Aquila Remotely Piloted Vehicle Recent Developments And Alternatives

This GAO report is about the Army's Aquila Remotely Piloted Vehicle (RPV), which has had numerous difficulties since it entered full-scale development in 1979. Among these have been technical performance problems and funding cuts, which have led to substantial cost growth and schedule slippage. During the past year, the emergence of critical performance problems during testing led to a major program restructuring and threatened the Aquila's future. Prior to these changes, costs to acquire the Aquila were estimated at about $2 billion. This estimate has not yet been revised to reflect the recent changes. Several RPV systems exist in addition to the Aquila. The Army considered these alternative systems in a study it made in 1984 from the standpoint of their possible availability and potential to perform in the stringent environment envisioned for Aquila's use. GAO found that although the study did not consider several factors which could have led to a more balanced comparison, the Army chose to continue the Aquila development because of its earlier availability. The Army's decision to continue Aquila's development was based primarily on its ability to perform the basic target acquisition and designation mission in a stringent environment, and on its availability for fielding earlier than alternative systems. Although the Army's 1984 study of the Aquila and the alternative systems concluded that the alternatives could be made to perform the mission in a demanding environment, they could not match Aquila's earlier availability.

Catalog of reports, decisions and opinions, testimonies and speeches.

The untold story of the birth of the Predator drone, a wonder weapon that transformed the American military, reshaped modern warfare, and sparked a revolution in aviation The creation of the first weapon in history whose operators can stalk and kill an enemy on the other side of the globe was far more than clever engineering. As Richard Whittle shows in Predator, it was one of the most profound developments in the history of military and aerospace technology. Once considered fragile toys, drones were long thought to be of limited utility. The Predator itself was resisted at nearly every turn by the military establishment, but a few iconoclasts refused to see this new technology smothered at birth. The remarkable cast of characters responsible for developing the Predator includes a former Israeli inventor who turned his Los Angeles garage into a drone laboratory, two billionaire brothers marketing a futuristic weapon to help combat Communism, a pair of fighter pilots willing to buck their white-scarf fraternity, a cunning Pentagon operator nicknamed "Snake," and a secretive Air Force organization known as Big Safari. When an Air Force team unleashed the first lethal drone strikes in 2001 for the CIA, the military's view of drones changed nearly overnight. Based on five years of research and hundreds of interviews, Predator reveals the dramatic inside story of the creation of a revolutionary weapon that forever changed the way we wage war and opened the door to a new age in aviation.