The MQ-9 Reaper was a linchpin in the Middle East. Now, it must adapt to new battlespaces.

Twenty thousand feet above Afghanistan, a U.S. Air Force MQ-9 Reaper prowls the skies, its tip-to-tip wingspan stretching 66 feet. It’s early 2021, before the U.S. withdrawal, and the aircraft is on an armed Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) mission. It’s also carrying a payload of up to eight AGM-114 Hellfire missiles, weapons so accurate that the CIA sometimes swaps their explosives with blades to target specific seats in moving cars.

The Reaper takes its cues from two people: a pilot at the aircraft’s controls, and an enlisted sensor operator controlling the MTS-B targeting pod. Both personnel are more than 7,000 miles away, at Whiteman Air Force Base in Johnson County, Missouri. The aircraft has been aloft for more than 15 hours, but its pilot, Captain Dennis (surname redacted due to operational security concerns) is just beginning his shift at the controls. It takes 1.2 seconds for the captain’s commands to reach the Reaper, and the aircraft returns high-definition video on a screen in front of his control panel. Just five minutes after the captain takes over the aircraft, he receives a “Troops in Contact” notification: Friendly troops are under fire by the enemy.

The alert comes with exact coordinates for the engagement. The MQ-9 can fly up to 27 hours without refueling, so Dennis turns the Reaper toward the threat and receives word from his sensor operator on the situation: Fifteen Taliban fighters armed with rifles and rocket-propelled grenades are approaching U.S.-partnered troops from the Afghan Armed Forces.

As the Reaper arrives on the scene, Dennis, a commissioned officer and instrument-rated pilot, begins direct communication with the Joint Terminal Attack Controller (JTAC), the person on the ground who coordinates air support from within the fight. The JTAC relays the exact positions of both friendly forces and the approaching attackers. Their precision ensures that the powerful sensors tied to the MQ-9’s onboard munitions have the right targets in their sights.

“We come with the mindset every single day that we [could] employ weapons,” Dennis says. “Due to the persistence of our attack craft and the fact that we can be anywhere we need to be, we show up with the expectation that we’re going to shoot if called upon to do so.” These scenarios have life-or-death consequences. In the captain’s words: “This is not a video game.”

Dennis works alongside the sensor operator to target the enemy with two Hellfire missiles. With the press of a button, the Hellfires scream toward their targets at speeds nearing 1,000 mph. Upon impact, their blast fragmentation warheads explode, throwing shrapnel in all directions and killing multiple Taliban fighters. Those who remain flee the scene.

The MQ-9 Reaper has been stalking its targets for 14 years; today, it’s a notorious terrorist hunter. But as Russia and China draw apace with the American military, the United States is shifting its focus away from counterterrorism operations in anticipation of a new era of near-peer warfare. These potential conflicts would bring tactical and environmental scenarios to the Reaper that are dissimilar from its experience in the Middle East, and it’s unclear whether the aircraft can adapt. The U.S. military is embarking on new training exercises to test the Reaper’s versatility, but if the aircraft can’t meet those demands, it could be phased out of its defense program—and one of the military’s most decorated, successful aircraft could be forced into retirement.

when the Reaper succeeded the General Atomics MQ-1 Predator in 2007, it brought a massive increase in both America’s remotely piloted capability and surveillance over the sprawling battlespaces of Afghanistan and Iraq. The MQ-9 is larger and more powerful than its predecessor, passing on the Predator’s 115-horsepower engine in favor of a Honeywell TPE331-10 turboprop that delivers 900 horsepower. This gives the MQ-9 more than double the MQ-1’s top speed and more than 15 times its payload capacity. Together, the Reaper and the Predator accumulated more than 4 million flight hours between 1996 and 2019—eight times the 500,000 flight hours accrued by the U-2 spy plane between 1958 and 2021.

The Air Force calls the MQ-9 a Remotely Piloted Aircraft, or RPA. A Reaper is about as big as an A-10 Thunderbolt II. It can carry 3,750 pounds of ordnance (including up to eight Hellfire missiles with the right modifications), and cover about 2,000 miles without refueling. Flying the aircraft takes up to two years of training through the Air Force’s Undergraduate Remotely Piloted Aircraft Pilot Training pipeline, making the leadup time for a pilot similar to that of other tactical aircraft.

The Reaper’s remote features make it a relatively risk-averse piloting option for U.S. service members, and Dennis says it’s the most requested form of air support among combatant commanders. While Air Force pilots may deploy and fly combat operations for four months at a time, Reaper pilots can fly multiple missions each day, remotely connecting to MQ-9s in different parts of the world in what are called “remote split operations.” No other combat pilots are conducting reconnaissance in Iraq, close air support in Afghanistan, and high value surveillance in Syria on the same day, but that’s feasible for Reaper crews. In the conflict landscape of the near future, Reaper mission sets could be even more diverse—if the aircraft itself can manage the highly contested environments of the 21st century.

The near-peer battlefields of the 21st century will likely differ from the technologically underdeveloped environments of the post-9/11 conflicts. In recent years, the Pentagon has shifted its focus toward “great power competition”—nations with near technological parity with the United States—and that has significant implications for the Reaper’s role in the military.

Great power competition has specifically drawn American attention to China’s aggressive advancements in the South China Sea, a waterway that hosts nearly a third of all global commerce. In violation of international law, China has claimed ownership over almost the entire South China Sea and begun fortifying local island chains to defend its claims. The United States, along with Japanese and British allies, is now sailing warships through China’s illegally claimed territory. An escalated conflict could see advanced air defense systems, surface-to-air missiles, and China’s Chengdu J-20 stealth fighter brought to bear against America’s forces.

It seems the Reaper is struggling to find a role in that type of battlespace. War in the Middle East gave the MQ-9 international notoriety, but widespread demand for those operations has brought a shortage of platforms in theaters like the Pacific. The Air Force has extended its MQ-9 purchases through 2021, but demand for the aircraft in 2022 is yet to be determined. Critics have pointed out that a subsonic, non-stealth aircraft like the Reaper could be an easy target for Chinese air defense systems in a near-peer war. “The survivability is different,” says Ward Carroll, an author and former U.S. Navy F-14 Tomcat radar intercept officer who hosts his own YouTube channel. “Those that have big radar cross sections are going to potentially get shot down.”

There’s some precedent to substantiate Carroll’s claims. In 2019, members of Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guard successfully shot down a U.S. Navy Broad Area Maritime Surveillance (BAMS-D) aircraft, the Navy variant of the Air Force’s RQ-4A Global Hawk. Like the Reaper, the RQ-4 lacks stealth, but U.S. forces assumed that its high operational ceiling of 60,000 feet would insulate it from attack. But Carroll, who’s also the director of outreach for the U.S. Naval Institute, says it was easy to shoot down anyway.“It’s slow, it’s not stealth, and it has a huge radar cross section,” he says of the RQ-4. “If you want to shoot something like that down, you’re going to.”

In response to the MQ-9’s limitations, the Air Force overhauled its new-pilot training program in 2020 to expand use cases for the aircraft. In addition to combat scenarios common in places like the Middle East, MQ-9 pilots train in combat search and rescue (CSA), maritime and air interdiction (disrupting enemy supply and troop movement), and air strike coordination between nearby allied aircraft and the Reaper itself. These areas signal a new focus on versatility among both the pilots and the Reapers, and certain Reaper capabilities are proving apt in new contexts. The coupling between the MQ-9’s surveillance hardware and its long loiter times, for example, is suited for search-and-rescue operations over the open sea as well as over the Middle Eastern deserts.

Remotely Piloted Aircraft aircrew fly simulated missions in an MQ-9 Reaper cockpit at Creech Air Force Base, Nevada, September 2019.

Courtesy U.S. Air Force

Dennis cites his training in maritime warfare as the norm among his peers. He points out that the Reaper’s high situational awareness regarding enemy positions, hardware, and movements can be critical to a large-scale conflict between global powers. This asset, he argues, would showcase a strength of the Reaper that was less prominent in the Middle East. “When we think about a near-peer fight, we’re not necessarily looking for one or two individuals anymore. We’re looking for main battle tanks, self-propelled artillery, and early warning radar,” he says. “Nobody can see those things further out than [the Reaper] can.”

The MQ-9’s baseline surveillance system uses a Multi-Spectral Targeting System that collects data from a suite of onboard visual sensors, including infrared, color, or monochrome daylight video camera, an image-intensified video camera, a laser range finder, and a laser illuminator. Reaper pilots can view these feeds separately or as a single fused stream on their high definition displays. “Opposed to a multi-targeting display that’s maybe six inches across by a pilot’s knee in most aircraft, we have unparalleled ability to see and locate targets,” Dennis says.

And though lacking stealth, MQ-9 pilots like Dennis are trained to leverage tactics to succeed where technology won’t. According to Dennis, the Reaper can eavesdrop on the enemy from beyond its range of fire.

“If tasked, we can fly outside most engagement zones and still see all the things we need to see, and we can provide that imagery to a team of analysts who can exploit that information and give it to decision makers, whether that’s military or political, to effect more strategic level objectives,” Dennis says. That means the Reaper’s surveillance systems are even accessible to the President.