Some Much Needed Upgrades For This UAV Generation
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For the current generation of unmanned systems to survive in contested environments, they need upgrades to situational awareness, automation and weapons, a major U.S. Air Force research project has found.
The conclusions come from the latest round of studies by the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board (SAB), an independent federal advisory committee made up of 50 scientists and researchers who every year drill down on a series of topics the service has asked them to consider.
According to Defense News, the study mentions the use of radar warning systems, new munitions and communications gear to allow operations in GPS-denied situations would give the two backbones of the unmanned intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) fleets new life in contested environments. The benefits would involve limited impact on operations for the UAVs, which are in high demand in the field. Adding the new gear should also have limited impact on how the systems fly during operations.
While the hardware upgrades can boost performance with little development, software upgrades could have an even larger impact on the effectiveness of the systems. Automation is one area the SAB explored, in particular if there are tasks such as automatic queuing that could alleviate stress on the operator.
Developing modeling and simulation software solutions is the only way to design the tactics, techniques and procedures used by UAV operators in a contested environment, the study concluded. It’s the kind of development that should have happened years before, but the nontraditional way the unmanned systems were developed and pushed into the field meant that no one ever sat down and did the groundwork to model all potential scenarios.
