One of the capabilities foreshadowed by the recent Defence White Paper and associated Integrated Investment Program is the acquisition of an armed Medium Altitude Long Endurance (MALE) UAS.
Nigel Pittaway | Melbourne
However the inclusion of such a capability came as no surprise and had indeed been foreshadowed by senior government officials and Air Force officers for at least the past three years. The DIIP calls for an investment of between $1-2 billion dollars on the project, which is planned to run between 2018 and 2038.
“A fully integrated armed, medium-altitude unmanned capability supported by intelligence analysts will facilitate the timely delivery of accurate information to commanders at all levels, providing superior situational awareness to inform decision making,” the DIIP notes.
Genesis
ADF operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, working alongside coalition forces for more than a decade, had highlighted the benefit of a persistent Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance platform which also had an armed response capability. This capability was typified in-theatre by US Air Force operations using General Atomics MQ-1 Predator and MQ-9 Reaper Remotely Piloted Aircraft (RPA), armed with air to ground missiles and precision-guided munitions.
"Some in industry refer to the program as ‘Air 7100’."
The possibility of Australia acquiring a similar capability was first aired in public at the opening of the 2013 Avalon Airshow, when both then-Defence Minister Stephen Smith and Chief of Air Force, Air Marshal Geoff Brown, told attendees that armed UAVs would play a part in future air combat capability.
This was taken a step further at ADM’s Defence/Industry Conference in Canberra in February 2014 when (then) Deputy Chief of Air Force, Air Vice Marshal Gavin Davies, delivered a presentation on the subject of an armed UAS capability, which was widely seen as an exercise in paving the way forward.
“The introduction of an armed UAS into Australian service will allow us to deliver the whole package of Close Air Support effects to Army and add to our capabilities in the wider strike role. In my opinion, the argument for Australia to acquire an armed UAS for the strike role will be a convincing one,” AVM (now Air Marshal and Chief of Air Force) Davies said.
“I think the opportunity for us to develop options, particularly within the Force Structure Review which, along with the development of the White Paper, would include the benefits, the cost and the vulnerabilities of having an armed UAV.”
An armed MALE capability is now a formal Air project and although the DIIP does not contain detailed information such as project numbers, some in industry refer to the program as ‘Air 7100’.
The DIIP does say that program will acquire the necessary capability in the early 2020s and will require enhancements to the ADF’s command and control facilities and the establishment of a ground control station, together with fixed and deployable launch facilities.
Although an ‘Air’ project, Group Captain Guy Adams, director of Unmanned Systems at Air Force Headquarters, points out that that the capability appeared in the DIIP under the ‘Proposed Future Force, Land Combat and Amphibious Warfare’ section, which sends a strong message about who the primary customer will be.
“We are already working with Army pretty closely to make sure that any system that we do acquire satisfies their requirements, and we are looking a fair way into the future because we need to make sure that not only are we ready to support Army at that time, but that Army is also ready to accept that support,” GPCAPT Adams said.
Where the UAS will be based is yet to be determined, but the DIIP specifically mentions that RAAF Townsville will require additional ‘fixed facilities’ to support the capability.
“Townsville would make sense in that it is close to a number of the Army units that the capability will need to train with and provide support to,” GPCAPT Adams continued. “So having the ability to operate a MALE UAS out of Townsville would be a great advantage to both us and Army.”
Likewise, who and where in Air Force will operate the MALE UAS has not yet been decided but the RAAF’s unarmed Heron RPA is currently operated by 5 Flight, within the Surveillance and Response Group (SRG), and there is an expectation that the SRG is where the future capability will reside.
Platforms
The General Atomics MQ-1 Predator and MQ-9 Reaper have become synonymous with the armed UAS strike role and have been widely regarded as the benchmark platforms in the ADF context.
The White Paper has reiterated interoperability with Australia’s major allies as a major factor in future Defence acquisition programs and if this criteria equally applies to the MALE program, the Predator/Reaper in their various forms would have to be regarded as the favourite, being widely used by the US, the UK and other allies.
However, Israel Aircraft Industries (IAI) has developed a larger, armed version of its Heron RPA, known as the Heron TP, which is in service with the Israeli Defence Force and has recently been selected by Germany’s Bundeswehr.
At the Avalon Airshow last year, IAI officials confirmed that they had held initial discussions with the ADF, regarding Heron TP.
General Atomics is developing a ‘certifiable’ version of its Predator B, known as the CPB, aimed at meeting EASA certification standards from 2017 and FAA requirements in the future. The CPB will be acquired by the UK, under its Protector program, and will provide enhanced structural fatigue and damage tolerance, as well as permitting operations into adverse weather conditions, such as icing.
GPCAPT Adams said that Air Force was watching CPB development closely, but noted that while certification accreditation would bring some advantages in terms of airspace access, the ‘peripheral’ advantages of the variant are of greater interest.
“The benefits of that platform are its strengthened wings and better weather protection for some of the environments it might be required to operate in, here, as well as overseas,” he said.
Training & timeline
The biggest hurdle facing Air Force is not the acquisition of the armed MALE platform itself, but in the ‘raise, train, sustain’ strategies required to develop and retain a highly trained workforce.
“An unmanned aircraft does not necessarily mean an unmanned capability, so as we move towards the ability to put assets over the battlespace 24 hours a day, seven days a week, the amount of people required to support that information and simply operate the platform actually becomes quite significant,” GPCAPT Adams explained.
In February last year, the Government announced that the RAAF had commenced aircrew training on the MQ-9 with the USAF in America and this experience will be combined with that gained from the ADF Heron operation and other allies to define the Australian training continuum.
The USAF is expanding its Reaper operations from 65 Combat Air Patrols (CAPs) world-wide today, to 90 CAPs in the near future, and generating the people required to maintain this capability is stressing their training pipeline.“So we need to look at ways to try and find a way of either doing it here indigenously, or the creative use of USAF and/or other allied training pipelines,” GPCAPT Adams detailed to ADM. “There is a balance that needs to be struck here and we’re learning from the USAF experience, the UK experience and from the 5 Flight operations.”
From a platform perspective, the project will begin gaining real traction in the 2021, with initial deliveries shortly thereafter.
“When you look at the DIIP, it talks about introduction into service in the early 2020s and you can read that as IOC. That milestone would probably be represented by one or maybe two CAPs,” GPCAPT Adams said. “FOC is a little bit further down the line and that's where we will start to see the real draw on personnel – this is the reason why the program, as you see it in the DIIP, is fairly lengthy.”