Carrier air wing tactics : incorporating the Navy Unmanned Combat Air System (NUCAS)

Abstract

The United States Navy has established a Program Office for Acquisition, PMA-268, to develop the Navy Unmanned Combat Air System (NUCAS). The NUCAS will be a fighter-sized aircraft capable of a variety of missions including deep-strike, Intelligence Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR), Time Sensitive Targeting (TST) and Air-to-Air Refueling (AAR).The NUCAS will offer new capabilities to the operability of a Carrier Air Wing (CAW). Potential benefits include improvements in combat sortie completion rate for manned aircraft such as the F/A-18 Super Hornet and the F-35C Lighting II Joint Strike Fighter (JSF). In this thesis, we evaluate a strike scenario that focuses on the coordination of the NUCAS, the F/A-18 Super Hornet,and the F-35C Lightning II. We construct a simulation model of the scenario, and use a designed experiment to run 12,000 simulated coordinated strike events. We then use a variety of statistical and graphical tools to evaluate the result in order to determine the quantity of aircraft required for mission success, and operational factors necessary to limit friendly aircraft losses. The results indicate that a division of four NUCAS aircraft is advantageous, in terms of achieved high target casualty rates and high blue survivability rates. The results also highlight the necessity of stealth technology requirements in future aircraft development.