Unmanned Air Vehicles: Transformation of Military Operations

Unmanned Air Vehicles (UAVs) were once thought of as machines to be used only for duties that were too boring, too menial, or too dangerous for a live flight crew. Originally called “drones” in reference to the mindlessness of their unpiloted patrols, they lacked the glamour of a highly-skilled, human fighter pilot who could think, decide, and act. Now, however, UAVs are becoming stars in their own right. More quickly than even their most ardent boosters hoped, they are transforming U.S. military operations.

Mark Bobbi, senior analyst for military aircraft and unmanned aviation systems for Jane’s, describes the ways UAVs are shaping this transformation. “They are providing information that identifies targets more easily and more readily but also shortens the kill chain,” he says. “Once a target is identified, it can then be taken down very, very quickly.” The U.S. military’s investment of billions of dollars in its communications network is the key piece that enables the success of the UAV. Through the development of its integrated communications network, the military has used common equipment and standards to make communication across the services more immediate and seamless, from laptops to ground control stations to the UAVs in the performance of their missions. “That, I believe,” Bobbi says, “is even more important than the evolution of the unmanned air vehicle itself. The whole idea of being able to send a UAV out, locate a target that maybe we didn’t even know was there, the ability to transmit that information to decision-makers and kill that target almost instantaneously is something that is transforming the battlefield beyond what anybody ever expected.”

The variety of UAVs that the military uses is rapidly increasing. They are ranked by tiers that mark their ranges, and those ranges can cover everything from an altitude of more than 65,000 feet, as for Northrop’s Global Hawk, down to a matter of inches for some of the handheld air vehicles. The Global Hawk is a 30,000-pound vehicle with a 130-foot wingspan and a maximum endurance of 35 hours that can carry an internal payload of 3,000 pounds. Handhelds are UAVs that weigh only a few pounds and can be launched by hand from a backpack. Data-linked to a laptop, they are very small and relatively inexpensive and so quiet that it is nearly impossible for an enemy to detect them. In fact, the newest generation of handhelds, Bobbi says, “what I call micro UAVs, are even smaller than what we have now.” Currently under development with strong funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the U.S. military in general, some of these micro UAVs weigh only a few ounces, and, Bobbi adds, “some of them actually mimic insects, how they fly, how they see, how they communicate.”

Bobbi attributes a part of the success of the surge in Iraq to the “voluminous use of unmanned air vehicles… particularly the medium altitude but also the handheld” in the urban environment. A short-range UAV that Bobbi singles out is one produced by Honeywell that weighs about 70 pounds. “It is an extremely effective little unmanned air vehicle because of its ability to land on a building, sit, and stare for long periods of time, waiting for something to happen, for a target to appear.” The use of these and other UAVs, Bobbi says, “accelerated the achievement of goals established before the surge… and in conjunction with political and social activities the military conducted, UAVs were instrumental in identifying appropriate targets and allowing the military to take out those targets, so they were instrumental in getting the surge to its conclusion, which, I believe, is a more stable Iraq.”

As the U.S. military pulls troops out of Iraq, its focus will turn to Afghanistan, and Bobbi expects to see a similar transformation of the war in that theater once the U.S. is able to deploy the necessary resources, and especially its UAV assets. “Obviously, operating in Afghanistan, with that incredible geography has been an impossible task for armies going back thousands of years.” But he believes that the use of the full spectrum of UAV capabilities “will eliminate a lot of those geographic impediments.” From the use of high-altitude UAVs to be able to see what’s over the next hill to the deployment of handhelds to fly into small spaces, “we’ll be able to find targets and attack the Taliban and other insurgents in Afghanistan much more effectively than we have in the past,” says Bobbi. He foresees the arrival of newer and even smaller UAVs in the next few months. These will be “primarily vertical takeoff and landing UAVs,” he says, “that can fly into a cave, and in some cases, carry a weapon and destroy whatever is in that cave. I see that happening as early as the summer.”

No longer mindless drones, UAVs are proving to be vital in the success of military operations and in reducing casualties. Both transformative and transforming, in the very near future, they will have autonomous capabilities, the capacity to think and make decisions on their own. Though there will probably always be a “man in the loop,” says Bobbi, these machines will learn “what to look for in terms of targets, be able to differentiate between a target and a friendly, and then make a decision about what to do with that target.”