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Air Force Rationale For Killing J-Stars Radar Plane Replacement Isn't Credible
[Forbes] The people who brought you "military transformation" 20 years ago have a new idea. It's called "multi-domain battle." It isn't a bad idea, but it isn't really new either -- it repackages some common-sense warfighting concepts for an era in which conflicts will be waged more on the electromagnetic spectrum and in cyberspace. So the armed forces need to synchronize their operations with the aim of achieving superiority across all the "domains" of warfare -- not just in the air, on land and at sea, but in space, on the EM spectrum, and in the cyber realm.If this seems kind of obvious to you, then you haven't read the white papers circulating around the Pentagon. They make multi-domain battle sound like an intellectual breakthrough -- the same way military transformation supposedly was in the 1990s, or "airland battle" in the 1970s. In reality, multi-domain battle is just the latest plea for inter-service cooperation in fighting wars. The only thing that really changes over time with these various warfighting visions is the technology -- but the visions tend to be way out ahead of what is technologically do-able. Which brings me to the Air Force's recently disclosed move to cancel replacement of one of its most unique warfighting assets. It's a radar plane called the Joint Surveillance and Target Attack Radar System (J-Stars) that can track moving ground targets over a 20,000 square mile area, focusing in on items of particular interest and using its sensor to take pictures through clouds, dust or the dead of night that can be quickly shared with friendly forces. The information can reveal where enemy combat vehicles are, which direction they are headed, and at what speed. It's an invaluable tool for U.S. Army commanders; the Marines have their own version of the same kind of radar on the Navy's new Poseidon maritime patrol plane (the radar can track ships too). But sometime later this week, the Air Force is likely to put out a position paper explaining why it doesn't want to buy a new manned aircraft that can replace the 16 aged J-Stars in the current fleet. It will claim manned radar planes can't survive in a world of multi-domain battles and near-peer adversaries equipped with the latest weapons. Posted by: Besoeker 2017-09-26 |
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