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Navy Times December 07, 2008

S-3's swan song: ISR over Iraq

Viking wraps up service life with surveillance duty

By Andrew Tilghman

History books will show that the Navy’s S-3 Vikings stayed in the fight until the end.

In the twilight of the aircraft’s five-year sundown phase, the Viking has been flying vital missions over Iraq, helping to meet the secretary of defense’s urgent call earlier this year for additional intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance assets in the Middle East.

The last operational squadron, Sea Control Squadron 22, deployed in July to a large airbase inside Iraq, where it provides real-time aerial images for troops on the ground.

The squadron is slated to return to Naval Air Station Jacksonville, Fla., in mid-December, marking the end of the airframe’s final deployment. The last plane officially will retire in January.

“They were not scheduled for this deployment. At this point, they would have been transferring the aircraft into the boneyard,” said Cmdr. Chris Schenck, the chief staff officer for Sea Control Wing, Atlantic Forces.

The assignment came about after an announcement in April, when Defense Secretary Robert Gates made a rare public demand for the service branches to provide more ISR aircraft for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It was “like pulling teeth,” Gates said.

At the time, the Navy had few ISR assets to spare. The Navy’s main ISR planes, P-3 Orions, faced serious problems. Nearly 25 percent of its aging fleet was grounded in December 2007 and remained in the depot because of fears that the wings would break off in flight.

So the Navy turned to its last S-3 Viking squadron.

“Secretary Gates said, ‘Hey, can we get some additional ISR capacity into theater, and what can we get quickly?’ We stood up and said, ‘Here are the S-3s,’ ” said Lt. Sean Robertson, a Navy spokesman at the Pentagon.

The S-3s — known as “Hoovers” because of their loud engine noise — still have at least several years of life on their airframes. But the Navy made the decision to retire the S-3 in 2004 after the aircraft’s core missions — submarine hunting and then in-flight refueling — migrated to other airframes.

The remnant of the S-3 community in Florida was eager to prepare the squadron for the unexpected deployment.

“When that call came out, we immediately told them, ‘we can do it’ — there was no hesitation,” said Chief Warrant Officer 3 Gary Owens, an assistant maintenance officer with the wing.

A key element to preparing the squadron’s four aircraft was outfitting with them with ISR equipment, including some high-resolution sensors that were previously attached to the Navy’s F-14 Tomcats, Owens said.

Extending the S-3s’ service life any further was not an option because the Navy had shut down the S-3 depot, its fleet replacement squadron and terminated most of its contract support, Robertson said.

“We had these four Viking aircraft, we deployed them in July, and we deployed them for six months, knowing that they were going to come back and decommission,” Robertson said.

Originally joining the fleet in 1974 and designed for anti-submarine warfare, the S-3’s mission focus shifted in the 1990s as the perceived threat of Soviet-era submarines faded. Its primary mission became aerial refueling, but newer F/A-18E/F Super Hornets now offer an alternative for carrier-based tanker runs.

The Navy hopes to save money and manpower by cutting the number of distinct airframes in each carrier air wing. That will reduce the supplies and maintenance teams needed for deployments.

“With the newer systems that are coming out on the F/A-18 Super Hornet, there’s a lot of redundant capability,” Schenck said. “I would say the retirement of this aircraft, that decision was made on an overall resource management strategy.”

The S-3 was briefly thrust into the news in May 2003, when a Viking carried President George W. Bush onto the carrier Abraham Lincoln — the only use in history of the call sign “Navy One.”

But as more Super Hornets joined the fleet, the Navy began retiring S-3 squadrons in 2004.

“Its mission just went away,” said John Pike, a defense expert at GlobalSecurity.org in Washington. “You’re sitting there with a perfectly fine airplane that — apart form hauling the president out there to say ‘mission accomplished’ — doesn’t do a whole lot of things. It’s unclear what problem it solves.”

Richard Aboulafia, a defense analyst with the Teal Group in Virginia, said the S-3 could help meet the combatant commands’ appetite for more ISR assets — but at a significant cost to the Navy.

“The aircraft could easily have another 20 years left,” Aboulafia said. “This is a very good ISR platform. Plugging that ISR gap would be a great enabler — if only it would be affordable. The sad truth is, there is a budget pinch.”

It’s unclear whether the Navy will provide U.S. Central Command with any ISR aircraft to replace the S-3 squadron that will decommission.

“This was a bonus,” Robertson said of the last Viking mission. “We said, ‘we can give you something extra to use for these six months.’ ”