Washington Post Sunday, April 15, 2001; Page A01
No Top Guns Need Apply
Air Force Readies Tests For Futuristic Drone JetsBy Greg Schneider
In the next few weeks, an unmanned airplane the size of a small Cessna will shoot a missile at a tank on a Nevada test range, blasting the Air Force toward a future in which some of its most dangerous missions could be carried out by robots.
While the Pentagon has been experimenting with pilotless planes for half a century, advances in technology have only recently made it feasible to use them to attack opponents. And with a Bush administration looking to redirect military spending into more futuristic weapons systems, unmanned combat aircraft are expected to be one of the big winners.
"I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a new military technology that has a broader following than unmanned combat vehicles. The idea is easy to grasp and the benefits are easy to see," said Loren Thompson, a defense consultant with the Lexington Institute in Arlington.
Known as uninhabited combat air vehicles, or UCAVs, such lethal drones could knock out enemy air defenses without endangering U.S. pilots -- not to mention prevent situations such as the recent standoff over a U.S. aircrew downed in China.
UCAVs would cost significantly less than traditional fighter jets, yet would be similar in size and capability. And they could be shipped quickly and in great numbers wherever needed.
President Bush cited them in a recent speech on military priorities, and Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John W. Warner (R-Va.) added $146 million to this year's Pentagon budget to speed up development.
"We're moving along as fast as technology will permit," Warner said in a recent interview, adding that he hopes Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld is serious about pursuing such innovative new weapons. "Hopefully, he'll pick up on this concept."
Defense contractors are lining up to get a piece of what many believe will be the future of military aviation. Both Boeing Co. and Northrop Grumman Corp. recently unveiled designs for sophisticated robot attack planes and are investing millions of their own dollars in the projects. Northrop's diamond-shaped flying wing made the cover of Aviation Week, while Boeing has already built full-sized demonstrators that should fly this summer.
Lockheed Martin Corp., meanwhile, is concentrating less on the drones themselves and more on the electronics that allow them to operate, with research programs that include secret government contracts.
But like National Missile Defense, another futuristic program that promises more than technology can yet deliver, the push for UCAVs strikes some experts as overblown.
"The problem with UCAVs now is they're in a very early stage of the technology," said Steven J. Zaloga, a weapons expert with consulting firm Teal Group Corp. in Fairfax. "It's really premature to be talking about what percentage of the future force is going to be taken up by UCAVs."
What's more, there will be resistance among some in the Pentagon against moving humans another step back from the trigger. "One Air Force pilot told me, 'Look, no guy is ever gonna pick up a girl in a bar by telling her that he commands a UCAV wing,' " one source said. "These guys want to be out there flying . . . not sitting at consoles trying to joystick this thing to where it ought to be."
But even critics concede that certain combat roles will inevitably shift over to unmanned vehicles as the technology matures. The reason is simple: They could save American lives.
"Rather than having piloted aircraft go in on day one to break the back of the bad guys," said John Pike of GlobalSecurity.org, a nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank in Alexandria, "you send in these robots who are infinitely brave. They are unafraid."
Armed but Limited
The current effort is really the second coming of weapons on unmanned planes. In the waning years of the Vietnam War, the Air Force and contractor Ryan Aeronautical Co. experimented with firing missiles from a derivative of a drone called the Firebee, which had been the first unmanned craft to be used extensively for reconnaissance during combat.
While those bombing-range tests showed promise, they were limited by the state of communications technology. All commands had to be transmitted by an operator in the line of sight of the drone, which spoiled the idea of keeping the human out of harm's way.
Interest in drones of all types surged again in the 1980s, when satellite technology made it possible to relay commands from great distances and when advances in computer processing gave the vehicles more capabilities. Unmanned reconnaissance planes were the first to benefit; remote-controlled spy planes proved useful during the Persian Gulf War, and today there is a burgeoning industry for spy drones of every description.
Athena Technologies Inc. in Manassas, for instance, is developing tiny robot surveillance planes that can be controlled by Palm Pilot hand-held computers -- still line of sight for now, although one day they may be programmed to execute distant missions on their own. Just outside Baltimore, AAI Corp. is building rugged, lawn-tractor-sized drones that the Army plans to use to survey battlefields.
The Teal Group projects an annual market of between $200 million and $300 million for drones over the next decade, including simple versions used as decoys to fool enemy radar and others used as targets for weapons testing. The Army, Navy and Air Force all have basic reconnaissance drones that have been used in conflicts since Desert Storm.
The most sophisticated unmanned aircraft flying today is Northrop Grumman's Global Hawk, an Air Force reconnaissance plane that's as big as a U-2 but has the bulbous white nose of a blind cave creature in place of a crew cabin. A Global Hawk flew last year from Florida to Portugal and back, monitored by a technician sitting in a trailer in southwestern Virginia. Soon another Global Hawk will fly to Australia.
Able to reach altitudes higher than 65,000 feet, a 44-foot-long Global Hawk can stay aloft for 36 hours at a time, and the plane is expected to take over some of the military's most demanding long-range reconnaissance missions over the next few years. The Global Hawk cannot carry as big a payload as the specialized EP-3 that went down in China, but experts say clusters of Global Hawks might one day be able to do the same type of communications snooping.
The Air Force has spent roughly $500 million developing the Global Hawk so far, and it plans to spend a similar amount through 2003, according to figures from the Teal Group. Each plane now costs about $51 million, the Congressional Research Service said, though the Air Force projects that cost to drop below $20 million once it begins buying Global Hawks in greater numbers -- ultimately 40 to 60 planes or more.
"This happens to be a fairly exciting growth area in the industry," said Bob Mitchell, head of unmanned systems for Northrop Grumman. Mitchell led development of the Global Hawk at Ryan Aeronautical, which Northrop Grumman acquired in 1999 in a bid to be a bigger player in unmanned vehicles.
There are no plans as yet to put weapons on a Global Hawk, Mitchell said. Instead, Northrop Grumman is in the midst of a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) program to design a pilotless fighter jet for the Navy. DARPA plans to spend about $14 million on the program, and Northrop Grumman has kicked in another $1.3 million of its own.
The company also spent an undisclosed amount of its own money to build a demonstrator plane, called Pegasus, that could fly later this year. Far faster and more sophisticated than today's drones, the kite-shaped jet -- 28 feet on a side -- ultimately could carry as much as 4,000 pounds of bombs and missiles.
But it isn't just ordinary weapons being envisioned for drones of the future. Boeing, which added $20 million of its own money to a $131 million DARPA contract to design and test an unmanned fighter for the Air Force, is also studying directed energy weapons: bursts of microwave or laser energy that could knock out enemy radars or launchers.
10-Year Shelf Life
Boeing's design, which looks like a 27-foot-long TV remote with wings, also uses stealth technology. The plane can be packed in a crate and stored for up to 10 years, then be ready to fly in about 30 minutes, said George Muellner, a retired Air Force general who now heads Boeing's advanced research facility, the Phantom Works.
The company hopes to begin test-flying the planes this summer.
"We've gotten certainly a lot of feedback that there's growing interest in this," said Muellner, who has briefed a Pentagon panel appointed by Rumsfeld to evaluate future weapons priorities.
One of Rumsfeld's advisers said UCAVs could solve several problems now confronting the military. "The services talk about UCAVs doing some of the dull, the dangerous and the dirty kinds of missions where you wouldn't want to risk pilots," said Andrew Krepinevich, who heads the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments and is participating in the Pentagon's weapons review.
Those missions include monotonous long-range flights, high-risk raids on enemy air defenses and forays into areas contaminated by biological or chemical weapons. In addition, UCAVs could help get around a problem that Krepinevich has long warned about and that has recently become a watchword at the Pentagon: anti-access.
The term refers to an enemy's ability to use cruise missiles to target U.S. air bases or sea lanes near a battle ground, blowing up planes or missiles before they even take off. That would nearly cripple short-range U.S. fighter planes, which need access to forward bases to be effective.
"UCAVs might be part of the answer for how you deal with that," he said. "To the extent that you take the person out of the aircraft, you should be able to build these things to go much greater distances."
To those involved in developing such weapons, those ideas just begin to suggest the possibilities. "We're about with UCAVs where we were a century ago with manned aircraft," said Mike Francis, who was involved in drone development at DARPA and now works on technology strategy at Lockheed Martin. "We've looked over the horizon and just begun to put weapons on them . . . but there's a lot that's got to happen."
Aside from refining the technology, engineers have to do a better job of envisioning UCAVs as something more than simply aircraft with pilots on the ground. "You have a broader set of opportunities when the human doesn't have to be a physical part of the system," Francis said.
The human role becomes more cerebral, he said, making high-level decisions about strategy and tactics without worrying about physical limitations. And human involvement can never be factored out, he added; there is a "moral imperative" about deciding when to shoot that only a human conscience can address.
Capable of Self-Defense
As engineers struggle with those topics -- not to mention practical matters such as accounting for unmanned planes in air traffic control systems -- the Air Force is blazing ahead with an effort to make a basic combat drone out of existing systems.
During the bombing of Kosovo, the Air Force used a 27-foot-long unmanned plane called the Predator to snoop out Serb missile launchers and report coordinates back to commanders. But by the time fighter jets got to the scene with bombs, the targets had often moved.
So Air Force officials decided to cut out the middleman: Why not stick missiles on the drones, the argument went, so they can shoot what they find?
Last month, an unmanned Predator drone fired a Hellfire missile and destroyed a tank on an Air Force test range in Nevada. It marked the first such test since those conducted at the close of the Vietnam War.
The Predator, built by General Atomics of San Diego, will try later this month to blow up another tank, this time from a higher altitude and under more realistic conditions. The State Department reviewed the program last fall and concluded that it does not violate arms control treaties. So the Air Force could soon have an off-the-shelf robot strike plane, with more sophisticated versions in the works.
There is another hurdle: In Kosovo, Serb helicopters sometimes simply pulled up alongside slow-moving Predator drones and shot them out of the sky. But the Air Force has an answer to that too: It plans to try equipping a Predator with Stinger air-to-air missiles. Then it could shoot back.
© 2001 The Washington Post Company
