The Robot Air Force

...As a class these planes are known as remotely piloted vehicles, or more commonly RPVs, and those just described are now in various stages of development...

...Because it does not have to support a human crew the RPV cannot only be smaller, but can leave out all those expensive elements needed to keep men alive-oxygen systems, ejector seats, heavy armor plate, fire detection systems, communications gear, and much more...

...Paul Dickson is author of The Electronic Battlefield, to be published this month by Indiana University Press, from which this article is adapted...

...For those who might find controlling just one of these planes too tame, work is now under way that will allow one human to fly a brace of up to 20 of them at one time...

...Since Ryan got its first contract, more than 4,000 Firebees have been sold to the three services and the drones have performed many impressive and diverse tasks...

...As Rand’s William B. Graham wrote in Astronautics and Aeronamtics, “Antiaircraft defenses will get tougher and tougher as far into the future as anyone can foresee...

...The attrition rate for Ilie planer: was less than four pel cent (including one shot down by a Navy interceptor, which had mistaken it for a hostile MIG-21...

...Meanwhile, a special organization, the National Association for RPVs, was recently formed to boost the idea and the product...

...Learning a lesson from earlier losses, during the Yom Kippur War the Israelis used a number of Northrop Chukar drones as decoys on which to get the Arabs to expend surface-to-air missiles as manned planes slipped in behind them...

...Air Force sources casually admit that they were used as early as 1962 for reconnaissance over Cuba, and a year later Ryan 147 drones were pressed into service for low-level spy missions over North Vietnam, Laos, and the People’s Republic of China...

...As many have pointed out quite seriously, once you get humans out of the plane you can start borrowing ideas from the realm of the model aircraft hobbyist...

...That manned aircraft are highly vulnerable is not a discovery-the United States lost 40,000 aircraft and twice as many pilots and crewmen during World War 11-but the results of conflict in Southeast Asia and the Middle East still came as a shock...

...Without men to support, all sorts of economies are possible, including the use of such materials as fiberglass, plastic foam, fabric, and even cardboard...

...About 90 per cent of the American POWs in Southeast Asia were downed pilots and airmen, and a total of 5,000 Americans died in hostile and nonhostile aircraft incidents in the war, in which there was hardly major opposition from the North Vietnamese Air Force...

...Even so, the “no Lomments” from the State Degartment, CIA, and Pentagon continued for some time, but nobody looking at the evidence could seriously doubt that the U. S. had given the lion’s share of its close-in surveillance work in Asia to the Ryan drones...

...A special Firebee I1 has been created for the Navy that is capable of speeds in excess of 1,000 miles per hour...

...The Robot Air Force by Paul Dickson Like a golfer selecting a club from his bag, the military pilot of the 1980s will be able to select the plane best suited for the martial drive, chip shot, or putt he is about to make...

...Air Force magazine said the RPV “. . . may be the closest thing to a panacea the aerospace age has yet created,” while Seapower magazine predicted that unmanned planes could “. . . revolutionize naval air power as dramatically as nuclear power has already revolutionized the surface and subsurface Navy...

...The 4-2 developed into more than 20 distinct models, each with its own name and number given by the service that commissioned them...

...About 85 per cent of the photos taken to assess bomb damage during the period were brought home by these automated craft...

...The Droning Firebees The RPV has an interesting lineage, stemming most directly from the target drone, the robot vehicle used routinely over the last 25 years to test and train combat pilots, missilemen, and antiaircraft gunners...

...It is also no secret that the Israelis have used and continue to use Ryan-built craft for photo reconnaissance missions and have been quite pleased with them...

...While Rand helped pave the way for the dawning of the age of the RPV, the truly dramatic turn in the way the military regards robot planes has come about through a quick succession of events, realizations, and demonstrations...

...A recent study for the Air Force, again by Rand, determined that the costs of manned aircraft are going up at such a rate that if the Air Force’s budget were to remain constant in the face of rising costs, they could afford only a dozen planes by the year 2000 and only one in 2020...

...If all goes according to plan, his specific choices will include: -A small but lethal “Kamikaze” to be used as an explosive ram against the enemy plane, ship, munitions depot, or other target of his choice...

...The lesson was taught elsewhere too...

...This similarity to the toy becomes frightening instead of amusing when one realizes how much more tempting robot war will be because the pilots will not have to witness the damage they are doing-the towns they are blowing up or incinerating-nor will they have to contemplate the even more unpleasant possiblity that they themselves might be blown up or incinerated...

...Radar Befoulers With the Air Force now admitting that some 3,000 unmanned missions were flown during America’s period of active involvement in Southeast Asia, the record of the robot spies i s coming out and it is dramatic...

...Israel watched many of its best aviators fall to Arab missiles and guns in the early days of the fourth Arab-Israeli conflict...

...One specific example occurred on Christmas Day 1969 when leaflets containing President Nixon’s picture and a plea for peace were dropped...

...First and most telling are the remarkable feats that the unmanned machines have performed, to the humiliation of manned systems...

...The figure is an interesting one because the military now estimates that $500,000 will be the top price for the most sophisticated RPV of the 1980s, while simpler models will cost as little as $1 5,000...

...Still another application, as a dispenser for radarbefowling chaff, was developed, but such use was severely limited because there were not enough C-130 mother slijps to go around...

...A special Pilotless Aircraft Branch of the Air Force came into being in late 1946 to develop three types of drones for use as training targets...

...Launched by C-130 “mother” ships, these sleek, black, unmarked craft were first brought out of the shadows when the Chinese claimed to have brought one down on November 15, 1964...

...Firebees were also assuming the jobs of waterborne electronic intelligence gathering vessels...

...And while the term RPV has yet to enter the realm of household word for civilian America, it can be said without hesitation that these three letters represent the hottest, most talked about new idea to come to the forefront of the military consciousness in the mid-1970s...

...The most dramatic to come to light was an aerial “dogfight” staged in early 1971 over the Pacific Test Range, which pitted a manned Navy F-4 Phantom against a Ryan Firebee outfitted with a remote flight control system, making it a true RPV...

...A sleek, lightweight model employing a TV camera to locate a target and a laser designator to mark and illuminate it...

...Air Force Secretary John McLucas, that service’s prime spokesman for the RPV, predicted that it would become “a significant force” in the future Air Force inventory...

...Virtually every antiaircraft system the nation has developed has had to prove its worth by downing a batch of elusive Firebees (or targets towed by Firebees...

...A plane that is virtually invisible to radar, infrared detection, and, until the last moment, the naked eye...

...They have flown at levels from 50 to 60,000 feet, moved at speeds from 200 to 500 knots, and stayed aloft for periods of up to two hours at a clip...

...In early 1965, when the Chinese were saying that they had bagged a total of eight, three moderately damaged examples were put on public view at the Chinese People’s Revolutionary Museutn in Peking and pictures released of the display...

...The unmanned fighter maneuvered by a man on the ground not only averted two air.-to-missile assaults, but scored several simulated “hits” on the F-4, which, incidently, is the nal ion’s finest fighter plaiie...

...Moments after the laser has spotted the target, a missile or bomb is dispatched to home in on its beam and destroy the target...

...The difference is much the same as that which exists between a paper airplane, programmed after a fashion by the arm that throws it, and a kite that is under human control through its string, which is akin to the electronic control the person on the ground has over the RPV...

...What is more, the future appeared even bleaker...

...This caused the Air Force and its favorite think tank, the Rand Corporation, to sit down for a symposium on the future possibilities of remotely piloted vehicles...

...Moreover, the pilot of the future will not even need to leave home to wage a foreign war...

...As promised in their name, the one thing they all have in common is that the pilot in charge is not in the plane but is running it by proxy from a ground station or mother ship operating in a safe zone...

...Nor was that the only experiment in which the formerly hunted became a successful hunter...

...lhe RPV has also had its combat debut in the Middle East...

...After that meeting and some follow-up studies, a consensus emerged among the military planners: there was, indeed, considerable promisein the RPV for a variety of military applications, which had been made possible through a decade of rapid advances in electronic technology...

...Many of these losses came in what amounted to situations in which the Israeli pilots were testing Arab air defenses, a job that should have been done by unmanned decoys...

...Because it is also silent it comes in very useful if surprise or secrecy is desired...

...In all, an odd prospect: air combat conducted by men and women who commute to their stationary cockpits for eight-hour stints from their homes in Arlington and Alexandria, Virginia...

...This little item comes in handy as a decoy used to flush out enemy fighters and surface to-air missiles...

...In short, there are compelling reasons for the military’s interest in RPVs...

...Today the military states that it costs about $500,000 to train a pilot to the point that he is ready to fight...

...One group, which was quickly dubbed “The Bullshit Bombers,’’ was used to dispense American propaganda leaflets around Hanoi and other population centers...

...For these reasons, the generally accepted rule-of-thumb is that the cost of an RPV versus a manned craft with the same function works out to be 20 to 30 times cheaper...

...Defense Toys As the human and dollar advantages of the RPV loom larger and larger in the minds of post-Vietnam era military planners, a less obvious but just as appealing point for the RPV has come to light...

...While the dollars and cents economies of the planes themselves are tremendous, there are also more savings promised in terms of support costs, pilot costs, and, because they are harder to hit, planes lost in combat...

...Nimble Dogfighters By 1970 enough key people in the military establishment were beginning to think that the drone had more potential as a sophisticated moving target, especially since the technology was available that would allow it to be piloted from the ground...

...Ilie Pirebee executed tui-ns so radical -and impossible for the F-4 and even the forthcoming highly touted F-15-that it was able to reverse direction in t nly 20 seconds, a fraction of the time taken by a manned plane because a man can only take so much gravitational pressure...

...Those who believed that the latest high-performance aircraft would beat the odds were wrong...

...Often unknown to both those who looked at them and those that published them, many of the aerial views of North Vietnam that appeared in the American press were taken by the drones...

...Human pilots all of a sudden began to look very vulnerable...

...By means of small, lightweight TV cameras and other sensors carried by the RPVs, the pilot is able to experience the thrill of combat and the sense of danger without the threat of death, injury, or imprisonment as a POW...

...It should not have a difficult time finding members, as more than a dozen major aerospace companies have hung out their RPV shingles to help attract a piece of the billion-dollar-a-year market envisioned by 1980...

...On March 1, 1975, the Air Force created a RPV “Super” System Program Office at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, which is their way of saying they are very, very serious about the idea...

...Spiraling defense costs and the runaway inflation of the early 1970s brought the financial picture into sharp focus...

...It is the U-2 without the “you” in it, the sport of the dogfight without its nasty, charred human remains-at least for the side with the RPVs-and the all-out thrill of a screaming Kamikaze strike without even getting your hair mussed...

...Furthermore, there is little question that the Israelis have the ability to build their own model RPV and some have speculated that they are now developing one of their own...

...Devices have been created to make the small Firebee show up on radar as a bomber, and modifications have been made in some that have enabled them to make the dives and turns that real pilots “fighting” them can make...

...In terms of actual performance, in at least one case the Ryan sea craft was able to bring home photos of an area in North Vietnam that two unmanned planes had been unable to get...

...The United States refused to admit to this or later allegations by the Chinese about American robots in their skies...

...RPVs have proven themselves in real combat situations-something that has attracted scant attention outside military circles...

...They were routinely recovered in mid-air as helicopters snagged them by the parachutes they spewed out at mission’s end...

...Whatever the RPV concept lacks in terms of dollars now pumped into it-about $150 million per year and rising as of 1975-is made up for in enthusiasm...

...Another is that the RPV work will have to be taken away from the aerospace industry and given to one that has the needed imagination and skill to keep costs under control: namely, the toy industry...

...The RPV promises to allow the military to do what it has been unable to do for at least a decade: mount a highly visible weapons development effort that will impress the Congress and the public alike because it is replacing something expensive with something truly inexpensive...

...This ratio, which is for reusable RPVs, becomes hundreds of times cheaper when you talk about bare bones-one-way RPVs for highly dangerous or suicidal missions...

...The novelty of a cheap system has occasioned several widely circulated and intentionally tongueincheek remarks...

...Second, while the impact of these simulated victories was absorbed by the Pentagon, a pair of realizations regarding men and planes became painfully evident...

...Just as it became obvious that the RPV could reduce human waste, it also became obvious that it could reduce fiscal waste...

...Ryan has been calling all of them its Firebees...

...One has it that the only way for existing aerospace companies to do anything cheap will be to set up a special plant away from the head office staffed with engineers with no experience working on military hardware...

...Of the three, the jet Q-2 was the most ambitious, and also the most important, in that it became the father of a class of drones built by the Ryan Aeronautical Company (now TeledyneRyan), which has given that company undisputed leadership in the field...

...Needless to say, not one American life was lost nor were there any Francis Gary Powers types to bring to trial, fuss over, and parade about for propaganda reasons...

...Meanwhile, there were other Vietnamera applications...

...The important difference between the RPV and its more simple-minded first cousin, the drone, is that the latter is a pre-programmed automaton given commands in advance of flight, while the RPV is subject to human control during flight...

...A truly tiny plane, not any bigger than the kind that model airplane enthusiasts use, which is electronically configured so that it is able to portray itself on a radar screen as a transport, bomber, or fighter...

...In 1972 a supersonic Firebee I1 penetrated the missile defenses of the Navy destroyer Wainwright and scored a simulated, direct hit...

...One only has to recall the Liberty and Pueblo disasters to see that this was a highly important development...

...A one-way, hence cheap, instrument which may be electrically powered...

...Others were used as electronic listening devices, and automated QU-22B Beech aircraft were used to pick up and relay sensor signals broadcast from the Ho Chi Minh Trail during Operation Igloo White...

...With foreign technology being what it is,” says George Weiss of Boeing’s Washington office, “there should be no reason why a man won’t be able to sit in the basement of the Pentagon and engage in combat in Europe or Asia through a satellite link...

...A recent Army statement said it may lead to “. . .what may prove to be one of the Army’s greatest assets...