US Battlefield UAVs - OUTRIDER

OUTRIDER

Although the Hunter proved very useful almost in spite of itself, the Army still needed a formal operational battlefield UAV system. In 1996, on the cancellation of the Hunter, the Army went through its third attempt to procure a battlefield UAV with the Alliant Techsystems Outrider.

The Outrider was based on the Mission Technologies "Hellfox" UAV, which had flown the year before. The Outrider was a relatively small battlefield UAV that featured an unusual "dual wing", meaning it was a biplane with the wings staggered and joined at the ends. It was powered by a four-cylinder piston engine driving a pusher propeller, had fixed landing gear, and a pancake-shaped data link antenna on its back.

The Outrider was another fiasco. The military demanded a wide range of major changes to the Hellfox, such changing airframe construction from composites to aluminum, and the effort never managed to converge to a solution. After continuous problems and a failure to meet specifications, the Outrider was cancelled in 1999, the same year it was formally designated the "RQ-6A".

While it is difficult to understand why the Army had such difficulty obtaining what would seem to be a relatively simple technology, part of the problem seems to be specsmanship. The Israelis were able to make use of battlefield UAVs quickly because they had simple requirements. The weather in the Middle East is generally hot, sunny, and clear, and the Israelis have a relatively fixed set of adversaries who mostly live right on their border.

In contrast, the US Army may be forced to operate almost anywhere and against anyone, meaning that a system that would be satisfactory to the Israelis would not be adequate for the US Army. The US Army necessarily had more demanding specifications. This was unavoidable, but it also opened the door to adding ever more specifications, a bureaucratic process known as "feature creep" that can squeeze the life out a project.

Along with over-specification, there seems to have been a degree of bumbling as well. The seeming simplicity of a UAV is misleading. Studies of the difficulties encountered in Army UAV programs indicate that participants tended to underestimate the complexity of a UAV system, starting out thinking that UAVs are little more than glorified RC model airplanes, and then were overwhelmed as problems mounted. On the other hand, some defense engineers approached UAVs with the same mindset as they would use for building a piloted aircraft, causing costs to skyrocket.

There also seems to have been problems from interservice squabbling and Congressional micromanagement. After the development contract was awarded, the Pentagon decided that Outrider had to meet both Army and Navy requirements. This meant increasing the UAV's range by a factor of four, to allow ships to see targets over the horizon, and specifying an engine that ran on diesel fuel, not gasoline, which is too flammable to store on a naval vessel except when the need absolutely demands it. The engine effort was a fiasco.

US Navy UAV efforts seem to have gone better partly because of high-level interest in the project. The original Navy request that resulted in procurement of the Pioneer UAV was a personal initiative of Navy Undersecretary John Lehman. Not only does having such a prominent patron eliminate obstacles, it also encourages program officials to greater efforts, since they know their actions have high-level visibility. The Army efforts, in contrast, have often lacked patrons or high-level commitment.

However, it should also be noted that the Navy has been criticised for becoming involved with programs like Outrider, changing the requirements drastically to fit their needs, and then walking off. In addition, the Navy's long and difficult search for an antiship missile target, discussed earlier, suggests that the Army has no particular copyright on bumbling. Further consideration of the matter leads into a tangle of bureaucracy best avoided.