By Marina Malenic
The Air Force is developing a sensor for its MQ-9 Reaper unmanned aerial system (UAS) that is eventually expected to provide up to 30 times the surveillance capability of the sensor on its MQ-1 Predator drone, the director for Air Force intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities said last week.
“We’re going to integrate on the Reaper a thing that we’re just cooking up now,” Brig. Gen. Blair Hansen told Defense Daily during a Sept. 19 interview at the Pentagon. “It’s called the Wide-Area Airborne Surveillance sensor,” or WAAS.
The first-generation WAAS is expected to weigh approximately 1,500 pounds, which would make it too heavy to be flown on the Predator or the Army’s MQ-1 variant, the Sky Warrior, according to Hansen. He said the system will initially provide 12 pre-programmable “sub-views” as well as a main full-motion video.
“Within about 18 months, we’re going to have the ability to go to 30 sub-views,” he added. “That will be a powerful leap as you look at UAS capabilities. We expect that to be done and fielded in FY-2010.”
The fiscal year 2008 supplemental budget request contained $43 million for WAAS development, according to Air Force briefing documents provided to Defense Daily.
Hansen said WAAS will also be adapted to the RQ-4 Global Hawk and could be flown on non-ISR platforms as well someday.
“There may be a time that we need to load that on an F-16 or a C-130 or some other kind of airplane,” he explained.
Senior Pentagon officials, including Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Michael Mullen, have pressed the services–and in particular the Air Force–to provide more ISR capability to soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan (Defense Daily, June 4). Defense Secretary Robert Gates last month approved a $2.2 billion package of ISR initiatives (Defense Daily, Aug. 14).
Hansen said the Air Force is responding as quickly as it can.
“We’re focused on the current fight and getting stuff in there–as fast as we can, as much as we can,” he said.
For example, the Air Force has accelerated Predator air combat patrols (CAPs) four times over the past 12 months. This acceleration led to the service meeting its Predator program of record of 21 CAPs two years early. The overall result has been increase of full-motion-video collection, analysis and dissemination via Predator by 300 percent in the last two years, according to Air Force briefing documents.
In addition, initial Reaper deployment occurred in July–one full year ahead of schedule (Defense Daily, July 25). The service plans to redirect fiscal year 2008 and 2009 supplemental requests from MQ-1 to MQ-9 procurement, according to the briefing documents.
Further, the Air Force has increased high-altitude airborne ISR collection–both through U-2 and Global Hawk missions–by 500 percent in the last two years.
“Nobody saw this coming, in terms of the demand,” Hansen said.
“The execution part of what’s going on today in the desert is a very low-level fight,” he explained. “Insurgency by its nature is an environment in which the tactic has a strategic effect. So the ability to know an incredible amount about your environment…that requires a huge synchronization of assets… which allows the maximum knowledge to get right down to the squad leader level.”
Hansen added that the Pentagon wants to field ISR collection systems “as fast as they can be built and bought.”
Further, the effort to train operators has also been redoubled. Just last week, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Norton Schwartz announced a new UAS pilot training initiative, as well as the creation of a unique career field for those operators (Defense Daily, Sept. 17).
Hansen said the Air Force is also looking to the future by exploring alternative ISR platforms such as aerostats and high-altitude airships.
“There’s a lot of potential in high-altitude airships,” he said. “Now that may sound wacky–we’re almost back to the future in the dirigible business. But the benefit is persistence,” he added, “and if you can put one high enough, you may be able to obviate most threats.”
UAS force protection will also likely become a concern at some point in the future, Hansen said.
“We’ve got to think about new kinds of vehicles. We’ve got to figure out how to enter the anti-access environment,” he said. “The current fight doesn’t drive that. It’s something to think about as we look more broadly” at the future.
“There are other things out there that industry is turning on and that we think are important in terms of multi-spectrals,” he added. “None of them are in our immediate procurement bucket, but those are the kinds of things that we want to look at.”