While small UAVs are proving their value on the battlefield in Ukraine for ISR and attack, there is an ongoing drive for larger, longer range UAS and ‘loyal wingmen’.
The current focus on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is being underscored by the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine. This has triggered significant purchases of unmanned systems by European NATO member nations including Poland and Romania.
The Teal Group estimates that worldwide military unmanned aerial system (UAS) production will exceed $162.2 billion over the next decade and it will grow rapidly from $12.1 billion in 2023 to $16.4 billion in 2032. In addition, research and development (R&D) will total $72.5 billion over the period, with more than 60 percent of that coming from the United States.
The global military UAV market remains dominated by the United States and Israel but they are being seriously challenged by China, and even more so by Turkey.
The US will account for 71.9 percent of the unclassified R&D spending on UAV technology over the next decade, and about 34 percent of the unclassified procurement through the forecast decade. By including Teal Group estimates of ‘black’ programmes the US accounts for 81.3 percent of world R&D on UAVs and 39.3 percent of the procurement.
The market is being driven by costly high-altitude, long-endurance (HALE) systems, low-cost Chinese exports, demand for armed UAVs, the development of the next generation of unmanned combat systems, and potential new applications such as missile defence. Over the ten-year period, Teal Group estimates that Medium-Altitude Long-Endurance (MALE) UAVs will be the largest production type measured by value. Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicles (UCAVs) will surpass MALE systems in annual production value in the middle of the forecast period.
It is clear that UAVs are already being used on the frontline of military operations, varying in size and scale, but each playing a vital operational role, from tiny handheld surveillance drones (some modified to drop grenades or small bombs) to large-scale remotely controlled UAVs with large payload capacity. Looking forward, the next key phase in UAV development will be autonomously operated air vehicles such as the Boeing Loyal Wingman project aircraft, the MQ-28A Ghost Bat, capable of both flying alongside manned aircraft for support and performing autonomous missions independently using artificial intelligence (AI).
This concept has recently been highlighted by the United States Air Force (USAF) Secretary Frank Kendall who announced in March 2023 an overhaul of USAF modernisation into an “operational imperative” (OI) model, outlining several mission areas that need investment. The most notable is the creation of the Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) programme, creating up to 1,000 autonomous UAVs that can work as unmanned ‘loyal wingman’ systems that will fly alongside the Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) platform to provide additional sensing, electronic warfare and weapons. For this, the USAF is requesting two new funded projects: $68 million to begin Project Viper Experimentation and Next-Gen Operations Model (VENOM), and $72 million for an Experimental Operations Unit (EOU), along with $394 million for autonomous platform development.
Project Venom
The aim of Project VENOM will be to help work autonomy into more routine testing as well as refine what is expected of the aircraft developed under the CCA programme. The initiative will outfit six Lockheed Martin F-16s from with autonomy agents that a human pilot will experiment with in flight. The aim of the project will allow the USAF to assess how it can best bridge autonomous and crewed formations while building trust in the autonomy.
These unmanned systems could carry out a variety of missions, including striking targets, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR), or electronic warfare (EW). The USAF envisions that they will be less expensive than manned aircraft, and in some cases being cheap enough that the service could afford to lose them in combat.
Kendall stressed that adopting ‘loyal wingmen’ will not mean the USAF will have fewer manned fighter aircraft in its inventory. Instead, he said, CCAs can be thought of as remotely controlled versions of the targeting or EW pods or weapons that manned aircraft now carry.
However, it has the be recognised that for many years, the USAF has struggled with a modest training budget to teach fighter pilots to battle large numbers of advanced aircraft. Now the service is seeing whether the answer could lie in the previously untapped potential of UAVs.
In 2022 the USAF awarded North Carolina-based Blue Force Technologies (BFT) an initial $9 million contract to develop unmanned air vehicles optimised for adversary air missions.
The effort, which Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) dubbed the Bandit programme, called for BFT to mature its UAV design known as Fury over the next 12 months, culminating in a critical design review and ground testing of the aircraft’s engine. If successful, the company could win additional contract options to build and flight test up to four drones. The goal is “to develop an unmanned platform that looks like a fifth-generation adversary with similar vehicle capabilities,” said Alyson Turri, who manages the Bandit programme.
In January 2023, BFT conducted a ground test for Fury performed in collaboration with AFRL, which successfully validated the performance of Fury’s novel carbon fibre composite propulsion flow-path system. BFT president Scott Bledsoe said: “On an unmanned fighter like Fury, proper integration of propulsion flow-path is the most significant design driver for overall vehicle.
“It was crucial to us to demonstrate, prior to building flight-test aircraft, that we could correctly predict interaction between propulsion flow-path components and Williams International engine.”
The test saw the BFT and AFRL team carry out a time-accurate ‘computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis’, using comprehensive computational resources from the US Army Engineer Research and Development Centre and AFRL. Alyson Turri said: “After making engine selection in June 2022, the AFRL and BFT team worked to finalise test objectives and procedures concurrently with BFT’s hardware build to ensure this full-scale test came together in under six months.”
These widened deployment options are completely in line with the US Air Force Agile Combat Employment (ACE) initiative that ultimately aims to “reduce the number of airmen in harm’s way in austere environments.
Just Dropping In
Europe has also been looking to the future of advanced UAV capabilities and operations. In February 2023 Germany’s Bundeswehr and Airbus jointly carried out the world’s first successful launch and operation of a Remote Carrier (RC) flight test demonstrator from a flying Airbus A400M which was developed in just six months.
For the test flight, the UAV was loaded onto the ramp of a Bundeswehr A400M, from which the RC demonstrator, a modified Airbus Do-DT25 drone, was launched. After the release, the Do-DT25’s engines were started and it continued in powered flight mode. The crew on board the A400M then handed over control to an operator on the ground, who safely commanded and landed the drone.
Remote Carriers will be an important component of European Future Combat Air System (FCAS) which will consist of a Next-Generation Weapon System (NGWS) as well as other air assets in the future operational battlespace. They will fly in close co-operation with manned aircraft as ‘Loyal Wingmen’ and support pilots in their tasks and missions. Military transport aircraft such as the A400M will play a role as mothership, to bring the RCs as close as possible to their areas of operation before releasing up to 50 small, or up to 12 heavy Remote Carriers. These will then join manned aircraft, operating with a high degree of automation although always under a pilot’s control.
As the use of UAVs grows, so does the need for the capability of conducting safe landings under emergency or contingency conditions. The European Defence Agency (EDA) is funding a project developed by two European companies, GMV Innovating Solutions and Aertec Solutions, to investigate ways to autonomously crash-land an Remotely Piloted Aircraft (RPA) in emergency situations, where the command-and-control data link is lost, avoiding the risk of the RPA falling on urban or populated areas
The Safe Autonomous Flight Termination (SAFETERM) system seeks to allow Medium Altitude Long Endurance (MALE) drones and large tactical RPAs to harness Artificial Intelligence (AI) to develop this capability. The EDA project, which was completed and demonstrated in June 2022, aims to help further develop the technology for automatic recognition and autonomous decision-making of safe areas to land or crash-land. Standardisation and certification of such technology will be central to its wider use.
The safety aspect of operating UAVs is also being addressed. Currently, safe flight terminations by UAVs are based on pre-programmed procedures, so that if the link with command and control is lost, they can automatically follow a contingency flight plan and proceed to a designated landing area.
In the event of the UAV having an additional failure, the EDA has developed a hardware and software suite that can identify features on the ground, using the onboard visible and infrared camera sensors, called SAFETERM. The system’s machine-learning algorithms can assess the data collected by the sensors, detect and classify the ground area around the UAV and assess the most suitable areas for an automatic controlled emergency landing. It’s basically pattern recognition, and so colour-coded areas can be safe or unsafe for landing. Areas in blue or green that are relatively safe and areas in red or orange are to be avoided, all of which is done autonomously by the UAV.
For the trials, the consortium used a TARSIS 75 fixed-wing UAV, manufactured by Aertec. The EDA project culminated with a real in-flight demonstration of the autonomous capability, delivering a hardware and software package with a Technology Readiness Level (TRL), a measurement system used to assess the maturity level of a particular technology of five to six which meant that it needed further testing in different environments to ensure that the hardware and software is fool-proof.
The inexorable growth of UAVs in defence means the sustainment of these military assets is also firmly under the spotlight, especially given their increasing complexity and operational importance. The support issues include lifecycle sustainment, repair and maintenance, training and obsolescence management, all of which will require next-generation software for planned, and unplanned scenarios using advanced analytics and forecasting.
by David Oliver
