Carrier-based drone offers way forward for US navy – subject to squabbling

Barely a year after the world's most sophisticated drone proved it could take off and land on the deck of an aircraft carrier, the project is at a crossroads, with huge implications for the future not only of drone warfare but US seapower writ large.

The US navy will soon release a request for proposals from a handful of defense companies for the development of the Unmanned Carrier Launched Airborne Surveillance and Strike vehicle, or UCLASS. That highly bureaucratic document will formalize the navy's vision for what it wants the highly advanced drone to do.

But that vision is already coming under fierce criticism, as academics, former defense officials and legislators charge the navy with holding a myopic view of the drone’s possibilities. The service, they say, is on the verge of missing a historic opportunity to secure America’s massive advantage in naval aviation against the threats to its aircraft carriers of the coming decades. And with the carrier fleet a stand-in for American power, small changes in requirements for the UCLASS can have global implications.

The navy rejects that criticism entirely, arguing that the system its critics want UCLASS to be is unaffordable and would place the enterprise in jeopardy.

The chairman of the seapower subcommittee in the House of Representatives, one of the navy's critics, is urging the service to prioritize the drone's mission ahead of its cost. He likened the situation to a budgetary choice between an expensive aircraft carrier and a far cheaper vessel, the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS), that performs different functions.

"If you're basing it strictly on cost, you're going to build the LCS. On the other hand, if you say we have a need for a carrier – that, the LCS can't match. Then all of a sudden the cost becomes worth it," said Representative Randy Forbes, a Virginia Republican.

In development for nearly a decade and conceptualized for even longer, and still years away from joining the US fleet, UCLASS will be unlike every other drone that currently exists.

It will be capable of taking off and landing on a moving aircraft carrier, perhaps the hardest maneuvers in aviation. While other drones of comparable size – a test vehicle has a 62ft wingspan, about the size of the F/A-18 Super Hornet fighter jet – are controlled remotely by humans, UCLASS is highly autonomous, flying preset patterns that humans program.

Last year, the navy launched and, more significantly, landed a demonstrator vehicle called the X-47B – known colloquially as the Dorito, for its shape – from the USS George HW Bush. "One small step for man and one significant technical leap for unmanned-kind," Rear Admiral Mat Winter, who managed the program and has since been tapped to be the navy's chief futurist, said at the time.

'A shift in strategic eras'

What UCLASS does, and what it is for, is up for grabs.

The two letters at the end of its name say it all: surveillance and strike. Those two missions are now-iconic functions of drones, albeit not ones that operate far out to sea. Yet the admixture of them for UCLASS is fiercely debated.

UCLASS's architects initially envisioned a system that operated like the Cadillac of drones: capable not only of spying, but also of flying stealthily and striking deep into heavily defended airspace, where fighter pilots would be at great risk. Accordingly, the UCLASS would have to withstand air defenses that would turn current, land-launched Predators and Reapers into scrap metal. Those drones, slow and loud, only fly above areas like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Libya, where insurgent groups lack the ability to shoot them down.

The ambitious conception of UCLASS offered two benefits to the navy. It would allow aircraft carriers to operate securely at much further distances than reachable by the powerful anti-ship missiles under development by nations like China, accordingly protecting the viability of a central seapower platform during a period of doubt. And it would secure the US position as the undisputed leader in drone sophistication, just as the technology proliferates.

A seminal conception of the forerunner to UCLASS, detailed in a 2008 thinktank paper, pictured a drone that could fly, with the aid of midair refueling, for up to 100 hours with a range of 3,000 nautical miles, giving "a dispersed aircraft carrier force to exert combat power over an enormous area". One of the authors of that paper, Robert Work, is now the deputy secretary of defense.

If it sounds like the drone itself isn't the point, that's because it's not. The real potential UCLASS offers is in allowing aircraft carriers – the heart of America’s ability to project its military power overseas – to operate far out of range of anti-ship missiles while UCLASS flies into territory controlled by a well-defended adversary.

"To give the carrier new life, we must expand its reach and striking power considerably," said James Holmes, a strategy professor at the Naval War College. "Otherwise it's a ship that has to count on others to defeat enemy anti-access before it ventures into relatively safe surroundings. That sounds like a ship that's been demoted from the centerpiece of the battle fleet to a support function."

UCLASS has accordingly unlocked a debate about the future of US military power in an age of war-weariness and declining defense budgets. A recent congressional hearing delved not only into design issues but wide-ranging discussions about "a shift in strategic eras"; the end of the "unipolar moment" in American geostrategic history; and a future marked by "a degree of great power competition" not seen since the cold war.

But before the flight tests aboard the George HW Bush, the navy drastically scaled back its expectations for the drone – the result of a navy and Pentagon re-look, which Forbes said continues to be riddled with internal disagreement and which continues to this day.

No longer will UCLASS be expected to survive in what the military refers to as "denied" airspace, where an adversary could shoot it down. Initially, it will be capable of staying aloft without refueling for 14 hours, and flying between 600 and 1,200 nautical miles – up to 2,000 on a strike mission. Yet it will start off carrying only a single laser-guided munition, making it vastly more of a maritime spy plane than an offensive weapon. In the military’s styling, the first S in UCLASS will be capitalized and the second lower-cased.

'Pushing the limits requires experimentation'

The navy says its plan is to stagger the capabilities of UCLASS. Once the navy selects a company's design – a process that the request for proposals will formally kick off – future iterations of the drone will allow for greater weapons storage, and for a more expansive conception of UCLASS missions.

In testimony last week to Forbes' skeptical House subcommittee, navy and Pentagon officials also suggested that larding UCLASS with premium requirements could render the system unaffordable – seemingly a major factor in downscaling initial UCLASS capabilities.

The navy wants "an affordable persistent intelligence surveillance reconnaissance and targeting, or ISR&T system, with a precision strike capability," said Vice Admiral Paul Grosklags, the sea service's research and acquisitions chief. Scaling back its unrefueled flight time to add weaponry or improve durability created an "enormous" cost risk of "more than four times" when accounting for the logistics of refueling, said senior navy official Mark Andress.

Navy futurists are skeptical that the service, once it selects a design from four competing defense giants, will be able to scale up the UCLASS. Designing an aircraft requires tradeoffs: its shape will influence how much fuel, weapons and sensors it can carry and, largely, how resistant to radar it will be.

"You need to get the shape and the propulsion path right or you're stuck forever in terms of the payload and the survivability. You can't undo those things," testified former navy official Robert Martinage, who warned that the navy's requirements for UCLASS were moving into a "permanent aircraft design trade that reduce[s] survivability and payload carriage and flexibility, the exact same attributes that are needed to perform ISR and precision strike in an Anti- Access/Area-Denial environment".

Translated from the wonk, Martinage's point is that UCLASS will be a far-ranging robotic aerial scout, increasing the situational awareness of an aircraft carrier across large swaths of ocean. But it will not significantly add combat power – and, accordingly, the ability to deter potential adversaries – against well-defended targets like mainland China, whose development of advanced anti-ship missiles has sparked enormous debate within the navy about the enduring relevance of aircraft carriers.

That has several naval analysts worried that the navy is setting itself up to miss an enormous opportunity. Some argue that the service will end up spending more on a less-ambitious drone – as it has seen ballooning costs in priorities like the Littoral Combat Ship and F-35 fighter jet – that takes what drones already do and plops it on a carrier deck.

"Funding a less-advanced version of UCLASS risks spending sparse investment and procurement dollars on capabilities that will not be so different from what the navy and air force already possess. The expected return on investment, in terms of additional capabilities, from the less-advanced UCLASS is arguably quite low," said Michael Horowitz, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania who recently spent a year in the Pentagon's policy directorate.

"Pushing the limits requires experimentation and a commitment to innovate. The risk for the United States is that, like the British with the tank and the aircraft carrier, the United States military will end up inventing great unmanned technologies, only to see others mimic the technology and jump ahead when it comes to organizational implementation, meaning others would gain much more significant military advantages from them."

Pentagon officials are stepping into the process. Robert Work, the deputy secretary of defense and a leading seapower wonk, will hold a meeting with navy officials to discuss UCLASS requirements and other major "power projection" questions. That meeting, expected next month, will precede the issuance of the request for proposal, sparking speculation about yet another re-adjustment in Pentagon expectations for the drone.

Forbes said he doesn't know when the actual proposal request is expected. He inserted a provision in this year's defense authorization bill, which has yet to pass the Senate, requiring a Pentagon re-look at the program – something the navy criticized for a delay, but which Forbes defends as a prudent measure on a technology with tremendous implication for US naval power.

"When all the history's written on this, the UCLASS is going to play a significant role in the relevance of our aircraft carriers 20 years from today," said Forbes.

"If we get this right, it's going to go a long way in making sure we have the kind of balanced air wing that's going to be necessary to continue to keep that great capability that our aircraft carriers provide operable for the national defense of this country."