The British Army is replacing the Watchkeeper drone with the Tekever AR5, a fixed-wing tactical uncrewed aircraft that will be manufactured in the UK under a £400 million contract, with initial deliveries expected by the end of this year.
The UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) announced the selection on 25 July 2026, stating that up to £400 million will be invested over the next decade in acquiring an initial six air vehicles under Project Corvus, with up to 24 to be delivered by 2029. The system must be capable of conducting ISTAR in support of the “corps and divisional deep battlespace.”
When the Project Corvus requirements were initially issued, they included that the system must conduct persistent and wide-area ISTAR by accurately detecting, recognising, identifying, tracking, and designating land and maritime targets in real-time using cooperative payloads. The system should be capable of securely communicating and disseminating ISTAR information and platform data with low latency, integrating with existing processing and exploitation systems, and it is expected to operate reliably in contested airspace and GPS-denied environments, with particular challenges in resisting kinetic interception in contested airspace. It should be quickly deployable and not require an expansion of 47 Regiment’s existing workforce.
In 2005, a £700 million contract was awarded to Thales to provide the Royal Artillery with 54 UAVs named Watchkeeper, designed for all-weather ISTAR capability. The UAV was based on the Elbit Hermes 450 and was planned to be deployed to Afghanistan by 2011. However, protracted development and late deliveries delayed its full in-service date to 2019, by which time the programme had cost £1.35 billion. By 2025, only 12 were operational, and the rest of the fleet was in storage, leading to the decision to replace them.
Designed by the Portuguese company Tekever, the UK AR5s will be assembled at its Swindon facility in England. The fixed-wing AR5 is a SATCOM-enabled tactical UAS for medium and long-range land ISTAR missions. It has an endurance of up to 20 hours while carrying a 50 kg payload.
by David Oliver
