EXPANSION IN THE UNITED KINGDOM One year removed from L3 Technologies’ merger with Harris Corporation, the unified company, L3Harris Technologies, is pressing ahead with business expansion plans in the United Kingdom.
Today, L3Harris employs approximately 1,700 personnel across 10 sites in the United Kingdom, focused on the delivery of a wide range of defense and security capabilities to the Ministry of Defence (MoD) and other government agencies, as well as supporting a broad European customer base. Spread across the four business segments of L3Harris Technologies, the U.K. businesses operate in land, air, sea, space and cyber domains. The business is in “good shape” in the face of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, which brought most of the United Kingdom and Europe to a near-standstill this past spring, according to L3Harris UK vice president Graeme Mackay, who is tasked with assisting the coordination across these business segments. Mackay outlined L3Harris UK’s role in cyber security and ensuring resilient connectivity across the contemporary operating environment. “L3Harris UK is ideally positioned to support the MoD’s requirements for
20 | Spectrum Magazine I AUSA 2020
10 sites 1,700 personnel protecting communications, especially as the world becomes an ‘Internet of Things,’” Mackay said. “We are very keen to provide protection as people move around huge amounts of data.” L3Harris UK also highlighted strong growth potential in its Communication Systems segment. Keith Norton, L3Harris UK’s vice president of Europe and Canada, said there is “great potential” moving forward post-merger. In September 2019, the Communication Systems segment moved into a purposebuilt 80,000-square-foot facility in Farnborough, Hampshire – the United Kingdom’s defense and aerospace hub. With 50,000 square feet set aside for the production, assembly, repair and maintenance of secure tactical communications equipment, the factory space is “flexible and adaptable for whatever task we need to take on,” Norton said.
L3Harris UK is currently under contract with General Dynamics UK to support and maintain the 50,000 BOWMAN tactical radios in service with the British Army. “We are moving into a new era for our supply and support to the MoD as we transition into the MORPHEUS timeframe,” Norton said. MORPHEUS, the British Army’s next-generation tactical communications program, represents a significant growth opportunity for L3Harris UK. This includes supplying combat-proven resilient tactical radios as well as repair and maintenance, waveforms, encryption and cyber security services. “Our new $100 million facility investment in Farnborough provides us with a solid foundation to support the MoD over the foreseeable future,” Norton said. “U.K. forces need solutions to address the re-emergence of the near-peer EW threat. L3Harris’ experience in defeating such threats across all domains provides us with the opportunity to directly feed this experience back to the UK MoD.” L3Harris UK is in full support of the MoD’s Information Advantage strategy and is prepared to provide “significant capability enhancements though the provision of world-class adaptable and flexible solutions for the MORPHEUS program,” he added.
