Weapons Systems within the UK Military vs. a corporate solution of outsourcing the configuration of weapons on to platforms. Outsourcing is a great idea, bypassing lots of the problems inherent to integration in the military. It does however require the co-operation of governments to make it possible. It is necessary to understand the working of the plane in order to safely configure a weapons attachment to it. There are certain key problems that are actually quite obvious, the weapon must communicate with the on-board system and getting it off the plane in to use, basically the bomb doors need to operate and be sized in order to allow the safe egress of the weapon from the vehicle. The aerodynamics of the weapon are a primary consideration, dropping an aerodynamically profiled explosive from a weapon at great speed can actually result in lift or upthrust
on the ordinance. This is a bad thing. The last
thing you want to see when dropping ordinance
is the same object gliding its way back
in to the plane or wing. In short, delivering
the payload is a lot more dangerous than
might at first be contemplated.

it is in this area that European governments
fare badly, we simply don’t want to share the
data with industry in Europe. In America, things are
different, key personnel are active in collaborating between

standards groupslike the Mil-Standards (with online data sheets) and key manufacturers (in reality US companies). The organisation through which much of this information is processed is called SAE-International. On the other side of Europe second world nations have fully embraced outsourced integration of weapons to platforms.

Only Europe refrains and combined with our reluctance to invest in a unified systems language is literally handing the advantage to America. We are at least 15 years behind the USA in creating a much needed language to connect weapons to aircraft and the saddest part is that the European defence Agency seems blissfully unaware of the developments elsewhere. To the left of us, we have Eastern European nations willing to outsource integration and to our right we have an ally who leaves us standing on future planning. Not a very clever place to be.

Land Vehicles are in better shape, I’m pleased to say, FRES program (Future Rapid Effects System) will deliver 3000 vehicles with networking capability early in the next decade. There are two areas of concern, firstly, outsourcing of logistics; industry doesn’t do stubby pencil solutions and the MoD doesn’t want whizzbang handheld unit