The U.S. Army is looking at paragliders as a way to give conventional forces, especially airborne units, new options for getting around the battlefield and surveilling enemy forces. The service says these capabilities, which are already found in the special operations community, could be especially useful during a future high-end fight in environments that are too risky for traditional fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters to operate in.
The Army put out a contracting notice regarding what it is currently calling the Personnel Air Mobility System (PAMS) earlier today.
Specifically, the Army Combat Capabilities Development Command-Soldier Center‘s Soldier Sustainment Directive (DEVCOM-SC SSD) “is seeking information on technologies or capabilities of private entities (non-profit and commercial) to develop a preliminary Personnel Air Mobility system design that will support a prototype project,” according to the notice. “The Personnel Air Mobility System (PAMS) is planned to be developed to support the U.S. Army’s Airborne forces by addressing a capability gap to provide unit organic personnel air mobility to support freedom of movement in contested environments.”
“Future battlefield threats are expected to require disbursed operations by small units in complex, contested environments,” the notice continues. “Traditional air assets, including fixed wing and rotary wing transport aircraft, will likely be unavailable for the movement of small teams due to supporting other missions and the difficulty of operating these vehicles in anti-access/area denial threat areas.”
“Development of a PAMS will provide an additional option to the unit commander, supporting freedom of action in remote and austere locations. This new system will be capable of transporting individual warfighters hundreds of kilometers, reducing dependency on traditional aircraft platforms and extending the range available through traditional parachute infiltration systems,” the request for proposals adds. “The PAMS will support multiple mission types including reconnaissance, surveillance, troop movement, infiltration and exfiltration. This new PAMS will also significantly reduce the cost to deliver/transport warfighters over traditional means.”
To meet these mission requirements, the Army is looking at a motorized paraglider with a range of at least 62 miles (100 kilometers) that can get up to an altitude of 10,000 feet mean sea level. Objectively, the service is interested in a PAMS that can fly to destinations as far as 186 miles (300 kilometers) away and at altitudes as high as 20,000 feet mean sea level. A supplementary oxygen source would be required for sustained flight at the upper limits of that altitude requirement. This is also something that is necessary for very high-altitude freefall parachute jumps.
Flying at low altitudes using nap-of-the-earth flight profiles would make paragliding troopers harder to detect and reduce their vulnerability to threats in the air and on the ground. Paragliders, in general, have low radar, infrared, sound, and other signatures, which would make it even more difficult for defenders to spot and track them. At the same time, operating at higher altitudes, where viable, would also offer benefits in terms of aerodynamic efficiency and, by extension, fuel economy and range.
In addition, the Army wants the PAMS paraglider itself to weigh no more than 75 pounds without fuel, and potentially as light as 60 pounds, while still having a payload capacity of up to at least 350 pounds, and maybe as much as 400 pounds. The weight of the weapons and gear a typical soldier might be called upon to carry varies widely depending on the mission and other factors, but data from recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan shows that it can easily be more than 100 pounds. Paratroopers expected to operate for extended periods without access to well-established supply chains could well find themselves carrying more. The low logistics footprint required to operate paragliders would offer additional benefits to airborne and other conventional forces operating at the tactical edge, or even behind enemy lines.
For general Army use, paragliders might be useful in other roles beyond just getting soldiers around and surveilling opponents, such as casualty evaluation and delivery of small cargoes to frontline units. U.S. special operations units have employed uncrewed cargo paraglider systems called CQ-10A SnowGooses for resupply missions.
It is also worth noting that the U.S. military as a whole is looking for new and novel ways to help rescue downed aircrew in contested environments. Depending on circumstances, forward-deployed teams might be able to use paragliders to reach those personnel and extract them. Paragliders could potentially be air-dropped to rescuees to allow them to escape on their own or at least move to an area where it might be easier for combat search and rescue units to retrieve them.
As mentioned, U.S. special operations forces have already been at least testing and evaluating paragliders, if not operationally using them to some degree, for many of the same reasons the Army has outlined in its PAMS contracting notice. Members of U.S. Marine Forces Special Operations Command (MARSOC) used them to descend into the harbor area in Tampa, Florida during a biennial public capabilities demonstration earlier this year. That event also highlighted the potential for paragliders to be used as small electronic warfare platforms, as well as for mobility and reconnaissance and surveillance, as you can read more about here.
“The parafoil, in general, is a great special operations platform that the Marines are taking advantage of. It’s something that’s easily deployable, it’s light, it’s inexpensive, it uses unleaded gasoline, so you can find that anywhere,” Jim Gregory, the Deputy Director of SOCOM’s Office of Communications, told The War Zone at the time. “And it’s something that can take off from say a ship or you know an otherwise fairly inaccessible area for air capability. So they can get operators up off the ground and take advantage of that other [air] dimension of warfare … that they might not otherwise be able to.”
The U.S. Navy has at least explored the possibility of using paragliders to help Marines, in general, get from amphibious warfare ships to the shore and as airborne surveillance platforms in the past, as well.
In the unprecedented surprise attacks on southern Israel in October 2023, Hamas terrorists also notably used paragliders, underscoring their value for getting personnel into more contested areas. North Korean commandos have trained to employ them to infiltrate across the DMZ and attack critical sites, as well.
As the new PAMS contracting notice explains, the Army is looking at a future full of distributed operations, especially as part of a potential high-end fight, such as one against the Chinese in the Pacific. In a major conflict with a near-peer competitor like China, U.S. forces would have to contend with an ever-growing anti-access and area denial threat ecosystem. This presents immediate challenges for getting airlifters loaded with paratroopers into the fight. When it comes to moving personnel and materiel by air once in theater, as well as providing organic aerial reconnaissance and surveillance, these issues are further compounded for the Army, which continues to rely heavily on traditional helicopters for these missions. The ongoing war in Ukraine has underscored the threats that helicopters face from modern air defenses.
This all looks to have factored into the Army’s selection of a derivative of Bell’s V-280 Valor tilt-rotor as the successor to at least a portion of its UH-60 Black Hawk fleets in 2022 and its cancellation of the Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft (FARA) program this year. In Febraury, the service announced other major changes to its future aviation plans, including increased investments in new drones.
Whether or not paragliding paratroopers, or other conventional Army forces, become a reality on a broad scale remains to be seen. The service has explored a host of concepts intended to provide individual soldiers with a degree of air mobility, including jetpacks and rocket belts, since the 1960s, but none of them have been adopted for general use. At the same time, paragliders are a known commodity that have already made inroads in the special operations realm.
It is not hard to see how the qualities that make paragliders attractive to special operations units – low cost, low footprint, and low probability of detection – would make them appealing for more general Army use.
Contact the author: joe@twz.com