The US Government Accountability Office just published its 2012 Annual Report. It found evidence of duplication, overlap, or fragmentation among federal government programmes – one of the defence areas highlighted is unmanned aircraft systems.
The Department of Defense (DOD) estimates that the cost of current unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) acquisition programmes and related systems will exceed $37.5 billion in fiscal years 2012 through 2016. These programmes and systems can be found across DOD and the military services (Air Force, Army, Navy, and Marine Corps).
In 2009, GAO’s work highlighted the need to consider commonality in UAS—using the same or interchangeable subsystems and components in more than one subsystem to improve interoperability of systems—and indicated that DOD lacked an analytical approach to prioritise capability needs which would reduce the likelihood of redundancies in UAS capabilities.
As GAO reported in June 2011, although the Joint Requirements Oversight Council is directed to ensure that trade-offs among cost, schedule, and performance objectives are considered as part of its requirements review process, it currently does not prioritise requirements, consider redundancies across proposed programmes, or prioritise and analyse capability gaps in a consistent manner. Congress has enacted legislation requiring DOD to establish a policy and acquisition strategy for more common ground stations and payloads for manned and unmanned aircraft systems. The elements of DOD’s planned UAS portfolio include unmanned aircraft, payloads, and ground control stations.
Military service-driven requirements—rather than an effective department-wide strategy—have led to overlap in DOD’s UAS capabilities, resulting in many programmes and systems being pursued that have similar flight characteristics and mission requirements. DOD currently has 15 unmanned aircraft programmes which it categorises into five groups according to weight, altitude, and speed.
Groups 4 and 5 contain the largest and most expensive aircraft, with weights exceeding 1,320 pounds. Group 5 aircraft fly higher—above 18,000 feet—than Group 4 aircraft. DOD has spent almost $19 billion through fiscal year 2011 to develop and procure three aircraft in Group 5 and five aircraft in Group 4, where GAO found potential overlap, and expects to spend an additional $32.4 billion to complete these programmes.
Illustrative of the overlap, in Group 5, the Navy plans to spend more than $3 billion to develop its own variant of the Air Force Global Hawk—the Broad Area Maritime Surveillance UAS—rather than using the already fielded Global Hawk. According to the Navy, its unique requirements necessitate modifications to the Global Hawk airframe, payload interfaces, and ground control station. However, the Navy programme office was not able to provide quantitative analysis to justify the variant. According to programme officials, no analysis was conducted to determine the cost-effectiveness of developing a new aircraft to meet the Navy’s requirements versus buying more Global Hawks.
If the preference for service-unique solutions persists in the absence of a department-wide strategy, so will the potential for overlap in the future.
To download the Unmanned Aircraft Systems section of the Report, click here.
Source: Government Accountability Office