This document presents the Department of Defense’s (DoD) roadmap for developing and employing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) over the next 25 years (2000 to 2025). It describes the missions identified by theater warfighters to which UAVs could be applied, and couples them to emerging capabilities to conduct these missions. A series of Moore’s Law-style trends are developed to forecast technological growth over this period in the key areas of propulsion, sensor, data link, and information processing capabilities. The result is a roadmap of capability-enhancing opportunities plotted against the life spans of current and projected UAVs. It is a map of opportunities, not point designs - a descriptive, not a prescriptive, future for UAVs.
This study does not necessarily imply future officially sanctioned programs, planning, or policy. Further, the conclusions at the end of this study (section 6.5) are not currently funded or programmed within the military Services’ plans. This section is not direction to any DoD organization to pursue any specific course of action. It is merely intended to highlight opportunities in the broad areas of technology, operations, and organizations, that the Services, industry, or other UAV-related organizations may wish to consider when developing plans and budgets for future UAV activity.
The U.S. military has a long and continuous history of involvement with UAVs, stretching back to the Sperry/Curtiss N-9 of 1917. UAVs have had active roles in the Vietnam conflict (3435 sorties), Persian Gulf War (over 520 sorties), and in the ongoing Balkan operations, providing critical reconnaissance in each. With recent technologies allowing more capability per pound, today’s UAVs are more sophisticated than ever. As the military’s recent operational tempo has increased, so too has the employment of UAVs. Over the past decade, the Department of Defense has invested over $3 billion in UAV development, procurement, and operations, and will likely invest over $4 billion in the coming decade. Today, the DoD has 90 UAVs in the field. By 2010, this inventory is programmed to grow to 290, with UAVs performing a wider variety of missions than just reconnaissance.
New capabilities projected for UAVs over the next 25 years include:
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Silent flight as fuel cells supplant internal combustion engines in some systems.
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60 percent gains in endurance due to increasingly efficient turbine engines.
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Rotorcraft capable of high speeds (400+ kts) or long endurance (24+ hrs) while retaining the ability to hover.
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Endurance UAVs serving as GPS pseudo-satellites and airborne communications nodes to provide theater and tactical users with better connectivity, clearer reception, and reduced vulnerability to jamming.
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Faster cruise missile targeting due to more precise terrain mapping by high altitude UAVs.
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Significantly speedier information availability to warfighters through onboard real-time processing, higher data rates, and covert transmission.
The advantages offered by UAVs to the military commander are numerous and often subject to debate. These advantages accrue most noticeably in certain mission areas, commonly categorized as “the dull, the dirty, and the dangerous.” In an era of decreasing force size, UAVs are force multipliers that can increase unit effectiveness. For example, due to its vantage point and multiple sensors, one hovering unmanned sentry could cover the same area as ten (or more) human sentries (“the dull”). The threat of nuclear, biological, or chemical (NBC) attacks on the U.S. or its military forces abroad will likely remain a key national security concern for the next 25 years, prompting the need for means to conduct operations in their aftermath. UAVs could reconnoiter contaminated areas without risk to human life1 (“the dirty”). In a climate more demanding of lossless engagement, UAVs can assume the riskier missions and prosecute the most heavily defended targets. Unaccompanied combat UAVs (UCAVs) could perform the high-risk suppression of enemy air defenses (SEAD) missions currently flown by accompanied EA-6s or F-16s (“the dangerous”). In such a role, UAVs would be potent force multipliers, directly releasing aircraft for other sorties.
Finally, and most fiercely debated, is the potential cost advantage offered by UAVs. Serious comparisons of manned versus unmanned system acquisition costs tend to show little advantage for the latter (the adjusted costs for reaching first flight for the U-2 in 1955 and the RQ-4/Global Hawk in 1998 were roughly the same). Likewise, any savings in procurement costs cited for UAVs by deleting the cockpit, its displays, and survival gear is typically offset by the cost of similar equipment in the UAV ground element. However, with innovative concepts of operation, UAVs may offer increased efficiencies in operations and support costs due to the reduced need to actually fly pilot proficiency and continuation training sorties. Such reductions in UAV O&S costs offer the potential for life cycle cost savings if adopted and managed correctly within the overall weapon system tasking tempo directed by the Defense Planning Guidance.
UAVs will play a major role in the increasingly dynamic battle control that will evolve in the 21st century. There will be micro air vehicles as well as behemoths. UAVs will stay airborne for weeks or months and longer, fly at hypersonic speeds, sense data in revolutionary ways, and communicate their data at unprecedented rates. Challenges, such as providing an adequate C3 infrastructure to capitalize on unmanned as well as manned operations, remain to be overcome. However, the decisions made now will lay the foundation for how far and how fast these advances are implemented. Only our imagination will limit the potential of UAVs in the 21st century.
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