The Kansas City Star October 7, 2001
US readying for war
By SCOTT CANON;
INDIAN SPRINGS, Nev. - It's not something that the experienced fighter pilot volunteers, or even admits the first few times he is asked.
But press Lt. Col. Eric Mathewson, and he concedes that, yes, he does take some ribbing from his thrill-junkie pilot buddies about his current command.
Mathewson leads a squadron of the Air Force's unmanned planes (don't let him hear you call them drones) that fly while their pilots stay grounded.
The aircraft sound like lawn mowers, pack no firepower and putt-putt along at speeds sure to make even a weekend Cessna pilot itch for more throttle. Yet the humble UAV (military-speak for "unmanned aerial vehicle") could be the thing that hunts down Osama bin Laden or prevents a caravan of aid vehicles from being mistaken for al-Qaida terrorists.
The plane is chock-full of electronic gadgetry that can see a man writing in a tablet or loading a gun from four miles away. It can see at night. It can peer through cloud cover.
And it can share all it sees in real-time video - making the single-propeller plane an invaluable tool in keeping commandos or infantrymen posted about what lurks in the next ravine or over the next hilltop.
"You get teased at first when people find out what you're flying," said Mathewson, who was moved from the sometimes physically punishing job of flying an F-15 fighter jet to UAV duty when he hurt his back.
"But it's changing. There's more and more excitement about this aircraft. It's the first step into the future of air power."
Military strategists almost universally look to unmanned planes as a key American asset in whatever fight the United States undertakes in the rugged wilds of Afghanistan. Especially when teamed with spies on the ground, the drones - despite Mathewson's objection, the dictionary definition of a remote-controlled plane fits - could pinpoint bin Laden or other targets for lethal air or ground attacks.
"I would just go ahead and get 100 of them for this mission," said Tim Brown, an analyst for the defense consulting firm Globalsecurity.org. "You've got nothing to lose with these things."
There are already claims that one drone, reportedly working in the service of the CIA perhaps to help resistance fighters, was shot down in northern Afghanistan last month.
And in many respects the loss of that aircraft would show off its peculiar advantages. They cost about $4 million each. (Actually, the Air Force prices them in groups of four, complete with the elaborate system needed to run their remote controls, at a total of $25 million.)
That is not cheap, but in a world of defense hardware - where prices are measured in hundreds of millions or even billions - neither would a loss be catastrophic.
What's more, it can crash spectacularly without so much as mussing the hair of an American pilot.
"If you lose one, it's not the end of the world," said Owen Cote, the associate director of the security studies program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "So that means you're not afraid to use it. You don't have to worry too much about putting it in harm's way."
If anything, Cote and others say, the Pentagon has been far too slow in embracing the idea of unmanned planes. Military officials are coy about how many are ready for duty, but the number appears to be fewer than two dozen.
They are in such demand, in fact, that some flying over peacekeeping forces in the Balkans probably will be diverted for missions over Afghanistan. An additional handful are being built by contractor General Atomics Aeronautical Systems.
Cote and other military analysts suspect that funding for the aircraft has lagged because of military culture. Top brass typically have made their careers in high-powered weapons systems such as jet fighters, rather than the low-speed world of reconnaissance planes.
But in a Pentagon that has been increasingly reluctant to put people at risk, support is growing fast for the idea of a plane that can snoop up-close in areas dense with enemy guns or even spoiled by chemical or biological weapons.
Unmanned planes also dovetail well with growing emphasis on using America's edge in communications to tightly choreograph battlefield movements.
"It vastly stretches your surveillance," said Anthony Cordesman, an analyst for the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
The plane's name is menacing: Predator.
Its reality is less fearsome.
The Predator is a gangling thing, with split tail fins pointing down instead of up, a propeller at the rear instead of the front and a nose so bulbous as to invite ridicule.
Sitting atop its spindly landing gear, it is slightly shorter than an NBA post player, with a wingspan nearly twice the length of the body. Its engine is too tame for a Toyota Corolla.
Flying the craft is an oddly disjointed affair. The pilot sits in windowless control center on a chair that looks to be plucked from a custom van. The view is of five video screens stacked above a keyboard, a track ball, a joystick and rudder pedals that are worked with the feet. The pilot can see what the plane sees, tie in the satellites and monitor all the functions of the plane.
To his right sits a sensor operator who can tweak the plane's cameras and radar to scope out different views. A third person occupies a rolling office chair between the two, constantly monitoring the flight's mission.
"You're just going left and right, up and down, looking everywhere," said Senior Airman Marqus Mancuso, one of the sensor operators. "We try to see everything."
Training flights from the Indian Springs Auxiliary Airfield in the Nevada desert - a treeless and seemingly colorless landscape of plains and mountains, like that of Afghanistan - are seen through video fed to the windowless room. The flight looks tedious from the plane's-eye view of a few thousand feet at a cruising speed of 84 mph.
But its plodding ways make it useful. On a single tank of gas it can travel more than 400 miles before settling into lazy, 24-hour holding pattern like some robotic vulture.
While still being tested, the planes were pressed into action in the 1999 Kosovo conflict and scored high marks for their ability to hunt down Serb commanders and to track tank movements. (A far more expensive Global Hawk drone, with a range covering thousands of miles for days on end, may be pressed into service now, even though its development was scheduled to stretch out at least another year.)
"We're looking at not being fooled about what's going on somewhere," said Robert Pape, author of Bombing to Win and generally a skeptic of air power. "These things go a long way in that direction. They work well as scouts, and we'll probably want another dozen or so every few months."
While Pape said the current shortage of Predators might result from a lack of support among the former fighter pilots typically atop the Air Force, those generals still love success. The plane's use over Kosovo gave it new momentum - much the way F-117 stealth fighters in the Persian Gulf War gained backing for all stealth technology.
For all their advantages, the aircraft remain vulnerable. Mathewson said the Predator does not currently have the ability to release chaff or flares to protect it from radar-guided or heat-seeking missiles. And so far only a handful of tests have been made to arm it with missiles.
Mathewson said, however, that the planes are hard to hear or see when peering at a target from miles away, or miles above, a target. And though they were not built with modern stealth techniques, they are small and their engines burn far cooler than a jet's. That means that they might prove to be a difficult target for the shoulder-mounted American-made Stinger and Russian-made SA-7 and SA-14 rockets that Taliban soldiers carry.
Even a downed plane does not offer much booty for the opposition. The aircraft is more unusual than high-tech. The cameras and radars stuffed into its fuselage are rather pricey, but not top secret.
"This is off-the-shelf stuff. There's probably not much inside there that you can't figure out over the Internet or your local Radio Shack," said Mathewson. "We're just putting it all to use in a unique way."
Copyright 2001 The Kansas City Star Co.
