Shield AI sells more V-BAT drones to Greece for maritime ops

Greece has signed an agreement to expand its fleet of Shield AI V-BAT drones for maritime surveillance operations across the Aegean Sea, the company announced June 2, deepening a partnership that has already seen the Hellenic Army deploy the systems for intelligence and reconnaissance missions across one of NATO’s most geographically complex operating environments.

The deal, concluded between Shield AI and the Hellenic Army, adds to an existing V-BAT fleet and increases Greece’s ability to maintain persistent awareness over the hundreds of islands, remote coastlines, and contested maritime approaches that define the Aegean’s strategic geography.

The Aegean Sea presents a surveillance challenge that no other NATO member faces in quite the same form. Greece maintains sovereignty over dozens of inhabited islands spread across tens of thousands of square kilometers of water, many of them within close proximity to Turkish territorial waters and the subject of ongoing territorial disputes that have periodically flared into aerial and naval confrontations. Monitoring that environment continuously, tracking vessel movements, identifying incursions, and maintaining situational awareness across a dispersed archipelago requires persistent aerial coverage at a scale and duration that crewed aircraft cannot sustain cost-effectively. A drone that can launch from a ship deck or a small island without a runway, fly for over 12 hours on a single sortie, and operate despite electronic warfare attempts to disrupt its navigation and communications is precisely the kind of system that Greece needs and that the V-BAT is designed to provide.

The V-BAT’s physical design is built around the operational constraints of island and maritime deployment. The ducted-fan configuration, where the rotor operates inside a protective shroud rather than in open air, allows the aircraft to launch and recover vertically in confined spaces including ship decks, urban rooftops, and the small clearings that island terrain typically offers without requiring the launch catapults or recovery nets that runway-independent fixed-wing drones demand. That single-engine, enclosed-rotor design also provides a measure of safety in maritime environments where a rotor strike against rigging, personnel, or deck equipment during launch or recovery could be catastrophic. The heavy-fuel engine runs on JP-8 or diesel rather than the gasoline that many smaller drones require, which simplifies logistics on naval vessels and forward island bases where military fuel is standardized but gasoline may not be reliably available.

James Lythgoe, Shield AI’s regional director for Eastern and Southeast Europe, described why the V-BAT’s operational characteristics align specifically with the Greek military’s requirements: “V-BAT is exceptionally well-suited for operations in Greece, where forces operate across dispersed islands, remote coastlines, deep valleys, mountain ranges, and complex maritime environments. V-BAT has proven itself in combat operations in Ukraine, including in GPS- and communications-denied environments, and was built for exactly these kinds of operational realities. We are proud to deepen our partnership with Greece and the Hellenic Armed Forces.”

V-BAT has been deployed in the war and operated in environments where Russian electronic warfare systems are actively jamming GPS signals and disrupting drone communications, the most demanding electromagnetic environment any drone faces outside of a laboratory designed to recreate it. An aircraft that maintains its mission capability in those conditions has demonstrated a resilience that the Aegean’s peacetime environment does not currently impose but that Greece’s proximity to potential adversaries makes a credible planning assumption. The ability to operate effectively when navigation satellites are being spoofed and control links are being jammed is the difference between a system that survives contact with a sophisticated adversary and one that falls out of the sky the first time electronic warfare is applied.

The V-BAT sits in the NATO Class I unmanned aircraft category, which covers systems weighing under 150 kilograms (330 pounds), a classification that reflects its role as a tactical asset deployable by ground units and small naval vessels rather than requiring the support infrastructure of larger systems. The more than 12 hours of endurance it provides at that weight class is a genuinely useful operational capability rather than a laboratory performance number: a single aircraft launched at dawn can maintain continuous coverage of a specific maritime area through the entire daylight period without rotation, returning data that persistent surveillance of this kind uniquely enables including pattern-of-life analysis that reveals the behavioral signatures of suspicious activity.

Greece’s expanded V-BAT fleet will add to the layered surveillance architecture that the Hellenic military has been developing across the Aegean, where early warning of maritime intrusions allows commanders time to respond before situations escalate.