Larger unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) have a role to play in experiments by U.S. Air Forces Central’s (AFCENT) Task Force-99 (TF-99), the AFCENT commander said on Feb. 13.
Asked at a Center for a New American Security forum whether TF-99 will need larger drones of the size of the Air Force’s envisioned Collaborative Combat Aircraft, Air Force Lt. Gen. Alexus “Grynch” Grynkewich replied, “I won’t speak to the Collaborative Combat Aircraft program, but I would tell you that the operational problems I’ve given Task Force-99 to solve will require some UAS that are larger and have longer distances they could go–500 kilometers or something like that.”
“Part of that is about being able to do sensing at range where I need a platform that could go farther in to an adversary’s space,” he said. “Some of it might be to provide something an adversary might have to react to in terms of an interdiction type mission. There’s a number of things that will require them to use longer range UASs.”
Last year, Grykewich said that he foresaw the new task force–then called Detachment 99–as a way to spur innovation in the detection and countering of small drones, like those of Iran (Defense Daily, Sept. 27, 2022).
This month, TF-99 began flying its first drones, mostly for shorter range, intelligence/surveillance/reconnaissance (ISR), and those sorties have been “pretty effective so far,” Grykewich said.
TF-99 is modeled on the U.S. Navy 5th Fleet’s TF 59 effort to improve maritime awareness and accelerate the integration of unmanned technologies via events and experiments, both unilateral and multilateral (Defense Daily, Dec. 15, 2022).
“If I only have one or two of an exclusive platform in the AOR [area of responsibility] like an RC-135 or even an MQ-9, whose numbers are decreasing, if I need to find some particular part of the enemy’s order of battle, if I can build a small platform and it doesn’t need to go very far because we know that piece of the order battle is close, then a small, shorter-range unmanned ISR platform that I can send out to go 20, 30, 100 miles and come back is really useful,” Grynkewich said last year.