By Kris Osborn, President, Center for Military Modernization
How did a US military AC-130J Ghostrider gunship manage to see, track and destroy Iranian-backed militants firing ballistic missiles at US and coalition forces on Al-Asad Airbase in Iraq … so quickly?
“Immediately following the attack, a U.S. military AC-130 aircraft in the area conducted a self-defense strike against an Iranian-backed militia vehicle and a number of Iranian-backed militia personnel involved in this attack,” Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh said, according to a Pentagon report.. “This self-defense strike resulted in some hostile fatalities.”
Singh said the AC-130 gunship was able to mount a response so quickly because it was already in the air at the time of the missile attack. Singh was clear that the AC-130 gunship “saw” the militants and was in position to respond, yet was the aircraft alerted somehow? Did the crew receive real-time intelligence about the hostile ballistic missile attack in time to maneuver into position to attack? This is the central question, yet either way the speed and precision of the response aligns with cutting edge Pentagon thinking about future warfare.
“We were able to identify the point of origin of these attacks because an AC-130 was up already in the area and therefore was able to respond,” Singh said. “They were able to take action because they saw the militants. They were able to keep an eye on the movement of these militants as they moved into their vehicles and that’s why they were able to respond.”
Was the AC-130 gunship cued or alerted by a drone? Satellite? Ground sensor or command and control node? It is possible, regardless the speed and effectiveness of the gunship response offers an indication that the Pentagon is making rapid progress “operationalizing” its high-speed, network-driven sensor-to-shooter curve. Often described as fighting at the speed of relevance, the military services have in recent years been breaking through with the speed and efficiency with which targets can be detected, identified and destroyed accurately and effectively in a matter of seconds due to advanced multi-domain networking, data processing and target-data transmission.
Tactical or technical details related to these kinds of operational events are typically not available for understandable security reasons, yet the successful rapid strike could have been the result of simple proximity and timing …. However it is also quite possible that the “kill web” or “sensor-to-shooter” timeline was massively expedited by now operationalized methods of high-speed AI-enabled data analysis and multi-domain networking.
Nevertheless, apart from the specifics of this particular targeting and attack circumstance, the ability to see, track, verify and destroy fast-moving enemy targets in real-time or near-real time across a networked, multi-domain force is exactly what the Pentagon seeks to accomplish with its Joint All Domain Command and Control (JADC2) effort. JADC2, which is now being implemented in a specific plan by Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks, seeks to leverage networking and AI-enabled data-processing breakthroughs from each of the respective services and engineer a common, joint, multi-domain warfighting environment in which air-sea-land-cyber-and-space “nodes” across a combat theater can securely share time sensitive information of critical combat relevance across the force in real time. The JADC2 effort is highly technical, as it of course does not merely involve the “transmission” of data and target specifics but also relies upon information processing, sensing, data collection and data analysis … things which often require interfaces, common IP protocol or data standards and AI-enabled high-speed analytics. Each of the services has its own effort contributing to the Pentagon’s collective JADC2 .. for the Army it is called Project Convergence, for the Air Force it is called Advanced Battle Management System and for the Navy it has been called Project Overmatch. In their respective ways, each of these service programs have achieved breakthroughs with an ability to “network” targeting data across domains, process information at paradigm-changing speeds and massively truncate, shorten and improve a “sensor-to-shooter” curve.
Kris Osborn is President of Warrior Maven – Center for Military Modernization. Osborn previously served at the Pentagon as a Highly Qualified Expert with the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army—Acquisition, Logistics & Technology. Osborn has also worked as an anchor and on-air military specialist at national TV networks. He has appeared as a guest military expert on Fox News, MSNBC, The Military Channel, and The History Channel. He also has a Masters Degree in Comparative Literature from Columbia University.
