Unmanned aircraft use in Iraq doubles

Implications: In the three months to January 2008 the U.S. more than doubled its use of unmanned aircraft in Iraq. Intelligence, not just firepower, is making a difference in that theater. The most heavily-used drone, the Raven, weighs in at only 4.2 lbs.

Analysis: Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), also known as drones, today play a vital role in conflict scenarios and nowhere is this more obvious than in Iraq in 2008. Since October last year, the U.S. military has more than doubled its use of drones in Iraq to the extent that more than 100 pilots have had to be taken out of the air to "fly" the UAVs and help keep up with the battlefield demand for real-time reconnaissance and intelligence.

The DOD has two main types of UAV at its disposal in Iraq: high-end, ultra-sophisticated vehicles such as the Northrop Grumman Global Hawk, which has 36 hours of flight autonomy and can carry a wide variety of sensors according to requirement. Iraq deployment of the Global Hawk is at three units, Northrop Grumman expects to build 54 over the next seven years. Unit price varies but is substantially more than $45 million.

At the other end of the scale is the CA-based AeroVironment Inc Raven which, hard though it is to believe, is actually thrown into the air by the company or battalion GI... The Raven can fly for up to 80 minutes, there are maybe 1,400 of them in the DOD inventory today, they cost somewhere around $35,000 and they have interchangeable payloads, from optical to infrared IR.

One of the main reasons for the climb in UAV use was the roughly 30,000-personnel increase in U.S troops in Iraq in the first half of 2007. Over the next six months the steady reduction from this surge level should see even more focus on best-use of assets, with the emphasis likely to fall on force-multipliers such as the Raven, which could well account for 350,000 hours in 2008 alone.

The U.S is under pressure to put more and more UAVs into the air over Iraq to ensure the best flow of intelligence to complement the MRAP-driven ground retaliation and control currently under way. This pressure translates into what the DOD itself calls a likely 25-year surge in UAV use by the U.S. armed forces -- a highly positive indicator in both conflict and peacetime with strong implications for all the key UAV players, from Northrop Grumman right down to AeroVironment.