Asa Winstanley
The Electronic Intifada / November 22, 2024
Britain will next year scrap a fleet of 47 drones manufactured by the Israeli firm Elbit Systems, the defense minister announced on Wednesday.
The uncrewed Watchkeeper aircraft were manufactured at UAV Tactical Systems, an Elbit factory in Leicester, a city in England’s Midlands region.
The Watchkeeper was modeled on Elbit’s infamous Hermes 450 drone, previously advertised as battle-tested on Palestinians,
The troubled Elbit subsidiary in Leicester has been a regular target for campaigners, especially Palestine Action.
“Elbit losing its biggest contract signifies the beginning of the end for the Israeli weapons maker’s presence in this country,” a spokesperson for the group said on Friday.
In a statement to Britain’s Parliament on Wednesday, defense minister John Healey described the scrapping of the drones as being part of wider cuts to the military – “the retirement of aging equipment,” as he put it.
Healey said the cuts would save the military up to $626 million over five years.
The minister did not mention Israel or Elbit. Watchkeeper was a joint project of Elbit and the French firm Thales.
Early retirement
The minister said that the five warships and dozens of military helicopters that were also being scrapped had either “in effect, been mothballed” or would have been retired in a few years’ time anyway.
What he didn’t point out was that, unlike the rest of the “aging” equipment, Watchkeeper’s originally planned retirement date was still almost two decades away: 2042.
The drone has been described in the British media as “troubled” or – to quote Sky News – “beset by delays, cost overruns and flaws.”
As the UK Defence Journal put it, “the system often struggled to meet operational requirements.”
That may just be a euphemistic way to write that the drone couldn’t fly well in Europe’s bad weather.
Watchkeeper drones “struggle to operate in poor weather conditions – limiting their utility,” Sky reported.
The end of Elbit’s Leicester factory ?
Since it was founded in 2020, Palestine Action has repeatedly targeted UAV Tactical Systems’ drone factory in Leicester with direct action and mass campaigns.
Despite UK subsidiaries of Elbit downplaying their ties to Israel after becoming targets for campaigners (neither Israel nor Elbit are mentioned on the Leicester factory’s website) the plant has been granted many licenses by the British government for exporting arms to Israel.
The licenses are worth millions and indicate that the Leicester factory has provided drone components to the genocidal entity.
Between the early scrapping of the UK’s Watchkeeper fleet and the continued targeting of the Leicester plant by Palestine Action, the future of UAV Tactical Systems must surely now be in doubt.
“Direct action undertaken by hundreds of activists has consistently disrupted the operations of Elbit Systems,” the Palestine Action spokesperson said.
This had led to “significant delays in its production, as well as damage to weaponry. There’s no doubt that direct action works, and it’s more necessary than ever to deploy effective tactics against the Israeli war machine.”
Asa Winstanley is an investigative journalist and associate editor with The Electronic Intifada; he is author of the book Weaponising Anti-Semitism: How the Israel Lobby Brought Down Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2023)
