The Air Force Is Retiring Most of Its Global Hawk ISR Drones to A Test Role for Hypersonic Missiles

Most of the Air Force’s RQ-4 Global Hawk high-altitude ISR drones, best known for collecting intelligence over the Middle East and more recently Ukraine, are set to become “Range Hawks”, tasked with monitoring U.S. hypersonic missile tests over the Pacific.

Twenty Global Hawks will be converted to Range Hawks at Northrop Grumman’sNOC
Grand Sky facility on Grand Forks AFB, North Dakota. Grand Forks AFB is home to RQ-4s operated by the USAF’s 319th Reconnaissance Wing which continues to fly the most recent Block 40 variant of the remotely-piloted Global Hawks.

The Air Force debuted prototypes of the sophisticated high altitude drones in service over Afghanistan shortly after the terrorist attacks of 9-11, 2001. It ultimately acquired a fleet of 32 RQ-4As/Bs in four production Blocks (10/20/30/40) at a total cost of approximately $10 billion. Global Hawk acquisition was plagued by cost overruns over the years. An initial flyaway cost projection of $10 million per aircraft in 1994 ballooned to $131.4 million per RQ-4 by 2013.

Though considered an invaluable asset at times, the Air Force appears never to have really loved the Global Hawk. Most of the Block 30 series RQ-4s it is retiring are less than a decade old.

Over its career, the Global Hawk’s extended flight endurance and broad area surveillance capabilities (it can survey as much as 40,000 square miles of terrain per day using high-resolution synthetic aperture radar and electro-optical/infrared sensors) have alternately been perceived as too costly, critical to national defense, unreliable, and superior or inferior to the manned U-2.

With that reputation in mind, it’s perhaps not a surprise the service has agreed to transfer Global Hawks to DoD’s Test Resource Management Center (TMRC) and its “SkyRange” hypersonic missile testing program. TMRC manages DoD test assets including equipment and ranges for multi-service weapons testing.

SkyRange is, as the name suggests, a framework for aerial test monitoring and data collection, a test range aloft. The concept substitutes airborne Range Hawks with special test sensors for the aging fleet of ships deployed across a Pacific Ocean corridor that TMRC currently uses to test hypersonic missiles.

Given the several weeks it takes to deploy and position the ships for each test, it’s only possible to schedule four to six hypersonic missile tests per year. Using the SkyRange Range Hawk fleet, the frequency of tests can theoretically be increased and done so on a nearly impromptu basis. The current test arrangement with sea-based sensors signals the testing schedule to U.S. adversaries.

According to TMRC, the modified RQ-4s will also be less expensive to operate and offer the potential of a moveable range, creating additional testing corridors in the Pacific and elsewhere. The Global Hawks join a number of unmanned MQ-9 Reapers (Range Reapers) in the SkyRange fleet. The aircraft will capture real-time telemetry data and multi-spectral full-motion video, while also providing the range clearance and surveillance information, and meteorological data, to support launch decision-making.

If the cost and flexibility claims pan out, it’s attractive logic, particularly to the Air Force. Last year, the service announced its intention to retire all of its Block 30 Global Hawks.

Air Force Chief of Staff, General C.Q. Brown, claimed in congressional testimony that the unmanned aircraft would be replaced with a mixture of unspecified alternatives, including “penetrating” platforms and “5th- and 6th-generation capabilities.” The latter may include the oft-reported on secret stealth spy drone popularly known as the RQ-180 whose purported ISR capabilities appear to be complimented by a communications/data-sharing gateway capability.

Written remarks accompanying Gen. Brown’s testimony asserted that legacy ISR platforms like the Global Hawk can no longer survive peer threat environments or deliver needed intel/data fast enough to be relevant. The remarks included the now familiar USAF logic that “These legacy platforms must be phased out, with resources used to invest in modern and relevant systems. Working together, we must take calculated risk now in order to reduce the greater future risk.”

The Air Force has followed through, transferring the first five Block 30 Global Hawks across the runway from the 319th RW’s hangars at Grand Forks AFB to Northrop-Grumman’s Grand Sky facility last month. The remaining 15 Block 30s will transfer from the 319th to Northrop Grumman by the end of July.

In a memo on the transfer Gen. Brown said, “The divestment of this weapons system was a tough but necessary resourcing choice we had to make in order to begin realizing a budgeted savings of over two billion dollars.”

Exactly how the Air Force plans to spend the savings isn’t clear. The service had not answered questions regarding follow-on ISR plans by publication time. General Brown’s emphasis on the $2 billion saved contrasts notably with remarks made by 319th RW commander, Col. Timothy Curry, during the recent transfer.

“There’s no way to count how many American and allied lives this specific sensor payload saved between the enhanced integrated sensor suite and airborne signals intelligence,” Curry said. “Putting those capabilities in the hands of our Airmen created near real-time intelligence for warfighters, decision-makers and command centers.”

Now, most of the Global Hawks are gone, destined to become hypersonic technology test assets. The remaining 11 Block 40 RQ-4s are expected to operate with the 319th and the 12th Reconnaissance Squadron at Beale AFB, California until the late 2020s.