Decent Cybersecurity Ireland has been selected for U-HARRIER, one of 57 projects funded under the European Defence Fund 2025. The company will deliver post-quantum cryptography and AI-driven cyber resilience for a 300 kg heavy-lift military UAV designed to operate in contested, GNSS-denied environments.
Decent Cybersecurity Ireland has been selected as a consortium partner in U-HARRIER, one of 57 projects funded under the European Defence Fund (EDF) 2025 call announced by the European Commission on 15 April 2026. The €4 million, fully EU-funded research action will design and validate Europe’s next-generation heavy-lift military drone, and Decent Cybersecurity Ireland will provide the post-quantum cryptography and AI-driven cyber resilience that protects it. The selection places the company at the heart of one of the EU’s most strategically significant defence-innovation rounds in recent memory, alongside the broader €1.07 billion in EU funding awarded across 56 other collaborative defence projects in the same call.
This article looks at what the new EDF cycle means for European defence innovation, why U-HARRIER matters at this particular moment in European security, and how a nine-partner consortium spanning six Member States plans to translate €4 million of EU funding into a concrete capability that does not currently exist anywhere in Europe.
EDF 2025: a record year for European defence innovation
Where the money goes: a portfolio of 57 projects
EDF 2025 funds a deliberately diverse portfolio. Capability-development actions account for the largest share of funding (€545.6 million across 12 projects, plus €96.9 million in spin-in development), reflecting the Commission’s drive to convert mature research into deployable systems. Research actions, including the SME-focused track that selected U-HARRIER, represent the bulk of the project count, ensuring that the pipeline of new ideas continues to flow. Disruptive research and technological-challenge calls round out the picture, channelling backing toward both incremental capability growth and the kind of breakthrough innovation that is impossible to plan but indispensable to fund.
Project size: from €2 million SME research actions to €79 million flagship developments
EDF 2025 funding ranges from a €1.99 million coordination action up to a €79 million flagship development project, with a median EU contribution of €9.8 million. The single largest cluster, 24 of the 57 projects, sits below the €5 million threshold, reflecting the Fund’s strong push toward SME-led research actions. U-HARRIER falls into this group, sitting at virtually the maximum threshold for its specific call (€4 million). The shape of this distribution matters: it shows that the Commission is not simply concentrating funding in a handful of large flagship programmes, but instead spreading risk across a broad spectrum of project sizes and maturity levels.
EDF 2025 directly supports the four Readiness Flagships
The 2025 work programme is explicitly aligned with the Defence Readiness Roadmap 2030, which sets a time-bound agenda to ensure Europe can credibly deter adversaries and respond to high-intensity conflicts by the end of the decade. More than 15 EDF 2025 projects support the four European Readiness Flagships, with U-HARRIER contributing directly to the European Drone Defence Initiative. The other three flagships, the European Air Shield, the Eastern Flank Watch and the European Space Shield, address complementary domains, and together they form the operational backbone of the Roadmap’s capability vision.
A truly pan-European participation
EDF 2025 projects involve participants from across the Union. Spain, France, Germany and Italy lead in raw participation counts, unsurprising given the size of their defence-industrial bases, but Greece, Belgium, Poland and Estonia all rank in the top tier, demonstrating that participation is genuinely Union-wide. Smaller Member States have learned to position themselves effectively within consortia, often by specialising in a particular technology niche, whether that is autonomous navigation, advanced coatings, AI software or cybersecurity. The U-HARRIER consortium itself spans six Member States, including three of the top participants (Spain, Greece and Poland), and illustrates how a relatively modest project can still mobilise expertise from across the continent.
Inside U-HARRIER: a European answer to a critical capability gap
The lessons of the war in Ukraine have made one thing unmistakably clear: modern operations cannot be sustained without unmanned aerial logistics. Front-line units need ammunition, water, batteries, medical supplies and casualty evacuation in environments where conventional ground resupply is increasingly lethal, and where GPS signals are routinely jammed or spoofed by sophisticated electronic warfare. The traditional logistics tail, vulnerable, slow and personnel-intensive, has become one of the most exposed elements of any modern force structure.
Yet Europe currently has no indigenous, in-production heavy-lift logistics drone in the 300 kg class. That gap matters because it sits precisely at the payload threshold needed to resupply a platoon or company in the field, evacuate a wounded soldier, or deliver bulky equipment such as ammunition pallets, batteries or water containers. Below this weight class, drones can carry small parcels but cannot sustain a unit. Above it, costs and infrastructure requirements rise sharply. The 300 kg sweet spot is exactly what U-HARRIER is designed to address.
Project at a glance
U-HARRIER is funded under call EDF-2025-LS-RA-SMERO-NT, the dedicated track for research actions led by SMEs and research organisations. The full project name, Unmanned Heavy-lift Aerial Reconnaissance and Resilient Integrated European Response, reflects the breadth of its ambition. The total estimated cost of €3,999,652.04 is covered in full by the European Union, with no national co-financing required, an arrangement that the Commission uses specifically to make defence R&D accessible to SMEs that would otherwise be priced out of large collaborative consortia.
The project will run for 36 months and is built around three types of activity: integrating knowledge across disciplines, conducting feasibility and design studies, and producing detailed engineering designs. It is coordinated by EDAIR Technologies SL, a Spanish aerospace and defence engineering firm, and brings together nine partners across six EU Member States.
What U-HARRIER will deliver
Over its 36-month duration, the consortium will design, develop and validate a UAV that integrates capabilities not currently combined in any existing European platform. The platform must carry a 300 kg payload for tactical resupply, equipment delivery and casualty evacuation. It must offer ballistic protection sufficient to survive in contested airspace, where small-arms fire and shrapnel are routine threats. It must include electromagnetic interference shielding to operate in dense electronic-warfare environments, where adversary systems flood the spectrum with jamming signals.
The UAV will also feature AI-driven structural health monitoring, allowing the platform to predict component failures before they happen and reducing the maintenance burden on already-stretched logistics units. Stealth-enabled design and signature-reduction features will make it harder to detect, track and engage. Cyber-resilient avionics, communications and command-and-control systems will protect against the hijacking, spoofing and tampering attacks that have become standard adversary techniques. And the entire platform will be designed for full compatibility with NATO and EU logistics standards, ensuring it can be operated alongside allied forces without the integration headaches that have plagued earlier European defence procurement programmes.
Most importantly, the UAV must remain operable in contested, GNSS-denied or degraded environments. That requirement, deceptively simple to state, drives most of the technical complexity of the project. It means the platform cannot rely on GPS for navigation. It cannot assume continuous communications with its operator. It cannot trust the integrity of its sensor inputs. Every system must be designed with the assumption that an intelligent adversary is actively trying to disrupt it.
A consortium spanning six EU Member States
U-HARRIER brings together nine organisations with deliberately complementary expertise, ranging from aerospace engineering and composite materials to autonomous navigation, advanced coatings and cybersecurity. Spain provides three partners, including the coordinator, alongside Adatica Engineering for aeronautical systems and FIDAMC for composite materials and lightweight airframe structures. Romania contributes two partners: INCAS Bucharest, the national aerospace research institute with seven decades of experience in flight dynamics and aerodynamic testing, and MGM Star Construct, which specialises in the advanced coatings that enable both stealth and electromagnetic shielding.
Decent Cybersecurity, the Irish entity of the Slovak-headquartered cybersecurity firm, brings post-quantum cryptography and UAV cyber resilience expertise. Diversitas IT Sustavi from Croatia contributes software systems and human-machine interfaces. Politechnika Wrocławska, one of Poland’s leading technical universities, adds UAV design and electronic-warfare research capacity. And Vertliner from Greece focuses on the critical challenge of autonomous navigation in GPS-denied environments, an area where the company has already developed deployable solutions.
| Partner | Country | Role / expertise |
| EDAIR Technologies SL (Coordinator) | Spain | Project coordination; aerospace and defence engineering |
| Adatica Engineering SL | Spain | Multidisciplinary aeronautical engineering; AI and digital systems |
| FIDAMC | Spain | Composite materials and lightweight structures |
| INCAS Bucharest | Romania | Aerospace research; aerodynamics and flight testing |
| MGM Star Construct SRL | Romania | Advanced coatings; stealth and EMI surfaces |
| Decent Cybersecurity Ireland Limited | Ireland | Post-quantum cryptography and UAV cyber resilience |
| Diversitas IT Sustavi d.o.o. | Croatia | Software systems; human-machine interfaces |
| Politechnika Wrocławska | Poland | UAV design; electronic warfare research |
| Vertliner | Greece | Autonomous navigation in GPS-denied environments |
Strategic context: why this project, why now
The Ukraine catalyst
Modern conflicts have rewritten military logistics doctrine. Ukrainian forces have demonstrated that robotic platforms can reduce personnel casualties by up to 30 percent when deployed for logistics, evacuation and mine clearance, freeing scarce human resources for tasks that genuinely require them. At the same time, the conflict has shown the cost of contested airspace: drone losses to electronic warfare run into the thousands per month on each side, and any platform that cannot survive in a heavily jammed environment is essentially useless at the front line.
These two pressures, the need to remove people from the most dangerous logistics tasks, and the need to operate through aggressive electronic and kinetic countermeasures, are exactly what shape U-HARRIER’s requirements. A heavy-lift logistics UAV that can survive ballistic threats, navigate without GPS and resist cyber compromise is no longer a futuristic concept. It is an immediate operational requirement that no European platform currently meets, and one that the EDF has explicitly chosen to address through this funding round.
The cyber dimension
Military UAVs face a converging spectrum of cyber threats: GPS spoofing, command-link hijacking, signal jamming, firmware tampering and supply-chain compromise. A logistics drone that is intercepted, redirected or rendered inoperable does not merely lose its cargo. It exposes unit positions, supply patterns and operational tempo to the adversary, turning what should be a force multiplier into an intelligence gift. Every drone flight becomes a potential security incident, and every compromised platform becomes a window into the broader operation.
As quantum computing advances, an additional threat looms. So-called “harvest-now-decrypt-later” attacks involve adversaries intercepting and storing encrypted communications today, then decrypting them later once quantum capability becomes available. For a logistics network whose data may remain operationally sensitive for years, this is not a hypothetical concern. Communications encrypted with conventional algorithms today could be readable by adversaries within the operational lifetime of the very platforms being designed now. This is precisely the threat surface Decent Cybersecurity will help defend within U-HARRIER, contributing post-quantum cryptographic and AI-driven security expertise to the platform from the design phase onward.
“Being selected for U-HARRIER is a strong signal that the future of European defence will be built with cybersecurity designed in from the first sketch, not bolted on afterwards. We are proud to bring our post-quantum and AI-driven expertise to a consortium that is closing one of the most urgent capability gaps Europe faces today, alongside partners from six Member States who share that vision.” , Matej Michalko, Founder, CEO and Chairman, Decent Cybersecurity
Aligned with Europe’s defence-readiness ambitions
U-HARRIER sits at the intersection of multiple EU defence priorities. It addresses the European Drone Defence Initiative, one of the four flagships of the Defence Readiness Roadmap 2030, and contributes to the broader ReArm Europe agenda, which aims to mobilise up to €800 billion to strengthen European defence capabilities over the coming years. It also embodies the SME-led innovation model that the European Commission has identified as essential to Europe’s defence-technology renewal, demonstrating that smaller specialist firms can deliver complex defence platforms when assembled into the right consortium.
In a broader sense, U-HARRIER reflects a maturing European approach to defence innovation. The project is small enough to remain agile and avoid the bureaucratic overhead that has slowed earlier European defence programmes, yet ambitious enough to deliver a genuine capability that does not currently exist anywhere on the continent. It combines established aerospace expertise with frontier work in cybersecurity, AI and autonomous systems, and it does so within a 36-month timeframe that is short by defence-industrial standards. If the consortium delivers, it will not only fill a real operational gap but also offer a template for how future European defence projects can be structured.
In summary
U-HARRIER is a small project by absolute defence standards, but it is one of the most strategically interesting items in the EDF 2025 portfolio. It addresses a capability that Europe genuinely lacks, in a domain (drone warfare) that has become central to modern conflict, with a consortium that combines breadth of geography with depth of specialist expertise. The total budget of just under €4 million is fully covered by the EU. The project will run for 36 months. Nine partners from six Member States will deliver it. And when complete, Europe will have the design for a 300 kg cyber-resilient heavy-lift UAV that no European company currently builds.
For Decent Cybersecurity Ireland, U-HARRIER is more than a single project. It is a confirmation that the company’s investment in post-quantum cryptography, AI-driven threat detection and drone-specific cyber resilience is exactly the expertise Europe now needs at the heart of its next-generation defence systems. The selection also extends the company’s growing footprint in EU-funded defence research and reinforces its position as a trusted European partner for defence-grade cyber innovation. Over the next 36 months, Decent Cybersecurity Ireland will work alongside eight partners across Spain, Romania, Croatia, Poland and Greece to translate that expertise into a concrete, deployable European capability. If the consortium delivers, the result will not only fill a real operational gap. It will also demonstrate what European defence innovation looks like when specialist SMEs are placed at the centre of the consortium rather than at its edge.
