Plan has huge implications for future space and aircraft propulsion.

Enhanced land-mine detection product is underway in Europe

While the U.S. Special Operations Command has seen its force size and budget grow despite the current fiscal austerity sweeping Washington, it is looking not for new platforms but for ways of obtaining more data from its existing unmanned air systems, especially small ones such as AeroVironment’s man-portable, hand-launched RQ-11 Raven.

Japan is considering development of an unmanned crisis-monitoring long-endurance aircraft.

Momentum is solidly behind fielding manned-unmanned teaming technologies for Army aviation assets. Combining video feeds and weapons of manned and unmanned platforms provides significantly better situational awareness to troops on the ground and dramatically improved efficiency in focusing weapons to support ground elements.

The RQ-7Bv2 incorporates several improvements, including extended endurance, encrypted data link and reliability upgrades. The U.S. Army plans to upgrade all of its 102 Shadow systems, each with four aircraft, to the new configuration. The biggest capability change is introduction of the Ku-band tactical common data link, already carried by the Army’s larger General Atomics MQ-1C Gray Eagle UAS.

While the Air Force and Navy programs will share elements and technologies, the two services have distinct requirements that likely cannot be reconciled into a single program. Still, the two services continue to pursue a joint analysis of alternatives to fully vet the need for separate programs.

The problem is that Boeing corporate management is taking a one-size-fits-all approach to labor relations.