ncourage Member States to spend Defence budgets more wisely.
As Chair of the recent Air Weapons Integration Conference, I saw how in the last four years UK IPTs have prevailed against the open market and swept aside competition to keep Weapons Integration internal to the MoD. This bucks the trend I outlined above. As Chair of that Conference I was also personally involved in the debate between the Eurofighter Teams from the UK MoD and the SAE based initiative called UAI (universal armament interface). It was obvious who would win, during the titanic battles between internal UK integration procurement and

essentially an American Collegiate alternative (UAI) from Raytheon, Lockheed, Northrop, and Boeing. In the end, on the open and even playing field we now have in the UK's Defence Procurement Industry there is the very real prospect that external contracting will prevail in the heartland of IPT activity such as Weapons Integration. Eventually, the Eurofighter will carry the new JDAM missile from USAF and therefore will inherit the corporate collegiate PC based solution of UAI. Once installed integrators will then have an open domain route to integration in a matter of days versus the traditional two years of implementation currently favoured. At that time, the Eurofighter and the Joint Strike Fighter will both carry a Universal Armament Interface and competition at least from larger integrators will become a reality.

In the end, as we have seen recently, big business always wins out, regardless of Government or Defence Departments who might think to the contrary.