Joining South Africa, Egypt and Nigeria, Morocco is soon to become a member of the group of African countries that build military drones. The announcement was made by Ronen Nadir, founder and president of the Israeli company BlueBird Aero Systems, which belongs in part to the state-owned Israel Aerospace Industries corporation. In a statement published on April 13 by the Spanish magazine Zona Militar, the former Israeli air force commander said that a production plant for unmanned aircraft (ASPs) had been created in Morocco and would start operating in the near future.
No details have been released on the location of this installation, nor on its start-up date. BlueBird Aero Systems declined a request by Le Monde for comment. Nadir’s remarks did not elicit any official comment from the Moroccan side either, but they coincided with an announcement in November 2023 by Defense Minister Abdellatif Loudiyi concerning plans to develop a national military industry focused on ASP production.
Which drones will be manufactured in Morocco? WanderB and ThunderB models, according to Asher Fredman, Israel director for the Abraham Accords Institute for Peace. These devices are primarily intended for reconnaissance, intelligence and target acquisition missions. By 2022, Rabat had ordered 150 of them, some of which will be produced on Moroccan soil.
‘Increasingly decisive on the battlefield’
The Israeli company’s SpyX drone, a ‘kamikaze’ version recently acquired by Morocco, could also be manufactured locally. These loitering munitions, which have proved their worth in Ukraine and Nagorno-Karabakh, “are increasingly decisive on the battlefield,” said Nizar Derdabi, a former Moroccan gendarmerie officer who teaches at the Economic Warfare School in Rabat.
BlueBird Aero Systems has not disclosed the manufacturing costs or sales prices of these ASPs. But the Emirati conglomerate EDGE − which the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) ranked in 2019 among the world’s 25 largest weapons manufacturers − last year offered $29,000 to purchase a kamikaze drone and $1.1 million for an ISTAR model.
This was not the first time that BlueBird Aero Systems set up a facility for manufacturing drones outside of Israel. The company has already been producing ASPs in India through a joint venture with Cyient. As for its rival Elbit Systems, whose Israeli liaison office in Rabat reported a year ago that it planned to open two drone production sites in Morocco, it has facilities in the US, Europe, Brazil and Australia, per Fredman.
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