MILTECH: Send in the 'Droids

One of the on-line magazines I frequent to get the latest in military technology is the Journal of Electronic Defense. The Jan. 2003 issue has a corker of an article on the development of Killer UAVs. The article (registration is required) is titled The Robot's Got Your Back by Brendan P. Rivers.

Here is the passage that grabbed my attention:

"An even more ambitious UAV-based SEAD program, however, is already underway: the Loitering Electronic Warfare Killer (LEWK) advanced-technology concept demonstrator (ACTD), a program involving all four US military services (with the Air Force serving as the lead). Begun in 2001, the LEWK ACTD seeks to develop a UAV with the ability to deliver precision-guided munitions - in this case, BLU-108 sensor-fuzed weapons - and provide a jamming capability to augment the EA-6B Prowler, all at a unit cost of about $100,000. For the ACTD, the LEWK will be deployed from a CH-53 helicopter, but the plan is to eventually get the UAV certified on a fighter aircraft. The idea is to have LEWKs, pre-programmed with target points as determined by the enemy's electronic order of battle, carried into a threat zone by a manned aircraft and released. The LEWKs would then fly in close to their targets for stand-in jamming and fly pre-programmed egress routes to a recovery point upon completion of the mission. In addition, the LEWK would provide an additional capability to strike time-critical targets that may pop up in the area. "If there's a time-critical target out there and we can meet the rules of engagement by employing the BLU-108s, we'll do that," said Col John Wilcox, US Air Force.

Again, the benefit to employing a UAV for this type of mission is the aircraft's persistence. "Putting a LEWK on a fighter that goes in at 500 knots and dropping it allows the LEWK to use all its fuel on station, rather than traveling to and from the site of interest," Wilcox said. The flight from Mazar-e-Sharif, for example, would take an average UAV three hours. The LEWK, Wilcox pointed out, gets there more quickly and can loiter longer.

But the LEWK ACTD is even more ambitious. Although the initial flights under the program have focused on controlling a single LEWK, Wilcox said, "We plan to have a swarm of LEWKs. We want to have one pilot and 50 LEWKs." Employing a swarm of UAVs, though, presents some challenges. Deploying the swarm requires a lot more carriage capacity than a fighter possesses, so a rack has been developed that could carry 18 LEWKs, with designs in place for a rack that could carry as many as 24. Controlling the swarm poses yet another challenge. The pilot, he said, could be anywhere - in a ground-control station, in an EA-6B - so long as he's got the laptop-based control system and a datalink. But Wilcox explained that the swarm concept is still a little way off. "We're going to crawl before we walk and walk before we run," he said. "After we get through one guy controlling one LEWK, we'll probably go to one guy controlling two LEWKs, then one guy controlling six LEWKs and see where we go from there." This isn't so different from the way manned aircraft are handled, Wilcox noted. "A lot of times manned platforms abort, and we have to retask other fighters and bombers to pick up their targets. It would be the same thing with LEWKs," he said."

So there you have it. America is looking to automate the control of armed UAVs such that swarms of them can be used by a single controller to hunt down and kill enemy air defenses, or any other military target.

The real mind bender is when this swarm control technology is mated to emerging micro-UAV technology in the law enforcement and paramilitary role to control large urban populations.

But that is the subject of another post here on Winds of Change.

Stay tuned.