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Technology
High-Tech Tools at FOB Rhino
(enr.com
- 2/25/02)
By Tom Sawyer
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| MOON
DUST Huge planes trashed Rhino's dirt strip nightly. Seabees
kept it open. (Photo courtesy of US Navy/Master Chief
Photographer's Mate Terry Cosgrove) |
Long before the first U.S. soldiers
hit the ground in Afghanistan, military construction specialists
began studying, analyzing, calculating and planning for the
support the troops would need. Military engineers are using
the information technology tools of the 21st Century—geospatial
data mining, digital collaboration, remote sensing and imaging
and satellite communications—together with intelligence
in the classic traditions of the cold war to take on an enemy
whose tactics range from driving bomb-laden camels toward
their foes to crashing hijacked airliners into the towers
of lower Manhattan.
It is a story that may never be fully
told, but from a series of interviews with military and construction
officials, it is possible to sketch how the work is being
done. A good starting point is the night of Oct. 19, 2001,
39 days after Sept. 11, as the first assaults by U.S. ground
troops in Afghanistan started to unfold.
A MYSTERIOUS OBJECTIVE. On one stage
helicopters swooped out of the moonless night to raid a Taliban
headquarters in Kandahar, their troops snatching documents,
data and prisoners and whisking them away. At another stage,
200 U.S. Army paratroopers, most from the 3rd Ranger Battalion
of the 75th Ranger Regiment of Ft. Benning, Ga., along with
a few "specialists" from the Army and Air Force,
raided a strange fortified compound on a dry lakebed about
80 miles to the southwest.
Preceded by fire from supporting aircraft,
the rangers jumped from four C-130 transports, parachuted
down and burst into the walled compound's buildings. About
30 defenders fleeing from outlying buildings or rushing toward
the compound were killed. The Rangers spent a few hours on
the ground and then flew out in the same four transports that
dropped them. Somehow, the pilots of those 155,000-lb aircraft
knew by then that the outpost's 6,840-ft-long dirt runway
was not only safe to land on, but that it also had room for
them to turn and taxi and get away again.
Planning for Operation Rhino, as the
raid was named, included numerous engineering issues, not
the least of which was evaluating the unexplored airstrip.
It was not only the return route for the raiders, it was also
to serve as a staging point in case the simultaneous raid
going on farther north ran into trouble and needed support.
Although it wasn't specified in the
mission plan, that same brief visit also helped set the stage
for the next act at Rhino on Nov. 25, when elements of the
15th Marine Expeditionary Unit, based at Camp Pendleton, Calif.,
began swarming in with more than 1,000 troops and an endless
chain of aircraft to set up a forward operations base. Engineering
support came from a detail of about two dozen Seabees from
the Naval Marine Construction Batallion-133, based in Gulfport,
Miss., whose primary task was to improve and maintain the
crucial runway.
Such commitments require good site
condition information. But the brief night raid of Oct. 19,
which began to wrap up when troops signaled the transport
planes that the field was safe for landing, was the only "boots
on-the-ground" time planners had. The rest of the analysis
was made by studying satellite imagery, research and old-fashioned
intelligence gathering.
One of the raid planners and participants,
Maj. Robert Whalen, regimental intelligence officer with the
75th, describes the target as a "frontier outpost,"
surrounded by an 8-ft wall with 30-ft-high towers on each
corner. And it was new construction.
"It was a self-contained compound
attached to a 6,000-ft runway right in the middle of Afghanistan;
an oasis of civilization in the middle of nowhere," he
says. "Once we received a tip about it we got new satellite
pictures and saw construction tents outside in September and
October, and then they disappeared."
Whalen says raid planners—as do
the rest of the military—rely on satellite imagery and
other remote sensing data collected by the National Imaging
and Mapping Agency, a secure federal clearinghouse for strategic
satellite imagery and geospatial data under the Dept. of Defense
and the Central Intelligence Agency. The raid planners used
NIMA images to document the layout, calculate the wall height
and estimate the number of people using the compound by looking
for the latrines. Then they obtained "hand-held"
photographs of the unfinished buildings that allowed the regimental
engineer and master breecher to study the construction and
estimate the sizes of charges that would be needed to blow
openings into the walls.
But when the soldiers jumped from their
planes on Oct. 19 there was still much they did not know.
"We had to make all sorts of guesses
about what was at Rhino," Whalen says. "After we
were there we knew the ground was very difficult to dig down
any distance at all. It seemed very hard-packed to us. Rangers
hurt themselves, two with broken legs and ankles." The
high altitude of the compound, at 3,285 ft, also meant the
soldiers, weighing 250 to 300 lb with their gear, came down
fast. "To us it seemed very, very hard, but I bet to
the C-130 pilots it probably seemed alarmingly porous,"
Whalen says. One thing the Rangers did not bring with them
was their own engineer. "We wanted as many shooters as
possible," Whalen says.
While the Rangers secured the perimeter
and searched the compound's buildings, specialists from the
Air Force, reportedly from the 23rd Special Tactics Squadron
of the Special Operations Command based at Hurlburt Field,
near Ft. Walton Beach, Fla., walked the runway in the dark.
Alert for mines, they tested the runway with a soil penetrometer,
a long rod with a cone-shaped end and a sliding weight. It
registers soil resistance when the weight is dropped, allowing
bearing characteristics to be evaluated.
The 23rd's members are trained in unconventional
infiltration tactics, including scuba and free-fall parachuting.
The unit includes a specialty group called combat controllers
whose capabilities include surveying and assessing assault
zones, and establishing and controlling landing and drop zones
"in the most austere and inhospitable regions of the
world," according to the unit's mission statement. In
addition to inspecting and evaluating runways, the special
tactics teams bring in kits that include battery-powered runway
lights to guide in pilots.
A public affairs spokesman for the Air
Force Special Operations Command declined to discuss Operation
Rhino, in part because combat controllers were still in the
field. "Combat Control has very few people but they have
been working with all those units," he says. The C-130
aircraft used in the raid "can just about land anywhere,"
he added. "It's unbelievable."
"The most important intelligence
we brought back was really the condition of that runway,"
says Whalen. "That was something we could not tell until
we were actually on the ground and sampled it. We brought
along specialists who walked up and down the runway to take
readings and measurements.
"By the time we left we were absolutely
certain it would support C-130s and cautiously optimistic
that it would support C-17s. It was more time-consuming to
figure out whether it could support a bigger aircraft like
a C-17, and this was a raid. Our goal was to destroy the Taliban
presence, destroy weapons, gather intelligence and get out.
And do it within one cycle of darkness."
In the weeks following the raid intelligence
officers monitored the site closely, looking for evidence
of fresh mine laying activity "particularly on the runways,
in case the Americans came back," Whalen says. On Nov.
25 they did.
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| KEEP
'EM FLYING Every morning the "pulverized" face
of Rhino's runway was scraped away. (Photo courtesy of
US Navy/Photographer's Mate First Class Greg Messier )
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EXPLODING CAMELS. Lt. Cmdr. Len Cooke,
who led Naval Mobile Construction Battalion-133 to help set
up Forward Operating Base Rhino, as it was now named, says
the Seabees were tasked with finding water, controlling blinding
clouds of dust and keeping the unpaved runway functioning
through about 800 nighttime landings over the course of the
next five weeks. "It was a dry lakebed runway that was
designed for Cessnas and Piper Cubs, and they were landing
C-17s," Cooke says.
The other challenge, of course, was
the threat of enemy raids, which included the possibility
of bomb-packed camels being driven into the lines and detonated
by remote control—a strategy Afghan fighters had used
against the Russians.
"In the month I spent at Rhino
we would have a security alert sometimes twice a night, sometimes
four times a night, and then sometimes nothing for four or
five nights," Cooke says. Each time they passed the alert
the Seabees grabbed their weapons and went to their defensive
stations. "We're fighting engineers," Cooke says.
"I've been in the uniform for 19 years and I have never
been around a group of people where morale was higher and
conditions worse."
At least one camel was unfortunate enough
to enter the perimeter by running between two fighting holes
one night. It was met with a barrage of fire but no trace
of the beast was found in the morning.
During the month the base was in use,
heavy transport aircraft, including the 585,000-lb Globemaster
C-17s, arrived nightly. Their landing gear gouged huge gashes
into the unpaved surface. Cooke says the big planes left ruts
18 in. deep and their wash blasted oceans of soil into the
air. "This kind of soil and terrain is pretty common
in that part of the world, but when it is hit by an aircraft
it is more like moon dust and talcum powder than sand,"
Cooke says. "When a plane lands it pulverizes what little
hardpan is on the land. It's more like fireplace ash."
Helicopter pilots throughout the theater
of operations are plagued by blinding brown-outs as they return,
resulting in hard landings and broken landing gear. Some crashes
resulted in injuries and fatalities. At Rhino, the Seabees
improved helicopter landing pads using scrap metal and clay.
Maintaining the helicopters was complicated by their stations
close to the dust-choked runway, a position needed to keep
the security perimeter tight.
Cooke says the Seabees did a lot of
seat-of-the-pants engineering but as soon as they established
satellite communications over SIPRNET, an Internet protocol
router network for classified communications, and NIPRNET,
an unclassified channel,they started long-range collaboration.
"We were looking for assistance for engineering—drilling
a well, stabilizing the dirt runway, controlling the dust,"
says Cooke. "We were sending images back and forth over
the SIPRNET nonstop, along with urgent requests for parts.
"We had so little equipment there
we had to have critical priority on parts," he says.
If a grader broke down and runway maintenance fell behind
it could have interrupted the airlift and compromised the
mission. "The mechanics stayed out there with the operators.
Sometimes right on the runway we had to do maintenance to
keep them running," Cooke says.
One of the Seabees' first tasks was
to dig a 6-ft-deep test pit by the runway, digitally photograph
the wall and transmit the image back to supporting engineers
in Bahrain and Hawaii for geotechnical advice. The Seabees
also needed water badly, and asked for help in finding it.
Supporting engineers accessed NIMA's
data, studied the remote imagery and geology of the area and
came back and told the Seabees where to drill. But there was
a catch. In order to tap groundwater, supporting engineers
told them they would probably have to drill to 600 ft to meet
their needs. After considering the probable length of the
mission, the time it would take to drill and the logistics
of flying in equipment and enough 10-in. casing and 4-in.
draw tube for the job, Cooke says the Seabees decided that
flying in "bulkwater" made more sense. "We
decided to try and squeak by without it," Cooke says.
Water was needed for dust control and
runway repair. Cooke says the top 3 ft of lakebed was like
clayless moon dust. Below that, however, there was some clay.
"So between landings we dug borrow pits off the side
of the runway to find that clay...took whatever bulkwater
we had and created improved dirt patches on the runway,"
Cooke says.
At dawn each day they started repairs
by scraping away the previous night's rutted surface. Then,
they would pick the worst spot and rebuild it by laying down
a 3- or 4-in. layer of clay, wetting it, rolling it, and repeating
the process over and over again. They could improve 400 ft
to 600 ft each day this way, and the patch would last four
or five nights before it was trashed again. It helped, but
it was a stop-gap method and not a solution. With more than
6,000 ft of runway, the Seabees were not exactly gaining.
After time, the entire runway began
sinking to the point where a front-end loader had to follow
the graders to pick up the spoil and throw it over the growing
berm along the side. The airstrip also began taking on a concave
profile from the wheels tracking down the center, a circumstance
that required additional periodic grading to restore flatness.
The machines worked the runway from
sunup to sundown and between landings at night. "Whoever
landed first each night got a pretty good ride. Everybody
else had to pay the price," Cooke says.
At the same time, supporting engineers
in Hawaii were tracking down a dust control product called
Envirotac II that had been tried on Marine maneuvers in Arizona
a few years earlier. Justin Vermillion, vice president of
Environmental Products and Applications Inc., Envirotac's
Wildomar, Calif., manufacturer, says he began to get a series
of phone calls and urgent requests for test samples.
The product is a syrupy "goo"
that is mixed with water and applied as a top dressing to
harden loose soil, he says. Vermillion's sample was quickly
approved, and by Dec. 12 he had filled two 5,500-gal bulk
trucks with the product and driven to a waiting C-17 at March
Air Force Base in Riverside, Calif. Lacking the plastic containers
needed for air-shipping the product, Vermillion says they
picked up 206 used Pepsi drums from a feed store's horse trough
inventory on the way to the airport and packaged the hardening
agent on the runway as Marines loaded the plane.
"Everything was from the hip, we
didn't get PO numbers or anything," he says. "I
didn't know it was going to Camp Rhino until afterward."
When it arrived, Vermillion says he
got a telephone call from a Seabee engineer at Rhino. Cooke
says they called because the kind of application they had
in mind wasn't exactly covered in the product literature.
"We were looking for a little insanity check," Cooke
says.
Vermillion says he also learned the
Marines took to calling his product "Rhino Snot."
That was all it took to give the product, which already had
some other nicknames, a new moniker. The name stuck and so
did the runway.
Cooke says advanced digital communications
and imagery were key to quickly and accurately assessing physical
problems and prescribing the solutions. "Without the
ability to communicate from that remote location accurately
about our requirements, we would not have been able to do
the mission as easily or as successfully. A picture was worth
1,000 words. It would have been very difficult for us without
that digital communication."
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Live From Afghanistan: Linking
Experts to the Field by Satellite
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| DEPLOYABLE
KIT HAS PC, VIDEO CONFERENCING GEAR. (Photo courtesy
of Wayne Fryer, USAERDC) |
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
is providing support to combat engineers in the field
via "TeleEngineering Operation Communications"
kits that provide live video-conferencing and data links
to subject matter experts back home.
The kits, developed at the U.S.
Army Engineer Research and Development Center in Vicksburg,
Miss., come in two versions. One is used to install
an office network at a base; the other for satellite
communications from the field. They are being used heavily
by military engineers repairing bomb-damaged runways
and neglected infrastructure facilities, such as water
and electrical systems, bridges, tunnels and roadways.
"If you've got a pavement
problem it makes it real easy to describe, especially
if you have something for scale," says Lt. Col.
Michael Picard, senior operations officer for military
operations at the Corps' Southwest Division headquarters
in Dallas, the campaign's engineering-support provider.
"The reason we are using
these kits isn't because they are ‘gee-whiz,' it's
because we want to bring great amounts of engineering
expertise forward to help that guy on the ground support
the maneuvering commander," he says.
The deployable kits have been
steadily improved and made smaller ever since their
first use
3 1/ 2 years ago in the Balkans. The 67-lb packages
house a Polycom ViewStation for video-conferencing,
a Panasonic Toughbook ruggedized notebook pc, an external
hand-held camera, a connection for an M-4 satellite
terminal and a sophisticated encryption device that
lets it communicate outside of military channels over
commercial satellite links. They can be powered by 110v
or 220v ac power, or from a vehicle battery.
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| CORPS
LIAISON KIT WITH KANDAHAR KIT. (Photo courtesy of
2nd Lt. Phillip Valenti, Charlie Company, 326 Engineering
Battalion, 101st Airborne Div. US Army) |
The kits have been reliable, Picard
says, and have enabled the Corps to make its "absolutely
huge engineering resources" available to combat
engineers without having to send specialty experts forward.
"We have been able to move stuff back and forth,
and it doesn't burden the military communications either,"
he says. "We are a ghost in the background. We
come packaged with our own communications."
There are three of the units in
theater now, one at headquarters in Kuwait and one in
Kandahar. The third has been lent to the 10th Mountain
Division from Ft. Drum, N.Y., which is involved in a
huge rehabilitation project at an old Soviet base at
Karsi Khanabad, Uzbekistan.
"I'm absolutely amazed some
wirehead hasn't already invented this thing, and that
it was left up to the [Corps of] Engineers to say, ‘we
need this capability. Let's build it and field it,'"
Picard says.
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Strategic Data And Image Service Feeds
Mission Planners
The National Imaging and Mapping Agency
was formed in 1996 from eight defense-related imaging, mapping
and analysis agencies. A name-change, to National Geospatial
Intelligence Agency, is being considered.
The tempo at NIMA has soared since
Sept. 11. Says one staff specialist who asked not to be identified:
"If we're going after terrorists worldwide…wouldn't
you expect a quantum increase in the workload, across the
board in every federal/ defense-related entity imaginable?"
The data NIMA is delivering for operations
in Afghanistan includes a new set of radar topographic measurements
made from the Space Shuttle a year ago. They capture elevations
on the entire globe from 56° north latitude to 56°
south latitude, with data points every 30 meters that are
up to two-and-a-half times more accurate than the incomplete
aerial photo-based data available before. Sample U.S. images
are at www.jpl.nasa.gov/srtm.
The points can be displayed as exquisite
photo-like images. But the real magic is not in their ethereal
beauty but in the fact that they are representations drawn
from 12.9 million points in every 60-mile square, to which
site-specific intelligence can be referenced. It is a map
on which a global geospatial database can be framed. At its
best, such a database means that anything that can be located
in three dimensions and registered there can be prompted to
interface with software, or reveal everything on file about
it, simply by pointing and clicking with a mouse.
Commands within the Air Force have
been developing geospatial systems for bases since 1995, after
a rape incident in Okinawa led to an agreement to reduce Kadena
Air Base there to half its size. The challenge was to compress
the base and "not lose the mission," says Brig.
Gen. Patrick Burns, who was deputy civil engineer at the Pacific
Air Forces headquarters in Hawaii at the time and is now head
civil engineer for the Air Combat Command at Langley AFB,
Hampton Va. By creating a spatial database of Kadena, planners
were able to manipulate alternatives before the compression
began and automate management once it was done.
Their system, called GeoBase, is built
around industry standards and commercial software to encourage
broader application. An offshoot is GeoReach, an expeditionary
version that begins with collected images of a foreign site
being assessed for rapid base deployment. NIMA has data and
images of 12,000 airfields around the world that can provide
starting points for planners.
Decision-quality data is linked to the
image. Burns says the process can remotely develop 70% to
80% of the information needed to execute a "beddown"
in 45 days—a deployment that might mean a tent city for
up to 5,000 people and runways capable of handling fighter
jets and transports. The missing information is filled in
by fast-moving reconnaissance teams with wearable computers,
digital cameras, testing tools and GPS equipment.
GeoReach got its first field test two
months before Sept. 11 in a covert Drug Enforcement Administration
deployment of three C-130s in South America. The Air Force
says it is being used extensively in Operation Enduring Freedom
now.
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