Thales Watchkeeper WK450 (British Army)

Contains threads on British Army equipment of the past, present and future.
SW1
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Re: Thales Watchkeeper WK450 (British Army)

Post by SW1 »

Well the gift that Keeps on giving….keeps the engineers employed


topman
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Re: Thales Watchkeeper WK450 (British Army)

Post by topman »

Is that the 7th crash? I've lost count.

SW1
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Re: Thales Watchkeeper WK450 (British Army)

Post by SW1 »

It’s certainly in and around that number quite the collection there racking up

dmereifield
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Re: Thales Watchkeeper WK450 (British Army)

Post by dmereifield »

Cheaper than decommissioning them....

Phil Sayers
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Re: Thales Watchkeeper WK450 (British Army)

Post by Phil Sayers »

Send them to Ukraine to use as loitering munitions....

Poiuytrewq
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Re: Thales Watchkeeper WK450 (British Army)

Post by Poiuytrewq »

Watchkeeper in the spotlight

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/20 ... -diy-uavs/

Is it still fit for purpose or already obsolete?

Watchkeeper drone on the runway
Beneath the balmy November sun of New Mexico, the British soldiers were happy. They were about to show off what their £5m Watchkeeper drones were truly capable of in front of a key UK ally.

Flying under the UK military registration WK036, the French-made, propeller-driven unmanned aircraft soared over the training area’s scrubland at speeds of more than 70mph.

Its high-definition cameras beamed back footage of targets on the Fort Irwin ranges, ready for waiting artillery batteries to engage them.

Suitably impressed by Watchkeeper, the Americans treated their British guests to a helicopter tour of the local area. Official photos show grinning Royal Artillery soldiers sitting in the back of a Black Hawk.

47th Regiment Royal Artillery
British soldiers from the 47th Regiment Royal Artillery were in New Mexico to demonstrate the Watchkeeper drone’s capabilities
Yet disaster struck on November 10, 2022 when WK036 crashed. The loss of that drone is being publicly revealed for the first time today.

Shadow defence minister Luke Pollard says his Conservative counterparts have tried to hide the incident.

“With Watchkeeper crashes now reaching eight since 2014, it is seriously concerning why ministers covered up the latest crash and have failed to learn the lessons from previous mistakes to ensure these drones can keep Britain safe while threats increase,” says the Labour MP.

The Ministry of Defence says the accusation of a cover up is “totally baseless and shows a complete lack of understanding of what actually happened”.

The crash means one in seven of Britain’s 54 Watchkeepers, which are supposed to stay in service until the 2040s, has met an untimely end.

Anti-drone campaigner Chris Cole, whose Drone Wars group brought the November crash of WK036 to light, says there are “serious questions” to be asked “about the value for money of the Watchkeeper programme”.

Meanwhile, military commentators are warning that battlefield reconnaissance is now done by cheap consumer grade drones instead of expensive aeroplane-sized UAVs, as shown in Ukraine.

“One has to question whether these big drones have had their day, on the basis that they are too easy to interdict and take down,” says Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, a former Army officer.

Battlefield experience from Ukraine shows how small, inexpensive drones such as the DJI Mavic can be used in the hands of frontline troops.

Even cheaper craft, homebuilt by frontline soldiers and not reliant on GPS or satellites to find their way, are proving just as useful.

With their built-in cameras, these DIY “first person view” drones can be used for reconnaissance or even strike missions, dropping grenades on enemy positions with pinpoint accuracy.


Originally billed as an “affordable solution” at £800m when Labour’s defence secretary John Reid ordered it in 2005, Watchkeeper’s costs have overshot that figure by half a billion pounds.

Defence minister James Cartlidge confirmed in June that Watchkeeper has cost £1.351bn, a sum that includes upgrades to airfields in Aberporth and Boscombe Down.

A whistleblower who contacted Parliament’s Defence Committee earlier this year pointed out that Watchkeeper is “exclusively procured from Thales”.

The French-headquartered company, which makes the drones at a facility near Leicester and is also contracted to maintain them, did not respond to a request for comment.

While questions hang over its costs, others are being raised about whether Watchkeeper is fit for purpose in the modern age.

De Bretton-Gordon, a retired colonel, says inexpensive drones costing a few thousand pounds each (as opposed to Watchkeeper’s £5.2m unit price tag) are proving highly capable in the Russo-Ukraine war.

“Ukraine’s artillery is so effective these days because virtually every Ukrainian artillery shell that’s fired has a drone on the other end marking its strike,” he observes.

Labour MP Kevan Jones adds: “Ukrainian forces have shown that many of Watchkeeper’s capabilities can be delivered for a fraction of the cost.”

Carrying out unarmed spotting for artillery targets is the niche that Watchkeeper was supposed to fill.


Army sources confirm, however, that the drone is unable to be flown in less-than-perfect weather.

Watchkeeper is fit for “visual meteorological conditions only”, yet wars do not wait for the sun to shine.

The drone that crashed in November was being flown from an airstrip a few miles southeast of New Mexico’s Organ Mountains.

Details of the latest crash are not being released by the Ministry of Defence (MoD), which confirmed that an internal investigation is still ongoing eight months later.

“The incident resulted in no injuries or damage to infrastructure,” said an MoD spokesman.

“As is routine with any aircraft incident, an investigation is taking place. It would be inappropriate to speculate further.”

Francis Tusa, editor of the Defence Analysis newsletter, explains that Watchkeeper’s origins were intimately bound up in the inter-Service politics of the Afghanistan War era.

With the Taliban having little access to anti-aircraft missiles, operating drones was not of interest to the Royal Air Force until military thinking began favouring unmanned aircraft, he says.

Such drones could loiter for hours over a spot of interest and were supposed to be cheaper to run than the RAF’s traditional fast jets like the Tornado.

“That sort of killed Watchkeeper,” says Tusa, “because the RAF said ‘rather than spending more money on Watchkeeper, give us the money and we’ll buy [the armed MQ-1] Predator’.”

He jokes that the £1.35bn spent on the unarmed observation drone could instead have been spent buying 275,000 consumer-grade craft, similar to how both Ukrainian and Russian soldiers are using drones today.

Promises of Watchkeeper’s cost-effectiveness have not come true.

Part of the project’s original plan was for junior Royal Artillery soldiers to fly the drones, saving money on pilot training and wages.

Such penny-pinching has backfired. The artillery’s dedicated drone unit, 47 Regiment, has been short of pilots since 2019.


The Armed Forces Pay Review Body urged Army chiefs to give the regiment’s pilots a £30,000 bonus apiece to tackle the shortage.

“The MoD concluded that an increase in workforce numbers would not be achievable without additional remuneration measures,” said the APRB in its 2022 annual report.

Even as defence chiefs struggle with staff shortages, the unarmed UAV may struggle on modern battlefields.

Watchkeeper was optimised for use against enemies who couldn’t shoot it down, recalls de Bretton-Gordon, contrasting the lack of air opposition in Afghanistan with the mass of anti-aircraft weapons in Ukraine.

“You could operate pretty much unhindered in the clear skies above Afghanistan and Iraq,” he says.

“It goes back to the old British focus on counterinsurgency over the last 20 years rather than war fighting, where you were fighting an enemy that didn’t have sophisticated air defences.”

Even a lack of enemy air defences hasn’t kept Watchkeepers from being destroyed.

None of the crashes over the last nine years were caused by hostile action, or even took place in a warzone.

A token deployment to Afghanistan’s Camp Bastion in late 2014 saw three Watchkeepers flying for 146 hours over a three week period – an average of four and a half days’ operations for each machine.

Consensus is building in Westminster that the drone programme needs close public scrutiny.

“In theory, Watchkeeper is a highly capable system and an important asset for the future British Army,” says Mark Francois, a Conservative MP and chairman of a Parliamentary sub-committee on defence procurement.

“However, it was so over-specified in development that it is years late coming into service and also has an unfortunate tendency to crash; which from a military viewpoint is distinctly suboptimal.”

His committee’s whistleblower suggested that there are 1,910 individual requirements that the troubled aircraft was supposed to meet.

Lamenting how much public money has been spent on “this failing programme,” Kevan Jones, the Labour MP, says the MoD has “serious questions to answer about why Watchkeeper cannot perform its most basic requirement – flying.”

Much like crashed drone WK036, those questions are not flying away any time soon.

SW1
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Re: Thales Watchkeeper WK450 (British Army)

Post by SW1 »

Couple of things, Aircraft unmanned or otherwise crash always have always will.

Does highlight the need for trained pilots and maintainers to operate them.

Drones are supposed to used in dangerous missions so that if they are shot down is doesn’t kill people

Watchkeeper doesn’t use satellites for control. The article concentrates on the air vehicle were as money was also spent on the ground infrastructure that was upgraded to handle the data interpretation and distribution.

The biggest cost increases and delays for watchkeeper over the Hermes 450 was the requirement to operate in civil aerospace without a qualified pilot operating it. The army included this requirement without understanding what it meant or how it was to be achieved the question is was this required for an artillery spotting drone is the question.

Poiuytrewq
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Re: Thales Watchkeeper WK450 (British Army)

Post by Poiuytrewq »

SW1 wrote: 31 Jul 2023, 07:43 Couple of things….
A lot has changed since 2005 and the infrastructure point is a good one.

The main question is, after lessons learnt in Ukraine, what now and how fast should it be procured?

SW1
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Re: Thales Watchkeeper WK450 (British Army)

Post by SW1 »

Poiuytrewq wrote: 31 Jul 2023, 09:30
SW1 wrote: 31 Jul 2023, 07:43 Couple of things….
A lot has changed since 2005 and the infrastructure point is a good one.

The main question is, after lessons learnt in Ukraine, what now and how fast should it be procured?
Well watchkeeper is now more than simply an artillery spotting air vehicle.

But it’s what uavs are supposed to do be expendable used and lost in conflict. The more you try to make them have the same attrition rate of manned a/c the more there cost will increase.

The lesson would be maybe more orbats are required more people trained to operate the air vehicles and perhaps more attrition built into your assumptions. But it’s like everything what to do wish to prioritise as what you’re contributing in future operations.

I’ve suggested before where I would prioritise in this regard and airborne surveillance and istar aircraft would be one such area.

Timmymagic
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Re: Thales Watchkeeper WK450 (British Army)

Post by Timmymagic »

SW1 wrote: 31 Jul 2023, 12:18
Poiuytrewq wrote: 31 Jul 2023, 09:30
SW1 wrote: 31 Jul 2023, 07:43 Couple of things….
A lot has changed since 2005 and the infrastructure point is a good one.

The main question is, after lessons learnt in Ukraine, what now and how fast should it be procured?
Well watchkeeper is now more than simply an artillery spotting air vehicle.

But it’s what uavs are supposed to do be expendable used and lost in conflict. The more you try to make them have the same attrition rate of manned a/c the more there cost will increase.

The lesson would be maybe more orbats are required more people trained to operate the air vehicles and perhaps more attrition built into your assumptions. But it’s like everything what to do wish to prioritise as what you’re contributing in future operations.

I’ve suggested before where I would prioritise in this regard and airborne surveillance and istar aircraft would be one such area.
One of the most persistent criticisms has been the RA training for pilots/operators, that has been to blame for a number of crashes. Like so many platforms it crosses over cap badges and indeed services. Given the way we should be getting a common picture across the battlespace I'd hope the Army looks at giving the next generation to the AAC...

SW1
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Re: Thales Watchkeeper WK450 (British Army)

Post by SW1 »

Timmymagic wrote: 31 Jul 2023, 16:17
SW1 wrote: 31 Jul 2023, 12:18
Poiuytrewq wrote: 31 Jul 2023, 09:30
SW1 wrote: 31 Jul 2023, 07:43 Couple of things….
A lot has changed since 2005 and the infrastructure point is a good one.

The main question is, after lessons learnt in Ukraine, what now and how fast should it be procured?
Well watchkeeper is now more than simply an artillery spotting air vehicle.

But it’s what uavs are supposed to do be expendable used and lost in conflict. The more you try to make them have the same attrition rate of manned a/c the more there cost will increase.

The lesson would be maybe more orbats are required more people trained to operate the air vehicles and perhaps more attrition built into your assumptions. But it’s like everything what to do wish to prioritise as what you’re contributing in future operations.

I’ve suggested before where I would prioritise in this regard and airborne surveillance and istar aircraft would be one such area.
One of the most persistent criticisms has been the RA training for pilots/operators, that has been to blame for a number of crashes. Like so many platforms it crosses over cap badges and indeed services. Given the way we should be getting a common picture across the battlespace I'd hope the Army looks at giving the next generation to the AAC...
The army hasn’t been particularly gd in this regard it did forget to budget for apache aircrew training after all.

As a prerequisite this should of been AAC at the very least from the outset but then cap badge protectionism rules…

RunningStrong
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Re: Thales Watchkeeper WK450 (British Army)

Post by RunningStrong »

SW1 wrote: 31 Jul 2023, 12:18 Well watchkeeper is now more than simply an artillery spotting air vehicle.
Is it?
Timmymagic wrote: 31 Jul 2023, 16:17 One of the most persistent criticisms has been the RA training for pilots/operators, that has been to blame for a number of crashes. Like so many platforms it crosses over cap badges and indeed services. Given the way we should be getting a common picture across the battlespace I'd hope the Army looks at giving the next generation to the AAC...
At what point does an STA asset become AAC and not RA?

Not forgetting the gunners on Hermes/Watchkeeper would have been used to crashing their UAS, it was how they worked for years before!

SW1
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Re: Thales Watchkeeper WK450 (British Army)

Post by SW1 »

RunningStrong wrote: 31 Jul 2023, 17:44
SW1 wrote: 31 Jul 2023, 12:18 Well watchkeeper is now more than simply an artillery spotting air vehicle.
Is it?
Timmymagic wrote: 31 Jul 2023, 16:17 One of the most persistent criticisms has been the RA training for pilots/operators, that has been to blame for a number of crashes. Like so many platforms it crosses over cap badges and indeed services. Given the way we should be getting a common picture across the battlespace I'd hope the Army looks at giving the next generation to the AAC...
At what point does an STA asset become AAC and not RA?

Not forgetting the gunners on Hermes/Watchkeeper would have been used to crashing their UAS, it was how they worked for years before!
Well they aren’t spotting for artillery off the coast of Cyprus are they or even in the channel?


When you need a qualified pilot to fly the aircraft.

RunningStrong
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Re: Thales Watchkeeper WK450 (British Army)

Post by RunningStrong »

SW1 wrote: 31 Jul 2023, 17:53 Well they aren’t spotting for artillery off the coast of Cyprus are they or even in the channel?


When you need a qualified pilot to fly the aircraft.
They're not operational off Cyprus, it's fair weather flying for training.

The channel was the briefest of military support to civilian activity. It wasn't a good look using military hardware to police the channel. 21 sorties in total...

So yeah, still a one-trick pony with an OoS date of 2042, it's absurd.

Timmymagic
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Re: Thales Watchkeeper WK450 (British Army)

Post by Timmymagic »

RunningStrong wrote: 31 Jul 2023, 17:44 At what point does an STA asset become AAC and not RA?
I guess the Intelligence Corps could have claim on them as well...

And the Royal Engineers in a historical sense..

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