Global Security and Intelligence Studies Volume 1, Number 1, Fall 2015 | Page 13

Global Security and Intelligence Studies
the advantages. Considering that the U.S. Air Force is the primary provider of
UAVs to the joint commander, this study will approach the costs and benefits of
UAV innovation through an Air Force core missions framework: air superiority;
intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR); rapid global mobility; global
strike; and command and control (C2).
Air-to-Air Combat UAVs
Today’s UAV plays essentially no role in air superiority. From an aircraft design
perspective, UAVs have the potential to be far superior air-to-air fighters than
a manned aircraft. Optimization of manned fighter maneuverability is limited
by the weight needed to support a human: life support systems, an ejection seat, the
control interface, and backup systems. Moreover, high maneuverability fighters have a
limiter on maximum G-forces to prevent the pilot from blacking out. The design of the
UAV is not constrained by these limitations. However, to conduct air-to-air missions,
new UAV designs would need to make significant upgrades in radar, weapons, and
defensive countermeasures. If the UAV could be made inexpensively and en masse,
perhaps the defensive countermeasures could be overlooked. To dogfight in a visual
engagement, major improvements in pilot field-of-view would be necessary. The most
significant challenge for a design with these additional capabilities would be meeting
the challenge for additional bandwidth.
While the bandwidth challenge could be overcome with fully autonomous UAVs,
near-term adoption of fully autonomous UAVs for lethal combat missions is unlikely
in the near term due to concerns over ethics, the quality of target discrimination, and
Air Force cultural resistance. Air-to-air target discrimination is technically feasible
(Byrnes 2014, 48-75). It is far less complex than air-to-ground target discrimination.
Even so, to negate ethical and target discrimination concerns, the actual decision to
destroy a target could be reserved for a command center such as the Combined Air
Operations Center (CAOC) or Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS). The
autonomous UAV would simply be responsible for executing the attack mission given
to it by the command center. From a target discrimination perspective, this is not
significantly different from a fighter firing a long-range missile beyond visual range
after AWACS declares a target hostile and authorizes engagement.
The proliferation of mass numbers of UAVs necessitates adoption of increasingly
semiautonomous UAVs for noncomplex flight operations. Defense companies are
working on UAVs with multi-day loiter times. These exponential increases in loiter
times will require an increasing reliance on semiautonomous navigation. However,
automating the mission and the sensor operator will be a far more difficult challenge.
Semiautonomous flight operations will enable a single pilot to control multiple aircraft.
UAVs spend a considerable amount of time transiting to/from and orbiting over the
target. These simple maneuvers can easily be executed by current autopilot technology.
Of course, such an implementation would limit the flexibility and responsiveness of
the UAVs.
6