Army UAS Operators: It's About Information, not Airborne Weaponry

As part of its Blogger Roundtable program, DoD offered journalists access to three Army UAS operators to discuss their work. Two were UAS Shadow operators, while another worked on Raven. The operators discussed their training and how they got into the Army's UAS programs. 

Possible R&D Area One of the operators mentioned additional challenges faced by UAS controllers when coordinating air with ground robotics operations. SUAS (small UAS) and ground robotics are an emerging area where stateside tests are still ongoing. According to this operator, line of sight is currently only 300 ft with the ground robots; a larger range, say to 1000 ft, would be helpful to operators and ground personnel. 

The main application discussed for these UAS systems was reconnaissance. 

Baseline training for the Shadow is approximately 7 months, though only "a couple of weeks" is reportedly needed for basic usage. On the other hand, one of the trainers on hand said that the XBox generation is extremely adept at learning how to operate Raven, Puma or Wasp.  Trainees find that it's "the best video game in the world," said a trainer. The trainer went on to say that it's not so much the damage inflicted by this or other classes of UAS, but rather the value of information they provide, especially in support of ground operations. The Shadow requires two operators and a mission liaison (camera + pilot + mission liaison), whereas the portable Raven requires only a laptop-equipped soldier. Some of items on soldier wishlists include longer battery life, shortages of UAS inventory and operators. Best uses? To discover IEDs and IED-placement activities, route clearance, support for special operations, added situational awareness for the brigade commander for operations in progress. One operator noted that the Ravens can fly in at building-top level and begin surveillance, which can serve as a deterrent to some adversary operations.  

Each brigade has only one Shadow system. The Army's complete UAS inventory, in order of size, includes Gray Eagle, Hunter, Shadow, Puma, Raven, Wasp. 

Information more than bullets In response to a reporter's question about possible moral issues with UAS warfare-at-a-distance, the operators reminded the press that typically the UAS is used for information gathering. Many are not weaponized; in the course of their careers, some operators will never touch a weaponized UAS. 

On the other hand, as one operator said, the presence of UAS in the battlefield has meant that tactics are constantly evolving. For some soldiers on the ground, these operators believe, the sound of a noisy Shadow overhead is a comfortable presence.

Great Britain, India Going Micro and Nano (Respectively)

Its future in the U.S. UAS arsenal may be unclear, considering the large investments being made in devices with single unit costs in the millions, but smaller unmanned flying machines are being given serious consideration in India and Great Britain. According to posts by sUAS News, India is looking at purchasing a UAS weighing less than 2 kilograms, and Great Britain is considering, even in its austere budget era, "swarm"-style devices weighing even less at 200 grams. The swarm application is being considered for deployment in Afghanistan. 

Commercial applications cannot be far behind.

$30M Contract Mod To Advance Global Hawk Won by Northrop Grumman #UAV

Northrop Grumman Systems Corp., Integrated Systems Sector (San Diego) was awarded a $30,346,614 contract modification to continue work they have been performing on Global Hawk.  According to the Department of Defense, Northrop's ISS Group "will provide flight test and software maintenance for the Global Hawk program."  The contract is administered by Wright-Patterson AFB.  Source: DoD ASD (Public Affairs) 

Unmanned Systems Inc. Awarded Predator/Reaper Contract #UAV

30 June 2010 The U.S. government announced a contract award to Unmanned Systems, Inc. of Las Vegas.  The contract value was $7,613,065.  Work is to "provide pilot and sensor operator services for acceptance and flight test of the Predator/Reaper program."  Less than half of the funds were obligated at this time. The contract is administered by 703 AESG/SYK, at Wright-Patterson AFB. Source: DoD ASD (Public Affairs).

PBS Frontline "Digital Nation" Lingers Long on Drone Pilots

The Frontline documentary "Digital Nation: Life on the Digital Frontier" lingered long on the subject of drone pilots.  In a series of balanced interviews, the story weaves sensibly between video games, virtual reality training, and way that growing up in a cyber-influenced environment is changing way the world looks to young people and to military planners. Teaching risk to drone pilots who are not themselves directly taking risk by taking fire is one such challenge.  As drone operators must collaborate more fully with ground personnel -- including NGO's as in the case of Haiti in January 2010 -- the equation is changed significantly.  

Soldiers Drowning in Video Data Could Receive Life Vest or Smoking Gun

A New York Times story by Christopher Drew brought to a wider public audience the challenges of an ever-increasing volume of video and other sensor data from unmanned aerial and other surveillance systems. The issue has been covered in depth in defense-oriented media outlets, but the Times' decision to run this article now may be related to reports of increased use of drone strikes by the Obama Administration. The Times own Scott Shane reported in early December 2009 that more UAS strikes had been carried out by the Obama Administration than in the Bush Admininstration's conduct of the Afghan war.

Life Vests Some improved technologies are already available and are being moved to the battlefield.  Not only operators at Creech AFB or Langley but soldiers in the field may benefit from improved ISR. 

Those who choose to dig a little deeper will learn that the issue is more complex than the Times article suggests.  Some added complexities include:

• Exploding domestic uses of video data, especially in high-surveillance societies such as Great Britain, are part of the bigger picture, not only military uses.
• Challenges of standardization continue to stymie attempts to leverage commercial video image processing systems .
• As students of business intelligence would attest, making sense of data from any single source is problemmatic, and correlating video data with episodic or static non-video data gathered at different times and locations is especially difficult.
• There's more to information fusion than "connecting dots."   Data can be unreliable, field reports can be incorrect.  There are numerous psychological factors such those affecting eyewitness testimony.

Smoking Gun There is as yet limited sousveillance (inverse surveillance) to validate the appropriateness of decisions made as a result of video data, but such digital records, whether collected by the military itself or third parties, should be expected.  As the notorious Rodney King trial demonstrated, a video record of an event become important, despite, or precisely because of its ambiguity. In retrospect it may not be so clear whether all the targets of lethal force ("warheads on foreheads") were legitimate wartime objectives.

On Technorati: The Real Story about Predator Video Feed Encryption

My story posted on Technorati goes into detail not covered well elsewhere about the supposed "hacking" of video feeds from U.S. UAS systems in Iraq and Afghanistan.