Northrop Grumman is working to improve the availability and flexibility of the RQ-4 Global Hawk to boost the high-altitude, long-endurance (HALE) unmanned aircraft’s usefulness in any future peer conflict.
Through increased autonomy and other changes, the company hopes to make the Global Hawk more usable and head off moves by the U.S. Air Force to divest the HALE UAV because it cannot operate in denied airspace.
“We are moving to the next phase of Global Hawk and trying to make it a lot more usable and a lot more user friendly, with a lot more different kinds of payloads,” says Scott Winship, vice president of advanced programs and aeronautics systems at Northrop Grumman Aerospace Systems.
Winship points to a report by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA) think tank that proposes a “deterrence by detection” operational concept to deter Chinese and Russian aggression. This uses a network of existing nonstealthy long-endurance unmanned aircraft to maintain persistent situational awareness in key geographic areas in the Western Pacific and Eastern Europe.
“I think deterrence by detection hits the point on the head that just because we have denied airspace doesn’t mean we’re done with permissive systems,” Winship says. “But there’s a big difference between a [MQ-9] Reaper permissive system and a Global Hawk permissive system,” he says, noting the RQ-4’s higher altitude and speed capability.
As it pivots to meet peer threats from China and Russia, the Air Force is proposing divesting its fleets of Block 20 and 30 Global Hawks while retaining the radar-equipped Block 40s. “I think we’re getting lumped in with the divestiture of a whole bunch of lower-end systems. I don’t really care about the small stuff. I care about big strategic systems. And this report by CSBA has produced a pretty good framework for how to use these systems going forward, even against peer competitors.”
In the deterrence by detection concept of operations proposed by CSBA, an intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) network of persistent systems, interoperable with allies, would deter both gray-zone aggression and a conventional attack by providing persistent real-time situational awareness.
“The part that is on us [as Northrop Grumman] is to make them more useful,” Winship says. “When you can tell a U-2 to go fly, a pilot starts walking to the cockpit. When you tell a Global Hawk to go, it could be a day before we get a route planned, into the system, approved and get going. It’s up to us to make that more autonomous and more robust and more available to the Air Force to meet that need.”
As the Air Force moves to develop a distributed, multidomain command-and-control (MDC2) network, Winship says he is working with the Global Hawk program on internal Northrop funding “to see how to use these things as communications nodes or GPS nodes, how to use them as a mesh network.
“Can we put laser comms on them? Can we do different kinds of ELINT/SIGINT [electronic and signals intelligence]? Can we make the Universal Payload Adapter [UPA] truly universal, so that you can swap payloads quickly and make it a real on-demand system?”
To improve usability, Northrop is looking at increasing autonomy by upgrading the Global Hawk with the company’s Distributed Autonomy/Responsive Control (DA/RC) battle management system. “The Block 40 airplane has a lot of autonomy, but it doesn’t have full autonomy like DA/RC would provide,” he says.
Increased autonomy would help with one of the biggest drags on the Global Hawk’s usability–weather. “If we are on the ground and there is a weather system on the lost-comms route that would put us into weather, we can’t go that day,” Winship said.
“So an automatic weather router–like DA/RC, which treats weather like a threat environment–that would do an automatic upload prior to flight to keep it out of the weather would increase our Global Hawk go rate on the order of 25%. That’s a big number,” he says.
By stripping out code, Northrop has been able to get the DA/RC software to fit in the Block 40’s existing mission management computer. “We have integrated DA/RC in our lab and made sure it’s compatible with the system. Once we have shown to our satisfaction that’s it’s a real capability and can be certified to Air Force standards, I think we want to go talk to the Air Force about putting it in the bird.”
The company is also looking at improving the Universal Payload Adapter, which has been used to enable the Block30 Global Hawk to fly with the U-2’s SYERS-2 electro-optical, MS-177 multispectral and optical bar camera payloads.
When it comes to making the entire Global Hawk fleet more valuable to the Air Force in a peer conflict, “I think you start by making the Block 40s more useful,” Winship says.
“The MP-RTIP [Multi-Platform Radar Technology Improvement Program] is an extremely powerful radar. And if you put the UPA on the Block 40, and make the Block 40s all they can be, then you might start to draw back some of those missions that were X’ed out for the 20s and 30s,” he says.
“I am not going to argue with the Air Force about what to cut or not. I’m going to make Global Hawk and [the U.S. Navy’s MQ-4C] Triton as usable as we possibly can that the demand signal stays,” he says. “That’s what we think is the secret to longevity.”
“If DA/RC is one piece–and I use that as a generic for putting it in a battle manager that automatically tasks the system–we are also trying to make it truly plug-and-play,” he says.
“We are trying to take some of our architectures, off the Firebird for example, and use those to upgrade the backbone of the Global Hawk in the future so that, no kidding, we can swap between payloads,” Winship says. “That’s not where we are today. I think it’s on Northrop to make that happen.”
Northrop has undertaken to provide Air Combat Command (ACC) with a list of actions that could be taken to improve the availability and usability of the Global Hawk. “Near term we want to get back to ACC and say here’s the things we can do to increase the usability or capacity or capability,” he says.
The Global Hawk program is pulling together a list of the main availability drivers with the goal of putting together an effort to address those issues. Among the top five drivers are weather avoidance, airspace integration and payload boot-up issues.
“If you fix those five things, we get 90% of the availability back,” Winship says. Northrop is also looking at the Triton, now in production for the U.S. Navy. “I want to find those twofers–fix it on Global Hawk and we fix it on Triton.”
The Global Hawk fleet still has a lot of airframe life remaining. “It is up to us to use all the things we are doing in MDC2 and DA/RC and integrate that,” Winship says. “Not just look forward to the next Global Hawk or draw a new airplane, but have all the older systems act like they’re new.”
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