Global Hawk: Providing the Warfighter with Dominant Battlefield Situational Awareness

Global Hawk is a high altitude, long endurance unmanned aerial reconnaissance system designed to provide military field commanders with high resolution, near real time imagery of large geographic areas. With an objective of operating for 20 hours at an altitude of 19.8 km and at ranges up to 5,556 km from its launch area, it is in the forefront of DOD initiatives to achieve battlefield information dominance. Satellite and line-of-sight communications links ensure world wide operational capability. Global Hawk's state-of-the-art sensors provide all weather, day or night, reconnaissance capability. This paper provides an overview of the Global Hawk system.