Uncrewed Systems Centre to pull drone buying together

The Uncrewed Systems Centre is the body expected to bring coherence to British drone procurement, and a newly arrived two-star officer has just taken it over, the Military Aviation Authority’s head of regulation and certification told the Apex Europe conference in London on Wednesday.

Commodore Neil Mathieson said the centre had not come up at the conference until that point, and that conversation about it tends to settle on the building it occupies when the value of it lies elsewhere. “The beauty of it is to cohere all these things, so we’re buying the right stuff with the right networks, with the right architectures,” he said.

The task in front of it is considerable, and he described it plainly. “We’ve got British Army regiments out there who are operating four or five different types of drone. They then come together at brigade level with other regiments who have also got four or five different types of drones. They don’t talk to each other. They don’t communicate in the same webs and the same networks. They then get to division level, and you’re suddenly faced with hundreds of these things,” he said, adding that doctrine and policy have not yet caught up with the rate at which equipment is arriving.

Speaking with his safety regulator hat off, he said the authority sees all of this and can advise on it while sitting outside the procurement chain. The same question arrives again further up the scale, he said, asking how a Royal Navy collaborative combat aircraft will talk to a Royal Air Force one. Companies telephone the authority announcing they will be flying at next year’s Steadfast Defender, at which point the useful questions are who is sponsoring them and how they intend to do it.

Colonel Thomas Erlenbruch of the Bundeswehr’s Cyber and Information Domain Service made the same case from the German side, and put it in terms of what a soldier can reasonably be trained to do.

He said: “Open interfaces are really, really important to be able to bring data from one system to the other, because we cannot forget that with all the autonomous systems, we also need a C2 system to get all the information they collect into, or to give missions to those systems for targeting. That’s one major user requirement, that I don’t have to train 50 different systems on the battlefield, but that I may be able to use one main system to be able to control all these different things out there, and that comes back to the standards and the interfaces. That’s the only way to be able to do it, because otherwise I cannot train my personnel to use it.”