WASHINGTON: The Air Force's RQ-4 Global Hawk unmanned aircraft appears to be the latest big-ticket program to fall victim to the Pentagon's budget axe.
The venerable intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance drone will be nixed as part of the Air Force's upcoming fiscal 2013 budget proposal , according to Loren Thompson, a consultant and defense analyst. Specifically, the Air Force will retire the Block 30 variants of the drone already in the service's fleet and end production of the platform entirely, he wrote.
The decision comes as Global Hawk-manufacturer Northrop Grumman is developing a new Block 40 version of the drone for the Air Force and a maritime version -- known as the Broad Area Maritime Surveillance system -- for the Navy. The cancellation also comes at a time when company officials have been aggressively pushing the Global Hawk into foreign markets. Deals with NATO, South Korea, Japan and Australia were potentially on the table until today's announcement.
"Obviously, it's a disappointment," company spokesman Jim Stratford said, noting that the Pentagon issued an Acquisition Decision Memorandum last June that concluded Global Hawk is "essential to national defense and no other platform could do this mission at lower cost." The ADM was issued when the Defense Acquisition Board approved a massive restructuring of the program. But the Global Hawk's multiple breaches of federally-mandated cost caps, including the one that prompted the June restructure, have proven a persistent headache to the Air Force. Ultimately, that concern pushed service leaders to offer the ISR drone as a "bill-payer" in the 2013 budget plan, according to Thompson.
The Global Hawk's cancellation may ultimately leave the brunt of the Air Force's high-altitude ISR operations to the aging U-2 spy plane. A burden that will only get heavier as U.S. military forces begin to pivot from Southwest Asia to the Western Pacific . Since the Global Hawk's inception, Air Force leaders have repeatedly claimed the drone would replace the legacy U-2. But as years passed, service leaders always came up with reasons why the RQ-4 was not yet ready to take the manned aircaft's place. What will be really interesting to watch is, if the Global Hawk program is killed, will the Pentagon order a new aircraft capable of doing the same missions.
Source: https://defense.aol.com/2012/01/24/pentagon-mothballs-air-force-global-hawk/