14.1 | Military equipment (post-conflict)

“the UK’s future protected mobility capability for light forces engaged on peace support

and other operations”.

200. Mr Woolley wrote that, whilst DUCKBOARD had originally been designed to

replace Snatch in Northern Ireland, UK casualties on operations in Macedonia and

experiences from operations in Afghanistan and Iraq had “confirmed the requirement

for a global family of vehicles offering similar protection levels”. To supplement the

Snatch vehicles that had been deployed from Northern Ireland to Iraq, he recommended

re‑profiling the funding of the programme by:

• bringing forward a battlegroup worth of 80 vehicles from 2007‑2012 to

2004‑2007 (£38.5m over three years); but

• cutting the remaining PPV capability to support a medium scale PPV capability

of 222 vehicles that had been profiled between 2007‑2014 (£76.2m over

seven years).

The overall budget was reduced by 49 percent.

201. On 31 March, the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL) produced

an operational analysis for a “Rest of [the] World PPV (ROW)” which would later become

known as the “Vector” vehicle.102

202. DSTL stated that, subsequent to an earlier operational analysis produced

in September 2003, Project DUCKBOARD had changed and the emphasis had

“shifted from a Snatch replacement in the medium term (ISD [In Service Date] 2007)

to providing a PPV (ROW) in the near term (ISD 2005) with an eight year in service

life”. That would “provide an interim capability between the Snatch OSD [Out of Service

Date]” and FRES.

203. It was clear from the operational analysis that DSTL intended to highlight that

additional work needed to be done. Its stated aim was simply to summarise its progress

to date. Further work was needed because:

• Vector’s capacity, mobility and protection Key User Requirements (KURs)

were “still only in draft form”; they had not been articulated as part of Project

DUCKBOARD’s operational analysis.

• The “coherent statement of CONOPS, threat assessment and payload

requirement” that had been tasked to “the user community” in the July 2003

workshop had not been developed in time for the DUCKBOARD operational

analysis. While further work had been done, and some assumptions about

Vector’s role had been made, more needed to be done to develop the user

requirement.

102 Report DSTL, 31 March 2004, ‘VECTOR Operational Analysis’.

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