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Kosovo: Allies still lack real-time targeting
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Allies still lack
real-time targeting
BRYAN BENDER
JDW Bureau Chief
Despite lessons learned from the 1990-91 Gulf War, NATO forces participating in Yugoslavia as part of Operation 'Allied Force' have not fielded a real-time targeting capability the ability to pass images of enemy installations and troop formations directly from spacecraft or airborne surveillance aircraft into the cockpit of fighter aircraft or other weapons systems.
Although significant strides have been made in data dissemination, or accelerating the time between locating targets and weapons delivery demonstrated by the lone launch of a Tomahawk Land-Attack Missile early in the campaign when it was learned a Serb MiG-29 was out in the open at a Yugoslav airbase officials interviewed by Jane's Defence Weekly said US and allied forces remain unable to instantaneously provide "shooters" with radar images and other intelligence gathered by the plethora of allied surveillance and reconnaissance assets and spy satellites.
Real-time targeting as well as real-time battle-damage assessment has been a top priority for Department of Defense and other military planners, particularly to deal with mobile surface-to-air missile batteries and other assets that can be moved very quickly.
"We learned our lessons in the Gulf War but not well enough," said a US intelligence official. From target identification to weapons delivery, he said, "three to four hours is the best we can do".
One platform, the Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System (Joint STARS), at the request of the US European Command (EUCOM), has been slated for an upgrade that would enable it to directly pass a target map via a satellite uplink into the cockpit of a fighter aircraft. Beginning in 1995, EUCOM was spending about $50 million per year on this effort.
US Air Force officials could not be reached for a status report on the upgrade, but the intelligence official said the current operation could be "a test case" for the capability if it is ready. Two Joint STARS aircraft are participating in the operation.
According to other officials, real-time targeting is not only hampered by the lack of such upgrades, which many agree can be instituted with little technological challenges, but a dearth of Global Positioning System (GPS)-guided weapons such as Tomahawks, whose co-ordinates can be "redialled" to take updated intelligence information into account.
Another limiting factor is space-based intelligence assets, officials said, which have not changed much since the Gulf War. Likely on call for the current operation, intelligence officials said, are US National Reconnaissance Office Ferreg signal and electronic intelligence satellites to pick up air defence radars; KH-11A+ radar imaging satellites; Defense Satellite Communications System (DSCS) satellites; various eavesdropping satellites; and Europe's MOPS meteorology spacecraft.
Such satellites, especially the imaging ones, follow very specific tracks and pass over an area of interest infrequently. Before the current operation, such satellites were unlikely to have photographed Yugoslavia's difficult terrain. "There could be new buildings there we didn't know before," one industry official said.
The USA hopes to
solve some of these problems with the Discoverer II series of small imaging
satellites, which will be launched in the 2002 timeframe, officials said.
Jane's Defence Weekly