The Air Force will buy seven more Global Hawks at US$35 million each over the next two years, then start buying six a year. That will supplement the current fleet of three Hawks, which were rushed out of development for Afghanistan. One was destroyed in a crash landing at the end of last year in what the Air Force will only describe as a mechanical failure. Global Hawk flights were suspended while the accident was investigated, but by the middle of this month the Hawk was redeployed.
Robotic planes have seen action before. In Vietnam, drone aircraft -- far cruder than today's models -- flew more than 3,000 missions. Most were on surveillance and reconnaissance, though a few were equipped to fire Maverick missiles. After Vietnam, military spending wound down, and the Air Force put its resources behind the then-new F-15 fighter. Development of robotic aircraft all but stopped at the Pentagon until the 1990s, when military planners began turning their attention to "networkcentric" warfare, the move to tie battlefield weapons, computers and communications systems into a seamless data web.
The same forces that swept through commercial technology in the 1990s were also transforming weaponry and military communications. Computers, bombs, sensors and UAVs became smaller, smarter, lighter and faster. Pilotless aircraft, loaded with computer intelligence and fast communication links, came to be regarded as essential, airborne nodes on the battlefield information network.
In fact, the major military contractors view such aircraft as just one piece of a big market in networkcentric warfare -- currently valued by Frost & Sullivan at US$11 billion annually.
Heinz, of Boeing, regards his new group as "a new business unit that would focus the various efforts we have going on all across Boeing" in networkcentric warfare. "We called ourselves unmanned systems, not unmanned air vehicles," he said. "It's mission management, it's integration with the surveillance and reconnaissance systems."
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