Builders of the ground stations used to pilot unmanned aircraft for the U.S. military are scrambling to understand the fine points of a Pentagon directive that, as one executive put it, “changes everything.”

America’s thousands of unmanned aircraft have been a famously fractured ISR force, with each military service relying on a different type of ground station and software to control its aircraft. The Air Force, the world’s largest operator of UAVs, relies on ground control stations supplied by General Atomics Aeronautical Systems to fly its Predators and Reapers. The Army has designated AAI Corp.’s One System ground station as the control unit for its forthcoming fleet of Sky Warrior aircraft under construction by General Atomics. The control software for these and other UAVs has been proprietary.

That is, until now. In a Feb. 11 “acquisition decision memorandum,” then-defense acquisition chief John Young, who in late April was replaced by Ashton B. Carter, laid out a plan to bring order to the realm of unmanned aircraft by overhauling the Pentagon’s development approach for ground control stations (GCSs). Officials at software companies and ground station suppliers are studying the initiative, but in their view the Pentagon is after this: A single ground control station that would fly different types of aircraft, with software “plug-ins” for each type of aircraft and to accommodate new aircraft as they are developed.

Specifically, Young told the U.S. Army, Navy and Air Force to come up with a common, open-software architecture for ground stations. Other changes appeared to go beyond software to the physical ground stations, however. Young told the Air Force, which flies Predators, to conduct a “user assessment” of the Sky Warrior One System’s ability to fly “a standard Air Force Predator mission.” He told those in charge of reviewing unmanned aircraft for the Pentagon’s 2011 budget request, which won’t be released until next year, to examine ground station “development and procurement related activities” for all major unmanned programs.

Industry officials do not expect Carter to undo Young’s initiative. A Pentagon official underscored the importance of the initiative in a statement issued shortly before the Senate confirmed Carter: The U.S. military services must “be willing to make difficult choices and to move toward a more competitive procurement environment for GCS capability. We cannot continue to fund closed, proprietary systems that do not meet our interoperability needs,” said Dyke Weatherington, deputy director for unmanned warfare in the Pentagon acquisition office.

“We think this changes everything,” said Raytheon’s Mark Bigham, director of business development for defense and civil mission systems. “This is going to revolutionize unmanned systems.”

Young’s initiative almost immediately forced a GCS project to be scaled back. The Air Force was forced to shelve the ambitious latter stages of its advanced cockpit program for Predators and Reapers, or face having the whole effort shut down, officials familiar with the program said. General Atomics was developing this new GCS to simulate the cockpit of a fighter jet or commercial airliner, complete with a 120-degree view. The cockpit also was to feature an interoperability component — the ability to fly several different types of unmanned vehicles.

Now the program is being retooled using older software in an attempt to fit a more open-architecture model that will be submitted for a new round of bidding, which means it will take several more years to field.

In the February memo, Young commended the Air Force for canceling the latter stages of the program, and for refocusing remaining development efforts on safety and reliability issues.

The ground-station initiative can be traced to December, when Young called in UAV representatives for a review of unmanned aircraft interoperability. Young assigned the Army the lead role in establishing ground-station interoperability among unmanned aircraft systems.

“This review convinced me that the acquisition team has the opportunity to do something truly joint and powerful by adopting a common GCS architecture that is open,” Young wrote in the February memo.

Common and open architectures would allow for the rapid addition of new functions to ground control stations, Young wrote. They would encourage innovation, competitive options, cost control, training efficiencies, interoperability and data access, he added, Companies could compete to provide new GCS tools — visualization, data archiving and tagging, and auto-tracking. The door would be open for “build-to-print” procurements for large-quantity buys.

Proponents said Young’s plan would do away with the proprietary software model in which a contractor controls the interface between the ground station and the unmanned aircraft. That old model, they said, guarantees that a particular unmanned aircraft fleet can never be better than its worst GCS. It also required procuring ground stations and UAVs together.

Creating a common GCS software standard could lead to an explosion in creativity among unmanned aircraft software designers, much as standard Internet interfaces enabled the iPhone.

“If you have only one [electronics] manufacturer in the world, you end up with Radio Moscow,” said Bigham. “This [Young] document is all about getting rid of the proprietary interfaces.”

Among potential ground station suppliers, Raytheon is banking that Young’s memo will help the company market the Universal Control System it has developed but not sold. Raytheon designed the station to control everything from Global Hawk and Predator-sized aircraft to the Small Tactical Unmanned Air Systems the Navy plans to buy for itself and the U.S. Marine Corps.

“If you look at the [memo] that Young put out, he is now pressing for that,” said Lynn Dugle, president of Raytheon Intelligence and Information Systems. “And so the time is now for that to really come in hard as a requirement, and for us to supply it.”

While the service branches will have to hash out what the common architecture will look like, the shared architecture probably will make up about 50 percent of each ground station, with the government owning that shared backbone, an industry executive said. Software tailored to the specific duties of the specific unmanned aircraft and the needs of its pilot or operator would be plugged into that backbone.

The GCS common architecture probably would be based on a NATO standardization agreement aimed at allowing member countries to use common control systems for unmanned aircraft, referred to as STANAG 4586. “Despite the availability of open standards such as STANAG 4586, the interface between the air vehicle and the ground station is still largely closed and prohibits effective competition for ‘best of breed’ in GCSs,” Weatherington said in his prepared statement.

The drive for interoperability — to make ground stations able to operate different types of unmanned aircraft — will be similar to the cell phone system where phones from different companies can communicate with each other, said Tom Bachman, division vice president for ground control systems at Textron’s AAI Corp., which unveiled its own universal ground control station, developed with the Army, in May.

Different interoperability profiles will be developed for GCS communicating with and controlling the aircraft and its weapons, and with the aircraft sending back video or other data, Bachman said.

One step toward interoperability and open architecture may be the development of converters that connect two types of systems that otherwise could not communicate, like converting Beta videotapes to VHS tapes, Bachman said. Converters could also be created to allow for new modules to be developed, and bid out, for systems that had previously been proprietary only.

Open architecture also opens the way for the government to buy unmanned aircraft and ground stations separately, so that the government does not have to pay for a new ground station each time a new UAV is developed, Bachman said. In the view of one expert, the Young GCS initiative would not require the Air Force to give up its approach of having pilots fly their unmanned aircraft, or force the services to adopt one ground station setup.

“I don’t see a wholesale changeover,” said Jerry Wright, a former executive at L-3 Communications and a board member of the Association of Unmanned Vehicle Systems International board.

Other changes could be universal. Young threw his support behind automated takeoff and landing technologies for unmanned aircraft across the board, holding that up as an example of improvements that could minimize crashes, reduce the level of training and time involved, and increase the pool of UAS pilots and operators.

Not everyone is enamored with the plan, however. As one industry official pointed out, open architecture can have its drawbacks. With a sole-source contracting model and proprietary software, competition is muted but control is guaranteed. Opening up a program to multiple plug-and-play contracts runs the risk of a decline in quality of service — such as when a Web site is not available, using the Internet analogy to open architecture, he said.

A sole-source contracting strategy is very efficient, if managed within a tightly bounded system, the industry official said. When many contractors bid on a project, for example, there’s a greater chance that official protests lodged by losing bidders disputing the bid award can lead to delays.

Security is another issue that has to be addressed with the open architecture model. With proprietary software, fewer people have access to the code.

Thomas Cassidy, president of the General Atomics Aircraft Systems Group, said he doesn’t see the GCS initiatives having much of an effect on his company’s business beyond the advanced cockpit work. General Atomics has been the contractor for Predator series GCS for 18 years.

General Atomics continues to make upgrades to more than 160 ground stations, including software upgrades and adding video touch-screen capabilities, and is still moving forward as planned, Cassidy said.

Even with the rollback of the General Atomics advanced cockpit program, Cassidy said, the Air Force may still move forward with the General Atomics system in the future. In the meantime, the company will focus on other potential customers for the UAS advanced cockpit GCS, such as Homeland Security and NASA.

“General Atomics will continue to improve ground stations,” he said. “There’s always a need for upgrades. We try to stay ahead of demand.”