First there is the question about survivability if the US Forces must face an enemy with a working Air Force or air defenses.
Unmanned aerial systems have enjoyed a coming-out party in war zones. Their use in Iraq and Afghanistan has shown that they are invaluable in uncontested airspace. But questions remain about how the current generation of U.S. drones would fair in unfriendly skies.
At a recent industry conference, Air Force Lt. Col. Steven Tanner made a gun with his fingers and impersonated the sound of planes being shot down.
“If we went to a North Korea scenario right now and put a bunch of Predators and Reapers in the air, you better bring the replacements because they’d be falling out of the sky,” said Tanner, doctrine division chief of the Joint UAS Center of Excellence at Nellis Air Force Base, Nev.
“The UAS honeymoon is over,” he said.
There there are the security and command and control issues...
“It does not meet my definition of a weapons system,” said Air Force Gen. Roger A. Brady, who at a conference in July all but dared a crowd of UAS enthusiasts to prove him wrong. “If I see an F-16, that’s a weapons system. You know where it is, you know where all the electrons are going, you know what’s happening, you know who’s responsible. There’s a program manager that you can call and yell at. There are operators. There’s a command chain.”
It doesn’t work that way for a UAS, said the commander of U.S. Air Forces in Europe. A signal from an aircraft is sent to a satellite, “then a million miracles happen along optical links and it ends up in Las Vegas. I’m not even confident we’ve mapped that whole thing. And by the way, it goes through commercial links.”
Those links are largely outsourced and lack central oversight. The “net” can easily be disrupted. “Sometimes it’s because we stumble over extension chords and sometimes it’s because somebody is messing with us,” Brady explained. “Why would an enemy try to directly oppose a multi-million dollar aircraft when he can disrupt it or strip away its advantage by using $30 of pieces and parts from Radio Shack or off the Internet?”
Brady was referring to insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan who have used inexpensive software programs to intercept video feeds from U.S. drones. And while the insurgency doesn’t employ an air force, the statistics weren’t pretty the last time the United States flew unmanned planes in contested air space. The NATO bombing of the former Yugoslavia in 1999 lasted two months. During that time, two U.S. jet fighters were shot down. The United States also lost 15 drones. The entire conflict saw the loss of about 50 unmanned aircraft belonging to allied forces. Current potential adversaries have improved their tactics for countering remotely controlled planes, experts said.
“Our adversaries have UASs,” Tanner said. “Our adversaries know what our vulnerabilities are. Our adversaries can see our pictures.” At a conference in Israel two years ago, Tanner met a computer hacker who breaks into terrorist websites. The man handed him a disc containing al-Qaida documents on how to counter the Predator and Hellfire missiles.
“That was two years ago,” Tanner said. “What’s out there in the street today?”
Then there is the notion that UAVs are automatically cheaper and easier to use...
An assumption persists that flying unmanned systems saves resources. Some military leaders have begun questioning that notion. Savings associated with a UAS depends on the type of vehicle. A handheld system can be operated on less money than a piloted plane. But cost grows exponentially for those that fly beyond the line of sight and carry an array of sensors, weapons and defense systems, Brady said.
The Army’s hand-launched Raven is advertised at $35,000 per vehicle or $250,000 for an entire system. An Air Force fact sheet lists at $20 million a Predator system that includes four aircraft with sensors. The closest manned comparison is the $23 million MC-12, which comes with a slew of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) equipment and requires two pilots and two sensor operators. A Global Hawk can cost between $38 million and $103 million depending on the model and capabilities. The prices of next-generation unmanned aircraft may equal those of fifth-generation fighter jets, Brady said.
But the expense of a UAS doesn’t stop with the purchase, he warned.
“There is nothing unmanned about an unmanned aerial system,” he said.
The support tail for an unmanned system can meet and exceed that of a piloted plane. The ratio of crew members to UAS can approach 10 to one, Brady noted. The same ratio for an MC-12 is five to one. Fighter jets require two crew members at most and usually just one pilot. As the Pentagon looks for savings, the hidden costs of operating unmanned aircraft must be brought to the forefront, Brady said.
“Manpower costs are ultimately more challenging for restricted defense budgets than the systems they operate,” he said.
As much as UAV proponents like to talk about their theoretical savings and utility it still has yet to be PROVEN.
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