Euler

While the Army has no plans to buy new types of unmanned aircraft systems in the near future, it continues to look at improving the effectiveness and efficiency of its unmanned aircraft systems by looking at commonality, interoperability and modularity as

“three key things to focus on” (Judson, 2013a). At the same time, the Army will closely scan the industrial sectors for such technological advances as improved sensors, information-processing capabilities, and payloads (“Army Working,” 2013).

The Army is looking at improvements to the Gray Eagle (Judson, 2013a).

According to the PM UAS, Colonel Timothy Baxter,

The Army is very interested in expeditionary right now, so we are taking a hard look at our footprint and signature on the Gray Eagle program to identify those things we can do within the existing program of record to assist both our general purpose forces and our [special operations] forces in reducing footprint and signature. Judson, 2013a.

One example is a “roll-on-roll-off” capability allowing the Gray Eagle to be deployed on short notice with a goal of trying to get the minimum amount of ground control equipment and ground control stations and aircraft deployed very quickly to

provide initial capability in advance of placing other equipment in theater. One proposed concept is a smaller control system, such as a portable or mobile ground control station or a mobile ground control station (Judson, 2013a).

Additionally, now that the Gray Eagle is being fielded to aerial exploitation battalions, giving the aircraft a Ka-band satellite link would open up the envelope for additional payloads. Gray Eagle is equipped with a standard electro-optical/infrared camera and synthetic aperture radar, but there is a plan to provide a tactical signals intelligence payload to the aircraft in the future, according to Colonel Baxter (Judson, 2013a).

To support additional payloads, the Army wants to embrace more of a universal interface that would allow the system’s operators to plug-and-play capabilities “very quickly” and meet the needs of the aerial exploitation battalions. A more “app-based”

universal interface “would significantly reduce the cost associated with incorporating on our systems,” and would streamline airworthiness certifications, Colonel Baxter noted (Judson, 2013a).

Colonel Baxter further told reporters on 4 February 2013 that efforts to revisit the service’s unmanned platforms would almost certainly include “a return to mobile-type operations” as opposed to operating UAS mainly from large forward operating bases (FOBs) (Wasserbly, 2013). He says, “We’ve been kind of FOB-centric in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past 10 years or so, so really instilling an expeditionary or mobile operations mind-set with our UAS is going to be our focus as we develop our strategic plans for the future and our five-year plan for product improvements across the board”

(Wasserbly, 2013). Accordingly, the UAS project office “has been aggressively pushing unmanned aircraft system stakeholders to really do a critical review of our UAS base philosophies within the Army” (Wasserbly, 2013).

E. SUMMARY

Not all Army UAS stakeholders will necessarily share the same concerns or have unified opinions or priorities. Depending on the topic in which they have a “stake,”

stakeholders can serve to help or hinder Army UAS.

In the first section of this chapter, we identified four relationships where organizational beliefs and cultures shape the way the Army executes its UAS programs.

The application of UAS capabilities poses issues such as inter-service disputes over their control, debates over how to organize and integrate them, and how to process and disseminate collected intelligence data (Blom, 2010). A sometimes adversarial stakeholder relationship exists between the Army and the Air Force with regard to mission control and funding to support those missions. Further, there is an internal Army struggle between the aviation and intelligence communities due to a perception that aviators fly and intelligence analysts produce intelligence. Additionally, manned and unmanned aircraft both play an important role in military operations. Sometimes they operate separately and sometimes side by side and there are advantages to operating in both ways. Finally, whether the aircraft is piloted by an enlisted soldier or an officer has impacts on manning, cost and potentially to future integration into the NAS.

In the second section of this chapter, we identified several resource management factors that stakeholders consider in their relationship to Army UAS. These factors may impact how the Army manages resources to better utilize and support integration into national airspace, bandwidth and frequency usage, security and allocation, contracted efforts, funding, basing and infrastructure, and training. First, we concluded that the Army lacks the ability to adequately forecast bandwidth, frequency, and data security requirements for the future without conducting an assessment of what currently exists as opposed to what will be required for future UAS growth. Furthermore, we concluded that the Army must better manage costs and to do so will require an examination as to whether maintenance and support should be done through contractor logistics or with organic military capability. We also concluded that to cut costs, the Army will need focus more on efficiencies outside of new capability development and rely more on enhancements, modifications, and innovation to meet mission requirements. Additionally, the Army can apply staffing and basing lessons learned from the Air Force to save resources (funding, personnel, infrastructure, training, etc.). Finally, we concluded that because the Army values decentralized operations down to the individual unit and lower

levels of organization, it will be difficult to for them to change their way of thinking to a more strategic level which will impact its ability to train its UAS units.

The third section of the chapter dealt with two policies and laws that have significant impacts on Army UAS. The first is acquisition policy dealing with the open systems approach to alleviate inter-service redundancy and waste. Though this approach will have benefits for the Army in the long-term, none of its UAS programs were developed from the start according to its methodology and thus they are overly reliant on proprietary and often more costly systems. The second is the FAA Modernization and Reform Act of 2012, which addressed the integration of UAS into the NAS. There is a stronger demand now than ever for the Army to be able to test, train and operate in the NAS. If the Army does not have the ability to coordinate, deconflict and maneuver in the NAS, it could significantly impact its ability to meet mission requirements.

The final section of the chapter looks at a few of the innovative future enhancements and improvements that the Army and industry partners can cooperatively invest in during these lean fiscal years to move UAS forward. The Army will closely scan the industrial sectors for such technological advances as improved sensors, information-processing capabilities, knowledge management technologies, and advanced payloads for expanding mission sets.

In the next two chapters, we will examine two major factors that were introduced in this chapter—UAS Funding and Integration of UAS into the national airspace system.

IV. FUNDING FOR U.S. ARMY UAS PROGRAMS

The Army has been incredibly successful in introducing Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) from corps level to platoon. Although still relatively new to combined arms operations, UAS are revolutionizing how the Army fights. In 2003, the Army deployed 13 aircraft for Operation Iraqi Freedom. Some 10 years later, about 1,200 unmanned medium and large aircraft are in the field. Spigelmire & Baxter, 2013, p. 55.