Urgency of the drone wars is passing us by
It was a surveillance drone designed for 'all weather' — except bad weather. The British Army's Watchkeeper programme was finally put out of its misery last autumn when it was tacitly acknowledged that the only place this 'world-leading' project was leading anyone was headfirst into a Welsh tree. Eight of the 54 drones delivered (taking 18 years and £1.4 billion) were lost to crashes during training exercises. The rest, for everyone's safety, seem to have been carefully stored in a warehouse.
Now what? Somehow, John Healey's announcement to ditch Watchkeeper caught the army off-guard. Quickly, a replacement programme, Corvus, was set up. Its trajectory will tell us much about how capable our government and military are of living in the real world.
It started well.
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