MQ-9B SeaGuardian® Is Rewriting the Practice of Surveillance and Reconnaissance

The NQ-9B SeaGuardian provides a new, highly cost-effective tool to meet the 21st century challenges of maritime security, resource protection and search and rescue.

The need for surveillance and reconnaissance can be a challenging and resource-intensive process, but uncrewed aircraft are helping rewrite the way it’s done.

Leading the way is the MQ-9B SeaGuardian®, which enables the most advanced navies, coast guards, and other civilian agencies to patrol longer, detect more, and complement other assets to make them much more effective.

Manufactured by San Diego-based General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, Inc., SeaGuardian has recorded several recent first-ever achievements across a range of operational and test environments around the world. Even as users prove what the system can do as it enters widespread service, they’re only scratching the surface of the ways MQ-9B will alter the way intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) missions are conducted.

SeaGuardian has shown it can provide timely, pervasive, and broad area ISR for both military and civilian authorities. It has supported numerous coast guard operations in Japan, prosecuted submarines, and escorted naval surface task groups, providing them with sensing, targeting, and communications capabilities. It can self-deploy over extensive distances from its home base and integrate seamlessly into normal aviation traffic.

In just two years of operation with the Indian Navy, the aircraft has recorded more than 12,000 operational hours, delivering valuable maritime, littoral, and overland ISR. Further, the Japan Coast Guard has been flying SeaGuardian since October 2022 and has logged nearly 2,000 hours of operations, including highly effective security and surveillance missions for this year’s 49th G7 Summit in Hiroshima, Japan. These operations have been enabled by General Atomics Aeronautical’s OPTIX Mission Intelligence System.

SeaGuardian was also utilized by the U.S. Navy for one of its most complex and challenging integrated exercises yet, the Integrated Battle Problem 2023 (IBP-

23) – one in which the MQ-9B joined with human-flown maritime helicopters in a major anti-submarine warfare exercise.

Sub-hunting

As part of the IBP-23 in May, an MQ-9B aircraft flown by its crew from a ground control station and operated over satellite joined with U.S. Navy helicopter squadrons to search for submarines in a range off the coast of Southern California.

The exercise focused on crewed/uncrewed teaming, showing how a remotely piloted aircraft can join traditional aircraft, such as U.S. Navy MH-60R Seahawk helicopters, in tackling complex missions. In this example, the helicopters released sonobuoys to detect submarines and conducted simulated attacks. The SeaGuardian then took over monitoring the data sent by the sonobuoys. The SeaGuardian also deployed its own sonobuoys. The MQ-9B demonstrated similar interoperability with the P-8A Poseidon during the Rim of the Pacific 2022 exercise. Overall, SeaGuardian’s considerable endurance gives military commanders increased versatility in how to tackle maritime missions.

In assessing the recent exercise, it is instructive to compare this crewed/uncrewed process with an oldfashioned anti-submarine prosecution, in which crewed aircraft might have needed to fly tens or hundreds of hours, exhausting crews, maintainers, and aircraft. The remotely piloted MQ-9B does this at a fraction of the cost and with no crew on board or even deployed.

The U.S. Navy sub-hunting exercise was one of several such exploits for SeaGuardian. Another involved the aircraft partnering with Navy carrier strike groups off the coast of Hawaii in April, working with warships, aircraft, and other units to ensure the safe passage of the surface ships.

Carrier strike group integration

Carriers, cruisers, and destroyers, as well as F-35 Lightning II fighters, F/A-18E/F Super Hornets, EA-18G Growlers, E-2D Advanced Hawkeyes, MH-60 Seahawks, and P-8 Poseidons were all in the mix with MQ-9B SeaGuardian, which provided them with maritime domain awareness, information dominance, targeting capability, and more.

What the aircraft did, in effect, was serve as the distant eyes and ears for naval commanders. Its onboard sensors can see all through the visual and infrared spectrum, including – with its onboard multi-mode radar – through clouds, fog, mist, or smoke. Other onboard systems can hear throughout the radio frequency spectrum, collecting intelligence that contributes to the most complete common operating picture possible.

No other large medium-altitude, long-endurance aircraft can contribute to multi-domain operations like this. And there are even more ways that SeaGuardian contributes. The aircraft’s proprietary Detect and Avoid System, invented by GA-ASI, means that it can operate in civil airspace just like any other aircraft. This eliminates the need for special arrangements or crewed escort aircraft like those that remotely piloted aircraft might have needed in the past.

Also new is SeaGuardian’s ability to self-deploy to far-flung operating areas. In each of the recent maritime exercises supported by MQ-9B, the aircraft took off from its home base in the California high desert and flew to the base where it was needed.

To participate in the Northern Edge field training exercise around Alaska in May, SeaGuardian flew more than 2,000 miles in a single hop – less than half of its operating range – highlighting its extraordinary range and endurance. Then the MQ-9B flew its missions and took part in the various exercises and, when it was finished, returned home the same way, with a single flight. Compare that to older practices in which an uncrewed aircraft might have needed to be disassembled, boxed up, loaded into a cargo aircraft, flown to its operating location, and then reassembled there for use, and the savings in workforce, time, and increased capability are evident.

Advanced onboard and supporting systems help make all this possible, including automatic takeoff and landing, artificial intelligence and machine learning, and cutting-edge networks. Satellite operations mean that MQ-9B’s crew can be located anywhere, even thousands of miles from where the aircraft is operating. During the Northern Edge exercise, for example, around Alaska, the crews flew the SeaGuardian from the Pacific Northwest area of the United States at Naval Air Station Whidbey Island.

This remote operation not only takes human crews off the aircraft and removes them from harm’s way at sea. It means the MQ-9B can cover other inhospitable areas, such as the cold, ice-covered polar regions, without burdensome hardship deployments for crews or the necessity to position other units for search and rescue in case of a mishap. Taking the people off the aircraft protects them and their support units – all while reducing cost and complexity.

The challenges of the 21st century to seafaring nations, ranging from military security to resource protection and search and rescue, aren’t simple or easy to tackle. But the good news is that authorities charged with oversight and protection in these domains now have a new, highly cost-effective tool ready to meet those challenges head-on – MQ-9B SeaGuardian.