Rheinmetall has been awarded a contract by the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) to supply a driver’s viewing system for British Army Warrior infantry fighting vehicles (IFVs), fuelling speculation that the Warrior fleet will remain operational well beyond its currently stated 2025 out-of-service date (OSD).
The German company announced on 21 November 2023 that its local subsidiary, Rheinmetall Electronics UK Ltd, had won the contract in an open competition and will now supply Trailblazer driver’s viewing systems for a total of 359 Warrior IFVs.
The value of the contract, Rheinmetall stated, “is in the low-double-digit-million-euro range”. With regard to timescales, a Rheinmetall representative told ESD that deliveries and integration were scheduled to commence in Q2 2024, with the majority of systems due to be delivered in 2024 and the remainder in early 2025.
The Trailblazer system will be used on the Warrior to provide a rear safety camera. This follows an accident in June 2022 when a British Army officer from the 5th Battalion The Rifles was killed on Salisbury Plain after being reversed into by a Warrior whose driver did not realise he was behind the vehicle.
The camera proposed by Rheinmetall Electronics UK has already been specified for the British Army’s future fleet of Boxer 8×8 Mechanised Infantry Vehicles (MIVs) as part of their local situational awareness system. The selected model is the HD90W-IR system, which the comprises an uncooled long-wave infrared (LWIR) camera with a 90° horizontal field of view and coverage down to 0 Lux, affording the driver a wide field of view across the vehicle’s rear arc.
Brigadier Matt Wilkinson, Vehicle Support Team Leader for the UK MoD’s Defence Equipment & Support (DE&S), was quoted by Rheinmetall as saying, “This safety-critical upgrade to Warrior is being delivered at pace and with the principals of quality, supportability, and value for money at its heart. The DE&S Vehicle Support Team look forward to working with Rheinmetall Electronics UK in integrating this leading-edge technology to our in-service fleet of armoured infantry fighting vehicles over the next 12 months.”
Given the Warrior fleet’s last-stated OSD of 2025, it seems unlikely that the MoD would fund a camera upgrade for the Warrior fleet when some of these vehicles would barely see a year’s worth of using it, even if such an upgrade could improve the UK’s chances of selling on its Warriors.
It thus seems more likely, particularly given the delays to the British Army’s Ajax family of armoured vehicles (which were originally expected to enter service from 2020 but are now unlikely to be deployed before mid-2025), that the Warrior fleet – or at least 359 Warriors out of the roughly 388 (according to IISS’ The Military Balance 2023 figures) remaining in service – will remain in service throughout the 2020s.
While the UK’s Warrior IFVs are not being directly replaced by the Ajax family of AFVs, which are predominantly intended to serve as reconnaissance vehicles, the fact remains that the British Army as a whole has no current alternatives to Ajax and Warrior in terms of land vehicles with a medium-calibre armament.
Warrior is armed with an unstabilised RARDEN 30 mm cannon, which was also used by the Scimitar from the CVR(T) family until its retirement in early 2023. According to IISS’s The Military Balance 2022 figures, the British Army operated some 176 Scimitars in the year prior to their retirement. Ajax is armed with the more powerful CT40 40 mm cannon, but only 245 of this turreted variant are being procured under current plans, most of which will be called upon to fill the gap left by the Scimitars’ retirement.
On the other hand, when the Boxer MIVs start to enter British Army service, which is expected to take place around 2025, they will only carry a remote weapon station armed with a 12.7 mm machine gun.
The Warrior Capability Sustainment Programme, which would have seen the British Army’s IFV fleet up-armed with a Lockheed Martin-designed turret armed with the CT40 cannon employed by the Ajax fleet and serving beyond 2040, was cancelled by the MoD in 2021.
As such, the British Army’s options to fill its IFV gap would seem to be presently limited to either re-roling some Ajax reconnaissance vehicles into the IFV role or extending the service life of the Warrior fleet. Given the aforementioned upgrade, it would appear that the latter option has been chosen.
