The U.S. Navy has decided its first drone will be an aerial refueling tanker, according to a new report inDefense News. The ability to refuel other carrier aircraft has trumped other roles for the drone aircraft, including strike and reconnaissance.

The U.S. Navy has embraced drones in a big way. The Navy funded the development of the X-47B drone , a proof of concept aircraft that demonstrated in a series of flight tests that operating drones from aircraft carriers was indeed possible. The tests, carried out on the USS George Bush in 2013, went very well as the drone excelled at takeoffs, landings, night operations, and generally fit in well with the crowded, chaotic nature of carrier flight operations.

With the drones-on-a-carrier concept successfully validated, the next step is UCLASS , or Unmanned Carrier-Launched Airborne Surveillance and Strike. UCLASS will be a real aircraft, bought in quantity and assigned to carrier air wings worldwide. Although the aircraft would technically be capable of doing both reconnaissance or strike, different factions in government and beyond have proposed that it should be more capable of doing one better or the other.

That the UCLASS would turn out to be a tanker would be a real surprise. But the new aircraft, Defense News reports, will be the Carrier-Based Aerial-Refueling System—CBARS for short—primarily a tanker, with a minor in reconnaissance capability.

CBARS would leverage an aircraft carrier's existing combat power, extending the combat range of the Navy's Hornets, Super Hornets, and eventually F-35 Joint Strike Fighters. Ten strike versions of UCLASS makes ten strike platforms sure, but ten CBARS drones could permit twice as many Hornets and F-35s to strike targets farther away.

All of this is important as China continues to field increasingly long-range versions of its anti-ship ballistic missile. Missiles such as the DF-21 "carrier killer" out-range U.S. carrier aircraft flying un-refueled, meaning a carrier must sail within range of the DF-21 in order to threaten it with a large air strike. CBARs would turn the tables on any land-based Chinese missile system, allowing carriers to hunt these missiles without fear of being directly attacked.

UCLASS was originally to planned be fielded in the early 2020s, and it's not clear if this reported change in missions will upset the timetable. While the Navy's first unmanned drone may not be the sexy surveillance and strike beast defense contractors had in mind, it is a smart way to increase the effectiveness of the forty eight or so fighters in a typical aircraft carrier air wing. And sometime the best strategy is the least flashy one.

Read more at Defense News

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