GOING INTO A CONFLICT WITH the US Air Force must be one of the great experiences in any war buff’s life. My turn came in the Balkans in the summer of 1996 when Operation Joint Endeavour was drawing to a close. It involved sorties in Joint-STARS – an airborne battle management, command and control, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance platform – as well as a series of in-flight refuelling operations in regions adjacent to where the war was being fought.
The primary mission of Joint-STARS has been described as the ability to provide theatre ground and air commanders with ground surveillance to support attack operations, and targeting that contributes to the delay, disruption and destruction of enemy forces.
As explained by one of the officers on board our modified 707-300 series former commercial jet, which had once been used to haul cattle in the Mid-West (the other in Frankfurt at the time had ended its commercial career with Qantas), the aircraft had, in a sense, not only been modified, but ‘remanufactured’. With the requisite radar, communications, operations and control sub-systems required to perform its operational mission, it allowed field commanders to see, as he succinctly put it, ‘well beyond the other side of the hill’.
As might have been expected, Joint-STARS operations have since been seen as a feature of other conflicts, including all of those currently taking place east of Suez. This activity has also been very substantially upgraded, and was sensitive and secret enough, at the time, to be guarded by armed personnel who were posted alongside these aircraft whenever they were parked on the apron at Frankfurt. Their orders, we were told at our first briefing, were explicit: ‘If any unauthorized individual approaches Joint-STARS aircraft, shoot to kill…’
As my informant explained, ‘given the acknowledged dependence of armies on wheels [or tracks] for much of their mobility, heavy firepower, armoured protection, supplies and engineering support, the ability of the Joint-STARS system to detect, locate and target these assets in any sort of weather or cloud cover must be a huge advantage that today’s armed forces must still fully exploit.’ Ultimately, he added, it would involve a totally different approach to warfare itself. It would affect how armies and air forces are eventually deployed in combat and even how they might be equipped.
I applied to go in with the USAF to cover this aspect of the Kosovo war on a whim. I was living in Chinook, Washington, and the great McChord Air Force base was kind of ‘up the road’ – though still four or five hours drive away, depending on the weather – so I used my Jane’s cachet to gain entry. A week later the trip was on.
I was told that I’d be going in with Japan-based Newsweek lensman Charlie Cole, an adventurous news-gatherer who, among other exploits, regularly made his name by being in the right place at the right time. He was at Beijing’s Tiananmen Square when Chinese troops and tanks dispersed dissidents and the photo he took at the time made history: a lonely student protestor who challenged supreme authority by standing in front of one of the tanks. The young man was taken away by the police and never seen again. Charlie’s picture of the event appeared later that week on the cover of Newsweek, taken in spite of the presence of a group of security guards with cattle prods who tried to keep the media at bay.