The Army is asking industry whether it can supply affordable, scalable first person view drone training systems, in an expression of interest covering the small uncrewed aircraft element of Project UBIQUITY, according to a market engagement notice published on Thursday.
The requirement is valued at an estimated £3 million excluding VAT, running from 11 January 2027 to 10 January 2028 with a possible extension to January 2029, and is marked as particularly suitable for small and medium-sized enterprises.
According to the notice, the element concerns “scalable, non-energetic FPV training systems for Army training, experimentation and force development”, with the exercise intended to gauge market interest and supplier capability to deliver those systems alongside ground control stations, batteries, spares, repair support and training documentation.
The department also states it wants to “confirm the existence of a competitive supplier landscape and inform refinement of the User Requirement Document prior to any potential formal tender release”. Responses are requested by 2 October, and suppliers who do not wish to take part are invited to explain why, which the department says will help develop an understanding of the wider market.
What non-energetic means
Non-energetic means the systems carry no explosive or warhead, which confines the requirement to training rather than to anything a soldier would fly at a target.
First person view flying puts the operator inside the aircraft’s own camera feed through goggles or a screen, rather than watching the drone from the ground, which is the technique that has made small quadcopters so effective in Ukraine and which demands a good deal of practice to do well under pressure.
Training systems of that kind are the same airframes without the payload, flown until operators can guide them through obstacles, into buildings and onto moving targets. The skill transfers directly, which is why the aircraft used to teach it need to behave like the ones used operationally.
Ground control stations, batteries and spares appearing in the same requirement reflect the consumable nature of the equipment, since training at volume means a steady loss of airframes to crashes and a steady demand for batteries and components.
The Army has been building drone capability across several programmes at once. Project ASGARD covers the sensing and strike architecture intended to find and attack targets at depth, and the Strategic Defence Review set out a force structure in which 40 per cent of combat capability comes from single-use autonomous systems and a further 40 per cent from reusable ones, leaving 20 per cent in traditional crewed platforms.
Britain has committed to supplying more than 120,000 drones to Ukraine this year, with over 25,000 delivered by the time the Defence Secretary reported to the Ukraine Defence Contact Group last week, and the department has drawn repeatedly on Ukrainian experience in shaping its own programmes.
The counter-drone side of the problem has been developing in parallel, with ministers confirming £240 million for Project PRESAGIUM, an enhanced counter-drone system for protecting military sites, while a separate answer this month stated that no decision has been taken on including a hard-kill counter-drone active protection system within the Mechanised Infantry Programme.
See if Russia will do it. Their drone corps is bigger than the British army now.
One of surprises of this war is how Russia traditional conventional forces failed so much.
What are these people thinking? If there is any secondary benefit from the billions we have spent to help the Ukrainians it must surely be that we can copy and paste what they are doing? We gave them the plans for the storm shadows recently, surely they can lend us a couple of guys to teach us?
This beggars belief!!
The British Army has trained thousands of Ukrainian soldiers. This is not about people,. Its FPV training equipment. The system, training drones, ground control stations, batteries and spares.
Surely the drone manufacturer would supply the training drones, ground control stations, batteries and spares? I can’t believe that the R Artillery or AAC can’t devise and run a professional training programme, without the need to spend a lot of money on bringing in a commercial outfit. If they need some particular expertise, then buy in a couple of experienced civvies from industry.The contracting-out route hasn’t worked too successfully with the joint flying training PFI, or with the barracks and family housing repair and renovation, or with the commercial catering providers, etc.
You have to wonder what the real bill comes to for all this contracting-out and PFI stuff, it must be multi billions when the Air Tanker contract, JMFTS etc are factored in.
So are we really saying the RA can’t run all arms drone training at Larkhill? After all they haven’t many guns t worry about have they!the RAC run armour courses at Bovi,RLC run driving courses at Leaconfield they are all arms courses so why not the RA?
More useless ideas from…. oh I give up!
many (many) years ago I was a member of the Royal Artillery. Shoulders back eyes front… The Gunners did not have ‘practice guns’, where experienced personnel and new recruits would practice, practice and then do it again to learn their trade.
So why do we have to have a drone practice dept within the MOD, with it’s stockpiles of ‘soldier proof’ drones, batteries, spare parts, a QM, QM 2IC, QM personnel, a QM office, QM personnel workshop, billets, cookhouse etc etc…
The mind boggles and the purse strings keep straining over hare brained ideas.
The negativity about this is astonishing:
1. Could the RA or AAC run this? No not yet, no-one has direct experience of it.
2. This isn’t a new concept; SAAB run all of the TES equipment for us, they run the after action reviews that go with it etc
2a. When we bring in new equipment, who do you think provides the initial training? It’s the manufacturer – they at the bare minimum conduct train the trainer packages on all of it.
3. Using a third party provider allows the Army to develop tactics, techniques and procedures without having to spend its own ops budget – because it’s already allocated through this contracting mechanism.
4. there is currently more expertise on FPV drone operations from a operator point of view in industry than there is in the military, so this makes so much sense! Where do we send SF medics to practice? In NHS Emergency Departments, that’s because they are the current experts.
Of course, in a world where the Army has huge amounts of money and manpower it would do this in house; but this seems eminently pragmatic.