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UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 535-iii House of COMMONS MINUTES OF EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE DEFENCE COMMITTEE
Tuesday 3 June 2008 MR JOHN HOWE CB OBE, MR VICTOR CHAVEZ, MR NICK MILLER and MR CHRIS DAY
DR GRAHAM THORNTON, MR JOHN BROOKS and MR ED WALBY Evidence heard in Public Questions 195 - 260
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
Oral Evidence Taken before the Defence Committee on Tuesday 3 June 2008 Members present Mr James Arbuthnot, in the Chair Mr David S. Borrow Mr David Crausby Mr David Hamilton Mr Dai Havard Mr Adam Holloway Mr Brian Jenkins Richard Younger-Ross ________________ Memorandum submitted by Thales UK
Examination of Witnesses Witnesses: Mr John Howe CB OBE, Vice Chairman, Mr Victor Chavez, Vice President, Business Development, Sales and Marketing, Mr Nick Miller, Head of UAV Systems, Business Development and Mr Chris Day, Business Executive, UAV Systems, Thales UK, gave evidence. Q195 Chairman: Good morning. I wonder, Mr Howe, if you could possibly introduce everybody? Mr Howe: Good morning. I am John Howe, Vice Chairman of Thales UK; Victor Chavez, on my left, is our Vice President for Business Development, Sales and Marketing; Chris Day, on my right, is head of our UAV Systems operation; and Nick Miller on my far left is the Head of Business Development for our UAV Systems operation. Q196 Chairman: Thank you for coming to give evidence on our inquiry into ISTAR, and UAVs particularly. Can you begin, please, by telling us how important UAVs and unmanned aerial systems are in terms of Thales's business; how important the technology is; and how you expect it to develop in the future in terms of the importance to you? Mr Howe: I will start, if I may, and then I will turn to Victor. We do operate in Thales at several levels which are relevant to your inquiry about ISTAR, and about the role of UAVs in ISTAR. We are a prime contractor, a systems integrator, across a wide variety of platforms; and we do provide a lot of high technology equipment and systems in the communications area; sensors; and in the field of ISTAR we particularly provide systems including ones which are based upon UAVs. We believe we have particular strength in the integration of UAV ISTAR systems. We are at the moment, as I think you are aware, providing the Hermes 450 to the British Army in operational theatres; and we are the prime contractor for the MoD's Watchkeeper programme which will provide the UK Armed Forces with a persistent tactical UAV ISTAR capability for the future. I will turn to you, Victor, if I may to add to that. Mr Chavez: I would just like to stress the breadth of Thales's involvement in C-4 ISTAR. Many companies have a C-4 ISTAR division, but if you actually look across almost all of Thales's divisions there are elements of C-4 ISTAR in there. That is because we have a systems integrator and an electronic systems provider. As John said, that goes from base technology through to being system of systems integrator on projects such as FRETs, for example. In that context we are not a platform provider. To us a platform is merely a mechanism for getting a set of sensors and communication equipment around the battlefield to a particular location and space whereby we can gather the information that we need, we can process that information and we can turn it into usable intelligence for the end user. From the very outset we are a company that specialises in the systems elements of C-4 ISTAR, and the systems element of UAVs. I would just like to reinforce John's point on that. Q197 Chairman: In the last evidence session I asked whether we were doing the wrong inquiry into the platforms, as opposed to all the other issues involved in UAVs. In view of your answer, Mr Chavez, what would you say to that? Mr Chavez: I think it is interesting to understand the platform dimension. As we look at UAVs, you cannot have a UAV system without the UAV platform; and, therefore, the platform is an important part of the system, clearly. I think it is important to differentiate between those systems where the platform represents the highest risk element of a particular system and those where, in the case of ISTAR surveillance systems that Thales is involved in, the platform is a relatively low-risk element of the mix of the system and the innovation, and the complexity and the potential risk lies in the maturation of the sensor technology and the bringing together of a coherent system, rather than in the platform. So platforms do have an important role to play; and, it is very important to understand, particularly in the field of UCAVs, in terms of combat air vehicles, that the platform complexity tends to be greater; because what you are actually asking of the platform tends to be much more substantial. Q198 Chairman: Of the three most recent urgent operational requirements two of the UAV ones were procured from the United States. Does that suggest there is a shortfall in British technology, or in European defence technology? Are British or European defence companies falling behind the United States? Is there something we should be doing to catch up? Mr Chavez: I think if you look at the UAV systems market you have a distinct set of different layers of the UAV programme. When you look, for example, at the strategic end and you look at the bigger UAV systems, such as that which is used in the Reaper system, Global Hawk and so on, it is fair to say that the US has invested a vast amount more than any other country in those strategic UAV systems. If you look at the middle level, where we see Watchkeeper and the Hermes 450, the country that has invested more and has greater operational experience of that than almost anywhere is Israel. You see that in terms of the US, because many of the US programmes, at that sort of tactical UAV level, are based around Israeli-originated designs. When you look at the small, handheld, man-portable UAVs you see it is a much wider market. Because of the scale of the UAV there are interesting platforms being provided by people almost out of their backyard and garage systems. It is not too far different from model aircraft technology; but you see strong usage by the US, strong usage by Israel and growing offers from around the world. In terms of the UK's knowledge, when we look at programmes like Watchkeeper, there is no doubt in my mind that Watchkeeper is absolutely state of the art. There is nothing in the States, I believe, that is significantly in advance of Watchkeeper. Watchkeeper, even though it was based originally on an Israeli UAV design, the system components, the communication systems, the sensor systems and so on are derived on a best in class from around the world: the data links, for example, very important in terms of international interoperability, are bought from the US; the radar system is being manufactured by Thales in the UK; so there is a wide range of systems issues that come together. In terms of the broader systems, I think the UK systems thinking is very advanced. Mr Howe: On the point of platforms versus systems, in the case of Watchkeeper the actual platform is a relatively modest part of the total value of the system - round about 30 per cent, I recall from memory. Secondly, the vehicle for Watchkeeper, though derived from the Hermes 450 which is an Israeli product, is being developed and produced in the UK, in a joint venture we have with Elbit which is contracted to Thales. Even the air vehicle is at least partly a British development. Mr Chavez: I think it is very important to recognise that right at the outset of Watchkeeper MoD placed upon us some fairly stringent requirements in terms of sustainability of supply of all aspects of the system in the UK, because obviously we wanted to ensure that the UK had ownership of the intellectual property associated with all aspects of that; and hence the creation of the joint venture, which is based in the UK, to manufacture and to own and to hold that IPR for the air vehicle. Q199 Chairman: Do you have anything you wish to add? Mr Miller: I can concur that the elements of Watchkeeper for the UK have put Thales and the UK in an excellent position from our current operations with Hermes. The UK, MoD and Thales on the industrial side have learnt a lot from those operations. Through Watchkeeper for the future we are now at the forefront of the UAV market and ISTAR market in the UK. Q200 Mr Crausby: Hermes 450 UAVs are currently operating in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Can you outline what capability they are delivering and what feedback you are receiving from our own Armed Forces? Mr Day: Today, if we look across both theatres (and I will speak generally about both theatres and specifics when we get to a particular point) we have now achieved somewhere in the region of about 9,000 operational hours, which is a significant total when we look at historic data. We support the MoD across a whole range of different types of operation. When we entered the journey, pretty much just over a year ago, the targets were tough and very difficult to meet; we had about six months to get this capability up and running, the regiment trained and ready to deploy; and more specifically, which has been one of the key areas that we have learnt probably most about, is the logistic support that we need in order to support our guys out in both theatres; and we have picked up an awful lot of information associated with that. We have to work closely with the guys because, at the end of the day, they are using it on average for about 14 hours a day - that is two air vehicles up each day for about 14 hours a day, every day of the year - sometimes for durations of 100 hours consistently. In order to support that we need to make certain that as the requirements on them change and evolve (and they will depending on how the operations are going) we can look at how we might reflect changes within a system, specifically when we look at Watchkeeper, in order to support those. One of the most significant benefits of this particular UOR - and in the MoD we call it "lines of development", so we mean the infrastructure, the training, the way they deploy them at CONOPS - we have started to learn very significant lessons out of these particular operations and how they might be reflected on Watchkeeper. What we are doing all the time is talking to the military; we are talking to our guys in theatre; and we must remember that we actually have a small team out in each theatre supporting the guys, so when there are technical challenges we are in a strong position to make certain that we can address those issues very quickly. From that perspective we are learning 24/7, and it is 24/7; every day of the week something else is coming back. We also get involved and we work closely with the regiment down on Salisbury Plain, attend regular meetings and we work closely together to make certain this thing works in the best possible way for the guys on the ground. Mr Miller: This is a fundamental capability that is being provided. Feedback from operations have said that this is extremely advanced, and an enhancing capability. It provides full motion video; and an electro-optic and infra-red camera is onboard the unmanned vehicle, and provides that video and intelligence throughout the battle command for the land-based commander, both through forward air controllers, through remote viewing terminals or laptops, but also into the ground infrastructure in both theatres. So it is providing that battle-winning capability of the electro-optic infra-red intelligence. Q201 Mr Havard: You said 9,000 hours, on how many frames? Mr Day: In each theatre we have five aircraft. Basically how that operates is we keep pretty much two ready to go all the time. That is spread over about four airframes. Occasionally when we have got vehicles down for servicing then we will use the three we have got. Q202 Mr Havard: Each airframe will not have done an equal amount of hours, will it? Mr Day: No. Q203 Mr Havard: In the extreme, one of them will have been used more than any of the others; so you have got an extreme testing, have you, of one or two of these vehicles? Mr Day: We keep very, very detailed logs associated with the air vehicles themselves, the ground stations, the data links and the sensors. We know exactly how many hours we have got on each of the platforms in each of the key equipments. In terms of the environments, that has been one of the most significant areas of learning for us all. I give you two examples: when we originally deployed the equipment into theatre last summer they pushed the boxes off the back of the aircraft into Iraq and immediately were met with 50 degree plus temperatures. Today that is outside of the specification of most UAV systems - clear to about 49 degrees. The moment we arrive - 55 plus degrees - everything is thermally stressed. In Afghanistan one of the most significant challenges, although it is not immediately apparent, is that the whole country is covered in a very fine dust. What does that mean to us? It means with things like computers and laptops you have to clean filters twice a day. You can imagine, on a piece of high technology equipment that changes the way you want to do maintenance; it changes the way you want to support the equipment. We then wait five or six months and then we are trying to operate the same equipment in Afghanistan. Today we are now operating in temperatures of minus 10/ minus 15 degrees, significant humidity, so we are working in icy conditions. We are working in temperatures where people on the ground are actually freezing to death, and the system is up there pushing hard and it is delivering to the guys on the ground. Out there we also have issues I think the Afghanis refer to them as "the day of a hundred winds", where up in the mountains the winds are over 100 miles per hour for days on end. The guys have got to plan and be able to operate and use the equipment in those environments, and that is where Watchkeeper comes in. Watchkeeper was designed from the outset to actually address those types of environments and give our guys the best possible chance when those conditions exist. Q204 Mr Havard: That is why you are testing off the coast of Wales, no doubt! Have some of these airframes been in both environments? Mr Day: At this moment in time we do not generally move platforms or equipment from one theatre to the other; but we actually keep a very detailed log of the equipment in both theatres. We identify all the issues that arrive, and we do have the ability to pull information about the system as it is located in both theatres. Q205 Mr Crausby: In a recent article in Jane's Defence Weekly you said that Hermes 450 was initially seen as a collector of intelligence, but the company was "widening what it can do and moving out to full network connectivity". Can you tell us what that means, and what the benefits and the future will be for UK Armed Forces personnel? Mr Miller: The Hermes 450 system is basically a collector at the moment of image intelligence, and provides the basis of that intelligence to the land component. What Watchkeeper brings as a system is much more of a dissemination, communication and network system. What we are learning from the Hermes 450 is how we grow that path towards the full integrated system where the information is passed throughout the intelligence. Hermes is a collector; is providing the right imagery, down to the right ground at the time; but the next step forward is to pass that information to all the necessary players across ground infrastructure, across air vehicles, across all the different land component commanders. There is a difference between the collector system of Hermes and the Watchkeeper system of the future; which is why the ground infrastructure is so important in Watchkeeper. Q206 Mr Holloway: What are we actually doing? How are we using it in Iraq that is different from Afghanistan? Presumably in Iraq it is mainly for intelligence; and presumably in Afghanistan it is being used far more for targeting? Mr Day: In Iraq today its predominant role, as you rightly identify, is just intelligence; and a lot of that is gathered pretty close to where the guys are based around Basra. Effectively it feeds its imagery straight into the main operating base, straight into where the commanders require it. In Afghanistan the CONOPS, the way the military use it, are different; in that it has several roles. It performs a similar role to that in Iraq, but it has the additional roles of supporting our guys when they enter complex and difficult scenarios. The greatest attribute of a UAV is to give the commander on the ground a bird's eye view of actually what is happening on the ground. The vast majority of operations will request that the Hermes 450 is over the top and giving that information. The way it works is, we have the ground station back in Camp Bastion, which could be up to 150 kilometres away, and they are responsible for mission controlling it, and they will actually receive what we call the primary information, the primary imagery. That is linked via several networks into the commanders that are fundamentally in command and control of the operations. They receive that pretty much real time, within just a matter of a second or so. Where it gains its most significant value for the British Army is to the guys that are actually in contact. How we can provide support to them is they have something called a "remote video terminal", which in reality is just a television screen, a manned, portable television screen with a simple antenna; and those guys on the ground are actually seeing what the aircraft is actually doing overhead. They get a clear view of what is going on in compounds. They get a clear view of what is going on over the hill. They get a clear view of what is around the corner. For the guys just about the enter that difficult compound, not knowing what is around the back of that wall, what is likely to be hiding in the corner, they get a clear view before they actually enter that building; and that is fundamentally one of the key roles that H-450 is fulfilling at this moment. Q207 Mr Jenkins: I understand, I think, but could you make it clearer for me. I get the feeling that the bigger the platform we produce the more stuff you are going to bolt onto it until the thing will not fly, and then you take the last bit off and it flies. When I see these soldiers coming out with the little model aircraft and sending them up and around, that can go around the compound and take pictures and send the pictures back. Of all the platforms we have got and are developing, I did not realise the Hermes 450 was called the 450 because it weighed 450 kilograms, so that is a big machines and we can bolt more bits on. What does the military want; what can they use; what is the bottom line? Is it a full video streamed down; is it infra-red? What is the machine and platform that would take the necessary capability? If you take us from the small one, through Hermes to Watchkeeper, will you tell us why each one is important and what it actually does and try and make it so I can understand it? Mr Day: I will start, if I may, and take us on a journey from the small, the mini UAVs. We have only got two effective capabilities in theatre. We have only got two air vehicles on the Hermes 450 that can be used with operations. They tend to use those for the more complex operations. At the end of the day, there is a lot of activity going on by the guys in the infantry who are walking the ground who actually want to know, in very quick time, what is immediately ahead of them. That really means they have got to have command and control of it themselves. They have got to be able to hand-launch it. He wants to know what is 200 metres down that road; so he hand-launches his little UAV and within 25-30 seconds he knows what is ahead of him. That is what the mini UAV gives him. It gives him an ability to have command and control, and for him to actually be able to use that air vehicle to gain that information extremely quickly; but it places constraints on the system. It means it has to live with the infantry, the guys who are actually walking the streets on the operation. He cannot push around a 450 kilogram air vehicle; he needs something that can live in his pack - and that is where minis come from. When we are talking about operations in urban environments, built-up areas, little mini UAVs are absolutely the right thing to have. The key message to get across there is the mini UAVs can normally have a daylight sensor, just like normal televisions at home, or a thermal imager; they cannot have both. They do not have the ability to lift both sensors. If it is night-time you have got to sit there, break it apart and put a thermal on it. If it is daytime you put the TV on it. The other thing is, because they are model airplanes, and if any of you have seen model airplanes fly, they are not very stable; so the imagery is not particularly good, but it gives you the snapshot, and it gives you that bit of information that may make a difference. As we go up the tree, the big driver for moving from minis, to slightly larger platforms, to a Watchkeeper, is all about the quality of the imagery and the range at which we can operate it. Now we are talking about a sensor that is very stabilised, that can sit and look at my face for 12 hours of the day; it can move very quickly through the environment, perhaps a speed of 100 knots, perhaps less. The little minis do 30 or perhaps 40 knots so they are a lot slower. The big platform also has the ability to carry other sensors, and the one I would like to talk about is something we call "synthetic aperture radar". What that really means, it is a radar that gives us an image that looks pretty much like something you would see on a television; it gives you an image. The real attraction is, when there is cloud most television cameras cannot see through cloud - no ability at all; you can leave your air vehicle on the ground - cloud, fog or mist, no capability at all. You put synthetic aperture radar on it and it sees through cloud; it gives the guys a clear image of everything that is stationary on the ground. We then link it to another bit of technology that allows us to see everything that is moving on the ground. Those radars weigh about 40 kilograms as a minimum. The moment you say to me, "Chris, we now want to have that imagery in those poor conditions", I need a larger platform to lift it in the air. I am talking about lifting half a man. I cannot do that with a mini; I need a bigger platform. You can start to see that the critical variable with UAVs - that is the air vehicles themselves - is the more payload you want, the larger the air vehicles. I have a little equation in my head that says, "Depending on your payload size, the payload you represent is between ten and 20 per cent of the platform mass". If you want a 40 kilogram sensor you probably need an air vehicle of about 400 kilograms. The more sensors you want, the more capability, the larger the general platform. The other driver that links to things the Americans do is they like to fly higher. Little mini UAVs, those poor little television sensors, they are only good from about 300 or 400 feet to a 1,000 feet above the ground; if you fly higher than that imagery is not very good. You might say, "I want to fly at 5,000 or 10,000 feet", but you need a better sensor, so you move into the Hermes system. If you have then got a very large platform like the Predator, the Reaper or the Global Hawk, they operate at significantly higher altitudes, and one of the reasons is they carry a very significant sensor sweep. They have to operate higher in order to keep them safe. Those are the sorts of variables which define where you pitch your UAVs. Mr Chavez: Just to add to some of the key variables, Chris touched on persistence - the ability to remain on-task for very extended periods of time - when you are actually gathering intelligence you will frequently want to watch one locality for 24 hours a day: you cannot do that with a mini UAV. The other thing is to do it in a totally undetected manner. You need to get your UAV up to an altitude where it is not visible and it cannot be heard; and, again, mini UAVs just cannot do that. Things like Hermes 450 and Watchkeeper are designed to operate so you can see and gather very usable intelligence without being detected at all for very extended periods of time. You can watch that building and you know that the white Mazda that drove in has been parked there, a person got out, nobody else has gone into that building and then he gets back into the White Mazda and he drives off 12 hours later. It is that sort of long-term persistent ISTAR that is very important. Q208 Mr Holloway: It might be very interesting to visit Mr Day's team when we are in Afghanistan if there is time. Mr Miller in his excellent article referred to "imagery exploitation". Just quoting from Mr Day again, in Afghanistan is there a conflict with the use of this kit between, for example, the JTAC teams that are in contact and the higher commanders who always want to know exactly what is going on? Also, to what extent can the troops in contact dictate or request where the machine should be looking in order for them to get rounds on the ground from indirect fire weapons or aircraft? Mr Day: In terms of the overall way the MoD uses their CONOPS, this is another driver behind the way that the MoD has structured UAVs with the minis, the tactical and the more strategic; that, at the end of the day, Watchkeeper or the H-450 is a brigade or a battle group commander's assets. Basically what will happen is the commander will say, "You have that asset for the duration of that particular activity". So there is no conflict with higher commanders wishing to take it away. It has been dedicated to that commander for his particular operation and he has command and control over it. The way that it operates at the moment: at the end of the day it is about the guy who is in contact; it is about the guy who wants to look inside that compound; and the way he achieves it is through things like our Bowman communications. He has a means of talking back to the HQ to say, "Okay, guys, the aircraft's not in the right position; we're not seeing what we want. Can you move it left a little bit; right a little bit; or, will you hold on where you are?" That is basically how the commanders in the field use it today. If, as a consequence, a higher priority issue came along and there was a debate and they said, "Look, guys, we've got a more significant issue happening elsewhere and we want to redeploy your assets", what might happen is the commanders in the field would default to their minis and accept the penalties of the poorer imagery and the shorter range. Q209 Mr Holloway: The JTAC teams then effectively have to talk the surveillance asset onto the target in the same way in the old days you had to talk aircraft onto a target. In the development of Watchkeeper, is this a kind of thing you might try to integrate? If so, are there likely to be any delays? I would have thought it is quite important to give the guys electronically on the ground some way of positioning it in the right place and then calling for whatever they want? Mr Day: People often ask me the question, "What is the difference between 450 and Watchkeeper?" It goes back to the Chairman's first question actually, which is: how do we find UAVs? Is this the right question we are asking? UAV aircraft have been around for a fair amount of time and we have a pretty comprehensive understanding of them. One of the key differences for Watchkeeper is how we integrate the whole system into the rest of the UK infrastructure, the COMS, the air traffic management, the logistics chain. That is what Watchkeeper brings to the UK. Today the MoD is looking at various ways of achieving that. One way is that most commanders in the field have a Bowman radio of some form or another, which is both the voice and the data. One of the things we have been looking at, and working with MoD on, is a guy can have a simple map display of exactly what is going on, with a clear lay-down of who is where and what is going on. That guy can tap on that screen and potentially say to them, "I want to view that particular geographic point on the ground". He can then identify where he wants that to go, which could well be the Watchkeeper ground station, and that information is then sent back via the Bowman network to the guys in the ground station and they can react accordingly. Q210 Mr Holloway: In the future it is likely that we will be dealing with rather more sophisticated enemies than tribesmen in southern Afghanistan. To what extent are you putting on equipment and ensuring that people could not electronically disrupt our UAVs in the future? Obviously you will consistently update it, but is it a consideration now on the equipment we are getting, in case we have to move it from Afghanistan to somewhere else? Mr Day: Watchkeeper itself when it was originally conceived was thought about as 15 years for the platform and 30 years for the system life. We had to consider that, like everything else in the military domain, as people understand the technology they find ways of countering it. We have done things within the system to specifically make certain that, as these issues arise - and I will give you one particular example - on Watchkeeper the data link is encrypted, so it has got a high grade encryption on that which will inhibit some of the very issues that you mention. Also, in addition, we have done some clever things with the data link to effectively bury it in the noise within the ether, rather than make it stand out like a particular electromagnetic lighthouse. We also look carefully at things like the noise it makes; and we pay particular attention to silencing the engine. We look carefully, and we will look carefully, at the next evolutions at how we would use all its signatures. Yes, you cannot enter the UAV field today expecting that your technology is going to last particularly long. You have got to make certain that as you understand as an organisation, and this is one of the key strengths of Thales, we do have a significant knowledge base, across a significant area of technology, we can pull that into these sorts of programmes and give us a future-proof solution. Q211 Mr Hamilton: Are there any additional things that Watchkeeper does you have not already mentioned which are better than H-450? Mr Miller: There is a key really. There are two elements of Watchkeeper that are different from the Hermes. There are the advancements in the air vehicle itself; and of course there is the network ground infrastructure which we have been talking about. The air vehicle itself is a dual payload configuration, so it can take the EO/IR camera as well as the radar together - electro-optic and infra-red - an additional more sophisticated radar. It has an all-weather operational capability; so it has de-icing systems built in. It has got enhanced structure integrity with an adapted wing fuselage construction. Of course, the additional maintenance and access to subsistence is improved - the advanced avionics on board. So there are many aspects within the air vehicle of a significant difference. On the ground infrastructure side you have got the exportation, communication dissemination that we discussed - fundamental of the Watchkeeper difference; and of course dual data links; the ability to pass information securely around the battle space. All this is required because Watchkeeper has got to provide a worldwide capability. Armed Forces can be deployed anywhere in the world and in climate conditions that are different from current theatres. Of course it has got the ability to be flexible for operational sensors in the future. You can see we have built into the growth future of Watchkeeper not only the air vehicles but also the ground. Q212 Mr Hamilton: At the evidence session on 6 May we were told that the MoD was fairly hopeful that the in-service date would be achieved towards the end of 2010. Are you confident that is going to be achieved? Mr Day: Yes, today the programme is on schedule and we look to deliver the capability into MoD on that date. Mr Miller: We are very pleased actually because, since our Contra award 2004, we have had the design phase; we have been through all the critical design reviews throughout 2006/07; we have met all the milestones for the Watchkeeper; we have achieved our first flight of the new Watchkeeper air vehicle in April this year; we are now starting the integration phase in testing; it is going on and will eventually come to the UK at Aberporth at the end of this year, beginning of next year, ready for the 2010 in-service date as planned. Q213 Richard Younger-Ross: This is obviously a great advantage for our Forces, to have this ability to see behind walls. Even on a simple basis it cannot be long before even in a place like Afghanistan that Afghani forces should not have their own device which will try to spy on our Forces. If we come across a more sophisticated foe then certainly they will have UAVs to spy on our Forces. Are you developing countermeasures against UAVs for spying? Mr Chavez: Perhaps if I take that as a question because it relates to broader military capability. Certainly one of the developing threats that Armed Forces see around the world is the threat of UAV systems being used widely against them. The traditional response to that comes from enhanced air defence systems. Thales, for example, in Belfast have been responsible for modifying the Starstream air defence system to adapt that to work with smaller radar across section targets, because UAVs do present very difficult targets because they are so small; they have very small amounts of metal in them, so they are very difficult to see on radars, and missile systems, because of their size, find it difficult to hit them. The traditional response is to actually look at upgrading your air defence systems, and that is what we have been doing using the Starstream missile. Q214 Richard Younger-Ross: The sort of foe we may face which we are trying to use UAVs against would have the same difficulties in trying to detect you? Mr Chavez: Absolutely. The survivability issues, as Chris touched on with Watchkeeper, have been very carefully thought through. Indeed, when you actually come to mission planning - because you do not just lodge a UAV and pilot it, typically with Watchkeeper one of the major advantages is that you can actually set it - you are not flying the aircraft round the sky, but saying, "I'm interested in surveying this area of land", and the aircraft will go off and it will steer the sensor, rather than you fly the plane. It will automatically go off on that track. There is a lot of automation in how we extract that information. Q215 Chairman: Just a brief question about trialling the Watchkeeper and flying it in UK airspace. Are your discussions with the Civil Aviation Authority going well? Is there an issue about delay or anything in terms of the extent to which you can trial the aircraft? Mr Howe: Could I comment on that. This, of course, is a subject on which it is the MoD, rather than us, which is leading. The MoD, as I understand it, is putting together a proposal in relation to air space which it is in discussion with the CAA about. We, of course, are very interested in the outcome of that; but we are not, as it were, the sponsor or owner of that process. As I understand it, there is a fairly elaborate process for considering changes to air space arrangements; the CAA is quite well advanced with that. The next stage, I believe, is public consultation about the sort of solution the MoD has been proposing. I believe that is likely to start quite shortly; I do not know precisely when. Q216 Chairman: But you would not describe it as a significant clog in the process? Mr Howe: I do not think so, no. It is a significant issue but I do not think it is a clog in the process. I think it is being addressed sensibly and very methodically and thoroughly, and we will get through the process. Mr Miller: There are two aspects: this is permanent airspace change which is being discussed; but you can at the moment fly in temporary restricted airspace. For instance, in 2005 we flew the Hermes at Parc Aberporth in a temporary restricted airspace; and we could do that now if we wished in consultation with the CAA. Those are two differences between what we can do now - control and permanent air space change that John was talking about. Q217 Mr Hamilton: You indicated, Mr Chavez, that Israel has developed the H-450. Will the UK be able to maintain and upgrade the Watchkeeper as we move forward; and will we be able to work independently? Mr Chavez: Absolutely, and that was entirely behind the reason we created a joint venture in Leicester which holds the intellectual property. Mr Howe: Held here in the United Kingdom. Watchkeeper is being built in the UK, whereas Hermes 450 is an Israeli project. Q218 Mr Jenkins: One thing that strikes me, Chairman, is that you have built this new Watchkeeper platform that you bought in bits and pieces: why did we not go for the American Global Hawk? Is that not a better platform? Would it not have carried all your sensor equipment? If we had got the basic platform from America the deal with have been done now, and it would have been trialled and proven airworthiness, and it would carry the loads you want of Watchkeeper. Why did we go down the Watchkeeper route? Mr Chavez: They are very different classes of UAV and they are rather different. The Reaper UAV is much more similar to Global Hawk. It is quite clear, the Watchkeeper competition was an open competition. There was a competition with UAV systems offered by Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and BAe systems as well as ourselves; so it was a truly international competition against the Watchkeeper requirement. It comes back to this: there is a significant difference between how you use these three different levels of UAV. It is an operational concept issue. Q219 Mr Havard: On that point, what about weaponising this thing; because then it does become a very different vehicle, does it not; and the point about its use and airspace becomes a different set of questions. In summary, we are having bits of material flying about that might bump into one another, but if they have not got explosives on them it is less of a problem than if they have. Is it able to do that? Reaper does that; is Watchkeeper going to do that? Mr Howe: If I may, I think that is really a question for MoD rather than us. We are not under contract to provide a weaponised UAV. We are providing an intelligence gatherer. Obviously vehicles that can fly could well have the potential to carry weapons; but we have not been contracted to do that - that would be in the future. The question about the military requirement is for MoD rather than for us. Q220 Mr Havard: Should it be needed to be done it would be capable to do that in that way in the future, would it? Mr Howe: I would not care to answer that directly. I should not be at all surprised. It is a capable aircraft, which is capable of carrying things. It can carry reasonably heavy payloads for surveillance purposes; it can carry payloads for other purpose, I have no doubt. Q221 Mr Crausby: The MoD acknowledges that there are shortfalls in the direction, processing and dissemination side of ISTAR and your memorandum tells us that there is a strong value for money argument for the Watchkeeper system "to provide the basis for the UK based NEC Ground Infrastructure exploitation and dissemination capability". Could you tell us something about that? To what extent could the Watchkeeper Ground Infrastructure address the shortfalls; and is the MoD showing an interest in your proposals? Mr Chavez: I am more than happy to discuss it. Just to come back if I may, Chairman, to labour the point slightly about the issue of exploitation of information and the difference between things like Hermes 450 and Watchkeeper. Hermes 450 is like having a satellite TV feed coming into your home, and you can watch it on the screen and, if you want, you can record it to your hard disk video recorder and so on. If you actually want to come back and say at a later date, "I actually want one frame of video out of what I've recorded in that programme two hours ago", then it is quite difficult to find it. If you actually said, "Okay, my neighbour wants that, and he wants to do it from his house", you cannot do it. Watchkeeper is actually more akin to taking that stream of data and logging it into databases so that you can actually retrieve all of that data at a later date; in the same way that you type into Google "I want a picture of the Houses of Parliament", and you come up with lots of images of the Houses of Parliament. Under Watchkeeper you can actually say, "I'm interested in this particular area and I want the latest data of information that was taken", or, "I want it between June 1 and June 3 2008". Anybody using the system, anywhere on the battlefield, can do that sort of retrieval over the very low data rate communication systems that exist on the battlefield. That is the reason why actually setting in place Watchkeeper will allow a huge increase in terms of responses to commanders' requests for intelligence. At the moment so much data is stored but it is not easily accessible; it is not easily catalogued; and it is accessible typically through one system. Watchkeeper provides a distributed information system where any number of users can access all of that data. Watchkeeper at the moment, the ground information infrastructure is really designed around the various sensors that are going to be on board Watchkeeper - the electro-optic cameras, the infra-red cameras and synthetic aperture radar; but there is nothing to stop that being extended to the information that comes off another UAV, a Reaper UAV, or off a Global Hawk UAV, or using different sensors. If you were to add in COMS intelligence sensors or electronic support measures which detect signals, there is nothing to stop you actually using that information infrastructure to share that information. That would fulfil part of potentially the requirement known as DABINETT. As the MoD lodged in its information memorandum, DABINETT is certainly one if not the highest priority ISTAR programming in the eyes of MoD; because at the moment MoD has got quite a lot of collectors of information but it has not got in place the infrastructure to really get best value out of that, and that is why there is such a high priority at the moment. Q222 Mr Holloway: Could you use Watchkeeper for locally disrupting enemy communications? Could you mime this data you referred to in order to identify threats, probably against a slightly more sophisticated enemy, but using specific bits of military kit? Mr Chavez: In terms of disrupting enemy communications, there is nothing to stop a UAV platform, such as Watchkeeper or indeed the Hermes 450 platform, being used as a jamming system to disrupt communications. Mr Miller: The systems are modular and can adapt different payloads. At the moment we have a requirement for electro-optic infra-red and radar - Watchkeeper; but of course in the future there will be additional payloads of that nature and others coming on board -hyperspectural links communications infrastructure links; so it is an adaptable system with a plug and play facility. That is the essence of these UAVs. Q223 Mr Holloway: Mining the data? Mr Chavez: Mining the data, certainly there are a number of tools; and indeed Watchkeeper will come with a number of tools to help target recognition and so on. Q224 Mr Jenkins: I read occasionally about the automatic nature of the systems now developing. I see them in civilian life, but can you give me an example of where you think this automatic system would improve the intelligence, the decision-making procedures? Mr Day: Potentially one of the most significant strengths of UAVs is that we all think about flying a UAV around with either a joystick or perhaps just clicking several positions on a map and the aircraft flies around, and that is fine; that is great for conventional mission planning; but actually we must never forget that the sole purpose of that air vehicle being up there is to collect imagery and the primary piece of equipment is that sensor; putting that sensor at the right point on the ground. One area of automation is, the guy does not actually dictate where the aircraft is going to fly, he just says, "I want to see that point on the ground with the sensor". He marks the ground and says, "That is a sensor point", and the air vehicle works out how it maintains that sensor on that point on the ground for as long as he may wish. That is one clear area. The other thing is, at the end of the day if he wants to cover a certain area, he might say, "I don't want to watch a point on the ground; I want to cover a whole specific area". When you are up there you have got winds from difficult directions; the aircraft does not want to do it in a particular way; you can just say to the air vehicle, "I want you to carry out an optimised path over that whole area", and it will sit there and work out exactly how it is going to fly that sensor across the ground in order to effectively survey that whole area. There are these little smart tools, but it is linked into the flight control system, that allow the system to effectively be more autonomous, be smarter but, very importantly, to take some of the load off the guys who are sat in those ground stations for many hours on end. Q225 Chairman: May I a question which arises out of a memorandum we have had from L3 Communications UK which says that, "There needs essentially to be a mix of assets, some of them manned, some of them very large, very high, some of them much lower, but with manning in the loop in much of the system". Would you agree with that? Does there need to be a broad mix in order to provide the best intelligence capability that you can? Mr Day: Without a doubt, and I go back to the statement I made earlier about the massive payloads. If we want some of the very complex payloads that we are alluding to in terms of being able to jam COMS and various other bits and pieces then you are talking about payloads that are very significant, and that actually need real time control, not through a data link but by a man sat in a seat on the actual platform. When you are looking at some of these very complex fused sensor suites, yes, you do need a mix of manned and unmanned to make that happen today. Q226 Mr Havard: Can I ask a question I have asked of others, which is about navigation. This dual location business, whether it is shooting your very difficult single target that is running away, or whatever it is, this thing has got to navigate somehow or another. It is not going to have a map and a pencil, is it? If somebody denies you various capability, either GPS, all the rest of it, where are we with that? We depend on operational sovereignty, so what resilience is going to be built into these things so they are still going to operate on a range of systems, Galileo or GPS or whatever it is? Mr Day: We were very aware at the outset of the Watchkeeper journey about the fragility of GPS, which is where the world is going to. We have them in our cars; we have them in our passenger aircraft. We are well aware there is a fragility there. At the end of the day, when our guys most need this capability for it to be denied because of a simple jammer or whatever was not acceptable. As we discussed earlier, future-proofing Watchkeepr, what are we going to do to get around this? There are techniques to get around that. A lot of work done in the US has been looked at. There is a lot of work which has been done in the UK. We do have instruments onboard the aircraft that allow us to hold position quite accurately. We have the ability because, at the end of the day, we are looking at a data link which could be seen effectively like a radar. You can use the data link to give you some positional data. There are ways of getting around it. The key message I would like to get across I suppose is that we were aware of that sensitivity ten years ago, and we have made certain that Watchkeeper will be one of the few UAV systems in the battlefield tomorrow that can actually support ops should that particular condition exist. Q227 Chairman: I think we ought to move on. Thank you very much, Mr Howe, to you and your team for a very helpful briefing. You have brought it to life in a way which has been most interesting. Thank you for your evidence. Mr Howe: Thank you very much, Chairman. Memorandum submitted by Northrop Grumman Examination of Witnesses Witnesses: Dr Graham Thornton, Managing Director, Mr John Brooks, President, Mr Ed Walby, Business Development, HALE Unmanned Systems, Northrop Grumman, gave evidence. Q228 Chairman: Good morning, Mr Brooks. Are you the boss? Mr Brooks: My name is John Brooks. I am the President of Northrop Grumman International, and it is truly an honour for us to be here to talk to you about UAVs. It is a subject that we have been focussed on for about 60 years, and we look forward to the dialogue with you very much. Dr Thornton: I am Graham Thornton, the Managing Director for Northrop Grumman in the UK. Lest you think we are just an American company visiting today - we have 700 employees in the UK and about £400 million of sales into the MoD; and we have some key programmes like the AWAKS aircraft support and the Cutlass unmanned vehicle for bomb disposal. So we are in the UK and have been for many decades. I thought I would give that as a background, but my colleagues are principally here obviously to talk about a US-based capability. Mr Walby: I am a retired US Air Force Colonel. I am Director of Business Development for Unmanned Systems in San Diego for Northrop Grumman, primarily Global Hawk. In my last assignment in the Air Force I was the first commander to take Global Hawk into combat as a technology demonstrator that converted to operational deployment. Q229 Chairman: Thank you very much for coming to give us a United States perspective. I am well aware, Dr Thornton, of what you said about Northrop Grumman having a significant British presence as well. Your memorandum says that in the United States use of UAVs has already been widespread, whereas the Ministry of Defence in the UK is just making it a strategic priority. Does that imply that the Ministry of Defence in the UK has been a bit late? Mr Brooks: I certainly have no expertise on which to comment on the Ministry's progress, but I would point out to you that in the United States we have benefited from some period of time and some very large investments of dollars which have enabled us to field some of the advanced capabilities that we will talk about today. Perhaps the point that we would commend to you is that, because of the very close relationship between our nations, in essence the UK has the ability to capitalise on these investments, and that indeed may be a legitimate strategy for the Ministry to take. Q230 Chairman: Yes. This may be a question which applies to all defence issues, but there must be a gap in view of the spending of the dollars you are referring to between what the United States is doing in UAVs and what the British are doing in UAVs, and because of the size of the dollar gap presumably that gap is widening. Would you agree with that? Mr Brooks: I would focus more in terms of the capabilities that we are working to generate - and you heard some discussion earlier of the different levels of technology and the different missions. The United States I think is investing in some of the higher end capabilities, the more advanced capabilities, and particularly investing development dollars there. Perhaps what we may see in MoD is investment in capabilities that may allow them to capitalise on those capabilities rather than duplicating the development investment. Q231 Mr Crausby: In April you won a contract for the US Navy's BAMS programme which offers a marinised version of your Global Hawk UAV. Can you tell us what sort of capability the marinised version of Global Hawk will deliver? Will this UAV be required to operate from ships? Mr Brooks: No, sir, it is a land based capability, capitalising on the extraordinary capability of Global Hawk to go very, very long ranges and search very large areas. Just as an example, in the US we say that one Global Hawk is capable of searching the entire State of Illinois in a single mission. That may not be terribly useful to you and perhaps I could offer that the combination of England and Wales are about the same volume as the State of Illinois; or, to put it in a operational context, if we think back to the horrific tsunami in the South Pacific of a few years ago, one Global Hawk is capable of surveilling the entire region affected by that tsunami in one mission. We take that basic capability and then customise it and optimise it for maritime surveillance. I would ask my colleague to offer a few thoughts on how we went about customising it for maritime surveillance. Mr Walby: Just to clarify in terms of the capability of the sensors that the Air Force carries, John's analogy to England and Wales or the State of Illinois, it actually has the ability to image every square inch of that territory, not just survey it. That awesome capability that was part of the US Air Force requirement was to carry electro-optical infra-red radar imagery, as well as signals intelligence collection, which includes communications intelligence and electronic intelligence. Those together met a need of the US Air Force. The Navy's requirement was to take it one step further; because in the Air Force's requirement set that I was a part of in the development when I was in the Air Force was essentially a land based operation where you would be moving from friendly territory into enemy territory; whereas the Navy's requirement was based on a 360 degree view and protection of the carrier battle group and battle space in the littorals. Their requirement was a 360 degree continuous presence in terms of the sensor field of view. What they are offering and have accepted with our BAMS programme, Broad Area Maritime Surveillance programme, is a 360 degree EO/IR system, and a 360 degree radar system, and at some point some form of electronic intelligence collection. Their requirement had to be 360 for continuous tracking of vessels and things on the sea. Global Hawk has been designed to be, as John has mentioned, modular and tailorable to whatever sensor capability you wish to add. Q232 Mr Crausby: The MoD does not appear to have a requirement for a maritime UAV. Does that surprise you? Is that in some way linked to the difficulties with operating UAVs from ships? Can you tell us something about that? Mr Brooks: No, I do not think it relates one way or another to a ship. We do in fact have an advanced rotary wing UAV that has already demonstrated the ability to autonomously land and take-off from ships at sea. If you go back to the beginning of the United States Air Force Global Hawk programme you will find that it was after the extraordinary power of that capability was demonstrated that other nations began to express interest and engage in dialogue and, in a few select cases, were given the authority to pursue that platform. We anticipate that with the US Navy's selection of this platform international interest is rising; and we expect further dialogue on that capability which, in this case, will only be made available we would anticipate to countries in which there is a strong relationship of trust and partnership. Q233 Chairman: A rotary wing UAV that can land on ships, is there a United States requirement for that at the moment? Mr Brooks: Yes, sir, there is. The United States Navy has that requirement initially for a class of ships known as the "littoral combat ship", because it would allow them to project sensors over the horizon as they examine areas in the littorals. They have recently expanded that to include other classes of ships and it can operate from any ship which is helo-capable. Q234 Mr Jenkins: How big is Fire Scout? Mr Brooks: It is a highly adapted version of a Schweizer small manned two-person helicopter. That provides you essentially a size in rough approximation. We could put one probably here in the middle, if we were to displace the ladies! Chairman: Which we would not dream of doing! Q235 Mr Holloway: This is probably not a line the Chairman wants us to go too far down, but can I ask Mr Thornton, could you, in your company, provide a sovereign, more capable product to the UK than Watchkeeper for less money? Dr Thornton: In principle, yes. The sovereign aspect, by which I take it you mean UK based intelligent properties, that is a model we have used and created already or have it in programmes, so it is not an issue. The only question mark is on, ITAR, but that has been replaced by the ratified Defence Treaty. We have a long record of defence technology into the UK, so that may not be a barrier. Have we got the right vehicle? Yes. I take the point that the Thales' representatives made that there are really several classes of air vehicle, and I think Global Hawk at the high end gives you total area coverage, admittedly down to great detail, but can you afford multiple Global Hawks to do the sort of role you are doing in Afghanistan, no, it is not appropriate, so you need a medium-sized model. In principle, we could supply that. Q236 Chairman: Dr Thornton, from your knowledge of British military requirements, do you believe that there should be a requirement for a maritime or marinised - there must be a difference - UAV? Dr Thornton: As long as one does not say marinated! Q237 Chairman: Indeed. Dr Thornton: Over the last two years I have been with the company I have made a very strong personal push to have Fire Scout recognized, and perhaps accepted by the MoD coastguard fisheries protection people. We have gone so far as to have discussions with the BT Group in relation to the river class of vessel. What Fire Scout does give you is flexibility, because you can afford more of them. You can have ship-borne operations with Fire Scout without the need for pilots, it is an autonomous vehicle. It has a long endurance, eight hours plus. It can carry all the sensors we have been talking about earlier. It is about a 350 kg payload. Is there a need for maritime surveillance? Yes, because particularly in areas such as the Straits of Hormuz in the Gulf of Arabia one needs forward-looking sensing for any group of ships. There is no point in taking ships into dangerous areas if there are small rubber boats with dangerous people and payloads on board. The short answer to it is there is a need for maritime surveillance on board all classes of vessels. Fire Scout is about a 1.8 tonne vehicle and will fit in a very small box on the stern of most UK ships even down to offshore patrol vessels. Mr Brooks: There is one more point I would add, sir, which I think warrants some thought, and I offer this not as an answer but to generate perhaps some thought and discussion for the future. That is, we are very used to the requirement to maintain complete situational awareness of what is happening in the airspace around our nations and our areas of interest. We really would not think in this day and time of not having that kind of capability. I believe that you will see in the future that nations such as yours and ours will be seeking the same thing in terms of protecting our sovereignty and of those areas we are vitally interested in in ensuring we know what is happening on the seas surrounding us. I believe that is one of the core reasons why you will see many other nations start to express more and more interest in this BAMS Global Hawk maritime surveillance because it provides that capability. Q238 Chairman: In view of the capability that you describe, it seems astonishing that there are still many problems along the Mexican border, that still pilots can go missing in Nevada and not be found. Why is that? Mr Brooks: I would tell you that as a nation we are still coming to grips in terms of political and policy decisions on the best way to maintain sovereignty, to surveil where appropriate and to bring the right tools to bear. The question is not whether the tools exist, the question is the most effective way to bring them to bear in both a network function and a policy function in terms of civil liberties and so on. In the case of our borders, there are some borders that are very long and if we choose to surveil those it will require a capability of both speed and sensing, so that you can visit and revisit in appropriate times, and that means a high end type capability. In terms of other borders, you may elect to use a more tactical asset that allows you to maintain a full motion video on a key crossing or key area, but we are still working through those policy issues and how to bring them together in the network as a nation. Q239 Chairman: You would say they were more policy issues than technology? Mr Brooks: The basic technologies exist. The networks in terms of how to bring it together are still being developed just as the policy issues are being addressed. Q240 Chairman: Mr Walby? Mr Walby: Yes, I would like to add to that. About last November the Air Force announced at Beale Air Force Base in central California, which is the home base for Global Hawk, that they were going to co-operate in a way that is relatively new with regard to civil authorities and customs and border protection in the United States, and they were going to look into employing Global Hawk on the northern border with Canada, which is a more porous border than the southern border, but do it in a way that the aircrew that fly the aircraft for training would use those borders as training missions, so you would get double bang for your buck. You would essentially patrol the border and operate in exactly the same way as you would operate in combat but, of course, the end solution would be different in terms of what you did with that information and how you collected it. There is a movement to use the system in a training environment, but for use as customs and border protection. Q241 Mr Holloway: BAE referred to autonomy as being "the way of the future". What do you think they mean by that and do you guys share that view? Mr Brooks: I believe we absolutely do share that view. Part of the value of our 60 years of focus and more than 100,000 UAVs of one sort or another is the development of fully autonomous vehicle management, which we now have on Global Hawk, on Fire Scout, which will be a key part of our UCAS programme, an advanced demonstrator for the Navy. Again, I will let Ed speak to it because he has experience as a U2 pilot and commander understanding the challenges of actually flying the aeroplane and having commanded the first fully autonomous air vehicle. Q242 Mr Holloway: What do you mean by "fully autonomous"? Mr Walby: Global Hawk has a computer system onboard, a multi-computer system onboard, and the pilot uses a mouse and a keyboard. He clicks the mouse for taxi and a little window pops up and it says, "Do you really want to taxi now?" and you go "Yes", and it taxies. The pilot then communicates, it stops at the runway and when he gets clearance for take-off he hits the take-off button and the aeroplane replies with, "Do you really want to take off now, yes or no?" and it moves to the runway and flies. His control is not a joystick or rudder paddles or a throttle, it is communication with the computers on board. As a U2 pilot my primary and focused attention was on keeping the aircraft flying straight and level, pointy-end forward, and at the altitude and air speed it needed to be. Because of that, all of my attention was flying the aircraft and I had very little involvement with the execution of mission. Obviously as I ran low on fuel I would tell everyone I was headed for home. In Global Hawk, through our first trials in Australia when we did a demonstration and later over Afghanistan, we discovered the pilot became a significant element of the execution of the mission. He sits right next to the sensor operator. What made that combination unique was the fact that the air vehicle would fly, stay airborne, and the pilot had his little focus of attention on his attitude indictors but he also was involved in four chat rooms in which he communicated with the intelligence folks who were doing the exploitation, troops on the battlefield, commanders in the combined air operations centre, and his tasking and process of employing the asset was not automatic but very human interaction based on the requirement of that moment. It was designed to be completely autonomous from take-off to landing, completely hands-off if that is what you wanted to do. We did not realise back in the mid-90s that we would have so much interaction and so much human involvement in the prosecution of the entire mission centre. Mr Brooks: What it allows us to do is focus not on how you do it because the aeroplane knows how to fly, it knows what to do at any given moment, it flies itself. It allows the entire crew to focus on the value of what it is you are trying to accomplish. Perhaps that is a good definition of "autonomy". It is not autopilot. There are those who define "autopilot" as autonomy. Our systems know what to do at any given point throughout an entire mission. The first major overseas deployment was executed with one mouse click from take-off to landing 28 hours later and at every point along the way it not only knew what it was supposed to do, it knew what to do if something went wrong and, absent a new command from you, would execute that. Q243 Mr Holloway: It is probably at rather a low level, but in the UK we are investigating the sort of military requirement we might have over the next ten or 20 years. Are you guys involved in that? What sort of future capabilities do you think the UK might want? For example, I do not know whether Watchkeeper is autonomous. How might your company fit into that in the future given that we have gone down the route with Thales? Mr Brooks: I will start and perhaps each of my colleagues may have something to contribute. I can tell you that for some years we have maintained a continuing dialogue with the RAF, for example, on the advanced capabilities that we are working on, not just the ones fielded today but those that we are working on for, as you would suggest, late in the next decade or perhaps in the 2020 timeframe. Your Chief of Air Staff, Sir Glen Torpy, has maintained a continued interest, has come to visit us and chats with us frequently and, again, perhaps as we talked earlier, is assessing what is happening and trying to decide if these technologies which the US is investing in may have application for the UK in years to come. There is some involvement and we would certainly welcome more. Dr Thornton: On the subject of ISTAR in the future, along with the RAF support we conducted a fairly comprehensive exercise on Salisbury Plain last October where we took some Special Forces personnel, an RAF regiment pretending to be the Army, and some Air Force assets, including C130, the Tornado, and Nimrod, and we actually did what was described as being the future for Watchkeeper. We actually fused the data, transmitted the data to users on the ground. We took Special Forces camera imagery back up to aircraft. The Tornado was acting in a close air support role, so it was giving targeting information, real-time video back to its cockpit up to 100 miles out from the target so it could see what it was supposed to be aiming at on the ground. That exercise was set up in a matter of weeks. We were able to adapt the system during the trial, it was very flexible, and right now the MoD, particularly the RAF, is in the process of preparing an urgent operational requirement which will see that capability fielded in Afghanistan. In essence, if you listen to the description of the Watchkeeper in the future it does that internet in the sky, if I call it that, now. I think the RAF wants to field it and it is certainly part of the DABINETT thinking. Q244 Mr Holloway: Given the persistence, resilience and, I guess, endurance as well of the UAVs, has anyone ever looked at the possibility of putting nuclear weapons on them? Mr Brooks: Some of our UAVs do, in fact, employ weapons. Hunter, which is a tactical UAV, perhaps in the same broad class as the ones that were previously discussed but an earlier generation, employs weapons. We have demonstrated the ability to employ weapons from our Fire Scout and that is both its Navy and Army configurations, because the United States Army has selected it as its rotary-winged UAV, will be part of the capabilities developed. As you get into the higher end, the Global Hawk type, that really is a policy decision. As I think the Thales gentlemen said, there is nothing inherently about the aircraft that prevents it from being used that way but the United States Government to this point has indicated because this is capable of operating over such large areas, for over-flight and basing reasons it views it right now as in our best interests to declare it to be an unarmed aircraft so that it has access to airspace that otherwise might be difficult to gain. Chairman: Because this is an ISTAR inquiry, I do not really want to get into nuclear weapons or heavens know where we will stop. Q245 Mr Jenkins: Dr Thornton, did I miss something insofar as when you had the exercise with the RAF, which platform were you talking about using? Dr Thornton: We put our main server onboard a C130, but all of the aircraft assets, the ground assets, individual soldiers with PDAs, were networked in together and the data was managed accordingly. We did not change any of the communications links, we did not change any of the configurations of the platforms, it just got overlaid and did not compromise their performance. It did do this process of taking real-time imagery and directing it to people on the ground. Mr Brooks: This capability he is talking about is platform agnostic. It does not care what platforms are there. This is really not something we are trying to sell. It is a capability that we have developed, among other things, to help with managing bandwidth, but we demonstrated it to the MoD because they had indicated this ability to share data quickly was something that they were interested in. Chairman: We will come on to bandwidth in a few minutes. Q246 Mr Hamilton: This is on the direction, processing and dissemination where the MoD seems to be content with the "collection side" of the ISTAR and the UAVs. However, it acknowledges that there is a need to improve "the way the collection of information and intelligence is directed and the resulting data processed and disseminated." Is this also an issue in the United States? If so, how is it is being addressed in the United States? Mr Brooks: Yes, sir, it is an issue. If you had US officers sitting here I think they would express similar thoughts to those which you have heard from the MoD. I would tell you that these capabilities have to advance in harmony and that, as we demonstrated, the extraordinary power of persistence of a platform to not be episodic and pass over an area every great once in a while, but to maintain surveillance on a broad area for 24 or more hours, does place new demands, particularly on the exploitation system but also on the dissemination system, and it will require some level of manning and particularly some new tools to help automate that so that it can move forward. That is not to suggest that we should constrain our ability to collect down to what may currently be our ability to exploit. I am reminded of a story almost 200 years ago in my nation when someone brought forward for the first time the repeating rifle and it was initially rejected by the Army because they said, "Our soldiers will shoot themselves out of ammunition in a few minutes and then we will not have any". It was wiser heads that prevailed and said, "We can find a way to make more ammunition. We need to capitalise on the capability". We are moving in that direction but it does have to go forward in harmony so that you can capitalise on it. Mr Walby: We encountered it early on in the war over Afghanistan, but what we were able to do as techniques were developed was we took an intelligence group and attached them to Global Hawk electronically in that as it collected and processed that imagery it was immediately exploited. Then as we progressed further we did some experiments on how we archive that information and now we are to the point where the information that is collected is archived, categorised and posted on secure websites for individuals to go and retrieve what they want to retrieve. The requirements of the collection may be dependent on a particular day but the information collected may be relevant to the next day's mission or the next hour's mission. All of that is at the hands of those throughout the distributed system who have access to those classified websites. We have even taken the server on board the aircraft which was the mission recorder and replaced it with a 1.4 terabyte server and connected that to a field radio so that a troop on the ground can literally reach up and pull and retrieve right off the Global Hawk. That is a capability that could be platform agnostic as well. Because of its altitude, Global Hawk tends to be a place that you can connect with other nodes. On the archival of that information, we flew a Global Hawk in combat for a year and collected every single image on that server and it only got to about 70 per cent full, so you have got the entire library of those images on board that system. Q247 Mr Holloway: I know nothing about the angles or the definition of pitch, but could you use this for facial recognition, for example? Mr Walby: I do not think that would be appropriate for Global Hawk. What we have discovered is what we refer to as layered ISR. Global Hawk's advantage is to search a broad area, pull up potential targets and pass that on to other systems. That may employ something like facial recognition, something that is closer and easier to get the finer detail. Q248 Chairman: In what sense did you use the word "appropriate" there? Would not be possible? Mr Brooks: I do not think we can comment on that in this forum. Q249 Mr Havard: I just want to ask a question. You said you ran this exercise and people had PDAs on the ground and you were talking about a field radio that could communicate. The field radio is what I am interested in, what the infantrymen carry. Are they very specific or could they be integrated into the Bowman system? Are we going to have infantrymen again with half a dozen bits of kit all trying to communicate? Dr Thornton: The whole point about the exercise we did was it would communicate through existing channels, including Bowman. Q250 Mr Havard: So it is software technology? Dr Thornton: It is a software system that has been recognised as the communication link, what is at the other end of the communication link in terms of the screen resolution you might have, and it feeds the appropriate data rate and data resolution down that communication. We are not talking about changing the communication technology or the hardware, we are not changing anything on board the aircraft or the land vehicles for that matter. It is a method of archiving and tagging information for retrieval and, as I say, being able to be agnostic as to what platforms we are using. Mr Walby: In the case of the server that I spoke of on Global Hawk, it is a small element of software placed on laptops and PDAs for the troops. It would take me probably three hours to learn how to use it but it takes a young marine about five minutes because it is an environment he is used to and it is based on Google search software. Mr Havard: I have got a godson like that. Q251 Chairman: We all know what you mean. Mr Walby: It is very, very convenient. Dr Thornton: Chairman, I am sorry, I have been passed a note due to my ignorance. The radio referred to is in service in the UK. Chairman: Okay. We will now move on to industrial issues. Q252 Mr Borrow: On 6 October the MoD published its Defence Technology Strategy and in that document it states: "the UK is world class in several aspects of UAS/UAV technology and systems development, including the areas of sensor payloads and synthetic environment based operational concept development". The Committee would be interested to know is that the view of the UK industry held in the US, and by your company in particular? Mr Brooks: Without trying to get specific, which probably would not be appropriate, there certainly are areas in which we view technologies in some UK companies as advanced, as leading edge. There are some cases where we have entered into discussions about perhaps capitalising on that capability. We are in a world environment now where no-one has a monopoly on the best capabilities and we will serve our forces and our national security best by reaching across transatlantic boundaries to capitalise on the best capabilities and put them together and offer them to those who are trying to protect us. Yes, there are some areas in which we think the UK capabilities are as good as any. Q253 Mr Borrow: In your memorandum you stated: "the UK remains a critically important market for the company as a supplier base and a source for technology partners", which is in another form of words what you have just said to us. Do you see the UK's position in terms of its industrial base in this area as something that is deteriorating or under threat, or do you remain confident that it will remain as robust as it is at the moment? Mr Brooks: I do not bring extraordinary expertise to that debate, but if I were to look at it holistically as an outside observer I would offer that I think there are areas, perhaps the previous discussion on Watchkeeper and so on is one, in which there has been substantial investment. There has been a reference to DABINETT which provides an opportunity for British forces to capitalise on the sum of all knowledge being generated within a coalition or allied operation and import data from not only sovereign systems but allied systems, such as Global Hawk and some of the others. I do see investment and I do not have the qualification or the expertise to really critique that. Q254 Chairman: Dr Thornton, do you have anything to add to that or were you hoping not to answer! Dr Thornton: I certainly have a view. For the Committee's benefit, I spent 31 years teaching engineering at Oxford and being involved in start-up companies and technology generally. It comes down to affordability. It is one thing to use sovereign capability in a phrase rather glibly, but you have to define "sovereign" for a start, and I suspect most people know that most of the chips in our avionics on military aircraft come from Malaysia. How sovereign is that! I remember Mrs Thatcher answering questions about high explosives a long time ago around the Falklands War. Affordability is the word that ought to be in front of everything, affordable sovereign capability. Frankly, you get what you pay for. Is the quality of the engineering education system in industry and transition technology good, yes, it is very good indeed, we are well-known in the world for being very innovative. We have a little bit of a hiccough when we try to exploit but there is no shortage of innovation and investment in the UK in new technology, I do not think. Somebody has just got to map out what we really mean by "sovereign capability" and can we afford to be the best, because there is no point in fielding second-best, particularly in a coalition situation. If you have a sensor that is only half as good as somebody else's they will tend to use the other guy's better sensor, it is just commonsense, so maybe we should become a niche player in certain technologies so we really are leading edge and stand up to proper benchmarking against the best. In the area of electro-optics and radars, UK stands out amongst the best. Q255 Chairman: Those are the areas which you would recommend us to move to? Dr Thornton: It is not an exhaustive list clearly but I just pick that out of the air as an area where I know we do very well technically. I will not say world leading, that is difficult to say. Q256 Mr Havard: Can I ask your advice on that. What the MoD says in the Technology Strategy is that we are good, and it gives examples, "including the areas of sensor payloads and synthetic environment based operational concept development". Dr Thornton: That is a fair statement. Q257 Mr Havard: Is that right? Are those the areas we should continue to concentrate on or are there others we should become more capable of? If we cannot do the whole list, what should be the list? Dr Thornton: That would be my first choice. Somebody said earlier in the previous session that the platform is a little bit less important than what you put on it. In the area of data handling, data processing, intelligence, creating information out of that data, what do you need? You need brain power and a computer, you do not need expensive test facilities such as you might if you were developing large scale missile systems. Are there other areas? I think in the area of chemical, biological, radiological sensing, my previous company, Smith's, is undoubtedly a world leader in that area, witness its sales into the US Department of Defense. There are pockets around the UK. I think it is quite instructive sometimes if you analyse UK companies that are exporting currently into US defense programmes, that is normally a test that the Americans have had to come here. The area of health and usage monitoring onboard aircraft, the Chinook system that Smith's did, again that is onboard the F35 and was a UK developed technology in the South of England backed by DTI grants and so on. Without me trying to create that list, I think the list can be created in terms of what is currently exported, and Cobham Group and Ultra all have high levels of defence exports. You have to ask the question, why is the US Government buying those technologies to put on its leading edge platforms. At the sub-system level there are some very strong areas. Mr Havard: We are waiting for DIS 2 or whatever it is going to be called and the technology strategy that comes with it, but when we get that, Chairman, perhaps we could have some input on that? Q258 Chairman: That might well be something that would be helpful. Dr Thornton: I would like to do that. I always say that every menu should have a price with it. Mr Brooks: I would offer one addition there and that is in some sense we have focused a lot on the technologies of collection but, in fact, what is collected becomes most useful when it is actionable, so that some focus on the ability to capitalise on ISTAR or ISR is value-added and it is capitalising across a broad mission set. We focus a great deal today on getting a key piece of information to a soldier in a specific place at a specific time, perhaps going back to the facial recognition question you asked, but that is not the only challenge that those who risk their lives to defend us will face. There is an almost inevitability that at some time in some place, somehow, they may face more advanced threats and need to be able to quickly understand broad thrusts. For example, if we go back to the combat phase of the Iraqi conflict, one Global Hawk airframe identified and targeted, according to US Air Force public statements, almost 40 per cent of the entire Iraqi armed force. That is a tremendous amount of information to gather, understand and rapidly move to those who can take action to deal with those threats and the technologies to do that are of value here and everywhere else. Q259 Chairman: I said earlier that we would come back onto the issue of bandwidth, which your memorandum says is one of the major technology challenges for UAVs. To what extent is that a major technology challenge in the United States? How are you dealing with it? Mr Brooks: It is, in fact, a major technology challenge. It is this issue of you are blessed with richness, you now have the ability to collect non-stop persistently across all of the spectrums essentially day and night, good weather and bad, imagery and electronics and signals and, therefore, something has to be done to make that useful. The current approach is largely a push approach to collect it and push it into the system where it can be dealt with. That means we have to expand the bandwidth available. There are also different ways to approach it in terms of concepts of operation. If I can use the analogy, at your desk today I suspect you have access to an almost infinite amount of information across the internet. You do not pull all that information into your hard drive, you define what it is you are seeking and your computer offers you a catalogue of what is available and you choose from what is on that catalogue and say, "I believe this is what I need to know" and then you pull that information. In essence, that uses much, much less bandwidth. We believe that the approach for the future should include both some technology that allows us to push greater volumes of information across the bandwidth and tools and procedures that allow us to make most effective use of the bandwidth that we have. That was really a part of the purpose of the demonstration that Dr Thornton talked about earlier that we did at Salisbury Plain, to show how SAS troopers could understand the catalogue of what is out there and say, "I only need that piece, give me that one". Q260 Chairman: Yes, but that is a matter of education, is it not? I know I make far too little use of the computer power available to me because I fail to understand how I could take advantage of it, and I suspect that would be true of almost everyone. Mr Brooks: I believe that is accurate. Chairman: Any further questions? Gentlemen, if I may say, thank you very much indeed, it has been a fascinating tour through the differences between the United States and the United Kingdom and also the advantages and benefits of working together. Thank you very much indeed for your evidence. |