http://www.af.mil/news/airman/0300/jam.htm
The story is just now unfolding how Electronic warfare crews flying EC-130H’s full of
secret jamming equipment from Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, Ariz., hastened U.S.
victories by muddling enemy communications in every battlefield since the Panama
invasion.
Snarling across a spectrum of frequencies, the specially-rigged Hercs named
“‘Compass Call” — were able to refuel in flight and linger for hours near combat zones,
suppressing enemy radio signals to air and ground defense forces, without interference
to friendly channels.
Even at their home base in Tucson, the work of the 41st and 43rd Electronic Combat Squadrons is not well known. Deploying from a former bomber alert
area, both are small, compact units with only 13 aircraft and fewer than 700 people between them. With the exception of the flight engineer, women currently
are assigned in all 13 “combat support” aircrew positions, including mission crew commander who manages the mission. The jammers share a training
squadron to prepare replacements for the top secret world of electronic battle.
Parked apart on the Davis-Monthan ramp are seven other EC-130E’s belonging to the 42nd Airborne Command and Control Squadron, whose mission often
complements the jammers. The 42nd EC-130E’s house a removable Airborne Battlefield Command and Control Center which contains computer displays,
digital communications capabilities and satellite communication radios. In the Kosovo war, the jammers and ABCCC (called “AB-triple C”) squadron often
shared air space and fighter cover.
The electronic combat squadrons “currently split the world up into areas of responsibility,” said Lt. Col. Douglas R.
Callihan, the 41st ECS’s outgoing commander. “To make it easier on ourselves, we’ve divided up the linguists.”
The 41st linguists speak Spanish, Arabic and Farsi, the language of Iran. They study idiomatic expressions by
watching Arabic and Spanish programs on cable TV in the squadron dayroom. At the 43rd, the languages are
Chinese, Russian and Serbo-Croatian. For the invasion of Haiti, the two units borrowed Creole speakers from the
Army.
In the past 10 years, the jammers haven’t missed a fight. They blitzed the communications of Manuel Noriega in
Panama, helped blindfold the defenses of Saddam Hussein in Iraq and zapped the Serbs in Bosnia and Kosovo.
The EC-130H’s, crammed with jamming antennae, are big, slow and fly low.
“We don’t seem to fly at the altitudes [other planes] want us to,” Colonel Callihan said. “We are usually in the way of people who are going up to altitude or
on their way down. It’s a slow airplane, but that’s to our advantage” for targeting and jamming.
Electronic combat crews have been known to arrive early in a theater, but only when the battle gets underway is the jamming equipment switched on.
Drifting along the fringe of enemy air space, the electronic combat aircraft zing enemy communication across the spectrum.
Lt. Col. Victor P. Jones, an electronic warfare officer and the 43rd ECS’s new operations officer, put it this way, “We add to the fog of war. We attack the
enemy’s ability to control and marshal his forces.”
Just how the electronic combat crews go about their business remains classified. Their aircraft belong to a family of weapons commanders regard as “low
density, high demand” — meaning they are available in low numbers but have a high demand because of their impact on a battlefield.
Antennae protrude from the EC-Hercs from nose to tail. The cargo bay is jammed with black boxes and crew positions. Through a bit of onboard computer
wizardry, the jammers avoid jamming themselves.
“We get as close as we dare,” says Capt. Todd LeGrand, an electronic warfare officer with the 41st who flew in the Haiti theater and in Southern Watch
against Iraq. “We were able to create holes in the enemy’s defense system.”
During the Kosovo dust-up, the “EC” airplanes circled slowly over the Adriatic Sea and Macedonia, sometimes just 150 miles from defended targets,
transmitting a tattoo of radio confusion.
“If the enemy is using radio, we can affect that. But,” Captain LeGrand conceded, “the only way to affect a land line is to drop a bomb on it.” That’s exactly
what happened in Bosnia and Kosovo — while the jammers made mincemeat of Serb defensive radio signals, the bomb-droppers cut the land lines.
Usually one of the 42nd’s ABCCC aircraft orbits nearby to function “as a powerful addition to and complement to the command and control in the corps
commander’s air-ground war,” said Lt. Col. David J. Landon, director of the 42nd’s EC-130E airborne operators. However, they also pass along information
provided by other systems, “offering a ground commander an opportunity to attack targets he might not know about by other means.”
Battle commanders considered the jammers’ work so vital during the Kosovo campaign that an EC-Herc was almost always in the air, and aircrews felt the
strain. Senior Master Sgt. Scott J. Deason, 41st ECS operations superintendent, said a typical mission involved a “two-hour brief and an hour debrief [with]
10 to 14 hours flying — about a 16- to 17-hour day during a 24-hour ops.”
Said Lt. Col. Patrick E. McMan-aman, the 43rd commander, “Those kids flew around the clock, with minimum crew rest — about a 70-hour work week —
that’s the story.
“I had folks we had to get waivers for, because they were flying more than that [330 hours in 90 days]. These kids would land, get their minimum crew rest
and turn to fly 24-7 for three months.”
“‘The other side of the story were the maintainers,” he said. “Those guys were out there changing engines, changing props. You’ve got to remember these
airplanes are 1973 models; they’re a challenge to keep up.”
Only now are the jammers discussing themselves. An aircrew was interviewed by CNN at Aviano Air Base, Italy, during the war. The Arizona Daily Star, a
Tucson newspaper, interviewed an electronic combat officer when the 43rd ECS first deployed. An editor of Aviation Week and Space Technology reported
on a peacetime mission in a two-part series on the mission that began in November.
“We want to get the word out on the mission and, as best we can, the capabilities of the platform,” Colonel McManaman
explained. Behind the publicity is a concern for recruitment, retention and recent high ops tempo.
The long deployments have exacerbated staffing and training for both squadrons. “‘We are critically undermanned in
airborne maintenance technicians, who maintain the onboard computers in flight,” he reported. Both squadrons are short
linguists.
Because the aircraft are old, “they just don’t have some parts in supply anymore,” explained Senior Master Sgt. Duncan T.
Tanaka, the ground maintenance supervisor for the 41st ECS.
Nor does he have enough skilled mechanics. Nearly half, he said, are “brand new three-levels. That means the guys who
are skilled are working twice as hard.” The condition has forced commanders to waive maintenance requirements for 7-levels “to sign off on a requirement.”
The electronic combat ops remains high for both EC squadrons and the ABCCC unit. All fly six to eight sorties a week for practice.
They also spend time telling commanders what they can do. “Because we are not a well-known weapon system, we usually have to work hard with the
CINC’s staff during the early days of a deployment to help the staff effectively employ us to our full advantage,” Colonel Callihan said. “We try to get out and
talk to these guys as much as we can. We go to many of the Red Flags [and] almost every Green Flag.”
He smiles at the thought. “We’re usually asked to tie our hands behind our back during exercises, because we can fairly well ruin it for everybody else if
we’re allowed to play full-up,” he said. “Besides, we cannot turn some of this stuff on during peace time.”
Meanwhile the jammers are adopting better ways to defeat the new communication technology adopted by potential U.S. adversaries — procedures sure to
catch an enemy unaware, Colonel Callihan said.
“There are some capabilities that, when I first learned about them, I just said, Wow!”
by Chief Master Sgt. Tom Kuhn
photos by Tech. Sgt. Lance Cheung