Land Warfare: UAVS - eyes in the sky | ADM Nov 2010

After nearly 20 years and several millions of dollars worth of study and experimentation, the ADF has finally ordered its first TUAV system – off the shelf from the US Army.

Gregor Ferguson | Sydney

The ADF should take delivery of its first Tactical Unmanned Air Vehicle (TUAV) system, the Shadow 200 manufactured by US firm AAI Inc, some time next year.

This will undertake battlefield surveillance, reconnaissance and target acquisition for Australian Army units in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

The $175 million deal, under a US government Foreign Military Sales (FMS) agreement, was signed in August.

It covers two sets of control stations and ground equipment, including launch and landing control systems, training and 18 RQ-7B Shadow air vehicles.

This is over twice the normal complement of air vehicles for a Shadow TUAV system.

The then-defence minister announced at the time the project forms part of the Government’s $1.1 billion Force Protection package announced in the 2010-11 Budget; the cost also includes funding to enable rapid delivery of some of the new TUAVs direct to Afghanistan.

The Shadow 200 is now a veteran with nearly 500,000 hours logged supporting the US Army and Marines in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The latest extended-wing RQ-7B variant has a six metre wingspan and six hours endurance and is equipped with the proven POP-300D optronic sensor manufactured by IAI Tamam.

This EO/IR day/night sensor includes a laser range finder and designator and target autotrack feature.

It also incorporates the secure Tactical Common Data Link (TCDL) with a data link range of 125 kilometres.

It is launched from a catapult and recovers conventionally using a Tactical Automatic Landing System (TALS) which consists of a millimeter-wave tracking radar on the ground and a transponder on the air vehicle with an arrestor wire to shorten the ground run.

The TUAV has become an indispensable surveillance and situational awareness tool for commanders and soldiers in Afghanistan, but the ADF has been slow to acquire such a system.

JP129 has been a deliberate, rather than lightning-fast, program and has encountered a number of avoidable obstacles.

The RFT for JP129 came out in 2005; AAI and Thales offered largely off the shelf TUAV systems, which is what Defence said it was looking for.

It then chose the developmental I-View 250 system from Boeing Australia and its Israeli partner, IAI Malat.

This ran into technical problems and Boeing’s $145 million contract was terminated in September 2008, after a lengthy negotiation.

Defence announced it would acquire an off-the-shelf TUAV system “as a matter of urgency” to support the ADF in Afghanistan and an evaluation team visited manufacturers in the US, UK, Italy and Israel in December of that year.

ADM understands that the DMO was offered two complete TUAV systems off the shelf in early 2009 for about one third of the price previously agreed with Boeing because one of the original JP129 contenders had some buffer stock available for immediate delivery.

Despite the ‘urgency’ of its requirement Defence took over 18 months to finalise an FMS deal with the US Army which will deliver much the same off-the-shelf TUAV system as AAI offered originally for JP129, but five years later and at a higher price.

It must be said, however, that the additional cost is due partly to the premium paid for the FMS arrangement, and partly to the fact that while a standard Shadow TUAV system has only four air vehicles for each ground station, Australia has ordered twice as many to provide redundancy and attrition replacements.

To provide an airborne surveillance capability in-theatre while JP129 ground through its difficulties, the ADF signed an agreement with Boeing subsidiary InSitu Pacific to provide a surveillance service for the Army in Afghanistan based on its lightweight ScanEagle UAV.

This has been extremely successful, but was always an interim solution and will be withdrawn once the Shadow 200 enters operational service in Afghanistan.

The RAAF surprised many observers last year when it announced the lease of IAI Malat Heron medium range UAVs through Canadian service provider McDonald Dettwiler under Project Nankeen.

The 16.6 metre wingspan Heron is a Medium Altitude, Long Endurance (MALE) UAV which fulfills a more strategic role intelligence-gathering and carrying out persistent surveillance, loitering above the battlefield at 30,000 feet for up to 24 hours at a time with a range of classified payloads including electronic warfare (EW) receivers, synthetic aperture radars and infra red cameras.

The RAAF Heron contingent in Afghanistan is based at Kandahar where it is hosted by the Canadian Heron UAV detachment and supports the ISAF operation as a whole, not just the ADF presence; Australia has come under the umbrella of Canada’s own lease arrangement with McDonald Dettwiler under Project Noctua.

This arrangement, involving a one-year lease with a two-year extension option, enables the RAAF for the first time to operate a long-range surveillance UAV system.

This will shape its views of what sort of UAV it should buy in the forthcoming Phase 1B of Project Air 7000, as well as exposing it to the difficulties, risks and benefits of such a system.

At least two crashes of RAAF Herons have occurred at Kandahar though no UAVs have been written off, but one of the belly-mounted sensors has needed replacing at a cost of at least $1 million.

Project Air 7000 will see the RAAF’s 18 AP-3C Orions replaced with a squadron of eight or nine Boeing 737-based P-8A Poseidon manned patrol aircraft and a squadron of six or seven Multi-mission Unmanned Air Systems (MUAS).

The MUAS purchase has been pushed back to beyond 2019; Defence originally planned to introduce Northrop Grumman’s RQ-4B Global Hawk long-range UAVs by 2006, and even joined the US Navy’s Broad Area Maritime Surveillance (BAMS) program to achieve this, but this arrangement has now lapsed.

The Federal Opposition made acquisition of the Global Hawk a priority in its 2010 Federal election defence policy, but there seems little enthusiasm within the RAAF for such a purchase before the arrival of the P-8A around 2017.

However, if for any reason the P-8A program should slip to the right, an early window of opportunity could open for a revived BAMS Global Hawk solution, though this is a remote prospect at present.

It’s telling that the ADF’s first venture into the UAV field was in the very early 1990s, when Project Air 87 included requirements for both manned and unmanned airborne surveillance systems.

It’s not clear why the ADF never acquired an off the shelf UAV system to provide a nascent surveillance capability and a basis on which to develop the ADF’s expertise in operating UAVs and disseminating and exploiting the imagery and data they produce.

Instead, Defence and DSTO spent 15 years experimenting from scratch with manned and unmanned airborne surveillance technologies.

DSTO even developed its own airborne surveillance radar and high bandwidth datalink under Project Ingara, which it attempted to commercialise but which never entered service.

It’s even more telling that the ADF has never successfully acquired a UAV of any kind after an open tender: all of its owned or leased UAVs thus far – ScanEagle, Heron and Shadow – have been the result of a sole-source acquisition.

This suggests some very timid, even immature, thinking within Defence.

Boeing invests in Australian UAV capabilities

While the termination of Boeing’s original Tactical UAV prime contract under JP129 left a bitter taste in everybody’s mouth, the company still has a significant presence in Australia’s TUAV market through Insitu Pacific in Brisbane.

A subsidiary of Insitu Inc, the company operates the ScanEagle UAV for Australian troops in Afghanistan, a service it has provided since 2006 (initially in Iraq) and which has now achieved 30,000 hours with 99 per cent mission availability.

But with the Army’s acquisition of the Shadow 200 under JP129, Scan Eagle’s ADF career seems to be in its closing stages.

The ADF contract began as a full-service “power by the hour” agreement paid for on a Rate of Effort basis; however, the company has trained over 150 Australian Army operators who now conduct most of the Scan Eagle flying operations while Insitu staff conduct launch, recovery and maintenance.

Insitu runs four training courses a year with 12 operators in each course, and four mission rehearsal exercises a year.

The current ADF Performance Based Contract (PBC), worth around $15 million a year, runs for three years and is flexible enough to embrace technology upgrades, according to Insitu Pacific’s managing director, Andrew Duggan.

The company has implemented three operating system upgrades and four sensor upgrades during its service so far.

These include a Forward Ground Control Station which enables STANAG Level 4 control of the system from the back of a Bushmaster PMV; a man-packable version has also been developed.

While the ScanEagle is practically inaudible and invisible above about 1,500ft, Insitu has developed a hush kit as well as integrating a cooled IR sensor to provide “an order of magnitude better” resolution; these upgrades enable it to provide a stealthy, low-altitude night surveillance and recce capability.

Other sensors developed recently for the ScanEagle include mid- and short-wave IR (MWIR and SWIR) and Nano-SAR radars.

The SWIR is particularly useful as it enables sight of battlefield lasers and IR beacons; in civilian service it also penetrates smoke and haze from bush fires better then EO sensors.

Insitu Pacific was set up to service the regional market for ScanEagle and its offshoots; this includes marketing the system to the Republic of Singapore Navy (RSN) and the Japanese Maritime Self Defence Force (JMSDF).

The former has trialled ScanEagle on two separate ship classes in the South China Sea, demonstrating its operational flexibility and that it can meet RSN surveillance requirements.

The RAN has also trialled ScanEagle at sea but there are no firm plans at present to embark such a system permanently on a frigate or patrol boat.

The company is happy to work under a full-service contract or do a direct sale to customers, Duggan says; initial integration of country-specific payloads would probably continue to be carried out by the parent company in the US, he said, but the aircraft would be assembled and payloads installed in Australia prior to delivery.

A key avenue for growth will be the non-defence market in Australia and the region, believes Duggan.

Many of these markets are government or quasi-government: Bushfire Monitoring, Coastal Surveillance, Search & Rescue, Marine Mammal Monitoring, and support to Police and Emergency Services.

However, power, pipeline and remote asset inspection requirements also open up a potential private sector revenue stream.

The next major iteration of the ScanEagle family is already under test: the Integrator UAV is roughly twice the size of ScanEagle with a payload of up to 50lb, depending on fuel load, a service ceiling of 20,000ft, mission radius of 550nm and up to 24 hours endurance.

Importantly, it also generates 1KW of electrical power to drive its sensor and communications payload and is launched and recovered in exactly the same way as the ScanEagle, on land and at sea.

It will be in service in Afghanistan by the end of this year with an as yet undisclosed coalition partner, according to Duggan.