Unmanned Aerial Vehicles: Improving Warfighting Capabilities in the Urban Environment

摘要

As worldwide urbanization increases and our adversaries seek to use the urban terrain to asymmetrically engage U.S. forces, the U.S. military must be able to effectively conduct military operations in the urban environment that maximize maneuverability, flexibility, and lethality, while minimizing the risk to our forces. Not only must our warfighters have timely, reliable information about the urban terrain, they must also possess the capability to effectively address these threats to seize the initiative from our adversary, allowing us to dictate where and when to accept the fight. This paper suggests that unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), although accepted for their value in providing our warfighters with enhanced information, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities, have more to offer. In the fluid urban environment, ISR is only one critical aspect of successful mission accomplishment; UAVs can be used to conduct other key missions as well. It is proposed that they could be used to overcome communications shortfalls; look inside buildings to ascertain occupancy and purpose; detect, identify, track, and target enemy threats; and sense out mines and weapons of mass destruction employment. UAVs have demonstrated their potential usefulness, however, the U.S. military needs to continue to investigate other missions against which to employ UAVs to take advantage of their inherent flexibility and maneuverability, which so enhance our urban warfighting capabilities. Further, UAVs are not viewed as the panacea for the challenging problems encountered in urban operations -- they should be employed to complement manned aircraft. However, we need to address the unmanned-manned force mix and doctrinal issues to maximize their utility.