Spike User Club Established SPIKE USER’S CLUB SUCCESSFULLY LAUNCHED 16 June 2005 Paris, France – The Dutch Armed Forces hosted the first meeting of the SPIKE User’s Club which took place at the beginning of June in the Netherlands. Six out of the ten armed forces that had previously purchased SPIKE multi-purpose missiles participated in the three-day event, as well as various industries involved with the program.
Sources in EuroSpike say that the idea for the User’s Club was born from the customers’ need to share their experiences and lessons learned from the operational use of the SPIKE. The Club also provides the opportunity to set up mutual programs to benefit all the SPIKE customers and to allow those customers to offer suggestions for future enhancement. The goal of this year’s meeting was to improve cooperation between the customers in terms of maintenance and training, thereby lowering life cycle cost.
This year’s participants also received a presentation and demonstration of the embedded C4I feature now available for the SPIKE system. This feature increases the force's effectiveness by reducing the time needed for each battle phase while using limited resources, such as missiles, more wisely.
“The sharing of knowledge and experience accumulated by all of the SPIKE users is extremely useful and important,” says Dr. Shaul Attar, Director of RAFAEL’s Anti-Armor Systems Directorate. “Our future interests lie in using that knowledge and experience to produce an even better product at a lower price. If the User’s Club can help us do that, then we’ve succeeded.”
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