Global Hawk Approved for Sale to Japan

The U.S. State Department has approved the sale of three unmanned drones worth $1.2 billion to Japan, the Pentagon said Friday.

Lawmakers have 15 days to block the sale, although such action is rare. Once the deal has cleared that hurdle, Japan and the U.S. government can negotiate the actual sale.

The Defense Security Cooperation Agency, which oversees foreign arms sales, told lawmakers the government of Japan had asked to buy three Global Hawk drones including parts and logistical support.

The drones “will significantly enhance Japan’s intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities and help ensure that Japan is able to continue to monitor and deter regional threats,” the agency said in a notice to lawmakers that was posted on its website.

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Sec Nav Mabus: Continue X-47B Testing, but do NOT Give Northrop an Edge in UCLASS RFP

Navy Secretary Ray Mabus said he would like to see the Unmanned Carrier-Launched Airborne Surveillance and Strike (UCLASS) program move forward soon, and he’d like to continue testing the X-47B Unmanned Carrier Air Vehicle demonstrator (UCAS-D) program in the mean time without giving an advantage to builder Northrop Grumman.

Speaking at the American Enterprise Institute on Tuesday, Mabus said the Navy has had a UCLASS request for proposals (RFP) ready to go for almost two years now, but “it’s been held up because of a look at overall ISR [intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance] systems.”

The ISR review is a Defense Department-level initiative, but many in Congress, including Senate Armed Services Committee chairman John McCain (R-Ariz.), have said they want to see a greater emphasis on strike capability from the platform. McCain said the requirements so far focus on things like unrefueled endurance – important for ISR missions – rather than payload capacity for strike missions.

Mabus explained that ISR is “certainly one role” for UCLASS but not the only role.

“One of the reasons we’d like to go ahead and get the RFP out is that we’d like to find out what’s available out there in industry,” he said.

“We put certain key parameters in terms of endurance, in terms of stealth, in terms of payload, but we don’t know what industry, how far they can go in these. Payload is obviously strike.”

“We would like very much to get going on UCLASS,“ he said, but until the Navy can push out its RFP the service will continue working with UCAS-D.

“We are still testing UCAS, the X-47B. We’ve done air-to-air refueling now, we’ve done a lot of the things – we’ve shown you can move it around the deck, we’ve obviously shown it can take off and land from a carrier,” he said.

“The issue with it is how you continue to do that without giving one manufacturer just a huge advantage over what comes next. I think there are ways around it, but we’ve got to be careful not to give the people that made UCAS a huge advantage over what the next iteration is.”

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GAO to US Navy: Decide on What UCLASS is Supposed to do

The US Government Accountability Office has warned that unless the US Navy carefully considers its requirements for the service's future unmanned, carrier-launched surveillance and strike (UCLASS) programme it risks rendering redundant any research carried out so far.

While UCLASS has been delayed by some three years amid indecision on the likely role for the aircraft, testing has been carried out on the Northrop Grumman X-47B unmanned combat air vehicle (UCAV) demonstrator that most recently achieved an aviation first when it performed an autonomous in-flight refuelling in mid-April.

"Ongoing debate about whether the primary role of the UCLASS system should be mainly surveillance with limited strike or mainly strike with limited surveillance has delayed the programme," the GAO says in a report released on 4 May. "The knowledge the navy has obtained about the resources needed to develop the UCLASS system may no longer be applicable depending on what requirements are finally chosen."

The GAO says that if the final UCLASS requirements emphasise a strike role with limited surveillance, the navy will likely need to "revisit its understanding of available resources in the areas of design knowledge, funding, and technologies" before awarding an air system development contract.

The future of the two X-47B demonstrators also remains unclear. As it stands, funding is exhausted, with the navy having spent some $1.5 billion on their development. The two prototype aircraft are expected to be retired to a museum.

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Wait! What?! Can the US Air Force RQ-170 Already Conduct Aerial Refueling?!?!

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LOCUST: ONR's Swarming Drone Demonstration

Lockheed: Fund Replacement UAV for Global Hawk and U-2

The Air Force's current plans for high-altitude surveillance, keeping the decades-old U-2 flying while upgrading the new RQ-4 Global Hawk drone, will not meet the demands of the military for reconnaissance, and the service needs to start again with a new aircraft to replace both spy plans, the head of Lockheed Martin's Skunk Works said.

The Air Force's fiscal 2016 budget request will keep the U-2 flying until 2019 while funding upgrades to the Global Hawk's sensor package to put the drone on par with the aging spy plane. The move will have the drone take over the spy plane's missions in full, though the differences in capabilities means that neither aircraft can really do the other's job.

"I ask myself, when will a program be initiated, which I think will be unmanned, to replace both and do the full set of missions accomplished by both the U-2 and the Global Hawk" said Rob Weiss, the executive vice president and general manager of Lockheed Martin's advanced development programs, or Skunk Works, which originally designed the U-2.

Air Force officials have repeatedly said there is an ever-increasing demand for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance around the world. The service does not have enough operators, and is trying to upgrade its ISR fleet to keep up with demand.

"There is no opportunity to replace both of them based on current demand," Weiss said.

The Air Force had originally sought to cut it's brand-new Block 30 variants of the Global Hawk, saying the U-2 was more capable and had a cheaper cost per flight hour. The service flipped its position, and in the fiscal 2015 request tried to retire all of its U-2s, a move that Congress blocked. The compromise in the newest spending request looks to appease Congressional concerns and keep the spy plane in the air long enough to meet short-term demands of combatant commanders.

But the difference in capability will mean this plan could mean a shortfall in ISR capability, Weiss said. Northrop Grumman is developing a "universal payload adapter" to take the sensor suite from a U-2 and fix it to the drone. The $487 million project is expected to take three to four years to develop and test, according to an Air Force report to Congress.

There is technology advanced enough to be able to develop a new system to address the need for high-altitude surveillance, but now it's an issue of funding and deciding to move forward.

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DARPA's Strike & ISR MALE UAV Moving Forward

The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is one step closer to demonstrating the launch and recovery of a medium-sized unmanned air vehicle (UAV) from a small vessel, following a $19 million preliminary design contract award to AeroVironment.

Under phase II of DARPA’s tactically exploited reconnaissance node (Tern) programme, the company will conduct “subscale flight demonstrations” over the next 12 months that will subsequently lead on to a sole-source phase III at-sea demonstration contract award.

DARPA launched the TERN effort in 2013, but joined with the US Navy’s Office of Naval Research (ONR) in May 2014 to continue the programme, which was retitled “Tern”.

The agency considers assets that provide worldwide airborne intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) as having weaknesses – specifically helicopters being limited by range and flight time, and manned and unmanned fixed-wing aircraft being restricted by large base and runway requirements.

“Tern envisions using smaller ships as mobile launch and recovery sites for medium-altitude long-endurance [MALE] unmanned aircraft,” DARPA says. “Ideally, Tern would enable on-demand, ship-based unmanned aircraft system operations without extensive, time-consuming and irreversible ship modifications.”

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US Navy Needs Triton, Poseidon & UCLASS for ISR

The future of Navy long-range reconnaissance, the recently arrived MQ-4C Triton drone, sprawls across its hangar here, with a wingspan 13 feet wider than a Boeing 737 but a body that’s 80 percent lighter.

Designed for 24-hour-plus patrols at 50,000 feet, Triton still can’t do the job by itself, say both the program manager and the admiral in charge of all Navy drones. It will provide the high-altitude, theater-spanning coverage that cues more tactically-focused recon aircraft to zoom in (in both senses of the word). Primarily, that means the manned, land-based P-8 Poseidon and the Unmanned Carrier-Launched Airborne Surveillance & Strike (UCLASS) drone. That’s three tricky balls for the Navy to keep in the air at once, especially in a time of tightening budgets:

The P-8 entered service late last year and is meant to work intimately with Triton. But the equipment to let a P-8 crew see all of a Triton’s sensor data and to remotely control the drone “is unfunded at this point,” Capt. Jim Hoke, the Triton program manager, admitted to visiting reporters last week.

As for Triton, as of late October all three aircraft built so far will be at Pax River for testing. A fourth test aircraft was cut for lack of funds, and an important collision-avoidance radar is behind schedule. The drone will enter operational service in late 2017, on Guam, but the planned buy of 68 aircraft is in some doubt. We can probably get by with fewer, Hoke told reporters, because Triton will be more reliable and spend less time in maintenance than the planning models predict.

Meanwhile, the controversial UCLASS program has not yet asked industry to submit final designs: Its official Request For Proposals (RFP) is delayed pending a top-level review of the 2016 budget, because critics in both Congress and the Pentagon argue the Navy’s requirements focus too much on “surveillance” at the expense of “strike.”

We need all three aircraft, Rear Adm. Mathias Winter insisted when I got him alone during the Pax River visit. But, I asked, echoing the skeptics, why buy two different intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) drones? In essence, his answer was that the Triton is designed to meet the theater combatant commander’s needs, while UCLASS will work directly for the carrier strike group commander.

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US Navy's UCLASS Delayed due to Budget, Direction Clashes

The US Department of Defense (DoD) is carefully considering how much funding it will allocate to the US Navy's (USN's) Unmanned Carrier-Launched Surveillance and Strike (UCLASS) system before it publicly opens a competition for the new programme, the department's acquisition chief said in early September.

Asked why the department has delayed release of a UCLASS Request for Proposal (RfP), Frank Kendall, the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics, said cost concerns are responsible for the planning slowdown.

"It's driven by the uncertainty about our future budget and about affordability concerns," Kendall said at a defence conference in Washington. "We're looking at all the things the [navy] may not have made provisions for. Affordability is a major concern for us right now, and any new start is going to be done very carefully, the UCLASS is a new start."

Kendall added that officials: "want to be reasonably confident that we are going to be able to actually do that programme, and afford it" before soliciting bids from industry.

NAVAIR did release a series of RfPs directly to the four competitors for the programme: Boeing, General Atomics, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman. The details of those documents are not publicly known.

The USN has reportedly been studying two UCLASS plans - a lightly armed surveillance aircraft and a larger, stealthy and well-armed vehicle capable of navigating through contested environments.

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Via Avleak: Lockheed Ready to Start on Mach Six SR-72 After Seven Years of Secret Research, Ready for 2018 Demo

Ever since Lockheed’s unsurpassed SR-71 Blackbird was retired from U.S. Air Force service almost two decades ago, the perennial question has been: Will it ever be succeeded by a new-generation, higher-speed aircraft and, if so, when?

That is, until now. After years of silence on the subject, Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works has revealed exclusively to AW&ST details of long-running plans for what it describes as an affordable hypersonic intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) and strike platform that could enter development in demonstrator form as soon as 2018. Dubbed the SR-72, the twin-engine aircraft is designed for a Mach 6 cruise, around twice the speed of its forebear, and will have the optional capability to strike targets.

Guided by the U.S. Air Force’s long-term hypersonic road map, the SR-72 is designed to fill what are perceived by defense planners as growing gaps in coverage of fast-reaction intelligence by the plethora of satellites, subsonic manned and unmanned platforms meant to replace the SR-71. Potentially dangerous and increasingly mobile threats are emerging in areas of denied or contested airspace, in countries with sophisticated air defenses and detailed knowledge of satellite movements.

A vehicle penetrating at high altitude and Mach 6, a speed viewed by Lockheed Martin as the “sweet spot” for practical air-breathing hypersonics, is expected to survive where even stealthy, advanced subsonic or supersonic aircraft and unmanned vehicles might not. Moreover, an armed ISR platform would also have the ability to strike targets before they could hide.

Although there has been evidence to suggest that work on various classified successors to the SR-71, or some of its roles, has been attempted, none of the tantalizing signs have materialized into anything substantial. Outside of the black world, this has always been relatively easy to explain. Though few question the compelling military imperative for high speed ISR capability, the astronomical development costs have made the notion a virtual nonstarter.

But now Lockheed Martin believes it has the answer. “The Skunk Works has been working with Aerojet Rocketdyne for the past seven years to develop a method to integrate an off-the-shelf turbine with a scramjet to power the aircraft from standstill to Mach 6 plus,” says Brad Leland, portfolio manager for air-breathing hypersonic technologies. “Our approach builds on HTV-3X, but this extends a lot beyond that and addresses the one key technical issue that remained on that program: the high-speed turbine engine,” he adds, referring to the U.S. Air Force/Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) reusable hypersonic demonstrator canceled in 2008.

[...]

Fundamental lessons were learned, particularly about flight control systems that could maintain stability through the transonic speed regime. Lockheed Martin’s work proved the configuration could “take off without departing,” Leland notes. “We were able to drive down the takeoff speed and keep it stable and controllable. We proved all that in a whole series of wind-tunnel tests.”

Just as importantly, the Skunk Works design team developed a methodology for integrating a working, practical turbine-based combined cycle (TBCC) propulsion system. “Before that, it was all cartoons,” Leland says. “We actually developed a way of transforming it from a turbojet to a ramjet and back. We did a lot of tests to prove it out, including the first mode-transition demonstration.” The Skunk Works conducted subscale ground tests of the TBCC under the Facet program, which combined a small high-Mach turbojet with a dual-mode ramjet/scramjet, and the two sharing an axisymmetric inlet and nozzle.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory’s parallel HiSTED (High-Speed Turbine Engine Demonstration) program essentially failed to produce a small turbojet capable of speeds up to Mach 4 in a TBCC. “The high-speed turbine engine was the one technical issue remaining. Frankly, they just weren’t ready,” recalls Leland. This left the Skunk Work designers with a familiar problem: how to bridge the gap between the Mach 2.5 maximum speed of current-production turbine engines and the Mach 3-3.5 takeover speed of the ramjet/scramjet. “We call it the thrust chasm around Mach 3,” he adds.

Although further studies were conducted after the demise of the HTV-3X under the follow-on Darpa Mode-Transition program, that fell by the wayside, too, after completion of a TBCC engine model in 2009-10. So, Lockheed Martin and Aerojet Rocketdyne “sat down as two companies and asked ourselves, ‘Can we make it work? What are we still missing?’” says Leland. “A Mach 4 turbine is what gets you there, and we’ve been working with Rocketdyne on this problem for the last seven years.”

Finally, he says, the two achieved a design breakthrough that will enable the development of a viable hypersonic SR-71 replacement. “We have developed a way to work with an off-the-shelf fighter-class engine like the F100/F110,” notes Leland. The work, which includes modifying the ramjet to adapt to a lower takeover speed, is “the key enabler to make this airplane practical, and to making it both near-term and affordable,” he explains. “Even if the HiSTED engines were successful, and even if Blackswift flew, we’d have had to scale up those tiny turbines, and that would have cost billions.”

[...]

Lockheed has run scaled tests on components. “The next step would be to put it through a series of tests or critical demonstrations,” Leland says. “We are ready for those critical demonstrations, and we could be ready to do such a demonstration aircraft in 2018. That would be the beginning of building and running complete critical demonstrations. As of now, there are no technologies to be invented. We are ready to proceed—the only thing holding us back is the perception that [hypersonics] is always expensive, large and exotic.”

The 2018 time line is determined by the potential schedule for the high-speed strike weapon (HSSW), a U.S. hypersonic missile program taking shape under the Air Force and Darpa (see page 36). “We can do critical demonstrations between now and then, but we don’t believe it will be until HSSW flies and puts to bed any questions about this technology, and whether we can we truly make these, that the confidence will be there.” In spite of the recent success of demonstration efforts, such as the X-51A Waverider, Leland observes that “hypersonics still has a bit of a giggle factor.”

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Let me say again: there was NO Aurora project.  oy.  This just helps prove it.

Flipside.  This would be a kewl compliment to the next gen bomber they are working on.  Something quick and something persistent.