Splitting the Difference

For all of the squabbling between the Army and the Air Force over who should own—and thereby run—the military’s growing fleet of unmanned aerial assets, it looks like the Army is taking a page out of the Air Force’s playbook in Iraq and Afghanistan in the way it deploys its UAVs. According to the Air Force Times,

An Air Force team is rigging an Army RQ-7 Shadow unmanned aerial vehicle so it can be flown by operators who are thousands of miles from the aircraft itself, the same way the Air Force operates its Predator UAVs. 

This is a pretty big departure for the Army, which normally fields its UAVs as battalion-level assets that move in and out of theater with the units to which they’re assigned. Having the “pilots” based stateside will allow the Army to leave its UAVs in theater permanently, while allowing the Army to deploy fewer soldiers, since the operators can stay stateside, just like the Air Force does.

Read the rest at Defense Technology International's ARES blog.