Orbit Fab hopes to build a range of tankers and fuel shuttles in low earth orbit, geosynchronous orbit, and cislunar space that can connect with aging satellites and distribute fuel. If successful, Orbit Fab’s technologies would enable customers to operate satellites for a longer period and defer the cost of having to launch a new vehicle into space.

Orbit Fab brought in more than $10 million total during its latest funding round from vendors including Lockheed and Northrop, bringing total funding for the company to $17 million.

“Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin both see clear value in on-orbit refueling to create a bustling in-space economy,” said Jeremy Schiel, a co-founder of Orbit Fab. “It’s great to see two aerospace and­ defense leaders embracing this technology. Their investment will help drive the adoption of our on-orbit refueling services and allow us to support the growing satellite servicing industry.”

So far, Orbit Fab has developed several products meant to kickstart the business of refueling vehicles in space. In June, its first on-orbit fuel depot was launched into sun-synchronous orbit. Called Tenzing, the vehicle is filled with high-test peroxide.

The company has also developed the Rapidly Attachable Fluid Transfer Interface (RAFTI), a fueling port that can connect two satellites.

“With technology moving so rapidly and creating new market entrants, we’re embracing opportunities to partner with emerging technology companies like Orbit Fab to accelerate innovation in new capabilities for our customers,” David Jacobs, Northrop’s vice president of corporate strategy, said in a statement.

Lockheed Martin Ventures director Chris Moran said Orbit Fab’s in-orbit refueling technology “could help our customers address new and evolving threats.”

During an August interview with Defense News, Moran pointed to emerging space technologies as a continued area of interest for Lockheed Martin and signaled that the company’s venture arm would pursue new investments in space startups.

“We’re past the first wave of space, we’re past the first wave of AI, we’re past the first wave of autonomy,” he said. “Now what we’re going to start seeing is the separation between the winners and losers and/or new, complementary technologies coming from them. We’ll pay really close attention to what’s going on there and hopefully find some new and differentiated capabilities along those lines.”

Lockheed Martin Ventures has made numerous investments in space technologies in the past, including to makers of medium and small launch vehicles such as Rocket Labs and ABL Space Systems in 2019.

Moran said Lockheed has already seen a benefit from those investments. Earlier this year, the company announced it had awarded a contract to ABL to perform the first-ever vertical small satellite launch in the United Kingdom, conducted in support of the U.K. Space Agency’s commercial spaceflight program.

Lockheed has also put money toward small satellite providers like Terran Orbital, which has created satellite buses for Lockheed’s LM 50 series of smallsats. In January 2020, Lockheed announced that it had created an experimental mesh networking payload called Pony Express, which was hosted on a Tyvak-0129 spacecraft, for which Terran Orbital is the parent company.

That demonstration helped to validate technologies that led to Lockheed winning a $188 million contract from the Space Development Agency later that year, Moran said.

“This is the beauty of the venture space,” he said. “What would have been a paper claim in a [request for proposals] was turned into a real world [demonstration]: ‘Hey, there’s real data. We floated this thing up in space and it’s performing as we thought, and this is what we’re offering you in this larger program, and we can tell you it works. It’s not just speculative.’”

Northrop has also shown interest in satellite servicing technologies that can repair or refuel existing vehicles. In April, its Mission Extension Vehicle-2 successfully docked with an operational Intelsat commercial communications satellite to provide life-extension services for the next five years.

Kratos received $13.2 million to continue work on its XQ-58A, while General Atomics got $7 million for its MQ-20 Avenger.

The funding will allow the companies to continue integrating their air vehicles with the Leidos-built Autonomous Core System, which acts as the Skyborg’s brain. It also pays for continued flight testing and experimentation, which will inform the Air Force whether the Skyborg drone is ready to move to a program of record in fiscal 2023, the service said in a news release.

“These contract actions, while tactical in nature, are strategically important to this [program] as we continue to discover and learn how we will employ this advance technology in the fight,” said Brig. Gen. Dale White, the program executive for fighters and advanced aircraft.

“The team has always been committed to transitioning Skyborg to a program of record, and we’ll be ready in 2023 as the Air Force prepares its FY23 president’s budget submission early next year.”

General Atomics, Kratos and Boeing were tapped to build Skyborg air vehicle prototypes in December 2020.

After integrating the UTAP-22 Mako drone with the autonomy core, Kratos conducted the first Skyborg test flight in April. A General Atomics Avenger equipped with the autonomy core took to the skies in the second Skyborg flight test in June.

So far, Boeing’s Skyborg prototype has not flown.

The next operational exercise will take place during fall 2021, the Air Force stated in the news release.

“I want to focus it more on specific operational return on investment,” Frank Kendall told Defense News in a Aug. 13 interview. “Where do we get the most improvement in performance operationally in the battlefield, for investments in that type of technology?”

“I don’t think we’ve thought thoroughly enough about where that type of technology can have the most impact and how to get there as quickly as we can,” he said. “I want to emphasize fielded, meaningful military capability, not just a demonstration that you show what cool thing you could do, but real capability in the hands of operators.”

The goal of the ABMS program is to create an “internet of things” for the military that would provide the technical infrastructure to connect all platforms and sensors, allowing information to flow freely among them. The service is also interested in integrating artificial intelligence technologies that could parse information and aid in decision making.

But in Kendall’s view, the program has yet to answer important questions about what information will be transmitted and why, what results it is aiming to achieve and how those results will be an improvement on current command-and-control capabilities.

Kendall said he’s directed the ABMS program to do that analysis.

“I want to get to a design of the capability that will make a measurable difference in operational results, improve exchange ratios … and increase the number of targets that the Air Force gets serviced in a certain period of time,” he said. “Pick your metric, but I want to be able to show an actual operational return on the investment.”

Kendall’s comments underscore those made by other top Air Force officials, including Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Dave Allvin, who told reporters in June the service needed to shift ABMS away from focusing on open-ended technology demonstrations and toward buying products that are ready to field.

“We understood that, when Congress looked at [the budget], that it was wasn’t clear enough. That perhaps we hadn’t laid out a clear enough path to justify the funds that we were requesting,” Allvin told reporters during a June 24 roundtable. “We had to look ourselves in the mirror and say, we need to better align ourselves to be able to articulate more clearly what we want to do.”

Two ABMS technology demonstrations were scheduled for 2021 after Congress slashed funding for the program. The first demo occurred in February, while the second wrapped up in July.

While ABMS technology demonstrations will move forward as planned in the short-term, Kendall said he would like future demos to revolve around giving defense companies an operational problem to solve and then trying out their proposed solutions.

“Here’s the operation we want to conduct, and here are the assets we have to have. You bring us the information system, if you will, that’s going to make us much more successful with this,” he said. “Tell me what that looks like, and how you would achieve it. What specific things would you do? We’ll do this competitively, of course.”

In its fiscal 2022 budget request, the Air Force proposed mothballing four of its 16 E-8 JSTARS aircraft, which are used for ground surveillance and targeting, as well as 20 Northrop Grumman RQ-4 Global Hawk Block 30 surveillance drones.

And while the service doesn’t plan to divest any of its General Atomics MQ-9 Reaper drones used for collecting intelligence and attacking targets, it does plan to lower the number of MQ-9 patrols in FY22 as the U.S. military withdraws from Afghanistan, said Lt. Gen. David Nahom, the deputy chief of staff for plans and programs.

“I do believe though that reduction in the combat lines, because of our reduction of our presence in the Middle East, is appropriate,” Nahom told members of the Senate Appropriations defense subcommittee. “Now we’ll have the opportunity to look at those platforms differently and use them differently in competition, and in some of these places around the world with less contested environments.”

The service plans to drop from 60 combat lines to 56 in FY22, Air Force spokeswoman Rose Riley told Defense News.

However, it will retain all MQ-9 aircraft — which number in excess of 300 air vehicles — and the manpower associated with MQ-9 crews will stay at current levels, Nahom said.

While the Reaper and the Block 30 Global Hawks are relevant for today’s missions, they are not optimized to survive a fight against a near peer adversary like China, he said.

“The three things that are most important [are] an ISR platform that can survive in the threat, persist in the threat, and then be connected. And the Global Hawk … it was not designed with the threat we’re looking at right now from a resurgent China,” Nahom said. “We have to look to the future, and that’s where that risk with the combatant commanders comes in.”

Meanwhile, the remaining Block 40 Global Hawks will be “very critical” to the Air Force over the next six to eight years, to fill a gap conducting ground surveillance as aging E-8C JSTARS aircraft become less reliable, he said.

Republican Sen. John Hoeven pressed Nahom to provide more details on the aircraft that will eventually replace the Global Hawk and Reaper. A senator from North Dakota, Hoeven represents Grand Forks Air Force Base, where a squadron of U.S. Customs and Border Protection MQ-9s and Air Force RQ-4s operate.

The Air Force intends to field a “family of systems” to replace some of its legacy ISR capabilities, Nahom said, but he declined to reveal further information in an unclassified setting.

“We’ve got a portfolio of about 20 technology programs spanning different functional areas providing the tools needed to do this very rapid, just-in-time integration to meet mission needs,” Tim Grayson, who leads the DARPA Strategic Technology Office, said during a July 20 event hosted by the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies.

“Our real big challenge now is how to transition those. We don’t have a nice, clean-cut program office where we can take our tools and put them directly in a classic, conventional program of record. They’re not designed to do those kinds of things. They’re enabling infrastructure.”

Typically, DARPA produces an advanced technology that could be turned into a program of record by the services, which then continue to mature that product before competing a contract.

But many technologies DARPA is developing for the Pentagon’s future war-fighting strategy of Joint All-Domain Command and Control don’t need further development, Grayson said. They need the people who will use the new technologies so that the services can implement the advances.

“What we’re really talking about doing is not buying technology, but buying bodies — buying human beings that will go out and use these tools to conduct mission planning,” he said. “If you put it in that context, it does not sound like RDT&E, but because it’s technology and because it’s coming from DARPA, because it smells like still needing to develop something … the current mindset is, it’s got to go to some program of record.”

One recent success story is the DARPA’s System-of-systems Technology Integration Tool Chain for Heterogeneous Electronic Systems program — also known as STITCHES.

The tool can autonomously write a software patch that translates messages between platforms using incompatible data types. The Air Force recently started to integrate STITCHES, though Grayson said its path has been a “rocky road.”

Although STITCHES has been validated in 19 experiments, the services have been slow to adopt it because they can’t figure out whether to pay for it with research and development funding or money set aside for sustainment, according to FedScoop.

The Air Force’s 350th Spectrum Warfare Wing, which was established in June, is starting a “STITCHES Warfighter Application Team” that will teach units how to use the STITCHES software and act as a help desk to support to established users of the tool.

“Someone from across the Air Force — or maybe, depending on policies, from across DoD as a joint activity — will call up SWAT and say I’ve got an integration problem,” Grayson said. “This can be anything from getting a new box on a platform to doing some large-scale JADC2 [combatant command] kind of exercise. The STITCHES team will go out [and] help them with that.”

However, Grayson acknowledged that most technologies under development by DARPA do not have a clear path to become part of the services’ JADC2 efforts: the Air Force’s Advanced Battle Management System, the Army’s Project Convergence and the Navy’s Project Overmatch.

There are “bits and pieces” that have been adopted by the services, he said. For example, the Air Force tested STITCHES and the agency decision-making tool Adapting Cross-domain Kill-webs, or ACK, during an ABMS experiment in September 2020.

Naval Air Systems Command has started to adopt DARPA’s Dynamic Network Adaptation for Mission Optimization (DyNAMO) — which helps route information across networks to the user who needs it — for the Marine Corps.

“The challenge we have now that we are working with things like ABMS and the other JADC2 elements is, how do we keep coherence?” Grayson said. “Maybe the answer is experimentation, maybe it’s program of record transition, but we’ve got to maintain some kind of coherence across this federated portfolio as these programs go off and have their own lives.”

The event comes about two months after the first flight of Skyborg autonomy core system (ACS) aboard the Kratos UTAP-22 Mako, and proves that the system can be used to pilot multiple types of unmanned aircraft.

“Flying the Skyborg ACS on platforms from two different manufacturers demonstrates the portability of the government-owned autonomy core, unlocking future multi-mission capabilities for the Joint Force,” said Maj. Gen. Heather Pringle, commander of Air Force Research Laboratory.

With Skyborg, the Air Force hopes to eventually field an expendable loyal wingman-style drone that can accompany manned tactical jets into battle, taking on missions that may be too dangerous for human fighter pilots.

The MQ-20 flight took place during the Orange Flag exercise at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif., over a period of about two hours and 30 minutes. After a human operator launched the Avenger drone and flew it to a safe altitude, it passed control of the aircraft to the ACS, the Air Force said in a statement.

“The ACS accomplished basic aviation behaviors and responded to navigational commands, while reacting to geo-fences, adhering to aircraft flight envelopes, and demonstrating coordinated maneuvering,” the service stated.

Air Force personnel at a nearby ground command and control station monitored the flight.

While initially the program will be focused on “demonstrating an open, modular ACS that can autonomously aviate, navigate, and communicate,” the service eventually wants to integrate more advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities into the Skyborg brain.

The Air Force is testing the Skyborg ACS with three drone manufacturers, which were awarded contracts in December 2020. Kratos received a $37.7 million, General Atomics got $14.3 million, and Boeing — the only company who has not yet paired its drone with the ACS — got $25.7 million.

According to the service, “future Skyborg experimentation events will explore direct manned-unmanned teaming between manned aircraft and multiple ACS-controlled unmanned aircraft.”

Skyborg is one of the Air Force’s Vanguard programs — four high-priority efforts where AFRL is using prototyping and experimentation to try to push groundbreaking technology forward.

Pringle serves as chief technology officer of the Skyborg program, while Brig. Gen. Dale White, the service’s executive for fighters and advanced aircraft, executes the acquisition side of the program.

For the Air Force, it was a wake-up call that the program had become too nebulous and focused on technology demonstration exercises, said Gen. Dave Allvin, the Air Force’s vice chief of staff.

“We understood that, when Congress looked at [the budget], that it was wasn’t clear enough. That perhaps we hadn’t laid out a clear enough path to justify the funds that we were requesting,” Allvin told reporters during a June 24 roundtable. “We had to look ourselves in the mirror and say, we need to better align ourselves to be able to articulate more clearly what we want to do.”

Now, the service finds itself having to correct the course of the program.

The cornerstone of the ABMS program up to now had been “on-ramp” experiments where the Air Force and defense companies tested whether various off-the-shelf technologies could give operators an edge during a scripted exercise.

Going forward, the service wants to highlight plans to buy “hard capabilities” that could be pushed to airmen for further testing, maturation and use in operations. Ultimately, the goal is to field layers of new networking, communications and machine learning technologies that would be interwoven to — eventually — connect the aircraft, sensors, and operations centers that identify, track and prosecute targets.

For fiscal 2022, the Air Force has asked for about $204 million for the ABMS program. The sum is a considerable increase from the $158 million lawmakers approved in FY21 but is far short of the $449 million it had planned to request in FY22, according to previous budget documents.

“That’s part of us just being better stewards, quite frankly,” Allvin said. “We anticipate that the investments that we’ve asked for will provide that return, they’ll provide Congress the confidence to help us out in the future if we were to look for more money in the budget years to come.”

What will lawmakers get for that $204 million?

More than half of those funds will go toward the first ABMS “capability release” to be procured and delivered to the field: a bespoke pod for the Boeing KC-46 refueling tanker that will allow it to act as a communications node for the stealthy F-22 and F-35 fighters, which cannot currently share information.

The Air Force plans to field four pods for an early operational capability by the end of FY22 but could acquire up to 10 pods, said Brig. Gen. Jeffery Valenzia, who leads the Air Force’s ABMS cross-functional team.

Some of the FY22 dollars will lay the groundwork for the next two capability releases, which are still in the planning stages. The second ABMS increment will deliver hardware, software and artificial intelligence algorithms to U.S. Northern Command aimed at increasing the speed commanders can make decisions, Valenzia said.

That AI may be trained to identify anomalous patterns of life or characterize objects that could pose a threat to the nation, as well as to provide options to commanders on whether to strike a target or take other action.

“We need to have a good understanding of the quality of the data sources, of the corruptibility of the data sources, of the security of the data sources, because that will inform us as to how much we trust the data coming into the machine,” Allvin said.

The third capability release, Valenzia said, will be more foundational, aimed at building network infrastructure and processing vast amounts of data across a larger enterprise.

Last November, the Air Force announced it was ready to begin procurement of the first elements of what will eventually become the Advanced Battle Management System. With that shift, the service would transition acquisition authority for the program to the Air Force’s Rapid Capability Office.

Valenzia’s cross-functional team would generate requirements for ABMS capability releases and figure out how to integrate those new technologies into the service’s existing doctrine, training and operations. Meanwhile, Air Force Chief Architect Preston Dunlap would continue running periodic experiments with emerging tech that could funnel into later capability releases.

There are signs that the Air Force’s new approach may be more palatable to lawmakers and experts who had previously criticized the structure of the ABMS program.

The Government Accountability Office slammed the program in an April 2020 report, stating that the ABMS effort was at risk of delays and cost overruns because it had not finalized an acquisition strategy or put forward a cost estimate.

GAO Director Marie Mak told C4ISRNet in an interview earlier this month that the Air Force’s transition of the program to the RCO is a step in the right direction.

“When we first started looking at ABMS it was demo after demo, and we were sort of like, what’s your point?” Mak said.

“I think now that the RCO [Rapid Capabilities Office] has taken it, they’ve made a concerted effort to not focus on just the demos … and that’s what the budget seems to be focusing on as well longer term. So that’s a good thing,” she said.

However, the service hasn’t answered all concerns.

Allvin acknowledged that — because of the incremental and iterative nature of the ABMS program — the Air Force is still not able to provide a full cost estimate for the program, and may not be able to ever forecast how much the service will spend on the effort.

“Where the cost estimates really become crystallized is associated with the capability releases,” he said. “That’s where you get an acquisition strategy. And that’s where … those who understand cost, schedule and performance really can dig into that and see the specificity of it.”

The Air Force plans on developing a full cost estimate for each capability release, with the estimate for the first capability release due at the end of June, Allvin said.

“It’s different, which is why we are getting we need to be very transparent with what we’re doing, how we’re approaching it, in order to give Congress and the public who gives us the money, the confidence that what we’re doing has a design and an objective.”

China has not yet caught up with the United States in most areas of advanced military technology, and the U.S. industrial base is well positioned to retain its edge, said Northrop CEO Kathy Warden, speaking during an event hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations. But one sector that is “particularly problematic” is China’s growth in advanced computing, including in the development of artificial intelligence and applications used to process and interpret large amounts of data.

“If there were an area I would point to where that capability has shrunk to an alarming state, that would be the one that I would highlight,” Warden said. “It’s not an area that the U.S. has been investing significantly in in previous years.”

There are signs that might be changing under the Biden administration, she said.

The Pentagon boosted funding in its fiscal 2022 budget request for a variety of areas closely related to advanced computing. It aims to spent $2.3 billion on microelectronics, $398 million for 5G network capability and $874 million on artificial intelligence.

President Joe Biden’s proposed $2.3 trillion infrastructure package also includes $50 billion for domestic research and production of semiconductors. That investment would match spending on semiconductors made through the CHIPS Act, which became law as part of the 2021 defense authorization bill. (The bill’s entire name is “Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors for America Act.”)

Warden said the bipartisan support for the act shows “strong progress being made” to incentivize semiconductor production in the United States. Currently, companies in China, Taiwan and South Korea lead in the manufacturing of advanced semiconductors and other microelectronics.

“Having the ability to control a supply chain in semiconductor and chip production could become a national imperative,” she said. “And we don’t want to wait until a conflict puts us into a position where it is a national imperative to realize that we don’t have the necessary capacity under U.S. control. That doesn’t mean it needs to all be onshore, but we do need to have clear access deep into the supply chain for semiconductors.”

While microelectronics are used in commercial products such as smartphones and personal computers, Warden argued that private industry is not incentivized to develop and manufacture the novel, advanced chips and semiconductors needed to ensure the U.S. military’s superiority.

Warden likened U.S. spending on microelectronics to investments made by the Pentagon during the 1950s and 1960s, which ultimately resulted in the invention of GPS and major advances in computers — both of which ultimately filtered to the commercial sector.

“I would submit that those [technologies] would not have matured at the rate they would have if we didn’t have strong government [research and development] spending,” she said. “And we certainly wouldn’t have found competitive differentiation from a national security perspective … if they’d have all originated in the commercial space because they would have been in the hands of all nations more simultaneously.”

“Our current MQ-9 fleet is sufficient to support current and future operational and training requirements,” acting Air Force Secretary John Roth wrote in a letter to Sen. Jacky Rosen dated April 1, which was recently viewed by Defense News. “There is no need to buy more aircraft.”

Rosen — a Democrat whose home state of Nevada is home to Creech Air Force Base, where multiple active, reserve and Air National Guard squadrons fly MQ-9s — had written to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin in March looking for assurances that the Air Force will continue to buy new Reaper drones.

Roth, writing in Austin’s stead, offered no such promises. Instead, he doubled down on the Air Force’s plan to stop MQ-9 procurement and added that the service intends to outline its plan to replace the MQ-9 — a requirement set by the fiscal 2021 defense policy bill.

“Looking to the future force, the service does not intend to rely on exquisite, single platform, high-cost systems to replace the MQ-9. Instead, we will use a family of interconnected multi-role systems, engineered to reduce cost and increase interoperability,” Roth said.

A spokesperson for Rosen did not respond to repeated requests for comment. The Air Force also declined to comment.

The Defense Department is set to release its FY22 budget on May 28. If the Air Force presses forward with a second attempt to shut down the MQ-9 line, it could spark a fight between those who believe the Reaper is unfit for a near-peer fight — a group comprising the top Air Force brass and the service’s future planning organizations — and the large group of MQ-9 stakeholders and constituencies.

The latter group includes the combatant commanders who rely on the Reaper for surveillance, Air National Guard squadrons that operate the drone and can independently advocate for their own interests, MQ-9 manufacturer General Atomics, and lawmakers with MQ-9 units in their districts.

In its FY21 budget request, the Air Force eliminated all funding to buy MQ-9 Reaper aircraft that year and in the future, effectively canceling plans to purchase 31 Reapers from FY21 through FY24. Instead, service officials asked for about $172 million to begin shutting down General Atomics’ production line in Poway, California.

Congress rejected the Air Force’s plan, setting aside $286 million in the budget to buy 16 more MQ-9 drones.

The MQ-9 is one of the most prolific Air Force aircraft, currently operating out of 20 bases located in 17 states, according to the service’s biennial acquisition report.

“We have a fleet of over 300 MQ-9s right now, and if you look at the life cycle of the MQ-9, we’ve got 15-plus years left on them, and that’s a good place to be,” Lt. Gen. David Nahom, Air Force deputy chief of staff for plans and programs, said during the McAleese & Associates conference this month.

If the Air Force is successful in ending MQ-9 production, it is unclear what the industrial impact would be. General Atomics currently has a backlog of MQ-9 variants that will sustain the production line through at least 2026, said C. Mark Brinkley, the director of strategic communications and marketing at General Atomics Aeronautical Systems.

“There will be both short-term and long-term effects if the Air Force decides to stop buying MQ-9s in FY22, but I can’t predict with any certainty what those will be. It’s a true ‘what if?’ scenario at this point,” he said.

The company’s biggest concern is that if the Air Force stops MQ-9 procurement rather than more gradually slowing down production, the service may find itself in a position in the late 2020s where it needs to buy more Reapers and cannot, Brinkley said.

“You can’t just jump back in later because you got it wrong and suddenly turn on the tap again. That’s not how production works,” he said. “You lose a lot of the economies and value that you built over time once you come to a stop. The nation has made a great investment in the MQ-9, and if we throw that away, it’s just gone.”

But the Air Force argues it will be unable to develop the advanced unmanned capabilities it needs to contend with Chinese and Russian threats unless it pulls funding from legacy drones like the MQ-9, which defense officials say could not survive a conflict with a near-peer competitor.

“We are trying to divest ourselves of the ISR [intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance] that is not particularly useful against a Russia or a China or even [the] dense air defense systems of an Iran or a North Korea, and invest in those ISR systems that do have penetration capability,” Army Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told lawmakers in a March 2020 hearing. “It makes no sense to me to continue to buy stuff that isn’t in alignment with the [National Defense Strategy].”

Marine Corps Gen. Kenneth McKenzie, who oversees U.S. operations in the Middle East as head of U.S. Central Command, told lawmakers in April that the MQ-9 “is not viable” in a high-end fight, including against some of the threats that could be posed by adversaries operating in CENTCOM’s area of responsibility in the near future.

However, he added, the platform would remain “vital” to CENTCOM, particularly as the U.S. military pulls ground forces from Afghanistan.

“Our ability to maintain persistent overhead coverage will possibly require additional MQ-9s because of the range from the base to the place where we will actually be looking,” he said. “We may even need more of them in Central Command dedicated to that particular task.”

A future for the MQ-9?

In the run up to the FY22 budget release, a number of lawmakers have questioned defense officials about the capability of the MQ-9 and the overall need for more ISR platforms, including: Rosen; Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn.; Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn.; and Rep. Kenneth Calvert, R-Calif.

Other lawmakers, like Republican Sen. John Hoeven of North Dakota, have taken a more direct approach. A member of the Senate Defense Appropriations Committee, he spoke directly with Roth to advocate for MQ-9 procurement in the FY22 budget, his office stated in a May 24 news release.

Frank Kendall, the Biden administration’s nominee for Air Force secretary, told lawmakers during his May 25 confirmation hearing that he’d be open to funding additional upgrades for the MQ-9 that would make it more survivable in a non-permissive environment.

“I know that some things have been talked about, including adding more countermeasures to the aircraft and providing some standoff capability. And I think those are well worth looking at,” he said. “We’ve made a big investment in that platform, and it would be a shame to not be able to utilize it against more significant sophisticated threats.”

Some of those upgrades could look similar to the “Ghost Reaper” configuration the service tested as part of this month’s Northern Edge exercise held in Alaska. Over a period of several weeks at Eielson Air Force Base, the service assessed the performance of several new pods for the MQ-9, including:

• A hardened targeting pod.
• Northrop Grumman’s Freedom Pod, which allows the Reaper to pass data between fourth- and fifth-generation fighters.
• The REAP pod, which connects to ground systems.
• The Reaper Defense Electronic Support System, which is a new pod that identifies and locates electronic signals from threatening systems at standoff distances.

While many of those capabilities are not yet built into the program of record, the Air Force is funding a new “Multi-Domain Operation” configuration upgrade for 71 MQ-9s, which would add internal power modification, an anti-jam antenna system, Link 16 data link, additional weapon capacity, open-architecture design and improved mission resiliency.

The service has begun retrofitting some of its MQ-9 fleet with these systems and is currently negotiating a contract with General Atomics to cut the capabilities into the drone’s production line so that new ones are manufactured with the upgrades already built in.

“With these smart investments the Air Force projects that MQ-9 will remain operationally viable through the end of the platform’s projected service life of 2035,” a spokesman for the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center said in response to questions from Defense News.

Don’t fear the Reaper replacement

The Air Force hasn’t sought a successor for the MQ-9 Reaper since the MQ-X program was canceled in 2012. But over the past year, the service has begun exploring how it will eventually replace the Reaper in the 2030s.

It released a request for information to industry in June 2020 for market research on existing technology and conceptual designs.

Then in March 2021, the service published a second RFI for a “Next-Generation Multi-Role Unmanned Aerial System Family of Systems,” further widening the scope of what it could seek out to replace the MQ-9.

The Air Force envisions its MQ-9 replacement as a series of drones that would run the gamut in terms of cost and capability, from expendable systems to highly survivable ones.

“Future Next-Gen Multi-Role UAS FoS technologies must hold a different role than they do today and address capabilities beyond traditional UAS mission sets, such as air-to-air, base defense, electronic warfare, moving target indicator (air and ground) capabilities, and be designed for native integration into [the Joint All-Domain Command and Control concept],” the service said in its solicitation.

General Atomics responded to the solicitation, Brinkley said, and the company agrees that the Air Force needs a family of unmanned aircraft to contend with future threats. But, he added, the MQ-9 should continue to be a part of that enterprise.

“We have an amazing airframe already. And we have lots of people developing new tech that works great on the MQ-9,” Brinkley said. “Whether it’s hardware or software, the MQ-9 can incorporate all of these new advancements. It’s the perfect platform to experiment on.”

For its part, the Air Force is in no rush to fund a program of record for the MQ-9 replacement; it’s in a “comfortable spot” where the service has time to evaluate its options, Nahom said.

“We can sit back and actually analyze: What does a replacement need to look like, and what does the war fighter need?” Nahom added.

Other parts of the Air Force are not so lucky, he noted.

“You look at a fleet like the E-3 AWACS, and that’s a fleet right now where you don’t necessarily have the time right now, and it’s probably a much bigger concern.”

On April 13, the Air Force released a request for proposals for the “rapid research, development, prototyping, demonstration, evaluation, and transition” of technologies that can be used to counter small unmanned aerial systems.

Responses to the solicitation are due May 14. The service plans to award a contract worth up to $490 million to a single vendor that can team with other companies to provide various counter-drone products. The period of performance for the contract is 72 months.

According to the solicitation, the Air Force is seeking a wide range of technologies that can be used to address the unique requirements of users, which may face differing threats based on geographic region or other factors. The service hopes to test out prototypes of various solutions and buy “limited product quantities” while it introduces the technologies.

The Air Force didn’t lay out exactly what technological solutions it wanted to purchase in its public solicitation, and the service did not provide further information to Defense News on the subject before press time.

However, a December 2019 PowerPoint presentation created by the Air Force Research Laboratory pointed to cyber and electronic warfare technologies, directed-energy weapons like lasers and microwave devices, and “interceptors” that kill a target through kinetic force as potential options.

In the Middle East, equipping commercial off-the-shelf drones with weapons has become a cheap and effective way for Iranian-backed Houthi forces to attack Saudi Arabian forces and civilians, as well as partner forces like the U.S. military that are supporting Saudi Arabia’s defense, said U.S. Central Command chief Gen. Kenneth McKenzie.

“For the first time since the Korean War, we are operating without complete air superiority,” he stated in written testimony to lawmakers on April 20.. “As a result, USCENTCOM has made the counter-UAS effort one of its top priorities, and employs a variety of systems and tactics to defeat these threats. Until we are able to develop and field a networked capability to detect and defeat UAS, the advantage will remain with the attacker.

In fiscal 2020, the Air Force fielded counter-drone technologies to meet three urgent requirements and delivered other new capabilities to 14 installations, the service said in its biennial acquisition report.

“In FY21 and FY22, the [counter-small UAS] program will focus on fielding an initial operational capability to 30 high-priority sites to protect critical assets and infrastructure,” it said. “The program will also support fielded urgent needs and integrate with additional systems such as counter rockets, artillery and mortars (C-RAM) and forward area air defense command and control (FAAD-C2).”

Last August, SRC Inc. won a $90 million contract for unspecified counter-drone systems. It also includes the costs of sustaining the company’s Multi-Environmental Domain Unmanned Systems Application, a command and control platform that was used by Al Dhafra Air Base in the United Arab Emirates to link its counter-UAS technologies on the same network.