Director’s Conclusion

Many challenges remain in UAV development if we are to continue to improve our performance of the intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance mission and to develop new roles for the 21st century.

Enduring Challenges include:

• Acquisition oversight — the assurance of Department-wide coordination of all the players and processes that lead to the fielding of interoperable, sustainable and affordable UAV systems, as a growing part of our ISR capability. Cost is on an equal basis with performance.
• Technology — in all its facets, the great enablers of our evolving systems.
• Architecture — the emerging framework within which our UAV assets will play increasing roles, in conjunction with more traditional manned and overhead systems.
• Operations — the full-spectrum arena within which our UAVs will be fielded, our current focus is on multi-UAV activities, airspace management (especially coexistence with manned aircraft), marinization approaches to meet deep-water operational requirements, and the management of great quantities of imagery products and data.
• Effective modeling and simulation tools — to help quantify the military utility of UAVs and of airborne ISR generally. These techniques in turn become the bases for force mix trade studies to identify the optimal mix of assets to meet operational needs of the next century.
• Control of program growth — which involves both protecting our developmental UAV systems from “requirements creep” and not letting new concepts and missions drive our programs beyond performance capabilities. Our ongoing review of Outrider is sorting out how to proceed in meeting a broad range of multi-Service requirements, while our cautious approach to the impending HAE UAV flights indicates that our first focus must be on basics: first the birds have to fly and meet ACTD criteria; then their full capabilities can be explored and potentially expanded.

System Objectives include:

• An HFE for tactical UAVs — As part of the review process for the Outrider ACTD, HFE development was removed from the Tactical UAV program and initiated as a separate development effort. An HFE is crit-ical to tactical UAV operations in that (1) it would use a more safe, reliable fuel already common to other aircraft systems, and (2) use of a common and safe fuel is crucial for UAVs operated and supported aboard ship.
• Improved video product management — We have begun to discover the value of video intelligence. Some estimates project that in the early 21st century over 90% of the pixels we collect will be from video sources. However, we have not yet resolved the problem of how to store, index and quickly retrieve the products. MPEG video compression will help reduce the video storage burden, but search and retrieval functions must also keep pace.
• All-weather intelligence for the warfighter — A continuing operational need is for accurate and timely intelligence regardless of weather. For this, we need to use synthetic aperture radar (SAR) techniques to see through clouds. As current SAR systems are relatively heavy, we need a SAR system sized for use on tactical UAVs.
• Reduction of UAV vulnerabilities — Now that UAVs are flying and meeting mission needs, we need to protect both their C2 and data transmission links against jamming, as well as consider counters to physical threats.

These activities all take time, money, thoroughness, and patience. They also take a family of UAVs, just as more than one aircraft is needed to meet multiple mission requirements. Any one program’s fortunes may fluctuate from year to year, but overall we have made substantial progress. Pioneer, Hunter and Predator are flying routinely. Outrider is defining its capabilities. The HAE UAVs should be airborne shortly. A promising future for ISR is just around the corner — to support both the warfighter and our broader national objectives.

UAVs are a key element within the concept of Information Dominance. As an office of the Secretary of Defense, the DARO's first responsibility is to develop and maintain the DoD's integrated airborne reconnaissance architecture as framework for the development and aquisition of improved airborne reconnaissance capabilities.