United States:  Army Describes Patriot Friendly Fire Difficulties

By David Ruppe
Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON — While the U.S. Army continues to withhold details on the causes of three friendly fire incidents involving Patriot missile batteries during the war in Iraq, an Army organization has produced a “lessons learned” briefing that points to known weaknesses in the Army’s ability to distinguish friendly aircraft from enemy aircraft and missiles.

Addressing two of the Patriot incidents, the briefing document — a PowerPoint presentation of “insights” drawn from fratricide incidents during Operations Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom produced by the Army Center for Lessons Learned — says positive electronic means of identifying airborne objects have been demonstrated to have “low reliability.”

Jammed communications, aircraft transponders that cannot communicate with air-defense crews and some “atrophied” air-defense skills are identified as problems by the briefing, which urges using “procedural methods” of identification.

“Positive” methods of identification generally use electronic means, including radar, friend-or-foe identification transponders, computers and communications equipment, while “procedural” methods rely on tactics, techniques and procedures such as predesignating safe areas for friendly aircraft.

The briefing also urges strict adherence to procedures for identifying and targeting suspected enemy activity, as well as having “robust communications” and standardized battlefield identification systems.

The document further recommends the systems be operated manually and not put on automatic.

“Every effort must be made to avoid autonomous fire units,” it said.

The low reliability of the Patriot’s identification capability already was known, according to the briefing.

“Past exercises and tests run in SWA [Southwest Asia] indicate the percentage of aircraft that [are positively identified] remains too low.  There are too many points of failure,” it says. 

Philip Coyle, the former Department of Defense director of operational test and evaluation, said joint-service testing as far back as the early 1990s identified communications problems associated with air-defense systems when attempting to identify a friend or foe.

“This clearly was not a priority in the development of this equipment and should have been,” he said.

Lessons Learned

The Patriot system currently is the Army’s only operational ground-based theater air-defense system.

Designed originally for defense against enemy aircraft, the Pentagon has invested $3 billion since the 1991 Persian Gulf War to improve the Patriot’s ability to track and destroy ballistic missiles, according to a recent congressional study.

The briefing document was prepared by the Army center following Operation Iraqi Freedom to help quickly disseminate lessons learned from various friendly fire incidents.

It does not say explicitly what the causes were for the three incidents, which led to the deaths of two airmen.  The Army and the U.S. Central Command have been conducting investigations, and so far no reports have been released.

During the conflict, two coalition aircraft were believed shot down by the Patriot — a British Tornado fighter aircraft on March 24, killing two pilots, and a U.S. Navy F/A-18C Hornet fighter on April 2, killing the pilot.

The Tornado reportedly failed to re-enter Kuwaiti airspace from Iraq in a predetermined zone cleared for friendly aircraft and reportedly carried an identification beacon that could not communicate with the air-defense system.

The third incident involved a U.S. F-16 which was targeted by a Patriot system left by its crew to operate automatically so they could take cover, and the radar mistakenly identified the aircraft as a foe.

Questions About Equipment

Many of the briefing’s recommendations identify problems not necessarily specific to the Patriot, but more generally to difficulties created by the U.S. military’s increasing emphasis on consolidating multiple pieces of surveillance data to provide a more complete picture of the airspace, said Coyle.

“Basically, the problems stem from a lack of interoperability and from fusing together data from many different sensors in a complex battle space.  It’s a tough problem requiring interoperable equipment and sophisticated computer routines that can sort through what’s happening,” he said.

In an official report in 1995, Coyle wrote that problems in then-recent tests stemmed in part from different services and weapons systems using various message formats, standards, terminology and algorithms for correlating target-tracking information.

The briefing document says the previous tests and exercises showed identification transponders on aircraft became jammed because they were overloaded by electronic requests for their signal.

“Communications continue to be a choke point, and not all elements on the battlefield have continuous access to the datalink air picture,” the briefing says.

The briefing says better capabilities are needed to allow air-defense controllers to directly communicate with aircraft.

“More emphasis must be placed on designing the theater voice and data communication architecture,” it says.

The briefing also cites a weakness with Patriot operators.

“Over the past 12 years, Patriot Tactical Control Officers have been trained to focus primarily on TBMs [theater ballistic missiles], and some skills necessary to maintain situational awareness have atrophied.  Maintaining friendly and enemy SA [situational awareness] for all air tracks is critical,” it says.

The Army is reportedly stepping up development of a new identification system called Blue Force Tracking, as a result of the war, Federal Computer Week reported recently.

The Senate Armed Services Committee in a report earlier this year expressed concern that “longstanding” combat identification and friendly force tracking needs have not been pursued “in the most expeditious manner.”

“Recent military operations have further demonstrated the high risk of fratricide on the modern battlefield and re-emphasized the need for comprehensive, interoperable combat identification and blue force tracking architectures,” it said.

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U.S. Plans I:  Air Force Will Launch Ballistic Missile Targets From Aircraft

U.S. Air Force C-17 aircraft will begin launching ballistic missile targets over the Pacific Ocean in November, Space & Missile reported today (see GSN, July 9).

“They wanted to do a lot of tests and evaluations at some locations where we just can’t provide the targets,” said Air Force Col. Nat Thongchua, director of the Rocket Systems Launch Program.  “We had to come up with a way of launching a target from anywhere.  The concept came up and it was called the Air Launched Target,” he added.

The air-launched missiles can be used to test any form of interceptor and the cost is the same as a ground-launched target, Thongchua said.  The first test of the new target is scheduled to take place at Kwajalein, in the Marshall Islands (Ray Nelson, Space & Missile, July 28).

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U.S.-Russia:  Mistrust Could Hamper Missile Defense Cooperation, Russian General Says

Lingering mistrust between the United States and Russia could jeopardize the two countries’ efforts to cooperate on missile defense development, Russian Deputy Chief of Staff Gen. Yuri Baluyevsky said today (see GSN, July 16).

Baluyevsky said there was concern over the U.S. decision to upgrade radar stations located in Greenland (see GSN, March 6) and the United Kingdom as part of missile defense efforts (see GSN, Feb. 6).  Those stations would be ineffective in tracking a ballistic missile launched from the Middle East or North Korea, he said.

“That means that the theorists and pragmatists in Washington fear that the threat is coming from Russia — for example in the form of an unsanctioned rocket launch,” Baluyevsky said (Agence France-Presse, July 28).

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U.S. Plans II:  Miniature Kill Vehicle Development Plans Advance

The U.S. Missile Defense Agency and the U.S. Army have decided to choose a single defense contractor to develop miniature kill vehicles for U.S. missile defenses, Defense Daily reported today (see GSN, April 10, 2002).

The agency and the Army have decided, after months of debate, to award three concept definition contracts and then choose one contractor to proceed with the development of the vehicles, a program official said.  Previously, there had been discussion of choosing two concepts, instead of only one, for further development, Defense Daily reported (Kerry Gildea, Defense Daily, July 28)

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U.S. Plans:  Pentagon Might Combine Airship, Mirror System, Lasers

The U.S. Defense Department might combine two of its missile defense efforts — the Aerospace Relay Mirror System and the High Altitude Airship — to increase the range of military laser systems, Jane’s Defense Weekly reported this week (see GSN, July 23).

The Missile Defense Agency is scheduled to begin flight tests of the airship in 2006, and officials want to conduct experiments that combine both systems around that time.  The airship is primarily being developed to track missiles, but it could be teamed with the mirror relay system to allow ground-based lasers to track targets that are out of direct view, according to Jane’s.

The mirror system would be attached to the airship with cables and would sit 50 meters below the aircraft, according to Donald Washburn, who manages strategic relay mirror programs for the Air Force Research Laboratory at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico (Michael Sirak, Jane’s Defense Weekly, July 30).

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Taiwan:  Taipei Formally Requests PAC-3 Missile Defense Batteries

Taiwanese officials have formally asked to purchase three Patriot Advanced Capability 3 missile defense batteries from the United States, according to Jane’s Missiles and Rockets as reported today by Agence France-Presse (see GSN, July 8).

The U.S. Defense Department is reviewing the request and is likely to recommend that U.S. lawmakers approve the sale, Jane’s reported.

“Taiwan is moving forward on missile defense, including PAC-3 and EWR (early warning radar),” a U.S. government official said (Agence France-Presse, July 24).

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U.S. Plans I:  Northrop Grumman Refutes Airborne Laser Criticism

U.S. defense contractor Northrop Grumman has criticized a recent report issued by the American Physical Society that claims the Airborne Laser system would be ineffective at destroying enemy ballistic missiles during their boost phase, the Abilene Reporter-News reported today (see GSN, July 15).

Northrop Grumman Vice President of Missile Defense Patrick Caruana said some of the challenges facing the ABL system are inherent to any first-time weapons program.  Both Northrop Grumman and the U.S. Missile Defense Agency plan to examine the APS report, he said.

Bill Ehrie, former commander of Dyess Air Force Base in Texas, said he believed the U.S. Air Force would have already considered the effectiveness of the ABL as a boost-phase defense system.

“I’d like to know how so late in the game they could come up with this conclusion,” said Ehrie, who has not seen the APS report.  “It would seem strange that this issue hadn’t already been considered by the Air Force, given the length of time they’ve been in development with ABL,” he said (Tara Copp, Abilene Reporter-News, July 24).

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U.S. Plans II:  Cities Lobby to Become X-Band Radar Base

Some U.S. cities that border the Pacific Ocean are lobbying the Defense Department to station a floating missile-defense radar near their communities, the Seattle Times reported yesterday (see GSN, June 19).

The Sea-Based Test X-Band Radar would be part of the developing national missile-defense system.  The Defense Department is considering positioning the radar platform in the Marshall Islands; Adak, Alaska; Valdez, Alaska; Pearl Harbor, Hawaii; Ventura, Calif.; Oxnard, Calif.; or Everett, Wash.

Adak Mayor Chuck Luck traveled to Washington Tuesday to promote his island community as a good home for the radar, while Everett Mayor Frank Anderson has vigorously opposed it, noting that the radar could rise 25-stories above the sea.

“We could have shook hands and said, ‘Everett doesn’t want it — give it to us,’” Luck said.  “We’re a struggling city.  We’re trying to build our economy and our tax base,” he added.

Meanwhile, Ventura and Valdez officials have also lobbied for the radar platform.

“They are talking about putting this monstrosity literally in our downtown,” Anderson said.  “If there are places that want it, why don’t they take Everett off the list?  We’d be happy to help them get it,” he added (Rachel Tuinstra, Seattle Times, July 23).

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U.S. Plans:  Defense Officials Develop Plan to Use Airborne Laser

U.S. Air Combat Command officials have completed a preliminary plan for how to use the Airborne Laser missile defense system in combat once it is fully developed, Inside Missile Defense reported today (see GSN, July 15).

The plan remains tentative, however, because the Defense Department has not determined how many ABL aircraft will be built, according to Lt. Col. Rick Nefzger, the chief of the system’s special management organization at Air Combat Command.

The laser system is a Boeing 747-400 aircraft that will operate with four lasers designed to shoot down an enemy missile in its boost phase.  The Missile Defense Agency is set to spend $3.5 billion on the program between fiscal 2004 and fiscal 2009.

“The original idea was seven aircraft,” Nefzger said.  “But right now I don’t know how many aircraft we are going to get because no one has told me what they really want us to do.  Do you want one orbit?  Do you want two orbits?  Do you want one 24-hour orbit or do you want two 24-hour orbits?” he asked (Thomas Duffy, Inside Missile Defense I, July 23).

Contingency Plan Involves Chemical Dump

Officials at Edwards Air Force base in California, where the system will be tested, are considering ejecting dangerous chemicals from the laser system if the plane’s landing is jeopardized.

“During nominal test conditions the ABL system will launch out of Edwards, perform flight tests and return to base with remaining chemicals onboard,” base officials said.  “However, if an in-flight emergency arose that required jettison of chemicals in order to avoid a safety incident, the ABL would do so prior to landing at a divert base other than Edwards,” they added.

The chemicals would be dumped over the California desert, Inside Missile Defense reported (Thomas Duffy, Inside Missile Defense II, July 23).

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