A bit of a twist on the usual relationship between USAF and Navy, when it comes to UASs:
The Air Force’s effort to field a brand new tactical drone, known as MQ-X has effectively been cancelled the service’s top intelligence officer said today.
“At this point we do not see a need, or we don’t plane, in the near term, to invest in any sort of MQ-X like program,” said Lt. Gen Larry James today during an Aviation Week-sponsored conference in Arlington,Va. “Given the requirement set, given what’s going on [in the world] out there with the Reaper fleet, that we can upgrade those as we need to, to meet the demand signals, to meet the requirements that are going to be out there in the future.”
Rather than develop a brand new set of tactical drones, the service will upgrade its fleet of MQ-9 Reaper UAVs and will closely watch the Navy’s effort to field a steathly, jet-powered combat drone later this decade under the Unmanned Carrier-Launched Surveillance and Strike (UCLASS) program with an eye toward adopting that type of technology if the Air Force likes what it sees.
“The Navy is developing some capability in the [UAV] domain, we want to see how that play out before we make any decisions on any next-generation platform capability,” said James during an Aviation Week-sponsored conference in Arlington,Va. “So as I said, in the near term, right now, there is no intent to pursue that MQ-X program.”
Navy has, over the course of at least the last few decades, been mostly content to let the junior service wring the risk out of new technologies. With UCLASS and Firescout, the Blue/Green team is going where the USAF hasn’t been.
I have to wonder if they know something we don’t know.
They know that the NAVY leads in this area and based on the present fiscal SNAFU, there is no need to spend our tax dollars on duplicative effort.
Lead, follow or get outta the way…..Glad to see the AF is comfortable with the 2nd place.
The NAVY controls 3/4 of the earth’s surface along with the airspace over the land. We need the AF to focus on issues occurring in space…..that will be a major task.
Mike (of the UAVs) can speak to this more directly, as it’s a song he’s been singing long & loud, i.e., with complexity comes unbelievable costs and numerous add points of failure reaching the point the UAV is as physically big as a piloted ac, costs as much or more, but less flexible (programming limitations, complexity), more brittle (due to multiple fail points in comm gear) and no more numerous than the ac it is supposed to replace. These are NOT going to be turned out in the thousands like Fords off the River Rouge assembly line, let alone sausages by Hormel. Thus each cmbt loss will seriously degrade/attrit the force in the same way manned ac losses do. UAVs are NICHE ONLY (or one-time only if used as first-strike one-way tgt penetration) but this fact only insures unit costs will sky-rocket as the numbers will always stay small rather than range in the thousands. UAVs, though useful, as a replacement for manned aircraft in the next 25 yrs (further out may see some useful AI capability) are a snare and a delusion–an immortal Chimera worshiped only by bean-counters and politicians who think UAVs will free up dollars from the DOD budget for the likes of ACORN.
Virg, you had me at ACORN.
Nonsense, VX. Don’t you remember? The bean-counters and politicians proved their infallibility in the ’60s, when they said, “missiles make guns unnecessary.”
So, Jas, how many gun kills have been made after the end of the Vietnam War?
No idea, Casey. What’s your point?
It is, though, a fairly large niche. And the long-endurance missions where unmanned aviation excels fit well with Navy requirements.
“unbelievable costs and numerous add points of failure”
An MQ-9 costs less than $10M. The other stuff (GCS, etc.) costs money too, but you aren’t crashing them. MQ-9s burn a few thousand LBs of gas in a 20 hour mission. Manned platforms use that on takeoff. MQ-9s are ultimately disposable. Got a super-hot mission that you just have to stay on? Stay, then let ‘er slip into the drink. Men aren’t disposable, to us at least.
MQ-9s don’t require a SAR package standing by to pick anyone up. Maybe an LGB to provide the coup de grace.
An MQ-9 can essentially carry 5-10 people on board, just a function of sensors for them to look at and BW to get the data back. With a bit more technology, an MQ-9 can be controlled by the guy on the ground getting shot at. Involved versus committed, and all that.
Compare the cost of keeping a manned platform over a target 24 hours/day and 7 days/week to doing it with a drone. You couldn’t do it manned.
Maybe they’ve come to realize that in a war with a peer foe, it’s inevitable that UAV’s will be jammed. It’s one thing to send a bunch of prop-powered Reapers against goatherders with AK’s. It’s quite another to send a radio controlled plane against foes that go “Oh hey, we have that technology thing too. GPS guidance? Let’s fire up those ASATs.”
If we go to war with a near peer, the first thing I expect to go is the GPS (generally GNSS) constellation. We have no ASAT capability in place, and are unlikely to attain same anytime soon.
If we go to war with a near peer the first thing to go are going to be population centers. It is lunacy to think that a war between nuclear powers will remain conventional.
Of course if Omoron has his way we won’t be a nuclear power…
If it does go nuke, it will most likely be us that starts that foofaraw. I don’t see that happening at the outset.
We would have been forced to nuke very quickly if Ivan had started the party in the Fulda Gap. If we didn’t they would have over run us very quickly. War with China will be far different in that regard. China will most likely direct land forces to her west for the main thrust. We have enough of a Navy, for now, to deny China the sea lanes. So Korea, and the real Republic of China have something to be nervous about, but everything from Tibet to the Levant should really worry.
Send in your absentees as soon as you get them.
Then get off your ass and go vote again [that's what they do], we can do this!
I just think the USAF is staffed with “bitter clingers”: desperately holding on to their manned aircraft. They came to the armed UAV world only after the CIA did so much with them. With the drawdown that is now “fashionable” on the left, the USAF will be converting B-52′s, B-1′s and F-15′s and F-16′s into plowshares or Chevy Volts (maybe windmills). That will get even worse with the unilateral nuclear disarmament the BO is so hell bent to execute. My guess is he wants the cripple the US military as much as he can before he gets the boot. That has been a goal of the Left all the way back to the 60′s. You know, trade all that defense money into foodstamps.
BT: Jimmy T sends.
JimmyT has a point, more than likely. When Gates was leaving office, he warned USAF not to assume they could scrap the UAV programs and go back to focusing on manned aircraft.
Which, I don’t really disagree with the USAF position. I think all associated with the military sense China’s rise. They will have to be contained. Predators, Reapers, Sentinels, etc, will all be fodder for the PLAAF – it is thought. With these odd colonial wars dying down, perhaps it would better to focus very limited resources on the high end, especially since we have built many hundreds of UAVs in the last decade? If we have another low-intensity war, can they not continue to serve?
Or so the thinking may go. One thing is certain, USAF needs a new bomber. Without bombers, there is no justification for a separate USAF. They need to get going on a new one 10 years ago yesterday. I don’t think the idea of an unmanned nuclear equipped bomber will fly, so to speak.
Disregard, carry on.
Fortunately, I don’t have any inside info on the AF thinking. I think it might be like reading the Necronomicon.
That being said, I think there are several things going on.
First, the AF has Reapers. I get the distinct impression that they concluded that MQ-X didn’t provide enough of an improvement to be worth pursuing.
Second, the value of ALL the COIN assets in a potential general war scenario is quite rightly questioned. An F-16 can do COIN, though inefficiently. A Reaper or AT-6 cannot do much in a general war.
Third, there is a “white scarf” mindset in the USAF. JimmyT is right, they had to be dragged into unmanned aviation. The Navy was flying Pioneers a decade before the Air Force flew any sort of unmanned platform.
And finally, UCLASS is looking more and more like a system that IS of value in a general war.
“Pioneers?” Have you forgotten the 50s SLCM REGULAS the Navy put on subs? Not exactly a UAV, but the very first unmanned system–which the Navy aviation types killed because it didn’t have a pilot and they were trying to prove the viability of carrier aviation to deliver nukes vs SAC in order to save the carrier fleet for conventional war at a time when SAC was getting 1/3 of the ENTIRE DOD Budget for ALL service branches. (see:”Revolt of the Admirals”)
Mace, Matador, no, the AF didn’t go down that route…
While UAVs do have their limitations, the USAF has had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the program, and I’m sure the resistance hasn’t lessened much. Of course when you convert F-16 TFW’s into UAV the pilots do have grounds to be upset. I mean there’s no way an enlisted guy could handle flying a drone, so it’s got to be pilots.
You DO need a pilot, at least if you intend to opreate in national airspace. The stick-and-rudder skills are the least of the responsibilities.
Understood – I should have specified the AF requirement for commissioned officer pilots as opposed to Warrant’s or even (oh, mercy!) enlisted scum.
To be fair, nobody went to flight training dreaming of flying a box. Which is why you have to have a proficiency airplane…preferably something appealing.
Something like a Pitts Special would be a good choice.
You forgot the USAF globe-girdling “strategic” GLCM SNARK.
Oh, and Pogue, that’s the “enlisted swine“–or at least that’s what one SSGT John “Encarnacionne” Lombaria used to tell me. “Oh sir oh sir, please don’t hurt the enlisted swine, sir!” (We had a running joke, he’d say it as he snapped to, clicked his heels and gave an exaggerated open-palm British SGT Majors salute
)
** “REGULUS”
Glad you rememebered the Snark. It would have been a particularly egregious oversight if that had been left out given the atmosphere of this blog. The irony would be far too much to leave out.
I suspect that -eventually- we’ll see a new version of “high/low,” with drones taking up a lot of the “low,” along with something like the T-6 Texan II.
One unanswered question is: is high-end stealth worth the cost? Are there other methods to defeat enemy sensors? Just how valuable is stealth during air combat? And I mean real air combat, not simulations or war games.
To date the only hard data relates to the effectiveness of the F-117 suppressing/killing air defenses in Iraq.
The USAF just canceled the planned replacement of the U-2 with Global Hawk Block 30 UAVs. They are going to keep the U-2′s flying and mothball new Block 30s right out of the factory.
The U-2 (and recce in general) has long been a red haired stepchild in the USAF, the U-2 is not being retained for any ‘silk scarf’ reasons.
The U-2 being retained over its planned UAV replacement because the UAV is more expensive to operate and delivers less capability.
I’m sure the Block 30 and RQ-170 fiascoes figured in to the decision to kill the MQ-X also.
I heard Burt Rutan say at Oshkosh a few years that if the U-2 had the same landing accident rates as the Predator that we’d have run out of U-2s decades ago.
The AF has a terrible safety record with Predators because they insist on the pilot controlling all the way to the ground during landing. Army puts theirs on auto-land and doesn’t lose nearly as many as a result. Enlisted swine fly Army’s drones as well.
There, VX, I used your preferred term for us enlisted scum. Happy now?
“An MQ-9 costs less than $10M.”
A Cessna Caravan with the same sized motor costs $2.5M @ quantity 1. So you could have 4 Caravans for the price of one MQ-9.
“MQ-9s burn a few thousand LBs of gas in a 20 hour mission. Manned platforms use that on takeoff.”
Manned platforms with the same sized motors use about the same amount of gas.
“An MQ-9 can essentially carry 5-10 people on board, just a function of sensors for them to look at and BW to get the data back. “
A Caravan can carry 3 people, lots of gas and a truckload of gear.
While it certainly can carry a data uplink transmitter doesn’t need ANY satellite links, duplicate control vans, nor is the Caravan likely to crash on landing, unlike a UAV.
Three Caravans can provide your 24 hour orbit with fewer people, less cost, and much better judgement.
“MQ-9s are ultimately disposable. Got a super-hot mission that you just have to stay on? Stay, then let ‘er slip into the drink. Men aren’t disposable, to us at least.”
That is really the only advantage to a UAV, it is why the military is justified in spending the extra money that small UAVs cost. Clearly UAVs don’t scale well for missions needing larger payloads.
No civilian agency of the government needs a UAV beyond those in the large RC model class.