(There’s a section on the impact of cheap, numerous unmanned aircraft in my book Weapons Grade, now in paperback. Here’s one man’s vision of what they could mean.)
The awesome future of air power is just around the corner but the Air Force doesn’t want it. Thats the word from Gregory Jenkins of the USAFs Air Armament Center, self-styled ‘heretic’ and architect of a concept he calls Just In Time Strike Augmentation (JITSA).
There are many fleeting targets on the modern battlefield that appear briefly and are gone. Think Saddam Husseins entourage slipping from one hideout to the next, or a Transporter-Erector-Launcher moving into firing position, or a pickup full of insurgents fleeing after staging a mortar attack. An air strike that takes five minutes to arrive is useless in these situations.
Jenkins vision is a networked battlespace with unmanned aircraft maintaining continuous surveillance over a wide area. At the cutting edge is Boeings Air Dominator, a 100 lb drone with a 12-foot span which looks like a model aircraft. I interviewed the people involved in the Dominator program two years ago here. Although Boeing say they have nothing new to report, there have been enhancements since then. A special lightweight fuel cell could bring its endurance to over 40 hours, and theres a sophisticated new vision system for mid-air refueling to increase endurance even further. Each Dominator will carry out up to three attacks using munitions similar to but more versatile than the BLU-108 Skeet . (Some sources claim this has been increased to eight submunitions; Boeing say its still three).
Above all it will be cheap, so unlike the solitary MQ-1 Predator drones, Dominator will be used in packs, with a large number of hunter-killers accompanied by a few ‘gateway’ vehicles providing networked communications and refuelling. Each craft folds away into a pod just eight inches square and four feet long for transport and launch. The plan calls for two dozen or so were to be delivered by an F/A-22 Raptor jet at high speed, but Jenkins is thinking much bigger.
You dont need a stealthy, high-performance aircraft to deliver something that can travel hundreds of miles on its own. In the JITSA scheme Dominators would be packed in pallets of twenty on a C-17 transport plane, with thirty pallets in all thats a total of six hundred drones. A loadmaster would handle the individual release of as many as needed. Its something akin to a British FOAS concept of replacing bombers with a transport plane packed with palletized cruise missiles.
Once in position, the swarm would maintain air dominance over a wide area, providing both of continuous surveillance and instant reaction. Jenkins estimates that any target in the kill zone could be hit within 2–4 minutes maximum. None of those fleeting targets would escape.
Against a conventional force, Jenkins calls the JITSA system a back breaker, destroying armor, artillery and air defences on a massive scale, not to mention taking out air forces on the ground.
Dominators can also tackle targets that would normally take much larger munitions by being smarter. You might need a 2000 lb laser guided bomb to destroy a bridge, but a few Dominators can simply destroy vehicles attempting to use it. The bridge is denied to the enemy just as well, and you dont have to rebuild afterwards.
The system can also neutralize deep bunkers which are invulnerable to the heaviest bombs. Missiles or stores of WMD are not going to harm anyone if they are stuck underground with a swarm of Dominators overhead 24/7, ready to attack anything the minute it emerges. Underground command centres become prisons.
The kill decision will always be delegated to a human operator using a mobile control set, so in the example above the bridge could be selectively closed to military vehicles.
JITSA is much bigger than Ive described here Jenkins has detailed a true net-centric concept, with additional tiers and other aircraft types providing extra capabilities. It doesnt even have to be based on Dominators, any networked loitering UAV would do.
The Air Force is going head with Dominator, but not in the swarms Jenkins would like to see. So why is JITSA not a USAF-endorsed concept at this time, with no funds allocated? In a world of multi-billion dollar programs, it offers outstanding capability for a modest outlay and minimal development. Perhaps a system based on something that looks like a toy and has no requirement for manned combat aircraft is not too popular with the blue suits. Or perhaps the idea of pilots demoted to delivery-truck drivers does not fit their vision.
So JITSA is still on the shelf. But even if the US does not buy into the concept, that doesnt mean nobody else will. And what might happen then would be anybodys guess.
Thanks to SSgt. Ryan Hansen, AAC Public Affairs and Marguerite Ozburn at Boeing for their help.
– David Hambling
Drone Swarm for Maximum Harm
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{ 31 comments… read them below or add one }
Think of the similarity between 21st Century drone swarms and medieval siege techniques, forcing the occupants to face starvation or surrender. The concepts behind Swarm and Retract Maple, coupled with advances in micro-production techniques available to civilians, could have grave consequences for internal security if the methods of implementation are ever open-sourced. We may be on the cusp of terrorist-styled UAV attacks, born from a combination of RC toy knowledge and just plain old-fashioned bombs. Just a thought. Ill keep all of the rest to myself.
“Well it’s got wings, its got to be an Air Force system!” seems to be the mantra when people start pointing fingers. But couldn’t another service step into this just as easily?
The AF is the conventional, fixed-wing branch, sure. But this sort of loitering support/seeker work is right up the Army’s alley. They’d be like artillery rounds that you fire and then command them to land when and where you need them. And since ground troops often needs this kind of “RIGHT F—ING NOW!” support it would make sense to have them in the same service. So why not beat the Army over the head with this?
Part of the problem is it really is TOO cheap, at least for the US military’s mindset.
This would be a great scheme for say, India. Or China.
$20k-50k a drone, with drones of various capabilities. All the innovation is in the software/programming/creativity.
(The explosively-formed munitions are very cool, but I have a huch the best “power at a point” weapon for a lot of targets would be a computer aimed 50 caliber gun or the OICW/OCSW style distance-fused munitions.).
Say, a $20M initial R&D budget (chinese engineers are brilliant AND cheap) and then $25k/copy, a $100M program could produce an air force of >3000 aircraft. For the price of 1 JSF.
And a mix could provide a huge group of close air support, close air defense (would you want to fly an Apache where there are 50 enemy drones in the air out to get you?) and reconnisance.
Sounds useful for certain situations like maybe denying access to a bridge while pushing from the other side towards the river without having to destroy the bridge cheaper safer than say a Apache, A-10, or other air dropped ground unit would. And good for troop support against dispersed lightly armed insurgent type guerrilla warfare.
The idea of having mass numbers deployed with the ground forces giving surveillance, communications, and bonus fire support now would be serious force multiplier.
However for major combat against large conventional forces it would definitely have its limits. To begin with I think some 50cal machinegun positions could chew up rather easily some low flying slow 4 airplanes. A couple of cheep Soviet age radar guided short range anti-air-guns would do even better. So a swarm attack on a tank column may not get close enough to do much damage. I would rather bet on JDAMs and cruise missile for such engagements. A 1000-500-or even 250lb freefalling 4 bomb is near impossible to shoot down.
Bottom line I think it would make a very useful club in the bag but I wouldnt go throwing the bag, that high dollar putter, or the graphite drivers away just yet.
This sounds like the kind of doctrine that’d be immensely useful in a close ground support role. Which means the Marines would likely want a part of the action if it proves to be sound on the battlefield.
Err, the Army’s already building something like this.
Ever hear of Netfires? 40km range on the PAM, 70km+ on the LAM, which is basically an offshoot of LOCAAS.
One comment on the whole “revolutionary new concept” deal–don’t put all the eggs in one basket. Human-driven platforms serve as a very nice backup when the enemy develops EMP weapons or jamming/spoofing capable of disrupting your airborne commnet over enemy territory.
It sounds cool, but it’d be a be-yotch to network. All the problems they’re having with Jitters? Compound that for having 500 drones over a city, each transmitting live video feeds.
Big D – Yes, I thought of menitoning NetFires, the ‘artillery support in a box’ concept has a lot in common.
C-low – Dominators might be harder to shoot down than you think. They’re virtually silent, much smaller than any manned craft, radar stealthy and can fly very low. The networked aspect means they can coordinate their attack to come in from all points of the compass simultaneously. If one in ten gets through they will be very effective.
Unfortunatly, like a lot of similar systems, it would be highly vunerable to a non-nuclear EMP generator.
Hitting an 8-inch square target with a .50 cal is not so easy when it’s dark.
EMP weapons? Like, we all have one of those, NOT! And how do you hit these things without zapping everything you’re trying to defend?
Brian-
JTRS is having its problems, but they don’t necessarily map to this situation. The technology to network lots of “users” at UHF frequencies with low succeptibility to interference or compromise is pretty well established. CDMA and other spread-spectrum techniques offer a glimpse at how it can be done. I’m sure there would be problems, and it would call for a lot more bandwidth, but I think these problems are mostly matters of scale.
And, yeah, I wouldn’t trade in all the fighter wings for these, but at first blush the Air Force is a pack of fools for not running with this. I’ll try to think up some drawbacks to it later.
On a small scale, here is an example of a system that allows multiple R/Ts to self-organize on a discrete chunk of spectrum, meaning no frequency conflicts for you RCrs out there.
http://www.spektrumrc.com/DSM/Technology.aspx
I’m liking the mother ship thing as well as the drone to drone refuel. Let’s hope the fighter mafia doesn’t strangle this thing in the crib.
Toastr,
Read up on HPM weapons if you want to answer your own question. Terrorists are unlikely to be fielding EMP grenades, but the traditional conventional foes (China, Iran, North Korea, and sometimes Russia) are probably capable of producing or procuring such systems. And yes, this sort of thing can be targeted- that’s the great thing about microwaves.
Naturally, we’ve been EMP-hardening many of our systems for decades- but all that stuff adds weight and cost.
EMP weapons might be an issue for those that can get them for individual targets. But if you are talking dozens and dozens of targets you end up with the problem that everytime you fire up your weapons to hit a target you get hit with an anti-radation munition. So you take one down at the cost of your transmitter,(I wonder which cost more to build and operate?) mean while you have not significantly reduced the firepower in the skys above you.
Sure a program like this would not be good for every situation and I don’t suggest for a moment that UAVs are a replacment for all aircraft but we are getting closer and closer to that day and the DOD needs to start dealing with that.
Expensive is not always better. We need to make sure that we have a good mix of the expensive over powerful fighters and the like as well as the cheap easy to replace and deployed in mass systems.
Cenobyte’s point is well taken.
(Caveat: I am not a microwave engineer and have to use VHF/UHF theory on the problem and hope it applies.)
I see it thus:
Economy, survivability, precision. Pick two.
You can have a highly directive system which is less liable to incur fratricides, but more vulnerable to enemy attack; or a more surivable system which is more likely to damage friendly systems. Or you can spend more money and have it both ways.
My reasoning is based on the two methods I know of for generating an EM pulse. You can either use the explosive method, which lends itself to being launched at someone and detonating in their vicinity. EMP flak, if you like. But what about friendly units in the blast radius?
Alternatively you can use a more conventional setup involving exciters, amplifiers, waveguides, and antennas. This should allow you to hit your target with less worry of slagging every FET on the block. Unfortunately it is easier to find and kill (for a number of reasons) and you’re limited in the number of targets which can be engaged simultaneously.
The expensive option is to deploy munitions which can be fired from a distance which direct their “blast”.
Predictions? The “flak” option would suit any low-tech foe. The US has looked into the expensive option for use with cruise missiles, and both the US and China are said to be looking into option 2. I’m sure other folks are as well.
Anyone for some math? I surmise there may be a sweet spot on the weight vs. cost graph where you can do a limited amount of UAV hardening which would reduce their vulnerability to a point where a single EMP won’t destroy the whole swarm. You’d have to work out output (MJ or kWH) for the warhead versus received power at a drone, and decide how many dB of shielding you’re going to settle for. Frankly I don’t have time to find these numbers because my lunch is up. But I think you can work to a point where killing the swarm requires dozens of shots, by which time (hopefully) the launchers has been destroyed.
C-Low,
Thanks for the comments. If you check the stats, Dominator can hit targets two thousand miles from launch, so a C-17 can release them from well outside the target country.
A single Dominator would do a lot of damange to an airbase – specifically it would destroy parked aircraft. Even one around an airbase would shut it down, in the same way as they would shut down a bridge by threatening anything using it. You could afford to use a lot of them to get one aircraft and no existing defence could cope with hundreds of them. That would do a lot more damage than a B-2 with JDAMS which would only do temporary damage and could not hit aircraft or mobile targets.
EMP or directed energy defence has exactly the same problme as any other – how do you acquire the target? It’s very much harder to detect than a manned plane.
EMP weapons and my doubts about them are discussed in some detail in Weapons Grade.
As for Locust-like swarming weapons, someone else may have read the same book, there’s a smaller weapon called LOCAAS which fits the bill. This will be in service before Dominator but is much less capable (single warhead. 30 min endurance).
There’s a reason why these don’t exist yet: there isn’t enough secure communications in the world to network something like this under positive control.
Unfortunately, DoD can’t keep up with the bandwidth demands *today*, let alone those projected for tomorrow.
Rotating propellor is more easily detectible than Seversky Ionocraft propulsion invented in the ’60s. Seversky Ionocraft has no moving parts and fuselage can avoid using the standard “plane” configuration because both lift and propulsion are provided by same method. Top velocity and range should be better also. Electric battery technology should be MIT “LEES” dept. carbon nanotubes if available and if it tests out as well as promised. Further improvements can be made by using helium lift modules or manufacturing carbon fiber fuselage components etc with helium interstitially in the materials (beams, surface sections etc.). Target weight should be at or near zero at Earth surface for maximum range and maneuverability unless these are to serve as permanent monitors or whatever, in which case the weight of the craft should be negative. Further weight reduction is by airtight sealed carbon fiber vacuum spheres; spheres with all air evacuated to provide maximum lift. These spheres are integrated into fuselage and could be of various sizes depending on the design needs. Fuselage is thin film solar photovoltaic collector perhaps using EMKR (Emkor) solar tech or better if available (for example if LEES carbon nanotubes lead to better photovoltaics). Standard telescope monitoring camera is replaced by CCD/laser/maser telescope operating in various invisible frequencies according to need. (Laser/maser telescope doubles as weapon of choice if laser/maser is pumped using Maxwell Technologies and Titan Technologies “ultracapacitors”). Onboard computer also used to help guide orbiting MetalStorm (MTSX) system for maximum ground penetration with reduced collateral damage; onboard computer is “Atom Chip Corporation” or similar new quantum optical or quantum ferroelectric computer, or quantum “magnetic memory” computer (IBM, Intel new tech, but also see Shimon Gendlin new patent claims made for the “quantum optical” computer, and/or Larry D. Maurer’s “HOLO-1″ patent [Japan].)
Wouldn’t the dominator’s laser system be vaulnerable to low power laser weapons? I know modern optics are supposedly ‘bulletproof’ against lasers, but that’s never really been tested. A few soldiers with effective blinding lasers could score soft kills on a whole swarm before it came into range. It’s also worth noting that a PDA and camcorder can do much the same job as the ballistics computer in an Abrams tank. The chinese or russians could build such electroptical sights from commercial hardware if they were given a reason to.
The C-17 can only hold 18 pallets.
“The C-17 can only hold 18 pallets”
Maybe these are smaller pallets? As you can see from the diagram, they’re reckoning on 30.
“Wouldn’t the dominator’s laser system be vaulnerable to low power laser weapons? ”
LADAR does not use the same frequency band as your easily-avilable laser. In addition, what do you think your chances are of seeing one of these before it sees you? Remember, they can operate in pitch darkness and are not audible.
if the air force wont accept it then why not do some research on what there looking for right now in drone asociated technology…
*do the research
*make improvements (btw the carbonfiber vac spheres thing is a good ideah)
*try to present it again
if that dosn’t work then like moose said the army likes this stuff, as do I
if the air force wont accept it then why not do some research on what there looking for right now in drone asociated technology…
*do the research
*make improvements (btw the carbonfiber vac spheres thing is a good ideah)
*try to present it again
if that dosn’t work then like moose said the army likes this stuff, as do I
The USA doesn’t really want the capability this weapon offers. The Dominator seems awfully good at going after that image we all have of the terrorist. The Bush gang knows darn well that terrorism isn’t the problem that it has made it out to be. Just the same, the Bushies have built up the terrorism threat, not because it is real, but because it’s a good way to get the country to agree to its real designs, that is, getting Congress to approve appropriations to companies like Halliburton. The real Bush plan is to invade countries, such as Iraq, then build a them back up again. Either way, Bush cronies get filthy, filthy rich.
Droping several dozen or more of these for a one shot search/destroy or self destruct seems very costly. There should be a recovery scheme.
Good ideas that pull money from those that have money are bad ideas to those that have money
This is a brilliant system. All of the caveats I’ve seen posted so far are really non-issues.
- Networking bandwidth is not an issue, as secure, fault-tolerant wireless protocols are now ubiquitous.
- At their size and paired with stealth composites, radar is nigh useless. Without fire control, shooting down craft of this size is laughable. These will likely have a flight ceiling of over 10k feet, and are inaudible even above 2k feet.
With the success of guidance capabilities and shaped charges, smaller munitions are now becoming standard fare in many of the weapons systems. Pairing this to lightweight drones is a natural evolution. We’re still a few years from UCAVs taking over air supremacy roles, but for ground attack, UCAV is here now. If the military is saying it’s not interested, that’s probably because development has been co-opted for covert use.
Think about it:
- No pilots taken POW or KIA
- No risk of 100 million dollar craft shot down by a weapon system costing only 1% of the target
- Massive numbers of attack craft can even be used for soft targets and counter insurgency roles
- Fear factor would be unparalleled
- Cost per unit would enable not just hundreds, but perhaps even tens of thousands for deployment
- Loiter time + distributed image processing would enable detection of asymmetric warfare activities
I abhor warfare. But if the job needs to be done, do it quickly, with overwhelming superiority and minimal collateral damage.
I see this platform as satisfying all of these requirements.
So when one of these drones falls to the ground someone will pick it up and reverse engineer the technology. Seems to me they’d be great weapon of choice for the assassins in the world. Maybe it is just what is needed….the poor man’s ultimate defence
We don’t have the comms to do this properly yet, among other potential pitfalls. The concept is sound and very promising but needs an assortment of new technologies to mature first. Cheap software defined radio would help a great deal for instance. Refueling or extended battery technologies need attention and refinement.
And the same developments that will make this feasible will yield more effective countermeasures.
A swarm of offensive UAVs could be countered with relatively few defensive UAVs containing SDR jamming arrays and antiradiation/EMP weapons (either air-launched or in a cheaper flying bomb configuration.) You don’t need to decode an encrypted transmission to hit the transceiver with a HARM, or to guide an EMP drone to the middle of your ‘locust swarm.’
In short, there’s a lot of potential here but it’s not a ‘magic bullet.’ Simply put, for the forseeable future JDAMs equipped with extended range kits are going to remain cheaper and less vulnerable than UAVs that attack from close in. Those JDAMs may be launched from UAVs–but that’s different than the ‘locust swarm’ concept. Munitions with a medium to long range standoff capability make the launch platform’s direct combat capabilities less important–which lowers cost, complexity, etc.
These systems will probably be more transformative for ground forces in terms of having disposable CAS and recon platforms (potentially organic to the unit) than it will for traditional strategic Air Force missions, and therefore will encroach more on the territory of rotary-wing than fixed wing aviation–at least in the initial generations. The ‘locust swarm’ might threaten to displace the A10 or the JSF in some roles but it’s going to be a while before it can displace the capabilities of platforms such as the BUFF or the Bone.
why not make mini zeppelins/blimps? much longer loitering time, just make sure they have a low cross-section to the wind. additionally, why not have them use Time Difference of Arrival (TDoA) with microphones to triangulate the location of gunfire, that seems like it would be very useful.
you could have a blanket of blimps capable of pinpointing the location of gunfire, giving all the information a howitzer would need. thus, firing at the blimp would cost you your life.
Thanks for the comments, I've learned a lot from them. The point made about a drone taking out a multi-million dollar aircraft is exactly the type of thing you need to do to be successful in war. I don't see any reason you wouldn't be successful with this mission… You could write a program to follow terrain and automatically attack an aircraft or tank… Just like a tomahawk only at a fraction of the cost and it would be 10x harder to kill (Cost, size and capability is what has created this paradigm shift in warfare).
Swarm killing: You might have imagined an artists concept of these things flying next to each other. Realistically they would be many miles away from each other.
The fact is that laser arrays (say 20 1MJ lasers pointing at the same thing) are going to make most aerial platforms sitting ducks so why not make them smarter, smaller and cheaper…and more disposable? That's the whole point here.
Drones fighting drones: Now this is where the programming gets complex and you start seeing drones with mini missiles. Steering with a rudder is childs splay compared to 3D dogfighting.