Northrop Grumman reveals WATCHKEEPER programme solution

Northrop Grumman Corporation's Integrated Systems sector has announced its approach to achieving the United Kingdom Ministry of Defence (MoD) requirement for WATCHKEEPER, an unmanned system that will deliver an integrated image intelligence, targeting and exploitation capability to meet the U.K. land commander's critical information needs.

The Northrop Grumman industry team, which is a combination of US and UK companies, recently completed the system definition phase of the programme and has submitted a tender offer for the follow-on system integration and assurance phase. The team has been working closely with the MoD for two years to define a solution that achieves the U.K. warfighter's intelligence, surveillance, target acquisition and reconnaissance (ISTAR) needs with the best capability at the lowest risk.

"Our industry team has approached WATCHKEEPER as a network-centric, system-of-systems capability," said Ralph Starace, Northrop Grumman's WATCHKEEPER programme manager. "The foundation of our solution is a C4I architecture driven to deliver timely data exploitation and dissemination of time-critical information so enemy targets can be precisely located, identified and eliminated before they have time to react."

The Northrop Grumman industry team includes the company's Electronic Systems sector, based in Baltimore, its Information Technology sector, based in Herndon, Virginia, and Northrop Grumman Information Technology Europe, based in Southampton, in the UK. Other UK-based companies in the team are Detica Limited, Ultra Electronics, General Dynamics U.K. Ltd and STASYS.

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