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WASHINGTON: A new study by the Mitchell Institute urges the Air Force to move out smartly to acquire “significant numbers” of re-usable, autonomous drones to fill in gaps in fighter and bomber capacity and to increase force survivability in high-end conflict with Russia and China.
“Plus, their low cost would allow the Air Force to do this now — not in some distant future, while blowing up current programs that are also needed to modernize the force,” Mark Gunzinger, Mitchell’s director of Future Concepts and Capability Assessments, said in a Mitchell Institute webinar today.
Gunzinger was co-author of the study, “Understanding the Promise of Skyborg and Low-Cost Attritable Unmanned Aerial Vehicles,” along with Lukas Autenried, senior analyst.
“Flat or declining budgets will require the USAF to make difficult choices between how it should allocate its resources to maintain its current readiness, sustain the size of its force, and modernize for the future,” the study elaborates. “Simply put, the service cannot cut its current readiness or further reduce its forces without serious impacts on its ability to perform its mission today, and it will not receive the years of budget plus-ups it needs to increase procurement of all of the high-end capabilities it requires. A middle path is needed.”
The study explains that future unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) will be based on “artificial intelligence-enabled autonomy” that allows them to team with other autonomous systems, or with piloted aircraft, to conduct multiple missions. These could even include missions with much higher risk in contested environments than the service would normally be willing to risk, for fear of losing pilots (not to mention their expensive and ‘exquisite’ aircraft).
Indeed, as Breaking D readers know, programs like Skyborg and the Low-Cost Attritable Aircraft Technology (LCAAT) umbrella effort (that spawned the XQ-58A Valkyrie) are aimed at developing families of attritable and/or reusable drones that are aimed at missions normally undertaken by the wingmen in an aircraft fighter or bomber formation — tasks that require some level of autonomy, but within very narrow boundaries. Eventually, however, the Air Force envisions drones piloted by highly capable artificial intelligence (AI) ‘brains’ that can operate with some measures of independence.
In the future, highly autonomous drones could further serve as nodes in the service’s high priority Advanced Battle Management System (ABMS), or carry new types of technology to provide alternate position, navigation and timing signals where GPS is being jammed, said Col. Don (Styker) Haley, head of the Futures and Concepts Division at Air Force Warfigthing Integration Capability (AFWIC), told the Mitchell Webinar.
Further, the study finds, autonomous/reusable (A/R) UAVs “that do not require airfields for launch and recovery would also help the Air Force remain an “inside force” capable of generating combat power from dispersed expeditionary locations within range of Chinese or Russian anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD) threats. This will help change adversary defense calculations and impose costs on opponents to the advantage of U.S. interests.”
All that said, the study cautions that no matter how smart, the drones “are complementary, force-multiplying capabilities, not replacements for 5th generation stealth aircraft” such as F-35 and F-22 fighter jets, and B-21 bombers.
Instead, the study suggests that low-cost, reusable drones “could have the greatest combat value if used for non-kinetic missions that take advantage of their force-multiplying potential,” particularly given their “modest” payload capacity. These include, the study says, electromagnetic warfare and persistent command and control/intelligence, reconnaissance and surveillance.
Other key findings:
- “The low cost and modularity” of these drones “make them highly adaptable to meet changing requirements and speed new capabilities to warfighters.”
- The USAF should explore the value of A/R UAVs for multiple missions and quickly field prototypes “to allow warfighters to develop concepts that integrate their operations with other manned and unmanned aircraft.”
- The Air Force “should determine logistical support and other requirements to launch support and other requirements to launch and recover large numbers of A/R UAVs from distributed theater locations without airfields.”
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