STARS Report:
The E-8C means better targetting, not more ground troops.

By Charles E. Miller, a retired Air Force colonel
November 6, 2001 10:50 a.m.

he recent decisions to deploy the Joint STARS radar aircraft and the Global Hawk unmanned aerial vehicle do not necessarily foretell a major deployment of U.S. ground forces into Afghanistan, as some have suggested. In fact, their use fits very well the emerging operational pattern of fighting the war by building a targeting network for informing and directing air strikes against Taliban and al Qaeda targets.

The Joint STARS (Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System) was originally conceived during the Cold War. It was envisioned as supporting the targeting of second-echelon Soviet ground forces as part of a Follow On Forces Attack operational concept — all aimed at disrupting the Soviet's ability to take advantage of breakthroughs. In the Gulf War, a developmental version of the aircraft and its supporting systems was used to identify and target (and destroy) an Iraqi column of 80 vehicles sent to reinforce the attack on Khafji, as well as to track Iraqi columns on the highway of death out of Kuwait City. In both cases, the information was used to direct air attacks on the targets.

The E-8C Joint STARS aircraft is a Boeing 707 modified to carry a 26-foot-long, side-looking synthetic aperture radar. It can look over 150 miles deep into an adversary's territory in all weather and can readily identify slow moving and fixed targets with great accuracy. It can easily distinguish between a truck and a tank, for example, or note the lift off and flight of a helicopter. Equally, it can identify trench lines, bridges, and tunnel entrances.

The aircraft covers about 400,000 square miles in its eight-to-ten-hour mission profile. Sensor data can be stored, processed on-board, and/or transmitted via secure communications links to satellites. The on-board systems crew of twenty-plus can be hooked directly into the strike aircraft command and control network. The U.S. Army has also developed ground stations to take advantage of Joint STARS capabilities, but the Afghanistan pattern says that these aircraft will first, and primarily, be used to target air strikes, and then to inform U.S. Special Forces of the ground situation as it affects anti-Taliban forces.

Hawking the Air

The U.S. also has also deployed the RQ-4A Global Hawk unmanned aerial vehicle to Afghanistan. With a wingspan similar to a Boeing 737, it can operate at over 60,000 feet carrying a sensor package of about 2,000 pounds. It can fly six hours from Germany and stay overhead of Afghanistan for forty hours or so. It carries a synthetic aperture radar as well as an infrared sensor and an electro-optical sensor. In wide area sweeps, it can detect moving and fixed targets about a meter long, and then focus down to one foot resolution on items of interest. It feeds its data via secure communications to satellites and onto a team that oversees the data and the aircraft. It can watchdog a given location or fly a broader search pattern of 40,000 square miles. The Global Hawk is designed to integrate into existing command-and-control structures. This appears to be an excellent tool for assisting in the search for bin Laden and the al Qaeda terror network, or for detailed mapping of the "front lines."

When the Pentagon leadership talk of increased ground presence, they mean a few hundred more, not thousands more. They are relying heavily on precise and fairly precise air strikes (still no real carpet bombing) and minimal ground forces. They appear to be very patient, grinding down the Taliban forces with "un-massive" air strikes, food packets for the starving, and ammunition (and apparently uniforms) for the opposition forces.