Policy General Overview by James Poss, Maj Gen (Ret.) USAF The MQ-9 Reaper is the DC-3 of the drone world. UNMANNED PLANS: WHERE THE DOD IS GOING WITH DRONES DOD AND THE SERVICES Air Force, Navy and Marines are on di erent paths for their unmanned futures. The Air Force is blending stealth and swarms with some of its “greatest hit” drones. The Navy is riding di erent waves for its surface, subsurface and aviation components. The Marines are profi ting from other services’ development experiences. T his article is all about what the ser-vices are doing with their drone programs. I don’t have the space to cover the entire DOD in a column, so I’ll start the conversation by covering the Air Force, Navy and Marines. The Army gets its own article elsewhere in this issue because its drone program might just get America back into the small-drone business after the Chinese seized about 80% of the American market. The bottom line is: drones are here to stay because the great drone culture wars in the services are largely over. Indeed, the big question about drones is no longer whether they’re safe and ef-fective; it might just be whether we still need manned aircraft. First up is the largest and most influential drone program in the DOD, the U.S. Air Force (I try not to pick favorites, but if I did…). AIR FORCE: STEALTHY, SWARMING AND STEADFAST Pardon the history lesson, but history begets experience and experience defines culture. Culture, not technology, logic or even funding drives how a service will fight. The American tragedy of 9/11 was a turning point for the Air Force. It was the first conflict where drones weren’t just a means to avoid com-bat losses, but the best and probably only choice “DRONES ARE HERE TO STAY BECAUSE THE GREAT DRONE CULTURE WARS IN THE SERVICES ARE LARGELY OVER.” inside 10 unmanned systems www.insideunmannedsystems.com April/May 2020 for a new category of target—the “high value individual” (HVI). It was also the first time drone technology allowed airmen to fly them beyond line of sight (BLOS). Before 9/11, Air Force drones either had to stay within rough-ly 50 miles of a ground control station or 150 miles from a drone mothership for a remote pi-lot to control the drone. General Atomics’ MQ-1 Predator had a satellite communications data link, allowing pilots to be thousands of miles away from their drones. General Atomics used the weight saved from going unmanned to add incredible endurance to the Predator; it flew about 20 hours without refueling. The endur-ance and BLOS capability of the Predator al-lowed the Air Force to stalk HVIs for weeks or months for the first time in history. The Predator’s success in Afghanistan sparked the great Air Force “drone culture war,” which was made worse as the demand for the Predator grew from the single 15-hour orbit I supervised after 9/11 to the 65-plus orbits the Air Force flies today. Drones were easy to ignore when they were a novelty. They became impossible to ignore when the president personally asked for more of them. Intelligence officers like myself loved drones from the start but Air Force pilots hated them at first. Most pilots doubted drones could perform as well as manned aircraft and some were afraid drones would do better than manned aircraft, threatening pilot jobs. Compounding the problem, the tremendous demand for drones drove the Air Force to press-gang pilots into flying them, creating a giant pool of pilots who Photo courtesy of General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, Inc.
Inside Unmanned Systems April/May 2020: Page 10
