The usually cautious chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, John W. Warner, has come up with a daring idea for Congress: Order the Air Force and the Army to buy planes and tanks that don't need human crews.
Air Force leaders say they would welcome any unmanned aerial vehicle that can spare a pilot's life. But Warner's proposal goes so far in this direction that the Virginia Republican and his allies are now busily assuring the men and women with white scarves that they will always have a place in the wild blue yonder. Unmanned planes, however, will be flying along with them.
Army leaders also are cheering Warner on. "It's a great idea," Paul J. Hoeper, the assistant secretary of the Army in charge of buying weapons, told National Journal. Ridding itself of the tons of armor needed to protect humans inside combat vehicles is the quickest way to make the 21st-century Army light and fast enough to arrive first with the most at a distant hotspot, he said.
Industry, too, is eager to broaden its umanned vehicle and aircraft beachhead if the Pentagon pays for the effort. Warner plans to stick between $200 million and $300 million into the new Pentagon budget to finance his initiative. Under Warner's plan, by 2010 one-third of military aircraft designed to strike deep within enemy territory would be unmanned, and by 2015 one-third of ground combat vehicles would be driverless. Elaborating on his idea in an interview with National Journal, the committee chairman and former Navy Secretary said this: "When you look at the history of casualties, beginning with almost half a million killed in World War II, over 35,000 killed in Korea, and more than 50,000 killed in Vietnam, and zero combat deaths in Kosovo, in my judgment this country will never again permit the armed forces to be engaged in conflicts which inflict the level of casualties we have seen historically. So what do you do? You move toward the unmanned type of military vehicle to carry out missions which are high risk in nature. . . . The driving force is the culture in our country today, which says, 'Hey! If our soldiers want to go to war, so be it. But don't let any of them get hurt.' "
A second important reason for pushing the robotic airplanes and tanks, Warner said, is to attract more of America's youth into uniform. The more high-technology equipment the military uses and develops, "the more likely we'll attract quality men and women because they're interested in learning high tech in the military and then moving on and using those skills in the civilian community." Warner explained that the military's most difficult problem today is keeping troops who have the skills to operate and repair high-technology weapons and computers. Those skills are so valuable in the private sector that trained military people keep leaving service for higher-paying civilian jobs. "The more high tech we can teach them in the military, the more likely we will attract quality people into the military at the front end, and hopefully some of them will stay in for a full career."
Warner said he doubted that warplanes and armored vehicles now in service could be transformed into unmanned ones. He envisions that the Air Force and the Army would proceed from the drawing board up. Warner conceded that the deadlines of 2010 for unmanned bombers and 2015 for armored vehicles "are a challenge" but contended that it was high time somebody laid down markers for the American military in the field of unmanned vehicles.
"Every now and then somebody like me has to take out their shotgun and fire it into the heavens to get somebody's attention," Warner said. "I ran this idea by Jim Schlesinger [Secretary of Defense from 1973-75], and he told me the history of stealth aircraft. It originated on his watch, and the Department of the Air Force resisted stealth technology simply because [the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency] had it, and not they." Warner's plan is to turn to DARPA once again and earmark $200 million to $300 million in the fiscal 2001 defense budget to develop the new generation of unmanned vehicles for aerial and ground combat.
Les Brownlee, the majority staff director on the Senate Armed Services Committee, is doing much of the downfield blocking for Warner's initiative. He is assuring Air Force leaders that the idea is not to push human pilots out of the cockpit but to exploit technology to make manned aircraft safer and more lethal. One idea is to field a two-seat version of the Air Force's new fighter, the F-22 Raptor. The second crewman, controlling an accompanying unmanned plane electronically, could see what it saw and could pull the robot airplane's trigger. In a dogfight, the unmanned plane could perform high-speed aerobatics that would render a human pilot unconscious.
Unmanned-airplane enthusiasts contend that an Air Force pilot flying today's F-117 stealth bomber over a target at night keeps his eyes glued on the TV-like console in the cockpit and follows its directions. He does not look outside the cockpit to aim his bombs. So why not put that console at an airbase and have a pilot safely on the ground there to direct the unmanned bomber to the target and back?
The Air Force and the Army already are using unmanned aerial vehicles for reconnaissance. They are far cheaper than manned aircraft and deny an enemy the chance to march a human pilot through jeering crowds if shot out of the sky. The Boeing Co., for example, is developing an Unmanned Combat Air Vehicle that could fly low over enemy anti-aircraft sites and bomb them repeatedly and in succession. This would prevent a country like Iraq from repairing them quickly in between the intermittent raids of manned bombers, as is now the case.
Hoeper said that developing unmanned ground vehicles by 2015 would not be a problem but predicted that employing them correctly so they could win battles would be difficult. He recalled that during the Civil War the generals had cannon with rifled barrels for accuracy, men in balloons who could see where enemy troops were massed, and telegraph hardware needed to pinpoint the troops' location for the gunners. But the generals failed to put these assets together so artillery could be fired with deadly accuracy from a safe distance behind the front lines. Instead they rolled the big guns up to the front lines like Napoleon had done before them and fired the cannon as if they were big muskets.
"We'll probably start out using the unmanned weapons the same way we now use the manned ones," Hoeper predicted. "Then some bright captain or lieutenant colonel will figure out the tactics" needed to exploit their potential. The advantage of modern weapons is that their various components can be miles apart, Hoeper said. Currently, in the Army's M-1 tank, for example, the sensors, communications, and firing mechanism are all clustered within the vehicle. But with new technologies they could all be in separate locations, and some of them could be on unmanned vehicles, the weapons chief said.
Hoeper stressed that, despite the glittering promise of unmanned combat vehicles, the foot soldier will never become obsolete. He said the air war over Kosovo is being described as "a defining moment, when, for the first time, a country surrendered to airplanes. The airplanes were terrific, and they won the battle of Kosovo. But you win that battle, and then what? Do you go home? You have to win wars the way you always win them. You have to put soldiers on the ground."
Gen. Eric K. Shinseki, Army Chief of Staff, has vowed to transform today's Army by making it lighter and faster. To do otherwise, Army leaders contend, would make the Army irrelevant to the country's prime military requirements of the 21st century: the ability to arrive in time and with enough strength to nip a conflict in the bud or, failing that, to win the war. They say a crash program to develop and field unmanned combat vehicles fits right into Shinseki's "transformation" plan.
But is all this talk about revolutionizing warfare with unmanned planes and tanks just that-talk? Philip M. Condit, the chairman and chief executive officer of the Boeing Co., who in his long aerospace career has shepherded aircraft from the drawing board to production, said in an interview with National Journal that it would not be difficult to develop and test unmanned bombers and tanks. But finding the money to produce them in quantity at the same time that big bills are coming due for the Air Force F-22, the Navy F/A-18 E and F fighter-bombers, and the forthcoming Joint Strike Fighter would be the hard part. This would require spending money at a "phenomenal rate," Condit said.
"I think the technology can be developed relatively quickly," the aerospace executive continued. "I think the issue then will be, how do you best use that technology. What does the human do best? What does that vehicle do best? One thing we always learn is that the human is a very adaptable system. Can we gather the same kind of data with unmanned vehicles as we do with manned vehicles? Can we do the same kind of discrimination? Can we respond in the same way? How do you deploy all your different sensors? What do you do with satellites? How do you bring [all the information collected by manned and unmanned systems] together, analyze it, get it to the right person? That's going to take careful investigation and testing."
But Warner has already achieved his first objective. He has fired his shotgun into the heavens and gotten everybody's attention.