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| Britain |
| UK to Scrap Tornado Replacement in Favor of UAVs |
| 2005-06-20 |
| The UK's high-profile Future Offensive Air System (FOAS) programme, a replacement for the Royal Air Force's (RAF's) Tornado GR.4 strike aircraft, has been scrapped after years of planning and concept evaluation to make way for a fundamentally different kind of project focused on a family of long-range, long-endurance unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that will probably embrace the combat, reconnaissance and surveillance roles. The UK Ministry of Defence's (MoD's) Strategic Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Experiment (SUAVE) will place the testing of UAV technologies - and probable procurement decisions stemming from it - at the centre of a wide-ranging plan to replace the capability currently vested in the Tornado. The Future Combat Air Capability (FCAC) programme, as the plan is known, will rely on 'legacy' programmes - platforms and weapons already in the inventory or on order - to fulfil the mandate originally laid down for FOAS. SUAVE, however, will add the final dimension to the 'force-mix' - placing a UAV and unmanned combat aerial vehicle (UCAV) capability at the centre of a gap that cannot be filled by manned combat aircraft and cruise missiles. FOAS began life as the Future Offensive Aircraft programme in the early 1990s but soon developed into a more broadly focused effort, as the UK attempted to address the strike gap vacated by the Tornado GR.4's anticipated departure from service in around 2018. FOAS' broad suite of capabilities were expected to comprise the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) - to which the UK committed itself in 2001 - and the conventional cruise missile capability represented, respectively, by the UK Royal Navy's Raytheon Tomahawk (later Tactical Tomahawk) and the RAF's MBDA Storm Shadow weapon systems. FOAS has drifted in the last five years, however, as it has struggled to establish a firm identity. Big and amorphous, and scheduled to absorb a vast amount of money in an increasingly constrained fiscal environment, FOAS had simply lost its way in the view of most observers. Moreover, the budget set aside for the system is badly needed elsewhere. "It was not well-enough defined and no one is prepared to take big-bang risks anymore," one analyst commented. "We don't need any more killing machines. There's a view that the needs of the army should be met first, with money invested in communications, body armour and technologies that cater to the soldier of the future. In the current climate [the UK military's commitment to Iraq and the war on terror], a big aircraft programme at this stage would simply have been shot down in flames." The UK Defence Procurement Agency (DPA) acknowledges that FOAS is "no more" and that parts of its former "activity" - mainly in the form of personnel - have been diverted into "other project teams where they will be better managed". This probably refers to efforts now underway to 'rescope' the F-35 and Storm Shadow programmes to meet key parts of the former FOAS (now FCAC) requirement, and to extend the life of the Tornado GR.4 well into the 2020s. The UK must decide by the end of 2006 whether it will commit to the production phase of the JSF and whether it will stick by the short take-off and vertical landing (STOVL) variant or supplement its STOVL capability with a conventional take-off and landing version of the aircraft. The Storm Shadow, meanwhile, will undergo a series of growth evolutions, to be tested in the next five to 10 years via technology demonstration programmes that will add bomb damage intelligence; increased range; the ability to strike hard and deeply buried targets; network 'connectivity'; and other modifications to the missile now in service. A SUAVE integrated project team (IPT), meanwhile, will look at UAV- and UCAV-related technologies under development in the UK and elsewhere, to prepare the way for a 'strategic' UK UAV and UCAV capability within the next 15 years. "The SUAVE IPT will be responsible for directing all the work (previously within FOAS) to establish the potential of UAVs across a wide variety of long-range roles so the UK MoD can make informed decisions on their procurement options by 2009/2010," a DPA spokesman told JDW. The work will cover technology, cost-effectiveness and interoperability issues, the DPA added. A long-range UAV stemming from the evaluation may feed into an emerging MoD programme for ISR collection 'in the deep' called Dabinett. Other platforms, including satellites, could ultimately feed into the Dabinett architecture. The key question is whether the UK will end up buying a domestically developed UAV or UCAV capability or one that has been produced by the US or Europe. Since the early 1990s, BAE Systems has been working on a range of classified technologies at its Warton facility in north-west England. Many of these technologies have been stealthy and directly applicable to UAVs and UCAVs. Funded by the UK MoD, BAE Systems may even have built and tested a UAV/UCAV to validate its technology work. At the Paris Air Show, BAE Systems chief executive Mike Turner alluded to UAV and UCAV technologies that the company had been developing 'in the black'. "Suites of activities underway in the north-west", Turner said in a cautious reference to Warton, could directly feed into a UK UAV/UCAV development and production programme. The industrial imperative for the UK to establish itself openly in the UAV/UCAV field is contrasted, however, by a desire on the part of sections within the RAF to forge ever closer ties with the US, where the Joint Unmanned Combat Air Systems (J-UCAS) programme will begin test flights of the Boeing X-45C and Northrop Grumman X-47B in 2007. The UK MoD and the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in March announced a co-operative programme to determine the military benefit of UCAVs for future coalition operations. One outcome of a deeper dialogue with the US on UAV and UCAV technologies is that the UK could end up buying Boeing or Northrop airframes. The UK could then 'anglicise' the airframes with technology developed indigenously via the BAE/MoD classified demonstration effort and other UK systems and equipment. "We expect to fight alongside forces operating advanced UAVs, so we must understand these systems even if we do not buy them ourselves," Air Commodore Andy Sweetman, IPT leader for SUAVE, said in a statement on 14 June. "Our work with the US should answer many of the questions we have about operational concepts and effectiveness." Good call, Commodore. We look forward to working with British forces for a good while into the future. |
| Posted by:too true |
| #1 Here's an early look at on of the possible contenders. |
| Posted by: Shipman 2005-06-20 13:51 |