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The U.S. Air Force has no immediate need of an MQ-X next-generation replacement for the MQ-9 Reaper unmanned combat aircraft, the service’s intelligence chief said.
“At this point, we don’t see a need, or we don’t plan in the near term to invest in any sort of MQ-X like program,” Lt. Gen. Larry James said at a Feb. 15 Aviation Week-sponsored conference in Arlington, Va. “Given the requirement set, given what’s going on out there, we believe that the Reaper fleet that we can upgrade those if we need to meet the demand signal.”
The Air Force is taking a wait and see approach to how unmanned aircraft technology evolves. The Navy is working on the Unmanned Carrier Launched Surveillance and Strike aircraft, and the Air Force wants to see how that jet develops before committing to a new project, James said.
The Air Force also want to make sure it has a solid grip on the technology challenges facing unmanned aircraft in an high threat environment — to include secure communications.
“We want to get our arms around all these technology challenges in an A2/AD [anti-access area denial] environment — the comm-paths, all those things,” James said. “So before we just jump in into a MQ-X next-generation thing, we think we need some time to sort through all those things.”
The sole partially stealth jet-powered General Atomics Predator-C Avenger aircraft the Air Force is buying will only be used as a test plane, he said.
Richard Aboulafia, an analyst at the Teal Group, Va., said that it is possible — though not necessarily likely — that the Air Force might have something up its sleeve in the “black world.” Aboulafia said he had assumed the service would have started to develop some sort of follow-on to the Reaper, but that it would have been pushed into the future given the current fiscal situation. Additionally, he suggested that such as aircraft might be developed to perform the risky mission of suppressing enemy air defenses.
“If they don’t gold-plate it, why not?” he said, but nonetheless, “You wouldn’t want to lose one.
Meanwhile, the Air Force will stop operating the Block 30 version of the RQ-4 Global Hawk on September 30, James said.
Additionally, the Air Force has yet to determine what will happen to all of the intelligence gathering hardware that the service has bought for Afghanistan. Some of those will be incorporated into formal programs, James said. Those decisions will be made in fiscal 2014 and 2015, he said.
Meanwhile, the Air Force is working on what exactly the service needs to do in order to fully exploit the F-22 Raptor and F-35 Joint Strike Fighter as intelligence gathering platforms. The two stealthy fifth-generation fighters already gather reams of data, but how to exploit that raw intelligence is a problem the Air Force has to work on, James said. The Air Force needs to somehow get that information from the fighters to the Distributed Common Ground Stations in a usable format.
“Especially in an A2/AD environment some of these platforms may be the only penetrating sources we have to get initial intelligence,” James said.
Air Combat Command and the Scientific Advisory Board are both working on the problem. A study was kicked-off about three weeks ago, James said, and should be completed by early summer.
