Guardsmen take role as eyes in sky
Posted on Monday, January 29, 2007
Half a world away, a small airplane buzzes over the Marines in Fallujah, training its eyeball-like camera on the Iraqis below.
The pilot of the craft - an M-1 Predator unmanned aircraft - sits in a windowless room at Nellis Air Force Base, Nev., guiding it through the Iraqi sky using a computer, digital screen and video-game like controls.
At the same time, the video image captured by the Predator's sensors is beamed to Little Rock Air Force Base, where intelligence specialists with the Arkansas Air National Guard's 123 rd Intelligence Squadron watch the action on computer screens.
"We are basically the eyes,"said Lt. Greg Johnson, operations flight commander for the 123 rd.
The 123 rd is one of four intelligence analyst squadrons in the National Guard, responsible for watching a war and intercepting data collected by unmanned aircraft in the skies over Iraq and Afghanistan. And now, with more than $ 6 million in new equipment, the analysts can do their job from their own headquarters.
The demand for analysts of real-time images and other intelligence gathered by unmanned aircraft such as Predators and Global Hawks has the Air Force considering adding the equipment to two more National Guard squadrons.
The 123 rd mainly works with the Predator, but its analysts are able to connect to a variety of unmanned aircraft if needed. The Predator is a ton of flying plywood, carbon fiber and Kevlar that is pushed through the air by a 110-horsepower prop engine.
The majority of its $ 4 million price tag is in its sensors and cameras, said Capt. Michael Conte, pilot and director of operations for the 46 th Expeditionary Strike and Recon Squadron at Balad Air Base, Iraq.
It can pack two hellfire missiles, and the latest model carries the GPS-guided J-DAM bomb that used to be the fighter jet weapon of choice. It sounds like a flying lawn mower, it's nickname around the Air Force, and has the gas mileage to back up the name. Its 100-gallon fuel tank can keep it aloft for 18 hours.
"The bang for the buck that we get out of these is pretty phenomenal,"Conte said. "It's the future of the Air Force."
The 46 th Squadron operations area is found behind a plywood door in the back of a massive concrete bunker in Balad. Near a bank of computers, a 24-hour clock hangs on the wall with the word "Nellis"scrawled in red ink across its face.
Back at Little Rock Air Force Base, the 123 rd works at computers in a cold, green, windowless room where time seems to pass without notice. Like any other intelligence operations room, it's restricted.
But for the 123 rd, it's a nice change to have one near home.
"We can go home every night,"said Lt. Paul Needham, assistant director of operations for the 123 rd. "We still get to live a normal life."
It wasn't always that way.
More than half of the squadron's 80 airmen had to deploy for the first two years of the Iraq war to bases in Langley, Va., and Nellis Air Force Base to do the same job they now do at Little Rock Air Force Base. The intelligence community stays relatively mum about how it works.
The 123 rd has always been called "The eyes of freedom."
The slogan is on the unit patch, below a picture of what members call a "generic"airplane that bears a striking resemblance to the legendary U-2 spy plane. The U-2 - which hit its heyday in the Cold War in high-altitude surveillance - is being phased out of the Air Force, replaced by unmanned aircraft such as the Predator and Global Hawk.
Less than a decade ago, the U-2 was the 123 rd's main customer. In 2003, the first year of the Iraq war, airmen from the 123 rd deployed to Kuwait to develop film retrieved from U-2 planes.
Back then, intelligence analysis and reports could take days if not weeks to complete.
"We started phasing it out in 1999,"Needham said. "We were some of the last [U-2 ] image analysts in the force."
They are still imagery analysts, but the job is vastly different.
Now it's about capturing live events as they unfold on video streams direct from the unmanned aircraft's sensors. They work with all coalition forces, not just American, and with all branches of the military.
"We produce a finished intelligence product, [intelligence ] assessments,"said Master Sgt. James Rivers, superintendent of production operations.
Over the past decade, those assessments became digital and much more timely.
Satellites connect the 123 rd to commanders on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan - they call them the "customers" - as they analyze what the Predator sees.
What used to take days or months with U-2 film is done in "single-digit minutes"now, Needham said.
And everyone is connected via computer, from the pilot in Nevada to the soldiers on the ground in Iraq or Afghanistan to the Pentagon. Commanders on the ground tell the analysts what they're looking for.
"As a younger troop, I never knew who wanted this information,"Johnson said. "Now I'm having direct communications with who does want it."
"It was so disconnected,"Rivers added. "Now it's immediate and right there."
Staff Sgt. Emma Chapman likes to ask the pilot and other team members at the beginning of her shift where they're working from on any given day.
"When I think about all these integrated pieces, it's pretty amazing,"she said.
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