Defense Daily
April 15, 2002
Pg. 6

Enduring Freedom Saw Shift In Compass Call Mission

By Frank Wolfe

The Lockheed Martin [LMT] EC-130H Compass Call jamming aircraft had a large role in jamming enemy ground communications during Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF), a role that represents an evolution of the plane’s mission from one that in recent conflicts primarily supported strike aircraft to one that supports U.S. ground forces, program officials said Friday.

The United States "didn’t start putting anybody on the ground until we showed up," Air Force Capt. Chris Kirschman, information warfare operations action officer at Air Combat Command (ACC), told Defense Daily during a telephone interview Friday. "Our priority this time around was the ground forces because they were going in at much higher risk than our aircraft…We were a go, no go item. Commanders considered us so important that they didn’t want to press forward unless they had our support."

Kirschmann recently returned from OEF where he served as an electronic warfare officer assigned to the 41st Electronic Combat Squadron.

When enemy forces shot down a Boeing [BA] MH-47 in March during Operation Anaconda, "we did not have a Compass Call flying that night," he said. "Our folks were disappointed and surprised and eager to get back into the fight."

Compass Call, 13 of which are based at Davis-Monthan AFB, Ariz, are specialized for radar and communications jamming and have a mission crew of nine. A 14th plane is a test aircraft.

The Air Force used Compass Call during the 1991 Persian Gulf War and the Balkan conflict to disrupt enemy tactical and strategic level communications, but OEF represented a shift to a ground-intensive jamming mission in which the planes came under fire. Because of the mountainous terrain in Afghanistan, the standoff distance for Compass Call decreased, Kirschmann said.

"We had to place our aircraft at much higher risk because of the geography," he said. On one mission, anti-aircraft artillery (AAA) skirted by the nose of the Compass Call which Kirschmann was aboard, he said, and aircraft risked coming under AAA and small arms fire on missions.

Despite the lack of an enemy Integrated Air Defense System in Afghanistan, the Northrop Grumman [NOC] EA-6B was used in a communications jamming role. The EA-6B was able to use its USQ-113 communications countermeasures set, which is made by Britain’s BAE SYSTEMS, in that role.

Compass Call was able to designate communications targets for the EA-6B during OEF.

"Communications jamming became the only game in town when it came to EW," Kirschmann said.

During Allied Force against Serbia in 1999, the Compass Calls performed a more traditional jamming role, flying Suppression of Enemy Air Defense Missions to clear the way for strike aircraft missions. But OEF "was a non-conventional campaign," Kirschmann said.

Boeing B-1 and B-52 bombers and C-130 aircraft, like the Compass Call and EC-130E Commando Solo psychological operations aircraft, were major players in OEF.

With the Block 35 upgrade, the Compass Call is to become more capable of low-frequency, early warning and acquisition radar jamming to fill a possible gap between the coming retirement of the EA-6Bs and a follow-on platform.

Receiving funds to modernize all 14 Compass Calls to the Block 35 configuration is the top need for the aircraft, said Bruce Pickerill, Science Applications International Corp.’s system program coordinator for Compass Call at ACC. Funds are sufficient to fund 11 Block 35 aircraft, he said.

"Another issue for us is we would like to be Link 16 and other data link-capable. Now we have no data link capability on Compass Call," Pickerill said. Such data links would enable the aircraft to receive communications targets from computer systems. The current method of transmitting such targets to Compass Call using voice communications slows the targeting of such communications nodes "considerably," Pickerill said.

Among the Block 35 upgrades are a Tactical Radio Acquisition and Countermeasures Subsystem (TRACS) by BAE (Defense Daily, Mar. 19). TRACS, a digital reprogrammable receiver, is to replace Compass Call’s aging 1970s-era receiver suite and is to have an expanded frequency range against communications targets. The current compressive receiver "has a lot of calibration and vanishing vendor problems," Pickerill said.

TRACS is to be fielded on the first Compass Call in FY ‘05.