Situational Awareness

Kudos from the Smithsonian

2007-01-18T17:44:00.000-05:00

I got a nice review of my documentary "Nagasaki: The Commander's Voice" from Charles Aston, a docent at the The Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center, which is an annex of the National Air & Space Museum that's near Dulles:

Hi Michael,

Jane sent the DVD, which arrived yesterday. I watched it yesterday evening. I'd have written sooner but this is the first I've been on line today.

It was excellent! Paul Tibbetts and Enola Gay have pretty well overshadowed Sweeney and Bockscar, which is a pity. Everything went right on Tibbett's mission. Nearly everything that could go wrong on Sweeney's did. Not to denigrate Tibbets, but the Nagasaki mission demanded much more talent to pull off.

Your choice of background music is wonderful.

We are all fortunate that you conducted the interview when you did. It's said that when an old person dies, it's like a library burning down. I believe that. Once a voice has been stilled, we can never know what amazing things it might have told us had we only asked while there was time.

I will show Nagasaki to my CAP squadron and my fellow docents. I'm sure they will find it as entertaining, educational and thought provoking, as I did.

Thanks again for your thoughtfulness in making the DVD for me.

Don't forget your standing invitation for a private tour of UHC.

Regards,

Chuck

A co-worker at my present job noticed me walking around with a Finnish Air Force coffee mug and asked me about it. I told her it was a relic from my previous career as editor of a defense magazine. She told me about a friend of hers who worked as a volunteer guide at the Udvar-Hazy Center. Well, I had shot some footage of the B-29 "Enola Gay" there for my Nagasaki documentary, so I wondered if she would send him a DVD copy.

And there you go.

What's interesting about Chuck's take on the Nagasaki mission is that he gives credit to Sweeney for his performance under difficult circumstances. Others are less complimentary.

By the way, CAP stands for Civil Air Patrol, a volunteer civilian auxilliary arm of the US Air Force. Hessian Bob was a CAP pilot when he was in high school.

I had to look up 'docent.'

It's Easy to Forget

2006-12-07T09:39:00.000-05:00

Click here for a short retrospective of the Pacific War. The music is Samuel Barber's "Agnus Dei" performed by the Santa Barbara Quire of Voyces. The clip is the coda of my documentary, "Nagasaki: The Commander's Voice." You can see the whole thing here.

Here's an aspect of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor you may not have heard about: the importance of electronic intelligence and radio silence to the success of the operation.

A great "Outre Mer" review

2006-12-06T11:52:00.000-05:00

My novel "Outre Mer" just received a terrific review from reader and avid science-fiction aficionado David Masci, who gives it five stars out of five.

# # #

A Wonderful First Novel

Outre Mer is that rare science fiction novel that is able to speak to today's anxieties while painting a compelling and utterly believable picture of tomorrow. It's also a ripping good yarn, that moves quickly and builds in intensity without sacrificing nuance or detail. In short, Michael Puttre's first book is a stunning debut and a novel that deserves a wide and grateful audience.

The future Puttre presents in the book is completely grounded in reality. He avoids the pitfalls of so many science fiction novels, which have a tendency to ignore human nature as readily as they change the laws of physics. The characters that populate Outre Mer are real people: at times petty, at times noble, never one dimensional. Puttre imbues even secondary characters with a flesh and blood reality that makes them both interesting and worth caring about.

The story is complex, involving political intrigue and war, and is told largely through the eyes of a half dozen characters. But Puttre uses the events and people depicted in the novel to dig deeper, exploring issues such as the nature of faith and duty, the need to belong to something greater than oneself, and the extent of our responsibility to those we have dominion over. Thankfully, the author does not provide easy answers. Instead, we see characters grappling with tough decisions that involve compromising one set of principles to serve another. This tension makes the novel tremendously rewarding.

Finally, and amazingly for a first time author, Puttre has managed to get right the mechanics of fiction writing. His prose is clear and tight, avoiding overly colorful language while still giving us a steady stream of dazzling description and dialogue. His pacing is also exceptionally good. The story never lags or wanders off in unproductive directions. Overall, this is a wonderful book, one that I enjoyed tremendously and look forward to reading again.

# # #

The reviewer is a a senior research fellow at a Washington, DC, think-tank (I don't want to name it here because David isn't representing it in writing the review). His specialty is religion and public life. David has also read more science fiction novels than anyone else I am aware of, so I am truly grateful for his kind review.

Please have a look at "Outre Mer." You can preview and purchase it at Lulu.com. It is also available at Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble.com.

A Long-Suffering Fan

2006-12-04T12:05:00.000-05:00

I found this in my inbox this morning from a reader in Australia:

Hey Michael,

Well let's detail my life over the last few weeks
shall we?

1. Moved house.
2. House moved into burned down.
3. Moved house.
4. Lessor decided to sell house.
5. Moved house.
6. Shitty house - guess what?
7. Moved house.
8. Got Internet.
9. Read Outre Mer.

10. Want sequel. NOW!

Seriously Michael, I have no idea why you haven't been published. Your work is top notch. Have you tried submitting it at Baen? Anyways, just wanted you to know that I loved your book and would look forward to anything else in the series and would love to read it as a beta-reader if you will.

Now as to the part I didn't like. In the very beginning, the description of your "hyperspace" is a little forced. A smoother description here will help the flow of the
story.

Strengths:
Great characters; believable, deep, flawed but not stupidly so (ala Robert Jordan).
Coolest Alien race ever...well next to Star Trek's Jem Hadar, anyways.
Awesome plot twist [spoiler deleted].
Dialog is great.
In short: Really dude, get yourself an agent. You are as good a wordsmith as many people that are published and better than many others.

--B.C.

So, if this gentleman can enjoy "Outre Mer" after the year he's had, imagine how much you might enjoy it in the comfort of a home that isn't on fire or being overrun with zombies, or whatever?

Go here to preview "Outre Mer" on Lulu.com.

Go here to find "Outre Mer" on Amazon.com.

"Outre Mer" reviewed at Reader Views

2006-12-01T20:08:00.000-05:00

I'd like to kick of the month and the weekend with a nice review of my science-fiction novel, "Outre Mer." And so I will: I have excerpted a review by Debra Gaynor of Reader Views, cutting out one or two spoilers and fixing the spelling of my name. If you want to read the full review, go here:

# # #

Outre Mer
Michael Puttré
Lulu (2006)
ISBN 9781430300960

Reviewed by Debra Gaynor for Reader Views (11/06)

Earth has reached the stars and began colonization and also destruction. A war was fought against the “Grey’s,” an evil alien race that has been capturing humans since the 1940’s. The war was won but the humans don’t quite trust the “Taken,” those that were abducted and returned.

The “Taken” have been quarantined on Outre Mer where the Duran live. Eventually some politicians decide that it was a bad idea and they plot to remove the “Taken” to another planet. But the “Taken” have no desire to leave. Humans attempt to isolate the “Taken” form the Durrani. They do not want the two races mixing. It is decided that all the “enlightened” Durrani must be exterminate but the Durrani that have not been exposed to the “Taken” may be allowed to live as long as they remain unenlightened. The main plot is the struggle for the “Taken” and the Durrani to remain free, but the plot has many twists and angles, there are many other paths for the reader to explore.

Janni, a Durrani, has been assimilated into modern society. He has a long furry tail, saucer eyes; he seemed to be all snout and teeth, he has been given a set of mechanical hands to wear on his paws. He thought the human face expressive. “There had been a time, early in his training, when Janni’s mannish colleagues invited him to play poker. He lost money for a while as he picked up the game. Then he learned how to read faces, and the invitations to live games stopped coming...”

The Durrani people are marked for destruction by a small group of politicians and operatives, each with their own agenda.

The characters are amazing. They have depth and are multifaceted; they are very real in that they are not totally good or totally bad. The author has made use of his background and offers his readers, technology and scientific descriptions.

Whether by coincidence or on purpose, Mr. Puttré; forces his readers to look deep in their soul for the prejudice hidden there. Perhaps once they come to light we will overcome them and learn to truly love our fellow man.

Mr. Puttré offers his readers a unique blend of sci-fi, romance, fantasy, political intrigue, and historical context. He leaves us with much to ponder. The cover entices the reader to enter in with a promise of adventure waiting. I recommend “Outre Mer” for those that enjoy science fiction, political intrigue, romance, space opera, fantasy and a really good book to curl up with.

# # #

You can preview and purchase "Outre Mer" at Lulu.com here.

Veterans Day / Bloody Tarawa

2006-11-09T01:42:00.000-05:00

I'm going to be traveling this weekend, so I thought I'd offer my Veterans Day post a little early.

Last year, I collected 11 stories of veterans of many countries in their own words.

In April and June 2006, I interviewed Leon Cooper, who was an ensign aboard the assault transport USS Harry Lee (a converted liner) and served as a boat officer on a Higgins boat during the Tarawa invasion. He told me his story, and I offer a recording of it here, in two parts (2 MP3 files).

This month is the 63rd anniversary of the Battle of Tarawa. The lack of a round number on the date doesn't mean the event isn't worth reflecting on. In November 20-23, 1943, US Marines, Sailors, and Airmen engaged in a fight that would provide the home front with its first bloody shock of WW II. More Americans were killed at Pearl Harbor, true, but that was due to enemy action and sparked outrage at the new enemy. At Tarawa, with the US on the attack against 4,000 entrenched Japanese defenders, more than 1,000 US servicemen were killed in less than three days. More than 2,000 more were wounded. Grieving American mothers were calling publically for Admiral Nimitz to be fired. History does not record what the Japanese mothers thought of their war leaders. The Japanese defenders died almost to a man. History has even less to say about the 1,000-plus Korean laborers killed on the island.

You'll want this map.

And here are some useful photos of the battlefield.

Leon Cooper is the author of "90 Day Wonder: A Darkness Remembered," a semi-autobiographical account of his experiences in the Pacific War. Here is a post about some of my impressions of his thoughts about Tarawa and the island-hopping campaign. I don't necessarily agree with all of his conclusions, but hey, he was there. I wasn't.

Over the course of the next few days I will add additional supporting links, so please check back.

"Outre Mer" reviewed at Bards And Sages

2006-11-08T09:43:00.000-05:00

My science-fiction novel "Outre Mer" received its first review at a third-party website. Julie Ann Dawson, editor of Bards and Sages, a site dedicated to speculative fiction (SF, horror, and fantasy) and role-playing games, gave it a thumbs up. Julie concludes:

Puttre’s characters are engaging and well developed. While technically this is a science fiction novel, the character-driven plot and personal interaction take center stage. Starships, intergalactic (sic) travel, high-tech sci-fi weaponry and gadgets…these things are all secondary to the characters that populate the story. Janni is simultaneously a hardened hero and an innocent bystander struggling with situations beyond his control.

Outre Mer is a polished, character-driven space opera with a serious message about the nature of humanity. A highly recommended read for fans of quality science fiction.

What's interesting is that Julie detected themes relating to the Crusader States of the Middle Ages, particularly with regard to the title. Outremer was a general name given to the Crusader States after the First Crusade. In using the term Outre Mer, I had in mind the notion of "overseas," as the French term their far-flung colonies and possessions. However, when I wrote the book, I tried very hard not to lecture the reader or even to tell him or her who to root for and identify with. I am very happy to see different readers coming away with different thoughts and views about the various characters and the actions they take.

You can read Julie's full review here.

You can preview and purchase "Outre Mer" here:

"Nagasaki" Wins an Alliance Award

2006-11-02T23:08:00.000-05:00

My wife just opened a letter and told me that I won first prize for my documantary, "Nagasaki: The Commander's Voice." It turns out that my local public access cable station entered it in the "Non-Professional Documentary - Event" (as opposed to "Person") category of the 2006 Alliance for Community Media - North East (NY-New England) video awards.

There will be an awards ceremony on November 17 at the Fuller Craft Museum (www.fullercraft.org). Huh. I'm glad to have won, but it is going to be a strange evening. The last time I was at the Fuller Craft Museum was for a ceremony honoring its late curator, Jennifer Atkinson. Jennifer was my sister-in-law, once removed (sister-in-law of my brother-in-law). Jennifer was a beautiful, brilliant redhead who drove a sports car and brought the Fuller back to life. She died young of cancer in October 2003.

The subject of my documentary, Maj. Gen. Charles Sweeney, died in 2004. It's really about him and his crew. You can read an account of the Nagasaki mission in Sweeney's own words here.

You can see "Nagasaki: The Commander's Voice" here for free on my website in bite-size pieces. Eventually I'm going to make it available on DVD through Lulu.com.

Fan Mail

2006-10-28T12:31:00.000-04:00

Since I don't get much fan mail, I feel justified in posting this from John Bybee, who just dug into my SF novel, "Outre Mer":

Ole buddy--this is great literature, who you gonna sell the movie rights to? The way you put your reader into the story and let your thought flow into word pictures and scenes. Reminds of the Henry G Felsen's STREET ROD and HOT ROD books I read as a kid. Granted you ain't talking 32' Fords on black top or gravel roads, but the intensity/interest of your story line lays rubber from Kansas to the stars.

Marten Fisher--Planet burner, Phalanx frigate, emerged into reality, eyes of the dragon, Ninth Circle--Lake of Ice. Ekaterina lying nude--"Then he left her." Reminds of Lt. Belenko who defected with the Mig 25 back in 1976.

This is a great read, your velocity is "gravity-breaking."

Links added.

That makes my rainy Saturday (although later I'm taking my little boy out to see "The Nightmare Before Christmas" in 3-D, so that ought to be cool, too). I don't know John except from correspondence. He's doing some interesting research into reported uses of anti-aircraft missiles and rockets by Germany in World War 2.

If I can appeal to the technically orientated niche historian and classic American car enthusiast market, I feel that I'm nearly home free.

I remember when the Foxbat pilot defected to Japan. I was twelve, and just lighting the afterburners on my military tech geekdom. If I remember correctly, there was a general sense that the MiG-25 wasn't quite the boogey man it had been made out to be, given that it's electronics were vacuum-tube based. Still, it was an impressive aircraft and a major event in the Cold War.

(Plus I give John extra points for knowing where the name of the frontier cruiser "Vermithrax" came from!)

You can preview and purchase "Outre Mer" by following the link:

Merkava Killers in Lebanon

2006-10-20T10:36:00.000-04:00

I had occasion to visit Israel as a guest of its ministry of defense in April 2001, in the run up to the Paris Air Show that July. The idea was for a group of defense journalists to spend a week visiting all of the key high-tech companies responsible for Israel's weapons systems, IAI Elta, IAI Malat, IMI, Tadiran, Elisra, Elbit, Raphael, and others. We also got to visit a number of interesting military installations, the Arrow ABM site and the 200 Squadron UAV unit outside of Tel Aviv, and the F-15I base in the Negev.

Coming into the country through Ben Gurion was a grueling process, however, and by the time most of our group had been processed I was still an hour or so in arrears. The upshot of this was that my escort, an IDF official, drove me to my hotel himself. It turns out that he was an armor officer, and was very enthusiastic about the Merkava main battle tank. Knowing that I was an American, he took care to say nice things about the Abrams. But the Merkava, he assured me, was the best tank in the world. It was conceived, designed, and built from the treads up to meet the specific requirements of the IDF. It fights in the desert. It fights in the streets.

It is interesting to note that Israel buys nearly all of its "platforms" from the US, notably its aircraft and vehicles. This is because the large amounts of military aid the US provides must be spent on US-supplied weapons systems. To these the Israelis typically integrate indigenous electronics and weapons systems of demonstrable high quality. Therefore it is significant that the only indigenously produced combat vehicle is the Merkava series of MBTs. Most anything other type of platform can be purchased from other suppliers (the subs come from Germany because the US doesn't make diesel electric attack boats) and customized with Israeli electronics. Even the ship hit by an C-802 missile in the recent war with Hezbollah was built by Northrop Grumman. But Israel considers its ability to produce MBTs to its own specifications to be a strategic necessity.

One of the most dangerous counters to the Merkava on the market today is the AT-14 Kornet anti-tank missile. Not only does the weapon have a tremendous two-stage warhead capable of penetrating the armor of the latest generation of MBTs, such as the Merkava and the Abrams, it employs a laser-beamrider guidance. The importance of the latter is that laser-warning receivers on tanks may not detect the laser energy of the missile system, because the beam is focused on a receiver on the tail assembly of the missile rather than the target. Think of a laser beamrider as receiving its guidance commands by laser rather than through a wire. Targeting information is collected by the launch crew by means of a passive electrooptical system and an auto tracker. A computer translates the tracking data into guidance commands sent automatically to the missile via the laser. This form of guidance is much more difficult for a laser-warning receiver to detect than laser-guided weapons whose seekers home on reflected laser energy from a spot held on the target. The only opportunity a tank crew has to receive warning of an impending launch of a laser-beamrider is when the missile crew briefly lases the tank for range, an activity that can be difficult for laser-warning receivers to detect.

Reports that laser-beamrider anti-tank missiles are turning up in southern Lebanon must be a source of intense concern to IDF officials. The weapons are apparently coming from Syria and Iran, who have purchased the systems in large numbers from an obliging Russia. It is likely that many of Israel's casualties and the unexpectedly large numbers of armored vehicles lost in operations against Hezbollah were due to the introduction of the Kornet. Certainly, the loss of Merkava tanks to Hezbollah militia must have come as a shock and a painful blow to the IDF, which has placed such faith in its homegrown MBT. I wonder how long it will be before Hamas also has access to such weapons?

Air Force Long

2006-10-14T16:10:00.000-04:00

I received this from a friend, who received it from another. The iconography on the side of the fuselage knocked me out.

For a full size photo, go here.

Here's the original caption:

A pic of the Global Hawk UAV that returned from the war zone on Monday under its own power. (Iraq to Edwards AFB in CA) - Not transported via C5 or C17. Notice the mission paintings on the fuselage. It's actually over 250 mission (and I would suppose 25 air medals). That's a long way for a remotely-piloted aircraft. Think of the technology (and the required quality of the data link to fly it remotely). Not only that but the pilot controlled it from a nice warm control panel at Edwards AFB. I worked on Global Hawk several years ago during it's OT&E out of Edwards. It has really long legs- can stay up for almost 2 days at altitudes above 60k. They flew it via satellite control to Australia, and we flew missions during OT&E that went from Eddy to upper Alaska and back non-stop.

Army Strong

2006-10-13T19:22:00.000-04:00

Hessian Bob (who was actually in the real Army in addition to being in several fake ones) tells me that the US Army has a new recruiting slogan. Apparently, "Army of One" wasn't cutting it. You can read about it and see a video here.

I'll watch this at home. I can't seem to get sound on my computer at work. Sight unseen, I'll say that I don't like the slogan: "Army Strong." It sounds like:

"Me Tarzan. Tarzan in Army. Army strong. Strong like Tarzan."

But I'll reserve jugement. Just pay the soldiers more. Soldiers should be paid at least as much as tradesmen like plumbers and electricians for the same levels of experience.

UPDATE: Okay, I watched the video and it's really pretty good. The imagery is effective, even moving. The score is stirring without going over the top. My only complaint is that constantly breaking away to show title cards to move the narrative along keeps taking me out of the experience.

Or as Butthead once scoffed while watching a video: "Words. If I wanted to read I'd go to school."

One of the most effective TV commercials out there right now is a great ad from Dow. (I know, I know, Napalm sticks to kids.) But this is a really beautiful spot called "The Human Element" with some striking, National Geographic-like video images set to a moving, Ken Burns-esque violin score. The narrative about the importance of the human element is sustained by a voiceover.

I like this much better. Now, of course the Army would want to strike a different tone than the Dow spot. But I think that the combination of imagery and music is so powerful that breaking it up with title cards reduces the impact. Have a voice, or a couple of voices tell us what Army Strong means to them as soldiers.

Also, I'm still not sold on "Army Strong" as a slogan. The context is: "There's strong (as defined by Webster's) and then there's Army Strong, as exemplified by the US Army." I don't know. Now it sort of sounds like a color-safe bleach.

My Science-Fiction Novel: "Outre Mer"

2006-09-30T01:41:00.000-04:00

Buy it exclusively at Lulu.com.
(If you do read it, please take 5 minutes and write a short review on the Lulu site. It makes a big difference. Thanks! --MP)

Some excerpts and background here.

Boilerplate:

"My name is Janni. I am a duranni, a native of Outre Mer. I have a mind. I believe that I have a soul. I am a person."

Born into Awakened society, Janni believes that people of all origins can live and work together. He does not understand why Earth sends its death squads into the forests of his homeland to hunt down educated duranni like him. Trained by his human worldmates, Janni leads a mission to rid Outre Mer of its jailors. Many on Earth are content to let Outre Mer go its own way. But a clique of policy makers and shadowy operatives goes beyond the pale to make sure that doesn't happen. An expeditionary force closes on Outre Mer, bringing fire...and worse.

Michael Puttré draws on his experience as an international aerospace, defense, and technology journalist to craft believable worlds in an age of starships. "Outre Mer" is a character-driven story of people on all sides of a conflict struggling to follow their orders, their convictions, and their instincts without always knowing why.

Nagasaki Controversy

2006-08-29T22:28:00.000-04:00

No, not the usual "should we have - shouldn't we have" nonsense (dispensed with here). A military historian who has done extensive research into the atomic bomb program and the conduct of the atomic missions over Japan contacted me with a bombshell of his own: The Nagasaki mission almost went south due to incompetence of command.

John Coster-Mullen, author of "Atom Bombs: The Top Secret Inside Story of Little Boy and Fat Man," emailed me in late August 2006 to compliment me on my documentary, "Nagasaki: The Commander's Voice." He also had some interesting information about the late Charles Sweeney, commander of the mission, who apparently was not held in very high regard by some of his comrades at the 509th Composite Group, mostly due to the content and tone of Sweeney's book, War's End, published in 1997.

I'm not sure that I agree with the assessment. Not so much that things weren't a little rough on the way to the target. But in my book, if you get there, deliver your ordnance, and get your people back in one piece, then you've done your job. Examine any military operation, particularly those involving new and difficult equipment and tactics, and you are going to find many, many flaws.

But go here to have a look for yourself.

Deterrence?

2006-08-24T20:50:00.000-04:00

For some reason, modern states are not as deterrable as they once were. At least that's the conventional wisdom. I recall growing up in the 1970s and '80s with nuclear war, and all that that implies, being "out there." We could talk about first strike vs. massive retaliation, and launch-on-warning vs. ride-out-the-attack. It was in the conversation. We got Civil Defense manuals in grade school (I was too late for duck-and-cover drills), with diagrams of heat and blast damage in concentric circles from airbursts of various megatonnages. There were other diagrams of plume exposure patterns of fallout from ground bursts. I took a national security policy class at the University of Rochester that the students nicknamed, "Bombs and Rockets." It was damned interesting.

I remember one friend of mine in Winchester, Massachusetts. He lived next door and was two years older than me. One day, contrails criss-crossed the summer sky above in a way I had never seen before. My friend said they were Russian missiles. I believed him, of course. I was eight. Probably, they were US fighters from Hanscom and/or Otis flying exercises. I stood for hours, looking up, my mouth agape. In front of my house.

Russians. They could kill us all at any moment. Where we live.

Most people were content to leave it at the "balance of terror" or "mutually assured destruction" level, a la Twilight Zone and WarGames. One bomb and everybody dies, effectively. Makes for a fine morality play. But there were nuances for the nuclear cognoscenti to examine over late night beers, coffees, and cigarettes. Even later, I've had the opportunity to discuss nuclear strategy with former Warsaw Pact pilots trained and charged with penetrating Western Europe to deliver nuclear weapons. And I've spoken with Western pilots who were trained to go the other way. I even got to introduce two such former enemy pilots to each other, telling them that if the balloon ever went up they would probably have passed each other in flight. Handshakes and smiles.

So the current hubbub over Iran and North Korea is slightly perplexing to me. Sure, there is a worry that North Korea might be undeterrable. Perhaps. But Iran certainly is deterrable. They want to live. And they want to win. To do the latter, they have to do the former.

Iran is deterrable. They have things of value that others can put at risk. Iran says Israel should be wiped off the map. Israel could do that to Iran right now, if it chose. Iran is striving for its first nuclear weapon. The US has thousands. Am I missing something?

So, I'm asking: Whatever happened to deterrence?

Nagasaki Anniversary

2006-08-08T09:47:00.000-04:00

August 9, 1945

Read about the mission here.

Watch and hear about the mission here, in the commander's voice.

And if you care to, hit the Paypal tip jar after. I thank you.

--MP

Nagasaki Revised

2006-07-29T23:26:00.000-04:00

I've changed the file format of my "Nagasaki: The Commander's Voice" video presentation to a decent resolution version of wmv for Windows Media Player.

The late General Charles Sweeney told me about the details of the Nagasaki mission he led over lunch. I recorded the conversation. Granted, I had a bad microphone. And it was originally for a print article.

But the movie I made about it received a Bronze Telly Award. I invite you to have a look.

One Happy Ending

2006-07-27T17:36:00.000-04:00

It's a small story.

Here's how it started.

But it ended well, and I'm glad.

C-802 Missile Likely Shore Launched

2006-07-16T10:37:00.000-04:00

Rumors persist that a UAV was used in some capacity to launch the missiles that struck an Israeli missile corvette and sank an Egyptian merchantman last Friday. While there is some possibility that Hezbollah used a UAV for observation and reconnaissance, there is no possibility that the C-802 antiship missile credited as the weapon employed was launched from a UAV.

Here is the entry on the C-802 antiship missile from the International Electronic Countermeasures Handbook, 2004 Edition (published by Horizon House, edited by me):

C-801, C-802 (NATO: CSS-N-4-Sardine)
A medium-range, ship-launched antiship missile, the C-801 first became operational in the mid1980s. It has been fitted to various types of warships, from fast-attack craft to destroyers. It is also available in sub-, air-, and mobile-ground-launched versions...

Guidance is by inertial navigation for the midcourse stage, followed by an active radar seeker for the terminal phase. The target is acquired by a search radar, normally the Type 245 version of the Russian MR-331 Rangout (Square Tie) I-band radar, which has a range of 130 km. The Luhu and Luda III destroyer classes use the Thales E/F-band Sea Tiger as the main search radar...

After launch, the missile climbs to about 50 m, descends to approach the target, and finally descends to about 5 m as the radar seeker locks on to the target until impact and detonation of the semi-armor-piercing warhead. The range of the missile is 42 km.

Iran reportedly produces C-801 missiles carrying the indigenous designation Tondar. The C-802 coastal-defense version, which has a small turbojet engine in place of the original solid rocket engine, has a range of about 120 km.

Warhead: 165-kg semi-armor piercing
Range: 42 km (C-801); 120 km (C-802)
Speed: High subsonic
Length: 581 cm
Body Diameter: 36 cm
Wingspan: 118 cm
Launch Weight: 815 kg (including booster)
Users: China, Iran, Thailand

There is no UAV platform currently deployed that could carry this missile. Note that the launch weight of 815 kg is more than 15 times that of the US Hellfire antitank missile, which is a common UAV-launched missile carried by the largish Predator series, which has a payload of 204 kg. The severe damage inflicted on the Israeli missile corvette and the sinking of the Egyptian merchantman (apparently incidentally) in the same attack indicates that the missiles used were large, antiship types, not antitank missiles.

If Hezbollah -- with Iranian assistance -- employed this missile to attack the Israeli ship, then they fired it from a truck-mounted launcher cued by a coastal radar installation. This is why Israel has stepped up its attacks against coastal radar sites, as any sort of surface-search set would be able to provide data for the initial launch. After launch, the missile takes care of itself with its own inertial guidance system and onboard radar seeker. Since the launchers are mobile, the trucks carrying them could scoot after firing. And we all know how notoriously difficult it can be to locate mobile units, even when you have lots of reconnaissance assets.

Reports on the internet dismissing the possibility that Israel could have been caught off guard by a radar-guided antiship missile fail to take into account the element of surprise. Israeli air and naval units are indeed well supplied with electronic warfare systems that can detect and then counter radar-guided threats. Electronic warfare is an Israeli specialty. However, electronic-warfare suites are not as automatic as commonly supposed. Plus, in a war zone, there are a many signals that have to be analyzed and classified. Moreover, the coastal radars would be able to acquire targetable launch data using a mundane surface-search mode, as might be expected from navigation radars in the vicinity of a port. This would not necessarily arouse the suspicions of a blockading ship that is not alerted to the possibility of an antiship missile attack.

Forewarned is forearmed, and if the Israelis were not expecting to be attacked by an antiship missile, then they could very easily have been taken by surprise. After all, it's happened before. And there is some irony that the class of Israeli ship hit by the missile is the Eliat class (alternate spelling, Eilat).

Remember the Eliat?

We were equipped with a relatively capable and sophisticated ELINT system for its time, the tunable microwave APR-9 receiver of Korean War vintage. Using the system, we had seen an increased level of high PRF radar signals, which usually meant military rather than commercial applications, and increased activity. But the Styx was one of the first of the easy to employ fire-and-forget surface-to-surface missiles and its onboard targeting radar did not turn on until it was in mid-course to its target. That gave us less than a minute and a half to react. We probably had been painted by surveillance radars, but there were so many radars operating in the region of the Suez Canal, we were not aware of any particularly hostile ones.

Hezbollah Employs Anti-Ship Missile

2006-07-15T07:57:00.000-04:00

UPDATE: Original reports said the the weapon employed was a UAV. Later reports say the weapon was a Chinese-designed, Iranian-supplied C-802 anti-ship cruise missile.

DefenseTech reports that the Lebanon-based militia Hezbollah has hit an Israeli missile corvette with an Iranian-supplied UAV equipped with a warhead.

UAVs are difficult targets. They have small radar cross sections and are surprisingly quiet and difficult to spot visually at even moderate altitudes. More importently, they can, in effect, be made into cruise missiles, which is apparently what Hezbollah has done.

As John Pike of Global Security said, it doesn't take "rocket science to put explosives on the thing and then use the TV camera to home in on the ship." However, it does require some imagination. And failure of imagination is one of the most basic of military blunders.

The Israelis have learned another lesson about underestimating their foe. It is a lesson that the US should consider in its standoff with Iran, as Iran was almost certainly the source of the equipment, expertise, and imagination. US ships in the Persian Gulf are as vulnerable as Israeli ones standing off the coast of Lebanon.

UPDATE: Maybe there's some rocket science after all. There are reports that Iranian soldiers are in Lebanon assisting Hezbollah with their UAVs, and that the systems are radar guided:

A senior Israeli intelligence official said Iranian troops helped Hezbollah fire a missile that damaged an Israeli warship off the Lebanese coast Friday night.

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the information, said about 100 Iranian soldiers are in Lebanon and helped fire the Iranian-made, radar-guided C-102 at the ship that killed one and left three missing.

Damn. Still, it's not the first time the Israeli navy has been caught napping. In October 1967, destroyer Eliat was sunk by a radar-guided Styx missile with a loss of 47 of her crew. Here is an eyewitness account of the event.

Global = Local

2006-07-13T18:28:00.000-04:00

A small side story in the Israel-Hezbollah War.

So We've Won After All.

2006-06-27T20:56:00.000-04:00

So Winston Churchill was quoted to have said upon hearing news that Pearl Harbor had been bombed by the Japanese, the Axis ally of his dedicated foe, Nazi Germany. The act, while creating short-term havoc for his friends and glory for his enemies, ultimately sounded the death knell of the Axis because Captain America could swing into action unencumbered by the flotsom of international law.

Hamas, the political party in power of the Palestinian Provisional Authority, the party that just won an election for which it campaigned and so now is legally in charge, kidnapped an Israeli soldier. Silly, silly, Hamas.

So Israel will exist after all.

Excellent.

I'm sorry for Corporal Gilad Shalit, 19, and I want him to get home. Kill all the power, water, and work until he does.

The Palestinians should have a state. Don't worry about historical borders. These have always been meaningless. Just look at Germany. Deal with it.

So Sadly Alone

2006-06-22T12:02:00.000-04:00

It would be foolish for North Korea to doubt the seriousness of the US when it comes to its ICBM program. The Pentagon has already spent more money on a missile-defense system designed specifically to intercept a ballistic-missile attack from North Korea than it would have taken to buy them a light-water nuclear reactor. If I may quote a previous post on Situational Awareness:

Since 1985, about $90 billion has been spent on missile defense by the US under various programs, beginning with the Reagan-era Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) through the Clinton administration's Ballistic Missile Defense Organization and into today's Missile Defense Agency. But funding since fiscal year 2001, at $4.8 billion, has been stepped up quite a bit, with $7.8 billion in FY02, $7.4 billion in FY03, $7.7 billion in FY04, and $9 billion in FY05. Missile defense accounts for about 2% of the Defense Department budget, more than any other program.

Since the mid-1990s, US defense planners have seen an "urgent need" for a missile defense system to defend against an end-game ICBM launch from North Korea. With surprisingly little fanfare, considering, the US has deployed this capability with a fast-track program using prototype systems and minimum testing. This is a high-risk, high-cost approach to any military program, not to mention one that requires the flawless execution of a long and complex sequence of events in order to be successful. But there it is.

The other day I was sort of joking about how "cool" it would be for the US to use the occasion of a North Korean test launch to try out our Ground-Based Midcourse Defense system (see previous post). However, the US does not consider this to be a laughing matter. There are voices calling for a preemptive attack on the North Korean launch site in order to make sure the test launch does not occur. This is not mere belicosity. Preventing a launch would deny the North Koreans the knowledge of whether their prototype Taepo Dong-II missile design works or not. Denying the North Koreans this knowledge would increase the uncertainty in the minds of those who might contemplate an end-game missile attack on the US. As I said before, lashing out with unproven systems is much more risky than striking with proven ones.

While a US preemptive strike on North Korea's ICBM prototype certainly would have negative repercussions, consider the US investment in its missile defense program proof that stopping a test launch has the highest priority. Right now, US officials are stressing diplomacy. But the bombers are standing by.

UPDATE: Really. It's a big deal.

UPDATE 2: No, really...

Only in Novels

2006-06-20T20:25:00.000-04:00

The North Koreans have been posturing about testing a new ICBM, probably the reported Taepo Dong II or Taepo Dong-X prototype. The US has been posturing for them not to try it. Now, there is a report about how if the North Koreans actually do fire the thing off, we might use the opportunity to shoot it down with the Ground-Based Midcourse Defense system that is being made operational incrementally. Background on that, here. (Please forgive the broken eDefense links. Can't be helped.)

Now, there are all sorts of reasons not to take a shot at the North Korean ICBM: chief among these is the embarrassment of failure. But come on, sometimes you just have to take a shot. If only for the theatrical beauty of the act.

The funny thing is, North Korea's erratic testing regime with regard to its ballistic missile capability is the sort of activity that prompted accelerated deployment of the GMD to begin with. The US missile defense system, based primarily around interceptor missiles based in Alaska with attending radar and command and control systems, could not defeat any sort of determined attack by China, let alone Russia. However, US defense industry officials have expressed confidence that the GMD, as currently configured, could indeed defeat a one-off, two-off attack from North Korea. And, indeed, it is the expectation that an attack would be launched as the regime collapsed, or in some other obscure and undeterable circumstance, that is the GMD's reason d'etre.

Is the North Korean test launch, if it happens, likely to be a sneak attack? Hardly. Neither the missile nor its payload have been tested. And the North Koreans haven't sounded erratic enough to be ready to go out on such a potential train-wreck of prototypes. So there's every reason to just sit back and watch the launch fail or succeed.

But it would be cool to take the shoot, wouldn't it?

Nagasaki Reposted

2006-06-15T15:43:00.000-04:00

Now that eDefense Online is defunct, I have posted my documentary, "Nagasaki: The Commander's Voice" over on my website here. I split it into eleven files MPEG-4 (DiviX) AVI format. File sizes range from 5.5 to 18.5 MB. If there's enough interest I may have copies produced in DVD format.

Some background on the project here.

Paris Air Show 2005

2006-06-15T10:46:00.000-04:00

Now that I have all this time to kill (see below), I've finally gotten around to posting some video clips I shot at the Paris Air Show last year. I love planes -- warplanes in particular -- and it's a rush watching and listening to them fly. The Paris Air Show was the best perk of my job as editor-in-chief of JED and eDefense Online. I've been to three Paris Air Shows (2001, 2003, and 2005 -- they alternate years with Farnborough) and I found this spot near the parking lot right under the glide path the planes use for landing after their demonstration routines. It's like you can reach up and touch them.

My sister Jackie gave me a Sony Handicam for Christmas in 2004, so I finally had a video camera small enough to carry about for long, hot, wonderful days at Le Bourget. Frankly, I'm not a professional videographer and I was using a tiny camera without a mount, so there's a shakiness factor. But with a little editing the clips are presentable.

I have the Airbus A-380 and Sukhoi Su-27 posted now. I'll add more ASAP.

UPDATE: I've added clips of the Dassault Rafale, Dassault Mirage 2000, and the Eurofighter Typhoon.

Game Over, Man.

2006-06-14T16:33:00.000-04:00

The JED/eDefense Online team have been given their walking papers, which is why things have been quiet around here. Now that the dust has settled, here's the scoop:

JED is the magazine of the The Association of Old Crows (AOC), the professional society advocating electronic warfare. It has been published by Horizon House Publications of Norwood, Massachusetts, for the last 25 years or so. I've been editor-in-chief for the last five years, and managing editor for a year-and-a-half before that. The June 2006 issue will be the last published by Horizon House. As of July, the AOC is taking over editorial control in house and will use a contract publisher in Texas specializing in association magazines to do the marketing and production.

The website, eDefense Online, is being discontinued as well. More on that another time.

The AOC controls the circulation of JED. Horizon House does not. In fact, Horizon House was barred by contract from engaging in effective marketing and circulation development programs. This rather suited Horizon House, because marketing and circulation are the most expensive aspects of magazine publication. A subscription to JED is a benefit of membership in the AOC, which costs about $35 a year and goes directly to the association. Horizon House made its money on JED through advertising. The problem was: the AOC has been declining from a height of about 26,000 members in the mid-1980s, the swan song of the Cold War, to about 13,000 today. A sizable portion of the remaining members are retirees, and not valued by advertisers.

The reason the AOC's membership had declined so drastically was that the priority of its core missions, electronic warfare and signals intelligence, fell along with the Soviet Union. Without digressing into a seminar on electronic warfare, it is enough to say that the requirement to have thousands of air, land, sea, and submarine platforms to send into harms way against a well-armed, technologically competent adversary is not what it once was. Evidence of this can be seen in the consolidation of the electronic warfare industry. Mergers and acquisitions have caused the number of independent companies specializing in electronic warfare to fall sharply throughout the 1990s to the present day. The shrinking field of companies that supply EW products and services means a shrinking traditional advertising base for JED.

At the same time, technology -- and the digital revolution in particular -- has marched over or around the hard-wired, black-box world of traditional EW systems. Dedicated EW systems are now considered subsystems of integrated sensor suites. Systems like radar-warning-receivers now also serve as geolocation targeting systems. Active electronically scanning radar systems provide electronic attack jamming functions. The story here is that software-defined functions and modes are taking over for dedicated analog EW systems. This is the case in just about every EW category, with the possible exception of self-protection decoy systems such as chaff and flares. This is not to say that dedicated, high-value EW programs are history. The ICAP III modernization of the EA-6B Prowler and the development of the follow-on EA-18G Growler electronic attack aircraft are key programs. But the number of such systems is declining.

At JED, the editorial and publishing teams saw this as an opportunity to evolve the magazine to reflect these new realities. In a nutshell, we tried to tell the story of how the electronic-warfare and information-operations missions were percolating throughout the armed services, becoming part of the integrated intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, and targeting (ISTAR) process. At the same time, we tried to show how other systems, such as AESA radars, software-defined radios, and forward-looking infrared (FLIR) systems were assuming platform protection functions that were formerly the role of dedicated EW systems.

We hoped to work together with the AOC to embrace this approach, and grow their membership. They cut us off at the knees.

JED lives on but the old team does not. I particularly want to call attention to the peerless work of Michal Fiszer, my friend and JED's (now former) European Editor, based in Poland. Situational Awareness readers are well aware of Michal's excellence. It is no secret to state that through Michal and his contacts, JED published information about Russian- and Soviet-source threat systems never before published in the West. Alas, no longer.

But, Michal and I are collaborating on a book series, starting with Russian and Soviet air-defense systems. Updates as they occur.

So, in a spirit of fencing, I salute the new editorial team at JED and wish them well. John Knowles and Hal Gershanoff are old JED hands, and know more about old-school EW than just about anybody alive. The AOC has taken its bat and ball and gone home.

Game over, man. Game over.

Opinion: An Army of One

2006-05-05T10:46:00.000-04:00

Brent Nosworthy, in his book on Napoleonic-era battle tactics, With Musket, Cannon and Sword (Da Capo Press, 1996), points out that the development of increasingly sophisticated battle tactics rather paralleled the changes in European society at large. The commanding general in the Age of Reason held tightly the reins on the battlefield, with authority not to be delegated, except perhaps to a specialist such as a general of cavalry or artillery. A commander's lieutenant generals had almost no control over how their forces maneuvered and fought above the mechanical. This was practical as well as philosophical: Linear systems demanded that an army remain in lockstep. However, in the more egalitarian armies of Revolutionary France, the societal changes that made it conceivable for a commander in chief to delegate real authority to subordinate commanders enabled real tactical maneuvers on the battlefield - maneuvers that earlier thinkers had imagined and described but that could not be implemented in rigid contemporary systems.

One aspect of battle tactics during the transition from linear to so-called "impulse" systems of warfare was their intention to manage casualties. As columns of soldiers - formations first of maneuver, then of waiting, and ultimately of attack - got closer to the enemy guns, their densely packed ranks and files were more vulnerable to musket and especially cannon fire than soldiers in a line formation. In order to preserve a particular unit for when it was needed, it was sometimes necessary for it to deploy into line in the face of destructive fire so a given cannon ball would hit fewer men. Certainly, it was impossible to allow the men to take cover or lie down as individuals, as this would have a negative effect on unit integrity and even army cohesion (although sometimes isolated formations were allowed to lie down, if the rest of the army couldn't see them). It is worth noting that "ducking" was a derogatory term used to describe soldiers who flinched and bobbed their heads under fire as a sign of lack of discipline and low morale. These days, ducking is generally perceived as a sign of wisdom and good reflexes.

Military thinkers and commanders had an almost mathematical understanding of how many casualties a given unit could sustain under a given volume of fire over a given period of time. Various formations might be assumed in order to reduce casualties in the face of specific battlefield threats, such as cavalry or artillery, but only if this was not seen to have a disruptive effect on the army as a whole. There seems to have been little thought about how the Mrs. Sullivans of their day would bear news of the loss of their sons, or of how children would feel when they learned that Daddy wasn't coming home. Even fast-forwarding well into the modern era, notions of acceptable casualties exchanged for a certain result are commonplace.

As societies the world over come to value the individual, military systems have been evolving to follow suit. In Western-oriented armed forces, casualty management is not good enough: The goal of many current battlefield tactics and supporting technologies is casualty avoidance. The evolution of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance; battlefield networks; stand-off, precision fires; and electronic warfare are all examples of how modern militaries exploit the skill and value the life of each individual warfighter. Every friendly casualty is viewed as a failure on some level. Some see this as a weakness. I see it as a strength, one that is entirely consistent with the relationship between a society and its military.

It must be frustrating - and maybe quietly terrifying - to face an enemy who expends money rather than lives to kill you.

Was Tarawa Necessary?

2006-04-21T10:39:00.000-04:00

I have been developing a new video documentary project on the Battle of Tarawa and the US invasion of the Gilbert Islands in November 1943. This will be a follow-on to my Nagasaki video. As part of the research for this project, I have been interviewing a gentleman named Leon Cooper, who commanded a Higgins boat (landing craft) at Tarawa. He was in the first wave, and unlike much of the invasion force, he found a way through the reef and dropped his ramp on the sand of Betio so his complement of Marines wouldn't have to wade through the lagoon. Mr. Cooper made as many as a half-dozen round trips that day, with the outbound runs carrying dead and wounded back to the ships.

Mr. Cooper has written an "autobiographical novel" about his experiences called "90 Day Wonder -- Darkness Remembered." He has a blog, too. Incidentally, a '90 day wonder' is a somewhat derogatory term describing a naval officer who received his commission after attending a three-month officer's candidate school.

In my discussions with Mr. Cooper, he has espoused the view that the battle of 'Bloody Tarawa' -- where 1,000 US Marines were killed in just two days -- was completely unnecessary. He believes that the facilities in the Gilbert Islands weren't worth the blood price, and that the "lessons learned" during the conduct of the campaign weren't really all that applicable to subsequent operations against larger islands. Moreover, Mr. Cooper maintains that most if not all of the so-called "island hopping" invasions were themselves unnecessary.

Mr. Cooper has an interesting theory. Given that Japan's two main bastions in the South Pacific, Rabaul and Truk, were bypassed by Pacific commanders General Douglas Macarthur and Admiral Chester Nimitz, why couldn't the entire Japanese defense network of islands have been bypassed as well?

Here is an excellent series of Pacific War maps from the US Military Academy at West Point to refer to.

In short, Mr. Cooper proposes that the US could have made a thrust directly at the Mariana Islands, bypassing the Gilberts and the Marshalls in their entirety. The purpose of securing Saipan, Tinian, and Guam would be establish bomber bases for a campaign against Japan, as was the case in the actual conduct of the war. However, Mr. Cooper believes that the preliminary "island hopping" campaign was both strategically unnecessary and a waste of lives. The US invasion of the Marianas was staged from Hawaii and Guadalcanal, with the forces rendezvousing in the Marshall Islands. This might be justification for taking the Marshalls. But could the invasion force have been marshaled elsewhere?

Histories of the US Pacific War have tended to accept the orthodoxy of the island hopping campaign without much question: each invasion enabled the US to construct airfields, depots, and harbors to enable the next leap west. But given that huge swaths of territory with numerous Japanese garrisons were bypassed, was Bloody Tarawa really necessary? Mr. Cooper believes that US forces embarked on the island hopping campaign due to the influence of the pre-war Plan Orange and its emphasis on relieving/recapturing The Philippines rather than on any sound evaluation of the strategic situation in 1943.

I would be interested in any thoughts readers might have about this theory. I'll share my own later, perhaps in the Comments, after I've done some more research.

I'm not really interested in pursuing this angle in my Tarawa video documentary project, other than to record Mr. Cooper's thoughts on the matter. My interest is in examining the expectations of how the assault would go versus how it really went down. Tarawa happened early enough in the Pacific War as to be an "initial encounter" for a particular type of operation: the opposed beach landing against an island. The casualties it produced were shocking at the time, even by WW2 standards. There was outrage in the US, and calls for Nimitz's resignation. Sound familiar?

UPDATE 11/09/06: I have put online a phone interview I conducted with Leon Cooper about his experiences as a Higgins boat commander at the Battle of Tarawa that can be accessed here.

Strange to Say, Global Warfare Declining

2006-04-13T16:39:00.000-04:00

The UN secretary general issues statements on the "worsening situation" in Chad and says he is "more concerned than ever" about the deteriorating situation in Nepal. Iraqi politicians continue to be unable to form a government, as car bombs and other attacks kill Iraqi citizens and US soldiers. Iran boasts of an ongoing nuclear-enrichment program despite international efforts to stop it.

The world would seem to be as dangerous as ever, and perhaps getting worse. Or is it? Only the dead have seen the end of war, to quote philosopher George Santayana, but people today may in fact be seeing its decline. At least, so argues Dr. Andrew Mack, a professor at the Liu Institute for Global Issues' Human Security Center at the University of British Columbia and the lead author of the October 2005 Human Security Report, a kind of analog to the United Nation's annual Human Development Report.

Rather than report on good news like decline in disease rates or growth in gross domestic product, the Human Security Report is instead a kind of "human misery" index that focuses on the hard-to-collect information like the number of ongoing wars, the death resulting from war, terrorist attacks, and other issues related to security. In a presentation April 12 at the George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs, in Washington, D.C., Mack said that the public has been profoundly misled about the state of world security today.

A director of strategic planning in the UN secretary general's office between 1998 and 2001, Mack said that prior to the release of his report, the United Nations and other organizations simply didn't know whether the number of wars, and the number of people dying in them, were going up or down, in part because such data is difficult to collect, especially in the very countries where war is most prevalent, and because the political nature of the UN makes labeling an act of violence difficult. Just as one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter, so a conflict that might objectively be termed a civil war could by the particular country's government be labeled simply "criminal activity."

In absence of solid data, people based make conclusions based on worldwide security based on media reports, which tend to emphasize death and disaster, Mack said.

Sponsored by various government agencies from Canada, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Norway, and Sweden, the report finds that, among other things, while the number of intrastate conflicts may be up since the end of World War II, coinciding with the beginning of the end of colonialism, the number of conflicts overall is down, as is the deadliness of conflicts. For example, armed conflicts in 1950 killed an average of 38,000 people; in 2002, armed conflicts on average killed about 600. As another example, the number of military coups or attempted coups dropped from 25 in 1963 to 10 in 2004, with none in that latter year succeeding.

If such figures are true, what value is there in knowing conflict is declining? The dollar value of international arms transfer may be down 33 percent between 1990 and 2003 but the billions still spent on arms surely means that armed conflict – even if less pervasive than commonly believed – remains pernicious. Mack said that data provided by reports like his can help organizations begin to see where their activities may be doing some good. In the area of peacekeeping missions, for instance, while the missions may be effective just 50 percent of the time, however "success" is defined, they appear to have greatly aided places like Timor and Sierra Leone avoid ongoing conflict.

"There's been an explosion of activism, spearheaded by UN peacekeeping missions" and aided by the World Bank and numerous non-government organizations, Mack said. "These are exercises in nation building, and as screwed up as they are, as appalling as they are, they appear to have made a difference."

ex-German MiG-29s operational in Poland

2006-04-13T13:01:00.000-04:00

On 12 April 2006 first tactical exercise was conducted by the 41st Tactical Fighter Squadron (Malbork airbase) of 1st Tactical Air Brigade (Swidwin), Polish Air Force, with the use of the squadron’s new aircraft, MiG-29 and MiG-29UB. The squadron received ex-German MiG-29 fighters, presented to Poland by Germany in the eve of the introduction of Eurofighter to German Air Force. The aircraft were considerably wore off and demanded major overhaul. Thought they actually arrived in Poland in summer 2005, only recently first seven were formally issued to the squadron, which withdraw its MiG-21bis and MiG-21UM already in December 2003. In 2005 the pilots and maintenance personnel of 41st TFS underwent intensive training at 1st TFS, which had been flying on MiG-29 since 1987.

MiG-29UB is prepared for tactical excercise sortie
Photo Michal Fiszer

During the recent tactical exercise, a pair of MiG-29 (including two-seat aircraft) intercepted four Su-22 flying in two sections, identified them (in accordance to Rules of Engagement based on No Fly Zone enforcement scenario) and due to the hostile behavior of one of the group “shoot down” them, after appropriate warnings. All aircraft, including those shot down, landed safely in their respective airbases. Su-22s, which provided targets for MiG-29s, were from 40th TFS from Swidwin airbase.

Above and below: Su-22 with four drop tanks taxis for long route to be excercise target for MiG-29s
Photo Michal Fiszer

Next Su-22M4 from 40TFS taxing for excercise sortie. The 40th TFS badge visible on the nose.
Photo Michal Fiszer

Above and below: One of the Su-22M4 had a horse's head painted on the nose. This reflect the legend that 40th TFS pilots are sometimes called "horse heads" by rival units personnel...
Photo Michal Fiszer

Above and below: MiG-29 from 41st TFS taxing for intercept mission.
Photo Michal Fiszer

Above and below: And soon after also two-seater MiG-29 is taxing for excercise sortie.
Photo Michal Fiszer

Above and below: the two TS-11 Iskra aircraft belonging to the 41st TFS also have the same badge - a knife, which is related to the Malbork's Crusaders' Castle built in early 15th century.
Photo Michal Fiszer

The 1st Tactical Air Brigade commander, BrigGen Slawomir Dygnatowski arrives in Malbork by Mi-2 helicopter belonging to 2nd Utility Squadron.

MiG-29 comming back from excercise sortie.
Photo Michal Fiszer

Polish Artillery

2006-04-03T03:47:00.001-04:00

1S15 artillery command vehicle.

Last week Polish Army withdrew 2S7 Pion 203 mm howitzers, the heaviest guns ever used by the service. Polish Army acquired eight guns of such types in 1986 and equipped with them a single battery at 23rd “Silesian” Artillery Brigade in Boleslawiec, western Poland.
This left the Polish artillery only with rather obsolete 2S1 Gvozdika 122 mm howitzers, used not only by brigades’ artillery battalions, but also by artillery regiments of mechanized divisions. There are four divisions in Polish Land Forces and every of them has an artillery regiment with one battalion of Wz. 1977 Dana 152 mm wheeled self-propelled howitzers, two battalions of 2S1 Gvozdika, a battalion of BM-21 40x122 mm multiple rocket launchers, artillery reconnaissance battalion, command & signal battalion and support elements. The whole Polish Army uses 509 2S1 Gvozdika howitzers, 111 Wz. 1977 Dana howitzers and 257 BM-21 or Czech RM-70 systems. The command system is still based on Soviet built command and control vehicles, thought equipped with communication equipment in accordance to NATO standards.

2S1 hwitzer from 1st Armored Brigade, Weosla.

There were plans to improve Polish field artillery capabilities by introduction of Krab 155 mm howitzers, based on British AS-90 type, produced on license in Poland. However the program ended on two prototypes and is now shelved (thought not cancelled). The artillery modernization is low on priority list and probably will be very prolonged process. Polish artillery generally has too small range, can use only classic, unguided ammunition, does not posses adequate reconnaissance and fire control means (for example not a single UAV is used for this purpose) and above all, every caliber and gun system used is not NATO standard (122, 152 mm etc.).
The artillery is not high on NATO priority list and this is probably mistake. Even in stabilization operations precise artillery fire can support ground forces in the bases vicinity (in 35-40 km radius under certain circumstances (probably not in urban areas) and artillery could respond much more quickly than combat helicopters or air force for request of a land element in trouble.

Dude, Where's My Carpet?

2006-03-24T15:00:00.000-05:00

This week, eDefense has an "In Depth" story on the first radio-frequency jammers used by the US during World War II. In his article, "Magic Carpet to Survival," Dr. Alfred Price briefly relates the story of how some of those first jammers were sent to England -- and lost. Here is the full story from O.G. “Mike” Villard, the man sent to find them, as it appeared in JED, The Journal of Electronic Defense, back in January 2002:

I recall that before the Second World War, my father, Oswald Garrison Villard, Sr., was a well-known author who edited the liberal journal The New York Nation for many years. When I went to Yale, he naturally wished me to follow in his footsteps, although I was tempted by engineering at the time. I majored in English and graduated in 1938. But I was always interested in technical maters and since the age of 12 had been a radio ham. During my sophomore year, I won a prize in English and spent the money on Dr Fred Terman’s well-known textbook Radio Engineering. I was so impressed with it that I resolved to try to get to Stanford University to study under him. Though my qualification was in English, Terman arranged for me to be given the status of graduate student in engineering, though I had to do a lot of the undergraduate requirements all over again. I started at Stanford in the fall of 1938 and spent most of the next three years catching up with my new discipline.

Towards the end of 1941, the University took on a research project for the National Defense Research Committee: to build a vertical-incidence variable-frequency ionospheric sounder to assist in understanding the effect of ionospheric changes on high-frequency communications. Terman contributed several valuable ideas. He also put me in touch with Harold Elliott, a mechanical engineer, who helped me build the circuits that tracked one another as they swept over the frequency range of 2-20 MHz. At the time, this was difficult to do, though now the pulsed sounder we built would be considered quite conventional. It radiated a peak power of about 1kW, had a pulse-repetion frequency of approximately 30, and a pulse length of 200 microseconds. It had all the elements of a radar, though at the time I had no idea that an extension of such a device might also be used to detect aircraft or ships.

In May 1942, Terman told me he was in the process of setting up a very secret laboratory at MIT to assist with the war effort. He asked me if I would like to join him there. I accepted the invitation and arrived at the Radio Research Laboratory (RRL) in mid-July 1942, while it was still part of MIT. My first few weeks were spent getting the necessary security clearances and reading reports on radar. I was fascinated by it all. Radar represented such an incredible extrapolation over the crude sounder on which I had been working. Unlike many newcomers at RRL, I felt moderately at home with the idea of radar; my previous work had given me an ideal grounding. When my clearance came in, I remember being particularly impressed by a report written by Terman, describing what he had been told concerning radio and radar countermeasures during his visit to England in the spring of 1942. Nobody at RRL at that time had any first-hand experience with such countermeasures, but it was clear that we were getting the benefit of a lot of very ingenious thinking on the subject from the other side of the Atlantic.

Immediately after RRL moved to Harvard in the fall of 1942, I was assigned to Clark Cahill’s group and charged with exploring the vulnerability of the current US radars to various types of jamming, as well as means of reducing that vulnerability. We installed a couple of standard radars on the top of the RRL building and tried various forms of jamming against them: a US Army SCR-268 searchlight and gun control set, and a British ASV Mark II airborne radar used for detecting shipping. Both of these first-generation radars proved painfully easy to jam.

Although there was little that could be done to reduce the radars’ vulnerability to noise jamming, we did devise some fixes to enable them to stand up to the less-effective jamming signals. For example, in the SCR-268, the detector was DC coupled to the following video-amplifier tube. As a result, even a little continuous-wave jamming was enough to bias off or completely overload the video amplifier. The obvious remedy was to put in capacitive coupling, which stopped this particular form of overloading. On our recommendation, I believe this simple modification was ultimately incorporated into all SCR-268s.

Our findings on the effects of the various types of jamming were passed to the radar people at the Radiation Laboratory at MIT, with the result that the newer sets were designed - to the extent that was possible - to be less vulnerable to enemy interference. Another important result of our work was that it set off a program to educate service radar operators on the likely effects of enemy jamming on their sets. It was, of course, vitally important that the operators should be able to recognize the difference between deliberate jamming by the enemy and unintentional interference or some equipment malfunction. In addition to reports, technical manuals, and motion pictures on the effects of jamming, the group produced some training signal generators that simulated the various types of jamming on the radar screen.

Early in 1943, I moved to Earl Cullum’s group, which later became known as Transition and Liaison. The Transition task had evolved form experience at the Radiation Laboratory, after they had rushed some of their early radars into production. They soon found that it was not enough simply to develop a new radar and get it working. The design team had to see it right through the production process and the subsequent service testing. If they didn’t, something would foul up for sure. So we at the RRL set up our own Transition office to handle that side of things. The liaison task involved continuous visits to the various Amy and Navy offices in Washington to acquaint them with the latest developments at RRL and discuss their own changing requirements. On my return to Harvard, I would write a newsletter that was circulated among the group leaders so that everyone would know about new developments.

By the spring of 1943 one of the first of the jammers designed at RRL, the APT-2 Carpet, had successfully completed its testing. Both we and the people at Wright Field could see there was going to be a service requirement for the jammer sooner or later, but at the time no such requirement existed. And until it did, there were no official grounds for a production order. Fortunately for us, Lieutenant Colonel McRae in the Pentagon clearly saw the need. He stuck his neck out and authorized the procurement of the first couple of dozen Carpets. These were the production prototypes, and at the time, they were considered to cost a lot of money; the contract probably came to something on the order of $40,000. If someone had chosen to make an issue out of it, McRae could have gotten into serious trouble. But luckily nobody did. And before worked on the contract had gone very far, the 8th Air Force in England came up with an urgent requirement for the jammer, and the Carpet program took off from there.

The initial batch of Carpets was rushed to England in the fall of 1943 and installed in the B-17s of two bomb groups, where they immediately demonstrated that they could reduce losses from German radar-guided flak. Suddenly, everyone wanted Carpets. A large follow-on order was placed with the two companies producing it, Delco and Galvin Manufacturing.

Early in 1944, the new batches of Carpets started to come off the production lines and were sent to England. We at RRL felt that we had done our job and could now get on with other tasks. But then we started to get plaintive signals from the people at ABL-15, RRL’s offshoot organization in England: “Where are the Carpet jammers you said were being sent?”

The Army had an efficient system using IBM cards for following the movement of its shipments, but on this occasion, the system effectively broke down. We learned that the jammers had left the manufacturers, been moved to New Jersey, and loaded on ships, and we even knew they had arrived in England. But then they had simply vanished. Eventually a more-demanding signal arrived from 8th Air Force headquarters: “Where are the Carpet jammers that were sent?”

Obviously matters had come to a head. The business of finding the missing jammers was considered to be a liaison task and was given to our department. Terman and Cullem took council and decided, “Someone’s got to go to England and straighten things out!” The someone they picked was me. In June 1944, I was flown to England and sent to 8th Air Force headquarters near London. My main qualification to take part in the search was that I would be able to recognize a Carpet when I saw one. Not many others in England could do that.

After a couple of weeks at the various Base Air Depots in England, examining pile after pile of equipment stacked floor to ceiling in the numerous huge storage hangars, we finally came upon the missing Carpets. They were hidden away in the corner of one of the buildings. I asked the noncom in charge what they were doing there. “I’m blessed if I know,” he replied. “Those numbers aren’t in my Signals Corps catalog!”

Once we had informed 8th Air Force of the whereabouts of their missing jammers, they moved with impressive speed. Shortly afterwards, trucks began to converge on the depot to collect the precious Carpets and rush them to the front-line bomber airfields.

I stayed in Europe doing various odd jobs for the remainder of 1944 and returned to Harvard early in 1945. By then it was clear that the war was not going to continue for much longer, and Terman asked me to help in writing the wartime history of the RRL. By the time that was done, Japan had surrendered and the Laboratory had started to disband itself. I returned to Stanford to complete my graduate work.

From an interview by Dr. Alfred Price conducted during research for his three volume series of books entitled The History of US Electronic Warfare.

Statistics on IEDs in Iraq

2006-03-24T12:09:00.000-05:00

The US Defense Department and the White House often complain that news organizations aren't telling "the full story" about US military efforts in Iraq, and too often focus on dramatic events like improvised explosive devices (IEDs), thus playing into the hands of insurgent groups that use IEDs essentially for PR -- to convey a sense of chaos in Iraq.

Is there one technological fix to stopping IEDs? Manufacturers of various anti-IED fixes may claim yes, but military experts generally say no (see "'Enigma'-Like Breathrough Sought on IEDs"). The Pentagon doesn't dispute that IEDs are a problem, but generally tries to discuss the subject in a relatively optimistic way. For a more clinical look at IEDs, however, check out the Iraq Index from the Brookings Institution. Frequently updated, these statistics may help people understand the situation in Iraq a bit more clearly, though statistics should always be swallowed with at least a grain of salt.

As Mark Twain said, "there are lies, damned lies, and then there are statistics...."

Nagasaki Video Wins Telly Award

2006-03-10T15:47:00.000-05:00

UPDATE: The video launch on eDefense Online has been rescheduled to March 29. We're hoping to find a sponsor for it.

UPDATE 2: It's up! We discovered that there was very little liklihood of finding a sponsor for the piece. This response to our enquiries was typical:

I watched the video, and found it was very interesting, and well-done. Even so, I'm not sure that I'd want to attach [XYZ's] name to it. The bombing of Japan--conventional or otherwise--is still a very sensitive topic with our Japanese business partners, and while I personally like the film, I'm afraid that from a business standpoint, it's a non-starter for us.

Fair enough. Well, in any event, the video is up and now you can go see for yourselves. --MP 3/20/06

UPDATE 3: Now that eDefense Online is defunct, I have changed to links to where I have posted the video on my own website.

I am happy to report that my freshman video documentary effort, "Nagasaki: The Commander's Voice," was selected for a Bronze award at the 27th Annual Telly Awards, which is an industry competition for film and video. You will be able to see the half-hour documentary on eDefense Online beginning on March 15. We're going to break it down into chapters so it won't choke people's Internet connections.

Here's the obligatory press release.

In January 2002, I had the privilege of interviewing Maj. Gen. Charles Sweeney, USAF (ret.), commander of the Nagasaki atom bomb mission on August 9, 1945. General Sweeney, who passed away in 2004, was the father-in-law of JED and eDefense publisher Charles Boyd, who arranged what was for me a historic opportunity. JED has a section called "First Person...Singular" where veterans describe their experiences in their own words. My job was to get General Sweeney's recollections from almost 60 years pervious, when he was a 25-year-old major leading one of the most important missions in US history. From the roughly hour-and-a-half of audio tape, I assembled a narrative of the preparations for and conduct of the atomic bomb attacks on Japan that contributed greatly, if not definitively, to the end of the Pacific War. The article was published in JED in March 2002, and I posted it here to open this blog on August 9, 2005.

Some time later, it occurred to me that an audio recording of General Sweeney, the last made before his death, would be of historical interest. At the time, I had been dabbling in home video editing, as many new fathers are wont to do, and had really taken a shine to it. I thought that I might be able to integrate selections of General Sweeney's account with appropriate imagery to produce a short documentary feature on the Nagasaki mission. I contacted Los Alamos National Labs (LANL), and Broadcast Media Specialist John Bass of LANL public affairs provided me with footage of the Nagasaki attack as well as footage of flight tests of the modified Boeing B-29 Superfortresses that would be used on the atomic bomb missions. I also collected digital photographs from the US National Archives, US Air Force, Boeing, and other sources. Since I wasn't able to get out to the US Air Force Museum at Wright-Patterson AFB, Ohio, to film "Bock's Car," the B-29 that flew the Nagasaki mission, I used the opportunity of a trip to Washington, DC, to shoot some video at the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum Annex of the "Enola Gay," which flew the Hiroshima mission.

The sound track bears mentioning, particularly the choral pieces "Coventry Carol" and "Agnus Dei" performed by the Santa Barbara Quire of Voices. I have to admit that I became acquainted with the Quire while playing the computer space strategy game "Homeworld," published by Sierra Entertainment in 1999. One of the game's chapters featured the survivors a world-destroying attack coming to grips with their plight, and the background score was the sad/beautiful "Agnus Dei," which is a choral arrangement of Samuel Barber's "Adagio for Strings." I could think of no better piece of music for the coda of my documentary, and Nathan J. Kreitzer, founder and artistic director of the Santa Barbara Quire of Voyces, graciously gave me permission to use the piece, as well as "Coventry Carol." The latter is a beautiful work in its own right, a mournful lullaby about the slaughter of the innocents by Herod, and in my mind it evoked the bombing of that English city by the German Luftwaffe in November 1940, the first time a city was devastated by incendiaries.

Both "Agnus Dei" and "Coventry Carol" are from the album "Illuminations." You can buy the album here, as well as read the liner notes. You can find out more about the Santa Barbara Quire of Voices here.

I had wanted to have the documentary finished for the 60th anniversary of the Nagasaki mission, but alas, the learning curve was steeper than I had imagined. I finally took a rough cut of my film down to my public-access TV station in Franklin, MA, which aired it throughout the month of November 2005. Steve Russo, the station's coordinator, suggested I submit the work for the 27th Telly Awards. Thanks, Steve!

For more information on the Nagasaki mission and the situation at the time, I recommend the following sources:

Websites

Manhattan Project Heritage Preservation Association, Inc. (MPHPA)

The 509th Composite Group

Books

War's End
Maj. Gen. Charles W. Sweeney, USAF (ret.), with James A. Antonucci and Marion K. Antonucci
Avon Books, 1997

Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire
Richard Frank
Random House, 1999

Operation Active Endeavor

2006-03-09T17:31:00.000-05:00

RFS Moskva and HMS Nottingham (foreground)

My latest short video is up on eDefense Online. It's shows Russian Marines conducting a board-and-search exercise.

On Feb. 11-16, 2006, the Russian guided-missile cruiser RFS Moskva participated in joint training exercises in the Mediterranean off Sicily with the UK's air-defense destroyer HMS Nottingham (D 91). The Moskva is an 11,200-ton Slava-class cruiser serving with Russian Navy's Black Sea Fleet. Her main armament consists of 16 P-500 Bazalt (NATO: SS-N-12 Sandbox) supersonic anti-ship missiles that are carried in distinctive deck-mounted launchers. While the Moskva is one of the one of the most powerful warships in the world, designed to attack aircraft-carrier battlegroups, she rendezvoused with the Nottingham, her former Cold War adversary, to train for NATO's Operation Active Endeavor.

NATO established Operation Active Endeavor after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the US to monitor and protect the sea lanes of the Mediterranean, through which 30% of the world's maritime traffic passes. In April 2003, NATO authorized an expansion of the mission to include boarding of suspect vessels, in accordance with international law. Over 100 ships have been boarded as of February 2006. In March 2004, NATO extended the area of operations to the entire Mediterranean and invited certain non-NATO nations to participate, including Russia and Ukraine.

Russian sailors and marines were trained aboard the Nottingham, while some UK personnel assigned to the NATO training team embarked with the Moskva. The UK's Royal Navy demonstrated the techniques necessary to professionally undertake the task of boarding merchant ships at sea. Thereafter, the Russians put their training into practice by boarding and searching the Spanish frigate SPS Navarra (F 85), which served in the role of a merchant vessel.

The world's premier navies are finding common cause in areas such as countering terrorism, piracy, and illegal trafficking in drugs, arms, and people. Operation Active Endeavor is demonstrating how naval personnel under different flags, even those of different alliances, can work together. Russian training with the Standing NATO Maritime Group 2 will continue through 2006, with the expectation that two Russian Federation ships will become operational with Active Endeavor later this year.

US Coast Guard With Hat in Hand

2006-03-03T10:48:00.000-05:00

Any kid who gets an allowance probably thinks it's not enough -- dad's just being cheap, right? I suspect that the US military and its individual services are a little more adult about the budgets they're given each year, understanding that resources and limited and everyone must share for the overall good of the country.

But while all services may complain to Congress that they don't receive enough funds to properly maintain existing assets, pay ongoing operational costs, and buy new stuff for the future, the US Coast Guard really does seem to get the short end of the stick, at least according to House subcommittee members who help oversee the agency (see "USCG Stoic About Proposed FY07 Budget"). Both Republicans and Democrats in that committee's most recent hearing seemed to feel that the $8 billion set aside for the Coast Guard, which in itself seems like a lot of money, actually doesn't go far enough to help the service adequately maintain existing assets and, more important, buy new ones, plus fulfill its many different duties, from maritime safety to drug interdiction to port security and more.

As one example of the aging cutter fleet the USCG must work with, Master Chief Franklin Welsch said the service's fleet was out of commission more than 50 percent of the time last year -- about four times what is supposed to be the average. Respect for the USCG professionalism and capabilities appears to be widespread yet, perhaps, taken for granted...

Lack of Urgency

2006-02-27T14:05:00.000-05:00

The following story appeared on eDefense on Friday:

US Army Planning Large Missile-Warner Buy

The US Army intends to issue a contract, valued at $1.4 billion, within the next two months for the procurement of more than 2,000 Common Missile Warning Systems (CMWSs) over the next five years for its helicopter fleet.

According to a pre-solicitation notice released by the Army on Jan. 30, the service plans to award the $1.4-billion indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract to BAE Systems (Nashua, NH), the developer and producer of the AN/AAR-57 CMWS. According to Chris Ager, business-development manager for BAE Systems, the contract is expected to call for the delivery of about 40 systems per month over the five-year period covered by the contract, for a total of over 2,000 systems, plus life-cycle support.

These systems, Ager said, will be shipped "directly out to where the Army needs them" – in other words, places like Iraq and Afghanistan. "The Army's focus has been on getting as many CMWSs into the field as possible," he said, adding that the helicopters that are "top priority for CMWS are aircraft involved in the global war on terror."

This should come as no surprise, since as far back as November 2003, in the wake of the loss of two Army helicopters in Iraq (see "Choppers in the Crosshairs in Iraq"), then Acting Secretary of the Army Les Brownlee issued a memo calling for action to boost the self-protection capabilities of the service's helicopter fleet (see "Army Helo EW Upgrades: URGENT!"). In that memo, Brownlee wrote, "Like other force protection measures, this is URGENT!"
Since then, the Army has been pushing to get the CMWS fielded on as many of its helicopters in the field as possible, including an $27.8-million order for 50 of the systems in 2004 (see "US Army Helos to Receive New IR Countermeasures"). At that time, Army requirements called for the procurement of just 1,078 CMWSs. The contract expected to be issued in the next couple of months, though, would almost double that number.

Ager said that the systems that have already been fielded have proven to be operationally effective against threats in theater. He did concede, however, that there were some false-alarm issues with the fielded systems initially (see "US Army Helos Getting False Alarms"). "We met the specifications to the letter," he explained, "but the system was found to be operationally deficient."

Army CH-47 Chinooks and UH-60 Blackhawk helicopters equipped with the system and flying in Iraq and Afghanistan were receiving alerts in the form of audible and visual warnings when there were no threats. Moreover, these false alarms could also trigger the countermeasures systems onboard the helicopters, which then launch flares that – along with unnecessarily depleting the stores of the decoys on the helicopters – could also give away their positions, particularly during nighttime operations. BAE Systems' solution was to develop new software that alleviated the problem without affecting the system's detection capabilities. This new software, Ager said, has decreased the CMWS's false-alarm rate by a factor of five over the past five months.

While the Army certainly appears firm in its intent in procuring the CMWS for its helicopters – first for those involved in operations supporting the war on terror and then for the rest of the fleet – it is still unclear how the service intends to proceed with the AN/ALQ-212 Advanced Threat Infrared Countermeasures (ATIRCM) system, which was developed to be paired with the CMWS and provide an active countermeasures capability against IR-guided missiles. Ager said that the Army is still trying to decide whether it would make sense to accelerate the ATIRCM program, as was done with the CMWS.

================

Since US forces entered both countries, attacks against US helicopters Iraq and Afghanistan have not been uncommon. Then Acting Army Secretary Brownlee was alarmed enough by such attacks to issue the memo mentioned in the above story, calling the need for increased protection for helicopters "URGENT" (the all-caps there being Browlee's, an indication of how strongly he felt). But that was back in November 2003. It's now February 2006, and the Army still hasn't gotten the CMWS on all of its helicopters engaged in operations in support of the war on terror. Where's the urgency?

Also, while the ability to detect an incoming missile is all well and good, knowing it's coming isn't worth all that much if you can't effectively counter it. Right now, Army helicopters in Iraq are relying on flares and old lamp-based infrared jammers to counter the threat posed by IR-guided missiles. The trouble is, missiles have gotten much more sophisticated since those technologies were first introduced (take the Russian-made Igla, for instance). The Royal Netherlands Air Force understands this and recently fitted its Apache helicopters that were to be deployed to Afghanistan with a new electronic-warfare suite that includes a directional infrared countermeasures (DIRCM) system, and the USAF has been working to get as many of its transport aircraft serving in theater equipped with the Large Aircraft Countermeasures (LAIRCM) system for some time now. Why hasn't the US Army followed suit? Right now, the Army is stuck in a planning stage, considering whether or not to accelerate the ATIRCM program? What's there to consider? The threat is there (indeed, has been there for some time), and the need for modern, effective countermeasures is now. Again, there's just no sense of urgency.

And that's just looking at the IR threat. Insurgents in Iraq have also targeted US helicopters with rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs). Less than a year ago, we noted on eDefense that electronic countermeasures (ECM) were ineffective against RPGs. Well, ECM might be, but that doesn't mean there may not be some means of protection available. Turns out there's a system called Quick Kill that was demonstrated earlier this year. The demonstration simulated an RPG attack against a ground combat vehicle, but the system's developers say it would work equally well (with some modifications, of course) on a helicopter. The Army has already been briefed on such a possible application, but will Army Aviation take a hard look at the Quick Kill system? Time will tell. Let's just hope it's not too much time.

Russia + Iran = ....?

2006-02-23T12:46:00.000-05:00

It's nice that Russia and China are getting involved in screening the Iranian nuclear weapons development program -- I mean, negotiationg a reasonable compromise on the issue of uranium enrichment. Good. I'm also glad that both Japan and the UN have welcomed the Russia-Iran talks, even though such talks seemed destined to produce only more talks -- and Iranian-enriched uranium. It's most important that everybody be happy with the way things are going. Happy, happy, joy, joy.

There is some hope that the US and Europe will be able to forge a common position on the issue of Iran's nuclear weapons program. Certainly, Western Europe seems to have been jolted by Iran's intransigence. Frankly, either Iran really does only want to have nuclear power for the electricity, or it wants to develop nuclear weapons. If it's the former, Tehran should be able to swallow the soverignty issue and accept the deal. After all, they just want clean energy, right? You never know when you're going to run out of oil, the Middle East is a turbulent place (even if your soaking in it), and the environment is ever so important. On the other hand, if Iran really is pursuing a nuclear weapons program (I'm going to go out on a limb and lean this way), then no amount of discussion will lead to a verifiable deal. Strikes will be forthcoming.

It should be noted that in December 2005, Russia fast-tracked the delivery of 29 Tor-M1 (SA-15) air-defense systems to Iran by the end of 2006. While the Tor-M1 was originally conceived as a mobile air-defense system to protect armored formations on the move, it is known to be an effective site-defense system. It should also be noted that the Tor-M1 is effective against the sort of air-launched, stand-off strike weapons that the US has come to rely on. The system also has an optical engagement capability that would enable it to function in an environment of electronic jamming, although the fire-control system would presumably still need a cue from a search radar. However, it is possible to cue fire-control systems from remote locations, so it may be possible for a search and track network to remain operative in the face of electronic warfare. Certainly, others have figured out how to do this in the past, notably the Yugoslavians. Regardless, the presence of Tor-M1 air defense systems at Iranian nuclear sites would certainly complicate matters.

So, even as the Russians claim to want to help, they are scrambling to protect their investment in Iran's nuclear program.

Here's some background on the Tor/Tor-M1 from "Russia's Roving SAMs" by Michal Fiszer. Be happy!

9K330 Tor

Missile: 9M330 (SA-15 Gauntlet)
Range: 1.5 to 12 km
Altitude: 10 to 6000 m

Target Search/Acquisition Radar: P-19 or 9S18 Kupol [command post]; C-band [launcher]
Fire Control: K-band

The development of the 9K330 Tor system was prolonged due to its high degree of system complexity. It started state trials in December 1983 and was finally accepted into service in March 1986. A Tor regiment consists of four launch batteries and is attached to a division. The regiment has a headquarters company with a MP-22 mobile command post, a MP-25 information and coordination center, and one or two P-19 or 9S18 Kupol radar sets. When first deployed, the C3 I equipment was not compatible with the Polyana-D4 system and this was the system's main shortcoming. The battery consists of a PU-12M mobile command post and four TELARs.

The 9A330 TELAR is mounted on tracked chassis. It has eight vertically launched radio-command guided missiles in a middle compartment, a target-acquisition radar at the rear, and a fire-control radar in the front. The 3-D target acquisition radar has a threat-warning alarm and automatic threat-evaluation modes, with automatic target prioritization. It operates in the C band with 1.5 kW pulse power output, and has mechanical scan in azimuth and frequency-modulation scan in elevation. The elevation scan angle is from zero to +32 degrees. Full antenna rotation takes four seconds. The radar can track up to 24 targets, provide continues route plots for ten of them, and designates the most threatening to the fire-control radar. Aircraft like the F-15 can be detected up to a distance of 25-27 km at altitudes between 30 and 6,000 m. A hovering helicopter can be detected up to a distance of 13-20 km, while a helicopter on the ground with a turning rotor can be detected up to a distance of 6-7 km (the system can engage such a target, provided the rotor is moving). A small UAV with a low radar signature can be detected up to a range of 9-15 km.

The fire-control control radar is a K-band, fully scanned array, mono-pulse radar with a relatively narrow field of view (3 degrees in azimuth and 7 degrees in elevation). It is highly accurate however, with an accuracy of 1 minute in azimuth and elevation, 100 m in distance, and 30 m/s in speed. The power output is 0.6 kW. The radar tracks up to two missiles (in a larger field of view, due to the missiles' radar repeater) and can lock them onto a single target. The fire-control radar locks onto a fighter-type target at a range of 23 km in 50% of engagements, and in 80% of engagements at a range of 20 km. The radar is supported by an optical tracking system with a TV day/night camera. The target engaged can be tracked either by radar or by camera or by both devices at the same time. The camera range is 20-25 km. The 9M330 missile can engage targets at ranges between 1.5 and 12 km, at altitudes from 10 to 6000 m, and with a maximum speed of 700 m/s.

As the Tor system was fielded in 1986 without fully meeting requirements, work started on an improved version called Tor-M1. NPO Antyei conducted the systems integration development, with NPO Agat providing the new 9S737 Ranzhir C2 system. This was fully compatible with the Polyana-D4 C3I system, and thus a Tor-M1 regiment can be integrated into the land forces air-defense network. The improved 9A331 TELAR received a new, phased-array target acquisition radar. It had the same range as the earlier radar but was much more resistant for jamming due to frequency agility (within the C-Band) and more advanced signal processing. A new digital fire control computer allowed Tor-M1 to engage air-launched stand-off weapons effectively, and also allowed the system to engage two targets simultaneously, with certain limitations. One target is engaged using radar tracking while the second target is engaged using optical tracking. The new system underwent state trials from March through December 1989, and was accepted to service in 1991. Currently, almost all Russian basic Tor systems have been modernized to the Tor-M1 version.

Programs to Watch: Arrowhead

2006-02-16T17:15:00.000-05:00

I just posted a short video feature on the Lockheed Martin Arrowhead upgrade to the AH-64 Apache's TADS/PNVS over on eDefense Online.

Arrowhead is the US Army's Modernized Target Acquisition and Designation Sight and Pilot Night Vision Sensor system for the AH-64 Apache attack helicopter. The AN/ASQ-170 Target Acquisition Designation Sight (TADS) and the AN/AAQ-11 Pilot Night Vision Sensor, (PNVS); also developed by Lockheed Martin; are turrent-mounted assemblies on the nose of the helicopter providing direct view optics, television, forward looking infra-red (or FLIR) sensors; and a Litton laser rangefinder/target designator. The TADS and PNVS are in seperate turrets and can be independently controlled by the Apache pilot and co-pilot/gunner. Both crewmembers can access both subsystems.

The Arrowhead system employes a second-generation longwave FLIR operating in the 8-12 micron band. This is the same frequency as the existing TADS/PNVS sensors, and is considered desirable because it offers better performance than midwave FLIRs when dealing with battlefield obscurants, such as smoke. The Arrowhead system is reported to have twice the range and resolution of the first-generation system. The improvements are attributed to a second-generation FLIR array and advanced image processing software. Arrowhead is a digital system where the existing TADS/PNVS is analog.

Arrowhead entered production in December 2003 and the first unit was delivered to the US Army in May 2005. The Army intends to buy 704 Arrowhead systems to outfit its AH-64 Apache fleet by 2011. Arrowhead has also been selected by the British Army for its Westland WAH-64 Apache Longbows. Other export customers are expected.

For many years, the Longbow millimeter-wave weapon system and its attending radio-frequency intertefometer were touted as the "ultimate" configuration of the AH-64D Apache. But opportunities to engage armored or radiating targets at standoff ranges with radar-guided missiles have been in short supply, lately. Improved situational awareness in the war on terror is more likely to be gained from electro-optical systems than from radar. Also, the laser-guided Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System II (APKWS II), which marries a 70mm Hydra rocket with a semi-active laser seeker, is shaping up to be a key weapon for the Apache in the future, Teams led by Raytheon and Lockheed Martin are competing for the US Army contract. The APKWS II will be much more effective with the improved target location and designation capabilities provided by Arrowhead.

US Army Aviation has been redefining combat-helicopter doctrine in light of ongoing operations. These revisions are spelled out in new Brigade Tactical Manuals that emphasize division reconnaissance and attack, close-combat attack, and urban warfare. New Apache doctrine and tactics stress "running fire" and "diving fire" over hovering engagements at low altitudes. This will place the Apache out of effective range of certain infantry weapons, such as small arms and RPGs, while also enabling better use of the helicopter’s TADS/PNVS sensors for greater situational awareness. The Arrowhead upgrade's role in improving the Apache's effectiveness in unconventional conflicts make it a program to watch.

J-UCAS Program Restructured (translation: "funding eliminated")

2006-02-15T15:59:00.000-05:00

The joint Air Force/Navy/DARPA program to develop a Joint-Unmanned Combat Aerial System was already on shaky ground -- or encountering turbulence, would be the better metaphor -- last year when about $40 million was cut from its funding. Now comes news that the the US Defense Department allocated zero funding for the program in 2007. The program director said at a conference in Washington just a couple of days after the new budget request had been released that he wasn't sure what the future of the program is, but that the DoD certainly wants to develop a long-range strike capability, and that the Navy seeks unmanned aerial vehicles that can takeoff and land from aircraft carriers, which is a capability that J-UCAS was not developing.

For more on the program's fate see "J-UCAS Canceled, But Not for Naught."

USAF on the Ground

2006-02-06T15:05:00.000-05:00

This time last year, for the first time in its nearly 60-year history, the US Air Force (USAF) was employing ground troops to take the fight to the enemy in Iraq.

While the USAF has long had its own security personnel and other ground forces, such as forward air controllers, Task Force (TF) 1041 is the Air Force's first unit trained and equipped specifically for offensive ground combat operations. With its 223 personnel, TF 1041 was tasked with disrupting the activities of anti-Iraqi forces around Balad Air Base, near the Tigris River, during operations that lasted from Jan. 1 through March 4 of last year. According to Capt. Kyle Hurwitz, who served in Iraq as part of TF 1041, the unit executed over 69 joint combat patrols (with the US Army and Marines), 495 USAF offensive combat patrols, 109 "hasty" raids, and three counter-intelligence missions. The result: a 95% reduction in attacks on Balad AB.

Before TF 1041 began operations early last year, Balad AB found itself a frequent target of attacks by Iraqi insurgents – in fact, on average, three indirect-fire attacks each day, Capt. Hurwitz said. At one point, the Air Force even considered stopping flights out of Balad, but the service later decided "to go find the bad guys that're threatening our personnel," he said.

Though technically part of the USAF's 332nd Air Expeditionary Wing, TF 1041 was usually under the tactical control of the Army's 2nd Brigade Combat Team (which is now handling TF 1041's mission on its own). This cooperation between the two services also included training of USAF snipers at the Army Sniper School (Ft. Benning, GA).

But the most important cooperation between the Air Force and Army, as well as the Marines, took place out in the field on missions. As Capt. Hurwitz explained, Iraqi insurgents would cross the Tigris to get close to Balad AB, launch an indirect-fire attack, and then escape back across the river. US Marines in boats, he said, were frequently called upon to stop the insurgent traffic over the Tigris. Capt. Hurwitz also recounted one instance in which US Army Kiowa helicopters from the 1-17 Cavalry Regiment, 82nd Airborne, were called in to provide air support in order to stop one boat in particular, which led to an USAF first – the first time the Air Force had ever captured a boat.

TF 1041 was also very successful in capturing the insurgents themselves, including what Capt. Hurwitz called "18 high-value targets, three with national import," as well as six weapons caches. "We use focused intelligence," Capt. Hurwitz said, "to find the bad guy and hopefully capture or kill him."

Not bad for a service that almost always fights from the air, but perhaps even more impressive was the number of casualties suffered by TF 1041: zero.

Small Diameter Bomb Video

2006-01-27T09:37:00.000-05:00

On eDefense Online I've posted our first video feature on the GBU-39 Small Diameter Bomb (SDB) program for the US Air Force. The Boeing GBU-39 is now undergoing operational trials at Eglin AFB, FL, and is scheduled to enter service on the F-15E Strike Eagle in late 2006. To use a tired phrase, the SDB is truly a transformational weapon, particularly for existing aircraft. Because it is GPS/INS guided, the SDB can be used to hit targets identified through passive geolocation means, which is a major advance. The glide bomb's 60-70 nautical mile range means the aircraft can make standoff attacks outside the range of short-range and some medium-range air defense systems. Up to four can SDBs can be carried in place of a single 1,000-lb bomb. The B-2 can carry up to 160 SDBs, all of which can be independently targeted to hit different aim points. Also, the relative accuracy and small warhead size of the weapon enables it to be used in a close support role in fairly close proximity to friendly forces and civilians.

Defense Industry Daily has been covering the SDB program as well.

The video is an extension of a post I made here a while back. We are going to make "Programs to Watch" a regular feature on eDefense Online. If you have any suggestions for candidate programs to profile, I'd be happy to read them.

Interesting Iraq Footage in "BattleGround"

2006-01-26T15:12:00.000-05:00

A documentary called "BattleGround," now playing on the Showtime cable network, shows some interesting footage of streets and people in Baghdad, Samarra, and elsewhere in post-invasion Iraq.

Scenes include patrols by US forces along roads that could be sown with bombs, tumultuous meetings between US commanders and Iraqi town councils, the aftermath of suicide bombings, and family reunions with an Iraqi-American who lives in New York and who had fled Iraq after fighting against the Saddam Hussein regime in 1991.

Produced by a group called "Guerilla News Network," the 83-minute movie seems to be pretty balanced in its interviews of various people in Iraq and how they view life there today, and whether they think the US-led operation is or was worth it. While the opinions of any of the interviewees are debatable, they at least help convey a more complex picture of Iraq than the image of continual bombing and mayhem some people may have.

US soldiers are trying to do good, but under trying circumstances. In one scene, commanders are shown planning a raid on a person believed to be training insurgents how to use mortar systems. But how solid is the intelligence? they ask each other. It could be based on a personal vendetta. Another soldier on patrol compares Iraq to the Vietnam War, when US soldiers fought against an enemy that easily blended in with the civilian population.

Clearly, the terrain in Iraq, both physical and psychological, is difficult to manuever across.

Did France Change its Nuclear Policy?

2006-01-25T07:18:00.000-05:00

On 19 January French president Jacques Chirac said that France could retaliate with nuclear weapons against states that launch terrorist attacks against it. Mr. Chirac's threat is considered a departure in terms of French defense policy.
Actually it was just a confirmation of that what I have already wrote in JED, on the occasion of Rafale and its ASMP weapon. The French nuclear policy changed considerably since the end of the Cold War, however one point remained unchanged. Contrary to USA, France always claimed that anybody who would threaten the France most vital interests – the country existence above all or who would use weapons of mass destruction against France, would have to consider the French nuclear retaliation. This claim was without pointing out any potential country, and thought Soviet Union was the most probable enemy, it could be also the United States, should the USA seriously endanger the France’s independence. Now not the Soviet Union but rouge states could do the same – bring sever losses to French citizens by using weapons of mass destruction, either delivered by ballistic missiles or by terrorists. On the both cases France could retaliate against the country of the attack’s origin. So since the end of Cold War France deactivated her land based ICBMs, maintained her submarine based SLBM and Mirage 2000N armed with ASMP capability, and added ASMP capability to the carrier based Super Etendard attack fighters. In the future the mission of the both land based Mirage 2000N and carrier based Super Etendard will be taken over by Rafale fighters, both land based (and fully deployable) and carrier based naval Rafales. The armament will be ASMPA improved nuclear missile, with the range of 600 km, which gives quite stand off capabilities. The ASMPA and Rafale will be the main tool for nuclear retaliation, giving the France of near global strike capability, through deployment of the aircraft carrier anywhere in the world. All the rouge countries’ territories are within the reach of Rafale-ASMPA tandem, thought China or Russia might stay beyond, as they are not countries likely to attack France. However the French SLBM are the main type of “Cold War type” deterrence tools against big but stable (“non-rouge”) powers.
Citing the press release, “the French president said nuclear dissuasion remained the fundamental guarantee of national security. The president said France is in the position to inflict all kinds of damage to a major power. Confronted with a regional power, he said, the choice is not inaction, but rather flexibility and reactivity. And French forces are capable of responding directly to such a power.
Mr. Chirac said that leaders of any state that uses terrorist means against France must understand they risk what he called a firm and appropriate response for his country. That could come via conventional weapons, he said, but also by what he described as [those of] another nature, that is nuclear weapons.”
And what about the other nuclear capable countries? Do they consider a nuclear attack against – let’s say – Iran, when they are attacked by chemical bombs delivered by terrorists of Iranian origin?

Sneak Previews for Quadrennial Defense Review

2006-01-24T11:25:00.000-05:00

A draft of the US Quadrennial Defense Review, due to Congress on Feb. 6, has emerged in public and the results are ... predictable, apparently. Reports from various news outlets say the product that the US Defense Department has come up with does not contain very many surprises, though that in itself should not necessarily be a surprise, given that the Defense Department and its various service chiefs have been basically singing in harmony the past few years about "jointness," "net-centric warfare," training forces for urban operations, and so on (see "Expecting the Unexpected" and "Guessing Game: Quadrennial Defense Review 2005").

Lexington Institute analyst Loren Thompson gives an overview of the various early reports coming on the QDR, and says "the 2005 QDR ends up being a status-quo document -- a fact that will be readily apparent to anyone who scrutinizes the 2007 defense spending request that accompanies the QDR report to Capitol Hill." Reporting specifically on the DOD plans to add more Special Operations-type forces, Ann Scott Tyson of the Washington writes in her story on "Plan Seeks More Elite Forces to Fortify Military" that the Special Operations Command in Tampas, FL, is expected to get billions of dollars added to its budget. It currently has 52,000 forces, but will receive thousands more under the QDR plan.

TheDoD clearly sees smaller scale operations targeting individuals as opposed to conventional military units as a primary task of the military in the future, as it is largely today. For more on this kind of warfare, see also "'Small Wars' the Norm for USMC" and "Urban Puzzle."

UK-US Skirmishes Over JSF Overblown, Continuing

2006-01-06T13:55:00.000-05:00

UK and US politicians and defense officials continue to squabble over restrictions on technology transfer between their respective countries on the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program, but industry analysts and government sources say a serious rift over the issue is unlikely.

The latest public manifestation of the dispute came on Dec. 21 with comments by the chairman of the UK House of Commons Defense Select Committee, James Arbuthnot, on a report on the UK's joint combat aircraft and aircraft carrier programs. According to the Guardian and other news outlets, Arbuthnot claimed that if the state of technology sharing between the US and UK does not improve, the UK Ministry of Defense could be forced to write off its $2-billion investment in the program and cancel its $10-billion order for 150 short-takeoff-vertical-landing JSFs that would replace the country's existing Harrier aircraft (for more on the program, see "JSF International").

The report in question, issued on Dec. 13 by the committee, states that: "We would consider it unacceptable for the UK to get substantially into the JSF program and then find it was not going to get all the technology and information transfer it required to ensure 'sovereign capability.' If the UK does not receive assurances that it will get all it requires to ensure sovereign capability, we would question whether the UK should continue to participate in the JSF program."

Is a breakdown in cooperation over the program forthcoming? Stephen Bethel from UK Ministry of Defense (MoD) Defense Procurement Agency declined to speculate on "hypothetical scenarios," but said that the UK for now has the information it needs to continue participating in the program. "We have also made the US aware of the progress that needs to be made ahead of the next milestone on the project in December 2006, [when] we aim to sign the production, sustainment, and follow-on development memorandum of understanding," Bethel said.

Some sources would prefer it said that no problem exists at all. For example, a representative from BAE Systems, the major UK partner involved in JSF, who requested anonymity, said no problems with technology transfer currently exist, nor are they expected to crop up in the next round of negations over technology transfer for the program – the "next milestone" referred to by the MoD's Bethel. The representative said that all of the technology required by BAE Systems for its work on the program through December 2006 have already been transferred. The next transfers of technologies are presently beging negotiated and these are likely to be agreed to and then implemented as planned. Additional sources at the MoD also said that no delays have occurred – at least recently – by the rate and quality of technology transfer from the US to the UK, and that press reports about the future of the program are "baseless speculations."

Tensions are real, though. British trade officials and industry executives, privately and publicly, have been complaining about tightened restrictions on technology sharing between the US and allies for some time (see "UK Embassy Denounces US Tech-Sharing Policies" and "Defense Firms Cope With US Protectionism"). But Frost & Sullivan (Washington, DC) analyst Michel Merluzeau said that while there certainly has been a tightening of policy by the Bush administration regarding sharing of technology with allies, and that this has caused resentment on the part of the British, the UK really doesn't have much choice but to go along with the program. While the UK could theoretically consider alternatives to JSF such as a "navalized" Eurofighter or a modified Rafale, the higher costs and delays in aircraft availability that would result make a pullout from the JSF program highly unlikely.

"Beyond the Saudi order for Eurofighter, which is not confirmed but looks likely, this is it," Merluzeau said. "This is the last manned fighter that the UK will probably produce. If the country is going to maintain core capabilities, it needs JSF."

A bit of drama, of negotiation, may lie behind the talk by members of parliament about "technology sharing" concerns. Given that JSF is a program that will last decades, and could involve the sale 2,000 to 3,000 aircraft, to countries such as Israel, Turkey, and Singapore (see "Israel, Singapore to Participate in JSF Program"), various UK parties are clearly interested in ensuring that the country gets a decent share of the licensing profits – what the recent Parliament committee report refers to as "work share."

"JSF will be a fairly significant chunk of money at the end of the day, and there is a little bit of positioning there, probably, to get a bigger chunk of that money," Merluzeau said. "Sure there may be a security issue, but what it comes down to is: How much is everybody going to get?"

--Ted McKenna and Michal Fiszer

Rumsfeld Departure Rumors

2005-12-28T15:47:00.000-05:00

Who knows if they're really true, of course, but apparently Donald Rumsfeld is rumored to be leaving the Defense Department some time after the new year. He's been asked in press conferences in recent months numerous times whether he would be resigning and always said he wasn't going anywhere. But it would make sense for him to resign fairly soon, given that many of his closest colleagues in the DoD have already left. He has reportedly offered his resignation to President Bush a number of times. Maybe if he offers to resign again, the reasons for resignation will be such that the president decides to accept it.

The United Press International makes a passing reference to the Rummy rumors in an interesting analysis of the "bunker buster" bomb, which didn't get any funding in the 2006 Defense Appropriations Bill (see also "Funding Dropped for Nuclear Bunker Buster"). That doesn't mean the bunker buster is gone for good, given that funding for it was cut off last year, too, yet supporters found money for it through the Department of Energy. Here's an except from the article:

"Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, always an enthusiast for new, high-tech weapons with which U.S. forces can strike first and hardest, was a longtime supporter of the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator (RNEP). But at a time when important but immensely costly active ballistic missile defense programs are being developed and deployed on all fronts, and with a serious, unanticipated insurgency continuing to rage in Iraq, cuts had to be made somewhere.

"Two Rumsfeld loyalists have left major positions in the Office of the Secretary of Defense in the past two year -- Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Under Secretary of defense for Policy Douglas Feith. A third, Pentagon Comptroller Dov Zakheim, left somewhat earlier. And now speculation is swirling in Washington that Rumsfeld's own days in office are numbered and that he might be replaced in the New Year by Gordon England or Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn. All this was bad news for the RNEP.

"Also, the Democrats loathed it -- and it was a safer political target to go after than BMD systems. Their position is that RNEP will be costly, there are far more important programs that need to be funded, and conventional munitions will do the job anyway."

Gordon England, who is currently acting deputy secretary of defense, appears to be generally well respected by the defense industry and military officials, though he has spent nine months or so in purgatory as acting deputy secretary because Senators Olypmpa Snowe (R-ME) and Trent Lott (R-MS) have concerns about the Navy's shipbuilding plans. Perhaps the White House and the Defense Department will ring in the new year with an announcement that, with transformation of the military under way and recent elections in Iraq completed, Rumsfeld has declared his work done and is ready for someone else to take over.

Poland takes over air defense of Baltic States

2005-12-28T13:08:00.000-05:00

Since 1 January 2006, Poland will take over the responsibility for air defense of Baltic States (Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia). Since those countries became members of NATO, the other countries have deployed a four-fighters flight tasked with air policing of the Baltic States airspace. First two MiG-29s deployed on 27 December, next two are to follow-up shortly. Two fighters will maintain continues 7/24 QRA ground alert for next three months.
Polish contingent consists of 4 MiG-29 fighters armed with R-27R, R-73 and R-60M missiles, 6 pilots, 4 GCI navigators, 10 planners/staff officers and 40 ground personnel (maintenance, meteo, armament specialists etc.). The aircraft will station at Siauliai – Zokniai airbase and will replace USAF detachment. On 31 March Polish MiG-29 will be replaced by Turkish detachment.
Since some time Russian air force occasionally tests the air defense of Baltic States. It started on 15 September 2005, when a Russian Su-27 crashed in Lithuania, when its pilot lost the geographical orientation. The German F-4F took off with delay and arrived on spot after the Russian fighter crash. During the German detachment, Russian aircraft violated the Baltic States airspace eight times.
Of course the four fighters is not adequate air defense in case of any hostile action, but is an important element of peace-time air policing. It is enough to make sure that the Baltic States’ airspace is not freely used by any other country at will. It also helps to integrate the air defense system, which is presently built up. It already consists of three Lockheed AN/TPS-117 long range radars and number of smaller and older types radars provided by Norway. The air defense is controlled by Regional Airspace Surveillance Coordination Center (RASCC), deployed in Karmelava, Lithuania (for all Baltic states). Polish fighters will report to that center (tactical control) and to Air Operations Center in Pyry near Warsaw (command and logistics matters). The detachment is provided by 1st Tactical Fighter Squadron from Minsk Mazowiecki. For the first time new NATO member (former WP country) will take over the task of air defense of Baltic States.

The Heat Is On -- Can You Feel It Burning?

2005-12-27T17:12:00.000-05:00

The US military appears to growing less shy about discussing its various directed-energy weapon projects, from microwaves that temporarily burn the sky to "laser dazzlers" intended to warn intruders away from restricted areas. For a rundown on various programs described at a recent conference see "Directed-Energy Weapons Promising, Problematic."

Though officials seem well aware that such projects could have "public relations" issues -- can the laser burned out people eyes? would they be misused? etc. -- as well as legal ramifications, new "rules of engagement" requirements, and so on, the demand is apparently very high. The program manager for "Project Sheriff," for instance, said generals are asking for his program to be fielded ASAP. Project Sheriff is a experimental vehicle fitted with a whole range of directed-energy devices, including the active denial technology (which creates the "burning sensation" in people's skin); improvised explosive device (IED) jammers; and acoustic emitters, which can project speech or noises into the middle of a crowd from long distances.

Congress clearly support such projects. Among other things, the new defense authorization bill include $10 million for Project Sheriff. Given the tricky situation presented by missions like Operations Iraqi Freedom, development of new non-lethal or less-than-lethal weapons -- there is debate within the Pentagon on just what to call them, reportedly -- is certainly worth a shot...

A Not-So Clear and Present Danger

2005-12-20T12:06:00.000-05:00

Interesting that a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security said recently that intelligence reports indicate that the use of a man-portable missile system against commercial aircraft in the United States is not imminent (see "Missile Protection for Commercial Airlines Debated"). Companies hawking technology for protecting aircraft from this threat, such as Raytheon and Northrop Grumman, often cite the most frightening statistics they can find on the subject.

That's not to say that developing technology to protect against the threat is a bad idea necessarily. Just that questions about whether money might be better spent on other things for protecting domestic security -- whether related to commercial aircraft or not -- seem reasonable to ask.

The topic of commercial aircraft countermeasures has already engendered a fair amount of debate (see, for example, "Flying the Not-So-Friendly Skies"), and as John Meenan, an executive with the Air Transport Association lobbying group in Washington, said recently, will likely be debated much more hotly when Congress must make some real decisions about whether to require commercial airlines to actually use this equipment.

Polish radars – fifty years of development

2005-12-15T16:02:00.000-05:00

First Polish radar - Nysa-A from 1952. Photo - RADWAR

Soon I will submit to eDefense a history of Polish military radars: ground surveillance, ground air defense fire-control, airborne surveillance (yes, “mini-AWACS”!) and naval. Among them are early and late 2D radars, radar altimeters, modern 3D radars, including phased array ones.
The first man who dealt with radar development in Poland was Prof. Janusz Groszkowski, who researched the electric phenomena in vacuum environment. In late 30s he developed a theory of EM generator stability conditions, which initially was not understood by the other scientists, but where latter used around the world.
The more serious works on radars started in Poland in 1948, at Warsaw Institute of Technology (WIT; Prof. P. Szulkin) and at newly created Przemyslowy Instytut Telekomunikacji (Industrial Telecommunication Institute) in Warsaw, headed by J. Groszkowski.
First experimental radar was built shortly afterwards, with the use of elements (vacuum tubes and other electric elements) collected from various sources. It had Yagi type of antenna, designed at WIT and most of the other electronic taken from German Freya radars, abandoned upon German withdrawal at the end of WWII. The experimental radar worked (or hardly worked) on about 200 MHz frequency.
After some experiments with antennas, it was decided to build a new radar, with the parabolic antenna, very much reassembling the design used on German Freya radar. In November 1951 Polish government issued a special secret decision, obliging the PIT to develop a surveillance radar for air defense units and the prototype was to be ready within a year, in November 1952. It was possible because in fact the works on such radar were quite advanced at PIT during this time. The radar was officially named Nysa-A (after a river, which formed new Polish-GDR border in its southern part, the “A” meant the first type of the Nysa family).
The new radar worked on 600 MHz frequency. The transmitter created pulses of 200 kW peak power (which was deemed too low, and the works were undertaken to increase it). The repetition frequency was 100 Hz. The radar’s antenna could rotate from 0.5 to 5 revolutions per minute, either by electrical engine, or manually, by crank inside the cabin. It was used especially for sector operations, when detection range increased considerably.
Interestingly Soviet Union provided almost none help, except for passing a quantity of American (!) 2C40 and 6AC7 vacuum tubes and some other elements. Such elements were used in US radars supplied to USSR on the provision of Land-Lease, together with large stocks of spare parts. Soviet Union started to field own radars after the war and the American radars were declared surplus and used rather for test purposes.
The vacuum tubes were not the only US elements in new Polish radar. Also the PIT designers managed to get multi-volume radar handbook published by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and commonly referred in PIT as “Radar bible”. The handbook was very helpful and later, when the next Nysa-C radar was exported to Indonesia, the Indonesian personnel said that the radar was built “like from a handbook”!
The radar was ready in 1952 and in the winter 1952/1953 it passed company’s and state’s trials, completed in April 1953. The measured range of the radar against MiG-15 fighter was 150 km, but it was achieved by company’s personnel, knowing all the “tricks”. Actual range was 100-120 km.
The radar was far from excellence, but it was accepted to service of Polish Air Force for airspace surveillance. During the 1953-1954 five Nysa-A radars were produced and passed to service. They were used till 60s, mainly for experimental purposes. Interestingly, the equipment was not warmly welcomed in the air force. The benefits of radars were not yet recognized. The radars were unreliable and demanded much tuning and maintenance. But soon air force get used for radars and they were appreciated. Much later Polish made radars were assessed as better than Soviet equivalents and during the whole Warsaw Pact period Polish Air Force used much more Polish made radars than Soviet made ones. The proportion was reversed in Polish Country Air Defense Force, which were integrated across the Warsaw Pact countries and the equipment was also much standardized, so more Soviet radars were used by this service.

Indian Akulas

2005-12-14T23:10:00.000-05:00

It was reported on eDefense yesterday that Russia is about to lease two Akula-class nuclear subs to India.

According to Indian Navy sources, some 265 personnel, mostly from Vishakapatnam, were trained in Sosnovy Bor, west of St. Petersburg, for service anboard two Akula-class submarines (referred to as the Bars class in Russia) that India is negotiating to lease from Russia. Officially, Russia has yet to sign an agreement for the lease of two submarines, but the training of Indian Navy personnel suggests that such a deal between India and Russia has already been struck, the sources said, adding that India is also paying for the completion of two additional Akula-class submarines in Russia.

India has been known to be negotiating with Russia, since at least sometime last year, for the lease of two Akula-class submarines at an estimated cost of $36 million per year for each submarine. India is also negotiating for an option to purchase the two submarines, valued at some $550 million. The Akula subs will arrive in Vishakapatnam by next year said one Indian Navy official. They are to be armed with the BrahMos cruise missile, jointly developed by India and Russia (for more on the BrahMos and other anti-ship missiles, see "Cruiser and Destroyer Killers"), and will also be used to train the crew of the Advanced Technology Vessel (ATV), a nuclear submarine currently being developed by India. All of the major components of the ATV have been produced, and only integration work remains to be done. Thus, an option to buy the Akulas would only be exercised, sources said, if there are problems on the ATV project.
India previously leased a Skat-class (NATO: Charlie-I) nuclear-powered submarine, INS Chakra, from Russia from 1988 to 1991. However, Indian Navy personnel were denied access to information on some parts of the vessel.

It's yet another signal that we're at an interesting point in history.

With the collapse, more than a decade ago, of the Soviet Union, we saw the end of nearly half a century of Cold War -- really the first period that two superpowers faced off without a direct military confrontation. But that doesn't mean they weren't preparing to do so. As we all know, both the US and the USSR built up huge militaries.

But now the Cold War is over. The Soviet Union lost, and its successor, Russia, is hurting and simply can't maintain the military might that the USSR enjoyed. The answer? Sell it off. Even if Russia's armed forces can't afford to buy new weapon systems, there are plenty of buyers out there.

This should disturb not just the US, but any country with a regional rival. Russia is now passing, for instance, 100 Su-30MKK fighters off to China. Hmmm...how do you like that, Taiwan? And 50 Su-30MKIs to India? Take that, Pakistan!

With the end of the Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union, we've entered a new era. Instead of the global Cold War that dominated the latter half of the 20th century, it's quite likely we're about to see regional cold wars spring up. Russia's more than happy to sell its military hardware abroad, and the US will have to counter these sales to maintain regional parity. Neither the US nor Russia desires the proxy wars that characterized the Cold War of the latter half of the 20th century, but both would, no doubt, be content to profit from miniature versions of their own experiences over the last half century.

Bombmaking, Algerian-style

2005-12-14T16:01:00.000-05:00

Few people may need reminding, but the 1962 film "Battle for Algiers" nicely depicts how "insurgents," "rebels," "terrorists" -- whatever you want to call them -- have for a long time turned to bombing of civilians to challenge government authority.

Though this movie is from 40 years ago, it has a documentary style and a setting -- North Africa -- that might remind many viewers today of certain countries to the east of Algeria, including Iraq of course. A few scenes show bombmakers putting their bombs together, and hiding them in, among other things, ladies handbags. The women aiding the Algerian nationists are pretty and dress in Western-style clothes, and thus have an easier time getting through checkpoints and planting the bombs in cafes, airline offices, and other places French people hang out.

The technology depicted is simple, but the fact that simple bombs are still used today in many countries shows that what's simplest often works best. Regarding the improvised explosive devices in Iraq, the Pentagon recently posted a video "news" clip on the US DoD website about progress they claim is being made capturing bombmakers in Iraq. The US may well be arresting more bombmakers lately, but is it a sign of progress, or just that there are more people making bombs in Iraq and therefore more people to arrest?

For those planning to relax during the upcoming holidays, another movie worth seeing for its depiction of military technology and the context in which it is employed is "Thirteen Days," a film made in 2000 about the Cuban-missile crisis. Among other things, there are some good scenes of aerial reconnaissance over Cuba -- the Philippines serves as a stand-in, with Philippines Defense Department aircraft (and a few miniature model planes) standing in for the US military.

Nose Art Warning

2005-12-13T13:59:00.000-05:00

It is being reported that Israel is going to let Iran's nuclear clock tick until the end of March. We'll see. But in the meantime, here's a blast from the past:

The Iraqi triangle on the nose of this Israeli Air Force F-16A is for the raid on the Osirak nuclear facility in 1981. I'm told that the Syrian roundel is for an air-to-air victory over the Bekka Valley in 1982. Interesting that Iraq and the Bekka are now both under new management.

I wonder if Iran's nuclear program is really going to make its regime more secure.

Photo by Remko van de Bunt. I've posted a larger version here, along with the same aircraft in profile.

UPDATE: It's looking increasingly likely that this is going to end badly.

Romania to Buy Ex-Israeli F-16s

2005-12-13T12:01:00.000-05:00

The Romanian Air Force has decided to purchase (or perhaps lease) some 24 ex-Israeli F-16s, like the one seen here, to complement a planned procurement of new fighters, a tender for which is expected to be launched in 2006.
Photo by Remko van de Bunt

In eDefense Online, Michal Fiszer reports on one of the more interesting fighter deals of late. Romania is likely to buy ex-Israeli F-16A/Bs:

Romania has decided to purchase or lease some 24 ex-Israeli F-16A/B aircraft to replace some of its MiG-21 Lancers.

The F-16A/Bs involved were declared surplus after Israel decided to introduce the F-16I Sufa into service with its air force. All of the F-16s are to be carefully checked for fatigue damage and will be overhauled. In addition, Elbit Systems (Haifa, Israel) has offered a modernization package for the F-16A/B aircraft, aimed at improving the cockpit, adapting the aircraft to new weapon types, and bringing the fighters to full NATO compatibility. Elbit has already worked together in the past with Aerostar SA (Brasov, Romania) on the modernization of MiG-21M/MF/UM aircraft to the Lancer A/B/C standard.

Romanian Ministry of Defense spokesman Col. Cristinel Ghinea stated that no contract has been signed yet and only confirmed that Romania is “interested in replacing the MiG-21 Lancer fleet with new aircraft."

There is a plan that, in 2006, Romania will launch a tender for 48 new multirole combat aircraft. The recent decision to acquire F-16s from Israel is to supplement the eventual procurement of the new aircraft, not to replace it. The new multirole fighters (not yet selected) are to be delivered over the 2010-2012 timeframe, while the delivery of the ex-Israeli F-16A/Bs, if the contract is finally negotiated and signed, would start in 2007.

The Romanian Air Force currently operates six squadrons of Lancers from three air bases: Baza 86 Aeriana in Borcea-Fetesti (861 and 862 Squadron), Baza 95 Aeriana in Bacau (951 Squadron and 205 Squadron, with the latter being a training unit) and Baza 71 Aeriana in Câmpia Turzii (711 and 712 Squadrons). In all, 73 MiG-21M/MF aircraft were modernized to the Lancer A ground-attack version with the Elta EL/M-2001B radar rangefinder (prototype flown on Aug. 22, 1995), while 14 MiG-21UM two-seaters were modernized to the Lancer B standard, also with the EL/M-2001B (prototype flown on May 6, 1996), and 26 MiG-21M/MFs to the Lancer C air-superiority variant with the Elta EL/M-2032 multirole radar prototype flown on Nov. 6, 1996).

Each of these aircraft received the Elop (now Elta Systems) 921 head-up display (HUD), two 127x127-mm multifunction displays in the cockpit, hands-on throttle and stick (HOTAS) controls, the DASH helmet-mounted cueing system, a new mission computer, and MIL STD 1553B multiplex data buses. The Lancers were also outfitted with a new self-protection system that includes the Elisra (Bene Beraq, Israel) SPS-20 radar-warning receiver (RWR) and chaff/flare dispensers produced by IMI/TAAS (now part of Elbit Systems). Some of the Lancer As were also equipped with Rafael Litening targeting pods or Elbit/Aerostar Airborne Reconnaissance Pods. In terms of armaments, the Lancers were cleared to carry a mix of Russian and Israeli weapons: R-60, R-73, and Python 3 IR air-to-air missiles, as well as Israeli made laser-guided bombs.

The Lancers, however, are to be withdrawn by 2012 and replaced by new fighters. The new fighters, as well as the modernized F-16A/Bs, are to carry beyond-visual-range weapons and guided air-to-ground munitions, and they are to be fully compatible with NATO standards. Should the transaction between Israel and Romania be sealed, the F-16C/D multirole aircraft will likely emerge as the favorite in the planned tender in 2006.

Should a deal for F-16s from Israel go through, the Romanian Air Force would use the aircraft to replace some of its MiG-21 Lancers, two of which are seen here in formation with a Mirage 2000D (attack) and Mirage F1CR (reconnaissance) aircraft during a Romanian-French excercise in 2003.
Aerostar photo

It should be noted that the Israeli-Romanian MiG-21 Lancer program has not been particularly successful. While the MiG-21 remains a useful aircraft for some missions, and its low-radar cross section and agility potentially make it a difficult opponant even for front-line fighters, its small, aging airframe and limited radar and avionics upgrade options have been a drag on modernization efforts. For more on MiG modernization, see "Red Fighters Revised" and "MiG-29 Export Modernization Programs." See also "Indian Air Force Plans Fleet-Wide Overhaul."

Best Poster Ever

2005-12-08T13:04:00.000-05:00

Well, maybe not. I had a poster in college that was a cutaway of the USS Enterprise (NCC-1701A) from Star Trek: The Motion Picture that...oh, never mind.

Anyway, this one came to me by email, and I'm sorry that I can't give credit where credit is due. Apparently it's an internal "loose lips sink ships" poster from Lockheed Martin about the dangers of espionage. Love the booze bottles holding the corners, particularly the Napoleon V.S.O.P.

I've also posted a larger version of it here.

UPDATE: I've fixed the link to the Webshots gallery.

ELINT, Information Operations Helped Japanese Forces Achieve Surprise at Pearl Harbor

2005-12-07T10:09:00.000-05:00

On December 7, 1941, air and naval forces of the Empire of Japan struck the US Navy base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and surrounding Army and Navy facilities. Twenty-one ships of the Pacific Fleet were sunk or damaged in the attack, including two battleships sunk and six heavily damaged. Nearly 200 US aircraft were destroyed and over 150 damaged, most while still on the ground. Total US casualties amounted to 2,403 dead (68 of which were civilians killed by improperly fuzed anti-aircraft shells) and 1,178 wounded. Nearly 1,800 sailors perished on the battleship USS Arizona alone. Japanese losses amounted to 29 aircraft shot down and five midget submarines sunk or beached: 64 men in all.

The raid commenced when the Japanese cruisers Chikuma and Tone each launched a floatplane about 220 miles north of Oahu at 0530 local time to ascertain the exact anchorage of the US fleet. Twenty minutes later, the carriers of Japan's First Air Fleet, Akagi, Kaga, Hiru, Soryu, Zuikaku, and Shokaku turned into the wind to begin launching approximately 350 fighters and bombers in two waves. The aircraft included Nakajima Type 97 "Kate" level bombers, some armed with torpedoes and others with bombs; Aichi Type 99 "Val" dive bombers; and Mitsubishi Type 0 "Zero" fighters. Cmdr Mitsuo Fuchida, leading the first wave, used a Honolulu radio station broadcasting Hawaiian music to home in on the target. At 0735 the scout plane from Chikuma broke radio silence that had been maintained since the force left Japan twelve days earlier with a report that the US fleet was at its Ford Island anchorage. Fuchida sighted the ships at 0740 and saw that they were sleeping peacefully. As his attack wave divided into smaller units to deliver its ordnance, Fuchida radioed the code words signaling complete surprise had been achieved: "Tora! Tora! Tora!" ("Tiger! Tiger! Tiger!").

Radio Silence
While credit for the success of the Japanese attack must go to the audacity and attention to detail of its planners -- particularly its chief architect, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, Commander in Chief of Japan's Combined Fleet -- the maintenance of strict radio silence for the entire outbound voyage played a crucial role in the results it achieved.

In the previous July, a Japanese carrier task force consisting of Soryu and Hiryu and their escorts accompanied the convoy of troop transports carrying Army forces to seize French Indochina. During its 2,000-mile voyage from Japan down the coast of China, the task force intercepted British radio reports from Hong Kong to London that pinpointed the location of the Japanese ships, and even identified specific types. The Japanese communications and intelligence officer understood that the British were plotting the fleet's movements using radio direction-finding equipment. This generated an official requirement that future task forces would maintain radio silence during an operation -- even to the extent of sealing transmitter keys -- and that efforts would be made by other units to send false messages to mislead whomever might be eavesdropping.

For the Japanese, the importance of radio silence surpassed even the benefits of aerial reconnaissance. The presence of six fleet carriers and several other vessels that carried floatplanes with the First Air Fleet would enable a system of air patrols to thoroughly cover huge swaths of ocean for ships and planes that might detect it. On the other hand, such a system of patrols increased the chances that a radio message would be sent in a hasty or unguarded moment, or if a pilot had an emergency. For the raid on Pearl Harbor, no air patrols were flown until the morning of the attack for just this reason.

Nevertheless, the interest in Japanese radio communications shown by US intelligence personnel both raised flags and caused strategists to second-guess themselves. The Japanese strike at Pearl Harbor was one of more than two dozen landings, raids, and related operations scheduled to coincide over a two-day period. As of December 1, the US was aware of a great "movement to the south" that presaged Japanese attacks on the Philippines, British possessions, and the Dutch East Indies. In fact, deployments southward of Japanese troop transports, supply freighters, destroyers, cruisers, and even battleships were indicated by radio traffic and this seemed to support preconceived notions among US planners that the inevitable blow would be struck in Southeast Asia, not the Central Pacific, let alone both.

There was some alarm at this point that no radio traffic had been identified from the Japanese fleet carriers for many days. Furthermore, the Japanese had just changed their radio call signs for the second time in a six-month period, which was unprecedented. Even more disturbing to some was the overall precipitous drop in the volume of Japanese radio traffic. However, US intelligence officers were "confident" that the carriers were in the home waters of Japan and not "rounding Diamond Head" as Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, Commander in Chief of the US Fleet, half-jokingly speculated. Such confidence on the part of seasoned intelligence officers was born of disbelief that the Japanese could mount a carrier attack on Pearl Harbor. If the Japanese carriers were not heading south, then they must be in their home waters, or so went conventional wisdom.

Upon recovering his aircraft Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo again clamped strict radio silence over the First Air Fleet. The US carriers Enterprise and Lexington were at sea somewhere nearby, and the last thing he wanted was an unexpected encounter. Nagumo did order air patrols to cover his withdrawal from Hawaiian waters, prepared to strike the enemy if he encountered him. Fortunately for the US flattops, perhaps, the First Air Fleet retired without such an encounter.

Raid Spurs EW Developments
The first moves to form an organization in the US devoted solely to the development of radio countermeasures came from the Navy on December 11, 1941, just four days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. On that day, Admiral Julius Furer, one of the coordinators of naval research and development, convened a preliminary meeting to discuss setting up such an organization. Following this, a letter was sent to the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC), requesting that it consider forming an organization to develop countermeasures equipment. The recommendation was accepted.
--From The History of US Electronic Warfare, Volume 1 by Alfred Price (AOC, 1984), pg. 19

Further Reading
For more information on the Pearl Harbor raid, consider the following books and websites:

The History of US Electronic Warfare, Volume 1 by Alfred Price (AOC, 1984)
At Dawn We Slept, The Untold Story of Pearl Harbor by Gordon W. Prange (Penguin Books, 1982)
"Modern History Sourcebook: Pearl Harbor Attack Documents, 1941"
"Pearl Harbor Operations: General Outline of Orders and Plans"

See the Nagasaki post for information on the raid that ended the Pacific War.

UPDATE: Roundups of posts on the Pearl Harbor attack can be found at the following sites:

La Shawn Barber's Corner

Winds of Change

Michelle Malkin

US-Venezuela: A love story

2005-12-05T16:40:00.000-05:00

Interesting how the recent rise in oil prices coincides with more news articles and reports on increased arms purchases by Venezuela. Hugo Chavez's government is pulling in more money, thanks to one of its best customers, the US, and now may spend some of that dough on new military gear (see "Venezuela's Oil Boom Fuels Arms Buying").

Coincidentally or not, the Pentagon has been releasing a lot more press releases rcently on activities by Southern Command in Central and South America, mainly of the "rebuilding schools and roads and aiding the drug war in Colombia" variety, but with precious few details about operations. At a briefing by Southcom officials at the AUSA show in Washington in October, officers stressed that US military service members in the southern hemisphere don't actually participate in missions, they only "advise" and provide assistance in the form of surveillance by satellite and other technologies.

If the government of Venezuela slips to the verge of revolution, as it did a few years ago, when Chavez was briefly deposed, the US may feel oblidged to get involved. The country's importance as an oil supplier no doubt compels the US military to keep a very close eye on all things Venezuelan.

Window Breaks the Kammhuber Line

2005-12-02T16:56:00.000-05:00

In a nine-day campaign in late July and early August 1943, nearly 1,000 night bombers of the British RAF Bomber Command, supported by US daylight bombers of 8th Air Force, struck at targets in the north German port city of Hamburg. The intensity of the attacks coincided with the near-paralysis of German radar-directed defenses engineered through anti-radar countermeasures. Nearly 50,000 Germans perished in the bombings and ensuing firestorm that consumed most of the city.

The widespread devastation and shocking death toll of the RAF-led campaign was the result of meticulous planning, the orchestration of heavy bombers, and the application of heretofore top-secret technology, released for the purpose. It was also the mindspring of Air Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, Commander-in-Chief of Bomber Command, who burned to bring the population centers and heavy industry of Germany under the wings of his four-engine heavy bombers. "They have sown the wind, and so they shall reap the whirlwind," Harris said while watching fires rage out of control during the Luftwaffe's "Blitz" raids against London in 1940.

Spiders in the Web
The success against Hamburg broke a period of heavy losses for Bomber Command at the hands of night fighters of the Luftwaffe's Nachtjagdgruppen that held the so-called "Kammhuber Line." Named for its chief architect, Generalleutnant Josef Kammhuber, a former bomber commander, the Kammhuber Line involved an extensive network of searchlights, radar, and night fighters based in occupied France, Belgium, and Holland, covering the approach routes of the British bombers. Early on, searchlights illuminated each bomber as a Messerschmidt Bf-110 or Junkers Ju-88 night fighter assigned to that area closed in for the kill. During 1941, a radar-controlled master searchlight introduced in 1941 made the Kammhuber Line even more effective by locking onto bombers automatically, illuminating the target with a pale blue guide beam that manually directed searchlights could pick up.

Radar-directed searchlights gave way to a more elaborate system of search and tracking ground radar and radio stations, known collectively as the "Himmelbett" system. A Himmelbett station consisted of a Freya radar for early warning with a range of 60 to 150 km, a Würzburg radar for plotting bombers, and a second Würzburg radar for guiding the night fighter. Each Himmelbett zone or "box" had a radius equal to the range of the Würzburg tracking radar (about 43 km wide and 34 km deep). These boxes were the building blocks of the improved Kammhuber Line. Target range, altitude, speed, and bearing data were sent to a ground control station that directed night fighters toward the enemy bomber "stream." Thus, each night fighter was like a spider at the center of an invisible web of beams.

The British employed a succession of radar jammers in an effort to blind the German Himmelbett network. The Germans responded with modifications to existing equipment and new systems that operated in different frequency ranges. This deadly game of one-upmanship spiraled on, and still bombers fell to the predations of the night fighters. In the weeks prior to the Hamburg raids, Bomber Command lost 872 bombers in the Battle of the Ruhr. However, the British had a radar countermeasure up their sleeves that they knew would be completely effective, but they had been reluctant to use it.

In the late 1930s, British electronic-warfare pioneer Reginald V. Jones demonstrated that strips of metal foil produced radar echoes. Subsequent tests with bundles of metal strips released from aircraft showed that in sufficient numbers the echoes took on the appearance of bombers as far as radars were concerned. Squadrons of bombers releasing foil bundles would effectively counter any radar operating between 200 and 600 MHz. Interestingly, similar tests were proceeding in parallel in Britain and Germany under the strictest secrecy. Both sides were worried that their respective radar networks would be compromised were knowledge of the technique to get out. The fear prompted Reichmarschall Hermann Göring to ban all further development of the German project, code named "Dueppel." The British proceeded with their project; code named "Window," but Prime Minister Winston Churchill would not allow it to be used operationally -- yet.

Operation Gomorrah
Churchill decided to "open the Window" for Air Marshal Harris' proposed air offensive against Hamburg. This campaign, dubbed Operation Gomorrah, was designed to utterly destroy the city in true biblical fashion. On the night of July 24-25, RAF Mosquito pathfinder aircraft equipped with H2S terrain-mapping radar sets guided nearly 800 Lancaster, Halifax, and Stirling four-engine bombers toward their targets. The aircrews hurled prodigious amounts of Window bundles from their airplanes through chutes cut into the fuselages.

The Window strips were 30 centimeters long and 1.5 centimeters wide and were packaged in packets containing 2,000 strips each. 46,000 packets were dropped, 92 million strips in all. Window completely disrupted German air defenses as the "heavies" plodded relentlessly toward their targets. German night fighter radar operators reported phantom bombers appearing and disappearing abruptly and repeatedly. Only 12 British bombers were lost during the raid.

The RAF would revisit Hamburg three times more in the days ahead, adding more incendiary bombs to the inferno. US B-17 Flying Fortresses made modest contributions twice during daylight raids. In those nine days in late July and early August nearly as many German civilians would die as all British civilians killed by German bombs in the entire war. In Germany, the firebombing of Hamburg became known as "Die Katastrophe."

For more on the German night fighter command and control system in WWII, see "Who'll Stop the Rain?" by Colonel Michael Svejgaard, Royal Danish Air Force.

For more on the destruction of Hamburg, see "Window on Gomorrah" by V. A. Pheasant, MBE.

China's Future Air Force

2005-12-01T16:37:00.000-05:00

At a fighter jet conference in mid-November in Washington, Richard D. Fisher, vice president of the International Assessment and Strategy Center, said he expects two to three new Chinese aircraft to come into readiness by the end of the next decade that will move the country's fighter force from so-called "second generation" to "fifth generation" – basically, F/A-22- or F-35-lite, with stealthy characteristics, active phased-array radar, internal weapons, and advanced networking capabilities.

China has 17 active aircraft programs at the moment, Fisher said, including the J-11; two variants of the Su-30; the J-10; the J-8; the J-7, which is being modernized as the JF-17 (see "Chinese-Pakistani JF-17 Continues Flight Testing"); and an advanced version of the Q-10. Of each type, China could be producing some 15-30 aircraft a year, equal to about one new regiment or two for each program.

In general, the country is looking to acquire whatever kind of advanced technology it can get from other countries, thus the on-and-off push to lift the European Union's non-binding arms embargo against China, an issue that for now has subsided as a result of strenuous US objections (see "Euro Parliament Favors China Arms Ban").

A Shenyang J-11 on the tarmac.

But here and there, despite trade restrictions, the military is steadily acquiring new technology. For example, while Chinese aircraft may not yet be able to sport advanced helmet display technology like the Joint Helmet Mounted Cuing System, the military is making progress toward fielding a comparable capability, thanks to both Israeli and domestic developers. For advanced weaponry, meanwhile, China thanks Russia for selling it the R-77 mid-range missile and the KH-31 anti-ship missile, among other armaments.

For more on this, see "China's Aims for '5th-Generation' Fighters."

25 years of service of Russian Kh-29 missile

2005-12-01T06:37:00.000-05:00

Early Su-30MKK launching kH-29T missile. Photo KNAAPO Konsomolsk

One of the most successful Russian Kh-29 missile was accepted to service in 1980 and is still in use as one of the most widely spread air-to-ground Russian missile. The missile could be carried by modernized Su-27SM and is the main guided air-to-ground weapon of Su-24M, primary Russian ground attack aircraft. The missile is also used by Belarus (also on modernized MiG-29BM), Ukraine, Bulgaria (on Su-22M4), Poland (on Su-22M4), Slovakia (on Su-24M4), India (on Su-30MKI), China (on Su-30MKK). It was also used by East Germany and Czech Republic.
The development of the missile started in 1975 in KB “Molnia” in Moscow (previously OKB-4) lead by Matius Bisnovat, while the direct development was lead by Georgiy I. Khokhlov. The team had already developed some successful air-to-air missiles: R-8, R-4 (K-80) and R-40 (the latter was the main armament of MiG-25PD. The “Izdelye 64” (“product 64”), which latter became Kh-29 was to be the first air-to-ground missile developed by the team. However in 1976 a decision was taken that KB “Molnia” would be merged with some other entities to form NPO “Molnia” and the new company was tasked to develop Soviet space shuttle (Buran). In 1977 Matius Bisnovat died and all the missile works were passed to KB “Vympel” (former OKB-134) from Tushino, near Moscow. In the new design bureau the program was lead by G. Khokhlov, and since 1981 – by Genadiy Sokolovskiy. In 1994 Sokolovskiy became the directot of the development center FGUP GosMKB “Vympel” reorganized from the formed design bureau and the farther development of the Kh-29 was then lead by Avangard L. Kegeles. Since May 2004 the OAO Korporatsya Takticheskoye Raketnoye Vorozhuneye (Corporation Tactical Missile Weapon) was formed and the FGUP GosMKB “Vympel” became a part of the corporation, as the design and development facility. In the KB “Vympel” the direct works on the missile development were lead by L.N. Kheyfer.
The first firing of the missile took place in 1976. After extensive trials the missile was accepted to service in 1980, in two versions: semi-active laser guided Kh-29L and TV-guided Kh-29T.

Kh-29T of the Russian Air Force. Photo Michal Fiszer

Initially the Kh-29L (“Izdelye 64L”) and Kh-29T (“Izdelye 64T”) were produced by Leningradskiy Severny Zavod (Leningrad Northern Factory), and in 1982 the production was passed to BAPO “Iglim” in Baku. After dissolution of the Soviet Union, the production of the missile was again taken over by Leningradskiy Severny Zavod. The production was ended around 2003, but the exact number of missile produced is unknown. The missile will remain in service for next several years.
The Kh-29 missile was built from five main elements. In front is the semi-active laser seeker 24N1 developed by NPO “Geofizyka” from Moscow. It is exactly the same seeker, which is used on smaller Kh-25ML missile. Behind the seeker there is missile control unit, which controls small all moving surfaces in the front and the control surfaces on the larger wings mounted in the rear part of the missile. In the middle of the missile is the warhead of 317 kg weight, from which the explosive is 116 kg. The warhead is especially shaped for penetrating concrete and according to official data it can penetrate up to 1 m of concrete behind the 3 m of soil layer (before the explosion). After launch the missile climbs to about 5000 m, so the attack comes almost vertically. The fuze can be set either on the immediate explosion (for attacking such objects like bridges) or for short delay (for penetration of bunkers or other reinforced installations). In the missile rear a solid state rocket motor is mounted. It is PRD-228 working for 3.2-6.2 s and giving a thrust of 228 kN (51,500 pounds), which gives the missile the average speed of about Ma=1.2. In the very end of the missile there is a gas bottle for powering the controls.

Kh-29L missile belonging to 8th Fighter-Bomber Wing of Polish Air Force (Su-22M4), photo taken in 1991.
Photo Michal Fiszer

The missile can be fired from the distance from 2-3 km to 7-8 km and from altitudes from 200 m to 10,000 m, at the speeds between 600 and 1250 km/h. From altitudes of 200-500 m it is launched from horizontal flight, from altitudes 800-2000 m from shallow dive and from 1500 to 4000 m (optimal altitudes) is launched from more step dive. The launch altitude above 5000 m is purely theoretical capability, without serious tactical use. The missile weights 660 kg and has a length of 3875 mm. The wing span is 1100 mm and the diameter body of 380 mm.
The version Kh-29T is equipped with Tubus-2 TV seeker, developed by NPO “Impuls” from Moscow, working in visual waveband (0.4 to 0.95 μm). The missile before launch passes the picture to the screen in the cockpit and after launch is of “fire-and-forget” type. It is slightly heavier (680 kg) and flies a little bit slower. The maximum distance of launch is 8-10 km and the minimum distance is 3 km. The remaining data is the same.
In late 90s the the OAO Korporatsya Takticheskoye Raketnoye Vorozhuneye offered also Kh-29TD version (known as Kh-29TE for export) with some improvements to the seeker and the control system, with the range increased to 12-14 km. Probably some missiles of this version were produced in late 90s and early next decade.

Su-22M4 of Polish Air Force taking off with a Kh-29T missile.
Photo Waclaw Holys

Kh-29 was reliable weapon (I personally fired Kh-29T from Su-22M4 of Polish Air Force hitting the target at Drawsko Pomorskie shooting range), achieving 5-8 m of accuracy, which does not make much different at more than 100 kg of explosive. The missile is carried on the AKU-58 catapult-rail, which actually drops the missile down from the aircraft. When the missile is about 3 m below the aircraft, the steel wire connected to the aircraft release the safety pin, which ignite the missile’s engine. It is done to avoid blocking the missile on the rail of launching aircraft (more than 50,000 pounds of thrust!) and to avoid sacking the missile fumes to the aircraft’s air intake. Interestingly, the missile has a big fire “tail” for the first few seconds of flight, but than almost disappear from the pilot’s view, with only thin (almost invisible) trace of white smoke. The explosion is however impressive and really destructive.

Wonder Weapon

2005-11-30T16:49:00.000-05:00

I received an intriguing letter from a reader who is researching the use of early surface-to-air missile (SAM) systems by the Germans during World War II. Here's a digest:

Dear Mr. Puttre,

I just stumbled on to your excellent blog through your post on WWII ECM/RCM/ELINT missions flown by LTC. Roger Ihle with the 15th AF. I am doing research for a book on the 15Th AF's Sunday 17 December 1944 mission to the synthetic oil refineries at Odertal (Kozle, Poland). Aboard Col. Keese's B-24 (484th BG), radio operator Sgt. Herb Weinstein (German-speaking, A-2 Intelligence) was operating a "special" receiver in a small compartment in the aft bomb bay. Weinstein's monitoring of German fighter frequencies enabled Keese to contact P-51s of the 5th Sq, 52nd FG prior to a major attack by FW-190A-8s of JG300. The trailing 461st BG had no such equipment and suffered ten out of twenty-six B-24s shot down.

In addition, an after action report from the 485th alleges that they had six B-24s damaged by Nazi SAMS @ 1414 hrs @ 12,000 feet near the center of the Nagykanizsa Oil Triangle in southwestern Hungary on 17 Dec. 1944. The following day, the 2nd BG (B-17s) claimed they were attacked by Rheintochter SAMS over Wiener Neustadt. On the same date, a lone 451st B-24G "Shady Lady" went MIA about thirty miles from where the 485th alleged to have encountered the SAMS.

I've also came across a blurb that a Guy D. Carnine (B-24 pilot, 8th AF, 392nd BG) claimed the white contrail of a Nazi missile missed his wing by a couple of feet.

Author Leonard Mosley in his 1976 biography, Lindbergh, says that that CAL [Charles A. Lindbergh] was a member of a US Naval Technical Mission in Europe commanded by Henry Adam (Packy) Schade that arrived at GAF HQ in Zell am See, Austria, on 18 May 1945. Dip Ing Helmuth Schelp, chief aide to Adolf Baumker (CO of German AF Experiemntal Institute Nuremberg), handed CAL a two-inch thick report on the German rocket/missile program since the 1930s. That report, #373-45, recounts that the Germans launched 75 SAMS and brought down 70 four-engine bombers. (I was around Nike-Hercs in the late 1960s, and the number of hits sounds too high). I made snail-mail contact with Richard Keech of San Luis Obispo, CA. Dick is a retired NAA employee and remembers reading the original German file in the late 40s/early 50s.

Would you have any data or leads about Ferret B-24s or B-17s collecting "trons" from German SAMS etc?

Respectfully,
John D. Bybee
Vermont, IL

Interesting stuff. If anybody has any thoughts about how Mr. Bybee might collect additional information for his book, please leave them in the Comments section.

Mr. Bybee has also provided scans of documents and photos he has collected during this research. I have posted these images here. Of particular interest is a reference to the firing of "rockets" from the ground at B-24s in an after-action report. The missiles cited in the attack were Rheinochter SAMs, although most sources say that this missile never became operational. There are references to operational uses of the Wasserfall SAM, however, and even to claims of "decisive victory" when 50 or so missiles were launched at US bombers. The Wasserfall was the basis of early Soviet efforts to develop SAMs and was instrumental in the development in the US Nike system.

It is also worth noting a conclusion in a US Naval Technical Mission report that the Germans had poured enormous resources into brilliant technical accomplishments but then failed to capitalize on them.

Magic weapons are a compelling component of lore, from the dawn of civilization through the present. Magic weapons materialize in the real world in the form of wonder weapons. That the builders of wonder weapons sometimes imbue with their creations with war-winning powers is typically little more than wishful thinking. During World War II, influential leaders of the German war effort were heroic believers in the fate-reversing, if not war-winning, powers of a parade of wonder weapons, including jet fighters and bombers, super tanks, and inertially guided rockets -- including SAMs. Many of these weapons came as rude shocks to the Allies and were very effective in the battlespace, but all ultimately failed to stem the tide of the Third Reich’s demise, because they were deployed in too few numbers. Some have pointed out that the engineering and manufacturing resources expended on these wonder weapons actually hastened Germany’s defeat.

If the myths of our ancestors -- and even our fathers -- tell us anything, it is that you do not need a wonder weapon to kill the enemy. Mundane weapons will do just fine if you attend to the basics of strategy, tactics, logistics, maintenance, and sound planning. This isn’t to say that wonder weapons aren’t nice to have on hand and aren’t worth beseeching the DARPA gods for. But excessive belief in the powers of magic can lead to your undoing if you are not supplied with the basics. Everybody wants a silver bullet. But experience tells us that they are in short supply.

On the other hand, electronic warfare has often been seen as the red-headed stepchild of the military. It is consistantly underfunded, and EW platforms are almost always "high-value, low-density" assets. This was particularly true in WWII, at the dawn of EW, where many didn't see the value in "trons." Yet the anecdote that Mr. Bybee leads with demonstrating the life-saving advantage of ELINT is a reminder that sometimes wonder weapons are worth the effort.

UPDATE: Here is a post on the use of "Window," an early EW secret weapon, and its contribution to the destruction of Hamburg in WWII.

Airpower in Iraq

2005-11-29T15:14:00.000-05:00

Articles by Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker are heavy on unnamed sources, but they are usually interesting, at least because they are controversial. In his latest -- "Up in the Air: Where is the Iraq war headed next?" -- he talks about concerns by the US Air Force over a possible shift to air power in Iraq as compensation for withdrawal of ground troops.

Various plans have been drawn up by military planners for withdrawal of various numbers of US troops in Iraq. That doesn't will it will definitely happen; it's just that like the Boy Scouts, the military wants to be prepared for anything. Sources in Hersh's article say that one thing these various withdrawal plans have in common is the increased use of airpower.

But with fewer US troops on the ground, would the Iraqi forces be trustworthy enough to do the targeting? Precision-guided weapons can be superbly accurate, but whether a target is successfully eliminated requires much more than just hitting the spot aimed for; it requires knowing where to target in the first place.

Here's an excerpt from the article:

Within the military, the prospect of using airpower as a substitute for American troops on the ground has caused great unease. For one thing, Air Force commanders, in particular, have deep-seated objections to the possibility that Iraqis eventually will be responsible for target selection. “Will the Iraqis call in air strikes in order to snuff rivals, or other warlords, or to snuff members of your own sect and blame someone else?” another senior military planner now on assignment in the Pentagon asked. “Will some Iraqis be targeting on behalf of Al Qaeda, or the insurgency, or the Iranians?”

“It’s a serious business,” retired Air Force General Charles Horner, who was in charge of allied bombing during the 1991 Gulf War, said. “The Air Force has always had concerns about people ordering air strikes who are not Air Force forward air controllers. We need people on active duty to think it out, and they will. There has to be training to be sure that somebody is not trying to get even with somebody else.” (Asked for a comment, the Pentagon spokesman said there were plans in place for such training. He also noted that Iraq had no offensive airpower of its own, and thus would have to rely on the United States for some time.)

Such issues underscore the importance of intelligence gathering for effective military operations, no matter how advanced weaponry may be, and that intelligence isn't just about collecting a bunch of photos or documents together -- it means a human mind evaluating that information and deciding what it all means. Computers and machines continue to improve, but they can't totally automate war.

Talk, Computer

2005-11-28T17:34:00.000-05:00

Urban ops are a lot harder to do when you don't speak the local natives' language, as the US military well knows. While it has boosted its efforts to train soldiers to speak key languages like Arabic (see "Renaissance Soldiers"), the US DoD also apparently hopes that it can create a machine that would simply translate what the other person is saying.

The latest program by DARPA is a $16 million project to develop software that would transcribe speach into text while simultaneously translating that text into English. Various handheld devices being touted at the most recent Association of the US Army show in Washington, though not as amitious as the DARPA project, are also supposed to help soldiers in the field when encountering language problems.

Maybe anything is better than nothing when it comes to this problem of language. Then again, given the complexities of language -- the way one word can have multiple meanings depending on the context, or how an individual person's accent can make a word sound similar to another, completely different word -- I wonder if this is not an instance where technology vendors promise solutions to a problem whose solution lies not in technology, but in old-fashioned human brain power.

For soldiers trying to win over the trust of the local populace during a mission, holding out a machine that speaks on their behalf or innaccurately translates what is being said seems possibly ridiculous. Imagine an American trying to use such a device to order a meal at a cafe in Paris -- the waiter would not be impressed.

A Better Urban Missile

2005-11-28T13:33:00.000-05:00

There has been a lot of discussion about the power of thermobaric weapons that are just entering US arsenals. Defense Tech has an article today with some history and political implications of such weapons. However, this power is nothing new. Nearly all types of Soviet- and Russian-source anti-tank guided missiles have variants with thermobaric warheads. Plus, there are thermobaric warheads available for select battlefield rocket systems, including the 9K58 Smersh MLRS:

The 9M55S 300mm rocket projectile with a thermobaric warhead is designed to defeat unsheltered troops, as well as personnel in light field fortifications and in soft-skinned/lightly armored vehicles. The warhead weight is 243 kg with 100 kg of explosives. The diameter of the thermobaric field (with the temperature in excess of 1,000° C) is 25 meters.

The US is fairly late in adopting thermobaric warheads as battlefield weapons. However, the requirements for defeating enemies in urban environments has found many existing weapons wanting. Remember how many TOW missiles they fired into the house where Uday and Qusay were hiding out? The fact is, it is difficult to bring down a structure with existing types of weapons. The thermobaric warhead is just one component in the quest to build a better missile for an urban environment. Here is an excerpt from an article in eDefense Online by Ted McKenna about the thoughts of an Israeli officer on the subject:

An officer with the Israeli Defense Forces who spoke at a July 19-20 conference on urban warfare produced by Marcus Evans Defense said that anyone with the misfortune to have fought in an urban situation knows that missiles available today are not up to the challenge.
Speaking from experience in leading infantry in urban operations, the officer described one situation he encountered in which a group of individuals holed up in a building were targeted with a large number of TOW missiles. "I'm a little ashamed to say just how many," he said, "but let's just say it was a lot." After the smoke had cleared, it was found that the men inside had left by a back door and run off, such was the inability of the missiles to penetrate the building.

Given the interest in finding new technology to confront enemies in urban environments, perhaps something could be made that is effective. Ten basic characteristics must be considered when developing any type of missile, said the officer, who has spent about 15 years developing missiles. These 10 characteristics, in no particular order, are as follows:

1. Price: each missile should cost no more than $15,000 each
2. Firepower: the missiles should be able to penetrate any type of urban structure
3. Lightweight: weigh no more than 10 kg
4. Trainability
5. Simplicity
6. Accuracy: able to hit a window at 600 m
7. Reliability: "I was an infantry commander with personal experience in urban combat, and I can tell you that I would gladly make do with 85%."
8. Low collateral damage
9. Versatility
10. Range: loss of 50% accuracy when used at 1,200 meters, say

Firepower may be the most important question, the Israeli officer said. "We want the firepower of a cannon, but how large should the warhead be?" he said. If the warhead weighs 2 kg, then the entire system may weigh around 6-7 kg. What types of payloads, though, are required - just the kind that explode, or perhaps they should include cameras? All these choices involve tradeoffs in weight, capability, and, of course, price.

The latest thermobaric weapons may be considered a partial answer to the problems of weapons in an urban environment, particularly in terms of firepower. It is interesting to note that the US is just now fielding thermobaric warheads for the Hellfire II missile. Here is an excerpt from an article on eDefense Online by Brendan Rivers on the US Army fielding thermobaric Hellfire missiles:

Lockheed Martin (Orlando, FL) announced on Aug. 23 that a thermobaric version of its Hellfire II missile has been cleared for full-rate production for the US Army, particularly for use in ongoing operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Following the successful completion of a production-readiness review by a government-industry team of the thermobaric warhead, the US Army awarded Lockheed Martin a $90-million contract for the production of 900 AGM-114N thermobaric Hellfires, along with 180 AGM-114K high-explosive anti-tank (HEAT) Hellfires. In addition, the contract calls upon the company to convert 100 existing HEAT missiles to the thermobaric version. Lockheed Martin is responsible for the missile bodies themselves and the integration of the thermobaric warheads, which are produced by Alliant Techsystems (Rocket Center, WV).

According to Mike Dowty, Lockheed Martin's Hellfire business-development manager, the thermobaric warhead works just like the other warhead variants of the semi-active laser-guided Hellfire II, with one difference: the explosive effects. The explosive material in the 27.5-lb. thermobaric warhead consists of a combination of traditional explosive, PBXN-112, and "energetic" material - in this case, a fluorinated-aluminum powder mixture. When the PBXN-112 detonates, the fluorinated-aluminum mixture disperses and burns rapidly, an effect that is extremely effective against enemy personnel.

This recent contract represents the first production buy of the thermobaric variant of the Hellfire, which was designed specifically for use against buildings and structures (whereas the AGM-114K was designed to engage heavy armor targets). According to a spokesman for the US Army Aviation and Missile Command (Redstone Arsenal, AL), experiences during current operations in Afghanistan and Iraq prompted the Army to request additional quantities of the new thermobaric missile to support those operations.

The thermobaric Hellfires can be employed on the Army's AH-64D Apache and OH-58D Kiowa Warrior helicopters, as well as US Marine Corps AH-1 Super Cobras and US Navy SH-60B Seahawks.

The controversy about the use of thermobaric weapons is reminiscent of the white phosphorous flap of a couple of weeks back. The fact is, weapons evolve as lessons learned from previous engagements make their way into requirements and then into new weapons programs. Problem/solution. Old as war itself.

1st Warsaw Armored Brigade – Polish Land Forces

2005-11-27T05:35:00.000-05:00

On Thursday, 24 November 2005 I took my students on a tour to 1st Warsaw Armored Brigade in Wesola near Warsaw. It was my second visit in this unit after more than twelve years. And there was a good opportunity to sum up, what the Polish Land Forces did, since Poland joint Partnership for Peace program in Spring 1994. Now Poland is NATO member since almost seven years.
1st Warsaw Armored Brigade is a part of 1st Warsaw Mechanized Division from Legionowo. The parent division presently consists of the following units: 1st Warsaw Armored Brigade (Wesoła), 3rd Mechanized Brigade of the Legions (Lublin), 21st Brigade of the Podhale Riflemen (Rzeszow; mountain infantry unit), 1st Ciechanow Artillery Regiment (Ciechanow; 152 mm Dana howitzers, BM-21 Grad), 15th Goldap Anti-Aircraft Regiment (Goldap; armed with Kub /SA-6/), 1st Legionowo Commanding Battalion (Legionowo), 1st Siedlce Reconnaissance Battalion (Siedlce), 15th Masurian Combat Engineering Battalion (Orzysz), 1st Supply Battalion (Legionowo), 1st Medical Battalion (Legionowo), 1st Lomza Repair Battalion (Lomza).

In 1992 the unit (as a regiment) had only one tank battalion with
31 T-72M1. Photo Michal Fiszer

In 1992 when I was in the unit, it was 1st Warsaw Mechanized Regiment. It consisted of two mechanized infantry battalions, a tank battalion, an artillery battalion, anti-aircraft battery, anti-tank battery, a reconnaissance company, engineering company, supply company, maintenance company and medical company. The 1st Mechanized Regiment was the only Polish unit, which used BMP-2 combat infantry vehicles in the both battalions. At that time there were difficulties in procuring in Russia ammunition for 30 mm gun and 9M113 Konkurs missiles for the BMP-2 and the regiment also had a stock of BMP-1 armored infantry combat vehicles (AICVs) for mobilization. Totally there were 60 BMP-2 and the same number of BMP-1.

One of the unit's BMP-2, in 1994 sold to Mosambique.
Photo Michal Fiszer

The tank battalion had 31 T-72M1 tanks and the reconnaissance company had 10 BRDM-2 reconnaissance wheeled vehicles. Interestingly, the air defense battery was one of the few Polish units equipped with Strela-1M (SA-9) launchers (4 pieces), along with popular ZSU-23-4 Shilka (also four pieces). Additionally the battery had Strela-2 launchers. The anti-tank battery had 9 self-propelled launchers 9P133 with six 9M14 Malutka (AT-3) each. There were also 12 mortars of 120 mm caliber in the both infantry battalions along with some anti-tank weapons (RPG-7), a few Skot wheeled APCs in command and engineering versions, BLG assault bridges and some engineering equipment, along with trucks of various types. All the equipment, including radio-sets, were of Warsaw Pact standard and the unit still was trained in accordance to existing manuals. However since 1991 the attention in training was switched from attack operations to maneuver defense operations.

The 9P133 launcher used by the unit's anti-tank battery. Now the 1st Armored Brigade do not have anti-tank battery.
Photo Michal Fiszer

In 1994 the regiment was reformed into brigade. More or less at the same time the troublesome BMP-2 were sold to Mozambique and the brigade was formed as armored unit, with reversed proportion between infantry and tanks. Now two tank battalions were formed, and one of it was recently rearmed with PT-91 Twardy tanks, being a deep modernization of Soviet T-72M1. PT-91 has new digital fire-control system with atmospheric sensor, new passive thermal observation devices, up-rated engine and new reactive armor developed in Poland.

Below and above: PT-91 tank, one of the 40 tanks of the type used by the brigade.
Photo Michal Fiszer

Now the brigade has 40 PT-91 Twardy tanks in the 1st Tank Battalion and 40 T-72M1 tanks in the 2nd Tank Battalion. The latter is not fully deployed unit and has to be mobilized in the case of war. All the tanks are equipped with NATO compatible communication equipment. In the future they will be also equipped with digitized command and control system. The single infantry battalion is now armed with 40 BMP-1s, being roughly the same as the vehicles used by the unit in 80s (before issue of BMP-2), only with new radios.

T-72M1 tanks, 40 of such tanks are still used by 2nd Tank Battalion of the Brigade.
Photo Michal Fiszer

Now the BMP-1 AICVs seems to have inadequate armor protection and poor armament in the form of 73 mm grenade launcher and 9M14 Malutka anti-tank missile launcher. The brigade waits for wheeled Patria APCs, which are in license production in Poland under name of “Rosomak”. However 690 ordered vehicles are to be firstly issued to mechanized infantry unit and since some of the ordered vehicles are to be made in specialized version (so the procured number of APCs in basic version will be enough only for infantry brigades), the armored brigades will be left with tracked vehicles (still obsolete BMP-1s).

2S1 Gvozdika howitzer of 1st Armored Brigade.
Photo Michal Fiszer

The artillery battalion still uses the same 12 self-propelled howitzers (2S1 Gvozdika, 122mm caliber) and the brigade also has 6 pieces of 120 mm mortars towed by trucks. The anti-tank battery was removed, typically for organization of armored brigade. The air defense battery lost its Strela-1, which were replaced by six ZUR-23-2. The latter are ZU-23-2 towed guns coupled with two Grom (Igla; SA-18) launchers attached to them. ZUR-23-2 are towed by trucks. The four ZSU-23-4 guns remained without changes. It is striking that the anti-tank and the air defense firepower of the brigade is inadequate. It is the case in most of the Polish land forces units. The brigades which will receive Rosomak APCs, will also receive NTD Spike anti-tank missiles. However the air defense still remains the problem. To add more, the divisional 15th Air Defense Regiment has four batteries of Kub (SA-6) with four launchers and a fire control radar in every battery, so the system is also getting obsolete. Basically the whole ground air defense in Polish Army is getting less and less effective, despite replacing old Strela-2 with Grom (Polish Igla-1 /SA=16/ produced on license, but modernized and similar to Igla system /SA-18/) and slow modernization of Kub systems, the air defense definitely needs some boost.

Above: Strela-1M used by 1st Mechanized Regiment in 1992, along with ZSU-23-4. Now the 1st Armored Brigade uses the same ZSU-23-4 and the ZUR-23-2 (below).
Both photos Michal Fiszer

1st Warsaw Armored Brigade still remains a homeland defense unit but is NATO compatible and can take a part in combat within NATO Combat echelon. It is the only heavy unit between Belarus and Warsaw and along with 3rd Mechanized Brigade would form the main defense of the area to the south-east from Polish capital in the case of armed aggression from the east. In front of it there will be two territorial defense brigades, the 2nd TD Brigade from Minsk Mazowiecki and 14th TD Brigade from Przemysl.
The concept of the homeland defense can be described as “wolves-hedgehogs-wasps” concept. Wolves bites, hedgehogs pricks and the wasps stings. The territorial defense brigades will form defense based on the urban areas (hedgehogs) and in rural areas they will delay the enemy advance by traps, hit and run attacks and other similar actions. The main forces of mechanized and armor units would form maneuver type of defense, massed on the main threat directions (wolves groups). And the special forces along with air force will attack the rear areas of the advancing forces (wasps). All the action is aimed as delay the enemy advance until the NATO reinforcement arrive and to inflict as much loses to the enemy as possible, to discourage the enemy for farther action.
But 1st Armored Brigade also has tasks related to the in-country crisis management, like disaster relief or maintain security in the case of domestic unrest. In the case of terrorist attack, the unit will provide troops for law enforcement and order maintaining tasks. The brigade has now more and more contract soldiers, however almost 900 soldiers out of 1500+ brigade personnel are still conscripts, serving now for only 9 months. Increasing number of contract soldiers (professional privates on 4-years contract) will allow to form all the PT-91 tank crews out of them since conscripts rather damage sophisticated equipment than operate it.

BLG Assault bridge. Three such units are in the brigade.
Photo Michal Fiszer
Generally I think that there is much to do in Polish land forces. The best part are the deployable units, namely 6th Air Assault Brigade and the 25th Air Cavalry Brigade (airmobile, infantry transported by helicopters). They are light units, easy to deploy and prepared for foreign missions. The existing mechanized infantry brigades will all convert to “Rosomak” wheeled APCs and will form “medium” component of Polish land forces (like American Striker Combat Teams). They will be issued with modern equipment, like Spike anti-tank missiles, new command and control systems etc and will be of double destination – home defense and overseas operations. In the latter tasks, the medium brigades will be better prepared for more hostile environment than light infantry units. The armored brigades however will have to serve with only minor equipment modernizations for some years to come. Only the 10th Armored Cavalry Brigade from Swietoszow is equipped with ex-German equipment, including Leopard 2A4 tanks and M113 APCs, and the unit is presently declared to NATO.

TRI engeeniring reconnaissance vehicle based on MTLB APC used by the 1st Armored Brigade.
Photo Michal Fiszer

What is better – missile or guided bomb?

2005-11-23T07:48:00.000-05:00

Russian Guided weapons; far right is KAB-1500KR, second from the right is KAB-500KR.

photo Remko van de Bunt

It was recently unveiled that Russian Air Force tests three types of new guided bombs. There are: UPAB-1500KR, which is a gliding version of KAB-1500KR heavy TV-guided bomb; KAB-500S GPS/Glonass guided bomb similar to American JDAM and KAB-250L, first Russian light laser guided bomb, very similar to American GBU-12. At the same time no new tactical guided missile was recently developed in Russia, only some new versions of existing types. Interestingly, for many years Soviet Union preferred missiles over the guided bombs. The necessity to drop guided bomb from medium or high altitude was deemed as a serious imitation of the guided bomb. It was assessed that a missile launched from a quick jump to 200-300 m, at some distance to the target (typically 5-7 km) would guarantee engagement of a battlefield target before its defense could react. Even when the launching aircraft would enter the range of small caliber AAA guns and MANPADs envelope, it would happen after the missile launch and the target kill probability is still high. Along with the guided missiles, also the other weapon was favorable. It was a retarded bomb, which was used in various size (100, 250 or 500 kg). The OFAB-250ShN or FAB-500Sh bombs, equipped with parachutes, could be dropped from level flight on the altitude of 50 m and usually hit the target with accuracy of 15-20 m, almost comparable with the accuracy of laser guided bomb dropped from high altitude. Even when somebody says that 15 m is not the same as 3 m, but I would like not to be even 200 m from 500 kg bomb explosion, not mentioning 15-20 m. My wing was allowed to drop the 250 or 500 kg retarded bombs against only specific targets at shooting range, because dropping them against a tanks in column (real T-34s withdrawn from service; my favorite target) usually overthrown the poor tanks turret down, and the commandant of the range had to hire a heavy crane to put the wreckage back on place. The both, retarded bombs and guided missiles could be used on relatively low altitudes at high speed and do not expose the aircraft against air defense fire. So according to this notion all the Soviet Su-17 and MiG-27, other Warsaw Pact countries Su-22 and MiG-23BN were armed with missiles. Even the Su-24M attacking in the first wave were to carry missiles, though usually heavier ones

The Future of the US Army's FCS

2005-11-22T23:20:00.000-05:00

I'd like to go back to my post here yesterday about the Pentagon's selected acquisition reports, specifically the 63.3% increase in the cost of the US Army's Future Combat Systems (FCS) program. Following the restructuring of the FCS program last year, it should have been clear that a cost increase was on the horizon. The Army most likely read the tea leaves as well and began its push to present its argument in favor of the FCS program. But is the FCS program in any real danger of serious cuts? Probably not.

First of all, the FCS program recently passed its functional review -- a review of the critical technologies upon which it's based -- with flying colors. But more importantly, the FCS program encompasses far too many different capabilities that the Army needs. Frankly, the Army did the smart thing in bundling its force upgrades into one program. The "18+1+1 platforms," as they are called -- the 18 FCS vehicles, along with the network and the individual soldier -- under the FCS program covers pretty much the Army's entire force.

So where does one begin to cut? One of the 18? Hardly. The Army will argue that it needs new cannons, especially given the cancellation of the Crusader program. Unmanned vehicles? Nah, they've have proven far too useful in recent conflicts, for missions from reconnaissance to the disposal of improvised explosive devices (IEDs)(plus, the loss of an unmanned vehicle doesn't bring any political repercussions). The individual soldier? Yeah, that'll fly in Congress. And the network? Not a chance, given the Pentagon's focus on network-centric warfare.

Sure, there may be slight cutbacks in funding, but not enough to seriously wound the FCS program. What we're more likely to see is more rapid fielding of "spin-outs" from the FCS program, getting individual elements into the hands of warfighters more quickly, rather than waiting for the eventual culmination of the program. The Army's already started down this path and, if the program is in any jeopardy, will certainly "spin out" more to the current force more quickly than previously planned, especially with troops in the field wanting some of these new capabilities (Micro Air Vehicles, for instance).

The FCS program, despite its difficulties, is in no real danger of serious cuts. But more rapid fielding of some of its elements may be in the cards.

Disappointment Over IEDs

2005-11-22T17:07:00.000-05:00

Our new best buds over at Defense Tech (who tripled our traffic with this link today, thanks guys) have an article on the failure of the Pentagon to come up with an effective counter to improvised explosive devices (IEDs), the so-called roadside bombs that have killed the bulk of US troops in Iraq. The article is link-filled and fair. It notes that there had been the promise of a "Manhattan Project" to develop and field IED countermeasures, and this promise has largely come to naught.

Two years ago, I used the thwarted assassination of Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf to express my hopes that the US DoD would engage in a crash program to counter IEDs. Rather than the Manhattan Project, I was thinking of another instance where the US military-industrial complex responded to a new and dangerous threat in record time -- the Wild Weasel program:

A jamming device in the motorcade of President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan apparently saved him from a radio-detonated bomb on December 14 [2003] that suspected Islamic militants had planted to assassinate him. The president’s convoy was at least 30 seconds clear of the bridge where the bomb had been planted before the bomb went off, destroying the bridge but hurting no one. As the AP reported it: "The sophisticated bomb – initially estimated to contain 550 pounds of explosives – was believed to include both a remote control and a timing device to trigger it, two intelligence officials told AP. Jamming equipment in Musharraf’s limousine stopped the timer for about a minute and also jammed the remote control, the officials said."

The technology to jam radio-detonated bombs or set them off too late or prematurely to affect their intended target is not a particularly exotic one. Moreover, the supporting electronic-intelligence (ELINT) technologies to monitor cell phones and walkie-talkies – the guerilla’s battlefield network – are also available to modern armies. I have been told off the record by industry sources that one contingent of Western forces serving in Afghanistan would not deploy until they had been provided with convoy protection against roadside bombs. It’s fairly amazing to think that units patrolling the roads of Afghanistan and Iraq wouldn’t all be equipped with jammers similar to the one that apparently saved President Musharraf’s life. It can’t be because such systems aren’t already available or can’t be developed quickly.

The story of the US Wild Weasels in Vietnam is one that Old Crows delight in recounting. The Soviet-supplied SA-2 Guideline surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) came as a nasty shock to US aircrews operating over North Vietnam in 1965. Planes and lives were being lost. Less than a year later, crash programs of technology development and training in new tactics produced the SAM-killing Wild Weasel teams. The achievement was a result of several factors coming together. First, there was a moment of clarity. The SAM threat was so universally perceived that typically clogged bureaucratic channels opened to allow the solution through. Second, there were great people on hand. People in industry and the services, in uniform and out, were willing to put in the overtime required to get the job done in the fewest number of days possible. Days equaled lives. Finally, there was an aggressiveness of spirit among all involved, from the labs to the cockpits. The enemy has what? We can beat that. We will beat that.

I like to think that the wheels are in motion right now to come up with new ideas, technologies, and training to combat the threat posed by remote-detonated bombs. The need to get countermeasures for land-convoy protection out into the field in Iraq is just as pressing as was the need to counter enemy SAMs in North Vietnam. Of course, it is possible that US and allied forces are already well supplied with such devices. There were reports in the fall that the Pentagon is spending money to this effect. Jammers do not have an effect on attacks by suicide bombers or human-aimed weapons, such as small arms and rocket-propelled grenades, and these have become the preferred weapons used by guerillas in Iraq. Furthermore, US forces have thwarted a number of ambushes, and one can speculate as to what ELINT systems were available to monitor enemy communications.

I am looking forward to finding out about the "Wild Weasel" program to equip US ground forces with jammers in response to the threat posed by remote-detonated bombs. My only question would be: Why weren’t the forces equipped with countermeasures before hand?

There are a lot of reasons why this hasn't happened. For one thing, the SA-2 Guideline was an "regular" weapon that had to be fielded and operated by well-trained crews using fairly rigid tactics. Therefore, a technological-tactical counter to it could be developed and fielded, and the Wild Weasels were the result. An IED is exactly the opposite sort of weapon. There is no single IED template that can be countered. Means of employment and detonation are myriad. There is no "silver bullet" to defeat them.

But this doesn't make the lack of success any less disappointing. And I just hope it wasn't about money.

Ground-Based Midcourse Defense Against ICBMs

2005-11-22T13:40:00.000-05:00

Here is an excerpt of a feature article on the Ground-Based Midcourse Defense (GMD) system from eDefense Online. For a brief description of the GMD, see this earlier post on Situational Awareness.

During the Cold War, the Soviet Union's arsenal of thousands of land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and submarine-launched balistic missiles (SLMBs) – not to mention nuclear weapons deliverable by strategic bombers and shorter-range systems – was countered by the equally impressive collective arsenals of the US, the UK, and France. It is easy to forget – even easier to lampoon – the state of affairs that dominated superpower politics in the last three decades of the 20th century, with its missile gaps, fail-safe points, duck-and-cover drills, and backyard fallout shelters. Yet it is clear today that decision-makers on both sides of the Iron Curtain understood that any general war would quickly go nuclear and, hence, to oblivion. The only question, really, was how to go about it. Do you launch on warning or ride out the attack? Do you employ massive retaliation or flexible response? Those missile-defense systems allowed at the time under the terms of the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty were skeletal at best. Bombs would have bounced the rubble on both sides. This understanding, exemplified in the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), is widely regarded as having kept the peace.

There is a fear today that a rogue state possessing both nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them might be undeterrable. This is an amazing concept, really. Imagine a power so careless of its own survival that it would commit suicide by launching an ICBM at the greatest power on Earth, one that could and quite possibly would destroy the offending regime, if not the nation. Yet preventing an enemy from taking such action against the US at some point in the near future is the key mission of the US Missile Defense Agency (MDA). In fact, the US government considers the threat of North Korea lashing out in its death throes with a nuclear strike to be so real that the "urgent need" for a National Missile Defense (NMD) system required the high-risk, high-cost development tempo of the program.

Since 1985, about $90 billion has been spent on missile defense by the US under various programs, beginning with the Reagan-era Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) through the Clinton administration's Ballistic Missile Defense Organization and into today's Missile Defense Agency. But funding since fiscal year 2001, at $4.8 billion, has been stepped up quite a bit, with $7.8 billion in FY02, $7.4 billion in FY03, $7.7 billion in FY04, and $9 billion in FY05. Missile defense accounts for about 2% of the Defense Department budget, more than any other program. Ground-Based Midcourse Defense (GMD) is only one facet of the expenditure. Other important activities include the Boeing Airborne Laser (ABL), Lockheed Martin Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense, and the Northrop Grumman Kinetic Energy Interceptor (KEI) programs. Each of these programs and attending technologies address different aspects of the ballistic-missile threat. The MDA views the entire package, including GMD, as an integrated, multi-phase effort to develop and deploy a defense network capable of covering the US and allied nations from the full range of ballistic-missile threats.

Urgent Need, High Risk
For all intents and purposes, the GMD system, as it is currently configured, is designed to handle one contingency: an "end-game" launch of an ICBM from North Korea, possibly during the dust-up of a regime collapse. This problem has been weighing on the minds of defense planners for more than a decade, since the latter years of President Kim Il Sung's rule. The instigation of this concern was an assessment that North Korea was determined to develop and deploy nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles to deliver them, apparently confirmed when North Korea declared its intent to withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1993. Extended brinksmanship ensued. During this time, North Korean bellicosity was generally viewed as coercive in nature, that playing the "nuclear card" would enable the regime to achieve leverage in its dealings with the US and its allies, especially South Korea and Japan.

The resurgence of National Missile Defense as we know it took shape after the US Department of Defense (DoD) announced the so-called "three-plus-three" plan in 1997, under which a decision would be made in 2000 about whether the threat warranted a fast-track deployment of a GMD system in 2003 or if deployment could be deferred. Extended domestic politics ensued. Ultimately, the DoD decided that the threat posed by North Korea did indeed justify a rushed deployment of a rudimentary NMD capability. This decision did not come without attending costs and risks. In fact, a NMD review committee chaired by General Larry Welch, USAF (ret.), a former Air Force chief of staff, concluded that the risks were such that an initial operational capability (IOC) in 2003 was unattainable. Scheduled IOC was put off until 2005.

The phased deployment of the GMD segment of the NMD system envisioned a series of threat levels that could be matched over time with ever-increasing capability. The so-called C1 threat level of a strike from North Korea using up to five single-warhead ICBMs that dispense few if any countermeasures would be countered by a system very much like the one now in place. The C2 threat level projected a reasonably orchestrated strike from East Asia or the Middle East involving a dozen or more sophisticated ICBMs equipped with countermeasures. This threat would require 100 or so Ground-Based Interceptor missiles, an expanded early-warning radar network, and a new-generation satellite-based Space Tracking and Surveillance System (STSS). Original estimates for this capability achieving operational status were 2010, but this has been pushed back to 2012 at the earliest. Projections of more advanced threat levels exist, but since these involve ICBM strike capabilities possessed by Russia and those under development by China, there is not much detail available on what the NMD architecture to counter them would look like or when it might be deployed.

In fact, one of the challenges to NMD had been the diplomatic one. First of all, there was the ABM Treaty to be withdrawn from, since many of the technologies required for strategic ballistic-missile defense were banned under it. But this was accomplished with surprisingly little shoe-banging from Russia in 2002, despite apocalyptic predictions from critics. Subsequently, the US has taken pains to assure Russia and even China – which was not a party to the ABM Treaty – that NMD is not intended to counter their strike capabilities. The assumption, strategically, is that the time-proven concept of deterrence will continue to keep the peace with both nations, at least with regard to nuclear war. From a practical standpoint, Russia appears confident that it will remain able to overwhelm or evade any NMD system the US deploys, and the latest generation of Russian ICBMs, the Topol-M, bears this out. China, which is understood to have only a limited number of true ICBMs capable of striking the continental US, has reasons to be more suspicious of US intentions with regard to NMD. Certainly, a bubbling disagreement over the status of Taiwan (see "Flashpoint Taiwan Straits") runs the risk of open conflict between the US and China. A 1999 Rand report entitled "Planning a Ballistic Missile Defense System of Systems: An Adaptive Strategy" pointed out that managing the objections of China would be an important component to deploying NMD.

Leaving aside diplomatic issues, there are real technical challenges to deploying a robust NMD capability. The Rand report put it this way:

"Even under ideal circumstances and with the latest technologies, ballistic-missile defense is exceedingly difficult. Destroying an RV [reentry vehicle] in flight requires an end-to-end sequence of successful tasks: detecting and classifying the threat missile, predicting the threat trajectory, cueing sensors down the line, tracking the target, discriminating the target from clutter and countermeasures, acquiring the target for intercept, intercept, kill assessment, and repeating the sequence as required. A failure anywhere in this chain precludes successful intercept."

Physics, Not Political Science
ICBMs go through a number of phases from launch to when payload warheads detonate over the target. The launch proceeds from the boost phase of approximately 90 to 300 seconds, during which the missile's series of booster stages ignite, burn, and fall away. All the while, the missile accelerates into the midcourse phase, lasting up to 20 minutes, in which the payload complex arcs out of the atmosphere on a suborbital trajectory. During the midcourse portion of the flight, the payload complex may release decoys and could possibly maneuver using attitude-control thrusters. The warhead or warheads are released during this phase. In the terminal phase, lasting perhaps 30 seconds, the warheads reenter the atmosphere and fall toward their targets. Shorter-range ballistic missiles go through the same stages, but of shorter duration.

Each phase has its own program to develop "interceptors" that would intercept and eliminate the enemy missile. Addressing the boost phase, the Airborne Laser system would consist of aircraft that fly about in shifts, all day and every day, ready to shoot down ballistic missiles using a chemical-oxygen-iodine laser, the heat of which would cause the ballistic missile to explode or at least leak so that resultant change in pressure causes the missile to go off course. There is also the Kinetic Energy Interceptor (KEI) under development that would be able to engage ballistic missiles in their boost phase with very fast interceptor missiles from either land- or ship-based launchers deployed in theater. For the mid-course phase, the GMD system, as outlined above, would swing into action.

In addition, apart from the threat of intercontinental ballistic missiles, still other programs are being developed to intercept short- or medium-range ballistic missiles, including Scud missiles, which Iraq was known to lob on Israel and US forces during Operation Desert Storm. These interception systems include the Patriot Advanced Capability-3/Medium Extended Air Defense System (PAC-3/MEADS), the Arrow 2 missile-defense system deployed by Israel, and the ship-based Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense system using the SM-3 missile. All of these missile-based interceptor technologies employ "hit-to-kill" kinetic warheads.

These various forms of interception will need a lot of help to hit their targets, particularly the long-range ballistic missiles. A number of supporting systems are in development to sense these incoming missiles and guide the interceptors to them. The Forward-Based X-band Radar Transportable program, for instance, would use solid-state, phased-array antennas to watch out for and track intercontinental ballistic missiles and medium-range threats. The Space Surveillance and Tracking System, along with the Space-Based Infrared System-High (SBIRS-H) program, would also be able to detect and track missiles from their launch to midcourse flight but, instead of using X-band radar, would use visible and infrared sensors. The Aegis system, in addition to having its own SM-3 interceptors, would also provide long-range surveillance and tracking of threats. These various means of tracking threats would be overseen and controlled by the Command and Control, Battle Management, and Communications element of the program. Information from the various surveillance systems could be correlated and passed along to the different types of interceptors, with the battle-management system used to make decisions about how to respond to threats.

Proponents of GMD technology, and particularly the contractors, focus on the capability and reliability of the key technologies. The sensor systems on the DSP satellites have a long track record of reliability. Similarly, the Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense system has successfully detected, tracked, and engaged missile targets in numerous tests. Likewise, the various phased-array radar systems that will be used for early warning and tracking of ballistic missiles have been shown to be effective and reliable. Perhaps most importantly, though, the hit-to-kill concept employed by the various kinetic kill vehicles under development for the NMD program has been demonstrated in suborbital- and terminal-engagement live-fire tests. Moreover, target-discrimination technology that fuses data from radar and EO sensors has been shown to be successful in picking warheads out from attending decoys and debris. It is their ability to demonstrate these key capabilities that is the source of much of the confidence expressed in the NMD system by officials at the MDA and its top contractors.

In all of these tests, the testers knew ahead of time where the target missiles were coming from and when they would be launched. Knowing ahead of time where and when a target is going to be makes tracking that target much easier than having no advanced notice, as might expected to be the case in an actual missile attack. Apart from criticizing the nature of the testing so far – at least to the extent that the unrealistic conditions surrounding the tests mean that statements about the system's effectiveness at this point can only be conjecture – critics also point to the use of certain types of countermeasures by enemy missile designers that could stymie the missile-defense system. These include the use of radar-absorbent materials (RAM) on the surfaces of the enemy missiles that would make them hard to detect by the interceptor sensors, as well as the use of advanced decoys to throw the interceptor off its scent.

Frankly, defeating advanced decoys and countermeasures is not in the cards for the C1 implementation of GMD. The North Koreans do not yet have a demonstrated ICBM capability, let alone the expertise to incorporate advanced countermeasures technologies into their systems. Many of the criticisms leveled at NMD – and the GMD segment in particular – about its inability to handle multiple decoys and advanced countermeasures or launches from unexpected quarters of the globe are unfair, in that such threats are not expected as imminent. The C1 implementation of GMD is a point defense against a very specific potential enemy at a particular moment in time. Everything points at North Korea. As the threat evolves, NMD will be upgraded accordingly. Charles LaDue, director of advanced missile-defense directed-energy weapons at Raytheon Missile Systems (Tucson, AZ), called this a capabilities-based approach. "The goal is to build up capabilities and deploy them to stay ahead of what the enemy can do," he said.

However, mundane problems can sometimes overshadow the greatest technological achievements. Even though the tests done to date have been quite controlled, based on advanced knowledge of the locations of objects to be tracked and targeted, not all of the tests done so far have been successful. Of the 10 times the GMD has been tested, for instance, it has successfully intercepted an incoming missile five times, with the most recent successful test in 2002, noted Victoria Samson, a research analyst with the Washington, DC-based Center for Defense Information (CDI) research group. It is important to note that all of these interception tests were done with kinetic-kill vehicles launched from modified Minuteman missiles as opposed to the GMI rocket, which is undergoing a separate test series.

Cooling problems in the EKV's EO sensor, faulty signals between the booster rocket and the payload, and faulty components in the EKV's separation mechanism have all caused test failures. The possibility of such low-tech failures compromising a missile-defense test, let alone a live interception under wartime pressures, is a real worry. The highly complex GMD system, which requires an extended chain of events to occur flawlessly in order to achieve an intercept, has had a comparatively spare testing regimen. One potentially encouraging aspect of the testing program has been periodic failures in getting decoys to inflate. Perhaps the North Koreans will have this problem, too.

A 1998 Welch Panel report pointed out that one of the vulnerabilities in the high-risk development track of the GMD program was that it would be "hardware poor," meaning that there would be little, if any, prototyping and that articles would fly as built. The report concluded: "Due to the inability to perform end-to-end tests in a realistic environment, simulation and analyses will provide much of the necessary design and decision information."

Despite not having completed testing of the various components, the MDA in 2004 began deploying ground-based missile interceptors in Alaska, at the behest of the Bush administration, which wanted to achieve its promised goal of having some type of missile-defense capability ready by the end of 2004, even if limited (see "Early Deployment of Missile Defense"). Thus, the first ground-based missile interceptor was planted at Ft. Greely, AK, on July 22, 2004. The SBX was originally scheduled to be in place by October 2005. It did perform a 58-day shakedown cruise in the Gulf of Mexico that ended that month (the 282-foot-high, 50,000-tons ocean-going structure was obliged to dodge Hurricanes Katrina and Rita), but it will be several more months until the SBX reaches its homeport of Adak Island, AK.

Tests of other NMD elements are proceeding apace. The Forward-Based Transportable X-Band Radar and an Aegis ship were tested in September to track a US Air Force missile originating from Vandenberg AFB, with their tracking information passed along to the command-and-control system. The Sea-Based X-Band radar transmitted a radar beam for the first time last Sept. 11. Also, a series of tests of the Airborne Laser's battle-management system and fire-control radar were completed this summer (see "Testing Continues on USAF Airborne Laser").

Complaining about critics who characterize the system as untested or unproven, and expressing the wish that "more people would give us the benefit of the doubt," MDA Director Lt. Gen. Henry Obering in an interview in the November issue of Arms Control Today declined to discuss in detail the likely current effectiveness of the system, saying that information is classified but calling it "much better than zero." The system cannot handle a "complex threat suite," he said, but it can handle what the MDA believes is the likely existing threat, adding that the recent unsuccessful tests of the GBI do not indicate the system's lack of functionality but were simply "technical glitches."

The Bush administration and the MDA, while noting that the missile-defense system is a work in progress, say that an initial capability for the system already exists. But at the same time, it has not been declared operational by the US military. This points to what some observers see as essentially inaccurate statements about the system's current capability. Though not tested as a system under realistic conditions – that is, without the system having any prior knowledge of the time of the enemy missile's launch, its location, or its trajectory – the MDA and members of the Bush administration nevertheless say the program provides a "limited capability." It would not be able to stop barrage of missiles that a country like China or Russia would be able to launch, but then again, it's not intended to. This harkens back to the "high confidence" expressed that the system could, right now, defeat a one-off, two-off attack from North Korea. This was the urgent need, and this is the capability as advertised.

The unofficial motto of the NMD program is "Engage early, engage often." Building on the initial GMD capability, the US plans to deploy a series of systems that will enable this motto to be put into practice. Ultimately, the purpose of NMD is to loosen constraints on US national-security policy by reducing or even eliminating the capacity of certain nations to threaten a nuclear attack. But in order to for NMD to achieve this, it will have to be widely perceived as effective. The US is only at the initial stage of demonstrating the effectiveness of such a system. But the security-policy implications of it are already being calculated around the world.

Didn't Need a Crystal Ball for This...

2005-11-21T23:21:00.000-05:00

Defensetech.org recently noted that the US Army's Future Combat Systems (FCS) program was among those mentioned in the Pentagon's Selected Acquisition Reports this year. Of course, Defensetech saw this coming a mile away, as one can see by following the links to view the history of that site's extensive coverage of the FCS program.

Anyone who's been reading eDefense could also have told you the FCS program was in trouble, what with last year's restructuring of the program and all. Restructuring a program is a recipe for cost increases. Hardly ever is a program "restructured" without an attendant boost in the program's price tag.

For that matter, though, a number of the programs that ended up in the Selected Acquisition Reports should've come as no surprise really. To stick with the Army, earlier this year, it was noted that the Army's Aerial Common Sensor (ACS) program had serious issues with the weight of the payload on the selected aircraft. Eventually, the Army decided to stop work on the ACS program until these issue could be resolved. And, not surprisingly, the ACS program was one of those listed in the SARs.

Other programs included in the SARs that should've come as no shock, again sticking with Army, were the Advanced Threat Infrared Countermeasures/Common Missile Warning System (ATIRCM/CMWS), considering that the Army has an urgent need for IR countermeasures for its helicopters but the ATIRCM system is lagging behind its CMWS counterpart.

But the Army's not alone. Other services have troublesome programs. Like the Army's FCS program, the Navy's DD(X) destroyer program recently changed course, leading to a schedule slip. And the US Air Force's Space-Baced Infrared System-High (SBIRS-High)? Well, even the commander of the US Air Force Space Command has referred to the after-effects of SBIRS-High program as a hangover.

The signs were all there. How anyone can be surprised is beyond me.

Topol-M: Missile Defense Penetrator

2005-11-21T14:11:00.000-05:00

Bill Gertz of the Washington Times is reporting today on the new Russian Topol-M ICBM system with a maneuvering reentry vehicle. The missile booster flies a faster, flatter trajectory and has more opportunities to change course in flight because it spends more transit time in the atmosphere and less in suborbital space than typical reentry vehicles. The development of this capability is actually well known to observers. The technique is also employed on shorter range missile systems, such as the Tochka.

Here's a description of the Topol-M from my colleague, Michal Fiszer, from a feature article on US National Missile Defense (NMD) soon to be published on eDefense Online:

The most promising missile in the Russian inventory is the RT-2PM2 (also called RT-2PMU; 15Zh62 according to the GRAU designation system) Topol-M, known in the NATO as SS-27. Topol-M has the weight of 47.1 tons, the length of 22.7 m and the diameter of 1.86 m. The system also has very high accuracy: 180 m side error and 230 m error in distance. In 2006 there are to be 50 such missiles in service and it was also recently announced that first regiment (10 missiles) will be issued the mobile version of the missile. It is planned that 220 Topol-M missiles will be deployed through 2012, while older types (SS-18 and SS-19) will be withdrawn.

The missile's development started in 1991 at the Moscow Institute of Thermal Technology and confirmed by a decree from President Boris Yeltsin in February 1993. The design team was headed by Boris Lagutin and Yuri Solomonov. The first launch test took place on December 20, 1994. The first test of the mobile launcher (and 15th overall test) took place on April 20, 2004. Production at GPO "Votkinsky Zavod" in Votkinsk started in 1998. The first missile was declared ready on December 27, 1998. The system was officially accepted to service on April 28, 2000.

The Topol-M has three stages, with the first stage having three rocket motors developed by Federal Center for Dual-Use Technologies "Soyuz" in Moscow. This gives the missile a much higher acceleration than other ICBM types. It enables the missile to accelerate to a speed of 7,320 m/s and to travel through more flat trajectory to a distance of up to 10,000 km. The missile carry a single warhead but has a high throw weight: about 1,200 kg. This enables three warheads to be fitted, when necessary. Presently the capability is used to carry realistic decoys that have the same weight and radar cross section as the actual warhead. These decoys reenter atmosphere at the same speed and with a similar thermal signature as the actual warhead. Unlike "balloon" and "relector" decoys, the mock reentry vehicles are not stripped away by the atmosphere and remain effective through the terminal phase. Also, the decoys are probably able to maneuver, as the actual warhead can. The warhead and decoys are all covered with radar-absorbing materials (RAM) to make their signatures very low.

Reportedly, the warhead and decoys are also equipped with active-deception jamming systems, activated as soon as the thermal cover is dropped after decelerating in the atmosphere. The missile was developed to overcome eventual defense system under development by the US, but not all of the details were unveiled. Nevertheless, if the Topol-M works as described it will be able to overcome many of the discriminator and hit-to-kill technologies being developed for the US NMD. According to a statement by Sergei Ivanov, the Russian minister of defense, each Topol-M will have an 87% change of penetrating the GMD [Ground-Based Midcourse Defense --Ed.] system.

UPDATE: Thanks to Noah Shachtman of Defense Tech for the link to this post. Read more about the Topol-M there.

Also, the eDefense Online article on US National Missile Defense is up. I'll post an excerpt on Situational Awareness as a separate entry.

How do you land a Seafire on a carrier?

2005-11-18T15:28:00.000-05:00

Normally I wouldn't pass along junk mail, but this is pretty cool:

Historical and Rare Pilot Manuals Now Available Online

ROCKVILLE, Maryland - Historical aviation researchers and aviation enthusiasts now have access to a large and growing collection of rare and historical pilot manuals, pilot operating handbooks, flight manuals and aircraft manuals, online.

PilotManuals.com, a division of Rare Aviation, has just released a collection of over 11,000 printed and downloadable manuals that are available through their website.

"As a pilot and historian myself I found it frustrating to try to search for and research lost and rare manuals and information on historic aircraft so I created this resource for everyone to be able to use," Said Steve Rhode, chief pilot and archivist for PilotManuals.com. "Since many manuals are downloadable, researchers from around the world can instantly access long lost information on aircraft from World War I on. The site is also loaded with many warbird manuals and historical aviation documents."

The downloadable pilot manuals are in the universally accepted Adobe Acrobat format so they are of high quality and resolution. All manuals may be printed once downloaded.

"On the site as well, visitors will find a number of historical aviation movies we have restored. These films include a growing number of restored gun camera film collections from World War II. Films from both United States aircraft and German Luftwaffe gun cameras are available."

The manuals would be interesting not just for historians and collectors, but for writers, novelists, and movie producers as well, it seems. At least those who are interested in realism. Oh, and the site has some sample gun camera and bombing footage from WWII and Vietnam, which is always amusing.

What kind of airbase defense?

2005-11-18T05:59:00.000-05:00

There is now discussion in Poland, what kind of air defense system is to be deployed to protect major airbases, declared to NATO: Minsk Mazowiecki, Lask, Powidz and Poznan-Krzesiny. One of the ideas is to move the S-125SC Neva (modernized version of Soviet SA-3 Goa) to those bases, ot provide some level of defense against aircraft and UAVs. Such a move do not fix the problem of defending the airbases against TBMs. Actually Poland do not operate any system with anti-TBM capabilities and the Polish territory is fully exposed on such attack. However the possibility of TBM attack against the mentioned airbases is also limited. Even when Belarus would place her Tochka-M launcher at the bridge to the north of Brest (normally used by alcohol and cigarette smugglers), the closest point to Minsk, the missile would not reach it, thought by slight margin. However Russia could theoretically use her Iskander system to attack Minsk, Lask or Powidz from Kaliningrad pocket, but the system is not yet deployed in significant number and will not be deployed in Kaliningrad area for rather long time, if ever.
So the main concern is to engage aircraft, cruise missiles (including air launched stand off missiles) and UAVs. When new systems are considered, the biggest chance have SL-AMRAAM (surfaced launched AMRAAM), recently offered by USA and Norway, in the form of surplus Norway NASAMS systems for reasonable price (recently modernized; with container launched AMRAAMs, Raytheon AN/TPQ-36A radars and Fire Distribution Centers). No details can be discussed since no decision was yet taken and even the tender not yet launched. Eventual procurement of NASAMS would be the other example of gradual replacing of ex-Soviet air defense systems by western technology in the new NATO member states.

Fighting Friendly Fire

2005-11-17T22:20:00.000-05:00

It's a staggering statistic: In the 1991 Gulf War, 35 of the 148 US combat deaths came from allied fire. In other words, fratricide was to blame for just under one in four US combat deaths.

Despite technological superiority over its adversaries, the US still lost a shameful number of its own men to friendly fire. Compare the results of various studies that estimate the some 12-15% of casualties in combat during the 20th century overall were the result of friendly fire, and the 23.6% lost to fratricide during the 1991 Gulf War can only be considered a disgrace.

However, it must be noted, as my colleague Ted McKenna did in an article on the subject of fratricide last year, that Gulf War marked a new era in warfare, with the introduction of a precision-guided weapons and the melding of different services and different countries’ forces on the same battlefield, which may explain the rise in fratricide. Certainly, because of the speed and precision of weapons today, friendly-fire incidents, when they occur, are more likely to be deadly. Add to this the split-second pace required for decision-making today, and you've got a recipe for trouble.

That said, it's good to see that the US military is taking steps to avoid fratricide: from joint exercise with French and British troops conducted last year to the new combat-ID devices being developed for the US army's Future Combat Systems (FCS). Hopefully, efforts such as these will lead to fewer cases of brother killing brother.

Soldier Pilots in Iraq

2005-11-17T17:27:00.000-05:00

A lot has been written about unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in combat, but what is it like to actually employ them, and what use are they to the average soldier? Dodge Billingsley of Combat Films & Research recently spent some time with UAV operators of the 3rd Brigade of the 101st Air Assault Division back from Iraq, where they have been operating the US Army's Shadow Tactical UAV (TUAV) and Raven (UAV). He wrote an article for eDefense Online entitled "Soldier Pilots." Here is an excerpt:

The Shadow platoon falls under the recently renamed Special Troops Battalion (STB), part of the newly transformed modular brigade. The STB was created last year and includes, among other units, military police (MPs), intel assets, and a UAV platoon. Each UAV platoon is supposed to have 22 soldiers when fully operational – a warrant officer, platoon leader, platoon sergeant, 13 qualified air-vehicle operators (AVOs) or pilots, mission-payload operators (MPOs), and maintenance personnel – although CPT Gourley, the 3rd brigade's UAV platoon leader, admits he will deploy to Iraq two pilots short of a full platoon.

Members of the Shadow platoon come from various Military Occupation Specialists (MOSs) -- field artillery, communications, and infantry. SGT Brenner used to be a 31-Charlie, or radio operator, "about as basic como as you can get, and I wasn't satisfied with that job, so when it came time for reenlistment, I reclassed and came in as a 96-Uniform [Tactical Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Operator] to Fort Huachuca."

SFC Baker is a former infantryman who was looking at an early discharge because of a medical condition, went before a medical board, reclassed to a different MOS, and found his way into the Shadow platoon. He now considers himself fortunate to be in the UAV platoon and is looking forward to his specific mission in Iraq. None of the pilots/operators expected to fly or work with UAVs, since the position didn't exist when they entered the Army.

SGTs Brenner and Baker received their Advanced Individual Training (AIT) for 26 weeks at Black Tower, the location of the UAV schoolhouse at Ft. Huachuca, AZ, where training with the Shadow and Hunter UAV takes place. They also received two months of additional training at the Redstone Arsenal facility near Huntsville, AL, with other platoon members.

SGT Brenner is the standards pilot for the platoon. "The standardization pilot is pretty much in charge of all training areas that our platoon is involved in, making sure that all of our pilots are current and they're up to all the different 1000-, 2000-, 3000-level tasks designated by the commander," he explained.

It is his job to evaluate all the pilots in the platoon. The Army requires that he and the other pilots operate the Shadow at least once every 90 days or they fall "out of currency" and have to re-qualify. Regulations and procedures allow each pilot to make one flight simulation count as a flight, but they must fly the actual Shadow within the second 90-day period. "If a pilot is outside of 90 days flying a Shadow, he's considered non-current and goes down to what is called RL-3, which is the readiness level of 3. That means you have to take evaluative flights, and you have three months in order to achieve RL-2, at which point you have another three months to achieve RL-1. An RL-1 is a pilot who is ready to fly with no one else in the back seat evaluating them," said SGT Brenner.

CPT Gourley and his pilots expect some growing pains operating a new system in a hostile environment. The platoon has had limited ability to integrate the Shadow system into their brigade training operations. The UAVs were sent directly from Redstone Arsenal to the brigade's staging area in Kuwait, instead of returning to Ft. Campbell, KY, with the Shadow platoon, so they did not train a single day with the brigade prior to deployment.

The primary means of communication with the Shadow is line-of-sight (LOS) communications. Being able to operate at a higher altitude means the Shadow will not fall victim to the obstruction of signal from which lower-flying UAVs might suffer in an urban environment of tall buildings and telecommunications towers, but potential loss of LOS will be a factor.

The sound of the Shadow's Motto Guzzi engine is another concern. According to the Army, more than 20 UAVs were shot down in Kosovo in 1999 and more, including Shadows, have been downed in Iraq and Afghanistan by alert enemy ground forces (see "US Army UAV Programs in Flux"). Despite these considerations, CPT Gourley is not overly concerned: "In open terrain, in the countryside, people below would hear it, but in the cities, the urban landscape, with lots of city traffic, it is unlikely that people would notice it overhead." In any case, labels posting a reward for the return of the UAVs to coalition forces are plastered on the sides of the Shadow and the Raven in an effort to minimize aircraft loss in the event one does go down due to hostile fire or mechanical issues.

However, some units within the brigade are benefiting from the noise factor. According to Shadow platoon members, psychological-operations (PSYOPS) units have recorded the sound of the Shadow and broadcast it in an effort to make the enemy think one is overhead, in an effort to deter insurgent strikes.

Flying in a crowded skies environment is perhaps the greatest challenge to the Shadow. Without any form of aircraft-avoidance system, word among the platoon is that there has been at least one case where a UAV struck the tail of a Blackhawk helicopter in Iraq, nearly causing the helo to crash. Standard operating procedure for the Shadow is to schedule a flight 72 hours in advance, reserve a slot, and then push out. Traditionally, an operations officer at the brigade level will work out the air-tasking order.

According to SGT Brenner, they are treated "just like a manned aviation plane. We have to coordinate airspace through air-traffic control, and we have officers that pretty much do that for us. But when we're flying, we're still in constant contact with air-traffic control."

Because of the need to reserve the airspace, the Shadow is not a quick-reaction-force (QRF) asset. Conceding that the Predator and other UAV assets will be tasked for theater-wide targets at a higher echelon of command, the real benefit, according the Shadow platoon, is the ability the UAV gives the brigade commander to get his own "eyes on target" without having to fight for airtime on other platforms like the Predator. (For more on UAV usage, see "US Plans Expanded Role for UAVs.")

The inability to quickly adjust the flight path in a fluid battlefield environment is compounded by the fact that UAVs are still under Air Force flight-plan constraints and requirements. Coordination with the Air Force is a time-consuming process, thus negating the potential benefit of having a tactical UAV at the brigade level. To overcome this obstacle, CPT Gourley hopes – in a best-case scenario, at least – "to have the Shadow more or less tasked to be in the air as much as possible in support of ongoing operations. The Shadow can then be re-tasked in the air to cover any contingency that might be necessary." He envisions at least one mission to "track vehicles to do area searches and road searches looking for IEDs [improvised explosive devices] and things of that sort. We're really good at route recons and smaller-level things like that." (For more on countering IEDs in Iraq, see "No Silver Bullets for IEDs.")

Shoot at the cables…

2005-11-17T09:18:00.000-05:00

Recently Romania took delivery of ex-Dutch Improved Hawk air defense system, shipped in late October from Netherlands to Romania on board of merchant ship. The eight batteries of Hawk with total 48 launchers and 16 High Power Illuminator fire control radars, previously belonged to No 801, 802, 803 and 804 Squadrons of Royal Netherlands Air Force in the de Pel airbase, where they formed so-called “triad units” with two Improved Hawk and a single Patriot battery in every squadron. Romania will field the system probably for airbases and other vital objects defense, thought the details of the organization of the future Romanian Hawk units are still unknown.

This remind me a story from Poland, from 1986. I was a pilot at 8th Fighter-Bomber Wing in Miroslawiec, which used badly obsolete Lim-6M aircraft – a Polish attack version of Soviet MiG-17. The aircraft was based on ex-radar equipped Lim-5P (MiG-17PF) and had bulbous nose, housing some ballast in place of removed radar. It was armed with three NR-23 guns of 23 mm caliber and two rocket pods for 16 S-5 rockets of 57 mm caliber. Theoretically it could also carry two 250 kg bombs in place of drop tanks, but could not fly anywhere with such load so we normally carried the tanks on every mission. The aircraft did not have any EW suite except for simple RWR protecting only rear hemisphere against attacking fighters. But we were also tasked to attack air defense means positioned not farther than 150 km from the front line of own forces, since the aircraft could not fly any farther on low altitude. The biggest challenge was the Improved Hawk system, since Patriot just started to enter service two years earlier and was not widely deployed, and we did not know yet much about Patriot. Nike Hercules we did not care, since we used to make jokes that fully loaded Lim-6M cannot reach the altitude of 1500 m, which is the lowest altitude on which Nike Hercules can engage an air target. But Improved Hawk was a challenge.

Somebody organized us (pilots from Miroslawiec) a common exercise with Kub air defense regiment (SA-6), somewhat similar to Improved Hawk, at least it was the semi-active short to medium range air defense system. And we looked for an advise from air defense guys, how to evade such an air defense system. The GBAD [ground-based air defense --ED] guys were not much cooperative and stated proudly that they sweep away from the sky any aircraft, if its pilot would be stupid enough to get close to their missile engagement zone. “Any aircraft” was to include wide range of supersonic and subsonic fighters, transport or helicopters, and even such a piece of scrap like Lim-6M, thought they would worry of expending their beautiful missile for it. Finally we had a common party so some initial ice was broken, but they still told us that there is no chance to evade modern air defense system without adequate EW system and anti-radar missiles, which would make the thing slightly better.

We had with us a young second-lieutenant, a political officer, inexperienced and stupid more than average among the political officers. And he started to explore the matter of countering Improved Hawk system, starting from the point that Kub is highly effective since it was developed in Soviet Union, but the Improved Hawk developed by those bloodsucking capitalists MUST have certain shortcomings. So the GBAD guys told him to buy a drink to every of them, and then they would tell him the proper way of Hawk suppressing, in a secret. His wallet became sleeker, the air defense men got drunk, but the officer was happy to learn the secret. Pilots were curious what was that. And he repeated what the GBAD guys told him: “all the elements of the Improved Hawk are separated by 50-150 m, but they are all connected by cables. Those cables are highly vulnerable. Shot at them and you get it…”

Some years later, when we got Su-22M4 and SPS-141 system along with Kh-25MP anti-radar missiles (which was actually never fired in Poland), we showed the Kub guys how the thing can be done. Then they were asking us, how to deal with all of this stuff. And our answer was equally smart. We told them: “our aircraft are extremely vulnerable for ingesting any foreign objects to the air intake. Release a lots of meteo [weather --ED] balloons, when we fly across your battery…”.

The Battle for India

2005-11-16T23:03:00.000-05:00

It was reported today by eDefense's New Delhi correspondent Pulkit Singh that the Indian Air Force is planning to upgrade a large number of it combat aircraft due to concerns that the service may be facing serious obsolescence issues until at least 2012. Given the aircraft involved -- primarily MiGs, Jaguars, and Mirages -- much of this upgrade work will likely go to European (including Russian) and possibly some Israeli contractors. A conservative estimate puts the total value of the work at some $3.5 billion, but that pales in comparison to the real prize up for grabs in India: the country's $7-billion program to acquire 126 new multirole, medium-range combat aircraft.

India's selection of an aircraft under this program will have a profound effect in one of the world's most rapidly growing military markets. The British and Swedes have thrown their collaborative hat in the ring with the JAS-39 Gripen, the Russians with the MiG-29, the French with the Mirage-2005V, and the US with the F-16 and possibly the F/A-18E/F. Given that the Indian Air Force operates primarily Russian-made fighters, the service could, of course, opt for the safe route and go with the known quantity. The same is true of the Mirage, earlier versions of which are already in service with the Indian Air Force. India could also stick with Europe and choose the Gripen -- probably not a bad choice, considering the relatively low price. The Gripen, though, as eDefense European Editor Michal Fiszer has pointed out, is perhaps better suited for small- and medium-size countries, like Hungary and the Czech Republic, that have air defense as a priority. India, in its quest for a "multirole" fighter more than likely wants an aircraft that can conduct strike, as well as air-defense, missions.

Should India decide to change course, though, the US is poised to provide F-16s (and maybe F/A-18E/Fs. But wait...the US has already sold F-16s to India's regional rival, Pakistan, and intends to sell even more, although the deal has been delayed to to the recent earthquake that rocked Pakistan. That said, however, expect the US to pull a hard-sell for its aircraft. There are a number of reasons why the US would sorely want to sell its fighters to India, but perhaps most important are the ties to the US created by a sale of advanced military hardware like F-16s. With F-16s in the inventory of a country's air force, that country is dependent upon the US for spare parts, training, and certain upgrades, thus forging links between its air force and the US Air Force, as well as between the defense industries of the two nations. In addition, and maybe even more importantly, a sale by the US of advanced fighter aircraft to another country confers a significant diplomatic status upon the buyer -- that of US ally. So selling F-16s to both India and Pakistan would effectively make both countries US allies, and allies of the US simply do not go to war against each other.

With both India and Pakistan being nuclear powers now, avoiding a war between the two is in everyone's interest.

White Phosphorus in Combat

2005-11-16T16:12:00.000-05:00

Here at Situational Awareness, our intention is to provide news and commentary on advances in military technology in an apolitical manner. Of course, it is not always possible to separate politics from the art of what has been called "politics by other means." There is a controversy raging over the use of white phosphorus by US forces in the Falluja campaign in November 2004. This is being celebrated in some circles as something of a "gotcha" moment, with commentators seizing on the Pentagon "admitting" to using the incendiary in combat. This is something like the Pentagon "admitting" to using bullets and high explosives against the enemy.

White phosphorus has been used extensively in combat for over half a century. In particular, it is worth noting the employment of white phosphorus rounds against the giant ants that infested areas of New Mexico and California in 1954. In one memorable engagement, US Army soldiers fired white phosphorus bazooka rounds at the opening of a desert nest in order to drive the Volkswagen-sized ants deeper into their tunnel complex, away from the surface. This facilitated the introduction of poison gas into the lair. Special combat engineering teams then rapelled down to mop up with flamethrowers. Textbook.

In Falluja, white phosphorus was apparently used to achieve the opposite effect. Enemy combatants were flushed from their hideouts by the heat and choking smoke so they could be killed in the open with bullets and high explosives. The dense smoke produced by white phosphorus rounds also was used to provide tactical cover for advancing US troops. Textbook.

White phosphorus: It's good enough for Them.

USB For Strike Weapons

2005-11-16T12:29:00.000-05:00

I like programs that make existing systems more effective. Sometimes relatively small improvements can have a significant impact on how armed forces get the job done. The Universal Armaments Interface (UAI) program, run by the Aging Aircraft Systems Squadron at Wright Patterson AFB, Ohio, has the goal of developing common software that will allow the Air Force to incorporate new precision-guided munitions onto its aircraft without requiring major changes to each aircraft's operational-flight-program (OFP) software. This capability is expected to enable the integration of weapons independent of the block-upgrade process, cutting as much as five years from a given integration effort.

"The Air Force recognized that most aircraft have an OFP cycle that runs three to five years, and you start the second cycle midway through the first one," said Jerry Duke, deputy director of Aging Aircraft Systems Squadron and manager of the UAI program. "If your weapon comes onboard in the middle of one of those cycles, you have to wait until the beginning of the next cycle before you even start integrating the weapon onto that platform."

Saving time is cited as the major justification for the UAI program. With a standardized interface between the platform and the store, any new weapon that supports this interface could be integrated onto that platform without having to make changes to its OFP. "The dollar savings will be there in the long run," Duke said. "In the short run, it might cost you a little extra to put UAI in. But then the next time you crack that OFP, you won't have to do any weapons integration."

In early December 2004, and the Aging Aircraft System Squadron contracted Raytheon, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman to develop the UAI. Each OEM has its own individual contract to create the platform stores initial capabilities document (ICD), the mission planning ICD, and perform validation activities. The UAI is an extension of Mil Std 1760, which specifies the number and type of connections between aircraft platforms and a class of precision-guided weapons that includes Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM), the Paveway family, the Wind Corrected Munitions Dispenser (WCMD), the Joint Standoff Weapon (JSOW), and the Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile (JASSM) (see "Hammers of the Gods"). What the UAI standard defines is a message set that 1760-class weapons and compatible platforms use and recognize. It is not much of a stretch to say that the UAI is functionally similar to the Universal Serial Bus (USB) architecture used in the consumer electronics industry in that it enables compatible hardware to be connected and operated without any additional hardware or software changes.

The UAI effort has been proceeding at a brisk pace. A baseline ICD was released on June 30, 2005, for the F-15 System Program Office at Warner Robbins AFB to use for planning purposes. The F-15 Eagle is to be the threshold platform for UAI. August 31 was the deadline for quality-assurance checklists from the OEMs. These checklists are being issued to all appropriate program offices for platforms and stores so that each can certify that the UAI can be used. A final design review for the UAI ocurred on in late September at Wright Patterson. If all goes well, the final UAI specification will be released by the end of December.

Duke said that while the UAI standard currently only addresses 1760-class precision-guided munitions, in the future, his program office will look at expanding it to include air-to-air missiles, training pods, sensors, and other pods and stores. Duke said that he was also looking at getting release authority to give the UAI to some Foreign Military Sale (FMS) partners. Thus, the non-proprietary UAI standard might conceivably be made available to non-US manufacturers of strike weapons and operators of US-source aircraft. This would enable vendors to develop UAI-compatible weapons and air forces to incorporate UAI into their platforms' OFPs.

The US Navy is currently performing a baseline cost analysis to see what the benefit of the UAI is for the F/A-18s in particular. The UAI program office is in talks with the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) program. The likelihood that the UAI or some derivative of it will be adopted across the services and even internationally seems quite good.

A Step Ahead of the U.S.

2005-11-16T09:32:00.000-05:00

The Los Angeles Times has a good article today on U.S. efforts to capture Iraqi insurgency leader Abu Musab Zarqawi, who not only has managed to elude US forces but even expanded attacks to outside Iraqi, with the recent bombings in Amman, Jordan (see "In a Battle of Wits, Iraq's Insurgency Mastermind Stays a Step Ahead of U.S.).

Here's an except:

"Officials from several U.S. agencies said Washington had dramatically intensified its effort to catch Zarqawi over the last year as his network, which he calls Al Qaeda in Iraq, had launched a series of deadly and audacious attacks against civilian and military targets...

At least two top-secret, multi-agency commando teams have been assigned solely to track Zarqawi and mobilize quickly to pursue him into the most unstable areas of Iraq where he is believed to be hiding, several U.S. officials familiar with the units said. One of them is called Task Force 626, which was established last year by the Pentagon.

There are also dozens of special forces commandos and military intelligence gatherers looking for him. The CIA has deployed dozens of case officers and analysts, the FBI has flown in special agents and bomb experts, and forensic money-trackers from the Treasury Department are trying to monitor the flow of illicit funds into and out of Iraq as a way of of cornering Zarqawi and his top aides, those officials said in interviews.

Eavesdropping satellites, unmanned drones and even U-2 spy planes are gathering intelligence on the insurgency, some of them specifically watching for Zarqawi, the officials confirmed..."

This is a good description of how technology may aid fights against insurgencies, but is no substitute for human intelligence, as U.S. forces are also seeing with the plague of improvised explosive devices in Iraq (see "No Silver Bullet for IEDs"). After a decade or so of emphasis on electronic means of gathering intelligence, military planners and intelligence chiefs are quickly seeing the need for more fully "multidisciplinary" approaches.

For more on this, see "Promises, Promises" and "Intel Community Ineffective, Experts Say."

First to Fight

2005-11-15T20:46:00.000-05:00

The US Marine Corps' website recently ran a story on the service's first use of the Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM), becoming the third and last US service to employ the weapon (the Army, obviously, won't be using it, since it doesn't fly attack aircraft). The US Navy first used the JDAM about a year ago, while the GPS-guided weapon made its combat debut with the Air Force back in Operation Allied Force in 1998.

I've always wondered why it is that the Corps often seems to be the last US service to get the latest weapon systems and other combat equipment. Maybe it's a function of the Corps being, in effect, a sort of "sub-service." The USMC, after, all is the only one of the four US military services not to have its own department and secretary. But wouldn't it make sense for those who are "First to Fight" to be those who are first to receive the latest equipment?

Well, there are signs that they may be. The Marines were, for instance, the first US service to demonstrate the ability to datalink imagery from targeting pods (in this case, from USMC Harriers). And more recently, the Corps took the lead in developing and fielding a new ground-based, electronic-attack capability in the form of the Rockwell Collins (Cedar Rapids, IA) Rubicon II system, with the Army, which had been planning to acquire such a capability for a while now, effectively attaching itself onto the USMC's acquisition program for the system.

Maybe there's some hope yet that the Corps can get the respect it deserves in the procurement process.

Assumptions about IEDs in Iraq

2005-11-15T10:48:00.000-05:00

It's generally accepted in articles about improvised explosive devices (see "Blast From the Past") that they are easy to make, yet the technology to counter them is expensive. While the latter statement may be true, a recent research paper by a research intern at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy questions received wisdom about tools for terrorism being cheap (and therefore very difficult to fight).

In "Accounting for Terror: Debunking the Paradigm of Inexpensive Terrorism," Joshua Prober uses the example of the 1998 East African bombings, which he estimates might well have cost over $50,000, including travel costs for the bombers and Al Queda supervisors, rental costs for the bomb-making factory, communications equipment such as satellite phones, electronic surveillance equipment, the trucks and other materials used for the bombs, and more.

What then does this mean? The importance of technology for detecting bombs will still be important, of course, but the cost of producing and planting bombs indicates that targeting the finances of terrrorists remains key. Prober quotes a US treasury officer as noting, "The simple fact remains that the money trail generally does not lie."

Star Trekkin'

2005-11-14T21:54:00.000-05:00

USA Today recently reported on a study on teleportation commissioned by the US Air Force. The resulting report, entitled "Teleportation Physics Study" and produced by Warp Drive Metrics (Las Vegas, NV), explores the possibility of being able to "beam" matter from one point to another, just like the transporters employed on the Star Trek television series. The study cost the Air Force $25,000, and the report's author, Eric Davis of Warp Drive Metrics, recommends that a five-year, $7.5-million program to explore "psychic teleportation," reminiscent of the "experiments" conducted by alleged psychic and spoon-bender Uri Geller, whom the report actually references.

Now, Star Trek originally ran during the 1960s, and four decades later, many things considered to be nothing more than science fiction back then have become or are becoming reality. Take just a few examples: directed infrared countermeasures to protect not just military but civilian aircraft, the Airborne Laser to shoot down ballistic missiles, a non-lethal system that causes a burning sensation in its target(s), a directed-energy system to zap improvised explosive devices from afar, and many others -- including the aptly named PHaSR. Some of today's technologies even surpass those envisioned by the creators of Star Trek. Remember how Mr. Spock had to to stare down into that viewer at his station to view data? Now we can put that data right on the visor of a pilot's helmet. And let's not even get into all the meaningless flashing lights on the bridge of the Enterprise.

But teleportation? Come now. That's more than a little stretch (well, except for maybe everyone but former US Congressman James Traficant, who frequently shouted "Beam me up" on the floor of the House). I realize science is all about pushing boundaries, but the Air Force would've been better served by investing $25,000 into figuring out how Captain Kirk always managed to land the hot alien women.

Okay, so that may not help the US Air Force, but I've been curious for a really long time now.

Disaster Planning

2005-11-14T17:27:00.000-05:00

However awful some future contingency might be, some military planner somewhere in Washington, DC, has probably already thought of it. War with Iran, war with China, war between India and Pakistan, a peacekeeping operation in a central African nation – the list of scenarios that could require deployment of US troops, or at least a threat to US interests that requires some type of response, is long.

Dr. Michael O'Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who spoke at the Air Force Association conference Sept. 13 in Washington, suggested a few that he believes are more likely than some:

1. Some scenario involving North Korea, including a collapse of the government there that creates a need to secure North Korean nuclear facilities.

2. A fight with China to protect Taiwan. "My sense is our Pacific Command plan is a bit too blindly escalatory, is prone to attacks on the Chinese mainland," O'Hanlon said. "This requires more thought."

3. Indonesia. A terrorist group could shut down the Strait of Malacca or other parts of the Malaysia straits, affecting the shipment of oil and other goods that pass through that area. This would be a much more serious situation than the piracy that already affects this region (see "Standing Watch").

4. An Indo-Pakistan war, perhaps caused by tensions over Kashmir and leading to the use of nuclear weapons. International control of Kashmir could be a solution to the problem.

5. A collapse of Pakistan, where unemployment, poor schools, and a general lack of opportunity could lead to some type of coup involving jihadists and which might require some type of intervention, say using special forces to help secure nuclear facilities. "I can't imagine any potential president, whether it be Howard Dean or Dick Cheney, not responding to the collapse of Pakistan," said O'Hanlon, who said political turmoil could also lead to government collapse in Iran (see "Chain Reaction") or Saudi Arabia, and be equally problematic.

Testifying at a recent hearing by the US House Armed Services Committee on the "goals and principles" of the 2005 QDR, Dr. Andrew Krepinevich, executive director of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said the three main challenges the QDR must address are radical Islam, in an era in which small groups or even individuals can get their hands on weapons of massively destructive power; nuclear power in Asia, where unstable government regimes are competing for increasingly scarce sources of energy; and the rise of China, which is not the certain threat to the US that the Soviet Union was, but because of its economic power could be tempted – like any powerful nation is – to achieve its national goals through military might.

Of the various future scenarios, the country that seems to be most feared by US military officers is China. Whether talking about protecting satellite capability (see "Lost in Space"), the F/A-22 and other new types of fighter aircraft, missile defense, new naval ships (see "US Navy Sizes Up Future"), or any other big ticket program, a major justification always seems to be the threat that China may pose (see "US DoD Ponders China Threat"). A number of analysts also view China as a potential threat to the US directly, pointing to buildups in China's submarine fleet and development of new command-and-control technology, in keeping with the reforms underway within many Western militaries (see "The UK's Military Makeover").

Is China a real threat or just favorite topic for US warmongers? QDR developers say the review is supposed to be able to help the US prepare for any possible scenario. Based on talk by military officials, China appears likely to play a big part in their thinking on future threats.

You Can't Be Too Thin

2005-11-14T13:44:00.000-05:00

I'm very excited about the Boeing GBU-39 Small Diameter Bomb (SDB), which has begun operational trials by the US Air Force at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida. The SDB is a 250-pound-class unpowered strike weapon that is guided with a GPS-aided inertial navigation system (INS). The SDB program builds on previously proven technology, enhances the effectiveness of practically the entire existing US inventory of strike aircraft, enables the F/A-22 to become a strike aircraft without compromising its stealth characteristics, is an enabling technology for the Joint Unmanned Combat Air System (J-UCAS), and offers combat commanders a weapon to support forces on the ground that can be employed under the very restrictive environments imposed by urban warfare.

Physically, the SDB cuts an almost missile-like profile. Dropped from an aircraft, it deploys small wings that give it the appearance of a flying crossbow. The wings enable the glide-weapon to achieve a published stand-off range of about 60-70 nautical miles when released from high altitude. The speed of the terminal descent impart the penetration capabilities of a 2,000-lb bomb with only a 50-lb warhead, greatly reducing blast damage. Because its INS has a new 12-channel GPS receiver, the SDB is a "fire-and-forget" weapon similar to the Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) from which much of its underlying technology was derived, but with a circular error probable (CEP) accuracy of about seven meters compared to about a 14 meter CEP for JDAM.

To understand just how revolutionary the advent of GPS-aided systems are, it is important to see bombing from the standpoint of people who fight wars. The conventional wisdom for tactical strikes prior to the 1991 Persian Gulf War was that it required six iron bombs to kill a particular "aim point." This is about the entire load of a typical strike fighter. And a given target might have more than one aim points, say an air base, depot, or missile site. So multiple aircraft would be tasked with striking the target. A percentage of these aircraft might be expected not to reach their aim points because of mechanical trouble or enemy action. Therefore, particularly valuable targets might have backup aircraft assigned for such eventualities. Compound this situation by dozens or scores of individual targets that need to be hit within a period of hours -- hundreds within days, thousands within weeks -- and the complexities and logistics required to mount and sustain an air campaign become clear.

The six-bomb rule was not because targets were so well protected, but because iron bombs tend to miss by such a margin that you need a six pack on average to get one good hit. The exception to this rule was for those few, special targets that rated a precision-guided weapon. But these were relatively few and far between, as were the numbers of such weapons in inventory. For a long time, since the Vietnam War at any rate, this was the accepted accounting: Drop six, kill one. Except that over time air defenses improved to the point where over-flying most any defended target was risky business. And then people started to become more concerned about where the other five bombs went.

So being able to hit a target, or even multiple targets, with a single aircraft at stand-off ranges satisfied three key concerns: First, fewer sorties needed to be flown to achieve mission goals, saving wear and tear on equipment and personnel. Second, aircraft could attack targets from outside the effective range of air-defense systems, saving lives and reducing the possibility of crew capture. Third, collateral damage to civilian lives, property, and infrastructure could be reduced.

While the JDAM -- an impressive and hugely successful program in its own right -- was a tail kit assembly that could be attached to existing iron bomb warheads to make them guided weapons -- the SDB was built from the drawing board as a new weapon system. The SDB was originally developed to provide the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter with the ability to carry useful bomb loads in internal bays that would not break the low-observable lines of its fuselage features as externally carried ordnance would. It was, however, always understood that the weapon would be usable by essentially all US jet combat aircraft with a strike role. Moreover, the lightness of the SDB means that four bombs can be carried in place of a single 1,000-lb. bomb. This means the number of potential aim-points attacked per sortie quadruples also. In the case of the B-2 bomber, up to 160 SDBs can be carried, each of which can be independently targeted in flight to attack a different aim point.

In addition to multiplying the effectiveness of existing aircraft as strike platforms, the SDB is also enabling the evolution of the F/A-22 into a strike aircraft. Conspicuously during its development, the F-22 Raptor was billed as an air-dominance fighter. The US Air Force still insists that it needs the hugely expensive aircraft in this role. However, in an attempt to broaden its mission statement and hence its appeal in Congress, the Air Force ostentatiously added the "A" label to the aircraft's designation, a la the F/A-18. Since up to eight SDBs will fit in the Raptor's weapons bays, the aircraft will be able to carry out strike missions without compromising its stealth characteristics. Thus, the SDB is will help justify the cost of the fighter program.

The SDM is an important component of the X-45 J-UCAS program, which is seeking to develop a semi-autonomous unmanned strike aircraft. The SDB is the strike weapon of the J-UCAS, which also carries the weapons in an internal bay. Any deployed unmanned combat air vehicle (UCAV) developed from the J-UCAS technology demonstrator program will almost certainly be armed with SDB. The development of jet-powered unmanned combat aircraft will certainly be one of the main storylines of 21st century military aviation.

A final word on the SDB is that it clearly supports the ways that the US is likely to have to make war in the future. The relatively small warhead size and high expected accuracy will enable to SDB to be employed as a close-support weapon in fairly tight proximity to friendly forces and with a minimized effect outside the target area. To be clear, a semi-active laser weapon is more accurate than one that is GPS/INS guided. However, most laser-guided bombs, such as the Paveway family, are much heavier and larger warheads.

So, in all, the SDB program is one to watch. It will make existing aircraft more effective and enable new generations of strike aircraft to be fielded, including revolutionary unmanned ones. The weapon will be an important one for the "small wars" in the US' future, as well as any larger conflicts that may arise.

How to Win in Iraq

2005-11-11T17:31:00.000-05:00

Debate about US strategy in Iraq has been heating up lately, with Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) in a recent speech at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington advocating a strategy of establishing what are basically security zones within Iraq, rather than using military forces to go to a particular city, town, or area, "sweep out" the insurgents, then leave for somewhere, with the insurgency simply retaking control of the area.

One influential article of late is "How to Win in Iraq," by Andrew Krepinevich of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (the pdf of the story is located in the section "latest from CBSA"). Published in the September/October 2005 issue of Foreign Affairs, the article advocates creating "security zones" where a sense of permanence is created. These zones would become like "ink spots," able to spread outward.

Perhaps surveillance assets, airborne or ground based, could help play a part in establishing such zones? Satellite imagery or UAV cameras may not work as well as contractors claim for detecting individual insurgents (see "Promises, Promises"), but when it comes to helping keep the peace, they seem to be quite helpful: think of all the video cameras on the London Underground. Then again...

Veterans Day

2005-11-11T12:59:00.000-05:00

I have devoted 11 individual posts to accounts of veterans about their experiences in war. The accounts were previously published in JED, the Journal of Electronic Defense (I'm editor-in-chief of that magazine). Although Veterans Day is an American observance, I have included accounts of veterans from other nations as well: Great Britain, France, Poland, Denmark, and Israel. Today is also Armistice Day, the 87th anniversary of the end of World War 1.

I am not a soldier and have never experienced war. This makes me lucky. It also makes me blessed. Other people have put on a uniform and fought and killed and suffered and sometimes died. They served for many reasons. But one of the results of their service is that I never had to risk my life in war. The same holds true for veterans who never saw combat: Their service has kept me safe.

Thank you, Veterans.

I want to add one more story: the account of the late General Charles W. Sweeney, commander of the Nagasaki atomic bombing mission. I started Situational Awareness on August 9, 2005, the 60th anniversary of the mission that ended World War 2. Please spare a moment to read General Sweeney's story, too.

In Their Own Words #11: Eleven Stories For Veterans Day

2005-11-11T12:41:00.000-05:00

Paul Goddard flew 25 combat missions while serving in the RAF during the Gulf War of 1990-91. He currently serves as business director for Chemring Countermeasures.

I was going to the Persian Gulf with my RAF Tornado squadron for what looked increasingly like a war. Whether we actually believed that we were going to fight a war was by-the-by. We had to be ready for it, and we were.

There was a lot of hard work; if we weren’t flying we were hitting the books, learning about new enemy systems and threats. We were briefed almost to death by all sorts and sundry people about what equipment the enemy had. By the time we left for the Gulf, people were very knowledgeable, knew what they were looking for and were quite confident they were going to crack the problem when they got there.

On my first mission, my aircraft was No. 2 to that of Trevor, our formation leader. We were the first Alarm mission package in and, in fact, we believe we were the first two RAF aircraft over the border. The JP233 — airfield-denial weapons package — had also gotten airborne and gone for the tanker to refuel. Taking off after midnight, we went directly to the border and straight for the first target, Al Assad — one of Iraq’s newly constructed major airfields. Once airborne, it was at first difficult to remember that this wasn’t a training sortie. But of course then came the border — almost a physical barrier and, as you cross it, there is a mixture of relief, tension...you name it.

You’re terrified, and realize that it’s really going on. We flew up past Mudaysis Airfield, and all the runway approach and perimeter lights were on, indicating that the element of surprise was complete. We went past Mudaysis towards Al Assad.

Trevor fired his Alarm missiles a few seconds before we did, and two hit the ground unfortunately. We were flying at 200 ft. and Mike, my pilot and flight commander, initially thought that, for some reason, the missiles weren’t coping with the low level, so we had time to disengage the autopilot and climb up slightly. We fired from about 500-600 ft., hoping that would give the missiles a chance. It worked; we managed to get all three off. As the missiles come off the rails there’s quite a loud Whoosh; they go forward of the aircraft for a few seconds and then just climb vertically. At that stage, they haven’t locked on to a target. An Alarm does most of its searching once it reaches altitude, so it’s effectively “fire and forget.”

Then we turned to get out of the bombers’ way. It’s very difficult to know what the missiles’ exact effect is, because the perceived threat from a missile is also highly effective. If they knew that we had fired an anti-radiation missile and, as a result, they had turned off their radar, then the missile had already done its job, because without radar the enemy cannot see you. If they kept their radar on and we then got a hard kill on that radar, we had no way of knowing. All one knows is that the radar is not searching any more. Either way, the missile has done its job. On subsequent sorties, they knew that we were firing anti-radiation missiles. That had two effects: it meant that they switched off their radar, which was good; but it also brought up the flak immediately, and at low level you just see the airfield blossom into this big flower of flak. To counter this, we turned at low level. This was what we had been practicing — turning without the autopilot at low level at night, using just the terrain-following radar.

Of course, in the pitch black of night, we had to be very careful. Then we headed back home. We were first back on the ground. The thing you asked straightaway when you came in was if everyone had checked in. They had! There was a lot of backslapping, handshaking and smiles all around, but inwardly one was quite reflective. It was difficult getting to sleep afterwards with a bucket full of adrenaline still rushing around the body. Everything kept coming and going in a whirling dervish of thoughts and emotions.

The second mission was more difficult, because we knew what was coming, and certainly the worst period for us was sitting in the aircraft, engines running, before we went. It’s the worst time because you have to put some of the weirder thoughts out of your mind and say to yourself, “Come on, let’s just get on with it.” But once you taxi for takeoff, you’ve got too many other things to think about. All aircrews ought really to be born without imagination, because you can envision all sorts of things. The second sortie was slightly worse in that they were expecting us. War had been going on for 24 hrs. at this point. It was the first time that we’d seen flak, and there is a cockpit tape of Mike saying, “What the bloody hell is that?” It looked just like a fireworks display, and it seemed a lot closer. From 30 mi. away it looked as if it was almost underneath the wing tip. We were amazed at the density of it. With Alarm missiles, we weren’t going too close to it, although we came fairly close to another airfield that was also pushing it out, so we had to be a little careful. The flak was extremely thick. We fired off our missiles and then came back again. “How fast will this thing go without falling apart?” I wondered of my aircraft.

Coming out the second time was a little different because we knew we were being fired upon. And when there’s something behind you that’s trying to kill you, you get away from it as quickly as you can. Everyone came back from that one as well.

I can remember the first two trips, and after that for the first week it was a blur of sleep, fly, sleep, fly. Thereafter, we went up to the medium-level option. The only reason for going low-level is to avoid a perceived SAM threat. But there is also the fighter threat. At this time, the SAM threat was not as great as anticipated, apart from what was known as “SAM City” — the Baghdad area. The Tornado is a low-level beast, and that means a problem at medium altitudes. The speed and maneuverability that we had at the higher altitude were very limited. If fired at or locked on by radar, our capability to break that lock was diminished.

We were fired upon one night when we were going against a power station to the southeast of Baghdad. We saw what initially appeared to be an explosion, but then we saw the moving white light denoting a missile. It goes from a long flame into a sort of pencil dot, which means, basically, it’s coming right at you. That tends to focus your mind somewhat. In this case, to evade the missile, we rolled inverted, pulling down initially, and then rolling back up. All that time, the aircraft shook and shuddered because, at that weight and at that altitude, we were near an accelerated stall. The missile eventually exploded behind us. Immediately thereafter, we were concentrating on trying to get back on to the target run. Lights out, we were only about 20 sec. between aircraft horizontally, and, although we had maybe 1,000 ft. between aircraft vertically, we’d just descended and were now very, very close to the guy behind us — with him dropping his bombs and us just below him trying not to get hit by them. We released the weapons and Mike then pulled off to the right, hoping the other aircraft was left, and up and over. As we pulled up on to the escape track we saw two afterburners light up only 100 ft. beneath me — it was Glen, one of our squadron mates, trying to get out of it. If that small a clearance had happened in peacetime, there would have been a lot of sweaty brows around. There was very little to say about it on the ground. We were avoiding a missile, we got the bombs off, we avoided everybody else, and that was it.

On our next flight, targeting a refinery, we came down through the clouds, saw the target and aimed for the storage facilities. The bombs came off, and Mike pulled off left and did a level turn, rather than a climbing turn to get back above cloud — a bit naughty, but like any pilot, Mike wanted to see where our bombs had gone. Sure enough, we hit smack on the catalytic cracking plant, the one place where we had been told not to hit. That, unfortunately, is one of the penalties that you pay with this medium-level bombing: it is inherently less accurate. On another refinery bombing run, one of the aircraft suffered a computer dump, so he was flying on the wing of another aircraft and was to pickle the bombs off when the lead aircraft dropped his bomb. We dropped ours, the second lot dropped theirs, and then the third and fourth dropped together. Ours went effectively on target, and likewise the second aircraft’s. After the third drop, we saw one bomb go off in the river, which was very close to the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, — another “Do Not Hit” target — and we thought, “Oh, dear!” Fortunately, the rest fell in a park and onto a double highway. So at least we missed the Gardens! Later, Nick, one of the wits in our formation, nicknamed two of the guys “River Killer” and “Road Driller” in honor of that episode. That’s typical of aircrew mentality: if you can’t make a joke of it, something’s wrong.

Another time we went against a Scud storage site. The storage sheds went up — an absolute treat! You get the initial explosion of the bomb going in, and that’s followed by a big shock wave, then a huge mushroom, and finally wreckage going this way and that, even straight up (we reckon to several thousand feet). It’s just like throwing a match into a box of fireworks. The accuracy we were getting with the medium-level bombing was not sufficient to go against point targets. We also went against ammunition storage in Kabala, which is a huge expanse of desert with bunkers quite well revetted and spaced out. There’s about 300 or 400 m between each bunker, and they were giving us individual bunkers to go for. In such circumstances, you can almost be guaranteed not to hit that bunker. But, for such a widespread military target there is no problem, since if you missed the target, you’d then hope to hit some other part of the facility. In this case, there was virtually no collateral damage; you either hit these bunkers or you missed them. If you missed them, they just ended up with a bit of sand thrown over them, even at a close miss, and, sure enough, we got nowhere — didn’t hit a thing. The more accurate laser bombs used by the Buccaneer aircraft became even more important.

Our blackest moments were spent after mates were lost and in worrying about what was going on at home. We tried to tell our wives that, while we were going to fly that night, everything would be okay, knowing that they weren’t going to sleep that night. Our formation didn’t suffer any losses. Only two people were lost from the group based at Tabuk — both in the same aircraft. We knew both of them very well. Some of the younger guys had not lost any friends before, and we think they were hit hard. Most of us who’d been around for a while had lost at least one friend in peacetime flying, and we’d learned to compartmentalize it. Still, it was a very sad element of the war, but it really strengthened our resolve. Fortunately, the trip which our two lost squadron mates had led — and on which they were subsequently lost — was a complete success, and the Iraqis had to evacuate one of their air-defense centers. So something came of that mission, and of course, the war was a huge success for the Allied Coalition. Our mates didn’t die in vain.

May 2000

In Their Own Words #10: Eleven Stories For Veterans Day

2005-11-11T12:27:00.000-05:00

Mike Gilroy served as a USAF EWO on B-52s, F-105s, F-4s and F-111s. He served two combat tours in Vietnam and flew a total of 119 combat missions, for which he received the Air Force Cross, the Silver Star, three Distinguished Flying Crosses, the Purple Heart and eleven Air Medals. He later served at the Pentagon and, following his retirement, at Litton Applied Technology. He has served as the mayor of Gilroy, CA.

I was a "Wild Weasel" Electronic Warfare Officer (EWO), flying a two-seat F-105F with my pilot, Glenn Davis. We had taken off from our base at Takhli, Thailand, about an hour before.

The other pilots jokingly referred to Glenn and me as Mutt and Jeff. Glenn was built like a fireplug, around 5'6" tall and weighed around 175 lbs. I, on the other hand, I'm 6'5" tall and weighed the same 175.

Glenn was one of the smartest people I have ever met, especially as relates to the F-105. Our F-105F had been modified with an array of specialized electronic equipment allowing us to find and destroy radars, especially those associated with surface-to-air missiles (SAMs). It is a difficult, dangerous, but extremely important mission. We were in Vietnam to protect the Strike Force, the F-105Ds whose job it was to bomb the targets in North Vietnam. Our purpose was to protect them from the Soviet-designed SAMs. In the few months we had been here, Takhli's Strike Force losses from SAMs had dropped significantly. Wild Weasel losses initially were very high, some to SAMs, but mostly to the anti-aircraft artillery (AAA) protecting the SAM sites. Our losses seemed to be settling down as our experience level increased.

Glenn and I had paired up as a crew about a month ago. Glenn's Electronic Warfare Officer returned to the states because of family problems, and my pilot severely damaged his back in a bailout after an unsuccessful duel with a SAM site. So far, we had flown around twenty missions together and really made a good team. We had quickly developed that special rapport typical of the very best Weasel crews. It starts with mutual respect for each other's unique skills in an airplane and develops into strong friendship. Glenn and I were both low key people. We did our job and didn't talk a lot about it. The strike pilots were comfortable flying with us. We had a reputation for not losing wingmen, and more importantly, when we flew SAM coverage for the strike force, no one got shot down by SAMs. To paraphrase the verse from Proverbs: "Yea, though we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, we shall fear no evil, for we are the meanest sons of bitches in the valley."

Our call sign that today was "Avenger," which had a good sound to it. It felt like it was going to be a good mission. The primary target was a military barracks area just west of Hanoi. However, the weather in the target area was forecast to be poor, and the strike had been canceled. The secondary target was in the northwest section of North Vietnam. That area might have been tough when the French were beaten at Dien Bien Phu, but as air missions went, it was a piece of cake. All of the missions into North Vietnam counted toward the 100 missions needed to go home. This one was going to be an "Easy Counter." Weasels were allowed a little more flexibility in doing their mission than the strike force. That didn't mean we were restriction free; everyone from the president down to our wing commander had put some limits on our fighting ability, limits that made no sense at all. We could drop our bombs on a road or bridge, but not on a power plant or fuel or oil storage area, unless specifically tasked to do so. Military airfields were off limits. You could attack and destroy an individual SAM site, but not the storage area near Haiphong Harbor, where hundreds of SAMs were stored out in the open in canisters.

Unless tasked against a specific target, you could not fly within 30 mi. of Hanoi or 15 mi. of Haiphong. If you flew past an airfield and saw an enemy aircraft taking off to intercept you, you could not fire upon him until his landing gear was in the wheel well. Whoever created these restrictions had probably never put his life on the line in battle. Those who enforced them were cowards.

As Weasels, we were allowed to go where we wanted in order to hunt down the SAM sites, except for flight into the restricted areas around Hanoi or Haiphong. Our plan this day was to accompany the strike force to the area of Dien Bien Phu, make a quick sweep of the area to ensure the North Vietnamese (NVN) hadn't moved any new defenses into the area, and then head east, over the flatlands south and west of Hanoi. That's where the heavy SAM defenses were. We'd see if we could stir up a little action. Our wingman was a captain from one of the other squadrons on the base. He had been at Takhli for approximately four months and, although he had flown Weasel missions before, he had never flown with Glenn and me. He was obviously looking forward to an easy mission, one where no one was going to shoot at him. When he heard our plan he wasted no time letting us know that he thought it lunacy. "You're going out on the flats, when you don't have to? You guys are out of your minds!" was followed by, "Don't you have to go where the rest of the strike force goes?"

This type of questioning didn't sit too well with either Glenn or me and shows that even among F-105 pilots there was an occasional candyass. We felt his questioning was almost a slur on our manhood: "Doesn't he know we're bulletproof?" He didn't win any points by questioning our plan, but once he had spoken he seemed to have sense enough to keep his mouth shut.

A pilot from Kadena was in the briefing room. The F-105 Wing at Kadena, Okinawa, sent their pilots to our base to augment the F-105 forces that were flying up north every day. They usually came for six weeks twice a year, and could complete their 100 missions during their three year tour of duty at Kadena. This fellow had arrived the previous week. He seemed to be a really nice guy. Several of us had had a few drinks with him in the Stag Bar a few nights before. When it came time to eat, he asked if there was any place downtown that served decent food. We didn't need much prodding, and soon were headed for the Main Gate, the One-Baht Bus, and the Takhli Villa, the best restaurant in the town of Takhli. Dinner at the Takhli Villa was great as usual. Fine French onion soup, Thai fried rice, a slipper lobster and a bottle of good red wine all for around $4. After a great dinner and a few war stories, most headed back to the base. Another fellow and I commandeered two pedicabs, coerced the drivers into taking the back seat and letting us pedal, and raced to one of our favorite bars and bath houses for a few more drinks, a hot bath and a massage. War is a bitch.

On this day's morning briefing, I chatted with the Kadena pilot for a few minutes. He said that he was glad that this mission was going to be an easy one. We joked around a little, and looked forward to another good dinner downtown. It was six o'clock in the morning when we finally headed out to our airplanes. Everyone was pretty relaxed. Unlike the primary targets where the defenses were always heavy, always waiting for us, and which always got three or four aircraft and crews, I expected that everyone would get back from this one. However, arrival at our airplane showed that we don't have a full ordnance load. Normally the weasels carried two AGM-45 Shrike anti-radiation missiles and either CBU-24s (cluster-bomb units) or two pods of 2.75-in. folding-fin aerial rockets (FFARs). We had the two Shrikes but neither CBUs nor rockets. The F-105s parked nearby were similarly armed. This was just another one of the many things about this air war that wasn't right; you risked your life going against the toughest defenses in the world with only a partial weapon load to deliver on the target. We'd all read in Stars and Stripes that Secretary of Defense MacNamara had been denying that there is a bomb shortage. That man and our president had a major lack of credibility with the aircrews. It's a good thing we were not going to our primary target that day.

"Sarge, did they download some of our ordnance, when the target was changed, or is this all we were going to get?" I asked the crew chief.

"That's all they were going to give you, Sir," he answered.

He was embarrassed, as if somehow he should have unilaterally been able to get a full ordnance load for his airplane. I really appreciated his attitude, but that didn't help increase the ordnance load. Damn, this sure was one screwed-up way to fight a war!

At any rate, the walk around inspection showed the airplane to be in good shape. Thank God for that. Easy missions like this one didn't occur very often and were no time to have a maintenance abort. Completion of one hundred missions into North Vietnam, easy or hard, was the price of a ticket home. Someone at the stag bar had recently passed the cheery news that at the current loss rate, everyone would be shot down three times before they finished their 100 missions. I only had two times to go. We didn't dwell on statistics or on the poor odds of living long enough to complete a combat tour. We were here doing the best job we could. Most of us thought that we were bullet-proof anyway, and enjoyed pitting our skills against those of the NVN, their Russian made weapons, and their Russian "advisors." All that aside, it was nice to get an easy mission every once in awhile.

We climbed aboard, cranked up the engine, checked out our systems, and taxied out to the arming area. Everything was looking good. With this "piece of cake" mission ahead of us, we might just return to enjoy the rest of it. It was a beautiful day at Takhli Royal Thai AFB, I was flying with someone I respected and trusted, we'd gotten a good airplane, a full load of gas, some missiles and a cannon, and were going to go kill some SAM sites. Life doesn't get any better than that! Our wingman still seemed a little pissed off since he made an obscene gesture to the Catholic Chaplain who is walking by blessing the aircraft and crews. The Chaplain smiled and shook his head. He was a pretty nice guy, but the severe loss rate for pilots seemed to be bothering him. The past couple of weeks he had really been putting away the booze at the Stag bar as if he were taking the losses personally. Most of the aircrews shied away from him. We didn't get maudlin about the losses and didn't feel comfortable with those that did. The support people at Takhli really cared.

We were next in line for takeoff. "Do you want to make the takeoff, Mike?" Glenn asked.

"Sure," I answered, not knowing if I could see well enough from the back seat (the forward visibility of the Weasel F-105F is almost zero), and as an EWO, not knowing if I could do so successfully. But, if Glenn had offered, he must've thought that I could, and I wasn't going to say no. There shouldn't be too much to it. Just go real fast and pull back on the stick. Glenn told our wingman that we would be making single ship takeoffs, and called the tower. Takeoff clearance received, I pushed the throttle to the stops and stroked it outboard to light the afterburner. With a kick in the butt and a satisfying roar, we were rolling. Glenn switched on the water injection, which adds extra thrust and we were now really moving. I was having a hell of a time keeping the aircraft centered on the runway - it seems to want to go from one side to the other, almost as if the nose wheel steering was still engaged. I cycled the nose wheel steering switch on and off and the aircraft settled down and smoothly tracked the center line of the runway. Must've been a malfunction in the switch. Glenn chose that moment to tactfully say that he probably should continue the takeoff. I really messed that up. I should have recognized and corrected that switch malfunction quicker. It was a little embarrassing, but no big deal.

We were airborne and climbing toward the rendezvous with our tanker. Our wingman was about 10 ft. off our right wing and I checked out my equipment. Everything seemed to be operating great. We would rendezvous with our tanker over Laos. It took about 35 min. to get there. I killed the time by flying the airplane. Glenn occupied himself by enjoying the scenery. He then called Red Anchor, the KC-135 that would be our tanker for the day. Red Anchor responded immediately and gave us his position. "I've got a flight of four inbound ahead of you," he said.

That would be Fosdick flight. I saw from the mission card on my knee pad that Fosdick two was the guy from Kadena, and a buddy of a friend. Glenn positioned us so that we were about a mile in trail behind the tanker and Fosdick flight, which was approaching the tanker. Just then, a bright flash! from the vicinity of Fosdick flight. The pilot of the KC-135 Tanker called over Guard Channel: "One of the fighters has just blown up!"

We then heard Fosdick lead calling on guard channel for the rescue forces. "This is Fosdick lead. Fosdick Two has just blown up on the tanker. No chute, no survivors!"

"Good Grief! What could have happened?"

"I don't know," replied Glenn. "It looks like his bombs just went off. What a hell of a way to go. What a waste!"

Consensus among the crews was that an arming wire that prevents the fuse from arming until the bomb leaves the airplane had worked its way loose - a defect associated with fuses that were not designed for high speed external carriage. Normal in-flight bomb rack vibration would allow the wire to come free and the fuse to spin down. From that time on, the bomb was armed and for detonation needed only a strong radar signal, which could be provided by a KC-135. The Rescue Command Post and Fosdick Lead continued to exchange information for a few more minutes.

Regardless, it was then our turn to move into position on the tanker, top off our fuel tanks and get on with the mission, though we all now felt a little hollow inside. We were losing enough people to the NVN defenses, made all the worse by the restrictive Rules of Engagement under which we are forced to fly. To be killed by a defect in your own bomb is really the pits.

Well, you can't dwell on those things, and must get on with the mission. Our flight of two aircraft refueled and headed north. Four other flights of four F-105s were visible off to our left and right. Glenn called to our wingman to switch to Channel 19. I tuned through the frequency bands on my Weasel equipment , and picked-up the first sign of NVN radar activity, a Soviet- made Barlock radar that would be passing to the enemy our altitude, heading, and the number of aircraft in the raid. My APR-25 vectorscope displayed the first of the precision tracking radars, a Firecan - Soviet designed, Soviet built and possibly Soviet manned - and one usually associated with one or several batteries of 57 or 85 mm anti-aircraft guns.

"Guns at 2 o'clock," I called. Glenn repeated this over the air, but the radar signal was pretty weak - probably the gun battery at Yen Bai, about 60 mi. ahead of us. The F-105s from both Takhli and Korat normally crossed the Red River in the vicinity of Yen Bai, in order to attack the targets in the Hanoi area from the North, where the more mountainous terrain offers some protection. The NVN (NVN) had moved that Firecan radar and its associated guns into position several months earlier. It was more of a nuisance than a threat. The gunners always shot but had been particularly lousy aims. The precision tracking of that particular radar, though, had passed vital information of our timing, intentions and strike force size to the rest of the NVN defenses. Thus, its presence had been a thorn in the side of the Weasels. Most of the Weasel crews had tried, at one time or another, to knock it out with Shrike missiles, with no success. We had speculated that the radar was probably very well reveted, making it particularly hard to damage with anything but a direct hit. A few days earlier, on a similar mission, Jerry Hoblit and Tom Wilson had tried something different (notice that I said "different," not "bright"). Back at Weasel School, we had practiced a technique that we called "Station Passage." The idea was, if you keep correcting your heading as you approach a radar site, so as to keep the radar signal directly off your nose, you will eventually fly a big arc that takes you over the radar. The equipment indicates the moment you fly over the site since the signal switches suddenly from off your nose to off your tail. Well, Jerry and Tom went through that drill with the Yen Bai Firecan. When they got station passage, Jerry lit the afterburner and pulled up into an Immelmann maneuver. Their idea was to fire their Shrike missile when their nose was pointed straight up. The missile should then continue on up for a bit before reversing itself and heading straight down onto the radar. Theoretically, it was a sound plan, and unlikely to miss. It was really neat to watch from a safe distance. It's always neat to sit safely by and watch your friends do dumb things. Up went the airplane. Off went the Shrike. Down came the airplane. Down came the Shrike. Up came the most intense barrage of flak any of us had ever seen. By some miracle, Jerry and Tom were able to fly out of there unscathed. To add insult to injury, the Shrike missed its target and the radar kept on transmitting. After that miss, we sort of left that Firecan alone. The guy shooting at us wasn't very accurate, and if we killed him, they would probably have replaced him with someone who could shoot better. Might as well leave well enough alone.

Back to this day's mission. We crossed the border into North Vietnam and turned almost immediately west northwest toward Son La and Dien Bien Phu. It is a short hop over there. Only about 15 min. passed until we were in the area, and looking things over. "Nothing on the scope, Glenn," I called.

"They must know that we are going to secondary targets today; there isn't much activity over towards Hanoi, either."

"Well," Glenn called back, "let's go over there and see what we can stir up."

"Avenger, is leaving the area," Glenn called to the Strike force over the radio.

With that, he pulled the nose of the plane around, pushed up the power and took up a heading of 120 degrees towards the flats south and west of Hanoi. There still wasn't much activity on the scope, just a few Firecans probably looking toward some Navy planes out over the Gulf of Tonkin. I turned up the sensitivity of my receiver and could just make out a very weak SAM radar from amidst the noise. It wasn't strong enough to generate an exact bearing, but common sense told us that it was directly ahead. Good. The SAM signal gradually grew stronger as we closed the gap with Hanoi at a rate of eight miles a minute. The signal was now growing strong enough for me to get a reasonable indication of its location. "The SAM site is at our 11 o'clock position, Glenn."

"Roger. It's probably that site just south of Hoa Binh. That's the one that hammered those guys from Korat, yesterday. Let's go pay him as visit."

Glenn then put the SAM site directly off the nose of the airplane. My job was to give heading corrections until we could launch one of our anti-radiation missiles. We also had to ensure we didn't get surprised by anything else while we are doing it.

The NVN radar network had apparently told the site that there were two aircraft coming in from the west. The radar signal increased significantly in strength, indicating it was now looking our way. I worked my IR-133 receiver, synchronizing the scan with that of the radar, and determined that we were almost directly in the middle of the SAM's azimuth beam. I moved to the elevation beam and got the same result. "He's tracking us," I told Glenn.

"I think we're close enough to put a Shrike on this guy," Glenn replied.

Seconds later the Shrike left the wing, trailing smoke as it roared towards the SAM radar. Moments later, the red "Launch" lights illuminated in our cockpits and the shrill screech in our headsets indicated that the site had launched missiles at us. "Valid launch off the nose," I told Glenn.

"Avenger flight has a valid launch. Take it down, Avenger," Glenn calmly announced.

He lowered the nose, pushed up the power and headed for the site. It was now a matter of visually acquiring the missiles and dodging them, while hoping that our Shrike found its way to the radar and put it out of commission. The Weasels had the edge in this battle - we could dodge; SAM sites can't. Of course, we had only a semi-dumb, short range missile with a 50-lb. warhead, while the enemy had a fairly sophisticated weapon system operated by a four men crew, with information fed to it from several other radars. One SAM site usually had another site providing overlapping coverage, as well as dozens of anti-aircraft guns in the vicinity. He also had six missiles which could go twice as far and twice as fast as our Shrikes and which had 300-lb. warheads. Still, we felt we had the advantage, as long as we didn't screw up by getting too high, too low, too slow, or too stupid.

The missiles came into sight. Glenn maneuvered so the missiles were coming at us from our two-o'clock position. They're easier to dodge when they are coming at you from the side. We could see two coming our way, although a third one may have been launched. Soviet launch doctrine, which the NVN used, went something like this: Shoot. Shoot. Look. Shoot. "I see the smoke from the launch site," Glenn said. "It's near the bend in the river."

Only fifteen seconds had elapsed since launching the Shrike. If it worked, and if we had been able to estimate our range from the site accurately enough, the radar should have gone off the air about then. I needed to look at my scope in order to see if that happened, but with missiles on the way, all eyes had to be watching for them. Glenn pulled up sharply and turned into the missile. Both missiles passed harmlessly below us and detonated in the distance. He rolled wings level to look for the probable third missile, as another site at our nine o'clock position launched at us. "Launch at nine o'clock!" I called.

"Roger," he said and turned hard to the left toward that site, temporarily forgetting about the first site.

A quick look at my scope showed the radar signal from the first site had gone off the air, indicating a probable hit from our Shrike; it was hard to tell as we were the center of attraction for several SAM and AAA sites, and the scope was cluttered with signals. "I see smoke from our Shrike at the first site," Glenn confirmed.

At least the radar was disabled. We could go in and destroy the vans and missiles as soon as we could stop dodging. "I've got two missiles in sight," called Glenn.

We descended to about 50 ft. above the ground, doing around 700 kts. This was too close to the deck to dodge missiles, but they wouldn't be able to track us at such a low altitude. Seconds later the first missile roared overhead. followed shortly thereafter by another. They were at least 500 ft. away, but looked a lot closer. "I'm going to climb a little and see if I can put a Shrike into this guy from point blank range," Glenn calmly announced.

"Go to it," I replied.

As we left the relative safety of tree-top altitude and climbed to 4,000 ft. to give the Shrike a better look at its target, two more SAM sites started tracking us strongly. "SAM sites looking at us at four and eight o'clock," I called.

"Roger," Glenn answered. "I'll just be a bit longer."

"Missile Launch!" I called. "It's the one at our four o'clock!"

"Avenger flight, missile launch," Glenn called on the radio.

He hung on a few seconds longer, and then sent the Shrike on its way. We were now diving back to the relative safety of the ground - down to where SAM radar would have trouble picking our aircraft out of the ground clutter.

"Where the hell is Avenger Two, Mike?"

"We lost him in the first SAM break," I answer.

"Avenger Two, where are you?" Glenn radioed.

"I lost you during the SAM break," Two answers. "I'm over on the Ridge."

Well that figured! Not only was the guy a candyass, he couldn't fly an airplane, either! "Well, head on home," Glenn directed him. "We've got some business here yet."

Neither of us could see the missiles from the third site and assumed that we were too low for them to track us. We were back close to our original heading, where we were first fired upon. We were going back to destroy the first site that fired on us. Glenn armed the 20mm Gattling gun-the best SAM-killing weapon ever devised. We were still about 50 ft. off the ground, but had slowed down to perhaps 600 kts. Forward visibility was not too great, as the combination of our speed and the high moisture content in the air created our own little fog bank on each side of the nose. Glenn climbed to about 4,000 ft. in order to get a better look at our target. Little red balls rose to meet us - harmless looking but quite deadly. They were tracers associated with some pretty fast shooting guns, and they were all around us. What didn't show were the multiple non-tracers amongst the visible rounds.

We could hear rounds hitting the aircraft. We seemed to be engulfed by a half square mile of anti-aircraft projectiles. Glenn maneuvered to spoil their aim. "I see the site," said Glenn. We had time, gas, and the inclination for just one pass and made good use of it. Our 20mm rounds stitched through one missile launcher, across and through the radar and control vans, and then out the other side through another missile launcher. We broke hard right. The explosions shook the airplane and orange smoke and fire belched hundreds of feet into the air. "Good shooting , Glenn!" "Thank you, sir!" he answered cheerfully. "Now let's get the hell out of here."

We descended back down to 50 ft. and stayed on the deck for another 30 mi., until we exited the heavily defended areas. Twice on the way out we again strafed gun positions which popped-up before us. Finally, we were able to climb back up to safety, take our oxygen masks away from our faces, and have a cigarette. We were both on an adrenaline high. It had been an exciting 20 min. "Did you hear that joke that Norm Frith told in the bar last night?" I asked Glenn. "No," he said, "tell me."

"Well, it goes like this: 'Do you know the definition of the world's greatest optimist? It's a Weasel who quits smoking, because he's afraid that he will die of lung cancer.'"

"Boy, we really stirred up a hornets' nest there," Glenn chuckled.

Yes, we really had. We had killed one SAM site, got a probable hit on another, shot up several anti-aircraft gun positions, dodged six missiles and thousands of anti-aircraft shells and had been the sole focus of the Hanoi defensive network. Just another routine Weasel mission and a lot of fun. Nine more just like it and we would earn an Air Medal.

July 2000