Keeping RBS 70 NG mission-ready for decades

Advanced defence products are increasingly judged not on unit price but on what they cost to own and keep ready over decades. Across industry, moving from reactive or calendar-based maintenance to condition-based maintenance is documented to cut maintenance costs by roughly 18–30% and unplanned downtime by 30–50% (industry benchmarks, McKinsey and the U.S. Department of Energy). Defence is now applying the same logic to systems that must stay ready for a generation. RBS 70 NG — built to defeat aircraft, drones and missiles out to nine kilometres — is a clear example of that shift, and of why diagnostics has become a design-phase decision rather than an afterthought.

In 2011 Saab launched RBS 70 NG, the new generation of its combat-proven short-range air-defence system. The leap was as much digital as ballistic: the analogue sight became a networked digital one — with a thermal camera, night vision, video recording, built-in test sequences and calibration, and control units linked in a network. A more capable sight is also a more complex one to keep running in the field for thirty years and more.

For Saab's customers, total cost of ownership is a decisive factor when choosing an air-defence supplier — and a digital, networked sight raises the stakes. How do you diagnose, configure, update and calibrate that system reliably, securely and affordably, in the field, across its entire life? Saab's insight was that the answer could not be bolted on afterwards: the maintenance concept had to be designed in alongside the product itself, with diagnostics requirements brought in already at the design phase so the product could be managed efficiently across its whole life cycle.

Saab brought Diadrom in early — during the development of RBS 70 NG itself. The two teams ran a joint pre-study in which Diadrom carried two decades of automotive diagnostics rigour into the defence and security context: how to architect a robust, secure on-sight network, and how to design for condition-based maintenance from the start. Out of that work came OBELISK (now MAS), a PC-based off-board system that became — and remains — the way the RBS 70 NG sight is managed through its life.

Work was carried out in Gothenburg and Karlskoga, with Diadrom contributing front-end, back-end and full-stack developers, an embedded software developer, a software tester, a business analyst / requirements engineer and a project manager.

OBELISK gave Saab a single, consistent way to manage the RBS 70 NG sight from production through every year of field service — reading status, resolving faults, downloading software and calibrating, without bespoke tooling for each task. Because diagnostics were designed in rather than retrofitted, Saab and its customers can build new maintenance solutions on top — condition-based maintenance and remote services — that lower life-cycle cost, the metric their customers actually buy on. It is the same discipline, proven in automotive serial production, applied to a system that has to stay ready for decades.

The direction of travel is more condition-based maintenance and more remote support — the automotive-born model that RBS 70 NG helped prove out in defence. Saab's own lesson generalises: the cheapest way to lower a product's life-cycle cost is to decide how you will diagnose and maintain it before the design is frozen — not after it is fielded.