The Pilot Who Wasn't There
A new breed of unmanned aircraft soon will be flying into combat.

By Mark Cantrell

In a small town south of Kabul, Afghanistan, on a moonless November night, a group of agitated Middle Eastern men gathered at a hotel. They were members of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network and had fled Kabul two days before.

They had taken great pains to avoid detection by the allies on their southern trek, and they had no idea they were being watched that moment.

Moving quietly through the dark skies above them, a shadowy winged craft beamed live video of the gathering to the United States, where military commanders watched the scene intently. Just before 1 a.m. local time, three F-15 Strike Eagles that had been loitering in the area were moved into position for the kill.

The word was given, and one by one the F-15s roared in and unleashed 2,500-pound GBU-15 smart bombs. As huge explosions rocked the hotel, the unmanned MQ-1 Predator that had been stalking the Taliban convoy launched its two laser-guided Hellfire missiles against the vehicles in the parking lot. Among the dead: Mohammed Atef, al-Qaida's senior military commander and bin Laden's deputy.

The 2001 attack wasn't the first time an air-to-ground missile was fired from an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) — that distinction was earned by the Ryan Firebee drone in the early 1970s — but it was the first successful use of an unmanned attack aircraft in combat. Until recently, UAVs had been used almost exclusively for reconnaissance, but the Predator's success in Iraq and Afghanistan has increased the momentum of a series of futuristic projects that aim to produce a new breed of unmanned aircraft designed for combat: the unmanned combat air vehicle (UCAV).

Unmanned history

The UAV story began even before the Wright brothers took to the air in their 1903 Flyer. In 1896, Professor Samuel Langley, president of the Smithsonian Institution, built an unmanned craft he dubbed Aerodrome No. 5, which managed to cover 3,300 feet on its first flight. Langley's subsequent attempts to build a manned flying machine, however, ended in failure. During World War II, some older B-17s were converted to radio control and stuffed with explosives with the idea of flying them into German V-1 installations, but not a single one ever hit its target. And the Firebee UCAVs were modified in 1971 to launch Maverick missiles against surface-to-air missile sites but never saw combat.

These early efforts always ran into the same problem: the technology simply wasn't ready. But the 1994 Predator, built by General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, proved the UAV's time finally had arrived. The 2,250-pound craft, powered by a snowmobile engine that drives a rear-mounted propeller and has virtually no autonomy, proved an important step in the evolution of unmanned combat vehicles.

Today, the most advanced UAV in America's arsenal is Northrop Grumman's jet-powered RQ-4A Global Hawk, which is much larger than the Predator. Once programmed with its mission parameters, the Global Hawk can take off, remain over its target for more than 24 hours as it gathers intelligence data, return to its air base, and land. Global Hawk flies from waypoint to waypoint under the control of a human operator who guides the vehicle with a computer mouse. The high-flying Global Hawk is used for surveillance and observation, and there are no plans to convert it to combat duty. However, the technological advances engendered by Global Hawk's creation are finding their way into the next generation of UCAVs, which will be truly revolutionary.

Quantum leap

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the research and development organization for DoD, oversees the largest unmanned aviation program in history. The Joint Unmanned Combat Air Systems (J-UCAS) project, a collaborative effort among DARPA, the Air Force, and the Navy, was formed in April 2003 by combining two earlier, separate efforts.

DARPA and the Air Force began one program in 1998, asking four defense contractors — Raytheon, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman — to produce concepts for a next-generation unmanned combat aircraft for the Air Force. Boeing won the development contract for its X-45A the following year, but Northrop Grumman wasn't willing to give up without a fight and took a gamble by building its X-47A Pegasus UCAV at its own expense. In 2000, DARPA and the Navy started another program called UCAV-N, granting both Boeing and Northrop Grumman long-term contracts to study the challenges of designing a large unmanned aircraft to operate from an aircraft carrier.

A year after the creation of J-UCAS, Boeing's X-45A unleashed a 250-pound inert small smart bomb on a truck in the California desert, missing the target by mere inches.

In a press release, Boeing noted the smart bomb had been dropped "under human supervision but without human piloting." In fact, the operator was sitting in a control center some 40 miles from the target.

The opening salvo in the UCAV competition had been fired, and the search for the winning design was on. As a result of lessons learned from Afghanistan, DARPA asked Boeing and Northrop Grumman to make changes to their designs that would allow greater range and loiter capability, resulting in the X-45C and X-47B. In August 2004, DARPA awarded Northrop Grumman a contract worth $1.04 billion over five years that will include the construction of three X-47B aircraft and supporting technology. And in October 2004, Boeing was awarded a $1.06 billion contract for three X-45C craft and mission control elements.

Pack mentality

The most obvious benefit of a UCAV over a manned fighter, bomber, or helicopter is that the pilot and crew are removed from harm's way. If an unmanned craft is lost in combat, there are no tragedies such as the 1993 battle in Mogadishu, Somalia, in which a Black Hawk pilot was captured and 18 Delta Force soldiers were killed. But there are other reasons for the UCAV's popularity at the Pentagon. It's estimated that up to 40 percent of the volume and weight of a combat aircraft is taken up with life-support systems and human-interface devices. Eliminating those constraints enables a UCAV to either be much smaller or carry a larger payload than a conventional aircraft. With more room for fuel, unmanned craft can remain on station much longer. And with no cockpit, a UCAV's shape can be much more stealthy.

At present, UCAVs such as the Predator are lone wolves; pilots remotely fly individual aircraft to their targets, fire their weapons, and guide them back to base. But J-UCAS will introduce a revolutionary new paradigm to the UCAV saga: networked airborne attack. Like German U-boats in World War II, J-UCAS will hunt in packs, but that's where the similarity ends. Each aircraft in a J-UCAS strike force will be in constant communication with the others while keeping its human controller abreast of mission developments. Acting as a cohesive unit will enable the flight group to greatly multiply its force.

Built with advanced low-observable technology, a J-UCAS flight team will be able to penetrate enemy airspace under the most dangerous conditions imaginable, evaluating air defense and other installations and then hitting its targets with internally mounted bombs. Each J-UCAS craft will carry up to 4,500 pounds of ordnance: either 12 small-diameter bombs or two 2,000-pound joint direct attack munitions. With four vehicles in each group, the strike force will be able to instantly triangulate emissions from enemy radar sites and destroy those sites.

"The network-based architecture and operating system software that underpin J-UCAS will enable unique functionality for multi-vehicle collaboration," says Mike Francis, J-UCAS program director. "Coupled with the advanced situation awareness that derives from shared information made available by J-UCAS and other platforms, the system will dynamically reconfigure and adapt to the threat even as the battle unfolds."

Francis also says the aircraft is just one element of the J-UCAS system. "The vehicle portion of J-UCAS, which we call the UCAV, is merely the host around which the system is built," he says. "UCAVs are technologically advanced aircraft, to be sure, but the soul of J-UCAS lies in the command-and-control, sensor, and weapons systems that enable their operation, individually and collectively."

To help satisfy the Pentagon's cost-effectiveness dictum, both the X-45C and X-47B will use a common operating system being developed jointly by Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and other contractors, says Francis. The highly complex software will manage systems and functions not only on the aircraft, but also at their control stations, overseeing command and control, communications management, mission planning, the human systems interface, and much of the system's interactive autonomy.

That autonomy will make the human operator's life much easier, because unlike earlier UAVs that require constant supervision, J-UCAS will fly largely under its own control. Humans will intervene only when necessary or preferred — for example, to provide new mission objectives or authorize lethal use of force. Both J-UCAS teams plan to begin prototype flight testing in 2007, leading to extensive operational evaluations in 2008.

New spin

If creating a computer-controlled, robotic reconnaissance and attack aircraft sounds challenging, just imagine doing it with a rotary-wing vehicle. That's the goal of DARPA's Unmanned Combat Armed Rotorcraft (UCAR) project, which applies the UCAV concept to helicopters for the Army.

Although UCAR Program Manager Don Woodbury admits it's more complicated to field a rotary versus a fixed-wing UCAV, he says it's well within the capabilities of current technology. "Without a pilot to worry about, it's actually not a big deal," he says. "The human doesn't fly either aircraft; they fly themselves."

Woodbury says the program builds on the technology developed for the J-UCAS program with the goal of making UCARs even more autonomous, enabling collaboration between systems and more effective operation in a complex battle space. UCAR's autonomous capabilities will allow a single operator to control a team of UCARs while still conducting a mission, says Woodbury, whether fighting in an Apache helicopter or commanding a unit from a Future Combat Systems command and control vehicle.

As with J-UCAS, the UCAR relies on the old wolf-pack model, as well as another tried-and-true tool: the human voice. "You talk to UCAR, it talks to you," says Woodbury. "As a commander, you give UCAR a top-level instruction much as you would a human pilot, and the system will process those instructions, apportion them out to team members as a series of detailed tasks, and then supervise their execution. The team will send back targetable information in the form of targeting chips."

Those chips are images of possible targets the UCAR transmits to a human commander, who decides if the target is valid and authorizes weapons release. One or several UCARs can be deployed to destroy the target or provide precise targeting coordinates to Army or joint systems. To date, simulations have been performed using the AH-64D Apache Longbow helicopter as a command and control center, but other options include a UH-60L Army Airborne Command and Control System or a commander on the ground.

The UCAR program's genesis dates back to a DARPA-sponsored study that determined the need for a low-altitude system that could precisely identify targets and immediately prosecute them, complementing the capabilities of the Army's Future Combat Systems. DARPA then awarded contracts for conceptual designs in 2002 and chose — or in DARPA lingo, "downselected" — Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman for the preliminary design stage in 2003. The winning team that will build and fly demonstration hardware may be selected by the time you read this.

An important goal of the UCAR program is to reduce operation and support costs, so both teams' designs leverage existing ground support equipment and personnel. Both also use regular heavy aviation fuel, taking advantage of what's available on the battlefield. Unlike current Army UAV systems, such as the Shadow and Hunter, a UCAR doesn't need a launch rail or runway, and it can be shipped to a battlefield in a cargo plane, truck, or ship or even self-deployed. UCARs will be able to fly more than a thousand miles without refueling, and they will require fewer personnel for support operations.

What unmanned systems do best, says Woodbury, are the dull, dirty, or dangerous missions. "Another advantage of unmanned systems is that they're attritable — you can afford to lose one occasionally. The taxpayers may wince, but our soldiers all come home. So you can send them into places where you wouldn't be willing to risk a manned system."

One of those places is the low- and medium-altitude airspace above a battlefield, a killing zone for manned aircraft. But getting in close is the only way to identify the enemy. With UCAR, says Woodbury, "we can fly in low and slow, put our sensors on target, get the resolution we need to make weapons-release decisions, and then prosecute those targets in an immediate, timely manner to support the ground commander. UCAR is the only UAV system in development with the technology that enables effective operation and survival in the Army battle space."

But don't Apache pilots worry that UCARs will take their jobs? "None of the pilots we worked with during the last simulation came back with that perspective," says Woodbury. "They all realized that the only things at risk were the tasks they didn't want to perform. The guys on the team who had flown in combat were the ones who were the most enthusiastic about the UCARs."

"We don't perceive unmanned aerial vehicle systems as a threat to manned aircraft," confirms one operator. "They allow us to be more effective and survivable."

If all goes well, the first UCAR demonstrator aircraft are scheduled to auger their way into the sky in the year 2006, heralding a quantum leap in the history of combat aviation. As the J-UCAS and UCAR advance toward maturity, they're not just working toward the future — they're creating it.