Experts question whether DOD has enough radio bands to support them

Unmanned aerial vehicles are vital to the Defense Department’s net-centric operations, according to the 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review, but the bandwidth essential to supporting them is disappearing.

John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, said DOD’s plans for greater use are unworkable because the portion of the radio spectrum the drones rely on is finite and is rapidly being used up by other commercial and DOD programs.

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Defense officials emphasized the use of UAVs in the QDR after their success in Iraq and Af-ghanistan, where they were run by controllers in the United States.

UAV payload data is used for targeting, bomb damage assessment and intelligence analysis. But experts say DOD must deal with the bandwidth limitations to make this possible.

“For all this QDR talk of ‘network-centric’ and ‘network everything,’ they have a horrible bandwidth crunch—because they’re operating so many of these UAVs beyond line of sight, and they need bandwidth in order to get the sensor data back to the processing center,” Pike said.

He said DOD was “lucky” to have bought from the commercial spot market sufficient bandwidth and transponders in 2001 for initial UAV operations in Afghanistan. But as UAV-driven requirements “increase exponentially,” available bandwidth continues to shrink.

There probably will not be enough bandwidth for the new Global Persistent Strike bomber, Pike said, leaving no choice but to use laser transponders and cross-links to communicate.

“They’d have to use the laser satellite” under the Transformational Communications Satellite program, Pike said.

Source and more info: gcn.com