A Performance Drone Works drone hovers during the small Unmanned Aerial
Systems Summit on Scott Air Force Base, Illinois, June 13, 2024. U.S. Air Force
photo by Senior Airman Violette Hosack
Air Force
Chief: Small Drones Are Both ‘Threat and Opportunity’
Oct. 29, 2024 | By Chris Gordon
The proliferation of drones in the war in Ukraine
has changed how many experts see the future of warfare. But the Air Force’s top
general is cautioning against overstating those lessons as the U.S. seeks to
deter China and Russia and prepare for other major threats.
“I think the appearance of drones and the
appearance of rapidly replicable, low-cost, mass airborne platforms offers both
a threat and an opportunity,” Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David W. Allvin
said Oct. 25 at the Military
Reporters and Editors Conference in Washington, D.C.
There is no question that drones provide the
military with a way to strike targets with precision in a cost-effective
way. That offers the opportunity, Allvin said, “to deliver combat
airpower, sensing, communications in a different way.”
But what works well in Ukraine, he added, may have
less utility in the western Pacific as the U.S. seeks to counter China’s
growing military.
“The question that we need to address as we look
at how it might impact and find its way into our Air Force writ large is the
utility across the geography,” Allvin added. “I would not want us to take
what’s going on in Ukraine and … transport that immediately to the Indo-Pacific
because of the nature of the tyranny of distance.”
Pentagon officials have noted the utility of
drones for both Russian and Ukrainian forces. Russia has used Iranian-made
drones to attack Ukraine’s energy infrastructure. Russian forces have also
employed small quadcopter-style and first-person view drones for reconnaissance
and aerial strikes.
Ukraine, in turn, has developed long-range drones
that can strike targets in Russia from over 400 kilometers away, Secretary of
Defense Lloyd J. Austin III said last week.
DOD recently gave Ukraine’s drone industry $800
million to keep working on long-range aircraft. And drone
technology has utility for the U.S. as well, as the Air Force pursues its
future force design.
“Those three words don’t often belong in the same
text: inexpensive, precise, and long-range,” said Allvin. “But we’re looking at
it from both that opportunity and threat perspective on how we might integrate
those into the force.”
Still, many of the cutting-edge systems the Air
Force is pursuing for great power competition are more sophisticated and costly
than the UAVs that have proliferated in Ukraine’s airspace.
The Air Force is betting big on Collaborative
Combat Aircraft (CCA), envisioned as wingman drones that cost $25 million each
and fly alongside the service’s manned fighters and bombers. The first series
of designs has been unveiled, and Allvin said 150 CCAs will be in service
within the next five years. The capability and mass that could be provided by
those platforms have led the service to reevaluate its future manned fighter
needs.
“Collaborative Combat Aircraft, I don’t want
people to think of those as a quadcopter-style drone,” said Allvin. “They are
certainly of a different class, and the idea is for them to be autonomous and
collaborative with current systems.”
Yet another challenge is figuring out how to
counter cheap drones that are used by adversaries. In the past year, U.S.
troops in the Middle East have been targeted by Iranian-backed groups armed
with one-way drone attack drones, including one drone strike that killed three
Soldiers in Jordan in February.
Iran has also deployed one-way attack drones
against Israel, which Air Force F-15E and F-16 fighters helped shoot down in
April, and Iranian-backed Houthis have attacked shipping in the Red Sea, Gulf
Aden, and Bab el-Mandeb strait in part with one-way attack drones by air and
sea.
“The counter small-UAS threat is something that is
certainly growing at a concerning pace,” Allvin said. “The barrier entry to
that is low, the ability to attribute [the attack] is low. … We plan on really
working on that and developing the counter small UAS to be able to counter the
threats, not only here, but also the ones that we are facing overseas.”
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