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מחקר מאלף של מכון מיטשל על תכניות הכטב"מים האמריקנים (חמושים ובכלל) מראשיתן ועד היום
בתגובה להודעה מספר 1 שנכתבה על ידי Centurion שמתחילה ב "פיירבי חמוש (BGM-34) במלחמת יום כיפור - שאלה"
המסמך המרתק הזה סוקר כרונולוגית ולעומק את רוב אם לא כל התוכניות האמריקניות העיקריות משנות ה-50 ועד השנים האחרוות, ובהם פרויקטים מסווגים שבוטלו בטרם מבצוע. לא פחות מרתק הוא הדיון הנוקב על המאבקים והאג'נדות הפוליטיות-צבאיות מאחורי כל פרויקט ובכלל זאת בין זרועות הצבא, ביניהן לפנטגון, CIA, ל NRO ולתעשיות, נסיונות גישור, שיתוף ושילוב שרובם נכשלו. כמו גם ההסברים ל "תקופת היושב" הארוכה של שנות ה-80 בטרם הקאמבק של אמצע שנות ה-90. שימו לב לאנקדוטות הישראליות - העניין שהביע האלוף אלי זעירא כנספח צה"ל בארה"ב בפרויקט ה COMPASS ARROW זאת בטרם שב ארצה לכהן כראש אמ"ן בספטמבר 1972 (והתגובה של ניקסון לעניין זה..), לשימוש הידוע בצ'אקרים ב 1973 וכן לתפקיד המפתח של אברהם כרם בפרויקטי כטב"מים אמריקנים מסווגים בשנות ה-80 וה-90 כולל "אבהות" על הנאט 750 שהופעל על ידי ה CIA בבוסניה ושהפך ברבות הימים למשפחת פרדטור והריפר של חהא"א. תמונות מעניינות בתחתית.
ישנו מחקר משלים מעניין על הפעילות המבצעית של הפרדטור וכו' במלחמות המאה ה-21 ממנו נביא בנפרד.
Air Force UAVs The Secret History - A Mitchell institute study, July 2010
http://www.afa.org/mitchell/reports/MS_UAV_0710.pdf
על הפעילות הנפרדת ופעמים רבות המתחרה של ארגונים שונים ב DOD ובממשל לפיתוח כטב"מים מסוגים שונים
One way to do that was to exploit the dominance of US airpower. In the early 1950s, Air Force Logistics Command (AFLC) formed a highly classified, quick-reaction aircraft modification program office at Wright-Patterson AFB, Ohio, known as “Big Safari.” It began to manage special airborne reconnaissance platforms that spied on communist
states.The CIA, on the other hand, managed the U-2 program throughout the mid-1950s, and began to look for its replacement by 1960. On Sept. 6, 1961 the National Reconnaissance Office was formed to coordinate the various overlapping strategic reconnaissance programs of various military and intelligence agencies. The NRO managed the Peacetime Aerial Reconnaissance (PAR) program, the predecessor to today’s National Foreign Intelligence Program (NFIP), funneling money into promising reconnaissance systems. The NRO’s “Program D,” an office established in July 1962
that was always headed by a senior Air Force pilot, used conduits like Big Safari to bring the programs to fruition. Thus, although the Air Force operated special intelligence aircraft due to its expertise in conducting flight operations, those programs were “off-budget” and only affected the service through the salaries of the flight crews and support personnel. This “off-budget,” or slack money funded the massive combat drone
program run by the Air Force throughout the 1960s into the 1970s
In a watershed decision, the NRO divested itself of all airborne reconnaissance assets and budgets in 1974, transferring its entire SR-71, U-2, and drone inventory to the Air Force. According to former NRO Director McLucas, the decision made sense for several
reasons: “It was obvious to me that we didn’t need to clutter up our minds with platforms the Air Force could operate, and it helped reduce resentment toward the NRO.”The “clutter up our minds” comment further reinforces that the NRO had become a satellite organization by this time and had essentially outsourced (in all but budgetary terms) its airborne reconnaissance to the Air Force. In the Administration of President Jimmy Carter (1997-81), lean, post-Vietnam budgets hit at the NRO and could not help but drive out peripheral programs. With the rise of the satellite, the NRO, which had played the “rich uncle” for drones throughout the Vietnam War, now handed to the Air Force the
responsibility for development of future long range reconnaissance drones.
מדוע בכלל החלו לחשוב על שימוש בכטב"מים למשימות סיור - הפלת גארי פאוורס והטילים בקובה (גם שם הופל U-2) כקטליזטורים
The increasing risk of U-2 operations over the Soviet Union was not lost on members of the Air Force reconnaissance community.In September 1959, Air Staff reconnaissance chief Col. Hal Wood and his assistant mulled over the risks of a U-2 pilot falling into
Soviet hands.A contractor asked about using Q-2C Firebee target drones as a reconnaissance platform.The shootdown also led to the letting of a contract
for an unmanned reconnaissance craft named Red Wagon.Red Wagon was an apt name for the drone project, for it looked puny compared to its two competitors.
First, the CIA was working on a manned reconnaissance aircraft with the codename Oxcart. This extremely high speed, high altitude reconnaissance aircraft that the CIA called the A-12—later to become the Air Force SR-71 Blackbird—aimed to re-establish
the dominance of aircraft over the burgeoning technology in surface-to-air צissiles.Second, the Powers shootdown also accelerated US efforts to conduct satellite
photo reconnaissance.
לגבי הכטב"מ המבצעי הראשון - ה FIREFLY (לאחר חשיפת השם שונה ל LIGHTNING BUG)
Model 147A Fire Fly
Test realism included a live weapons intercept by Air Force fighters in May 1962. F-106 Delta Darts failed to get a head-on radar lock on the small, stealth-enhanced Fire Fly, and numerous air-to air missiles failed to down the drone from the tail-chase position. Arguably the hottest moment of the Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis provided yet another catalyst for UAVs. U-2s detected Soviet nuclear missile installations in Cuba on Oct. 14, 1962. The SA-2 threat over Cuba was serious, and the tiny, two-air vehicle Fire Fly force at Holloman AFB, N.M., now on 72-hour operational alert, got the call to deploy to Tyndall AFB, Fla. for a short-notice mission. Lloyd Ryan, then an Air Force
colonel and drone proponent, recalls that NRO chief Dr. Joseph V. Charyk (also an undersecretary of the Air Force) pushed hard to use Fire Fly for photo reconnaissance
over Cuba.28 On Charyk’s orders, the drones were loaded, programmed, and the GC-130 mothership was taxiing to the end of the Tyndall runway when the mission was aborted. The mission was stopped because, ironically, the Air Force did not want to tip the Soviet Union to the presence of this super-secret capability.
The CIA wanted a drone to collect electronic intelligence (ELINT) on the dangerous SA-2 missile system. This not only included picking up the radar tracking frequencies, but also characterizing the terminal tracking and warhead arming and fuzing signals. Here was
a mission manned aviation simply could not do—the drone offered up its “life” to get the electronic information, which was beamed in real time radio waves to a ship or plane out of harm’s way. By December 1962, the model 147D was declared operational for picking up SA-2 guidance and fuzing information from missiles stationed in Cuba.The contractor and the Air Force’s Big Safari proved that they could react quickly to these special requests, but once again diplomatic events overcame their engineering and management dexterity. The Soviets stopped firing SA-2s from Cuba just as the system became operational, and the 147D models ended up reconfigured as reconnaissance drones.
BLUE SPRINGS השימוש בטיוואן כבסיס לגיחות U-2 וכטב"מים למעקב אחר סין
Nationalist China had already been operating U-2s as a CIA surrogate in order to gain information about the Chinese nuclear program and maintain plausible deniability of US involvement. Blue Springs also took upon itself a Nationalist Chinese cover, as each drone left the base with Nationalist Chinese markings. The first operational Lightning Bug sortie over China flew on Aug. 20, 1964, but, as Big Safari and the contractor quickly found out, turning prototypes into an effective operational capability proved much more difficult and time-consuming than pushing workable prototypes off
the production floor. The unit’s initial performance was dismal. Recall that the drone used a special DC-130 launch and control aircraft, and upon return it parachuted to the ground.Numerous single-point failures haunted drone operations. The first seven missions resulted in only two reels of film and a number of lost air vehicles, with most flights demonstrating poor navigational accuracy. Drone damage on recovery was a persistent problem.Very quickly the unit was down to a few operating air vehicles and the program was in trouble. The first US drone shot down over China on Nov. 15, 1964 made the front pageof the New York Times,
Within a year, with its operations now becoming old news, the drone unit flew 160 Lightning Bug sorties in 1965-66.The Blue Springs operation proved to be an invaluable shakedown for drone operations that benefited from SAC’s stiff operational standards, expert contractor maintenance, and the strong mandate to monitor Chinese military operations without creating an international incident. The Lightning Bug drone was the most significant UAV operation in US history—and the most costly. [/B]The years of development since Red Wagon and Fire Fly allowed enough system maturation so that when the need arose, the Lightning Bug could respond. More than 1,000 drones were built with 200 lost in combat, at a total program cost of about $1.1 billion dollars (not including the substantial operations and maintenance costs), which translates to more than $5.8 billion in FY10 dollars—the most expensive UAV operation of its time.
Lightning Bug drones could not reach some ofthe most important targets in China, however. The most difficult objective was the Chinese nuclear facility at Lop Nor, a 4,000 mile round trip from Taiwan. Only the U-2 had the range but, with the introduction of the SA-2 into China, five of these “Nationalist Chinese” U-2s were shot down. This led Kelly Johnson and his Lockheed Skunk Works team to propose an unmanned offshoot of the SR-71 Blackbird for the Lop Nor reconnaissance mission.This idea evolved into one of the most exotic aircraft of the Cold War: the D-21 drone. Like the other national reconnaissance drones, Tagboard was not just classified, it was a compartmentalized NRO program so secret that even Skunk Works engineers working in the Fort Knox-like SR-71 assembly building were restricted from viewing the D-21 by a hangar bulkhead dubbed “Berlin Wall West.”
Test flights in late 1968 fully exercised Senior Bowl at operational distances to successful recoveries off Hawaii.The D-21 successfully completed its operational test flights on five of seven tries, to include collection and processing of film. The first operational flight commenced on Nov. 9, 1969 under orders from President Nixon.The target was an ICBM facility under construction near Lop Nor.Lockheed’s Rich remembers launching a D-21 cost “a bloody fortune to stage.”The B-52 launch vehicle, the expendable rocket booster, the Navy picket ships in the recovery area, two aerial refuelings, and the JC-130 recovery
aircraft all cost untold thousands each time the D-21 flew. Drone operators aboard the B-52 successfully jettisoned the first operational drone after 14 hours of flight to the launch point, but the mission was unsuccessful.[B]The drone was lost due to a guidance failure,
which kept it flying across the Chinese mainland until it ran out of fuel, somewhere over Siberia. Subsequent missions in October 1970 and March 1971 ran perfectly,
but the recovery parachute failed to deploy on the first, causing the package to be lost at sea, and a frigate ran over the second package, resulting in another total loss. The fourth and final flight on March 30, 1971 also ended in failure as the drone vanished over “a heavily-defended area” in China.
Senior Bowl closed its operational career with a record of 0-4. Diplomatic preparations for President Nixon’s trip to China ended Chinese drone overflights altogether.67 Although the failure to complete even one successful mission contributed to the D-21’s demise,
the intervention of international politics meant its only reason for being had vanished. Exacerbating that fact was an even more ominous, unmanned competitor—the satellite.
During this period, the NRO was rapidly improving its satellite reconnaissance capabilities. Like the drone, reconnaissance satellites lacked the political sensitivities associated with manned reconnaissance overflights. Furthermore, unlike the drone, satellites violated no international norm or law. With the new US promise to desist from all aircraft overflight of China,the low-profile nature of US drone operations turned into a political disadvantage.
Compass arrow
Like the D-21, Compass Arrow was built for the trip to Lop Nor, and its capability goals were high. The challenges of autonomous flight at the required altitudes (80,000 feet) and distances pushed the stateof-the-art and the program quickly exceeded its budget
and projected operational date. The original development program was bid at $35 million, but contractors later admitted they knew actual costs would be much higher. A company publication explained the huge cost escalation experienced by the program by saying, “The 154 [the company designation for Compass Arrow] was a victim of too much optimism in the heat of a very tough competition to get the business.”Only one year
after the contract was awarded, the NRO cut the production number from 100 to a lean 20 airframes. Ryan deliberately under-bid to get the job, counting on the support of the highly secretive NRO community to bail them out when the inevitable escalation occurred.
Compass Arrow, the product of the United States’ most knowledgeable drone contractor and a conventional program office bent on efficiency, proved that the most advanced aerospace nation in the world was not up to the engineering challenge of long distance, high altitude, unmanned operation within feasible limits of time and money. The paradoxically exotic and obsolete Compass Arrow system stood on alert at Davis-Monthan AFB, Ariz. starting in December 1971. The futility of that facesaving move was apparent, and it was not long before the project suffered an ignominious end. The NRO divested itself of the project in 1974 under NRO director John L. McLucas, part of a post-Vietnam cost-cutting effort, and the Air Force put the expensive drones in a storage hangar. Compass Arrow project manager Schwanhausser remembers that the Israeli military attaché, Maj. Gen. Elihu Zeira, had visited the Ryan plant and later, as the chief of Israeli intelligence, made “desperate attempts” to get the shelved vehicles just prior
to the 1973 Yom Kippur War. According to Compass Arrow engineer John Dale, President Nixon did not want the drones transferred to Israel and personally ordered that they be destroyed to end the issue.
combat dawn
On April 18, 1968, North Korea shot down an EC-121 Super Constellation signals intelligence (SIGINT) aircraft in international airspace over the Sea of Japan,
killing 31 American crewmen. President Nixon was roundly criticized for sending up an unprotected spy plane into that volatile region. As a result, the NRO asked Ryan Aeronautical to build a Firebee variant to accomplish the EC-121’s suspended SIGINT mission. The high altitude 147T photo reconnaissance version, with two and one-half times the wingspan of the Lightning Bug series, was modified for the SIGINT role with
a National Security Agency (NSA) package, a real-time data link, and a more powerful engine. Four of these 147TE Combat Dawn SIGINT versions deployed to Osan AB, Korea under Air Force control in 1970. Flying over international but prohibitively lethal airspace, these high altitude UAVs collected radar data from targets in North Korea, China, and the Soviet Union.
As with Compass Arrow and D-21, Combat Dawn flights were curtailed for a short period in July 1971 when President Nixon announced his trip to China.On July 28, William Beecher of the New York Times reported, “Administration officials said the United States had suspended flights over Communist China by manned SR-71 spy planes and unmanned reconnaissance drones.”This was the first government acknowledgment of drone intelligence activity.Soon thereafter, Combat Dawn drones continued flying over this region until 1975 with very high reliability rates. Politics actually had little to do with the demise of this particular UAV mission; a much bigger factor was the emergence of satellites. Combat Dawn flights came to an end when satellites picked up the ELINT and COMINT missions.Satellites had developed a strong constituency and had come to dominate NRO operations. Unlike UAVs, satellites incorporated technologies that responded to investment because their operational scheme was essentially mature.
The extremely high operating and acquisition costs associated with the Combat Dawn SIGINT program concerned Air Force planners, who wanted to use that technology to locate hostile air defense radars in Warsaw Pact nations. As early as 1968 a new program for a high-altitude, long-endurance SIGINT project called Compass Dwell (initially called Comfy Bee), was initiated by the Air Force Security Services, probably under the aegis of the NRO’s Program D or a separate NSA contract. The program was submitted for bids in early 1970 and six major aerospace companies competed to build flying prototypes in a “fly before buy” arrangement. Also, Compass Dwell prototypes were “optionally piloted,” that is, had a cockpit for a ferry pilot (which also contributed to greater learning about flight characteristics during the test phase) and was designed to be disassembled and packed into an Air Force C-141 Starlifter jet transport to solve the deployment problems inherent in the helicopter recovery method
The Compass Dwell program accelerated in 1970 after the Air Force-sponsored RAND symposium touted RPVs as a breakthrough concept. The competing contractors used commercially available sailplanes extensively modified into propeller-driven RPVs. The program may have been inspired by a secret Army surveillance aircraft called YO-3A, a very quiet, propeller-driven modification of a civilian sailplane used to observe Viet Cong night movements.The mission for these RPVs was high-altitude, standoff hotography
and electronic eavesdropping missions on the NATO-Warsaw Pact border. Because they were programmed to carry real-time data links, Compass Dwell also promised to be an important early warning tool for NATO commanders.
Ultimately, the concept of operations for this innovative design ran headlong into the manned aviation meta-system. Because of Compass Dwell’s endurance and altitude capability, US planners wanted its staring electronic eyes on Warsaw Pact forces on a 24-hour basis. This meant it would operate just above congested civilian airspace. European air traffic control agencies would not clear the aircraft for regular operations
in commercial airspace due to the fear of collision with airliners. More than any other impediment, the lack of European airspace clearance led to Compass Dwell’s demise. That did not
AARS & Gusto 2
The stealthy, very high-altitude, intercontinental range UAV, known as the Advanced Airborne Reconnaissance System (AARS), was one of the grandest UAV conceptions ever. It had its roots in the re-heated Cold War and the associated US defense buildup of the 1980s. Knowledge about stealth aircraft construction, satellite data links, digital fly-by-wire autopilots, composite structures, and autonomous navigation using the Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites pointed toward the possibility of a UAV that could loiter so long, so high, and with such impunity that it would serve as an endo-atmospheric, geo-stationary satellite
For instance, Northrop proposed a large, subsonic aircraft with a high-lift wing that would allow it to reach more than 80,000 feet.Lockheed’s Johnson proposed two very different means of upgrading this vital national capability. One was a very fast (more than Mach 3), moderately stealthy, high altitude aircraft that became the SR-71 Blackbird. The other was a subsonic, 120-foot wingspan, stealthy aircraft called Gusto 2. Both operated
at high altitude, but the former used speed as a defense, while the latter used a low observable shape to avoid detection. The CIA chose the supersonic variant for sound technological reasons, but its choice locked the US into a restricted operational mode—fast reconnaissance.
הסיבה לעניין הגובר והדחוף בפלטפורמות לשהייה לזמן ארוך מאד - המעבר הסובייטי מ ICBM נייחים למשגרים ניידים
As spy satellite systems came on line in the 1960s, they shared the same fundamental operational scheme as the SR-71. Both conducted reconnaissance with relative impunity but were so fast that they only provided episodic coverage. The Soviet system of fixed air bases, missile silos, and command centers of the Cold War’s first 30 years favored “fast pass” reconnaissance, however, so its weaknesses were not evident until the strategic equation shifted in the late 1970s. Soviet mobile missiles (both nuclear and air-to air)and the advance of aviation technology opened the door for a true loitering surveillance UAV called AARS.
With the emergence of mobile nuclear ballistic missile systems, the weaknesses inherent in fast reconnaissance rapidly became a national security liability. The Soviet Union destabilized the European theater in 1977 by introducing hundreds of accurate, mobile, multiple-warhead SS-20 intermediate-range nuclear missiles that threatened key North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) military sites.Mobile air defense radars and launchers made getting to those missile sites a lethal proposition. Soviet nuclear missile submarines could flush out of their ports in between satellite overflights and be missed. The expansion of Soviet mobile missile threat from one impacting the European theater to one that threatened the US homeland undoubtedly accelerated the
project. Aware of Soviet work on an intercontinental version of the SS-20 and after several studies investigating the concept, the Air Force accepted design proposals
from seven US aerospace companies for the big, covert surveillance UAV.The year was 1984, not long after Reagan made his famous Strategic Defense Initiative (“Star Wars” speech. By 1985, the Soviets deployed an intercontinental-range, road-mobile ballistic missile called the SS-25. The SS-25 and its railborne cousin, the SS-24, presented an ominous new threat because, as mobile missiles, they were designed
explicitly to survive a nuclear strike and hold the US and its allies hostage in a protracted nuclear war environment.
The technological problem of holding these mobile missiles at risk, one that NATO had never solved with the SS-20, now became vastly more complex. US forces had to constantly monitor their movement and electronic emissions, something neither fast-pass satellites, U-2s, nor the SR-71 could accomplish. The mission also entailed breaking the over two decade-long declaratory policy of not overflying the Soviet Union, a
prospect the Reagan Administration apparently felt was worth the gain. To complicate matters further, they needed a platform that could track those missiles in a nuclear detonation environment while flying from remote bases in the continental US.
A 1998 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) briefing on the history of high altitude endurance (HAE) UAVs mentioned a “Special Program” costing more than $1 billion for the purpose of “covert intelligence gathering in denied or heavily defended airspace,” and in 1994, the head of the Defense Airborne Reconnaissance Office, Air Force Maj. Gen. Kenneth R. Israel, acknowledged that more than $850 million had been spent on a very big stealthy UAV program.These shreds of evidence revealed the program’s existence but more recent information reveals that AARS was, indeed, planned to be the ultimate surveillance UAV, one of the most ambitious Cold War aircraft programs ever.
In fact, a Lockheed engineer disclosed in 1995 that more than 50 shapes were analyzed for AARS, with the eventual shape, the very odd “flying clam,” always showing better stealth characteristics for the high altitude loiter mission. Kier said the AARS program management used the U-2 and SR-71 acquisition and operations model—it had composite intelligence agency roots and was to be operated by the Air Force.
AARS pushed the technology envelope in many— perhaps too many—areas, and that translated into high developmental costs. Due to high costs, “black” UAV programs came under Congressionally mandated centralized UAV management in 1989 and “Kier’s
Bird,” as some still call it, also transitioned from service management to a “joint” program office.
According to reports filed not long thereafter, the Air Force considered three UAVs for
the SR-71 replacement role, two DARPA UAVs called Amber and Condor, and “a Lockheed candidate.”In January 1990, based on an Air Force initiative, the generals on the Joint Requirements Oversight Council (JROC) approved a formal military requirement called a “mission need statement” for a “long endurance reconnaissance, surveillance, and target acquisition (RSTA) capability” with the added requirement to
conduct those missions in defended or “denied” areas for extended periods.The requirement was probably timed to pave the way for the transition of AARS to production.
Kier said the large version of AARS, which according to some reports had a wingspan of 250 feet, cost less than a B-2 but more than $1 billion a copy.Reportedly, the production plan called for only eight vehicles at a cost of $10 billion, each of the vehicles capable of an amazing 40 hours on station after flying to the area of interest. Air Force officials were so leery of the UAV’s autonomous flight concept (no pilot had moment-tomoment control) that they reportedly insisted the flying prototype carry a pilot to handle in-flight anomalies and that the final design include a modular, two-place cockpit insert to make it optionally piloted.
One proposal would put a sophisticated target acquisition system on the B-2 stealth bomber—the so-called RB-2 configuration.The proposal had value as a terminal tracking system, but the RB-2 lacked a method of off-board cueing to direct it to a search area.
For instance, the Air Force space community retrenched to save its controversial satellite
program called Milstar, as did the still powerful but fading bomber community to save the B-2 stealth bomber. AARS, Milstar, and the B-2 were originally planned to work as a team to find, relay tracking information, and kill Soviet mobile missile systems. Yet,
unlike for its more traditional, well-supported teammates, the Air Force pulled funding on AARS, and it was terminated in December 1992 by the intelligence community hierarchy just as it was to enter full scale development.
As it turned out, none of the alternative programs made the cut, for not only was the Cold War officially over with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, but the venerable Strategic Air Command was disbanded in June 1992. With that move, AARS lost its primary military constituent and the AARS alliance began to crumble.
The Navy also participated in two very secret UAV programs that constitute important data points in the technological and programmatic evolution of UAVs. Socalled “black” programs, shielded from public scrutiny by their classification, expanded rapidly in the 1980s during the Reagan Administration’s military buildup.All the services had black UAV projects in the 1980s and, as it had in the 1970s, Congress acted as a brake on UAV development as DARPA, the intelligence community, and the services attempted a technology push. The first Navy black program, a medium altitude, over-the-horizon UAV called Amber demonstrated the circuitous path a UAV can take before operational acceptance. Amber started as a DARPA project backed by the Navy (and the CIA) that did not transition to production. The second project was one of the most fascinating
UAVs ever to reach flight test. Dubbed Condor due to its astonishing 200-foot wingspan (longer than that of a Boeing 747 jumbo jet), this very high altitude, seven-day endurance UAV was another Navy-backed DARPA project that failed to reach the fleet. Yet, as a UAV technology testbed Condor was unparalleled and showed the way to a future in which technology may not just challenge pilots, but render them extraneous.
After the failure of high altitude, long endurance UAVs like the Air Force’s Compass Cope in the mid- 1970s, DARPA in the late 1970s began a project called “Teal Rain” investigating high altitude engine performance. Based on that work, they commissioned Israeli inventor and iconoclast Abraham Karem to design a less ambitious project than Compass Cope, but one with medium altitude (15,000-25,000 feet), long loiter capability. Still concerned about the cruise missile threat, the Navy took over partial sponsorship of the $40 million program as it showed promise for the same mission its ill-fated “over the horizon” (OTH) UAV was slated to fill—long range Harpoon target acquisition. DARPA’s aircraft came to be called Amber.
Karem’s prickly personality made it exceedingly difficult to work with him.He designed Amber with a unique inverted “V” tail, a pusher propeller, and a long, thin, high-lift wing— it was an odd-looking bird. Amber was designed to be rocket-launched out of a torpedo tube as well as conventionally launched from a runway. Karem reportedly produced a weaponized version as well as one for standard reconnaissance work. By 1986 Karem conducted successful flight tests, and by late 1987 the Navy decided to transition to operational trials.On June 7, 1988, Amber demonstrated flight duration approaching 40 hours at altitudes exceeding 25,000
feet. After several internal Navy failures to achieve a ship-launched endurance UAV, it appeared DARPA had achieved a workable prototype.
Amber provided an innovative way to gain the kind of long-range aerial reconnaissance that proved critical in naval battles like Midway and Coral Sea, but the Navy surface community never found its voice for Amber. It may have been a combination of the“not invented here” syndrome or difficulty dealing with Karem’s abrasive personality.Today, several Amber prototypes and their sophisticated ground control stations sit idle in a China Lake, Calif. Warehouse.
Gnat 750 to predator
Despite this setback Karem tried to forge ahead with the design in an attempt to find a foreign customer, pouring all his earnings from Amber into a conventional runway-launched version called Gnat 750. Out from under DARPA’s helping hand, Karem’s company was on the verge of bankruptcy. A large defense contractor bought Karem’s designs and continued to develop his Gnat 750 for foreign markets. Thus a well-designed system was allowed to mature over a decade, something few UAVs can manage
Two of the three UAV “tiers” had Amber derivatives in mind. Tier I was the low-level Gnat 750, a quickreaction program funded by the CIA for deployment to Bosnia. Gnat 750 was fielded quickly because the aircraft and relay systems were already built as part of a contract with Turkey.Tier II started as a DOD and Joint Chiefs of Staff (no service involvement) initiative called the “tactical endurance UAV.” Tier II, which later
came to be called Predator, was a larger, more sophisticated version of the Gnat 750. It carried a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) that imaged the ground through cloud cover and, more importantly, had the ability to be controlled via satellite data link, allowing true beyond line-of-sight control for the first time.These Amber derivatives also benefited from the maturation of GPS technology, which for the first time allowed a high degree of position accuracy at a very low cost, a problem that haunted UAV systems for the previous three decades. Predator went on to become an Air Force UAV system that, even before the eruption of the Global War on Terrorism in 2001, had logged more than
6,600 combat hours in five deployments.
condor
The Condor UAV started as a DARPA initiative in the late 1970s to counter Soviet Backfire bombers delivering anti-ship cruise missiles.Soon after taking office in 1981, Navy Secretary John F. Lehman Jr. proposed an aggressive naval strategy which involved sailing US carrier battle groups into the Norwegian and Barents Seas to defeat the Soviet Navy in its home waters. As it had since World War II, the land-based air
threat to such an armada loomed large.The Soviet Union employed long-range Backfire bombers loaded with anti-ship cruise missiles to counter such an incursion, and it was assumed the Soviets would volley-fire hundreds of cruise missiles from outside the range of the carrier’s air wing. Condor was designed as a sensing platform for the Navy’s “outer air battle,” which involved firing large, ramjet-powered (Mach 3+) missiles to intercept the bombers prior to weapon release. As with the Harpoon problem, the challenge for Navy planners was how to achieve long-range target acquisition commensurate with weapon range.
The aptly named Condor was designed to loiter for a week—well beyond the capacity of a human pilot—in the vicinity of potential Backfire ingress routes to cue long-range missile launchers.It featured innovative high altitude propulsion concepts, non-metallic (composite) structures, and a new wing design. Its massive wings deflected 25 feet upward in flight and its all-composite airframe weighed only 8,000 pounds without
fuel. With payload, Condor might have cost as much as $40 million per copy, which also gives an indication of how much autonomous, high-altitude, long-endurance flight costs.
LIGHTNING BUGS OVER VIETNAM
On July 24, 1965, those missile batteries shot down their first US aircraft, an Air Force F-4C Phantom fighter.Although the Air Force gradually learned how to jam or out-maneuver the deadly system, it remained difficult to get good electronic signatures as Soviet engineers fielded improvements. The answer: send in the drone. In response to this need, the CIA developed an electronics package that could record the SA-2’s
transmissions as it fuzed and exploded. The Big Safari office had the contractor squeeze this special payload into a large-model Lightning Bug ELINT drone. The employment concept was the same as that developed for the SA-2 threat over Cuba in 1963—the drone would take a direct hit from a missile while its data link transmitted
the terminal firing data to a manned aircraft loitering a safe distance away.
On Feb. 13, 1966, the specially configured drone picked up good SA-2 fuzing, guidance, and overpressure data that allowed US electronics experts to build jammers that would throw off the missile. As the missile blasted it from the sky, the drone transmitted the
SA-2’s terminal emissions to a standoff aircraft (an EB-66 Destroyer). The electronic take was so important that the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, Dr. Eugene G. Fubini, called this mission “the most significant contribution to electronic reconnaissance in the last 20 years.”Later that year, another specially converted drone flew over North Vietnam with a new Navy electronic defensive pod to test its utility against the actual threat, and the drone drew more than 10 missiles before it was brought down, confirming the pod’s ability to spoof the missile.
Another sacrificial drone mission deserves mention because of its historical significance. In 1966, when it became clear that the SA-2 sites in North Vietnam posed a serious threat to high altitude drone operations (16 of 24 were shot down in late 1965), the NRO asked for 10 radar-enhanced drones to be used deliberately as decoys to protect high altitude drone operations. The stripped-down decoy (costing around $520,000 in FY10 dollars) would fly in close proximity to the camera-carrying drone, but was programmed to split off near the target area to confuse enemy radar operators. SAC picked up on the idea, ordering 10 additional decoys to help cover B-52s flying into North Vietnam as part of Operation Rolling Thunder.Although the program reportedly worked, it was shortlived
because enemy radar operators soon learned to distinguish decoy from real. Still, the idea lived on.
השימוש הידוע של ח"א הישראי ב 1973 (כאמור לפני שנושא המרקיז צף לאחרונה והוסיף פרטים נוספים מעניינים)
The use of UAVs as decoys was later adopted by the Israeli Air Force, which employed US-made BQM-74 Chukar target drones as decoys for the first time in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, this time as part of a deliberate, phased attack plan designed to suppress missile defenses. The drones (looking like an attacking formation) prompted Egyptian missile radars to emit. Radarhoming missiles right behind the drones slammed into
the radar sites, blinding them for the manned aircraft strike that dropped deadly ordnance on the missile sites. Israel repeated the trick in the 1982 Bekaa Valley strike using a variety of indigenously produced decoys. (In a deliberate reprise of those Israeli tactics,
the US Air Force launched 40 Chukar target drones into Baghdad on the first two days of the Gulf War in 1991. Whether as sacrificial data-gatherers or as a means of confusing enemy defenses, drones showed infinite courage in their role as protectors of US military pilots.
Buffalo hunter = דגמי ה J וה S של ריאן לחדירות בגובה נמוך
the low altitude 147J model flew its first operational mission in the spring of 1966. This flight was the first foray into what would become its dominant mission profile as the
high altitude regime became too lethal. By 1971, the commander of 7th Air Force, Gen. John D. Lavelle, told his Vietnam chain of command that the “vehicle most effective under northeast monsoonal conditions is the Buffalo Hunter drone.” The Air Force now had a mix of reconnaissance assets, with satellites, the U-2, and SR-71 performing in a standoff role, the RF-101 and RF-4 squadrons doing high volume bomb damage assessment, and the drones performing in denied areas
One of the most important additions to the “S” series capabilities was a real-time data link that had eluded drone designers for years. In June 1972, advances in micro-circuitry allowed the Air Force to field the “SC/TV” model with a television camera in the nose
to enhance navigation accuracy. The airborne remote control officer, who used to fly “on instruments,” so to speak, could now navigate using a low-resolution television image. Still, both these technologies required radio transmissions that could be jammed in a combat environment, so the location accuracy program still plagued the drone’s combat effectiveness.
Low-altitude Lightning Bug drones flew almost 500 missions that year and registered their most important contributions to the US war effort. They proved fairly immune to enemy air defenses later in the conflict as tactics and electronic warfare methods improved, with enemy air defenses inflicting only two to three percent losses from 1970 through 1972. Buffalo Hunter reconnaissance coups included the first pictures of the Soviet ATOLL heat-seeking missile attached to a MiG-21 Fishbed making an unsuccessful try at shooting down the drone, identification of the first optical tracking devices on the SA-2, and thousands of feet of high-resolution imagery.
Due to the persistent overcast during that campaign, Buffalo Hunter drones proved to be the only reliable way to get crucial bomb damage information. Vogt, 7th AF commander during Linebacker II, commented, “The high altitude airplanes such as the SR-71 and our own [manned] tactical reconnaissance, which fly at altitudes considerably higher [than the drone], are not capable of doing this particular job. In its various guises—seven different models by the end of the war—the low altitude “S” series became the workhorse of Vietnam War drone operations, eventually flying 2,369 missions, comprising almost 70 percent of the total drone sorties in the Vietnam War. In fact, although manned flights over Vietnam were suspended in 1973, Lightning Bug crews flew right up to the surrender of Saigon in 1975.Buffalo Hunter had come of age and found its niche and had become a valued, fully-integrated part of military reconnaissance
operations in Vietnam.
COMPASS COPE
The Air Force’s Compass Cope project is important because it represents the first time a major aerospace company committed itself to a UAV project. Boeing, which embarked on a company-funded high-altitude, long-endurance UAV project immediately after the RAND/Systems Command RPV symposium, took the kind of clean sheet, technology-stretching approach the Air Force found attractive. In July 1971, Boeing won a sole-source contract to develop the jet-powered RPV which came to be called Compass Cope
Tactical Air Command jumped into the Compass Cope program as its prime advocate in 1973 with a concept of operations calling for a high-altitude relay drone (HARD), but the program attracted many more customers. TAC planners originally envisioned a loitering, tactical battlefield surveillance RPV that operated from standard runways, carrying a 750-pound payload up to 70,000 feet for 30 hours while providing communications relay for voice and video.Eventually, they converged on the idea of having the high-altitude, long-endurance RPV carry the Precision Emitter Location
Strike System (PELSS), which would identify and locate air defense emitters by triangulation from multiple high-altitude standoff orbits over Europe. SAC wanted Compass Cope to perform the RC-135 mission for locating Soviet radar sites that threatened bomber ngress routes or to serve as an electronic monitor of Soviet missile testing. Even the NRO got involved through its “Program D” airborne reconnaissance office. NRO director McLucas reported witnessing a Boeing demonstration of satellite drone control—probably the first in history—in which controllers in Seattle directed a surrogate drone flying over Hawaii Soon, however, the program began to unravel due to cost overruns and two crashes in test flights
Like Compass Dwell, the Air Force wanted to operate the high-flying RPV from bases
in the US, Germany, Belgium, Great Britain, Holland, and Italy.Unmanned craft did not comply with international flight safety rules for “see and avoid” unless accompanied
by a manned aircraft to altitudes well above commercial air traffic. US rules required manned escort up to 18,000 feet, which may have been workable, but the air traffic control agencies of Belgium and Germany expressed doubts that they would allow a robot craft regular, sustained access to their airways.Unfortunately, the unique ability of these aircraft to loiter for hours at high altitude and the common characteristic
of runway operations both ran afoul of longstanding, pilot-centered airspace control rules.
Eventually, TAC lost all interest in Compass Cope, casting its gaze instead to an improved, enlarged version of the venerable U-2 called the U-2R. Although human endurance limited the duration of U-2R missions to five to 10 hours and Compass Cope had a nominal 24-hour operational endurance, the upgraded U-2 had much greater altitude and payload capability and dodged the airspace control issue. The most
compelling argument for the U-2 was that the primary payload (now called the Precision Location Strike System, or PLSS) exceeded the load-carrying capacity for Compass Cope due to weight growth in that program. Also, in a classical example of how an innovative system has to fight history, the U-2’s peacetime attrition data showed a much higher flight reliability than was expected for the RPV.
Multimission lightning bug
The BGM-34C, the so-called “multi-mission RPV,” superficially resembled the Lightning Bug but was designed to overcome the manifest flaws in the old system. TAC wanted a common, supportable, affordable system that could take advantage of microprocessor
breakthroughs to deliver the combat capability promised at the RAND/Systems Command symposium. The BGM-34C featured interchangeable nose-mounted modules designed for either reconnaissance, electronic warfare, or air-to-ground strike missions.Unfortunately, the new RPV system also included some very high-priced ancillary items such as a new DC-130H, a multiple drone control system, and more MARS helicopters (CH-53s due to the inability of the CH-3 to lift the heavier drones at high-pressure altitudes), all financed by the Air Force budget rather than the deep pockets of the NRO.The TAC acquisition plan called for 145 BGM-34C air vehicles over six years, and contracts were signed in 1975
ומדוע הכטב"מ החמוש המוקדם הזה נכשל כפלטפורמת חמ"מ
The 11th Tactical Drone Squadron maintenance experience showed that it took 24 hours to turn around a reconnaissance RPV after recovery, whereas an A-10 had a three-hour turnaround time.Finally, a RPV unit required 32 C-141s and three C-5s for deployment, about the same as a complete, 72 aircraft F-4E wing, and the F-4s would be ready for combat at least three days before the RPVs. Underpinning the lack of meaningful military capabilityinherent in the BGM-34C concept, RPV technology lagged in several important areas. RPV data link vulnerability had not been addressed in development and would certainly contribute to cost overruns. A study conducted by industry advocates stated, “There is an urgent need to initiate efforts that will culminate in an imagery system design with the ECCM [electronic counter-countermeasures] capability to operate successfully
in the probable jamming environment
A largely overlooked but important reason for the cancellation of the BGM-34C multi-mission RPV involved its effect on the US defense posture under the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT) II negotiations that had been going on since 1972. Since the BGM-34C had one-way endurance well in excess of 372 miles and had been tested in a weapon delivery mode, it would be counted against US nuclear cruise missile limits even though it had no nuclear mission. The practical, warfighting reasons for TAC’s growing skepticism concerning the BGM-34C were obvious, but the SALT II treaty
removed any doubt about the program’s survival. The rise of another innovative unmanned weapon system, the cruise missile, only served to magnify the RPV’s difficulties in addressing its substantial credibility gap.
Medium Range UA V (BQM-145A)
On March 11, 1985, under direction of the Joint Staff, the Air Force signed a memorandum of agreement with the Navy to produce a jet-powered tactical
reconnaissance UAV to support air operations.The heart of the so-called MR-UAV (Medium Range UAV)system was a small, fast, jet-powered aircraft that amounted to a more stealthy, data-linked Lightning Bug. As with that system, the MR-UAV could be either air-launched from manned aircraft or ground-launched using an expendable rocket assist Navy assumed the lead for the air vehicle and control system, whereas the Air Force took responsibility for developing a digital, electro-optical sensor with a data
link called the Advanced Tactical Airborne Reconnaissance System (ATARS). ATARS was planned to be a modular, “joint” payload, able to be used on the UAV and as a pod on manned replacements for the RF-4C Phantom (i.e., the Air Force’s F-16 Fighting Falcon or the Navy/Marine Corps-operated F/A-18 Hornet).
The Navy’s requirements, while wholly rational for its seagoing environment, gradually lessened range, speed, and altitude capabilities that the Air Force wanted and drove the price high enough to erase planned economies of scale. Delays in the Air Force-run ATARS program exacerbated program slippage, and in doing so, the MR-UAV missed a
critical opporunity to prove itself in combat. Unlike the Lightning Bug program, which was at least deployable (if not mature) when Vietnam escalated in 1964, MR-UAV was not close to production when the massive buildup for the Persian Gulf War kicked off in late 1990. As a result, the Air Force, when war came, was the only service to operate without a UAV, even in an experimental capacity.As forecast by the Air Force study of a few years earlier, Gen. Charles A. Horner, USAF (Ret.), the coalition air chief as a lieutenant general, did not have enough tactical reconnaissance assets and commented after the war that the Air Force should buy a “cheap” UAV for that role.Horner’s comment reveals a key perceptual problem— the MR-UAV was far from cheap.
The Cold War’s end certainly played a role in dampening the Air Force’s enthusiasm for an unmanned penetrator, but ultimately the program failed due to over-reliance on jointness as a measure of air vehicle merit and the Air Force’s own poor handling of ATARS.The “perfect” tactical reconnaissance system ended up as a few minimalist pods on Marine Corps F/A-18 Hornets and eight low-rate production MR-UAVs sitting on
the shelf at Tyndall AFB, Fla.
כתבה מקיץ 2012 על כרם
http://www.nrg.co.il/online/1/ART2/324/639.html
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