The Navy effort to develop a system of unmanned surveillance aircraft has passed several subsystem reviews and is poised to undergo a major design assessment early next year.
The Broad Area Maritime Surveillance (BAMS) unmanned aerial system (UAS), developed by Northrop Grumman [NOC], is doing “exceptionally well,” Capt. Robert Dishman, program manager for the Navy’s Persistent Maritime Unmanned Aircraft Systems Program Office, said recently at a Denver conference.
The BAMS network of unmanned aircraft will be used for persistent surveillance of the water to detect, track, and identify surface targets.
The program is slated to undergo 11 subsystem critical design reviews (CDRs), as part of a systems-engineering process, before a full-system CDR in the January 2011 timeframe. The Navy then is eyeing a first flight in 2012, followed soon after by the start of low-rate-initial production, and then an operational evaluation and beginning of initial operational capability (IOC) in 2015.
Dishman said BAMS thus far has passed through four of the 11 subsystem CDRs; they were on the airframe as well as electronic-support-measures, wide-band-communication, and mission-management systems. In the near term, BAMS is scheduled to undergo a defense acquisition executive interim program review later this summer.
“We’re going and doing the systems-engineering process and discipline in order to make sure that we develop a system that’s going to be ready in 2015 on cost, on schedule, and is going to provide warfighting capability for at least two decades,” he said yesterday at the Association for Unmanned Vehicles International Unmanned Systems North America 2010 conference.
Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) Adm. Gary Roughead reportedly talked at the conference on Wednesday about tight budgets impacting plans for purchasing unmanned aircraft as well as the need for improving the service’s intelligence collection at sea and a desire to deliver drones to warfighters as soon as possible.
Dishman emphasized yesterday the capability BAMS will bring to the Navy, providing 55,000 annual hours of persistent surveillance coverage. The separate BAMS demonstrator effort, he said, is approaching 2,800 surveillance hours this year.
The Navy plans for BAMS to provide one persistent orbit at IOC, and then to add on one additional orbit each year for the next four years, so it has a total of five such orbits for 20 years.
BAMS passed through a preliminary-design review this past February. The effort is meeting all the acquisition-program-baseline (APB) parameters established in 2008 when it received approval to enter into the system-development-and-demonstration phase, Dishman said.
The surveillance-drone effort, he said, is “no longer a paper tiger.” The first jib will be loaded with the initial BAMS fuselage the first week of September, he said.
“We’ve got the airframe critical design review, it’s stable, so we’re going to go ahead and produce that hardware,” he said. “Like the CNO said, he’s leaning forward, he wants to make sure we can get the capability to the warfighter as soon as we can, so we’re making these decisions. We’re putting hardware that’s low-risk for making early design decisions on stable parts of the program in order to maintain schedule and deliver to the warfighter on time.”
Dishman said the Navy, meanwhile, continues to “aggressively pursue” “joint synergies” with the Air Force for its R-Q4 Global Hawk program.
Roughead and Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Norton Schwartz signed a memorandum of agreement on June 12 that establishes procedures for the BAMS and Global Hawk programs to seek commonality, interoperability, and joint efficiencies (Defense Daily, July 2).
The House Armed Services Committee has called on the two services to work together more closely on the BAMS and Global Hawk efforts, both under contract with Northrop Grumman.
Dishman described the relationship between the services as the Navy leveraging the investment the Air Force made in the R-Q4.
“What the Navy’s going to like to equate it to is a relay race, passing the R-Q4 baton (from the Air Force) to the Navy, and now the Navy’s running with capability, making some improvements to that baseline and then we’re offering those back to the Air Force should they want to take the next leg of the relay race or run along with us,” he said.