ISR and business as usual

[Cavguy]

The Air Force developed the Predator and turned it into a capable weapons and ISR platform that is integrated with other weapons systems. Yes the Army has UAV's and I'm sure you put them to good use, as you should. But unless I'm mistaken they are essentially just cameras in the sky.

For example, can your mortar or arty teams use them to correct fire?

Yes, All of them can from Raven and above, I've done it.

Can they designate for your other weapons systems?

Some can, to different levels. All can spot designate in some method, and some can laser designate. Keeping it vague here.

Can your apaches get your video feed to develop SA when they're enroute to your tic?

If they have something similar to Rover installed, they could. All our UAV's can be received in Rover as well as Aircraft.

And I'm genuinely sorry about your bad predator experience, there really is no excuse for that.

No problem, wasn't you. But it happened more than once, and that's the worst case. I came off harder than I should, I do love the USAF, a USAF F-15E drop ended a bad firefight I was in once.

But the notion you can do COIN from the air with ISR, or even effeciently interdict the enemy, is a myth at the present time.

Case in point, the nation threw every surveillance asset it had, from satellites to aircraft to UAV's on a single stretch of road south of Balad to stop IED activity. Some months later, the program was cancelled because of outright failure.

Anyway, I was cranky posting at 2AM last night. Sorry for the harsh tone, I promise to play nice!

[Ken White]

how can that be? He spluttered...

[Cavguy]

Some quotes from Rick Atkinson's article linked above:

Read the whole thing.

IED Blitz would focus as many forms of surveillance as possible in a "persistent stare" at a bomb-infested 20-kilometer stretch of Route Tampa, just south of Balad on the road to Baghdad. The blitz would enlist satellites, U-2 spy planes, 14 Mako unmanned aerial vehicles, a pair of larger I-Gnat drones, and the Horned Owl, a Beechcraft turboprop airplane equipped with ground-penetrating radar used to assess whether road shoulders had been disturbed by digging.

Attacks had grown increasingly extravagant, with "daisy-chained" munitions that included as many as 22 artillery shells wired together to explode simultaneously in a 300-yard "kill zone." Intelligence analysts assumed that such ambush sites took hours or even days to prepare. On the basis of past attack patterns, they predicted that 60 IEDs would be planted in 75 days on this short segment of Route Tampa.

Hundreds of thousands of photographs would be snapped as part of a technique called "coherent change detection." Two images of the same scene taken at different times would be compared, pixel by pixel, to spot changes in the landscape -- such as the anomalies caused by an insurgent planting a bomb. Ground convoys could be warned, and, if the reconnaissance was nimble, hunter-killer teams could flush emplacers or triggermen.

The operation, estimated to cost at least $3 million, would be directed from Defense Department offices leased in Fairfax County.

Blitz began on Tuesday, Aug. 24, 2004. So brilliant were the digital color images that analysts could read the brand names on plastic water bottles littering the roadside. They could distinguish an apple from a pomegranate at a fruit stand.

What they could not see was a bomb or a bomber.

The most disheartening day came on Thursday, Nov. 4. By chance, virtually all surveillance assets -- satellites, U-2s, drones -- happened to be focused simultaneously on one small swatch of Route Tampa. Traffic appeared normal. Two hours later, another sequence of images revealed a scorched crater where a bag of artillery shells triggered by a detonation wire had just killed one American soldier in a truck and severed the leg of another. Dozens of photos showed the burning vehicle veer across the median, and rescue vehicles convene at the site. No images revealed the IED being placed, or the triggerman.

Analysts soon surmised that bomber cells around Balad in late summer had shifted "to a just-in-time device-placement method," as a Defense Intelligence Agency analyst put it. Instead of requiring hours or days to survey an ambush site and bury a device, "hasty emplacement" took two hours or less.

Blitz ended on Nov. 15. In 10 weeks, 44 IEDs had detonated or were discovered by ground clearance teams. Asked how many had been detected by aerial surveillance, the Air Force officer said, "To be honest with you, I can't say any of them.

"We had only a 20-kilometer stretch," the officer added. "There are thousands of kilometers in Iraq."

This is why I get nervous anytime someone tells me the tech in FCS or Air power will solve my problems through ROVER or any other gimmick. We focused almost national asset and tech available, plus hundreds of personnel on twenty klicks of road and were unable to stop or identify attacks.

[Coldstreamer]

Pull back to the Drop Ship and nuke them all from Orbit. Only way to be sure.

I'll try for something sensible tomorrow, possibly.

Tech gobbledigook just doesn't deliver the goods in COIN and insurgencies. That stretch of Tampa would have been better secured if all the money and talent had been diverted from model aeroplanes with cameras to a couple of good HUMINT teams who could have given proper warning of when the devices were laid, and led to strikes to arrest the insurgent cell commanders, who could then be sweated to spill the beans on their pals, and then reconciled to become stakeholders in a future they could contribute to.

Oops. Couldn't help myself.

[slapout9]

Pull back to the Drop Ship and nuke them all from Orbit. Only way to be sure.

I spilled some coffe reading that one.

[Entropy]

Cavguy,

To be sure there are limits to aerial ISR, just as any capability has inherent limits. There isn't a silver bullet here and the enemy gets a vote too as they learn our various capabilities and exploit their inherent weaknesses.

The good news is that the AF and Army seem to be trying to put aside the mutual distrust and both are making an effort to work together. Hopefully that continues.

Returning to the original point of this thread for a minute, the Air Force willl have to come to grips with how the UAV fleet fits into the service culturally. As long as UAV's are an ancillary job viewed as a distraction from the "real" job of flying manned aircraft, the service is gonna have problems. Most of these issues were identified almost ten years ago - it's sad that so little has been done to address the UAV cultural problems.

Pull back to the Drop Ship and nuke them all from Orbit. Only way to be sure.

lol