The Defense Department is adding billions of dollars to future budgets for
unmanned air vehicles, but Pentagon officials cautioned that UAV programs increasingly
will be scrutinized not just for their technical performance, but also for how
they manage costs.
UAVs no longer are novelties that should be treated as isolated laboratory
projects, officials said. If the Defense Department is to fulfill its goals
of proliferating UAVs as mainstream military weapons, they will not only have
to be cheaper, but also easier to integrate with other aircraft, ships and ground
vehicles.
Most UAV programs today “need robust concepts of operations, doctrines,
strategies and tactics,” said Dyke D. Weatherington, an acquisition official
who oversees UAV programs at the office of the defense secretary.
“OSD sees a lot of work remaining in the conops [concepts of operations],”
he said at a conference of the Association of Unmanned Vehicle Systems.
“We cannot operate UAVs as an exception, managed as a segment of the
airspace that nobody else operates in,” Weatherington said.
Of specific concern are programs to develop unmanned bombers, called UCAVs.
The Bush administration wants to see UCAVs in combat as early as a decade from
now, but it is not yet clear how these vehicles will fit into the bigger picture
of air operations, he noted. “We need to provide tools for those systems
to be integrated into the air space. ... There is additional work to do in exploring
opportunities with UCAVs.”
Unproven technologies such as UCAVs, said Weatherington, should be developed
in a “sensible, deliberate and structured manner so we don’t flood
the war fighter with capability he doesn’t understand how to use or can’t
integrate into his current force structure.”
Each UAV, for example, has different communications systems. That must change,
said Weatherington. “It’s unreasonable to assume that we will build
dedicated communications systems for each UAV system. We need a high degree
of commonality and integration.”
The integration of UAVs into a common architecture, he said, is “one
of the largest issues we have to wrestle with. ... We cannot operate these as
single platforms that are out there doing their own thing,” he stressed.
“It is an absolute necessity to integrate UCAVs with the larger class
of unmanned systems, with manned and space systems.”
Another vexing matter is the upward spiraling costs of UAVs. “One of
our top goals is to develop better tools and procedures to define and manage
the cost of these systems,” he said.
Aircraft themselves are not expensive, but the electronics onboard command
steep prices. In most UAVs in operation today, the sensors and payloads account
for 50 percent of the cost. One way to help curb those costs is by standardizing
the electronics across all families of UAVs, so production runs could be made
more efficient, he said.
“There is a greater opportunity for common sensor and platform development
that can be shared across a wider UAV class,” said Weatherington. “It’s
not effective to spend hundreds of millions of dollars developing a sensor system
that we can only put on a few vehicles.”
The most compelling mechanism for lowering prices, however, is aggressive industry
competition. “Competition is one of the key aggregates the Defense Department
believes we have to control cost in the systems,” he said.
That is the reason why the Defense Department gave the Navy additional funds
to bring a new competitor into the UCAV program, Weatherington said. The Navy’s
UCAV only had one contractor, Northrop Grumman Corp. A second company, Boeing,
will join the program. Boeing is the prime contractor for the Air Force UCAV,
the X-45. Weatherington said he also would like to see more competition in the
Air force UCAV project. “Getting competition back into the Air Force side
is a very high priority for the UCAV joint program office.”
The UCAV joint program office is a new organization scheduled to begin operations
in October 2003. It will combine several programs, such as the Navy and Air
Force UCAVs, as well as the Army’s unmanned combat rotorcraft project.
The JPO will be modeled after the Joint Strike Fighter program.
Weatherington dismissed the notion that by creating a joint program office,
the Defense Department is sending a message that it does not trust the services
to manage their own programs. “It is not a matter of trust,” he
said. Practicality is the main reason why this office makes sense. “Many
of the technologies cross service boundaries. So they need OSD coordination.”
In the past, said Weatherington, “We have not done the best job maintaining
competition in UAV systems. ... We were trying to demonstrate the capability
with less of a focus on cost. Now, we demonstrated that UAVs can do a lot of
missions, and they need to be managed just like any other acquisition system.”
Throughout all UAV programs, he said, “We need to apply all the cost-control
methods that we applied to other more traditional systems. One of those methods
is competition.”
As the joint UCAV office takes shape, he said, “Expect to see additional
efforts by OSD and the services to use competition in a much greater role.”
The Defense Department, he asserted, “wants, needs, desires competition
within the UCAV joint program office. That is a very high priority in the development
of this JPO.”
The technologies that the Air Force and the Navy desire for UCAVs are similar,
Weatherington said. Some components also could apply to the Army’s unmanned
combat aircraft, called UCAR. “We made a conscious effort to include the
Army in those discussions very early,” he said. “We believe there
is a high degree of commonality at least in the back end of these systems, and
some vehicle technologies.”
Software Standards
Without offering details, Weatherington said that OSD plans to expand the competition
for UAV work to a larger field of contractors by introducing technical standards
that could be applied industry-wide. These standards—mostly related to
software—would make it easier for companies that are not in the UAV business
to participate. The idea is to “open up development competition in segments
of traditional UAV programs that haven’t seen a lot of competition before,”
he said.
Weatherington could not disclose specifics about the standards or how they
will be implemented. “OSD expects that, once the standards are produced,
each service will go to JITC [Joint Interoperability Testing Center] to certify
that they meet the standards. Once standards are published, there should be
more competition for a broader range of systems.” As of last month, he
said, his office had distributed “draft standards” to the services.
Existing UAVs, however, are likely to be exempt from meeting new standards,
he said. “Current systems will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.”
UAV programs that will have to comply with these standards, said Weatherington,
include the UCAV, the Navy’s broad-area surveillance program (called BAMS)
and the Navy-Marine vertical takeoff UAV.
He warned that these standards will not be a “new invention” but
rather a modified version of the Navy’s tactical control system (TCS),
now in development. The OSD standards will be “a lift out of TCS, with
some tweaks,” he said.
The TCS program office already is working to modify the system to meet OSD
joint standards, officials said.
“Today, we have a dedicated command-and-control system for virtually
every UAV system we developed,” said Weatherington. “Clearly, that
will not work in the future.”
He anticipated that the command-and-control air-vehicle standard will be a
TCS-type system. However, “I do not foresee that TCS will become the broad
service requirement that supports everybody.” OSD’s job, said Weatherington,
is to “define the interoperability standard and leave it up to the services
how to incorporate that standard. ... Certainly, TCS could be an option for
the other services.”
Leading the OSD standards effort is a team with representatives from the office
of the assistant secretary of defense for C3I and the Joint Forces Command.
The influx of funds into the UAV accounts (expected to grow by $500 million
a year during the next six years) are not necessarily an indication that unmanned
systems are silver bullets, Weatherington noted.
“UAVs are not a panacea,” he said. “They are not going to
take over every mission area. They are not in the near-term or long-term going
to meet every user requirement.”
A firmer prediction is that UAVs will complement existing military hardware.
“We have invested huge assets in space and manned systems,” he said.
“We are just not going to throw those out wholesale, because a new UAV
technology offers us some opportunity to replace them.”
UCAVs are unlikely to replace F/A-22 fighters, but, in the future, they could
“provide options for decision makers.”
For the most part, he added, “You will see OSD emphasis on those mission
areas that present a high risk to human life or areas where we have operational
deficiencies in our current force structure, and UAVs offer us an opportunity
to move a new system at a relatively low cost.” In the long term, “You
will continue to see significant OSD attention at the budget level to provide
stable and in some cases increased funding for these programs.”
Weatherington’s office also will be focusing on UAV reliability problems.
The UAV accident rate is about 100 times as high as manned aircraft. Overall,
about one-third of the losses are due to engine failures. Another 20 percent
result from communications and human interaction problems. But for the most
part, the high attrition rate is attributed to war planners taking higher risks,
because they are not putting any human lives on the line. “Some of that
loss rate is a factor of having an unmanned system and be willing to risk it,”
he said.
Weatherington said he is hopeful that the Federal Aviation Administration eventually
will allow military UAVs to “file and fly” on short notice, rather
than require case-by-case clearances in order to fly in restricted air space.
“We have been engaged with the FAA for four years in demonstration projects,”
said Weatherington. “Military UAVs have been flying in restricted air
space for 20 years.” The ability to “file and fly” UAVs on
the same day, by 2005, is one of top 12 goals in the latest UAV “roadmap”
that the Defense Department released last month.