The U.S. Air Force has confirmed it has come up with a new set of requirements as it continues to look for a successor to its hard-working MQ-9 Reaper fleet. In contrast to the Reaper, the replacement aircraft is likely to be more flexible in terms of mission spectrum. At the same time, the service wants to use new manufacturing technologies to ensure that it can be built at scale and at a lower price point than the MQ-9. This would allow it to be bought in larger numbers and risked more freely in contested environments.
All this reflects the continued high utility placed on the MQ-9 fleet, as well as its considerable loss rates sustained against mid-tier and lower-tier adversaries. It also points away from filling the MQ-9’s role with a far more exquisite, costly, but more survivable asset, which seemed to have been the direction the Air Force was heading, at least in part, for many years now. With this in mind, this new direction appears to accept that many losses will occur in future combat scenarios and embraces that reality to leverage quantity over quality for whatever eventually takes over from the MQ-9.
Testifying before a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing yesterday, Maj. Gen. Christopher Niemi, the acting head of Air Force Futures, said that a new requirements document for an MQ-9 replacement had been approved. Aviation Week was first to report the development.
The approval clears the path for the Air Force to begin a new acquisition process for an uncrewed aircraft system (UAS) that will assume the MQ-9’s role. A medium-altitude, long-endurance (MALE) system, the Reaper is primarily used for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) and strike missions.
Niemi told the Senate Armed Services Committee that improvements in technology since the MQ-9 was developed mean the service now considers it possible for a new drone to be “more flexible,” leaning upon open architectures.
At the same time, modern production methods mean the new drone will be easier and cheaper to produce “in mass numbers,” Niemi said. The result should be a drone that the Air Force can “use in a more attritable way.”
Interestingly, within the Air Force, there has in recent years been a shift away from the term attritable — meaning inexpensive enough to be willing to lose on high-risk missions while being capable enough to be relevant for those missions — to “affordable mass.” This is something TWZ previously highlighted was already happening back in 2021.
This change came about as a way of helping define the kinds of advanced drones that the Air Force is planning to acquire in the coming years, reflecting that their capabilities will necessarily come at a cost that will make them less than “attritable.”
Last month, the Air Force published a market survey notice, requesting information from industry on a new attritable ISR drone.
This notice included some key performance parameters for the drone, including a range of up to 932 miles and a 20-hour endurance. The attritable nature of the drone was reflected in a requirement for it to fly 100 missions with a “low-to-medium acquisition” cost.
The basic Reaper can fly for more than 20 hours unarmed, or more than 12 hours with weapons. In the case of the MQ-9B version, with an extended wingspan, flight endurance can be increased to more than 40 hours.
“Operators desire low-cost, fast-to-field, fast-to-deploy airborne ISR mass to increase mission flexibility and mission surging,” the market survey notice added.
The process of figuring out what to replace the Reaper with has been ongoing for many years now. However, the latest effort is noteworthy for its emphasis on a lower-cost, more attritable platform.
Back in 2020, the Air Force published a request for information for a program dubbed MQ-Next, also seeking an MQ-9 successor. This was focused on ISR and strike capabilities, but also stated a desire for reduced operating costs and greater persistence, survivability, and range.
By 2021, the Air Force was concentrating more on a family of systems — the so-called Next-Generation Multi-Role Unmanned Aerial System Family of Systems (Next-Gen Multi-Role UAS FoS) — including a growing emphasis on low-observable (stealth) technologies. The same year, the service said it was seeking a replacement for the MQ-9 that could possibly include defensive counter-air capabilities to protect high-value manned aircraft, such as tankers, as well as potentially fly red air aggressor missions. Fast forward to today, and it’s clear that these higher-performance air-to-air focused missions could be taken over, at least in part, by the current Collaborative Combat Aircraft program. As a result, whatever replaces the MQ-9 is unlikely to have such broad requirements.
The Next-Gen Multi-Role UAS FoS included scope for platforms that could be survivable and reusable, or ones that would be attritable or expendable. This was not a single platform solution, either. It would likely need to include a mix of systems.
The 2021 document also stipulated that the MQ-9’s successor should be tailored for Great Power Competition, pointing to a drone ecosystem suitable for the kinds of highly contested environments that would be encountered during a conflict with a peer rival such as China or Russia. At the same time, the solution was also intended to fly missions in more permissive environments, like the MQ-9.
Around this same time, the Air Force also said it wanted to leverage advances in development and manufacturing, meaning that smaller numbers of manned aircraft could be produced quickly to meet dynamically evolving threats. This reflected the Air Force’s “Digital Century Series” that was in vogue at that time, and which led to talk about “throwaway” technology and essentially “disposable” aircraft. Some of this appears to have made it into these new requirements, which stipulate that the aircraft needs to be able to fly just 100 missions.
Meanwhile, the latest statements from the service describe a drone with increased flexibility achieved through open architecture, rather than building bespoke batches of drones for particular requirements. Previous statements from the service outlined an aspiration to have its new drone capable of accommodating rapidly reconfigurable payloads, something that open architecture would expedite.
Above all else, the MQ-9 successor will still have to operate in contested environments.
In his testimony yesterday, Niemi presented a vision of a new drone, the design of which would stress being attritable, rather than survivable.
The Pentagon has long worked on the basis that a future conflict with a peer rival, and especially with China in the Pacific, would see it facing highly robust anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD) scenarios. With that in mind, previous Reaper replacement studies had suggested that low observability would need to be incorporated into the design.
The latest thinking seems to reject that, or at least reorient the program toward a lower-cost platform of the kind that the Air Force would be able to field in mass, as well as to absorb the anticipated attrition in a high-end conflict. This does not preclude this airframe from featuring low-observable elements. In fact, it most likely will. But those would be more aggressively balanced against cost.
Concerns over the MQ-9’s vulnerability to air defenses have been ongoing for years now, although usually the nuances of this issue are not portrayed accurately in the media. Regardless, many MQ-9s were lost over Yemen, against a bottom-tier force. The war with Iran earlier this year underlined both the great utility and vulnerabilities of the platform. At least 24 Air Force Reapers were destroyed during the war, but these aircraft were pushed deep into Iran, loitered there for hours on end, and did some of the most important air-to-ground strike and surveillance work during the air campaign. While the Air Force says it plans to “buy back” some of the losses from that conflict, that will come with a hefty price tag, something that the service will want to avoid with its next ISR/strike drone. Furthermore, production of the MQ-9A model has now ended in favor of the MQ-9B.
The assumption that the MQ-9 replacement will be acquired in significant numbers is also noteworthy in terms of the current Air Force Reaper fleet, which includes more than 130 MQ-9As, according to Aviation Week.
What appears to be missing at this stage, or at least obscured, is an acquisition strategy for the new drones. As well as the aerial platforms, the MQ-9 successor will require suitable new ground control systems, sensors, and data exploitation technologies, all of which are compatible with open-architecture standards. These systems will also have to leverage the latest technologies to allow the drones to be more effective and more survivable over the battlefield.
Since MQ-Next, the U.S. drone landscape has changed considerably in terms of manufacturers. A few years ago, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and General Atomics would have been seen as the front-runners for the MQ-9 replacement. Now, there are more contenders, often with a founding focus on rapidly scaling up production at low cost. Still, these firms have much to prove, especially considering the risk in replacing an aircraft as important as the MQ-9. At the same time, in the more advanced drone space, the legacy defense “prime” contractors are also making major progress in leveraging new technologies to reduce production costs and migrating away from exquisite, very expensive drones as their default offerings.
Back in 2021, the Air Force was promoting a “Speed to Ramp” initiative for its MQ-Next, which would see the first iterations of this capability fielded before “the 2026/2027 timeframe.” Other solutions under the same effort would begin to be fielded “in the 2030 timeframe,” the Air Force said.
While the latter timeline might still be somewhat achievable, it will require a considerable effort and investment and, not least, the firming up of the requirements for exactly what the Air Force wants its MQ-9 replacement to look like.
What we do know is that, while the Reaper’s replacement might not be as survivable as once envisioned, it will certainly be tailored to the increasingly harsh realities of a conflict against an advanced peer-state adversary.
Contact the author: thomas@thewarzone.com