The test of the “long-range” drone is imminent, is a new air combat pattern coming?

Recently, General Atomics Aeronautical Systems announced that it plans to conduct flight tests on a new air-launched UAV designed for the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's "Long-Range" project from December this year, and will determine the final development plan for the UAV in 2024. The "Long-Range" UAV is a new concept air combat platform, so what is the performance level of this new type of UAV? If the "Long-Range" project is successfully developed in the future, what impact may it have on the air combat mode?

The design evolution of the "Long Shot"

The "Long-Range" UAV project was first made public in 2020. Although public information reports over the past three years have hardly mentioned any specific physical or performance parameters of the UAV, the outside world can get a glimpse of its combat capabilities from the published "Long-Range" UAV design plan.

At first, in the concept map of the "Long-Range" UAV released by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency of the United States Department of Defense, the "Long-Range" UAV had a flat and streamlined fuselage head, a pair of swept wings in the middle, two small backpack air intakes at the tail, and no external pylons. Its appearance design was similar to that of a stealth cruise missile.

Later, in 2021, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency of the United States Department of Defense awarded the first phase of contracts to Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and General Atomics, allowing these three companies to provide preliminary design solutions for the "Long-Range" project. In the concept drawings released by Northrop Grumman and General Atomics, it can be seen that both companies have adopted a trapezoidal swept wing plus an outward-inclined double vertical tail design in the layout of the "Long-Range" UAV, but in terms of the way of mounting weapons, the former uses an external rack and the latter uses an internal bomb bay. Both of these appearance designs are somewhat similar to stealth fighters.

After a round of technical solution comparisons, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency of the United States Department of Defense may have believed that General Atomics' design was more in line with its needs, and finally chose to retain only the company as its contractor when signing the second phase contract in March 2023. In June 2023, General Atomics was also naturally determined to be the only successful bidder for the final flight test of the "Long Shot" project.

After General Atomics successfully won the contract for the third phase of the Long-Range project, it immediately released a new version of the Long-Range UAV concept map. This latest concept map reveals more details about General Atomics' design of the Long-Range UAV.

First, the aircraft's appearance layout has changed from the previous design. It adopts a new slender fuselage plus a small duck wing in the front and an inverted V-shaped double tail. The swept main wing can be folded, there is an internal bomb bay on the belly, and there is a backpack air intake above the tail. Second, the "long-range" drone is mounted on the inner pylon under the wing of the F-15E multi-purpose fighter, and each F-15E should be able to mount two "long-range" drones. Third, each "long-range" drone can launch at least one AIM-120 AMRAAM advanced medium-range air-to-air missile.

In general, the Long-Range UAV has a highly stealthy appearance, a very compact aerodynamic layout, a small radar cross-sectional area, a low risk of detection, and strong battlefield survivability. It may use a subsonic turbojet engine to achieve long-distance flight in lower airspace, and can also expand the range of engagement through ultra-long standby and long-range launch. The Long-Range UAV is equipped with missile weapons, which are generally supersonic weapons, achieving a combination of subsonic and supersonic, with a fast strike speed, and can also attack targets from different directions, increasing combat suddenness and having good penetration capabilities.

"Someone" retreats, "no one" moves forward

Air combat is a military struggle conducted for the purpose of gaining air superiority. In modern battlefields, the main form of air combat is generally manned aircraft carrying air-to-air missiles to attack targets. The "Long Shot" project is different. It aims to explore a new combat style of "manned aircraft + unmanned aircraft + air-to-air missiles". This combat style emphasizes "man-led control, machine-led combat" in the combat relationship of human-machine cooperation.

In this "man-machine-machine" coordinated combat style, the addition of drones is equivalent to adding a multifunctional air combat node to the air combat system. Drones can not only act as long-range sensors, weapon launchers or decoys for manned aircraft, escorting manned aircraft, but also rely on their own range to fight close to the enemy, significantly expanding the strike range, thereby enabling manned aircraft to better undertake command and control tasks and become information fusion processing centers or combat management hubs on the battlefield, ultimately forming a situation where "manned aircraft retreat to command, and drones go forward to fight."

The essence of the "Long Shot" project is to create an integrated air offensive force system composed of manned and unmanned systems and weapons and equipment. The formation of this combat system will trigger a revolution in air combat modes.

Based on this combat system, the effectiveness of air joint operations may be greatly improved. But at the same time, the addition of unmanned systems has squeezed out part of the load that originally belonged to the ammunition, which will to a certain extent reduce the strike performance of the terminal strike weapon and increase the complexity of the system design. Therefore, how much the combat effectiveness can be improved remains to be verified. (Author: Jia Anqi)