During the years since Desert Storm, the response time for SEAD challenges has become longer, not shorter, owing to an absence of adequate planning and to the disappearance of a talent pool of Air Force leaders skilled in EW. One senior Air Force Gulf War veteran complained that “we used to have an XOE [operational electronic warfare] branch in the Air Staff. That doesn’t exist any more. We used to reprogram [ECM] pods within the wings. They don’t really do that any more.” During a subsequent colloquium on the air war and its implications, former Air Force chief of staff General Michael Dugan attributed these problems to the Air Force’s having dropped the ball badly in 1990, when it failed to “replace a couple of senior officers in the acquisition and operations community who [oversaw] the contribution of electronic combat to warfighting output. The natural consequence was for this resource to go away.”[35]
A particular concern prompted by the less-than-reassuring SEAD experience in Allied Force was the need for better capabilities for accommodating noncooperative enemy air defenses and, more specifically, countering the enemy tactic whereby Serb SAM operators resorted to passive electro-optical rather than active radar tracking. That tactic prompted Major General Dennis Haines, Air Combat Command’s director of combat weapons systems, to spotlight the need for capabilities other than relying on radar emissions to detect SAM batteries, as well as to locate and fix on enemy SAM sites more rapidly when they emitted only briefly.[36] Looking farther downstream, one might also suggest that in the long run, the answer is not to continue getting better at SEAD but rather to move to improved low-observability capabilities and to the use of UCAVs (unmanned combat air vehicles), with a view toward rendering SEAD increasingly unnecessary.
Such concerns have occasioned a growing sense among SEAD specialists that the management of EW should be taken out of the domain of information operations, where it was pigeonholed for convenience after the retirement of the EF-111 and F-4G, and returned to its proper home at the USAF Air Warfare Center at Nellis AFB, Nevada. As one senior officer complained in this respect, electronic combat after Desert Storm found itself “buried in with information operations and information attack. What got lost was the critical issue that EW is a component of combat aircraft survivability.”[37] One side result of this neglect of the EW mission by the Air Force was that maintenance technicians could no longer reprogram quickly (that is, in 24 hours or less) ECM pods and radar warning receivers to counter newly detected enemy threats. That problem first arose in 1998, when several planned U-2 penetrations into hostile airspace had to be canceled at the last minute because USAF radar warning systems could not recognize some IADS signals emanating from Iraq and Bosnia.
Yet another problem highlighted by the IADS challenge presented in Allied Force was the disconcertingly small number of F-16CJs and EA-6Bs available to perform the SEAD mission. Aircraft and aircrews were both stretched extremely thin, even with the modest help provided by German and Italian Tornado ECR variants. This shortage of SEAD assets prompted a proposal for backfitting the HARM targeting system carried by the F-16CJ onto older F-16s and F-15Es. Another fix suggested for the shortfall in SEAD capability was to begin supplementing existing capabilities and tactics, which rely on the small-warhead HARM, with PGMs and attack tactics aimed at achieving hard kills against IADS targets for the duration of a campaign, essentially a very different approach. Most telling of all, the uneven results of the SEAD experience in Allied Force induced Air Combat Command to seek an increase in its planned acquisition of new F-16CJs from 30 to 100.[38]
THE F-117 SHOOTDOWN
It did not take long for the problems connected with the air war’s SEAD effort to register their first toll. On the fourth night of air operations, in the first combat loss ever of a stealth aircraft, an F-117 was downed at approximately 8:45 p.m. over hilly terrain near Budanovici, about 28 miles northwest of Belgrade, by an apparent barrage of SA-3s. Fortunately, the pilot ejected safely and, against formidable odds, was recovered before dawn the next day by a combat search and rescue team using MH-53 Pave Low and MH-60 Pave Hawk helicopters, and directed by a flight of A-10s.[39]
There was a flurry of speculation afterward as to how such an unexpected event might have taken place. Experts at Lockheed Martin Corporation, the aircraft’s manufacturer, reported that unlike earlier instances of F-117 combat operations, the missions flown over Yugoslavia had required the aircraft to operate in ways that may have compromised its stealth characteristics. By way of example, they noted that even a standard banking maneuver can increase the aircraft’s radar cross-section (RCS) by a factor of 100 or more—and such turns were unavoidable in the constricted airspace within which the F-117s were forced to fly.[40] Another unconfirmed report suggested that the RC-135 Rivet Joint aircraft monitoring enemy SAM activity may have been unable to locate the SA-3 battery that was thought to have downed the F-117 and may additionally have failed to relay to the appropriate command and control authorities timely indications of enemy SAM activity. Lending credence to that interpretation, the commander of Air Combat Command, General Richard Hawley, commented that “when you have a lot of unlocated threats, you are at risk even in a stealth airplane.”[41]
Although the Air Force has remained understandably silent as to what confluence of events it believes occasioned the F-117’s downing, press reports claimed that Air Force assessors had concluded, after conducting a formal postmortem, that a lucky combination of low-technology tactics, rapid learning, and astute improvisation had converged in one fleeting instant to enable an SA-3 not operating in its normal, radar-guided mode to down the aircraft. Enemy spotters in Italy doubtless reported the aircraft’s takeoff from Aviano, and IADS operators in Serbia, as well as perhaps in Bosnia and along the Montenegran coast, could have assembled from scattered radars enough glimpses of its position en route to its target to cue a SAM battery near Belgrade to fire at the appropriate moment. The aircraft had already dropped one laser-guided bomb near Belgrade, offering the now-alerted air defenders yet another clue. (The Air Force is said to have ruled out theories hinging on a stuck weapons bay door, a descent to below 15,000 ft, or a hit by AAA.)[42]
At least three procedural errors were alleged to have contributed to the downing.[43] The first was the reported inability of ELINT collectors to track the changing location of the three or four offending SAM batteries. Three low-frequency Serb radars that at least theoretically could have detected the F-117’s presence were reportedly not neutralized because U.S. strike aircraft had earlier bombed the wrong aim points within the radar complexes. Also, F-16CJs carrying HARMs and operating in adjacent airspace could have deterred the SA-3 battery from emitting, but those aircraft had been recalled before the F-117 shootdown.
36
Robert Wall, “SEAD Concerns Raised in Kosovo,”
39
Although some criticism was voiced afterward as to how CSAR had been shown to be “broken” because of problems that cropped up during the rescue operation (apparently, one of the helicopters was forced to disengage, refuel, and penetrate enemy airspace a second time before it could find and finally retrieve the downed pilot), genuine acts of heroism were displayed during the mission. It ended up a brilliant success and had the welcome effect of turning a propaganda coup for Milosevic almost instantly into a propaganda coup for NATO. On the criticism expressed, see Rowan Scarborough, “Air Force Search and Rescue Operations Called ‘Broken,’”
40
James Peltz and Jeff Leeds, “Stealth Fighter’s Crash Reveals a Design’s Limits,”
41
“Washington Outlook,”
42
Eric Schmitt, “Shrewd Serb Tactics Downed Stealth Jet, U.S. Inquiry Shows,”
43
See David A. Fulghum and William B. Scott, “Pentagon Gets Lock on F-117 Shoot-down,”