Strike fighters bring their own surveillance to the battle

By RICHARD R. BURGESS, Managing Editor

High over a town known to harbor insurgents, the radar of a Navy F/A-18F Super Hornet strike fighter scans an area of interest, detects suspicious activity with its ground moving-target indicator and displays a real-time image map of the ground to the aircraft’s weapon system officer. He captures the image on his display and transmits it in a matter of seconds over a radio data network that uses wideband high-speed Internet.

On the ground, a Special Operations Forces unit receives the image on its rugged laptop computer. The unit’s forward air controller clicks on the location of a target, sending the pointer over the data network.

In the aircraft, the weapon system operator sees the pointer and marks it on his display. He hits a single button to download the global positioning coordinates of the target to the guidance system in one of the aircraft’s precision-guided bombs, and drops the bomb to destroy the target.

The entire action takes less than two minutes and is done silently, without radio chatter.

This scenario is only a few steps farther into the future than today’s actual operations with Navy Super Hornets over Iraq.

A new term in the lexicon, nontraditional intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (NTISR), describes what is happening in the U.S. tactical aviation world where heavily armed strike fighters are valued equally for their surveillance capabilities as for their strike prowess. In Iraq, ISR systems help mitigate the conflict’s asymmetry — the situation of massive high-powered conventional U.S. military units pitted against an elusive force of lightly armed insurgents — and give U.S. forces an advantage.

Surveillance traditionally relies on specialized platforms, such as the Air Force’s E-8 Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System aircraft, to search for enemy activity, track it and transmit the intelligence information to a ground processing center, which, in turn, sends target information to strike aircraft for action. These surveillance aircraft are being upgraded with networked systems for speedy information distribution.

Meanwhile, the organic capability increasingly found in strike fighters is reducing the intelligence turn-around time and shortening the time between target detection and engagement from tens of minutes to as few as two minutes. Their tactical targeting sensors, coupled with radio data links, are doubly valuable as surveillance sensors.

The Super Hornet is equipped with the Advanced Tactical Forward-Looking Infrared (ATFLIR) system, a pod equipped with long-range, high-resolution electro-optical and infrared sensors, as well as a laser target designator, the latter to mark targets for laser-guided bombs. It transmits target imagery from the sensor to ground commanders via a radio data link called Link 16.

The two Super Hornet squadrons currently deployed in the Persian Gulf on the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan are equipped with such a capability.

“Almost every flight that goes off the Reagan right now does nothing [over Iraq] but ISR with ATFLIR systems,” said Capt. “BD” Gaddis, the Navy’s program manager for the Super Hornet.

Gaddis described a typical scenario over Iraq, with a new helmet-mounted capability as part of the situation. A Super Hornet pilot on a forward air controller mission spots enemy activity on the ground. His helmet, fitted with the Joint Helmet-Mounted Cueing System — a system that slews a sensor on the aircraft to focus on whatever the pilot is looking at — automatically slews the electro-optical sensor in the ATFLIR pod. He designates the target on his cockpit display and its latitude and longitude are transmitted over the radio data link. Whoever is on the data net receives the target information.

“When they select ‘target designate,’ their radar, their ATFLIR, their helmet, all slew to that same point on the ground, and there is no talking,” Gaddis said. “It’s all machine-to-machine.”

The ATFLIRs have joined in combat over Iraq with similar sensor pods on the Marine Corps’ AV-8B Harrier II attack aircraft, the Navy’s F-14 strike fighters, and the Air Force’s F-15E and F-16 fighters.

“We’ve just introduced our aircraft data link, and we’re data-linking pictures from ATFLIR down to the [Special Operations Forces], and down to the Army guys with Rover III,” said Gaddis.

Rover III is a Panasonic Toughbook rugged laptop computer with a multichannel receiver, able to receive narrowband transmissions — such as C-band and L-band from the various pods — as well as wideband such as Ku-band, which can carry much more data at a much faster rate than narrowband.

The information sharing works both ways. In another scenario described by Gaddis, a Navy SEAL receives images from an unmanned aerial vehicle and, using computer software called Precision Strike Suite, automatically determines geographic coordinates for a group of six targets. A Super Hornet arrives on-station and the pilot sends a digital message over the data network that includes the aircraft’s altitude, time on-station, remaining endurance and weapons load.

The SEAL sends up air strike requests for all six targets, generating the coordinates within two minutes and transmitting them in less than a second. In some cases, the target data contains embedded images. The Super Hornet slews its ATFLIR to the targets and sends snapshots back to SEAL, and the aircraft attacks the targets.

The Super Hornet also is equipped with the Shared Reconnaissance Pod equipped to provide electro-optical and infrared imagery in near real time from medium and high altitudes to other units via a radio data link.

“With the reconnaissance pod, we’re now data-linking over a thousand images down to the [Tactical Exploitation System-Forward], the Army’s exploitation ground station that’s in one of Saddam’s palaces,” Gaddis said.

The recent addition of the Raytheon-built APG-79 active electronically scanned array radar into new production Block II Super Hornets will take NTISR to the next level. The radar has a synthetic-aperture radar imaging capability that creates high-resolution images of the ground with photographic quality. It also features a ground moving-target indicator that distinguishes moving objects from stationary ones.

“We’ve got to get that image off the aircraft in a seamless, no-kidding, gotta-do-it-right-now type of manner,” Gaddis said. “That’s really why we need high-speed [Internet Protocol]-based networks.”

Kory Mathews, Boeing’s director for Super Hornet program strategy and integration, said, “With a wideband [Internet] connectivity on the Super Hornet, those tens of seconds (of target detection through attack) come down to around one … literally greater than tenfold reduction in time simply to exchange an image.”

In April, the Navy and Air Force experimented with a number of Internet Protocol wideband applications with F-15Es and an F/A-18F in a joint expeditionary force experiment. These included image transfer, TV-like streaming video, voice transmission over the Internet and a blue-force tracker to plot the locations of friendly forces.

Another is the Heartbeat message, which is a continuous broadcast of an aircraft’s dynamic mission status (time on station, endurance remaining, location, weapons load). And yet another is called Point of Interest, with which a ground controller can send a pointer to a cockpit display and “move the pointer around in your cockpit to point at the target,” Gaddis said.

The Internet technology will allow a ground controller to mark locations of friendly and enemy forces on the cockpit image, as well as rings and boxes depicting no-hit zones and personnel safety areas to prevent the aircraft from hitting friendly forces.

The results of the experiment will be used by the services as a risk-reduction basis for determining future funding requirements. The Navy hopes to field Internet Protocol wideband data net capability in the Super Hornet in the 2012-2013 timeframe.

“We’ve got so many world-class sensors in [the Super Hornet] right now,” said Gaddis, who expects future Super Hornet crews “are going to start doing all sorts of things that we can’t even think about right now.”