Even with the starring role in Afghanistan played by pilotless Predators armed with Hellfire antitank missiles, Air Force Secretary James G. Roche says the service is resisting pressure to build another, more capable missile-firing reconnaissance drone.
Instead, the Air Force wants to create what Roche calls an unmanned "hunter-killer" that could employ far more exotic technologies than streaming video in the never-ending quest to link "sensors" to "shooters" on the battlefield.
"What everyone wants to shove on us is another reconnaissance drone with a weapon, and we're going, 'No, no, no,' " Roche says. "We drew up the concept of 'hunter killer' -- which is to try and have persistent observation and a near instantaneous attack if you choose to do so. What's the appropriate set of technologies involved in hunter-killers? It might be a signals [intercept] system that correlates to a radar. It could be little drones dropped from big drones that go and doublecheck something for you."
Roche, former president of Northrop Grumman Corp.'s Electronic Sensors and Systems Sector, says he and other Air Force strategists are also rethinking the F-22, which has for years been envisioned as the supreme air combat fighter aircraft. But things aren't quite so simple any more, given the new fusion -- demonstrated in Afghanistan -- of fighters in the sky and Special Operations forces on the ground.
"This idea of hooking back to the Army, hooking back to Special Forces, is turning everybody on," Roche says. "So the F-22 to us now is going to be as much an air-to-ground machine as it's going to be an air-to-air machine."
The role modification, Roche says, requires a basic change in the plane's radar that can be accomplished by borrowing technology being developed for the other new fighter plane in development, the Joint Strike Fighter. "You get the radar to have better ground mapping," he says. "Everything that was done for JSF was built to be back-fitted into the F-22."
SENSOR-TO-SHOOTER II: Army Secretary Thomas E. White says the Army's new digital, rapid-fire artillery piece, the Crusader, should also reduce sensor-to-shooter time to near zero. "And that means we can finally start hitting fleeting targets that we pick up with our sensor platforms," he says, "and get steel on them before they've moved very far."
Pentagon critics cite the Crusader as the classic example of a Cold War-era weapons system that lives on in the Pentagon budget for political reasons. Allocated $475 million in next year's defense budget, the self-propelled howitzer is being developed by United Defense Industries Inc., a defense contractor controlled by the Carlyle Group Inc., an investment firm whose advisers include former president George H.W. Bush and former secretary of state James A. Baker III.
White says Crusader remains in the budget, not for political reasons, but because it gives the Army the firepower it has lacked for the past 40 years. He blames the Army for loading the weapon up with requirements, greatly increasing its weight, and failing to make the case that Crusader is a "truly transformational system."
No, at a slimmed-down 42 tons, White says, the Army will be able to load a Crusader plus a resupply vehicle onto a single C-17 transport. "The robotic cockpit on this thing not only loads the gun automatically, but calculates all the fire control data in a very short period of time, and it's going to be completely integrated on the digital battlefield," White says. "I'd like to have it tomorrow morning."
MILITARY NOMENCLATURE: In a recent story on how a dead battery in a Global Positioning System device was partly responsible for a "friendly fire" incident near Kandahar in December that killed three U.S. servicemen and wounded 20, the individual operating the machine was identified as an Air Force combat controller.
Air Force Combat Controllers, or CCTs, responded with a barrage of e-mails, pointing out that the responsible individual was, in fact, an Air Force Enlisted Terminal Attack Controller, or ETAC.
While Combat Controllers are air traffic controllers within the Air Force Special Operations Command who have more than 78 weeks of Special Operations training, Enlisted Terminal Attack Controllers are radio operators who receive additional training and work with Army Special Forces, but are not Air Force Special Operations troops.
Vernon Loeb's email address is loebv@washpost.com.
