Efforts under way to harden unpiloted aircraft for contested airspace.

• Author: Beidel, Eric

By their own admission, troops tasked with flying drones in the current conflicts have been spoiled. They often use local runways in Afghanistan and Iraq and enjoy complete freedom in the skies.

But what happens when the services want to fly their unmanned aerial vehicles inside a hostile nation that has the air defenses to deter them? Military leaders are beginning to wonder how Predators, Reapers, Hunters, Shadows and the rest will perform in unfriendly skies.

The NATO bombing of the former Yugoslavia in 1999 lasted two months. During that time, just two U.S. fighter jets were shot down. But allied forces lost about 50 unmanned aircraft in the skirmishes, including 15 drones operated by the United States.

Air Force officials are tight-lipped about what attributes future remotely piloted vehicles would need to increase their chances of survival. "We cannot discuss our operations capability and cannot speculate on future operations," said Capt. Jennifer S. Ferrau, a spokesperson at Air Combat Command.

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But comments made by leaders at recent conferences and round-tables indicate that they are working on the issue behind the scenes.

"We're thinking about the next war, thinking about the next fight, thinking about the next campaign," said Air Force Col. Dean Bushey, deputy director of the Joint Unmanned Aircraft Systems Center of Excellence. "We've fought in a very permissive environment where there are no enemy attacks against our unmanned aircraft ... It would be foolish for us to imagine that we could continue to fly unmanned systems in an environment that is not only friendly but is not GPS-denied, that is not communications-denied."

The military must continue to develop systems that are hardened against GPS-denied environments, situations where communications are disabled and against aerial and ground threats, Bushey said.

U.S. remotely piloted vehicles are "very" susceptible to electronic jamming, Bushey said. "It would be misrepresentative of me to say we are hardened against electronic warfare," he said. Insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan have used inexpensive software programs to intercept video feeds from U.S. drones.

Most systems, but not all, are programmed to fly to a home base when communications go down. The vehicles have computers on board that will find automated flight plans if they don't hear from their operators. "Sometimes that flight plan is to continue with your mission," Bushey said.

When NATO...