Air domain operations are critical to the U.S. military defense strategy. Military air domain missions use aircraft for tasks like attack; resupply; rescue; intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance; etc. Historically, air domain missions required manned aircraft, putting the aviator at risk. In the 1990s, the military began replacing manned aircraft with unmanned aircraft. Unmanned aerial systems (UASs) remove the risk to human aviators and are considered extremely valuable assets. Recently, the value of some UASs has rapidly declined with technological improvements inherent to aerial systems. The cost of some UASs is so low that they are being named attritable.
Attritable systems are viewed as a spectrum, ranging from expendable (intended to be lost) to manned (plan to get back), and have become a focus of the U.S. military. In support of a U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) priority for fielding attritable systems, this webinar covers the following topics:
- The state of the art for attritable aircraft for multidomain operations
- Boundaries on the types of attritable aircraft covered, defined by the missions manned aircraft would conduct
- Conceptualization of attritable aircraft within the DoD
- Key Organizations in Attritable UASs
- Attritable UASs that are developed, prototyped, and readily available