Unmanned Planes Face Threats From Near, Far

In Afghanistan, unmanned aircraft have come as close to being war heroes as machines can get. They are providing invaluable reconnaissance, damage assessment and other intelligence information. Some have even hit enemy targets. All at zero risk to American pilots.

Despite their increasing acceptance by a once-skeptical military, however, unmanned aircraft will be hard to find when the Pentagon unveils its new budget Monday.

In fact, the future of unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, is menaced by two of the oldest enemies of military effectiveness in the book: bureaucratic competition from older, entrenched interests; and Pentagon planners’ tendency to gold-plate anything that moves.

UAVs, close to revolutionary when first deployed in the Afghanistan war, are now so much a part of U.S. military operations that when two crashed in the last 10 days, no one paid much attention.

Air Force Secretary James G. Roche calls the increased reliance on UAVs “a cultural breakthrough.”

But their ability to perform vital missions while safeguarding American lives does not guarantee that UAVs will be used to their full potential.

First, in the twisting, turning world of competitive defense programs, when an innovative new system wins, other more traditional systems lose. Senior officers and others whose careers are tied to established programs tend to defend them against upstart rivals.

Contrary to widespread belief outside the Pentagon, it is not die-hard fighter pilots who feel threatened by UAVs. “I’ve seen that silly horse being ridden,” says one senior flight officer. “There’s nobody that thinks UAVs might endanger us in terms of our jobs.”

Rather, it is the intelligence community that feels the breath of robotic aircraft on the back of its neck, particularly the impenetrable empire of super-secret spy satellites.

The other danger to using UAVs to their fullest comes, ironically, from their friends, and is linked to the drones’ increasing sophistication. Pentagon planners already are larding on new “requirements” for future UAVs: stealth capability, heavier payload, better engines, greater endurance, even armor.

Military planners often seem incapable of thinking in anything but “worst case” terms. That may sound prudent, but as one analyst says, “You don’t buy an entire military that is able to operate in your worst-case environment.”

Building every system to handle the worst case raises the cost. Greater cost inhibits greater use. And the very attractiveness of UAVs is that they are expendable.

Before the advent of global positioning systems, the effectiveness of unmanned aircraft was limited by the fact that, most of the time, they just didn’t know precisely where they were.

GPS has solved this problem. What’s more, industry sources say, although technical problems still cause UAVs to fail more often than manned aircraft, the reliability gap is closing.

Five unmanned aerial vehicles have been “killed” in action during the Afghanistan war; two were lost over Iraq in the same period. The Defense Department now has 90 UAVs in the field, high and low altitude, long and short range, each an enormous improvement over yesterday’s technology.

Two high-end systems have been the mainstays in Afghanistan: the General Atomics Aeronautical Systems Inc. Predator and the Northrop Grumman Corp. Global Hawk.

Predator is hand-flown by a “pilot” on the ground, using a stick and rudder pedals to maneuver the vehicle. Global Hawk has a pre-programmed flight path but can receive updated directions.

Both scan the ground to collect a variety of imagery--from streaming video to synthetic aperture radar data, which yields three-dimensional pictures.

Although the CIA has employed its own version of the Predator to fire missiles, what makes UAVs so revolutionary is that they can linger over the battlefield for more than 24 hours, providing constant coverage of a potential target. Global Hawk has a 36-hour flight time.

Nonetheless, UAVs get only the most modest boost in the Pentagon’s new budget. Global Hawks will be built at double the planned rate for the next two years, and the Navy is embracing the system. Twenty-two of the 60 existing Predators have been lost in crashes; the new budget is expected to contain funds to purchase eight new ones a year, only one more than last year’s plan.

But even with such shots in the arm, a number of defense industry analysts think that the priorities for the future are wrong.

Take Global Hawk: The Air Force plans to buy four a year, though the production line could build 12. And the military bureaucracy is generating costly new “requirements.”

Instead of ordering ever-more-costly versions, some analysts say, the Pentagon should build a fleet of present-day drones and learn to use them as relatively expendable assets.

For example, a fleet of 100 Global Hawks in close to their current configuration would allow virtual 24-hour coverage of multiple hot spots anywhere on the globe. With a cost of about $25 million per drone and a total program cost of $2.5 billion, commanders could feel comfortable using them whenever needed.

Senior military officers say that what really set Predator and Global Hawk apart in Afghanistan is that Gen. Tommy Franks, the Operation Enduring Freedom commander, “owned” them. He and his air war commander decided where the UAVs went. And the drones got the intelligence product directly into their command centers.

At $3 million per Predator, the cost of losing one was low enough to have them loiter over Kandahar or other locations, looking for Taliban and Al Qaeda leadership.

The challenge for the 21st century, Air Force Secretary Roche says, is to “find moving targets” and “have persistent intelligence.”

Why not just use space satellites? They don’t tend to crash, and their technical capabilities are legendary. With imagery satellites, however, “tasking” is a cumbersome and competitive process of claiming space on a limited national system that must serve many customers. Also, the current imagery satellites only pass over the same spot on Earth about every three days.

Because they fly about 300 miles above the Earth, says Jeffrey Richelson of the National Security Archive in Washington, a leading expert on spy satellites, about 30 satellites would be needed to provide constant coverage of any one spot.

Given the cost of an advanced KH-11 satellite--about $1.5 billion, Richelson says, with an additional $300 million cost to boost each satellite into orbit--such a force would cost about $54 billion. That’s more than 20 times the cost of the 100-strong Global Hawk force, with far less flexibility.

Unlike satellites, UAVs and their sensor packages can be modified and given new equipment to meet changing needs.

The cost and other advantages of UAVs are sure to be pressed hard in the enormous debate that has begun since President Bush reopened the Pentagon’s coffers for the war on terror. According to the Defense Department’s April 2001 “Roadmap” for UAV development, “UAVs may offer increased efficiencies in operations and support costs due to the reduced need to actually fly pilot proficiency and continuation training sorties.”

UAVs currently suffer accidents at 10 to 100 times the rate of manned aircraft. But for every hour flown by a UAV, military aircraft fly 300 hours; that’s because 95% of a manned aircraft’s flight time is for air crew training.

UAV operators get most of their training in simulators, at significantly less expense.

Given that “force” is the Air Force’s last name, it shouldn’t be surprising that, although Predator and Global Hawk have been stars because of their surveillance duties, enthusiasm is shifting toward another system, the Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicle, or UCAV.

If deployed at the end of the decade, UCAV would be the first true unmanned bomber, able to go into the most lethal air defense environment without fear of U.S. casualties.

Roche and others are truly taken with this capability. One senior commander in Enduring Freedom said that, with current (and future) Stealth aircraft, such as the F-22, under development along with UAVs, the military will be able to operate with acceptably low casualty rates against any postulated enemy.

But that assumes the UAV will remain cheap enough and simple enough to use routinely.

“I wouldn’t want to lose the ability to just throw it away,” one analyst says. If it gets too precious for that, he says, “then you won’t take risk to actually fly it where it’s needed.”

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William M. Arkin is a senior fellow at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Washington and an adjunct professor of the U.S. Air Force’s School of Advanced Airpower Studies. He is a consultant to a number of nongovernmental organizations and writes military analysis articles as a special correspondent for The Times.