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02:15In the United States, the best and brightest from ROTC schools,
02:20prestigious universities and the Air Force Academy
02:23come to Randolph Air Force Base to train for this invisible battle.
02:27They are given a lot of technical background.
02:31They'll be taught how radars work, how chaff works,
02:34how, in pretty much detail, how a lot of the jammers work,
02:37flares, and a lot of the other systems that are coming on.
02:41Speed and velocity. Propagation. Period.
02:44It's three months of intensive training requiring an understanding
02:48in engineering, physics, mathematics, and basic military strategy.
02:53The teachers don't have to manufacture high expectations.
02:57The students already ask more of themselves than any teacher possibly could.
03:03I expect to be a fully qualified electronic warfare officer,
03:08use any part of the electromagnetic spectrum to defend and jam against radar signals,
03:13and also against missiles, surface-to-air missiles, coming up to attack my aircraft.
03:20The training may be rigorous, but the consequences of not knowing the job
03:24could cost an officer's life.
03:27The lives of fellow airmen, or even worse, threaten national defense.
03:32Electronic warfare is developed into an essential component of American security.
03:37It is deadly, it is fast, it is dangerous, and it is always changing.
03:43It's not something that lives in a fixed place in space.
03:47The first case of documented radio jamming occurred not during wartime,
03:55but during an America's Cup yacht race back in 1901.
03:59Newspaper reporters wanted to get the results of the race out as quickly as possible,
04:05so they could scoop their competitors.
04:10They used spark transmitters capable of sending Morse code
04:13to broadcast the position of boats from the race back to their offices.
04:19Knowing that two spark transmitters could not send a message simultaneously,
04:24one wire service came up with a plan to beat the competition.
04:28A single dash meant that the American boat Columbus was in the lead.
04:33Two ten-second dashes meant the British boat Shamrock was in the lead.
04:38On it went until the rogue company got all its information through.
04:42Then the operator planted his Morse key down and sent a Morse dash lasting one and a half hours,
04:49preventing the competitors from getting their information out.
04:52Certainly one of the longest and most underhanded Morse dashes in history.
05:00Although the success of cryptanalysis proved to have far greater intelligence value
05:05than jamming enemy signals in the First World War,
05:09electronic hijinks still played a role.
05:13The British erected a chain of direction-finding stations along the east coast of England,
05:18whose bearings could establish the position of any ship or aircraft using radio in the North Sea area.
05:27The stations each sent out radio beams that, when broken by a passing ship or aircraft,
05:33would alert an operator that something was traveling nearby.
05:36At that time, air defense early warning systems were less sophisticated.
05:42They depended on acoustical sound detection.
05:45Huge dishes were connected to headsets and men would listen for enemy airplane engine noise.
05:51It would take the revolutionary discovery of radar to bring electronic warfare to the forefront of the battlefield.
05:58Throughout the 1930s, the British Air Ministry had a standing reward of a thousand pounds to anyone who could develop a ray gun
06:08that could kill a sheep at a hundred yards.
06:11Robert Watson Watt, in his attempts to discover the first death ray,
06:17found instead that he could actually detect reflected microwaves off of metal objects like ships and aircraft.
06:25It didn't take long for the British military to take notice.
06:30Though Watt is often credited with being the inventor of radar,
06:33other scientists in several different countries serendipitously discovered it around the same time.
06:40During the 1930s, we get radar being developed quite independently in the USA, in France, in Great Britain,
06:50the Netherlands, Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union.
06:55And each one of these nations thought that it alone had discovered the secret of radar and was trying to exploit it.
07:03Of all these countries, Great Britain was the most concerned of an attack from the air,
07:08and the British military accelerated its research on radar.
07:12It also looked for a means to outsmart the technology,
07:15both to disable an enemy's radar and to learn ways to protect its own.
07:20But the only people who understood radar and how to jam it were the inventors themselves.
07:27It was rather like asking a mother to bear a child and then have to do a vivisection operation on it.
07:33People just aren't like that.
07:34But the military insisted on trying to find means to disable radar.
07:41So Watt and his crew put a spark transmitter capable of disabling the radar frequency
07:46being used in an old vintage World War I fighter.
07:52They flew it up and down the east coast of England past several radar stations.
07:57The story goes that the scientists didn't try too hard to jam their babies.
08:02If the fighter was successful in jamming the ground stations,
08:06the British government would have had a very good excuse for cancelling the entire radar program.
08:13Instead, the British government made the decision to build a fence of radar sites,
08:18called the Chain Home stations, around the perimeter of Great Britain.
08:22It took years to build the system, but by April 7, 1939,
08:28Chain Home stations stretched from the Isle of Wight in the English Channel to the Firth of Tay in Scotland.
08:35In effect, Chain Home allowed the British to blanket the English Channel with radar coverage,
08:40creating a wall of radar using multiple frequencies.
08:45This gave the British the first radar barrier ever built, one that would soon prove invaluable.
08:53The saviors of Great Britain were people like Watt and his radar stations,
09:00as well as the fighters and the men who flew them.
09:03The survival of Great Britain was ensured starting about 1935-36, when they began to take defense seriously.
09:12The vital importance of radar as an air defense system was not yet known,
09:17but as the Nazi threat and the winds of war blew across Europe and towards the English coastline,
09:23radar would very soon be put to the test.
09:26In September of 1940, Britain stood alone against the Nazi menace.
09:37Hitler had overrun Europe with relative ease and now set his sights on England.
09:45The British war machine was just beginning to build the kind of air force that could fight off an attack,
09:50but troops in England were still greatly outnumbered and outgunned.
09:54No secret to the Germans or the British.
09:59The gamesmanship for control of the ether began with a journey by Edward Taffy Bowen,
10:04a young civilian scientist working for the British Air Ministry.
10:09On a blustery day in September 1940, Bowen paced the platform at London's Euston station,
10:16gripping an innocuous black suitcase about the size of a bread box.
10:20He was understandably nervous because he carried not only papers describing the British military's latest
10:28advances in radar technology, but also a working magnetron radar.
10:34A magnetron was a small advanced radar system that could be installed in fighter planes.
10:40No other country possessed this technology.
10:44If it were to fall into the wrong hands, it could tip the balance of the war.
10:52Although the magnetron technology worked, it contained glitches,
10:56and the British didn't have the manpower and resources to work out all the problems.
11:03But if they didn't get this radar in the nation's night fighters, planes that were outfitted to counter
11:09Germany's night attacks, Great Britain may have succumbed to the Luftwaffe's relentless bombings.
11:15Winston Churchill, in a bold move to get this technology online quickly,
11:22decided to share all of Britain's technological secrets with scientists in the United States.
11:30But nothing hastened the development of U.S. radar more than the events at Pearl Harbor.
11:36At 6.30 a.m. on December 7, 1941, Private Joseph Lockhart's cathode ray screen came alive
11:44with so much clutter that he thought it had gone haywire.
11:49He was manning the radar station at Opana, on the northern tip of Oahu.
11:54After a systems check indicated all was well, he decided that 130 miles offshore
12:00lay the biggest aircraft formation he had ever seen on radar.
12:07A Lieutenant Tyler at the Information Center listened to Lockhart's report,
12:11and a bell went off in his head. The Army paid a local radio station to broadcast a specific
12:17musical number whenever aircraft were headed towards the island base. This was a way of
12:23furnishing aircraft with a friendly homing signal. By chance, the song was playing.
12:30Tyler concluded Lockhart's radar clutter must have been a flight of friendly bombers approaching,
12:38and told Lockhart to disregard the signal.
12:41This was nothing conscious that the Japanese did. It was a failure in an American system, but the thing was,
12:53you hadn't learned to trust your radar as the British had been forced to do, and I had great sympathy for the
12:59commander there on that day. Despite British and American work to perfect jamming techniques and
13:06countermeasures, the first large-scale use of electronic warfare came during a German operation called
13:13Servius, better known as the Channel Dash. In February 1942, three German warships, the battlecruisers
13:22Scharnhorst and Gisenau, along with the heavy cruiser Prince Eugen, were trapped by the Royal Navy in
13:29Brest off the Brittany coast of France. German naval Gross Admiral Erich Rader wanted his ships home.
13:37He was afraid that if he took them out into the Atlantic, they would be hunted down by the Royal Navy,
13:42as the Bismarck was in 1942. Instead of taking a long trip around Great Britain, past Greenland and
13:51Iceland and then home, the Germans decided to take an extremely risky six-hour shortcut through the English
13:58Channel.
14:02Aude Calais in France and the cliffs of Dover in Great Britain becomes the most surveilled piece of
14:08Earth on the planet. You have radars looking at airplanes, radars looking at ships. This area
14:16literally becomes a place where you cannot go and row a boat without getting noticed.
14:21I interviewed the navigating officer on the Scharnhorst and he told me that the crew really were very
14:30frightened at having to do this operation. He'd written his last letter to his wife because he really
14:35didn't think that they were going to succeed in getting through to Germany.
14:38The Germans' route plan included fighter cover escorting destroyers and torpedo boats.
14:46But at its core was deception through radar jamming, including fixed jammers along the French coast,
14:53a heavily utilized system well known to the Allies.
14:56As these German ships passed the British radar sites, the shore-based jammers turned on their equipment.
15:05At the time, many of the best British radar operators had transferred to North Africa.
15:11Those now manning the channel radar hadn't experienced this type of jamming before.
15:16By the time they got the whole thing sorted out, the German ships were through the channel
15:22and they managed to make it back to Germany. This very bold operation was very successful.
15:30It had always been clear that the Germans had some sort of radar capability,
15:34but Allied codebreakers and spies had yet to discover what that was.
15:40RV Jones, a 28-year-old British scientist, had been given the task of not only discovering the
15:46German radar grid, but also of countering and eventually overwhelming it.
15:53He was, if you will, a fantastic generalist and one of the things he had a particular skill for
16:00was understanding what the dangers of an enemy having radar technology was going to do to Great Britain.
16:09In 1939, a mysterious package was found just outside the British Embassy in Oslo, Norway.
16:15It was forwarded to Jones, since it contained top-secret documents that appeared to outline
16:21Germany's amazing advances in radar and rocket technology. Many in the British intelligence
16:28community thought the report was a hoax, but Jones believed its authenticity. This became known as
16:35the Oslo Report, and Jones would often refer to its contents. Jones learned that the Germans were
16:41beaming very high radio frequencies at Britain from Cleve on the German-Dutch border and from Schleichwig-Holstein near Denmark.
16:51He presented these findings to Churchill, who gave him the go-ahead to carry out countermeasures.
16:59This led, in fact, to several actual uses of armed force by the British to actually reach out
17:05and grab pieces of German radar technology so that they could evaluate it and see where it was going.
17:13British intelligence discovered that Freya, the Norse goddess of beauty, was the German code name for a
17:19certain type of radar. Freya was used to search the ether for long-range threats.
17:25Another model, called Würzburg, could detect threats at short-range and direct searchlights to expose RAF bombers in the night sky.
17:36Jones and his team had a reasonable understanding of Freya technology, but the Würzburg was still a mystery.
17:44Countermeasures had to be found to neutralize the system if the Allies hoped to recapture the European continent.
17:51Around 1 a.m. on February 27, 1942, 119 Scottish paratroopers were dropped behind enemy lines in northern France, near Saint-Brunneval.
18:06One group held the beach, another secured the villa, and a third stormed the radar facility.
18:13A technician, C.W.H. Cox, a movie projectionist before the war, was chosen to dismantle the Würzburg radar.
18:21Cox was supposed to have half an hour to dismantle the Würzburg.
18:26But mortar fire forced Major John D. Frost, the commander of the mission, to order an early retreat.
18:34Cox still managed to remove the German contraption in half the time.
18:38The Würzburg was loaded on a cart and pulled down to the beachhead with mortar rounds exploding everywhere.
18:44The paratroopers were able to find the beach and help their comrades escape onto a waiting Navy landing craft.
18:54By 2.30 a.m. one of the most daring operations of the war was over.
18:58It was a decisive blow.
19:00German air defenses along the coast were now partially blind, allowing RAF bombers easier access to the European continent.
19:08During the second half of 1942, Winn Salisbury, an American scientist working on the Harvard University campus,
19:19discovered that the Würzburg radar could be jammed by dropping strips of aluminum foil over the target,
19:25filling German radar screens with false echoes.
19:29The foil was nicknamed chaff.
19:32It took nearly a year before the Allies agreed to use chaff in the field.
19:36One of the worries was that the Germans would realize its effectiveness and use it on bombing runs over London.
19:45With no counter-counter measure, the English capital could become an inferno.
19:52But Allied commanders gambled on the theory that if they hit hard and early,
19:56the Germans would be back in their heels long enough for the Allied scientists to come up with a defense for their own invention.
20:03On a July night in 1943, bombers were instructed to dump chaff over the port of Hamburg.
20:14They had a box, like a shoebox, and in there was the right number of strips,
20:19so that when they were pushed out the flare chute, they were given echo the size of an aircraft.
20:24And you can imagine that if you had 25 Flying Fortress bombers in a formation,
20:30each of them putting out one of these shoebox-sized amounts of chaff once every 30 seconds or so,
20:37as they went through the flak defenses, that put a lot of echoes in the sky for the enemy guns to shoot at.
20:45Jamming radar during bombing runs is one thing,
20:48but to confuse an enemy into believing a fictitious army is ready to invade is quite another.
20:55This is exactly what a series of electronic spoofs intended to do just prior to and during
21:02the most important operation of the war, the D-Day invasion.
21:08One of the first priorities of this operation, known as Overlord,
21:12was to knock out as many of the German radar stations in France as possible.
21:17But it was just as important not to give a hint of where the invasion would take place.
21:23For every target attacked in the area of the intended invasion,
21:27two more were to be attacked elsewhere to keep the Germans guessing.
21:32For this deception, Dr. Robert Cockburn, head of British countermeasures at the
21:37telecommunications research establishment and his team of scientists were putting the finishing touches
21:43on the most elaborate piece of electronic wizardry ever to support a military operation.
21:49A simulation on radar of two huge ghost fleets of ships and supporting aircraft to divert attention
21:57away from the main Allied landings. Cockburn worked out a method of producing a huge radar
22:04echo by dropping lengths of metal foil from aircraft flying carefully arranged routes.
22:10It was like building a huge radar reflector covering an area of 256 square miles.
22:18The echo patterns appeared far to the north of the actual invading force.
22:24Just imagine the scene on that night. There will be a half-trained conscript radar operator
22:30frightened sitting at a radar screen on the coast of France.
22:33And suddenly he sees this huge radar echo in front of him and he telephones through to his
22:38headquarters and tells them what he's seen. So does somebody to the left of him,
22:42so does somebody to the right of him. German commanders still feared another landing
22:49and failed to move divisions to Normandy for weeks. The Allies had their foothold on the continent.
22:55By the end of World War II, it was clear that electronics would be an integral part of any future war.
23:06As the conventional war cooled down, the struggle for superiority in the electronic war would continue to heat up.
23:12The end of the 1940s brought peace and prosperity to much of the world.
23:22But it was a fragile peace delineated by strict ideological borders.
23:27Russian and Chinese communism versus Western capitalism led by the United States.
23:33The war in Korea pitted one side against the other in a battle of North versus South.
23:40And the war in the ether continued to play a vital role.
23:45The Russian built radars that are being deployed in that country are very similar to the equipments
23:50that were in use in World War II. And indeed the B-29s carried exactly the same jamming
23:57equipment by and large that they had carried in World War II.
24:01U.S. Air Force B-26s conducted raids to suppress flack in support of B-29 bombing raids against
24:09North Korea by actually bombing searchlights. The radar or sound guided searchlights were used by
24:16communist gunners to illuminate the bombers overhead. The lights proved to be a difficult target,
24:22but the overall results of U.S. electronic countermeasures,
24:26chaff and B-26 searchlight suppression reduced losses from fighters and flack.
24:34Still in general, the electronic warfare techniques used in Korea were merely an extension of tactics used
24:40in World War II. As a tenuous ceasefire took effect between North and South Korea, the nuclear buildup
24:49between the Soviet Union and the United States began in earnest. Learning which electronic measures
24:56and countermeasures each side possessed was a primary objective in the deadly game of cat-and-mouse
25:02espionage that would be waged for years. During the late 50s, a new deadly electronic weapon emerged,
25:12the surface-to-air guided missile, or SAM, which depended on two-way communication from a ground
25:18radar station to continually maneuver the missile towards its target. Both the Soviets and NATO used
25:26SAMs, but the trick was to know the exact radio frequency the missiles were using for guidance and
25:31obviously where the small mobile SAM sites were located. We had a passenger airplane and we had windows
25:40on the side in which we were able to hold this little device that was about uh probably 15 inches long and
25:48had a handle on it and we would point it in the direction of where we thought a SAM site would be
25:54and we had a headset and we would hear the tones of the radar that was going on. It was a game in which
26:00both sides knew what the rules were and we both played it. But the game became deadly on May 1st, 1960.
26:08An American U-2 spy plane took off from Pakistan for an overflight of the USSR. There was nothing unusual
26:17about the flight, nothing that hadn't been done before, and nothing the Soviets hadn't seen before.
26:25There were times when the Soviets would send MiGs up, but again we knew that only if somebody got a wild bug
26:33that he would try to shoot us down. But for whatever reason the Soviets suddenly shot down the U-2.
26:43What really made U.S. intelligence nervous was what the Soviets might learn from the downed plane.
26:49It carried a Granger box containing some of the latest U.S. countermeasure electronics, including
26:56sophisticated jamming devices to help protect the plane from SAM technology. Had the Soviets recovered
27:04this equipment intact, U.S. planes might have become more vulnerable to attack. To this day it's not clear
27:11what they learned, if anything, from pilot Francis Gary Powers downed U-2.
27:20In Vietnam, more sophisticated surface-to-air missiles added a new and lethal dimension to aerial warfare.
27:28Vietnam really was the turning point for electronic warfare.
27:31You now have anti-aircraft guns, fighters, radars, control centers and surface-to-air missiles
27:39all tied together in a large defensive network.
27:44Although the Germans had dabbled in crude guided missiles toward the end of the Second World War,
27:49nothing as lethal and accurate as the SAM had been used in wartime.
27:53The downing of the occasional reconnaissance plane was one thing, but bringing down scores of fighter-bombers was quite another.
28:03The North Vietnamese had a sophisticated and integrated air defense system developed with
28:09the latest Soviet technology. It included Phansong radar, numerous SA-2 surface-to-air missiles,
28:17as well as radar-directed anti-aircraft artillery guns, known as AAA.
28:24Of course the AAA just tore up the airplanes. It was hitting us very badly. Then they moved up in altitude
28:31so that they could stay out of the range of the AAA. And of course the SAMs came up. They began to get hit by the SAMs.
28:39It was clear that the fighter-bombers couldn't survive down low against the AAA, so a method had to be devised to defeat the SAMs.
28:51The North Vietnamese missile system included several elements, the first of which was named Spoonrest,
28:57which was a circular scanning surveillance radar. This generally indicated where the targets were.
29:03The other radar was the Phansong, and it had a very narrow angle, allowing it to track targets at close range.
29:12The wide and narrow band radars had to work in tandem to be effective.
29:19Supposing there were flies in the room and you had a flashlight to try and illuminate them,
29:23it would be very difficult to find where they were on the ceiling if you didn't have the light on in the room,
29:30to give you a rough idea where to look. If you had to search with your flashlight, it would take you a long time to find them.
29:37These integrated SAMs were highly effective, destroying 8% of US fighters in Vietnam,
29:43and forcing planes to fly lower, making them vulnerable to ground fire.
29:48Eventually, American pilots learned that it was possible to evade SAMs.
29:53If the skies were clear when a missile was launched, pilots could actually see the puff of smoke from the ground,
30:02as well as get a signal on their radar. They'd turn their aircraft on either side,
30:06so they could see the missile clearly from their cockpits.
30:11The first thing they wanted to know is, can I see the side of the missile,
30:14or is it pointing straight towards me? Obviously, if it's pointing straight towards you,
30:19then that's the time you've got to do something about it. Pilots were told to push the nose of the
30:25plane into a full dive when the missile got within one mile, and then pull up so they could get inside
30:31its angle of maneuverability. SAMs had limited steering ability, so this type of evasion usually worked.
30:41The problem was sometimes that coming behind the first missile was the second missile,
30:45and perhaps even the third missile, and you might do a magnificent job of avoiding the first two,
30:50but the third one gets you, so that was always a problem.
30:54The day I was shot down, there was another pilot shot down and captured it as well,
30:58and one of the challenges that you have is when there are multiple SAMs, multiple surface-to-air missiles,
31:04in the air, picking out which one is aimed at you and dodging it complicates the problem rather significantly.
31:13A man named Inky Halgan working at Eglin Test Center in Florida found the answer.
31:21It was simple but extremely effective because it took advantage of the flaws in Vietnam's radar system.
31:29Halgan developed a flight of four aircraft equally spaced in a jamming pod formation.
31:34Aircraft were to fly exactly 1,500 feet apart, so the ground radar operators would only see a series of jamming strobes on the screen,
31:44but they couldn't pick out exactly where the aircraft were.
31:48Provided you were to sit there and hold your formation, you could see the missile streaking through the jamming
31:55formation and going off way past you perfectly harmlessly.
31:59After the countermeasures effort had been running smoothly for about nine months,
32:05the North Vietnamese radar operators became very adept at seeing through the jamming.
32:10If American pilots wavered in the formation by even a few feet, the missiles found their mark.
32:17North Vietnamese were very good because they saw jamming every day.
32:25As they got better, they were able to see through and they would get aircraft that strayed outside this
32:301,500-foot box, so to speak, and they could hit those aircraft.
32:37The U.S. Air Force and Navy weren't content to just jam the radar sites or depend on evasive action
32:43to neutralize the sands. They wanted to eliminate these sites on the ground in order to make the skies
32:50safe enough for their bombers to hit targets with impunity. This secret mission was given to a
32:56new breed of fighter pilots, the Wild Weasels. These crews flew modified F-4s or F-105s on missions
33:04dedicated solely to attacking radar sites. A pilot navigated the plane on its dangerous course.
33:12A backseat electronics warfare officer operated the complicated equipment that would foil the ground
33:18radar defenses. It was an heroic assignment, but also a very dangerous one.
33:26There's an argument to be made that if you were in the Air Force in the mid to late 1960s,
33:30the single most dangerous job you could have is being a Wild Weasel crewman.
33:38A Wild Weasel was essentially electronically naked without jammers.
33:42ици-limited Navy's military officers and military officers. Like bait on a hook, the pilot trolled for
33:46radar signals... ...waiting for the enemy to lock up on them.
33:49David Spiegemon S detbyter, Navy Air Force.
33:50James in Southern California, Navy Air Force. We were the decoys. As far as the mission was concerned,
33:54we wanted them to come after us because we were prepared to go after them.
33:58the weasels wanted the north vietnamese to launch as many sams as possible so that the other weasels
34:07in the vicinity could fire anti-radiation missiles back at the sites on the ground a shrike was a
34:14heat-seeking anti-radiation missile known also as a harm that could home in on a radar beam
34:20follow it until it reached its source and then explode taking out the radar
34:25once we would see a radar that was on the air we would try to line up and fire a shrike at him
34:33to go after and shut down at least shut down his antenna in the meantime the sam was locked on and
34:40coming straight for the weasel at mach 3. the weaseled pilot had to dog fight the missile and
34:45get out of the way if he was lucky there was only one do you feel the shock wave as it goes past you
34:53but his fuse isn't working right or he may be going somewhere else or who knows why he doesn't
35:01explode but yeah it's it's a scary situation but you don't have time to think about being scared
35:07only three medals of honor given to pilots flying fixed-wing aircraft during the vietnam war
35:13all went to people who were doing the anti-sam mission the wild weasel mission
35:18the secret tactics learned in vietnam were invaluable to the development of electronic warfare and set
35:26the stage for a stunning operation years later in the gulf war
35:35as u.s involvement in the vietnam war wound down new developments in electronic warfare were left on the
35:42shelves untested many of the weasel back seaters or electronic warfare specialists were reassigned to
35:50desk jobs in the states when i left vietnam i went to the pentagon this was in the early part of 69
35:59and i became responsible for the operational aspects of all fighter ew and the wild weasels
36:06so i got involved in the development of the new systems the new wild weasel
36:14more sophisticated radar monitoring equipment went into the conversion from the f-105f to the f-105g
36:23it carried standard armaments plus the new harm shrike missile at the same time the air force was
36:30enhancing the f-4 wild weasel or the f-4g each f-4g had ecm or electronic countermeasures material that
36:39could foil radar detection blistered into the side of the aircraft every time intelligence information
36:47indicated a change in soviet sam technology computers designed to jam them aboard u.s planes became obsolete
36:55and had to be replaced but a bunch of us in the pentagon decided we should take advantage of
37:01this intelligence information and start the drums to get the digital warning system in the
37:06in the inventory so that we could make changes to it through software rather than hardware
37:13they were able to get money from the air force obtain top priorities and get a testable device ready
37:19by july of 1972 and then we wanted to find a place to test it so we knew that the soviets wouldn't
37:29probably cooperate with us in eastern europe so i asked the israeli air force if they would help us
37:35and the israeli air force said yeah we'll help you except we would like to have that for our airplanes if
37:42we tested for you a team of logistics specialists engineers and other contractors went to israel in
37:51august of 1972 they flew several missions on israeli f-4es against egyptian air defenses which did have
37:59sa3s though not the sa4s the tests proved very successful whenever the enemy would change frequencies
38:08on their sams or any other characteristics it would be just a matter of reprogramming the plane's software
38:14instead of tearing out a whole system to adjust to the changes we took the analog system turned it into
38:22a digital system and got this in the inventory and this the the grandson of this same digital system
38:29is now flying in the f-16s of our inventory today
38:32the lessons learned in israel would be put into practice two decades later when coalition forces
38:41faced another threat in the middle east iraq was the biggest geographic target the united states ever
38:48tried to take on with the exception of the soviet union it was protected by what was arguably the finest
38:56integrated air defense system ever seen culled together in the late 80s by different systems from
39:03the soviet union china germany and france it included the finest radar computers surface-to-air missiles
39:10fighters and guns iraqi money could buy known as the curry system it was woven like a big spider web
39:18throughout the country protecting virtually every piece of saddam hussein's domain general chuck horner
39:25commander of the air war in the gulf was tasked to find a way through this secret maze it is august of 1990
39:34and you have a terrible problem you have just been put in charge of potentially having to take
39:39an air force and go into this environment and conduct a large bombing campaign you're going to have to bomb
39:46strategic targets around iraq you're also going to have to go over here and you're going to have to
39:50bomb an army into submission down in kuwait and all of this is tied together you have to find a way
39:57to obviously take down and destroy the carry system what do you do
40:05general horner didn't hesitate he chose brigadier general larry henry a wild weasel backseater who flew
40:11in southeast asia considered by his peers to be one of the most skilled tacticians in electronic warfare it
40:19would be henry's job to break the back of iraq's carry system with the iraqi armored forces you would
40:27find sa6s sa8s sa9s which are very capable missile systems and when you lay that with the command and
40:36control system in kuwait and and long-range surface air missiles such as sa2s their armor and attacking
40:45forces would had a significant umbrella over the top of them my job in a nutshell was to erase that
40:52and knock out that umbrella larry henry and his team spent two months pouring over secret blueprints
40:59from a french company that put the system together they got classified specifications from around the
41:05world for all the different radar and communications links and started looking at them as a complete system
41:11it's not just the hard shooting elements the fighters the sams the guns it's also the power
41:21the electrical grid the communications links the radio links the computers that run it
41:28electronically the curry system was like a medieval fortress with big high walls that you had to either
41:35break down or get inside and attack from within
41:38henry found a way to get in electronically and helped design a plan that became known as poobah's party
41:45poobah was henry's call sign when he was a weasel the party was an electronic fireworks display
41:51the magnitude of which had never been seen the very first thing that happened in the assault was the
41:58army apache helicopters went in and took out the the very low frequency radars early warning radars
42:05those radars have a low enough frequency that so that you can start you can begin seeing a stealth
42:13aircraft henry and his team knew that they had to make the iraqi sam operators think they were picking
42:20up signals from a sizable strike force before the operators would be willing to light up their radar
42:26just minutes after the baghdad control centers had been destroyed about 40 bqm 74 target drones were
42:35launched from saudi arabia simultaneously aircraft coming in from the west dropped a whole series of
42:42israeli made glider decoys called tactical air launch decoys at this point there was something that
42:50on radar looked big enough to be a strike force so the iraqi operators of the radars and sam sites
42:57all turn on their radars and they begin to engage and probably something between
43:02oh 100 and 200 surface-to-air missiles go off flying at these decoys and they've turned their radars on
43:11at that moment every aircraft that could carry a high-speed anti-radiation missile
43:16came up and fired at those iraqi radar sites the results were spectacular over a hundred iraqi radar
43:24of all varieties never came back on they were destroyed for the rest of the war
43:32we had a sequence of events i think which allowed the stealth airplanes to come and go unseen and bomb
43:40and it's very disconcerting i think if you're an enemy
43:42and you don't see an airplane but you're getting bombed how did that happen and then you see
43:49airplanes and you're getting bombed but they're not really airplanes and when you try to destroy the
43:56airplane somebody destroys the thing you're trying to to shoot those airplanes down with
44:02i believe that the electronic combat contribution to the air campaign was significant and helped a lot
44:09within the first few hours of desert storm coalition forces had managed to take control of the skies
44:19poobah's party was a complete success the gulf war confirmed that in modern battle he who controls
44:26the ether controls the war
44:30almost daily there's a new advance in electronic technology scientists technicians and engineers are
44:37constantly incorporating those advances into weapon systems new and old in hopes of gaining an edge in the electronic battlefield
44:49electronic warfare never stands still measures and countermeasures change constantly and it takes a
44:55concerted effort not only to keep up with those changes but also to develop new electronic capabilities
45:02operations one only hopes that in the next confrontation he has tricks that the enemy hasn't thought of yet
45:11this is that whole pendulum of measure countermeasure you have to constantly update the electronic order
45:17order of battle you constantly have to get that information out to the planners and make sure they know
45:23okay they've moved these sam sites from here here and here and they've moved them down here here and here
45:27over 16 000 people worldwide make up the air intelligence agency arm of the united states air force
45:37their mission is to exploit defend and attack and to ensure superiority in the air space and information
45:45domains many of these experts are stationed at kelly air force base in texas as part of the air force
45:52information warfare center and the joint command and control warfare center sensor harvest is a command and
46:00control warfare analysis system they rely on it targets countries by looking at specific areas where
46:06they might be vulnerable to electronic intrusion the nice thing about sensor harvest it gives the air component
46:13commander a variety of options beyond physical destruct i found in my time in bosnia last year that going
46:21and blowing things up was the least desirable plan sensor harvest uses advanced computer technology to
46:30provide vital information on ew targets in this case it's a fictional country what we do is we gather
46:38information where things such as an electronic order of battle will show us where some where the enemy has
46:44positioned their equipment and their military units it takes about six months for sensor harvest to analyze and
46:53build a virtual country including sam sites radar electric grids and other vital electronic areas once built this
47:01intricate information serves as a valuable tool for operations out in the field as well as for strategists
47:08in the pentagon this is the target aircraft that's the missiles aimed at off in the distance we have
47:16the firing aircraft it's going to fire an infrared air-to-air missile at the target once the the missile is shot
47:23we'll see once the simulation starts the aircraft will fly in this direction and the missile will chase it
47:29this corner up here shows the eye of the missile this is what the missile is looking at
47:32so when we fire it we can see that the missile starts to track and it's chasing the airplane
47:39this next scenario is the same as the one we just showed you except this time the aircraft will
47:43release three salvos of four flares
47:48but even with the best technology and the best minds in the world perfection is still unattainable witness
47:55this operation allied force the nato air war to dislodge the serbian army from kosovo in 1999
48:04this was the first major war fought totally from the air and every high-tech asset available to the
48:10nato forces was put into play one of the most advanced was the stealth f-117 fighter when one was shot
48:18down it sent shock waves throughout the electronic warfare community
48:22they didn't put together an ew war that took out the yugoslav air defenses immediately
48:31the early warning radars that can see stealth a little bit were still operating
48:38the f-117 flew the same route exiting the target four nights in a row on the fourth night the serbians
48:46were waiting for it and shot up a blanket of missiles that the stealth flew into there's an
48:53old engineering adage if you can't repeat it you haven't done it and the yugoslavs were never able
48:59to do it again so it shows that there was a counter counter measure that was brought in by the u.s
49:04forces to prevent that happening again does the rapid evolution of electronic warfare having come so far
49:13in such a short time suggest that the next wars will be fought exclusively in the electronic spectrum
49:21will there be bloodless games of electronic wizardry won by those with the better gadgets or tricks
49:27measures and countermeasures what we have seen is that the attacks on the troops probably achieved
49:34very little at all but the attacks on the yugoslav economy like knocking out bridges and knocking out
49:41their electrical system from the nato point of view there was nobody killed they could have carried on
49:47that action just as long as was necessary the yugoslavs saw their economy being taken out all around them
49:55the only solution was to surrender maybe this is the pattern of the war of the future then again maybe not
50:04one of the great misconceptions about electronic warfare and air power in general is the idea that
50:10they can win wars by themselves they can't what they can do though is they can enable ground forces naval
50:18forces forces that have the ability to provide presence it's impossible to predict exactly how future wars
50:26will be fought but it is certain that electronic warfare the wizard war born when the first electric
50:34pulse coursed through a metal wire is now as ubiquitous as the microwave oven in kitchens
50:40and it's just as clear that a nation's ability to stay ahead in this ethereal chess match will determine
50:47its viability as a military force in the future
51:01is
51:06in the future
51:12and