The Pentagon plans to cut spending on unmanned aerial vehicles in fiscal 2014 by one-third of the amount over the previous year, in part because of the winding down of operations in Afghanistan and the end of the U.S. military role in Iraq, a senior Pentagon official said Tuesday.
Dyke Weatherington, the Pentagon’s director for unmanned warfare and strategic and tactical systems, told a House committee that research and development as well as procurement funds were reduced by 34 percent in the fiscal 2014 spending request. That amounts to $1.4 billion for R&D accounts and $1.2 billion for procurement, he told the House Armed Services Committee subcommittee.
Weatherington emphasized that the military is still committed to unmanned systems and will continue to develop improved technologies for carrying out intelligence, reconnaissance and surveillance missions. But there is less demand for the small UAVs remotely by soldiers on the ground to detect possible improvised bombs or other threats, he said, noting that flight hours have dropped.
The flight hours “are now beginning to decline as operations in Iraq have completed and Afghanistan operations have stabilized,” he said in his prepared testimony.
The Pentagon in 2014 is proposing to buy only two of Northrop Grumman’s [NOC] Global Hawk, and that’s for NATO, as it moves to the next block upgrade in the Air Force program. It plans to buy 27 General Atomics Predator aircraft, including the two variants for the Air Force and Army. Plans to start large production of the Navy’s variant of Global Hawk known as Triton were delayed by a year to address some technical problems.
The Pentagon expects to begin production of the mid-size Integrator for the Marine Corps and built by Insitu, a subsidiary of Boeing [BA], in fiscal 2014.
The department, however, did not request funding to buy more of AeroVironment’s [AVAV] Raven, a small hand launched UAV that has been a workhorse for foot soldiers.
The Pentagon bought more than 1,100 of the Raven systems in 2012 and an additional 234 in fiscal 2013 for a combined cost of $111 million, but plans to buy zero in 2014, according to budget documents released earlier this month.
Instead, the Pentagon wants to spend $10.8 million to upgrade current Raven systems as well as for training and contractor services, the documents said.