DTN News - DEFENSE NEWS: The Revolution In Unmanned Aircraft Is Overrated

DTN News - DEFENSE NEWS: The Revolution In Unmanned Aircraft Is Overrated

Source: DTN News - - This article compiled by Roger Smith from reliable sources Loren Thompson - Forbes

(NSI News Source Info) TORONTO, Canada - August 30, 2011: In the ten years since the 9-11 attacks, remotely-piloted aircraft have become the signature weapons of America’s global war on terrorists. As Richard Aboulafia of the Teal Group aerospace consultancy observes in his August newsletter, the only stories concerning military aircraft that seem to make it into the news columns of most newspapers these days are reports about unmanned aircraft.

It isn’t hard to see why. From Boeing’s 40-pound Scan Eagle to Northrop Grumman’s ten-ton Global Hawk, unmanned aircraft have become ubiquitous on the modern battlefield. The military has bought literally thousands of them. They collect vital intelligence for warfighters at every level in the chain of command, sometimes loitering silently above enemy formations far longer than any manned aircraft could. They have killed hundreds (maybe thousands) of unsuspecting terrorists and insurgents with Hellfire missiles, often in places where other U.S. forces could not operate such as Pakistan and Yemen. Just last week, a CIA drone strike in Pakistan took out al Qaeda’s number-two leader.

Some observers think that unmanned aircraft amount to a revolution in modern warfare. Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution told the Associated Press in August that, “The era of manned airplanes should be seen as over,” and his colleague P.W. Singer has written an entire book on how robotics will transform the conduct of war. Congress has legislated goals for replacing manned military aircraft with unmanned systems, and every major defense contractor is marketing products that contribute to the trend.

However, the notion that human pilots have no future on the modern battlefield finds few takers among military professionals. They see the value of unmanned aircraft — one combat commander likened Northrop Grumman’s Global Hawk to having his own personal spy satellite — but they also see the limitations. Aboulafia derides the exaggerated sales expectations that companies have for the systems, noting that his consultancy estimates the value of world unmanned aircraft output today at only 2.5 percent of the amount for manned aircraft, and forecasts it will remain below five percent in 2020. Thus, while well-positioned drones like Textron’s Shadow will continue making a significant contribution to tactical operations and corporate results, the skeptics say they aren’t about to eclipse the dominant role of manned aircraft in the military marketplace.

I think the skeptics have it right. Although there is a lot of intellectual and emotional force behind the idea of robotic planes, the current enthusiasm for unmanned aircraft has taken root at a time when threats were relatively modest and people’s minds were opened to new possibilities by the information revolution. Even a cursory assessment of the hurdles unmanned aircraft must overcome before they can displace human pilots from the performance of most military missions suggests the technology has been oversold. Here are five limitations worth considering.

First of all, unmanned aircraft typically lack defensive weapons with which to protect themselves. That doesn’t matter much today, because the United States has spent the last ten years fighting enemies who had no air forces and few surface-to-air missiles (Iraq’s air defenses were quickly suppressed in 2003). However, our military competitors in the last century were other industrial powers who sought to beat U.S. air power at its own game, so it would be dangerously naive to assume that defenseless drones will be a viable warfighting technology for the foreseeable future. The Serbs managed to down U.S. drones with antiaircraft fire during the Balkan air war in 1999, and when a Predator unmanned aircraft was attacked by an Iraqi fighter in 2002, the fighter’s pilot quickly destroyed his quarry — even though that was one of the rare occasions on which an unmanned aircraft had been equipped with air-to-air missiles. No unmanned aircraft in the U.S. arsenal today would survive long in Chinese air space.

Second, even in the absence of enemy air defenses, unmanned aircraft are relatively fragile. They cannot perform the kinds of maneuvers typical of manned tactical aircraft, and their flight routes are usually planned carefully with an eye to local weather conditions. Despite such caution, it is common to lose drones due to mechanical problems, disruption of command links and other problems. The U.S. Air Force had bought about 60 Predators by the time the Afghan campaign began in 2001, but a third of them had already been lost, reflecting the high attrition rates associated with operating unmanned air vehicles during the early years. As experience with flying remotely-piloted vehicles has increased, loss rates have fallen considerably, to a point where the Air Force projects that by 2013 they will be comparable to the loss rates for the manned F-16 fighter. However, nobody would seriously consider using a Predator to carry out most of the missions assigned to F-16s, and the U.S. has been conducting unmanned aircraft operations in Southwest Asia for a long time now. If mission requirements change or war zones shift, loss rates will probably rise.

Third, unmanned aircraft aren’t really robotic in the sense of functioning autonomously. They usually are operated by remote human pilots linked to the vehicles through line-of-sight datalinks or satellite downlinks. In other words, even though unmanned aircraft take human pilots out of the cockpit, they don’t remove them from the picture. Quite the opposite — without continuous links to a human operator, most drones would be unable to accomplish their missions and eventually crash. However, the fact that operators are often located far from the setting in which missions unfold helps explain both the high loss rates of early years and the collateral (unintended) damage that sometimes results from drone attacks on ground targets. Since current unmanned aircraft lack the agility and situational awareness of manned aircraft, their performance is relatively clumsy even if their endurance is considerably greater.

Fourth, there is little likelihood that emerging technologies will enable unmanned aircraft to become autonomously capable and survivable in the near future. Although proponents dream of removing people from any role in operating robotic aircraft, that vision under-estimates how crucial the human brain is to the conduct of effective air operations. Studies funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency indicate that the brain performs 38,000 trillion operations per second and has memory capacity equivalent to 3,584 terabytes. The biggest supercomputers don’t achieve even one-percent of those levels, while consuming much more energy and space than would be available on an unmanned aircraft. So even though companies like IBM are working on so-called cognitive computers that would mimic human learning and reasoning, there is no chance we will see autonomous drones that can survive the rigors of aerial combat anytime soon. In a fight against any adversary possessing halfway decent air defenses, unmanned aircraft must remain tethered to the brains of human operators or they will quickly be swept from the skies.

Finally, unmanned aircraft are not cheap — at least, not the high-end vehicles for which proponents harbor the most ambitious hopes. The price-tag for a single MQ-9 Reaper (an advanced, armed version of the Predator) is about $30 million, and the cost of an entire Reaper unit capable of sustaining a continuous “orbit” is five times that amount. The unit will include several air vehicles, a ground control station, satellite datalinks and various other subsystems essential to combat operations. The price-tag looks even heftier when the limited versatility and survivability of unmanned aircraft are factored into the life-cycle cost equation. A typical F-35 joint strike fighter may cost a hundred million dollars to buy and sustain over a 30-year service life, but it will be able to autonomously perform a vast array of vital missions and it will be the most survivable tactical aircraft in the world. The Reapers will carry out a very limited range of missions, and be nearly useless against sophisticated adversaries — unless operators are willing to incur high loss rates.

Fortunately, sophisticated adversaries are not what we face today, and so the current operational environment affords maximum latitude for employing unmanned aircraft. But as Richard Aboulafia of the Teal Group points out, there’s a reason why even in today’s relatively permissive environment, the military has not applied unmanned vehicle technology to mission areas such as aerial combat and the collection of strategic reconnaissance. Some enthusiasts contend the military is simply too wedded to old ways of doing business, but Aboulafia is more believable when he suggests current unmanned aircraft technology simply isn’t capable of accomplishing most missions.

One day that may change. But advanced aerospace and information technologies are now widely diffused in the global economy, so the hope we can gain some long-term advantage over future adversaries in unmanned aircraft technology is unfounded. The more likely scenario is that one day soon we will face an enemy far more capable than the Taliban, and when that day comes we will see all too clearly the limitations of unmanned aircraft.

*Link for This article compiled by Roger Smith from reliable sources Loren Thompson - Forbes

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*This article is being posted from Toronto, Canada By DTN News ~ Defense-Technology News

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