Global Hawk deploys in the march to BAMS

In the march towards BAMS, the U.S. Navy may move one of its two Global Hawk Maritime Demo aircraft to the Iraq theater to begin maritime surveillance operations. Aviation Week says that while no announcement of its base was made, "it is widely known that the Air Force’s high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft supporting activities in Iraq and Afghanistan operate from Al Dhafra Air Base in the United Arab Emirates."

If the GHMD can demonstrate successful shipping lane surveillance in the Persian Gulf, this will mean that the Navy's P-8 Poseidon (ex-MMA) follow-on to the P-3 Orion will indeed be able to look forward to assistance in broad area surface surveillance missions. It will be interesting to see if the GHMD can track small boat traffic as well as ship traffic from its normal (high) operating altitudes using its systems, which are less capable than those scheduled to be on the BAMS version. If, however, it does well enough, I'll go out on a limb and say we should expect to see additional acquisitions of the Navalised Global Hawk before BAMS comes online in 2015.