It’s been months since the Navy released a draft request for proposals for an aircraft that could change the landscape of carrier-based strike-fighter aircraft: the Unmanned Carrier-Launched Airborne Surveillance and Strike (UCLASS) aircraft. And yet, with a final RFP scheduled to come out later this year, some lawmakers aren’t quite ready to sign off on the Navy’s plans for the aircraft.
In the first signs that there may be a clash between the Congress and the Pentagon over the aircraft, the House Armed Services seapower and projection forces subcommittee – the same committee that broke with the other committees in slashing half the UCLASS’ research and development budget in its fiscal 2015 markup – held a hearing July 16 devoted solely to the program, and wasn’t particularly kind to it.
At issue is the future role of UCLASS. Lawmakers are concerned that the Navy is developing a platform that will be able to do many things – but won’t be much good at any of them.
The first part of the hearing involved a variety of experts, many of them voicing opposition to the Navy’s stated requirement of 14 hours of on-station time on a tank of fuel – an F/A-18 clocks in at 8-10 hours – which, to those who testified in the first part of the hearing, indicates that the Navy will sacrifice payload for endurance and have a mediocre strike asset as a result.
Subcommittee Chairman Randy Forbes (R-Va.) said in his opening remarks that while he strongly believes a UCLASS like platform will be needed in the 2020s and beyond in an era of anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) environments, “in its current form, the subcommittee has concluded that the UCLASS air system segment requirements will not address the emerging anti-access, area denial challenges to U.S. power projection that originally motivated creation of the Navy unmanned combatant air system program during the 2006 quadrennial defense review and which were reaffirmed in both the 2010 QDR and 2012 defense strategic guidance.”
In particular, the “disproportionate emphasis” on unrefueled endurance would result in an aircraft design that would have “serious deficiencies” in both survivability and payload capacity, Forbes said.
His concerns were echoed by Robert Martinage, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, who argued that an alternative is to produce an aircraft that has an unrefueled capacity of 8-10 hours – similar to current strike aircraft – which would allow it to carry up to 4,000 pounds of strike payload internally, compared to 1,000 pounds for the Navy’s version.
Shawn Brimley, director of studies at the Center for a New American Security, said the Navy’s plan “will result in a platform that, one, fails to add any real striking power to the air wing; two, duplicates many of the ISR [intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance] systems already available to the Navy; three, does nothing to address the major threat facing the aircraft carrier, the need to operate from longer ranges due to improvements in anti-ship ballistic and cruise missile design; four, and most problematically, vectors the Navy down an investment path that will waste precious time and money in my view, risking our ability to integrate long endurance, strike-capable unmanned systems into this country’s most important power projection asset, the aircraft carrier.”
Martinage suggested the Navy should focus on making UCLASS a strike platform and use an existing capability such as the MQ-8B/C Fire Scout, which can operate off of any air-capable ship – not just carriers – to conduct maritime domain awareness activities.
“To me, that would be a much more effective and affordable way to get that ISR rather than dedicating what really should be an integral part of the carrier air wing in the future for ISR and strike,” he said.
However, Vice Adm. Paul Grosklags, principal military deputy to the assistant secretary of the Navy for research, development, and acquisition, said in the second part of the hearing that the critics are underestimating the flexibility of the aircraft as well as the fact it will have two hard points on the wings that can carry 3,000 pounds each – either for fuel, weapons, or sensors.
“We want to ensure that it is not a dead-end solution for the carrier or for the joint force – that it is a very adaptable solution that can be incrementally grown in capability into the future, and we believe the requirements support that and our acquisition strategy that industry will see through the request for proposal reflects that as well,” Grosklags said.
Mark Andress, the Pentagon’s assistant deputy chief of operations for information dominance, testified that the 14-hour endurance solution just made more sense, although he couldn’t get into detail at the hearing due to the classified nature of the program.
“I can certainly talk to you in this setting about cost, which was a huge driver in the AOA [analysis of alternatives] and some of the technical risk,” Andress said. “Twenty-four hours of endurance, while the most cost efficient, introduced unacceptable technical risk to one of our top performance criteria which is carrier suitability. This is mostly driven, I think, by wingspan, payloads and things like that.”
Having only eight hours of endurance “introduced by far the highest life cycle cost of all the alternatives, by a margin of four to one,” he added.
In any event, the combatant commander in the field will have the flexibility to trade some endurance for payload, Grosklags argued.
“What we’re trying to ensure is the operational commander … has the flexibility to make that decision,” he said. “Do I want this 14-hour aircraft with a precision strike capability albeit somewhat limited or am I willing to give up a little bit of that endurance for a particular mission where I want to carry more ordinance or I want to carry a different sensor package or I might want to take additional fuel on my external hard points? Those decisions, long term, we want to leave to the operational commander.”
The Navy appears settled in its requirements for UCLASS and will continue to argue its case before Congress. So far, only House authorizers have made a move to alter funding, with the other three committees – most importantly, both appropriations panels – signing off on the Navy’s request. But the debate is one to watch – if Forbes and like-minded lawmakers continue to be unsatisfied with the Navy’s responses and can rally support from other sectors of Congress to move the program in another direction, it will have major ramifications for the future of the Navy ISR and strike fleet as a whole.