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No 'hidden message' in Army briefing
Titled “Above the Best: Army Aviation Today & Tomorrow,” the keynote address presented at the Association of the United States Army’s (AUSA’s) Army Aviation Symposium and Exhibition, held in Washington, DC, 7-9 January 2009, focused on a broad range of issues surrounding both manned and unmanned aircraft systems.
Presented by Major General James O. Barclay, Commanding General, US Army Aviation Warfighting Center and Fort Rucker, the address included a briefing slide outlining the Army’s Aviation Modernization Strategy.
In terms of UAS platforms, the slide identified several currently fielded systems, moving to the ongoing activities surrounding Sky Warrior. However, from that point, the chart stretched blankly through both ‘Near Term’ and ‘Far Term’ timeframes, moving directly to a ‘Future’ that specified ‘Joint UAS.’
Asked afterwards about the apparent oversight of programmes like the FCS Class I and Class IV UAS, Barclay was quick to clarify that there were no hidden messages in the overview.
“I didn’t list a whole bunch of systems,” he said. “I didn’t list G-MAV. I didn’t list some others.”
“There’s no message there,” he added. “It’s just that there are a bunch of them out there percolating. But they are at different levels of development and stages. But there is no underlying message at all.”
By Scott R. Gourley, Washington, DC
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