Since the inception of air travel, drones have long been a pillar of innovative achievement. Over the past 100 years, researchers have seen significant advances in drone research and development. For modern military research, these unmanned aerial vehicles offer unique advantages, including having the ability to gather intelligence, conduct surveillance, and perform reconnaissance, among other things, all without needing a human pilot on board. As aerospace technology continues to advance, traditional drones as well as autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles are poised to transform airpower.
Mike Shortsleeve, vice president for Department of Defense Strategic Development at General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, Inc., spoke with Popular Science about what’s coming next in unmanned aircraft systems and General Atomics’ pivotal role in it.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
CM: First, from your perspective and experience, why are autonomous aircraft so important?
MS: To understand autonomy, you need to go back to the way we traditionally did unmanned aviation. That is: You have an aircraft with nobody on board, but there is a human crew somewhere in a Ground Control Station that’s flying it live. A pilot has their hands on a throttle and stick, watching instruments, and flying the airplane the old-fashioned way over a radio link.
That was great for the old days. But if an adversary degrades the communications link the system was using, the pilot wouldn’t be able to get intelligence from that aircraft or command it to do mission tasks in the traditional way.
That’s where autonomous technology comes in. Autonomy lets the aircraft take on a lot of that itself. On a traditional unmanned aircraft, if you wanted to fly from Point A to Point B, the pilot would turn, climb, manage power — essentially do all the traditional pilot things. With autonomy, the aircraft knows how to get to Point B by itself and then when it arrives, it does what you want. For example, it can look for objects of interest or go into an orbit waiting for something to happen. Importantly, humans are always in the loop. The aircraft isn’t allowed to take many actions without having been instructed or authorized. However, the degree of live, direct attention required by a pilot goes way down.
Can you tell me more about your remotely piloted aircraft? What makes your technology unique and stand out among competitors?
Our company has been at the forefront of unmanned systems for more than three decades. And we’ve been the technical leader since the beginning, including with our Predator-series aircraft all the way through to today. We’ve delivered more than 1,100 aircraft and, all together, they’ve flown for nearly 9 million hours around the world. So we know what works and what doesn’t and how to build on top of what’s been proven to hit the next level of capability.
Take our newest medium-altitude, long-endurance aircraft, the MQ-9B SkyGuardian. If you look at its picture alone, it clearly resembles its predecessors: the Predator and the MQ-9A Reaper. To create the SkyGuardian, we didn’t need to reinvent the wheel. Rather, its development was an evolution. It was built on proven decisions. This takes a lot of cost and risk away for our customer. And yet, the SkyGuardian is its own, new highly capable aircraft. It has a greater wingspan, better endurance, greater payload. It does everything better.
Going forward, we’re incorporating a variety of new missions. The classic use of our earliest aircraft was providing surveillance over a remote area on flights much longer than any human crew could fly but without any danger to an onboard human crew. And we still do that better than anyone else. We’re also making it possible to do anti-submarine warfare, communications support, remote targeting, electronic warfare, and a lot of other missions that, traditionally, only human-occupied aircraft could handle. And that’s a very exciting chapter to be a part of.
The US Air Force recently announced its Collaborative Combat Aircraft Program, which is an initiative to develop new autonomous aircraft concepts. What is GA’s role in this? In your view, what will air combat and security look like in the future?
We’re bringing together our tested experience in unmanned aircraft and advanced autonomy to drive a revolutionary change in air combat with flexible and scalable solutions to achieve and sustain air superiority across contested airspace. This is important because future air combat will take place in highly contested airspace with complex air and ground threats that demand quicker, artificial intelligence-based decision-making to outmaneuver competitors.
We have been involved with Collaborative Combat Aircraft since the very beginning when it was a science and technology program. We built a demonstrator aircraft called the XQ-67A Off-Board Sensing Station for the Air Force Research Laboratory that flew in early 2024. This was the precursor to the Collaborative Combat Aircraft program. Right now, we’re doing ground testing on a production-representative aircraft that will be our Collaborative Combat Aircraft. The Air Force has designated it the YFQ-42A.
With ever-increasing threats to aircrews, Collaborative Combat Aircraft will play a crucial role in performing high-risk missions and defending manned platforms. The goal will be for the new autonomous wingmen to stand in and be the initial contact with an adversary. They can alert the rest of the force and take the first actions. This gives human fighter pilots and aircrews a critical advantage. Our goal is to keep them safely back from danger, give them the capability they need if they get into contact and, most importantly, let them go home when the fight’s over.