i. These systems are no longer "test beds" - they are operational and are producing vital intelligence. The company has just been asked to cover an additional area of operations that will double the number of infrared missions that have to be flown. In order to meet this requirement, it is essential that both the TI SEAMORE infrared aircraft be functioning. Also the company will have a particular need for real time capability in this new area.
4. (C) DOCTRINE: It is felt that the level of intelligence (strategic versus long-range tactical versus short-range tactical) should determine the level of assignment and control of the Mohawk company. The 131st has really moved from its stated Army role and mission to one of supporting the Air Force; in such a case assignment to Theater is practical. However, if required to produce battlefield intelligence it might be better to have them at least OPCON to a corps and possibly even with designated elements working in a DS type role to the divisions. It is axiomatic, of course, that the more centralized you can keep the company, the better will be the maintenance on both aircraft and the surveillance systems.
5. (C) TACTICS: With there areas of interest usually well beyond the division AO's, the 131st's targets are normally supply depots, storage areas and LOC's instead of enemy platoons and companies. As a result they are confronted with much heavier anti-aircraft such as 23mm, 37mm, and 57mm guns, some with radar detection, instead if 30 caliber machine guns. Neither the Mohawk company nor the AF flying the same general mission areas could understand how this AA could be so accurate at night. The ECM showed no gun radars. The AF conducted a limited but informative field test at Ubon, Thailand. This proved that a ground observer could see the planes clearly even on a moonless night or under full cloud cover. Binoculars improved the observer's capability considerably. It is strongly suspected that the enemy has excellent alerting and tracking system using wire (Mohawk has taken pictures of this) and probably radio. As a result, the 131st flies no night photography missions. All pilots are strictly indoctrinated against area searches. "if you fly over a spot twice you are pushing your luck." The normal methods of operation are random zone reconnaissance and, for a point target, a single pass over the area.
6. (C) INFRARED SYSTEMS. TECHNIQUES OF EMPLOYMENT: a. With the heavier AA weapons, pilots must maintain an altitude of at least 2000 to 3000 feet AGL. The systems are affected at this altitude to a great extent by moisture and by the altitude itself since there is considerable absorption and scattering of the heat energy at that distance from the source. However, the SEAMORE system is capable of working at 3000 feet if the system is aligned properly. There will be some degradation of target resolution but you will be able to pick up the heat patterns. The Singer system will also work at this altitude even though it is designed to work at 1500 feet. By increasing amplifier gain, putting good detectors in the system, and with good optical alignment, it gives the same basic heat patterns at the higher altitudes as the TI system.
b. The Singer system is employed in the B/A format which is the expanded format using both the short wave length and medium wave length detector. This gives a fairly good hot target pickup and also fairly good mapping background. The actual number of successful detections using this technique often compares with or even excels, the TI system. However, this could be due to the fact that the TI system has seldom been at peak efficiency.
7. (C) COMPARISON OF SYSTEMS: a. After extensive experience in comparing both the old and new systems, these officers feel that the major advantages of the new system are: 130° scan versus the 80° scan; increased number of detectors from two to five; much improved resolution of the film; much improved video display; quick reaction capability.
b. Even though distortion at the edges of the 130° scan is much worse than with the older system, it is still easier to plot through not only because of the better resolution but because it picks up heat patterns better.
c. The increased resolution is also obvious in the 10 X 10 inch video display as compared with the old 4 X 4 inch. Also it gives a much better real time capability since the cross hairs can be placed over any target, a button pushed and six digit coordinates of the point of interest obtained immediately. This data is passed to Forward Air Controllers (FAC) and gives them much more accurate target locations than formerly.
d. The TI hot-spot marker, which can be used in either black or white, is particularly well liked. The white is considered much better and is used almost exclusively. It puts a "little white donut" around the hot-spot and is particularly helpful in identifying the specific points of emission. The system gives such a standard terrain display that it would be difficult to pick out heat emission spots without the hot-spot marker. However, numerous malfunctions have occurred with the hot-spot maker; its sensitivity has sometimes been so great that it blanked out the entire video viewer.
8. (C) SYSTEM DOWNTIME: a. There has not been a single failure on the computer in the year and a half they have been using the system. A little dust gets in around the switches and has to be cleaned out once and a while, but there have been no failures.
b. The system capability is probably one of the highest of present Army systems but the results obtained have been far short of what the system can produce. During the period December through March, less than 10% of the system's capability was realized. The cockpit read-out was adequate, targets were consistently seen on the video viewer but the film alignment and the amplifiers and some of the other more technical aspects did not function properly and when the aircraft got back they would find the film was unused. Perhaps one or two targets would have been obtained from the whole mission run, so this would be recorded as constituting a successful mission but at the same time the video viewer may have shown as many as 50 or 60 valid targets. The systems were aligned by technical representatives from Ubon Air Force Base, Thailand in December and did improve somewhat.
c. In one three month period, attempting to fly two aircraft per night, the records show that there were 85 missions flown indicating about a 50% system availability. The aborted missions were due primarily to the inoperability of the SEAMORE systems. Of the 85 missions flown, the system failed in flight 11 times, aborting those 11 missions. On approximately 50% of the remaining missions imagery was obtained but the quality was so bad that it could not be interpreted. Thus, the company was experiencing between 30% and 40% of the system's capability.
d. In mid May two outstanding and dedicated technical representatives from Texas Instruments joined the unit. They have begun working on the IR systems like the Motorola people have been working on the SLAR system for some time - they tear into it and try to fix any part or sub- assembly including "potted" (sealed) items and have had considerable success. In the month of June, of 30 missions flown, five were aborted because of avionics failures.
e. One rather well educated guess is that $25,000.00 would get two grounded systems in the air. One would require the 3KV power supply which could cost no more than $1,000.00, and a Storage Tube estimated at $7,000.00 (one of those is supposed to be on the way now). Another $15,000.00 would certainly put the second system in the air.
9. (C) MAINTENANCE PROBLEMS: a. Dust and sand blown into the aircraft while it is on the ground are thought to be the cause of 50% of electronics failures. A high powered shop vacuum cleaner might be a partial but quick answer.
b. Parts have been the main problem. The people here have had the technical knowledge to repair the system but they have not been getting the spare parts that are required to keep the system maintained. The pilots say "You can go out and spend three hours night after night over enemy territory and come back with the same thing you get by sitting on the ground and talking about it. This has occurred many, many times. Support for the maintenance has been the major problem".
c. The Technical Representatives and the Company Commander feel very strongly that the systems should be pulled out of the country one at a time and returned to the Texan Instruments Company for complete refurbishing because so much is needed and so much of it can only be done at the factory.
d. The problems are primarily with the power supply and the detectors themselves. The power supply is rated for 10,000 feet but at approximately 7,500 feet high voltage arcing occurs. The unit has not been able to get spare transformers. One of the systems is currently operating with a WAS 183KV power supply which is not designed for the "22"; however, it will work if it has been modified. They also have a problem getting the batteries to keep the 3KV power supply operating. They run two batteries instead of one and change them twice a day.
e. All optics have degraded approximately 20 to 30 percent. The silver backing on the mirrors peels off due to the humidity and heat and about 20 to 30 percent of the incident radiation of the detectors is lost.
f. There are collimation problems where the energy bundle is not being properly focused and with the basic electrical allignment of the system. It's a fairly complicated system and in not all instances have the technicians completely understood the allignment problem. It wasn't always spelled out in the technical manuals and they had to write back to the factory on numerous problems of allignment.
g. A tremendous amount of corrosion takes place on many of the moving parts of the SEAMORE system thereby giving an overall increase in the number of maintenance problems as compared with the Singer system. This corrosion is particularly common in the servo units. These stick many times and good film simply can not be obtained.
h. There are also problems with water seepage. It gets into the cockpit and into the video display. It also comes in through the upper fuselage, possibly through the wing roots, and gets down into the systems. It gets into the scanner itself and on occasion a power supply has been blown when someone, not knowing that the water was in there, turned the system on. Personnel of the unit are very cautious about this now. They hangar the aircraft during heavy rains and cover the systems with plastic. Some provisions should be made on the systems to make sure this doesn't happen.
i. Dust gets into the dozens of fine wheels and gears and causes the Marconi doppler to be as much as 3, 4 even 5 kilometers off. A plane was lost into a mountainside because of this. As a result, the IR people have to constantly check and recheck it and frequently have to abort missions. No one who these officers know, anywhere in the Mohawk business, has the confidence to "let down" on this system without visual contact with the ground. In some units it is forbidden. The pilots and observers feel strongly that a simple rubber-sealed box around each item of equipment that doesn't need air circulation is all that is needed.
j. Another major problem area is the ADIZ system. This prints down the side of the film and gives mission number, altitude and various items of information that the photo interpreter needs to accurately interpret the film. It also picks up proper coordinates. It fails on approximately 70% of all missions. The three prototypes that the unit has are all completely different. None of them follow the schematic. When they run into problems at the factory, they modify the board. None of the parts are interchangeable between the various sub-assemblies. It's been a major problem to maintain these ADIZ units. Giving the exact coordinates every four inches down the side of the film is a good aid - a necessary aid. More research and more work has to be put into the development of the ADIZ unit.
10. (C) DESIRED IMPROVEMENTS TO FOLLOW-ON SYSTEMS: a. Either the doppler system be improved markedly or a much more dependable navigational system with better accuracy should be developed. Given a better navigational system with the computer, a better coordinate read-out should be possible - perhaps to eight digits.
b. A marking capability is felt to be essential. Point targets are common such as individual trucks or supplies stored in a shell hole. The Forward Air Controller may fly right over a point where the IR system was getting good returns through light canopy jungle but there is no visual contact at all. It's rather difficult to get a FAC to look down at a jungle canopy stretching in every direction and say, "OK, thats the target". The unit has jerry-rigged some Navy bomb racks on two of the IR birds and successfully used them to mark targets with Mark 6 Ground Flares (LOCS) for the FAC. Some such marking capability is recommended as an MWC.
c. The system should be made accessible for maintenance. You have to remove a considerable portion of the aircraft's skin just to get to the system to make one simple electrical allignment. Frequently you have to remove the whole system from the aircraft. This then requires one full day to replace one transistor or correct one void in the system. The present scanner unit is made out of approximately one inch steel which requires four men to lift out. It should be possible to reduce its weight considerably without losing any of the strength of the case. If possible, the system should be broken down into smaller units that can be removed and handled more easily.
d. Water from moisture and hydraulic leaks collects in the well. This tends to get into the system and onto the optics. The spinning mirrors throw it up into the system creating film problems and leading to corrosion. The system may have to be elevated out of the well.
e. Because of its greater resolution and magnification, the video viewer frequently gives the pilot an indication of a real good target so he pushes his button for a coordinate read-out. But then, the photo interpreter may not be able to find anything on the film because it is so faint in comparision to the pilot's video viewer. A system is needed whereby the film is marked on the side somehow each time the pilot makes a coordinate read-out so that the PI knows exactly where to look.
f. The ground terminal data links, AN/TAQ1 and AN/TKQ2, are in use in the southern part of the Theater but are not being used here. The 131st is operating at the very fringes of the normal range of that equipment. However, they feel that the ground data link capability must be retained in the D model or any subsequent models if we are to maximize the near real time aspect of the system which, in their minds, is a critically important one.
g. It is realized in the unit that the SEAMORE systems are prototypes. It is also realized that in some research and development it is sometimes planned to buy the least amount of material that you can to put a system into operation, let it degrade and then return it to the factory for failure analysis. However, in this theater, these systems have come to be relied upon. They are producing a large amount of critically important, strategic intelligence and have a potential to produce three times as much.
h. The unit can understand not having a large number of spare parts for the few-of-a-kind high dollar items such as the fiber optics system. However, to let a two million dollar aircraft sit on the ground for want of a $7000.00 or $800.00 power supply doesn't seem reasonable. Many times the technical representatives have the capability to repair a board if they merely had the correct $2.00 capacitor.
i. The new D model system should arrive in theater complete with a maintenance package of spare parts, specialized tools and equipment. It should also be accompanied by an IR repairman trained specifically on the D system. A plain IR repairman could not do the job. He must know specific system. Now, of course, is the time to train him.
11. (C) COMPARISON OF SYSTEMS: a. The imagery interpretation people say that if the film is from a SEAMORE bird they can expect to find three to four times as many targets as they would on film from one of the old systems.
b. The more rapid presentation in the cockpit (one minute as compared to three to five minutes) now makes it feasible to go back and check a moving target that was one minute old when you saw it and will be two minutes old when you fly back over it. This was not true when a target could have been as much as ten minutes old by the time you got back to check it. Obviously, much more detailed information is obtained this way, such as which way the vehicle was moving and other information of real time value. "This may not get us much high level intelligence but it sure kills a lot of trucks; I spend more time now killing trucks but I am still in the area gathering other intelligence."
c. Radars interfere with the new system much more than they did with the old. A ground radar station will sometimes mess up several inches of your imagery anytime you go near one. One officer, very knowledgeable in electronics feels that the radar pulse length (one-half that of the old system) may well contribute to this problem.
d. The better scale and better resolution are considered to be even larger advantages of the new system than the slower speed capability. Given the nature of targets that the 131st is looking for, they work primarily in the less sensitive mode which, of course, does not pick up as slow a moving object as the standard mode does. For their purposes the more sensitive mode actually picks up too much. It picks up things that are not significant such as blowing trees. The question is, "Is the object really significant to you? Are you worried about a bicycle or are you interested in trucks?" These officers realize that in other tactical employments, where people are looking for squads, this more sensitive mode would be required but in their use of the system, they feel that many more targets are coming out because of the larger scale and better resolution than because of the increased velocity discrimination.
e. Plotting from the new larger scale (1250,000 as compared to the old 1/500,000) is far more consistent; if you make an overlay it matches almost identically.
f. With the marked improvement in range resolution, the interpreters are now able to distinguish between objects 150 feet apart as compared with 250 feet apart for the old system. This is an important advantage since it allows them to more nearly approximate the number of vehicles in a convoy. In the coastal areas where there is no masking and it's almost a "school book solution", it is felt that this increased sensitivity allows them to pick up about 2.5 times as many returns along the enemy's lines of communications. In the mountain areas where vehicles stay closer together on the curving roads, it's even more effective. The number of targets picked up here as compared to the old system would closely approximate four to one.
g. An observation rather than a critticism is that the new system doesn't have quite the range delay that the old system had. That is, you can't stand off quite as far with the SEAMORE. In 99.9% of the cases this probably would not make any difference, however, the company had one instance where they had to stay a given number of miles from a certain border and the SLAR could not paint the strip that they wanted to paint from that distance.
h. With the SEAMORE, of course, you only get moving target indications (MTI) where with the old system you had both the moving target and the fixed target presentation. This makes very little difference since most operators plot off the MTI side anyway. The only targets that don't show up quite so well on the MTI as they do on the fixed target indicator are stationary boats; the SEAMORE doesn't get quite as many sampan locations. Operators use the old system by bringing up the background to plot directly on the moving target. Actually, they use the old system like the SEAMORE system but with half the scale. The increased accuracy and consistency of the larger scale is without question one of the real plus factors of the new system. They hope that if the D model system goes back to the double presentation, it is not at the expense of this new larger scale. This is a very strong recommendation. They would much rather have this scale than the split presentation. The value of the fixed target information is not commensurate with the losses that you would get by reducing the scale again.
12. (U) SYSTEM DOWNTIME: a. The SLAR is an improvement of an older system made by the same company and therefore has not been plagued by anything like the start up troubles experienced with the Texas Instruments IR system - a new system by a new company. With the two SLAR birds they have had a good availability with the SEAMORE systems.
b. There have been some minor difficulties occasioned by the fact that some of the operator adjustments have now been converted to built in or fixed items and on occasion one or two weak cards have caused come degradation of the system and there have been no replacements for those cards. Again, if the part is a common part, they probably will get it but if it is a SEAMORE related part the same old problems arise.
13. (C) DESIRED IMPROVEMENTS IN FOLLOW-ON SYSTEMS: a. The unit would like to see some sort of a computer system put into the SLAR so that they can get coordinate read-out of a target similar to the IR system rather than having a manually plot a target in reference to terrain features. This would markedly speed up the process of getting target information.
b. Either the doppler information should be moved over to the side or the imagery should be plotted in such a way that the doppler information is not a blank area between the two sides. This would permit the utilization of a permanent terrain feature on one side of the film to be used to plot a target in nondescript jungle on the other side. This, of course, cannot be done with the separation of the right and left sides by the doppler information strip.
c. There are few reliable radio navigational aids in the area in which the 131st operates. The SLAR pilots therefore use the radar map coming up in the cockpit as their NAVAID. Working with their technical observers (TO), they keep track of their present location and lay out their courses based on the video presentation. The lack of tone quality in the imagery of the new systems makes it difficult to pick out the terrain features, particularly mountain ranges and ridge lines, as well as with the old system. This is thought to have something to do with the development of the film. It's not considered a major problem but does warrant mentioning.
d. The film developer lasts somewhere around two and a half hours but the aircraft has enough gasoline for about three hours over target even at the longer operational ranges. So they find themselves having to come home for developer when they still have half an hour of fuel left. With more normal ranges from airfield to target area, you might find yourself losing as much as an hour of mission time simply because you don't have enough developer in your tank.
e. Another minor problem is the fact that river rapids and falls show up on the imagery as a moving target. Since the roads and rivers frequently run close together, it's often impossible to tell if a moving target indication is a vehicle on a road or a ripple in a river. With the onset of the rainy season, the streams and rivers are filling up and this is becoming a more frequent problem. Although still not a terribly serious one. However, in such places as the Cua Viet River where sampans would be common targets, it could result in an awful lot of missed sampans or bombed ripples.
14. (C) COMMANDER'S COMMENTS: a. We have been getting poor results with the systems. As the company commander, I immediately looked into the maintenance and technical supply aspect. I found out from the representatives from both Grumman and TI that they weren't getting the replacement parts that they had put on order. I checked into their procedures on how this was done and found out that at three month intervals they send in a list of those parts that were used. What goes on there, I don't know, but whatever it is, it sure takes a long time. Then there is shipping time over to us in Vietnam. Whoever is working on it is not doing the job for us, the users, over here. We are dissatisfied with the maintenance support; we are dissatisfied with the performance because we know the capabilities are there; when the systems are peaked up now and then, they really show us some of those capabilities. However, in their present state we waste too much time going on missions without getting the mission results the Air Force needs. Lives are risked with no mission accomplishment. If the people at AEC, and so on, don't get the proper supplies to us, then they may as well take the systems out of the country; they are just wasting the taxpayer's money.
b. I feel that we are also going to have the same problems with the SLAR System soon. I talked to the Motorola representative and he wrote out a list of parts that he needed right them to assure himself that the sets would be functioning in the next sixty days. I let Joe Loman know about this and I also gave him the things that we are down for in our IR systems. This was a complete list including the various manufacturer's parts numbers. This was about three months ago. It was relayed back to Washington to the project officer. I think Colonel Love was the man that supposedly got the information. After all this time we haven't heard anything about it. We don't know what the problem is. We don't know what they are going to do for us over here. I think though, that unless something is done in the relatively near future, we are also going to start hurting on all our systems; we are going to run out of parts just when our mission areas are being exploded. At the rate they are sending over here, it's inadequate; it doesn't do the job. We should place the responsibility on these companies to set up some sort of a demand type of supply system so that they build up an inventory of these parts in-country and so that they can air-mail other parts when they are needed. The turn around time should be about two or three weeks on most items. Grumman, TI and Motorola people here are outstanding. They are doing a fine job. They want to support us and they work extra hours. They are continually working on the systems but if you don't have the equipment or the replacement parts, you are not going to be able to do it. We realize this. They realize this. We hope somebody back there understands this.
KENNETH W. KOCH
COL., GS (Armor)
Senior Liaison Officer
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