Wallace gave her a tight grin, but the expression gave nothing away. He was the Air Force’s chief of staff — the top boss — and a difficult man for her to gauge. He’d served with her father, and claimed to be a great admirer of Dreamland and everything associated with it. He and Zen occasionally had lunch together during his visits to Capitol Hill. On the other hand, he frequently butted heads with Breanna’s boss, Deputy Defense Secretary Harold Magnus. The two had clashed when Magnus was in the Air Force some years before, and while they didn’t openly feud — Magnus wasn’t the type, and there was no percentage in it for Wallace — Wallace’s animosity was often subtly displayed, especially toward Magnus’s pet projects.
One of which Breanna had come to discuss.
“Thank you, General,” she said, sliding her laptop onto the table. “Everyone is aware of the Sabre UAV program and its present status.”
She nodded toward Steph Garvey, the two-star Air Force general in charge of the Sabre program. Garvey gave her a smile — genuine and easy to read.
“We have made good progress with the UM/F program in general,” continued Breanna. “Including the Navy variant.”
“That’s a matter of opinion,” grumbled Admiral David Chafetz. There was no mistaking Chafetz’s attitude — he didn’t like anything even remotely connected to the Air Force, and was a skeptic of unmanned aircraft as well. That was two big strikes against the Sabre program.
Officially designated UM/F–9s, the unmanned aircraft had been developed as replacements for the Flighthawks, the robot aircraft that helped revolutionize aerial combat in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Though greatly improved over the years, the Flighthawks had a number of limitations, including range and speed. More importantly, their airframes were now well past their design age. Materials fatigue — both their metal skeleton and carbon-fiber skins — was starting to hamper their effectiveness. Internal fasteners had to be inspected before each flight on some of the high-hour aircraft — an onerous procedure that added several hours to the maintainers’ routine chores. It was time for a new generation of remote fighters to take over.
The Sabres were that fighter.
Nicknamed after the fighter that had dominated the skies over North Korea during the 1950s, the UM/F–9 was the first UAV capable of sustained Mach speeds. (Though technically the Flighthawks could fly faster than the speed of sound, they could not operate reliably in Mach-plus regimes for several reasons unrelated to their airfoil.) Long and sleek, the aircraft used a hybrid ramjet pulse engine to fly; an array of maneuvering nozzles and high- strength carbon-based alloys made twelve g-plus turns routine. Tests showed that it was more than a match for even the improved F–22C Block–150s that had recently joined the Air Force’s top interceptor squadrons.
But high speeds and maneuverability meant nothing if the aircraft could not be controlled. And this control system — called Medusa — represented the real breakthrough.
Like the Flighthawk, the Sabre was capable of “autonomous combat.” In other words, it could figure out on its own how to take down an enemy, then do so. Unlike Flighthawks, Sabres could work together against an enemy, employing section tactics without human intervention. Data from one aircraft was immediately shared with all of the aircraft in the same flight. Spotting a group of four enemy planes, for example, the flight could decide to break into two elements and attack from two different directions.
While the Flighthawks had small onboard flight computers to handle many of the basic tasks of flight, they relied heavily on a centralized computer and a human controlling them, generally from an EB–52 or modified B– 1.
Medusa did not exist separately from the Sabres. It was, as the man who invented it liked to say with his droll puns, a true “cloud computer.” The interconnection of the units working together created the real intelligence.
But there had to be a human in the process
Actually, the man who invented Medusa didn’t agree that there should be any human anywhere in the process. It wasn’t that Ray Rubeo had no use for his fellow man or thought that human intelligence was an oxymoron, though charges along those lines had often been leveled at him. Rubeo simply saw no need for a human “to muck things up.”
“You don’t steer a Sidewinder to its target,” he had told Breanna on several occasions. “It’s fire and forget. Same with this.”
But the military was not ready to think about a squadron of aircraft as “fire and forget” weapons. And though Rubeo worked, as a contractor, for her, Breanna wasn’t ready to think that way either.
So where did the Medusa “control” unit go?
At a secure base far from harm, like those generally used for the Predator and Global Hawk? Or a plane, like the Flighthawk system?
A satellite control system with a ground base could be used, but there were problems with bandwidth, and the cost was considerable — much more than Medusa, let alone the Sabres.
Medusa’s range was roughly two hundred miles, a considerable improvement over the Flighthawks. Still, that was close enough that a savvy enemy could seek to locate and isolate the control aircraft. Simply making the plane run away would mean a cheap victory, as the Sabres would have to follow or lose their connection. That wasn’t much of an issue for a system like the Flighthawks, originally designed to protect a bombing package: their job was to stay close to the mother ship in the first place. But it would be disastrous for interceptors.
The Air Force was pushing for a new version of the F–35 to act as the Sabres’ controller. This would be a stretched, two-seat version of the stealthy lightweight fighter. There were considerable problems with such an approach, starting with the fact that the stretched F–35 couldn’t carry enough fuel to stay in a combat area for more than an hour, far less than the Sabre. There was also a matter of cost, which would be considerable for a plane not even off the drawing board yet.
The Navy had gone along with the plan, grudgingly, because it would allow the Sabres to operate from carriers for the first time. But as Chafetz’s demeanor made clear, their support was less than enthusiastic.
Breanna had come today to offer a different solution entirely.
“I should start by giving you all a bit of good news about the intelligent command system that flies the planes,” she said, flipping open her laptop. “We call it Medusa. It’s—”
“A Greek monster,” quipped Chafetz.
Breanna smiled indulgently. Her solution would actually help the Navy, but she didn’t expect to be thanked for it.
“The admiral knows his myths,” she said. “Medusa is six months ahead of schedule. In fact, as you’ll see at the demonstration next week — those of you who are going out to Dreamland — it’s completely operational. Or would be, if we had more Sabres.”
“We will have a dozen by the end of the year,” said General Garvey.
“And that program is on schedule and on budget,” Breanna offered quickly, not wanting to seem as if she was criticizing Garvey. “Along the way, we’ve made some improvements to Medusa’s human input unit. It’s now as compact as the units in Sabres. Which gave us an idea.”
While talking, she had booted up her laptop. The computer found the secure local network, signing itself on automatically. Breanna glanced down and double-clicked on a PowerPoint icon. A pair of video screens began to rise from the center of the conference room tables.
“We’d like to propose a new aircraft as part of the control solution. Some of you will be familiar with it.”
A jet came on the screen. It looked like a cousin of the F–22, perhaps by way of the YF–23 and a Bird of Prey. Black, with an oval double wing at the tail and stubby fins at its side, it was two-thirds the size of a Raptor, as the next slide demonstrated.
“The Tigershark?” asked Chafetz. “A Navy plane?”
Wallace cleared his throat.
“Actually, that began as an Air Force project,” he said. “But it’s dead. The company’s bankrupt. No more aircraft can be built.”
“At the moment, we have all we need,” said Breanna. “There are three aircraft. They could all be given over to the program. That’s one more than you need, at least for the next two years.”
Three Tigersharks had been built and tested three years before. The aircraft was seen first as a replacement for the F–22, and as a possible fifth generation fighter for the Navy.
