Senior HASC Lawmaker Forbes Presses Navy On UCLASS Requirements

[unhappycamper]

http://breakingdefense.com/2014/02/senior-hasc-lawmaker-forbes-presses-navy-on-uclass-requirements/



Senior HASC Lawmaker Forbes Presses Navy On UCLASS Requirements
By Colin Clark
on February 18, 2014 at 2:30 PM

CAPITOL HILL: A member of Congress, Rep. Randy Forbes, is so concerned about a new Navy program and its future importance that he has written Navy Secretary Ray Mabus about the requirements of the service’s promising drone known as UCLASS. (Scroll down to read the full document).

This is the second time Forbes, chairman of the House Armed Services seappower and power projection force subcommittee, has expressed his views to the Navy on UCLASS. We broke the story last time, when he and his ranking member, Mike McIntyre, wrote Mabus last September urging the Navy to buy a stealthy drone able to carry a large weapons payload.

We understand some on Capitol Hill would like UCLASS to incorporate so-called broadband stealth, which permits a plane to penetrate very high-frequency radars such as those China and Russia are developing. While BAE Systems is not expected to be a UCLASS competitor, their new Taranis drone may be designed for broadband stealth (tip of hat to my colleague Bill Sweetman at Aviation Week).

The X-47B drone scoots off the back end of the USS BUSH flight deck and back into the sky after its first “touch and go.”


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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UCLASS

Unmanned Carrier-Launched Surveillance and Strike program

The United States Navy Unmanned Carrier-Launched Surveillance and Strike (UCLASS) program is to develop an aircraft carrier-based unmanned aerial vehicle to provide an unmanned intelligence and strike asset to the fleet. The UCLASS will be "an autonomous aircraft capable of precision strike in a contested environment, and it is expected to grow and expand its missions so that it is capable of extended range intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, electronic warfare, tanking, and maritime domain awareness".[1]

Competitors

The UCLASS program currently has several competing designs and design bases:[2]

Northrop Grumman is offering a design based off their X-47B demonstrator
Lockheed Martin is offering the Lockheed Sea Ghost
Boeing is offering a design that may be based off the Phantom Ray
General Atomics is offering the Sea Avenger, a naval version of their original land-based Avenger.


The main competitors for the UCLASS contract are expected to be Boeing, General Atomics, Lockheed Martin (pictured at top) and Northrop Grumman, the builder of the UCLASS precursor, the X-47B.

[MADem]

1. Damn--that video is pretty remarkable when you think back over the arc of recent history.

I can remember back in the seventies, when the Navy working with the APL at Hopkins was about the only service doing anything noticeable on the "drone" front. They had a little half-assed operation out in Bainbridge or somewhere in MD and they were doing early work (they actually started way earlier, but that's when it first hit my radar that they were doing this sort of thing...USAF were mocking them for it, too, as I recall!).

I wonder if any of those folks ever thought they'd see this kind of thing...it's kind of like going from the Stanley Steamer to the Tesla in terms of tech.