April 25, 2015
Pentagon leaders often speak of the need for disruptive technologies in the Fleet to mitigate the risks of shrinking defense budgets, declining U.S. military technological superiority and improving adversary capabilities. Last week, a remarkable example of disruptive innovation occurred. How did the Navy react? It simply reaffirmed its unimaginative plan to send its carrier-launched drone to the boneyard—and potentially sentence the aircraft carrier to a similar fate.
The Navy’s test carrier drone, the X-47B UCAS-D (Unmanned Combat Air System Demonstrator), recently participated in the first-ever fully autonomous aerial refueling at Naval Air Station Patuxent River. Though the implications of this engineering feat are wide-ranging and not wholly known at this point, successful demonstration of unmanned aerial refueling does shed light on several ongoing arguments about the future of U.S. military aviation.
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