The nature of modern day operations means that air strikes are often the primary form of attack used against targets, and traditional battlefields, which generally only involve the two opposing sides but that are away from civilians, reside for now in the history books.
Insurgents today, as they have been throughout history, are integrated into everyday societies: “The guerrilla must move amongst the people as a fish swims in the sea,” noted Mao Zedong, the founding father of the People’s Republic of China. Practitioners of political violence have the advantage of being indistinguishable from civilians, and relatively safe from large scale bombardments, because opposing forces, notable the US and its allies, want to keep collateral damage to a minimum, to avoid adverse publicity in the global court of public opinion. Close Air Support (CAS) is therefore utilised to ensure that when an air strike has to be made near civilians, the enemy is the only target that is hit. While aircraft now have an array of sensors available to them that allow for a near-perfect situational awareness in the air, pilots do not always know exactly what is going on, on the ground, despite the detail of the intelligence picture they have available to them.
The missing pieces of this intelligence jigsaw can be found by having personnel on the ground whom can provide the information that is missing to the pilot, offering a picture of what is happening on the ground and feeding this up to the aircraft. Typically these personnel are referred to as Joint Terminal Attack Controllers (JTACs) that are highly trained, and responsible for directing air power to the right target. JTACs use a range of different technologies, which incorporate a number of different communication feeds that allows JTACs to transfer the information they have received to a commander, or directly to a pilot.
This story is from the June - July 2017 edition of Armada International.
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This story is from the June - July 2017 edition of Armada International.
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The nature of modern day operations means that air strikes are often the primary form of attack used against targets, and traditional battlefields, which generally only involve the two opposing sides but that are away from civilians, reside for now in the history books.
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