Rheinmetall will supply four complete Oerlikon Skynex air defense systems to an undisclosed international customer, the company announced on July 2, 2026, adding a gun-based short-range shield against drones, rockets, artillery, and mortars. The order matters because it delivers a full sensor-to-shooter network able to protect air bases, depots, ports, command sites, and critical infrastructure.
The package includes trucks, ammunition, training, spare parts, tools, and support equipment, with the first battery due 21 months after contract signature. This phased delivery gives the customer time to train crews, prepare maintenance, and integrate Skynex into a wider national air defense network as demand grows for layered protection against low-cost aerial threats.
Rheinmetall Italia will act as prime contractor, while Rheinmetall Air Defence, Rheinmetall MAN Military Vehicles, and Rheinmetall Weapon and Munitions in Switzerland will support production and delivery. This division of work matters because Skynex is not only a 35 mm gun order: it combines command-and-control software, radar sensors, remote-controlled guns, ammunition programming equipment, trucks, and sustainment stocks. For the customer, the inclusion of ammunition and logistics in the same contract reduces the risk of receiving a system that cannot be kept at readiness because of missing training aids, spare parts, or qualified maintenance procedures.
A standard Skynex configuration is built around a control node using Rheinmetall’s Oerlikon Skymaster battle management system, at least one sensor such as the X-TAR3D tactical acquisition radar or Oerlikon Multi Sensor Unit, and up to four remote-controlled Oerlikon Revolver Gun Mk3 air defense guns. The X-TAR3D provides a local three-dimensional air picture up to an instrumented range of 50 km and sends tracking data to the control node, where automatic threat evaluation supports allocation of targets to the guns. This architecture gives Skynex its main tactical value: search, classification, target handover, engagement, and kill assessment are distributed across the battery, so individual guns can engage assigned threats with their own radar tracker, TV camera, infrared camera, and laser rangefinder once the command node has built the local air picture.
The central armament is the Oerlikon Revolver Gun Mk3, a remote-controlled 35 mm x 228 air defense gun designed for fixed, displaceable, or truck-mounted use. Rheinmetall lists an effective combat range of up to 4,000 m, 252 ready-to-fire rounds, a nominal rate of fire of 1,000 rounds per minute, and a rapid single-shot mode of 200 rounds per minute. The gun uses a 3,150 mm barrel, equivalent to 90 calibers, with a mean muzzle velocity of 1,050 m/s for AHEAD ammunition and 1,075 m/s for full-caliber rounds. The gun turret weighs 4,650 kg without ammunition and 5,100 kg with ammunition, has continuous 360-degree traverse, an elevation arc from -10 to +85 degrees, a traverse speed of 115 degrees per second, and an elevation speed of 57 degrees per second.