Sikorsky graphic

The Sikorsky Raider-X, Lockheed Martin’s proposed design for the Army’s Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft

WASHINGTON: Soldiers and special operators are testing an artificially intelligent “network in the sky” that will be the digital backbone for the whole Future Vertical Lift force, even as companies compete to build the next generation of Army manned and unmanned aircraft.

Army photo

Brig. Gen. Walter Rugen

Instead of aviators and ground troops laboriously relaying information over the radio, algorithms will help identify urgent threats and pass targeting data from drone to human to weapon at machine speed — across the entire Future Vertical Lift force. That force combines a new family of drones with high-performance, highly automated “minimally manned” aircraft — a scout and a transport — sharing common Modular Open System Architecture (MOSA) electronics. We’ll dive deep into each of these efforts in this series of stories on FVL, but we wanted to start off with the most crucial and probably most under-appreciated element: the invisible, digital connective tissue that binds the force together.

“We’re working very hard to get machine to machine [communication],” said Brig. Gen. Walter Rugen, “with use cases that span from Assured Position, Navigation & Timing” — that is, knowing precisely where you are even when GPS is jammed — “to electronic warfare” — the art of detecting and disrupting enemy radar and radio signals.

Rugen coordinates this effort as director of the Future Vertical Lift Cross-Functional Team, a group of combat veterans, scientists, engineers, and acquisition experts from historically rivalrous bureaucracies across the Army, including Special Operations Forces. When it comes to automation, he said, “the brains behind this have really been our SOF partners.”

“We set up this demonstration… in September of last year,” added Geoff Downer, who heads Special Operations programs at Army Aviation & Missile Command, “using a Black Hawk [helicopter], a Grey Eagle [drone], and a Small Glide Munition [guided bomb]. SOF is still involved in this, we’re still using our team, our resources, and the technology that we developed [to build] the network in the sky.”

Details of September’s experiments at China Lake, a Navy test range in California, are classified. But the Army has said that AI algorithms not only helped human commanders spot (simulated) enemy targets and strike them from drones: They also allowed the humans to redirect the smart bomb in mid-flight when a higher-priority target unexpectedly popped up. That’s the kind of AI-assisted adaptability the Army believes will be essential to defeat advanced anti-aircraft defenses being developed by Russia and China and sold to client states around the world.

“It Really Is the Ecosystem”

What does the Army want to build? Right now, the service is effectively running three competitions at once:

But FVL is about much more than those pieces of hardware. “FARA, the future UAS, FLRAA…those are important,” Rugen told me. “But it really is the ecosystem.”

That ecosystem must bring together AI, drones, and optionally manned aircraft – that is, both FARA and FLRAA must be capable of flying with two pilots, one, or none, depending on the complexity of the mission. All of them have to connect over the Army’s future jamming-resistant network not only to each other, but to ground troops — including the Army’s future hypersonic missiles — and, ultimately, to the Air Force.

Since a scout must be small and nimble, “a FARA is not going to carry… much munitions, [so] we’ve going to outsource a lot of this lethality, and with that comes the requirement to interface with other shooters,” Rugen said. “LRPF [Long-Range Precision Fires] is our prime customer.”

In the Army of 1991, Apache gunships fired the first shots of the Gulf War, destroying Iraqi radars so Air Force jets could fly in undetected. That’s a model in miniature of the kind of interdependence the Army and Air Force envision for future multi-domain operations waged simultaneously over land, air, sea, space, and cyberspace. The Future Vertical Lift aircraft will have to be the vanguard, not just for the Army, but for the entire Defense Department.

Inhuman Wave

In a future war, the first wave will be drones (Unmanned Aerial Systems), probing into enemy airspace to gather intelligence, strike targets, and spread digital confusion without risking humans:

  • The large, long-ranged Advanced UAS (AUAS) will replace the Grey Eagle, the Army variant of the Predator, although no formal competition has yet been launched;
  • The smaller, shorter-ranged Future Tactical UAS (FTUAS), which four companies are now competing to build, will replace the aging Shadow drone; and
  • The tiny Air-Launched Effects (ALE) mini-drones will be small enough to be shot out of the FARA scout aircraft, carrying payloads ranging from jammers, to decoys, to network relays, to explosives.

Behind the drones – and in the case of ALE, launching them – will come the Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft (FARA), for which five companies are now developing potential designs: AVX, Bell, Boeing, Karem, and Sikorsky. None of them is a conventional helicopter that derives all its lift from a single main rotor on top: All use novel configurations to achieve previous unattainable speed and range.

Bell graphic

Bell 360 Invictus on an attack run (artist’s rendering). Note the prominent wings to provide extra lift at high speeds and the ducted-fan tail rotor for stability.

 

“In our survivability studies, with these advanced rotor craft configurations, we basically saw large percentage increases in survivability,” Rugen said, from a low of 24 percent to, “in some scenarios, nearly 50% more survivable.”

“We want survivability in those very contested large-scale combat operations. We want to be lethal,” he said. “We want superior reach, so we want speed, range and endurance at range, in our next generation fleet.”

Replacing the retired Vietnam-era OH-58, FARA’s role is not to raid deep into hostile territory, a tactic that proved risky even for heavily armored Apaches against the crudely armed Iraqis in 2003. Instead, it will lurk over the front lines, small and agile enough to hide behind buildings and zip down city streets, providing human oversight for the drones and close support for Army ground troops (who’ll have ground robots of their own). When FARA and its drone flocks spot a threat, they may take it out themselves; pass the target data to Army Extended Range Cannon Artillery, Precision Strike Missiles, or hypersonics; or call in an Air Force strike over the future Joint All-Domain Command & Control (JADC2) network.

Relentless and coordinated attacks by manned scouts, drones, artillery, airstrikes, electronic jamming, and computer hacking aim to disrupt the enemy’s air-defense network faster than it can repair itself. The goal is to rip open flight corridors that are safe –  at least, relatively and temporarily safe – for deep strikes against the most critical targets, above all the sensors, communications nodes, and command posts without which the enemy force is blinded and paralyzed.

Army graphic

SOURCE: Army Multi-Domain Operations Concept, December 2018.

Charging down these corridors before they close will be the Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft (FLRAA), larger and probably even faster than the FARA scout, but with similarly unconventional configuration to maximize performance. With Bell and a rival Sikorsky-Boeing team having already flown early prototypes, the Army is confident FLRAA can carry the same 12-man squad as the current Black Hawk but over much longer distances in much shorter times. FLRAA-borne special operators and infantry will destroy targets impervious to air attack, seize key terrain, and provide eye-level, close-up recon that drones cannot – laying the literal groundwork for the next round of attacks, over and over until the enemy is defeated.

Once the FVL drones, scouts and assault transports have penetrated the enemy anti-aircraft defenses and crippled their ability to coordinate — what the Army’s Multi-Domain Operations concept, with a very deliberate hyphen, calls “dis-integration” — older aircraft will be able to move forward to exploit the breach.

“Once our penetration force moves forward,” Rugen said, “we will generate joint force freedom of maneuver” — not just for the Army, in other words, but for all the services — “and our enduring fleet can now start coming forward to help us.”

“Our Black Hawks, Apaches, and Chinooks are the enduring force,” explained Maj. Gen. David Francis, who commands the Army Aviation Center at Fort Rucker, Ala. “We’re going to have these aircraft into the 2040s, [alongside] Future Vertical Lift.” That means the existing helicopters must be upgraded not only to stay in working order, but to connect digitally to the new FVL aircraft.

None of this will happen without a network that can pass the data at high speed over long distances – and despite enemy hacking, jamming, and physical strikes against every American network node they find.

Let’s Get Digital

While the manned and unmanned aircraft competitions have produced lots of sexy concepts, there are no cool pictures of the electronic backbone so essential to the whole Future Vertical Lift ecosystem. But being invisible doesn’t mean it isn’t already becoming real.

“What we showed out at China Lake was the capability to automate some of the target recognition, at a very nascent level,” Rugen told reporters in January. “We’re starting to train our algorithms on that.”

Since the new manned and unmanned aircraft haven’t been built yet, the China Lake testing used surrogate aircraft. But it did use real AI algorithms to analyze the data and real network communications waveforms – scheduled to roll out across the Army in 2023 – to pass that data.

Dynetics graphic

Dynetics GBU-69 glide bomb

“We did that from the back of a [helicopter], with the UAS [a Grey Eagle] being flown by the air mission commander on an iPad,” Rugen told reporters. After the (human) commander had confirmed the AI’s target recommendation and ordered the drone to fire – all using his iPad – new data emerged and he approved a different target in time for the weapon, not even a missile but an unpowered glide bomb, to change course. “As the GBU-69 was in flight – that was our munition – the algorithm popped up with an even higher-payoff target,” Rugen said, “so while the munition was a mile away from the UAS, we retasked it.”

The idea of an all-domain, all-service AI network connecting “any sensor, any shooter” in near-real time is an ambitious one. But Rugen sounds confident that industry can deliver both the digital and physical components of the FVL ecosystem.

In the Army’s painful past, “some of other programs were counting on inventions” being made on a fixed schedule, Rugen said. For Future Vertical Lift, he said, “none of this stuff has to be invented. We’ve just got to integrate it and show we can do it.”

“I’m seeing aircraft fly, we’ve already flown our small drones, so we haven’t taken any extreme moonshots,” he said. “We kind of hit the pause button on two decades of Army aviation [development]. It’s time for us to catch up with what industry’s been champing at the bit to do for us.”