In the near term, the U.S. Army plans to invest in soldier-borne sensors, leader-follower cargo-hauling technology and tiny, hand-held unmanned aircraft, said Maj. Gen. Robert M. “Bo” Dyess, deputy director of the Army Capability Integration Center.

Kicking off Ground Day at AUVSI’s Unmanned Systems Defense, Dyess told the crowd that the best way for industry to get into the military production pipeline is to build something that soldiers demand.

In recent demonstrations, soldiers took to small, backpackable UAS that would let them see over the next hill or fence.

“If you really want to roll in on this thing, you’ve got to develop something that the soldiers are going to say … hey, sir, we really need to get that thing … if we had to buy something right now, that’s it.”

The Army is also moving forward, literally, with other ground systems as well, including eventually an unmanned combat vehicle, fully autonomous convoy operations and swarming unmanned aircraft.

These systems are going to need to be at least partly autonomous because they will be going up against not only ISIS-style groups but also near-peer combatants, and doing so in areas of a contested electromagnetic spectrum, Dyess aid.

“We need to look at a multi-domain battlefield, the Army, and the Marines, once they get ashore … how do ground forces project power into the other domains, of maritime, and space, and cyberspace,” Dyess said.

Swarming, Please

Shad Reese, TWS UxS coordinator for the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense, said the Department of Defense is working on the latest unmanned systems roadmap, which should be published in the first quarter of 2017.

The roadmap has been underway since late February, with writing starting in March. It covers the period from 2016-2041, as anything beyond that is “pure guessing.”

Reese said that one thing has struck him as he’s worked on the roadmap: Many in the military are talking about the need for swarming, but there isn’t much of an industry base for it.

“Everyone and their mom is talking about swarming, but if you step back and look at what’s going on in industry, there are no real players in industry working on swarming,” he said.

Instead, much of the work is shoulder by academia, but “we would like to have commercially available swarming technology.”

He also noted that overall spending on unmanned systems from fiscal 2016 to the president’s fiscal 2017 budget declined $1.2 billion to $4.6 billion, but said that is due to some programs winding down and others, particularly for large UAS, having completed their purchases.

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