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Katherine Ziesing | Canberra

As the RAAF transitions a number of successful platforms (Growler, P-8A, C-27J, PC-21) into its order of battle and is making headway into support and training plans for much anticipated platforms like the JSF and Triton RPA, I can’t help but think what the next generation of platforms will look like.

Increasingly, they will be unmanned I suspect. That is not to say there will be no humans in the loop; far from it. But the platform itself will have a pilot and a trigger finger far from the platform.

Militaries around the world are also moving this way. We are living in the first age of UAV warfare. While UAVs can trace their origins back at least as far as 1918, it took fairly recent technological advances to truly showcase the abilities of long-endurance, high-flying remotely piloted machines. Yet despite their prominence in modern battlefields, the greatest impact of UAVs will be felt in the future.

Right now, UAVs are mostly changing the calculus for counter-insurgency and domestic warfare, but in the future, drones might fundamentally change wars fought by nations against other nations.

A new paper from university scholars Michael C. Horowitz, Sarah E. Kreps, and Matthew Fuhrmann entitled The Consequences of UAV Proliferation: Separating Fact from Fiction looks at how UAVs are used now by nations around the world (counterterrorism, interstate conflict, crisis onset and deterrence, coercive diplomacy, domestic control and repression) and what their operational evolution is likely to look like.

“Current-generation drones offer little utility for coercion against other governments,” the paper states. “Contrary to the conventional wisdom, moreover, drones might actually enhance security in disputed border regions by providing states with greater ability to monitor contested regions persistently at lower cost, leading to reassurance that potential adversaries are not attempting to change the status quo through force.

“The limited significance of current-generation drones in interstate contexts beyond monitoring stems from a key technological limitation: UAVs currently in operation are vulnerable to air defence systems, meaning that they are much less likely to be effective when operating in hostile airspace.”

Perhaps there is one area where I diverge with the authors and that is their statement that “given their technical limitations, current-generation drones are unlikely to have a large impact on interstate warfare”. There are current generation UAVs that are armed, stealthy, have a significant payload of sensors and can be networked into a federated command and control structure that prioritises ‘any sensor, best shooter’.

Platforms like Predator MQ-1 and Reaper MQ-9 are in this class and the US Navy’s Unmanned Combat Air System, which saw the X-47B operate off a carrier, are just the beginning in the US context. Europe, Israel and Asia also have a range of weaponised UAVs that are either in the testing and development phase, in service or plans are afoot to weaponise the current generation of platforms.

Australia has its own plans for a weaponised UAS with an announcement at the Avalon Air Show this month an event to watch out for.

But how do we counter such threats? Air 6500, alongside Land 19 Phase 7B, will fulfil Australia’s effort in this space (see P74). Integrated Air Missile Defence (IAMD) and Integrated Missile Defence (IMD) is not just about taking out missile threats but also the threat of UAVs I would argue.

Commercial counter-UAS technologies are aimed at the smaller UAS market (see P52) and may have military applications at the tactical level. But it is Air 6500 that will provide the central sensor, C2 and effect support to such efforts at a theatre level.

State on state conflict is something that militaries and governments plan for in the hope that such plans remain unused. The latter half of the 20th century was a time of unprecedented peace at this level but as many analysts have noted this is not ‘normal’ in the history of human endeavours.

UAVs are excellent for the dull, dirty and dangerous roles so often seen in the military. They can also be used for uncertain roles in an uncertain future.

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