Record Setting RC-135

file photo

An interesting look into the shadowy world of aerial electronic intelligence gathering.
FROM STRATEGYPAGE.COM:

Record Setting RC-135
March 19, 2008: A U.S. Air Force RC-135 aircraft has set a record, spending over 50,000 hours in the air since it entered service in 1962. The main reason for all those hors in the air is that RC-135s are very good at what they do, and have been much in demand of late. The RC-135 is a flying vacuum cleaner of electronic signals. Built on the same airframe as the KC-135 tanker and Boeing 707 airliner, it carries two dozen people to operate all the electronic gear. Exactly what kind of electronic signals the RC-135 can pick up is classified, but apparently includes any electronic device the enemy in Iraq or Afghanistan is using. Costing about $4,000 an hour to operate, only 15 of them are in service.

Periodically, the air force has to remove KC-135s from service because of metal fatigue problems (usually in the wings, or with the pylons that attach each of the four engines to the wings.) All 732 KC-135s were built between 1956 and 1965. The Boeing 707 commercial transport is actually a civilian version of the original KC-135 (which itself evolved from the World War II B-29 heavy bomber.) Over the decades, the KC-135 fleet has undergone constant repair and reconstruction. New engines, and new structural components have been added, as older items wore out, or showed signs of wearing out faster than anticipated.

The problem with older aircraft is that you never know what's going to go next. The KC-135s are carefully scrutinized for metal fatigue, which is, so to speak, the "silent killer" of aircraft. Better diagnostic tools, like scanners that allow careful examination of components without tearing apart portions of the aircraft, as well as new sensors that can be installed in the aircraft itself, keep the KC-135s flying safely. With current technology, it's believed that the KC-135s and RC-135s could be kept going at until 2040. In the case of the RC-135, any similar sized aircraft would do as a replacement. And that's how the next generation RC-135 is being put together.

The RC-135s get even more attention, mainly because they have proved particularly useful over Iraq and Afghanistan. There, the RC-135s collect a wide variety of electronic signals in an area, and analyze them quickly. The analysis effort is looking for patterns. The bomb teams leave signs electronically (cell phones, walkie-talkies) or visually (images captured on surveillance cameras). Using the right math and analytical tools (software and computers) and you can quickly discover where the bad guys are coming from, and have the ground troops promptly raid the location.

This kind of work is popular with the RC-135 crews, because they are getting a chance to do, in a combat zone, what they have long trained for. Moreover, it's relatively risk free, as the aircraft fly beyond the range of machine-gun or should fired anti-aircraft missiles. In addition, the most productive work is done during night missions, when the bad guys can't even see the RC-135's high above.

But when these RC-135s land, the ground crews know what to look for, and what components may need some extra attention. With decade's worth of maintenance records, patterns emerge, and the crew chiefs get to know each RC-135 very unique "personality."

Rewriting The History of Torture

A look at the fight by the left to inject politics and their own restrictions on the interrogation of terrorists.
FROM STRATEGYPAGE.COM:
Rewriting The History of Torture
January 18, 2008: The CIA is having a hard time keeping politics out of intelligence collection. The key issue here is interrogation methods, and the belief that practices defined as torture are barbaric and useless. "Opposition to torture" has become something of a religious issue, and a vague one at that. Pressure groups, both domestic and international, have seized on torture, and its abolition, as a major issue. The problem is, there is no agreement on what, exactly, torture is. To many anti-torture advocates, what goes on in police interrogation rooms worldwide, every day, can be considered torture. The effort to define torture gets mixed up with the efforts to outlaw torture. Caught in the middle are intelligence organizations, which are sometimes in situations where torture is the lesser of several evils. CIA officials recently tried to point out that some techniques, that many want to outlaw, were critical in obtaining life-saving information.

In the popular imagination, torture is the application of pain, often to the point of death, in order to obtain information from an unwilling subject. Torture has been around for thousands of years, and during that time, a lot of mythology has grown up about it. Basically torture is interrogation carried to extremes. The ultimate extreme is killing the subject, which is usually avoided, at least until you get the information.

Advocates for the abolition of torture believe that torture doesn't work. Obviously, it does work. Just check out the history of espionage during World War II, or any other major conflict. Torture was accepted, if not much talked about. Information was regularly extracted from unwilling captives, and damage often done to the subject as a result. Everyone used torture, even if there were regulations against it. To this day, spies and soldiers are trained to deal with torture. It is acknowledged, in the espionage world, that if one of your people is caught by someone who has torture experts, your guy is likely to talk eventually. Thus there are often provisions for suicide pills. At the very least, there is a "Plan B" for situations where one of your people, who knows secrets, is taken alive. You have to assume he will be tortured and some, or all, of those secrets extracted. Critics of torture insist that information extracted like this is not reliable. The historical record says otherwise, and intelligence agencies, and the military, continue to plan accordingly.

In the war on terror, it was understood, early on, that there might be situations where you had a captive who possessed life-saving information, and you had to get that data, or lose a lot of your own people. To the anti-torture crowd, that is not acceptable. They believe, as an article of faith, that torture is never justified, and simply doesn't work. How do you argue with this? You don't. You can't. It's a religious argument, and you cannot dispute faith.

What the Department of Defense and intelligence agencies want is to avoid is getting stuck with a set of rules so restrictive that, when information must be obtained from someone, the interrogators will have to accept the possibility of going to jail if they attempt to get life saving information. That may be end up being the situation, and torture will never be eliminated. But it is possible to issue rules and regulations, if only to keep the media happy and silence the stridently righteous.