The Army and the Air Force each have their own football field-sized surveillance airship in the works:
Here’s why. Surveillance drones like the Predator and the Reaper are starting to lose just a bit of their sheen in military circles, even though their number of “orbits,” or combat air patrols, has more than quadrupled in the last five years. Giant spy blimps are the new hotness. They can stay in the air for much longer than any drone. Instead of a Predator’s single camera, the blimps can carry a whole bunch of surveillance equipment, because they’re so freakin’ huge. Any one of those sensors could spy on an entire town at once. There’s even enough space on board the airship to process all that data in the sky, easing the burden on overloaded intelligence analysts.
A sign of the spy blimp’s rising stock: Retired Lt. Gen. David Deptula — who, until recently, was in charge of all Air Force intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) programs — is now the CEO of MAV6, a Vicksburg, Mississippi, startup building one of these next-gen airships for the military.
It’s part of a project called “Blue Devil.” The behemoth, 340-foot-long blimp and all of its spy gear should be ready for Air Force duty by January, Deptula promises. And if Blue Devil works as promised — staying four miles above Afghanistan for five days at a time — drones could suddenly seems like an expensive anachronism.
“It brings to bear a completely different concept for ISR: multiple sensors on one platform integrated with on-board processing and storage. It’s the first time we’re using a modular system on an aircraft to host a variety of sensors, and they can be rapidly changed for new or different sensors in a matter of hours,” Deptula tells Danger Room. “We’ve got the world’s largest ISR payload — and ‘real estate’ to host it, and nearly a supercomputer on board to process what they find.”
The Pentagon is planning to spend $4.5 billion to mount 15 more drone air patrols. The costs of operating, maintaining and processing the information from the roboplanes runs about $8,000 per hour. Deptula claims Blue Devil would run $1,000 per hour, because it requires fewer people (although that’s just an educated guess; the thing hasn’t flown yet). “A handful of Blue Devil orbits could achieve significantly greater ISR effectiveness for a fraction of that cost and save billions,” he insists. For now, the Air Force is spending $211 million on one of Deptula’s blimps.
The Senate Armed Service Committee digs the idea. “There are many platforms and systems that advertise ‘multisensor integration,’ but almost always the different sensors … cannot view the same piece of terrain at the same time,” the committee notes in its recent report on next year’s Pentagon budget. “Blue Devil is different: this QRC [quick reaction capability] is designed to give ground forces a new capability to detect, locate, identify, and track targets seamlessly, building on concepts and practices pioneered by special forces to tightly integrate sensors and pursuit operations.”
Giant asterisk being that you need a permissive (meaning enemy aircraft-free) airspace. But that’s true of most of the current models of drone airplanes as well.
I think it’s fair to expect complete air superiority in a counterinsurgency — and losing a few recon airships at the start of an enemy air attack isn’t the worst thing in the world.