Air Force's relationship with unmanned aviation hits plateau.

• Author: Erwin, Sandra I.
• Position: Defense Watch

* Air Force Gen. Mike Hostage was flying in circles over an Afghan village aboard a turboprop spy aircraft. The four-man crew spent seemingly endless hours trying to spot a sport-utility vehicle that transported a suspected insurgent.

The ground commander had directed an Army helicopter to be ready to strafe the SUV with its 20mm cannon. But on closer inspection, the aircrew realized that the insurgent had hidden under bushes and the helicopter was about to hit the wrong target, and most likely kill or injure innocent civilians. Hostage's team immediately alerted the helicopter to hold fire.

Only a human observer could have noticed that, said Hostage, who runs the Air Combat Command. "A Predator would have had no idea," he said, referring to the Air Force's aerial spy of choice during the past decade of counterinsurgency warfare.

The vignette, said Hostage, illustrates the dangers of becoming so enamored of a particular technology that one forgets its limitations.

Remotely-piloted aircraft are the darlings of 21st century warfare. Drone fleets are expanding across the U.S. military, the CIA and the armed forces of many foreign countries.

Air Force leaders, meanwhile, appear to be questioning the service's devotion to unmanned aviation at a time when budgets are tightening and the Pentagon is seeking to "rebalance" its resources from ground conflicts to naval and air warfare.

Hostage is one among a cadre of Air Force officers who are championing a new thinking in how the service acquires its future weapon systems. It's not about "manned vs. unmanned," said Hostage. The issue is how the Air Force will equip itself to dominate the airspace in future conflicts. The current fleet of UAVs will not cut it in a war against foes that are armed with advanced radar and surface-to-air missiles. "We're shifting to a battlefield where there is an adversary who is going to have a vote in whether I have that 'staring eye' over the battlefield 24/7," he said. The UAV fleet that the Air Force has built and "is still being prodded to build up is not relevant in that new theater."

The hype about drones being the new wave of warfare obscures the fact that they are vehicles that drop weapons and spy from above, but can't make decisions, he said. "I can build a platform and give it autonomous capability, tell it to go somewhere and kill anything that moves. But we are not morally comfortable to do that. We're not able to make them smart enough to tell the...