Rheinmetall Air Defence AG

Rheinmetall Air Defence AG is the Zurich company that carries the Oerlikon name in gun-based air defence. Its lineage starts with Schweizerische Werkzeugmaschinenfabrik Oerlikon, founded in the Oerlikon district of Zurich in 1906, which adapted the 1916 Becker 20mm cannon into the Oerlikon autocannon that armed ships and aircraft on every side of the Second World War. Rheinmetall bought Oerlikon Contraves in 1999 and renamed the unit Rheinmetall Air Defence on 1 January 2009, folding in other air defence activities at the same time. Around a thousand people work for it across Switzerland, Germany, Italy and Canada. The business divides into medium calibre weapons, ground based air defence, mobile air defence, naval systems, command and control, and the ammunition that makes the whole approach work.

That ammunition is the technical argument. AHEAD, short for Advanced Hit Efficiency And Destruction, uses a muzzle device that measures the exact velocity of each round leaving the barrel and programmes its fuse to burst just short of the target, spraying tungsten sub-projectiles into the path of whatever is coming. Against a rocket, a mortar bomb or a small drone, that beats trying to score a direct hit. The gun end of the equation runs through the 25mm KBA, 30mm KCE and 35mm KDE cannon and the revolver gun used in the Skyshield system.

Ground based systems build outwards from there. The towed twin-gun Oerlikon GDF has been in service for decades and is still sold in the GDF009 EO configuration. Skyshield paired revolver guns with a fire control unit, and Skynex is its networked successor, an open-architecture point defence system that mixes gun and missile effectors, including the SkyKnight interceptor, and has been delivered to Ukraine. MANTIS covers counter rocket, artillery and mortar work. Skyguard 3 provides the sensor and fire control layer, with X-TAR3D as the search and tracking radar and Skymaster as the command and control node. Mobile air defence has become the growth area, built around the Skyranger turret in 30mm and 35mm forms, integrated onto Boxer and other chassis and offered with Stinger or Cheetah missiles alongside the gun. Naval work covers the 35mm Millennium gun, the lighter Searanger and Seasnake mounts, Seaguard tracking and the SeaVision and SeaStorm sensor modules. Vehicle weapon stations round it out under the Fieldranger name, and the company has demonstrated high-energy laser counter-rocket work. Drones changed the market in the unit's favour. A cheap quadcopter is a poor target for an expensive surface-to-air missile and a good one for a programmable 35mm round, which is why a product line that looked dated for two decades is now central to Rheinmetall's growth in air defence. The Zurich site has also carried reputational baggage, including a blacklisting by India's defence ministry in 2012 over a procurement bribery case.