IAV 2026: Leonardo DRS continuing work to extend Morpheus and Bowman capability

Image of US Army MFoCS unit, which Leonardo DRS said has the same underlying electronics as the systems delivered to the British Army as part of Bowman. (Leonardo DRS)

Leonardo DRS installed more than 40,000 of its user data terminals (UDTs) in British military platforms as part of the Bowman communications system since 2002, Peter Hurst, vice-president of international projects and business strategy at Leonardo DRS, told Janes on 20 January during the International Armoured Vehicles (IAV) 2026 conference held from 20 to 22 January in Farnborough, UK.

“In service at any one time there are about 13,000 systems,” Hurst said. The UDTs were provided to prime contractor General Dynamics UK (GD UK) for the Bowman implementation. Leonardo DRS competed and won the subcontract for the vehicle-based workstation in 2002.

The UDTs were delivered in a different format depending on the vehicle. All of the terminals are supported by the same mainboard computer, software, interface, and radio, according to Hurst. “They [the UDTs] are referred to as CT1 – computer type one, computer type two [CT2], and computer type 5 [CT5] for a notebook, a tablet, and a tactical server,” Hurst added.

General Dynamics provides the battle management system (BMS) software called the Common Battlefield Application Toolset (ComBAT). The software is used by the British Army for command and control (C2). The BMS is one of the components of the Bowman communications system also known as BCIP (Bowman ComBAT Infrastructure and Platform). “L3Harris provides the tactical radios, we [Leonardo DRS] provide the tactical computing, and GD delivers the integration onto the vehicle, and they also provide the ComBAT application,” Hurst said.