Page 40 - Australian Defence Magazine Feb 2020
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40 AIRPOWER UNMANNED
FEBRUARY 2020 | WWW.AUSTRALIANDEFENCE.COM.AU
RAAF PLANS WORKFORCE CHANGES AS UNMANNED PLATFORMS COME ONLINE 2020 may one day be seen as the year RAAF truly began pivoting itself around the unmanned future.
EWEN LEVICK | SYDNEY
WHILST the headlines will be dominated by major decisions on flagship remotely-piloted aircraft (RPAs), unmanned technol- ogies are also starting to shape the workforce. ADM caught up with Air Commodore Darren Goldie, Director-General of Air Combat Capability, to understand a little more about the unmanned future and how RAAF is adapting.
First, however, it’s worth laying out some definitions. The word unmanned is usually used as an umbrella term for platforms that don’t have a pilot on-board, but reality is a bit more complicated.
Some aircraft are remotely operated but not remotely piloted. An example is the MC-55 Peregrine, a modified Gulfstream 550, which is flown by a pilot on-board as other personnel remotely operate the aircraft’s electronic warfare (EW) and intelligence gathering capabilities from an off- board extension station.
Moving further up the spectrum, some aircraft are both remotely operated and remotely piloted. These are the big ticket RPAs like the MQ-4C Triton and the MQ-9 variants such as Reaper and Sky Guardian.
At the far end of the spectrum are autonomous aircraft, which have minimal human involvement. RAAF’s efforts to understand the capabilities of these aircraft fall under the auspices of Minor Program 6014 Phase 1 – a partnership with Boeing’s Airpower Teaming System, or Loyal Wingman.
“A key difference is the ‘nearness’ of the technology,” AIRCDRE Goldie said to ADM. “Right now we can remote- ly pilot a system like Triton as soon as it arrives in Australia. Autonomous aviation is still some time away.”
Another difference is the complexity of the task unmanned aircraft are asked to perform. As a rule of thumb, the more cognitively complex the task, the more necessary the human.
COMBAT MASS
The real advantage of future autonomous aircraft from a force projection point of view is the ability to create combat mass. This could become more of a focus for RAAF as Government considers a new Force Structure Plan, which will seek to im- prove elements of the current force mix and decide which have grown or diminished in importance and where to accept risk.
Air Marshal (Ret’d) Leo Davies, who occupied the Chief of Air Force role until June last year, and his predecessor Air Marshal (Ret’d) Geoff Brown recently called on Minister for Defence Linda Reynolds to prioritise RAAF’s combat mass, a call that has prompted other commentators to highlight the potential for low-cost unmanned aircraft to improve Austra- lia’s strike capabilities.
The obvious candidate for that role is the Loyal Wing- man, which is RAAF’s headline effort to explore the opera- tional and tactical viability of autonomous combat mass in cooperation with Boeing Defence Australia.
“If we’re talking about making the equation more com- plex for an adversary, that’s possible simply by creating au- tonomous mass,” AIRCDRE Goldie said.
ABOVE: Minor Program 6014 Phase 1 is an effort to explore the viability of autonomous aircraft.
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