British Army seeks new bridge demolition capabilities
A bridge demolition site at the Rena training area in Norway. (Photo: US DoD)
The project will explore using uncrewed devices to place charges at critical locations, among other areas.
The UK’s Defence and Security Accelerator (DASA) has launched a new project seeking solutions and new ideas for how the British Army can destroy bridges safely.
The new innovation focus area, dubbed ‘A Bridge to Fall’, explores how the army’s approach to demolishing bridges can be modernised with up to £400,000 ($478,000) of funding.
Run by DASA on behalf of the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl), the project seeks a reduction in the time to prepare demolitions and ways to minimise the exposure of personnel to hazards.
Bridges are essential to large-scale manoeuvres, with defenders having the incentive to deny their use and attackers a need to preserve them.
Demolition of bridges is usually done through the select placement of charges across the span of a structure; however, this is resource- and time-intensive.
To improve this, A Bridge to Fall identifies three challenge areas: identifying and diagnosing structural weaknesses, optimising the placement of charges and designing an uncrewed device to place them.
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