Kelsey D. Atherton
After years of service, the Army is ready to replace its Shadow, and will not let the pandemic get in its way. On April 7, the Army had soldiers remotely pilot an Arcturus drone for the first time. The Arcturus is one of several candidates to replace the RQ-7 Shadow, and the program itself tells us a lot about how the Army’s thinking on drones has evolved.
The RQ-7 Shadow is an old drone, an inelegant weapon from a less sophisticated age. Developed in the 1990s and introduced early in what would become the decades-spanning War on Terror, the Shadow functioned as a nimble, capable scout for an army on the move.
Nearly 20 years later, the Army is testing Shadow replacements, putting years of lessons learned into an acquisition program designed to meet the needs of the wars the Army actually fights.
When it was first designed, the Shadow offered a lot of function in a relatively small package. The drone could be carried by trucks, launch and take off from small fields, and fly for hours, letting soldiers see not just beyond the next hill, but down stretches of highway leading to the next hill.
With special rail-launches and skyhook-arrests, trucks with a little bit of extra gear could even put Shadows into the sky without the need for runways.
The Shadow’s primary purpose is as a scout and surveillance platform, sometimes using laser designators to paint targets for other aircraft. The Army and Marine Corps both tested weapons for the Shadow, and Shadow maker Textron TXT advertises the drone as “tested with precision guided weapon,” that’s been a far more theoretical than practical application for the drone.
The Shadow replacement program is formally known as the Future Tactical Unmanned Aircraft System (FTUAS). It fits into a larger drone fleet modernization program, aimed at letting the Army do what it does best, better: find an enemy, and then bring overwhelming force to bear before that enemy can attempt to make the battle a fair fight.
The drones explored for the FTUAS program are all trying to match the Shadow’s strengths, like long endurance scouting flights, without the need for all that extra equipment, like launching rails or skyhooks. The Arcturus, tested on April 7, features two pylons that run parallel to its fuselage, each with a pair of rotors for vertical lift. That lets the drone take off and land like a quadcopter, then convert to pusher-propeller thrust and fixed wing lift in flight.
Another big change for the Shadow-replacement drones is they are all aiming to be much quieter than the roaring engines of the RQ-7.
"We're used to screaming at each other and having to use radios in order to communicate," Spc. Christopher McCoy, a crew chief assigned to 1st Engineer Battalion, 1st ABCT, told Defense News. "You can stand right next to this aircraft and not even raise your voice.”
While a quieter scout is almost always better than a loud one, that’s especially true in irregular warfare, and in an age of cheap acoustic sensors. If the Shadow roared ahead of the tanks and humvees of an invading army, the noise at worst gave a modest advance notice of impending peril. For Army patrols operating in-country, whose primary threat is not opposing tank formations but instead irregular infantry operating among civilian populations, loud scouts undermine much of the benefit from scouting.
Another big push in the FTUAS program is to reduce not just the noise, but the visual and the electronic signals emanating from the drone. The harder it is for enemies, insurgents or otherwise, to detect and identify the drone, the longer the drone can operate unimpeded.
Finally, the Army is looking for more than just scouting the enemy. Under the buzzword of “Lethality,” the FTUAS program calls for drones that offer “a broad range of sensors and cross-domain fires that increase the speed of detecting, acquiring, identifying, and prioritizing targets to suppress, neutralize, and destroy enemy forces.”
“Cross-domain fires” is a weird, jargony phrase. It includes everything from jamming radar and radios to launching some form of cyber-attack on enemy electronics, to spoofing or jamming GPS, to “kinetic engagement,” or the Pentagon’s preferred euphemism for firing missiles and bullets and bombs against people or vehicles.
This month's tests of the Arcturus are but one part of a year-long program designed to evaluate several drones for the Army. At the end of 2020, the Army wants a strong candidate, built for the wars of the present and the future.
And maybe, just maybe, by Groundhog’s Day 2021, the Army will see its Shadow replacement.
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