U.S. military grapples with UAV control questions
programmes, common ground stations and future programme development,” says a senior army officer. “It is the air force that refuses to join the joint team, preferring to criticise others, disseminate misleading statements and independently lobby Congress for support they do not have in the Pentagon.”
Tom Ehrhard, a UAV expert at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, says the debate is a “fundamental doctrinal issue” about the current state of Goldwater-Nichols, the 1986 law designed to improve co-ordination across the branches of the military. “The bid for executive agent authority is in part an indictment of current joint organisations,” says Mr Ehrhard. “What the air force is trying to get is supposed to be taken care of with existing organisations but it clearly is not.”
Other experts disagree. Pierre Chao of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, argues that it would be a “strategic mistake” to narrow competition for UAVs. “If you think it is a young technology, that the Orville and Wilbur Wrights of the 21st century are running around in the UAV marketplace, then as messy as it makes the environment, is it far more strategically important to have lots of players, different patrons behind those players, and to keep stimulating the useful competition of ideas that a useful inter-service rivalry brings.”
The three branches are afraid that making the air force the executive agent for UAV procurement will mean not only that the air force would be in charge of UAV acquisition and development,, but that it will edge closer to controlling them in the theater. The army argues that it is important to keep drones such as the Sky Warrior “organic” to the units that are deploying them for tactical missions. It says army commanders would not get sufficient UAV resources because there are more requirements for drones at the theatre level. Army officials also argue that operating drones from the battlefield reduces communications problems, and they balk at suggestions that they should be operated from the United States (the air force operates many of its drones from Nevada, which it says reduces the number of troops placed in danger on the battlefield).
Peter Singer, an expert on contemporary warfare at the Brookings Institution, says the military is just starting to grapple with some of the key questions surrounding UAVs, including whether they should be operated by pilots as the air force does, or by trained specialists in the army. “The people who really need to be making the decisions … are the very senior leadership in both the civilian and the military world, and yet you are talking about people who needed their grandkids to programme their VCRs,” says Singer. “The best result of the air force pushing [executive agency] right now is that it really does create a debate and forces the issue.”
