Pentagon planned $851 million for failed Outrider drone fleet
By Miriam Adler ·
Seven percent of drones were expected to vanish into foreign terrain in a joint surveillance project that was eventually deemed inadequate to justify further production.
One hundred meters of unimproved surface. That is all the runway an Outrider Tactical UAV needs to get airborne. It is a modest requirement for a machine designed to provide "near-real-time reconnaissance, surveillance, and target acquisition information" to the front lines of the American military.
According to a program page mirrored by the FAS Intelligence Resource Program, the Outrider was the center of an Advanced Concept Technology Demonstration managed out of Crystal City, Virginia. The goal was total mobility. The entire system—the aircraft, the sensors, the launch and recovery equipment—was designed to be small enough to fit on two High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicles and a trailer, all transportable on a single C-130 cargo aircraft. It was a blueprint for a lightweight, portable eye in the sky, capable of a 200-kilometer range and four hours of on-station time.
Two Humvees and a Trailer
On May 2, 1996, the Naval Air Systems Command awarded a $53 million contract to Alliant Techsystems to deliver six of these systems. The project was an exercise in corporate aggregation. Alliant’s team was a constellation of contractors: Cirrus Design in Minnesota, Combustion Dynamics in Saskatchewan, IAI TAMAN in Israel, and Lockheed Martin in California.
These partners built a machine that weighed 385 pounds at maximum takeoff and ran on a McCulloch 4318F four-cylinder pusher engine. It carried color CCD and forward-looking infrared sensors, meaning it could conduct "24-hour battlefield surveillance." The military requirements, codified in Joint Requirements Oversight Council Memorandum 150-95, weren't just about the hardware, but the seamlessness of the gaze. The Outrider used the Global Positioning System for navigation and target reporting, ensuring that the coordinates of a target were precise and immediate.
If the demonstrations had proved successful, the financial scale of the project was set to balloon. The Department of Defense planned to spend $268.5 million on system development and another $583.2 million to procure 60 systems comprising 240 aircraft.
Document imagery from irp.fas.org From the files: irp.fas.org
Seven Percent Attrition
In the ledger of military procurement, the loss of equipment is not a failure; it is a projection. The FAS record notes that the "planned attrition rate for the Outrider UAV was 7% per year."
To the analysts in Crystal City, this number was a point of pride. They compared it to the Pioneer UAV, whose attrition rate was "almost double," sitting at nearly 14%. When we speak of attrition in the context of unmanned aircraft, we are speaking of the acceptable rate of disappearance. Seven percent of these machines were expected to crash, be shot down, or vanish into the terrain of a foreign conflict—a calculated cost of doing business in the era of remote warfare.
This clinical approach to loss mirrors the way the program viewed its targets. The Outrider was designed for "target acquisition," a phrase that strips the human element from the act of spotting someone for an airstrike. The machine does not see a person; it sees a coordinate to be reported via a data link.
Document imagery from irp.fas.org From the files: irp.fas.org
"A Fully Joint Program Could Not Be Accomplished"
Despite the technical specifications and the millions of dollars in initial contracts, the Outrider could not bridge the gap between the branches of the military. The FAS page admits that while the "military utility of a land-based UAV" had been proven, "a fully joint program could not be accomplished."
Internal friction between the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps led to a modification of the requirements. Instead of one common air vehicle, the services were permitted to use different types. The Navy began seeking a vertical takeoff and landing UAV for use on ships with small landing areas and in urban environments.
To maintain some semblance of order, the military introduced the Tactical Control System (TCS). This system was meant to be the universal remote, allowing flexible control of all tactical unmanned vehicles. Notably, the record indicates that the TCS would also be used to control "Predator endurance UAVs operated by the Air Force." The Outrider may have struggled to find a unified home, but it helped build the control framework for the Predator, the aircraft that would define the next two decades of American surveillance and targeted killing.
In the end, the Department of Defense shifted its strategy. Rather than investing in lengthy development cycles, they began conducting market surveys to find "off-the-shelf systems" that could meet their needs. They wanted maturity over innovation, performance that was already demonstrated.
Related records held by the Internet Archive, specifically DTIC ADA329483 from 1997, suggest the conclusion was bleak: the Outrider demonstrations were deemed "inadequate to justify further production."