Tag: Watchkeeper UAV

On Wednesday 20 November, the Defence Secretary John Healey announced in the House of Commons that the UK was scrapping its entire fleet of Watchkeeper drones bringing to an end to the sorry saga of this drone programme.

Anyone who has been following the Drone Wars blog over the last 14 years will be well aware of the failings of Watchkeeper. Based on the Israeli Hermes 450 drone, Watchkeeper was built by a joint venture company (U-TacS) owned 50-50 by the Israeli company Elbit Systems and Thales UK.

While the UK’s armed Reaper drones are operated by the Royal Air Force, the unarmed watchkeepers were bought for the British Army with the intention of undertaking short-medium range surveillance in order to conduct artillery strikes.

Fifty-four of the drones were built under a 2004, £1bn contract which was supposed to see “world-class” drones, operated by the army in Afghanistan by mid-2010.  Long delays saw only four of the drones deployed to Afghanistan for four weeks in 2014, conducting around 140 hours of surveillance as British forces withdrew from Camp Bastion.

Since then, apart from one short deployment in the UK, the 50 plus Watchkeeper drones have either flown on training flight, mostly in the UK or Cyprus (despite being marketed as an all-weather system, it performs poorly in ‘adverse’ weather) or simply kept in storage.  The UK deployment was to support Border Force operations to curb refugees crossings the channel. According to responses to our FoI requests at the time, a total of 21 flights were conducted in September and October 2022.

Crashes of Watchkeeper drones

Military Technophilia

While it would be fair to say that there have been particular problems with the Watchkeeper programme, the dominant narrative that sophisticated military technology is the answer to a wide array of political and security issues is also an important element here.  Read more →