printer version   email this page

BIG TARGET
Proliferation of shoulder-fired missiles bolsters need for coutnermeasures to protect large Air Guard aircraft

By William Matthews
September 2009

A blacked-out C-130 climbed into the night sky over Baghdad in January 2006 and headed toward Kuwait carrying six members of the House Armed Services Committee. Suddenly, a shoulder-fired missile streaked toward the plane.

“Fortunately the C-130’s onboard countermeasures system was one of the most capable available,” an Air Force pilot wrote in a report about the incident.

It may well be that the lawmakers are alive today because the C-130 was equipped with LAIRCM—the large-aircraft infrared countermeasure.

The LAIRCM’s laser “deflected the missile” and the attack failed, the pilot reported. The missile, it turns out, was a Russian-made SA-18, one of the most sophisticated shoulder-fired missiles made for shooting down aircraft—and now available to terrorist organizations worldwide.

Alarmed by the threat, NGAUS has made large-aircraft infrared countermeasures one of its top Air National Guard legislative priorities. Guard leaders also are pressing the issue.

Speaking to the House Armed Services Committee in May, Lt. Gen. Harry M. Wyatt III, Air Guard director, listed laser defense systems as one of the Guard’s most critical aircraft modernization needs. His audience included committee members who were aboard that C-130 flying from Baghdad three years earlier.

Congress has complied with the Guard’s request, adding money for LAIRCMs in annual budgets and in warfunding supplementals. And the Guard has begun installing LAIRCMs on some of its biggest planes.

Four of the Guard’s eight C-17s now have laser-based missile defenses, says Col. Eric Mann, chief of the Air Guard’s operational requirements division at the National Guard Bureau.

So far, 36 of the Guard’s 181 C-130s have the wiring needed to accommodate the laser defense systems, and soon 20 of them will have complete systems fully installed.

C-5s come next, Mann says. But before money is made available for them, a decision must be made about whether to keep them in service or retire them.

KC-135 refueling tankers and E-8 Joint Stars ground-target-spotting radar planes are on the list, too, but it is likely to be several years before they begin receiving laser defense systems.

The threat, meanwhile, continues to grow.

During the early months of the Iraq war, Gen. John Handy, then chief of the Air Mobility Command, said U.S. military cargo planes were being fired on with shoulder-fired missiles and anti-aircraft artillery “on almost a daily basis.”

At that time, Air Guard planes were equipped with flares and metallic chaff as countermeasures. The flares are burning bits of metal that create hot spots in the sky to lure heat-seeking missiles away from the hot exhaust of aircraft engines. Chaff is used to confuse missile system radars.

Those defenses and evasive maneuvering by pilots are enough to keep planes safe from less sophisticated “man portable air defense systems,” or MANPADS, as shoulder-fired missiles are often called. But flares are less effective against the more sophisticated missiles that have begun showing up in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Pilots have adopted other defenses as well. Flying just above treetop level, for example, gives insurgents less time to aim and fire. That tactic reportedly was used to protect former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld when he flew into Baghdad aboard an MC-130 Combat Talon in 2003.

And instead of making a gradual descent into Baghdad’s main airport, C-130 and C-17 pilots often drop into a tight, gut-wrenching corkscrew to avoid becoming targets for shoulder-fired missiles and rocket-propelled grenades.

Nonetheless, at least three large cargo planes have been hit. A commercial cargo plane operated by freight carrier DHL was badly damaged in November 2003 while taking off from Baghdad. An Air Force C-17 was hit in December 2003, and a C-5 was hit in January 2004.

The C-17 and the C-5 were hit despite their defensive flares, says Jack Pledger, who is the head of infrared countermeasures development at Northrop Grumman. Fortunately, each plane was able to land safely.

Perhaps U.S. forces have been lucky. The threat of shoulder-fired missiles “has outpaced current strategy and available countermeasures,” wrote Air Force Reserve Maj. James Whitmire, who analyzed the growing danger to commercial airliners and military planes.

Thousands of shoulder-fired-missiles “are available on the black market at affordable prices. … Multiple sources corroborate the fact that these missiles are well within the reach of terrorists,” Whitmire wrote.

Guard planes are indeed operating in a new environment, says Mann of the Guard Bureau.

“We’ve moved from the traditional Cold War—the good guys are over here, the bad guys are over there—to now, where you’re surrounded by the enemy,” he says. “There is no forward line, the line is blurred. You don’t necessarily know where the enemy is or what kind of weapons they have.”

So even on bases that are considered secure, “planes are going in and going out and they’re vulnerable,” Mann says.

And new operating scenarios are likely to increase the vulnerability. In its “2010 Weapons Systems Modernization Requirements” document, the Air Guard says that in the future, KC-135s won’t simply serve as airborne gas stations that fly at a comfortable distance from danger.

Instead, KC-135s will operate in high threat areas, perform riskier tasks such as low altitude refueling and serve as airborne-command-and-control relay posts, the document says.

In Afghanistan, where a growing number of Guardsmen can expect to deploy, geography can turn the missile threat into a multidimensional peril. Mountains offer enemy forces high ground from which to strike, so planes that normally operate outside the range of shoulder-fired missiles may become vulnerable, Mann says.

“When you’re flying in mountainous terrain,” he says, “sometimes you’re closer to the ground.”

Current countermeasures are insufficient. For example, the infrared seekers on more advanced missiles such as the U.S. Stinger and the Russian SA-16 and SA-18 are designed not to be fooled by flares.

Flares have other drawbacks, Mann says. “They’re pyrotechnics, they’re volatile,” so they require more care in handling and more crew training.

“And once you’re done, you’re done,” he says. Planes carry a finite number of flares, and once they’ve been expended, there is no defense until the plane lands and the flare dispensers are reloaded. Laser systems, by contrast, have unlimited capacity to fire at attacking missiles, Mann says.

Ideally, Guard officials say they would like to install LAIRCM systems for Air Guard C-17s, four varieties of C-130s, E-8s and KC-135s.

The cost? Just over $1 billion, according to Guard Bureau documents.

Five companies make laser-based infrared countermeasures for aircraft, but so far the Air Force is buying only Northrop Grumman’s LAIRCM.

That’s “the program of record,” says Ted Zwitcker, an Air Guard electronic warfare specialist at NGB.

The Northrop system kicks into action when its missile-warning sensor detects ultraviolet light from a missile’s exhaust. An on-board computer determines whether the missile is a threat to the aircraft.

If it is, a tracker and the laser are activated. The tracker locks onto the missile and calculates its trajectory. Then the laser fires pulses of infrared light to disorient the missile’s guidance system, steering it away from the aircraft. The process takes only a few seconds.

The LAIRCM system detects, tracks and jams the incoming missile automatically, and doesn’t require inputs from the aircraft’s crew.

More advanced LAIRCMs are being developed with missile-warning sensors that detect infrared rather than ultraviolet signatures from attacking missiles. These “NexGen” sensors are expected to perform better in cluttered environments and spot missiles at greater distances, the Air Force says.

Northrop has been trying for several years to interest the airline industry in installing a civilian version of the LAIRCM on commercial airliners. But the cost—$6 billion or more—has been prohibitive.

However, the Air Guard now is poised to benefit from Northrop’s effort to protect airliners. The company developed a special LAIRCM encased in a pod that can be quickly attached underneath passenger planes. The Guard is considering installing LAIRCM pods on the bellies of its old KC-135 refueling tankers for instant protection against shoulder-fired missiles.

The first test of a pod-equipped tanker is scheduled for this fall. Guard pilots will test the pod to ensure that it doesn’t interfere with refueling or ground operations.

But the pods aren’t considered adequate for protecting C-17s, C-5s and C-130s.

The systems for those planes have to be tougher. The cargo haulers “fly into much more unfriendly environments, they’re used in much more hostile conditions, they fly into unimproved airstrips, they bounce off runways, they pull Gs,” Pledger says.

Their missile defense systems have multiple missile warning sensors and other redundant equipment. Equipping a C-130 with an LAIRCM system will cost about $3 million a plane.

Mann of the Guard Bureau calculates that equipping C-17s will cost about $4 million per plane and C-5s may cost up to $6 million.

The Guard can’t afford to equip all of its large planes with missile countermeasures, and luckily, it doesn’t have to.

The plan is to wire some planes to accommodate sensors and lasers, but only install full missile defense systems when the planes are heading into high threat environments.

“You can move the equipment between planes,” says Mann.

Current plans are to equip all eight of the Guard’s C-17s with LAIRCMS. Eleven of the Guard’s 30 C-5s will also get them if the planes remain in service, Mann says.

LAIRCM pods can be installed in KC-135s in four days to a week, Pledger says, but the nonpodded LAIRCMs take longer—three to four weeks for a C-130 and longer for the bigger C-17s and C-5s.

“We hope in the next year or two to have decent numbers of infrared countermeasures fielded” on C-130s, C-17s and C-5s, Mann says.

The threat leaves little choice.

The U.S. State Department reported in 2008 that “thousands [of shoulder-fired missiles] are outside of the control of national governments” and some are in the hands of terrorist organizations, including al Qaeda.

British newspapers reported in March that Iran is selling SA-14 shoulder-fired missiles to the Taliban.

And even U.S.-made missiles are part of the problem. The United States supplied Stinger shoulder-fired missiles to fighters in Afghanistan in the 1980s for use against Soviet helicopters and planes. Today, 400 of them remain unaccounted for.

Since the beginning of the war in Iraq, Pledger says, “the use of MANPADS has increased tremendously.”

William Matthews is a Springfield, Va., freelance writer who specializes in military matters.