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BAE SYSTEMS awarded FIST soldier modernisation planning phase contract

14 Aug 2002

BAE Systems C4ISR has been awarded one of two funded contracts by the United Kingdom's Defence Procurement Agency (DPA) to prepare a planning baseline for the forthcoming Assessment Phase of the Ministry of Defence's Future Integrated Soldier Technology (FIST) programme.

This four-month activity, valued at 250k, will create two alternative proposals from industry for the full Assessment Phase of the FIST soldier modernisation project. Competitive assessment will then enable the DPA to down-select to a single contractor to undertake the three-year, 15 million full Assessment Phase, the results from which will be used to underpin the Ministry's Main Gate approval process for the full FIST programme in 2006.

BAE Systems C4ISR will co-ordinate progress across the company's centres of excellence and its international partners. It will continue to adopt an innovative, partnership-focused approach to the FIST requirement and oversee the application of the company's world-class systems integration skills.

C4ISR is also managing - and seeking synergy with - parallel activities being undertaken by BAE Systems to meet the UK's Indirect Fire Precision Attack, Future Rapid Effects System and Watchkeeper Unmanned Aerial Vehicle programmes, ensuring that its world-class domain expertise and systems integration skills create synergy between related, network enhanced military capability programmes.

The BAE Systems-led team will also follow up earlier Supplier Conferences - aimed at identifying 'best-of-breed', high value adding, specialist and niche technologies for use in a FIST solution within the company's world-class systems integration processes - with similar international partnership initiatives.

Team Leader Murray Fullerton comments: "Our low-risk, value-for-money approach to FIST will bring the benefits of the integration of the individual infantry soldier into the high tempo digitized battlespace, which is the focus of significant investment by the Ministry. It will also increase the situational awareness, flexibility, protection, mobility, firepower and overall effectiveness of the infantry section.

This will be done within an open overall architecture and whole-life support environment provided by BAE Systems' internationally respected systems integration expertise. Strengthening the domestic industrial base, this expertise will also be transferable to other soldier modernisation programmes around the world."

The FIST requirement encompasses enhancements to the five NATO specified soldier domains of lethality, survivability, C4I, mobility and sustainability. The UK Ministry of Defence issued the FIST User Requirement Document and Pre-Qualification Questionnaire in 2001, to which a number of companies - including BAE Systems C4ISR - responded. An initial operational deployment is expected in 2009.