Two days before New York Yankees slugger Mickey Mantle went yard for one of the longest Major League home runs of all time—a 565-foot blast at the old Griffith Stadium in Washington, D.C., the U.S. lost two anti-aircraft artillerymen to a “Bedtime Charlie” night attack by a North Korean aircraft on the island of Cho-Do in the Yellow Sea—on April 15, 1953.
The plane was likely a low-flying, Soviet-made, wood-and-fabric Polikarpov-2 (P0-2) biplane, suggests the late Robert Futrell, a longtime military historian, in his 1983 book, The USAF in Korea: 1950-53.
Four U.S. Air Force Lockheed-made F-94 fighters flew to the area, but the North Korean aircraft “kept too low to show up in the ground clutter on the airborne radar scopes,” Futrell wrote. North Korean Lavochkin-11 (LA-11), Yakovlev-18 (YAK-18) and Po-2 propeller aircraft flew subsequent ground attacks—with no U.S. ground personnel deaths recorded–in April 1953 against U.S. targets.
“Anti-aircraft artillery and all-weather fighters were equally unable to engage the low-flying planes,” Futrell wrote of those follow-up strikes.
Since April 15, 1953, a point of pride for the U.S. Air Force has been the protection umbrella that the service has extended for U.S. ground troops and the lack of U.S. troop deaths from adversary aircraft. That nearly 71-year streak ended on Jan. 28 when a kamikaze drone attack killed three U.S. Army soldiers and injured dozens of personnel at the Tower 22 base in northeast Jordan near Syria. The base has 350 Army and Air Force service members, U.S. Central Command said.
“Of course, Central Command is looking into what can be done when it comes to our air defenses and looking into this incident to determine how best we can further strengthen our air defense systems,” she said. “We have seen repeated attacks on our U.S. servicemembers in both Iraq and Syria and a majority of the time our air defenses have been incredibly successful, and you’ve only seen minor damage to infrastructure and, of course, some injuries, which we all take very seriously, but, for the most part, our air defenses have been robust and have been successful.”
While Air Force leaders frequently testify on Capitol Hill about the need for the unit-costly Lockheed Martin [LMT] F-35 and the Next Generation Air Dominance “family” of manned aircraft and wingman drones, the real threat to U.S. air superiority may not lie in the high-end realm of Russian and Chinese surface-to-air missiles and fifth and sixth generation adversary fighters, but in the cheap one of low-flying flocks of unmanned aircraft systems able to escape radar detection and interception.
Air Force officials said that the Task Force 99 (TF 99) unit at Al Udeid Air Base, Qatar–the aerial innovation-to-field arm of U.S. Central Command’s Air Forces Central (AFCENT), began short-range drone intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance flight tests about a year ago (Defense Daily, Feb. 23, 2023).
Last October, AFCENT Commander Lt. Gen. Alexus Grynkewich said that the unit had “either on-order or on-hand…98 different UASes across 13 types with ranges from 20 kilometers out to 900 miles,” including a 3-D printed drone called Kestrel with a range of 100 kilometers.
Grynkewich said that using kamikaze drones “is certainly something that we’re looking at…but it also could include something that can do spectrum warfare, something that just harasses the adversary, etcetera.”
In 2022, Grykewich said that he foresaw the new task force–then called Detachment 99–as a way to spur innovation in the detection and countering of small drones, like those of Iran (Defense Daily, Sept. 27, 2022).
“If I only have one or two of an exclusive platform in the AOR [area of responsibility] like an RC-135 or even an MQ-9, whose numbers are decreasing, if I need to find some particular part of the enemy’s order of battle, if I can build a small platform and it doesn’t need to go very far because we know that piece of the order battle is close, then a small, shorter-range unmanned ISR platform that I can send out to go 20, 30, 100 miles and come back is really useful,” Grynkewich said at the time.
AFCENT said on Jan. 29 that it has had about 200 attacks at U.S. bases in the region by small drones since Oct. 17 last year.
The small drone threat is not a brand new one. In Sept. 2019, Iranian-built kamikaze drones struck Saudi oil fields in the Abqaiq-Khurais attack after Saudi air defense systems failed to detect and intercept the UAS. “When the attacks on Lake Abqaiq and Saudi Aramco happened, one of the things that came out afterwards…there was a Kuwaiti falconer who was in the desert and had some video of the drone as it was going across Kuwait,” Grynkewich said last October. “And someone at the time goes, ‘Man, wouldn’t it be neat if we could use that as a crowd source detection capability, as opposed to the Pentagon radars to find this thing?’ So we’ve been working over the past several years with MITRE to develop an app that goes on your phone called ‘Carpe Drone‘–seize the drone, and that app has the ability to be a crowd source detection tool.”
“So someone who’s wandering around who had this app on their phone could take a picture of the drone and then an alert would go out to people in the area that the drone was there,” Grynkewich said at the time. “There’s some AI [artificial intelligence] on the back end that can help identify what the drone is. They can build track files if enough people take pictures of it so we now are working really closely with ARCENT and Army Central has done a terrific job at trying to take this now and build it into that detection capability.”
With allied participation, Task Force 99 is now Combined Task Force 99.
Air Force Col. Mark “Juice” Whisler, a fighter pilot, has headed Combined Task Force 99 since last September.