Future of Warfare, 2030: Massive High-Altitude Airships Rain Armed Drones on Remote Targets
A joint venture of European aerospace firms BAE Systems, EADS and Finmeccanica, MBDA asked its weapons engineers to project ahead to 2030 and take a stab at guessing how UAVs might then be deployed.
What they came up with is a class of UAV that provides expendable backup for the descendants of today’s Predator and Reaper drones.
The vision is of vast airships that constantly loiter at high altitude over target areas, carrying pods of small UAVs in much the same way as today’s fighter jets carry missiles under their wings.
These launcher racks could contain at least two types of armed UAV - a small scout and a long-range version. Both sprout spring-loaded wings when air-dropped and are powered by electric ducted-fan engines.
A controller on the ground - dressed in the robotic garb that will clearly be de rigeur in the 2030’s military - then punches a few buttons on a wrist mounted screen to choose a UAV and its target GPS waypoints…
(via One Per Cent: Loitering airships could dispense drones on demand)
Developing New Approaches to Capture the Potential of Dirigibles
Revolutionizing transportation with airships is an old idea but a persistent one, and it’s usually the military that brings it closer to reality.
More than a century after George Griffith described armed conflict fought with “war balloons” in his popular novel The Angel of the Revolution, the U.S. military was considering the merits of transporting materiel with airships.
In 2005 Darpa, the Pentagon’s experimental branch, initiated Project Walrus and set about finding a contractor to build a “hybrid ultra-large aircraft” that could transport 500 tons of cargo at least 12,000 nautical miles. Pasternak’s Aeros got the biggest contract of the project. (“There is only one solution,” Pasternak had explained to the Los Angeles Times, “and we have that one solution.”)
But in 2010, the Pentagon chose not to renew Project Walrus, a fate not uncommon to airship schemes.
(via A Plan For Airships That Might Finally Take Off | Popular Science)
Army’s Giant Robot Spy Blimp to Test over New Jersey in Two Weeks
The Air Force’s highly computerized (and potenitally missile-armed) Blue Devil 2 airship recently ran into integration problems, forcing the flying branch to cancel a planned test run in Afghanistan. (Although the service had never been too hot on airships in the first place.)
The Navy meanwhile grounded its much smaller MZ-3A research blimp for a lack of work until the Army paid to take it over. The LEMV seemed to be losing air, too, as Northrop and the Army repeatedly delayed its first flight and planned combat deployment originally slated for the end of 2011.
As recently as last month Northrop and the Army declined to comment on the airship’s new flight schedule. Northrop VP Brad Metzger’s boast from last summer that the $500-million LEMV prototype would “redefine persistent surveillance” seemed hollow.
But at a special forces industry conference here in Tampa, Northrop’s Brown surprised Danger Room with a hard date range: LEMV will lift off between June 6 and 10, he says. After a brief trial around Lakehurst, the 300-foot-long airship will motor south to Florida to be mated up with a custom-designed gondola containing the blimp’s cameras and radios. If the gondola fits as planned and all the gear functions, the pilotless LEMV will cross the Atlantic in “early winter,” bound for “a theater” for a front-line demonstration, Brown says. We’re sure the “theater” in question is Afghanistan.
If war commanders like what they see in their new giant spy blimp, the Army could order up more copies, Brown says.
Never mind airworthiness and sensor integration: The biggest danger, according to Brown, is the weather. Airships are “subject to buffeting by winds and by thunderstorms.” Operators have to plan carefully to keep their airships away from storms. Despite airships’ checkered past, Northrop is optimistic the LEMV will survive the elements and its combat debut. T
he company is already looking beyond the initial Afghanistan trial. The LEMV can do more than hover and spy. It’s also a potentially useful cargo carrier. The current model can carry 20 tons of supplies. A scaled-up version could carry hundreds of tons — and at a fraction of the cost of fixed-wing airplanes. Noting Pakistan’s continuing blockade of roads into Afghanistan, Brown proposes that the LEMV could help the Army remove its weapons and gear from from the landlocked country as U.S. troops withdraw. “It presents an attractive alternative.”
(via Army Readies Its Mammoth Spy Blimp for First Flight | Danger Room | Wired.com)
DOD Shifts Emphasis from Drones to Spy Blimps:
Surveillance drones like the Predator and the Reaper are starting to lose just a bit of their sheen in military circles, even though their number of “orbits,” or combat air patrols, has more than quadrupled in the last five years.
Giant spy blimps are the new hotness. They can stay in the air for much longer than any drone. Instead of a Predator’s single camera, the blimps can carry a whole bunch of surveillance equipment, because they’re so freakin’ huge. Any one of those sensors could spy on an entire town at once. There’s even enough space on board the airship to process all that data in the sky, easing the burden on overloaded intelligence analysts.
…It’s part of a project called “Blue Devil.” The behemoth, 340-foot-long blimp and all of its spy gear should be ready for Air Force duty by January, Deptula promises. And if Blue Devil works as promised — staying four miles above Afghanistan for five days at a time — drones could suddenly seems like an expensive anachronism.
“It brings to bear a completely different concept for ISR: multiple sensors on one platform integrated with on-board processing and storage. It’s the first time we’re using a modular system on an aircraft to host a variety of sensors, and they can be rapidly changed for new or different sensors in a matter of hours,” Deptula tells Danger Room. “We’ve got the world’s largest ISR payload — and ‘real estate’ to host it, and nearly a supercomputer on board to process what they find.”
The Pentagon is planning to spend $4.5 billion to mount 15 more drone air patrols. The costs of operating, maintaining and processing the information from the roboplanes runs about $8,000 per hour. Deptula claims Blue Devil would run $1,000 per hour, because it requires fewer people (although that’s just an educated guess; the thing hasn’t flown yet). “A handful of Blue Devil orbits could achieve significantly greater ISR effectiveness for a fraction of that cost and save billions,” he insists. For now, the Air Force is spending $211 million on one of Deptula’s blimps.
(via Giant Spy Blimp Battle Could Decide Surveillance’s Future | Danger Room | Wired.com)
