The New Era – The Evolution of Unmanned Aircraft

The increasing demand and reliance on unmanned air vehicles (UAV) in warfighting and peacekeeping operations has doubled the pace of UAV-related research and development in recent years.

Equipped with more capabilities, UAVs today are able to play a greater role in critical missions. Achieving information superiority, minimising collateral damage, fighting effectively in urban areas against widely-dispersed forces, and striking autonomously and precisely are areas where UAVs will be increasingly indispensable.

Three major thrusts in UAV development include: the growth in size of strategic UAVs for better endurance and payload; reduction in size of tactical UAVs; and, the weaponisation of UAVs to offer lethal capability in combat missions. This paper describes future UAV technology trends and their evolution. The forecast of technology growth will focus on datalink, sensor and information processing capabilities.

The Future Unmanned Battlefield

The role of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in modern warfare has evolved with each successive conflict, from naval gunfire support during the 1991 Gulf War to real-time satellite relay of video over Kosovo in 1999 to attacking mobile Al Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan in 2002/03 and continuing today. Afghanistan marked the formal debut of the HELLFIRE-carrying PREDATOR, giving warfighters a sneak preview of what tomorrow's dedicated Unmanned Combat Air Vehicles (UCAVs) promise to offer.

Armed forces worldwide are beginning to explore the possibilities offered by unmanned systems as both sensor and weapons platforms. The promise of an autonomous, highly survivable and absolutely fearless UAV will usher in a new paradigm in which the ultimate consideration is no longer the value of pilots' lives, but rather the mission and cost effectiveness of UAVs.

Nations have to carefully study and redefine the value of human operators - where and how much to do away with humans, bearing in mind the costs to the economy at large. At the same time, unmanned systems have to evolve such that they can perform as well as, if not better than, current manned systems in order to gain the confidence of military commanders. Today, continued advances in unmanned systems technology are pushing the envelope in terms of performance, propelling UAVs into a greater variety of missions and applications to be true force multipliers.

UAVs will track the paradigm shift towards a network-centric warfare concept, seamlessly integrating into all three key areas of defence systems encompassing the sensor, shooter and Command and Control (C2) network. UAVs will allow the force commander to "see first, understand first, act first and finish decisively" by providing platforms for deploying sensors, weapons, and communications architecture.

Operation “Enduring Freedom” saw the first successful integration of sensor, shooter and C2 data streams using Link 16 and other datalink technology, including the RQ-9 PREDATOR UAV, RC-135V/W RIVET JOINT Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) aircraft, U-2 high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft, E-8 Joint STARS aircraft, and the RQ-4A GLOBAL HAWK long-endurance UAV.

UAV Evolution

The furious drive towards UAV deployment in every theatre of war has seen the debut of many revolutionary concepts. Increasing demands for better performance and higher reliability will escalate the development and production cost of UAVs. Whether the platform is designed to be even more reliable than manned-rated aircraft or expendable depends on its application, the payloads it carries, mission pay-off and cost effectiveness. The misconception that all classes of UAVs will be low-cost and expendable has severe consequences downstream. Rather, it must be properly appreciated that for strategic high-value UAVs to perform as well as manned systems, their respective have similar complexity, and hence acquisition cost.

UAVs have traditionally been employed as sensor platforms in intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) missions, target acquisition, battle damage assessment, SIGINT, COMINT (Communications Intelligence) and ELINT (Electronics Intelligence). The advent of light airborne precision weapons, autonomous target acquisition and recognition technologies will push UAVs towards becoming armed and lethal unmanned platforms. UAVs with the ability to pick out targets and attack autonomously with persistent presence over areas of interest will come of age in the near future and commanders are beginning to see them as indispensable weapons of war.

The continued development of strategic and tactical UAVs follows the line of employing UAVs as multi-role multi-mission platforms. UAVs will see progressive developments towards both extreme ends of the size spectrum. Strategic UAVs will see continuous growth in size for better endurance, reliability and payload capacity, while the mini- and micro- UAVs will grow smaller, lighter and more expendable. The tactical, close-range platforms will become more versatile, with multi-mission, multi-role capability.

Strategic UAVs

Strategic UAVs will grow in size for greater payload capacity, reliability and endurance. High-altitude airborne surveillance and communications assets such as the E-3 AWACS (Airborne Warning and Control System) and E-8 JSTARS (Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System) currently provide long-range, all-weather, wide-area comprehensive surveillance. However, they are handicapped by the penalties associated with human physiology, resulting in limited endurance and relatively lowered payload capacity. Strategic UAVs, designed from the ground up, will be able to remain airborne for days, weeks or even months at a go, providing a truly “unblinking” eye in the sky. These include Medium Altitude Long Endurance (MALE) and HALE UAVs as well as lighter-than-air aerostat vehicles and balloons.

Tactical UAV

Tactical UAVs (TUAVs) will evolve towards multi-role multi-mission platforms. As UAV technology matures, we see that UAVs become increasingly cost-effective as they adopt more missions per platform MTOW - they either have to grow smaller, or be able to satisfy a greater number of missions and roles. Besides current applications in Reconnaissance, Surveillance and Target Acquisition (RSTA), the tactical UAV mission set could be expanded to include target designation, strike, chemical/biological agents detection, mine countermeasures, Theatre Missile Defence, electronic warfare and information warfare. Payloads with functional and/or architectural commonality would be deployed on disparate TUAVs to reduce developmental costs and allow cost savings from economies of scale.

Micro UAVs

Micro UAV (MAVs) have significant military and law enforcement utilities because they are less detectable, cheap to produce, truly expendable and can be organic to smaller units such as special task forces, groups and companies, providing over-the-hill and urban area reconnaissance at reduced signature without risk to the personnel.

MAVs take the other path towards cost effectiveness - growing smaller and smaller. Advances in payload miniaturisation continue relentlessly with integrated Micro-Electromechanical Systems (MEMS) reducing payload sizes to that of the average silicon chip. While the performance of such sensors may not be as impressive as their larger counterparts, their small size, weight and power requirements make for deployment on increasingly smaller vehicles allowing close-up surveillance.

Current research foci include flapping wing airframes, microscopic jet engines and molecule-size avionics. Flapping wing designs are increasingly attracting funding, because despite their relative immaturity compared to their fixed-wing counterparts, they seem able to address real operational needs such as high manoeuvrability and better aerodynamic performance.

VTOL UAVs

Experience with Vertical Take-Off Landing (VTOL) UAVs has been rather dismal over the last decade or so, as technology challenges and cost overruns led to repeated cancellations of developmental programmes. Despite the performance penalties suffered by VTOL aircraft, however, there remains a market for such UAVs especially for operations where space is limited - such as surface vessels and urban warfare. VTOL UAVs provide a small, highly manoeuvrable platform to conduct overhead surveillance, remote sensing, communications relay and ultimately “fly-on-the-wall' surveillance”. They are particularly attractive for ISR applications.

Further technological advances in areas such as shrouded rotors, composite manufacturing processes and canard rotor wings will usher in smaller, more capable VTOL UAVs ensuring their continued relevance in the future battlefield. Shrouded rotor concepts provide more thrust than the open blade design of conventional helicopters. Besides improving system safety, the shrouded rotor allows diameter reduction of VTOL rotors and hence platform sizes without compromising on performance.

Revolutionary manufacturing processes allow the low-cost production of complex rotors which represent a quantum leap in VTOL performance. The conventional flexible rotors, connected to the rotor hub through articulated joints, are replaced by composite rotor blades which are tapered and possess variable cross sections from the blade root to tip. The stiffness varies from the root to tip allowing a rigid and hingeless system, which features a larger diameter and lower disk loading, compared to a conventional helicopter rotor system with the same lift capacity. With low disk loading and rotor tip speeds, the variable speed rotor system is able to give efficient low power loiter.

Innovative concepts are also being explored such as the stoppable rotor design that would enable both a VTOL capability and efficient high-speed cruise in a fixed-wing mode.

Unmanned Combat Air Vehicles

The military establishment has always conceived the UAV as a sensor platform, leaving the manned systems to take up the role of shooter platforms due to their perceived value-add in making real-time decisions and in-flight mission reconfigurations. However, two main factors have prompted a shift in this conception, towards the employment of UAVs as attack platforms: the limits of pilot’s physiology, and the need for reduced sensor-to-shooter times.

The Unmanned Combat Air Vehicles (UCAV) is unfettered by a pilot's physiological constraints. Unlike manned fighters, it can pull manoeuvres beyond 10g, has no need for a controlled environment (temperature, pressure and oxygen), is truly fearless, and able to handle multiple sources of information and address them through real-time multi-tasking.

Also, experiences in Kosovo have prompted a re-examination of the Observation, Orientation, Decision and Action (OODA) loop in order to reduce the latency between sensor and shooter. During that campaign, targets of opportunity spotted by the PREDATOR UAV eluded destruction due to the time it took for attack aircraft deployed from Italy to engage them. In order to shorten the sensor-to-shooter cycle, efforts were made to adapt the PREDATOR to launch HELLFIRE missiles, with the first missile launch successfully conducted in February 2001 destroying a stationary tank. HELLFIRE-armed PREDATORs have subsequently been field-proven in both Operation “Enduring Freedom” and Operation “Iraqi Freedom”, providing a critically needed interim solution for engaging time critical targets and eventually leading to the development and fielding of the dedicated MQ-9 REAPER hunter-killer variant. Even this, however, is but one step towards the intended goal of ground-up design of the ultimate UCAV.

Optimised to undertake high-risk missions such as Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses (SEAD), a stealthy, high-speed, high-g capable UCAV equipped with next- generation weapon systems is seen as a cost-effective alternative to manned systems.

UAVs in Network Centric Warfare

The concept of network-centric warfare embodies a paradigm shift from the traditional way users get information through a centralised collection agency to users getting information directly, near real time, from the sensors in a network-centric manner. The key tenets of the network-centric warfare concept which guarantee the widespread deployment of a variety of UAVs include data fusion and management of layered sensors for successful exploitation of knowledge and engagement of threats before closure using unmanned systems.

In this framework, besides being sensor and shooter platforms, UAVs will also serve as airborne communications nodes, providing mobile network coverage for manoeuvring forces, not unlike a satellite. This relieves manned systems for greater value-added missions whilst providing a cost-effective means of maintaining reliable communications. However, military planners have acknowledged that it would be a nightmare to manage bandwidth and the sharing of information between the sensor, shooter, knowledge and command grids, especially with intensive imagery and video applications.

Besides being platforms for distributed network architecture, unmanned systems will drive the interface standardisation of components such as payloads, datalinks and control stations towards a “plug-and-play” concept, enabling users to customise their UAV system according to the specific missions or needs. With standard interfaces, development costs for new capabilities will be significantly reduced.

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