US Army heads into future
tactical unmanned aircraft rodeo next month
By: Jen Judson 3 days
ago
32
Soldiers from 2nd Brigade
Combat Team, 101st Airborne Division, at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, help assess
Martin UAV's V-BAT drone. (Army)
WASHINGTON —
The U.S. Army is heading into a culminating event used to evaluate four
different unmanned aircraft systems capable of replacing the
service’s current tactical UAS — the Textron-made Shadow.
The service
will hold a “rodeo” at Fort Benning, Georgia, the last week of February through
the first week of March where all five of the Brigade Combat Teams which spent
the last year evaluating Future Tactical UAS systems will be represented, Brig.
Gen. Wally Rugen, who is in charge of Army aviation modernization, told Defense
News in a recent interview.
The Army
selected four UAS in 2019 as candidates to replace the Shadow. Each candidate
would undergo soldier assessments to help inform requirements for a FTUAS
capability that would fit into a future vertical lift ecosystem, including new
helicopters and other air-launched platforms.
The service
first selected two teams to provide systems
for the soldier-led evaluation in March 2019: Martin UAV and Textron’s AAI
Corporation. Martin UAV teamed with Northrop Grumman to provide its V-Bat UAS. Textron offered its
Aerosonde HQ.
But shortly
after, the Army added two more aircraft to the mix: the Arcturus-UAV Jump 20
system and L-3 Harris’ FVR-90. Aerovironment purchased Arcturus this month.
Each of these
systems have already been through a rodeo of sorts, participating in a rigorous
fly-off from December 2018 through January 2019 at Dugway Proving Ground, Utah.
The competition helped the service select the system for the soldier-assessment
phase.
The Army will
brief senior leaders attending the event on the data it has been able to garner
through the work the BCTs did in 2020 to evaluate the systems, Rugen said. The
1st Brigade Combat Team of the 82nd Airborne Division was the last to wrap up
its evaluation at the end of the year.
Each unit was
provided just one of the candidate systems, so the rodeo will bring each of the
aircraft back on one playing field.
“We are
probably 90 percent done on the requirement document,” Rugen said, but the
service is waiting for the last bit of data to come in from the 82nd. The
requirements document should be complete by the time the rodeo begins.
“It’s an agile
process, that as different data comes in, well, we’re still open to change,” he
added.
Once the rodeo
is over, the Army will tee all of the information up for an Army decision.
Rugen said an Army Requirements Oversight Council deliberation could come as
early as next quarter.
“I’m very
optimistic as to how it will be received,” Rugen said, but that doesn’t mean
it’s a done deal. “But I tell you, soldiers are demanding this. They all wanted
to keep it.”
Coming out of
the year-long evaluation period, Rugen said that he was hopeful that the Army
would get a revolutionary, not evolutionary, new tactical UAS capability that
isn’t tied to a runway, that has a lower acoustic signature and that has far
lower equipment requirements in order to transport the system organically
within a unit.
Rugen said a
unit at the National Training Center was already able to use the system far
more frequently in a 10-day period than Shadow, showing the ease of deploying
the capability. “We’re seeing a far more agile capability,” he said, “and a far
more effective capability at a much lower price point, both on cost, but also
on personnel in the unit.”
If Army leadership
delivers a positive AROC decision, the service can then move the program into a
full and open competition.
And the Army
plans to move quickly.
“With all these innovative
approaches, what we’re not going to be wed to is what we would have traditionally
done, which is we’d get a [capabilities development document] and we’d wait
some period of time while we went through a bunch of machinations,” Brig. Gen.
Robert Barrie, the program executive officer for Army Aviation, said in the
same interview. “We’re going to look for the most innovative approach and it
will be dependent on how that requirement, how close that requirement is to
something that we can readily get and that we’re demonstrating already.”
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