The Navy’s MQ-4C Triton program has been chugging right along lately, clearing initial flight testing in March on its way to beginning payload testing later this year before being delivered in 2017. And despite some recent setbacks and a tough budget climate, at least one analyst believes the Triton has a very promising future.
All is not necessarily well for the program: A recent news report indicated that the cost to develop the Northrop Grumman-built drone has jumped 25 percent, or $270 million, to $3.9 billion — all while production and deployment dates have slipped two years to the right. The Navy plans to buy 68 aircraft.
Navy cost estimates in its budget submission show that the flyaway cost for the aircraft rose from around $120 million fiscal 2014 to $140 million in fiscal 2015. Meanwhile, the Navy canceled the aircraft’s sense-and-avoid system after it ran into development problems.
But Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, does not anticipate the overall cost of the Triton to rise dramatically, and believes the sense-and-avoid system will be an easy fix.
There is also good news on the international market. The recent announcement by Australia that they are interested in procuring the Triton provides a fresh boost for the program. Australia is planning to purchase the Triton to accompany their P-8 Poseidon fleet. Both platforms will replace Australia’s aging P-3 Orion force, mirroring the US Navy’s shift from P-3s to P-8s and the MQ-4C. India might also be interested in acquiring the Triton to compliment its own P-8s.
According to Clark, the P-8 and the MQ-4 have similar surveillance capabilities, but the manned P-8 can process its information on board and provide speedy targeting information to other platforms. In contrast, the MQ-4’s long loitering time makes it ideal for tracking vessels for long periods of time, a new capability for the Navy.
Despite the general reputation for drones as being cheaper than manned aircraft, it’s not as clear-cut with the MQ-4C. The Navy listed the flyaway cost for the P-8 at around $170 million, which isn’t a whole lot more than the $140 million currently listed for the MQ-4C.
Clark says this should not be a troubling fact about the Triton, as it bears out with other programs. “For example, the manned equivalent of [the MQ-1] Predator is not an F-16. It is a Super Tucano, which is about the same cost as a Predator,” he said. “The MQ-4 will be about $40-60 million less per copy than a P-8, but the P-8 is primarily an [anti-submarine warfare] aircraft and has sensors, processing, and weapons capabilities for that mission that the MQ-4 does not have. If the P-8 were just a surveillance aircraft, it would cost about the same or a little less than MQ-4.”
However, the Navy believes the MQ-4C is very much worth the money. Clark said the Triton will take over the role of the EP-3 spy plane, the Navy’s aging signals intelligence gather platform. The Navy had been looking to build a ground-up platform known as EPX a few years back, but later canned the effort. The Triton could solve that problem for the Navy, even if it isn’t ideal.
“In peacetime, this works fine because this is done for intelligence gathering and the processing and analysis can be done after the data is gathered by the MQ-4,” Clark said. “In wartime this will be more difficult, because often real-time information on threat contacts is needed to support strike operations. Either the MQ-4 will have to beam real-time info to a ground station for immediate processing [which could be jammed] or the Navy will use a similarly-equipped P-8 for those missions.”
Reporting and analysis by Derringer Dick