GEOINT in OEF/OIF/GWOT
The United States has been at war in Afghanistan since 2001 and Iraq since 2003. Intelligence played a crucial role in the run up to both operations, and a particularly contentious role in justifying the invasion of Iraq. The later is a particularly interesting topic. Please read in "The Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction" the transmittal letter, and Overview (pages 1-38), then scan the chapters on Iraq (pages 43-250) and Afghanistan (pages 267-278). Then look at the rest of the document for specific and useful references to geospatial intelligence.
For those who are interested you might look over this optional reading on the Senate Report on Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction and consider the role of geospatial intelligence in the justification for the invasion of Iraq.
POSTWAR FINDINGS ABOUT IRAQ'S WMD PROGRAM AND LINKS TO TERRORISM AND HOW THEY COMPARE WITH PREWAR ASSESSMENTS
A spatial or geographic perspective provides great insight into OEF and OIF. To get us started, read this article from the Geographic Review that looks at the military geography of Operation Iraqi Freedom from the invasion up until the initial insurgency.
Reading
Read "Operation Iraqi Freedom: A Military Geographical Perspective" in Geographic Review July, 2005. (Pages 373-399)
Whether you support the war or not, geospatial intelligence is playing an increasing role in supporting the troops on the ground. Some of your classmates are on the ground in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other locations supporting or conducting operations right now. We look forward to hearing from them in our forum to provide their perspectives. Consider this short article from the American Forces Press Services.
'Geospatial Intelligence' Helps Save Troops' Lives
By Rudi Williams
American Forces Press ServiceWASHINGTON, May 5, 2005 — Mention the word "geospatial" to troops on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan and they might ask, "What's that?"
"Geospatial" and "intelligence" are two words that help save a lot of lives on the battlefields and get the combatants back home to their loved ones safely. But the troops will never know when these two words come into play to protect them, because much of what the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency does is top secret.
The agency is a member of the U.S. intelligence community and a Defense Department combat-support agency. It has its headquarters in Bethesda, Md., with major facilities in the St. Louis and Washington areas. Retired Air Force Lt. Gen. James R. Clapper Jr., a former senior intelligence officer for the Air Force, heads the agency.
To better understand the meaning of the word geospatial, "geo" comes from the Greek word for Earth. "Spatial" refers to place. Therefore, geospatial might be described as the means of finding out what's happening on every place on Earth.
That's a good thing for warfighters from the highest-ranking combat commander to troops in foxholes. And it's a boon for homeland-security officials and recipients of NGA's humanitarian efforts, such as peacekeeping, tracking floods and fires, and providing disaster relief for earthquakes and other natural disasters.
In an interview with the Pentagon Channel and American Forces Press Service, Clapper said geospatial intelligence represents an expansion of a long-used Army term, "intelligence preparation of the battlefield."
"We've changed the term to mean intelligence preparation of the environment," Clapper said. "That's what we can glean from looking at the Earth and those matters which have national-security implications deriving from either natural or manmade factors."
NGA's objective is to provide timely, relevant and accurate geospatial-intelligence to decision makers, whether they're sitting in a foxhole or the White House, said the former enlisted Marine.
"Obviously, our biggest customer is the military," Clapper said. "But we support other cabinet departments, too. A growing mission for us is (supporting) the Department of Homeland Security."
Geospatial intelligence combines mapping, charting, imagery analysis, and imagery intelligence. NGA uses pictures to make sense of volumes of data and information. The organization provides tailored, customer-specific geospatial-intelligence analysis, services and solutions. When counterterrorist operations are to be launched, NGA tries to provide geospatial-intelligence answers to where the bad guys are located, the type of terrain in the area, and lines of communication. Clapper said the war on terrorism has changed NGA profoundly. "We're not unique here," he added. "We're part of a sea change that is going on in the intelligence community."
He said the battle model of legions of motorized rifle divisions charging an enemy is obsolete. "And the intelligence structure, which built up over decades during the Cold War, was geared toward that monolithic nation-state threat," Clapper said. "Of course, that's profoundly changed — symbolized most graphically and most unfortunately with the attacks of 9/11 and the aftermath of that. So now we've gone from large, fixed complexes, as we did during the Cold War, to chasing individual people — very fleeting targets."
Today's adversaries place a lot of emphasis on such things as denial, camouflage and deception, which makes fighting them tougher, Clapper said.
NGA has contributed to many successes in the war on terrorism, but most of them must go unpublicized, Clapper said. Saying he can't go into specifics, the retired general said there have been some profound successes in terms of attacking terrorists' networks. "We'd like to think we had some impact there," he added.
"In a homeland security context, we think we've helped effect the safety of many special events in the United States — political conventions, Super Bowl, World Series or any other potential event where a terrorist attack could occur," he said. "The nation has done a lot to protect such events, and we play an important role by providing the common operating picture for all the entities, whether they be federal, state or local."
NGA and its predecessor — the National Imagery and Mapping Agency — have participated in consequence-management support after natural disasters, Clapper said.
"This includes imagery, which is a great assist to planners and responders so they can see graphically the full extent of damage, such as where roads are out and power lines are damaged," he said. "That helps with planning for recovery efforts. So after 9/11, it was sort of a natural morphing from support to disaster relief and recovery efforts into a homeland security mission because it's much the same."
NGA support teams are embedded in the Department of Homeland Security to provide front-end support with "reach back to mother NGA," just as is done with combatant commands, Clapper noted.
A major challenge facing NGA today is modernizing infrastructure. "We need to modernize and create an infrastructure that will accommodate the many sources of data and information we're acquiring," he said. "We're going to be in a very data-enriched environment. So we must come up with an infrastructure that will automate this process so we're not depending on humans to do so much of the labor."
With dramatic improvements in communications over the last decade, "we're able to move around a lot of data and imagery these days that we couldn't do 10 years ago," Clapper said.
Increasingly, NGA's experts are finding that they need insight from troops in the field. "There's no substitute for what the boots on the ground can see," Clapper said. "One of our challenges is to extract information from what they see and can collect. Every soldier is a sensor, and we need to capture that data as well.
"So it's a two-way street," Clapper noted. "It isn't just a monolithic national agency descending on the soldier. We need their input and their feedback and this needs to be a constant loop."
Now consider some specific applications of geospatial intelligence in support of the Warfighter. The NGA Pathfinder magazine is an internal NGA publication that allows NGA personnel to highlight their contributions. Some of your classmates may have written some of theses articles. Recognize that this is a public affairs product and view it with a critical eye. Nevertheless, these insider stories of geospatial intelligence support of the Warfighter show what is happening during the current conflict.
Reading
Scan the NGA Pathfinder magazine March/April 2005 and read the articles addressing geospatial intelligence support to warfighters in Iraq and Afghanistan.
A very interesting situation is developing as regards the mission, operation, and command and control of an increasingly critical resource and technology: Unmanned Aerial Vehicles or UAVs. UAVs were originally used only for reconnaissance and surveillance. The escape of Osama bin Laden from Tora Bora, Afghanistan resulted in a push for armed UAVs resulting in Predator UAVs armed with two Hellfire precision guided missiles. Read the following articles and consider these questions:
- What is the relationship of UAVs to network centric warfare, and geospatial intelligence if any?
- What are appropriate functions for UAVs and what are the ethical/moral considerations of using lethally armed UAVs or unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs)?
- Who should control UAVs and why?
We look forward to discussing this topic in the forum and hope that classmates with experience in this area will share what they can.
December 12, 2005
Long-Distance Warriors
From a base outside Las Vegas, an Air Force squadron fights real-life war games in Iraq and Afghanistan
By Sally B. Donnelly
NELLIS AIR FORCE BASE — Six days a week, Shannon Rogers kisses his wife and two young kids goodbye and wheels his battered 1989 Chevy Cavalier out of the driveway of his suburban Nevada home. The houses here are cookie cutter, done in beige stucco. Like most of the other dads and some moms in this traditional middle-class community, Rogers heads down Interstate 215, toward his job near Las Vegas, using the 30-minute drive to make the mental transition from family man to workplace professional. But Rogers will end up in a place far different from that of his fellow commuters: when he arrives at work, he will be at war in Iraq.
Rogers, an Air Force major and experienced fighter pilot, is part of an elite group of U.S. troops playing a crucial role in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan from the U.S.'s most notorious playground. From Nellis Air Force Base, outside Las Vegas, Rogers controls a Predator, a flimsy drone that has been transformed from a spy plane into one of the wars' most lethal weapons. Predators played a key part in catching Saddam Hussein and have killed al-Qaeda suspects in Pakistan and Yemen. In September a Predator tracked 11 insurgents who had attacked a U.S. base in Iraq, then killed them as they fled.
What makes the Predator mission—and Rogers' job—so unusual is the 7,000 miles between pilot and plane. Basing the crew members at home rather than at the front keeps them out of harm's way and saves the military money. Still, "for us, it's combat," says Rogers, 34, who has been deployed to battle zones twice, most recently Iraq this summer. "Physically, we may be in Vegas, but mentally, we're flying over Iraq. It feels real."
Certainly the decisions they face are life and death, as TIME observed when it was recently granted exclusive access to operations of the Air Force's 15th Reconnaissance Squadron, which commands 25 Predators from Nellis. It was 10:30 p.m. in Nevada, 9:30 a.m. in Iraq, and after two hours of watching insurgents fire a pickup-truck-mounted .50-cal. machine gun at U.S. troops in western Iraq, Rogers and the sensor operator with whom he works were given the command to shoot the truck. Both developed a case of what Rogers calls the "trembles"—the nervousness of wanting to kill the enemy but injure no one else, combined with the enormity of taking human lives. Just as Rogers pushed the button to let fly one of the Predator's Hellfire missiles, a car appeared and started to drive toward the pickup. His partner's job is to keep the missile locked on target or, if necessary, divert it to a place where it would cause as little damage as possible. "What do we do, sir?" the partner asked in a shaky voice. "Stay on the target and hope he drives fast," said Rogers coolly. The car passed, and the truck exploded violently when the Hellfire struck. Rogers let out a whoop and exchanged high fives with his partner.
The Predator is an unlikely star. In military terms, it is an unmanned aerial vehicle, or UAV. It was first flown a decade ago and for years was armed with only an unsophisticated camera for intelligence gathering. After the fall of 2000, when Osama bin Laden was spotted in Afghanistan by an unarmed Predator, the U.S. government sped up a program to fit each aircraft with two Hellfire missiles. Awesome sounding but benign looking, the 27-ft.-long Predator is painted a dull gray and shaped like an upside-down spoon with wings. The drone is made of lightweight composite plastic and metal and has a tiny, propeller-driven engine—adapted from a snowmobile's—with a decidedly unimpressive top speed of only 150 m.p.h. Rogers' previous craft, the supersonic F-15 jet fighter, can fly up to 900 m.p.h.
The Predators commanded by the 15th Reconnaissance Squadron are launched and landed by troops at the front, but while they are in the air, up to 24 hours straight every day, they are controlled by Air Force crews sitting in six grounded cockpits at Nellis. Each cockpit consists of two large armchairs set in front of banks of computer screens with keyboards, control joysticks and live video images. Video is relayed from a camera mounted on the bottom of the Predator not only to Nellis but also to troops on the ground, commanders in the region and the Pentagon. The crew consists of a pilot who flies the plane and launches missiles and a sensor operator who controls the camera and the laser targeting device for the two Hellfires. The crew members communicate with troops and commanders in the war zone through secure instant-messaging systems as well as radio transmissions routed through a mission controller who sits in a command center at Nellis and issues orders to the crew.
The conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan have proved the worth of unmanned aircraft—which are cheaper and, because there is no pilot to be shot down, politically more palatable than traditional airplanes. The thousand-plus UAVs in the military's arsenal range from tiny craft that can fit in a soldier's palm to ones the size of business jets. Military analysts are predicting that within two decades, UAVs may even take over the jobs of pilots flying fighter jets. It makes economic sense; the $4 million Predator is a bargain compared with the Air Force's newest fighter, the $354 million F-22.
The effectiveness of the Predator in war zones, however, has translated into stresses in an unlikely place: back home. The operational tempo puts intense pressure on the small group of men and women who deliver death from a distance. The 180-person Nellis unit runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week, with no holidays. The unit has logged more flight hours than any other squadron in the Air Force yet is only 65% staffed. Crew members are so tightly scheduled that when on duty, they have to ask permission to go to the bathroom and cannot leave their chairs unless there is someone to replace them. The troops call the Predator compound Shawshank because it reminds them of a prison. The schedule demands that the men and women change shifts—days, evenings and overnights—every three weeks, which makes fitting into normal civilian life off base nearly impossible. Morale, say many crew members, is suffering. Crew members are experiencing more problems in their personal lives, including separation and divorce.
One may expect that being home would be a plus for the troops, but actually it's often a complication. Soldiers in the field have to cope with danger, but at least they live in one world, whereas their counterparts at Nellis commute daily from war to civilian life. "How many people can say they went to work today and killed or captured a few terrorists?" says Lieut. Colonel John Harris, commander of the 15th. "Our people are proud they contribute to the war from home. But being at home brings some additional stresses. We're very close to a crisis."
Rogers says he feels pulled in two directions, between spending more time helping with the war effort and being an integral part of his family. He rushes home after his day shift to jump in the pool with his kids. "At least I get to sleep in my own bed," says Rogers. But he says being deployed in Iraq was easier because he was isolated from the daily errands and the emotional demands of family life. His wife Laura feels differently about his being home. "It takes the edge off being a pilot's wife," she says, "that at least I know I won't be getting that phone call in the middle of the night telling me my husband has been shot down."
September 13, 2007
Pg. 1U.S. Pilot Helped Clear the Fog of War
Greg Harbin saw a way to streamline airstrikes. The solution — and his cause — was the Rover, a device that would one day save his life.
By Julian E. Barnes, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
In the summer of 2003, an Air Force pilot named Greg Harbin was doing desk duty at Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia.
Day in and day out, Harbin sat in front of five computer screens, scanning photographs and video sent by unmanned planes flying 1,200 miles away, over Iraq and Afghanistan.
His job was to take that information, along with reports from ground troops, and identify fresh targets — Taliban fighters or Iraqi insurgents.
But one thing puzzled him.
When regular units called for an attack by a Predator drone, the request went to Harbin, and then, if approved by a general, to "pilots" in Nevada, who fired the missile by remote control. The process often took as long as 45 minutes.
By contrast, special operations forces could call in attacks by unmanned Predator aircraft in less than a minute.
The difference, Harbin learned, was that a handful of special ops units were equipped with a device called the Rover, which gave them the same view as the pilots in Nevada. This greatly simplified communications.
Why don't all American fighting units have the Rover? he asked himself. Then he put the question to his boss, Lt. Gen. Walter E. Buchanan, commander of the Air Force in the Middle East. Buchanan's reply: Why indeed.
Buchanan dispatched Harbin to Texas to get a crash course in the Rover, a combination video receiver and laptop computer, and to bring back several of the kits with him. Seventy-two hours after he left Texas with four Rovers, Harbin was in Fallouja, Iraq, teaching members of the 82nd Airborne Division how to use it.
Harbin's days sitting in front of a computer were over. Over the next four years, Harbin would take a niche technology, spread it throughout the military — and help change how the Air Force fights wars.
One day, it would save his life.
The Rover, or the Remote Operations Video Enhanced Receiver, was born in 2002, shortly after the Afghanistan war began.
Christopher Manuel, an Army Special Forces chief warrant officer, had long wanted ground units to see, in real time, the video footage shot by Predators. After serving in Afghanistan, he traveled to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio to make his case. Engineers quickly developed a prototype of the Rover system.
Over the next year, it was used exclusively by special operations forces. Harbin's mission to widen access to the technology began with the 82nd Airborne, the first conventional forces to use the system. His next stop was Mosul, Iraq, and the 101st Airborne Division, which happened to be his brother Eric's unit.
There, Harbin realized a limitation of the Rover: It could communicate only with Predators, and that day the Predators were grounded by bad weather. F-15s were flying, and he wondered why the Rover could not connect with the cameras mounted on them.
So Harbin sent an e-mail to Air Force officials. "Why … can't I see what the pilot sees on his targeting pod????? We can do it with Predator, this shouldn't be so goddam hard," he wrote.
"I was mad," Harbin said later. "I wanted my brother and his unit to have the best protection they could."
An Air Force officer wrote back: "Harbs, we got it." The message touched off a chain of events leading to a new version of the Rover that also could communicate with fighter planes, bombers and some helicopters.
Harbin, now a lieutenant colonel, is 43 and 5 feet 9, with receding blond hair that gets a little longer and wilder when he is deployed. A slight Alabama cadence gives his voice a relaxed, measured feel that nevertheless has an edge of urgency. He is a man in a hurry.
Throughout the early months of 2004, Harbin shuttled from Mosul to Baghdad to Najaf, wherever violence was flaring, teaching people how to use the Rover. By April, he was near the end of his tour. But on his way to Baghdad for his flight home, he was dropped off in Fallouja.
He used the quick stop to show the Rover to Marine Maj. Kevin Shea, a friend from the Air Force Academy.
Harbin accepted an invitation to join a Marine patrol, an opportunity to demonstrate the Rover. Not long after the patrol rolled out of the camp, a rocket-propelled grenade flashed by with a whoosh, and a mortar shell landed with a crack. As the Marines around him scrambled to return fire, Harbin sat mesmerized.
Through the din, Harbin heard a radio crackle and a voice report that a Predator was flying overhead. Through the dust of the battle, Harbin looked out the window of the Humvee for a place to work his Rover kit. This would be no demonstration; this would be survival.
He jumped from his vehicle and sprinted across the road toward another Humvee. The laptop's battery was dead, and the Humvee had no power outlet. Undeterred, Harbin cut off the electrical cord and hot-wired the laptop to the Humvee's battery.
As the laptop powered up, another rocket-propelled grenade burst nearby. Harbin reeled. His ears rang from the force of the explosion. He turned back to the Rover. The kit worked, linking with the Predator overhead. The plane's camera sent an image of the surrounding area to the laptop's screen.
Harbin searched the video, and pinpointed the insurgents, about 100 yards away. He yelled for the Marine captain and pointed to the enemy mortar position on the screen. The captain called in a strike. The Predator fired a Hellfire missile at the insurgents, killing them.
Harbin and two Marines were injured, one fatally. He would later learn that shrapnel from the grenade had destroyed the hearing in his left ear.
His actions in the fight earned him a Bronze Star Medal for valor, but they ended his days as an Air Force pilot. Harbin and his superiors say the Rover system saved his life and those of many of the Marines on the patrol.
"For sure," he said, "I would be dead without this technology."
Harbin was born and raised in the mining and lumber town of Parrish, Ala., in the Appalachian foothills. His parents divorced when he was 7. For most of his childhood, he lived in a trailer with his mother on a small patch of woods.
As a child, Harbin read the World Book encyclopedia obsessively, and inspired by what he read, he led his friends and his brother, Eric, into adventures. One time they built a wooden "submarine" from wooden crates and milk jugs in a pool by an abandoned grist mill. It was not any sort of technological breakthrough, his mother said.
"I went down and watched the submarine go under," Janice Harbin recalled. "The problem was getting it back up."
His youthful creativity grew into serious study in high school.
"There were not a lot of highly educated people in Parrish who dreamed big dreams, I guess you could say, but Greg was a big dreamer," said Stan Randolph, Harbin's history teacher and football coach. "He had visions for what he wanted to do."
In Randolph's class, Harbin took a deep interest in the military history of World War II. Harbin decided to apply to the military academies, and in 1983, he entered the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colo.
He spent the first year on academic probation but his last two years on the dean's list. After graduation in 1987, he became a pilot and eventually an instructor who flew air shows over NASCAR races on the weekends. It was a typical Air Force pilot's career, with stints at bases near Oklahoma City; Ellsworth, S.D.; San Antonio and other cities.
Until he met the Rover.
When he returned to the United States after the attack in Fallouja, Harbin's inner-ear injury left him feeling nauseated and off-balance. As he was recovering, Harbin learned that Shea, his academy classmate, had been killed in Fallouja by an insurgent rocket in September 2004.
Harbin was deeply depressed, but the loss sharpened his focus on trying to speed the military's acceptance of the Rover, said John P. Wheeler, a top Air Force official.
"People try to live two lives after the death of a friend," Wheeler said. "You try to do what your friend might have done."
Over the next few months, Harbin designed a Rover training course and lobbied the Air Force to purchase more.
His next opportunity to use the system did not come until August 2005 — and it was in the United States.
Harbin arrived in New Orleans 40 hours after Hurricane Katrina. He intended to draw video from a small unmanned aircraft to get an overhead view of New Orleans. But the Federal Aviation Administration would not let the craft fly.
He then taped a Rover video camera to a Black Hawk helicopter, but the image it captured was too shaky.
"That is when Col. Harbin said, 'Let's take the high ground,' " remembered Kyle Stanbro, a retired Air Force special operations master sergeant, who accompanied Harbin to New Orleans. They climbed 51 floors to the top of a bank building to set up Rover cameras on tripods. The system beamed images of the flooded Lower 9th Ward to the military command in Colorado.
The images quickly demonstrated the need for additional small Coast Guard vessels to help rescue people trapped in their homes. Within hours, the military command, in part because of the Rover images, ordered more than 100 small boats to New Orleans.
"We could show them visually that we needed more boats," Harbin said. "And those assets showed up a lot faster than they would have."
In the Pentagon, decisions about procuring weapons systems are made by civilians, not uniformed officers. One of the ways civilian service secretaries create their legacy is to find promising, but underappreciated, technology and get behind it.
For much of 2005, the Air Force was without a permanent civilian leader, but in November, Michael W. Wynne was sworn in as the service's secretary. He requested briefings on new technologies and initiatives, and Harbin was asked to discuss the use of the Rover in New Orleans. The secretary was sold.
"Greg, what you are about to do is … change how we fight," Wynne recalls saying.
In early 2005, there were 183 Rover units in the field. There are now 1,500 of the 12-pound kits in use mostly in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the service has ordered 2,200 more. So far, the Air Force has spent about $72 million on the Rover.
Still, Air Force officers think the Rover should be as common as a radio. To fully equip active-duty military units, the National Guard and the Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. would need 16,544 Rover kits, an Air Force study found.
Wynne and Harbin are also pushing development of the next generation of Rover — Rover IV, or what airmen call "the John Madden version": The operator can draw on the screen and a pilot can see the notation, just as television football commentator Madden draws lines during replays. The new version, which costs about $90,000, nearly three times the cost of the current model, is due to go into the field in February.
Air Force officers have no illusions that the Rover technology will single-handedly change the course of the war in Iraq. But it has increased the accuracy of bombs: In 2003, "danger close" — the minimum distance away from U.S. forces a bomb could be dropped — was 2,000 meters or about 18 football fields. Today, thanks to smaller bombs and the improved accuracy the Rover system allows, it is 75 meters, less than one football field. Harbin says equipping helicopters with Rover technology could help pilots avoid insurgents armed with shoulder-fired missiles. And the Rover system helps units minimize accidental civilian deaths.
This spring, Harbin was sent to Afghanistan to show NATO forces fighting the Taliban how to use the Rover.
In May, a Canadian army regiment got a call from someone in a village near Kandahar. A group of Taliban had killed two women in the town. Harbin and his NATO team used the Rover to help track the Taliban fighters. They told a NATO fighter plane to hold off as the fighters moved through the alleyways of the village. When the fighters stepped on a road, Harbin's team called in the strike. A 500-pound bomb from the NATO plane killed five fighters. One Taliban fighter escaped, but Harbin tracked him on the Rover, and called for the Predator to launch a Hellfire missile.
As the missile neared the target, Harbin noticed a second "heat signature" on the Rover screen and called for a course correction. The Hellfire struck the fighter, but spared the first target indicated on the Rover, which turned out to be a dog.
"We found them, tracked them, then picked the time and the place to strike in order to minimize collateral damage," Harbin said. "We were so precise that the dog got away."
Now, back from Afghanistan, Harbin walks the halls of the Pentagon, carrying his Rover laptop in a backpack. He darts from office to office, using videos to sell the system to decision-makers from every service.
Among top Air Force officials, there is little doubt that without Harbin, the Rover might have remained a niche technology used by only a few.
"I am not the guy who invented it. I am not the guy who built it. I am not the only one who believes in it," Harbin said. "My role was to get it out there."
Sitting in a Pentagon cafeteria lined with vending machines, his Rover at his feet, Harbin paused between meetings to consider what he had achieved.
"When you believe in something, you can't just talk about it and make PowerPoint slides. You have to go out to the battlefield and show how it works," he said. "I knew it would be useful. I didn't know it would change the way we fight."
September 13, 2007
DoD's England Will Soon Settle Pentagon Turf Battle on Drones
By Roxana Tiron
Deputy Secretary of Defense Gordon England is expected to decide as early as Thursday whether the Air Force should become the executive agency for all medium-and high-altitude drones, capping a bitter turf battle between the Air Force and the rest of the military services.
But England's impending decision, after a meeting of the so-called Deputy Advisory Working Group (DAWG), may not be able to stymie a potential legislative fight on the Hill, where strong allegiances - both in favor of and opposing the Air Force's proposal to become the executive agency - have formed.
The Air Force's proposal could affect missions, budgets, facilities and training.
This spring the Air Force took its fight to become the executive agency for all medium- and high-altitude unmanned aircraft to Capitol Hill, prompting the other military services to mount campaigns to defend their territory.
The Air Force has aggressively made the case both at the Pentagon and on the Hill that it is organized, trained and equipped to be the executive agent and that therefore the change represents a cost-effective option.
The Air Force's proposal promises savings of $1.7 billion, prompting skepticism from the other services, which say the Air Force has had cost overruns on its own drone programs.
After a previous attempt was rejected in 2005, the Air Force renewed its campaign this spring to become the executive agent for all unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) flying at 3,500 feet and higher. In July, the Pentagon's Joint Oversight Requirements Council endorsed the establishment of an executive agency for medium- and high-altitude unmanned aircraft systems under the Secretary of the Air Force.
The endorsement prompted outcry from the Army, Navy, Marine Corps and Special Operations Command, whose leaders asked for the issue to be discussed under the auspices of DAWG, so that acquisition representatives could formally review the proposal.
While Congress has mostly left the decision to the Pentagon, members on both sides have been writing letters to England in anticipation of his decision. Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), together with the rest of the Alabama delegation, has been one of the most outspoken critics of the Air Force's proposal.
Shelby has been going head to head with fellow defense appropriator Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.), who has taken the Air Force's side and has been pushing for the executive agency concept.
For a third consecutive year, Shelby inserted language in the defense appropriations bill that would prohibit the transfer of research and development, acquisition or program authority relating to tactical unmanned aerial vehicles from the Army.
The language would also ensure that the Army will retain operational control over and responsibility for the Extended Range Multi-Purpose (ERMP) UAV. That drone is the Sky Warrior, a system that has been in the Air Force's crosshairs and plays a pivotal role in the service's argument that it ought to become the executive agency. The Air Force flies the Predator UAV, a system considered similar to the Sky Warrior.
The decision to make the Air Force the executive agency over high-flying UAVs could have a detrimental effect on Alabama. Fort Rucker, Ala., is the Army's primary UAV Center of Excellence, which ensures that doctrine and training techniques are in line with integrating the drones on the battlefield.
At Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Ala. — where most of the Army's UAV work is managed — more than 250 people are connected with the UAV programs, bringing $66 million into the local economy, according to several reports.
Shelby, who traveled to Iraq over the August recess, made sure to talk to battlefield commanders there about the executive agency concept. Commanders, he said, "agreed that the Army needs to maintain control of their UAS [unmanned aerial systems] assets because from a tactical standpoint, our soldiers in the field need a versatile, service-specific capability."
After the most recent Pentagon base realignment and closure round, North Dakota lost Air National Guard F-16 fighter jet missions in Fargo. In order not to lose people, North Dakota and in particular Grand Forks Air Base could stand to attract more UAV work. The Air Force envisions Grand Forks to house a series of UAVs.
But Dorgan argues that his fight is not about jobs, but about eliminating duplication and waste. "We are already going to have UAVs assigned to North Dakota," Dorgan said. He added he would like to see reform within the Pentagon.
In recent congressional hearings, Dorgan questioned the need for the Army to pursue the Sky Warrior. The Army has had to defend its Warrior medium-altitude UAV program, which critics — including the Government Accountability Office — have said is too similar to the Air Force's Predator UAV.
The Predator was a sole-source contract awarded to General Atomics as part of an advanced concept program. The Army competed with its program; General Atomics ultimately won. The Air Force has bought two Warrior aircraft for testing.
At the heart of the issue is a philosophical difference between the Army's and the Air Force's use of UAVs: The former views them as tactical and the latter as strategic technology. The Air Force defines UAVs as full-motion video intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance systems. Also, the Air Force uses trained pilots to fly the drones, while the Army trains its soldiers to do so.
But Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Michael Moseley said in an interview with The Hill earlier this year that he is "not trying to poach anybody's territory, nor am I trying to degrade or deny any tactical requirement. I am trying to make it faster, better, more in-depth, more robust and get it fielded faster."
