U.S. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVS) and Network Centric Warfare (NCW) impacts on combat aviation tactics from Gulf War I through 2007 Iraq

Unmanned, aerial vehicles (UAVs) are an increasingly important element of many modern militaries. Their success on battlefields in Afghanistan, Iraq, and around the globe has driven demand for a variety of types of unmanned vehicles. Their proven value consists in low risk and low cost, and their capabilities include persistent surveillance, tactical and combat reconnaissance, resilience, and dynamic re-tasking. This research evaluates past, current, and possible future operating environments for several UAV platforms to survey the changing dynamics of combat-aviation tactics and make recommendations regarding UAV employment scenarios to the Turkish military. While UAVs have already established their importance in military operations, ongoing evaluations of UAV operating environments, capabilities, technologies, concepts, and organizational issues inform the development of future systems. To what extent will UAV capabilities increasingly define tomorrow's missions, requirements, and results in surveillance and combat tactics? Integrating UAVs and concepts of operations (CONOPS) on future battlefields is an emergent science. Managing a transition from manned- to unmanned and remotely piloted aviation platforms involves new technological complexity and new aviation personnel roles, especially for combat pilots. Managing a UAV military transformation involves cultural change, which can be measured in decades.http://archive.org/details/usunmannedaerial109454211Turkish Air Force authors.Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited

Post-Westgate SWAT : C4ISTAR Architectural Framework for Autonomous Network Integrated Multifaceted Warfighting Solutions Version 1.0 : A Peer-Reviewed Monograph

Police SWAT teams and Military Special Forces face mounting pressure and challenges from adversaries that can only be resolved by way of ever more sophisticated inputs into tactical operations. Lethal Autonomy provides constrained military/security forces with a viable option, but only if implementation has got proper empirically supported foundations. Autonomous weapon systems can be designed and developed to conduct ground, air and naval operations. This monograph offers some insights into the challenges of developing legal, reliable and ethical forms of autonomous weapons, that address the gap between Police or Law Enforcement and Military operations that is growing exponentially small. National adversaries are today in many instances hybrid threats, that manifest criminal and military traits, these often require deployment of hybrid-capability autonomous weapons imbued with the capability to taken on both Military and/or Security objectives. The Westgate Terrorist Attack of 21st September 2013 in the Westlands suburb of Nairobi, Kenya is a very clear manifestation of the hybrid combat scenario that required military response and police investigations against a fighting cell of the Somalia based globally networked Al Shabaab terrorist group.Comment: 52 pages, 6 Figures, over 40 references, reviewed by a reade

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Domain: Areas of Research

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) domain has seen rapid developments in recent years. As the number of UAVs increases and as the missions involving UAVs vary, new research issues surface. An overview of the existing research areas in the UAV domain has been presented including the nature of the work categorised under different groups. These research areas are divided into two main streams: Technological and operational research areas. The research areas in technology are divided into onboard and ground technologies. The research areas in operations are divided into organization level, brigade level, user level, standards and certifications, regulations and legal, moral, and ethical issues. This overview is intended to serve as a starting point for fellow researchers new to the domain, to help researchers in positioning their research, identifying related research areas, and focusing on the right issues.Defence Science Journal, Vol. 65, No. 4, July 2015, pp. 319-329, DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14429/dsj.65.863

System Architecture of Small Unmanned Aerial System for Flight beyond Visual Line-Of-Sight

Small Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) have increasingly been used in military application. The application in expanding scope of operations has pushed existing small UAS beyond its designed capabilities. This resulted in frequent modifications or new designs. A common requirement in modification or new design of small UAS is to operate beyond visual Line-Of-Sight (LOS) of the ground pilot. Conventional military development for small UAS adopts a design and built approach. Modification of small Remote Control (RC) aircraft, using Commercial-Off-The Shelf (COTS) equipment, offers a more economical alternative with the prospect of shorter development time compared to conventional approach. This research seeks to establish and demonstrate an architecture framework and design a prototype small UAS for operation beyond visual LOS. The aim is to achieve an effective and reliable development approach that is relevant to the military’s evolving requirements for small UASs. Key elements of the architecture include Failure Mode Effect and Criticality Analysis (FMECA), fail safe design for loss of control or communication, power management, interface definition, and configuration control to support varying onboard payloads. Flight test was conducted which successfully demonstrated a control handoff between local and remote Ground Station (GS) for beyond visual LOS operation