The Vertical Space

#76 General James Poss: Affordable Mass and Counter-UAS

• Luka T • Episode 76

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Two years ago, we hosted Gen. James Poss to discuss the evolution of drone technologies, their adoption in the U.S. military, and their early use in the war in Ukraine. With significant advancements since then - especially in Ukraine's use of drones - we invited Gen. Poss back to focus on counter-UAS strategies and the concept of attritable mass, including the USAF's major program, the Collaborative Combat Aircraft. We explore various counter-UAS technologies, such as missiles, lasers, drone interceptors, and electronic warfare, in the framework of mobility, survivability, magazine depth and cost per shot considerations.

The discussion also delves into the Collaborative Combat Aircraft program, which aims to restore mass as a military advantage. While the concept of "attritable mass" is not new, we explore why it's vital now and how it compares to past conflicts. Additionally, we examine the role of small UAS in the war in Ukraine, their impact on both offense and defense, and how the U.S. is adapting based on these lessons. Gen. Poss shares his valuable insights from his 30-year military career and leadership in UAS development, highlighting the exciting innovations reshaping modern warfare.

Poss:

After Desert Storm, we only lost what an F-16 and an F-117 in 20 years of combat. And we were deluding ourselves that was how air combat worked. And it is not. You can't suppress all of the SAM systems. You can't crater all the runways. You can't overwhelm all of the air defenses. And you're probably going to be stuck with a 3 percent loss rate like we were on World War II. Much better to have that with drones. The question then becomes, how many of them can you churn out? And how autonomous can they be? What's shot cost essentially?

Luka:

Welcome back to The Vertical Space. Two years ago, we hosted General James Poss to discuss the historical and cultural context of drone adoption in the U.S. military, the evolution of drone technologies, and their role in, at the time, early stages of the war in Ukraine. Obviously a lot has changed since then, especially regarding the proliferation of drones in Ukraine and their undeniable importance in modern warfare. So we invited General Poss back to revisit these topics focusing primarily on Counter UAS and the concept of attritable mass, along with programs like the U.S. Air Force's Collaborative Combat Aircraft, one of its most important upcoming initiatives. We kick off the discussion by examining Counter UAS systems, looking at what works well, what doesn't, and what promising advancements are on the horizon. We cover a range of technologies, from missiles and lasers and microwaves, drone interceptors to proximity-fused guns, electronic warfare, nets and even falcons, all within the context of mobility, survivability, magazine depth and cost per shot considerations. We also exchange ideas on how electronic warfare needs to evolve to remain effective in an increasingly sophisticated drone battlefield. A significant portion of our conversation focuses then on the Collaborative Combat Aircraft program, which the U.S. Air Force is pursuing to reintroduce mass as a critical military capability. And although the idea of attritable mass isn't new and in fact, dominates, defense industry discussions, we revisit its first principles, why it's crucial now, how it parallels the use of mass in past conflicts, both conventional and the Cold War. Naturally, the conversation turns to the war in Ukraine, where we discuss small UAS and their potential roles in both offensive and defensive operations, collaborative swarming technologies and how the U.S. military is adapting based on lessons learned from the conflict. And you might be surprised to learn that the U.S. Army is even considering replacing mortars with small drones. These are truly exciting times for aerospace innovation and we're honored to have General Poss, a true leader in the UAS industry share his insights. He is a retired U.S. Air Force Major General and Founder CEO of ISR Ideas, a consulting firm specializing in intelligence and unmanned aircraft systems. With a distinguished 30 year career, including combat experience in four wars, General Poss was the Air Force's senior intelligence officer before his retirement. He also co-founded and served as the executive director of the Assure FAA UAS Center of Excellence leading 23 top UAS research universities to address critical research questions for commercial and consumer drones. Enjoy the conversation with General Poss after a brief sponsor message. General, welcome back to The Vertical Space, it's great to have you on after, what, two years?

Poss:

Yeah, I think two years. Pretty darned eventful two years too, man.

Luka:

Yeah, indeed. Indeed, We usually start by asking, what the industry does not agree with you on. And, I went back and listened to our part one and you mentioned two things you mentioned, on the commercial side. I think there was some, disagreement in Remote ID where the Bluetooth and Wi Fi networked, solutions as opposed to perhaps something more robust along the lines of 5G or even a dedicated frequency. That was one thing. And then on the military side, it was how the Reapers are here to stay and how the argument about them being not survivable in contested or perhaps even denied airspace, is a bit of a contentious topic. So how do you feel about those things now, after two years?

Poss:

Remote ID hasn't made much progress, if any. The interesting thing is we're seeing Remote ID on steroids in the, Russian Ukraine War, just how important it is, and, just how chaotic it can get if it's not done right. But, we're still waiting for the advanced features that are going to really have an impact on the whole commercial drone industry from 5G. I'm starting to think that those are just a year out every year, but who knows. And, we're getting a little bit more experience with the Remote ID, just using Bluetooth and Wi Fi, and it's okay. The forcing function for Remote ID hasn't happened yet for networked Remote ID, which is what most of industry is pushing for, because we still don't have our beyond visual line of sight rules. They are allegedly coming out for public comment in December. I actually believe that, but I was just at a Honeywell event for Advanced Air Mobility on Thursday, and, what the rumblings I'm hearing from industry is they're not too happy with what they think that the draft rules are going to be. So that's the civilian side, on the military side, I still stick with my main thing, which is, is the data link stupid. But most people agree with me that the data link is, is the most important thing on a drone, even though as we talk about the low cost, attritable aircraft and the, Collaborative Combat Aircraft, I'm starting to realize that the long pole intent there is the engine. Data links are getting better. Starlink is really working. There's gonna be a military version of Starlink. General Atomics has had great success with a Air National Guard, MQ-9 using Starlink. Ukrainians are, when Elon is in a good mood or, um, really making good use of Starlink. So it's really, starting to show what it can do. Uh, the MQ 9, I, uh, we're still losing, way too many of those, largely to the Houthis there in Yemen. And, I can't go into detail because I actually don't know the detail. And if I did, I think the reasoning between a lot of those losses is we're just not applying lessons learned from the Air Weapons School out at Nellis in that flying MQ 9s by themselves without any kind of electronic warfare support, or in this case, lethal suppression, is just not the way to do it. It's just too easy. There's too many systems that can shoot a single aircraft out. Which is why we never fly F 15s or F 16s out by themselves. Those always go in a minimum of a four ship. And, I'm sure you guys know why that is.

Luka:

With the benefit of two years of observing the war in Ukraine, is there anything that you would add to the list of things that the industry does not really agree with you on?

Poss:

So when you say industry, I'd include the Department of Defense there. And I think the Army agrees with me on the importance of, small UAS, both for ISR and munitions. My people in the U. S. Air Force, they are laser focused on that collaborative combat aircraft which they should be. But I think, they disagree with me on how important small UAS are for, for offensive purposes. I think small UAS are going to become the ultimate airdrop munition. And, we're not going to, obviously get a, 10 pound drone to fly 500 miles to, Beijing or whatever. But we could use, existing technology. The, JASM missile or the long range version of the JASM, the LRASM, or even General Atomic's new Long Shot, could all be repurposed to take, dozens of small drones that you could drop in the general area of the target and then give them enough autonomy to figure out how to get to the target and what to do once they get there.

Luka:

And do you think that your friends in the Air Force don't subscribe to the thesis of death by a thousand small cuts? Or is it cultural resistance?

Poss:

I think it's the attraction of shiny baubles. the CCA is getting all the attention, and to a certain extent it sucked a lot of the oxygen out of the room. The other problem is, air weapons are about the most important thing the Air Force does, but we, show a surprising lack of attention to them. For example, we've known for years that the, AIM 120 Advanced Air to Air, AMRAAM, missile just doesn't have the reach, but we really haven't, addressed that until recently. And the scientists at Air Force Research Lab down at Eglin and industry have done brilliantly in increasing the reach of our air to air missiles. When I first got back from Afghanistan back in 2002, we came back saying that all of our bombs were too big. The smallest bomb you could realistically drop on somebody back then was a 500 pound bomb, maybe a 250. Or you can go all the way down to a Hellfire, which is a 14 pound warhead. And gosh, it took until, oh, probably 2010, before the armaments industry was putting out viable precision small weapons, just because for some reason, my fellow airmen don't pay enough attention to weapons. they don't have wings on them and whatnot. I think the guys down at Air Force Research Lab Eglin and industry are going to pick up, up on it pretty soon once they put, reasonably stealthy, very cheap carrier together with dirt cheap, small drones and working autonomously. But, that, that moment hasn't come yet.

Jim:

General Poss, you were saying some similar things two years ago on our podcast as it relates to the Air Force's approach to small UAS. What's changed over the last couple of years from the Air Force perspective? What's matured and perhaps what's degraded?

Poss:

Yeah, I'd like to, I'm trying to think how to give a positive, report card on that. I will say the security forces and the air base ground defense guys are much more serious about the small UAS threat. And, many thanks to our brothers and sisters in the U. S. Army. They've been leading the Joint Program Office for Counter Small UAS, and they've done a great job. And they've come up with, very effective, fixed installation, weapons out there. And, you saw them in action when Iran launched 300 cruise missiles, drones, and missiles against Israel. And together with the U. S. Navy, the Royal Air Force, Jordanian Air Force, and, Israeli forces, we got 297 of those things. I host a National Congress on Counter UAS Technology every year in the spring, and this year the United States Army, much to their credit, brought the leadership team that was in Iraq and Syria, when we had that tragic incident of losing three soldiers, and you didn't get it in the press, but, that, Infantry Brigade, and not just an infantry brigade, 10th Mountain Infantry Brigade, shot down, well over 300 Group 2 and Group 3, drones launched at them from Iranian supported forces and only missed, four of them. And what's more, they did it with, this new counter UAS equipment that's been provided by the Joint Program Office with, the world's, finest weapon, which is the U. S. Army Infantryman. They were guarding over 20 sites. they ran out of trained air defenders after about 10. And the other ones were all manned by, 11 Bravos Infantrymen and did

Luka:

What kind of systems did they use?

Poss:

So the real hero of the modern counter UAS fight, at least, in, Southwest Asia is Raytheon's Coyote system and, Coyote is, kind of like a counter drone drone. The other hero, is this, uh, Ku band, ESA radar also made by Raytheon that just has a resolution. So, um, you know, you're 11 Bravo at one of those, times 20 or so sites in Iraq would, pick them up generally first on the, the radar and they would know something was headed towards them. They would generally have to get an electro optical or IR picture of it to make sure it wasn't a friendly. And, then they engage it with a Coyote and the Coyote flies in the, the general direction of where the drone was last seen. And then as it gets closer, does terminal guidance with an infrared system on board, and very effective at it. But, the Iranian backed forces were using very effective techniques, flying low, and generally the air defenders only had, three to five minutes to make a kill decision,

Luka:

How much do we know about the Block 3 of the Coyote? I've heard that it is probably going to be recoverable or reusable, and have some elements of non kinetic impact to it as well, and cost below 100, 000.

Poss:

And we'll be faster. That's the other drawback we got to the other blocks of the Coyote, is they're just not fast enough. The problem with all of these is, of course, getting the cost per shot down. And, I hope Raytheon gets that down below 100k. I wouldn't hold my breath on that. But it's, like we're learning, it's the lower cost, terminal guidance sensors, which we've actually got a pretty good handle on in there in the, um Yeah, engines, boy, those are tough to make cheap.

Luka:

Speaking of Counter UAS, what are some of the most exciting methods and how would you describe what works today? Obviously there's the Coyote guns are very effective as well as are some of the, you know, call it first generation EW systems against unsophisticated drones that are using data links whose protocols are well known. And so that seems to be working today. How will that change in the future? And what are some of the technologies that you're particularly excited about?

Poss:

Yeah, well, I mean, Counter Drone 101 is, you absolutely, positively have to have an electronic warfare component to what you're doing. To go against, as you mentioned, the data link, against, even sophisticated drones are going to try and use a data link on you if you let them. And then some type of, precision navigation and timing jammer, GPS jammer, out there, certainly in the target area. That's just Drone 101, that stops them from, getting, less than three meter precision on you and allowing a human or ground based, computer to make the targeting decision. Once you get beyond that, we already talked about the Coyote. That's a great weapon. The one I think is going to end up being, the most, certainly the most cost effective per shot, and probably the most cost effective all out, is, the U. S. Army is working on proximity fuses. They're aiming at 30 millimeters, which is a, chain gun on the Bradley and a bunch of other stuff. They may even get it down to 50 cal, but you know, proximity fuses are a, World War II, design and, the World War II, proximity fuses really only had one setting, when it got close to the enemy aircraft, it would explode and, send shrapnel out further than if they had to hit to kill the aircraft. These ones have got all kinds of settings. They've got a little mini battery that they last for years. So you can set them up to do your traditional prox, get reasonably close to the aircraft and blow up. They've even got a setting that allows, Infantryman to shoot a proximity fuse to get troops and defilade, so you shoot the 50 or 30 cal over the top of the trench and it senses the void of the trench and then blows up over the trench kind of deal. And obviously there's a lot of, there's a decent number of weapons out there. 50 cals are everywhere if they can make that happen. As we're learning in Ukraine, it's all about magazine depth and to a lesser extent costs. I mean, it's great to have a Patriot. Patriot can shoot everything down, but you've got a problem with magazine depth and they are not cheap. 2. 5 million dollars out there. So No country, our own included, can afford to shoot a Patriot at everything. So, these, really cheap cost per shot proxy systems I think are going to be real heroes. The other ones that are working frighteningly well are, Air to air missiles, we call them in Air Force Intelligence, air to air missiles on a stick, but, like the NASAM system, that we have deployed to Ukraine is basically, AIM 120 AMRAAMs and AIM 9X Sidewinders in a box, and, they're tied into an early warning system, and just like an AIM 120 will kill you when it's launched from an F 16, it will kill you when it's launched from the ground, and those have been very effective. The Russians have, and the Iranians both have versions of their own, not quite as effective. but they're great because it gets the cost, magazine depth is fantastic. Everybody's got, AIM 9s and AIM 120s, and the shot cost is reasonable. Plus it's common with what, you're going to be firing from the Air Force there. What isn't working yet, just because we don't have a lot of them out there, I have high hopes for new techniques in high powered microwave. There's some new techniques that are going to allow us to use, medium, maybe even low power microwave against specific vulnerabilities on drones. Lasers are always a year away every year, and I think we're about a year away from the lasers. The new solid state lasers, as opposed to the old fashioned chemical lasers that I grew up with, show great promise, but, we really haven't seen them make an impact, yet. The exotics, Falcons and things like that, really aren't working. 18 year olds with a 12. 75 or 50 cals mounted on trucks, buildings, ice cream trucks, you name it, are also shooting a lot of drones down there.

Jim:

General, what have we learned about UAS in the last couple of years, based on the lessons learned of the Ukraine war.

Poss:

The interesting part about it is, back in the old days, before the Ukraine war, everybody was about an integrated air defense system, IADS. And it was a tailored systems that we'd spent years out on the range, you know, both the Russian systems and the NATO systems working together. And it was a Patriot missile that worked with this specific radar to pick up the target and the specific radar to guide the missile and all that. And what's really working is the system of systems approach, just because, I don't know on the Russian side, I know more about the Ukrainian side, just because they've been so entrepreneurial that these guys are taking Russian radars, German radars, American radars, you name it, and are making them work together, and they're working with missiles and guns and acoustic sensors and infrared sensors and EO sensors that were never ever intended to work together, and they're working together very well. So I, I think the system of systems approach, which again, it's always been a year out every year is this is the year of the systems of systems approaches is actually working out there, which is frightening for us in air, Air Force intelligence, because you go from, well known systems that, I literally grew up on like the SA 6 and the SA 11, the Buk, to, you don't know what, It's out there, but you still gotta suppress it.

Luka:

One way that I make sense of this spectrum of technologies and putting things in perspective is, by the degree to which there is, situational awareness or detection on the battlefield. And on the one end of the spectrum, there is, we can call it, adequate time to not only do the detection, but also the, find, fix, track and target parts of the kill chain. And if there's plenty of time to do that. Or perhaps there's some sensor fusion and networks of sensors that allow that then, of course, you'll use whatever you have available and, in case of high energy lasers, perhaps, with the right atmospheric conditions, you might be able to do that, but those are operated at a higher echelon level, especially the, 30, 40, 50 kilowatt systems that you would normally put in a Stryker vehicle or something like that. And so that is not portable, and that is not, applicable at the platoon level or maneuver, level. if you're countering a swarm, then yes, to your point, high power microwave could be used, whether ground based or, or, drone based or airborne based. But. also, more maintenance, more training, issues with mobility and survivability can be countered by radiation hardened electronics, et cetera. and so you're

Poss:

Yes and no.

Luka:

Yes and no. Yeah, like everything else, like lasers, you can tumble, you can, I mean, there's things you can do, but on the other end of that spectrum, if you don't have this, call it adequately wide, detection and SA, and you only have to rely on achieving detection locally, when you account for the time to, do the find fix track target and, in the case of lasers, the dwell time of, several seconds, whatever that might end up being, I actually did the math and assuming, a detection of about a thousand meters for a small UAS system with a radar. I've heard some larger figures, but I think realistically, if we peg it around the kilometer, then, you really have a difficult time countering a drone that is, let's say faster than a hundred miles an hour, now the drones are not there yet, but there will be, and they're getting there. And so the lasers and high power microwaves, because of dwell time start to become a problem in that situation, EW might also not work if the threat is using a sophisticated data link or, a certain level of autonomy. And then, missiles, guns, as you described, they're effective, but, there's trade offs. The thing that I'm excited and also see as a bit of a wildcard is, drone interceptors, especially if you are, going up

Poss:

That's what the coyote Essentially is, but yeah.

Luka:

Exactly right. and, but you know, if you can get it into a form factor that is more, call it easier to handle than a Coyote, literally a quad copter, but designed to, go out and counter an AI enabled, very low flying, fast, autonomous system that is constantly jinking, good luck countering that with anything that's out there. And so, I'm really curious to see how that part of the stack evolves, the drone interceptor technology.

Poss:

Yeah. Well, the most frightening, soldiers on the battlefield in the Ukraine, Russia war are definitely the first person video, drone pilots on the Ukrainian side. And I, I don't know where they get these people from, but, they're able to, you know, take a drone that's, going 70, maybe 100 miles an hour and guide it. And if you just go on to YouTube or Instagram or whatever, and put in FPV drone killer, and they're getting a good number of kills, with these FPV drones, which when you think about it is actually a pretty good use for it even without any type of kinetic package because you can definitely tip off an FPV drone operator. You can put them in a number of places he's gonna be able to get a GPS link and he's gonna be able to get a data link because he's operating over his own territory and He's just visually guiding in on the drone Yeah, I'm not sure we'd have to change sensors to work at night, but certainly during day, they've been, very effective. And as we've learned, with the US MQ 9 crash, in the Black Sea, you just got to knock a couple of propeller blades off of, just about any drone and it's going down.

Peter:

This is, really shaping up like a game of cat and mouse and we're just going through one more turn in the game.

Poss:

Game of Drones. Needs to be an HBO special.

Peter:

Kind of is. But when when you look across the spectrum of defensive measures, we have to think ahead to what is the next move that the attacker has at their disposal to respond with. And the one that I keep coming back to is just throwing more mass at the defender and, because the attacking drones are so incredibly cheap that bringing an order of magnitude more to the table, provided you can get the human operator, the labor out of flying them out of the way, which we're seeing that happen. It's totally on the table to say, okay, well, we failed attacking the U. S. base with 300 drones. But if we come back with 3, 000 the next time, will we prevail? And you look across the set of technologies that we're developing as defensive measures, how are the different ones going to fare in the face of increased mass in the attack? And especially considering how much time and money we invest in deploying these systems, how will they fare in the face of greater mass and how long can we expect that investment to deliver a return for us before we have to go and invent something new?

Poss:

Yeah, I mean the Air Force word for it is affordable mass, and you hear that used in context with the collaborative combat aircraft, which we're hoping to get that down below 20 million a copy ish, but at 20 million a copy we're certainly not going to spend, 3, 000 of them at a single target. But that is, the conventional way that airmen are approaching the target, they're still building, aircraft that are capable of, flying fairly fast and going a long way and have a, large payload and all that. And that's certainly better than, trying to hurl one of our 19 surviving, B 2s en masse, at a target. It kind of gets back to my idea that, we've got to come around to the fact that we're going to need more mass, more targets. And to me the perfect way to do that is to use some of these, stealthy aircraft as drone carriers, or even, missiles as drone carriers. And, think of it as a, a shotgun shell that, that you can fire, but it doesn't explode into shot for, a hundred meters or so. Or in this case, 100 miles. But, what goes from, half a dozen targets, just outside the range of your defenses into your 3, 000, because, you could afford to build 3, 000 drones that are only going to go, 50 miles or something. And, you could afford to have, one in 10, is actually you know got the you know the data link and or high end autonomy software and is capable of going that you're not going to be able to tell which one in the 10 is

Peter:

I was handling an FPV drone at a conference just a week before last. It was a very typical one,$500 object. it could carry a 1. 5 kilogram payload, 20 kilometers, and it had all of the FPV capability. And so, okay, if you want to go a little further, something a little bigger, it's still single digit thousands to produce something with that level of capability and longer range. And, you can totally come back with an order of magnitude more in the attack. Adding mass with that being the template, adding mass is totally an option. And how does the Coyote fare, against that? How does it scale relative to that? Especially if we have so many places that we need to defend and we don't know when or where the attack is going to occur. So we have to have depth of defense in a ton of locations. against a cheap massed attack that we don't know where it's coming from.

Jim:

Is this our worst nightmare, General Poss, as it relates to small UAS?

Poss:

Yeah, we're living it every day. I mean, the Iranians have calmed down a little bit in, Syria and Iran. They're not quite hurling the numbers. I mean, the good news is they tend to hurl, Shahids, which are fairly big aircraft and, are Coyote capable of shooting down. But yeah, it doesn't take a lot of imagination to think that they're going to You know, instead of 300, you're going to see 3, 000, which is why everybody is obsessing about, shot cost and magazine depth.

Jim:

Let's say we deploy, for whatever reason, to the Middle East. Who's responsible for this defense? Is it the respective service? Is it the Air Force responsibility? Who's planning for this? Which service?

Poss:

Okay, so the air component, the air, generally the Air Force, is in overall charge of air defense, out there, so they set the rules of engagement and, decide where we're going to defend higher level decisions. The air component is in charge of any aircraft that are used for defensive counter air or offensive counter air. Setting the AWACS up and putting the F 15s out. The Army is almost always responsible for ground based air defense. So, they've got the surface to air missiles, most of the ground based radars. When it gets into individual sites, then you get into more of a dogfight, no pun intended, between the Air Force and the Army. Generally, the Air Force will provide troops and material for some of their bigger sites. But it's generally run by a joint command post on the base, like Al Asad Air Base. It's generally run by an Army Air Defender, and they're making the decisions there. When you go into a pure Army site, it's all Army.

Luka:

Back to Peter's example, what's your best guess in terms of how that gets countered?

Poss:

Yeah, so 3, 000 drones coming at you. Proximity fused, weapons are gonna have to be a, probably the backbone of that. Assuming that electronic countermeasures, against the data links and, the, precision nav and timing don't work. I don't see Coyote playing a huge role unless, these are larger drones and, we'll just get done with our magazines of those pretty quickly. When you start talking about 3000, small drones coming in, I really have high hopes that high powered microwave is, going to really work. And, we, again, it's like airborne lasers, it's always happening, next year. But we've got a lot more research in it and we know which components are vulnerable and the good news is most drones have commercial components which just, aren't set up for any of this at all. The other good news is depending on how you do microwaves, the bomber may not always get through, but the microwave is going to find a resonant frequency to get through just about anything, except a couple feet of lead, which, you don't want to put on your drone anyhow,

Luka:

What do you think Electronic Warfare 2. 0, for lack of a better definition, will look like? 1. 0 would be the systems that have been evolved over the last decade that, will still continue to work well against unsophisticated users or some of the commodity drones out there. But once you're facing a data link with a proprietary waveform, or, something that is a lot more intelligent in terms of hiding in the background RF noise, hopping, randomly, et cetera, et cetera. my intuition is that EW 2. 0 becomes less about RF and more about spoofing the sensors, the computer vision, especially as people shift towards computer vision based autonomous guidance and last mile quote targeting. and so that might be some kind of algorithmic warfare confusing the sensors at the tip of these drones, but perhaps there's something else on the RF side, maybe something that, starts to resemble cyber more than anything. What do you think, how does EW stay relevant? Because it's clear that the first generation is becoming obsolete very quickly.

Poss:

Yeah, well, EW is all about software, as are radars and data links and everything, out there. And, if you're using software, the best counter to software is cyber. When we saw the pagers blowing up, last week in, Lebanon, my first thought was Mossad had figured out some way to, overcharge the lithium ion batteries and they blew up. And it turns out it was, they cheated and put explosives in. But, that type of ability to adulterate an enemy's, supply chain, to infiltrate their networks and, when they go to load up their, fancy vision based software, put in some geo fencing to where it mysteriously won't work around any of your targets and, it'll present, that it's doing just fine, back to its operator, because that's the problem with autonomous systems is you never know what the damn things are doing. So it's not like, the MQ 9 to where if, the MQ 9 starts spinning out of control, you're going to get control input, things let you know, and that the, your sign of danger is your sensor starts spinning. You'd never know that with an autonomous aircraft. And, our autonomous aircraft, the U. S. Air Force is the RQ 4 Global Hawk, and, that thing goes lost link you never really know what's going on there because it is capable of fully autonomous operations. So, I think long story short, the answer to advanced EW is cyber. That said, you can't give up on a good old fashioned, RF, EW, unfortunately that just gets a order of magnitude harder because, we were already up against, DRFM jammers, digitally, digital frequency modulated jammers that don't know what they're doing or who they are until software boots up and tells them to jam a frequency hopping radar in the VHF band, and you know, next time to jam a target acquisition radar in the 18 gigahertz band. so we're already seeing those, but you're right. particularly when you start putting in AI, that, that gets very hard to, counter RF frequency, EW.

Luka:

And the billion dollar question is how do you develop technologies that have dual use? And opportunities to be used in civil context as well, where the tolerance for collateral damage is zero. So a lot of things that are effective on the battlefield are just off limits to put on a stadium, right? Can we imagine the battery of Coyotes on the, on the stadium? I remember, you're pretty vocal about this, how, correct me if my quote is off, but you know, the threat is not, we shouldn't be looking across the ocean, we should be looking at the threat across the parking lot.

Poss:

Yeah.

Luka:

So yeah. What's your latest thinking on the right mix of technologies for the civilian use case?

Poss:

Well, yeah, and the Russian Air Force has seen plenty of attacks from across the parking lot. I think we talked about it last time where the Ukrainian drone actually landed on the radome of a Mainstay AWACS before bringing its buddy in to blow up the radome of the Mainstay AWACS. And that was done from a few miles away. But you're right, that's a military example. And what we should all lose sleep about is, pick your event. I'm gonna go with Taylor Swift concert, but, Super Bowl, next LSU game or whatever. In the U. S. it's, a civilian problem, for civilian sized attacks. So, just a couple of them. But if the Iranians come after them, then the DOD will come in and we will, be able to put high power microwaves over the superdome and all that. But the question is, keeping out the, what does the FAA call them? The clueless, careless, and criminal, drones out there. To a certain extent, it's just like the military drone 101. You have to have a data link jammer. You have to have the ability to shut down PNT in a given area. And, that's less and less effective in Ukraine and in, Southwest Asia. Still pretty effective in the civilian category because most of the time, certainly the clueless and the careless are going to be using drones that are susceptible to data link jamming and PNT jamming. And then, if you believe in the RFID theory, which sometimes I do, you're going to have a good GPS location of where that drone is and hopefully where the pilot is. If you're dealing with terrorists, then, that becomes a lot worse, but it goes down into, what are you going to do kinetically against those drones? And, really the only system I see, being viable are the drone v drone, systems, largely employing nets, to capture drones. Believe it or not, one of the more effective weapons that U. S. Air Force security forces have are shotguns with net shells. Those are actually pretty good out to 100 yards or so. But other than that, yeah, you're right, we're

Luka:

mean, that just sounds like watching the Bugs Bunny cartoon. Throwing nets around. I'm sure it works, but.

Poss:

Yeah, the Road Runner always runs away from them, so. But, hopefully, that's just going to be the criminal and the terrorist one, which is It'll be the big one that they're going to make against the Superdome, but it's not going to be the day in and day out one that the, electronic warfare and PNT jammers are going to do pretty well against. That's a tough one. And around the world, you look at what, the Saudis are doing because they've been attacked repeatedly. It's generally been EW, PNT jammers, and then, you step up to surface to air missiles and stuff around, oil refinery and all that. I don't know what they do to protect a soccer game in Riyadh.

Luka:

What's the latest on authorities in the U. S. for counter UAS mitigation?

Poss:

Still a work in progress and probably ain't going to happen until after the election. But depending on how the election comes out, it could be pretty, pretty positive. you know, the problem with the American system is if you have something that everybody likes and it's good for everybody and it's bipartisan, someone's going to hold it hostage for something that nobody likes. So, every attempt to get it through has been wrapped with some kind of, poison pill on immigration or something like that. And hopefully, that'll go away, either in the lame duck Congress, fingers crossed, or in the new Congress. But the authorities that we have now are not proper to defend our nation, domestically.

Jim:

Which regulatory body will be most responsible for counter UAS?

Poss:

Well, that we know. yeah, so, they're gonna continue with, dividing it, based on departments. So, Department of Defense is responsible for their Facilities, Department of Energy for Nuke Facilities, Justice does, Secret Service work, and, their facilities. The big one is gonna be, split between FBI and DHS. It's a contest between the two. There is, a lot of ground level interest in the FBI and doing counter UAS, but there's literally like five guys, that do it. DHS is the one that should do it, but they know it's going to end up being an unfunded mandate, so no one is particularly sticking their head up, to do that. But you can't blame them, because with the authorities so unclear, we're not sure who's got what authorities. But in the new bill, you'll see hopefully the FBI in charge of doing a lot of pilot programs with state, local, and tribal folks, and the bulk of the work being done hopefully well funded by DHS with the provision that, state, local, tribal, and commercial entities can buy their own surveillance equipment for the feds to, but the feds still do, active measures.

Luka:

You mentioned before we started recording, that you attended the recent AFA summit. Can you give us some, highlights how that went? What are some of the takeaways?

Poss:

Well, I went tearing through on collaborative combat aircraft, wanting to find flaws and what was going on. And, to be honest with you, what I found was a real success story, particularly by the, the men and women of Air Force Research Lab. I was, not a research guy for my career. And, we always looked up to them. Scants at DARPA they were always working problems that weren't really central to what we're doing. Lasers. But my gosh, these guys have taken a very big program. How do you make cheap, truly autonomous aircraft? And they figured it out and they figured it out without, industry going ballistic over anything. And they've come up with some pretty good designs. They started originally with the concept of loyal wingman, if you remember that. and the idea was, you're going to have four loyal wingman drones and one F 35 is going to control them and that's going to give us affordable mass. And they went from that to figuring out how would they really do that, with the low cost attributable aircraft, platform program, LCAPS, which, got with industry and asked experts, how do you make a relatively cheap, capable aircraft? And, uh, then came up with some pretty good answers. Good answers for everything except the engine. Engines are still a long pole in the tent. They came up with the idea for the Common Core Chassis, which, is, in the,

Luka:

The Gambit,

Poss:

Well, that's GA's version of that, but the Common Core Chassis is very much an Air Force Research Lab set of standards and requirements, and, GA has been the one that, really ran out first, and Gambit is a pretty fantastic program if, if the Air Force lets it run. There's only one Gambit that's, really flying as an X aircraft, and that's the, off board sensing station XQ 67. XQ 67A, which tells me maybe they're planning on a B, which they actually had the aircraft there at AFRL. I don't know what paperwork they had to do that, but, the OBSS or X67, XQ 67 has in it the, autonomy core system, which is again, AFRL owned set of standards, that is the central nervous system, for a drone, which you would drop various programs into, brains, into to turn the aircraft from a, air to a bomber to an ISR. Inside is the common core chassis, and the best way I had that explained to me is, well, it's what the automotive industry does. F 150 and the, Expedition both have the same chassis, so you go down the line, on one hand it's going to be an X 150, on the low end, and excuse me if I go on about the F 150 I have several, I've had several. It'll either be a cheap XL two wheel drive or goes all the way up to the 80, 000 Raptor that's got all kinds of stuff on it. Or it's gonna be an Expedition on the cheap end or if it's gonna be on the real fancy side, it's gonna be, what is the Lincoln version of that. It's going to be a Lincoln, and you got to have Matthew McConaughey in the back of it as you're going around. But same idea with a common core chassis. it starts out, and you put a certain set of wings, a certain engine, a certain nose, a certain sensor on it, and voila, you have an ISR platform. You put completely different stuff on board, put a weapons bay, you got an air to air platform. Or, you put a completely different set of wings on board with a hybrid electric drive and, some LO coatings and you've got a LO ISR bird. And what I just described to you is actually the Gambit program, that is using the Common Core, system by, by General Atomics. But of course the big thing is we've got to program a record now, and it's gone to picking out two sides Anduril and General Atomics to do an actual fly off. And, apparently the range, payload, speed, altitude, numbers of CCA we're going to buy and cost of CCA are all classified. But what they would say is they're going to do a fly off between Anduril, and General Atomics. And Anduril bought Blue Force Technologies last year and they're using their Bandit aircraft that was, for another, yeah, for another DARPA program for adversary air, aircraft. They're going to fly off, they're going to pick one, and then they're going to build a bunch. I, the rumors I've heard is in the thousands, low one to two thousand and then, they're going to build, do another, fly off between different sets for a different set of, requirements for Tranche 2, of which, there is zero agreement on what that is. Everything from a, drone B 21 to a drone, C 17, out there. So they're still working on that.

Luka:

There's also very little information on the software part of the program, except that, five companies have been awarded contracts to build the software that will be on the CCA, the various, AI, capabilities and behaviors. Given that this is shrouded in secrecy, obviously there's no facts, but what is your intuition in terms of what is going on there and how the government will be buying these capabilities.

Poss:

Well, so far it's going to plan. And, the fact that we've got five companies that are vying, and we may end up with five companies at the end of it, that's the whole idea behind the Autonomy Core System, is to have, the more people building brains, the better. And, as long as you comply with the, Autonomy Core, System standards, and my, I assume, software development kit, the autonomy core system is not going to let you do anything stupid or un airworthy with the aircraft. I don't think that's a word, I just invented that. So you can get a lot more people in, you know, if you're going to ask somebody to do, FAA certifiable, flight control software, that's, very few number of people that can do that, but if you've got that handled by the autonomy core system and you're just asking, folks to write AI for air to air routine, that's a much larger group of people. So I'm pretty happy with that going. I foresee, one to two thousand, and this is just me, I have no intelligence behind this, one to two thousand of the tranche one being built. Not taking bets on what variants they're going to be. I think you'll see a preponderance from ever going to be, air to air slash air to ground, along with, a few ISR, variants out there, GA is probably going to win. I think Anduril true strength is in software and they'll do very well on the software side. But, building an airworthy drone airframe is a lot harder than it sounds. And, that's been GA's story throughout, all the loyal wingman programs. They keep trying to give it to somebody else, Anduril in this case or Kratos before. And the smaller companies find out it's a lot harder to build an airworthy drone, particularly one with the, kind of a Mr. Potato Man approach to the airframe, than it sounds because GA has always taken that approach. I mean, with the MQ 9 and we've got what, four sets of wings for it, now and a whole different variety of data link configurations and all that. And it's all still airworthy.

Luka:

How do you make sense of this tension between quality and quantity on whether a large attritable mass of relatively inexpensive UAS systems is better suited for a future peer conflict than fewer high end manned aircraft and there's a lot of probably echo chamber is not the right analogy but everybody's singing the attritable mass tune, for better or worse. I'd like us to maybe poke holes or not poke holes, but revisit the first principles and to put things in a little bit of a historical context, yes, mass is a quality. We've WWII, with, waves of bombers and B 17s and over time, we moved away from these mass formations to precision guided weapons and stealth technology that resulted in achieving even greater effects with fewer aircraft. And so this attritable mass concept does seem counterintuitive. So why are we going back to it? Is it because we're coming back to potentially fighting a war with an equally capable opponent and, anti access and area denial strategies, are such that even with sophisticated aircraft, you can expect to struggle to operate with impunity. What is really driving this movement back to mass?

Poss:

Yeah, the Ukraine Russia war. The Russians have always had about the air defense system they had since when I joined the Air Force in, 1982, well, maybe late 90s out there, but we never saw it in action, and, we've taken it apart and, we know how to, counter it and all that. And so in the back of our minds is, we're never going to really fight these guys. And if we do, we'll take them apart and then whoomp, we see it in action, on both sides there in Russia, Ukraine, and both Air Forces are essentially shut down with reasonably competent airmen and airframes out there and then we kind of sort of wish China away you know because they're building their own stuff and Chinese have zero combat experience. Last time they fought was 1974 and they did as well against the Vietnamese as we did. And so we wished him away, but all of a sudden, the basic principles of Chinese air defense system, which is a tremendous number of long range, SAMs that are netted together in this kind of system of system thing, holy cow, that looks like it works. And then you go into, the sheer cost of the aircraft that are capable of operating in that denied airspace. Manned low observable aircraft, and they're just horrendously expensive and may not work with acceptable levels of losses. I mean, you know, you look at those wave after wave of B 17s that, we sent out there, we would only lose an average of 3%. And that nearly wiped us out in a few, two months of combat. if we lose higher than that, imagine losing a higher percentage of that at B 21s or F 35s. How long could we last with that? So, I think very realistically, we're in a way back to World War II unmanned World War II that just, we really couldn't stop the German air defenses, certainly the ground based ones, and, we continued to take 3 percent losses. It's just that we were pumping out more and more B 17s with 10 airmen in them each. That gosh, how many aircraft? After Desert Storm, we only lost what an F-16 and an F-117 in 20 years of combat. And we were deluding ourselves that was how air combat worked. And it is not, you can't suppress all of the SAM systems. You can't crater all the runways. You can't overwhelm all of the air defenses. And, you're probably going to be stuck with a 3 percent loss rate like we were on World War II. Much better to have that with drones. The question then becomes, how many of them can you churn out? And how autonomous can they be? What's your shot cost essentially?

Luka:

At the height of the Cold War, we knew that we were facing a resource plenty opponent. And so at what point did the mass argument go away and start to be replaced with Precision Guided Weapons, Stealth, thinking that this is the technology mix that now is appropriate and ironically against a same or similar opponent.

Poss:

We always accused the Soviets of making cheap and cheerful aircraft, and they were the ones that had mass, and we had the capable aircraft, and, up until the Gulf War, we didn't, and even during the Gulf War, we didn't know that this precision stuff would work. We only had a handful of aircraft, F 111s, that were capable of delivering precision weapons. And so, throughout the Cold War, we really had a mass of our own, response to this. The NATO Air Forces were going to go in at, 500 feet, do their best to, avoid Soviet surface to air missiles, crater the runways, and then hopefully we'd be able to cut down on their sortie counts, but we were going to lose a lot of aircraft, if the Cold War turned hot. We thought because our systems were more efficient that, the Soviets were going to lose more, but it was still a mass on mass approach. It wasn't until after, Desert Storm that we, the key in Desert Storm, was we figured that we could fly at about 20, 000 feet and get out of range of anti aircraft artillery, which has historically shot down most of our aircraft and if you're 20, 000 feet you're very ineffective at bombing unless you have precision weapons, which we had and so we were able to have our cake and eat it too, you know. Stay out of anti aircraft artillery range and deliver weapons, which work fantastically until Russia Ukraine. And Russia, Ukraine, were two forces that met, air defenses that were capable of reaching up to 20, 000 feet and denying us our sanctuary, that we've always had. Granted, neither the Russians or the Ukrainians employed a suppression of enemy air defenses campaign like we would have done. We would have spent a lot more time going against the long range double digit SAMs to fight to get our above 20, 000 foot sanctuary back, you allow the U. S. Air Force to fly that high over your country and they'll wipe everything out. And the only two things that can go that higher are generally long range double digit SAMs, I say 10, 20, 22, and then fighters. And, the United States Air Force welcomes any fighter sent up against it there. I like shooting those down.

Jim:

So, play out, General Poss let's say we have a major conflict today. And based on what we've thought up until the Ukraine war and what we've learned from the Ukraine war, play out the first two to three months of combat. What's going to be the role of the offensive UAS and the defensive UAS? How do you see it playing out? And what are the areas where you're most concerned?

Poss:

Let's do it in, say, 2030 or 2035 when we get, these programs, come online. So, number one, by 2030, 2035, we've got our space based radar, our space based, persistent low Earth orbit communications and infrared sensors, and, we're not as dependent as we are with manned or unmanned air breathing reconnaissance as we are presently. So ISR gets a lot better if all those things work, you know, a little bit of a big if. The next thing we have is the, the CCA aircraft. Hopefully there's a bunch of other aircraft that we would buy, along with it. I like what General Atomics is doing with the Longshot, which is, barely big enough to hold, two or three, air to air missiles. May or may not have a target acquisition ability of its own, but it's, an F 15 can fire it from, 300 miles away and it'll go flying into, you know, over the enemy's airfield and surprise, launch a bunch of AMRAAMs that we could then cooperatively target perhaps even with our space based radar. I like the idea of a really attritable UAS that can be carried by a bunch of aircraft. GA's got this Sparrowhawk idea that, you can fit four of them on an MQ 9. They're not the prettiest aircraft, but DARPA did that with the Gremlin, so you've got, tens of thousands of those things flying. You've got thousands of CCA flying, and you get to the attritable mass, and once you get to, that type of mass that is gonna make it through, the bomber will get through when you get to those kinds of numbers, you can start hammering those systems that are denying us our above 20, 000 foot sanctuary, which no matter how you slice it are pretty big systems. You have to have a pretty big missile to go, you know, 200 miles at 20, 000 feet. So they're not, they're not ghosts, we can find them. And, Simultaneity got to be the big thing when we invaded Iraq, where, we're not going to take down enemy air defenses and crater the runways. And then when that's all safe, we'll, send everybody in. I think we're going to have to go back to a phased, suppression of enemy air defense campaign. And I think with those kind of numbers and those kind of sensors, and hopefully, more of our sensors in space, will be a pretty tough cookie. Take a lot of losses, but I don't think anybody's ever gotten in trouble for losing a drone. Well, that's not true. In combat for losing a drone, peacetime to get in a lot of trouble.

Luka:

What assumptions must come true for this CCA attritable mass concept to play out as expected? One assumption, I guess, is that if you saturate enemies defensive systems and flood them with, simultaneous threats that you kind of, introduce confusion and chaos and overwhelm them and therefore they become less effective. Okay. But at the same time, if there's AI somewhere in the vicinity of that loop, I think that complexity can be dealt with easier, than what we perhaps expect now. So, that's one, one thing. Another might be that, you know, you throw, all these attritable aircraft, that need to be low cost enough such that they are easily replaceable, and that the loss of, hundreds even of them will not impact the overall military fighting capability. Another one is that yes, that will not only be inexpensive, but also sophisticated enough to survive long enough to perform their mission. So there's a lot of assumptions that need to fall into place. Would you add, to this any insightful commentary or add some additional things that need to play out as we expect them today, because I, and just to not to belabor this question, but, I think that while we are making these arguments, not we here, but generally what I hear, people talk about, they, they generally discount the pace at which defensive systems are growing in their sophistication as well. And they expect that they will not, come down the cost curve as well. And so you might have mass that is countering mass. And so where are we then?

Poss:

Yeah, well, throughout history it's always generally been better to be on offense than defense. I mean, there's a couple of major exceptions out there. And, if you're able to get potentially thousands of aircraft over an enemy territory, no matter how sophisticated their air defenses, they're still going to have vulnerabilities that are difficult to camouflage, difficult to move. And, of course, we're all going to be using very advanced AI and all that, all of which is, very vulnerable to cyber. And I think we don't give cyber enough credit, in these future conflicts. I mean, one good virus and, we win the war. I mean, I've always been a big fan of Battlestar Galactica for that reason. Remember the Galactica, is the only one that lives because it's an analog carrier as opposed to the rest of them. So, I think that'll go. But, no matter how you slice it, the solution is not, I don't think, small numbers of very low observable, very expensive manned platforms. The solution is absolutely unmanned, on both offense and defense. It's just we get into the question, the thing that all of us have doubts about, that we can build aircraft that are, cheap enough, made enough of, capable enough, and I'll add airworthy enough, to be able to use them in this thing. We got a lot of expendable aircraft. We've always had expendable and attritable aircraft and, they last right until one of them, hits a busload of civilians somewhere. So, I don't believe in this very cheap, methodology because whatever we fly, we're going to have to fly it over, allies and, and American soil. And it's got to be airworthy enough to where we're not asking people on the ground to take, significant risk by living by an Air Force base.

Luka:

Do you have a sense that a B 21 with it's, you know, 30, 40, 000 pounds payload whatever it ended up being, and that is able to, with that payload prosecute, 20, 30 targets. Do you believe that it can penetrate a, highly sophisticated, denied airspace and take out some of these strategically critical targets? And if the U. S. Air Force ends up buying, a hundred of those or 150 of those. How much would that impact the conversation that we just had where you can take out some of these, same systems that are, the highest concern for us and, and then come in with the traditional, air power and, end up fighting a war that, is similar to what we're used to, in the past. How much does the capability like that influence attritable mass doctrine,

Poss:

Well, the good thing about the B 21 is the, is not just the tremendous payload, it's the tremendous range. And then the Russia Ukraine war. If you're going to fly something over the front lines or right into Russian territory, inside of Ukraine, tremendous density of air defense systems. You're just not going to do it. You're lucky to get a small UAS in there. You're not seeing that, tremendous air defense density around Moscow around some of the Russian strategic bomber bases or fighter bases. And so something that's got tremendous range and low observability is going to pick off those less defended targets, which, in a Chinese scenario is probably actually Beijing itself. And then, a lot of the fighter bases and all that aren't nearly as well defended as the Taiwan Straits areas. I mean, that, that's what we spent all of our time obsessing about, because that's where the invasion force is going to be there. But that is the most defended airspace on earth. And that's no nation can afford to keep that density around the rest of their country. So there will always be vulnerabilities when you've got that kind of range, in there. And we could have another question, B 21 was always supposed to be optionally manned. That's another mission that you could easily turn into an autonomous

Luka:

And is then the CCA a kind of a bet of not placing all of your eggs in one basket, recognizing that, yes, there's this, denied airspace penetration capability with a B 21, but at the same time, you might not have enough of them for all the conflicts around the world. And also, they might get shot down just as we've seen the F 117 being shot down, over Serbia, right?

Poss:

Yeah, and I think that's the debate that we're not hearing about on Tranch 2 of the Collaborative Combat Aircraft. Everything's about the budget and this is just not the right time in history because the B 21 still isn't on the rail to all of a sudden get into a discussion about these miraculous CCA Tranche 2 aircraft that, could be about the size of a B 21, about the payload, about the range, but, not manned. Cause that would shut the B 21 program down and the Air Force isn't going to take a risk at that, but I'll bet you those Tranche 2 aircraft are going to be substantially longer range, substantially longer payload, and designed to have the luxury of flying around and picking off those, Russian AWACS bases like those, small drones did, they actually got them in Belarus. Which you can afford to do if you've got range. If you're, an F 35 or the Tranche 1 of CCAs you know, you can't, you're going to have to drive straight in there. You can't float like a butterfly and sting like a bee. Sting like a bee, but very short range.

Luka:

Right. Fascinating. Let's see, what else should we talk about on the CCA? Did we, do you think that we have discussed the CONOPS of a future war, in enough detail or perhaps some additional color

Poss:

Yeah, no, I think we talked about that. The interesting thing is there's, CCA like aircraft, out there now that we really don't spend enough attention on. Um, the Australian, MQ 28 Ghostbat, which is a Royal Australian Air Force, Boeing effort, was not competed to be tranche one of CCA, I never got a straight answer on it, but word on the street was they had trouble getting, It's an AFRL program, so they ask you for just about all the intellectual property. And, Australian government wasn't comfortable in sharing down to that level of detail. But the Aussies have something. And it's, supposed to be working pretty well. The interesting thing is, what the Brits are doing. And, they did have a collaborative project, Mosquito, one of my favorite aircraft, going with Northrop, which, they unceremoniously, dumped two years ago. I think waiting to see what the U. S. Air Force is going to do out there You never hear about the MQ 25, which is that the Navy's a Boeing aircraft world's first carrier capable aircraft, which don't get me started. The U. S. Navy is still going to make an air refueler. There's stuff that we can be doing now with aircraft that are existing now that I don't think we spent enough time talking about.

Luka:

I'm really curious to get your thoughts on, okay, shifting now gears to the small UAS side again, the things that we're seeing in the war in Ukraine, one of the big kind of next frontiers is, swarming technology. Collaborative autonomous swarms. And, you will remember early 2000s with the X 45 program, some really interesting capability that was demonstrated, among them was, I think, on the 50th flight of the X 45. There were two of them that were, flown over a simulated threat environment. And they picked up a threat and were able to, collaborate to the point where, between the two aircraft, they decided what aircraft will engage the target based on geometry, based on, energetics, the payloads, all of those different factors. And that was 20 years ago. And, I can only imagine what kind of progress has been made in the last two decades on that front. And so why is it that, we're only now talking about, some of these capabilities on the small UAS side? One theory is, and probably the one that makes most sense, is that, it's really difficult to bring something from a high end to the low end and especially to make it cheap and, at scale. Is that the reason why this is a gap in the small UAS space? Or are you surprised that, some of these large primes weren't able to, bring that capability to the low end of the spectrum?

Poss:

Yeah, I'm going with service culture on that one. I mean, it's kind of funny, both in the Army and the Air Force, and we'll get to the Navy later, their major warfare communities, in this case Army, Aviation, and in the Air Force, Fighter Aviation, didn't really warm up to drones until we came up with the Loyal Wingmen Program. And, Apache pilots used to hate, the RQ 7 drone until they figured out a way to pump the camera into the gunner's position, and now it's the best thing since sliced bread. And now, Army aviation has taken drones away from military intelligence in the Army, solely for this, manned unmanned teaming is the Army word for it. But, you know, in their culture, there's always a manned helicopter there someplace. Interestingly, the Army's future, helicopter program is not doing well, and there, there's some thought about making that completely unmanned which, if you're an Army aviator, the lesson you take from that is be careful with those drones, even if you do tie them to a manned aircraft, because they'll, eventually get you, On the Air Force side, yeah, no, we've been able to do, largely autonomous engagements for, I think it's 20 years out there. General Atomics has a Defender concept, which, they've got, thousands of hours of wargaming on that uses a modified MQ 20 to do high value aircraft defense, HAVA defense, which is pretty much the easiest air to air mission you've got because you're defending AWACS or tankers or Rivet Joint, 100, 200 miles back and you've got the enemies coming across and it's very clear and, well, allegedly very clear. But drones do that a lot better than manned aircraft, and it's a waste to have a bunch of F 15s hanging around doing that when you can do it with a much smaller platform that is just tailored to that mission. So we've always been able to do it, but again, like with Army aviation, Air Force aviators didn't really, warm up to this until, became Loyal Wingmen. I think this direct control of CCAs by manned aircraft will last about 15 minutes in combat. The only company I've seen that has approached the human machine interface of this is Raytheon, and I saw them at, AFA, and they've got a pretty good system that uses existing, HOTAS, hands on, throttle and stick controls in an F 35 and an F 22 to control four robot wingman and, very reduced, displays to show what the drones are doing and, playbook orders for them to do. We ask a lot of our F 35 and F 22 pilots, as is just flying the F 35, let alone four other drone wingmen. I'm just not sure how that's going to work. What I am sure is going to work is this, proliferated low earth orbit comms. Starlink is already working. Starlink has set up its own military company, DARPA, and the Space Development Agency are developing the military specific, constellations that we're going to need, you know, Link 16 from space and stuff like that. And I think these CCAs are going to, be as autonomous as we can make them, but are going to have, satellite communications backup somewhat similar to what our MQ 9s do. And they're going to be, flown via remote split operations.

Luka:

Yeah, and they will need a way to communicate amongst themselves, right, if they're employed in a large formation.

Poss:

That's easier. I mean, uh, the Air Force hasn't said what data link, they're going to use to control these CCAs. I'll bet you it's a variant of MADL that is already on the F 35, which is pretty stealthy and it's got a, shocking amount of bandwidth, so I could see them using a variant of that Talk in line of sight, fairly close to each other, where you can, use a low probability of intercept, high bandwidth link like MATL, that's also close and difficult to burn through, even if they do pick you up, is one of the easier problems.

Luka:

Speaking of data links and fusing sensor information and Automated Target Recognition, what's the state of the art in ATR? Especially if we're talking about not just, highly sophisticated, stealth aircraft, but bringing that down to every sensor, every shooter.

Poss:

Yeah, I'm a grumpy old man, and I've been Automatic Target Recognitioning, if that's a word, since 1983. It's gonna be there next year. We've made great strides in it. We had Project Maven at USDI, which made great strides in it. We have a great system for doing mission intel data signatures for the F 35 and, a variety of platforms on down to the Stryker, believe it or not. The, anti missile folks, anti ballistic missile folks, have done tremendous work. Back in the old days, Iraqi Scuds were a problem because they blow up in a manufacturing problem and have a cloud of debris and, we never figured out what the warhead was. We know what the warhead is now and, we also can pick out, decoys and all that based on target recognition. But I'd be honest with you, the older I get, the more I am of the automatic, driverless cars, which, again, are going to be here next year. I guess, was it Waymo in San Francisco? it's got reasonably reliable ones, but look at the struggle we've had with automatic target recognition for driverless cars and that's on highways that, were painted with stripes and big signs and flashing lights and stuff like that, let alone the fog of combat, where you're in fog and it's dark and all that. But, like I said, night and day, compared to even when I retired in 2013 and what we're doing now, but it's one of those problems that we're gonna have to solve, Just like we're, we are solving it. we're probably less than a year out and solving it for driverless cars is, it's just, I think it's going to take more than, than we, than we knew to fix it. I think we'll fix it pretty easy and I think we pretty much have fixed it for air targets, but. that's cheating. That's a well known target against a cold background with hot engines and all that. Not so easy to find Russian T 90s in some trench before some Ukrainian FPV teenager finds them and blows them up.

Luka:

What are some of the promising and very impactful technologies that still remain to be solved as you're observing, small UAS being employed in Ukraine that you are enthusiastic about?

Poss:

Yeah, well, number one, the boring stuff. People are assaulting, the engine problem. And, they're coming at it from a couple of different ways. Conventional engines are intentionally run at a lower RPM so that they last more flight hours. But, we're figuring out that the, CCAs are not going to live that long, even if they do keep coming back, and so you can double the cycle rate on the turbine and go faster. Folks like Kratos, I think partnered with GE, are coming up with a new line of engines, which is very hard to do, or very expensive to do, for the aircraft. The big one to watch is, whether, proliferated low earth orbit communication really does deliver, because it still is the data link stupid, and although I'm excited about AI and autonomy and all that, I'm a belt and suspenders kind of person. I would still like to have a Starlink or Space Development Agency equivalent ability to reach in there and control that aircraft. The stuff that we don't talk about, but is fascinating and has been a true miracle is additive manufacturing and the composites that are going into these things. Back in the old days, we used to run screaming from composites. Cause nobody knew whether they were going to be airworthy and, they were a pain in the buck to make. Nope. They're airworthy, maybe even air worthier, again, second use of my new word, than aluminum. And, we now had, we now know how to manufacture them. Additive manufacturing. Oh my gosh. I got a birthday coming up. If anybody wants to get me a 3D printer, that would be great. It's amazing what industry can do with that, that we don't even think about nowadays. And it's all stuff that, for some reason, everybody is much more comfortable in using in drones than in manned aircraft. cause there's no pilot on board, but it's also something that's really driving the cost down on manned aircraft. It's exciting.

Luka:

Anything we haven't asked you that we should have?

Poss:

No, I think we covered everything. I'd love to come back and talk with you after the, BVLOS rules come out next year because, that's a whole 10 hours of discussion, but that's something that's going to revitalize the commercial drone industry. I feel pretty good about what the military is doing. I mean, I think the Air Force is certainly on the right track on CCA. We didn't get a chance to talk about the Army much, but the Army is doing some amazing, things out there. The Army, I think, is starting to realize that, maybe they don't need as much artillery because they've got small drones. They may even get rid of mortars in favor of drones because, why haul around a 120 millimeter mortar in the back of a, I think they're in 113s, when you can put four 120 millimeter mortar shells on a drone and just drop them on the target. So, fascinating

Luka:

Fascinating conversation indeed. I really enjoyed it. Thank you so much for your time, General.

Poss:

Yeah, I appreciate the invite. You guys are always fantastic to talk to.