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US Army reveals plans for UAS operations
The US Army unveiled a 'new roadmap' for its future unmanned aircraft system (UAS) strategy at UV Europe in Brussels on 29 June.
Centred around a ’universal operator’, the army wants all of its seven UAS assets and accompanying unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) to be operated from either the universal ground control station (UGCS) or ‘Mobile or Manned’ UGCS (M-UGCS), a senior officer revealed.
It is envisaged that UGCS will operate RQ-5 Hunter, ER/MP (Extended Range/ Multi-Purpose) and Shadow B UASs with M-UGCS operating Raven, gMAV, Wasp and Puma small and mini UAVs while also providing links to manned airframes. There is also a forthcoming requirement to control UGVs from the M-UGCS, it was revealed.
Similarly, the army is looking for increased co-operation between manned helicopter assets and its fleet of UASs, according to Lieutenant Colonel Jennifer Jensen, Product Manager for UAS Program Management Office.
Addressing delegates at the conference, Jensen described how a total of 3,000 One System Remote Video Terminal (OSRVT) systems had already been fielded to US forces with the roll-out due to become an officially recognised Program of Record later in the year.
‘Full motion video and metadata can be fused onto mapping and makes information actionable,’ she said while describing how a battalion of AH-64 Apache attack helicopters had already been equipped with OSRVT. Additional AH-64 battalions are slated to receive the upgrade she added.
Capable of providing Apache crews with live video feeds from Hunter, Reaper, Raven and Shadow B UASs, Jensen described how such a capability would ‘increase the situational awareness [of Apache crews] and their top-down aerial perspective’, especially for target acquisition missions.
She also revealed that the army was planning to upgrade OH-58D Kiowa Warrior, casualty evacuating UH-60 Blackhawk and CH-47 Chinook helicopters with a similar capability. OSRVT can be soldier-borne and vehicle-mounted and operated from tactical operation centres (TOCs).
Jensen also outlied how dismounted warfighters or manned aircraft crews could control the electro-optical/infrared payload of a Shadow B separate to the UAS operating team itself. She said all new army UAS systems would also be fitted with such capabilities.
Finally, Jensen announced that risk mitigation and interoperability capability demonstrations were slated to take place later in the year with Shadow, Hunter and ER/MP UASs all controlled from a single UGCS.
By Andrew White, Brussels
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