pkpatriotic
SENIOR MEMBER
- Joined
- Apr 2, 2008
- Messages
- 2,317
- Reaction score
- 0
RAF's New Astor Spy Aircraft Is Ready for Combat
By David A. Fulghum
It doesn't take classified access to understand that the Royal Air Force's new Astor intelligence-gathering system, being fine-tuned here in the green swales of East Anglia, will soon be bound for operations over the sand seas and knife-edge ridges of Afghanistan.
The commander of No. 5 (Army Cooperation) Sqdn. (which includes RAF, British Army and Royal Navy personnel) says the unit will be ready to deploy by year's end with as many as two Sentinel R1 aircraft and two ground systems (for collating and analyzing intelligence). The numbers will remain unspecified until the expeditionary mission is completely defined. Other loose ends of the Astor's operational debut include finding the funds, locating a suitable base in theater and awaiting the political blessing of the government for the combat deployment.
The Raytheon-built Airborne Stand-Off Radar (Astor) is a modular intelligence-gathering and analysis system. The Sentinel aircraft - a modified Bombardier Global Express - is its airborne component. Raytheon also designed the large, active electronically scanned array (AESA) dual-mode radar for surveillance of small objects, primarily on the ground, from an operational altitude of more than 45,000 ft. and at ranges up to 200 naut. mi. That high-altitude, long-range perspective allows the advanced sensor to look into deep valleys where insurgents often go undetected. Raytheon, which serves as Astor's prime contractor for the Defense Ministry, also provides the intelligence fusion system.
The Sentinel aircraft can operate fully loaded from a 6,000-ft. runway and fly unrefueled for 5,000 naut. mi. It has a crucial mission in intelligence, surveillance, targeting and reconnaissance (Istar), but it is not seen as the apex of a target cueing system of systems. To satisfy targeting criteria, the system should be able to adjust fall-of-shot for indirect fire weapons, which Astor's radar array is not able to do.
"In the Istar community, we talk about the process of scanning, cueing and focusing," says Wing Cdr. Harry Kemsley, commanding officer of 5 (AC) Sqdn. "[Astor is] the scanning and cueing asset. We're there to detect the needle in the haystack and steer other assets [such as strike aircraft] to it."
There are clues about additional experimentation and training at RAF Waddington that demonstrates strides made in digitally connecting the platforms here. The Nimrod R1 signals intelligence aircraft has been exchanging information with the new Typhoon strike aircraft, for example.
"Typhoon Force was not aware of how powerful the Istar exchange systems are, or of the benefit of electronic surveillance systems to quickly cue target pods and generate high-grade coordinates for weapon strikes," says an RAF-generated report. Nimrod R1s also practice multisensor cueing between the E-3D Sentry AWACS and Nimrod MR2 maritime surveillance aircraft for identification and targeting to simulate conditions in Afghanistan's Operations Herrick and Telic.
Following three operational tests in the U.K., the Sentinel aircraft itself deployed this year to Greenville, Tex. It then shifted to exercises at the China Lake test ranges in California to meet the milestones for its now-completed capability assurance mission.
A measure of success, say program officials, was that "we tasked 5,000 [radar] scenes, collected 94.7% and were satisfied with 90.8% of what was collected. The requirement was for 85% collected and 85% satisfactory."
Subsequently, the system has started its transition into a combat capability. The software-driven radar functions on a Windows operating system that allows new capabilities to be integrated through incremental, commercial off-the-shelf upgrades. The next stage is operational evaluation.
Moreover, there are broad hints coming from the aerospace industry that while in the U.S., the Astor system was involved in closely held exercises with the secretive RC-135W Rivet Joint signals and communications intelligence-gathering aircraft. During operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, such connectivity would be key to operational success.
"The technology has reached the stage where it can be used operationally," Kemsley says. "We anticipate we'll be ready to deploy by the end of the year. The decision belongs to Permanent Joint Headquarters (PJHQ) in London, the operational nerve center for U.K. forces. While we're waiting for approval, . . . we're still defining what and where the deployment will be."
In fact, the Astor probably could have been deployed two years ago, except that the operational requirements have changed radically over what was envisioned at the program's launch in 1999.
"We've changed path with engineering change requests and small contracts," says an Army official with insight into the Astor program. "When we get to theater, the system will further change and that's the method of evolution for a complex military. It's preferable to make changes now than to wait two years until we get to full operational capability."
However, those changes in requirements - from the focus on an armor-heavy, central-Europe environment to guerrilla warfare - have produced some organizational and operational conundrums.
The current in-service date (ISD) threshold is for two aircraft and two ground stations manned by enough trained personnel to support a brigade-size deployment. But that leaves a lot of loose ends.
"We don't know if that means an armored, mechanized, light or commando brigade," says a British Army official. "There's a huge difference in configuration between 16 Air Assault Brigade and 20 Armored Brigade. Moreover, their laydown in the U.K. is not representative of their laydown in our theater of operations. That requires a translation of requirements and that's what's going on. We're working with PJHQ on defining the requirement. I appreciate the modularity and the tailoring aspect of Astor. But we don't know what we're going to be asked to do. There will be more than one needle and the haystack is enormous."
The shift to a theater in the Middle East has driven a number of new Defense Ministry change requests. One example is the need for contractors on deployed operations. Now that the location is known, the contract has to be rewritten.
"We also know that when we arrive in theater, everyone will find a use for us," the Army official says. "We will have to make them understand what we've got and what we don't have." In fact, squadron officials say even they really don't know what they'll have yet.
"I can take one aircraft and it can do useful work," Kemsley says. "I can take one aircraft, a small part of the ground station that operates from the [aircraft parking] ramp and do even more. Or I can take a huge footprint with ground segment, analysts and exploitation capabilities and do a great deal more."
Meanwhile, the facts required for planning the deployment are still being drawn up, says the Army official. The aircraft's base location is still to be determined, say officials, but there are many advantages to operating from the same base as other U.K. aircraft like the Tornado (with its digital Raptor reconnaissance pod) and E-3D AWACS (with electronic surveillance capability) as well as the U.S. E-8 Joint Stars (which has the same radar ground surveillance mission as the Sentinel). Those advantages make Al Udeid AB in Qatar a prime candidate.
"The [Astor system's] capability is similar [to J-Stars']," Kemsley notes. "It is in theater and has been operational for so many years that we would be foolish not to spend time with them. Both squadrons have exchange officers. We have a program of interaction with J-Stars that is past the conceptual phase, and now we're figuring out how to practice it. We're trying to understand the lessons they've learned to save us having to re-learn them."
But those advantages do not necessarily mean that Astor and Joint-Stars will share a base.
"There is the human dimension" that allows informal exchange of information between crews and development of new techniques, Kemsley says. "But with modern technology, the need to be physically co-located is behind us."
Regardless of where they are based, once in the air, the two aircraft can be used interchangeably and send data to each other's ground stations.
"The Astor system is just now hitting ISD," says a senior British Army official associated with the Astor program. "We've proven that the ground station can use J-Stars data. That means that J-Stars and Sentinel can alternate with each other to maintain around-the-clock [moving-target indicator] coverage. There are differences - 19 versus two crewmen and 18 hr. versus 12 hr. on station - and Astor doesn't have a battle management capability. However, it does ensure that the ground commander's reconnaissance requests are fulfilled."
The Sentinel's speed and endurance don't make the flight from Qatar to Afghanistan a serious problem, say operational analysts. The primary limiting element continues to be the endurance of the small crew.
The Defense Ministry also is reconsidering the squadron's designation. Since Royal Navy personnel are being added to the British Army and Royal Air Force cadres, 5 (AC) Sqdn. may become 5 Joint (J) Sqdn. as early as April 2009.
The signature element of Astor is the Sentinel R1 aircraft with its Raytheon-designed AESA radar whose canoe-like fairing runs along the belly from nose to wing root. Officially, the system's operational details are classified, but certain capabilities can be extrapolated.
The aircraft is capable of flying to Afghanistan, spending 8 hr. collecting data and then returning to a base anywhere in the theater. The advanced AESA radar can spot very small, slow-moving targets, such as humans walking at less than 4 mph. along ridges or mountain sides. Or, because of the aircraft's operational altitude, the radar can peer down into the floors of valleys that are normally shielded from surveillance by mountains of the Hindu Kush that reach up to 18,000 ft.
Each Sentinel aircrew consists of a pilot and copilot on the flight deck and in the mission compartment, a mission coordinator (including retrained RAF navigators and bombardiers and Navy veterans of the AESA-radar-equipped Sea King) and two image analysts (many of them warrant officers and senior NCOs from the Army intelligence corps or RAF imagery analysts). Two more workstations can be added, although for the first operational deployment British planners say they anticipate flying with the basic crew only and concentrating on perfecting baseline tasks.
Due to the aircraft's long endurance but small crew, "Our operators will be required to perform at the top of their game for 12 hr.," Kemsley says. "While there is room for two more [crewmen], we won't routinely carry more than we need."
Part of the answer to manning will be a tactical display for the pilot and copilot that allows them far greater situational awareness through watching the Link 16 picture. Their job will be understanding the air space and threats to the aircraft. They will control all the defensive aids, which include chaff, flares and towed decoys. The flight deck crew can put target tracks onto Link 16 and, as automation lessens the pilots' workload, they may be assigned other mission roles such as off-board communications with strike aircraft pursuing moving ground targets.
Aircrew training constitutes one of the squadron's primary short-term pre-deployment problems.
"I have crewmen that have never worked in an Istar environment," Kemsley says. "Some of the soldiers have never flown while doing their job. There's a rule that when you step into an airplane, you leave half of your brain behind and when you sit down at the console, you lose the other half. Getting to the point where they are operationally viable is my biggest challenge because the system will have to mature around them."
So far, the squadron has about 140 airmen. That includes photo interpreters without ground moving target indicator (GMTI) or synthetic aperture radar experience. It also has approximately 140 soldiers, and to date fewer than 10 seamen with experience operating GMTI radar on helicopters.
A second major stress factor is the waiting for sensor officials to approve a start date for operations.
"We're working toward being ready by the end of the year," says Kemsley. "We're ready for somebody to tell us when and where they wish to use us."
By David A. Fulghum
It doesn't take classified access to understand that the Royal Air Force's new Astor intelligence-gathering system, being fine-tuned here in the green swales of East Anglia, will soon be bound for operations over the sand seas and knife-edge ridges of Afghanistan.
The commander of No. 5 (Army Cooperation) Sqdn. (which includes RAF, British Army and Royal Navy personnel) says the unit will be ready to deploy by year's end with as many as two Sentinel R1 aircraft and two ground systems (for collating and analyzing intelligence). The numbers will remain unspecified until the expeditionary mission is completely defined. Other loose ends of the Astor's operational debut include finding the funds, locating a suitable base in theater and awaiting the political blessing of the government for the combat deployment.
The Raytheon-built Airborne Stand-Off Radar (Astor) is a modular intelligence-gathering and analysis system. The Sentinel aircraft - a modified Bombardier Global Express - is its airborne component. Raytheon also designed the large, active electronically scanned array (AESA) dual-mode radar for surveillance of small objects, primarily on the ground, from an operational altitude of more than 45,000 ft. and at ranges up to 200 naut. mi. That high-altitude, long-range perspective allows the advanced sensor to look into deep valleys where insurgents often go undetected. Raytheon, which serves as Astor's prime contractor for the Defense Ministry, also provides the intelligence fusion system.
The Sentinel aircraft can operate fully loaded from a 6,000-ft. runway and fly unrefueled for 5,000 naut. mi. It has a crucial mission in intelligence, surveillance, targeting and reconnaissance (Istar), but it is not seen as the apex of a target cueing system of systems. To satisfy targeting criteria, the system should be able to adjust fall-of-shot for indirect fire weapons, which Astor's radar array is not able to do.
"In the Istar community, we talk about the process of scanning, cueing and focusing," says Wing Cdr. Harry Kemsley, commanding officer of 5 (AC) Sqdn. "[Astor is] the scanning and cueing asset. We're there to detect the needle in the haystack and steer other assets [such as strike aircraft] to it."
There are clues about additional experimentation and training at RAF Waddington that demonstrates strides made in digitally connecting the platforms here. The Nimrod R1 signals intelligence aircraft has been exchanging information with the new Typhoon strike aircraft, for example.
"Typhoon Force was not aware of how powerful the Istar exchange systems are, or of the benefit of electronic surveillance systems to quickly cue target pods and generate high-grade coordinates for weapon strikes," says an RAF-generated report. Nimrod R1s also practice multisensor cueing between the E-3D Sentry AWACS and Nimrod MR2 maritime surveillance aircraft for identification and targeting to simulate conditions in Afghanistan's Operations Herrick and Telic.
Following three operational tests in the U.K., the Sentinel aircraft itself deployed this year to Greenville, Tex. It then shifted to exercises at the China Lake test ranges in California to meet the milestones for its now-completed capability assurance mission.
A measure of success, say program officials, was that "we tasked 5,000 [radar] scenes, collected 94.7% and were satisfied with 90.8% of what was collected. The requirement was for 85% collected and 85% satisfactory."
Subsequently, the system has started its transition into a combat capability. The software-driven radar functions on a Windows operating system that allows new capabilities to be integrated through incremental, commercial off-the-shelf upgrades. The next stage is operational evaluation.
Moreover, there are broad hints coming from the aerospace industry that while in the U.S., the Astor system was involved in closely held exercises with the secretive RC-135W Rivet Joint signals and communications intelligence-gathering aircraft. During operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, such connectivity would be key to operational success.
"The technology has reached the stage where it can be used operationally," Kemsley says. "We anticipate we'll be ready to deploy by the end of the year. The decision belongs to Permanent Joint Headquarters (PJHQ) in London, the operational nerve center for U.K. forces. While we're waiting for approval, . . . we're still defining what and where the deployment will be."
In fact, the Astor probably could have been deployed two years ago, except that the operational requirements have changed radically over what was envisioned at the program's launch in 1999.
"We've changed path with engineering change requests and small contracts," says an Army official with insight into the Astor program. "When we get to theater, the system will further change and that's the method of evolution for a complex military. It's preferable to make changes now than to wait two years until we get to full operational capability."
However, those changes in requirements - from the focus on an armor-heavy, central-Europe environment to guerrilla warfare - have produced some organizational and operational conundrums.
The current in-service date (ISD) threshold is for two aircraft and two ground stations manned by enough trained personnel to support a brigade-size deployment. But that leaves a lot of loose ends.
"We don't know if that means an armored, mechanized, light or commando brigade," says a British Army official. "There's a huge difference in configuration between 16 Air Assault Brigade and 20 Armored Brigade. Moreover, their laydown in the U.K. is not representative of their laydown in our theater of operations. That requires a translation of requirements and that's what's going on. We're working with PJHQ on defining the requirement. I appreciate the modularity and the tailoring aspect of Astor. But we don't know what we're going to be asked to do. There will be more than one needle and the haystack is enormous."
The shift to a theater in the Middle East has driven a number of new Defense Ministry change requests. One example is the need for contractors on deployed operations. Now that the location is known, the contract has to be rewritten.
"We also know that when we arrive in theater, everyone will find a use for us," the Army official says. "We will have to make them understand what we've got and what we don't have." In fact, squadron officials say even they really don't know what they'll have yet.
"I can take one aircraft and it can do useful work," Kemsley says. "I can take one aircraft, a small part of the ground station that operates from the [aircraft parking] ramp and do even more. Or I can take a huge footprint with ground segment, analysts and exploitation capabilities and do a great deal more."
Meanwhile, the facts required for planning the deployment are still being drawn up, says the Army official. The aircraft's base location is still to be determined, say officials, but there are many advantages to operating from the same base as other U.K. aircraft like the Tornado (with its digital Raptor reconnaissance pod) and E-3D AWACS (with electronic surveillance capability) as well as the U.S. E-8 Joint Stars (which has the same radar ground surveillance mission as the Sentinel). Those advantages make Al Udeid AB in Qatar a prime candidate.
"The [Astor system's] capability is similar [to J-Stars']," Kemsley notes. "It is in theater and has been operational for so many years that we would be foolish not to spend time with them. Both squadrons have exchange officers. We have a program of interaction with J-Stars that is past the conceptual phase, and now we're figuring out how to practice it. We're trying to understand the lessons they've learned to save us having to re-learn them."
But those advantages do not necessarily mean that Astor and Joint-Stars will share a base.
"There is the human dimension" that allows informal exchange of information between crews and development of new techniques, Kemsley says. "But with modern technology, the need to be physically co-located is behind us."
Regardless of where they are based, once in the air, the two aircraft can be used interchangeably and send data to each other's ground stations.
"The Astor system is just now hitting ISD," says a senior British Army official associated with the Astor program. "We've proven that the ground station can use J-Stars data. That means that J-Stars and Sentinel can alternate with each other to maintain around-the-clock [moving-target indicator] coverage. There are differences - 19 versus two crewmen and 18 hr. versus 12 hr. on station - and Astor doesn't have a battle management capability. However, it does ensure that the ground commander's reconnaissance requests are fulfilled."
The Sentinel's speed and endurance don't make the flight from Qatar to Afghanistan a serious problem, say operational analysts. The primary limiting element continues to be the endurance of the small crew.
The Defense Ministry also is reconsidering the squadron's designation. Since Royal Navy personnel are being added to the British Army and Royal Air Force cadres, 5 (AC) Sqdn. may become 5 Joint (J) Sqdn. as early as April 2009.
The signature element of Astor is the Sentinel R1 aircraft with its Raytheon-designed AESA radar whose canoe-like fairing runs along the belly from nose to wing root. Officially, the system's operational details are classified, but certain capabilities can be extrapolated.
The aircraft is capable of flying to Afghanistan, spending 8 hr. collecting data and then returning to a base anywhere in the theater. The advanced AESA radar can spot very small, slow-moving targets, such as humans walking at less than 4 mph. along ridges or mountain sides. Or, because of the aircraft's operational altitude, the radar can peer down into the floors of valleys that are normally shielded from surveillance by mountains of the Hindu Kush that reach up to 18,000 ft.
Each Sentinel aircrew consists of a pilot and copilot on the flight deck and in the mission compartment, a mission coordinator (including retrained RAF navigators and bombardiers and Navy veterans of the AESA-radar-equipped Sea King) and two image analysts (many of them warrant officers and senior NCOs from the Army intelligence corps or RAF imagery analysts). Two more workstations can be added, although for the first operational deployment British planners say they anticipate flying with the basic crew only and concentrating on perfecting baseline tasks.
Due to the aircraft's long endurance but small crew, "Our operators will be required to perform at the top of their game for 12 hr.," Kemsley says. "While there is room for two more [crewmen], we won't routinely carry more than we need."
Part of the answer to manning will be a tactical display for the pilot and copilot that allows them far greater situational awareness through watching the Link 16 picture. Their job will be understanding the air space and threats to the aircraft. They will control all the defensive aids, which include chaff, flares and towed decoys. The flight deck crew can put target tracks onto Link 16 and, as automation lessens the pilots' workload, they may be assigned other mission roles such as off-board communications with strike aircraft pursuing moving ground targets.
Aircrew training constitutes one of the squadron's primary short-term pre-deployment problems.
"I have crewmen that have never worked in an Istar environment," Kemsley says. "Some of the soldiers have never flown while doing their job. There's a rule that when you step into an airplane, you leave half of your brain behind and when you sit down at the console, you lose the other half. Getting to the point where they are operationally viable is my biggest challenge because the system will have to mature around them."
So far, the squadron has about 140 airmen. That includes photo interpreters without ground moving target indicator (GMTI) or synthetic aperture radar experience. It also has approximately 140 soldiers, and to date fewer than 10 seamen with experience operating GMTI radar on helicopters.
A second major stress factor is the waiting for sensor officials to approve a start date for operations.
"We're working toward being ready by the end of the year," says Kemsley. "We're ready for somebody to tell us when and where they wish to use us."
