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Good afternoon, my name is Simon Hay, I'm the Chief Marketing Officer for John Cockrell
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Defence and the Cockrell IX was an internal development, something outside the box and
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again as you have just said we presented it for the first time in March 2022 at the show
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here in Riyadh and since then we've been doing a lot of work, especially on the mobility
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and the firing trials. We did a first set of static firing in the summer in Belgium
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and then in the spring of this year we were able to do a live fire mobile firing with
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the French Army at the range in northern France in Sweep where we did fire on the move against
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mobile targets and then more recently again with the French Army with their STAT or the
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Technical Services of the Land Forces. We went to Canjou in the south of France and
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did more firings, especially on the move and we fired at over 120km an hour, stabilised
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against moving targets with very impressive precision results. Now that hopes we can show
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the French Army that if we can stabilise a 25mm cannon on a 4 tonne vehicle then for
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the future project VBAE, which the design phase has just started, we can stabilise the
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same type of gun on an 8 tonne vehicle. I don't know if there's a world record for firing
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on the move in a stabilised manner but 120km an hour was a very impressive result with
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very impressive precision results obtained during that test. What we're envisaging, this
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is a high speed vehicle to do long distance intercepts for countries with long borders
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long internal borders where they can't necessarily have soldiers or battalions or even a small
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platoon positioned at every 10km. This is something that could get to a place to take
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on somebody coming in that you don't want. 600km range, 200km an hour on the highway
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over 100km an hour cross country, gives you an amazing amount of firepower for a very
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lightweight, very mobile, very fast system. The idea will be a family of vehicles going
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forward, we'll have a 25mm version which we already have developed and we're looking to
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bring across, we'll see an anti-tank guided missile version to take on heavier targets
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We expect this to be border patrol, anti-intrusion, high speed manoeuvre and also a lot of interest
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in special forces in Europe as well for special intervention raids, fast missions where you
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have to go in and out quickly. Where we have the challenge is there's only two men on crew
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and often the special forces like to operate as four or six but we're working with them
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to see how we can solve that. It's possible if the acquisition of ARCUS goes through in
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the future that we'll be working with them to develop the mobility solution to bring
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it to a production phase. The weapon solution is already very mature, it's based on technology
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we use on our other turret systems, it's just a little bit more extreme in terms of speed
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and obviously the capability to stabilise a gun at very high speed is something we've
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now got good experience with. Right, and this summer at Euro Satori we'll show the new helmet
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system which gives you an interactive control of the weapon system and of your environment
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so you can have different modes of observation, select your target with a click of an eye
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and engage the target very, very quickly and especially when you're high speed on the move
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trying to use a joystick, may not be the easiest interface when a vehicle is moving around
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quickly. So this will be another piece of innovation, partly financed by the regional
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government of Wallonia to show our new capabilities together with the decision aid making where
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we can propose a solution when you're in a specific combat environment and with that
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we have the automatic identification of the threats that could be around both terrorist
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and in the air. We've got a big, big database of vehicles, of drones that we can propose
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solutions for in terms of how to combat them. This whole technology is based on artificial
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intelligence so the identification and the aid to make a decision is all based around
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artificial intelligence, gaming theory, we're using artificial intelligence to generate imagery that it then has to identify. So we are using it for the training side, using
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war gaming theory to predict how you should behave in different situations and using real
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life environments to simulate, you know, to create battlefield environments to make your
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aid of decision tool better and better. So it's an artificial intelligence system that
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keeps on learning and it'll be something that we'll roll out in the IX as a demonstration
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but will be retrofitable to our existing fleet of turrets with some upgrades to the software
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and hardware that manages the graphic systems. For the IX, we're probably about two years
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away from being at a production phase, we're continuing to use our proof of principle prototype
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to develop and understand what people want to do with it and I think if the ARCUS acquisition
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goes through, we'll be working with them to bring it up to an industrial phase for
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2026 timeframe. Because there's a lot of interest we have to be able to deliver and there's
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work to be done to get to that stage still. Right, well John Cocker was founded by an
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Englishman in 1817 and in the 1820s we were already producing weapon systems and components
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for weapon systems and then when Belgium was formed in 1830-1831, we started making deliveries
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of gun carriages to the Belgian army. We've been involved in weapon manufacturing since
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the 1840s and the weapon we see here is 1902 vintage, it's a three pounder or a 47mm gun
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which was used for infantry, very highly mobile, very light and with an interactive screw lock
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breech which was quite unique at the time, so a fast firing weapon. And we've been doing
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weapon systems and turrets, I think our first turret was in the 1970s with a lightweight
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90mm turret which you'll see on the Otterkar stand and then the 30mm turret we delivered
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to Scandinavia in the 1990s, then the newer generation from starting in the 2000s, 3000
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series that was delivered starting deliveries in 2014 and with the IX now our 2022. So we've
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had a long, long history in doing defence products at John Cockerill and a very proud history
