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Somewhere over Iraq Predators armed with Hellfire missiles are making life difficult for Iraq's former armed forces. Two Global Hawks have also been active. These assets should not have overly stressed the bandwidth needs of the Air Force, yet it seems even these few UAV's have been a headache to operate, consuming much satellite and ground bandwidth resources. Some of the consumption may be the multiplicity of feeds that these vehicles are supplying; there are runs to various HQ's, back to Washington, and down to the Corp level.

If operational bandwidth issues are present with this small fleet, what chance do we give the network with a fleet of a hundred UCAV's?

Tucked away in a corner of the electronic research wagon that the Pentagon wheels around is a palletized communications system. This may indeed be the answer to the upfront bandwith issues facing the deployment of UCAV's, but it also leads into an operational question that may have Washington wringing its hands. Who controls what?

Front loaded Network warfare

By palletizing the communications gear needed to operate UAV's (Predator and Global Hawk) and the UCAV's, means that control of these assets can be pushed up to the front, right in the back of the battlefield. These pallets can be loaded on C-130's and other large transports, making control of many vehicles a matter of Line Of Sight operation, or maybe limited Over the Horizon activity (a 747 with a pallet might be able to cruise at 40,000 feet and push the horizon out well into the hundreds of miles.) A small fleet of transports could now operate a sizeable fleet of UCAV's and UAV's.

The downside is that the two-way data going between the commanders and the UCAV/UAV is now indirect. Furthermore, the more bandwidth that the intelligence people want and need, will be just as expensive as it is to operate the current UAV's. The need to control the UCAV's can be pushed out, and the need to process UCAV responses can be pushed forward to the carriers of the palletized systems, but at the end of the day people on the ground want to know what is out there and want to be able to redeploy the UAV's and UCAV's to meet new threats, and now there is a complex line of command that needs to be managed.

As the actual command of the UAV's and UCAV's is expensive in bandwidth, its move forward is a great improvement in making UCAV's a potentially useful tool. The complexity in now moving multiple aircraft to handle a single weapons targeting may still prove to be a horrible issue.

Hurt, Don't Kill!

One issue with respect to UAV's and UCAV's that doesn't receive much coverage is the lack of need to actually destroy the air vehicle (from a defenders point of view.) This comes about as a by-product of the complexity of making flight control systems that can handle most eventualities (think 'pilots'). The computer rules to handle a UAV are fairly simple, those in a UCAV may be more complex as it will have a harsher environment to work in, but the rules will still be elementary and simplistic in comparison to those which we give trainee pilots. The upshot is that if the vehicle is damaged it will frequently fligh into conditions a pilot would avoid, or could fly out of, but that a UCAV might not be able to communicate to its operator and crash as a consequence.

We may see over the coming years a move by some countries to develop low lethality, high fragmentation warheads for surface to air missiles. Reasoning that simply damaging a number of UCAV's might bring a large portion of the damaged craft down, being a viable economic and tactical driver. We may see the development of the A/A equivalent of grape shot.

Given that the UCAV's we are currently looking at are all Stealthy vehicles, the ability to cover a large chunk of sky in nasty but normally non-lethal metal work, or even carbon and kevlar fibers (flame outs on a UCAV might be almost uncontrollable from 200 miles off) becomes handy as the defender may lack the absolute resolution to determine if these things are operating, but the unexpected falling bombs are a sure sign of presence. Automated response systems geared to filling the sky between 10,000 and 20,000 feet with 'stuff' could produce the damage barrage that would be needed to inflict chaos on the UCAV fleet.

In Conclusion

Over the last two years many things have slipped into place that make UCAV's a potential tool for a new war fighting force. However, many issues remain, and with escalating costs the potential for a broad based UCAV fleet will tested sooner rather than later.