Book Description
The Air Force (AF) tasked the SAB to examine how the AF operates remotely piloted aircraft (RPA) for irregular warfare, and make recommendations for reducing manning, enhancing operational effectiveness, and planning for future operations. The Study Panel observed 1) approximately 70 percent of the manning requirements represent exploiters and maintainers and are expected to grow, 2) manually intensive airspace deconfliction and management is inefficient, will not scale, and hampers manned/unmanned integration, 3) RPAs contribute to minimizing collateral damage because of persistence, increased "eyes on target", and use of focused lethality munitions, and 4) inexpensive and proliferating kinetic and electronic threats are an increasing RPA concern. Findings include 1) insufficient and inflexible platform and sensor automation, 2) poorly-designed operator control stations, 3) limited communications systems to address interoperability, lostlink, and scaling, 4) inadequate selection criteria and training, and 5) CONOPS and TTPs that lagged systems. Based on these findings, the Panel recommends the AF 1) improve automation to enable variable levels of autonomy, 2) enhance operator control stations, 3) create robust communications systems, 4) develop targeted selection and enhanced training, 5) improve CONOPS and TTPs, and support distributed operations, and 6) improve the transfer of ACTD results to acquisitions.
