Military taking larger role in drone sustainment.

• Author: Parsons, Dan

As the conflict in Afghanistan draws to a close, die Defense Department finds itself having to maintain unmanned aircraft fleets with less money and fewer resources.

Experts and industry officials forecast a growing need for sustainment services, but the budget crunch is prompting theservices to look for creative ways to shoulder the logistics burden, including performing some of the work in military depots.

The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq prompted the Pentagon to rapidly field a menagerie of unmanned aerial systems in largequantities. The need to quickly put such capabilities into the hands of troops outweighed long term sustainability planning, which often occurred late in development, according to the Defense Department's unmanned systems integrated roadmap released last December.

"Many programs have been procured as vertically integrated, vendor-proprietary solutions relying on a single prime contractor who was often held accountable to meet many criteria, including a compressed delivery schedule," it said.

"These rapidly-fielded programs are often immature in terms of reliability and support- ability and are heavily relianton contractor logistics support."

"As budget pressures increase, programs must develop more cost-effective sustainment solutions," the roadmap said.

Calculating the market for UAS sustainment can be difficult because most of those dollars come from operations and maintenance funding, which isn't always itemized, said Michael Blades, aerospace and defense senior industry analyst for Frost& Sullivan.

The U.S. military drone market - which includes procurement and research, development, testing and evaluation funding -will be increasing about 2.2 percent a year for the next five years, he said. When taking inflation into account, that's aflat market.

If the military is not procuring as many remotely piloted aircraft, it will need to focus on supporting what it has, Blades said.

"I could probably guess that the increase in sustainment is probably 2 to 5 percent per year," he said. "They have to increase the capabilities of these platforms without buying new platforms. They're going to be putting different data linkson, different sensors and all that, so I think tiiat's going to be where your growth comes in."

The Pentagon spent $1.4 billion on UAS support in fiscal year 2012. That sum includes maintenance, repair, logistics and training costs, Blades said. He did not have data for 2013.

General Atomics in 2012 raked in...