Gulf War Air Power Survey
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- Figure 65 Aircraft Battle Damage Repair Time (Data are man hours or clock hours) (Figure is SECRET) Figure 66
- Environmental Effects on People and Equipment
- Collection and Use of Maintenance Data
- Maintenance Outside the Area of Responsibility
- Intermediate-Level Centralized Support to the AOR
- Table 32 Queen Bee Engine Support
- Type Acft/ Engine Deployed Units AOR
- Table 32 (Continued) Queen Bee Engine Support
- Type Acft Engine F-16/ F110-GE-100 Deployed Units
Figure 63 ABDR Events by Aircraft Type Figure 64 summarizes damage frequency by aircraft area.636 Figure 64 Damage Areas The histogram in Figure 65 characterizes the time required to repair the battle damage.637 Because of the limited number of aircraft sustaining battle damage, it is probably unwise to use the battle damage repair data as conclusive evidence of any particular trend. It is instructive, however, to compare the early expectations of the ABDR concept with the experience of Desert Storm. In 1976, the Institute for Defense Analysis published a report titled The Impact of Battle Damage on A-10 Availability and Sortie Rate.638 The report, citing the success of Vietnam-era rapid area maintenance teams, recommended the creation of teams specially trained to perform temporary, field-expedient battle damage repair on A-10 aircraft and is the report that led to the ABDR concept.639 Based on a fairly extensive simulation analysis, the study concluded that “A dramatic saving of time is possible by following the temporary repair doctrine. . . . ”640 Figure 66 compares the repair times presented in the 1976 IDA report with those of the fifteen A-10 Desert Storm battle damage incidents on which we were able to obtain repair data. It should be evident that the Desert Storm A-10 ABDR experience is consistent with 1976 expectations in the sense that over fifty percent of the aircraft were returned to service within four hours.641 Because of the limited amount of battle damage to other than A-10 aircraft, the comparison was not extended to other aircraft types. Figure 65 Aircraft Battle Damage Repair Time (Data are man hours or clock hours) (Figure is SECRET) Figure 66 A-10 Aircraft Battle Damage Repair (Figure is SECRET) A result of the limited need for battle damage repair was that ABDR teams and technicians functioned in their traditional combat logistics support squadron (CLSS) roles (i.e., performing heavy maintenance) or were simply integrated into the maintenance organizations where they were stationed. The ABDR personnel at Taif are an illustration. Sourced from the 2951st CLSS, 406th CLSS, and 2953d CLSS, the 81st Taif ABDR technicians were integrated so thoroughly into the Taif maintenance organization that they held the supervisory positions in the Fabrication Shop, Structural Maintenance Shop, one of the Aircraft Maintenance Units, and the Electric Shop.642 Environmental Effects on People and Equipment Other than sand-induced unreliability of helicopter engines, the desert environment did not cause the rash of major problems that had perhaps been feared. Minor problems either completely or at least partly solved during the Gulf conflict included sand frosting and scratching of aircraft canopies and higher than normal usage rates of propellers, tires, and brakes.643 Preventative maintenance such as washes reduced the effects of these problems. By October of 1990, deployed units were reporting imagery degradation due to sandblasting of Low Altitude Navigation Targeting Infrared Night (LANTIRN) seeker windows. 644 The design of the system, however, was such that the degradation was detected by the LANTIRN Intermediate Automatic Test Equipment before it was noticeable to pilots and it was that degradation being reported. The interim solution was to ship more spare windows and clear up confusion over the approved replacement procedures.645 The long-term solution, not completed before the end of Desert Storm, was development of a harder coating for the windows. The one significant environmental problem from a “people” aspect appears to have been heat tolerance while wearing chemical protective gear.646 As it happened, the problem had been anticipated, and the Air Force Human Systems Division at Brooks AFB in Texas had started developing a multiman intermittent cooling system before Desert Shield. On 13 August, Hq TAC elevated the cooling system to an urgent requirement and the system was rushed into production. When the production contract was completed in December 1990, 373 air distribution units and 24,800 cooling vests had been produced for the theater. Embedded Software Issues associated with embedded software during Desert Shield and Desert Storm seem to have been limited to Electronic Warfare equipment.647 This equipment requires reprogramming (actually only loading of changed data rather than new computer code) to respond to changed threats. During Desert Shield and Desert Storm, five different Air Force electronic warfare systems required a total of eight mission data changes. Additionally, four foreign military sales systems required a total of twelve mission data changes. The time to prepare the changes averaged 103 hours (range of 30 to 480). Warner Robins Air Logistics Center created the data and then transmitted them through communications centers to the unit in the theater for upload into aircraft. The average time required to generate Air Force-organic changes was 37 hours (range of 16 to 60) versus the wartime programming goal of 72 hours. On the receipt end, most units used 1960s-technology AN/ASM‑660 punch-tape-based memory loader verifiers. The verifiers required approximately two hours to upload data into an aircraft. Newer program loader verifiers using current technology were entering initial operational test and evaluation and were not available during Desert Shield and Desert Storm. If there was a particular problem other than obsolete technology in the electronic warfare reprogramming area, it appears to be a lack of memory loader verifiers at the deployed locations in some instances. When EF-111As from Upper Heyford England arrived in the theater, for example, two of the aircraft had malfunctions in the ALQ-99 jamming subsystems. In both cases, the needed fix was a data reload requiring a memory loader verifier, which the deployed unit did not have initially and did not receive until later.648 A similar problem occurred with the QRC-01 Pod carried on the AC-130H; the 1st Special Operations Wing deployed without a capability to reprogram the Pod.649 The problem with the QRC‑01 pod was expected to disappear with introduction, after the Desert Storm timeframe, of the newer ALQ-184 system, which was designed to be flightline reprogrammable.650 Collection and Use of Maintenance Data Before Desert Shield began, the need for a deployable Aircraft Maintenance Information system was recognized. The Air Force Logistics Management Center had created a project to determine requirements in the areas of status and inventory, configuration control, engine tracking, aircrew debriefing, work order generation, and aircraft scheduling.651 The perception of need appears to have been well founded, since the mainframe-based Core Automated Maintenance System (CAMS) planned for wartime support was not available until approximately the one-hundredth day after deployment began and was never available to all units.652 Because, in the absence of automated support, the choices were to either revert to manual procedures or do without data, Desert Shield and Desert Storm provided a “window” into the importance of maintenance data to maintenance and, hence, to combat capability. To quote from one of the interviewees contacted by the logistics management center: “Workarounds [were] used for virtually everything. . . nothing came to a total grinding halt.”653 Thus, failure was gentle, and immediate impact on combat capability appeared to be absent. The lack of automation does seem to have increased the difficulty of determining aircraft mission capability at both the flightline and higher headquarters level. It severely compromised knowledge of the remaining usable life of components such as engines and removed the ability to use failure history as an aid to troubleshooting.654 All of these effects increased the labor-intensity of maintenance by either making it more difficult or making maintenance unnecessarily frequent. Quotations from interviews with Air Force Logistics Management Center personnel illustrate this point: We assigned about five guys for two days to get serial numbers accounted for.655 Scheduling was a real headache because of the ops to maintenance interface problems. It was also very confusing because of the lack of knowledge of the complete status of the aircraft and the availability of parts (time frames to bring the aircraft back up to MC status).656 When an engine was pulled and sent to Rhein Main for repair/overhaul, it is critical that the history accompanies the motor . . . . Thousands of hours of serviceability could be and were lost in the repair process.657 Maintenance Outside the Area of Responsibility Maintenance forces outside the AOR provided ILM to AOR units, maintained the USAFE Proven Force, SAC, and MAC aircraft, and also provided industrial-level support. Intermediate-Level Centralized Support to the AOR After the phase I deployment settled down, most Tactical Air Command (TAC) and TAC-gained Air National Guard and Air Force Reserve Units in the AOR received engine intermediate support from “Queen Bee” locations in Air Force Europe658 because, as the TAC 1991 History states, the units lacked adequate in-AOR facilities and equipment. While this is certainly the case, more specific and compelling reasons include reducing the influx of people and equipment into a theater with an already-strained bare-base support structure (as indicated earlier) and recognition that better efficiency was likely to be achieved by an established facility.659 The Air Forces, Central Command Deputy Chief of Staff for Logistics also cited reduced airlift as a reason. Probably a more accurate statement would have been reduced front-end airlift because, at four engines per C-141, the number of engines moving back and forth between USAFE and the AOR required over 150 equivalent sorties.660 Table 32 summarizes the Queen Bee support picture. Only three out of the seventeen installations listed earlier in Table 29 received engine support from within the AOR. Table 32 Queen Bee Engine Support661
Table 32 (Continued) Queen Bee Engine Support
Although Table 32 indicated that Queen Bee sites returned ninety-two percent of engines to serviceable condition, the engines were not readily available to aircraft in the AOR. The experiences of the Ramstein operation are indicative.662 As indicated in Table 32, the 86th Tactical Fighter Wing (TFW) at Ramstein supported the 347th TFW(Provisional), and the 388th TFW(P), flying F100-100 engines on F-16 aircraft.663 Monthly engine production at Ramstein was about 400 percent higher than during peacetime and was achieved through compression of individual maintenance tasks. As an example, at the start of Desert Shield, F‑100‑110 engines were in the middle of a high pressure turbine/low pressure turbine time compliance technical order that typically took about two weeks per engine. During Desert Shield and Desert Storm, the more typical time was four days. But the Ramstein shop was in fact underutilized because, during almost all of the Desert Shield timeframe, moving retrograde (i.e., unserviceable) engines from the theater to Ramstein was a problem. The officer in charge of the 86th engine operation sent a message to the 347th TFW and the 388th TFW on this subject in December 1990. Instead of more repairable engines, however, the only immediate result of his message was a staff assistance visit from Hq U.S. Air Force Europe, also at Ramstein. Retrograde engines did not begin showing up until January 1991, and after that, in ones and twos. Repair parts were also a limiting factor. The parts situation was caused largely by the condition of retrograde engines, which had been fairly well stripped during in-theater cannibalization. As an additional note, when the 86th moved serviceable engines to the Ramstein loading dock, the engines would sit there for one to four daystending to confirm other indications of poor visibility and control over components in transit. Proven Force The 7440th Composite Wing (P) comprised RF-4C, F-4G, F-16, F‑15C, F-11E, EF-111A, MC/HC/EC-130, KC-135, E-3, and MH-53 aircraft.664 The wing established seven aircraft maintenance units (one for each flying squadron), a combined component maintenance/equipment maintenance section, and an ammunition branch out of the 39th Consolidated Aircraft Maintenance Squadron and deployed U.S. Air Forces in Europe units.665 The component repair and equipment repair functional areas provided fuel system, hydraulic, nondestructive inspection, electronics countermeasures, armament, precision measurement equipment, sheet metal, machine, electrical, environmental, and wheel and tire shops. Since the majority of intermediate-level repair (i.e., engine repair and all avionics except electronic countermeasures) was sourced out of European home stations, the wing, along with almost all units in the AOR, operated on a de facto two-level maintenance concept with Military Airlift Command channel and special airlift providing the lines of communication.666 Although the official history of Proven Force states that monitoring of parts flow was “highly effective,”667 it was also evidently cumbersome and manpower intensive, requiring manual tracing of as many as 500 pieces of cargo per day.668 As discussed previously, however, if mission-capable rates were the measure, then the net result was effective because Proven Force mission-capable rates were approximately the same as those for peacetime and for similar models of aircraft in other units. SAC Aircraft The Strategic Air Command had deployed 234 air refueling aircraft, 38 bombers, and 10 reconnaissance aircraft into the AOR by the time Desert Storm terminated.669 Additional aircraft had been deployed outside the AOR, mostly to Spain and Diego Garcia. (Other reports in this series discuss the politically charged process of deciding where to bed down the aircraft and the uncertainties that resulted.) In July 1990, Strategic Air Command had two KC-135R aircraft in Southwest Asia (in the United Arab Emirates). By 12 August, 99 KC‑135 aircraft were supporting Desert Shield operations; a month later, the number grew to 150.670 To provide maintenance for the tankers, the Command created intermediate-level maintenance centers at Moron AB and RAF Mildenhall. By 7 September, the RAF Mildenhall facility was able to perform KC-135 phase inspections, fuel cell repair, and wheel and tire build-up. Moron in Spain by then had a much more complete capability for avionics maintenance, corrosion control, as well as some limited support for RC-135s. Other than the uncertainty caused by limited communications and limitations imposed by the War Readiness Spares Kits issues (see Chapter 7 of this report), creating an overseas maintenance capability for KC-135 aircraft was essentially unremarkable. When the KC-10 was procured, Strategic Air Command chose not to establish a KC-10 intermediate-level maintenance capability because of the aircraft's high reliability and the ready availability of Douglas Aircraft commercial support.671 So it should come as no surprise that KC-10 support was unproblematic. To ensure support, however, Oklahoma City Air Logistics Center dispatched a Douglas logistics survey team to Europe to establish contingency distribution centers to expedite movement of spare parts.672 The fifty-seven KC-10 aircraft deployed were for all intents and purposes problem-free during Desert Shield and Desert Storm.673 After 8 August 1990 and until B-52 deployments to Moron and RAF Fairford began during Desert Storm, B-52s were stationed at Diego Garcia as part of the 4300th Provisional Bomb Wing.674 Intermediate-level maintenance and heavy maintenance such as engine changes, corrosion washes, and phase inspections were not available at Diego Garcia and were instead provided from Andersen AFB, Guam.675 The capability at Andersen was fortuitous. Although the base had been closed the previous year, Maj. Gen. Searock, Strategic Air Command Deputy Chief of Staff for Logistics, had made and won a case for leaving the intermediate-level maintenance capability in place as a sort of insurance policy for the Pacific Theater.676 Although proposals to create an intermediate-level maintenance capability at Diego Garcia were discussed after Desert Shield began, nothing concrete transpired before Desert Storm ended.677 In-theater B-52 intermediate-level maintenance was never seriously considered because of lack of facilities and ramp space. The problem was where else to put it once B-52s bedded down in theater.678 RAF Fairford had an inactive intermediate-level maintenance capability that, somewhat like the one at Andersen, had resulted from a fortuitous previous decision. In this case, the maintenance assets had previously been put in place (using assets from Mather AFB when the 420th Bomber Wing was inactivated) in what amounted to prepositioning for a war in Europe.679 The perspective of the Strategic Air Command Deputy Chief of Staff for Logistics is revealing: We knew that if we had a war in Europe or in the Pacific where we would go; we did not knowwe had not thought through yet what we would do if we had a war in Southwest Asia.680 RAF Fairford, however, was too distant from the AOR to provide intermediate-level maintenance support.681 Because Moron AB in Spain was already on the tanker air bridge, it was the logical choice. Moron had the advantage of being a reasonable distance from RAF Fairford and became the second site for intermediate-level maintenance.682 Table 33 shows the combined KC-135 and B-52 intermediate-level and heavy-maintenance production at Andersen and Moron for the period August 1990 through March 1991. 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