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Air Force Plan To Abort Replacement Of J-Stars Radar Planes Is Full Of Flaws

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The U.S. Air Force operates a fleet of 16 radar planes that are unique in their ability to track moving ground targets. They are called the Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System, or J-Stars, and each plane can track up to 600 targets simultaneously, day or night, through rain or dust, clouds or haze. J-Stars pierces the fog of war, providing friendly troops with detailed information on where enemies are, how many vehicles they have, what direction they are traveling, and at what speed.

This is life-saving information. Two years ago, the Air Force's top weapons buyer said, "If you look at how they're using J-Stars in the fight today, it's incredible what it's doing." But he also warned that the planes were so old that they might "fall out of the sky" in the near future. At the time, the Air Force was implementing a plan to replace the J-Stars fleet with a new generation of radar planes.

But now it isn't so sure. This summer, the Air Force suddenly disclosed that the existing fleet could remain airworthy until 2030; that it might be too vulnerable to survive in future fights; that other means already existed for performing the mission; and that it would conduct a quick-reaction study to determine how the replacement effort might be restructured. That study was supposed to wrap up this month, but findings may not be disclosed until the Pentagon's next budget request is sent to Congress in February.

If this sounds suspicious to you, it should. The Air Force has a long history of suddenly discovering information that justifies putting modernization plans on different vectors -- vectors that just happen to match up with the preferences of new commanders. That appears to be what has happened with J-Stars. Aviation Week reported last week that the new plan is to keep the current fleet flying until 2030 while gradually transferring the tracking of ground targets to drones.

This plan will not work. If it becomes the official Air Force solution for sustaining airborne tracking of moving ground targets, then the mission will gradually go away -- depriving U.S. and allied troops on the ground of vital tactical information they may have no other way of obtaining, like where Russian tanks are on a foggy day in Poland. Here are five reasons why Congress should be highly skeptical of the latest plan for tracking moving ground targets that the Air Staff has cooked up.

Existing planes will be hard to keep in the air. The 16 J-Stars planes in the current force have accumulated more flight hours than any other type in the Air Force fleet. The planes are all second-hand 707 jetliners, an airframe that Boeing stopped building in 1978. Each plane has unique maintenance issues -- mostly due to corrosion -- and as a result it is not uncommon for 6-8 of them to be in repair shops at any given time. So while they might be kept airworthy for a few more years, they can't be kept available in an emergency. That's one reason the Air Force said their replacement was an "urgent" matter until this summer.

The Air Force doesn't have enough drones. The Air Force has a grand total of 11 Global Hawk drones capable of tracking moving ground targets. However, the precision of ground-tracking radars is closely related to the size of their apertures, and the four-foot-long radar antennas on those 11 drones are less than a fifth the size of the antennas on J-Stars planes. By one estimate, it would take half a dozen of the drones to match the performance of one J-Stars plane, and yet the Air Force has no plans to buy more of the drones. In fact, it was trying to get rid of the drones it already had until a few years ago.

The drones are easy for enemies to shoot down. If Air Force planners are worried about survivability in a future war, it's hard to see how defenseless drones would be an improvement over the current approach. The drones would have to be emitting continuously to track moving ground targets, providing a beacon for enemy forces. The Air Force has made noises about fashioning a "disaggregated" network of diverse sensors that includes the drones, but other combat aircraft are not configured to track moving surface targets, and satellites close enough to see items on the ground pass over battle zones only infrequently.

There's no system to process the intelligence. J-Stars planes have 18 work stations from which onboard battle managers can process and analyze intelligence that is then shared with other friendly forces. But information about hostile ground targets that is collected by drones would have to be sent somewhere else for processing, exploitation and dissemination. No such system currently exists, and the network for linking together all the pieces -- like the network for remotely piloting the drones -- would be subject to electronic jamming and cyber attack. Military networks always turn out to be much harder to operationalize than initially expected.

The Air Force will pay more for a "solution" that doesn't work. The Air Staff's bright idea for saving money on J-Stars modernization will end up costing more than the existing plan. Recapitalization of 16 radar planes will cost $7-9 billion, while keeping the current, decrepit fleet in the air through 2030 would cost much more. And then there's the price-tag for networking the drones, building facilities to process the intelligence they collect, and so on. If the Air Force buys new planes like the Gulfstream 550 or the Boeing 737, they will consume much less fuel and require much less time in repair shops.

The most distressing aspect of the Air Force's eleventh-hour rethink of its plan for the J-Stars fleet is its continuing refusal to follow congressional guidance with regard to modernization of that fleet. Year after year Congress tells the Air Force to speed up the replacement program, and year after year the Air Force comes up with some new reason for slowing the process. If Congress doesn't compel the service to stay on track, the U.S. will end up jeopardizing a unique military capability no other nation possesses.

Several companies competing to offer solutions for the ground moving-target mission contribute to my think tank.