By Geoff Fein
With the use of unmanned aerial systems (UAS) growing, the Pentagon is examining a number of issues, from the systems’ implications on tactics, techniques and procedures (TTP) to how the drones should be controlled to what kind of payloads the systems should carry, a senior defense official said.
While the argument about unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) may have started out about who would be in charge of the systems, it has migrated on to the question of bringing about a level of commonality that will allow the military to leverage quantity for resource savings, the official told Defense Daily in an interview earlier this week.
Additionally, the discussion will have to focus on what can unmanned systems do that manned can’t and what is it manned vehicles can do that their unmanned counterparts can’t do, he added. “And how close are we to not really caring one way or the other whether we have a person in it or not?”
Earlier this month Pentagon officials announced they were beginning a review of the roles and missions of the armed forces that would examine, among other things, unmanned aerial systems in advance of the next Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), The study should be wrapped up and the reports packaged by late November.
Within the area of UAS, official leading the review will also look at some broader intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) type of mission areas (Defense Daily, May 9).
While the advantages UAVs have brought to operations in Afghanistan and Iraq are without question–from persistence to carrying weapons–some questions remain, the defense official said.
“What we don’t yet understand are, what are the implications on TTP, doctrine, etc., when do they really show value,” the official said. “We are just now starting to get a sufficient body of evidence for our operational research guys to actually quantify when [are UAVs] a good thing to have. When does it not really add value, how do you use it and add value, what is it that you are doing with it? We are working our way through all of those things.”
One argument, however, in favor of UAVs is the fuel savings, the official pointed out. All one needs to look at is the fuel crisis right now, the official said. “That’s pretty compelling in and of itself.”
“For a third of a tank of gas in a fighter I can put up a UAV for 24 hours instead of two, and persist on the battlefield in ways we had never been able to in the past,” he added.
Another issue being examined is who will operate UAVs. “Do we need fully certified pilots? Why?. What about their skills is different from someone else’s skills,” the official asked.
“What does it take to recruit these guys? What skills do we have to have? How do they interface into the larger enterprise managing aviation? What are the interfaces there…all of those are questions out there,” he said. “What is the difference between controlling these things 5,000 miles away versus right underneath them? There is a cost to being that far away in that you have to move that signal, by the same token there is a savings in that you are not moving those people forward.”
And does one size fit all when it comes to sensors, the official said.
“In other words, does every sensor need to have a high degree of resolution, very precise knowledge of exactly where it is, etc. Or is it just good enough to look over a hill? So we are trying to understand those taxonomies, where the knee in the curve is in that activity,” he added.
One issue, the official noted, is that the military needs to find a sensor that is a big broad area sensor to cue UAVs. “You don’t need a camera to do this.”
It could be that it is a signals pod or any phenomenology that then allows that sensor, that spot beam, to focus in and stare at something and then decide whether or not to engage the target, he added.
UAVs have also enabled the services to buy in quantity, the official said. “To me this is a huge savior.”
“This is what brings quantity back to the table. We are hoping we can find something similar for Navy. Not in the air, [but in] boats…ships…because we are getting ourselves down to a point where we have so few,” he said. “You become vulnerable no matter how good the asset is.”
The official said there are numbers tossed around about how many UAVs are out there. Some have said there are as many as 5,000 in use, he added.
“I don’t know if that number is right or wrong, but clearly in comparison to F-22 or JSF, it’s huge,” the official said. “So this is the only thing right now that is saving us in the quantity, which in this diverse world we are going to have to be in a lot of places, and a couple of squadron of planes is not going to hack it.”
What he is worried about right now is the tendency to say since UAVs are affordable, they are also disposable.
“Not really,” the official said.
“At some point you do pay, and we do have a higher loss rate in these than we do in the manned platforms,” he said. “[I am] not sure [if it is] because there is or isn’t a man on them. I think the risk calculus goes in earlier than that, probably in the engineering stage we need to pay more attention as if this thing were manned so we have the redundancy in the systems and that’s appropriate so we don’t lose so many of them.”