by Al Venter
I applied to go in with the USAF to cover this aspect of the Kosovo war on a whim. I was living in Chinook, Washington, and the great McChord Air Force base was kind of ‘up the road’ – though still four or five hours drive away, depending on the weather – so I used my Jane’s cachet to gain entry. A week later the trip was on.
I was told that I’d be going in with Japan-based Newsweek lensman Charlie Cole, an adventurous news-gatherer who, among other exploits, regularly made his name by being in the right place at the right time. He was at Beijing’s Tiananmen Square when Chinese troops and tanks dispersed dissidents and the photo he took at the time made history: a lonely student protestor who challenged supreme authority by standing in front of one of the tanks. The young man was taken away by the police and never seen again. Charlie’s picture of the event appeared later that week on the cover of Newsweek, taken in spite of the presence of a group of security guards with cattle prods who tried to keep the media at bay.
Charlie Cole standing in front of a US jet fighter. (Charlie Cole)
Back in the United States, prior to leaving for the Balkans – and with our appropriate security clearances in place – we were told to report to McChord the day before we were due to leave. On arrival, Charlie and I were given our own quarters in the wing normally reserved for generals, complete with well-stocked mini-bars that were operated on the ‘honour’ basis. While a lot was taken for granted, not everything came free.
What we were told shortly after we arrived at the base was that we were to fly to Europe in a C-141 StarLifter, that beautiful old workhorse of Air Mobility Command that has since been superseded by the even more expansive C-17. A four-engine jet, the C-141 (it was finally retired from active service early in the new millennium) had an overall length of 168 feet and a payload approaching 50 tons.
It was interesting that one of the first publications I inadvertently paged through while sitting in the cockpit after take-off, was a booklet with the words ‘Top Secret’ printed in large letters on its cover. A most interesting document, it provided complete instructions on stowing thermonuclear bombs on board. I was obviously spotted and later, when I wanted to reacquaint myself with some of the details, it had mysteriously disappeared. Somebody onboard obviously decided that this scribe had no business going through such sensitive material.
The Balkans conflict was one of the last big operations involving C141s. Late in 1995, the Pentagon ordered the deployment of 20,000 US troops to the former Yugoslav Republic of Bosnia as part of a multinational peacekeeping force. Eighteen crews and six aircraft from McChord were in place at Rhein-Main Air Base, Germany, by mid December that year, ready to play their part. In spite of severe weather conditions, McChord crews and aircraft were soon flying troops and equipment into Tazsar, Hungary, for Operation Joint Endeavour.
The flight to Frankfurt was a delight. There were two stops, the first at McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey and from there on to the Portuguese-held Azores in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. It was dinner time when we got there, and we had time on hand while freight on board was offloaded and the plane refuelled to enjoy a few rounds at the local bowling rink on the periphery of the island’s civilian/military air base.
Once airborne again, it was time for bed. There are enough bunks onboard the StarLifter to allow every member of the crew at least a few hours of prostrate shut-eye. I asked to be woken about an hour out of Frankfurt and slept in total comfort throughout.
Having flown between Europe and America more than 100 times in a professional career that spans decades, this trip, I discovered, was the most pleasant crossing ever. What’s more, the trip on board the C-141 was courtesy of the US government, which underscores my most basic personal premise about journalism: it is better than working…
USAF strategic bomber and transporter – now phased out of service – that took us to Europe and back again from the McChord Air Force Base in Washington. (Author’s Collection)
Having been ensconced in Frankfurt, Charlie and I became integral members of the crew after we’d all been billeted in one of the local hotels. Daily, depending on the nature of the mission, we’d be taken through security to whichever area we’d be flying sorties from.
One of our first tasks was viewing air-to-air refuelling from one of several USAF KC-10 and KC-135 ‘flying tankers’, which returned to Germany after a good day’s work. Though pretty mundane to those doing this sort of thing each day, each sortie had its moments, especially since we were usually operating almost within sight of what was then still the Yugoslavian coast.
It was a massive operation and in the final weeks there were almost 4, 500 personnel from a dozen NATO countries including Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Turkey, the United Kingdom and the United States. At any one time there were more than 100 NATO aircraft in the air around us, the majority heading in from air bases in France, Germany, Greece, Italy and the United Kingdom or from aircraft carriers in the Adriatic.
Sometimes, it would be only half a minute between one of the fighter jets having topped up and another arriving under our port or starboard wings to do the same. Since we were linked to the cockpit, we could listen to all transmissions taking place, including some fighters heading in to us with almost-empty fuel tanks and perhaps a minute of flying time left.
It sometimes needed a pretty deft hand at the controls to manoeuvre these fighters into position under the boom so that the receiving receptacle atop the fighter’s fuselage could marry with the fuel line.
Apart from the usual range of USAF F-15s, F-16s, and F-18s, and US Navy EA-6Bs, there were also French-built Mirage 2000 fighter and ground-attack aircraft, Super Etendard and Jaguar fighter-bombers as well as Tornados operating from a variety of air bases in Italy, including Istrana, Gioia de Colle, Practica di Mare and a host of others. Add to those tallies Dutch F-16s, British GR-7 Harriers as well as Sea Harriers, Spanish EF-18s, German Jaguars, Turkish F-16s and many others. All had their specific requirements and some were thirstier than others.
It was, as one British journalist described it after seeing this operation from up close, ‘a veritable air armada’. As he declared, it involved the most modern planes available from many like-minded nations and was something that modern-day Europe had never before experienced on this scale.
To us supernumeraries, it was interesting that the KC-10 from which we took many of our pictures is a military version of the McDonnell Douglas DC-10 and can carry an average payload of 40 tons. The KC135, used for in-flight refuelling, is a military version of the Boeing 707.
We were to discover afterwards that in an effort to improve the capabilities of the Air Mobility Command (AMC) tanker fleet, and to provide support to carrier-based aircraft, wing-mounted drogue refuelling pods were installed on a number of both KC-10s and KC135s. This was done largely to provide the extra margin of receiver safety necessary for over-water operations.
Everything linked to fuel delivery took place at the rear of the plane, where we would sit in comfortable seats and view the process from up close. We could wave at the pilots if we caught their eye, though most of the time they were preoccupied with monitoring a situation that could rapidly become critical if not properly handled.
Since some of this work took place over enemy territory, combat jets that came in never switched off their weapons systems during the refuelling process. Several times we’d watch a pilot break off contact and swerve away, sometimes violently. Their onboard radar had picked up hostile emissions from the ground.
As it was explained afterwards at a pre-flight briefing back at base, the Serbs needed to activate their ground control stations in order to ‘lock onto’ NATO aircraft flying above if they were to have any hope of firing their SAMs, of which they had an inordinate number. Almost all the missiles were of Soviet origin and quite a few were very sophisticated indeed. Occasionally, Coalition aircraft were fired at, but the moment the enemy activated its missile radar systems, all fighter planes in the vicinit
y would be alerted. Within moments, several clutches of missiles would be heading in towards the target on the ground.
View from refueller of an F-16 being refuelled during the Balkan War. (Charlie Cole)
Quite a few Serbian anti-aircraft crews died in such strikes. To us, flying at a moderate height in an unarmed, converted passenger jet, the support was comforting. It was good to learn afterwards that NATO forces never lost a single airborne tanker as a result of enemy activity.
The refuelling system was basic. In the KC-135, the boom operator worked in a prone position. In the KC-10, by contrast, there was a small chamber at the rear with three seats and a large reinforced window, almost two by six feet in size, which the operator used to observe everything going on below. The boom would be lowered and he’d watch the receiving aircraft coming in, directing him by radio if necessary to make small adjustments in speed or altitude.
We’d observe the entire process carefully while a system of mirrors allowed the ‘boomer’ to monitor other aircraft in formation off the KC 10 wing tips. The boom was ten feet longer than the KC-135’s and featured ‘fly by wire’ flight controls and an increased fuel transfer rate of up to 1,500 gallons per minute.
Then followed our sortie on board one of the Joint-STARS Boeings, which almost didn’t happen for me because my security clearance hadn’t come through from Washington by the time that crew call was sounded. Five minutes later, one of the officers poked his head through a door and gave a shout. I was on my way, the first non-American civilian to have this experience.
But first, some background to what it’s all about.
One of the concepts that originally brought the Joint-STARS project to fruition was the fundamental truth about conflict: in war, he who achieves better movement on the battlefield invariably dictates its outcome. That little maxim is as apposite today as it was in the time of Napoleon’s swift attack at Austerlitz. It was equally valid in Vietnam and in Operation Desert Storm, which is one of the reasons why the system is referred to as ‘The Window to the Battlefield’.
The difference today is that Joint-STARS is designed to give those involved in a ground war – whether it be Kosovo, Iraq, the Philippines or Afghanistan (or Syria or Iran in the future) – the living dynamics of the battlefield. Most significant, it comes in real time.
In the same way that the E3 Sentry (AWACS) provides all-weather surveillance, command, control and communications in the air, the Joint-STARS concept is land-fixated. Operational procedures allow it to act in concert with ground-hugging AH-64 Longbow Apaches by digitally passing along targeting information. Co-ordinated with a good mix of manned and unmanned assets, it has the potential for a truly seamless data transition, either in peacekeeping or in the sort of debacle that the Allies faced in Kosovo.
When we were aloft over Kosovo there were four or five of these machines in full operation, several of them based in Okinawa to monitor developments in North Korea and, obviously, offshore China. The tally of converted Boeing 707-300 series aircraft for this work is ultimately likely to number more than two dozen, with a fair proportion designated for the Far East.
As explained by Lieutenant Colonel Kevin C. Peterson and Major Phillip G. Basinger in a post-Kosovo report, the Joint-STARS is an Army-Air Force system designed to provide immediate surveillance intelligence, targeting, and battle management to the land component commander:
The system is made to support a corps-size unit and consists of a USAF and Army aircrew, and what we like to call the ‘business end of the system’, the Ground Station Module (GSM), operated by the Army.
The E-8, using its chin-mounted multimode radar, collects moving target indicators (MTIs), fixed target indicators (FTIs) as well as synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery. It downlinks all this information to the GSM.
GSMs not in the footprint of the aircraft data-link might task another GSM to relay the data through a satellite at a reduced data rate using built-in satellite communications radio.
Once fielded to military intelligence (MI), aviation, and artillery units, the GSM will be the most numerous MI end-item in the Army, located from maneuver brigade up through echelons above corps (EAC).
Our crew on take-off from Frankfurt numbered 23. Two were US Army specialists, one of whom was the deputy mission crew commander (DMCC), and this pair operated at the rear of the plane in conjunction with the air force specialists onboard. It was their job, together with those manning the other 16 work stations, to provide intelligence and targeting information to the Combined Air Operations Centre (CAOC) at its Southern European headquarters in Italy.
Information requests such as area searches, SAR images, and a good deal else besides, were relayed through workstations on board. There were a number of variations: more requests for data that came in from the Joint Analysis Centre at Molesworth in England (one of the primary downlink points for Joint-STARS data) or an asset on the ground that needed clarification about something that was visual.
There was also a direct link with our aircraft’s airborne adjunct, the EC-130 Airborne Battlefield Command, Control and Communications (ABCCC) and with the Army’s Ground Station Module through a secure Surveillance Control Data Link. I was told that up to 15 ground stations could simultaneously pass text messages back to the Joint-STARS and our three VHF radios were primarily used to communicate with them.
Once ‘in orbit’ adjacent to Kosovo, the aircraft flew tight figure-ofeight circuits of classified length. If anything on the ground moved, the aircraft, in theory, would detect, locate and support attacks against it. Because visibility was not a factor, no matter what the weather, such operations could go on around the clock, though most missions are a bit more than half a day. Ours lasted 14 hours and included an in-flight refuelling session from a KC-125 tanker.
Long hours aloft should be truly boring. However, in reality it stayed interesting from the start because there was always something happening. On one of the earliest flights over Kosovo, before we got there, one plane hadn’t been on-station for an hour when it was thrown into an almost vertical dive. That left some crew members who hadn’t been strapped in clinging to the roof of the aircraft.
No reason for evasive action was given. However, the crew was aware that such things only happened if threatened by hostile missile or aircraft action. What was clear was that there were either enemy fighters scrambling or there had been a missile alert.
The threat factor stayed sobering while we were aloft. Crews have refused to remain on-station without a combat air patrol (CAP), though numbers and types of fighter escorts were secret. The crew was emphatic: ‘No CAP and we’re out of here’, they would state.
The Joint-STARS defensive strategy is simple. Should enemy aircraft suddenly become a threat, the crew wouldn’t waste time before heading in the opposite direction.
The issue of Yugoslavian ground-to-air missiles remained uppermost in all our minds while we were up there. From what I was able to observe on the consoles, mobile SAM-6 batteries were thick on the ground in Kosovo. There were also long-range SAM-3 batteries, some of which had been targeted by the time we arrived, according to a Pentagon briefing a month earlier.
Certainly, that destructive potential was raised often enough during the course of hostilities. Missile (and Triple-A) threats, while not taken lightly, were invariably balanced against intelligence reports from ground observers and the fact that any Joint-STARS orbit was always beyond the maximum missile target range of the latest version of ground-to-air missiles that Belgrade acquired over the years from Moscow. Almost everything in the Serbian armoury, we were aware, was former Soviet Union in origin.
It was interesting that during our flight there were some active concentrations of ground forces radar-tracked near the southern and eastern borders of Kosovo. There were also indications of a lot of activity along the Albanian and Macedonian frontiers and it quickly became clear that the Yugoslav Army was preparing for a major ground action.
No US spokesmen
would comment on this aspect, even though in places the ground was cluttered with hardware. That included armour, which indicated a substantial military presence.
Meanwhile, the US Air Force has lifted some security restrictions surrounding the ability of its long-range, air-to-ground surveillance system to locate, classify and track in virtually any weather, on-line and in near real-time, a variety of enemy ground targets.
Although the concept is old hat – a prototype Joint-STARS test-bed was originally used to track, locate and target Iraqi divisions in Operation Desert Storm (especially during the Battle of Al-Khafji) and Airborne Reconaissance Low (ARL) and the Mohawk systems are also active – very little about this long-range detection weapon has been made public.
Tactically, the Joint-STARS system operates from the safety of friendly airspace. Our aircraft, for instance, was able to peer about 150 miles across borders and do a stand-off analysis of enemy ground assets. Each aircraft carried a phased-array, mechanically operated radar antenna housed in a 25-foot dome or ‘canoe’ under the forward fuselage area. It weighed tons and we could feel it thudding as it alternated its scanning role from port to starboard. That equipment provided the necessary data for pinpoint strikes by aircraft, missiles or artillery for fire support.
We were also told that Joint-STARS ground-tracking radar, in a single eight-hour sortie, could search an estimated 200,000 square miles of terrain, though the officer warned that the aircraft was unable to identify targets. Other assets such as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) or Human Intelligence (Humint) might have been used to clarify the information still further.
Most details regarding operational and acquisition procedures on board Joint-STARS aircraft remained classified. However, information made available in a briefing by the unit commander at the Rhein-Main Air Force Base, indicated that its fundamental operating modes included Wide Area Moving Target Indicator (MTI) surveillance and Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR).