The F/A-18D Hornet handles a lot of jobs in Iraq, these days including bomb-hunting. Two two-seater plane looks out for improvised explosive devices with its nose-mounted Advanced Tactical Airborne Reconnaissance System, a bank of downward-looking cameras that replaces the Hornet’s standard 20-millimetere cannon.
A ground station at Al Asad air base is equipped with a new workstation that allows analysts such as Sgt. Elizabeth Zakar to lay two day’s imagery side by side to isolate the differences. This way they can spot disturbed earth, suspicious objects, piles of debris and other telltale signs that insurgents have planted a roadside bomb.
It’s not easy work, but there’s a full-time civilian expert named Kevin White on hand to help. White is my roommate here at this sprawling air base. Besides being a great guy, he’s a hard worker too — for a full year he’s worked late nights and long morning in the analysts’ tiny little trailer on the compound of the Marine Fighter Attack community. The Marines are making an effort to keep one of their six F/A-18D squadrons in Iraq at all times, and the ATARS is a major reason why.
Here at Al Asad, the chowtime talk is all about Ralph Peters, the Army officer-turned-columnist who loves to rail against the Air Force and its budget-hogging ways. A recent Weekly Standard piece by Peters took the Air Force to task for spending billions on a handful of F-22s when less money invested in simpler platforms would, he claims, pay far greater dividends. The fliers of Marine All Weather Fighter Attack Squadron 332 agree wholeheartedly, pointing to their bargain-bin Hornets and their huge quiver of weapons and sensors.
I’m not quite convinced that the Air Force needs to abandon the cutting-edge of air supremacy. A few Marine aviators here have indirectly sided with the Air Force with tales of getting schooled in air-to-air exercises by aggressive Thai F-16 pilots.
–David Axe
UPDATE 02/02/06 3:02 PM: There have been a heap of interesting comments on this post. One of the best (as usual) comes from Joe Katzman, who asks:
Why are we using Hornets, that cost thousands of dollars per hour to fly, so we can wear down a fleet that would be useful in a more serious war and deplete US forces down the road (fighters have lives measured in hours put on the airframe)?
For the job they’re doing, you could use a Cessna. Yeah, the same ones that do traffic reports here at home. Same job, just add cameras and communications. Heck, Cessnas can even be given small gun pods if they feel a need to be able to shoot up a convoy of terrorists in the middle of an IED instalation operation.
How expensive do you think that would be to buy? To fly? How easy to transfer the aircraft to Iraqis without a lot of difficulty?
Heck, we could even buy Schweitzer’s dedicated reconaissance aircraft for that job at a couple million per, and get something that not only has a ton more station time, but is SILENT from observation height so people can’t hear it coming. Paint it correctly, and it would be hard to see from the ground as well.
Cheap, devastatingly effective, could be bought in numbers and drive the rate of IED attacks (and hence deaths) down.
Perhaps someone out there can kindly explain why $40 million ($55–60 million replacement cost) jet fighters are doing this job instead? That was excusable in 2003 when the operation began. In 2006, it’s just waste.
{ 19 comments… read them below or add one }
I’d be leery of tales of ‘getting schooled’ in multi-national exercises. They tend to be choreographed in order to exercise other systems and generally have pretty restrictive ROE. The old REFORGER exercises were a good example of this for the ground folk. If you were blue you would be retreating for the first week, followed by the grand counterattack towards the end of the exercise regardless of your unit level antics.
No, when I said “schooled”, I meant legitimately schooled. To hear the Marines talk, the Thais had a firm grasp of fighter tactics, excellent discipline and high aggression, plus solid equipment. Building a good air force isn’t about massive numbers of airplanes or uber-expensive technology, it’s about physics, repetition, good maintenance and attitude. The U.S. has been lucky to not have faced a serious air opponent in recent decades, but this situation could change.
Dave, have you seen any interferometric SAR being used over there to spot IEDs? I have been wondering for a long while if they are doing this, or if they even have the platforms for it over there. The extra phase information avaible in SAR images seems like it would allow it to out perform the EO stuff in this area.
Rutty:
I’ve talked to a couple of people who have tested out SAR (synethic aperture, or ground-pentrating, radar) for bomb-spotting in Iraq. They attached sensors to small-to-mid-sized UAVs, and flew ‘em over hot areas. The results were promising, I understand.
nms
See, I hear these stories about Third World air forces surprising American pilots and I get something different out of it: the pilot matters as much as the plane. This came up in the 80′s when the US military was cutting training hours to buy more aircraft and I think it will be coming up in a couple of years when the war hangover comes.
One of the dirty little secrets of the USAF is that they’ve gotten in the habit of letting air combat training slide in favor of more attack training. This makes a lot of sense, given what they’ve been doing the last decade or so. But it also might explain why they get spooked by the Third World pilots who spend most of their flying time practicing fighter tactics.
The Marines are said to devote more of their flight time to air combat but I’m willing to bet the Thais make it their top priority. They don’t have the IED gizmos on their planes.
Thanks, Noah. Out of curiousity do you know who was doing the CCD/interferometry SAR work? Putting it on a UAV may me think Sandia. Just wondering.
Rutty:
We didn’t talk vendors; these were Army guys. But Sandia sounds like a good guess to me.
nms
Thats a smart way to find the IED’s, though it’s got to take a lot of time.
Peters, this guy, bad author and just a hack.
There is no doubt in my mind that we need the F-22. And I am glad my tax money goes to it.
Joseph, I know the post says that they lay the images side-by-side to do the change detection, but I would bet dollars to donoughts that they are actually reviewing the results of an alogorithm. Accurate change detection requires sub-pixel accuracy in the image registration before either a difference image or a correlation image can be formed. It is still a computationaly intensive task, but I’d bet they have a linux cluster that can chew through the images pretty fast. At least I hope they do.
Oh yeah I see what you mean now. I guess I was picturing someone with magnifying glass just checking two photots.
Actually, let’s take Peters to his logical conclusion. Why are we using Hornets, that cost thousands of dollars per hour to fly, so we can wear down a fleet that would be useful in a more serious war and deplete US forces down the road (fighters have lives measured in hours put on the airframe)?
For the job they’re doing, you could use a Cessna. Yeah, the same ones that do traffic reports here at home. Same job, just add cameras and communications. Heck, Cessnas can even be given small gun pods if they feel a need to be able to shoot up a convoy of terrorists in the middle of an IED instalation operation.
How expensive do you think that would be to buy? To fly? How easy to transfer the aircraft to Iraqis without a lot of difficulty?
Heck, we could even buy Schweitzer’s dedicated reconaissance aircraft for that job at a couple million per, and get something that not only has a ton more station time, but is SILENT from observation height so people can’t hear it coming. Paint it correctly, and it would be hard to see from the ground as well.
Cheap, devastatingly effective, could be bought in numbers and drive the rate of IED attacks (and hence deaths) down.
Perhaps someone out there can kindly explain why $40 million ($55-60 million replacement cost) jet fighters are doing this job instead? That was excusable in 2003 when the operation began. In 2006, it’s just waste.
Joe: because that’s the plane they happen to have. They have this plane because that’s what they decided they needed back in the late 90′s. They decided they needed this plane because at that time the military was counting on the Powell Doctrine of not getting bogged down in these godawful wars of national liberation. They had the Powell Doctrine because the military of the 80′s and 90′s was dominated by guys who had the misfortune to see Vietnam up close and personal and vowed that they would never let that happen to their country again.
Having the capability, they reckoned, was an attractive nuisance, rather like the Republican senator who stood up in the 60′s to denounce the purchase of sealift ships: “If we buy these ships,” said the man, “we’ll have the ability to go anywhere and do anything. Which means we’ll always be going places and doing things.” I miss those kinds of Republicans.
James,
That was the plane they happened to have in 2002. and you might get away with that argument in 2003. It’s now 2006, and to still be using F/A-18Ds in this role is stupid and wasteful. Especially given the coming crash of TacAir as it both shrinks and ages under F-22 and JSF costs.
So now we have an approach that’s stupid in the present, and also stupid in the future. Color me unimpressed.
And as a final note, you can still find Republicans like that. I’m sure Pat Buchanan would love to hear from you. Personally, I don’t miss his influence on the GOP, but YMMV.
The ability to rapidly scan images and detect anamolies of interest (IED) has existed for some time. The problem has always been that the capabilities are husbanded by escelons too far removed from those who need the information. What airplane flies is not worthy of debate to the troops on the ground. Getting an indication from signatures indicating IED’s is their concern and the technology exists to do so in a timely fashion. The indicators are ground disturbance(texture and color), geometry (location), and composition (density and IR).
As far as the platform to acquire the data, who gives a shit if it responds to the mission requiements. Scanning for the indicators (signatures) should not rely on human perception rather on electro-mechanical-optical processing well within the state of the art. Failure to provide this in the AO responsive to need is not justified and borders on betrayal of trust.
Phil Weinert,COL,USA (RT)
The guys who came up with this are probably the same guys who decided it would be a dandy idea to use jeeps (Humvees) as combat vehicles. And then realized that the jeeps have no armormaking the troops sitting ducksand then merrily embarked on expensive and excrutiatingly slow armor retrofit programs. Of course, the weight of the armor will shorten the vehicle’s lifetime considerably. Just like these jets. Hey, what’s to worry? We got lots of money. The really unfortunate thing is that federal criminal statutes do not cover such instances of misfeasance, malfeasance and nonfeasance. And there are lots of them.
And the beat goes on. Ralph Peters is right.
I take Phil’s point, and no, the troops don’t care. It’s not their job to care.
It is, however, the Pentagon’s job to care – and if they could provide similar or better capabilities for far less money, while husbanding their top-line resources against future threats, that would be the best form of keeping the faith.
I’ll add that no-one (well, not me anyway) is recommending Mk1 eyeballs only. Advanced sensors on UAVs (or the LITENING/Sniper XR pods the fighters use) take up little space, and can be retorfitted to modern “bird dogs”. One could provision a Cessna, and the silent Schweitzers come equipped with plenty of sophisticated stuff because this is their dedicated-purpose.
Which would you rather have overhead in, say, a big sector like Balad? 2 F-18Ds at $50 million each? 70 Cessnas with all toys plus Viper Strikes, laser-guided 70mm Hydra rockets, and/or minigun pods at well under $1 million each, plus $100k each per pilot, giving you 24/7 coverage? Or how about 10 silent Schweitzer RU-38Ds, full of advanced sensors that work day or night and impossible to hear coming if your an Islamist death squad?
Which sets make it much harder to be the bad guys?
Smarter force structure could save lives both now (broader coverage via more platforms, faster Iraqi ramp-up) and in future (more high-end stuff is there when needed, or deterring opponents who don’t see a hollow force and hence don’t start stuff). That’s keeping the faith the your warfighters.
I’ll close with a point or two for the other side of this debate. One is that some of the units pulling these duties are the USA’s remaining F-14D “Bombcats.” They’re headed for the scrap heap after this cruise, and the modifications to enable this sort of thing were fast and VERY inexpensive, so why not use em? They work, you’ve paid for everything anyway (except fuel, which is marginal), and the crews need to fly. I’ll buy that. No criticism.
The other point is that a certain number of F-16s, F-18s et. al. are necesary to have a response to external threats in Iraq. As long as they’re there, if their LITENING pods and new tools like ROVER (covered by DID here: http://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/2006/01/rover-sics-tacair-on-americas-enemies/index.php ) give them a viable daily role, why not use them this way at least some of the time? That’s a compelling argument to me, too.
So I guess my overall response would be:
“Sure. Do that. Fly missions with F-18Ds if they need to be up there anyway. But don’t make them the mainstay option – add enough other aircraft to give you more coverage at a sane cost.
Especially aircraft that are easy to transfer to the Iraqis in order to build up their own capabilities a lot faster, a concept that could be streamlined by placing some Iraqi AF crew members in the second seat on occasion. That’s very useful for training, and also as instant translation for Iraqi unit support requests. Which are growing as their capabilities and involvement in operations increases.
In contrast, I don’t think you’ll be putting Iraqis in F-14Ds of F/A-18Ds as back-seaters any time soon.”
See this AFLink article: http://www.af.mil/news/story.asp?storyID=123016197
“While Balads F-16s cover the entire country of Iraq, their capabilities are often employed in a base defense role right here.”
Which speaks to my earlier point of aircraft assigned to protect Iraqi airspace being given a secondary function in-theater. Which is fine – in fact, I’d like to see more coverage and that’s why other platforms are attractive. It also raises a useful point re: silence, however:
The litening pods have such a good sensor that we can stay out of noise range and still complete the mission, said Capt. Dan Sanders, F-16 pilot. Most of the time the guys on the ground want to catch the bad guys in the act, not scare them off, so we stay high enough or far enough away that the bad guys dont hear us.
Which is good. Must confess, didn’t think that was so, and it’s important.
Re turning aerial surveillance of to Iraqis:
Let’s see, we know there are bad guy spies in the ranks, and now we’re going to let them learn all about our hi tech sensors and tactics, and pass that info back to their HQ, who will use that knowledge to devise ways to evade the sensors.
Sounds like a bad idea to me. What say we let either our military or our civilian contractors do the aerial surveillance and selectively pass the info on to the Iraquis?
The reason you have F-16s do this and not Cessnas is F-16s need to be inthe air any way. They are in the air 24/7 to respond to incursions by Iranians or Syrians and armed with cluster bombs for close air support if a unit gets pinned down. This is a good use of their time if they are in the air anyway. If Iranian or Syrian MIGs cross into your sector, you’re not going to send the Cessna to get rid of them.