As ad hoc wireless networks require less or no fixed infrastructure support, communications among nodes can be quickly and adaptively constructed. This property ensures that ad hoc wireless networks are especially suitable for communications in critical application such as military, emergency and rescue missions. In this paper, we design and evaluate a security framework for multilevel ad hoc wireless networks with unmanned aerial vehicles. Our design, based on identity-based public key infrastructure using bilinear pairing, consists of group key management architecture, static pair-wise communication, tripartite key agreement, and group key agreement. Compared to its counterparts, our design reduces the certificate validation process, improves computational efficiency and reduces storage requirement.