Air Force 2027: Fewer pilots, more drones, more challenges
The Air Force of the future is likely to be slightly smaller and more reliant on remotely piloted aircraft, face growing challenges from the rise of Asia and rapidly increasing space traffic, and struggle to maintain its technological superiority as the United States produces fewer scientists, engineers and other highly skilled graduates.
And to survive, former Chief Scientist Mark Maybury said in a June 21 report, the Air Force is going to need to adopt several “game-changing” strategies to keep up with emerging challenges and global threats between now and 2027. That could include adopting speedy acquisition strategies from commercial space companies such as SpaceX, making greater use of lasers and other directed energy weapons, and adopting advanced manufacturing techniques such as 3-D printing.
“If we presume the future is going to look like today, I think we are going to be sorely mistaken,” Mica Endsley, the Air Force’s new chief scientist, said at a July 11 breakfast hosted by the Air Force Association. “The future environment, even in the next decade, has some really significant potential threats that we need to be aware of and we need to be thinking about carefully.”
In the report, called “Global Horizons: United States Air Force Global Science and Technology Vision,” Maybury said that the Air Force’s manned air fleet is likely to shrink slightly by 2027. But the Air Force’s fleets of remotely piloted aircraft and their missions are likely to grow significantly.
The United States also needs to pay attention to the worldwide proliferation of RPAs as their cost plunges, Endsley said.
“It’s not just us, and that’s the big change that we need to take a look at,” Endsley said.
The report said that most RPAs today are designed for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, but nations are investing significantly in combat drones. Some may even be capable of delivering weapons of mass destruction such as chemical, biological or nuclear weapons, and the U.S. needs to develop ways to detect and defeat them, the report said.
