WARRANT — One Aperture, Four Warrants

01 The problem

The duty to protect and the power to act sit in different hands

Shortly before midnight on 5 August 2026, staff at Leipzig/Halle found a drone parked on the apron carrying a package with a detonator, next to a Ukrainian Antonov AN-124 — an aircraft of the NATO strategic airlift programme. The airport closed completely. A DHL freighter that had to abort its approach then struck an unidentified object at around 400 metres and landed at Hannover with damage to its nose. Two German laws that both came into force in March 2026 govern what the airport was allowed to do about it, and they point in opposite directions.

01
The operator is obliged to establish self-protection

The KRITIS-Dachgesetz entered into force on 17 March 2026. Section 13 obliges operators of critical facilities to take appropriate resilience measures and to provide adequate physical protection of plant and grounds. This is a duty to do something, not to observe something — and it is enforced by a supervisory authority against a schedule: registration with the BBK by 17 July 2026, then nine months for risk assessment and ten for implementation.
02
The operator is forbidden to act

The second amendment to the Air Security Act came into force on 6 March 2026. Private parties may not intercept, jam or destroy a drone. Detection is open to operators and service providers; the effect layer remains a state monopoly. An operator can therefore buy a warning, and nothing else.
03
The authority arrives without the hardware

Federal Police hold nationwide responsibility for drone defence at airports; states may request the armed forces in administrative assistance, decided by the Defence Ministry. All of them arrive by road, with their own equipment, to a site they have never surveyed — long after the flight that mattered has ended.
04
The opponent is a service, not a hobbyist

The Federal Criminal Police Office recorded more than 1,000 suspicious drone flights over military sites and critical infrastructure in 2025, alongside 321 suspected sabotage cases attributed largely to foreign intelligence services working through disposable agents. Geofencing and Remote ID discipline the law-abiding. A state saboteur switches them off — and at Brunsbüttel in 2024 flew at up to 100 km/h over an LNG terminal for weeks while police drones broke off pursuit because they could not keep up.

Selected drone incidents against German critical infrastructure, 2024 to 2026
When and where	What happened	Consequence
Aug 2024 Brunsbüttel	Weeks of nightly overflights of the ChemCoast Park, an LNG terminal and a decommissioned nuclear plant, by aircraft reaching around 100 km/h. Police drones could not follow.	Investigated as agent activity for the purpose of sabotage. No means of interdiction available to the operator or to the state on site.
Oct 2024 Thuringia	An ICE struck a drone at about 200 km/h on the Munich–Hamburg high-speed line.	Windscreen damage; line closed for a fruitless search.
Nov 2024 Munich Hbf	A drone caught in the overhead contact line near the main station; the caller fled.	Ten platforms closed in the evening peak to prevent a short circuit. A few hundred euros of airframe against a national rail hub.
Jul 2025 Frankfurt	Drone sightings on approach to Germany's largest airport.	90 minutes of full closure, 57 diversions, 72 cancellations, around 9,700 stranded passengers.
Oct 2025 Munich	Repeated sightings on consecutive days, partly in groups. Helicopters located neither aircraft nor operators.	Runways closed for hours across several days, roughly 6,500 people on camp beds. Bavaria requested armed forces support for detection.
5 Aug 2026 Leipzig/Halle	A drone with a detonator and suspected explosive placed beside a Ukrainian AN-124 serving the NATO SALIS airlift programme.	Complete closure of a primary European air freight hub; a diverting DHL freighter then struck an unknown object in flight. Treated as a state security offence.

The Munich case is the escalation chain in this concept, executed the slow way: the operator could see nothing conclusive, the state police could not resolve it, and the armed forces were requested for detection support — over days, with equipment that had to be brought in. Sources: DLR; Spiegel; Spiegel on Brunsbüttel; Spiegel on Munich Hbf.

Sources: KRITIS-Dachgesetz; Deutscher Bundestag on the LuftSiG amendment; Bundeswehr on what it may do; Rheinmetall; MBDA.

02 The solution

Put the capability on site and let the law decide what it may do

A single head carries the sensing aperture and the beam director on one optical path. What changes between a lawful operator installation and a lawful police engagement is not the hardware. It is the key in it.

A · The head

Many small emitters, one beam, one removable objective

Power comes from an array of modest fibre emitters combined into a single beam rather than from one large source. That makes the head cheaper to build, gracefully degradable when a channel fails, and — the decisive part — scalable by exchanging the objective rather than the machine.

Coaxial sensing and beam path, no boresight drift
Search does not stop while a bearing is engaged
Ground movement reported from the same optics as air tracks

B · The grid

Range and prediction from several heads

One head gives a bearing. Two give a fix. Several give height, speed and a track that survives a head being masked by a cooling tower. From the track history the grid forecasts where the target will be, which is what makes a slow effector viable against a fast one.

Overlapping cover removes the shadow behind buildings
Track continuity across heads, not per device
Data release itself escalates with the warrant

The objective is the key Beam quality and achievable irradiance are set by the aperture that forms the beam. Objective I sits in the head permanently and makes it a sensor; III lets the same emitters reach through to a seeker; IV reaches further still. A permission you can only exercise by physically holding a piece of glass cannot be escalated by a software fault, a misconfiguration or an intrusion. The higher objectives live in a safe on site, and custody of that safe is the legal control.

The head Engagement must not blind the watch. A system that stops searching while it fires is a system that can be saturated by the second drone — which is how swarms are meant to work.

03 The chain

Four warrants on one installation

This is the whole idea. The operator invests because the law obliges them to. What they buy is not only their own warning system — it is the pre-positioned capability the state finds already installed when it arrives.

One installation, four warrants Each objective unlocks two things at once: how far up the effect ladder the emitters may go, and how much of the grid's picture flows into the holder's own systems. A police unit does not merely gain the ability to bring a drone down — it gains the track history that led to the decision, which is what a later court will ask about. And the ladder starts one step lower than one might expect: the operator's own objective I is issued by the regulatory authority, so even the lawful detection tier is a licence you can hold in your hand rather than a setting you assert.

Why this is worth more than the sum of its parts

The operator is not asked to watch. They are required to protect. Section 13 obliges appropriate resilience measures and adequate physical protection — something has to actually be established, and a supervisory authority will ask what. At the same time the Air Security Act forbids the operator any effect against a drone. The maximum lawful self-protection available to them is therefore precisely this: a permanently installed capability that sees everything, acts on nothing, and can be lawfully unlocked by the state within minutes rather than hours. Anything less does not discharge the duty; anything more is not permitted.

And the compliance budget buys it either way. Spent on a detection-only system, that money buys a warning and nothing more. Spent here, the same money buys the warning today and hosts the effector the state can lawfully use tomorrow — no second installation, no second survey, no second integration.

For the state, coverage appears without a procurement programme. Every protected site becomes a node. By the time the police or the armed forces need to act at a given plant, the aperture is already mounted, already surveyed, already tracking — and already part of a grid whose data they can draw on. The capability was financed by the party that had to invest anyway.

And the data is the second product. A national picture assembled from operator-funded heads is worth more than any single engagement. That is also where the honest caution belongs: who may see what, for how long, and under which legal basis is not a feature to be decided late. It is the first thing that has to be settled, and it is settled by the same key that gates the beam.

One beam, six levels The physics is continuous — the same emitter, more power and longer dwell. The law is not continuous, and the gate sits exactly where the law puts it. Everything left of the gate is available to an operator under house right. Everything right of it requires a state warrant.

04 How it works

From bearing to fix to forecast

A laser is a precise effector with an unforgiving requirement: it must know where the target will be, not where it was.

Range from the network Bearings are cheap and passive; range is expensive and usually radiating. Crossing bearings from several heads produces the fix without anyone transmitting, and the track history produces the forecast the beam director actually needs.

Coverage across a site A single mast on a tank farm sees a cylinder and a shadow. The shadow is where an attacker will fly. Overlap is not redundancy here, it is the whole point — and it is why the unit price has to stay in the range an operator can put several of on one site.

05 Market environment

A large market, a legal deadline, and a gap in the middle

All figures are published third-party estimates. Spreads between publishers in this segment are wide and are shown rather than reconciled.

0.5 → 160

EUR m · damage from drone disruption at German airports, 2024 → 2025

DLR · a 320-fold increase in one year

116

partial or full closures at 25 German commercial airports in 2025

DLR, June 2026

> 1.000

suspicious drone flights over military sites and critical infrastructure, 2025

BKA · plus 321 suspected sabotage cases

17 Jul 2026

registration deadline for operators of critical facilities

KRITIS-Dachgesetz, in force 17 March 2026

2029

planned operational date of the German naval high-energy laser

BAAINBw contract, June 2026

23.8

USD bn · directed energy weapons by 2030, CAGR 22 %

Research and Markets, January 2026

Drone disruptions to flight operations at German airports

2026 is the first half only — the year is on course to double again.

Source: DLR and DFS via airliners.de. The economic figure follows the DLR damage model: delay, diversion and cancellation costs plus network effects, which compound once a closure passes an hour and buffer capacity is exhausted.

Where the demand actually comes from

The economics are already decided; only who pays is open. Nine full closures in 2024 cost about half a million euros. In 2025, 116 closures cost between 60 and 160 million. A single hour of closure at a hub exhausts the buffer and the cost compounds across Europe. Against that, an installation that shortens a closure from hours to minutes pays for itself on one incident — which is the only argument that reliably moves an operator who is not otherwise in the market for defence equipment.

Not from a defence budget line — from a compliance deadline. The operators of energy, water and transport infrastructure have to register by 17 July 2026 and implement physical protection within roughly the following year and a half. That is a defined population with a defined date and a defined obligation, and it is not currently served by anything that scales past a fence and a camera.

The European funding channels are open in parallel. The EU Action Plan on Drone and Counter-Drone Security of 11 February 2026 names Horizon Europe, EDF, EDIP and SAFE; the European Drone Defence Initiative is backed by EUR 6 bn and Eastern Flank Watch is to reach full operational capability by the end of 2028.

The technology base for this is German and it is in Jena. Combining many modest fibre emitters into one beam is the discipline the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Optics and Precision Engineering has pushed hardest: three thulium fibre lasers spectrally combined to a record 1.91 kW, using diffraction gratings above 95 per cent efficiency and an overall combining efficiency above 90 per cent (Fraunhofer IOF). Around it sits the German ultra-precision optics industry that already holds a genuine European monopoly at the top of the market, in lithography optics. The objective at the heart of this concept is exactly the component that Europe can build and others cannot easily copy — which makes the sovereignty argument a technical fact rather than a slogan.

And the incumbents are aiming elsewhere. The German laser effort is naval, high-energy and planned for 2029. MBDA's hybrid turret shown at ILA 2026 pairs a high-energy laser with interceptor missiles for asset protection — a military product for military users. None of it is architected around a civilian operator installing the hardware and the state unlocking it.

06 Regulatory position

The escalation ladder is not a feature — it is the legal architecture

Every tier below already exists in German and international law. The concept does not ask for a change in the law; it asks the hardware to reflect the law that is already there.

Legal anchors and their consequence for the design
Instrument	Specific anchor	Consequence for the design
KRITIS-Dachgesetz § 13, in force 17 Mar 2026	Operators of critical facilities must take appropriate resilience measures and provide adequate physical protection of facilities and grounds; registration with the BBK by 17 July 2026, then risk assessment and implementation on a fixed schedule.	The buyer of tier one is not a defence customer. It is a compliance officer with a deadline and a budget, and the product must be procurable and installable as plant security.
Air Security Act 2nd amendment, 6 Mar 2026	Private parties may not intercept, jam or destroy drones. The detection layer is open to operators and service providers; the effect layer remains reserved to the state.	Tier one must be provably incapable of effect while installed under house right. This is why the gate is an optic and not a permission flag: with objective I fitted the installation cannot reach an effect tier by construction, and a supervisory authority verifies that by looking at the part rather than auditing a configuration. Because objective I is itself issued by the regulatory authority, the operator's lawful capability is licensed, revocable and physically accounted for.
Custody of the objective evidentiary chain	Every state effect must later be attributable to an authorised actor at an identifiable moment, and the scope of that authority must be reconstructable.	Fitting an objective is a physical, logged, two-person act with a known holder and a known time. The record of who opened the safe is the same record that proves which effect tier was available — one artefact instead of a software audit trail nobody trusts.
Federal Police powers UZwGBw and LuftSiG	Federal Police hold nationwide responsibility for drone detection and defence at airports; the armed forces may be requested by the states in administrative assistance, with the decision taken by the Defence Ministry.	Two distinct state warrants, not one. The key hierarchy has to mirror the actual chain of authority, including who may delegate it and how it is revoked when the incident ends.
CCW Protocol IV Blinding Laser Weapons	Prohibits the employment of laser weapons specifically designed to cause permanent blindness to unenhanced vision, and requires feasible precautions to avoid such effects from other laser systems.	Effects are directed at unmanned aircraft only. Persons and vehicles are detected and tracked, never engaged. Beam interlocks, exclusion sectors and eye-safety design are part of the certification case, not an afterthought.
EU AI Act (EU) 2024/1689 Art. 2(3), Recital 24, Art. 12	Systems placed on the market exclusively for military or national security purposes are exempt; anything also placed on the civil market is in scope. Art. 12 requires automatic event logging for high-risk systems.	The operator tier is unambiguously a civil product and is designed to be. Signed logs of every detection, every key insertion and every effect are a requirement in both directions — regulatory and evidential.
GDPR and state police law data release tiers	Optical surveillance of persons on and around a site engages data protection; onward transfer to police and armed forces requires a legal basis that differs per tier.	Data release is bound to the same key as the effect. What an authority may see is provable after the fact, and what it may not see never leaves the site.

Primary sources: KRITIS-Dachgesetz, Bundeswehr on the LuftSiG, CCW Protocol IV, Regulation (EU) 2024/1689.

07 White space

Everyone is building the effector. Nobody is building the warrant.

Finding from published programme announcements, manufacturer releases and the German legislative record of 2026.

A

No documented system changes its legal capability with a physical part

Counter-UAS products are sold to one user class with one set of permissions, and where capability tiers exist at all they are licence keys and configuration. Enforcing the legal boundary through custody of the objective — so that the operator's installation is incapable of effect rather than merely forbidden from it — is not offered by anyone publicly.
B

The laser programmes are military platforms on military timelines

The German naval high-energy laser is contracted and planned to be operational in 2029; MBDA's ground-based hybrid pairs laser and interceptors on a palletised turret for asset protection. Both are procured through defence channels for defence users. Neither addresses a chemical park with a filing deadline in 2027.
C

Operator-financed capability is not a business model anyone is using

The state is buying its counter-drone coverage the traditional way — as programmes, for its own sites. The population that is legally compelled to invest in physical protection right now, and whose sites are precisely the ones worth protecting, is being sold cameras.
D

The German answer is radio-frequency detection, and the threat does not radiate

The most advanced domestic programme couples Deutsche Telekom's mast network as a passive RF sensor with Rheinmetall's effectors. It rests on the fact that over 90 per cent of commercial drones talk to a controller over RF — which is true, and irrelevant against the cases that matter. The Brunsbüttel aircraft outran police drones; the Munich sightings were never localised; the Leipzig device was already on the ground. An optical head that tracks what it can see does not care whether the target emits.
E

Data escalation is unaddressed

Discussion of counter-drone data focuses on the operator's own picture. What happens to that picture when the police take over, what they may retain, and how the operator proves what was released and what was not, is a question nobody is answering in a product.

This section rests on public programme reporting and legislative sources rather than on a systematic vendor survey. A full competitive mapping of the counter-UAS and directed-energy field is the next piece of work, and until it exists these findings should be read as a hypothesis with named evidence, not a proven gap.

08 Team & unfair advantage

The hard part here is not the laser

Founder · Initiator

Arne Eilers

Munich

Lieutenant Colonel (Reserve), multi-domain operations
Working at BASED, a European defence and dual-use platform

High-energy optics can be bought, licensed or partnered. What cannot be bought is the reading of four legal roles, their thresholds and their evidence requirements, translated into a key hierarchy that a supervisory authority, a police lawyer and a defence procurement officer will all accept. That is the moat, and it is built from operational and procurement experience rather than from photonics.

Status of the venture

Concept and application stage. No company, no pilot contract, no capital raised. We are looking for:

Optics and beam-control partners — fibre laser sources, beam directors, tracking loops and eye-safety certification.
Legal and regulatory counsel — LuftSiG, KRITIS-Dachgesetz, state police law and data protection, to turn the warrant hierarchy into something defensible in writing.
Pilot operators — an energy, water or transport operator facing the § 13 deadline and willing to host a detection-tier installation under real conditions.

09 Contact

A conversation about optics, law or piloting

For investors, programme managers, funding bodies, infrastructure operators and prospective co-founders.

contact@charlie-xray.com

Analysis on request · English or German · Munich, European Union

WARRANTOne aperture. Four warrants. The capability is already on site.

The operator is obliged to establish self-protection

The operator is forbidden to act

The authority arrives without the hardware

The opponent is a service, not a hobbyist

Many small emitters, one beam, one removable objective

Range and prediction from several heads

Why this is worth more than the sum of its parts

Drone disruptions to flight operations at German airports

Where the demand actually comes from

No documented system changes its legal capability with a physical part

The laser programmes are military platforms on military timelines

Operator-financed capability is not a business model anyone is using

The German answer is radio-frequency detection, and the threat does not radiate

Data escalation is unaddressed

Arne Eilers

A conversation about optics, law or piloting