Moseley said he has no doubt the Global Hawk unmanned aerial vehicle—which, he termed worth “its weight in gold”—will probably begin replacing some of the older manned systems like the U-2. “We can walk away from some of the older systems, and we can maintain much more persistence with these unmanned systems,” he explained. The Air Force can configure Global Hawk for a host of capabilities, and keep the aircraft airborne “days at a time.” Fighter pilot Moseley said he’s a “big fan” of UAVs, especially when you can hook imaging technology and Hellfire missiles to them.
The Defense Innovation Unit is gearing up for the first flight of its commercially developed hypersonic testbed as soon as the end of February—part of a larger project to quickly increase the cadence of the Pentagon’s hypersonic flight testing and field advanced, high-speed systems and components at scale.
