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Air Force, Army near agreement on UAV pact

The Army and Air Force are drafting a joint concept of operations for medium-altitude unmanned aerial vehicles, marking an end to years of tension, service leaders said.

A breakthrough came at a Sept. 8 meeting between three-star generals.

“Right now, we have a joint agreement on unmanned aerial system ConOps, and we’re moving in the right direction,” said Army Lt. Gen. James Thurman, deputy chief of staff for operations. Thurman said the deal will be finished in coming months but that the services have agreed on several things, including:

* The Air Force will provide more direct support missions to Army units on the ground with theater-capable assets such as the Predator.

* The Army will better communicate its intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance needs. To assist it, the Air Force will place more ISR airmen with ground units, moving them out of the Combined Air Operations Center miles away from the fight.

* Both services will work harder to deconflict increasingly crowded airspace.

* As the Army deploys more armed Sky Warrior UAVs, it will request fewer armed UAV missions from Air Force Predators.

“There is an obvious level of understanding and cooperation between [the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command] and Air Combat Command. We understand each service’s concerns,” said Air Force Maj. Gen. William Rew, director of operational planning, policy and strategy for the operations deputy chief of staff.

Although UAVs are much more prevalent in the Iraq theater than they were just a couple of years ago, demand for eyes in the sky continues to grow. Defense Secretary Robert Gates has described ground commanders’ appetite for UAVs as insatiable.

Tension between the Army and Air Force has centered on the medium-altitude UAVs most useful to Army ground units in their daily work: primarily Air Force MQ-1 Predators and MQ-9 Reapers.

Predators and Reapers have flown close to 82,000 combat hours in just the past six months, mainly in support of Army missions, Air Force spokesman Lt. Col. Michael Paoli said.

The rift exists because of disagreements over how it’s decided where Predators and Reapers — and the Army’s similarly sized Sky Warriors and Shadows — are sent in theater.

The Air Force sees its Predators and Reapers as theater assets and tasks them based on Joint Force Command requirements.

“There’s one service who is giving all their UAVs over to the Joint Force commander ... and there’s another that is not — and in my view, the logic is on the side that is giving over their assets,” said Tom Ehrhard, a retired Air Force colonel who earned his doctorate studying unmanned aircraft.

The Army, on the other hand, delegates its medium-sized UAVs over to unit commanders, sometimes as low as the battalion level.

“The issue to me, and if you ask the commanders on the ground, the UAVs should be decentralized as opposed to centralized, which is the sticking point,” said Stephen Mundt, a retired brigadier general and former Army Aviation director.

Air Force leaders argue the Army UAV strategy leaves too many UAVs sitting on the runway. The Army counters that in a firefight, it takes too long to get a Predator over their soldiers’ heads when it’s a theater asset.

The disagreement in recent years has had Army leaders seeking independence, especially after the Air Force sought to become the executive agent of all UAV operations. But the seeds of reconciliation were sown by Gen. George Casey, the Army chief of staff, who took the service’s top job last year, and Gen. T. Michael Moseley, former Air Force chief of staff.

“The Army does not want to worry about losing a UAV for a theater mission if they are counting on it for a fight they will be doing tomorrow,” Rew said. “The Army is generally concerned with organic assets that will support an appropriate level of their fight, whether it is a company or a battalion. In the future, even a platoon may have a UAV that is part of its fighting equipment. The ground commander is interested in having those eyes over the horizon or over the next hill. A tactical UAV will give that to him.”

Rew said Air Force leaders understand the frustrations of deployed Army unit commanders. But he said a misconception exists that Air Force leaders are the ones denying such requests.

They are denied because a ground commander’s ISR collection requirements may be outweighed by others — and that is determined by the Joint Force Command before it is handed down to the Joint Force Air Component Command. It’s the JFC, not the JFACC, that decides which requirements are more important, Rew said.

But to address Army concerns, for one thing, the Air Force is prepared to fly more Predator direct support missions.

“We care about the whole theater,” Rew said. “We like to take the air assets that we have control over and put them where they are best-suited to support the overall joint commander’s requirements.”

The Air Force ISR division, based at the CAOC, typically fields many combat zone requests for UAVs and dispatches assets that include Predators, Reapers and Global Hawks, but also U-2 spy planes, satellites and even F-16s.

“Airmen were sent by [AF Central commander Lt.] Gen. [Gary] North down to the division level to augment the ISR expertise at the lower level, so that the requests that come up are improved,” Rew said. “If you increase the ISR expertise at those lower levels, you improve the quality of the requests that come up.”

Both sides will work to address a common concern: finding space in the sky to fly their burgeoning fleets of unmanned planes, which must share space with manned aircraft and artillery shells.

At the beginning of the war in Iraq, the Army had only a handful of UAVs; now it has hundreds. One of the latest is the new Sky Warrior Extended/Range Multi-Purpose UAV, slated to deploy next year. Similar to the Predator in size and range, the Sky Warrior, which fires Hellfire missiles and has a 58-foot wingspan, can fly up to 29,000 feet. That makes it tougher to find clear airspace.