n August 2015, a Royal Air Force
General Atomics MQ-9 Reaper
remotely piloted air system (RPAS)
carried out the first-ever missile strike against
British-born members of the so-called Islamic
State (IS) terrorist group inside the Syrian
city of Raqqa. The political significance of
the strike was reinforced by the then Prime
Minister David Cameron personally announcing
the attack to the British Parliament. This
was not an event that could be made
public in a low-key press release on the
Ministry of Defence’s (MOD’s) website.
A few weeks later, Cameron made clear that
he wanted the RAF to preserve the option
to make similar strikes against terrorist safe
havens into the future. The RAF would
therefore receive a new RPAS that would
remain credible for many decades to come.Ahead of the Conservative Party Conference
in October 2015, Mr Cameron announced in
a newspaper interview that the RAF would
receive 20 new Protectors as part of a wider
ramp-up of unmanned, surveillance, and
special forces assets to combat Islamist
militants in the Middle East and North Africa.
He said the ten General Atomics MQ-9 Reaper
(Predator B) medium-altitude long-endurance
(MALE) RPAS currently fielded by the RAF
would be replaced by double the number of
Protectors to “keep us safe and to give us the
intelligence and information, and potentially
give us the capacity to hit people who are
potentially planning to hit us.” Cameron
provided little detail except to say that it would
fly longer distances, be quieter and capable
of carrying more sophisticated weapons and
equipment than the incumbent Reaper.From Scavenger to Protector
The former Prime Minister’s announcement
caught many in the RAF by surprise, however
Protector was a rebranding of the well-
established Scavenger programme. The
latter had been running for more than five
years as a long-term replacement for the
Reaper, which had itself been purchased from
2006 with urgent operational requirement
(UOR) funding for service in Afghanistan.
“Scavenger has been dropped as a name and
we now have to call it Protector,” a senior RAF
officer involved in RPAS projects told AFM the
day after Mr Cameron’s announcement. The
officer added that the intention was to have
the new unmanned craft ready to enter service
around 2018-19, when the Reaper Force was
scheduled to be retired. Up until this point the
Scavenger brand had not been pinned to aUnmanned
AmbitionAmbition
Britain’s
Unmanned
Britain’s
Unmanned
Tim Ripley looks at
the Royal Air Force
Protector project that
will take the UK remotely
piloted air system
capability forward.I
RAF 100
94 // FEBRUARY 2018 #359 http://www.airforcesmonthly.com