Safran to Supply Bundeswehr With 1,000+ MOSKITO Systems

France’s Safran will supply the German armed forces with more than 1,000 MOSKITO and several hundred SHARPCROW portable battlefield observation systems, an order that lands squarely in the least glamorous and most consequential corner of land warfare: what a dismounted soldier can see, and how fast that becomes a target coordinate.

The order

The systems are being procured under Germany’s Infanterist der Zukunft — Infantryman of the Future — programme, with Rheinmetall Electronics acting as prime contractor. Production takes place at Safran’s facilities in Germany.

“This new order underscores the Bundeswehr’s confidence in our technologies and in our ability to equip the modern soldier with advanced capabilities required for today’s land operations,” said Marzell Schiller, chief executive of Safran Electronics & Defense Germany.

The Infanterist der Zukunft effort treats the infantry section as a connected system rather than a collection of individuals, pursuing simultaneous gains in effectiveness, survivability, command and control, mobility and endurance.

MOSKITO: seeing is only half the job

MOSKITO combines day and night channels, a laser rangefinder and precise target geolocation in a single compact housing sized for one soldier to carry over a long patrol.

Geolocation is the function that matters. The observer frames a target, the laser measures range, and the device fuses that with its own position and line of sight to generate a grid coordinate. That coordinate goes straight to artillery, a mortar section or close air support. The device does not exist to let a soldier look at something — it exists to convert what he sees into fires.

SHARPCROW: three channels, one picture

SHARPCROW is the multi-sensor option, pairing thermal imaging with low-light imaging and a direct optical daylight channel, plus target location and digital reporting that pushes observer output onto the network.

Carrying three imaging paths is not redundancy for its own sake. Thermal holds up in darkness, smoke and obscurants. Low-light preserves detail through dusk and dawn when thermal contrast collapses. The direct optical channel keeps working when the electronics fail or the battery dies — the failure mode every infantryman eventually meets. That triple architecture is becoming the default expectation in modern dismounted optics.

Why this matters now

The sharpest lesson of recent land campaigns is that the individual soldier has become a sensor node. In Ukraine, the effectiveness of artillery has repeatedly been decided not by the number of tubes but by how quickly and accurately target data was generated. Drones carry much of that load — until electronic warfare severs the link, at which point the ground observer becomes decisive again.

European armies have responded with money. Budgets for dismounted optics have risen sharply over the past three years, and Germany’s €100 billion special defence fund has pushed spending well beyond heavy platforms into exactly this category of small, high-multiplier equipment.

The competitive field

Portable target acquisition and geolocation is contested ground: Safran, Thales and Hensoldt in Europe; Elbit America and Leonardo DRS in the United States; Elbit Systems in Israel. Safran’s MOSKITO family already serves with the French Army and a long list of export users.

Turkish industry occupies the same category. ASELSAN fields handheld observation systems with integrated laser rangefinders, thermal binocular families and target acquisition suites, while companies such as Fotoniks, 3E and ASPİLSAN fill out the sensor, optics and power layers of that ecosystem. Rising European demand for infantry optics is simultaneously direct competition and a supply-chain opening.

The supply chain angle

That the order runs through Rheinmetall Electronics reflects a structure now standard across European defence procurement: a domestic prime signs with the customer, while the specialist subsystem crosses a border. It satisfies local industrial participation requirements without demanding that every country build sovereign optical sensor capability from scratch.

The model has a cost. Cooled thermal detectors, high-precision laser modules and ballistic computation software remain concentrated in a handful of suppliers. Reducing exactly those bottlenecks is one of the stated purposes of several European Defence Fund projects.