Tired of cost and schedule overruns, the U.K. Defense Ministry is applying top-level oversight on troubled programs to force companies to cure persistent ills. Unfortunately, in one of the first test cases-the Watchkeeper unmanned aircraft program-that strategy has not panned out. The Thales-led Watchkeeper development, begun in 2005, is the ministry's flagship unmanned aircraft development program. Having acquired many off-the-shelf systems-such as the Desert Hawk small UAV or Reaper medium-altitude, long-endurance system-Watchkeeper was more ambitious; Thales would take the Elbit Hermes 450 and significantly change its systems and architecture to deliver a far more capable system for the British army.
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