Described as an Apache gunship that fits in the back of your car, the UK's Hydra drone could be a game changer on the battlefield .
The unmanned device, which will use rotors and rocket boosters to lift up to 400 kg, could be equipped with everything from laser-guided Brimstone missiles to a heavy machine gun. .
Hydra was demonstrated by the Army at the Defense and Security Equipment International (DSEI) exhibition last September in London. It's the kind of innovation the military wants to see more of.
But after four years of fruitless negotiations with officials, Hydra says it still doesn't know if the Defense Department will ever be able to fund the idea.
Bosses have already invested more than £800,000 in the company. with drone demos tested at army exercises on Salisbury Plain in 2022 and 2023.
To produce a final prototype, the company needs to raise £500,000 — money it hoped to receive from the Ministry of Defense by January. when suddenly it was said that a budget freeze would make this impossible. Since then nothing has been heard from them.
The situation forced Hydra to look outside the country for potential partners. Indonesia is now among the countries that can buy a drone instead.
“We have a British product that we want to sell into the UK market and everyone seems to like it — the Army put it on their display stand,” says Stephen Pryor, chief executive of Hydra.
“But at the moment, no one is willing to invest such a relatively small amount of money to get the project off the ground. So that's a huge question mark.»
The Hydra case highlights the challenge Rishi Sunak faces as the Prime Minister tries to revive Britain's defense industry.
Last week he outlined plans to reinvigorate the country's military industrial base by increasing defense spending to 2.5 % of GDP at the end of the decade. Sunak said it represented an «incredible opportunity» for Britain's smartest defense start-ups.
The Ministry of Defense has also announced its intention to work more closely with innovative small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to develop advanced technologies such as drones and autonomous weapons.
However, there are big questions about this. whether Whitehall can get its act together.
“The challenge is to encourage new ideas, new thinking,” says Kate Hartley, a defense expert and emeritus professor of economics at the University of York. “It will involve costs and risks.”
These are two things the government has been pushing back against in recent years.
Although the UK's defense budget remains one of the largest in the world, it must fund a much wider range of military capabilities than most other countries.
NATO's commitment and the security of the European continent come first. That's the point, but the UK is also keen to project its power around the world to protect its national interests.
This requires a wider range of equipment and has been used to justify spending £8 billion on the aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales, as well as the F-35 fighters that fly from them.
More Much of the funding is also going toward Britain's nuclear deterrent, with £41 billion earmarked for the design and production of four Dreadnought-class submarines that will carry Trident missiles in the coming decades.
Although maintaining these capability remains key to Britain's industrial development, defense plan ministers said the budget should also be expanded to include new technologies that are central to modern conflicts such as the war in Ukraine.
The world is at the very beginning of the «drone wars», says Professor Trevor Taylor, director of defense industry at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI).
The government's plan to increase defense spending is replete with references to how the Ukrainians have used drones with devastating effect against Russia, noting that these «low-cost solutions are increasingly outperforming more complex systems» such as Putin's Black Sea Fleet.
Spending decisions made today will be key to facilitating the growth of future drone makers , says Professor Taylor.
However, how much additional funding will be allocated to new technologies is still a matter of debate.
Although the government has announced an extra £75 billion for defense by the end of this decade, the Institute for Fiscal Studies says that calculations assume that otherwise the defense budget would have been frozen at its current level, rather than growing along with GDP.
<р>The think tank estimates that if the existing pledge to spend 2.3% of GDP on defense is taken into account, the real increase would be around £20 billion.
While this is undoubtedly a significant amount, there are concerns that it could be absorbed by existing spending commitments. Analysts at Chatham House say there is already a £17 billion gap between the requirements of the MoD's defense equipment plan 2023-2033 and its actual budget — without taking into account the new capabilities the armed forces want to acquire.
Further absorbing this amount is a commitment to spend £10 billion over the next decade to rebuild the country's munitions stockpile, partly to support Ukraine but also to improve Britain's ability to «keep the fight going». This means a nearly doubling of current spending on ammunition, with BAE Systems being the main beneficiary.
This has caused smaller defense companies to wonder whether they will get more than crumbs while the largest defense companies — known in industry jargon as «simples» — raise additional money for huge programs to build new fighter jets, submarines and warships.< /p>
Critics of the Defense Department say officials favor big, unwieldy projects that typically come late and run far over budget. Dominic Cummings, a former adviser to Boris Johnson, called defense procurement a «shit show.»
Take for example the British Army's Ajax program, which aimed to produce 589 armored fighting vehicles by 2017 at a cost of $3.5 billion pounds sterling, but to date only 44 vehicles have been delivered, valued at 4 billion pounds sterling.
The two Queen Elizabeth class aircraft carriers ended up costing more than £6 billion compared to the original budget of £3.9 billion, with the first delivered five years late in 2017. There were also cost overruns on the Navy's Astute-class submarines and its six types. 45 destroyers.
RUSI's Taylor attributes this trend in part to the British habit of seeking best-in-class equipment, known among the troops as «Gucci kit», rather than opting for alternatives that are simply «good enough».
< img src="/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/87c1a5a6059abbcc496883450cee89f7.jpg" /> RAF F-35B aboard HMS Queen Elizabeth. Projecting power around the world was used as justification for Britain's £8 billion aircraft carriers. Photo: LPhot Belinda Alker/MO Crown Co.
Spending on research and development, which most directly helps start-ups and SMEs, has suffered in the face of these larger projects, with funding for the more expensive part of development cut by around 75% from Cold War levels.
“We call it the “valley of death,” Taylor says. “Good ideas are slowly falling by the wayside.”
“When it comes to providing funding, the Ministry of Defense also tends to prioritize the financial sustainability of SMEs over innovation considerations.”
Sometimes the Whitehall experience can also make smaller firms feel the cards are stacked against them.
Executives complain that they are not allowed to bid on contracts worth more than half their annual income while how those promoting applications have to fill out lengthy questionnaires about “corporate social responsibility” and other ESG (environment, social and governance) requirements.
Meanwhile, prime ministers tend to employ large numbers of ex-servicemen, giving them insider knowledge of how procurement works and relationships with the people making purchasing decisions.
“The prime numbers hold all the cards, because they have this relationship,” says Hydra Drones’ Pryor. “So, as a young company, you're trying to penetrate this very difficult market.”
Another executive says, “The system is designed to reduce risk. And to some extent it makes sense: you don't want to suddenly give a group of five a £100 million contract and see what happens.
“But there are other ways to deal with it. Currently, many firms are automatically excluded from participating.»
Supacat, which makes the Jackal armored vehicle, is an example of a small company that received benefited from a long-term deal with Babcock. Photo: Ben Birchall/PA Wire
In many cases, SMEs may feel that the only way to gain access is to partner with a larger defense company, which potentially means they will have to sell or dilute their ownership of key intellectual property.
This isn't always a bad thing, says John Howe, chief commercial officer at defense giant Babcock, which has worked with a number of smaller companies to make their technology suitable for the armed forces.
Example: The company's long-standing deal with Supacat to make the latter's Jackal armored vehicles for the army at HMNB Devonport, Plymouth.
“Supacat is the general contractor and this is their intellectual property,” Howie explains. “But they lack the scale and mass production capabilities that we have, so the partnership has actually worked well.”
“Young companies are great to work with because they grow very quickly, but one of the The problem is that any form of public procurement is usually very complex.
“Companies like ours have entire departments dedicated to this. things so we can help them get to market.”
Another potential path forward is public-private collaboration. Ministers recently announced the success of the Dragonfire directed energy weapon, a powerful new laser that can be used to shoot down drones and missiles.
Developed by the Defense Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL) in partnership. In collaboration with private firms including MBDA, Leonardo and QinetiQ, the ship's device fires a concentrated beam that can burn through a metal fuselage in seconds — and costs just £10 per shot.
The project, first presented in 2018, is unusual both in its rapid implementation and in the close cooperation between government and business. The process has moved so quickly that the Royal Navy now aims to have the weapon on its ships by 2027, despite delays during the pandemic.
Mike Sewart, QinetiQ's chief technology officer, says Dragonfire is an example of how how «rapid prototyping» — rather than Whitehall issuing a list of requirements — can get cutting-edge technology into the hands of the military more quickly.
“Technologists, scientists and engineers love solving problems,” he says, “and in the UK we truly have some of the best people in the world in this industry.”
“Let them solve problems, built around problems, maximizes the effect of that brain power.»
There are signs in the UK that the Ministry of Defense wants to emulate the model adopted by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in the US — the Pentagon's «blue sky» investment arm that supports new technologies that can be used in defense.
As part of the commitment to increase spending, a new Defense Innovation Agency (DIA) will be created next year, tasked with unifying the «fragmented defense innovation landscape» under a single body.
The Defense Innovation Agency will be focused on work. on new technologies and invest in SMEs. About 5% of the defense budget will be allocated to research and development between 2025 and 2026, and another 2% will be allocated to the military application of advanced science and technology.
Whether DIA will be as effective as Darpa, which is credited with creating everything from the global positioning system (GPS) to stealth aircraft and the Internet, remains to be seen.
The new agency joins a host of other initiatives created throughout for many years to help SMEs have had mixed success. It may be similar to the existing Defense and Security Accelerator, which is tasked with finding and funding “useful innovations for a more secure future.”
On top of that, the Department of Defense still doesn't even have «a phone number that a person on the other end of the line could talk to that small and medium-sized businesses could talk to,» warns RUSI's Taylor.
The government has made various changes that it says will help small businesses get more involved, which is included in the Procurement Act 2023.
Officials have also been ordered to give SMEs more freedom over certain requirements, simplify the bidding process and break large contracts into smaller pieces so they can bid for additional work.
Shadow Defense Secretary John Healey (left) called on the Ministry of Defense to “buy British” weapons. Photo: Stefan Rousseau/PA Wire
Labor says if elected it will match the government's defense spending commitments «as soon as resources allow», although it has rejected Conservative proposals to fund the increase by cutting 70,000 civil service jobs.
John Healey, the party's shadow defense secretary, called on the Ministry of Defense to «buy British» and said small and medium-sized defense businesses were «essential to the sovereignty, security and economy of our UK».
SMEs say they need more than that just kind words to reassure that politicians and the Ministry of Defense are serious about change.
It has not escaped the companies' attention, for example, that the UK's new drone strategy was unveiled at the Maidenhead base. Malloy Aeronautics — just three weeks after the company was taken over by Defense Prime Minister BAE.
“What the Ministry of Defense likes to predict and what actually happens is often a different story «,» complains one executive.
Meanwhile, Hydra Drones continues to negotiate with foreign governments and larger defense companies. Bosses are also looking at potential equity investments in rocket maker MBDA UK or Airbus to provide a cash injection.
“We're not giving up and we've survived on a very bare bones basis for four years, so we won't give up.” , insists chief executive Pryor.
“But of course it's difficult and it's frustrating. We've always been up for a challenge — we just want to crack the whip fair.»
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