Pentagon recruiting software developers for drone 'app store'.

• Author: Erwin, Sandra I.

The military's unmanned aircraft, like smartphones, need regular software upgrades. For the Defense Department, this is a costly proposition because drones are not disposable devices, and each technology refresh can cost millions of dollars.

With a fleet of several thousand unmanned air vehicles and a shrinking budget, the Pentagon expects to cut back on purchases of new aircraft and to update the existing inventory Under the traditional business model, the military would pay the aircraft manufacturer to develop new software operating systems and applications. That approach is no longer affordable or desirable, Pentagon officials say.

When Pentagon budgets were soaring over the past decade, such inefficiency was not questioned. That changed in 2009, when then Undersecretary of Defense John Young directed the military services to adopt a "joint standard architecture" for unmanned vehicle ground control stations.

The policy resulted in the creation of UCS, or unmanned air systems control segment. It is a "service-oriented" architecture that guides the development of new software used in the operation of unmanned vehicles. The Defense Department's procurement policy guide, known as Better Buying Power, endorses UCS as an "open architecture that enables real competition between subsystem suppliers ... and subsystem reuse across DoD systems."

In a service-oriented architecture, individual modules collectively function like a large software application. Owners of separate systems can share software and cooperate, which over the long run could save the Defense Department billions of dollars in software costs, officials predict.

The best analogy to what the Pentagon is trying to do with UCS (www.ucsarchitecture.org) is the smartphone market, says Rich Ernst, team leader for interoperability at the office of the undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics.

"The goal is to develop a business model behind the ground control station," Ernst tells National Defense. Every unmanned aircraft's ground control station has similar software needs: a weather app, blue-force tracker, cursor on target, weapons release and situational awareness. If those applications were available in a standard format, he says, the military services could download them and upgrade their ground control stations, rather than pay vehicle manufacturers to develop proprietary software.

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