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The X-47B experimental drone is one of the world’s most advanced aircraft. Only two have been ever built, named Salty Dog 501 and Salty Dog 502. With a sleek bat-winged shape that looks like something out of the 1980s sci-fi flick Flight of the Navigator, the X-47B practically screams
“the future is here.” In their short life-span as experimental aircraft from 2011 to 2015, Salty Dog 501 and 502 repeatedly made aviation history. The X-47B was the first uninhabited (unmanned) aircraft to autonomously take off and land on an aircraft carrier and the first uninhabited aircraft to autonomously refuel from another plane while in flight. These are key milestones to enabling future carrier-based combat drones. However, the X- 47B was not a combat aircraft. It was an experimental “X-plane,” a demonstration program designed to mature technologies for a follow-on aircraft. The focus of technology development was automating the physical movement of the aircraft—takeoff, landing, flight, and aerial refueling. The X-47B did not carry weapons or sensors that would permit it to make engagements.
The Navy has stated their first operational carrier-based drone will be the MQ-25 Stingray, a future aircraft that is still on the drawing board.
While the specific design has yet to be determined, the MQ-25 is envisioned primarily as a tanker, ferrying fuel for manned combat aircraft such as the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, with possibly a secondary role in reconnaissance. It is not envisioned as a combat aircraft. In fact, over the past decade the Navy has moved steadily away from any notion of uninhabited aircraft in combat roles.
The origin of the X-47 was in the Joint Unmanned Combat Air Systems (J-UCAS) program, a joint program between DARPA, the Navy, and the Air Force in the early 2000s to design an uninhabited combat aircraft. J- UCAS led to the development of two experimental X-45A aircraft, which in 2004 demonstrated the first drone designed for combat missions. Most drones today are intended for surveillance missions, which means they are designed for soaring and staying aloft for long periods of time. The X-45A, however, sported the same sharply angled wings and smooth top surfaces that define stealth aircraft like the F-117, B-2 bomber, and F-22 fighter.
Designed to penetrate enemy air defenses, the intent was for the X-45A to perform close in jamming and strike missions in support of manned aircraft.
The program was never completed, though. In the Pentagon’s 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review, a major strategy and budget review
conducted every four years, the J-UCAS program was scrapped and restructured.
J-UCAS’s cancellation was curious because it came at the height of the post-9/11 defense budget boom and at a time when the Defense Department was waking up to the potential of robotic systems more broadly. Even while the military was deploying thousands of drones to Iraq and Afghanistan, the Air Force was highly resistant to the idea of uninhabited aircraft taking on combat roles in future wars. In the ensuing decade since J-UCAS’s cancellation, despite repeated opportunities, the Air Force has not restarted a program to build a combat drone. Drones play important roles in reconnaissance and counterterrorism, but when it comes to dogfighting against other enemy aircraft or taking down another country’s air defense network, those missions are currently reserved for traditional manned aircraft.
The reality is that what may look from the outside like an unmitigated rush toward robotic weapons is, in actuality, a much more muddled picture inside the Pentagon. There is intense cultural resistance within the U.S.
military to handing over combat jobs to uninhabited systems. Robotic systems are frequently embraced for support roles such as surveillance or logistics, but rarely for combat applications. The Army is investing in logistics robots, but not frontline armed combat robots. The Air Force uses drones heavily for surveillance, but is not pursing air-to-air combat drones.
Pentagon vision documents such as the Unmanned Systems Roadmaps or the Air Force’s 2013 Remotely Piloted Aircraft Vector often articulate ambitious dreams for robots in a variety of roles, but these documents are often disconnected from budgetary realities. Without funding, these visions are more hallucinations than reality. They articulate goals and aspirations, but do not necessarily represent the most likely future path.
The downscoping of the ambitious J-UCAS combat aircraft to the plodding MQ-25 tanker is a great case in point. In 2006 when the Air Force abandoned the J-UCAS experimental drone program, the Navy continued a program to develop a combat aircraft. The X-47B was supposed to mature the technology for a successor stealth drone, but in a series of internal Pentagon memoranda issued in 2011 and 2012, Navy took a sharp turn away from a combat aircraft. Designs were scaled back in favor of a less ambitious nonstealthy surveillance drone. Concept sketches shifted from looking like the futuristic sleek and stealthy X-45A and X-47B to the more
pedestrian Predator and Reaper drones, already over a decade old at that point. The Navy, it appears, wasn’t immune to the same cultural resistance to combat drones found in the Air Force.
The Navy’s resistance to developing an uninhabited combat aerial vehicle (UCAV) is particularly notable because it comes in the face of pressure from Congress and a compelling operational need. China has developed anti-ship ballistic and cruise missiles that can outrange carrier- based F-18 and F-35 aircraft. Only uninhabited aircraft, which can stay aloft far longer than would be possible with a human in the airplane, have sufficient range to keep the carrier relevant in the face of advanced Chinese missiles. Sea power advocates outside the Navy in Congress and think tanks have argued that without a UCAV on board, the aircraft carrier itself would be of limited utility against a high-technology opponent. Yet the Navy’s current plan is for its carrier-based drone, the MQ-25, to ferry gas for human-inhabited jets. For now, the Navy is deferring any plans for a future UCAV.
The X-47B is an impressive machine and, to an outside observer, it may seem to portend a future of robot combat aircraft. Its appearance belies the reality that within the halls of the Pentagon, however, there is little enthusiasm for combat drones, much less fully autonomous ones that would target on their own. Neither the Air Force nor the Navy have programs under way to develop an operational UCAV. The X-47B is a bridge to a future that, at least for now, doesn’t exist.