One Way Effector (OWE) Contract Award Notice

CPV: Unmanned combat aerial vehicles

Procedure method

Restricted procedure

Legal basis

CELEX · 32014L0024 Public Contracts Regulations 2015 (Directive 2014/24/EU)

Procurement category

Goods

Notice status

Awarded

Procurement threshold

Unspecified in notice

Regulatory regime

Standard

Commercial structure

Stand-alone contract (no framework)

Competition type

Competitive procedure

GPA / WTO covered

Unspecified in notice

Recurring procurement

Unspecified in notice

First published

18 Dec 2024, 13:43 GMT

Last source update

17 Apr 2025, 19:11 BST

FTS notice number

2025/S 000-016072

Classification (CPV)

Unmanned combat aerial vehicles

Delivery area

UK

Official registry OCID

ocds-h6vhtk-04c923 Find a Tender

Why no open competition

No tenders or no suitable tenders/requests to participate in response to negotiated procedure with prior publication of a contract notice; The products involved are manufactured purely for the purpose of research, experiment, study or development under the conditions stated in the directive

Published justification

The Secretary of State for Defence, acting through DE&S (the “Authority”) intends to award Modini Limited a direct contract for the supply of One Way Effector (OWE) systems for Project ASGARD in support of Op CABRIT. The estimated value of this contract is £7.5m and the proposed term is 24 Months. This will be awarded as a call-off contract under the Human Machine Teaming (HMT) Framework, contract reference 702953450.

Project ASGARD will be a software-defined, network enabled reconnaissance and strike complex, consisting a suite of digital and data components that enable decision support. This software defined approach will provide an ‘any sensor to any effector’ decision advantage capability. The procurement to which this notice relates will be for the one way effector systems only, with the other elements of ASGARD being subject to separate procurements.

In accordance with regulation 4 of The Defence and Security Public Contracts (Amendment) (EU Exit) Regulations 2019 (SI 2019/697) this procurement falls to be regulated under the provisions of the Defence and Security Public Contracts Regulations 2011, as amended (in particular by SI 2019/697 and SI 2020/1450). Prior publication of a contract notice in the Official Journal of the European Union is no longer appropriate.

It is considered that award of the contract using the negotiated procedure without prior publication of a contract notice in the UK e-notification service (as required by relevant legislation) is lawful in accordance with Regulation 16(1)(a)(ii) of the Defence and Security Public Contracts Regulations 2011 for technical reasons.

This is because the Authority has identified strict technical impracticality for a supplier other than the chosen supplier to achieve the Authority’s technical requirements as it is necessary to use specific knowledge, tools or means which only MODINI Limited currently has at its disposal. More specifically this relates to the mandatory performance characteristics of the required solution, namely payload weight, scalability, range, max speed and terrain following capability. Due to the particular timescales for this requirement, it was also identified that only Modini could reach the Authority’s strict and necessary deadlines for production and delivery of the hardware for Spring 25 & be deployed on Op Cabrit in Summer 25.

It should be noted that Project ASGARD is intended to meet a specific, near-term capability need and will not define technical solutions for UK MOD’s longer term OWE based capability requirements.

• Modini LimitedAwarded supplier Pewsey, UK

No document links were published on the notice.