By Marina Malenic
With demonstrations well under way, the Marine Corps is preparing to choose a new unmanned aerial system (UAS) for hauling equipment to maneuvering troops, officials said yesterday.
“We are assessing right now in the Marine Corps warfighting lab what industry has to offer,” said Marine Lt. Col. Brad Beach, unmanned air systems coordinator, department of aviation.
Beach was speaking at a UAS conference in Washington sponsored by Association For Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI).
A Marine Corps request for proposals (RFP) for an “Immediate Cargo Unmanned Aerial System” was issued last spring. The plan calls for an drone aircraft capable of delivering 10 tons of supplies at high altitudes and across a distance of 150 miles within 24 hours. The Marines want to field the new drone this year.
Beach said developing and rapidly fielding a cargo hauler is now more pressing because a Joint Urgent Operational Need has been issued by commanders in the field. “Our goal is to get trucks off the road,” he explained. “The more stuff we can airlift, the fewer people we have maneuvering on the roads in Afghanistan.”
The Marines hope to use cargo drones to reduce the danger and expense of resupplying troops in remote outposts. Ground supply convoys in Afghanistan are vulnerable to roadside bombs and ambushes, and the rough terrain and poor road conditions cause costly damage to trucks over time.
Initial respondents to the Marine Corp’s RFP last year included the Northrop Grumman [NOC] Fire Scout; the Boeing [BA] A160T Hummingbird; the Mist Mobility Integrated Systems Technology (MMIST) SnowGoose; and the Kaman [KAMN] K-MAX intermeshing-rotor helicopter. Last summer, the Marines awarded Boeing $500,000 and Kaman, along with its partner Lockheed Martin [LMT], $860,000 to demonstrate their respective helicopters (Defense Daily, Aug. 14).
The K-MAX is in use in private industry–primarily in logging and construction–as a manned system. Lockheed Martin provides the communication links and the datalinks and interfaces that allow for an unmanned capability.
Naval Air Systems Command is the contracting authority for the project. The Marine Corps Systems Command at Quantico developed the urgent requirement for a cargo-hauling UAV that can resupply troops with provisions and other materials at forward operating bases in Afghanistan.
“Moving 750 pounds of cargo to remote sites…it’s is not an easy task to do that and to program that into an unmanned lift system,” Beach said. “That’s something the competitors for the contract have just demonstrated recently.”
Demonstrations of sling-load hauling and underbelly mounted cargo pods had been slated for December. The pod is a smaller payload geared toward resupplying maneuvering troops very quickly (Defense Daily, Oct. 1).
Beach and other Defense Department officials at the conference said all the military services are interested in long-term development of a more advanced cargo drone. Beach said he expects fielding of such a system “in the 2020 time frame.”
“We’re all working together for the long-term unmanned cargo aircraft,” he said.
Col. Eric Mathewson, director of the Air Force unmanned systems task force, said the air service has begun looking at a next generation multi-mission drone. He said the MQ-X “first needs service-oriented architecture to make it interoperable.” The future UAS is expected to be “mission agnostic” and “payload agnostic,” according to Mathewson.
“We’re hoping that within 10 years we’ll have something to field,” he added.
He said the Pentagon envisions long-term collaboration with industry and academia to generate ideas and to determine what types of capabilities could ripen in the envisioned time frame.
“What we’re thinking now is a series of fly-offs…so that we can get past the prototype stage more quickly,” Mathewson said. “The onus is on everyone to be creative and innovative.
“I don’t think we’ll be able to describe the exact widgets we need…the best we can do is describe the effect desired,” he said.