Wednesday, Feb 16, 2005

The first army brigade scheduled to deploy to Iraq with the military's Pounds 1.9bn battlefield communications system will be forced to go without the new radios in its Challenger tanks and Warrior fighting vehicles, according to defence officials.

The 12th Mechanised Brigade, which will leave for southern Iraq at the end of April, will instead be sent with a "core capability", which will see the Bowman system installed only on several other vehicles - including Land Rovers and Saxon command vehicles - and carried by soldiers.

One senior officer said that while 12th Brigade was disappointed at the inability to get the radio working on its armoured vehicles more quickly, an estimated nine out of 10 operations in southern Iraq did not now require Challengers or Warriors. He said they had wanted to take the Warrior and Challengers into Iraq converted. "Of course we did. But on routine operations, (the other vehicles) cover most situations".

According to General Dynamics, the US-based defence contractor building Bowman, the Challenger problems centre on old headsets provided by the Ministry of Defence that plug into the new radio system's in-tank intercom. The MoD required the manufacturer to use the old headsets as a cost-saving move, but they proved incompatible with Bowman and the intercom frequently stops working.

"That has been quite a knotty problem," said Sandy Wilson, the head of General Dynamics' UK operations. "If the intercoms don't work, things don't move."

There have been problems getting the radios working in the Warrior armoured vehicles' gun turret, where the turret's rotation has caused interference. In addition, a new thermal sight for the gun was causing the radio to shut down.

Mr Wilson said the company was in the process of testing fixes to both the Challenger and Warrior problems and hoped to have them approved by the military by next month. A senior MoD official said he believed the next formation to deploy in the Iraq rotation, 7th Armoured Brigade, would have the radios fitted on armoured vehicles.

Senior defence officials said even the limited Bowman system was a significant improvement on the existing Clansman radios, which have been in use since the 1970s and do not work over long distances. Clansman also does not provide "secure communications", meaning enemy forces can listen in on conversations between field commanders, forcing army patrols to use decades-old paper signals to communicate clandestinely. Bowman allows for secure contact, but the capability will have to be turned off when Challengers and Warriors are used in high-intensity oper-ations by the 12th Brigade.

General Dynamics was awarded a contract to build Bowman just over three years ago and a senior defence official said he believed the system was still on track to be fully delivered by 2008.

By PETER SPIEGEL

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