Five years ago, the Pentagon was on cusp of an air-combat revolution. For a few brief, heady months in late 2005, it looked like the U.S. military might soon launch full-scale development of a new class of fast, lethal Unmanned Aerial Vehicles eventually capable of replacing all kinds of fighter jets, from the older F-15s, F-16s and F-18s to the latest F-22s.
But the revolution fizzled when the Air Force abandoned its share of the so-called Joint Unmanned Combat Air System effort. Manned jets continued to dominate, culminating in today’s mammoth, $300-billion F-35 program.
The embers of upheaval kept burning, almost invisibly. The technology from the 2005 effort survived in various forms, slowly maturing amid a growing demand for combat UAVs. Today, no fewer than three separate killer drone designs — two of them direct descendants of the original J-UCAS demonstrators — have converged on two airfields in California for flight tests.
The revolution flared up again without many people noticing. While the F-35 still gobbles up the bulk of the Pentagon’s fighter funding, jet-powered killer drones are back — and revolution is once again a real prospect.
High-endurance armed drones such as the General Atomics Predator have been a fixture of U.S. military operations since the mid-1990s air war over the Balkans. Besides being cheaper to buy and operate, robot aircraft carry fuel in place of a pilot and so can stay in the air longer.
Plus, if they crash or get shot down, nobody gets hurt. That means the military can assign drones to what a robot-industry insider from Boeing called the “worst down-and-dirty missions that even the nuttiest pilot wouldn’t want to do.”
But today’s drones are “fair-weather” killers, too slow to survive the sophisticated air defenses of, say, China or Iran. To bring the advantages of robot aircraft to high-intensity warfare, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency along with the Air Force and Navy sponsored J-UCAS starting in 2003. Boeing’s X-45 (pictured) competed with the Northrop Grumman-built X-47 to “demonstrate the technical feasibility, military utility and operational value for a networked system of high performance, weaponized unmanned air vehicles,” according to Darpa.
By 2005, the J-UCAS program had sent its prototypes on mock bombing runs and proved the drones could develop their own tactics on the fly. The “Common Operating System” meant to control the speedy, lethal bots was particularly promising, and with it J-UCAS even threatened to upstage the $300-billion F-35 manned-fighter program. The new drones were “on the cusp of making history in the aviation world,” said the insider.
Then in 2006, the axe fell. The Air Force withdrew from the program. Officially, the Air Force wanted to shift its focus and cash to the new, manned (and ultimately short-lived) “2018 bomber.”
There were concerns that algorithms might not be trustworthy to make combat decisions, quite yet. Unofficially, the move away from J-UCAS might have reflected concerns among the Air Force’s top brass that the new killer drone could hasten the demise of the traditional fighter pilot.
In any event, without the Air Force J-UCAS collapsed. The Navy continued funding the X-47 for a modest series of tests. The original X-45 ended up an exhibit in the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum, never to fly again.
Or so observers believed. In fact, Boeing had secretly continued work on a new version of the X-45, apparently believing the Air Force would come back around to the idea of fighter-style killer drones. Meanwhile, a high-profile think piece co-written by future Navy undersecretary Bob Work (.pdf) helped persuade the Navy to raise its expectations for the X-47. Sensing a new momentum for armed UAVs, General Atomics spent its own money to develop a bigger, jet-powered cousin of the Predator called the Avenger.
In the summer of 2009, the Air Force published a “road map” showing how robots might replace nearly every kind of manned aircraft in today’s arsenal. Just a few months later, the air branch lifted the (patchy) veil of secrecy surrounding its fighter-like MQ-170 spy drone, built by Lockheed Martin.
The stage has been set for an unofficial revival of J-UCAS. There are no official requirements for a new fighter drone — yet. But the Pentagon is obviously very, very interested.
As is often the case, the drama is taking place in California. Northrop’s X-47 is at the Navy’s China Lake base in the Mojave Desert, running ground tests prior to a planned first flight “before the end of the year.”
Not to be outdone by its former J-UCAS rival, Boeing two weeks ago bolted the new-and-improved X-45to the back of a 747 for a ride from St. Louis to the Golden State’s Edwards Air Force Base, where the bot will have its first flight early next year. General Atomics beat both of the bigger companies into the air: The Avenger has racked up scores of test flights at Edwards since 2009.
Years ago, one analyst called J-UCAS “the worst-funded good idea in decades.” There’s still not a lot of government money behind the current revival: The Navy has allocated around a billion dollars for X-47 tests. The X-45 and the Avenger are both company-funded efforts.
But the idea is as good as ever. And with the impending first flights of the X-45 and X-47, killer drones are about to get a second shot at transforming aerial warfare.
Danger Room will be there, every step of the way.
Photo: Boeing
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