The U.S. military has sent so many of its 6,500 UAVs to the Middle
East that other operating theaters are going without, says Marine Corps
Brig. Gen. Glenn Walters, deputy director for resources and acquisition
for the Pentagon’s Joint Staff.
[airforcetimers.com] Walters said Pacific Command,
Southern Command and Africa Command have requested more UAVs, but are
being forced to wait until demand is met in the Central Command.
Drones
are used from Yemen to Pakistan, but most of the demand is related to
the surge of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, he said April 28 at an
Institute for Defense and Government Advancement conference in northern
Virginia.
It will likely be a year before U.S. planners have a
better handle on how many UAVs will be needed there and how many can be
spared for use outside of the Middle East, he said.
Eventually,
those other regional commands will have to learn the ins and outs of
employing UAVs, perhaps bringing in units that have practical
experience with them, Walters said. He said Southern Command, which
operates in Latin America, has a serious need for the aircraft but has
very limited practical experience with them, while the situation is
slightly better in Pacific Command.
Walters said the military,
whose UAV fleet has grown from about 200 in 2001, needs to figure out
what to do with them as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan wind down.
By
2012, he said, “We’ll have 8,000 UAVs that will have to fit into” the
Defense Department’s global maintenance and basing structure.
In
the U.S., he said, the Army and Federal Aviation Administration are
trying to figure out how to allow the pilotless aircraft to operate in
civil airspace. Many of the UAVs will be based far away from the
slivers of airspace where they are currently allowed to fly.
Walters
said the two groups agree that UAVs need reliable onboard systems to
sense and avoid nearby aircraft and to automatically return home if
they lose connection to ground control stations.
Source: http://www.airforcetimes.com/news/2010/05/defense_uavs_centcom_050110/
