Drone fever: army on a fast track to build its own high-tech air force.

• Author: Erwin, Sandra I.

* The Army soon will begin deploying larger quantities of remotely piloted surveillance aircraft--the high-tech kind that so far only have been operated by the U.S. Air Force.

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The scope and pace of the Army's unmanned aircraft buildup has been described by one official as a "California gold rush."

The centerpieces of the Army's unmanned warplane fleet will be the Shadow and Sky Warrior aircraft. It plans to acquire more than 300 of these two variants during the next five years. Nearly a hundred aircraft already are in the inventory.

In addition to purchasing new planes, the Army will equip them with advanced sensors, networking systems and weapons, which effectively gives the Army capabilities to conduct aerial warfare that up until now were predominantly only available to the Air Force.

The introduction of new systems gradually has accelerated during the past two years, as Army commanders vehemently have argued that the Air Force's Predator UAVs are good enough for "theater level" surveillance but not sufficient to support ground forces' needs for real-time video of their immediate surroundings.

The Army's frustration about having limited access to UAV imagery reached a boiling point in Afghanistan, where commanders claimed that some smaller units were fighting blind because they didn't have UAVs tracking enemy positions.

Troops in hostile areas cannot afford to wait for the UAVs to be rerouted; they need support 24/7, said Timothy Muchmore, director of the Army Quadrennial Defense Review at the office of the deputy chief of staff for programs. Units have experienced great disappointments in the way UAVs have been used in Afghanistan over the past couple of years, Muchmore said at a Washington, D.C., conference hosted by Aviation Week.

"The air power provided by our sister services has dominated the third dimension, but the Army is unable to leverage that third dimension," Muchmore said. During the past year, "We've had two combat outposts overrun by superior forces. Those are losses that we consider unacceptable, because we couldn't see what was going on around the outposts."

Because the UAVs are not always available to small units, these troops end up getting ambushed, Muchmore lamented. This issue has been the subject of contentious discussions at the Pentagon. Air Force officials insist that its Predators work exclusively in support of ground units.

At a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee last month, Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Neb., pressed Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey to explain why his...