Army lays out ambitious plans to expand unmanned aircraft fleet.

• Author: Wright, Austin
• Position: ARMY AVIATION

In coming decades, unmanned aerial vehicles will expand their role in warfare beyond intelligence gathering to become a vital component of attack, transport and resupply missions, said Army officials.

"Unmanned aerial systems must provide the ability not only to see, but to shape, the battlefield," Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli said in a keynote address at the Army Aviation Association of America conference in Fort Worth, Texas.

A key message the Army wants to get across is that unmanned aircraft are not just a fad. "They have forever changed the way the Army operates," Chiarelli said.

His speech last month coincided with the release of the much-anticipated "Unmanned Aircraft Systems Roadmap." The document outlines the Army's plan to develop its own fleet of UAVs over the next 25 years, when all aviation missions are slated to transition to predominantly unmanned. Some missions, such as cargo resupply, will be performed mostly autonomously, while others, like attack, will be performed mostly by remote operators.

The Army plans to train more than 2,000 UAS operators and maintainers in fiscal year 2012--a roughly 800 percent increase in the course of a decade.

Advancements in technology during the next two decades could allow manufacturers to build unmanned vehicles that could replace current cargo helicopters and ferry troops to battle, officials said. They urged contractors to find ways to reduce the weight of unmanned aircraft parts so that UAVs can carry heavier payloads.

Officials hailed recent improvements in command-and-control technologies that allow operators to operate multiple UAVs from a single device.

The expansion of the UAV fleet also will require the Army to find more efficient and less costly ways to maintain the aircraft. The answer, according to officials, is condition-based maintenance.

Nearly half of the Army's aviation fleet is currently on a condition-based maintenance schedule. Those aircraft have on-board sensors that measure deterioration. The Army plans to shift all aircraft to condition-based maintenance schedules by 2017, said Christopher Smith, director of the Army's condition-based maintenance program.

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Aircraft in the program have shown a 10-percent increase in the number of hours they're able to fly. This is because their sensors detect problems earlier than traditional inspections do, giving maintenance officials more leeway when drawing up repair schedules, Smith...