Pentagon revamps management of unmanned aircraft programs.

• Author: Erwin, Sandra I.

The Defense Department is adding billions of dollars to future budgets for unmanned air vehicles, but Pentagon officials cautioned that UAV programs increasingly will be scrutinized not just for their technical performance, but also for how they manage costs.

UAVs no longer are novelties that should be treated as isolated laboratory projects, officials said. If the Defense Department is to fulfill its goals of proliferating UAVs as mainstream military weapons, they will nor only have to be cheaper, but also easier to integrate with other aircraft, ships and ground vehicles.

Most UAV programs today "need robust concepts of operations, doctrines, strategies and tactics," said Dyke D. Weatherington, an acquisition official who oversees UAV programs at the office of the defense secretary.

"OSD sees a lot of work remaining in the conops [concepts of operations]," he said at a conference of the Association of Unmanned Vehicle Systems.

"We cannot operate UAVs as an exception, managed as a segment of the airspace that nobody else operates in," Weatherington said.

Of specific concern are programs to develop unmanned bombers, called UCAVs. The Bush administration wants to see UCAVs in combat as early as a decade from now, but it is not yet dear how these vehicles will fir into the bigger picture of air operations, he noted. "We need to provide tools for those systems to be integrated into the air space. ... There is additional work to do in exploring opportunities with UCAVs."

Unproven technologies such as UCAVs, said Weatherington, should be developed in a "sensible, deliberate and structured manner so we don't flood the war fighter with capability he doesn't understand how to use or can't integrate into his current force structure.

Each UAV, for example, has different communications systems. That must change, said Weatherington. "It's unreasonable to assume that we will build dedicated communications systems for each UAV system. We need a high degree of commonality and integration."

The integration of UAVs into a common architecture, he said, is "one of the largest issues we have to wrestle with. ... We cannot operate these as single platforms that are out there doing their own thing," he stressed. "It is an absolute necessity to integrate UCAVs with the larger class of unmanned systems, with manned and space systems.

Another vexing matter is the upward spiraling costs of UAVs. "One of our top goals is to develop better tools and procedures to...