PTDS Balloon, Payloads, Rigging and Mooring Platform

ISR Assets over Baghdad - 2007

Iraq Impressions

Chapters 1 & 2 – PTDS Team 4 and the ISR Network

All the people, equipment and software that gathers intelligence, provides surveillance and reconnoiters the battle space make up the network of which PTDS, The Persistent Treat Detection System is a part. In the broadest sense the network includes the intelligence agencies and all they do as well but in practice, when referring to the “ISR Network”, war fighters are often speaking of the systems and devices that watch and listen to things on the ground.
 
The PTDS balloon, which operated just a few thousand feet above ground level in Baghdad, occupied a position in the network near the bottom. At the top are the satellites in low earth orbit which is a couple hundred miles up. Next in order of altitude are Lockheed Martin’s U2 spy plane which has a service ceiling of 85,000 feet and Northrup Grumman’s Global Hawk unmanned aerial vehicle which flies as high as 65,000 feet. Further down are the EP-3E Aries which flies as high as 30,000 feet and the JSTARS radar aircraft which is a modified Boeing 707 whose service ceiling is 42,000 feet. AWACS aircraft, which are built on various airframes, including the Boeing 767, are up there too. When close support fighters like F-15s and F-16s operate as ISR assets their altitude will vary, so will the mission altitudes flown by Predators although that unmanned aircraft can’t operate any higher than 25,000 feet. The Predator, built by General Atomics, flies the same camera as the one on the PTDS aerostat, the Wescam MX20. Shadow UAVs, which are catapult launched, can fly as high as 15,000 feet but that relatively small UAV is typically used at much lower altitudes. Raven UAVs, which are hand launched and Raytheon’s RAID (Rapid Aerostat Initial Deployment) aerostats operate at under 1000 feet. At the bottom of the arrangement are Raytheon’s RAID tower cameras, which are on platforms just a little over 100 feet off the ground. You might list base defense cameras, which are mounted on buildings and walls, as part of the ISR network too but only if you are on one of the bases. The feeds from those cameras aren’t generally on the network and available to other sites.
 
All these different systems and vantage points gave the United States the “high ground” in a VERY big way. The highest ground the enemy ever occupied was a rooftop. They saw almost nothing and when the sky was clear we could potentially see virtually everything. With some sensors, a clear sky isn’t even needed.
 
Lockheed, Wescam, Raytheon and the others with the military agencies and offices they work for have developed amazingly capable systems to gather intelligence, survey the terrain and reconnoiter the battlefield but as I would discover in the coming months the usefulness of the network, as with any tool, is a function of the user’s skill and desire to handle it effectively and the skill and the desire, particularly the desire, that the companies who make the products have in abundance is much more scarce among those who use them.

 
This program is about my job in the war zones and how the events of September 11, 2001 affected my family . It isn’t the television version of the memoir. The resources to produce that are beyond me, but the video and stills in this more modest production compliment the book.
 

© Robert A. Crimmins