In Dou­glas Car­swell MP’s blog post “Is Man­tis going to fly?”, he bemoans the amount of money the Min­istry of Defence have spent fund­ing BAE’s Man­tis unmanned aer­ial vehi­cle (UAV), sug­gest­ing instead that we should not have invested in it and should instead have bought exist­ing off-the-shelf UAVs, by which he pre­sum­ably means the MQ-9 Reaper. He goes on to pre­sume that a Man­tis pro­cure­ment con­tract must no longer be on the cards, based on the response he received to his ques­tion to the Sec­re­tary of State for Defence.

With all due respect to Mr Car­swell, I do believe he’s missed the point here. Not only has the Royal Air Force already bought 13 of the Reaper air­craft, but they have already seen oper­a­tional use in Iraq and Afghanistan.

BAE’s Man­tis vehi­cle (pic­ture from Wikimedia)

BAE’s Man­tis vehi­cle is, as Par­lia­men­tary Under­sec­re­tary of State Peter Luff says, a tech­ni­cal demon­stra­tor — a one-off pro­to­type built in order to prove the tech­nol­ogy behind it. There never was a pro­cure­ment pro­gramme for the Man­tis. Sure, BAE received some fund­ing from the Min­istry of Defence, though as this Defense­News arti­cle sug­gests, it may not have been all that much. Mostly it seems like BAE and the other con­sor­tium mem­bers threw their own money into the Man­tis pro­gramme, and the MoD put some of their own research bud­get into it in the hope that the Man­tis would suit Britain’s needs bet­ter than the Reaper does.

As I write this post, Mr Car­swell has updated his own to address the com­ment of “an angry reader” (not me, by the way) who points out that “Man­tis is just a demo project… We’re just see­ing if we can do it bet­ter”. The MP’s response is to bring up the SA80 rifle and the Future Lynx and Eurofighter pro­grammes. Issues with the SA80 and with the Typhoon have been widely broad­cast in the press (though I can’t find any­thing par­tic­u­larly damn­ing about the Future Lynx from my brief online search). But the fact that the Man­tis is a tech­ni­cal demon­stra­tor is still rel­e­vant here — the SA80 and the Typhoon are in active pro­duc­tion and use by our armed forces, the Man­tis is not.

Maybe with our glo­ri­ous 20/20 hind­sight, we should have aban­doned the Eurofighter project and bought F35s and F22s. Who knows — it’s not as if those are the epit­ome of suc­cess­ful pro­grammes. But shy­ing away from tech­ni­cal demon­stra­tors entirely, par­tic­u­larly ones that are largely privately-funded, would result in stag­na­tion. Britain is one of the few coun­tries that main­tains a high level of mil­i­tary research of its own, rather than com­mit­ting to buy­ing all our gear from the Amer­i­cans or the Rus­sians. While I don’t pre­tend to have any big num­bers to throw around, I would imag­ine that the defence sec­tor is rea­son­ably impor­tant to the British econ­omy, and it would be in poor shape indeed if the Min­istry of Defence no longer wished to invest in the kind of tech­ni­cal demon­stra­tor pro­grammes that fur­ther our country’s engi­neer­ing prowess.

(Dis­clo­sure: I’m a for­mer employee of Qine­tiQ, a mem­ber of the Man­tis con­sor­tium, though I’ve had no involve­ment with Man­tis itself.)