The U.S. Army and the United Kingdom's Ministry of Defence today launched a joint initiative to explore the use of Tactical Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (TUAV) on future battlefields.
The agreed upon Letter of Intent opens the way for exploring opportunities for future cooperation on TUAVs for military forces. Potential activities will include:
TUAVs from the U.S. and the UK played a major, successful role in NATO operations in Kosovo and performed a wide range of missions. As a result of this agreement, work will consider the operational lessons learned in Kosovo and their applicability for future TUAV requirements, in particular, linkage with other Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR), Strike, and Command, Control, Communications, Computers and Intelligence (C4I) systems. The output from this joint initiative is expected to assist other US/UK national TUAV programs.
The agreement was signed at the Association of the United States Army Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C. by Lt. Gen. Paul Kern (Military Deputy to the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Acquisition, Logistics and Technology) for the United States, and by Major General David Jenkins (Master General of the Ordnance and an Executive Director of the Defence Procurement Agency) for the United Kingdom.
For more information, call Army Public Affairs at (703) 697-4739/4314.