The Lego Principle: Falcon Shield, RiwP and the growth of modularity in land defence
A Moog RIwP turret in its UK configuration. (Photo: Moog, Inc.)
Shephard spoke to Leonardo about its Falcon Shield system and Moog about its Reconfigurable Integrated weapons Platform (RIwP) at DVD 2024, and discovered the trend in land defence was towards modularity.
There was a time when every land vehicle, every weapon, every sensor was a thing unto itself, often requiring a different part of the same supply chain, or even an entirely different strand of supply altogether. That led to a situation in land defence where supply chains were diffuse and rarely well used, because the likelihood of needing certain bells or particular whistles was often not enough to justify the expenditure of buying them.
Increasingly, however, that time is disappearing. The rise of modularity lets defence units fit as many, or as few, elements of a system together as they
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