Afghanistan Crippled by Lack of Runways, Facilities
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Posted
by David A. Fulghum at
10/30/2009 7:45 AM CDT
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The buildup of manned and unmanned aircraft for operations in Afghanistan is being crippled by a lack of bases, aviation ramp space, personnel and sensors that can deal with terrain that bears almost no resemblance to Iraq, says a senior Pentagon planning official who is providing equipment for both Iraq and Afghanistan.
Also jeopardizing the mission are limited infrastructure, housing, specialized facilities and high-altitude runways. The last requires smaller gross takeoff weights and longer takeoff distances.
There appears to be no delay in reaching the Pentagon-mandated 50 orbits of Predator UAVs for the theater. What is not available is a concept of operations that would divide those capabilities between the two theaters. One clue about the eventual allocation is that since Afghanistan has fewer air bases and less parking and service space, logic dictates that smaller aircraft – such as UAVs – would be concentrated there.
By comparison, Iraq is topographically flat, for the most part, and had has scores of military airfields at sea level with long runways which makes operations easier for large manned aircraft like the RC-135W Rivet Joint signals/communications intelligence and E-8C Joint Stars radar ground surveillance aircraft.
Often procedures and flight geometries that work in Iraq, don’t do well in Afghanistan where high mountains, steep slopes and deep valleys require new flight profiles for optimum surveillance, particularly of small groups of people moving in broken terrain. In addition, with a new foe, “there are constantly emerging, unique targets” that aren’t suited for wide area surveillance systems, he says.
For the troops arriving in Afghanistan, commanders are already calling for full motion video, precision signals intelligence and ground moving target indicator radar with enough resolution to track people, referred to as “dismounts” moving at speeds well below 4 mph. The E-8C has been a stalwart of ground moving target indicator (GMTI) operations in Iraq, but it could lose its primacy in Afghanistan to smaller, more flexible designs.
Equipment is flowing into the main bases of Kandahar and Bagram (where the classified Area 84 is growing exponentially) at a rate that scares some U.S. Army officials. They have publicly complained (at the recent Old Crows Association show) that at Bagram Air Base alone there are 200 systems that can’t communicate with one another. Critics predict that the polluted electronic environment around Baghdad – which has slashed the range of data links and foiled the coverage of some radars and IED jammers – is quickly being duplicated in Afghanistan.
The initial need is for a unique “concept of operations that flow back to operations and integrate into the ISR architecture,” the Pentagon official says. For example, “the operational piece might be to integrate the signature of people walking with a positive identification on the same platform. We can’t do that now.
The SYRES III EO systems being looked at for Joint Stars may be a potential solution, “but in its present form, it doesn’t make sense with the flight geometries needed for dynamic terrain,” the Pentagon official says. An alternative could be to move full motion video via datalink to Joint Stars operating as a node in a network to make positive IDs of radar imagery. Moreover, the resolution of the GMTI is no where close to what is required in Afghanistan,” the Pentagon official says.
Darpa’s Vader radar pod for synthetic aperture radar and ground moving target indicator imagery – designed for manned and unmanned aircraft – is another option being introduced for use in Afghanistan.
And they said the original USAF requirements for a VSTOL "JAST" variant would be unnecessary.