Interesting.
November 29, 2004
Moving targets, beware
Air Force-Navy exercise takes aim at would-be enemy ships
By Nicole Gaudiano
Times staff writer
As Air Force planners considered what to call an exercise in which bombers would blow up a moving ship, they couldn’t help but recall the stunts of legendary pilot William “Billy” Mitchell, who led the air campaign in World War I.
They read an article in Aviation History magazine that described the battleship admirals’ “resultant fury” after Mitchell proved bombers could sink one of the world’s largest battleships, and then boasted about the achievements of air power to the press.
More than 80 years after his feat, the Air Force hopes its “Resultant Fury” demonstration with the Navy will set new milestones. The plan is to pound three slow-cruising boats and the USS Schenectady with weaponry perhaps even Mitchell couldn’t have envisioned — Global Positioning System-guided J-series weapons.
The demonstration was set for Nov. 19, 22 and 23 in a still-undisclosed Pacific location. If successful, it will mark the first time Joint Direct Attack Munitions and Joint Standoff Weapons will be used to strike moving maritime targets, adding a new capability for the weapon systems.
Although Air Force B-52s and a B-1 and Navy F/A-18s will drop the weapons, the demonstration should prove any airframe loaded with those weapons can take out an enemy ship with precision in any weather, said the demonstration’s director, Maj. Mike Eliason, chief of the Pacific Air Forces weapons and tactics branch.
“So we’ve basically taken this weapon and we’ve taken the next step to say, ‘I don’t have to just use it to strike stationary items,’” he said.
Despite the demonstration’s name, the Air Force isn’t trying to once again incite resultant fury from the admirals. Service officials say the demonstration is an opportunity to showcase the two services’ abilities to work together, using the bombers and Hornets to accomplish the same goal.
However, as one expert sees it, Billy Mitchell’s spirit is still alive and well in this demonstration.
“The Air Force wants to send a message, primarily to the U.S. Navy, that ‘We’re also in the business of being able to go after hostile surface ships,’” said Kurt Campbell, senior vice president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank.
“It is also the case that China’s surface naval combatants have grown rather substantially, and at a time that the United States is repositioning some of its ground forces to deal with Iraq, this is a useful reminder to everyone in the region that U.S. military capabilities remain very robust,” he said.
U.S. Pacific Command said the rotational deployment provided for training opportunities that could integrate bombers into the command’s joint and coalition exercises from a forward operating base.
The Air Force has always had a role in overseas attack missions, Eliason said. With this demonstration, “it’s just something we’re re-emphasizing.”
Participants in the demonstration were to spend Nov. 19 making sure communications equipment and satellites are working properly, but the real action was to begin Nov. 22.
The day begins with Airborne Warning and Control System and Joint Surveillance and Target Attack Radar System platforms gathering the air and surface picture for the Pacific Air Operations Center.
The AOC, participating for the first time at this level, will analyze the intelligence and find three targets: 30-foot boats being towed by remotely controlled vessels traveling at about 12 to 20 knots.
The tow vessels are worth $1.5 million. They won’t be sunk, Eliason said. But the other three platforms are expected to go down.
Two F/A-18 Hornets will take the lead, firing two inert JSOWs from 60 miles away into one of the towed targets, poking holes in it.
Then come the B-52s carrying the real deal: live JDAMs. They will target the other two boats.
“We expect those two little boats they’re hitting to disappear,” Eliason said.
The J-STARS crew commander will have a data link to the weapon, and will guide it into the moving target.
Next, the B-1 will show up to polish off the Hornets’ spoils with some “old-school style targeting,” dropping general-purpose bombs on the already punctured boat, Eliason said.
Organizers predict it will take 25 minutes to sink the boats, which should be child’s play compared with the next day’s target: the 522-foot Schenectady.
This tank landing monster, decommissioned in December 1993, will be towed to an environmentally designated area and released. Because of its mass, this ship should be moving at about four to six knots when the B-52s unleash six to 10 JDAMs for simultaneous impact.
“I expect that boat to blow into a thousand pieces,” Eliason said.
If it doesn’t sink, another B-52 pilot will illuminate the target and drop laser-guided GBU-10 bombs to finish it off.
Eliason said Affordable Moving Surface Target Engagement technology, a modification to the JDAM, has been used to strike moving tanks and trucks, and has a 100 percent hit rate. This demonstration will take the same technology and move it over water.
He expects to get hits on these boats within three feet of the target, “and we’re going to do it from altitudes that provide us sanctuary,” he said.
Sinking moving targets has always been a difficult task. The Air Force has previously dropped Harpoons for maritime interdiction exercises, but that weapon system has its drawbacks, according to Eliason.
He called it an old and “indiscriminate” weapon system that would hit anything within a 30-mile radius.
Doing maritime jobs
Naval author and analyst Norman Polmar sees the Resultant Fury demonstration as just another maritime mission the Air Force is trying, but won’t maintain the capability to keep performing. He cited the B-52s being armed with Harpoons and outfitted to lay aerial mines as examples. “Periodically, the Air Force gets on a kick that, ‘Hey, we can do maritime jobs,’” Polmar said.
Even if the exercise proves successful, he said it doesn’t mean it will work in wartime unless it is practiced repeatedly.
“Can they do it?” he asked. “Of course they can do it. With a JDAM or a JSOW, you can hit almost anything in peacetime, especially when the target is not shooting back at you. Again, you look at Billy Mitchell and level bombing in the [19]20s and then you look at the Battle of Midway when B-17s dropped 335 bombs on Japanese ships and did not score a single hit.”
But although the Harpoon is an expensive weapon system, Richard Aboulafia, an analyst with the Teal Group, said the JDAM is “cheap and cheerful” and would be a “nice improvement” on the battlefield.
“If you’re limited by the number of delivery systems or by the economics of mass [precision guided munition] use, that’s not going to have nearly the effect of using large numbers of cheap and effective JDAMs,” he said.
