Air Warfare

With Army combat aviation in mind, Textron plans upgrades to Shadow drone through at least 2036

The Army is replacing the Shadow in its infantry brigades, but Textron is upgrading as the company expects other Army groups, like aviation and special ops, to use it for more than a decade longer.

By Andrew Eversden on October 11, 2022 11:25 am
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Textron’s Shadow RQ-7B V2 Block III. (Courtesy of Textron)

AUSA 2022 — As the US Army plans to swap out its Textron Systems RQ-7B Shadow drones in brigade combat teams for a new tactical unmanned aerial system, the manufacturer is upgrading the Shadow, expecting other parts of the Army will use it for years to come.

Textron Systems is already fielding Shadow Block III unmanned aircraft to combat aviation brigades and special forces units, the company recently told Breaking Defense. The company said it is upgrading the performance and reliability of the aircraft as it prepares for the UAS to be used by Army units through at least 2036 “and likely beyond that,” according to Wayne Prender, senior vice president for air systems at Textron.

“The scenarios and the places that Shadow will be operated in the next 15 years, they’re going to be more contested as compared to the Iraq and Afghanistan theaters,” Prender said ahead of the Association of the United States Army annual conference. “So we’re actively working with the Army to ensure that our system is more survivable in those contested environments.”

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Since the Army selected Textron’s Shadow program in 1999, the drone has flown 1.3 million flight hours. On the battlefield, soldiers used the Shadow for reconnaissance, surveillance and target acquisition, and the platform also serves as an aerial communications relay to connect ground networks.

But over the last several years, the Army has been working to replace its infantry brigades’ runway-dependent Shadows with the Future Tactical Unmanned Aerial System, an as-yet undecided new platform capable of vertical take-off and landing (VTOL). Textron has put forward another, smaller drone, the Aerosonde, for that competition.

For the Shadow, Textron still has customers elsewhere in the service. So far, the company said it has fielded about 100 of the new the Shadow Block IIIs and plans to get the bird in the hands of all 11 of the Army’s combat aviation brigades.

On Block III, Prender said Textron increased engine power by 24 percent, allowing the engine to aircraft’s gross take-off weight to 537 pounds and 95 pounds of payload. Because of that, the new block is also 60 percent quieter.

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A Textron Shadow drone takes off from a mobile launcher. (Courtesy of Textron)

The company also has more on-board power and includes a computer, which Prender said would allow Textron to make future upgrades to Shadows down the line. In addition, the aircraft carries higher-fidelity, higher-definition electro-optical/infrared cameras, which can increase the stand-off range.

Prender said the Block III Shadow will also be able to carry more special mission payloads, including electronic warfare and intelligence systems, and provide increased communications relay ability to connect or extend the range of ground networks. To enhance Shadow’s survivability, the Block III aircraft can operate in up to two inches of rain, Prender said.

To upgrade the drones, the company sends units new vehicles that fit into existing equipment, and the company sends the old drones back to the factory for “reset and refurbishment,” where they come out as Block III air vehicles. The company is currently 40 percent through  “new equipment training” courses that last about five weeks, which includes two weeks of ground familiarization and three weeks of flight training, he said.

The Future (Tactical Unmanned Aerial System) Is Vertical

Under the Future Tactical Unmanned Aerial System program, the Army is looking for a vertical take off and landing (VTOL) drone to reduce dependency on runaways, as well as a platform that can operate in weather.

Prender said that the company’s small UAS offering, Aerosonde, is designed to do that, and can also be equipped with over 40 different variations of electronic warfare, signals intelligence and other special payloads — payloads that Prender said could also be configured for the Shadow in the future.

The Aerosonde platform will take part in Project Convergence 22, where it will demonstrate different capabilities, including EW. As it competes for the FTUAS program of record, Textron leaders believe that the company’s decades of experience in provided unmanned systems to Army, including the Shadow, will be a major benefit.

“We understand what those soldiers go through. It needs to be simple, it needs to be intuitive. It needs to work every time. It needs to be ready when they are for the missions at hand,” Prender said.

AUSA 2022

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AUSA 2022

Over at Rheinmetall's booth sat the hefty Lynx OMFV (Optionally Manned Fighting Vehicle). The company, as its competitors, is hoping to make a strong impression as the Army looks for OMFV proposals later this fall -- the early stage of an almost certainly lucrative long-term contract award. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith).
All the way from down under, the Australian firm Defendtex presented some of its modular UAVs. Here visitors can see the Drone155, which the company says can be outfitted with ISR payloads or explosives. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith).
The MVPP from Globe Tech stands for Modular Vehicle Protection Platform, a vehicle add-on that can take the brunt of improvised explosive device detonations. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith).
AUSA was well attended by international officers and officials as well, and by foreign defense firms. The Korean booth, shown here, featured some products hoping to make a splash in the US military. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith).
Not your traditional defense contractor, the computing giant IBM has a booth at AUSA showing off its flashy but functional quantum computer. The US government as a whole, and the Pentagon in particular, are heavily invested in the quantum computing race with the likes of China. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith).
Among the fleet of vehicles parked throughout the AUSA floor for display was the Flyer 72-U, made by General Dynamics. The company says the vehicle takes a "modular approach" so it can be configured for anything from "light strike assault" to rescue and evacuation. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith).
The stuff of counter-UAS nightmares, the Virginia-based BlueHalo firm makes drone swarms that use AI and machine learning to provide battlefield intelligence to soldiers. The Army's Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office awarded the company $14 million in February to develop the HIVE. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith).
It's a .50 caliber Gatling gun, one that Dillon Aero says can fire 1,500 shots per minute, or 25 rounds per second. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith).
For this year's show AM General rolled its own Humvee Saber, Blade Edition, onto the floor. The company claims "leap-ahead" technology for a light tactical vehicle. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith).
Patria, a defense firm owned jointly by Finland and Norway's Kongsberg Defence & Aerospace, made it's way across the Atlantic for AUSA 2022, bringing along its AMV multi-role vehicle. The AMV was recently purchased by the dozens by Slovakia and its home country of Finland. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith).
At the Pratt Miller Defense booth, visitors will see a full-sized Expeditionary Modular Autonomous Vehicle (EMAV) is the "newest and perhaps most mobile and lethal" of the company's autonomous offerings. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith).
Marathon's Autonomous Robot Targets are exactly what that sounds like: shooting targets guided by computer code and designed to "look, move, and even behave like people," the company says. The robots were on the move on the AUSA floor -- though no shooting was allowed. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith).
The AUSA show floor offered a fresh look at a futuristic version of an old Army standby: the Abrams tank. This one, the Abrams X, is made by General Dynamics Land Systems, manufacturers of the current Abrams M1A1 and M1A2 battle tanks used by the US Army. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith).
Attendees may walk by model versions of the famous Iron Dome system, in use for years in Israel, and its sister SkyCeptor system, both made by Rafael. The SkyCeptor, in particular, is meant to "defeat short- to medium-range ballistic and cruise missiles and other advanced air defense threats," the company says. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith).
As the need for counter-UAS systems explodes, Epirus is at AUSA repping its counter-electronics system Stryker Leonidas, made with General Dynamics. The system's "counter-swarm" weapon "fills a pressing short range air defense (SHORAD) capability gap," the company says. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith).
A new unveiling for AUSA, Rheinmetall announced this week the Mission Master CXT platform, the newest addition to the company's "family" of autonomous ground vehicles. The company says the CXT "combines the power of a diesel engine with a silent electric motor." (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith).
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Two new Armored Multi-Purpose Vehicles (AMPV) sit at the booth by Bae Systems. The vehicles are meant to replace the Army's venerable, but old M113s. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith)
Palantir shows off its prototype for the Tactical Intelligence Targeting Access Node (TITAN) vehicle. The company says the TITAN "will be the critical backbone that provides correlation, fusion, and integration of sensor data alongside insights from AI/ML overlaid at the tactical edge." In other words, it's meant to find the signal in the noise. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith)
A model of a "modernized" Boeing Apache AH-64E shown Association of US Army Conference in 2022. While the Army is about to choose two new airframes, there's currently no Apache replacement on the horizon. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith)
Lockheed Martin teamed up with Sikorsky to produce the Raider X, the team's competitor in the Army's Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft (FARA) program, one of two high-profile Army Future Vertical Lift contests currently underway. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith)
The Bell 360 Invictus is the other FARA competitor, looking to beat out the Lockheed-Sikorsky team. The Army's expected to make its decision in fiscal 2024. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith)
The defense start-up Anduril has expanded its footprint in the defense market in recent years. This product, the Mobile Sentry, "brings autonomous fixed site counter UAS and counter intrusion capabilities into a mobile form factor," the company says. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith)
The military's no-so-furry friendly robot dogs are back at AUSA this year. This model, called the Vision 60 Q-UGV from Ghost Robotics, is an "all-weather ground robot for use in a broad range of unstructured urban and natural environments for defense, homeland and enterprise applications," the company says. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith).
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