When Hornets Growl

The new, supersonic face of e-warfare.

• By D.C. Agle

No soft underbelly here: The EA-18G Growler hauls missiles, fuel tanks, and electronic warfare pods.

Two hours north of Seattle, Washington, at the eastern end of the Strait of Juan de Fuca, the entrance to Puget Sound is guarded by a citadel dedicated to the aerial mastery and manipulation of one of the universe’s fundamental particles—the electron. The site, Naval Air Station Whidbey Island, was originally envisioned as little more than a waypoint for patrol aircraft scanning the Sound for invaders in World War II.

Today, the station has evolved into the headquarters for the Navy’s airborne electronic attack mission, a shadow world where the electromagnetic spectrum—the range of radiation frequencies—is the battlefield, and jets firing radio waves, microwaves, and infrared waves instead of bullets can wreak havoc without a trace. Now, as the Boeing F/A-18F Super Hornet morphs into the EA-18G Growler, the Navy’s e-warfare capability has gone into afterburner.

In electronic warfare, various pods and antennas on an airplane send and receive these high-powered electromagnetic signals to disrupt, suppress, or disable an enemy’s radar-based defenses and communications networks. Called aerial electronic jamming, the practice can make a flight of attack airplanes accompanied by a Growler vanish from enemy radar screens in a storm of disorienting electromagnetic noise, like an orchestra drowning out a bugle. Or a Growler can slouch into passive mode, eavesdropping on the enemy for extended periods to gather intelligence.

For some 40 years, those at Whidbey have been practicing the black art of jamming from inside the cockpit of Grumman’s drumstick-shaped EA-6B Prowler. But that aircraft, which flummoxed a generation of enemy radar operators in Vietnam, is aged, overbooked, maintenance-needy, and downright slow.

In 2009, the first operational squadron of EA-18G Growlers, the Prowlers’ successors, began tearing through the skies around Whidbey. By the end of 2014, the Navy plans to take delivery of 114 Growlers. At $67 million each, the G comes with a lot of bells and whistles.

The electronic attack community likes the Growler’s speed and its ability to fly from either airfield or carrier deck. Pilots like the fact that it will be able to stand back and jam for other airplanes, called standoff jamming; or, because it’s able to keep up with Super Hornets, that it will provide modified escort jamming in almost all phases of an attack mission, targeting in particular an adversary’s airborne and ground-based anti-aircraft missile capabilities. And everyone likes the cut of its jib. The Growler has the DNA of a fighter, so it is more suited to a Hollywood closeup than its bulbous and blistered predecessor.

Yet those who fly the Growler for the “Scorpions” of VAQ-132 at Whidbey, the first operational squadron, know their place in the world: below the radar. “Oh, we’ll never have a Top Gun movie made about us,” says Lieutenant Commander Eric Sinibaldi, a Scorpion electronic warfare officer. “The problem we have as electronic attack guys is there is no kinetic. You don’t see a bomb blow up.” The only way to confirm how e-warfare methods worked in a given scenario would be to ask the enemy what effects he witnessed.

Jack Dailey, a retired Marine Corps general and the director of the National Air and Space Museum, flew McDonnell RF-4s and jammers in Vietnam, including the Grumman EA-6A, the two-seat e-warfare precursor to the four-seat EA-6B. He also flew the Douglas EF-10B Skyknight, an e-warfare version of the F3D. He confirms that the work was quiet but very intense. “The mission was classified so nobody knew what we did,” he says, a fact largely true of the Growler’s mission now. “We had a song we sang: ‘We’re the senior squadron in the East, we fly the most but we do the least.’ And we did fly a lot. Always airborne, always orbiting, always watching.”

From Allied landings on D-Day to NATO’s bombing campaign in Kosovo in 1999 to the Israeli air force’s reported successful targeting of a Syrian nuclear facility in 2007, militaries that have manipulated the electronic spectrum have had a major advantage.

“If [e-warfare aircraft] are not airborne to support the strike, the strike does not go,” says Commander Jeff Craig, the Scorpions’ commanding officer. “Guys are recognizing the threat today is much more diverse.”

That realization trickles down to the people on the ground who get cover from the electronic warfare mission.

“You come back to the chow hall maybe a couple of weeks after working with [the troops] and actually sit and eat dinner with them,” says Lieutenant Kristen Levasseur, another Scorpion electronic warfare officer. “And they ask you, ‘Were you guys the ones out there that night?’ You say yes, and they tell you the crazy stories about what went on, and thank God you were there.”

E-WARFARE first broke out on the high seas during the 1901 International Yacht Races, now called the America’s Cup. Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi had planned to provide radio-telegraph updates from a boat to the Associated Press on shore. But a competitor, the American Wireless Telephone and Telegraph Company, eager for an exclusive, constructed a more powerful transmitter. As the racing yachts Columbia andShamrock II tacked around Sandy Hook at the northern tip of the New Jersey coast, the airwaves that should have carried the Morse code dots and dashes of Marconi’s transmitter were instead saturated with noise from American Wireless, rendering his dispatches indecipherable.

It took just three more years for electronic jamming to truly go to battle. During the 1904 Russo-Japanese War, Russian radio-telegraph stations at Port Arthur on the Chinese coast interfered with wireless communication between Japanese ships trying to shell the Russian naval base there. A decade later, radio jamming went to the battlefields of World War I, but both sides opted more often to gather enemy transmissions. In World War II, Germany struck a blow in the expansion of e-warfare: On February 12, 1942, as the German warships Scharnhorst, Gneisenau, and Prinz Eugen bolted from the bombed-out French port of Brest via the English Channel to the relative safety of German waters, all behind a curtain of German electromagnetic interference, English radar screens turned to gibberish. Known as the Channel Dash, it compelled the Brits to start waging e-warfare in earnest.

Among their first tasks was to address Bomber Command’s losses due to the early warnings enabled by German radar. The RAF turned to the unsung Boulton Paul Defiant, a two-seat, four-gun, one-turret fighter that failed to achieve the stardom of the Hawker Hurricane and the Supermarine Spitfire.

“The Defiant was designed to pull alongside and below German bombers and pour rounds into the engines and fuel tanks, protected from return fire by the bomber’s own structure,” says Les Whitehouse, a British aircraft historian with the Boulton Paul Association. “It could out-turn the Hurricane, Spitfire, and Messerschmitt Bf109. What it could not do was outrun the Bf109.” This made the Defiant vulnerable, so the RAF assigned it to training, air-sea rescue, night patrol, and work with airborne radar countermeasures.

Five months after the Channel Dash, eight Defiants were flying formation over the south coast of England, using “Moonshine,” a new radar technology the Brits had created, to try to fool one of Germany’s powerful Freya early warning radars, this one near Cherbourg, France. Moonshine reradiated Freya’s radar waves back with a larger, identical pulse combined with the natural pulse off the Defiants, giving the appearance that a pack of a hundred heavy bombers was approaching. Before the last pulse of Moonshine had been sent, 30 German fighters were in hot pursuit of a phantom bomber group. Less than two weeks later, Defiants again fooled Luftwaffe ground controllers, who vectored 144 fighters toward an imaginary air raid while a dozen B-17s and their fighter escorts attacked the rail yards at Rouen, France.

“England was not the only country to get into airborne electronic countermeasures during the war,” says Daniel Kuehl, director of the Information Operations Concentration Program at the National Defense University in Washington, D.C. “Everyone did. But the Brits and the Americans were the best at it, and they won. From World War II on, electronic warfare becomes essential to operating and winning a war.” The airborne jamming genie was out of the bottle, and the Defiant had shown that you didn’t have to be fast or glamorous to get the job done.

Which was good news for the homely EA-6B Prowler, the U.S. Navy’s primary jammer since 1971. The airplane, a Grumman A-6 Intruder stretched 4.5 feet and equipped with two more electronic warfare officers in shoulder-to-shoulder back seats, ripples with tumor-like bulges and pods housing the airplane’s jamming equipment. The subsonic Prowler, first flown in May 1968, had electronics that were tailored to counter Soviet-built radar stations launching the Mach 3.5 SA-2 radar-guided missiles that, early in the Vietnam conflict, were downing U.S. Air Force pilots in alarming numbers—one American airplane lost for every two SA-2s fired.

John McCarty, a tour guide and gallery lead at the National Electronics Museum in Washington, D.C., worked for Westinghouse in the Vietnam years developing electronic countermeasures. On visits to South Vietnam, he watched as strike groups returned to base missing airplanes downed by SA-2s. “Pilots made it clear that they would rather have a 500-pound bomb to drop than a piece of mysterious equipment hanging on a wing,” says McCarty. “But afterward they started seeing that aircraft flying with our jamming pods were returning and those [without] were not coming back as often, so the conclusion became obvious.” The Navy began calling up every jammer it could get.

“We had done our workups in preparation to go to the Mediterranean,” says Bob Pettyjohn, a retired Navy captain and Prowler pilot aboard the carrier America. “Ten days before we left, the Navy said, ‘Whoa, not so fast! You’re going to Vietnam.’ Well, the other guys on the boat weren’t too happy about the change in plans, with the exception of the two Phantom fighter squadrons aboard ship who looked at us as the biggest MiG bait ever to come down the pike.

“The first flight we flew over there in the Prowler, when we turned on the jammers, every radar in North Vietnam lit up. They had never seen anything like the Prowler.”

Once on station, Prowler crews found themselves flying at all hours. “They would have a carrier flying noon-to-midnight cycles, and another from midnight to noon,” says Pettyjohn. “The idea was you could shut everything down and people could get some sleep. But since we were covering everybody, they would sometimes have to get up in the middle of the night just to launch one of our airplanes. So the America didn’t like us. I can remember one night blasting off the America at three o’clock in the morning to cover the B-52s. We get airborne and I look in the rearview mirror and see all the lights go off. They were happy we were gone so they could go back to sleep.”

Night and day, the Prowler built up a reputation as crucial to a strike group’s ability to penetrate North Vietnamese air defenses. “I can gladly and gratefully attest to the incredible effectiveness of the Prowlers,” says former space shuttle commander Michael Coats, who flew the Ling-Temco-Vought A-7 Corsair II in Vietnam. “They were fantastic, and a combat pilot’s best friend in a high-threat environment.”

By 2016, the 93 Prowlers still flying (170 were built between 1968 and 1991) will be either the property of the Marine Corps, which plans to fly them until at least 2019, or decommissioned, with a few ending up on a pole in front of an airfield.

“IN THE PROWLER, you had four guys working an older weapon system,” ex plains Eric Sinibaldi. “Now, with only two guys in the Growler with a newer weapon system, it requires both to be really on the same page to fight the jet.”

Some have joked that the pilot in the EA-6B was just a chauffeur. No one can say that of the Growler. Integrating the pilot into the electronic attack mission involved more than 200 Prowler pilots and electronic warfare officers running numerous missions in the Growler simulator at Boeing’s St. Louis facility. This revealed that it takes a lot more automation, as well as advanced cockpit displays that clearly present critical data, to get two people to do the work of four. “I think it’s fair to say they tend to be a different breed of cat,” says Captain John Green of e-warfare crews. Green runs the Navy’s airborne electronic attack program at Naval Air Station Patuxent River in Maryland. “If the average brain is 14 pounds, maybe Prowler and Growler guys are 16.”

The Prowler’s steam gauges and thumb wheels have been replaced in the Growler with digital, flat-panel displays. And compared to the two-seat F/A-18F Super Hornet, a fully loaded G is 1,400 pounds heavier, with 66 more antennas, an additional half-mile of wiring, and 1.5 million more lines of software code. A Link 16 data exchange network lets the Growler send and receive data with other airplanes on the fly, allowing Growler crews to effectively “peer over the shoulders” of other airplanes in the strike group in real time to see what their radars and other data gathering systems see. The crewmen wear helmet-mounted cueing systems that display targets and flight data on the inside of the visor to enhance their head-up awareness (see “Hard Hat Zone,” Then & Now, Aug./Sept. 2008). The Growler’s electronic countermeasures system, called Improved Capabilities (ICAP) III, was originally deployed on the Prowler. To make ICAP III work in the Growler, engineers had to reconfigure its ALQ-218 jammer. The system’s main receiver, called the “football” when it was perched like the Super Bowl trophy atop the Prowler’s vertical tail, has been split into a pair of sleeker antennas, one on each of the Growler’s wingtips. Rounded off at the front and back, the receivers have the same weight and center of gravity—but slightly higher drag—as the AIM-9 air-to-air missiles that Super Hornets carry there. Because its brawny electronics had to go somewhere, the ALQ-218 also robbed the Growler of its 20-millimeter Vulcan cannon. Still, the G carries air-to-surface missiles to take out radar dishes and other emitters, and air-to-air missiles to confront airborne threats.

With its wingtips occupied by the new antennas, the Growler still has nine external points for pods, fuel tanks, and missiles (see p. 44). The most recognizable payloads are the detachable ALQ-99 jammer pods, each with a ram air turbine, a passive mini-propeller on the nose of the unit that spins in the slipstream to generate its electricity. The innards of the 15-foot-long, canoe-shaped devices have been updated several times since their introduction. The pods limit the Growler’s speed, but chances are, with an active electronically scanned array (AESA) radar that reportedly can see 200-plus miles, the crew won’t get surprised by even a high-speed adversary.

The Growler hasn’t had time to compile a track record, and the Navy isn’t saying when it might deploy to Afghanistan. In one of the world’s poorest countries, where there are virtually no enemy missiles or anti-aircraft radars, the EA-18G might be a bit overqualified. But it can jam a Taliban cell phone call, or a signal from an electric garage-door opener intended to set off a roadside bomb. Some reports on the ground say that EA-6B Prowlers can now do “courtesy burns,” pre-flying the route of a truck convoy, emitting electrons all along to trigger buried explosives. The Navy offers no comment on such a capability.

Militaries sometimes tend to fight the last war, because it is the war they know. E-warfare is the realm in which they can least afford to do that. Yet, in times of relative peace, jamming advocates are forced to speak up to keep the funding flowing for research and development.

“Electronic warfare is something that everybody wants when you’re in combat, but nobody is willing to pay for in peacetime,” says Jack Dailey. “It’s extremely difficult to justify because it has to be based upon handling a threat that may not have been developed yet.”

The Navy has been sharing a few details about its Next Generation Jammer program, which will replace the ALQ-99 on the Growler at first, and then on the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. Central to the jammer will be developments in AESA radars that promise much wider frequency coverage, better identification of sophisticated waveforms, and more seamless integration between the AESA and jammer.

And while it’s difficult to anticipate if the nemesis will be a cell phone or an advanced missile radar, one thing is for certain: the Navy will need the very best electronic countermeasures available to watch, listen, and act.

When D.C. Agle isn’t writing, he’s doing his best to refrain from growling as he changes his five-monthold twins’ diapers for the umpteenth time.

Note: Article from www.airspacemag.com

Stealthy Chinese J-20 Vulnerable

By David A. Fulghum, Bill Sweetman, Bradley Perrett, Robert Wall Washington, Washington, Beijing, London

China’s newest combat aircraft prototype, the J-20, will require an intense development program if it is going to catch up with fast-moving anti-stealth advances. In fact, anti-stealth will bring into question all stealth designs: How much invulnerability will current low-observability techniques offer as air defense systems adopt larger and more powerful active, electronically scanned array (AESA) radars? From the early days of AESA development, a key goal was to build a radar that could detect very small objects—such as a cruise missile at a distance great enough to target and shoot it down—or a larger object like a fighter with a very low-observable treatment. Airborne detection of stealth aircraft may already be an operational capability. In a series of tests at Edwards AFB, Calif., in 2009, Lockheed Martin’s CATbird avionics testbed—a Boeing 737 that carries the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter’s entire avionics system—engaged a mixed force of F-22s and Boeing F-15s and was able to locate and jam F-22 radars, according to researchers. Raytheon’s family of X-band airborne AESA radar—in particular, those on upgraded F-15Cs stationed in Okinawa—can detect small, low-signature cruise missiles. Moreover, Northrop Grumman’s lower-frequency, L-band AESA radar on Australia’s Wedgetail airborne early warning and control aircraft is larger and potentially more capable of detecting stealth aircraft at longer ranges. Lockheed Martin also hinted at a JSF anti-stealth capability in 2009 in a reference to combat with sophisticated, foreign aircraft. “The F-35’s avionics include onboard sensors that will enable pilots to strike fixed or moving ground targets in high-threat environments, day or night, in any weather, while simultaneously targeting and eliminating advanced airborne threats,” said Dan Crowley, then-executive vice president and F-35 program general manager. Better images emerging from China point clearly to the J-20’s use of stealth technology, but major uncertainties and questions remain unresolved. The overall shape resembles that of the F-35 and F-22, which have a single “chine line” uniting the forebody, upper inlet lips, and wing and canard edges with a curved surface above that line and flat, canted body surfaces below it. The wing and canard edges are aligned: The wing and canard leading edges are parallel and the trailing edge of each canard is aligned with the opposite wing’s trailing edge. The same basic philosophy also has been adopted in British, Swedish and Japanese studies for stealth fighters. The aim in all cases is to endow a practical, agile fighter configuration with a “bow-tie” radar signature, with the smallest signature around the nose and the greatest (still much lower than that of a conventional aircraft with curved or vertical-slab sides) to the side. The fighter’s mission planning system, using a database of known radar locations, then derives a “blue line” track that weaves between radars and avoids exposing the side-on signature to those radars more than transiently. The “diverterless” supersonic inlet avoids a signature problem caused by a conventional boundary layer diverter plate. For example, the F-22 has a conventional inlet, which is likely to require extensive radar absorbent material (RAM) treatment. The biggest uncertainty about the Chinese design concerns the engine exhausts, which as seen on the prototype are likely to cause a radar cross-section (RCS) peak from the rear aspect. One possibility is that a stealthier two-dimensional nozzle will be integrated later in the program; however, the nozzles on the current aircraft show some signs of RCS-reducing sawtooth treatment, suggesting that the People’s Liberation Army has accepted a rear-aspect RCS penalty rather than the much greater weight and complexity of 2D nozzles. Other features are less clear. Stealth development has been dogged by detail-design challenges. All the antennas on the aircraft have to be flush with the skin and covered with surfaces that retain stealth properties while being transparent in a specific frequency. Maintainability becomes a complex tradeoff: Some systems requiring frequent attention will be accessed via landing gear and weapon bays, and others by latched and actuated doors that can open and close without affecting RCS—but the latter involves a weight penalty. Perhaps the toughest hurdle is managing radio-frequency surface currents over the skin. Early stealth designs used heavy, maintenance-intensive RAM. The F-22 introduced a much lighter surface treatment, but it has proven unexpectedly difficult to maintain, causing corrosion issues. Lockheed Martin now asserts that the F-35 will be robust and affordable to maintain in service, with a combination of a high-toughness, sprayed-on topcoat and a conductive layer cured into composite skin panels. The Chengdu J-20 design has struck many analysts and observers as familiar and somewhat different from the F-22, F-35 or Sukhoi T-50. “The J-20 is reminiscent of the Russian MiG-1.42 both in terms of planform and also with regard to the rear fuselage configuration,” says Douglas Barrie, senior fellow for military aerospace at London’s International Institute for Strategic Studies. “The most obvious difference is the greater forward fuselage shaping as the basis for low-observable characteristics, along with the different engine intake configuration. The MiG program was canceled by the Russian government around 1997,” he notes. However, the similarity to the MiG concept may suggest some collusion with the Russian aviation industry. The J-20 made its first flight shortly before 1 p.m. Beijing time on Jan. 11. The flight ended three weeks of anticipation that began in late December when the new design started taxi tests. The discussion about the program will now shift to the aircraft’s mission (fighter or, more likely, long-range strike), sensors (strike missions would require a high-resolution, long-range radar) and communications (which would demand high-speed data links and sophisticated integration). Conventional radars have only one-half to one-third of the range of an AESA radar. Moreover, the movement of a conventional, mechanically scanned radar antenna provides a tell-tale glint of radio-frequency reflections to enemy aircraft with advanced radars. Such reflections undercut the effectiveness of a stealth airframe. China is known to be pursuing newer radar technology. “It’s too early to tell the true status of the Chinese AESA program,” says a Washington-based intelligence official. “We’ve seen lots of press and air show information on the program, but that doesn’t automatically translate into a robust development or give us an accurate look at where [China] is as far as fielding one anytime soon. “Like the [high-performance] engine, it’ll be a challenge to take the step from older radars to one designed for a fifth-generation fighter,” he says. “Again, though, the J-20 is just the first or second—depending on whom you believe—prototype in a very long development program.” If the Chinese conduct a few months of flight tests and there are no more aircraft involved in the program, this might indicate that the J-20 is a proof-of-concept or technical demonstrator. If there are several aircraft eventually, a prototype program would be a more likely conclusion. The flight occurred during a visit to China by U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who says Chinese President Hu Jintao confirmed the event to him in talks. However, Gates still believes the U.S. will retain a preponderance of stealth fighters through 2025. Photo Credit: Internet via Airpower Australia

The Last Gunslinger

he F-15C is the only dedicated dogfighter left in the U.S. military fleet. Why isn't the Air Force replacing it?

• By Michael Behar
• Air & Space Magazine

While driving through downtown Mountain Home, Idaho, on a gray February morning, I notice something troubling: Mountain Home has no mountains. Later I learn why. In the 1880s, the town was relocated. Its original site was an Overton trail stagecoach stop called Rattlesnake Station. A post office, a farmhouse, and a few clapboard structures were nestled in the foothills of the Sawtooth Range, where snowy peaks soar above 10,000 feet. The outpost served a gunslinging clientele of trappers, miners, and explorers, and, true to the romance of the American west, survival there required a will and an ability to fight. But in 1883, the Oregon Short Line railroad laid tracks seven miles southeast, on the Snake River Plateau. A more comfortable life beckoned, so the town moved. And that’s when Mountain Home lost its soul.

Its rebirth began in August 1943, when the U.S. Army Air Forces built an airfield on the outskirts of town to train B-24 Liberator crews. Soon the base expanded, until it encompassed 134,000 acres. In 1991, the F-15 Eagles arrived. Built by McDonnell Douglas (now Boeing), the F-15 made its first flight on July 27, 1972, and the C model remains the only fighter in the U.S. arsenal designed exclusively for air-to-air combat. Its pilots have restored to Mountain Home the sensibility of the gunslinger, whose singular pursuit leaves no safety net: It’s kill or be killed.

But after more than 30 years in service, the F-15 dogfighters are becoming an endangered species. To blame are the multi-role, fifth generation Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor and F-35 Lightning II. By 2025, the ambidextrous multi-roles, along with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), will have replaced all F-15Cs, a drawdown that’s already under way. Some F-15Cs are headed to the Air National Guard; others are being cannibalized for parts. A handful of pilots will get reassigned to the F-22, but an unlucky few might end up holding the joystick controlling a UAV, or grounded at desk jobs.

For their part, Department of Defense wonks claim that America’s enemies reside in caves, unreachable by aircraft. F-15C pilots see it differently. The threat of an airborne attack has diminished, they say, precisely because the Eagle has maintained air dominance over the battlefield for nearly four decades. “We are a victim of our own success,” says Lieutenant Colonel Mark McGeorge, who is chief of flying operations and training at Air Combat Command at Langley Air Force Base in Hampton, Virginia, and has 2,800 hours in F-15s. “If we don’t maintain our advantage of air superiority, then maybe our enemies will decide to challenge our aircraft directly.”

“There are just not going to be enough airplanes anymore,” declares 42-year-old Lieutenant Colonel Jim Stratton. A Chicago native, Stratton is the commander of Mountain Home’s 390th Fighter Squadron, one of four under the 366th Fighter Wing. “We’re taking on more risk because some elements within the DOD assume that air superiority is going to be a given.” Stratton has flown combat missions in Kosovo and Iraq. To his dismay, his entire squadron—21 F-15Cs and 13 fighter pilots—will be disbanded by September.

Now you’d think the Eagle top guns—the pilots refer to each other as “Bros”—would be hankering to get behind the stick of an F-22 (and eventually an F-35, due in 2016), with all its “Gucci” technology, as 29-year-old Captain Benjamin Leestma puts it. But they’re not. “The thing is, [in multi-role fighters] there is so much information that you have to weed through to get to what you really care about,” says Leestma, Mountain Home’s chief of weapons and tactics. Pilots like Leestma joined the Air Force to fly the legendary F-15Cs. “I have spent six years working my tail off to get to the point where I am,” he says. “The jet is a twin-tail, twin-engine, combat-proven, air-dominant fighter. Being single-seat allows me to make and execute instant decisions without coordinating with another crew member. In my experience, the speed at which the pilot can make and execute decisions is often the key to success in air-to-air combat.” Leestma concedes that the F-22 and F-35 are indeed be-all, do-all workhorses, but complains that the pilots flying them rely too much on gadgetry and too little on grit. The Bros are a vanishing breed, bemoans another Eagle pilot. And they warn that mothballing F-15s while not pursuing a fifth generation air superiority jet—one designed principally for dogfighting—is a mistake, a risk to America’s national security.

The news is not all bad. Sweeping technological upgrades since its inception have rendered the F-15C a formidable 21st century weapon, while additional add-ons in the near-term will prolong its viability. What upsets the F-15C pilots at Mountain Home is that in the interim the Air Force will begin curtailing the Eagle’s mission as a dogfighter. If, by chance, the country goes to war where air dominance is contested, the multi-role platforms will supposedly handle dogfights just fine. But new recruits to the multi-role programs won’t spend long hours flying dogfight scenarios. Stick time is limited—operating an F-22 costs $50,800 an hour, compared to $31,800 for an Eagle—and there are just too many other systems, procedures, and missions to master.

The fifth generation assumption is that pilots will eliminate the enemy before having to engage at close range. “At the end of the day, if you are dogfighting in an F-22, lots of mistakes happened in the previous 80 miles,” says Stratton. But mistakes do happen. Stratton also worries that those who fly the multi-roles aren’t hardwired for air-to-air combat. Of his F-15C Bros, he says, “We attract a certain portion of the population to the job, guys who bring that controlled aggression and cunning and desire to never lose, no matter what the odds are.”

Last year I went to Cuba and for two weeks drove 1,100 miles around the island. No doubt you’ve seen photos of the vintage 1957 Chevys there, those pre-Castro leftovers that roam the countryside in mint condition, engines purring, as if they’re fresh off the lot. I had a chance to inspect one of these stalwart gems up close. Its owner showed me how he had retrofitted his with a diesel motor from a Mercedes-Benz, and installed air conditioning and a thumping audio system. Surely Chevy’s engineers never envisioned the kinds of modifications that have kept this classic alive in Cuba for a half-century. But its sturdy frame, modular architecture, and generous engine compartment left ample room for modernization. The story of the ’57 Chevy is the story of the F-15 Eagle.

Stratton walks me out to the Mountain Home flightline, where an icy wind scours the tarmac. F-15Cs are aligned like sentries, their wing pylons laden with air-to-air missiles. Maintenance crews scurry from airplane to airplane, checking and rechecking avionics, engine 
specs, hydraulics, control surfaces, and weapons systems. 
We approach Stratton’s F-15C where a fresh-faced kid has just finished hand-polishing the landing gear assembly. He sees us coming, jumps to his feet, and acknowledges Stratton, his commanding officer. I follow Stratton up an aluminum technician’s ladder. He slides into the cockpit while I stand on the ladder’s top rung. “Don’t touch anything,” he warns. “You could arm the weapons system.”

The dials and knobs are decrepit; nearly every painted surface is scuffed and chipped. The control stick looks like it might have been dragged behind a tractor for 60 miles. And I’m pretty sure that the tattered pilot’s seat came from the VW bus of a group of Deadheads, shortly after the ’77 spring tour. To discover where the magic happens, I have to peek beneath the forlorn facade. Integrated into both the interior and the exterior fuselage are several large compartments and caches. They once housed hefty pneumatic controls and bloated radar and weapons components that pre-dated the microcomputer revolution. But as technology shrank, the F-15’s flight systems got smaller and lighter, leaving room to cram in new innovations. Instead of languishing as decades passed, the Eagle got more agile and lethal.

By the 1980s, McDonnell Douglas engineers had gained enough space in the forward fuselage to add a second seat for the F-15E model, a potent air-to-ground strike fighter. It boasts under-wing fuel tanks to extend its range, a digital flight control system, low-altitude “tree-top” navigation, infrared night vision, and color cockpit displays. During Operation Desert Storm, F-15Es pounded Iraqi Scud missile sites, obliterated Saddam Hussein’s feeble air force, and rained cluster bombs on his Republican Guard troops. To detail the dozens of improvements since the Eagle’s debut—communications, navigation, propulsion, displays and instruments, electronic warfare, sensors, and weapons targeting—would drown you in acronyms. The list of upgrades that stokes F-15C pilots, however, is much shorter. Stratton has two favorites. The first is the Fighter Data Link, or “Fiddle.” In essence, Fiddle gathers flight data from other Fiddle-equipped aircraft and sews it into a single seamless display. In combination with other technology, Fiddle also collects information from airborne refueling tankers, E-3 airborne warning and control systems, and forces on the ground or at sea, even submarines. “It gives you a three-dimensional picture of the battlespace from a God’s-eye view,” says Stratton. “As a flight lead managing four airplanes and sometimes up to 14, I used to have to put what all the guys were telling me in my ear into this three-dimensional picture in my head. Now that is all presented to me graphically on my Fiddle display.”

Another prized advance is the Joint Helmet Mounted Cuing System. “We just call it The Helmet, with the emphasis on the,” says Stratton. From his gear locker in the ready room, Stratton offers me his helmet to inspect. The visor is nearly opaque, and the shell is embedded with magnetic sensors that transmit real-time spatial data from a pilot’s head position to receivers inside the cockpit. During a dogfight, Stratton can cue and fire weapons at attacking aircraft, even during high-G maneuvers, simply by glancing at his enemy. “I really don’t know how we did missions before we had the helmet,”he admits.

Leestma, who has racked up more than 900 F-15C hours, tells me about a recent radar makeover called Active Electronically Scanned Array, or AESA. (As part of an Air Force F-15 program known as Golden Eagle, C-model airframes are undergoing stress tests, and those with the least wear and tear will receive an AESA system.) Conventional radars make sweeps that show solid objects as pings or blips on a head-up display. With each radar pass, the process repeats. The problem is that in a dynamic air-to-air situation, bad things can happen between cycles. “By the time the radar we have now does all its math, you might have something completely different out there,” says Leestma. AESA is fluid and encompassing. It uses multiple frequencies to continuously scan the skies, then stitches together a real-time radar image. Leestma explains, “It paints the picture of anything moving out in front of you and constantly updates it.”

The economy is quashing spendy military ventures, and fifth generation fighters are already suffering the wrath of the red pen. With every F-22 costing as much as $227 million, according to the Rand Project Air Force analytical team, President Obama ordered production halted at 187 jets and slashed further funding. The ongoing F-35 development program, a relative bargain at $155 million per airplane, is already over budget and behind schedule, causing Congressional colic. Cutbacks to its $300 billion-plus program are virtually certain. That’s just fine with F-15C pilots, who believe their dogfighters are plenty capable of defending America’s turf for the foreseeable future. “The F-15C is still our frontline air superiority fighter,” says Major John Boehm, a veteran F-15C pilot and program element monitor at Langley, whose job entails setting future hardware and software requirements for the Eagle fleet. “It was overbuilt in a good way, designed with enough extra margins to allow us to have all the options we have today for upgrading. Some call it the world’s greatest fighter based on its proven legacy. It has a kill ratio of 104-0.”

In a dogfight where an F-15C might face off against a Russian Sukhoi Su-27 or China’s Shenyang J-11, both fourth generation fighters, or even the mighty fifth generation F-22, Eagle pilots are confident they’d triumph. In fact, two pilots told me that if an F-22 uses its thrust vectoring to do a post-stall maneuver during a dogfight, there is a specific move that they can execute to win. This classified tactic is the F-15C pilot’s ace in the hole. Stratton acknowledges the tactic, but cautions that in air-to-air combat, no one move will always solve a particular problem. “Rather, it is much more likely that the F-15 pilot was able to fly his aircraft to its maximum potential [while] the F-22 pilot made a maneuver error. While the machine is important, and the F-22 enjoys a maneuvering envelope advantage over almost every aircraft, the man in the cockpit tilts the balance between success and failure. A pilot that is flying his F-15C to its maximum potential is a very tough adversary to defeat.”

A number of features make the F-15C an ideal dogfighter. With a thrust-to-weight ratio greater than 1:1, it is one of the few fighters with that power advantage, so it can accelerate during a vertical climb. And the large lifting surface of the fuselage enables the Eagle to keep flying even with a lot of battle damage.

The Eagle also blends a computerized system with old-fashioned manual controls. Other fighters, particularly the F-22, are pure fly-by-wire. In the F-15C, say its pilots, a pilot can override his computer warnings and go beyond the edge to get that little bit of boost to survive. In the F-22, the computer system simply won’t allow that, as it thinks the airplane will break up in flight—not good when you’re in the midst of a dogfight and need to execute tactical maneuvers.

Major David Skalicky, leader of the F-22 Aerial Demonstration Team, and a former F-15C pilot, disputes the F-15C pilots’ claim of an advantage. “The F-22 will aerodynamically out-perform and out-power the F-15 in every scenario,” says Skalicky. “That isn’t to say that on exceptionally rare occasions, F-22 pilots haven’t lost to F-15 pilots in practice dogfights due to poor maneuver selection. However, the credit for victory in that scenario belongs to the F-15 pilot, not the airframe.”

The majority of active-duty Eagle pilots flying today were born after the aircraft went into service. So to find out if anyone expected the F-15 to remain a viable dogfighter for more than a quarter-century, I tracked down those who designed and built it. They gather every three years for a reunion on the anniversary of the F-15’s inaugural flight. Donn Byrnes, who flew F-86 Sabres and F-84 Thunderjets in the 1950s and later spent six years on the Air Force side of the team designing and developing the SR-71 Blackbird, was the system program office project manager for the F-15 airframe. He got involved with the Eagle program in 1969, coordinating with McDonnell Douglas engineers during the early blueprint stages, and stayed through mid-1975.

The 78-year-old retired colonel is panting when I reach him by telephone at his home in Los Lunas, New Mexico. “Sorry, I just hauled in a cord of firewood,” explains Byrnes, who wrote the book Air Superiority Blue, a retelling of the Eagle’s birth. I ask Byrnes what spawned the sudden demand for an air superiority fighter, something the Air Force hadn’t shown an interest in since it procured the P-51 Mustang in 1940. “We had our tail feathers burned off in Vietnam by the MiG-19, and if we went to war with Russia, we would be in deep trouble,” he says. “So we wanted to put together a machine that when fitted with a skillful pilot, who is aggressive and courageous, would have the ability to turn and burn and kill whatever he comes across.”

Byrnes agrees with most Eagle pilots that the F-15’s longevity is a direct result of its singular mission. “We designed the F-15 to do what we wanted it to do, and nothing else.” Byrnes is a critic of the multi-role concept: “You don’t want to make an airplane be the Swiss Army knife of a fighter,” he says. “I’m absolutely not in love with the idea. The F-35 is the worst nightmare of hardware idiocy. It does everything wrong. You need a long-legged fighter, not a short, fat one.”

Byrnes credits chief Air Force engineer Frederick Rall for championing the F-15’s robust and redundant design. “His mantra was: The first failure can’t kill you, and that the only failure we could define that you could not recover from was the stick busting off in the cockpit.” Consider the story of Israeli F-15 pilot Zivi Nedivi, who during a training exercise in 1983 hit and destroyed an A-4 Skyhawk. The collision sheared off all but two feet of Nedivi’s right wing. He punched the afterburners to generate lift over the fuselage and managed to land.

The Air Force purchased its last F-15 in 2001, and the 499 Eagles that remain in the fleet (C, D, and E models) are, on average, 20 years old. Meanwhile, foreign sales, mainly to Singapore and South Korea, could keep manufacturing plants at Boeing chugging along for at least another few years. “Given the end of the F-22 program, if force structure begins to look really bad, the Air Force could buy a few more F-15s,” says Richard Aboulafia, vice president of the Teal Group, a military consulting firm in Fairfax, Virginia. “Every day the line stays open, it keeps alive that chance.” A new prototype, the F-15 Silent Eagle, has a stealthy, radar-absorbent coating. “Singapore and South Korea are getting planes that are extremely capable, with the latest systems and sensors,” says Aboulafia.

For a guy integral to the design of the world’s greatest fighter jet, you’d think Byrnes might be a bit wistful to see the F-15 destined for the boneyard. He’s not. In fact, he’s dismayed that the Air Force never acquired a fifth generation dogfighter. “It’s the only fighter in modern times that has been in constant production for 35 years—who would have thought—and I think it’s because we didn’t have our act together to buy another one,” he says. “When you kick pilots out in the dark and say to them, ‘Go find what that is and kill it,’ riding an old horse is not the way to succeed. You are asking them to take an airplane guaranteed for 4,000 flight hours with airframes that already have about 6,000—way past their approved fatigue life—and then rat race with them.”

Very few Eagle pilots think the F-22 or F-35 will eliminate the need for a dedicated air superiority fighter with a skilled pilot. If you’re a multi-role pilot, “intel hands you a target package, you fly the black line, drop the bomb, and come back,” says Stratton. “Multi-roles can do different missions, but their primary mission—the reason we bought them—is to drop bombs. A guy that is going to go drop a bomb has been given a discrete target. There is no decision-making. In the F-15C, we’re told to protect a battlespace. It’s a much more fluid environment.”

UAVs, such as Predator drones and their offspring, which undoubtedly will be more sophisticated, could take on dogfights in the future. In fact, some experts predict the F-35 will be the last manned fighter ever built. This deeply troubles F-15C pilots, who know that once their Eagles are scrapped, they could get reassigned to UAV duty. Imagine training to race a Formula One speedster, only to be told that you’ll be touring the track in a Prius. “I’d shoot myself,” says Leestma. “[Flying UAVs] is a totally different mindset. My skills are not transferable. I am putting myself in a position where my pink body is on the line. I’ve gotta kill a guy before he kills me…. Personally I don’t think there is a replacement for [a pilot who would] actually make that decision to hit the pickle button and shoot somebody.”

listening to Leestma, I can’t help recalling what happened when the Oregon Short Line arrived in Idaho. Survival no longer hinged on tenacity and resolve. The multi-role jets might herald the future of warfare, with their big bag of tricks to defend the skies. But in both culture and cunning, the dogfighters are the descendants of the gunslingers at Rattlesnake Station, who never went anywhere without their six-shooters, and at high noon, knew how to kill with terrifying precision.

Based in Boulder, Colorado, Michael Behar writes about aerospace, adventure travel, science, and environmental issues.

Congressional Security and the Tucson Shooting

By Fred Burton and Sean Noonan
Following the Jan. 8 shooting of U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, Federal District Judge John McCarthy Roll and 17 others in Tucson, Arizona, discussion has focused on the motivations and ideology of the accused shooter, Jared Loughner. While it was important to make a quick assessment of Loughner’s profile in order to evaluate the possibility of an organized threat, all the available evidence (though not conclusive) indicates that he acted alone.
For the most part, discussion of the event has not touched on a re-evaluation of security for members of Congress. STRATFOR has previously analyzed the issues surrounding presidential security, and while there are common concerns in protecting all branches of government, Congress and the judiciary involve much larger numbers of people — 535 representatives and senators and more than 3,000 federal judges. And members of Congress put a high priority on public accessibility, which makes them more vulnerable.
A common mindset of politicians and their staffers is that better security will limit their accessibility and thus hinder their ability to do their job (and win elections). In fact, there are a number of measures that members of Congress and other public officials can institute for better security without limiting accessibility. While staying in a secure facility would be the safest, it isn’t a realistic option. What is realistic — and effective — is the prudent employment of protective intelligence as well as some measure of physical protection on the move.

A Look at the Threat

While there have been approximately 20 assassination attempts against U.S. presidents, four of which were successful, attacks on members of Congress and local judges are much more rare. There have been only five recorded attempts against members of the U.S. House of Representatives, including the attack on Gabrielle Giffords. And two of those five attacks resulted from disputes between representatives (one of which was a duel in 1838). But there are also many more threats voiced against public officials, which should never be ignored. The majority are issued by what we call lone wolves — individuals acting on their own rather than with a group.
Communication and preparation among a group of people increases the chance of security services discovering and even infiltrating a terrorist plot, but the one-man wolf pack is much less penetrable. Their plans are made alone, they train themselves and they provide their own resources, all of which means they carry out the phases of the terrorist attack cycle with very minimal exposure to outsiders — including authorities trying to prevent such plots from maturing.
The other side to lone wolves is that they often have more intent than capability. Loughner did not have the proper training or experience, for example, to carry out a major bombing or to breach a well-defended perimeter (what we call a hard target). Instead, he relied on a tactic that STRATFOR believes U.S. targets are most vulnerable to: the armed assault. Guns, and the training to use them, are readily available in the United States. The last successful armed attack carried out with political motivations occurred at Fort Hood, proving the devastating effect one man armed with a pistol can have, particularly when armed first responders are not at the scene. Many VIPs will travel in armored cars, avoid or carefully control public appearances and hire security in order to minimize the risk posed by gunmen. Members of Congress, on the other hand, are readily recognizable and often publicly available. No public official can be completely guaranteed personal security, but a great deal can be done to manage and mitigate threats, whether they are posed by lone wolves or organized groups.

Protecting Public Officials

While individual attackers may be able to do much of their preparation in private, their attacks — like all attacks — are most vulnerable during pre-operational surveillance. This makes countersurveillance the first step in a protective intelligence program. Most victims of a street crime, whether it’s pick-pocketing or attempted murder, report that they notice their attackers before the attack occurs. Indeed, individual situational awareness can do a lot to identify threats before they become immediately dangerous.
In the case of the Giffords attack, Jared Loughner was already known by the congresswoman’s campaign staff. He had come to a previous “Congress on Your Corner” event in 2007 and asked an odd question about semantics. Loughner’s presence at one of Giffords’ public appearances before, and possibly others, left him vulnerable to identification by anyone practicing protective intelligence. The problem here was that Loughner, as far as we know, was not acting illegally, only suspiciously. However, trained countersurveillance personnel can recognize suspicious behavior that may become a direct and immediate threat. They can also disguise themselves within a crowd rather than appear as overt security, which can bring them much closer to potential perpetrators.
Analysis is the second part of protective intelligence, and anyone analyzing Giffords’ security would note that serious threats were present over the last two years. In August 2009, an unknown person dropped a gun that had been concealed in his pants pocket during a town hall meeting Giffords was holding with constituents. It is unclear who the man was and whether he represented a real threat or just accidentally dropped a gun he was legally carrying, but the incident raised concern about her security. Then on March 22, her congressional office in Tucson was vandalized after a heated debate over the U.S. health care bill, which Giffords voted to support. Giffords was not the only member of Congress to confront violence last year. At least nine other lawmakers faced death threats or vandalism the week after the health care bill passed, including Rep. Tom Perriello of Virginia. An unknown individual cut a gas line for a propane tank, presumably to cause an explosion, at Perriello’s brother’s house believing it was the congressman’s residence. All 10 of the lawmakers were offered increased protection by U.S. Capitol Police, but it was not maintained. The multitude of these threats in the 2010 campaign warranted a re-evaluation of Congressional security, specifically for Giffords and the nine others who experienced violence or faced potential violence.
While the vandalism and dropped gun have not been attributed to Loughner, and the Jan. 8 shooting appears to have been his first violent action, further investigation of his past could have provided clues to his intentions. After the shooting, his friends said they had noticed his hatred for Giffords, his classmates said they had observed his increasingly odd behavior and police and campus security said they had been called to deal with him on numerous occasions (for reasons that are currently unclear). Prior to the shooting, disparate bits of information from different people would not likely have been analyzed as a whole, but any one of these observed activities could have warranted further investigation by law enforcement and security agencies. Indeed, some were brought to their attention. On Dec. 13, Loughner wrote on his MySpace page “I’m ready to kill a police officer!” Tucson police or the Pima County Sheriff’s office may have investigated this threat as well as others. Sheriff Clarence Dupnik said there had already been law enforcement contacts with Loughner in which “he made threats to kill.”

Protection Responsibilities

The underlying story here is that threats to public officials are often apparent before an attack is made, and proactive protective intelligence can identify and address these threats. But what agency is currently responsible for protecting U.S. public officials?
A little known fact is that the U.S. Capitol Police (USCP) is the agency in charge of safeguarding congressional officials not only inside the perimeter of the Capitol grounds, which includes the House and Senate office buildings and the Library of Congress, but also when those officials are traveling. The USCP has its own protection division to do just what we describe above — analyze and investigate threats against members of Congress. Based on threat assessments, this division can assign teams for countersurveillance and security whenever and wherever a representative or senator travels. The USCP is also responsible for liaison with local law enforcement in order to ensure some level of security even when there is no identifiable threat.
In the case of any scheduled public appearance, protocol should require congressional staff members to notify the USCP, whose liaison unit will then alert local law enforcement, including city, county and state police, depending on the event. At this point, we don’t know why there was no police presence at Giffords’ event on Jan. 8. It appears that the event was announced the day before, according to a press release on her website. The Pima County Sheriff’s office has said it was not given prior notification of the event.
In the case of federal judges like John McCarthy Roll, the U.S. Marshals Service has responsibilities similar to those of the USCP. In fact, federal marshals were assigned to Judge Roll for a month in 2010 after he received death threats. It appears that his presence at the Congress on Your Corner was not scheduled, and thus we assume he was not targeted by Loughner. Had both Giffords and Roll planned to be at the same event, the participation of two recently threatened public officials would also have warranted a security presence at the event.

Security and Democracy

While the U.S. president has a large, well-resourced and highly capable security service and private sector VIPs have the option of limiting contact with the public, members of Congress are somewhere in the middle. Like a presidential candidate, they want to have as much public contact as possible in order to garner support. They are also representing small, and thus very personal, districts where a local presence is seen as a cornerstone of representative democracy. Historically, in fact, the U.S. president actually received very little protection until the threat became evident in successful assassinations. Those traumatic events led the public to accept that the president should be less accessible to the public, protected by the U.S. Secret Service (which was created in 1865 originally to deal with counterfeit currency).
Still, American democratic tradition dictates that members of Congress must maintain a sincere trust in the people they represent. Thus the current reaction of many in the U.S. Congress who say they will not change their activities, not add protective details and not reassess their security precautions.
The concerns of becoming less accessible to the public are not unreasonable, but accessibility is not incompatible with security. We need not think of a security detail being a scrum of uniformed police officers surrounding a public official. Instead, plainclothes protective intelligence teams assigned to countersurveillance as well as physical protection can be interspersed within crowds and positioned at key vantage points, looking for threatening individuals. They are invisible to the untrained eye and do not hinder a politician’s contact with the public. Moreover, a minimal police presence can deter attackers or make them more identifiable as they become nervous and they can stop individual attackers after the first shots are fired.
The assumed tradeoff between accessibility and security is in some ways a false dichotomy. There will always be inherent dangers for public officials in an uncontrolled environment, but instituting a protective intelligence program, with the aid of the USCP or other law enforcement agencies, can seriously mitigate those dangers.

Congressional Security and the Tucson Shooting is republished with permission of STRATFOR.

Sidewinder

The missile that has rattled enemy pilots since 1958.

• By Preston Lerner
• Air & Space Magazine, November 01, 2010

For more than 50 years, Sidewinder missiles have been riding the rails of U.S. Navy fighters, from F9F-8 Cougars to F-14 Tomcats (shown here).
(George Hall/check-6.com)

May 1956. Holloman Air Force Base, Alamogordo, New Mexico. The preflight briefing took place in the office of the base’s commanding general, but the center of attention was a cocky young Navy pilot named Glenn Tierney. He was dead certain that he was about to win a shoot-off between two weapons competing to become the United States’ first self-guided air-to-air missile. The Air Force was betting on the radar-guided Falcon, built by a vast engineering group at Hughes Aircraft. Representing the Navy, Tierney was betting on the heat-seeking Sidewinder, developed by a small cadre at the Naval Ordnance Test Station in China Lake, California.

Tierney, the commander of Guided Missile Unit 61, had already demonstrated the lethality of the Sidewinder, blowing up a surface-to-surface Matador missile a few hours earlier. Now, he told his skeptical audience, he planned to fly as a wingman while an Air Force pilot who had never before fired a Sidewinder destroyed a second Matador. When the general scoffed, Tierney told him, “I’ll cover all the bets in the room up to $100.”

After $85 was collected, Tierney and an Air Force lieutenant took off in a pair of F-100 Super Sabres. At 30,000 feet and Mach 0.8, they lined up two miles behind a Matador already in the air. “You got signal?” he radioed to the other pilot.

“I got good signal,” said the pilot, referring to the distinctive growl in his headset, which meant that the heat-seeker in the nose of his Sidewinder had locked onto the infrared radiation of the Matador’s exhaust.

“Well, let her go,” said Tierney.

“It was a turkey shoot—nothing to it,” Tierney recalls with a chuckle. “The Sidewinder blew that son of a bitch right out of the sky.” Tierney flew back to China Lake with $85 of Air Force money in his wallet.

Despite the Sidewinder’s success at Holloman, the Air Force chose to put its own missile, the Falcon, into service in 1956. The missile was so finicky that in Vietnam, it became synonymous with failure. The Sidewinder, on the other hand, which entered service in the Navy a few months after the Falcon, scored the world’s first guided-missile kill: a Chinese MiG-17 that a Taiwanese F-86 shot down in 1958. Since then, the Sidewinder, later designated the AIM-9 (for Air Intercept Missile), has claimed dozens of victims in Vietnam, several Arab-Israeli conflicts, the Falkland Islands War, and Operation Desert Storm.

The missile has been built by the hundred thousands not only in the United States but also under license in several NATO countries. Working with stolen plans, the Soviets copied it so faithfully that the Vympel K-13 shared the Sidewinder’s parts numbers. The Soviet missile was exported en masse to Warsaw Pact countries and later copied by the Chinese. But new-and-improved ’Winders continue to be assembled by Raytheon in Tucson, Arizona, and the missile has progressed through the alphabet from the AIM-9A to today’s AIM-9X.

Even after all these years, the latest Sidewinder variant still retains the five-inch diameter and rough dimensions of the cigar-shaped original. It’s gotten longer (from just over 109 to 119 inches) and leaner, from 155 pounds to 118 pounds. But like George Washington’s hatchet (“Only the handle and the blade have been replaced”), the Sidewinder has been modified so thoroughly over the past half-century that just about all that remains of the original is the name. Well, that and the fundamental concept, which dates back to 1947, when an engineering genius named Bill McLean made a rough sketch of what he called a “target-seeking gyro.” A few years later, he filed a patent application for a “heat homing rocket.” By the time McLean and his merry band of missileers at China Lake were finished, the Sidewinder had earned a spot on the short list of weapons that have changed the way battles are fought.

After World War II, the Naval Ordnance Test Station at China Lake (now the Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division) was the Promised Land for weapons development and testing. Situated in the Mojave Desert three hours northeast of Los Angeles, it featured 1,200 square miles of largely unpopulated terrain that was perfect for blowing things up. Its remote location also fostered a self-reliant spirit and contrarian mentality that attracted unconventional thinkers. McLean, a graduate of the California Institute of Technology whose genial and unassuming demeanor hid a mighty intellect (later Sidewinder program manager Frank Cartwright describes him as “a 108 on a scale of 100”), arrived in 1945 to work on air-to-air rockets.

Rockets serve a lot of useful functions, but shooting down airplanes isn’t one of them, a truth demonstrated all too clearly in 1956, when a pair of F-89 Scorpions fired 208 rockets against a wayward drone that was threatening southern California, and failed to score a single hit. After World War II, various military contractors developed nearly a dozen guided missiles. The most promising guidance system seemed to be radar, which was, after all, a proven technology. But because the equipment was too bulky to fit inside a rocket, the airplane firing the missile had to “paint” the target with radar, and the pilots had to stay locked on until the warhead detonated.

McLean had a better idea: Why not create a weapon that carried its own control system, so the missile was guided by the target? This led him to investigate the use of an infrared seeker to detect the target’s heat. McLean wanted to give a conventional rocket—a dumb weapon—eyes and a brain. The missile would “see” via a transparent seeker head, through which infrared radiation from the exhaust of a jet engine would reflect off a gimballed, rotating mirror onto a lead-sulfide photocell. As the gyroscopically stabilized mirror moved to track the heat source, a servo motor manipulated the canards that controlled the missile’s flight, maintaining a constant bearing with respect to the target. Proportional navigation, as the technique is called, enabled the missile to anticipate where the target was going to be rather than aiming at where it was, like a quarterback leading a receiver.

Compared with radar-guided missiles, McLean’s alternative was cheap, simple, and robust. Also, unlike radar guidance, it was a passive weapon that gave the targeted pilot no warning until he saw the missile flying toward him. Small, lethal, and able to strike quickly and outmaneuver its quarry, it shared several qualities with another heat-seeking predator native to the Mojave Desert: the sidewinder rattlesnake. So in 1950, another proposed name—Low I.Q. Homing Head—was rejected, and Sidewinder was adopted.

There was no official backing for the project, and on several occasions it was nearly canceled. But the tiny team working on the Sidewinder was persistent as well as ingenious, and the engineers, faced with seemingly intractable problems, developed a host of elegant solutions. A good example was the so-called rollerons: spur-like discs that unlocked from the tail fins in flight. The gyroscopic effect of the spinning discs prevented the missile from rotating on its axis. And then there was the famous Sidewinder tone, a menacing growl—once heard, it is never forgotten. During early flights, test pilots had to check a small voltmeter in the cockpit to determine whether the seeker was sensing a heat source, an unwanted distraction in the middle of a dogfight. By running an additional wire to the missile, the Sidewinder team was able to create a sound that could be piped into pilots’ headsets to alert them that the seeker had acquired a target.

Tom Amlie worked on the Sidewinder project as a young Navy lieutenant, and he later became technical director at China Lake. He says the secret of the missile’s success is simplicity: “In flight, it had seven vacuum tubes and five moving parts. The competition [Falcon] was complicated almost beyond description.” For professor Ron Westrum, the author of Sidewinder: Creative Missile Development at China Lake, the project demonstrated the triumph of lean R&D and imaginative management. “They had less than 25 people in the beginning, and they did it as a bootleg project,” he says. “The Sidewinder demonstrated that what we now call a skunk works actually works.”

Well, not at first.

Several years of development passed before the missile was ready to be fired in a simulated combat environment. In August 1952, astronaut-to-be Wally Schirra, flying an AD-4 Skyraider, launched a heat-seeker toward a propeller-driven Grumman F6F Hellcat that had been turned into a radio-controlled drone. Final score: Hellcat 1, Sidewinder 0. In fact, all 12 of the first Sidewinders missed the target. On several tests, Amlie flew in the right seat of the attack aircraft. After one failure, he wrote a memo quoted by Elizabeth Babcock in her history of China Lake, Magnificent Mavericks: “Missile took off like a big-assed bird, never saw it again.”

The 13th test, on September 11, 1953, was the charm. The Sidewinder fired by Lieutenant Commander Al Yesensky missed the drone by two feet, but if the missile had been equipped with a warhead and a proximity fuse, it would have destroyed the Hellcat, so the shot was declared a success. Four months later, an unarmed Sidewinder scored its first direct hit, punching a hole through the number 1 engine of a QB-17 drone. Then, on February 17, 1954, the Sidewinder did the unthinkable: It brought down—in cartwheeling flames—another QB-17 thought to be indestructible because it had survived so many missile attacks over the years.

The Sidewinder had shown its fangs.

CONVENTIONAL MILITARY WISDOM circa 1967 held that close-in dogfights were a relic of the past. Radar-guided AIM-7 Sparrows, developed by Sperry Gyroscope and Douglas Aircraft and first deployed in 1958, were supposed to take out bogeys while they were still miles away, and if that didn’t work, AIM-9 Sidewinders would finish the job long before enemy pilots got close enough to fire cannon. Thus, the F-4B Phantom wasn’t even equipped with a gun. Which meant that Navy Lieutenant Denny Wisely couldn’t do anything other than give his North Vietnamese adversary the finger as they passed canopy to canopy in the airspace near Hanoi.

The date was April 24, 1967, and Wisely was embroiled in an epic furball: three F-4s against eight or nine MiG-17s. Twice, he was in position to fire the gun he didn’t have. Compounding the problem, his Phantom had been loaded with only one Sidewinder instead of the usual four (a fast turnaround of the aircraft between missions didn’t leave enough time for ground crews to install the full ordnance load). He was carrying four Sparrows, but he figured he was too close to the nimble MiGs to use the long-range missiles.

“We’re not going to get radar lock in this environment,” Wisely recalls radioing his backseater, Lieutenant (junior grade) Gary Anderson. “I’ll just keep pulling the airplane up, using the afterburner as necessary, then unloading it and turning so you can reach around in your seat and really check our six.”

Zooming up and down between the treetops and 5,000 feet, Wisely waited for the right shot for his single Sidewinder. Twice, he saw Sparrows punched off by other Phantoms fly harmlessly into the distance. Then he spotted a MiG sidling in behind an F-4. Wisely rushed in behind it, heard his Sidewinder growling, and fired. Another North Vietnamese pilot must have alerted Wisely’s prey. But as the MiG banked right to escape the missile, the ’Winder struck and exploded.

“It was just ‘Thank you very much, MiG,’ ” Wisely says today.

Wisely’s experience notwithstanding, guided missiles performed much worse in Vietnam than expected. Sparrow hit rates through 1968 were so anemic—eight percent—that most pilots fired them in pairs, figuring at least one would be a dud. With a hit rate of 16 percent, the Sidewinder was twice as good but not nearly good enough. Actually, the Navy version of the Sidewinder, the AIM-9D, had a nitrogen-cooled seeker head that improved its ability to track infrared radiation, enabling it to outperform the Sidewinders used by the Air Force. Nevertheless, the Navy was so upset that it commissioned a hard-driving captain named Frank Ault to figure out what was wrong.

After several months of study, Ault produced a 480-page Air-to-Air Missile System Capability Review. Popularly known as the Ault Report, it began by assessing what happened when 600 air-to-air missiles were fired in 360 Navy and Air Force combat engagements between 1965 and 1968. “Only about one in ten had any probability of achieving a kill,” the report stated. To hit its target, the Sidewinder had to be launched within a strictly defined envelope, no more than roughly 30 degrees off the tail of the adversary and at relatively modest G loading. Among his 242 recommendations, Ault suggested that the Navy create a school for post-graduate air-to-air combat training. In 1969, the Navy Fighter Weapons School, a.k.a. Topgun, was established at then Naval Air Station Miramar in California.

“Most dogfighting maneuvers, from World War I to Vietnam, were designed to put a fighter in a gun’s firing envelope,” says Robert Shaw, an author and air combat consultant who used to fly a gunless Navy F-4. “But with the Sidewinder, once you got into gun range, you were too close to fire.” Since airplanes were so much farther apart, turning with the enemy made no sense, so counterintuitive tactics—flying vertically when the target turned horizontally, for example—were developed. Also, the conventional fighting, or welded, wing, in which the leader hunts for targets while his wingman protects his rear, didn’t work in the missile environment. Instead, Shaw explains, aircraft moved farther apart and flew line abreast so that each could watch the other’s tail.

As tactics improved, so did the Sidewinder. Over the years, it underwent a series of upgrades—better seekers, more efficient fuses, stouter rocket motors, slicker aerodynamics—to expand the firing envelope and make the missile less susceptible to countermeasures. The AIM-9L added all-aspect capability—it could hit an airplane no matter what its relative angle, even approaching head on. This so-called Super Sidewinder was so deadly that in dogfights over Lebanon and during the 1982 Falkland Islands War, it posted kill ratios of better than 80 percent. And in the next decade the follow-on, AIM-9M, was even more efficient in dogfights over Iraq and Bosnia.

But by the mid-1990s, the Sidewinder seemed on the verge of being replaced by newer heat-seeking missiles with more bells and whistles. Instead, a digital makeover gave engineers the chance to “teach an old dog new tricks,” as Dave S. Adams, director of Raytheon’s short-range-missile programs, puts it. In the fifth generation AIM-9X, the analog seeker and its mechanically rotating mirror—what Adams calls a “chirps and squeaks system”—were replaced with a staring focal plane array, the pixel-based technology in a digital camera. Besides being able to track infrared energy more efficiently and see targets more accurately through its nose cone, the latest AIM-9X is also far better at distinguishing between targets and countermeasures, such as flares.

At the tail end of the missile, designers added movable jet vanes to redirect the exhaust plume of the motor and achieve a form of thrust vectoring. This allows the -9X to turn at much sharper angles after coming off the launch rail than previous models, which is a major advantage in close-in aerial combat—the proverbial knife fight in a phone booth. And by using thrust vectoring to help control the missile, designers could reduce the size of the Sidewinder’s conventional control surfaces—canards and tail fins—and clean up the missile’s aerodynamic profile. So despite using the same solid-fuel rocket motor as the -9M, the -9X flies significantly faster and farther.

MARCH 1991. The war with Iraq was over, but the cease-fire was still in place, and Captain Tom Dietz and his wingman, Lieutenant Bob Hehemann, were patrolling the skies 50 miles north of Baghdad in their Air Force F-15 Eagles. During the fighting, they’d used Sidewinders to down four Iraqi jets making a run for the Iranian border. But according to the rules of engagement in force since the cease-fire, the Iraqis were allowed to fly helicopters. So when Dietz locked up a pair of targets on his radar scope, he assumed that’s what they were—until he realized that they seemed to be flying at 345 mph. “Let’s go investigate this,” he radioed Hehemann.

They pushed their throttles forward to military power. At a range of about five miles, Dietz started to make out the details of one bogey: Canopy. Sloped tail. Swept wings. Suddenly, his radio crackled: “VID Fitter.” Hehemann was visually identifying the Iraqi aircraft as a Sukhoi Su-22 fighter-bomber (“Fitter” is the Su-22’s NATO name). They would later learn that it was returning from a mission to bomb Kurdish civilians. Dietz, closing quickly, immediately activated the master switch, which cooled the seeker head of his Sidewinder by flooding it with argon gas. A second or two later, he uncaged the missile, got a good tone, and fired.

“I didn’t want to fly out in front of the Fitter,” Dietz recalls. “So I pulled up as soon as I saw the missile come off the rail. When I rolled back over and looked down, all I saw was a fireball. The AIM-9 went right up this guy’s tailpipe, and his airplane blew up just like the movies. There was not a discernible piece left, just a bunch of metal in a huge fireball.”

Since Desert Storm ended, the world has changed radically, and nobody knows what the combat environment will look like if and when airplanes trade ordnance again. In the future, some military thinkers suggest, aerial engagements may feature more unmanned vehicles than conventional fighters, and the diminishment of the human factor could change the calculus of weapon design. At the same time, history has taught us that each advance in military technology expands the weapon-engagement zone, from ancient swords with a range of only a few feet to beyond-visual-range missiles that can destroy targets seen only on radar screens.

Under the circumstances, says Dik Daso, a former Air Force F-15 pilot who is now the National Air and Space Museum’s curator for modern military aircraft, the role of the Sidewinder is bound to shrink. “These days,” he explains, “the object is to deploy your radar missiles so that when you get to the merge [the point at which two fighters pass each other], hopefully you see nothing but fireballs. But in air-to-air combat, nothing ever goes perfectly, and I think the AIM-9 is the best fallback for self-defense that you can have.” Says Captain Jeffrey Penfield, a former F/A-18 pilot who, until recently, ran the Navy’s Air-to-Air Missile Program Office: “When you get in a mano-a-mano, visual-versus-visual engagement, the AIM-9 is the weapon of choice.”

Military procurement officials apparently agree. Since 2001, more than 4,000 AIM-9Xs have been built, and the missiles have been sold to 10 countries, bringing the total production to more than 200,000 Sidewinders flown by 51 nations during the past half-century. An upgraded Block II version is poised to start coming off the assembly line in Tucson (in the cavernous plant that Howard Hughes erected to build the Sidewinder’s original rival, the Falcon). Current plans call for production to continue into the 2020s. It should come as no surprise that there’s talk of certifying the AIM-9X for the next-gen F-22 and F-35 fighters. In fact, unless some new technology (lasers? directed-energy projectiles? space-time-continuum shredders?) renders heat-seeking missiles obsolete, AIM-9s will likely still be in military inventories a century after the first successful launch at China Lake.

This time around, nobody’s betting against the Sidewinder.

Frequent contributor Preston Lerner wrote “Black Day at White Sands,” a look back at the McDonnell Douglas DC-X, for the August 2010 issue.

During Desert Storm, most fighters packed Sidewinders. F-16s armed with the missiles await the next mission.

During a training exercise, an F-16 Fighting Falcon assigned to the 80th Fighter Squadron at Kunsan Air Base in South Korea unleashes a Sidewinder. The missiles can reach speeds up to Mach 2.5.

Notice: this article and photo are taken from website www.airspacemag.com