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USAFE chief: Don’t rely on UAVs

The Air Force’s top officer in Europe has a strong message for supporters of unmanned aircraft: Remotely piloted planes won’t be as effective in future wars as they are in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Gen. Roger Brady, outgoing commander of U.S. Air Forces in Europe, laid out the limitations of unmanned aerial systems and pumped up manned aircraft in a no-holds-barred speech to more than 500 military leaders, engineers, scholars and UAS manufacturers.

Brady acknowledged that UAS play a key role in combat and will play even a bigger part in the service someday, but warned the Air Force must include manned aircraft in its future as well.

“In this debate, the burden of proof, in my opinion, is on the proponents of UAS,” he told the unmanned proponents, all attending a UAS conference July 29 and 30 in suburban Washington. “We know the advantages and disadvantages of manned aircraft. Technology must deliver, not merely promise to deliver, the same level of competence in UAS that we have learned to place in manned aircraft.”

A future war will be fought in contested airspace, where today’s UAS can’t perform well because of maneuverability and stealth limitations, he said.

To make his point, Brady cited the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, when 15 of the 17 allied fixed-wing aircraft shot down by Serbian air defense were drones.

“In contested airspace — a more plausible scenario for future conflicts — today’s UAS would be extremely vulnerable,” he said.

Another major vulnerability of UAS is their heavy reliance on a data link — much of it carried by commercial means and lacking a central oversight.

The data link can be “easily interrupted,” Brady said, though he declined to go into detail.

The ability of an unmanned aircraft to return to its launch point when the data link is interrupted isn’t always reliable. About a year ago, an MQ-9 Reaper flying over Afghanistan lost its connection with its pilot in the U.S. and had to be shot down by an F-15E Strike Eagle before it flew into Tajikistan.

Such interruptions, Brady added, are “sometimes because we stumble over extension cords and because people are messing with us.”

“I am increasingly concerned as a combatant commander and as the guy who’s responsible portion for this a significant portion of this link regarding its vulnerability,” he said. “It’s a concern that grows as we move forward in this area of asymmetrical engagement.

“Why would an enemy directly oppose a multimillion aircraft when he can disrupt it by using $30 of pieces and parts from a RadioShack?”

The cost of operating UAS — viewed by many as cheaper to maintain than fighters — can balloon because of the large number of airmen required to fly and maintain them, he said.

An MQ-1 Predator system of four drones, a ground-control station and the satellite link costs $20 million; an MQ-9 Reaper system runs $53.5 million. But each need about 10 pilots to maintain a 24-hour orbit, and personnel costs are becoming a larger share of the Air Force budget.

Nonetheless, autonomous systems are the direction the Air Force is taking, according to a long-term science outlook released in mid-July. In “Technology Horizons,” the service’s top scientist, Werner Dahm, writes that machines will increasingly operate with little or no human interaction.

In a briefing with reporters, Dahm admitted cultural hurdles will be difficult to overcome.

Brady said that the service’s future reliance on unmanned systems will hinge on trust. Most people, he said, would not want unmanned aircraft to carry President Obama or transport and deliver nuclear weapons.

“Would you not want the advantage of the human brain making not just decisions but judgments in our most critical cockpits?” he said.

“In these scenarios, a most-of-the-time solution will not be acceptable. What we must not do is allow fascination with technology to lure us away from decision-making fundamentals.”