As HAS 59 will recall:
CASTOR. "Can Anybody State The Operational Requirement?."

ASTOR . "Anybody can State The Operational Requirement!"

Personalities
 

The US Army were keen to fly a Mohawk into an RAF airfield in West Germany (Gutersloh probably).
It got to the planning stage in the early 80's with HQ 1 BR Corps, 50 missile Regt RA and HQ RAFG with 4 Sqn RAF (Harriers) all keen to take part.

A senior RAF Officer on the RAF 'Air Force Board' a former Canberra gentleman stopped it.
However, I need my pension to survive on and will not go further into it.

It doesn't matter anyway, by then the whole thing was so confused with the budget for it being diverted every which-way at each planning year.
In the end neither service was prepared to fund it from their dwindling budget.
The Army got Phoenix (chortle) and the RAF got new sensors for the Canberra.

As Haraka correctly said of the 'Corps Area Stand - Off Radar'.
CASTOR = "Can Anybody State The Operational Requirement?"

The Harrier Force Recce squadron shouldered the burden of confirming the targets for the Lance regiment and we did what we always do ...
just got on with it using what we had and not what we might have liked or thought we needed.

Sentinel came along - way too late and struggled to find an Operational Requirement.
Work was found for it to do but that's not the same thing.

[QUOTE Work was found for it to do but that's not the same thing.[/QUOTE]

Interesting. I always had a fairly cynical view of the utility of Sentinel but some time ago I met a PJHQ planner who said that the data was ‘absolutely vital’ and that in Afganistan, ‘nothing moved without Sentinel MTI data’ - at the planning stage that is presumably.

However, it is an asset primarily used away from home shores (I believe that the risk an invasion of the U.K. mainland by armed forces is reasonably low!) and with the declining appetite for foreign intervention you can see how it is an easy capability to drop when finances are tight. Once the programme, and the required rolling updates, were strangled under SDSR then writing was on the wall for a premature retirement no matter what. :(

Genuinely sorry for what it means to all the Raytheon guys. All the RAF guys will no doubt move elsewhere.

Watch RAF Sentinel R1 being intercepted by Russian Su-30s ? Alert 5

Planning
 

MTI only tells you that something is moving. It doesn't tell you what it is. For planning I guess it can say that 'something moved from one place to another' but you still need to send another asset else to see what it is.
I suppose it was 'vital' if that's all we had. Would we have bought it just for that?
As you say mate, sad for the Raytheon guys, at least they would have had an inkling that the end was near.
Good luck to all who move on from here.

HAS59 - that's exactly what we bought it for - WP Tanks on the German plains, Iraqi tanks in the desert! However, we found it equally useful in other ways. When it comes to MTI, you are just thinking with a tactical hat on. Don't forget if something stops, SAR can help ID it although you will always need PID from a visual/IR source before going further. However, as a strategic asset MTI is much more useful - knowing the pattern of life in a target area can be hugely important, and that is what the PJHQ planner was on about. Unsure of the exact detail because I wasn't there, but when the French 'borrowed' Sentinel in West African order to help identify rebel strongholds, I understand that the job was pretty much complete after one trip - a scan which took in the whole country, look for the MTI hot spots. Here be rebels. Try that in your Protector!

I'm sure some of the AIA's who lurk on here can provide much more detail !

'Thumbs Up' for what it did ... but
 

" ... ... that's exactly what we bought it for - WP Tanks on the German plains, Iraqi tanks in the desert! ... ..."


Hi 'Tom',
by the time the first one became operational (2008) the threat of hordes of Soviet tanks in the Northwest German plain had diminished.
It had to wait three years to find a job in Afghanistan assisting the mantra of ‘Pattern of Life’ being used as a cue for targetting persistent UAV surveillance.
Was it ‘vital’? It may have been, but this was also a case of ‘we have this, it’s not exactly what it was designed for but it will help’. I know it worked well, thankfully that situation is now behind us.

In Libya I gather that it was able to follow the movement of the battle fairly well.
But without any visual backup – the product was always just a ‘probable’ at best.
Anyway, with the Storm Shadows being programmed in the UK, by the time the jets got to their mobile targets – it wasn’t there.
A bit disappointing but at least they were able to tell the jets not to hit an empty space.

I get what it can do (I know many Int Analysts) I also know what it can’t do.
One problem with it was that the aircraft was too small for the kit.
We needed either lighter kit, fewer racks of kit or a bigger ‘plane.
It would have been an absolutely fabulous system if it had some sort of long range EO capability to make sense of the dots of MTI or the sketchy images of the SAR.
Interestingly the current SAAB GlobalEye has an EO sensor alongside the Maritime radar, which rather confirms the point.
There may be more similarly equipped aircraft in the future.

So when it goes we will lose the capability of broad area radar coverage of large areas of reasonably flat landscapes.
Well I guess the vastly reduced force we now find ourselves will have to learn to live with that.
We may find that some of our allies’ space-based systems will fill some of the capability gap if required.

The Sentinel is going because it is now considered obsolete. It certainly wasn’t useless but it wasn’t perfect either.
If there is to be a new system at some time in the future one hopes that the Operational Requirement will be drawn up by people who fully understand the limits of a radar only aircraft.



I offer my best wishes and good luck to all those who will move on from V(AC) Sqn.

Sentinel didn't wait 3 years after 2008, the first deployment was in the same year...

Regrettably the sole reason for its obsolescence was SDSR 2010. There was a very simple paperwork solution to the (overstated) weight issue at that point and Raytheon had even scoped an EO sensor and underwing hard points (Globaleye is the same airframe). Once SDSR pulled the rug from under its feet, development was limited and penny packets were thrown at it to keep it running when the servers became no longer supportable. The original servers specified as late in the programme as possible and at the time were the highest spec items cleared for airborne access to TS info. Regrettably the pace of computer technology moves much faster than the CIS people that clear hardware for such uses......

We seem to have managed to keep it constantly deployed on operations since 2008, other than a short break to allow the crews to recuperate, which seems to suggest there is a need for its data. However, we do have to cut our suit according to our cloth and nowadays we can only afford sackcloth - I fully accept that the need for Poseidon and Wedgetail is far greater than wide area battlefield surveillance....I just hope that the politicians begin to reign in their ambitions overseas to match!

Government, we disposed of Sentinel, as we no longer required it. current thinking would surely say to the contrary

I am quite sure that J-Stars can cope.....