NASHVILLE, Tenn. − The U.S. Army is close to establishing a set of requirements for purpose-built expendable drones it will buy in the future, according to the service‘s project manager for unmanned aircraft systems.
The service recently released a market survey looking for what it’s calling Purpose-Built, Attritable Systems, or PBAS, and is headed into an Army Requirements Oversight Council review of the requirements sometime in June, Col. Danielle Medaglia said Wednesday at the Army Aviation Association of America’s annual conference.
The PM UAS within Program Executive Office Aviation is working with the Maneuver Center of Excellence to develop the requirements for PBAS, she noted.
While the initial focus for the program was the massively popular first-person view drones that were made battlefield famous in the war in Ukraine, the Army sees these attritable drones possessing a much wider range of capabilities and control mechanisms. They will be “a multifunctional capability,” said Col. Nick Ryan, the Army capability manager for UAS within the service‘s Capabilities Development and Integration Directorate.
“It can be FPV, it can be first-person view control, like wiggling the sticks like you see in Ukraine, or it could be more of like what the [Short-Range Reconnaissance] is where you just kind of control it a little easier, push a couple buttons, give it a couple waypoints and it goes off and flies by itself.”
The drones could also be tethered using something like fiber-optic cable, Ryan added, or they could be autonomous and a flight plan and mission preprogrammed.
“You have your target and I’m not going to talk to you anymore, go,” he said.
The Army also envisions the drones taking swarming formations and pairing with manned helicopters like the AH-64 Apache attack helicopter, Ryan noted.
Another option would be to use the drones for countering enemy drones.
“PBAS is the perfect thing that could that as an air-to-air autonomous dog fight. Just tell it, launch it and say, ‘Hey, go kill things in the air. Robot to robot,” Ryan said.
The call-to-industry for solutions published roughly two weeks ago generated over 60 responses from vendors.
The evaluation board for those proposals will begin its work this week, Medaglia said. The effort is funded from evaluating paper proposals to inviting select vendors to flight demonstrations.
The Army plans to award multiple vendors following those flight demonstrations, according to Medaglia. The service will look to companies who have the ability to quickly produce the systems.
“We need to scale,” she said. “We want to get it out quickly, learn, iterate. We are moving incredibly, incredibly quickly in this space. It’s funded. We have responses, and we‘re ready to roll.”
Jen Judson is an award-winning journalist covering land warfare for Defense News. She has also worked for Politico and Inside Defense. She holds a Master of Science degree in journalism from Boston University and a Bachelor of Arts degree from Kenyon College.
