Marine Corps experimenting with new Drones.

• Author: Tadjdeh, Yasmin
• Position: Viewpoint

The hum of unmanned aerial vehicles could be heard during a recent experiment in California. Tiny quadcopters zipped across the sky as an MQ-9 Reaper flew overhead.

The test--known as the Marine Air-Ground Task Force Integrated Experiment, or MIX-16, and hosted by the Marine Corps' warfighting laboratory--marked an effort by the service to study and eventually acquire new, powerful drones to give troops increased situational awareness and communication abilities.

Unmanned aerial vehicles evaluated at the event--which took place in California at Camp Pendleton and Twentynine Palms in July and August--included a mix of tiny drones that could fit in a Marine's hand to systems that weighed thousands of pounds, said Lt. Col. Noah Spataro, unmanned aerial systems capabilities integration and requirements officer at the Marine Corps' capabilities development and integration office.

The service--which currently operates systems such as the Raven, Wasp, Shadow, Puma and Blackjack--is looking for new systems that can provide troops with increased capability, and is especially interested in small systems, he said.

Vertical take-off and landing aircraft, also known as VTOL, could be especially useful, he noted.

"Those right now aren't part of our program of record, and so that's where this experiment is really important because it's helping us define how do you operate with these things? How do you sustain them? What are the best tactical scenarios to integrate them with?" Spataro said.

Such systems would be ideal in urban environments where buildings can make it challenging to launch fixed-wing drones, he said.

"If you are say in a city and you need to get eyes on a specific area, or you're doing a patrol through a city and you have all these vertical obstructions, it's really hard... to try and launch this aircraft if you've got fixed wings," he told National Defense.

At the same time, VTOL systems often have limited battery life, making a fixed-wing asset potentially more useful for certain missions, he noted. "With the fixed wing, you need a little bit more space for launch and recovery but you're going to get better endurance," he said. Plus, "it's going to orbit the target so you're going to get a bunch of different views while it's flying around."

The Marine Corps will need a combination of both kinds of systems in the future, he said. During MIX-16, it tested systems such as Prox Dynamics' PD-100 Black Hornet, PSI Tactical Robotics' InstantEye...