Aviation Week & Space Technology
06/28/2004, page 33

David A. Fulghum
Washington


Sneak Attack

The U.S. Air Force has the ability to render enemy air defenses ineffective by making anti-aircraft missiles ignore their assignments, says the chief of Air Combat Command in what appears to be the first high-level acknowledgment that such a capability exists.

Gen. Hal Hornburg also expresses the desire to bring some classified, non-kinetic/non-explosive weapons into the open so they can be more easily developed and fielded. "I look forward to the day when we can convince a surface-to-air missile [SAM] that it is a Maytag [washing machine] in a rinse cycle [and thereby] make it irrelevant to combat [or] render it inoperable non-kinetically," he says. That offensive capability is associated with computer network attack--the ability to penetrate a foe's digital communications networks.

Asked if the Air Force already can fool a SAM into thinking it's something else and ignoring its assignment, Hornburg replied, "We can. It's classified. I'd like more, and I'd like it faster."

"I [also] look forward to some airborne or space capability [so that] we can take an advancing phalanx of enemy armor and shut down its ignition system. These are the things in electronic attack we need to carefully explore."

As to the latter non-kinetic capabilities, "I don't think some of the things are ready to be fielded," Hornburg said. "We should do more serious and thoughtful analysis of why they aren't ready to be fielded and see whether what I described is within the art of the possible and go for it more aggressively if it is."

The Air Force experimented clandestinely with the Suter 1 and Suter 2 programs during Joint Expeditionary Forces Experiments held at Nellis AFB, Nev., in 2000 and 2002. The capability, carried on an EC-130 Compass Call aircraft, allows an attacking force to enter the enemy computer network that integrates an air defense system. Suter 1 allowed the attackers to watch in real time what the enemy radars could detect. Suter 2 allowed them to actually take over the network as system administrator and start manipulating the radars. Suter 3, scheduled for testing this summer at JEFX04, is to extend the non-cooperative monitoring capability to time-critical targets.

Shutting down the ignitions of enemy vehicles and scrambling computer memories has been a goal of Air Force directed-energy programs for more than a decade. The technologies of choice involve High Power Microwave (HPM) weapons that can be carried by unmanned aircraft. Early tests using specially modified air-launched cruise missiles were troubled by the inability to precisely direct the beam of energy at a target. But updated, reusable directed-energy systems are being designed for use on the Joint Unmanned Combat Air System.