Unmanned and Intelligent

Col Mandeep Singh (Retd)

The advent of jet aircraft in the mid-1940s made the already skewed playing field between air and air defence a bit more asymmetrical, in favour of the jet. One option to counter jet fighters was to use jet aircraft to fight them but this was a costly proposition and not all countries could afford to have them in the required numbers. The other option was to develop a ground-based system that could neutralise the jet advantage; thus, the development of surface-to-air missiles (SAM).

In its early years, the SAM challenged the manned aircraft effectively and threatened to neutralise jet aircraft’s supremacy over the air space. In Vietnam alone, the United States lost more than 200 aircraft to SAMs. There was an urgent need to find a counter to the SAM with the United States Air Force (USAF) resorting to ‘Wild Weasel’ tactics, using a pair of manned aircraft armed with Anti-Radiation Missiles (ARM) to take out hostile radars and SAM sites. This ran the risk of loss of human lives when one of the aircraft ‘flashed’ the radar. Though more advanced ARM, like the British ALARM, were fielded with an added loiter capability, they were still limited by the time the missile could loiter (stay in the target area). In loiter mode, ALARM will, when launched, climb to an altitude of 13,000 metres. If the target radar shut down, the missile deployed a parachute and descended slowly until the radar lit up again, and then targeted the radar. The need was to stay longer in the air, to hunt the enemy radar and SAM sites without running the risk of loss of human lives.

In 1973, the United States Defence Advanced Research Agency (DARPA) began working on developing cheap, small drones to attack enemy air defences. The project, called Axillary, aimed at deploying fleets of low-cost, explosive-carrying drones that would loiter above an area to home on to, and destroy any emitting radar. The project had its roots in a Pentagon-backed project at the CIA though it incorporated a US Air Force (USAF) programme as well. Axillary was conceived as a fully autonomous system with no human control once the drones were launched. As the then USAF director of Reconnaissance and Electronic Warfare explained, “We don’t want a man in the loop. We want to let it go, find a radar, and hit it and never come back. We don’t want the manpower, the logistics, to bring it back. It’s a one-way mission.”

In his book Army of None, Paul Scharre writes that the project was shelved because of budgetary constraints and a shift to more complex anti-radar systems. There were other attempts as well to develop loitering munitions including the Tomahawk Anti-Ship Missile (TASM). It was launched over the horizon at possible locations of Soviet ships, then flew a search pattern over a wide area looking for their radar signatures. If it found a Soviet ship, TASM would attack it. TASM was briefly fielded by the US Navy as the first operational fully autonomous weapon but was taken out of service in the Nineties, writes Paul Scharre in Army of None.

A concurrent programme to develop a persistent anti-radiation missile resulted in Tacit Rainbow and the system was extensively tested but never fielded. Meanwhile the Israelis, after the bitter experience of the Yom Kippur War and the SAM threat posed by the introduction of newer Soviet systems in the region, were looking at a suitable weapon system to counter the newer and more potent SAMs. The result was the Harpy system that was deployed by the late Eighties. it was to be the first loitering munition to be used in combat. Since then, the loitering munitions have rapidly proliferated, especially in the last five years. In 2017, there were less than 10 sta