Flying binoculars

ISIS drones, generally the readily available Chinese made quadcopters and fixed wing types have become a common sight during the extended fighting for Mosul, scarcely tilting the battle in their favour but adding an additional layer of complexity to a complex battle.

The various weapons dropped by these drones appear to include various Eastern bloc sub-munitions and 40mm grenades. One video appears to show one striking and blowing up an Iraqi armoured vehicle, possibly a BMP, showing they can get lucky.

The Iraqi military also uses small unmanned aerial systems and so too will the Australian Army.

So will the ADF be fielding a small weaponised UAS?

No, says Lieutenant Colonel Keirin Joyce, manager of the army’s unmanned aerial systems (UAS) program.

“Do we have any plans – no – but the open question of can they, absolutely. Through Ebay you can buy a very small servo datalink kit for a couple of bucks, get some Tek screws, bolt it on and you could weaponise any small UAV,” he says.

Far more useful than any nuisance raids is the UAS ability to conduct surveillance, allowing a soldier or a commander to see over a hill, around a corner or even through a window in a manner inconceivable even just a few years ago.

After three years of trials, the Army is rolling out a pair of systems.

At the start of June, Defence Minister Marise Payne and Defence Industry Minister Christopher Pyne announced the government would spend $101 million on a small UAS for Army.

That’s the AeroVironment Wasp AE, a man portable small air vehicle to be acquired through the Canberra-based firm XTEK. AeroVironment is a California firm which produces a range of small UAS for military and civil applications.

The Wasps will be modified for specifically Australian requirements content by companies such as Sentient Vision Systems and General Dynamics Mediaware. The ministers said this deal will directly create up to 10 new jobs in Canberra and support dozens of jobs in the supply chain.

“It’s a proven capability used by militaries around the world, including with the US Marine Corps,” Minister Pyne said.

“Importantly, a significant proportion of this investment will remain in Australia, with local industry content valued at approximately $11 million for acquisition, plus up to $4 million each year for sustainment.”

“The majority of maintenance and support will be carried out in Australia by XTEK.”

Wasp is a hand launched fixed wing UAS with wing span just over a metre, endurance of 50 minutes, range of about five kilometres and operating altitude of about 150 metres.

This will be issued at company level.

Most importantly it has both day and night capabilities on board.

“Having both cameras on board means if the operators want to kick over to the infrared spectrum, they can and then come back to normal television,” Joyce says.

The datalink is line of sight in the encrypted military band, about 2.2Ghz, with data going to a toughened tablet.

“That’s all you need to fly it. But it is an even more powerful capability when you connect with a laptop. Then it’s not just the operator sitting there inside the zone flying,” he says.

“All of that imagery goes to a laptop with a moving map with all the data displayed and the commander gets all of that. If it goes to a laptop that gives us extra capabilities. We can tie it into a network, put it up onto a big screen – do all sorts of things.”

All of that imagery goes to a laptop with a moving map. Ltcol Keirin Joyce

As well as Wasp, the Army is rolling out Black Hornet, developed by Prox Dynamics of Norway and in service with the Norwegian, British and German armed forces.

Black Hornet has seen service with the British army in Afghanistan where it proved particularly useful for looking over the walls of compounds for insurgents.

Termed a nano-UAS, this is a truly tiny rotary wing UAS which comes in two variants equipped with different sensors – grey airframe for daytime and black for night. It will be issued down to platoon level.

“We have had these in trials now for three years. We are rolling them out across the army over the next two years. So every combat unit in the army will have access to Black Hornet,” Joyce says.

“It is the size and weight of a sparrow. This has the capability of operating up to two kilometres away for 20 minutes. Through its built-in cameras you basically put an eye in the sky ….to look at your next step to help in planning – over the hill, around the corner or inside windows if you are going into urban terrain.

“You can drop down and interrogate a car number plate.”

With such a tiny sensor, the imagery isn’t exactly selfie quality. But Joyce says it’s quite good to tell whether a person under observation is wearing Australian or enemy cams and carrying a rifle or RPG or a shovel.

Both systems have been trialled extensively right around Australia, in multiple exercises by numerous army units. The Wasp on display at a recent conference had been tried out hard by the Special Air Service Regiment and was no longer deemed airworthy.

So what do the soldiers, already heavily laden with weapons, ammunition body armour and much more, think of this new kit?

“It’s always a tradeoff,” Joyce says.

“Of course it’s more weight and more volume. But flying binoculars means you don’t need to send a soldier to go have a look.

“When we have been talking to soldiers, I think they love it. It’s a fun capability, as well as being incredibly handy providing force protection and a powerful tool for the commanders to make decisions.”

Unlike larger UAS, both Wasp and Black Hornet are battery powered. The key advantage is virtually silent operation. To keep flying it’s just a matter of swapping out the batteries. Wasp uses the same rechargeable battery as used in the Army radios.

Wasp breaks down for transportation into a briefcase-sized container. Black Hornet goes into a small container around the size of a pencil case.

With new equipment comes new training, provided by the Army’s specialist UAS training unit, the School of Artillery at Puckapunyal, Victoria.

Joyce says training for Black Hornet takes 3-5 days, depending on how quickly the operators gets it.

“We are frequently finding the younger soldiers are graduating pretty quickly,” he said.

“They are used to the functionality that is being taught. There is the classroom phase which is all about air worthiness, aviation meteorology, talking on radios with air traffic. Everybody gets that. It’s just procedures and learning.

Using Black Hornet competently takes a little longer. It’s operated by a button controller, something like a Wii controller, and a touch screen. Operators can manually steer or set waypoints. All data is transmitted back to the operator, not stored on board. That’s so a captured Black Hornet can’t reveal what it’s been observing.

Joyce says training on Wasp is a bit more complicated.

“Obviously if you can go further for longer with a higher capability payload, there’s more to learn,” he said.

The training course takes 7-10 days, again depending on how quickly the operators get it.

Neither capability is cheap. Since no contracts have yet been signed, the Army isn’t revealing unit prices. Joyce says only that Wasp is six figures and Black Hornet five figures.

The US Army, which aspires to putting a nano-UAS in the hands of troops by 2018, grumbled that Black Hornet was too expensive at US$190,00 each. That figure appears to have been derived from the 2013 UK STG20 million contract for 160 units. That could be a way of saying we’ll wait for US industry to come up with something.

Joyce said for bang for buck as far as military capability goes, these were still pretty good value.

Compared to even a decade ago, the sensor capability of these small devices is impressive but the Army believes it will get even better.

Companies are already investing plenty of R and D into improving sensor performance.

“We are absolutely counting and banking on not even incremental but evolutionary improvements,” he said.

We are banking on evolutionary improvements. Ltcol Keirin Joyce

“Last week the Defence Innovation Hub released a special notice on behalf of Army. That is basically a challenge to Australian industry to make a better Wasp that we want to buy in five years.

“As a taxpayer wouldn’t you much prefer these six figures going to an Australian company?”

Compared with other nations such as Israel, the US and some European nations, the Australian Defence Force has been a relatively late adopter of UAS technology. The Army’s UAS journey started in 1999 with Codarra, developed by Codarra Advanced Systems, of Queanbeyan, NSW.

Joyce said this early trials UAV was rudimentary, essentially a model radio control aircraft with a camera, but it gave the Army an introduction to this capability.

In August 2003, Australian troops tried out four Australian-made Aerosonde UAVs in the peace restoration mission in the Solomon Islands.

This was the first ever Australian operational deployment of UAVs and proved extremely useful in learning just how to use this new capability and just what it could do.

That actually turned out to be more than just the intended surveillance.

“Our tactical UAVs were also a potent psychological tool that clearly played on people’s minds. We openly displayed our abilities and the imagination of the locals took over from there,” mission commander Lieutenant Colonel John Frewen wrote in Defence magazine at the time.

Our tactical UAVs were also a potent psychological tool. Ltcol John Frewen

Subsequently the Army acquired the Israeli Elbit Skylark – a tactical UAV with a two-metre wingspan – in a rapid acquisition in 2006. That was specifically to support the Australian taskforce in southern Iraq but Skylark also operated in Afghanistan and East Timor, where in May 2007 one drew attention to the capability by crashing into a house in Dili. There were no injuries and defence personnel fixed the modest damage to better than it was pre-crash. The mishap was attributed to an unspecified technical fault.

Skylark was speedily followed by the Scan Eagle from Insitu Pacific, a Boeing subsidiary. This was a larger three-metre wingspan petrol engine powered UAV with endurance around 14 hours. Scan Eagle flew 45,000 hours in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In one incident in southern Iraq, an Australian Scan Eagle spotted a group of Iraqi insurgents setting up a rocket rail and then firing a rocket into Basra. They speedily dismantled the rail, loaded it into a vehicle, scooted up the road then stopped to set up again. A JDAM, apparently from a Dutch F-16, ended their day.

Scan Eagle remains in the Australian Defence Force inventory, although now with the Navy.

Australian Special Operations Command also acquired the widely used AeroVironment RQ-11 Raven for use in Afghanistan. This is a small 1.3 metre wingspan hand-launched UAS for tactical use.

With its taste for UAS thoroughly stirred, the Army acquired the US AAI Corporation Shadow in 2011. This is a tactical UAV with a 4.3 metre wingspan which flew 10,000 hours in Afghanistan. It remains in the Army inventory.

The US military experimented with weaponising Shadow after one in Afghanistan spotted a large number of high value targets. In the absence of any armed assets, all escaped.

Among various possibilities, the US considered the six-kilogram Raytheon Small Tactical Munition.

It ultimately concluded Shadow’s main role was persistent surveillance and even this modest payload decreased performance and endurance and there were better means to put explosives on people and their stuff.

So what’s next?

Certainly an armed UAS capability is on the way, likely the General Atomics MQ-9 Reaper, though it will be a RAAF capability, like the existing Israeli Aerospace Industries Heron. In early 2015, six RAAF personnel began training on Reaper in the US and have even flown missions over Syria.

With the proliferation of UAS capabilities, Australian troops in any future deployment will surely find themselves under observation and perhaps attack by other people’s UAS.

In Iraq and Syria, ISIS drones are invariably met with a blizzard of smallarms fire which occasionally has the desired effect.

The rise in use of small UAS has prompted a rise in research on counter-drone technologies, ranging from energy weapons, large shotguns and net projectors, to the Stinger SAM, equipped with a proximity fuse and a fragmentation warhead to take out drones as small as two kilograms.

This isn’t just a military problem. If ISIS can weaponise small cheap drones, so too could terrorists in Australia – even a crude munition dropped into a crowded sporting venue could cause substantial casualties.

Since small commercial UAVs mostly use standardised operating protocols on a known frequency band, the most elegant solution would appear to be technology to jam and even hijack the offending drone.