Thursday - July 10, 2008

New Military Concept: Cooperation?

Sorry, no moonbattery here. Just a bit of good news that you probably won’t see on your TV news shows. It looks like the Army and the Air Force have found a way to cooperate with each other when it comes to those wonderful Predator UAVs. This is important, as that program is rapidly expanding, and the new aircraft, the MQ-9 Reaper, is starting to replace the 12 year old Predator. Plus, I have a somewhat vested interest in this story, as my cousin’s husband, a senior avionics specialist with the 174th New York Air National Guard, is over in Iraq right now. Again. I think this is his 4th trip for this war, and he was over there in ‘91 for the first one too. His unit has has flown F-16s for ages, but now they are scheduled to become a UAV operational group.

WASHINGTON - Army and Air Force leaders met Monday to discuss developing a new joint unmanned aerial system concept of operations.

“As opposed to finding independent solutions, we are trying to find joint, collaborative solutions that best support the joint warfighter in any spectrum of war,” said Air Force Gen. John D.W. Corley, head of Air Combat Command.

Corley met with Gen. William S. Wallace, commander of Army Training and Doctrine Command, and Lt. Gen. Michael Vane, director of the Army Capabilities and Integration Center. The meeting at Langley Air Force Base, Va., emphasized developing unmanned aerial system operations for the full spectrum of conflict—from centralized major combat operations to smaller-scale decentralized operations to include stability operations.

“Taking a joint approach on UAS issues will allow us to rapidly develop force capabilities from concept and capability development through employment by identifying, linking and synchronizing all of our activities, so we can give the best capability to joint warfighters who are fighting a very elusive, thinking and adaptive adversary.”
The approach will include doctrine, organizations, training, leader development, materiel, personnel and facilities, officials said.

One focus of the CONOPS will be methods to best share information and command and control.
“If we can’t share data, then we can’t share information,” Corley said. “If we can’t share information, we can’t command and control.”

Finding joint solutions begins with new CONOPS that look at every piece of the UAS spectrum, rather than individual pieces of the puzzle, the ACC commander said.

“We have to treat this as a system,” he said. “You have to think about all the pieces.”

The general said such interoperability will increase effectiveness from a combat standpoint.

“We want to identify areas or opportunities for increasing interoperability in order to optimize support to the joint warfighter,” said Wallace. “It’s all about working together to get a capability to our troops quickly and effectively.”

All of this is Mil-Speak for “We have to work together on this, because some day the budgets are going to get cut. Plus, we’ve figured out that if our people and their people can talk directly to each other, we can react faster against threats.” And that makes a whole lot of sense to me and to everyone over there and their relatives back here. Let’s hope this cooperative endeavor doesn’t get bogged down in meetings and paperwork. Yes, it might cost a few million to change a couple radio frequencies and swap some software, but in the long run everyone will benefit.

The UAV program (what the military just has to call the UAS program) has had a good bit of friction. The things fly, so the Air Force felt they should be theirs, with pilots at the controls. The Army found out that the latest crop of soldiers, who grew up on video games, can pilot these things just as well. So who needs the Air Force? Even being in-theater isn’t completely necessary; because of satellite links these planes can be flown from Omaha nearly as well as they can be flown from Baghdad. But somebody has to maintain and rearm the birds over there, so that part needs figuring out too.

At five tons gross weight, the Reaper is four times heavier than the Predator. Its size — 36 feet long, with a 66-foot wingspan — is comparable to the profile of the Air Force’s workhorse A-10 attack plane. It can fly twice as fast and twice as high as the Predator. Most significantly, it carries many more weapons.

While the Predator is armed with two Hellfire missiles, the Reaper can carry 14 of the air-to-ground weapons — or four Hellfires and two 500-pound bombs.

“It’s not a recon squadron,” Col. Joe Guasella, operations chief for the Central Command’s air component, said of the Reapers. “It’s an attack squadron, with a lot more kinetic ability.”

Don’t you just love Mil-Speak? “Kinetic ability”. That means “blowing stuff up”.

Posted by Drew458     on 07/10/2008 at 10:21 AM   
Filed Under: • Military •  
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