“Defense officials said the U.S. Army plans to eliminate at least eight brigades while reducing the size of the active duty Army from 570,000 to 490,000, cuts that are likely to hit armored and heavy infantry units the hardest. But drone and special-operations deployments would continue to grow as they have in recent years.”
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta on Thursday and in budget documents next month, calls for a 30% increase in the U.S. fleet of armed unmanned aircraft in the coming years, defense officials said.
One major component of the data collection and dissemination process is the UAV GCS. The ground station receives the information collected by a UAV, processes that information, and reroutes it via a datalink to the appropriate end user. The station also controls where the UAV goes and what it looks at.
For example, the MQ-1 Predator UAV system comes in a package with 4 vehicles, 1 GCS, and a data link suite that consists of UHF and VHF radio relay links, a C-band line-of-sight data link, and Ku-band satellite data links. When the Predator drone is out of sight of the GCS, the operators use a satellite data link.
The Predator GCS is housed in a commercially available trailer. The trailer incorporates an integral uninterrupted power supply, environmental control system, pilot and payload operator (PPO) workstations, data exploitation, mission planning, communication (DEMPC) terminals, and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) workstations. All imagery recording is located in the GCS, since the Predator has no onboard recording capability.
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