The Ministry of Defence has said it is too early to determine how much work will take place in the United Kingdom on a new NATO low-cost air defence weapon currently under development.<\/p>\n
Responding to a written parliamentary question from former defence secretary James Cartlidge, Defence Minister Luke Pollard said the project is still in the early stages of selecting an industrial partner.<\/p>\n
The weapon is being developed under the Low-cost Extended Air Defence (LEAP) initiative, which was announced in February as a collaborative effort between the UK and European allies to produce affordable air defence interceptors.<\/p>\n
Cartlidge asked what percentage of the programme\u2019s workshare would be carried out in the UK. Pollard said this had not yet been determined.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe low-cost air defence effector project under the LEAP initiative, as announced on 20 February, is now entering the international industrial selection phase,\u201d he said. \u201cUK workshare will be dependent on the chosen solution.\u201d<\/p>\n
The LEAP initiative aims to develop a low-cost surface-to-air weapon designed to counter emerging aerial threats while reducing the cost per interception compared with existing missile systems.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Ministry of Defence has said it is too early to determine how much work will take place…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":479096,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-479095","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/479095","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=479095"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/479095\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/479096"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=479095"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=479095"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=479095"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}