Military Poised for Era of Super Surveillance

Beads of light appear on a large video screen in a darkened room, and an Air Force captain explains their tactical significance to a Navy vice admiral and Marine brigadier general.

A revolutionary method of waging war--or, better yet, of deterring war--by being able to monitor and assess an enemy’s every move is being tested this tranquil night aboard the command and control ship of the Navy’s Third Fleet as it steams off the Southern California coast.

In an era where American military forces are being downsized and yet asked to stay combat-ready to quell brush-fire conflicts around the globe, the value of surveillance intelligence has soared. Firepower is important, but information is crucial.

“Information is everything,” said Navy Lt. Ross Mitchell, cruise missile officer on the Navy’s Third Fleet staff.

The beads of light show the presence of vehicles, helicopters and other equipment being moved by troops at the Marine Corps base at Twentynine Palms--as captured by an Air Force jumbo radar plane cruising at 31,000 feet and relayed in a nanosecond to the Coronado.

“Amazing,” said Vice Adm. Herbert Browne, commander of the San Diego-based Third Fleet.

“Tomorrow has arrived, sir,” a subordinate suggested.

The Coronado experiment marked the first time that intelligence from what the Pentagon calls the Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System (Joint-STARS) had been relayed to a ship at sea. In Operation Desert Storm and Bosnia, Joint-STARS planes sent data only to land-based stations.

If the Coronado experiment is deemed a success--and initial reviews are upbeat--it could mean a quantum leap in the ability to gather military intelligence, even beyond that provided by satellites, spy planes and clandestine operatives, officials said.

Herbert York, director emeritus of the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation at UC San Diego, one of the world’s leading experts on issues of technology and military weaponry, said he believes that Joint-STARS and other high-tech intelligence systems will provide the United States with a significant advantage over potential foes.

“It will give the U.S. an advantage both for strategic balance-of-power issues and also in tactical situations for short-duration conflicts,” York said.

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Military analyst James F. Dunnigan, in his comprehensive book “How to Make War: A Comprehensive Guide To Modern Warfare for the Post Cold-War Era,” predicted that Joint-STARS and other intelligence-gathering systems, “will revolutionize battlefield operations in the coming decades.”

As a measure of its faith in Joint-STARS even amid shrinking military budgets, the Pentagon is ordering more of the planes while closing bases and cutting back on research and development and production of other kinds of weaponry.

The Air Force now has two Joint-STARS planes--which are converted Boeing 707s--with plans for 20. The cost per plane is set at $225 million, which is three to four times the cost of the average fighter plane.

With Joint-STARS beaming information to Navy ships, the military would no longer need to establish a beachhead on hostile turf to erect its Joint-STARS receptors or to depend on cooperation from a nearby government. Staffed with commanders of all four services, a warship could move swiftly into position in international waters when hostilities seem imminent.

“The Navy and Marine Corps don’t need visas,” said Cmdr. Dave Summer, coordinator of the Third Fleet’s experiment to test Joint-STARS and other gear and tactics.

With Joint-STARS, any move made by an adversary would be detected “in real time” and could be countered by massive firepower from offshore ships or attack planes from carriers or land bases, without the need to commit ground troops.

“This is going to allow us to focus our forces where we can do the most damage with the fewest [American] losses,” Browne said of Joint-STARS and other information systems being tested. “We have an American public that will not tolerate losses, and that needs to be part of our equation.”

Browne and other military commanders hope that any potential adversary will back down without the United States needing to fire a shot when the adversary realizes how closely its movements are being watched.

“This is information warfare,” said Air Force Capt. Keith R. Jones, chief of contingency plans for Joint-STARS. “We’re going to win because we’ll have way more information than the other guy could even dream of.”

Although it has not received the same hoopla as the B-1 bomber and other expensive weapon systems, Joint-STARS has been a major project for the Pentagon since the contract was awarded in 1985 to Long Island-based Grumman Aerospace Corp. That company was purchased three years ago by Los Angeles-based Northrop Corp. to form Northrop Grumman.

During Operation Desert Storm, the two prototype Joint-STARS planes were rushed into action before final testing. Military analysts credited Joint-STARS with giving the United States a tactical advantage by allowing for more accurate air strikes and permitting commanders to monitor their troops in the field.

“We’ve come a long way from Desert Storm, that’s for sure,” said Bill Guttabauro, a Northrop Grumman communications engineer aboard the Coronado.

The amount of information provided by Joint-STARS has increased significantly since Desert Storm. The clarity of the presentation on the screen has also improved. And the computer’s memory has increased from three to 60 gigabytes.

The 24-foot-long radar unit, mounted under the fuselage like a canoe, can distinguish between tracked and wheeled vehicles, and between moving and stationery objects, Air Force officials said.

The radar can spot a single helicopter in flight and tell when an antenna such as that used by radar or missile sites is moving. The radar’s sweep can encompass an area of 25,000 square miles--in any weather--while the plane stays 120 miles away, the officials said.

On video screens in the Coronado’s operational center, the radar information from the Air Force E-8C is superimposed on a map of the area being scanned, allowing for pinpoint targeting.

“The goal is to operate within the adversary’s information loop,” said Navy Capt. Rick Williams, Third Fleet’s assistant chief of staff for command, control, communication, computers and intelligence.

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Joint-STARS was part of an exercise, which ended last week, called Fleet Battle Experiment Alfa. Involved were the Coronado and the Benfold, one of the Navy’s state-of-the-art, Aegis-class destroyers.

The experiment was designed to test two prospective methods of directing Navy firepower ashore: An “arsenal ship” stocked with 500-plus missiles, and a centralized system called “ring of fire” to decide which ship will hit which target.

Also tested was a high-tech system of detecting in real time the launch of ballistic missiles--like the Scud missiles used by Saddam Hussein to strike at American forces and terrorize the Israeli civilian population. Developed by Aerojet Corp. of Azusa, the system detects a launch, predicts its impact point, and allows for immediate warning and retaliation.

Within two years the Navy hopes to have a ship-based missile capable of shooting down a Scud, to complement the land-based Patriot missile in the Army’s arsenal.

Simultaneously with Fleet Battle Experiment Alfa, the Marine Corps conducted large-scale war games at Twentynine Palms to, among other things, test the use of hand-held Newton computers by troops in the field to report their positions and intelligence about “enemy” movements.

Information from troops in the field was beamed to the Coronado where it was integrated with the Joint-STARS radar information to give Navy and Marine brass aboard ship a minutely detailed picture of the mock battlefield at the sprawling desert base.

“There is so much information,” Summer said. “The task is to get it out of the stovepipe, fuse it into a complete picture, separate what is important from what is not, and then get it to the war-fighters in a matter of minutes.”

Browne, a 33-year Navy veteran who flew the A-6 Intruder during the Vietnam War and commanded the carrier John F. Kennedy during Desert Storm, hopes a shared faith in technology like Joint-STARS will build trust among the sometimes competitive branches of the military.

“Teamwork, you can build,” Browne said. “Trust you have to earn. Trust in the services is hard. I think we’re getting better at it. . . . If these systems help build that trust,” they will be successful.

Browne is having the Coronado retrofitted to include space for a joint command including high-ranking officers from other services. Each Joint-STARS mission is led by an Air Force officer and an Army officer, and intelligence specialists from both services are in the planes to interpret the radar data and to add text.

“The information that used to take hours to get now takes minutes,” Jones said. “The information that took minutes now takes seconds. It’s a tremendous jump in capability.”