The U.S. Air Force issued a Request for Information on August 17 seeking a new family of target drones capable of representing "the full range of airborne threats, spanning from inexpensive 'hobby drones' to the most advanced adversary fighter and large-scale aircraft," with responses due September 28. The specifications read less like a routine equipment upgrade and more like a direct answer to what the past several months of actual combat have revealed about the threat environment: fighter-class targets need supersonic performance past Mach 1.6 at 40,000 feet, high-G maneuvering, low-observable radar cross-sections, multi-spectral infrared signatures, active RF emissions, and electronic-attack capability, while separate target classes need to replicate C-130-sized multiengine aircraft, strategic bomber and AWACS-scale radar returns, and drone swarms ranging from 50,000-foot Group 5 UAVs down to sub-150-knot Group 1 and 2 systems capable of coordinated swarm behavior. Crucially, the Air Force wants these new targets cheap and simple enough to be "treated as attritable or expendable when required," a direct break from the current fleet.
That current fleet is genuinely inadequate for the threat picture the RFI describes, and the gap is almost comically literal in scale. The Air Force's primary subsonic target since 2007, the BQM-167A, is 20 feet long with an 11-foot wingspan, which the Defense News report notes bears little resemblance to a 67-foot Chinese J-20 or a 108-foot-wide H-6 bomber. The alternative, the QF-16, a converted retired fighter, can simulate a full-sized fourth-generation aircraft but was never built to replicate fifth-generation stealth characteristics, and at the cost of an actual airframe, it's far too expensive to expend in the quantities realistic training now requires. In practical terms, American pilots and missile-seeker systems have been training against sensor returns that don't match the actual size, radar signature, or performance envelope of the aircraft they're most likely to encounter, a mismatch this RFI is explicitly designed to close.
What makes this RFI worth reading closely rather than treating as routine procurement housekeeping is how directly its threat categories map onto specific adversary systems this blog has tracked all summer. The fighter-class requirements, low-observable RCS, supersonic performance, integrated electronic attack, read as a training profile built around exactly the kind of aircraft this blog covered in the J-36 and J-50 sixth-generation prototype story, and the more mature J-20 and J-10C threats already flying operationally. The large multi-engine and strategic-bomber categories point toward realistic training against the H-6 and Chinese AWACS platforms like the KJ-600 this blog documented aboard the Fujian. And the small-drone, swarm-capable category is a near-exact description of the Shahed-136 threat profile that this blog's coverage of Iran's adaptive missile-and-drone tactics, and the LUCAS drones CENTCOM reverse-engineered from that same Iranian system for Task Force Falcon Strike, has tracked since Epic Fury began.
The "attritable and expendable" cost requirement is the same underlying economic logic driving nearly every other procurement story this blog has covered this year, just applied to the training side of the ledger rather than the combat side. This blog's coverage of the interceptor cost-exchange problem, PAC-3 and THAAD interceptors running millions of dollars against Shahed drones costing tens of thousands, was fundamentally a story about America's defense-industrial base being built around expensive, low-volume systems meeting an adversary that fights with cheap, mass-produced ones. Training realistically against that same cost asymmetry requires target drones cheap enough to actually expend in realistic quantities during exercises, rather than the current QF-16 approach of repurposing expensive retired fighters that can't be risked or replaced casually. A pilot or missile system that has never trained against a target genuinely representative of a modern stealth fighter's radar cross-section, fired in quantities that approximate a real swarm engagement, is being asked to perform in combat against a threat profile its training never actually simulated.
None of this guarantees the Air Force gets what it's asking for on a useful timeline, RFIs are early-stage information-gathering exercises rather than contracts, and this blog's own coverage of programs like AHEL and THOR has documented how often ambitious directed-energy and unmanned-systems requirements stall well short of fielding. But the specificity of this particular wishlist, essentially describing, threat category by threat category, the exact adversary systems this blog has spent the summer documenting in actual combat and prototype form, is itself a signal worth noting: the institutional recognition that America's training infrastructure has fallen behind the threats it's meant to prepare pilots and weapons systems against isn't confined to any single program or platform, it's now explicit enough to show up as a formal, detailed acquisition requirement with a signature deadline six weeks away.
No comments:
Post a Comment