With at least 138 military unmanned aircraft in production today, it is imperative
for the Defense Department to enforce common standards for the operation, command
and control of these vehicles, said an industry study completed last month.
In particular, Air Force officials worry that, as more UAVs from every service
join the battle, it will become increasingly difficult to manage and coordinate
air combat operations, because each UAV system comes with its own unique software
and mission-control stations. Keeping trained operators and maintainers for
each system also drives up the cost of UAV operations.
These concerns prompted the Air Force deputy chief of staff for war-fighting
integration to seek recommendations from major UAV platform manufacturers on
how best to achieve a “plug-and-play architecture” that would allow
multiple unmanned aircraft, sensors, mission control and ground stations to
work in a common network.
The study group, organized by the National Defense Industrial Association,
had 104 representatives from companies in the UAV business, including Boeing,
General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and
Raytheon.
The study concluded that, “UAV stovepipes are the biggest barriers to
interoperability, but new standards and tools will help break down cultural
mindsets, organizational turf and industry point solutions.”
So far, “we have not found anyone in the UAV industry who is moving toward
architecture commonality,” the study said. Contractors would support any
mandated interoperability standards, but they also would expect the Defense
Department to enforce compliance strictly across the board. “Most of the
architecture requirements for UAV commonality are being defined today, but compliance
with them is not being mandated,” the study said. “Industry cannot
support that commitment without government intervention.”
Joint, interoperable UAV systems must become the norm for operational planning,
training and exercises, the report noted. The Defense Department must take action
sooner, rather than later, to enforce standards—or “building codes”—before
the problem gets worse.
“The Air Operations Center is becoming inundated with a proliferation
of ‘tribal’ stovepipes requiring ‘tribal’-unique training,
configuration-unique electronics and software, and an ever-increasing AOC bandwidth
load and ground station logistics footprint,” the industry group wrote.
“The introduction of a new UAV into a theater of operations should not
require a new, separate mission control station.” A universal UAV architecture
is achievable, “but will not be affordable unless managed properly.”
Organizational resistance to change is easily the most intractable obstacle,
according to the study, but continued pressure from top management and financial
penalties for “stove-piping” should help bring about change in the
long term.
The group recommended that the Defense Department designate a single office
to be in charge of mandating commonality within UAV programs, as well as the
budget authority to enforce standards.
Further, the Joint Requirements Oversight Council and the Defense Acquisition
Board should “disapprove any UAV program that does not pass the commonality
test.”
The plug-and-play approach to UAV development will “fundamentally transform
UAV operations,” the study said. “Every UAV manufacturer will be
affected. Every user, operator and trainer will be affected.”
More than likely, there will be resistance to changing the status quo. “Everyone
who sees commonality as a threat to their turf is going to fight this. Commonality
will have to be top-down directed and supported,” said the study.
Making things simpler—and cheaper—is “not the natural order
in a bureaucracy. Somebody has to be in charge, with the authority and resources
to do the job.”
Regardless of what the mandated standards are, the industry would like for
the Defense Department to work with UAV contractors early in the requirements
process. One of the top concerns for the industry is the protection of sensitive
company technology.
“In the absence of strong industry incentives to do so, the benefits
do not in themselves justify corporate commitment to commonality, at the expense
of corporate proprietary information,” the study said.
Contractors said they would like for the Defense Department to make the UAV
architecture requirements available to industry as early in the concept development
process as possible. The companies’ performance would be gauged based
on how they implement commonality, the study recommended.
Concepts, Operations
A common UAV architecture is achievable, the study said, but it requires “direction,
CONOPS [concept of operations], time and money.”
The concepts of operations for UAVs are likely to evolve over time. For that
reason, the architecture should be flexible to allow changes in the configuration,
payload and network features. Hardware-independent software and commercial network
architectures can make this easier to achieve.
“UAV system flexibility will pay large dividends,” the study said.
“Communications is the ‘long pole’ and will determine CONOPS
and system options that will be available.”
A top-level architecture can be common, but must fit within the concept of
operations.
Standards are needed for air-vehicle command-and-control interfaces, which
tend to be unique to each UAV type.
According to the study, UAV concepts of operations are inconsistent in their
approach to C2 interfaces. Because specific C2 requirements have not been formalized,
UAV manufacturers have proprietary data concerns, making them less likely to
push for compatibility with other systems. Further, C2 interface training is
different for each UAV.
A similar problem applies to the data that UAVs collect and disseminate. Imagery
products use common standards, but most other information exchange is non-standard.
Mechanisms for communicating with payloads are unique for almost all existing
platforms, the study noted. Additionally, no standard data format exists for
C2 messages. “Tasking is disjointed for all payloads—there is no
standard method in the AOC for making generic requests for information.”
In the area of logistics and support, much remains to be done to make UAVs
interoperable, the study concluded. UAV systems should be able to operate out
of the same bases, use the same logistics resources and perform the same mission
planning, launch, servicing and recovery.
“There is no natural, economic or legislated force driving UAV manufacturers
toward logistics or support commonality,” the study said. Specific elements
that could be standardized for all UAVs are technical publications and manuals,
training programs, maintenance, mission planning and vehicle-health management.
Despite the lack of commonality in many areas, however, the study pointed out
that several initiatives already are under way to make service-unique systems
interoperable and technologies more standardized. These include:
UAV Roadmap
UAV commonality is one of the goals listed in the Defense Department’s
“Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Roadmap (2002-2027),” published a year
ago.
According to the document, “interoperability among UAV systems is critical
in order to reduce acquisition costs, share sensor data among disparate users,
ease issues of operational and tactical control, allow common operational procedures
and reduce training requirements.”
Historically, attempts at UAV interoperability originated primarily in the
intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance domain by establishing standards,
the roadmap said. “Thus, the elements of the technical architecture were
developed in the absence of an operational architecture.” To achieve UAV
interoperability, “standardization is required in the regimes of situational
awareness, control, tasking, collection, processing and dissemination.”
In an ideal world, “operational and systems architectures would be defined
for UAVs,” the roadmap said. But, in all likelihood, each different class
of UAVs (large, medium and small) will have its own interoperability requirements
to “accommodate the different operational thrusts of each UAV class and
to recognize the accompanying design constraints.” Each class of UAVs
would become “totally interoperable, while maintaining some appropriate
degree of interoperability between UAV classes.”
The roadmap proposes that the OSD, Joint Staff and JFCOM work together to develop
an “overarching UAV joint operational concept and joint operational architecture.
... Budgetary authority must be established to work standards concurrently with
the technology.”
Acquisition programs developing new technologies, the roadmap said, “must
be made responsible for developing and coordinating appropriate standards to
ensure interoperability.”
A UAV Standards Working Group will evaluate each Defense Department UAV program
on an annual basis for standards compliance. This IPT will provide recommendations
to Pentagon, Joint Staff and JFCOM officials for specific UAV programs. These
recommendations, the roadmap suggested, would then be used in the annual service
budget evaluations to make any proposed adjustments.