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Task force, not Air Force, to oversee UAVs

The U.S. Air Force will not become the central agency for medium-to-high-altitude unmanned aerial vehicles, Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England has decided.

Instead, the Pentagon will keep a closer watch on the individual services’ unmanned aircraft programs, seeking to forestall redundancy and operating miscues, England wrote in a Sept. 13 memo to senior civilian and uniformed military officials.

The defense undersecretary for acquisition will create a task force “to coordinate critical UAS issues and to develop a way ahead that will enhance operations, enable interdependencies, and streamline acquisition of [unmanned aerial systems],” England wrote.

Meanwhile, the Joint Requirements Oversight Council will coordinate the development of training and tactics, he wrote.

“We’re trying to determine a way ahead, and this is an interim way of looking at the situation,” said one senior DoD official. “We can now see the kind of questions that need to be answered, and this addressed the equities of all the services involved.”

England also ordered the merger of the Air Force’s Predator and Army’s Sky Warrior programs by October 2008.

“I believe the secretary made the right decision,” said Tim Owings, the Army’s deputy project manager for unmanned aircraft systems. “What you are going to see is increased collaboration between the Army and the Air Force with a big ability to focus on service specific needs.”

He said the Army and Air Force had already established a team to work on a common data link for the UAVs, and would create more teams for other areas.

The Air Force, which has lobbied hard on the issue, indicated that it is willing to work within the cooperative framework outlined in England’s memo.

“We will cooperate with the new task force and are committed to develop a way ahead to ensure optimal unmanned aerial systems capabilities are delivered to war fighters,” said Air Force spokesman Ed Gulick. “Streamlined acquisition of unmanned aerial systems also remains a key objective.”

Air Force officials had argued that their service should oversee UAV procurement, as well as operations to better organize the growing numbers of unmanned vehicles flying in the increasingly crowded airspace over battlefields. The Army and Marines have countered that ground troops should control not only the acquisition but the operation of their own UAVs to more effectively support their fast-moving tactical operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Kris Osborn and Erik Holmes contributed to this report.