Some Unmanned Combat Air Vessels Are Standing By

Nothing on the UCAV drawing boards compares with the capabilities offered by retrofitted surplus aircraft—following the lead of this unmanned QF-4—that could be flying in months.

Driving through Arizona's Davis-Monthan Air Force Base is an awesome experience for any pilot. On both sides of the main road, as far as the eye can see, thousands of military aircraft sit idle: B-52s, A-6s, F-14s, F-ISs, F/A-18s, and row upon row of F-4s. More aircraft are sent to the "boneyard" every few weeks. They fly to Arizona as operational fighting machines and then are parked, partially covered with preservative coatings, and left to bake in the desert sun. Only a handful ever will fly again.

Instead of letting those aircraft rot in the desert, why not use them to add firepower to the fleet and to save lives on the ground? Why not use our surplus aircraft as armed drones, to augment our current inventories of (expensive and scarce) cruise missiles and (more expensive and only slightly less scarce) manned aircraft?

For the past 50 years, starry-eyed technophiles have predicted that unmanned drones soon would end the era of manned aircraft. That day is not upon us, and probably never will arrive. However, in today's warfighting environment, manned aircraft already are only one part of a growing array of air combat assets, with conventional airplanes at one end of the spectrum and cruise missiles and standoff weapons at the other (see Table 1). Future unmanned combat aerial vehicles (UCAVs) such as the X-45 and X-47 are designed to fill the yawning capability gap between those two families, but there is a much cheaper and more effective solution: Convert the surplus aircraft we possess to armed drones or dual-use combat aerial vehicles (DUCAVs).

Current Strike Air Assets

When cruise missiles were introduced in the early 1980s, they were a wonder weapon, offering the only all-weather, near-precision strike capability that did not involve mushroom clouds and the end of the world. Today, they remain very useful tools, especially in reducing risk to pilots, but they are scarce, expensive, relatively inflexible, and pack a light punch. For many missions they are grossly overcapable; certainly it makes poor economic sense to send a $1.5-million cruise missile on a suicide mission to destroy a target that could be destroyed by a $30,000 Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) or an accurately dropped $800 iron bomb.

Tactical Tomahawk will be an improvement in both cost and capability, according to retired Navy Captain Steve Morrow in a recent Proceedings article, but at a nominal unit price of roughly $600,000, it still will be expensive.¹ Cruise missiles and long-range standoff weapons always will have a role attacking heavily defended, relatively soft, "first night" targets such as aircraft and hangars, but our adversaries know Tomahawk's capabilities and can defeat it by hardening targets, burying facilities, and using decoys. Furthermore, large targets such as large bridges and tunnels always will be beyond the capability of Tomahawk.

Most readers of Proceedings can visualize the faces of downed American aviators Scott O'Grady, Scott Speicher, and Jeffrey Zaun. This illustrates the major problem with taking manned aircraft into combat today: no matter how capable an aircraft might be, its use over hostile territory still can result in the political nightmare of the image of a stunned and beaten pilot on the evening news. (Ask any member of the Clinton administration what the White House focused on during the 11-day captivity of Army helicopter pilot Michael Durant in Somalia.) Stand-off weapons are a great help in keeping aircrew out of harm's way, but their relatively short ranges mean their employment almost always requires putting a manned aircraft over the beach.

DUCAVs and the Capability Gap

Any enemy of the United States could read the two paragraphs above and come to a simple conclusion: to protect a target from attack by the U.S. Navy, it must be hardened against attack by Tomahawk and have enough air defense capability to discourage manned attack. For example, large targets such as bridges and bunkers are too much for Tomahawk. Defending them with cheap and simple antiaircraft artillery systems and/or missiles and/or decoys makes them too risky for an F/A-18. Burying a target solves the Tomahawk problem and deters the use of all but the largest weapons dropped by manned aircraft. Not surprisingly, most of our potential enemies, such as Iran, Syria, and North Korea, have spent the past few years tunneling like gophers and shopping for advanced surface-to-air missile systems. Like the North Vietnamese, leaders of those nations know their only hope of salvation in a war with the United States lies in making that war as politically costly as possible, and, above all, that capturing the hostages and prisoners of war have been effective tools for our enemies in the past. To defeat such tactics and to wage a modern air war effectively, we need a no-risk aircraft that can drop large numbers of large precision weapons. We need the DUCAV.

The DUCAV concept is simple: retrofit the combat aircraft we have bought and parked in the desert into unmanned bomb freighters. For naval use, five or six DUCAVs would be craned onto the carrier at the beginning of a cruise and slung from the hangar deck ceiling to preserve deck space.² (If the DUCAVs began life as F/A-18s, they would be a very useful source of spare parts before their employment.) These aircraft could be flown remotely with human input, or programmed to fly to a series of locations for weapons delivery. In either case, the aircraft could be either expended or, if range considerations permit, recovered at a land base.

DUCAVs would combine the long range, high speed, precision weapons, and large weapons capacity of manned aircraft with the zero pilot risk of cruise missiles. Consider a DUCAV on a one-way mission. An F/A-18 or F-14 drone would have the same or greater payload than the manned aircraft, but with more than twice the untanked range. It could hit multiple targets with JDAMs or deliver the 2,000- and 5,000-pound bunker busters needed to destroy hardened or underground targets. If the target is truly hardened, DUCAVs offer a new and unique attack capability: a weapon consisting of two 5,000-pound penetrators and a 20-ton aircraft, all delivered in a Mach 2 dive on target. (Such a weapon, if successful, might allow us to attack very deep targets without resorting to the "mininukes" that are now under consideration.) The Navy knows how to deliver JDAMs. The drone version of the Phantom, the QF-4, has been flying at Point Mugu, California, for years. Is it technologically impossible to hit a JDAM release point with such an aircraft? Is it technologically impossible to hit a point on the ground with a diving aircraft? Of course not.

Unlike manned aircraft or the X-45/X-47, a DUCAV does not necessarily have to return, so its range would be enormous. Unlike a cruise missile or X-45/X-47, an F/A18 or F-14 DUCAV would have the ability to transit at supersonic speed to a time-critical target. Most important, nothing on the UCAV drawing boards even comes close to the size, speed, range, payload, and hardened-target capability of the DUCAVs that could be flying in a matter of months. And we have hundreds of airframes already here, now, in the real world-not on paper or as a budget line item.

Cost and Competition

Consider an F/A-18 that has reached the end of its service life. It either can take a one-way trip to the land of tumbleweeds and tarantulas to sit and roast until it is scrapped, or it can deliver four 2,000-pound bombs to targets 800 miles from its carrier or air base and then destroy one more target as a kinetic kill vehicle. If converted to operator-controlled instead of preprogrammed flight, it can recover at a land base. Even if the aircraft is sacrificed after a single mission, if we can convert that F/A-18 to remote operation for less than $3 million, that mission is fully cost justified when compared with those of five $600,000 Tactical Tomahawks. If we can build an entire MQ-1 Predator for $3 million, it is difficult to believe we cannot retrofit an F/A-18 for the same price or less.

The X-45 and X-47 programs are virtually indistinguishable. Both are developing small, stealthy, high-tech UCAVs that will cost about $15 million each-almost half as much as a Joint Strike Fighter. In terms of speed, payload, and range, both aircraft are more similar to cruise missiles than they are to manned aircraft. The capabilities provided by these two UCAVs would be very welcome, but the real question is whether a particular UCAV system provides the best bang for the buck. Fifteen million dollars is a lot of bucks, and a 3,000-pound payload is a pretty small bang. Although stealth is an incredibly valuable asset early in a conflict with a technologically advanced enemy, the X-45 and X-47 are pip-squeaks in terms of range, speed, and payload when compared with DUCAVs. Whatever else they may end up being, they will not be expendable assets, and we will not be buying them in the multiple hundreds.³

Obstacles

Technical issues will not stand in the way of remote or preprogrammed operation of an F-4 or an F/A-18, and there are no insurmountable difficulties in dropping weapons from such aircraft. Unfortunately, there are plenty of other potential problems-not in development or in combat, but in the swamps of Washington, D.C., and in the minds of some aviators.

Like most issues that are resolved in Washington, developing DUCAVs comes down to money. Retrofitting an F/A-18 would cost a lot less than building a new X-45, but would create fewer jobs and less contractor profit and put less money into the home districts of senators and representatives. From the defense industry's standpoint, the DUCAV would be a weapon aimed directly at its bottom line. Weapon systems without corporate and congressional backers do not stand much of a chance in Washington, no matter how cheap or effective they might prove to be.⁴

Resistance to DUCAVs also may come from those who fear the question, If robot planes can drop bombs, why do we need pilots at all? The answer may be found in Table 1. Drones never will replace pilots for air-to-air, suppression of enemy air defenses, close air support, and any mission near friendly troops. That said, perhaps it is time to admit that using nonstealthy $60-million manned airplanes to attack fixed, heavily defended targets is stupid. For example, a DUCAV fleet based on F-15E Strike Eagles safely stationed in Japan and targeted at bridges, tunnels, and roads in North Korea could save a great many lives if the North ever invades South Korea. Those DUCAVs could drop the 2,000-pound JDAMs needed to destroy large, reinforced structures and the penetrators needed to counter the tunnel-happy North Koreans. Any Air Force officer who thinks this a foolish idea should be prepared to defend the current situation, which puts dozens of F-16s and A/OA-10s and their maintenance personnel on South Korean air bases that undoubtedly will be hit in the first minutes of a North Korean attack. Unfortunately for those maintenance personnel (and their dependents), unmanned aircraft have been a bad dream for the Air Force for decades. Although potentially very useful to the Navy, DUCAVs make more sense as an Air Force asset. Unfortunately, our sister service is about as likely to embrace the DUCAV concept as it is to buy the Navy a new aircraft carrier.

Put Up or Shut Up

War usually speeds up the typically glacial pace of weapons development. The penetrators used in the last days of Desert Storm were conceived, fabricated, and employed in combat in a matter of weeks, not years. We are at war now, but we are not acting like it. The development and employment of DUCAVs requires wartime thinking, with goals of utility instead of glamour and combat power instead of congressional pork. Keep the program small and fast—about $10 million for the first three prototypes, which should be dropping weapons at China Lake in six months. Keep it Navy—the Air Force and defense industry would do all they could to obstruct a DUCAV program. But no matter how it gets done, at least try the concept-now. We hear a lot about transformation these days. Producing the DUCAV, an effective but unglamorous weapon that saves money, saves lives, reuses assets, does not create a whole lot of jobs, and makes some people think pilots are obsolete, sounds pretty transformational. We could build them tomorrow, and they could be a godsend in a war with North Korea, Syria, or Iran. The DUCAV can fly, but only if we have the guts to put our money and our will behind our buzzwords.