Tag Archives: Department of Defense

Killing Games: the enormous hunger for drones and their pilots

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At the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, becoming a fighter pilot is still a hotly coveted goal. But slowly, a culture change is taking hold. Initially snubbed as second-class pilot wannabes, the airmen who remotely control America’s arsenal of lethal drones are gaining stature and securing a permanent place in the Air Force.  Drawn to the flashy drone strikes that have taken out terrorists including Al Qaeda leader Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen and the terror group’s No. 2 strongman Abu Yahya al-Libi in Pakistan, airmen are beginning to target unmanned aircraft as their career of choice.

It’s a far cry from the grumbling across the air corps a few years ago when Air Force leaders — desperate to meet the rapidly escalating demand for drones — began yanking fighter pilots out of their cockpits and placing them at the remote controls of unmanned Predators and Reapers.The shift is critical as the Air Force struggles to fill a shortfall of more than 300 drone pilots to meet the US military’s enormous hunger for unmanned aircraft around the world.  Some airmen are even volunteering to give up the exhilarating G-force ride in their F-16s for the desktop computer screens and joysticks that direct drones over battlefields thousands of miles away.  The difference is often generational, but many pilots see drones as the future of air combat.

Drone pilot Major Ted began his Air Force career as an F-16 pilot, but shifted to flying drones and now says he will not go back to flying a fighter jet. He said piloting a drone is empowering because it has a direct impact supporting US troops in Afghanistan. The US military does not allow drone pilots to make their full names public because of concerns the pilots could be targeted.  Asked which is harder to do — manned or unmanned flight — he said that at times, he has been more overcome by the torrent of information pouring in during a drone flight than he was in the cockpit.  “In an F-16, to form a three-dimensional picture, I look outside,” said Ted, who flew F-16s for about four years before switching to armed Reapers, a drone that can carry Hellfire missiles and laser-guided bombs. “But here . . . I have multiple computer screens showing two-dimensional information that I have to then mentally build that picture.”  To attract more drone pilots, the Air Force has created a new career specialty within the service and is ending the system that forced drone assignments on fighter pilots. The new system creates a separate training pipeline for drone pilots.  In a recent survey, the Air Force asked 500 airmen who started out as pilots but had been shifted to drones if they would like to stay on in the unmanned aircraft field. There were 412 volunteers. Those results, Air Force leaders said, show that while a new career field may take 20 years to fully develop, this one is on its way.

Despite the end of the Iraq war and the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan, top military leaders staunchly defend plans to boost the drone fleet to meet intelligence, surveillance, and targeting needs of US commanders in other hot spots, including the Pacific, Africa, and South America.  Budget cuts could slash that spending, but members of Congress have largely supported the unmanned aircraft programs and voiced little opposition to the drone fever that has gripped the military. The military’s spending on drones has grown from about $2.3 billion in 2008 to $4.2 billion this year.  Right now, drones complete 57 24-hour combat air patrols a day, mostly in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and areas around Yemen and the Africa coast. The goal is to increase that to 65 patrols daily by mid-2014, with eight crews each. By 2017, the Air Force wants to have 10 crews per combat air patrol to meet staffing requirements and allow the drone pilots time for schooling, training, and other career-building time.   To staff 65 combat air patrols, the Air Force will need nearly 1,700 drone pilots and 1,200 sensor operators. Currently there are just 1,358 pilots and 949 sensor operators.

By LOLITA C. BALDOR, Flashy drone strikes raise status of remote pilots, Associated Press, August 12, 2012

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How to Unambiguously Identify Zooming Satellites

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U.S. military observers can have trouble identifying satellites whizzing overheard in Earth's crowded space lanes. A new Pentagon effort aims to find the unique visual signatures of individual satellites for quick identification, regardless of whether such satellites belong to friend or foe. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency hopes such signatures — remotely seen from ground or space sensors — could even help identify different satellites made by the same manufacturer. But it's not easy. Satellites' orbits may often change between overhead passes, and it's getting more difficult to spot individual satellites in a space becoming more crowded with vehicles, satellites and pieces of leftover space junk.

The DARPA solicitation for an innovative solution from small business, issued April 27, noted, "Some objects are frequently lost, and sometimes serendipitously reacquired without recognition of its previous catalog existence, unless manpower-intensive analysis intervenes."Any effort to reliably track "active payloads and tumbling objects" and the like would focus on finding each satellite's physical or "operational" signatures (perhaps signals or movements unique to a certain satellite). Timeliness and speed would be crucial for helping military observers quickly identify satellites that had gone missing and possibly reappeared.

The technology needed here likely would involve some sort of software algorithms that can do automated identification based on satellite signatures. Once such software is created, DARPA envisions passing the testing along to the Joint Space Operations Center, the U.S. military's center for coordinating space forces and directing space power to support global operations.  DARPA's focus on satellites also includes the recently launched "SeeMe" effort to deploy dozens of cheap satellites that can provide overhead battlefield surveillance for the U.S. military. The Pentagon afency also has the ongoing "Phoenix" project to try to cannibalize dead satellites and use the parts for new "Frankenstein" satellites.

Military wants to know: Whose satellites are those?, MSNBC.com, May, 3, 2012

See also http://www.dodsbir.net/sitis/display_topic.asp?Bookmark=42609

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Regulating Satellite Technology Exports; the military and the industry

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Satellite export controls should be relaxed by Congress so that U.S. companies can better compete globally for sales of communications and remote-sensing equipment, a report by the Pentagon and State Department found (pdf).  “Limited national security benefits” are provided by a 1998 law (Section 1248 of the National Defense Authorization Act of Fiscal Year 2010 (Public Law 111-84)that applies more stringent controls on satellites than on other equipment that may have both civilian and military uses, the departments said in the report requested by Congress and released today to lawmakers.

The report is “a key step toward relieving U.S. commercial satellite system, component, and part manufacturers of unnecessary controls,” said John Ordway, an export-licensing attorney with Berliner, Corcoran & Rowe LLP in Washington.  Among companies that may benefit are Northrop Grumman Corp. (NOC), Boeing Co. (BA), Loral Space & Communications Inc. (LORL), Honeywell International Inc. (HON), L-3 Communications Holdings Inc. (LLL), Alliant Techsystems Inc. (ATK), Orbital Sciences Corp. (ORB), Moog Inc. (MOG/A) and America Pacific Corp.,....

The report specifies items that should remain on the State Department’s more restrictive munitions licensing lists and those than can be moved to the less restrictive oversight of the Commerce Department’s “Commerce Control List.”The equipment that can be shifted encompasses “hundreds of thousands of items we think U.S. industry should be able to compete” on, Gregory Schulte, deputy assistant secretary of defense for space policy, told reporters on a conference call.

The 1998 law “places the U.S. space industrial base at a distinct competitive disadvantage when bidding against companies from other advanced satellite-exporting countries that have less stringent export control practices and policies,” the report found....

The 1998 law was passed after a congressionally mandated commission headed by Representative Christopher Cox, a California Republican, concluded some U.S. companies gave China access to U.S. technology that may have aided the communist nation’s military missile programs....Industry groups such as the Aerospace Industries Association say the law has stifled U.S. exports. The report today backs that assertion, concluding, ‘‘Over the last 15 years, a substantial number of commercial satellite systems, subsystems and related technologies have become less critical to national security.’’  ‘‘At a time when the budget request for national security space is already slated for a 22 percent reduction, Congress needs to act to ensure the U.S. space industrial base remains viable,’’ AIA President and Chief Executive Officer Marion C. Blakey said.  ‘‘These companies can only sustain our technological edge if they aren’t regulated out of legitimate commercial markets,’’ she said in an e-mailed statement. U.S. manufacturers lost $21 billion in satellite revenue from 1999 to 2009, costing about 9,000 jobs because of the controls, according to her group.

The report emphasizes that the State and Defense departments aren’t advocating a wholesale abandonment of the 1998 law, saying the U.S. ‘‘should maintain strict controls on transfers of ‘‘non-critical’’ items ‘‘that are likely to be used against the U.S. national interest.’’  China’s continuing efforts to acquire U.S. military and dual-use technologies require vigilance, according to the report. That nation’s civilian and military space industry ‘‘are fused together such that reasonable regulators must consider the high likelihood that space-related items and technology will be diverted from a civil use and applied to military programs.”  China recently attempted to acquire a “fully functional, European imaging satellite constellation” that was blocked because it contained U.S. technology, the report found.

Excerpts, Tony Capaccio, Satellite Export Controls Should Be Eased, U.S Says, Bloomberg, Apr 18, 2012

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