J & S Franklin today announced a further order for their core protective barrier and ground stabilisation product, DefenCell.
Supplied to an unnamed NATO military customer, the order – worth €250,000 – equates to over five 20ft container loads / 105 pallets of DefenCell. The requirements of the customer to be able to order specific pallet quantities has resulted in the NSN codification of complete pallets of various DefenCell products. These items have also been added to the NATO online ordering system, enabling existing customers to purchase additional products more easily.
DefenCell is a lightweight perimeter and force protection defence system that offers an easily deployable solution for expeditionary operations, which can be filled using locally available material, (sand, dirt and rocks). DefenCell is up to ten times lighter and five times more compact than gabions, so uses less supply chain resources and is more effectively deployed to forward positions. As all components are lightweight, man portable, and with modular packaging, it also offers considerable savings to logistics, storage and transportation costs.
DefenCell provides versatility in a variety of military engineering roles, from force protection in operational environments such as Afghanistan, to protecting critical infrastructure from VBIEDs in the UK, to emergency disaster relief such as the flooding in Kentucky, US earlier this year.
A single 20ft military container of DefenCell can be used to construct one 100-man forward operating base with walls over 2.50m high and 600m perimeter (150m long x 150m wide). A single pallet of DefenCell weighs less than 350kg, providing sufficient units to build a 2m-high wall more than 40m long. An equivalent wire-based defensive wall would weigh 1,400kg.