Most notably, this summer included the June 20 shoot-down of a U.S. RQ-4 Global Hawk over the Strait of Hormuz by Iran. But these events are not entirely uncommon.

Unmanned aircraft have been a part of U.S. military operations since World War II and have led to leaps and bounds in mission capabilities. Drones allow the armed forces to undertake missions that would be too risky or impossible with manned aircraft, and uncertainty as to their presence in future military conflict is all but guaranteed. Countries around the world will increasingly operate on the drone axis, developing capabilities to both employ and combat against drones. After the expensive, high-profile destruction of a Global Hawk in Iran, some historical context of the destruction of U.S. drones by hostile forces is in order.

With that recent context, here is a retrospective of U.S. drones shot down by enemy forces.

June 20, 2019: RQ-9 Global Hawk, Strait of Hormuz

After Iranians shot down this $110 million, 737-sized UAV, the United States was 10 minutes away from a conflict with Iran, CNN reported. The “RQ” designation means that this aircraft does not carry weapons.

June 6, 2019: MQ-9 Reaper, Yemen

This 66-foot-wingspan, $30.2 million, “hunter-killer” drone was shot down by Houthi rebels over Yemen just two weeks before the Global Hawk was brought down. Unlike the Global Hawk, the Reaper’s “MQ” designation means that it carries weapons, which can include Hellfire missiles, Paveway II laser-guided bombs and other guided bombs. Reapers are the primary UAVs used in offensive strikes by the U.S. Air Force, according to military.com. The Pentagon claimed another Reaper was shot down by Houthi forces in August 2019.

March 17, 2015: MQ-1 Predator, Syria

This 55-foot-wingspan, $5 million UAV was likely shot down by Syrian forces during Operation Inherent Resolve, although specifics were not confirmed by the Air Force.

April 7, 1999: RQ-5A Hunter UAV, Yugoslavia

This drone was one of four U.S.-controlled Hunters to be shot down during the 78-day duration of NATO action in the Kosovo war. Hunter flew alongside the Predator and Pioneer drones in the conflict. The early drone was under half of the size of the Reaper and less than a quarter of the size of the Global Hawk and cost $300,000 in 1999, or just over $450,000 today.

1991: RQ-2A Pioneer, Kuwait, Iraq

Of the 34 Pioneers deployed to the Persian Gulf War, only 2 were shot down.

“We think it’s the first electronic capture in history.”

-Adam R. Fein, director of corporate communication at AAI, 1991

The RQ-2A Pioneer was the first modern-style drone flown by the United States. The Pioneer was powered by a 26-horsepower modified snowmobile engine in a 15-foot wingspan frame. In 1991, as a part of Operation Desert Storm, a Pioneer became the first robot to receive a military surrender. Iraqi soldiers surrendered to a Pioneer as it was assessing damage from battleship weapons.

September 11, 1944: Remote Controlled B-17, Germany

This downing was the final attempted execution of Operation Aphrodite, one of the United States’ earliest forays into UAV technology. During World War II, the Air Force modified B-17 bombers to carry large amounts of explosives and be controlled remotely as a way to compete with the more advanced German unmanned aircraft, which included guided bombs. Operation Aphrodite was largely unsuccessful, the first six participating planes crashed off-target without enemy interference and the seventh was shot down. The ninth and final attempt was shot down before it reached its target, U-boat pens in the North Sea.

More information on drone crashes can be found at Drone Wars UK or the Washington Post Drone Crash Database.

Final proposals are due Aug. 9. The Army expects to award up to three prototype contracts through other transaction agreements.

The idea of EITaaS follows the belief that commercial IT companies can increase effectiveness, increase IT user efficiencies, and establish standardized, innovative IT services. As a result, staff traditionally assigned to IT tasks can be freed up for more specific tasks.

The Air Force is also pursuing an EITaaS solution.

The Army’s notice comes after a three-month process that began with vendors self-qualifying against eight government-chosen capabilities that are necessary for a prime contractor, the notice said. This means competitors must be able to add a surge capacity of about 10,000 users in 45 days or less and an increased customer base of about 1.3 million users over four years. They must also be able to implement identity access management and integration with other cloud service providers, the FedBizOpps listing said.

The program’s leaders will pursue three lines of effort, the release said. They include:

• Network as a Service, which means the industry partner will supply networking services to the Army because this arrangement is more efficient than the Army building its own infrastructure;
• End-user services, which involves providing endpoint security and end user device management; and
• Compute and store, which includes managing data storage and access through cloud deployment methods, Lt. Col. Christine Youngquist, the project’s acquisition lead from Program Executive Office Enterprise Information Systems, said in an email to C4ISRNET.

The industry partner or partners will work with Program Executive Office Enterprise Information Systems, Army Cyber Command and the Army CIO/G6 to explore a new approach for delivering enterprise-level network and core IT services.

Accenture Federal Services, a multinational professional services company, received the third contract for Air Force’s Enterprise IT as a Service program and will experiment with delivering computing and storage capabilities as a service to eight Air Force bases, according to the release. The new capabilities will allow the Air Force to use edge cloud computing to expedite data-driven base operations and support artificial intelligence efforts, the release said. Microsoft and AT&T had previously won contracts for the program.

The agreement comes as a part of a multi-year modernizing initiative for the Air Force’s digital structure, which is meant to improve technologies and delivery models. The Enterprise IT as a Service model allows the Air Force to use commercial companies, which can perform IT services more efficiently than airmen, for day-to-day IT tasks.

The eight bases Accenture will support are Buckley Air Force Base in Colorado, Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama., Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska, Joint Base Elemendorf-Richardson in Alaska, Cannon Air Force Base in New Mexico and Hurlburt Field in Florida.

Accenture is expected to finish work on the project by June 2020.

GDIT already works for the Air Force to provide network support for the service’s Distributed Common Ground System), a contract the company has held for 20 years, the report said. That program is the Air Force’s primary ISR planning, collection, processing and exploitation, analysis and dissemination weapon system. GDIT developed and implemented the initial design for the global network that supports the system, the report said.

As a result of the contract, the program’s operations center will receive network administration, network engineering, information assurance, computer network defense, systems administration, computer network defense, systems administration, project management and C4ISR engineering, according to the report. The company will also work to help modernize the network, the release said.

The Senate Homeland Security Committee’s permanent subcommittee on investigations released a June 25 report, titled “Federal Cybersecurity: America’s Data at Risk,” that details the deficiencies of the seven agencies with the lowest cybersecurity practices ratings in fiscal year 2017, as well as the Department of Homeland Security, which is responsible for setting directives to implement cybersecurity measures in other agencies.

Federal cybersecurity is a perennial concern of the federal government and has appeared on the Government Accountability Office’s high-risk list every year since 1997. In 2017 alone, federal agencies reported 35,277 cyber incidents.

The subcommittee recommended that the Office of Management and Budget assist agencies in their spending decisions and expand the role of each agency’s chief information officer. The OMB has a risk-based budgeting model that would allow agencies to identify security risks that are most likely to be exploited and spend their IT budgets accordingly, the report said.

In August 2018, the Government Accountability Office found that none of the 24 major federal agencies had fully implemented the position of CIO as Congress had wanted. The subcommittee recommended expanding the scope of those offices by ensuring that CIOs are able to make agencywide decisions on cybersecurity.

The subcommittee also recommended that federal agencies consolidate their cybersecurity efforts into security operations centers, specialized facilities for information security teams.

The report compiles the findings of yearly audits by the inspector general belonging to each agency. Over the past decade, inspectors general noted failures by many of these agencies to protect personally identifiable information, maintain a comprehensive list of information technology assets, remediate cyber vulnerabilities, ensure authority to operate or replace legacy systems.

Federal agencies are responsible for a plethora of personally identifiable information such as taxpayer records, medical records, Social Security numbers and much more and seven of the eight agencies studies failed to adequately protect it, the report said. In one of the largest breaches of government information, a hacker stole 22 million security clearance files, which included personally identifiable information on workers eligible to access classified information.

Among the problems listed, all eight agencies studied failed to remediate vulnerabilities, according to the report. In addition, all eight agencies studied used legacy systems, such as Windows XP and Windows 2003, the report said. These legacy systems are more difficult and more expensive to secure than their modern counterparts.

The combination of Optisys’s 3D-printed aluminium antenna arrays and IMSAR’s radar assembly will allow high-altitude, long-endurance (HALE) platforms multiple modes of operation, such as imaging and moving-target indication, that were previously unavailable to them, according to the release.

HALE vehicles have tight size, weight and power requirements for equipment, which presents a variety of challenges when designing what they will carry, IMSAR Director of Radar Applications Ryan Bartley said. Complicating matters, when the distance between an aircraft and what it is communicating with is doubled, it is 16 times more difficult to send a signal. To overcome this, a larger antenna and/or more on-board power is typically needed, both of which strain the stringent SWaP requirements of these systems.

By reducing the parts required for the antennae aperture by 94 percent and pairing it with power-efficient airborne radar technology, however, the new system can be integrated in platforms continuously operating at over 60,000 feet above ground level in stratospheric environments. This increases imagery collection while decreasing the number of aircraft and satellites needed.

The project is under government contract, but the specific branch could not be shared because of government restrictions, said Bartley, who also could not disclose the specific fielding timeline, but said it was scheduled for a rapid timeline.

IMSAR is the primary contractor on the program and Optisys serves as a subcontractor.

Crowdstrike is a cyber-security firm that focuses on cloud-delivered endpoint protection, according to its website.

Endpoint protection requires endpoints, such as PCs, laptops, smartphones, tablets and bar code readers to satisfy certain requirements before gaining access to the network. The company has also worked to boost its presence in the public sector.

Falcon, the endpoint protection platform developed by Crowdstrike, became available for purchase to government entities in California in January 2019.

CrowdStrike also provides services to private sector entities, including 44 of the Fortune 100, 37 of the top 100 global companies and nine of the top 20 major banks, according to a blog post celebrating the IPO. CrowdStrike is also known for revealing the breach of Democratic National Convention servers during the 2016 election.

The stock closed June 14 at $64.16 a share, about 88 percent above its initial price.

The Army’s Common Robotic System – Individual program aims to build a small robot that soldiers can fit in a backpack and assist in reconnaissance, surveillance and target acquisition.

But for these robots to perform these duties effectively, they will need to have consistent communication with soldiers and other robots. In a June 12 press release, Persistent Systems announced that it will supply networking technology to QinetiQ as a subcontractor. QinetiQ has an indefinite delivery indefinite quantity contract worth up to $164 million on the Army program.

Persistent’s networking technology is what is known as a mobile ad-hoc network, or MANET, said Leslie Hulser, director of programs at Persistent. The ad-hoc nature of the network means that each device is both a transmitter and a receiver, removing the need for fixed communications infrastructure, she said. MANET technology allows a soldier to communicate with ground and aerial robots as well as other soldiers in the field, Hulser said.

Persistent will roll out the fifth generation of its Wave Relay MANET technology for the project, which includes an on-board Android operating system, a change from single input single output (SISO) to multiple input multiple output (MIMO), the introduction of a new form factor, full duplex audio, an on-board video encoder and decoder and a reduction in size and weight.

The change from SISO to MIMO increases bandwidth and range of operation and increases the probability of sending a message successfully, Hulser said.

The Army expects to field the program in fiscal 2020.