USJFCOMLive

Walking around the various landing zones involved in this year’s Bold Quest exercises, you see a lot of people wearing a lot different uniforms.  You see a lot of different vehicles as well: Land Rovers, Mercedes, Humvees, Amphibious Assault Vehicles and the like.  They’re leading convoys, following convoys, or parking near areas where aircraft are presumably flying overhead at something above 10,000 feet.  A lot of these vehicles and uniforms belong to U.S. and coalition joint terminal attack controllers (JTACs), the warfighters who make sure airspace stays deconflicted while coalition aircraft come in to test combat identification systems and deliver the notional indirect fire being called for by those on the ground.

Canadian Forces Capt. Brian Johnson told me he is here to help evaluate the capabilities of digitally aided close air support.  He said that digitally aided CAS revolves around sending packets of information on targets to the planes overhead rather than telling it to the pilots flying them.

We’re just transmitting data over the radio.  It takes out a bit of the middleman of [the pilot] pressing in all the data while he’s flying around.  We just send it to him from our computer and it just shows up directly into his aircraft’s systems.

U.S. Navy Lt. Brian Culver, a JTAC who works with Marines here at Camp Lejeune, told me that participating in the assessment has obvious values for U.S. and coalition forces, but it is additionally valuable to the JTACs who get a chance to work together.

Normally, when we deploy, we’re not always working with someone from U.S. forces. We’re working with a different country, so these are guys that we are going to see again.  It’s giving us a chance to work with aircraft that we are going to see again.  When we deploy, it obviously does benefit us when we’ve got that experience working together.

Mitigating fratricide – the focus of BQ09 – is very important to both warfighters on the ground and in the air.  Culver, a Navy pilot who will soon return to the cockpit, called it “huge.”

That’s our biggest responsibility, trying to eliminate friendly fire casualties, so this is big for us and for the future.  Right now, we’re not necessarily employing all the systems that we’re testing out here.  We’re seeing which ones work the best and taking the good things from all of them … We’re always looking for stuff that is smaller, lighter and works better.  The end result for us is we’re looking for tools that can make our job easier, are going to be more user friendly, and make us better at what we do.