Following the release of the "Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems (SUAS) Flight Plan: 2016-2036" in May, there has not been much public movement from the service on the topic, despite ongoing internal testing and evaluation.
With an aggressive operational tempo over the last decade and a half leading to an "insatiable demand," the plan was designed to develop concepts and usage cases for small drones for which "applications are greatly outpacing strategy and policy," as "now is the time to … leverage the technological explosion of commercial Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems (SUAS) that is upon us."
However, the service is still a long ways away from realizing any formalized concepts, uses or platforms, never mind operational contexts. Most of the notions described in the plan, as well as concepts envisioned by Air Force leaders within the Pentagon, are still pre-decisional.
The Air Force is still in the process of internally formulating a strategy for using small drones, Brig. Gen. John Rauch, director of ISR capabilities at the Air Force, told C4ISRNET in February. After that, he said, the service will be defining what currently exists in the world and when it's the right time to approach industry to see where they need help.
"We are in the phase of figuring out what can these things do beyond the local effects that they're already great at," he said, noting requests for proposals from industry are "way down the road."
"What can they do in the Air Force's battle space — what we're responsible for?"
The SUAS flight plan is a vision document illuminating the way forward as opposed to a directive saying the force should do this or that, Reid Melville, strategy lead for unmanned systems at the Air Force Research Laboratory's Aerospace Systems Directorate, said in a recent interview. The plan and process behind it is not about bearing a silver bullet system or a single system that will change everything, he said, but rather helping the Air Force discover how to field this new class of systems and these new concepts coming forward.
Melville identified two advantages in pushing toward SUAS. First, a strategic impetrative to increase operational agility by introducing a new class of weapons system, which provides the force more options; and second, the push toward major smaller platforms, which can hone in on different ways to drive costs down and pursue affordability in new ways.
While the Air Force is good at making high-end performing systems, the push toward smaller systems is a good opportunity for the Air Force to learn the skill of making a low-end complement to a high-end Air Force in a way that will give them flexibility and a price point of operations, both of which are strategic needs of the Air Force.
A decade ago, it wasn't clear how SUAS could help the Air Force in its strategic mission, and this is now a new effort for the service, Melville said
Col. Brandon Baker, the chief of the Air Force's remotely piloted aircraft capabilities division, during a presentation to largely members of industry last fall — one of the first major briefs on the Air Force's plans on SUAS since the flight plan's release — described some of these new concepts that SUAS could afford the force. While these small drones have typically been thought of in the tactical sense for local effects, Baker described a construct for theaterwide, strategic employment on par with Group 5 remotely piloted aircraft such as the MQ-1 Predator and MQ-9 Reaper.
Instead of purchasing 500 new Reapers in the future, the Air Force may buy 300. Accompanying them could be 1,500 to 2,000 SUAS to accomplish the low end of the mission set, predominately ISR mission sets, or counterterrorism mission sets conducted by Reapers.
The Air Force might allocate a swarm of small drones to a combatant commander for theater or regional ISR coverage instead of a Reaper combat air patrol, which typically consists of four aircraft, Baker postulated.
"What we’re trying to explore, though, is as the Air Force, if we’re responsible for theater ISR, how does it play into that space and is there even an avenue for it exactly," Rauch said. "We’re interested in those concepts and that’s what we’ll spend some time talking about this fall or this spring going into summertime."
In the immediate term, Rauch explained the labs will be examining what’s in the "art of the possible" for these systems. Then the service will approach industry "to see what’s possible after they define: Here’s the type of capabilities and characteristics we think something needs and the technology is either close or it’s not close yet and we need to wait for this to happen," Rauch said.
Given that the model is not building toward a singular solution, Melville said ther service is trying to understand a range of options and enable those options. In the meantime, the labs offer the opportunity space to understand emerging trends, concepts and platforms for the war fighter.
"Not until you get through all of that will we then go to the corporate infrastructure as a process and say: 'Is this interesting in filling this niche?' And I’m sure we’ll have to look at it as an institution depending upon the finances of it — is that displace another platform or is this additive? So that’s a long ways down the road," he added.
Melville said there isn’t a single effort to advance a single solution in the near term; rather, this effort as a whole aims to be a broad approach to explore a range of technologies and an active dialogue between technologies and the war fighter to understand how they’ll meet challenges and priorities for the Air Force.
He added that the service doesn't yet know when it can identify the opportunity to meet a need with a new system as there’s not a timeline or published acquisition expectation.
"It’s really moving forward to explore the space and taking advantage of the opportunities we encounter," he said.
Mark Pomerleau is a reporter for C4ISRNET, covering information warfare and cyberspace.
