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The U.S. Army plans to field thousands of small hand-launched drones, such as the Skydio RQ-28A short-range reconnaissance quadcopter.
Part of the U.S. Army is trying to determine how to provide thousands of hand-launched drones and ground-launched effects to small units as quickly as possible. Another part of the Army is meanwhile grappling with the resulting challenge to airspace management.
“I think the one thing for me, in the short time that I’ve been back in Army aviation, that concerns me is our airspace management,” Maj. Gen. Clair Gill, commander of the Army Aviation Center of Excellence, said at the Association of the U.S. Army’s Hot Topic seminar on Army aviation in Arlington, Virginia, in September.
The skies above future battlefields will be crisscrossed by drones and other autonomous flying platforms launched by every echelon, from privates at the platoon level to generals at the division level.
- Policy and technology changes are under review
- A permissive drone launch policy is favored
“As I think about putting manned systems in that airspace, we’ve got a real challenge,” Gill said.
To be sure, the Army knows how to safely operate uncrewed aircraft systems (UAS) and crewed helicopters, thanks to its more than two decades of experience in combat. But the volume and diversity of future platforms, along with a permissive approach to operations, creates a completely different problem than Army aviators faced in the past.
Traditional airspace management procedures are highly restrictive to drone operators on the battlefield. “I’d have to call up a [restricted operating zone coordinator] and then take a nap until my airspace was approved,” Col. Nick Ryan, the Army’s UAS capability manager, quipped at the seminar. “Then I could put [the UAS] up in this tiny little constrained area just to maybe look over that tree, and then I have to bring it back down immediately.”
Lessons from the wars in Ukraine and around Israel suggest that such safety-driven restrictions are obsolete.
“They are free to shoot whatever they want, launch whatever they want, because that’s as fast as they’re seeing targets,” Ryan said. “And if they don’t, either that target is going to move or they’re going to be targeted and shot before they can do something about it.”
Likewise, the Army’s small units will need a similar, permissive approach to airspace access for small drones and launched effects, he noted.
But battlefield airspace could become even more complicated. Army aviation crews flying at low altitudes in helicopters will have to worry more about collision threats than friendly drones.
“We’re talking about us launching our systems,” Anthony Crutchfield, Boeing vice president of army systems and a former Army aviation branch commander, said at the seminar. “I will tell you, there will probably be a lot more to worry about coming the other way, and we’re not going to command and control that.”
Some proposed solutions are circulating internally. Brig. Gen. Matt Braman, director of Army aviation, proposed a set of procedural reforms in August at the service’s Aviation Industry Days Expo at Fort Novosel, Alabama.
Braman’s proposal divides the airspace into five levels. At the lowest, the Army’s crewed rotorcraft would operate from the surface to 150 ft. above ground level, where they are least exposed to enemy detection.
Above that are three layers of airspace categories for UAS and loitering munitions. The smallest UAS would operate in a layer 150-1,000 ft. above ground level. Tactical UAS and loitering munitions would roam the skies at 3,000-8,000 ft. Larger UAS, such as an AAI RQ-7 Shadow, would take a slice of airspace at 8,000-10,000 ft. General Atomics Aeronautical Systems Inc. MQ-1C Gray Eagles would occupy the airspace at 20,000-24,000 ft. The proposal also splits airspace above 20,000 ft. with crewed Air Force and Navy combat aircraft.
These procedural controls would be augmented by new technologies, such as DARPA’s Air Space Total Awareness for Rapid Tactical Execution flightpath planning software and the Army’s Integrated Mission Planning and Airspace Control Tools software suite, Braman said. Eventually, these tools—combined with autonomous see-and-avoid technology on future UAS—would evolve airspace management from a deconfliction approach to seamless integration, he added.
Braman’s proposal is a starting point. As major UAS, loitering munition and launched-effects programs move forward, the Army intends to use procedures and technology to transform airspace management radically.
“We’re flipping everything on its head, including how we envision the future of airspace management, airspace integration and trying to make it as permissive as possible, still within how the Army would do it,” Ryan said. “So that private who needs to launch a drone to do something in that moment before the target moves has the ability to while we’re still protecting the manned assets, which are our most critical assets that are flying through the air.”
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