Air Force May Keep Warplanes On Alert For Counter-Terror Response

Inside The Pentagon | March 14, 2002 | Elaine M. Grossman

[Stand Watch Listen]

The Air Force may keep selected aircraft and weapons on alert as part of a strike package aimed at responding quickly against terrorist targets, according to a draft service briefing obtained by Inside the Pentagon.

The "Global Response Task Force," or GRTF, is one of seven task forces around which the Air Force will soon plan nearly all its requirements, operations and acquisition, ITP was the first to report Jan. 31. Other packages will assemble Air Force capabilities for: Global Strike; Homeland Security; Humanitarian Relief or Non-combatant Evacuation; Joint Space Command and Control/Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance; Nuclear Response; and Air and Space Expeditionary Forces.

For counterterrorism missions, the Air Force is crafting a "near-term" concept of operations "designed to hold all kinds of terrorist-related targets at risk," according to a briefing drafted primarily by the Air Staff's air and space operations directorate and circulated in the Pentagon and to industry in late January.

"Using actionable intelligence for some fleeting targets, [the task force] combines alert strike platforms based in selected locations with the ability to launch and receive updates en route to allow the GRTF to respond rapidly" to direction from civilian and military leaders, the briefing states.

Although the document portrays confidence that the Air Force has the capability to strike targets on short notice anywhere around the world, locating and correctly identifying targets that house terrorists or support their efforts has often proved more challenging than anticipated.

The Clinton administration's August 1998 missile strikes against an al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan and a Sudanese pharmaceutical facility were widely viewed as ineffective and ill-conceived, respectively.

More recently, the Bush administration has acknowledged losing track of terrorist leader Osama bin Laden's general whereabouts, saying it is unclear if he is dead or alive. And weeks of planning for an air-ground offensive carried out south of Kabul in Afghanistan last week failed to accurately pinpoint an al Qaeda military stronghold, leading to the loss of eight American servicemen in a single day.

The Air Force draft briefing acknowledges this "new enemy" is different from the nation-states the United States has fought in the past. A terror group is "unconventional in its actions, dispersed in its location, and concealed by disguise," the document states.

In response, the service wants GRTF to offer a "poised force" that can act "swiftly, precisely, decisively and globally." Its concept of operations lays out the following notional scenario:

* An "actionable tip is collected" from electronic or human intelligence;

* Intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance is used to "find, fix, track and validate [the] target";

* A "decision [is] made to strike"; and

* "Target-quality data is passed to strike force."

The briefing notes that cruise missiles can strike targets "within minutes," special operations forces can be deployed to attack "within hours," fighter aircraft can be repositioned to "strike within three hours," and bombers can hit targets "within eight hours."

Effectively disabling or destroying terror targets clearly depends on good intelligence, and a related draft briefing on a new Command and Control/Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (C2ISR) Task Force shows some appreciation for that. "C2ISR warriors establish conditions to win," reads a slogan displayed across two pages of the document.

The briefing is thick with acronyms and catch phrases describing streamlined processes and hardware-to-hardware links to transmit target information. Some defense and industry sources said it remains difficult to discern how the Air Force C2ISR system will adapt to the agile, creative, highly mobile, dispersed and decidedly low-technology terrorist adversary described elsewhere.

"C2ISR provides persistent global surveillance for national and military decisionmakers, and command [and] control of air and space C2ISR capabilities to enable independent or joint and multinational operations," states the briefing.

The C2ISR Task Force, "as it's employed, fuses intelligence/operations people, functions and systems into a single network to remove the seams between tactical, theater [and] national assets (sensor, decisionmaker, shooter)," the document says. The task force "enables people [to] dynamically command, control, synchronize and integrate platform, sensor and striker for predictive operations, and to compress the kill chain across the entire spectrum of operations," the draft briefing continues.

Among other things, the anticipated process "accelerates seamless transition from collection in focused, persistent global surveillance/IPB [intelligence preparation of the battlespace] to focused, persistent ISR for improved PBA [predictive battlespace awareness] to tee-up targets," the document states on one of its more abstruse pages.

One Pentagon official noted the irony of a briefing drafted by the service's communications specialists that is so difficult to understand -- a remark echoing Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. John Jumper's repeated lament about "tribal languages" spoken by insular communities within the service.

Also drafted principally by the air and space operations directorate, the document repeatedly describes the approach as "ISR with attitude" and is illustrated with photos of deer in the crosshairs and dead after the kill.

In coming months, Air Force leaders intend to refine concepts of operations for this and other task forces with an eye toward more effectively providing the warfighter with the needed tools to accomplish key missions, officials say.

But even as the service settled early this year on the list of seven task forces, it became clear that some critical missions the Air Force performs -- like mobility, training or, in the future, information warfare -- were left without a dedicated task force, officials acknowledge.

So the Air Force now additionally describes six mission areas defined by its air and space operations directorate as "crosscutting" capabilities needed for each of the seven task forces to succeed, officials said.

Taken from the service's "CONOPS 2020" white paper published last year, the crosscutting missions include some key operations the service undertakes that seemed to be missing from its task force list:

* "Gain and maintain situational awareness;

* "Deter and defend U.S., U.S. forces and allies against [weapons of mass destruction] attack;

* "Gain and maintain freedom to operate;

* "Exploit attack dominance to achieve strategic and operational effects;

* "Dominate the information spectrum; [and]

* "Provide rapid global mobility."

"The task forces are a great start toward organizing required Air Force capabilities," said Maj. Gen. Danny Hogan, the mobilization assistant to the service's director of plans and programs, in an interview with ITP last month. "We're also looking at additional constructs that would address all Air Force capabilities and resources."

-- Elaine M. Grossman

[Free the USA]

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