Operator’s Account Of The Wars In Iraq & Afghanistan Intelligence, Surveillance & Reconnaissance

Sample Chapters

I was fifty-one years old, which was about the average age of the nine guys on my team. We were all employees of Lockheed Martin and most of us had been hired two or three months before. I was the only member of our team who wasn’t ex-military, or military contractor with extensive, recent experience. Jeff was the only African-American, the rest of us were white. Jeff Ballard, Bill Dunbar, Barry, Steve Carter and I are married. Most of us have ex-wives. I think everyone drinks, Jeff and I to excess sometimes. Don Craig is a body builder. Bill is a good-old-boy from “LA” (Lower Arkansas). Barry told us he is manic-depressive. Winston Rogers worked in Iraq for security contractors in 2004 and ‘05 and knows his way around. Vince is a proud Massachusetts liberal, and Steve is retired Navy, married to a Filipino, who he loves but would rather not live with. Rick Lawrence is the smartest guy on the team and the only one other than me that has operational experience with kite balloons.

None of the corporate or military people call them kite balloons. That’s not sexy. To them they’re “aerostats”. I first saw them in World War II newsreels. They were used then to prevent low level strafing and bombing runs and they were called “Barrage Balloons”. But, in the language of “aerostation”, the field of air vehicles and conveyances known as “lighter than air” (LTA), a field related to but distinct from “aviation”, an aerodynamically shaped balloon on a tether is a kite balloon. That’s the proper name for what we were going to operate.

An “Aerostat” on the other hand is anything that holds a lighter than air gas and can remain at a given altitude, so kite balloons, moored spherical balloons, free balloons, and airships such as blimps and dirigibles are all aerostats. So is a child’s toy balloon. Since the Air Force and Army generally prefer technical and masculine terms applied to their systems and products, kite balloons are never called that. To them they are “aerostats”.

We were “Team 4”, the third PTDS (Persistent Threat Detection System) team to operate in Iraq. The first group had been in place since 2004 on Camp Slayer in Baghdad. Team 2 had recently started operations in (LOCATION REDACTED BY DOD) and Team 3 had been at FOB Loyalty in (LOCATION REDACTED BY DOD) since February. The kite balloon that we were sent to Baghdad to assemble and operate as well as the ones used by the other teams would float a L3 Communications, Incorporated, “Wescam” MX20 gyroscopically stabilized, multi-spectral airborne imaging system, which is a very sophisticated and expensive camera.

(SENTENCE REDACTED BY DOD) All the people, equipment and software that gathers intelligence, provides surveillance and reconnoiters the battle space make up the network. In the broadest sense it includes the intelligence agencies and all they do as well but in practice, when referring to the “ISR Network” war fighters are often speaking of the systems and devices that watch and listen to things on the ground. The PTDS balloon, which operated just a few thousand feet above ground level in Baghdad, occupied a position in the network near the bottom. At the top are the satellites in low earth orbit which is a couple hundred miles up. Next in order of altitude are Lockheed Martin’s U2 spy plane which has a service ceiling of 85,000 feet and Northrup Grumman’s Global Hawk unmanned aerial vehicle which flies as high as 65,000 feet. Further down are the EP-3E Aries which flies as high as 30,000 feet and the JSTARS radar aircraft which is a modified Boeing 707 whose service ceiling is 42,000 feet. AWACS aircraft, which are built on various airframes, including the Boeing 767, are up there too. When close support fighters like F-15s and F-16s operate as ISR assets their altitude will vary, so will the mission altitudes flown by Predators although that unmanned aircraft can’t operate any higher than 25,000 feet. The Predator, built by General Atomics, flies the same camera as the one on the PTDS aerostat, the Wescam MX20. Shadow UAVs, which are catapult launched, can fly as high as 15,000 feet but that relatively small UAV is typically used at much lower altitudes. Raven UAVs, which are hand launched and Raytheon’s RAID (Rapid Aerostat Initial Deployment) aerostats operate at under 1000 feet. At the bottom of the arrangement are Raytheon’s RAID tower cameras, which are on platforms just a little over 100 feet off the ground. You might list base defense cameras, which are mounted on buildings and walls, as part of the ISR network too but only if you are on one of the bases. The feeds from those cameras aren’t generally on the network and available to other sites.

All these different systems and vantage points gave the United States the “high ground” in a VERY big way. The highest ground the enemy ever occupied was a rooftop. They saw almost nothing and when the sky was clear we could potentially see virtually everything. With some sensors, a clear sky isn’t even needed.