It was a recognition that RPAs were not just a temporary feature of our Air Force, but rather an enduring new weapons system. Taking it a step further, we needed to have a bench of remote aviators who could grow up to be colonels and supervisors and planners who would know their weapons systems just like the fixed-wing and the rotary-wing conventional pilots do today. To that end, we created an entirely new career path focused entirely on RPAs.
It was a combat platform no different than fighters or gunships or U-2s, and it was going to be a lasting part of our Air Force. The notion was that this was not going to be a leper colony because the pilots were operating from locations out of harm’s way. They were combat aviators whose actions could be every bit as lethal and calibrated as their counterparts in the manned cockpits. To signal this, we approved remote pilot wings—just like traditional pilot wings, but with their own insignia.
We did everything we could to instill a sense of community that was akin to our other weapons systems. Part of that was coming up with a means of recognizing accomplishments that went considerably above and beyond, something that acknowledged remote operators for their impact on the battlefield. We came up with the Distinguished Warfare Medal, the DWM.
By this time Secretary Panetta had replaced Gates, and he was the one who would have to approve the new medal. I had gotten to know Panetta pretty well, especially after working so closely with him on the F-22 oxygen issue. If there were ever any doubt as to his compassion and respect for the men and women of our military (and there were no doubts), the way he handled that engagement would have laid them to rest.
Before I ever broached the subject with the SECDEF, we had in-depth discussions with Chairman Marty Dempsey and the rest of the Joint Chiefs. They got it, and ultimately suggested expanding it to include cyber warfare specialists who had an extraordinary impact on combat operations, even though—like the RPA aviators—often they were not physically present in the combat zone. It was an appropriate addition in keeping with the evolution of combat. Once we obtained the buy-in (reluctant in some cases) of the Joint Chiefs, I met with the civilian policy personnel; they’d be ones to work out all the details should it be approved, and raise any red flags if there were reasons why it should not be implemented. They had none.
Armed with all the data, I felt prepared to present to Panetta. The meeting was set for a blistering afternoon in early summer of 2012. In fact, that July was the second hottest month in the history of the District.
Upon entering his huge inner office, I was warmly greeted by his affable companion, whose thick auburn tresses dangled from his belly as he enthusiastically sniffed, then licked my extended hand.
“Bravo, get over here and leave the general alone!” commanded the SECDEF, motioning for his gorgeous golden retriever to join him in the sitting area where we were about to meet. Bravo’s presence was not uncommon—at the Pentagon or at CIA, where the secretary proudly shared how the companion sat in on many of the briefings for the May 2011 bin Laden raid.
“So what do you have for me, Norty?” the Secretary asked as we settled in.
I pulled out some backup material and began. “Sir, we are entering a new era that has operators in new disciplines that are creating effects on the battlefield that need to be recognized,” I told him. “While they do not entail physical risk, nonetheless they provide the kind of outcomes that have a profound effect on the battlefield situation. It’s true for our RPA crews and it’s also true for cyber. The question is, how do we recognize their excellence? I contend that a medal is the appropriate recognition.”
I handed him a rendering of one of six proposed designs. “The Distinguished Warfare Medal.”
“Did you know that it’s been more than seventy years since the last combat medal was introduced?” Panetta asked, scratching the canine’s head as he reviewed the sketches.
“I did, sir,” I answered. “Seems like we’re overdue.”
Secretary Panetta announced the award on February 13, 2013, just a few days before he left office, five months after I had retired. It was his final press conference from the Pentagon briefing room. “This award recognizes the reality of the kind of technological warfare we are engaged in in the twenty-first century,” he said. “Our military reserves its highest decorations, obviously, for those who display gallantry and valor in actions when their lives are on the line and we will continue to do so. But we should also have the ability to honor the extraordinary actions that make a true difference in combat operations. The contribution they make does contribute to the success of combat operations, particularly when they remove the enemy from the field of battle, even if those actions are physically removed from the fight.”
He retired with the satisfaction of knowing that these dedicated airmen would be appropriately acknowledged and rewarded. The new medal would be ranked as the eighth highest individual award behind the Medal of Honor, which would put it ahead of the Bronze Star and the Purple Heart.
Now, I wish I could say that the story ended there, but that’s not the case. Chuck Hagel had barely been sworn in as SECDEF when the complaints starting coming in. First the Veterans of Foreign Wars criticized the medal’s order of precedence. Then the Military Order of the Purple Heart. Alumni asked, “How can you recognize someone who wasn’t even close to the battlefield and value that service more than someone who was wounded?” Congress picked up on it and chimed in, with three military veteran congressmen (Duncan D. Hunter, Tom Rooney, and Tim Murphy) introducing legislation to reduce the precedence of the medal to somewhere below the Purple Heart. The bill gained 124 cosponsors, while a corresponding bill introduced in the Senate had gained thirty-one cosponsors. Other veterans’ groups and lawmakers lobbied the Pentagon and President Obama to downgrade the medal’s status. They weren’t suggesting that the medal be cancelled, just that it be lowered in rank.
On April 15, Secretary Hagel announced what was expected to be a concession to adjust the medal’s rank. Instead, he opined that the medal was “unnecessary,” and he killed it completely.
It was ultimately decided that rather than awarding a medal, they would issue a “device”—in this case a quarter-inch bronze “R” (for “remote”)—that the recipient would pin to an existing noncombat medal to recognize direct contributions to specific combat events by those not physically in the battle. This was not what we had hoped to achieve, which was to provide a venue to recognize remote warriors that was roughly equivalent, recognizing the differences in physical risk.
In hindsight, I probably should have seen the writing on the wall as soon as the medal’s precedence was announced, and dealt with it head-on at the time. Likewise, it was a mistake not to have involved Congress from the start. After thirty-nine years in the Air Force, I should have known better.
The big takeaway from all this is that coming to terms with new modes of combat is very difficult on many levels, many of them unanticipated. Doing so in the midst of insatiable demands from battlefield commanders in multiple war zones escalates the challenge—and the stakes—to off-the-chart levels. We stepped into a triage situation (a.k.a. “the surge”) that was impossible to be adequately and effectively served by our insufficient number of skilled aviators who had been trained for that platform—dedicated men and women, to be sure—but ones without a career path, many of whom were driving two hours each way to their secure location in the middle of the Nevada desert. Crews were overworked in inadequate conditions, and many suffered damage to their careers since they were unable to find time to pursue career advancement opportunities. Throw in a lack of family time and you have an acute problem with morale that presaged an exodus from the Air Force.
But lives were being lost and you can’t help but ask yourself how many can be saved by adding just one more CAP, or five more, or ten more. So we borrowed pilots from other platforms, and even trainers from the schools—which of course exacerbated the problem because fewer trainers meant fewer new pilots to solve the problem—a catch-22.
In spite of all this, and in no small part due to the great vision, drive, support, and inspiration of my bosses—Secretary Gates and Secretary Panetta—we did what it took to meet current demands and chart a path to the future. In 2007, the Air Force was providing eight Predator CAPS. When I retired, we were providing fifty-six. It was a good start; we laid a solid foundation.
But the truth is that when I left, our Air Force was still going through growing pains as we tried to come to terms with this new mode of combat. Secretary Gates had called for sixty-five CAPs. That was met in 2015, then reduced to sixty in late 2015 to allow the community to stabilize and rebuild—a very smart move.
RPA operator and maintenance manning is the result of accessions, the training pipeline, and retention of more experienced personnel. But on the retention side, other needed adjustments are necessary, including diversifying the locations where these personnel serve. If the only active duty locations are Creech AFB (Indian Springs, Nevada) and Holloman (outside of Alamogordo, New Mexico), that is not the strongest incentive for members and families to continue to support that mission. There are other “environmentals” as well as institutional issues the Air Force must address: promotion rates, school selection rates for officers, family support capabilities, local advanced degree programs, and workload.
My successors instituted other measures to stabilize the mission area:
• The Air Force is currently in the midst of hiring civilian contractors to fly and maintain government-owned RPAs, ground stations, and equipment for ten combat air patrols per day in addition to the sixty flown by the Air Force. It’s an effective solution for surveillance missions only. While we used this concept for training, our successor leadership elected to expand contractor support for non-kinetic (ISR) RPA operations.
• Enlisted airmen are now authorized to fly the RQ-4 Global Hawk on ISR missions—the first time our Air Force has had enlisted pilots since World War II.
• $35,000/year retention bonuses are being offered to RPA pilots who agree to renew their active duty service commitment for an additional five years, for a total of $175,000 in bonus pay over the five years.
The expectation is that these modifications will allow the system to stabilize to the point that by 2019, we can safely and efficiently support seventy CAPs, sixty using Air Force personnel plus the ten staffed by the civilian contract suppliers.
FUTURE TECH
As I look to the future, I envision an Air Force that effectively controls and exploits air and space, and eventually cyberspace, in ways that provide even greater margins for global stability and economic vitality. We anticipate significant challenges in gaining access to the commons as our adversaries pursue asymmetric methods for thwarting our use of air, space, and cyberspace.
The proliferation of precision means that state and non-state actors will continue to build sophisticated air defenses, long-range missiles, and even short-range precision systems that will threaten our bases, our deployed forces, and, if one throws readily available and easily modified low-cost drones into the mix, our homeland.
Surely there will be greatly increased demand for space- and aircraft-based intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities so that our military forces and national leadership retain unprecedented understanding of the global operational environment. The ability to perceive and anticipate an adversary’s actions and intent offers a decisive advantage in warfare and in maintaining the peace. As the demand for RPAs continues to expand, new platforms will evolve, and new systems will be developed to broaden and enhance the platform’s capability.
Unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) and the effects they provide have emerged as one of the most in-demand capabilities the USAF provides the Joint Force. The attributes of persistence, endurance, efficiency, and connectivity are proven force multipliers across the spectrum of global joint military operations.
Secretary Donley, Lt Gen Dave Deptula, and I created an actionable plan entitled “Unmanned Aircraft Systems Flight Plan” that takes us all the way out to 2047. A few years later it was updated by the “RPA Vector” report. Between the two of them, we can get a pretty good feel for what we envision for the future of RPA warfare.
The USAF UAS Flight Plan describes a family of unmanned aircraft consisting of small man-portable vehicles, including micro- and nano-sized vehicles, medium “fighter-sized” vehicles, large “tanker-sized” vehicles, and special vehicles with unique capabilities, all capable of performing autonomous operations. The concept is to build a common set of airframes within a family of systems with interoperable, modular “plug and play” payloads that can be tailored to fit the mission—weapons and sensors that plug right in. There will always be fiscal restraints, and modularity provides a way to upgrade, augment, and replace technologies while preserving the bulk of the airframe investment and keeping costs down.
We are currently developing the MQ-X, a stealthy RPA capable of surviving in heavily defended, contested airspace and performing a wide variety of ISR and strike missions. It will use modularity for rapid reconfiguration to serve any of a number of widely divergent missions. It must accommodate autonomous intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance operations, since it is possible that an enemy will be able to interrupt the links between the operator and the aircraft.
The next-generation RPA must project power and have the ability to strike quickly from over the horizon in contested and anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) environments—where enemies operate advanced radar systems and other advanced air defenses, fifth-generation stealth fighter jets, and long-range precision-guided weapons that make physical access very difficult. But peer- and near-peer actors also have the ability to disrupt transmissions in the electromagnetic spectrum, creating contested communications environments that must be overcome. RPAs will eventually be robust man-on-the-loop autonomous systems that can adapt on their own to operate effectively in hostile environments despite disturbances. They will have the capability to assess, recover, learn, and adapt from adverse events, and in doing so successfully complete their mission objectives with minimal impact.
In the near term, automation (versus full autonomy) will be implemented to decrease operator workload. This will initially include auto takeoff and landing operations, plus full integration with other vehicles and personnel on the ground during launch and recovery to include auto taxi. It differs from full autonomy in that the system will follow preprogrammed decision logic. Eventually this will mature to the point of full man-on-the-loop autonomous flight operations. While people maintain control of the overall mission, the moment-to-moment decisions are made by the aircraft’s automated systems, subject to human intervention.
In a further evolution of what Gary Roughead and I tried to achieve with the Air-Sea Battle initiative, the NextGen systems must take joint operations to the next level and further enable cross-domain synergies between all land, sea, air, space, and cyberspace domains. They must be multi-mission capable, adverse weather capable, net-centric, interoperable, and must employ appropriate levels of autonomy.
As the technology advances, using multi-aircraft control (MAC) will provide a mechanism for substantial savings in manpower. Multi-aircraft control allows one pilot to simultaneously control multiple aircraft, resulting in a reduction in the number of pilots required to execute high volume CAPs.
Advances in miniaturization of sensors and power supplies will yield smaller and smaller RPAs. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is exploring a new class of algorithms for high-speed navigation in cluttered environments. Their hope is to develop small autonomous RPAs that will navigate high-clutter environments at speeds of up to forty-five miles per hour—independent of communication with outside personnel and without reliance on GPS. DARPA program manager Mark Micire has said the intent is for the small RPAs to exhibit the same kinds of capabilities as birds of prey and flying insects. “Goshawks, for example, can fly very fast through a dense forest without smacking i
nto a tree. Many insects, too, can dart and hover with incredible speed and precision.” Applications for such a vehicle could include cyber-attack, indoor reconnaissance and communications relay, and signals intelligence (SIGINT), as well as lethal and nonlethal attacks.
Many other RPAs will use enhanced sense-and-avoid systems that enable unmanned aircraft to sense its surroundings and avoid obstacles and other vehicles. In fact, it’s a key element in any autonomous or semi-autonomous flight system.
On the flip side, we foresee large, tanker-sized RPAs that could serve as communications nodes while simultaneously providing air refueling and ground moving target indicator (GMTI) missions with onboard radars. The key concept will be multipurpose, achievable through interchangeable modularity. Single use aircraft for single purpose missions will become ancient history.
WAMI (Wide Area Motion Imagery) and WAAS (Wide Area Airborne Surveillance)
Certain RPAs can be fitted with a pod set capable of scanning a small city and broadcasting multiple simultaneous discrete video feeds to coalition forces.
The Air Force is also working to broadly expand the capability of its GMTI airborne surveillance platform, which allows RPAs to detect and track moving targets on the ground. With each sweep of the radar, thousands of vehicles can simultaneously be detected and tracked.
Loyal Wingman
An electronic “brain” is inserted into a fourth-generation F-16 fighter jet to allow an autonomous flying wingman to operate in tandem with manned F-35s in the battlefield of the future. Air Force Research Lab is well into the algorithms that will control the autonomous jets, and is doing so with an eye toward modular interchangeability that will enable the “brain” to be rapidly transferred from aircraft to aircraft, much like SIM cards are easily transferred from one mobile phone to another.
Journey Page 38