According to a contract notice, the Royal Navy intends to award a £2 million contract to HII Unmanned Systems for the purchase of additional REMUS 100M autonomous underwater vehicles.
The contract notice states:
“It is considered that this contract can be awarded using the negotiated procedure without prior publication of a contract notice pursuant to regulation 32(5)(b) of the Public Contracts Regulations 2015 for additional deliveries of goods. This is because MOD already hold a contract with HII Unmanned Systems Inc for provision of this equipment and for the subsequent support. HII Unmanned Systems Inc own the original equipment manufacturer who are the sole known provider of this equipment.
The equipment must be identical to the items originally purchased to ensure inter-operability with the existing systems and because RN personnel already have training and experience of using this equipment. Using different equipment would result in disproportionate technical difficulties in operation by RN personnel and incompatibility with existing RN equipment.”
The total duration of the original contract and this contract does not exceed 3 years.
What is Remus 100M?
According to OSL Systems lab here, REMUS (Remote Environmental Monitoring UnitS) 100 is a compact, light-weight, autonomous underwater vehicle designed for operation in coastal environments up to 100 meters in depth.
The REMUS 100 can be configured to include a wide variety of standard and/or customer specified sensors and system options to meet your unique autonomous mission requirements.
The system is used onboard the Hazard class crewless minehunter drone vessels, you can read more about those here.
We are faced with a foreign power, Russia that spends most of its time thinking militarily something we have forgotten how to think decades ago. This is very unpleasant but the sooner we start thinking that way; at least in part; the easier it will be to push back.
In terms of Russian security they do not seem to get it into their thick heads as to who, in their right minds, would ever want to invade Russia. Maybe we should offer them NATO membership and then we could all face the threat from a rising China.
Precisely and exactly nobody is interested in attacking or invading Russia.
If Russia wound its neck in then it would have been pretty much welcomed in everywhere.
The trouble is that a lot of the sabre ratting is to cover up for kleptocratic activities and pseudo imperial stuff.
I’m not sure it’s all that Pseudo imperial to be honest, it’s pretty much a continuation of the imperial Russian state and the the view that what was Part of Imperial Russia should still be part of Russia now.
Absolutely right. Whatever the regime – Tsar, Soviet or Putin – the Russians have always had an imperialist mindset.
Spot on.
I think the only people realistically able to invade Russia are China. All of the Western Nations (European) armies are too small for such an adventure. Even as a whole NATO are not in a realistic position to invade Russia, short of some cross border action. We simply do not have the material in place to support such a campaign.
After all, I think it was Monty who stated: “Do not invade Russia!” Where he was describing why the German Army and its allies failed.
I think it is a little different for the first conventional strike.
But the war of attrition on the ground would suck in some much resource that even China wouldn’t be able to carry it off.
I was only half joking, in another thread, when I said that Xi is hoping Vlad will overplay his hand and hit financial meltdown.
Xi can then step in with cash in exchange for Russia jet engine and submarine design secrets as well as lump of territory they want – on a long lease you understand……
China will be watching maybe thinking if Russia does attack the Ukraine they might at the same time attack Taiwan hoping all focus from the West would give them their time, very Horrible situation for the world if that would happen, While we ran our Armed forces down they both have invested heavily in theirs
Yes I think Russia are making a massive Geopolitical mistake and are facing the wrong way. Historically they are very good at these specific types of massive Geopolitical mistakes, I think it seems to be an inbuilt trust that a strongman totalitarian state will respect another similar state. Russia did the same thing with Napoleon, Hitler and is following along nicely with China. Unfortunately for Russia China will inevitably need Russian land for food security as well as for its access to natural resources. China has the population mass as well as Wealth and production that it will at some… Read more »
So the Remus 100M will be used as one of the tools in the box for coastal water mine clearance ….. CCTV relay being the obvious function I presume? CCTV survey (cables) might be another role? I believe there’s a Remus 6000 …. the numbering indicative of the depth, in meters, the device can dive down to. I guess the system uses an umbilical cable to link back to the mother vessel so the range of the REMUS would be limited by this?