The European Defence Agency has announced the results of Stage 1 of its Sentinel Strike Challenge, a prize contest on loitering munitions run through EDA’s Hub for European Defence Innovation (HEDI). Destinus was ranked among the five highest-scoring applicants, selected from more than 140 expressions of interest from across participating EU Member States, and is invited to Stage 2 of the contest. The challenge is not a procurement competition. Its purpose is to generate comparable operational evidence that defence ministries can use when assessing which technologies could contribute to future capabilities. For Destinus, that is precisely the value: European systems evaluated by European military users, in the field, on a common basis and in the same scenarios.
Stage 2 is an operational experimentation campaign hosted by the Portuguese Army at the Santa Margarida Military Training Area, conducted within EDA’s Operational Experimentation Campaign 2026 and in conjunction with the ARTEX26 exercise, from 28 September to 9 October 2026. Destinus will demonstrate a complete loitering munition system developed and produced in Europe, with operational experience in demanding environments. Military users from EU Member States will assess the competing systems across the full precision strike mission cycle: from mission planning and launch through target detection, engagement, and post-strike assessment, in realistic, degraded, and contested conditions. The five finalists compete for a total Stage 2 prize pool of €1.8 million.
For the five selected companies, the competition now moves to the field, where they will compete for a total of €1,800,000 in prizes. During the EU OPEX26 operational experimentation campaign in Portugal, their systems will be tested under controlled, realistic and contested operational conditions. Military users from EU Member States will assess not only whether the technologies work, but also how they perform across the full mission cycle, how resilient they are under operational conditions, and how they compare when tested under the same scenarios. The successful selection for the second stage of the challenge does not mean that the technologies are ready to be purchased or deployed. It means they have earned the chance to be tested under more demanding conditions.
While the competition will identify the highest-performing systems, its broader objective is to generate practical lessons for future defence innovation. By involving military users throughout the testing process, the challenge aims to improve how emerging technologies are evaluated before they are considered for future capability development. Recent conflicts have turned loitering munitions into a rapidly evolving military capability, with technological advances and battlefield adaptations often outpacing traditional development cycles. As new systems enter the market and technologies evolve at an unprecedented pace, understanding how they perform in realistic operational conditions has become increasingly important. The results of the experimentation in Portugal will determine the overall winners of the Sentinel Strike Challenge, who are expected to be announced in 2027.
