£700m UAV project gets go-ahead
Defence secretary John Reid today gave the go-ahead for the armed forces’ new ‘spy in the sky’, the Watchkeeper unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) programme.
The £700 million contract with defence group Thales UK will create up to 2,000 high-quality manufacturing jobs in the UK, he said.
Dr Reid said UAVs are a key part of the future vision of the armed forces, allowing high-quality images of the battlefield to be passed to commanders quickly to enable them to make more accurate decisions.
Lieutenant colonel Nick Fitzgerald of the 32nd Regiment Royal Artillery, the army’s UAV regiment, said Watchkeeper was an “exciting prospect”.
“The system dramatically increases the utility of UAVs for intelligence gathering and targeting, allowing us to operate longer, at greater distances, and to a much higher degree of accuracy than ever before,” he said.
