The defense world suffered a minor shock last week, when Marine Gen. James Cartwright, the Joint Chiefs vice chair, said that U.S. generals chose buying more electronics-jamming EA-18G Growlers, over buying more super-dogfightin' F-22 Raptors. Air Force magazine's Daily Report said the Pentagon is "not winning the argument" over F-22s "on the merits," and characterized Cartwright's comments as an "offensive" against the Lockheed-built stealth fighter.But there's ample evidence that electronic-warfare planes really are more useful in today's wars. In the early days of the Afghanistan conflict, the U.S. Air Force, Navy and Marines cobbled together a makeshift armada of jamming planes -- Air Force EC-130H Compass Calls and Navy and Marine EA-6B Prowlers -- capable of zeroing out the Taliban's communications. That armada subsequently shifted to Iraq, then back to Afghanistan as the Iraq war winds down. Last week, the small Compass Call detachment at Bagram airbase, in Afghanistan, marked its 2,000th Afghanistan mission. "There are only 14 of these aircraft in the Air Force," Maj. James Bands said. "So it's taken four years of constant flying at about 2,000-3,000 hours on one aircraft a year, in order to accomplish this."
The F-22, by contrast, has never flown a single mission over Iraq or Afghanistan, as Secretary of Defense Robert Gates is so fond of pointing out.
The EC-130 was designed during the Cold War to listen in on, and jam, Soviet radio networks. For Afghanistan, BAE Systems added $2-million Special Emitter Array pods. Each pod can steer four, separate beams for jamming a wider range of comms, including cell phones and detonators for roadside bombs. In Iraq in 2006, I was on a patrol with the U.S. Army when a Compass Call flew overhead, wiping out all communications in a wide swath down below, all in an effort to disable insurgent booby traps. The soldiers, "deaf" and "mute" due to the protective jamming, had to sit and wait until the Compass Call finished, before continuing their mission.
For some missions, the EC-130s team up with speedier, armed EA-6B Prowler "penetrating" jammers, according to a 2007 report from Forecast International. Prowlers fly from land bases and aircraft carriers. When I visited Al Asad air base in Iraq in 2006, the EA-6Bs were the only planes that were off limits to reporters. "The two made a good jamming team, with Compass Call linguists providing valuable inputs regarding the selection of jamming targets to the Prowler crews," Forecast said. The EC-130Hs usually "focused on discrete, individual targets," while the Prowlers "jammed broader parts of a net."
The problem with both the EC-130 and EA-6B, is age. The Compass Calls are pushing 40 years old, and the Prowlers aren't much younger. The EA-18G is meant to replace the Prowlers, before they start falling from the sky, from age. No one has identified a Compass Call replacement, quite yet.
| It's a C-130 frame. We still make those, don't we? |