Talk Story
MY COUSIN, a captain in the Air Force, expected to be sent to Afghanistan. He says those orders didn't come through, unfortunately. Instead, he and his venerable EC-130E Hercules, an airborne battlefield command and control aircraft, were dispatched to Honolulu last week. Tough duty. Military hardware: Out with
the old, in with the newI toured his plane at Hickam. After 35 years in service, racking up 33,000 hours including combat action in Vietnam, Iraq and Bosnia, she still looks good. The flight deck is a marvel of analog technology, crammed with the gauges, switches, levers and blinking lights it takes to run four Allison T56-A-7 turboprop engines. A B-17 pilot would feel right at home.
Although C-130s can reach 345 miles per hour, they weren't built for speed. The 3,000-mile flight from Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Arizona to Honolulu took 11 hours at a significantly more leisurely pace.
What has kept C-130s flying in an age of high-tech Predator UAV's (unmanned aerial vehicles) is their ability to carry a 45,000-pound payload onto and off of short, unpaved runways.
This particular plane carries a flying war room and communications center, which is built into a big container not unlike the ones Matson uses on ships. It rolls up the ramp under the plane's tail and plugs into its electrical system.
The radios, encryption gear and computers aboard the old bird are still impressive looking, but the display on the monitors resembles a game of Pong more than what's commonplace today. Her systems still work smoothly, but she'll be grounded for good before the end of the year.
TWO YEARS AGO, I had the opportunity to ride a new Arleigh Burke-class missile destroyer. The captain stopped her dead in the water, told everyone to hang on and ordered the 500-foot ship to full speed ahead. The water aft exploded in foam and the 8,500-ton ship surged from zero to 35-plus knots in a few seconds.
What does such an amazingly capable war machine have to do with fighting wars in caves, mountains and the alleyways of Third World cities? Like most U.S. military hardware, it was designed to fight the Soviets on the oceans and the plains of Europe, but there is change afoot.
Digital information technology has revolutionized electronics. We can now buy an inexpensive portable device that can surf the Internet, make cell phone calls, collect e-mail wirelessly, determine location, altitude and speed and hundreds of other tasks -- including playing solitaire.
These same advances will radically change warfare -- eventually. For now, the bulk of the military budget is still paying for expensive weapons systems originally designed to fight the Cold War.
THE ARMY is working to become more mobile, the Navy is looking at growing from 310 ships to perhaps 500 smaller ships designed to fight close to shore, and the Marines are planning to work more closely with Special Operations Forces, but new technology has always provided the winning edge.
The English used longbows to conquer the armor-clad French. Hundreds of years later, the German blitzkrieg used radios, airplanes and tanks to do it again. Stealth bombers, smart bombs, the global positioning system and cruise missiles defeated Iraq.
James G. Roche, secretary of the Air Force, says Afghanistan is teaching the lesson that "persistent intelligence surveillance reconnaissance, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, good weather or bad" will win future wars.
Predators, which can fire missiles themselves or identify targets for others, have joined our aging fleet of Boeing 707-based reconnaissance planes. We've also equipped refueling aircraft with sensors and antennas, turning them into "smart tankers."
According to Edward Aldridge, undersecretary of defense, the key is closely integrating all the pieces, from finding targets to knocking them out. "From the time of target identification to the time of target to kill, (it used to take) five, six hours. Now that's seconds," he told the Wall Street Journal.
"We have armed Predators with Hellfire missiles. It sees a target and shoots it. AC-130 gunships fly around, have sensors, see a target, shoot it," Aldridge said. "A guy on horseback calls a target in and a B-52 drops its precision weapons within 10 minutes. They call it the kill chain. It's really now been cut very, very short."
Meanwhile, my cousin is job hunting, looking for a new assignment. Once on the cutting edge of battlefield technology, soon his plane will either go out to the desert to be mothballed and stripped for parts or, perhaps, end up in a museum.
She's earned a good rest. Anyone for a game of Pong?
John Flanagan is the Star-Bulletin's contributing editor.
He can be reached at: jflanagan@starbulletin.com.