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Aircraft-carriers take to the air
Read more on - Polity | Economy | Schemes | S&T | Environment
- Huge but vulnerable: The giant aircraft-carriers are actually nice targets. Like medieval castles in the age of the powerful cannon, technological advance threatens to make them redundant. Satellites and over-the-horizon radars mean pinpointing their locations is easier. And a single well-aimed, well-armed missile may be enough to render a carrier useless, even if one shot does not sink it outright.
- US and China: American naval planners are particularly worried about China’s DF-26. This weapon, which came into service in 2018, is a so-called manoeuvring ballistic missile (meaning it can vary its final approach path, rather than being subject solely to the laws of gravity) that has been dubbed a “carrier killer”. The DF-26 can be launched from a lorry, and can carry either a conventional or a nuclear warhead. This threat is fearsome enough to keep American carriers at least 1,600 km from China’s coast, much farther than the range of a carrier’s warplanes unless they can be refuelled in-flight. So, the US is now looking for a workaround. One idea is to turn a suitable plane into an aerial aircraft-carrier capable of launching and recovering uncrewed drones in flight.
- Castles in the sky: To that end DARPA, the US defence department’s advanced research projects agency, is running a programme called Gremlins, a name that also applies to the individual drones themselves.
- A Gremlin drone weighs 680kg and has a wingspan of nearly 3.5 metres. Once it has been dropped, deployed its wings and fired up its turbofan engine, it can fly to an area up to 500km away and in the words of Scott Wierzbanowski, the Gremlin programme’s head, “go in and create havoc”. That done, it would then return to its aerial mothership.
- Gremlins would operate in fleets, under ultimate human control. In this, they are similar to the “loyal wingman” idea of drone squadrons accompanying a crewed fighter aircraft into battle. Loyal wingmen, however, would take off from and land on terra firma, or possibly a conventional, naval, aircraft-carrier. Operational Gremlins need never touch the ground.
- Gremlins’ principal jobs would be intercepting communications, jamming signals and hunting for things to be destroyed, thus softening up the defences in contested airspace to make it safer for crewed aircraft. Such drones could also be armed with small missiles or explosives for a kamikaze attack. And they would both share data and co-operate among themselves, and pass reconnaissance and targeting information back to warships and aircraft able to fire bigger missiles than they could carry.
- Gremlin swarms would no doubt suffer losses. But drawing enemy fire would actually be an objective. This way, Gremlins would flush out the position of any hostile missile battery that switched on its targeting radar, marking it for subsequent destruction.
- Utility of Gremlins: In the calculus of combat, sacrificing a drone or two to knock out an enemy air-defence battery makes for a nice swap. Gremlins should therefore be thought of as “tradable” for systems of greater value. The better to fool the foe, military planners also envisage air-launched drones that mimic the radar and heat signatures of bigger fighter jets and bombers. This would be done by using shapes and materials that reflect rather than absorbing radar pings, and by leaving an engine’s heat signature unmasked. The illusion could be enhanced by flying drones at speeds and in patterns indicative of larger aircraft.
- Costing: To that end, costs must be kept low. The US defence department plans to pay less than $800,000 a unit for Gremlins, though that would be for an order of 1,000 of them. Each Gremlin will fly a maximum of about 20 missions. This means they can be made from less durable, and therefore cheaper materials and components. The aerial aircraft-carrier of choice for the Gremlin project is a modified C-130 cargo plane, which could carry up to four of the drones in bomb racks slung under its wings. When a Gremlin flies back to the mothership, the cargo ramp opens and the recovery system lowers a boom out of it. A successful capture shuts off the Gremlin’s engine. A winch then hoists the drone on board. This arrangement should be able to pull eight Gremlins an hour out of the air.
- Army in the game: The American army plans to use helicopters fitted with drone-launching pneumatic tubes as motherships. These drones, which, like Gremlins, unfold their wings after launch, have a wingspan of 2.5 metres. In a test six such drones launched in flight were recovered in the air, albeit not by the Black Hawk from which they had emanated. Rather, they were snared by a quadcopter drone dangling a cord that snagged hooks on the target drones’ wings. As with Gremlins and Sparrowhawks, the army’s push for what it calls “air-launched effects” is driven by America’s shift from counterinsurgency to potential war with a foreign power.
- Problems: Aerial aircraft-carriers of these sorts do have drawbacks. Snatching drones from midair eats up precious time. That and the manoeuvring required could make it easier for an enemy to shoot down a mothership. But drones that can be reused 20 times offer advantages, not least of cost, over expendable single-shot alternatives. Castle builders of yore solved the problems brought by cannons by redesigning fortresses to be low, thick-walled and protected by bastions. That worked well. Whether launching aircraft-carriers into the sky will be an equally successful response to technological advance remains to be seen.
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