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The newly revealed XQ-58 Valkyrie drone is the future of American air power. Here’s why … [a THREAD] 👇thedrive.com/the-war-zone/2…
The Air Force used to have a lot of planes. A *lot*. As this great @MitchellStudies report shows, the numbers have declined markedly over time. docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/a2dd91_5dd…
The standard narrative is that this is because of budget pressures – from BCA, the wars, etc. There’s some truth to this but it misses the bigger picture, because even in times of budget growth the Air Force inventory has gone down.
From 2001-2008, the Air Force’s base (non-war) budget rose by 22%. The number of combat-coded aircraft *decreased* by nearly 20%. 
So in lean times, sure, budget pressures have exacerbated these problems, but there are underlying structural issues driving down aircraft inventory even in when the budget is flush. Bottom line: more money won’t solve this problem, only delay it.
What’s killing the Air Force? Rising per-unit cost. This graph is from 2014 and the F-35’s cost has come down since then, but you can see the trend. It’s a harsh exponential curve.
(And here’s aircraft per-unit cost over time in a log plot, if you’re into that thing…)
Norm Augustine noted this trend in rising per-unit costs back in 1984 as one of Augustine’s Laws. He humorously noted, “In the year 2054, the entire defense budget will purchase just one tactical aircraft. ..."
"... This aircraft will have to be shared by the Air Force and Navy 31⁄2 days each per week except for leap year, when it will be made available to the Marines for the extra day.”
The problem is: (1) it’s three decades later and we haven’t really fixed this problem; and (2) these budget pressures start to be a concern long before you get to one aircraft. They’re a real problem now.
The biggest problem these per-unit costs have had for the Air Force is drive it to an almost-monoculture. The Air Force didn’t just used to be bigger. It used to be more diverse. (Thanks again to @MitchellStudies for this amazing graph!)
There are cost savings benefits to a more homogenous fleet, to be sure: Fewer programs, so less money spent on R&D. Also lower per unit costs, since you’re buying more a/c at the tail end of production when the marginal cost is lowest. Plus more commonality in maintenance.
But the penalty for a homogenous fleet is enormous. It's a massive operational risk. We’re entering an era where American airpower (which, let’s face it, is the American way of war) will hinge almost entirely on a single program, the F-35. That’s a lot of eggs in one basket.
If there’s a problem with the F-35 (oxygen failure, cyber breach, etc.) that takes an enormous amount of American firepower out of the fight. That’s an unacceptable risk, and the U.S. should never put itself in that kind of position of vulnerability.
But the desire for a multi-mission do-it-all aircraft drove us there.
And the U.S. was sort of forced into that position because aircraft costs have become so eye-poppingly insane that it was the only way to afford 5th Gen aircraft.
Back in the 1960s during the F-100 series the U.S. had *nine* different combat aircraft in operation. Having nine different 5th gen aircraft programs would be totally unaffordable.
Today, however, the Air Force is caught in a death spiral of rising program costs, leading to fewer aircraft, leading to a desire for more efficiency and multi-mission aircraft that can do it all, which further drives up complexity and unit cost.
A diverse fleet is hands down better because it is not only more operationally resilient, but because then aircraft can specialize at missions and be built simpler (and cheaper). But it’s hard to break out of this cycle.
And to make matters worse, adversaries have invested in ballistic missiles that can target U.S. bases, meaning U.S. aircraft will have to operate from further away, which means more time in flight and less time on station. So the U.S. will get less out of the aircraft it has.
This problem of range is a killer. Even if the entire U.S. inventory of F-22s was based in Guam (which is not practical anyway but let’s pretend), it would generate only 6 aircraft over Taiwan to fly 24/7 combat air patrols.
U.S. aircraft are good, but can’t compete with this numerical disadvantage. Rising costs and shrinking numbers, coupled with range, are crippling U.S. airpower and no qualitative advantage 1v1 can make up for this disadvantage in numbers.
To cite just one open-source analysis of this problem, back in 2008 a RAND study of a hypothetical air war with China assumed that U.S. fighters were qualitatively superior (27X better in the case of the F-22), but the U.S. still lost due to China’s superior numbers.
An earlier '08 RAND study assumed that every U.S. missile hit a Chinese aircraft and that every U.S. fighter was invulnerable to Chinese attacks and the U.S. *still* lost the air war because U.S. aircraft ran out of missiles and the Chinese attacked vulnerable AWACS and tankers.
Bottom line: numbers matter.
The Air Force’s response to this has been to take a cue from the Navy and just establish a totally arbitrary number of aircraft and start demanding it. It might be an effective way to argue for a larger budget, but it won’t save the future of American airpower.
You can add more money, but if you don't change the paradigm, Augustine’s Law will just keep eating those dollars. You can’t buy your way out of this exponential death spiral of rising costs, just delay the inevitable.
Enter the Valkyrie. There’s not that much to it. It’s not going to go toe-to-toe with an F-22. It’s not even comparable. It’s basically a larger, modular, recoverable cruise missile. But it’s designed to be cheap and attritable. And that’s the genius of it.
It’s not just that you can buy a lot of Valkyries cheaply. You can, but 100 of them still won’t substitute for an F-35. But that’s not the point. They’re not supposed to. What they are supposed to do is augment the combat capability of F-22s & F-35s inexpensively.
Don’t envision what the Valkyrie can do on its own. The real question is what an F-35 could do with 8 or 16 of these helping it. And the answer is these will make existing F-22s and F-35s far more capable at their job. This is the machine in human-machine teaming.
Cheap attritable UCAVs like the Valkyrie can bring #s and diversity back to U.S. airpower. The USAF can buy a whole lot of these – 1000s of them – cheaply and equip them with a diverse set of sensors and payloads for a range of missions: strike, ISR, EW, decoys, jamming, etc.
Best of all, they allow the USAF to upgrade combat power cheaply & quickly by changing how we think about modularity. Right now, systems can be upgraded by making them modular: Payloads over platforms, software over payloads. But a drone like the Valkyrie expands that further.
Now, the combat system is no longer the platform. It’s beyond that. It’s a team of platforms working together. So if you want to upgrade the combat system, you’re not constrained by the SWAP (size, weight, and power) of the platform. You just plug a new platform into the team.
This was the thought behind the DARPA SoSITE program, which aimed to move from a platform-centric model of combat power to one that relied on distributed functionality among a diverse mix of heterogenous, low cost platforms.
This distributed system concept has a number of advantages. It’s harder for the enemy to target, presents them with more numerous and diverse challenges, is more resilient to disruption (less brittle), and it’s easier to upgrade faster and at lower cost.
The U.S. has been constrained in adopting this approach to date because it requires accepting some air vehicles aren’t going to be fully capable multi-mission aircraft. They might be special purpose vehicles and might be attritable, meaning it’s acceptable to lose them.
It’s possible to adopt this model with people, but it requires treating your people more expendably that the U.S. military does today. And it also doesn’t make sense with an all volunteer force where the number of pilots is limited.
Low-cost attritable aircraft make a lot of sense when drones are involved, though, and can be a real game-changer for the Air Force.
Not all drones will be cheap and expendable. There is a role for expensive, exquisite systems as well. But attritable drones fill an important niche in the aircraft ecosystem.
Most importantly, they are essential for bringing back numbers and diversity, which are important for helping secure another generation of American air power.
An Air Force with thousands of Valkyrie-like drones augmenting its F-22s, F-35s, and B-21s will be far more capable than one without. The real question will be whether Air Force leadership will make those investments a priority and bring this future into reality.
For more on what robotic swarms can do, check out this @CNASdc report: s3.amazonaws.com/files.cnas.org…
