HMS Duncan Takes On Drone Swarms and Wins

Royal Navy warship HMS Duncan just survived a drone swarm attack off the Welsh coast. Controlled chaos, live firing, and a training exercise that felt anything but fake.

One Ship. Multiple Threats. Zero Excuses.

QinetiQ’s Sharpshooter exercise doesn’t mess around.

For four days off the coast of Wales at MOD Aberporth, HMS Duncan faced simultaneous drone swarms, uncrewed surface vehicles, simulated cruise missiles, anti-ship ballistic missiles, and enemy aircraft — all at once, day and night, as Quinetiq reported.

This wasn’t a classroom drill. This was the real thing, minus the actual war.

QinetiQ’s subsidiary Inzpire designed the scenario to be deliberately overwhelming. Live aerial targets including the Banshee Whirlwind drones and Hammerhead uncrewed surface vehicles mixed with synthetic threats to keep the crew guessing. The goal was simple: make it as ugly and chaotic as a real deployment so that when the real thing comes, nothing feels new.

The crew delivered. Five aerial targets tracked and neutralized. Two Hammerheads sunk.

That’s not a participation trophy. That’s a ship’s company proving it can handle the modern battlefield.

Meet the Banshee Whirlwind — The Drone You Don’t Want Coming at You

When the press release says “aerial targets,” it’s easy to picture something slow and manageable.

The Banshee Whirlwind is not that.

This machine tops out between 103 mph and 230 mph, with an operational range exceeding 62 miles and the ability to fly above 22,965 feet. It carries a radar altimeter that allows it to perform controlled sea-skimming flight at a minimum altitude of just 16 feet — essentially hugging the ocean surface where radar detection becomes exponentially harder.

Up to four Whirlwinds can be operated simultaneously from a single ground control station in autonomous mode, which is exactly the swarm scenario that keeps naval commanders up at night. Add digital autopilot, integrated GPS, and customizable payloads, and you have a target drone purpose-built to simulate exactly the kind of threat that showed up in Ukraine and the Red Sea.

The Banshee family has been in production since 1984, and QinetiQ recently produced its 10,000th unit — a number that tells you everything about how seriously the world’s militaries take this kind of training.

HMS Duncan’s crew wasn’t shooting at paper targets. They were engaging systems engineered to be genuinely hard to kill.

The Drone Swarm Problem Is No Longer Theoretical

Here’s the thing about drone swarms — they’re not a future problem anymore.

Ukraine changed that conversation permanently. What was once theoretical is now standard operating procedure for anyone who wants to challenge a naval vessel on a budget. Small, fast, cheap, and numerous. The math is brutal for defenders.

Traditional naval training was built around known threats — missiles, aircraft, submarines. Drone swarms break that playbook entirely. They demand faster decision-making and systems that can track multiple small targets simultaneously without losing the plot on everything else happening around the ship.

HMS Duncan’s crew had to do all of that. At night. In real time. With live weapons.

Commander Dan Lee put it plainly: his team leave this exercise more confident, more capable, and better prepared. That’s not PR language. That’s what happens when training is designed to actually hurt a little.

NATO Is Running the Same Playbook

This isn’t just a British story.

In December, the Netherlands Navy’s HNLMS Evertsen ran a similar QinetiQ exercise. Two NATO navies, same training framework, same threat scenarios. That’s deliberate. NATO’s collective readiness depends on allies sharing not just hardware, but doctrine and muscle memory.

QinetiQ operates across land, air, sea, and cyber. They’re building a training architecture that scales across the alliance — and drone swarm defense is clearly becoming a core module.

Real threats demand real training. And the drone threat is as real as it gets right now.

DroneXL’s Take

I’ll be honest. When I first read this story, my brain went straight to the pilots behind those Banshee Whirlwinds.

Someone had to plan those attack runs. Someone had to design the swarm patterns, the timing, the chaos. There’s a whole other side of this exercise that doesn’t get the headline — the people operating the threat drones, making the training hard enough to actually matter.

That’s the part that fascinates me as a pilot.

No sugarcoating this — exercises like Sharpshooter are a reminder that the drone world has two very different trajectories running in parallel. On one side, people like us — hobbyists, filmmakers, creators, flying our Minis and Mavics chasing golden hour light. On the other, a full military-industrial ecosystem building drones specifically designed to be shot down, so that warships can learn to survive.

Both sides of that world are evolving fast. The question worth asking is whether policy and regulation are keeping up with either of them.

Because from where I stand, it really doesn’t look like it.

Photo credit: Royal Navy, QuinetiQ.