With the U.K.'s Strategic Defense and Security Review (SDSR) set to be published in November, industry is preparing to meet the big gap in airborne maritime surveillance left by the cancellation of the Nimrod MRA4 program in 2010. It seems almost certain that the SDSR will detail a need-but not necessarily a requirement-for a multimission platform able to take on what the head of the U.K. Royal Air Force, Air Chief Marshal Andrew Pul-ford, described at the London DSEi defense exposition in September as a "persistent wide-area surveillance over land and over water" mission. And industry is working hard to push for a competition.
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