Giant Spy Blimp Battle Could Decide Surveillance’s Future

How many giant experimental spy blimps does the military need over Afghanistan, exactly?

That’s one of many questions the Senate Armed Services Committee is asking after an intramilitary battle has erupted over what many expect to be the future of aerial surveillance. The Army and the Air Force each have their own football field-sized airships in the works; the Senate panel wants to know why it should pay for both — especially as the Air Force seems fickle about its model and keeps changing the spy sensors on board. Legislators are asking: What gives?

This is more than some obscure bureaucratic hair-pull. The answer to those questions — and the winners of those fights — could determine the direction of U.S. intelligence-gathering for years to come.
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A sign of the spy blimp’s rising stock: Retired Lt. Gen. David Deptula — who, until recently, was in charge of all Air Force intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) programs — is now the CEO of MAV6, a Vicksburg, Mississippi, startup building one of these next-gen airships for the military.

It’s part of a project called “Blue Devil.” The behemoth, 340-foot-long blimp and all of its spy gear should be ready for Air Force duty by January, Deptula promises. And if Blue Devil works as promised — staying four miles above Afghanistan for five days at a time — drones could suddenly seems like an expensive anachronism.

“It brings to bear a completely different concept for ISR: multiple sensors on one platform integrated with on-board processing and storage. It’s the first time we’re using a modular system on an aircraft to host a variety of sensors, and they can be rapidly changed for new or different sensors in a matter of hours,” Deptula tells Danger Room. “We’ve got the world’s largest ISR payload — and ‘real estate’ to host it, and nearly a supercomputer on board to process what they find.”

The Pentagon is planning to spend $4.5 billion to mount 15 more drone air patrols. The costs of operating, maintaining and processing the information from the roboplanes runs about $8,000 per hour. Deptula claims Blue Devil would run $1,000 per hour, because it requires fewer people (although that’s just an educated guess; the thing hasn’t flown yet). “A handful of Blue Devil orbits could achieve significantly greater ISR effectiveness for a fraction of that cost and save billions,” he insists. For now, the Air Force is spending $211 million on one of Deptula’s blimps.
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Even muddier is the Air Force plan for what to do if the spy blimp wows the military if and when it goes to Afghanistan; there’s no follow-on effort in the budget, at the moment.

Making things murkier still is that there are two more giant blimp programs making their way through the military’s development chain.

The Armed Services Committee is kind of fed up. It’s demanding that the Pentagon appoint a single point person who can sort out which airship projects make sense, and which don’t. This is supposed to a time of coming budget cuts, after all. The sky is pretty big. But it’s not big enough for all these king-sized blimps.

Good times!