Quo Vadis Navy’s UCLASS - into Jointness?

The Dragon's Tales:
US Navy's Review of UCLASS RAQ-25
Attack Drone Complete

Opinion: Looking for Answers to the Navy’s UCLASS Mystery
Secret clues to the Navy’s tangled drone story

Bill Sweetman
Aviation Week & Space Technology

Feb 27, 2015

What’s going on with the Pentagon’s longest-running drama, the Navy’s Unmanned Carrier-Launched Airborne Surveillance and Strike (UCLASS) program? After years of factional intrigue that made Borgia politics look like a Dick & Jane reader, the debate about UCLASS specifications has been declared not over, but deferred. (How can there not be enough data to make a decision?) But instead of redoubling their lobbying, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman appear to have walked away [leaving the field to GA-ASI and Boeing].

[WEST: Bob Work Says UCLASS Development Needs a ‘Joint Perspective’ - USNI News] Deputy Defense Secretary Robert O. Work (a supporter of unmanned combat air systems in his previous jobs) explained the UCLASS delay in February comments: “In addition to looking at capabilities that we already have and using them differently, we’re going to make sure...that when we go after a new platform, it’s the platform that we need from a joint perspective.”

A joint platform is a U.S. Air Force/Navy program — the term can have no other meaning — but if Work is arranging a marriage for UCLASS, where’s the bridegroom? When orbital patterns are so disturbed, it’s time to look for a dark planet somewhere in the system.

In October 2010, Maj. Gen. Dave Scott, head of the Air Force’s operational requirements directorate, gave a briefing [Dave Scott - Anti - Access/Area Denial Challenges.pdf] that disclosed the service’s plans for a long-range strike family of systems (LRS-FoS) — plans that then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates approved a few months later.

Three family members are real today:

• LRSB, the Long-Range Standoff cruise missile, and 
• a “penetrating intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance” (P-ISR) vehicle, which is Northrop Grumman’s secret RQ-180. 
• Penetrating Airborne Electronic Attack (P-AEA). 
• (A fourth, Conventional Prompt Global Strike, was dropped like a bad habit as soon as the Pentagon’s exit door closed behind its leading advocate and was replaced by the Minuteman follow-on.)

In the LRS-FoS plan, RQ-180 would find targets for LRSB and the P-AEA would suppress defenses. 
P-AEA appears in no known plan, but you need not dig very deep into the Air Force’s fiscal 2016 budget to find $7 billion in classified acquisition money that is neither part of the cash that the Pentagon launders for the intelligence community, nor the LRSB.

This would be exactly the same as the solution proposed in October by a Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments paper on the Pentagon’s Third Offset plan for a future U.S. military. You almost wonder if they knew something.

Related/Background Links

• Sustaining America's Strategic Advantage in Long-Range Strike CSBA brief
• Sustaining America's Strategic Advantage in Long-Range Strike CSBA report
• Air War over Libya: The Lessons for Future U.S. Military Acquisitions, Part II | Lajos Szászdi León-Borja - Academia.edu
•  spendergast: UCLASS competition put off for another 3 years - may be more of a UCAV.
• spendergast: 2015 NDAA Restricts Navy UCLASS Funds Conditioned on ISR Review