Unmanned Combat Air Vehicles. Current Types, Ordnance and Operations. By Dan Getlinger. Harpia Publishing Verlags GmbH, Wien, Austria, 2021. ISBN 978-1-950394-05-0
Reviewed by David Hobbs
Dan Gettinger is the founder and co-director of the Centre for the Study of the Drone at Bard College, an inter-disciplinary, non-profit, research and education institution at Hudson New York. He has researched extensively into the development, procurement and international trade in drones for military purposes and is, therefore, well qualified to write on the subject.
Unmanned Combat Air Vehicles differs from the standard Harpia format in that it has a hard-back cover. It is described as Volume 1 in a Strategic Handbook Series in line with the publisher’s stated intention of providing reference material about topics on which there has been too little coverage. However, the hard-back format has a price-tag and this volume is significantly more expensive than the paperback Harpia books about individual air forces that I have reviewed previously. It is divided into three chapters, the first of which covers definitions and analysis; the second lists individual air vehicles, sub-divided under the countries in which they were developed, and the third lists theatres where drones have been used operationally and the countries that deployed them. Every air vehicle has a colour photograph and a table that gives its status and basic specifications. Helpfully, the author ends every air vehicle description with a list of the sources from which he gained his information, most of which are from the internet, so that readers who want to delve further into the subject are able to do so. The author has gathered his material from sources in the public domain and concentrated it into a single-source, reference volume that allows those who are not drone experts to look up an air vehicle quickly and see its basic history and parameters. It includes both unmanned combat air vehicles and loitering munitions even though the dividing line between the latter and a guided missile is somewhat nebulous. UCAVs are classified according to the NATO guidance used for operator training into Class I, light, Class II, medium and Class III, heavy. There is a similar classification for loitering munitions that places them in micro, tactical and strategic categories. In the data tables the author further differentiates between air vehicles by indicating those in service as A, those under development as B and those still in the concept stage as C. Roughly one third of the entries fall into each category.
Drone development is dynamic and likely to become even more so in the next few years. I have already seen a reference in the press to a Turkish Bayraktar TB3 development for operation from the LHD Anadolu which is not mentioned in this book’s text. No doubt more will follow in the near future and the book clearly needs to be updated regularly if it is to remain a relevant and comprehensive focus of information.
My one complaint about the book is the number of minor typographical mistakes which slipped through the proof-reading process. As examples the Bayraktar UCAV mentioned above is spelt as both ‘Bayraktar’ and ‘Baytakr’ on page 121. On page 126 the twin-boom Aksungur drone is described as a ‘twin-book’ design. Most of these minor errors are simply irritating but there are some that can be misleading as in the Definitions and Analysis section on page 9 where the author mistakenly states in paragraph one ‘…two types of armed drones: UCAV and loitering munition. The latter is designed to be reusable, while the former is expendable’. This is, of course, the wrong way round and seven lines lower the author corrects his error by stating, correctly, ‘…an unarmed combat aerial vehicle, UCAV, is a reusable aircraft designed to conduct kinetic operations…’. In the next paragraph he states, again correctly, that ‘a loitering munition is an expendable uncrewed aircraft that is designed to explode on impact with a target’. Proof- reading should have removed the error in paragraph one and avoided any confusion in the reader’s mind about what is the correct definition. Hopefully future editions will address these shortcomings.
In summary this book achieves its aim of giving a short summary of unmanned combat air vehicles and loitering munitions that will allow researchers to look up basic details and seek further references if they want them. It will, however, date very quickly and its high price tag would put me off it, especially since those proof-reading errors mean that it is not up to the high standard set by Harpia in its less expensive volumes. I recommend it but with some reservations about those errors.
