Defense Week
March 12, 2001
Pg. 3

Air Force Neglects Electronic Warfare, Congressman Says

By Christian Lowe

One of the Air Force s best friends on Capitol Hill thinks the service is paying insufficient attention to electronic warfare.

Rep. Joseph Pitts (R-Pa.), co-chairman of the House s Electronic Warfare Working Group, told Defense Week he s concerned that a new Air Force warfighting strategy the service unveiled on the Hill last week seems to neglect the radar-jamming mission.

Gen. John Jumper, chief of the Air Force s primary warfighting body, Air Combat Command, briefed congressional staffers and reporters Thursday on the new strategy, called Global Strike Taskforce (GST). The new doctrine would use long-range bombers like the B-2 Spirit stealth bomber and the next-generation F-22 Raptor fighter jet to clear the skies and rapidly halt an enemy s advance within hours.

But conspicuously absent from this plan is the incorporation of electronic warfare, or EW, assets such as the EA-6B Prowler, which jam enemy radars, helping strike planes like the B-2 and F-117 Nighthawk maximize their stealthy potential.

"The GST concept has some positive features, but I am concerned about the continued neglect of EW capabilities within it," Pitts said in a statement.

Pitts is a veteran EW officer on the B-52 Stratofortress, having flown 116 combat missions over Vietnam, and he established the EW Working Group in 1999. As this Congress convened, he left the House Armed Services Committee for International Relations, but he retains an intense interest in defense, and EW in particular, his spokesman said.

"I am concerned, specifically, that the Air Force approach to EW under GST will perpetuate the existing problemthat the Air Force has a host of EW capabilities, but not a real understanding of EW as a mission in and of itself," Pitts said.

Instead of using planes dedicated to the EW mission, Jumper said GST would take a holistic approach to electronic warfare, using computer network attack, jammers aboard the a multi-mission platform airplane, and self-protection pods on the strike planes themselves to blind an enemy to the attack. These, combined with the radar-evading stealth of the F-22, B-2 and Joint Strike Fighter, and the tactics of flying higher and faster, make the planes less detectable.

"The whole concept of electronic warfare is now caught up in the total notion of information operations," Jumper said. "The idea that we have to get weapons to targets is the problem and we can go about that a number of ways."

There may be a near-term need for specialized aircraft for electronic warfare, he said, but the future of these assets is uncertain. But Pitts was still skeptical of this approach.

"The Air Force should not view stealth, supercruise [high speed], and C4I [command, control, communications, computers and intelligence] as a replacement for EW, but rather as an addition to, or a way to improve, our EW capabilities," he said. "There is still, and will be in the future, an immense value to a dedicated, tactical support jamming aircraft, like the Prowler, to provide that extra layer of protection for our force."

Key to the success of the GST strategy is intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, or ISR, data being used to affect strikes moments after it has been collected. Jumper said he s frustrated with the current culture of the ISR community, which puts a premium on the collection part of the equation and leaves the packaging of the information into useful data to others.

"You know, we have a cultural problem in our intelligence community," said Jumper. "What we have is people in the air operations center, ... what I call

tribal representatives, sitting in front of their work stations and interpreting their tribe s piece of equipment ... and interpreting that tribal language for the rest of us."

"[In the past] when you ran into the room with the prized image of the SS-25 hiding in the forest of Siberia, that s when you popped the cork on the champagne," Jumper added. "What we re asking our intelligence people to do now is not just to collect but to target. ... Now you don t pop the cork on the champagne until the target s hit."

In addition to the cultural change, Jumper says computers need to do more of the analyzing of the ISR datadata that could then be transmitted to strike planes and fed into weapons systems.

Another initiative: Incorporating all of the various intelligence gathering and dissemination duties into one aircraft instead of a host of different platforms like the E-3 AWACS, RC-135 Rivet Joint and E-8 Joint STARS. Jumper calls this single plane, currently in the concept phase, the multi-mission platform.

"Its primary feature is that when you sit down at a console on this airplane, the console doesn t know what it s going to do today until you click the icon," said Jumper. "Are we going to do MTI (ground motion tracking)? Are we going to do SIGINT (signals intelligence)? Are we going to do air surveillance? And you can apportion that to whatever the mission calls for."

"The simplicity of that overwhelms some," he added.

Though the new strategic plan puts an emphasis on using the 20 B-2 bombers in the Air Force s inventory, Jumper was non-committal on whether he advocates buying more. Some on Capitol Hill, including long-time bomber advocate Rep. Norm Dicks (D-Wash.), have called for additional B-2 buys.

But Jumper said he wants to analyze the entire bomber force of B-1 Lancer, B-52 Stratofortress, and B-2s and how they best fit into the future strategy as it evolves, before calling for a specific number of new bombers.

The $180 million F-22 Raptor, the modernization pride and joy of the Air Force, will likely be augmented for strike missions as well as air superiority, Jumper said. Even though that puts a heavier work load on the force of 339 F-22s the Air Force plans to buy, Jumper said, so far, he s sticking with the current number.