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ISTAR 05
Memorandum from Intellect
Intellect is the UK trade association for the IT, telecoms and electronics industries. Its members account for over 80% of these markets and include blue-chip multinationals as well as early stage technology companies. These industries together generate around 10% of UK GDP and 15% of UK trade. Intellect is a vital source of knowledge and expertise on all aspects of the hi-tech industry.
The following paper provides the initial views of Intellect member companies on the UK's use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) within UK Intelligence, Surveillance, Target Acquisition and Response (ISTAR) capability. A high proportion of Intellect's members are active in Defence, and this submission draws on their views. This paper addresses those aspects specified in the Committee's call for evidence, and also raises issues that Intellect believes it is important to address in this inquiry.
Intellect welcomes the opportunity to provide input to the committee and is keen to engage with the committee, the Ministry of Defence, and UK Armed Forces to ensure progress on the issues raised in this submission.
IntroductionIn 1998 a UAV crossed the Atlantic for the first time, covering 3270 kilometers in 26 hours and 45 minutes, and using a gallon and a half of fuel. To a casual observer, boundaries around aircraft effectiveness and efficiency had been shattered by this exciting new technology, which offered the potential to greatly reduce the exposure of aircrew to risk and to greatly expand military ISTAR capabilities. Subsequently, UK and allied forces have been able to exploit UAS for the benefit of operations and intelligence gathering, bringing immediate upgrades to tactical and strategic ISTAR capability.
Intellect recognises the various pressures which have surrounded the development of the UK's UAS capability up to this point, and those operational and financial constraints which continue to play a role. Given these challenges, UAS have in many ways been a success story for MoD, in terms of rapidly delivering increased capability to the front line. The committee's inquiry now offers the opportunity to step back and assess how well these technologies are being exploited, integrated with wider Defence capabilities, and developed for the future.
This paper does not address in detail the challenges to UAV capability which may arise from any future roles - for example weaponisation - and instead concentrates on the contribution that UAVs make to the UK's current and future ISTAR enterprise at the capability level.
Intellect's positionIntellect believes that UAVs - and the Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) capability to which UAVs contribute - are an important example of the benefits which successful exploitation of technology in Defence can bring. As well as offering reduced risk for UK personnel, UAS have the potential to greatly expand the ISTAR capability available to the Armed Forces, and can often enable real efficiencies in terms of time and cost when compared to traditional alternatives.
Intellect believes that the challenges the UK now faces in seeking to improve on existing capabilities are as much cultural and conceptual as they are technical, and that to successfully exploit the potential of UAS within ISTAR a capability approach to its acquisition and employment is required.
As UAS become increasingly commonplace and experience of their utility in theatre grows, there will inevitably be increasing levels of demand for them to be deployed in a wide range of roles and environments. The future development of UAS must have flexibility as its first principle - both for the UAV platforms and the systems which enable them - so that this innovative new technology can bring benefit across UK Defence.
Current UK UAV provision In recent years UAVs have become an increasingly important part of MoD's ISTAR approach. A number of different UAV assets have been procured and have generated operational benefits - both in terms of effectiveness and lower human risk. Present deployments of UAVs deliver benefits in terms of force protection and situational awareness, broader data gathering through a range of sensors, and persistence.
The MoD has three types of UAV operating in the TELIC (Iraq) and HERRICK (Afghanistan) theatres, predominantly operating as collectors at various organisational and operational levels. Specifically: · The strategic Reapers are tasked at Division level (and above) and controlled from a distance. Reapers are being deployed with the RAF · The Hermes 450s are a tactical asset, tasked at Brigade level, and under local control · The hand-launched Desert Hawk is tasked and controlled at Company/Platoon level. Both the Hermes 450s and Desert Hawks are deployed with the Army · The long established Phoenix system should also be noted, having given good service in theatre and provided experience in the use and deployment of UAVs
Intellect's membership believes that whilst the acquisition of UAVs has been beneficial, and has the potential to significantly upgrade the UK's ISTAR capability in future, this improvement will be stunted if the UK emphasises the acquisition of platform-based collectors over other parts of the system which allows intelligence to be effectively exploited.
Moreover, the four phases of the UK's intelligence processes - Direct, Collect, Process and Disseminate - must be adequately provisioned and balanced in order to deliver an optimal ISTAR capability. Intellect's members believe, however, that the tangibility and accessibility of UAV assets - which are effectively limited to the "collect" function - can lead to an imbalanced focus on these platforms. Whilst a vital collector, the UAV can only form one component of the wider UAS capability, and it is this capability which must be holistically developed in order to improve the UK's ISTAR provision.
Procurement and funding The MoD has two parallel procurement streams in this area, the first of which is using the MoD's Equipment Programme (EP) to develop and procure "Watchkeeper", an advanced UAS incorporating both infrastructure and collectors, and will come onstream in 2010. At a cost of around £700m, Watchkeeper is the largest European UAV programme, and - laudably - is designed to provide not only the collector platforms but also the exploitation and dissemination systems which enable benefit to be derived from gathered information. At present, the Watchkeeper procurement is believed to be running to requirement, time and budget.
The majority of current UAS assets, however, have been not been acquired through the mainstream EP, but are the result of Urgent Operational Requirement (UOR) purchases. UORs have so far provided three Reapers (under a USAF managed Foreign Military Sales programme), twelve Hermes 450s (under the Lydian H450 service provision programme) and twelve Desert Hawk systems (each system with eight aircraft).
Some of the UAS UOR programmes have strayed from the traditional asset acquisition model of procurement: both the Hermes 450s and the Desert Hawks are provided as a managed service, where the MoD is procuring 'ISTAR by the hour'. This alternative - and overtly capability based - model may provide useful lessons for the future delivery of UAS.
The UOR programmes have brought immediate and vital benefits, delivering assets into theatre within a short timescale and enabling increased force protection via improved ISTAR capability. Industry believes, however, that some UORs are being funded by bringing money allocated to the DABINETT programme forward - a measure which may generate future difficulties, as this programme was intended to provide a balanced capability across the Direct, Collect, Process and Disseminate phases. Using part of this funding to instead procure greater numbers of collector devices, in the form of UAVs, has created some unease within industry at a perceived expenditure imbalance between the gathering of information and its effective analysis and use.
Challenges Intellect's members believe the UK has made significant progress in the exploitation of UAS, but that much of the potential of this system has yet to be tapped. There are a number of challenges, some of which are cultural, which must be overcome if the UK is to move from owning a collection of disparate UAV assets to deploying a truly strategic UAS capability.
It should be noted that whilst the UK's achievements in this area are some distance behind the advanced use of UAS by the US and Israel, comparisons with France - which has similar resources and aspirations for UAS - show that many of these difficulties are not unique to the UK. Contextual factors also exacerbate some of these issues, including UAS technology's relative novelty and the stresses and strains of ongoing operations.
Intellect believes that one significant challenge to effective exploitation of ISTAR - and indeed to wider Network Enabled Capability - is the lack of an integrated and cohesive UAS capability, incorporating legacy systems, current assets and future programmes. Whilst the growing collection of UAV assets offer an immediate low level of ISTAR support, the absence of effective integration prevents the UK's UAS assets operating as a true capability, and creates bottlenecks which prevent information from flowing freely between collection, decision and processing agents.
Specifically, this includes: · technical interoperability (assets and networks) · operational sovereignty · organisational interoperability · ownership of ISTAR assets · prioritising command and control of UAS · mission/command tradeoffs · integration of UOR-procured assets
MoD has recognised that the integration of UAS capability is a critical need, and its work to ensure interoperability on Watchkeeper shows positive intent to ensure relevant EP programmes are framed within an overall capability. What remains unknown, however, is how the UOR programme - which is likely to remain a feature of MoD procurement for some time - can be adjusted to ensure that COTS assets are similarly interoperable, and how ownership and tasking can best be arranged to manage UAS at a capability rather than service level.
As touched on in the previous section, industry believes that the perceived imbalance between collection and DPD presents a significant challenge. A bias towards the acquisition of increasing numbers of platform/collection assets rather than developing holistic UAS runs the risk of consistently gathering vast mountains of data which cannot then be analysed.
For example, Intellect's members are aware of an analysis which claims that 80% of the ISTAR gathering in support of Operation TELIC took place to acquire material which had in fact been collected previously, but was either not accessible or not known to be available. The operational and personnel risk and financial cost associated with re-gathering this material could potentially have been avoided had a more effective and holistic ISTAR capability been available.
Parts of MoD have repeatedly recognised that such an imbalance is nonsensical, but spending patterns have not significantly altered to rectify the shortfall. Despite assurances to industry that the Direct, Process and Decide (DPD) elements of the intelligence cycle should have priority over the Collect function, in the past year more money has been spent on UOR procurement of (mostly) collectors than on conventional procurement of ISTAR systems. There is clearly a mismatch between declared intent and actual procurement, which is further exacerbated by poor differentiation between intelligence requirements and collection requirements.
Exploiting current ISTAR capability Given the challenges highlighted above, the full exploitation of current UAS provision is - in Intellect's view - dependent upon the successful integration of existing assets into an overall ISTAR capability. Members believe that better enabling the rapid management, analysis and dissemination of intelligence through interoperable components (including collectors) would enable greater exploitation of the information generated by UAS. This could, for example, make an immediate contribution to operational support areas like situational awareness.
In order to create this integrated capability, issues of organisational and management fragmentation need to be addressed. Intellect believes that unifying the disparate UAS ownership into an enterprise-level capability view would enable more strategic decision making, and facilitate better management of the different drivers and priorities within the UK's relatively limited UAS provision. A capability view would also enable an overall understanding of current expenditure, and thus facilitate a rebalancing of spending priorities to improve the previously underprioritised Direct, Process and Disseminate functions.
Development of doctrine and concept is needed to reflect the advanced capabilities of modern UAS, and to enable the structuring of the capability level management of UAS. In particular, the development of information exploitation and information assurance concepts should be an immediate priority. The further development of some evolving concepts around "non-traditional ISTAR", for example, could identify opportunities to draw other useful assets into the ISTAR envelope. Cross-fertilisation of training requirements and provision across the capability would also benefit from and contribute to an effective integration regime.
The NEC architecture which MoD is developing has the potential to enable the necessary technical integration. The architecture could allow ISTAR information to be created once and stored for use many times, so that the wealth of tactical information being generated by existing UAS assets is more consistently analysed and disseminated. The reduction of duplication in data collection and its associated costs would enable current UAS capability to support a wider range of operations in a wider variety of roles.
Integration through this architecture would allow exploitation capabilities to be shared more widely and enable greater scaleability and lower barriers to innovation. Open standards would also go some distance towards preventing proprietary lock-in and therefore enable a wider range of existing technologies to be brought to bear.
The establishment of an integrated capability could also allow the exploitation of additional sources of information, including for example data inputs from platforms such as attack helicopter, MSTAR, and sensors and sights on armoured vehicles. Future platforms, such as the Joint Combat Aircraft, could also integrate to provide data for ISTAR use.
Gradual improvements in UAS technology are inevitable given the relative youth of this area, and clarity on the integration and governance would essentially provide an overall roadmap for UK UAS, enabling incrementally developed technologies to be brought into the capability toolset.
Programmes already in development - notably Watchkeeper - show that the next generation of UAVs will offer substantial technological improvements over current models. Existing provision could, however, be improved by widening the range of sensors carried by UAS - currently this is limited to EO/IR and video, but members suggest the addition of complementary fielded airborne sensors such as radar and ES which can operate in adverse weather conditions and at longer ranges.
The UK's approach to future ISTAR Partly because of the legacy of fragmented procurement and management of UAS programmes, a certain amount of confusion exists within industry over MoD's overall vision for future ISTAR. What is clear is that MoD and the services understand the potential benefits which can be derived from UAS, and across the board different programmes are being taken forward to deliver greater ISTAR capability to their owners. Notable by its absence, however, is a consistent strategic approach to the development of future UAS/ISTAR capability.
This lack of overall direction manifests itself through apparently contradictory developments. For example, MoD has stated that no further Reapers will be procured until the current fleet is brought into core programme management. However, there are no funded plans to do so, and the US has disclosed that it approved the UK's purchase of another ten platforms. Industry is thus unsighted about integration of current and future Reapers into the core programme, and also unsure as to why, again, stated intent and actual procurement seem to be at odds. Other UAS programmes (such as the Naval ISTAR UAV) have been initiated only to later be cancelled by MoD due to a lack of Departmental buy-in, leaving industry to question why time and resource was spent developing a programme without an agreed role in the overall capability.
Whilst some sensitivities remain in MoD around the perceived threat that UAS poses to manned aircraft programmes, the UK's continuing financial commitment demonstrates that the ISTAR community intends to continue developing UAS capabilities.
How to best develop future ISTAR/UAV capability Intellect believes that the exploitation (rather than solely the gathering) of information must be the focus of the UK's future development of ISTAR capability. The future of UK UAS capability is as a key part of overall ISTAR, acting in concert with other components and capabilities across a range of roles and scenarios. Integration, both organisationally and technically, is the key which enables UAS to be deployed more flexibly, taking on more "dull, dirty and dangerous" collection tasks and allowing personnel to effectively exploit intelligence from its own and other sources.
Development of future ISTAR capability must therefore not be automatically conducted through the traditional - platform-based - procurement channels and processes. Acquiring and improving a capability throughout its life is a very different proposition to the one off purchase of a platform, and Intellect therefore reiterates its support for MoD's development of Through Life Capability Management (TLCM) processes. The Hermes 450 "ISTAR by the hour" procurement model shows that exploration of alternative acquisition approaches will be a large part of future ISTAR development - use of a "business services orientated" approach (for example) could incentivise innovation in service delivery, as well as unlocking MoD from the sort of platform or technology dependency which can result from procuring specific end solutions.
One key challenge which TLCM may only partly address is how to reconcile EP-procured UAS capabilities with the piecemeal approach delivered by UORs. The development of future UAS must, of course, respond to operational needs and provide the best possible capabilities for the personnel in theatre, and the unpredictable nature of UORs is no friend to overall capability planning. Looking forwards, however, development of UAS must incorporate the UOR process and be able to take a view across the full spectrum of capability. It is no use for MoD's development plans to only include a fraction of UAS projects and expenditure.
The flexibility of UAS means that there are many roles and capabilities which could be developed in future. Intellect's members drew particular attention to the development of mini-UAVs as one interesting example, because of their low unit cost, portability and suitability for difficult environments such as urban areas. High Altitude, Long Endurance (HALE) UAVs are also under development at present, and industry believe that the UK is well placed to deliver world-leading capabilities in this area, through projects like Zephyr.
Enthusiasm for the use of UAS outside theatre is likely to grow, and with this comes a further degree of complexity around the development of future assets. As has been well documented, certain of the UK's current UAS platform assets cannot be used in UK airspace (except in a very small number of test sites) and if MoD's overall vision of UAS capability includes use in non-segregated airspace then greater attention will need to be paid to the development of "sense and avoid" technology, redundancies and other safety measures, extended range, and different communications systems.
One role which looks set to be a part of the UK's UAS capability is that of armed or Strike UAS. Development of offensive UAS platforms - such as Taranis - is likely to be a focus for in the future, and doing so presents significant potential issues around how to manage the transition from ISTAR-focused single role UAS to strike-enabled dual role UAS. Many of the issues around management of the overall capability will need to be revisited - including ownership, command & control and doctrine - and there may also be sensitivities around using some alternative acquisition strategies for armed assets.
The development of autonomous UAS capability has also been the subject of much attention, and there are potentially significant efficiency benefits from self-tasking and self-managing systems, such as decreased risk from human error. Industry recognises, however, that the concept of introducing autonomous assets to theatre carries its own risks - both operational and political - and the successful deployment of this capability will depend heavily on the development of robust and accepted governance.
Information management is the most effective way to leverage available defence resource into optimum capability, and is therefore the key to the UK's ISTAR and wider NEC future. Intellect strongly believes that the development of future ISTAR capability needs to be conducted in partnership with industry. The technology industry which Intellect represents is a vital stakeholder in the future of UK defence, and is able to contribute cutting edge experience and expertise not only from UK defence but from work in other sectors.
Conclusion Compared to the photogenic and iconic platform assets which have long dominated the public image of Defence, ISTAR is a relatively low profile capability, short on political saliency and long on thorny technological and management issues. It is, regardless, one of the most strategically important parts of future Defence capability - information superiority over adversaries is a critical need for UK forces in all types of warfare and peacemaking. Intellect believes therefore that the effective exploitation of information needs to be close to the top of MoD's priority list.
A unified approach to ISTAR assets' deployment and management needs to be considered, and whilst drawing this together from different Services, procurement methods and command layers may be uncomfortable, that it could be the key to enabling UK ISTAR to reach its full potential.
As MoD develops its future UAS, improving the exploitation of the information they provide must be as much of a priority as improving the UAV itself. Industry has confidence that this is recognised within MoD, but once the current Planning Round is settled will be keen to see that future actions match the abundant statements of good intent.
Intellect believes that technology offers HM Government the best opportunity to leverage the available resource into the optimum military effect, and UAS offer a clear example of technology being used to expand capability and lessen human risk through the exploitation of industry's expertise for the good of UK Defence.
21 April 2008
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