UAV: Under-supported Aerial Vehicle?

One of these days - when I find that twenty-fifth hour in my day, I fear - I'd love to sit down with some of the folks I know who wear sky-blue uniforms and talk about the CF's UAV problems in detail. Aircraft offer the highest, most readily available return on the unmanned vehicle dollar (as opposed to UGV's - Unmanned Ground Vehicles and ANV's - Autonomous Naval Vessels). There's a whole host of reasons for this, most of which centre around the fact that a live crew limits the performance of air tasks much more than it does of ground tasks or naval tasks (although I think the Navy should be the next frontier for unmanned vehicles, not the Army).



As far as I'm aware, the CF currently has two drones: the Sperwer TUAV (above), and the Skylark mini-UAV (below).



With the world's second-largest landmass to patrol, including vast tracts of territory virtually impassable by land, and the world's longest coastline to protect, Canada has need of long-range, high-endurance UAV's that can perform credibly over water and in extreme cold. We also have need of battlefield UAV assets (TUAV's that perform the role the Sperwer is trying to fill), and I'd suggest that arming them would be a good idea. Even at a unit level, Canada should be looking at miniature UAV's that can be deployed by individual units needing to see over the next hill or into the next walled compound before they assault their target.

I'm also of the opinion that once the technology catches up, we should be looking at unmanned fighter aircraft (not autonomous, but without a crew in the aircraft). It's long been the case that the limiting factor in fighter performance is the pilot - put him or her on the ground with a joystick and a top-notch data-link to fly the beast, and let the aircraft loose.

I'm sure that folks within the CF are doing just that on a strategic level, we're just not hearing about it. But I've also been reliably told that the Air Force was slow off the mark when it comes to UAV's - which is one of the reasons the artillery branch is so involved with the Sperwers in Afghanistan: the Army, as an end-user, drove the process to a large extent. I fear that pilot-centric Air Force types have been a bit shortsighted in the past, and I sincerely hope the organization has woken up a bit and realized that much of their future lies in exploiting this technology.

Unfortunately, as this Globe editorial from last week (just catching up now from the family camping trip) states politics factors too much into everything the CF does: how much money do we have, and how are we politically allowed to spend it?

Last April, it was reported that the Conservatives had rejected a plan by the Defence Department to buy Predator unmarked aircrafts - to be used both in Afghanistan and for surveillance of Canadian coasts - from the U.S. firm General Atomics. Having just been chastised by the Auditor-General for untendered military contracts, the government was apparently concerned by the optics of spending more than $500-million without opening it up to competition - especially since a British Columbia company also looking to sell drones would have been overlooked. Since then, little progress appears to have been made on choosing a supplier, with reports suggesting the government is now targeting 2009 for new drones. Meanwhile, the Quebec-based firm Rheinmetall Canada says that it has been standing by for months with low-cost upgrades to the current fleet that would improve the existing drones' endurance, but that it has yet to receive the green light from Defence.

I've had the bulk of that confirmed by folks I know in uniform. I'm not going to say we should have purchased the Predators on an ACAN - not without knowing more about the CF's overall UAV plan and which platforms could be feasibly used for other purposes. I suspect the Predator would be able to perform the widest range of tasks if we don't have the ability (read political will and money) to specialize right now, but I don't know that for sure.

Here's what I do know: if the CF, and specifically the Air Force, is interested in developing the political will required to fund the broad, multiple-aircraft spectrum of UAV operations our country requires, it would make sense to have the public know a bit more about how folks in the sky-blue uniforms view Canada's needs and the solutions they propose. Sole-sourcing is a useful procurement option for DND, but taxpayers become legitimately leery when it seems to them that's it's being used often. In this case, perception is guiding the reality.

That doesn't mean the CF shouldn't sole-source a UAV immediately, just as the Globe editorial suggests - perhaps we should. But the mandarins at DND need to justify such a course of action before anyone, including me, will jump on board and support it.