British Billion Pound Spy Drone Blunder | Security Expert Explains
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- čas přidán 3. 08. 2024
- The British £1.4 billion spy drones programme has been labeled a disaster after it was revealed that the drones struggle to operate in poor weather conditions. The so-called watchkeeper drones, costing five million pounds each, are not in use on operations. Many of the drones have been written off at a cost of £40 million. This latest procurement failure highlights a pattern of costly blunders in British armed services equipment acquisition.
The failure of the watchkeeper drones can be attributed to the British exceptionalism mindset, as discussed by security expert Will Geddes and former army officer Lieutenant Colonel Stuart Crawford. The insistence on extensive modifications to existing designs, rather than adopting off-the-shelf solutions, has led to increased costs and decreased performance. This pattern of over-engineering and customization has plagued other procurement projects, including the troubled Ajax armoured reconnaissance vehicle.
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#drone #spydrone #military
I have no doubt that certain MP's and their friends will have made a shed load of money from this disaster. Bit like Covid.
Surely not 🤔👍🏻🇬🇧
The Gem-7 was the competing drone in this competition.
It was going to be 15th the price, with treble the range and endurance.
But QinetiQ used their corporate muscle to lever Gem Aero out of the competition.
Even though we told them Watchkeeper would never work.
Look at the slab wing, the small fixed pitch prop, and the ballooning weight.
It was the RAF Nimrod debacle, all over again.
Gem could have provided 800 drones, for the same price as QinetiQ.
But the Army went with the incompetent establishment.
The Gem-7 would have delivered 3,500 km range, with a fuselage wide enough to accept satellite coms.
The Gem-6 only needed two people, and a farmer’s field for operations.
Look at all the kit the Watchkeeper required…!,
But the Army fell for their pitch - and wasted YOUR money.
T
@@tatelyle1Yes, you have confirmed my suspicion.
Further, on every occasion a moron posts exactly what you have.
I smell a rat here. So how many Tories have family, mates who either have shares in the Company or have them working at high level for said company. Every new add on would be ££££££ going to said Tories.
The MOD civil service staff should all be laid off and replaced by British Forces veterans, I can guarantee that the MOD would run like a well oiled machine.
Not so, many of the Civil Servants in procurement are ex forces anyway. I did two posting in parts of the Logistic executive as a REME Warrant Officer and it always amazed me how many procurement projects were actually being managed by serving Officers with zero project management training and experience. These people were usually on a 2 to 3 years posting after which they went back to their regiments. Where it not for the Civil Servants with years of relevant experience, the fiascos would have been even more numerous.
Might also end up with a functioning border as well!
Civil servants like the SA80 doesn't work and you can't fire them 😂
Ummm...some are good.
But more often than not vets aren't always great at critical thinking or dealing with complex tasks...basically things that lead to unintender consequences.
They are already run by MOD personal, don't over estimate your ability..
The words “piss up” and “brewery” spring to mind 🤭🇬🇧
Their solution is buying drones from China. This is a DJI sponsored ad
So they took perfectly good drones and broke them...
If I didn’t know you better , I would suspect you of being a cynic !!!
Whoops, I don’t know you 😢
No, the UK gov took 'perfectly good drones', wasted £1.4B, make richer richer and poorer poored due to tax money mishandling rather than enriching or fixing national issues, and called it a whoopsie.
Two limited capable aircraft carriers with no cats or traps which means they can only service one type of aircraft with limited capability, A fleet of destroyers that spend more time undergoing repairs because of chronic design faults, disastrous procurement of weaponized vehicles for the army and now this debacle. Somebody,s head needs to roll. Not only sheer incompetence but complete embarrassment. Pity our brave fighting men having to put up with this crap.
Another blatant waste of taxpayers money
By the M.O.D./Torys, again !!!
Will these drones prevent the cross-channel invasion?
If not, they're useless.
They have been used for monitoring it.
@hughn is that like an exercise 😂
Weather is too bad for them to fly.
We're under attack. Both foreign and domestic.
No but you can watch it happening live.
Anybody who has had dealings with the MOD over the last few decades will be fully aware of the incompetence of those in charge of procurement and the associated decision-making. It has become obvious that most, if not all UK state agencies operate in a similar way. IMO, we urgently need tens of thousands of retirement gongs handing out to the top echelons.
Too many people being over-promoted into positions and standards routinely downgraded to meet Diversity/Equality/Inclusion targets; that curse is affecting all of government. from the Prime Minister through to the lowliest clerk.
All the managers in the food chain will have been well rewarded.
The point is that everyone is missing is its not about defence. It's about transferring money from the public purse to defence contractors and increasing the profits for shareholders.
Thank god the British army has the ever reliable SA80.
The Gem-7 was the competing drone in this competition.
It was going to be 15th the price, with treble the range and endurance.
But QinetiQ used their corporate muscle to lever Gem Aero out of the competition.
Even though we told them Watchkeeper would never work.
Look at the slab wing, the small fixed pitch prop, and the ballooning weight.
It was the RAF Nimrod debacle, all over again.
Gem could have provided 800 drones, for the same price as QinetiQ.
But the Army went with the incompetent establishment.
The Gem-7 would have delivered 3,500 km range, with a fuselage wide enough to accept satellite coms.
The Gem-6 only needed two people, and a farmer’s field for operations.
Look at all the kit the Watchkeeper required…!,
But the Army fell for their pitch - and wasted YOUR money.
T
You get that when you take a precise machine out of specifications.
Just like the SA 80 rifle when it first entered service. All the experienced engineers were let go, the rifle was an unmitigated disaster & so released engineers were, eventually, rehired as highly paid consultants to iron out all the issues. So now a few quids worth of drones can be used to attack troops, ships, tanks etc yet the British multimillion pound effort can't work in the sort of weather that an enemy would use as cover to launch an attack...... MOD proving it's not fit for purpose once again!
Asked to design a trailer to go behind a Challenger Tank in battle field conditions and able to be homologated for the highway.. and towed behind a HGV at highway speeds and dimension criteria, these people haven't got a clue.. That was a £300m waste of time..
Doesn't surprise me that the MOD is still waisting billions of pounds they are an absolute joke, like most other departments not fit for purpose
Only the British can spend a fortune on weapons and end up with rubbish not fit for purpose!
Who are these idiots in charge that are wasting our money like this???? 5 million quid each? I've built a few drones from scratch and they didn't cost much to make.
This country is in a whole lot of trouble. The government need to step up before it is too late. What can we do to give them a kick up the arse?
Vote tge out and get tge Greens in.. Same like Germany..
@@plasticjock1090 The green brigade are part of the problem, not the solution. If it were up to them we would regress into the middle ages.
This has been going on for years ,back in the 1980 ,s it was expected to take 15 years to build anything for the military .
Why are we buying drones from them for ?? we should be making our own.
Because Israeli drones have an excellent reputation, having pioneered the design and use of them in the 80s and we have virtually no experience building them having trashed our industry on the whims of idiot politicians.
Haha. Have you just woken up? Who the hells gonna build anything in the UK? The pink haired non binaries? Or the Andrew Tate wannabes, that are scared to be called a brokie if they get their hands dirty ? The country is screwed . Simple .
Typically military procurement the mod finds something off the shelf.
The politicians add requirements and then the mod buys the off the shelf item
All those juicy MOD contracts to fiddle around with some other county's best kit? Yummy, YES PLEASE!!!
The enemy is not only at the gates but pouring through the gates every day.
I’m tired of this country being run by idiots. It’s our hard earned money they keep throwing away with complete disregard
It’s actually fairly common with engineering where you get focused on perfection rather than function and end up over engineering something to the point where if fails to even do the original task.
The problem gets compounded by the engineer continues to try fixing the problems adding more and more issues while trying to fix the last one.
Down the engineering rabbit hole I’ve done it myself designing things and this is where proper oversight comes in to say WTF are you doing that’s not in the budget.
Britain can no longer do competent engineering design.
Particularly bad in electronics now. Extreme lack of practicality but very big on pretension.
Never did.
Monty Python remains an integral part of the British reality, on all levels. So, it's going to be very funny until the very end...
And Black adder
It isn't a disaster, all the right people made lashings of profit.
We don't have money to help homeless people and are trying to arrest people in our communities. We don't have enough council social housing for millions of hardworking British families, but we have billions to waste on unreasonable contacts.
This is billions of taxpayer money. This is where our money is wasted without anybody being held accountable for this nonsense. Millions of hardworking families are struggling with high cost of living crisis.
Our NHS is struggling, and illegal immigrants have overthrown our borders. Our security services can't keep us safe on our streets.
What is going on in this country? Is there no other way to get the British government to manufacture drones cheaper or buy them cheaper elsewhere.
A company designs and builds a product and sells it commercially to the public, =£1000 per unit.
The same company sells the same product to another company, =£10,000 per unit.
That same company sells that same product to the government or military, =£100,000 per unit.
Ukraine has been using commercially available small FPV drones to great effect, with a few minor DIY alterations.
The UK could buy 4 MQ-9 Reapers direct from General Atomics for around 60m and use them until such time that we can design and build our own.
Its not even hard - these airframes already had a payload limit because the Israeli's have used it for ages. So when "top brass" ask for x,y,z its also easy to know the weight of x and the weight of y and so we cannot have x,y,z if there's only room for x and y.
Somehow we let a lot of idiots into defence and there's no one keeping an eye on them.
There's somebody in the MOD sitting very comfortable with all this over spend and substandard equipment entering or not entering service.
The Russians are laughing their tits off
At least we can public discuss this , in Russia anyone trying to expose this type of thing would dissapear
@@JohnThomas-hv3nd you mean like Dr David Kelly?
@@JohnThomas-hv3ndThen you clearly know nothing about Russian politics
Equipment requirements differ, specially over time, so drones need room to grow. Buying off the shelf drones that only meets today's requirements will potentially mean they won't meet tomorrow requirements. That's the problem and is a problem with all hi-tech equipment.
I used to work on this drone and it's a pile of crap if I'm honest, the engines never work, the electronics are temperamental as hell, also whoever buys stuff for the MOD always mess up because they always buy the basic shell model and then realise it doesn't do what they want and doesn't work so they then have further and further upgrade programs even though it would have been much cheaper to just buy everything you need from the start.
Speaking of drones.... The same "exceptionalism" that referred to in the video may be found with the UK CAA's insistence that the UK couldn't possibly adopt the EASA guidance on drones for the UK, thereby simplifying the drone code for manufacturers too. Having personally qualified with both regulators licensing requirements for hobby drones, I can tell you that the differences are so minimal that it seems that the UK CAA wants different rules just for the sake of them & justifying the expense incurred.
Maybe it's a Brexit-driven mentality, but must the UK insist that their way is better - even when it's plain as day to the man-in-the-street/taxpayer that it's not?
As for the UK's military spending: the problem is the process in how it spends its money, rather than the amount being spent. It's far too wasteful, does zero to reward innovation, R&D, etc. & keeps the large players well funded on projects that reliably are delayed & over-budget.
Does Michelle Mone have anything to do with it
Anyone would think as this sort of stuff keeps happening is it being deliberately done
No surprise there then eh. . It is the modern UK after all, what do you expect. . !!
I bet half of that Occupied Goverment and Parlament got a big payday.
if they are too heavy make them lighter to fly don't scrap and waste money
Old boys network,nimrod billion wasted,clansman radios,They had personnel carriers that the back doors wouldn’t open when parked on incline. Look where the money goes.
The people in charge are not fit for purpose anymore. Taxpayers would be fired for less
Just add it to all the other military programs that run over budget and time ,,sadly we’re lacking in engineering skills
The lsraelis ditched this drone a long time ago.
Because it was absolute craaaap.
They upgraded to the Hermes-900, which is much better.
But costs £26 million each.
The Gem-7 was pitched at £2 million each, with 3x the range and endurance.
R
Haven’t we spent more on Bridges and railways which were never going to be built ?
You should have reverse engineered the Iranian drones
Whats happened to our intelligent people in this country! We used to lead the world in design and engineering!
This Country is absolutely pathetic
Wonder if the jets can call universal credits and claim limited capability 😂😂
Government/military incompetence again. We need a new management.
if Mps were made to reimburse from their own pockets for their failed big ideas it would be amazing that these things would suddenly stop costing so much and "errors" would stop happening, as long as they get to waste other peoples taxes then why should they care?
What a surprise that something made in British doesn't work .
Has to be a Tory project; look at HS2, NHS Smart Systems, Border Control, PO Banking Systems the list goes on, and Tories motto, if it works, break it.
Fleet Auxilliaties actually rendevouzing with frigates and, y'know, resupplying them ????
Don’t need a drone to see rubber boats but still can’t defend the country. What a joke.
who is reasonable for this decision and will they get a bonus ,just from watching the war in Ukraine they must see what works and what doesn't. spend the money wisely
Taking a UAV that worked well in the deserts of Israel, then adding a lot of kit and weight to it and finally wondering why won’t it work well in places like the Falklands with its harsh winds. British Army in a nutshell
Like you could take high tech from a foreign state, without adapting it so the country who made it cannot turn it off at their will or know how to use countermeasures against it. There are only ever temporary alliances!
How many more blunders are we gonna make…drones can’t fly in bad weather, ships sink themselves sa80 nuff said, billions wasted on equipment that’s obsolete before it’s finished we’re a joke militarily
Why don't they test before purchase in all weather condition? Clearly the test was not done. Start saving procurement in MOD and get professional involved. It about time we did band MOD and rebuild a new team of people who knows about the different aspect of weapons and they have to test before purchase in all theatre before purchase.
Ironically, this is the same type of drone that killed the three British people in Gaza this week
Poor state competence is not limited to the MOD. You find it right across the activities of the State. It is built into our system because we ask our candidates for leadership to win an election and that's a bit like trying to find the best tennis player by asking the candidates to play golf. Spent the last 10 years working in China where they get massive things done well, on time and within budget. In their system, leadership candidates are required to spend 25-30 years demonstrating all the attributes and competences needed for great leadership and it shows.
Are these drones made in China or are they sourced from an indian entity?
iran can build drones, turkey makes great drones, what went wrong?
Buy umbrellas, then they'll work in the rain.
Problem is that def spend is too low and too boom and bust, ie everything or nothing ordered, no Drumbeat of production
our enemies are certainly behind the firewalls.
They cost £22 million each, not £5 million.
They only produced 52 of them.
R
Why don't we go to the Ukrainians and learn how to build drones?
My Daughter visited me after 10 years living in China, Hong Kong and Costa Rica. She was shocked by the decline of the country with even major shopping centres like Edinburgh with boarded up shops, pot holed roads and dirty streets. It was clear to her that given we are the 6th largest economy that corruption must be the reason for this. I have to agree every out sourced project is given to some Tories pals and never delivered. the country is being bled dry.
This could have all been avoided if someone had the balls to implement a no fly zone.
And what happens when the first Russian jet is shot down? WW3 and big mushrooms all over the West. No-fly zones only work when you are up against some poorly armed, poorly equipped, poorly led, 3rd world country who cannot strike back.
It's the cival servants. And the ruperts at army hq.
Should of kept the H450 or buy the H900
May be INCOMPITENCE somewhere!
It rains in Israel too.
The Australian military also suffer from this exceptionalism nonsense. 😂😂😂😂
Dam, Vanessa Feltz has changed. She used to be huge!
To many university degree students who have no idea how to fix a Punchure on a push bike, let alone build a drone.
😁😁
You need skilled engineers, welders, mechanics who have no interest in doing University degrees.
They will build you a drone for the half price and it will work first time.
errrr, there’s one out of Aberporth flying, yup, a few crashed, mentioning no names, Thales 😂, you know who you are, was only based on the Hermes, and I could go on about this for days why it was an awful concept to implementation, COTS kit end up costing just as much now,
All this money being splurged again , no wonder we are poor . Can we some people with common sense please ?
What massive splurge of money? Thrse drones are 15 year old..your defence budget is tiny..it has been cut year on year since 1991. It needs massive investment. The whole of europe is rearming with huge increases in money. We all have the same problems with inflation and debt and weak growth/resession. Why should your gov and people like you not want to do your bit as a country and start preparing for a conflict?
@@neiloneil3854 Cause we spend it on vanity projects and unfinished unwanted railways , ferry companies that don't have any ferrys etc
Perhaps we should buy drones from Ukraine. Or from Russia.😆
I need my tax back, I know corruption when i see one. Not even Nigerias would try these tactics
If it’s true that’s bad enough then tell the world!
Has Vanessa had some work done 🤣🤣🤣
If it ain't broke...
Can i get one of the shelf 😂
So, do the Israeli versions work in bad weather?
Well this is what happens when you employ people with no understanding of Drones ! No doubt the people working on these drones have no clue at all ! Otherwise they would of designed them to fly in rain and storms ! in fact if I was in charge I'd be designing one that can dive in the sea also ! Now that would be the perfect drone.
Is there no wonder us the tax payer are skint.
Jobsworth government.
It's cause BAE needs their cut
Need to get Ukraine to supply them. DJ Mavick less than a grand.😊
Surely they can attach rainbow banners to them and fly them about in support of gay pride month.
Money well spent.
Purchased from the wrong geography and climate,
Me. Give. ME. That. Money. 😊
and they wonder why smart people dont want to join the clown run show
See my question is why can't they develop their own drones...look how well it's gone for the Turks.
Pootin must be quaking in his boots 👢 😂
Thats nothing compared to the 🏀🏐 up with spending money on s border force that gives illegal immigrants a lift in and arranges free bed and bord in a 4* hotel!