Late last month, one in all the Air Force’s big MQ-9 Reaper drones—an ominous fixture of U.S. drone strike campaigns—turned its sophisticated MTS-B electrooptical sensors on a novel goal over a barren plain in Wyoming: U.S. Route 287, a highway running across the US.
This challenge wasn’t to spy on suspicious activity or pulverize a hapless High-Value Goal with Hellfire missiles—not even an imagined one—but simply to land. On Route 287.
The Air Force had done prior homework on this problem. The service tested patching in landing parameters to the Reaper’s automatic takeoff and landing system (ATLC) using optical sensors for an unprepared airfield in Latest Mexico, and tested a targeting pod in 2021. Perhaps those methods generated parameters for MQ-9’s landing system over Highway 287 too. Still, an unprepared airbase is just not the identical as a highway.
Nonetheless, Air Force media shows the MQ-9 successfully landed. It was met by an advance Air Force special ops team from the 123rd Special Tactics Squadron, which had prepared a Forward Arming and Refueling Point (FARP) to receive the thirsty, crewless bird. Upon refueling, the drone took off and eventually returned to base.
Also along for the ride on this highway takeoff-and-landing derby were a pair of tough-as-nails A-10 ground attack jets and an MC-130J Commando II special operations transport, which deployed the fuel and equipment used to refuel the tank-busting ‘Warthogs’.
Then, on May 2, an analogous exercise was carried out on Wyoming’s Highway 789. It involved an MC-130J organising a FARP for 2 tiny, egg-shaped MQ-6M Little Bird armed scout helicopters, which practiced dropping off and picking up Air Force Special Ops personnel.
However the standout of the drill remained the Reaper drone which—unlike the opposite platforms—had never before performed a highway takeoff and landing, and has long been considered depending on everlasting airbase infrastructure.
The exercise in Wyoming wasn’t about fighting a hypothetical insurgency of bike raiders, but relatively, a brand new warfighting strategy geared toward mitigating losses to China’s military within the Pacific Ocean. And it’s also, paradoxically, a shot at giving the Reaper a brand new lease on life.
Agile Combat Employment: All About Surviving China’s Land-Attack Missiles
At present, U.S. defense strategy is concentrated on potential conflict with China, which is most definitely to occur within the event of an attempted invasion of Taiwan. But U.S. air power, which is arguably the Pentagon’s best strength, faces a giant problem. Its many short-range fighters—starting from F-16s, to carrier-based FA-18E/Fs and F-35 and F-22s stealth jets—can only depend on a handful of bases within the western Pacific Ocean which can be well inside range of China’s over one thousand short- and medium-range ballistic missiles.
Air defenses would whittle down the incoming salvoes, but too many would likely get through. And while aerial refueling can allow fighters to transit to the battlespace from distant bases, the logistical effort shepherding fighters on round trips across hundreds of miles of Pacific Ocean drastically reduces sortie generation rates. Aircraft carriers carrying short-range fighters can also’t risk wading too near the fray because of China’s deep inventory of submarines and anti-ship cruise and ballistic missiles.
A recent series of simulations of a defensive war over Taiwan organized by the CSIS think tank saw the U.S. and Japan losing over 400 combat aircraft in two weeks, just about all while on the bottom in Japan or on carrier decks. While long-range bombers based further away ended up pulling greater than their weight, they couldn’t much help achieving air superiority.
The Pentagon’s latest doctrine to deal with this problem is named Agile Combat Employment (ACE). It takes a page from methods other air forces have practiced for many years to protect against being worn out on the bottom by a strong neighbor’s first strike. On this method, combat aircraft are rapidly dispersed across a network of smaller secondary bases to avoid presenting a convenient goal—including using highways as makeshift airstrips.
Indeed, Ukraine’s Air Force on the onset of Russia’s invasion in February of 2022 managed to avoid wasting all but a handful of its Soviet-built warplanes from the opening barrage of Russian missile and airstrikes through rapid dispersal.
ACE is due to this fact the U.S.’s wartime dispersal strategy. And highways are especially appealing because there’s so lots of them to go around they will’t all be cratered.
The challenge of ACE ops goes beyond training pilots to takeoff and land from these austere improvised bases, and includes quickly organising the bottom supports structures obligatory to refuel, rearm and at the very least minimally service combat aircraft without the deep logistics a big, fixed airbase offers. Which means helicopters or transport planes, just like the MC-130 in Agile Chariot, must have the option to rapidly deploy obligatory equipment and personnel to the improvised bases before the warplanes arrive.
Other sound strategies include spreading out combat aircraft across civilian airports to render missile attacks less efficient—a move would effectively require permission from the Japanese government—or greatly expanding construction of hardened aircraft shelters (HASs) at forward bases, which might shield individual aircraft from most munitions landing anywhere in need of a direct hit. Nevertheless, such an expensive concrete-pouring operation lacks the political allure of procuring shiny latest weapons.
A Latest Chapter for the Reaper?
The Reaper’s role within the Agile Chariot ACE exercise is especially interesting, because the craft has an enormous goal painted on it’s metaphorical back. It was put there by Pentagon brass, who in 2020 cut procurement at 337 aircraft, despite continuing high demand to be used of those drones in surveillance flights over the Middle East and Africa.
The MQ-9 Reaper was built to circle for hours over areas of interest on surveillance missions, and to be used in locating and killing insurgents who attack using precision weapons released from such high altitudes that their targets often haven’t any way of shooting back. On top of that, the Reaper was meant to do all of this over longer distances while carrying more weapons and sensors than the preceding smaller, piston-engine MQ-1 Predator combat drone.
Though hardly low-cost at $35 million for 2 aircraft and a ground control station, Reapers still cost way less per flight hour and airframe than beefier manned warplanes, and will be piloted from across the globe by pilots in the US via satellite communications links.
Since entering service in 2007, MQ-9s have performed hundreds of strikes, and have change into the combat drone capability of the air forces of France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, and United Kingdom.
But being neither fast nor stealthy, Reapers can be sitting geese in a war with capable adversaries like Russia or China, with quite a few fighter planes and high-altitude surface-to-air missiles. The recent destruction by collision of an MQ-9 intercepted by Russian fighters in international airspace over the Black Sea highlights that vulnerability.
Now that the Pentagon is prepping more intensely to potentially fight China or Russia—and, less so, regional insurgents—it’s less involved in maintaining the Reapers. It might relatively buy latest drones which can be either cheaper and more expendable, or purchase stealthy alternatives more likely to remain effective inside a strong adversary’s air defense zone.
By showing that the MQ-9 is compatible with ACE operations, the special operations community is making the case it still will be slotted into the Pentagon’s latest airpower strategy. It must also interest Taiwan, which is procuring its first 4 MQ-9Bs. Though likely procured with peacetime maritime surveillance in mind, Taiwan’s military will nonetheless want ideas on ways to maintain the Reapers in a single piece should China invade.
Within the horrible event of a shooting war with Russia or China, U.S. MQ-9s might remain useful in areas where there’s a lower density of hostiles fighters and air defenses. That would involve maritime surveillance of operational flanks, in addition to goal acquisition, strike, and shut air support missions in ‘permissive’ airspace where opposing high-altitude anti-air capabilities are absent, or only sporadically present.
Such scenarios aren’t inconceivable. Ukraine demonstrated last 12 months within the Battle of Snake Island that high-flying missile-armed drones will be relentlessly effective picking apart isolated island garrisons lacking long-range air defenses. And if MQ-9s can at the very least temporarily operate from improvised runways on the U.S.’s own distant island bases—as Agile Chariot suggests—they may provide beneficial support for forces based there, including goal acquisition for island-based anti-ship missile batteries of Marine Littoral Regiments.
Time will tell whether exercises like Agile Chariot persuade the Pentagon to stave off Reaper retirement only a bit longer.