I've never had to do it myself but I lived and worked on a number of air bases and it would occur to me just how one would go about securing an air base from attack. There are a number of approaches and of course there are the standard definitions of the word 'secure'. It's an old joke among us:
If you were a Marine you think it means to attack the building with fire and maneuver.
If you were in the Army you think it means post guards to control access to the building.
If you were in the Navy it means to turn out all the lights and lock the door.
If you were in the Air Force it means to take out a five year lease with an option to buy.
But with that old saw, what is the current environment for securing an air base in the 21st century? In the old days we would expect to find that some degree of ground force combat element was present in sufficient numbers to keep out the bad guys. "On March 8, 1965, about 3,500 Marines from the 3rd Marine Division’s 9th Marine Expeditionary Brigade landed at Red Beach in Da Nang. The landing force, the first U.S. ground combat unit in Vietnam, consisted of troops from the division’s 1st Battalion, 3rd Marine Regiment, and 3rd Battalion, 9th Marines. The battalions were sent to Da Nang to protect an air base there, which the South Vietnamese and U.S. air forces had been using to launch attacks on North Vietnam since Operation Rolling Thunder began on March 2, and the air base needed added security."
There would also be some form of anti-aircraft capability and one might even speculate on whether or not there was some form of ballistic missile defense.
That being said, what exactly is the air base defense against the already widely spread killer drones? It would have to be something pretty damned devastating and effective if it is to cover an air field that covers square miles of wide open land. Those runways alone are more than 10,000 feet long and there are usually several of them aligned in different directions and in among them are the hangers, armament buildings, parking ramps, taxi-ways and all the usual infrastructure of petroleum, oil and lubricants and the officer's club liquor supplies.
I'd really like to know what the Air Force is using or planning on using to defend its installations overseas and here in America from thousands and tens of thousands of drones that can be programmed to seek and destroy B2 bombers and any winged thing it finds in the vicinity of a control tower. Right now I think we have nothing at all out there and no prospects of immediate deployment of useful systems and let's just be honest here and say that a useful system incorporates a 99.9% kill rate on incoming drones and costs far less than the drones. It would also have someway to backtrack to the drone controllers and kill them as well.
I think we're talking about bringing out of the black a number of existing programs that nobody wants to admit exist because then every base commander will be clamoring for them and the people that own and control that capability don't want to tip their hand or let on that they have the means to neutralize drones.
I've been writing about this now for 15 years and so far there hasn't been a lot of innovation deployed but then I could be wrong. It was not very often that we took a Close-in-Weapon System and shifted it to Air Auto where it would automatically detect and engage air contacts in its vicinity. Still, that was a long time ago.
I do hope that they are looking at multitudes of anti-drone systems and not doing our usual one-size-fit's all nonsense. It would be interesting to see what the Mission Needs Statement looks like and the Required Operational Capability and Projected Operational Environment look like for all the systems that I'm sure the Marines, Army and Navy want. If they were smart, the FAA would get aboard along with HLS and New York City.
I'll tell you one thing for free though; it is hard. Adding fire control and deadly weapons to the mix top-filled with aircraft can only be deadly and requires extreme focus. It's 2 o'clock in the morning and you have a radar contact. How do you decide to unleash the killer bots? Welcome to the past.
4 comments:
I was JCSE for the first 13 years of an AF career. I had a Marine Gunny as my supervisor the fist 8 years. We were the best of the bast. The last 8 I was Combat Comm - easy years.
I had a friend on the mine sweeper in the fields in 1988, went ashore to a unit he swore never deployed and never went anywhere so it was called to Saudi Arabia for Desert Shield and Storm and when he got back he went to a command that he swore blind nobody knew about and it never deployed or went anywhere and I ran into him in Korea about a year later where he'd spent the last year with the Navy Auxiliary Mobile Comms Suite. It was really funny. About 10 years after that we were both working in the same area in SAIC.
Unfortunately America and the American military cannot learn proactively. It's going to require an actual attack with the loss of who knows how many aircraft
before anyone in charge will actually address the issue. And the odds are very good the attack will be done with drones and possibly some of the countless foreign invaders the left has allowed in over the years.
Hilux with mortar tubes are tough to neutralize, too.
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