The Birth of Digital Close Air Support

by Ethan Brown

The following is an excerpt from: “Visual Friendlies, Tally Target Volume I: Invasions (Chapter 20: The Birth of Digital Close Air Support)”; Ethan Brown, Casemate Publishers (November 2024)

By the time aircraft had begun converging overhead, the front gate and a second spot on the compound wall of Camp Tillman had been breached, the first by a suicide bomber, the second through another explosion, though it wasn’t known if the second breach had been with an RPG or other explosive. In both instances, the beleaguered American and Afghan defenders repelled the sudden rush of insurgent attackers with weltering machine-gun fire.

The sound of aircraft—a B-1 bomber first, and an MQ-1 shortly after—immediately caused the bulk of Taliban to withdraw from Camp Tillman’s perimeter, and from OPs 1 and 3. OP1 remained decisively engaged as the attackers tried desperately to bring the damaged anti-aircraft gun to bear on the forward operating base (FOB) below. An hour after the attack began, OP1 was retaken by Americans. Observing through their sensor, the aircrew could easily identify dozens of attackers, though exact numbers, especially in the dense scraggy undergrowth of Afghanistan, would be impossible to determine.

After breaking contact, the Taliban attackers consolidated in groups and moved south, straight into the curving ridgelines and rugged terrain, and towards the Pakistan border. The bulk of their force made it into a valley adjacent to OP1, where American personnel, having retaken the outpost, could occasionally make out their attackers breaking in and out of small terrain features and vegetation. Returning to the TOC with Bareback – the prototype Digital Close Air Support system – running at full capacity, Air Force TACP Matt Schleich continued to track the insurgent packs through the MQ-1 sensor.

At the time, the B-1s flying in country didn’t have Sniper [advanced targeting] pods, so I was reliant on the RPA [remotely piloted aircraft] crews who continued to feed me updated enemy positions. I utilized the imagery software in the BAO to build a fires box—four corner grids pulled from PSS–SOF—and passed those mensurated coordinates to the B-1. The bomber distributed six 2,000-lb GBU-31 JDAMs within the box, neutralizing dozens of enemy personnel. The MQ-1 continued to track and sort the remaining enemy, and another pass from the bomber would result in that aircraft going “Winchester” (all air-to-ground ordnance expended). But there remained more enemy maneuvering despite the overwhelming firepower.

A two-ship of A-10s would check in with Litening advanced targeting pods (ATP), Mk-82 unguided 500-lb bombs, rockets, and 30mm as the B-1 departed. Finally, Schleich was able to establish a clear video feed from the MQ-1, shortening his timeline for building targeting data with the BAO even further. The A-10s, despite the precise and accurate targeting data built from the RPA overhead and SA software correlation, could not locate the remaining enemy personnel maneuvering through the rugged terrain. This would prompt Schleich to attempt a TTP that had only been sparingly attempted in sterile training events, and never in combat.

A new feature of the Litening ATP pod was a laser spot search and track (LST) capability; meaning another aircraft or ground-based laser could provide a target designation, and if the correct pulse-repetition frequency, or number of flashes per second, were programmed into the LST, it could immediately queue the sensor itself to the designation energy. We had tested this back in Nevada, among all the other Bareback capabilities but, to my knowledge, no one had ever used an aircraft-to-aircraft handoff like this. I directed the MQ-1 to put their laser spot on a group of enemy personnel and told the A-10s to utilize their new LST function. Immediate tally target, just like that. This TTP would eventually become standard operating procedure for laser talk-ons. The A-10s quickly rolled in with Mk-82s and guns, followed by one last strike with the MQ-1’s Hellfire missile.

A contingent of the ODA and 82nd soldiers went out the following morning to conduct post-attack analysis. Of the assessed 250–300 Taliban who attacked Camp Tillman and the surrounding OPs that night, only a handful would escape to Pakistan. If there was any kind of validation for the [SIC] Digital Close Air Support system, it happened that night. This was the culmination of years of trial and error, development, and testing. It worked.

Lwara would remain occupied by the platoon from the 82nd Airborne, but due to the attrition of previous missions, casualties and redeployments, ODA344 was down to five soldiers and Schleich, rendering them combat ineffective. That team would rotate out of Afghanistan, leaving Schleich looking for work.

Once they had recovered all men and material, Schleich would return to Bagram, and soon found himself supporting another SF team, ODA774, at Camp Wright in Asadabad (Kunar Province). At Asadabad, Bareback became a primary tool for Schleich, who installed the equipment in the back of a Hilux pickup truck. He had also begun flying a Raven sUAS ahead of convoys and while on the FOB. That tactic of imagery and live-video area surveillance would inform and evolve the integration of the Bareback system as well. I spent hours tweaking and rehashing how the equipment fit into a vehicle, because it wasn’t something you could readily throw in a backpack and walk around with.

How best can I manage a Toughbook, radios, and cables, which make sense in a truck, but then what about jumping out to return fire? Or is it in the way of the gunner standing up behind the driver? A lot of missions I was the driver, just by necessity, so how do I utilize this SA tool while not driving over a cliff, which are seemingly everywhere near the roads of Afghanistan.

I was utilizing the entire system now, correlating the ISR feed with PSS–SOF, I essentially had a full C2 [command-and-control] suite just on my set up alone. We were plotting CAS and artillery attacks in the high ground based on my live feed and targeting software, and it worked. We could pass gnat’s ass coordinates to B-1s holding up at more than twenty thousand feet, build them a firebox, and they’d be astounded at how precise and accurate our coordinates were.

The system, once refined and adapted to meet mission demands, instilled an incredible amount of confidence in the operator, and it significantly decreased the time it took to brief aircraft on the ground situation and various key locations across the battlespace. It gave me the confidence knowing that I could pass a target coordinate and be certain that the bombs were going to hit exactly where I wanted them to. We still confirmed via talk-on in the necessary circumstances, but it was a fundamental change.

The success of this early system caught the attention of special-operations forces (SOF) and the intelligence community operational teams who were in country at the same time, and those cohorts became invested in iterative systems that would build upon the success of Schleich and his team’s prototype. Those entities were supported by their own, more exclusive ISR and C2 capabilities beyond that of the White SOF cohorts, but the concept of the SA tool Schleich had helped create would fundamentally evolve the CAS ecosystem.

Bareback would fade into the annals of obscure military technological history, but the success of Alan Yoshida’s conceptualization, Lou Pochet’s engineering and programming genius, an entire ecosystem of other air controllers’ inputs, and Schleich testing it in combat, would lead to the development of more advanced situational-awareness tools that would become a mainstay for nearly every JTAC by the end of the war.

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This first appeared in The Havok Journal on October 29, 2024.

Ethan Brown served 11 years in the United States Air Force as a Special Warfare JTAC, with multiple combat deployments. He now works as a Senior Fellow for Defense Studies for the Center for the Study of the Presidency & Congress and is a George Mason University National Security Institute visiting fellow. His work has been featured in the Diplomatic Courier, War on the Rocks, Task & Purpose, the Modern War Institute (West Point), DefenseOne and several other publications. He is on X @Libertystoic and IG @ethanbrownauthor.

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