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2020-04-01

UAVs to Play a Key Role in Present and Future Aerial Operations

Although remotely piloted aircraft came into use more than fifty years ago with the increasing usage of armed Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), in recent years UAV roles have evolved beyond traditional ISR functions. While the use of UAVs in contested airspace is still premature, air superiority has already been achieved and the use of UAVs for close air support has proven to be effective, primarily due to its ability to loiter over the Area of Operations (AO), provide intelligence to ground commanders and neutralise key threats accurately with extended time over target.

Extensive military use of armed UAVs began with Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom where they provided direct support to military operations, mostly through utilisation to detect and kill Al-Qaeda and Taliban leadership in Afghanistan and Iraq. Indeed, the use of pilotless aircraft in Desert Storm in 1991, followed by Desert Shield, can be considered the first wide-scale deployment of UAS/UAV.

Autonomous capability is a critical advantage for any military force because it allows the system to react faster to threats, with faster iterations within the decision-making loop. During Desert Storm, some 500 Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) sorties were conducted to support intelligence gathering and guide heavy artillery from battleships in the Persian Gulf, with successful UAS deployment in Desert Storm convincing militaries around the world of the usefulness of UAS in spotting enemy locations and directing artillery units.

The use of UAVs had also reduced the sensor-shooter loop, enabling UAV pilots to complete the Fix, Find, Track, Target, Engage, Assess (F2T2EA) loop seamlessly for time critical targeting. Persistent tracking of key enemy movements also provided key intelligence, while buying time for decision-making and strike packages to be prepared.

Increased Military UAV Use

For most of the world’s military forces, the acquisition and development of both armed and unarmed UAVs is viewed as having been on an upward trend. Although spending on procurement and development is projected to grow from US$6.6 billion in 2013 to US$11.4 billion in 2022, only 23 out of the current 70 UAV users have developed or are developing armed UAVs.

Proliferation of armed UAVs is not yet widespread, principally because of self-imposed export control on the part of the American government and the alignment of most friendly nations. However, other countries have actively marketed their armed UAVs, with China announcing publicly that it would be exporting its armed UAV - called “Wing Loong” - to the Middle East and other unspecified countries.

At the same time, it does not require extensive research to weaponise a UAV, with less-developed countries such as Iran having created UAVs of potential use as ‘suicide’ weapons. Faced with these threats, governments should review their export controls to friendly nations to counter the risk of proliferation.

Classification of UAVs

There is no single standard when it comes to the classification of UAVs, as defence agencies have their own while civilians have ever-evolving categories for UAVs. People classify them according to size, range and endurance using a tiered category system employed by the military where, according to the size, UAVs can be classified into very small, small, medium or large.

Very Small UAVs: With the advancement of radar and sensors parallel to ongoing developments in counter-stealth technology, only systems at the micro, near-silent and ultra-low energy levels are likely to operate undetected. The very small UAV class therefore applies to UAVs with dimensions ranging from the size of a large insect to 30-50 cm long.

With their flapping or rotary wings, insect-like UAVs are a popular micro design. Being extremely small in size and having a very light weight, they can be used both for spying and biological warfare.

FLIR Black Hornet: Equipping the non-specialist dismounted soldier with immediate covert situational awareness (SA), FLIR Black Hornet comes in Airborne Personal Reconnaissance System (PRS) mode for dismounted soldiers and the Airborne Vehicle Reconnaissance System (VRS) for military operations.

Game-changing EO and IR technology bridges the gap between aerial and ground-based sensors, having the same SA as a larger UAV and the threat location capabilities of UGVs, while with a flight time of up to 25 minutes, this combat-proven, pocket-sized Black Hornet PRS transmits live video and HD still images back to the operator.

The Black Hornet Vehicle Reconnaissance System (VRS) equips armoured or mechanised vehicles with an immediate, organic and self-contained surveillance and reconnaissance system. In extending the game-changing and lifesaving capability of the Black Hornet nano-UAV, the VRS launch unit mounts externally and fully integrates into the vehicle to create a real-time situational awareness (RSTA) airborne system for crews protected inside the vehicle.

CyberQuad Maxi: As an electric, remote-controlled reconnaissance platform that features four ducted rotors providing lift and manoeuvrability, the MAXI allows use of remote-control UAVs in urban and enclosed environments. With over a dozen different CyberQuad combinations of payloads and ground station accessories currently available, this is one of the safest UAV in the world for inspecting high-risk infrastructure, like power poles and communication towers.

Small UAVs

Highly capable of Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) with offensive capabilities, Small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles are just like very small UAVs in being extremely difficult to track and target, while having a higher chance of penetrating the network of sensors. The small UAV class (also called mini-UAVs) applies to vehicles with at least one dimension greater than 50 cm and no larger than 2 metres.

Coyote UAS: The most capable in its class, Coyote UAS is small, expendable and tube-launched for deployment from the ground, air or a ship. The Coyote UAS can be flown individually or netted together in swarms, while being adaptable for a variety of missions including surveillance, electronic warfare and strike.

Ideal for improved surveillance imagery, enhanced targeting capability, near real-time damage assessment and reduced threat to manned aircraft, the Coyote UAS system will operate up to one hour being designed for interchangeable payloads, while it can handle reasonably large accelerations during launch as a critical feature for all tube-launch applications. The U.S. Army has selected the Coyote drone for a near-term counter-UAS solution as the Coyote-enabled system can successfully identify and eliminate threat UAVs when equipped with an advanced seeker and warhead.

Indago 3: The newest version of Lockheed Martin’s Indago quadrotor unmanned aerial system (UAS) is a military-grade, all-weather quadrotor UAS equipped with TrellisWare Technologies software, providing a long-range secure ISR platform for sensitive military operations.

The Indago 3 system enables military customers to complete sensitive ISR missions securely with TrellisWare’s MANET software products, with this enhanced system offering the following benefits: improved propulsion technology for reduced noise signature and extended flight time; military-grade encrypted and secure data link; secure, mesh capable video dissemination across multi-node networks; and extended range radio for long-distance operation at low-flight altitudes.

Wasp AE RQ-12A: as the all-environment version of the battle proven Wasp III Micro Air Vehicle (MAV), Wasp AE boasts special design considerations for maritime and land operations, delivering superior imagery, increased endurance and an ease of use inherent to all AeroVironment UAS solutions.

Weighing in at just over a kilogram with an endurance of 50 min, the Wasp AE delivers best-in-class capabilities for an unmanned aircraft system of its size, including stealth-like manoeuvrability, superior imagery and encrypted video. The all-environment Wasp combines hand-launch capabilities with deep-stall landing for operations in confined areas on land or water, while also featuring an integrated landing camera to provide operators with exceptional situational awareness as the aircraft approaches the ground.

T-Hawk Micro Air Vehicle: In subcontract with Honeywell, AVID, has assisted in the design of T-Hawk, an unmanned ducted-fan micro air vehicle (MAV) that provides real-time situational awareness in critical situations and boasts over 30,000 hours total flight hours. Combat-proven since 2007 with unique hover-and-stare capability, T-Hawk supports advanced ISR with real-time video documentation and vertical take-off and landing (VTOL).

Medium Class UAVs

The medium-sized category applies to UAVs that are too heavy to be carried by one person while remaining smaller than a light aircraft. Medium fixed-wing UAVs usually have a wingspan of about 5-10 m, capable of carrying payloads of 100-200 kg, such as the UK Watchkeeper and Insitu RQ-21A Blackjack, alongside other historical brands such as the U.S. Boeing Eagle Eye, the RQ-2 Pioneer, the BAE systems Skyeye R4E and the RQ-5A Hunter.

Watchkeeper UAS: As a high-performance Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) with scalable architecture designed for a wide range of military and homeland security mission requirements, the Watchkeeper is built to operate in extreme and challenging environments. It is an integrated ISR system intended to collect, exploit and distribute vital information, accurately and efficiently.

Watchkeeper’s range and endurance is based on its combination of electro-optical, infrared and radar sensors, enabling both point and wide-area surveillance in all weathers and even in zero-visibility. While Watchkeeper can gather vital information on the whereabouts of potential threats, non-combatants and friendly forces, it can also support route reconnaissance, identify possible threat locations and provide detailed terrain information. By gathering and transmitting imagery for information operations, such as details of collateral damage or hostile actions, Watchkeeper can identify and pinpoint targets and, where appropriate, control or cue military action.

RQ-21A Blackjack: Insitu has developed the RQ-21A Blackjack programme in partnership with the Department of the Navy to fill the requirement for a small tactical unmanned aircraft system capable of operating from land and sea. With a length of 2.5 m, wingspan of 4.9 m and empty structure weight of 36.7 kg, the RQ-21A Blackjack is modular, versatile and multi-mission capable, providing rapid transitions between land and maritime environments, whose open payload architecture is customised with imagers, communication systems, electronic warfare, signals intelligence capabilities and other tools to give the warfighter a look ahead in every operational environment.

Large UAVs

The large UAV class applies to the large vehicles mainly used by the military for combat operations, examples of which include the U.S. General Atomics Predator B and the U.S. Northrop Grumman Global Hawk.

General Atomics Predator B: Designated the MQ-9 Reaper by its U.S. Air Force and Royal Air Force customers, the turboprop-powered, multi-mission Predator B Remotely Piloted Aircraft (RPA) was developed with GA-ASI funding to provide significantly greater capabilities than Predator.

Twice as fast as the Predator with unmatched operational flexibility, the Predator B has an endurance of over 27 hours and speeds of 240 KTAS, operating up to 50,000 feet with a 3,850 pound (1,746 kg) payload capacity that includes 3,000 pounds (1,361 kg) of external stores, which represents 500 per cent more payload or nine times the horsepower of the Predator. An extremely reliable aircraft, Predator B is equipped with a fault-tolerant flight control system and triple redundant avionics system architecture, engineered both to meet and exceed manned aircraft reliability standards.

Global Hawk: The 44-foot-long Global Hawk airframe has a wingspan of more than 116 feet, a height of 15 feet and a gross take-off weight of 26,750 pounds, including a 1,500-pound payload capability. A single Rolls-Royce AE3007H turbofan engine powers the aircraft, while the distinctive V-tail, engine cover, aft fuselage and wings are primarily constructed of graphite composite materials.

As the premier provider of persistent intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance information, the Northrop Grumman RQ-4 Global Hawk UAS can fly at high altitudes for over 30 hours, specifically gathering near-real-time, high-resolution imagery of large areas of land in all types of weather, day or night. Beyond intelligence collection, a portion of the Global Hawk fleet is engaged in supporting air and ground users with communications relay support because the system provides an affordable and flexible platform for multiple sensor payloads used together, delivering mission-critical information to various users around the world.

UAVs’ Future Airpower Role

Most militaries around the world have made the decision to invest heavily in UAV technologies, entailing that drone warfare will be the next round in the evolution of airpower where the U.S., China and other developed nations will be engaged in the design and production of Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicles (UCAVs) such as the Boeing MQ-25 and Dassault Aviation’s nEURON.

While UCAVs can perform similar tasks as modern manned fighter aircraft with similar performance and self-defence features, future UCAVs are likely to come with built-in autonomy, such as the Northrop Grumman X-47B’s capacity to land on an aircraft carrier, a task traditionally challenging for aviation pilots. Multiple trajectories of weapons are also in development, including micro-munitions, electromagnetic bombs, self-protection weapons and Directed Energy Weapons (DEWs).

Electromagnetic bombs could be used to deliver a sharp burst of electromagnetic pulse, which has the potential to destroy electronic targets without causing harm to infrastructure and humans. This movement away from traditional munition-based weaponry will further increase the attractiveness of UAVs as a persistent ISR and strike asset, which could achieve strategic strike effects with minimal collateral damage.

Strategic Strike Capabilities
Electronic Warfare (EW) is one of the promising future capabilities for future UAVs in its potential to enable airpower penetration of modern IADS. For example, the U.S. Marine Corps has tested the viability of UAVs in EW missions against enemy air defences by using MQ-9 Reapers carrying the Northrop Pandora EW System to launch wideband, multifunctional jamming attacks on radar and targeting systems in support of tactical strike missions.

Owing to the high-risk nature of close-in jamming or decoy operations, UAVs are ideal EW systems, not least for their ability to gain extended coverage by loitering over the area of operations. The ADM-160 Miniature Air-Launched Decoy and the Northrop Grumman Bat system come equipped with EW payloads to extend their spectrum of missions, particularly in combatting Anti-Access/Area Denial (A2AD) strategies.

Accurate and Timely Intelligence

UAVs employ a suite of ISR payloads to achieve accurate and timely intelligence, including Imagery Intelligence (IMINT), Communications Intelligence (COMINT) and Electronic Intelligence (ELINT). IMINT is critical to accomplishing Find, Fix, Track as part of the F2T2EA loop and commonly comprises fusion of multiple sensors such as Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) and Long-Range Electro-Optics/Infra-Red (EO/ IR) sensors.

With the employment of SAR technology to deliver long-range and very high-resolution images, alongside Ground Moving Target Indicator (GMTI) radars to detect moving targets against clutter, the use of radars in UAVs for ISR is becoming commonplace. With greater future computing density and performance promised, more powerful COMINT and ELINT payloads will be integrated within smaller UAV platforms.

COMINT and ELINT sensors detect, geo-locate and classify Radio-Frequency transmissions, permitting forces to access or disrupt enemy communications. These capabilities are key to enhancing the survivability of friendly forces while destroying/disrupting the enemy’s military capabilities.

Multi-UAV Multiples Opportunities

With the increasing focus of research and development of networked UAVs seeking to perform complex tasks autonomously, there has been wide recognition that the networking of multiple UAVs opens up a multitude of opportunities for mass operations proving otherwise too expensive or impractical to carry out with manned platforms.

Micro-UAVs and Swarm Operations

Militaries worldwide recognise that the most revolutionary use of UAVs in future warfare will be those of Micro-UAVs (MUAVs) in swarm operations. The United States Air Force (USAF) Research Laboratory is now developing swarms of MUAVs based on biological fliers, such as birds and insects that could be mass-deployed via a larger aircraft and used for extended surveillance in plain sight of the enemy to extract key intelligence at extremely close ranges.

Swarm endurance could also be extended through solar power or even the extraction of power from vibrating machinery or power lines. These MUAVs could potentially operate undetected for weeks and track targets through complicated terrain in urban areas, while there is scope for their deployment for covert strike operations aiming to disrupt key enemy installations or remote tagging or targeting for their larger counterparts to employ precision weapons.

Challenges for UAV Airpower

Lack of situational awareness is often reported to be a severe disadvantage for UAVs in air-to-air scenarios. UAV pilots do not have the same field of vision compared to pilots in a bubble canopy of modern tactical fighters, meaning that they can only rely on a suite of sensors to monitor the UAV’s surroundings.

UAV pilots are subjected to latency issues that may be significant for Within Visual Range (WVR) dogfights and require instantaneous decisions, but compared to fighter aircraft UAVs also perform worse in terms of manoeuvrability and speed. Nonetheless, with the proliferation of Beyond Visual Range (BVR) weapons today, it may be argued that visual situational awareness are no longer be relevant and situational awareness should actually be viewed as the ability to detect threats through more advanced sensors and networked capabilities, even before the threat becomes imminent.

In fact, manoeuvrability and speed are no longer relevant to such engagement because the payload can be released, or evasive actions can be taken, long before the enemy detects the UAV. Another factor is the limited payload capacity of UAVs compared to their manned counterparts.

Losses and Reliability Issues

UAVs are vulnerable to enemy fighters and air defence systems because they are not usually equipped with Electronic Countermeasures such as the Chaff/Flare/Radar Warning Receivers found on most tactical fighters, entailing that UAVs have mostly been used in relatively benign airspace. Most of the UAV losses in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars have been due to poor reliability and have resulted in significant financial losses for countries, such as the United Kingdom, suggesting that UAV design standards need to be improved.

Vulnerability to Electronic/Cyber Attacks

As UAVs are subjected to potential unauthorised access to their video feeds, as exemplified by the leakage of unencrypted UAV footage to Iraqi insurgents in 2009, any assessment of an UAV’s vulnerability will be incomplete without a discussion of the impact of an EW environment on its datalinks and Global Positioning System (GPS).

Other common threats to UAVs are GPS spoofing and jamming attacks. While countermeasures such as anti-jamming devices, more advanced encryption and software ‘hardening’ are being developed to reduce susceptibility to these attacks, new counter-UAV technology developments (i.e. control datalink jamming) are expected to evolve considerably in the future as more military forces recognise the potential threats posed by UAVs.

Political Obstacle to Drones

Despite the proliferation of UAVs in both military and civil sectors, there is still a growing stigma among the public towards their usage. Until now, only the US has openly admitted using armed UAVs, with most countries either steering away from their deployment or choosing not to declare their usage due to political sensitivities.

These sensitivities are illustrated by the limitations imposed by the Missile Technology Control Regime, as well as the disarming of UAVs before they can be exported and generally unfavourable public discourse. As of today, most ASEAN military forces possess only Tactical UAVs to fulfil the ISR role, but the potential remains of an UAV arms race is growing in the region.

The ASEAN nations are now seeking increased technology transfer opportunities and advanced systems for force modernisation efforts.

Conclusion: UAVs Overtake Manned Platforms

UAVs are certain to play an increasing role in the projection of airpower in the coming years, for the advantages associated with UAVs - such as persistence, autonomy, low unit cost, flexible design and the removal of human lives from danger - will continue to position UAVs as the go-to solutions for many future airpower challenges. Nonetheless, civil airspace integration, frequency spectrum management, reliability, political sensitivities, integration challenges and vulnerability to electronic attacks may continue to restrict the widespread use of UAVs across the entire spectrum of air operations.

In the near future, manned platforms will continue to play an important role in airpower, while UAVs will continue to take up ‘dull, dirty and dangerous’ tasks such as ISR over enemy airspace.

Nonetheless, it is envisaged that UAVs will eventually take over manned platforms in the second half of this century, when the technologies for UCAVs, unmanned strategic bombers and even unmanned helicopters and tanker/transport are expected to mature.

The expectation is then that the corresponding network infrastructure and regulatory civil and military framework will eventually become as established and well-maintained as that of manned platforms.

This future is dependent on the willingness of military forces and governments to expand the roles of UAVs which, in turn, may drive their research and development towards UAVs eventually being able to match or even surpass manned platforms in terms of performance and efficiency.

Reference Text/Photo:
www.boeing.com

www.lockheedmartin.com

www.ga-asi.com,
www.mindef.gov.sg

www.e-education.psu.edu

www.navy.gov.au

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