Army Maneuver Officials Want to Buy Ammo Resupply Drones and Give them to BCTs
Jeff LPH 3 sends in this cool story.
Army maneuver officials are testing quadcopter drones capable of carrying ammunition, water and other supplies into battle, a “promising” concept that could eliminate the danger of resupplying infantry units in the middle of a gunfight.
“Normally, you would bring the supplies up once you reach some sort of termination, reorganization and consolidation in the fight,” Ed Davis, director of the Maneuver Battle Lab at Fort Benning, Georgia, told Military.com. “What this does is allow you to bring emergency supplies forward while you are still in the fight because it’s unmanned.”
The battle lab kicked off Army Expeditionary Warrior Experiment (AEWE) 2021, during which it plans to refine tactical resupply using improved variants of commercial drones that participated in last year’s experiment, he said.
“We started out doing blood resupply … but we didn’t realize that the birds had the lift capacity they did, so we expanded out the tactical resupply and said, ‘Well, this has promise,'” Davis explained. “One of these that we worked with can bring about 80 to 150 pounds of emergency resupply forward.”
Last year, Benning officials tested the quadcopters in 49 tactical resupply missions.
“We started throwing ammunition on there, we started throwing on batteries, we started throwing a little bit of water on there and some other things just to test the concept,” Davis said. “So, if you had four of these quadcopters, they could carry what we call a speedball, which is an emergency resupply for a platoon.”
The current AEWE began in late October and will consist of soldiers conducting live-fire and force-on-force experiments on more than 50 new technologies. It is scheduled to run until March 2021.
Early next year, soldiers will use the tactical resupply drones during force-on-force events, after the battle lab began recommending that the Army evaluate the concept further following, last year’s AEWE, Davis said.
“The recommendation coming out of the Maneuver Center of Excellence here after that was ‘Hey look, this is a good concept. The technology is kind of in the sweet spot; we recommend that the Army purchase or procure a few of these and give them to an IBCT because an infantry brigade combat team is probably most likely to benefit from it,'” he said.
The current drone technology being tested is capable of flying autonomously to a set location, dropping a load of supplies and returning, Davis said, adding that it is far more dangerous to send trucks or UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters to resupply units in the middle of a fight.
“Convoys are typically ambushed trying to get the stuff forward, so it’s much more secure when we bring emergency supplies forward when they are in the fight,” he said. “Normally, you are thinking about a helicopter, two pilots and a crew chief, so this mitigates having to do that, and we can actually push the supplies forward because it’s not manned. And you can actually drop it right in the back of where the soldiers are fighting. If you lose one, it’s not that catastrophic.”
In April, battle lab officials briefed the recommendation to XVIII Airborne Corps commander Lt. Gen. Michael “Erik” Kurilla, who was supportive of the concept, Davis said.
“In the interim, in this AEWE coming up in February and March, we will have those birds and we will probably have some more advanced birds, and we are going to advance the concept in this AEWE to include the XVIII Corps bringing people down to take a look at it so we can further the concept’s tactics, techniques and procedures,” he added.
“We think that has great potential … but we don’t know how many you would need, what would be the optimal size, you also have to look at manpower requirements, training requirements and all that, so the only way we can really do a good job of that is to get it out into an IBCT,” Davis explained.
The Army is working on other unmanned resupply options. The service hopes to start fielding the first of 624 Small Multipurpose Equipment Transports (S-MET) — an unmanned mule capable of carrying 1,000 pounds of equipment for more than 60 miles — in the second quarter of fiscal 2021 as a way of reducing the individual load soldiers have to carry into the fight.
Using S-METs and possibly drones for future tactical resupply gives a commander “the ability to really look at the load, being that you can bring part of your supplies forward on short notice,” Davis said.
“The soldier might not have to carry it in the future; it could come off of a S-MET … so we are looking at a lot of those kinds of things too — how to best use equipment without making our soldiers be donkeys,” he said.
We’re truly living in the world of tomorrow.
Source; Military.com
Category: Army, Guest Link
Easy target in the “RF” battlefield.
In fact, easier than skeet.
Waste of money. Except for those who are involed
with military R&D an investment. Ike was right.
Dunno, compared with a chopper they would be much harder to hit and no worries about crew. Makes sense to me.
“choppers” don’t fly by WiFi.
Anything radio controlled can be jammed.
And it ain’t hard to do. WiFi is even easier to deny.
Ask my neighbors….
Okay, we’ll knock off the WIFI jamming by going old school to control the UAV:
6145-910-8847 One mile of WF-16 on a DR-5./s
How much does a mile of commo wire weigh?
62lbs, so solid plan. Or just use freq hopping. That can be jammed too but not without taking down their own coms as well. Not worth it likely for an ammo truck.
With directed RF and enough radiated wattage, the receiver gets swamped. Ask anyone south of Davis-Monthan what a TROPO site does to satellite tv. Oops.
So we’ve eaten up 62 pounds of available payload for the commo wire. To replace the existing receiver with one capable of frequency hopping and the battery power to run that receiver as well as the resto of the drone eats up how much more available payload. We’re starting to reach diminishing returns.
One of the problems with horse drawn/and mule drawn transport in WWI and WWII was you had to pack fodder and water for the animals that took away from payload.
Petroleum based fuels pack more energy per unit volume so are more efficient.
FH is no longer resource intensive. A Bluetooth that only weighs a couple of grams uses the same technology.
While petro fuels are more energy dense the conversion of the energy to useful work is many times more efficient in an electric motor. You also have resourcing and resupplying the motor as well.
Bluetooth utilizes frequency-hopping spread spectrum technology to avoid interference problems. The ISM 2.4 GHz band is 2400 to 2483.5 MHz, and Bluetooth uses 79 radio frequency channels in this band, starting at 2402 MHz and continuing every 1 MHz. It is these frequency channels that Bluetooth technology is “hopping” over. The signal switches carrier channels rapidly, at a rate of 1600 hops per second, over a determined pattern of channels. There are six defined types of hopping sequences.
While Bluetooth is intended to be a safe protocol for wireless transfer of data, and is often touted for its security, it does have its flaws. It is beyond the scope of this article to delve into the numerous vulnerabilities of a system like Bluetooth, but it suffices to say that Bluetooth devices are susceptible to a number of attacks, including eavesdropping, man-in-the-middle, and denial of service attacks. The National Institute of Standards and Technology has published a Guide to Bluetooth Security detailing the vulnerabilities of Bluetooth and recommendations for dealing with them
K. Scarfone J. and Padgette, “Guide to Bluetooth Security,” U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology, NIST SP-800-121, September 2008.
62 pounds
Oh, and WF-16 is ribbed for your pleasure./s
You could tow a truck with that stuff.
How long until the first troop gets lift from one?
https://www.flightglobal.com/fixed-wing/us-army-looks-for-autonomous-medevac-vehicles-including-uavs/135489.article
It appears they’ve been looking for a while.
Unmanned (is that sexist?) Air Medevac Vehicles?
Won’t that put Maggie and Jan Spann out of a job?/s
Jan Spann would crawl over broken glass to save herself.
Yes, this would make helo medevac female Army nurses non-existent, like they already have been for the past 80 years.
Even the series “China Beach” did not go there.
The battle field is truly inclusive. Everyone is a man. The women are men. The children are men. And of course, the men are men.
Hell, even the donkey’s and goats are men. (insert donkey/goat joke here)
“(insert donkey/goat joke here)”
A donkey, a goat and Jan Spann walk into a bar….
Why the long face?
I don’t know who jan spann is, but that was funny.🤣
80 to 150 lbs. More than enough for a machinegun or two. Maybe a couple of rockets. So now the resupply drones will need an escort to protect them from the enemy fighter drones which will also be strafing our troops. And some way to tell friendly drones from enemy drones. And some sort of man-portable anti-drone weapon. And pilots for every drone. And maybe some sort of command & control, because the airspace over a platoon or company is pretty small.
This could get complicated. Looks like history may be repeating itself on a smaller scale. I wonder what the drone equivalent of a B-52 airstrike (ARCLIGHT) would look like.
Enemy fighter drones or some kid with a sling shot.
12gage, full choke, and #4 birdshot of tungsten/iron. Maybe #4 buck
Directed RF pulse.
HK drones to kill the freighters.
RF-seeking drones to find and kill the drone operators.
Large RPVs with a bunch of rf-seeker “HAARM” type weapons.
Bigger shotguns.
Anti-drone 40mm seeker rounds
Drone freighters as deceptions.
Grunts using drones to put grenades or other gifts in enemy hides and bunkers. Heh
Cannon fired nets over the battlefield.
Capture everything and everybody. Less lethal.
Peace.
A-HEEM!! You call? Y’all know all of this talk about Army Nurses, China Beach, “ribbed for your pleasure”, and nets has got a picture of Dana Delany in fishnets burned into my brain. Apologies to the Lionesses of TAH. For those that are asking “What are we going to do with you?”, I can make a list.
There was semi war novel I read a couple or 5 years back, think it was by our “Buddy” Ralph Peters, that touched on using swarms of drones on the modern battlefield. And, yep, it was set in the ME Theater. Part of the story line was a splinter group of Career Army Ossifers calling themselves MOBIC (Military Order Brothers In Christ) had taken over the running of this war, Higher be damned. They were on a mission from God…Literally. BTW, the drones didn’t do well in a nuke environment either.
And yep…what Ike said!
106 miles from Chicago, full tank of gas half a pack of cigarettes it’s dark and we’re wearing sunglasses. On mission from God.
Hit It!
And Katherine, Queen of the Gun Bunnies!
It used to work for Marlin Perkins.
Grandpa had an 8 gauge single shot bolt action J.C. Higgins goose gun. Had barrel that was easily 36”. Family legend has it that if a goose was close enough to be identified as a goose, you could hit it.
FlakKannon
Bet that would be just ducky for bagging drones.
Pilots for every drone?
Modern drones are flown by artificial intelligence. You no longer need a pilot for a drone.
So it’s a new way to get Rip-its and Porn to grunt and arty units?