AIR FORCE BUILDING SECRET, STEALTH DRONE

We interrupt this Defense Tech vacation for a special report, from ISR Journal:

In what could be the largest top-secret aircraft program since the B-2 bomber, the U.S. Air Force is racing to develop a stealthy, supersonic, long-range unmanned reconnaissance plane that would give commanders better intelligence on the ever-shifting targets in the war on terrorism... and allow them to strike those targets.

The Air Force wants to develop an unmanned airplane that combines attributes designers historically have said were difficult, if not impossible, to blend: high speed, high stealth, high altitude and, most important, high persistence — the ability to remain over a given spot for a day or more. The new aircraft would fill a looming gap caused by delays in developing an ambitious new generation of spy satellites.

The ultimate aim, senior officials said, is to combine characteristics of stealth, speed, altitude and endurance not seen since the legendary SR-71 Blackbird spyplane built by Lockheed Martin was retired from active duty in the late 1990s because of costs…

Like the SR-71, the heart of this new program is shrouded in intense secrecy. But unlike the SR-71, this new “black” bird would be capable of deploying an array of weapons from high-precision munitions to devices that can emit pulses of electromagnetic energy to wreak havoc on everything from power grids to electronic equipment.

But sources familiar with the program say difficult technical barriers remain… [And it is unclear] how large this aircraft would be, how many would be built, or how much each one would cost…

The secret UAV effort was accelerated two years ago after it became clear the next-generation imaging satellite system, the Future Imagery Architecture (FIA), was over budget and behind schedule, sources said, taxing the existing optical reconnaissance satellites. Coverage is becoming increasingly spotty, senior military officials and analysts said…The successful introduction of a stealthy and fast reconnaissance UAV, however, could reduce the need for military recon satellites... Even the National Reconnaissance Office [the Pentagon's department of orbiting spies] is assessing whether emerging UAV systems and technologies could diminish the U.S. reliance on space systems…

The secret project, sources and analysts said, builds on decades of work in unmanned reconnaissance systems, among them two systems from the 1990s — The Tier III, which became the Global Hawk, and the Tier III Minus, which was Lockheed’s highly stealthy DarkStar. Both efforts were quietly ended in the late 1990s.