FPP083 - Electronic Attack

This is the Fighter Pilot Podcast Episode 83. This week we are discussing the arguably unglamorous but unquestionably vital role of modern warfare and the electromagnetic spectrum. Focusing primarily on tactical electronic attack with a guest who flew both the EA6P prowler and its successor, the EA18G growler. And few digital combat simulator enthusiasts stick around after the interview for a special announcement about a new partnership with our friends over at Thrustmaster, makers of your favorite DCS flight control ecosystems. [Music] Welcome to the Fighter Pilot Podcast, the internet radio showed that explores the fascinating world of air combat, the aircraft, the weapon systems, and most importantly, the people. Now here is your host, retired US Navy Fighter Pilot Vincent ILO. [Music] Hello and welcome to the Fighter Pilot Podcast. I am your host, Jello, and joining me in studio today is United States Navy Captain Dave Kurtz, call sign minimi. How's it going, Mini? It's going great. Thanks for having me. You bet. I mean, Gully, you just live up the street here in Coronado, but it's been a little effort to get together. I was in Oregon last week visiting family, hanging out, fishing, and having fun. Before that, you weren't too accessible, were you? No, we were trying to get together for a while and then being out at sea. So currently the CEO of USS Somerset based here in San Diego. And we were out at sea doing an exercise. And while the COVID pandemic was raging itself around the country, we were healthy. Had an entire healthy, our, out at sea. And the decision was made that we should stay out there and be prepared to support the country as necessary. Worked out well. We have a healthy crew and we got a lot of great training done, but it's good to be a sure and good to be able to get together. Well, you had open barbershops and gyms. That's right. We did. We had the only open barbershops and gyms in the country. Never thought there was an upside to being underway, but I know you guys were out there doing good work. So, I'm glad to have you back. Let's start at the beginning, though. And we're doing a little different format from usual. You're going to be both our guest and our guest coach. But let's get to know you. Where are you from? Where did you go to school? What did you do before you started driving ships? I grew up in town called Coatesville, Pennsylvania. It's about the 40 miles west of Philadelphia. So remain a Philadelphia sports fan. But my mom was from Virginia Beach. We used to vacation in Virginia Beach all the time. And I would see the timecats fly over. So I got hooked fairly early in my life. So I angled for the Naval Academy and got it in there. And then after that, picked up NFO. Went down to flight school and ended up selecting prowlers out of there. I wanted timecats, but ended up with prowlers, which I greatly enjoyed. It's a very NFO-centric aircraft. And so I felt like I was a more part of the crew. But it was great fun. And interestingly enough, my uncle was a carrier suitability test pilot. He was an A6 pilot in Vietnam. And then he did a lot of the initial testing on the prowler Pax River. So it goes back quite a ways. Then I did a J-O tour, West Coast, the second deployment of which happened right after September 11th. By that point, I was a tactics instructor in the prowler and got to use my experience to help train the squadron and prepare us for that. Following that went down to a Fallon where you and I overlapped a little bit there. Then a CAG staff tour. The Fallon tour was interesting. I don't know if you remember that a bunch of us went over and planned OIF in the Air Operations Center. So a short tour with a three-month deployment shoved in the middle of it. But that was great. A Marine and I planned all 800-some prowler missions that occurred during that initial operation. Then I got to go over there and fly it at myself as part of the CAG staff. Cool. After that, I ended up as department head in Japan and didn't go to the Middle East for 12 years, which is interesting nowadays for someone who's been in the Navy as long as I have. So I did my department head tour in Japan. After that went to a legislative fellowship in DC, working for a congressman from Philadelphia. Not planned. It just happened to work out that way. Serendipity. But it was awesome. Then I went to my command tour at which point I transitioned to the growler. So I took command of VHQ-132 and we were an expeditionary squadron. So we were land-based. Then we were the first squadron to deploy expeditionary to Japan. We took the first growlers across the date line, did our deployment over there and in fact I did my incoming change of command down in Australia. Nice. I did my first day in command. I was on national TV in Australia giving a tour of the jet to the Australian Defense Minister, the US ambassador and the chief of the Royal Australian Air Force. And then they announced that they were buying growlers and became our first department. So we can thank you. I was just the face on TV. It was all the guys in Pax River and Widby Island that were doing the hard work of selling that. From my command tour I went and did EW Cyber Stuff on the joint staff, got selected for Nuke Power, went through that whole process, was the exo of Nimitz. So in my deployment in 2017, that was my first return to the Middle East, like I said, in 12 years. And now I find myself here in San Diego. Finally after 24 years of service, I finally made it to San Diego. And that is why you are currently the CEO of the USS Subrissette because it's your deep draft, right? Correct. Yeah. The process is exo of a carrier, deep draft command, get the practice driving a ship and leading that crew and then kind of on standby for selection for CVN command at some point in future. All right. Well, Gali, how many hours total and break it down for me if you could. I didn't tell you I was going to ask this, but how many flight hours you got? I have about 2700 flight hours. Mostly in the prowler. I'm guessing about 1900, just shy of 2000 in the prowler and another 500 or so in the prowler. And then during my Cagstaff tour, I ended up flying super hornets. Oh. So, yeah, I was down in the moron. There were no prowlers down there. So in order to maintain currency, I got to fly that right. Got the back of the F. It was good. Excellent. Well, we have a question coming up on that from one of the listeners. So you're just the guy to answer it. Great. And clearly, you're the right person to discuss today's topic because there is a lot that goes into this. First off, just the alphabet soup. There's a lot of two and three letter acronyms that begin with a letter E for electronic. Yes. EW, ECM, ECCM, ESM, EP. Let's start big picture and then work it down to what is electronic attack? And we're going to focus our discussion today mostly on that. Sure. Let's think of EW as the umbrella term, electronic warfare. And then you have subsets of electronic warfare. So you have your electronic surveillance. That's listening. Let's build the picture just like you would with a radar. Then you have electronic protect. What are the things that you were doing as a blue force or as an individual unit to maintain your ability to use the electromagnetic spectrum, be it comms or radars? And then the electronic attack portion, that is the offensive portion of that. So EP being defensive, EA being offensive. Okay. Now we're going to delve into again, the EA part of it today. But let's start back at the beginning. How long has EA been a thing, if you will? I mean, I'm guessing radar started showing up in World War II. So I'm guessing as soon as there was radar, there was counters, right? As soon as there were radars, there were counters and it started with aluminum foil with chaff. Yeah. Folks putting that stuff out to disrupt radars as radars got better at being able to work through that. Then you have to adapt again to a counter everybody else's growth. What you really see in terms of the offensive nature of it though is during Vietnam. Marines started to convert some of their A6s into electronic attack aircraft because of the prevalence of the radar guided sams in that war and the toll that they are taking. You see the Marines start to add that capability. The Navy did it with the A3 with the Sky Warriors. So they turned it into the EK A3B, the whale and added that version in order to provide some of that capability as well. The prowler comes around in the late 60s. This flight was actually 1968 about a week ago, May 25th, 1968, first flight of the prowler. Comes into service 1971. This is the Navy's chance to try and build a dedicated platform to provide this capability. You can see the proliferation of sams in Vietnam and as they've grown and grown in capability as well, it obviously becomes necessary to have something to counter that in order to enable aircraft to do their job. Well, on this particular episode, we're not necessarily going to delve deeply into any of the specific aircraft, although I think you're clearly capable to do that. Maybe we'll have you back when we do. But in general, when we think of EA, so for example, in the Super Hornet that you flew, there was various onboard systems, ALQ126 on the old Hornet. I forget what, 216? Yeah, it sounds right. ASPJ, right? Right, right. So does that qualify as electronic attack or what about carrying a harm? Is that part of this too? And I know there was a lot of acronyms we threw out before, but. Right. Airborne self-protect jamming ASPJ. Right. Yeah, that certainly qualifies. It receives a signal. The computer in this case sends a signal back in order to disrupt that radar signal and protect the aircraft. The difference with the growler is that you put a man in the loop in order to make priority decisions with limited resources. So they can take a look at whether that threat signal is really a threat to the aircraft or by using the ES suite using those antenna, you can tell pretty well where that location is and then decide whether it's even worth going after that or not. And thereby preserving resources, ASPJ, you know, kind of just a repeater, if you will, and it acts autonomously. And it's more defensive, I would argue. So, I'm proud, or in a grower, is a dedicated part of the whole strike package with a certain purpose that we're going to talk about in a moment. But if I'm just out there and I want to increase my survivability, I can put on different like Jeff, for example, exactly. That's something to help survive as is the ASPJ to decoys all these different things. That's only going to protect that one aircraft. Oh, good point. Right. And so the prouder and the grower are going to be used to protect other aircraft primarily. Cool. Well, besides Prouder, Grower and other airborne platforms, what other type of EA platforms are there? Are there sea based, land based, space based? Well, you have the EC130 is the primary one that the Air Force is using. They'll work mostly in the communications role out there. Now, Grower has communications jamming capabilities. The EC130 is going to have a little bit wider frequency range. It can operate more power. But space based, I'm not sure about space based. I really don't know. Although there are advantages and disadvantages of it since a lot of communications flow through space. But alignment, we could talk about that in the strike planning portion of it. But alignment is very important for jamming when you have signals that are very narrow in order to be able to disrupt that signal. You have to block it. Like you would block a laser at your garage door. If you break that beam, the garage door doesn't come down. But if you just stand on top of it, the garage door still comes down. And so alignment is very important. And from space, the alignment gets a lot more difficult. You have to be almost directly over top of something. The other thing that space has is by the time their signal gets to earth, it's pretty quiet, which is why GPS is so easy to interfere with. It's a very, very quiet signal by the time it gets to your car or your airplane. It looks like from what I've read most of the space based stuff is actually going kinetic. Star Wars. Well, again, we'll stick with the air-based stuff. That is the point of the show being military aviation and your experiences as well. Now, in the Priler or the Grower, what are some, I don't know what else to call them, but victims of electronic attack. In other words, if I'm out there doing a pure air-to-air mission, is there a value added if you're behind me, let's say, when jamming the enemy aircraft perhaps? Absolutely. There's value in jamming, not only the enemy aircraft, but those controlling stations, be they ground or air controllers. The whole goal of jamming is to disrupt the kill chain. You got your fine-fixed track and target. So if I can delay finding the protected entities, what we would call somebody that I'm jamming to protect. If I can delay that being found, if I can delay maneuvers from threat aircraft out there, if I can delay their decision-making as to whether or not they can shoot, then that's going to provide our side and advantage. So yeah, those ground-based threats or those ground-based controllers, if I can disrupt their communications and their radars, that's going to make their job harder and it's going to put the onus on finding our air guys solely on the guys in the cockpit and relying on their training and their radars. And then if I can throw some jamming into their radars, they may not see our guys until it's too late. But as you alluded earlier, alignment gets very challenging. Yes. Because if now there are the enemy and the friendly fighters going after each other, you have to be in essentially the line that those two groups scribe otherwise it may not be as effective. So you're bread and butter really, right, is against ground-based surface-to-air type threats or detection, etc. Is that fair to say? That is correct. Especially with the current pods that the grower carries, the ALQ99 pods, same ones that were on the prowler. They're transitioning to the NGJ and we can talk about that a little bit later, the next generation jammer. But the way that they are configured and built, they point down. So it's a lot more effective on the ground. All right. So just to give everyone a frame of reference for this, let's walk through a practical example. Suppose we have a strike package, training, combat, whatever you want. But I'm most familiar with training like Ben Fallon. You probably did a lot of that as well. So we've got a large strike package. There could be fighters, strike fighters, dedicated attackers, whatever. But you're always going to have the EA package out there, maybe more than one element of it. And so let's suppose today we've got EA, TNG, growlers. They're supporting a strike against a robustly defended target. What are some considerations in this whole scenario? Let's just start the beginning. I mean, the very first thing we do is meet the day before in plan. Right. And the first thing you're going to do is understand the target area. So once you know where the strike package is going to go, then you're going to start looking at the radar's in the area. So first of all, what are the Sam threats that are out there? What are the radar's starting from out to in? What it's going to see us first? What's our early warning radar? What are the targeting radars? And then finally, what are the fire control radars on the actual systems that we're going to be concerned about? Like I mentioned with the air to air stuff, you would expect that your strike package is going to be intercepted by aircraft first. What are they going to use to control those aircraft? What are they going to use to build their picture to pass that information? So I take a look at those threats because what that threat is going to do is it's going to drive us to put the correct pods on the aircraft. So I mentioned the ALQ99 pods. Each one of those pods carries two transmitters. And we can reconfigure the transmitters inside of each pod, but it's like ordinance. They only cover certain frequency range. And so we have to make sure that we have the right transmitters for the threats that are out there. Once we understand what's out there, we prioritize it. We're going to attempt to influence the strike route. We're going to take a look at terrain. We're going to take a look at the angles, you know, so the guys with the targeting pods are going to tell us what angles going to work best for the time of day. And we're going to try to influence them to go through an area that provides either the least exposure to threat or drives them, if they have to go through threat rings, drives them through the threat rings that we're going to have the most impact on. Obviously, we're going to be more capable against some radars than other radars. And so we're going to try to get you to a place where we can provide you the most benefit. So now we've built the pods up. We've influenced the package there. We now know the route. What we're going to do at that point is we're going to start looking at prioritizing and prioritizing our timing and our positioning behind the strike package. So you talked about alignment before. If you think of a radar signal as a cone, I want to be inside that cone preferably with the protected entity between me and the radar on the ground. Now, if I am below above that cone off to the side, I'm going to have some effectiveness perhaps, but not as much as I would if I was directly in that cone. You think about radar as noise, it goes out, bounces off and comes back. My goal is to be louder than that noise that comes back. And I'm going to be loudest if I'm right in line with the noise that's bouncing back off of the strike package. So I'll start building my alignment positioning and timing to ensure that I provide the best possible coverage for the strike package that's going in there. And I start talking about timing, I'm thinking both in terms of when I'm pushing relative to the strike package, when I'm bringing the jammer zone, because if we are far enough away, they're not going to see us if we're beyond their radar horizon. Once I bring the jammer zone, now they're going to start looking at the direction. That's it. Here we come. That is exactly right. Look here. And so if I do it too early, then I highlight where we're coming from. If I do it too late, then they may already have a really good asmeth that they can start sending fighters or missiles down. So I've got to build that timing into it. And then like I mentioned, it's transmitters are kind of like ordinance. I only have so much with me at any given time. I'm going to have to prioritize what I'm using it on. If I'm beyond the early warning radars now, we're inside of the early warning radars. We assume that they've seen us. Then the next thing I'm going to do is start transitioning to the next type of radar on down the line. Okay. So we talk a lot about radar. When you think of the electromagnetic spectrum, there's a lot more than just the bands, if you will, that are used in radar. Obviously there's visual light. Yes. And you could in fact have coastal observers. They're out there. And we're not going to do much against them. I presume our tactic for those would be trying to jam their comms. Okay. If you think of VHF, UHF, those are line of sight. And again, alignment is going to be important. So we're going to try to get as loud as possible in terms of our noise to try and block those things out. Definitely one of the things that we factor in hitting the comms part first. Got the coastal observers. Okay. Now we're shift into the radars. Now we're shift into the actual threat missiles. Okay. And then kind of reversing it on our way back out to make sure that trailing shots are held off or any launches that have happened for fighters and things like that. What about the infrared portion of the electromagnetic spectrum? Is there anything we're doing there necessarily? Not that we're doing in the growl or so. Yeah. The things with the electro optical, that's something that is not going to be something that we're going to be able to help with. However, talking about that kill chain, if I can force it, if you think of the early warning radars as binoculars, if I could take away your binoculars, now you're going to have to search through a telescope. If I could take away your telescope and now you're down to fire control radars, now you're searching through a soda straw. They are necessarily very thin beams because they want to track movement, very, very closely so that they can guide a missile in there. Obviously, if you're searching the entire sky with a soda straw, it's gonna be very difficult to find. But if I can then take away your soda straw too, and now you're just searching with your eyes, it's not gonna leave you a lot of time because you're not gonna have much range, and an aircraft flying pretty fast, you're gonna have to make a decision, you're gonna have to try and guide it in visually, which is gonna be very difficult. - Right, so as you said at the beginning, the idea is you're disrupting their SOP in a sense, right? - Yes. - If they say, "Hey, everyone, here's what we're gonna do, we're gonna have people out of the coast with binoculars, and they're gonna look for contrails," or maybe even just with passive sensors to listen for either our radar or our comms or whatever, and then they'll pass that back to our early warning radars, which will have a big band or that big cone that you talked about that's searching, and then once they pick something up, they can hand it off to something a little more accurate or specific maybe, and then when it comes time to employ something else. If that's their modus operandi, then we can jump in there and say, "Oh, well now you don't have this," or "Now that's degraded," or "This is denied," or something along those lines, and that can buy us time, effectively, or options, or maybe by the time they get it figured out, we're gone. - That's correct, yeah. We would call that entire system an i-adge, an integrated air defense system. So that's everything that is going into the defense decision-making process. And if we can just delay a decision, then we're gonna buy time and hopefully make their problem harder. - So proximity to the protected assets is important, right? In other words, you guys can't just be 500 miles behind us, and of course we wanna be careful of getting too specific with anything here, but you don't wanna necessarily be right in with us either, although it may depend on the threat. And then if we go in from one direction, but go out another, sometimes it's too hard for the folks that were with us to go in to get there to help us on the way out. So we might have what other elements down there. - That's right, and we would try to fly with as many as we could in order to want it helps our alignment. So the more that we have spaced out a little bit, we're hoping to solve our alignment problem. If we have an ingress and an egress jammer, yeah, we're gonna defend against those trailing shots. We're gonna defend folks on the way out. And from the more axes that we can provide those effects, again, the harder the problem is gonna be. And if you've ever seen it on a radar, it can look like snow on a TV. It can look like false targets again. So now, what am I shooting at? I don't know what I'm gonna shoot at. Maybe they waste missiles shooting at things that aren't there or maybe they just don't shoot because I don't know what I'm shooting at and I don't wanna get in trouble for wasting a missile. So these are all the things that are going into our thought process to try and delay their thought process to enable guys to get weapons on targets. - And just a quick aside on that, having been a foul in a couple of times in you were as well, for those who aren't maybe initiated, that is why airwings go to foul in together for a month. And I presume it's the same in the Air Force. I don't know if it's red flag or something else, but Fallon is equipped with different real world and simulated sensors where we can actually assess how well it went. So when 40 airplanes, let's say of an airwing go out and do a strike and they all come back to the theater afterwards to debrief, there can be actual video that the folks on the ground can play to say here is how effective it was or here is how your alignment was. So we can get actual feedback on how we're doing. - That's exactly right. And you can get the SAM operators, whether they're simulated or real, they're in Fallon to operate on a specific doctrine and they can then report back. I wouldn't have gotten a shot off or I still got a shot off because at this range, at this target, but when you see it on video, you can really judge how effective you're planning and your execution was. And in reality, a place like Fallon, Red Flag, even up at Mountain Home in Idaho, for the Air Force Base there. Those are some of the few places that we can actually go out and do this. People get freaked out by GMing. And so we have limitations on where we can do it. So that's really good training for us to see, for our maintainers to see, because this is where we groom our pods to make them more effective groom our transmitters. But yeah, really important for the strike package to see, 'cause you see, you know, with the prowlers, you get the Fed kids over in the corner and they're doing their magic and sprinkling pixie dust on the plan. But when you come back and you see, we flew through all of these threats, we flew against, all of these aircraft and they didn't even get a shot off and then you could throw up the radar screen and see, wow, yeah, that was legit. It really provides a lot of credibility and really enhances that air wing camaraderie. - Well, that's absolutely true. But I think it's also worth saying that a lot like Adivisary Fighter Palette who are maybe as good as ever. If you can beat one of them, you could probably beat just about anyone. The folks that are running these systems out in Fallon and these different ranges are probably as good as anyone in the world. - It's all they do, all day long. - And they've seen it month after month. - And if you live in Central Nevada, there's not much else to do, but work a radar site. So awesome. All right, so we're out there on this noional strike from before and we don't have to get into obviously specific tactics, but as far as for something on the ground, what type of EA, if you will, are you gonna throw at it or does it depend on the system or what we want to do that day? I mean, aren't there different techniques effectively? There are, and it definitely depends on the system. Like I mentioned, it's a cat and mouse game. Everything's constantly iterating. And when we come up with a solution, they come up with a counter and then we have to evolve our solution. And so we're gonna have to take a look at what the latest intel is. What are these systems operating on? How do they operate? Are we going to be effective if we just throw noise at them? Are we gonna be effective if we try to introduce false targets? If we try to throw speed problems at them, range problems, asmeth problems, all of these types of different techniques that we're gonna try to do, but it's all gonna be based on what the threat is. And it's not necessarily just, this is a newer threat, this is an older threat, 'cause software, most of it is driven by software and software, I say it, but I'm not a coder, so but software's relatively easy to change, but easier than hardware. And so as these things iterate, then the intel is going to have to feed us. Luckily, we have a huge support staff that looks at what we capture in the airplane from our ES systems, breaks it down, analyzes it, looks for those changes and how the radar is operating, and then goes into our libraries and updates how our transmitters are going to, or how our system is going to use those transmitters to try and counter that. - Wow, so it's a learning process all the time. - Constantly. - Wow, all right. So as far as methods go, you said earlier about the two of us are sitting here talking a barrage noise type jamming might be if someone suddenly walked in with a leaf blower, and we don't change the tone of our voice, then I probably won't be able to hear you anymore, even though the signal hasn't changed, but the noise has changed, right? - Right. - So that's one style. And is alignment as big a deal on that? I mean, if the leaf blower were behind you, might not actually be as good as if you were sitting here right next to my ear. - That's correct, and alignment is going to be an issue there. If you think of an early warning radar, they're generally 360 degree libraries, so it's something that spins when you're driving past the airport. But if you are behind it, you're not going to be quite as effective as if you are in front of it with the protected entity between you and that radar. Off to the sides, gonna be even less effective. Just by the way that RF kind of bleeds over, we call those side lobes and backlobes, and you generally have a little bit more effectiveness and backlobes than side lobes, but obviously right in the main beam is where you're gonna be effective. So if a leaf blower is standing between you and me, we're not gonna be able to hear anything off to the side, we may be able to hear a little bit more of that, and that's why alignment is really the critical characteristic in how we plan what we're gonna go after. - And if it's off to the side in that example, one thing I can do is either increase the volume of my voice to get what we call burn through, right? Or I get closer to you. - That's right, wait for you to get closer to me effectively. - Right, and burn through is gonna be a product of both power and distance, so if you don't change it, once I get closer, you're gonna be able to hear me, and burn through is one of the things that we're definitely looking at in terms of switching between targets. Once we know that a protected entity is at burn through, it does just no good to continue jamming that. Let's find something else that we can jam to be a little bit more effective for the next set. - Okay, so that's noise. There's also something with deception, right? So I can take the signal, you give me a crept it and send it back effectively. - That's right. You hear a lot about the derfum jamming. It became kind of the new hotness in the early 2000s, digital radio frequency modulation. Yeah, and I think of it as Tivo, you know, you can pause live TV and then play it back. You pause a radio signal, you catch a radar signal, you hold it for some length of time, maybe you modify it just a little bit, and as you retransmit it on that same frequency, the radar that's receiving it, thinks it's the signal that it's sent out, that radar then does the calculations based on when it's sent the signal out, when it returned it, it can calculate how far it is, how far did that travel, therefore how far away is my target? And then as it compares it to other ones around it, it can do speed calculations, it'll do angular calculations. So if I can manipulate that and make the radar think something else is happening, either in speed or in range, then that radar is going to start tracking that. And that's what I wanted to do. I wanted to track something that isn't there, or at least induce some doubt as to what's actually going on. - So my listeners know I'm famous for awful analogies and I'm sitting here listening and I'm trying to think of one. So let's try this. Suppose I'm at the tennis court, but I have no one to play with and you know how they always have that wall. - Right. - And I've got my racket in my ball and I want to bounce it off the wall and it's going to come back to me normally. - Yes. - And I would expect after doing this for a while, based on physics, that if I hit it a certain way, it's going to come back a certain way. Now imagine the wall is some sort of. of evil system that can like change physics a little bit, either send it back faster or off to the side or with a little spin. Is that essentially what's going on? In other words, the ball's coming back like I expected, but suddenly something's different about it. Yeah, that's a great analogy, or you hit a crack and it kind of shoots off to the side, or anything that changes what you expect to happen there. Now, the reason it is more effective against modern systems is because modern systems will constantly change their frequency in some way. What it can do by that is, as the jamming comes in, if it doesn't match what it's expecting to see, then it can ignore that jamming. That's the ECC on the talked about before, electronic counter countermeasures. I'm just countering my countermeasures. And so if I can make the radar think that the false signal I'm sending it is the one that it expected to see, then it goes into the processor and becomes another piece of data that it has to sort through. Yeah, that's it. All right, that's pretty crazy. So I've got some of my own questions and I've got some listener questions I want to hand off to you here. So let's start with this one. So I actually thought the Air Force was out of the EA business and then you mentioned the EC130 earlier, but they used to have tactical, right? And then for a while they got out of that business and prowlers and were over helping, and then I assume growlers are helping now. But what is the Air Force doing in the Marine Corps? Getting out of this business to you, right? The Air Force and the Marine Corps are out of the tactical electronic attack business now. It's all Navy. And the Air Force used to have the EF111, the Raven, and they got rid of that. Why they did that? I can't speak to it directly, but from what I've heard and what I can assess when you're trying to spend a boatload of money or an airport load of money in the Air Force's case on stealth, it's hard to make an argument that you need both stealth and jamming in support of that stealth. However, F117 getting shot down a Kosovo, it's not obviously foolproof. That's why they've gotten out of that business. The EC130 provides them a lot of capabilities, definitely in support of spec ops and things like that. Yeah, and the Marines, again, can't speak specifically to what their decision was, but they obviously have gone all in on F35 and have declined the Super Hornet. And the F35 has some capabilities, but again, I assess not being fully up to speed on what they can do, mostly self-protect with a little bit of probably bleed over. But if you've gone to that sort of fifth generation stealth aircraft, it becomes difficult to make a case for jamming. Well, and I don't know the politics behind why the Marine Corps didn't buy the Super Hornet, but they didn't. And my guess is they are low to buy the growler because that would be a foot in the door for, or if there was some agenda for why they didn't want the rhino because at that point, it's more or less, I think the same airplane, but we can talk about that. Yeah, can we sure? Is that the reason then why, as a CO, you said you were afforded deployed squadron? So was that, were you were doing, were you going out and supporting Marines or Air Force or what were you doing? Yeah, it's exactly right. So as the prowler, growler transitioning was coming along, the Navy was going to get out of the land-based business. So about the time I started flying the late 90s, early 2000s, the Navy had gotten into the land-based prowler mission. The Iraq and Afghanistan being obviously very land-based missions were driving a need for having electronic attack, mostly against IEDs. So the IEDs that are being detonated by cell phones or by key fobs and garage door openers, there's vulnerability there. And so these things became important. The Navy was going to go away from that. They were, everything was going to be carrier-based. So I think it was sometime in the 2007 and nine-time frame when I was department head, General Petraeus put a memo up to believe the secretary defense and said, this is a capability that we cannot afford to not have anymore. The Navy then in order to buy more growlers and support this mission, I believe a deal was struck where three of the first four growler transition squadrons were going to be land-based in order to provide that air force, rain and army support. My squadron was the first squadron I got there after that. Right as they finished up the transition, we were land-based squadron. The second squadron went to see in order to verify that everything on an aircraft carrier was going to work to support it. And then the next two squadrons became land-based squadrons as well. We deployed to Masawa in northern Japan and we flew exercises with the Air Force, the Japanese Air Self-Defense Force, the Australians, the Koreans, and utilized that capability with them from both radar and communications perspective. What time of year were you up there? We got there in August, which is miserable hot and humid. None of the lodging had air conditioning. It was absolutely awful. We left in February, when it was freezing cold. We left in February, it was seven feet of snow, and we couldn't fly because of the blinding snowstorms and the divert field wouldn't plow. We had no diverts, and it was the extremes. The in-between parts, though, in Korea, Guam, and Australia were fantastic. Sure. I assumed it was beautiful because I've seen some pictures and it looked like the fallen area if you go west over to Lake Tahoe. The only time I went up there was for the ice festival in February, which was really cool. We didn't make it up there to that. We actually left in January, but it was, yeah, the snow is unbelievable. That's crazy. All right, shifting gears a little bit. How do we handle EA from our adversaries on us? Is that something you guys are involved with at all, is in VAKU community? Not necessarily in VAKU community because we're looking at projecting out, but understanding what they are trying to do to our air-air radars, for example, and making sure that we act as smis, jamming smis for the subject matter experts for the air wing, for the ships. I'm concerned about right now as jamming of my radars on the ship, and how is that going to impact my ability to self-defense? Since we train to that, we train to one, recognize it. So if an operator hasn't seen it, may not know what they're looking at, may think there's a problem with the radar or the display itself. So we've got to train to it to understand what we're looking at, and then we have to train to how we're going to adjust frequencies, or are we going to adjust gains? Are we going to move positioning? Because the jamming can be very, very localized. So if we can move out of the bandwidth or out of the cone, then we're going to provide ourselves a little bit more capability there. So it's a training and recognition aspect. Awesome. All right, so I have a question from listener Robert Collin who asks, "Pralars had a crew of four, Pilot plus three e-wows, although I think they were ECMOs right?" ECMOs, electronic countermeasures. "Gralars have that on introduction. What happened to all the extra ECMOs?" The community started to downsize. So as we were picking department heads, you know, at each one of the wickets, you start to downsize. You start to downsize in the session, you start to downsize in promotions and selection boards. But at the end, what you saw were the few prowler squadrons that were left were getting the prowlers. So they had more airplanes. They were getting the air crew. So they turned out to be fairly big squadrons in order to see how things were going to play out with some of the folks. But it was definitely a planned and phased transition in terms of number of people. And unfortunately, it's a tough game and some people didn't make the cut also, which is a shame. Well, and that's the follow-up question we have here from Philip Novak, who told me, by the way, he lost his cousin in a 1998 prowler mishap. He says, "How did they go from three ECMOs when they divided their duties in that one to one, effectively in the growler?" And specifically, his question is, let's start with this. In the prowler, did each seat have a different role? The two back seats had the same role. Okay. The ECMO in the front seat, in the front right seat, that seat was known as ECMO-1. Okay. That ECMO was responsible for communications, navigation, and harm. The two in the back were responsible for ES and EA. And both seats in the back were exactly the same. And so it was really just kind of a crew handshake on who was going to be responsible for listening and identifying signals, locating them, and who was going to be responsible for doing the jamming. Okay. The pilot in the prowler had zero mission display. Must drive her. He had all that's right. He had all of the flight information. The guys in the back seat only had altitude and airspeed. The guy in the front right seat had to kind of lean over and look at the instruments just to know altitude and airspeed. So ergonomically, it was a mess. So how do we do it with two instead of four? Yeah. What toured the end of the time that the prowler was flying, technology had grown. So it started out with two people in the back seat as leaders had told me when I was very junior because the two guys in the back seat would go out there with reams of paper and have to manually input everything of little keyboards back there. So as technology came, as technology grew and they were able to upgrade it, it got to the point that we would walk to the airplanes with these big metal discs that we would load into the airplane and that then had. So all the work was being done in mission planning. By the time I left the prowler and same thing in the growler, we're down to PCM CIA cards, which are little credit card sized things. So the technology enabled more mission planning, which enabled you to reduce the workload and the guys in the back. By the time the prowler was done flying for the most part, you could fly a prowler with two people except for the fact that a lot of the navigation and definitely the harm stuff was on the far side of the cockpit for the pilot. And he couldn't physically reach it. So ECMO one at that point was doing comms, nav and harm simply because the pilot couldn't reach it. Technologically speaking though, they could could do the mission. So as you go to the growler, and you really upgrade the technology, and you really upgrade the user interface, you integrate the pilot into it. So the pilot is now doing a lot of the mission stuff, and that's where we, as an early adopter squadron, had to figure out what the proper true coordination was. What is the pilot gonna focus on? What's the EWO gonna focus on? And as we work that out, once you have two people with the technology enabling them to just use it instead of manipulated in the airplane, and then the technology of the airplane makes the displays a lot more user-friendly, two people becomes actually way more effective than four people. Yeah, because the crew coordination is always a big hurdle, a lot of times, of just interacting with the different people. Yeah. All right, well, that's interesting. And I think that's partly why a growler pilot, or EWO for that matter, is not necessarily a super hornet pilot, even though it's basically, and again, we're not gonna talk specifics on those two airplanes, we'll come back to those, hopefully, on another episode. But I mean, for all purposes, growler is a F frame, right? Yeah. Then they put the wingtip pods on, they put some different antenna, they plummet differently. I know the displays are different, but it's based on the F. But it doesn't, the mission's not the same, and as we have a question coming up, it doesn't fly the same either. Right. And from my early days of Fallon, when we were, this kind of was in the nascent development stage, what I thought was gonna happen, and I don't know if this happened or not, was that every aircraft coming off of the Boeing line was gonna be plumbed for growler, it's like 500 extra pounds of wiring or something throughout it, and then you could say between a deployment of growler lands heavy, because it's got those pods underneath each one weighs a thousand pounds. So if a rhino takes off and drops its bombs and comes back in lands, it's a lot lighter than a growler that comes back in lands with 3,000 pounds every single time. So in order to kind of spread that stress out across the fleet, one of the ideas was let's make them all growler insides, and then between deployments, we can shift all the stuff around and kind of spread that out. I don't know if that ever happened or not, but I thought that was a good idea. Yeah, interesting. Okay, and so that is the next question I have here from Jackson Reims, who works on growler wingtip arrays and power supplies, you see? - Nice. He's curious how the antennas on the wingtips, the extra body antennas, and the jamming pods affect maneuvering performance compared to a super hornet, and you said earlier, you had a chance to ride in the back of the F, but I'm gonna take a stab at this because again, you put all those pods on there, and this thing's gonna wallow around a bit. But now when you're deployed, will you always have what, three pods or five pods, how many pods are you gonna have? - Generally carry three pods. On the aircraft, so you have room for fuel tanks, so you have room for harm. - Yeah, okay. So is a three-potted growler going to fly like a, let's say, three-wet rhino? - It is. It's gonna perform similarly, although the pods are 1,000 pounds versus 2,000 pound drop tanks on the rhino. But yeah, it's sluggish. The wingtips and the antenna that kind of ring the aircraft, they're flush, they don't make much of a difference. It's really the pylons, just like in a rhino with the canton, the pylons, and those 1,000 pound barn doors that are out there that affect the performance. - Yeah, you're not burning the fuel out of them so that they're empty at the end, okay? - That's correct. Fair enough. Joe Kunsler asks, "How did EA go from radars for fellow planes to jamming radios and IEDs in support of the boots on the ground?" You kind of touched on this already, but someone along the way said, "Hey, wait a minute, we're losing a lot of soldiers to these remote controlled devices. We have things that can jam, and someone figured out it could be done, huh?" - Exactly, yeah. And I assume this is Proler Joe up in WIDB Island, who I know is so good. - You wanted to ask you about FCLPs, but I'll stay out of that one for sure. - Yeah, Afghanistan, you think about Afghanistan, I think they had maybe some old Russian Sam or something, and that was destroyed on night one. Proler's were flying and providing communications, jamming, support, and things like that, where there were no radar threats. But yeah, the IEDs started becoming the primary threat over there, and once you realize that the IEDs are operating via RF, and that the frequency spectrum allows us to have an impact on that, it became a primary mission. And a lot of time and energy was spent doing this, and a lot of Proler guys going on individual augmentee assignments to ground units in order to advise them on how to request it, what they needed to specifically ask for, especially in terms of routes. And then we had to spend a lot of time as tactics guys and as aviators, figuring out how we were gonna fly our profiles, how far out do we need to be? How far out is too far? What can we do? We detonate it before they get there or can we prevent detonation? And what's the right answer? And a lot of it again depends on the threat. - Yeah. David Swafford asks, can a jamming pod operate at maximum capacity in steady state or will thermal loading factor into how the EA can be deployed? And again, if we wanna steer away from sensitive subjects, I don't know if this is one of those or not, but is there a limitation for you guys? And obviously you wanna tailor it to what we're seeing out there, but is time also an issue? - It is, and first of all, the AOQ 99 provides its own power. So it's got a propeller on the front for a Ram Air turbine. As it goes through the air, that propeller spins and that's what provides the electricity. So it doesn't use any of the aircraft generator electricity, provides all its own power, and then it's also got air access. - That's a cool thing. - This is cool, that's all it is. It's cold air, flying around it and flying through it. And if you look at the underside of a jamming pod of an AOQ 99 pod, we call it the canoe. It's a fiberglass canoe, first of all, so it lets the RF energy out, but it also just allows air to flow through there. - All right, a GVO says, "When or how does the EA community learn their adversaries have technology capable of defeating or overcoming theirs? Is it only during a conflict?" And again, I think you could have touched on this before, as far as we can get feedback from how we're doing, not just in training, but in combat. - Absolutely, Intel, of course, is a big part of this. So everybody's watching everybody all the time, which affects the way that we operate, but as we gather Intel from watching other people's exercises, we can kind of build this library up. The other thing that we're gonna do is every time we're flying around, especially in the growl, or which has a much, much better ES suite in terms of frequency discrimination and location data, it's just sucking in all this information at building up a library. And we can come back and analyze that and we can send that back to the experts who will look at it and look for those little changes and then make adjustments in how our jamming techniques are going after those things. However, things that they don't wanna show us, they wanna hold their cards close to the vest, and so I expect if conflict happens, we're gonna be surprised by a lot of stuff. And there are gonna be a lot of people back home that are gonna be pouring over this data, looking to find those changes in their capabilities. - Is there a whole office dedicated to this, like in China Lake or the Pentagon or somewhere? - There are multiple offices, guys to build the libraries, guys the code, the stuff that goes into the airplane. There are some smart guys at Johns Hopkins that take a look at this stuff. There were a few folks that will know as the experts in this and we used to say, let's make sure they fly on different aircraft if they're coming out here to we'd be out into brief thoughts. We don't want these guys going down. - Well, they probably work in buildings with no windows and have to go through access points 'cause this is again cutting edge stuff. - Unusually close to Fort Mead. - Yeah, there you go. Christopher Franklin asked, what measures are taken to reduce radiation risk for pilots and ground crew on both platforms? Are there any differences or improvements with the growler as compared to the prowler? And before you answer that many, 'cause I think it's related to these other two questions I have, one is from Tom Little who wants to know why the difference between the prowler and the growler canopies, how it looks. And then we have a phone call about this too. So let's give that a listen. - Jello, this is Dex from Lodai, California. B52H, check six, hey, the EA6B prowler had that goldest tint to the canopies, the Feridate tint, I think that we can call it. And when I look at the EA10G growler, I'm not seeing that. Is there a reason why the prowler who has the same mission, both less crew, does not have that golden Feridate tint? That's a question of the day. All right, I know. - All right, Minnie, so let's start with the easy one. I'm guessing there's not a lot of threat to the guys on the ground, 'cause you're not transmitting usually when the aircraft is on the ground. - Correct. - And if you are transmitting at an enemy system that's on the ground, well, if the people next to it are caught up in that, I guess that's not a huge concern, if there are combatants. But what about the folks in the airplane, and what about the canopies? - Let's start with the ground folks. Again, yeah, we're not jamming on the ground. And as we go through our bit checks and making sure that everything's working correctly, there's all internal type stuff, same thing with the radar, and then we put the radar in silence as we start taxing out. For those folks that are on the ground, 'cause we talked about those great folks that live in Fallon and work the radar as far as, by the time the power gets to them, they're getting more radiation from the Nevada sunlight than they are from us. So not a concern for those guys. I'm worried about their computers. So in the air, the gold canopy, the prowler had a gold canopy. It was lined in kind of a gold foil. And that was to prevent the radiation from getting in and doing too much damage to the air crew in there. There's an old joke that prowler guys have lots of daughters out there. I have a son, so maybe I didn't fly enough, perhaps. But then as you see in the growler, you don't see that, but it's integrated into it in a different way. I think the gold canopy was probably just kind of a makeshift solution initially. And then, like, all right, let's get that fixed throughout the fleet. And then now you have the canopies that are just far more integrated, thinking about it from the beginning. But the other thing that you have to your advantage in the airplane is the fact that like I said, the transmissions are generally going out and down. So you have masking from the airplane, which is helping to prevent a lot of that stuff from getting up into the cockpit area. Masking is something that we're concerned about in our positioning as well. Because if I'm trying to jam off the right wing with a transmitter on my left wing, the aircraft is blocking a lot of that energy. And so that's which providing that capability or that defense for the air crew themselves. Yeah. I just on a side note, I have seen some headlines lately. I forget who's pursuing it. I think maybe the wounded warrior folks have someone looking into this. But something about fighter pilots and I assume they mean tactical air pilots, having higher cancer rates and looking into that. But is that a concern in the community? Is that ever come up as far as, "Hey, we're sitting right next to these pods, putting out all this RF energy as far as, you know, anecdotally, girls." But I don't know, is there any evidence to suggest in your experience you've been in the Navy a long time? Not that I've seen. I think it's an initial concern when everybody shows up right after flight school. Like, "Boot, I'm not going to get radiated here. I don't think that anybody, nothing that I've seen from that." With capabilities, though, he asked about the change in capabilities. I think that's an important question because the growler, it's not an incremental leap from the prowler. It is an exponential leap from the prowler. So you think about it from a speed and maneuverability standpoint. It's a rhino, essentially, so it's able to, you talked about being integrated in with the folks who are trying to protect. It's an option now. It wasn't an option in the prowler. We could be right in there. Now I know I've got alignment because I'm right with you. I can keep up. Data-length. Now the prowler started getting data-length toward the end of its life, but it's integrated into the growler. So I can really adjust my alignment because I can see you in my helmet. I can see where the protected entity is compared to where that thread is on the ground. So I can be more precise in my alignment. In the prowler, I had to listen to the strike lead say, "We're coming right 45 degrees. Our new ingress access is this." Now I've got a scramble and you do mental math, the drawout on my knee board. How am I going to maneuver the airplane to make sure I have this alignment on there? From that perspective, we're going to be a lot more effective. From an ES perspective with those antenna around the aircraft instead of just in the tail of the prowler, I'm going to get a lot more precise location data of where those threats are. That's going to enable me to fix my alignment. It's going to enable me to make better recommendations to the strike lead to avoid pop-up threats. And that's just great. I've got an air-dare radar with AMRAM. So I can defend myself, which may help when resources are limited. I don't need escorts perhaps, or maybe I just need one escort who can act as a wingman. The ability to defend ourselves enables us to drive a little bit closer, which is going to make our jamming more effective. And it's also going to enable us to stay on station a little bit longer in the prowler as soon as something pierced your bubble. You were running away. And that's a mission kill. Now those guys that are over the target don't have jamming. So I want to stay there as long as possible. And if I know that I can see that thing on radar and potentially shoot that threat and stay on station, that's going to provide a lot more benefit. From maintenance perspective, we talked about it essentially being a rhino. It's somewhere greater than 80% commonality. It's newer. It's going to work better than the prowler. It's going to be more reliable. But that maintenance commonality is huge from a supply and maintenance perspective on the aircraft carrier. AIMD can focus on a bunch of rhinos essentially, which is going to help your mission capable rates and keep those things fine. That makes sense. Ryan Shepard asks, how is it possible for an active jamming platform of any kind to operate without revealing its location? Yeah, you can't. Once you bring the jammers on, everybody knows you're out there. Yeah, look over here. But there's a benefit to that too, right? Perhaps I talked about the timing. Well, what if I send one off in a different direction and have him light up early? And now I can get everybody looking left when we're coming in from the right. The old rope a dope. There's a potential benefit to that. But really what happens is we become a very vulnerable asset because they can see where we are. They know that if they can get us to run away, that jamming is gone. It makes the blue forces more vulnerable. They could target us again trying to get a hard kill and then reduce that threat for the next strike. Yeah. Well, and to your point, knowing that it's hard to deny where we are, we can use that to our advantage. And like I said, in a faint. So we can have some aircraft that maybe just go over and launch some TOLD, right? Tactical air launch decoy, which is not just a piece of metal in the sky that can be detected, but sometimes they can have their own emissions and say, hey, look over here. And that way you can again make everyone look left when you're coming from the right. That's right. All right, James Pollett says, is it better to have dedicated electronic warfare aircraft or can any fighter be modified for electronic warfare by adding jamming pods and anti radiation missiles? And along the same lines, is it better to have entire squadrons dedicated to electronic warfare? Or should it be a mission that all fighter squadron are trained for? And before you answer many, I'm going to take that second one because no. It's hard enough to do everything we have to do in a VFA squadron. But you had talked about mixing foundations, if you will, of aircraft to spread out essentially the wear and tear on that. But what do you think to his point about maybe mixing it around in the air wing as far as either the air crew go or the squadrons? Any merit to that, you think? Yeah, I'm obviously biased, but I agree with you that there's enough going on in a super hornet that adding another mission set, especially one that's fairly complicated, would really just dilute the capabilities of someone in a squadron. So I think the single squadron is the way to go. Like I mentioned in terms of swapping the airplanes around. Yeah, if they're foundational, the same. That makes sense to do that. I don't think that you could pull it off inside of one squadron. Well, and again, the insides of the rhino and the growler are different. And we're going to get to that when we have a growler episode. But so it's not just a function of slap some pods on and go. You've got the wing tips that are different. You've got all the different capabilities. Well, what's the future for EA? I mean, we've talked about the cat mouse game that comes up a lot on the show of tactic counter tactic capability counter capability. You throughout the latest hotness being door fun, but is that still just the thing is figure out what the enemy's doing and how can we jam it essentially. Well, we've got to with limited resources. We've got to focus on how are we going to improve. And I don't know that we spend time or money trying to improve things that the enemy isn't doing yet, but you definitely want to stay ahead. Really what they're working on right now is looking to get clearance for the next generation jammer. Getting these old A.O.Q. 99 pods, although they've been updated and upgraded. It's time to get those moving on and get these new pods going. And they're working on that. A packs river. I don't know if they're testing them a China lake or not yet, but that's where it's going to go for the growler. I would think from an overall perspective, not just US, but adversary. If I was looking at changes to make, I would try to see what I could do about cyber about getting into someone's Wi-Fi. Now, or someone's Bluetooth network, if I can put something on my normal radiation energy, my normal frequencies that can have an impact on a computer, at least temporarily. So it's not a cyber attack, at least temporarily. Maybe that can again delay that kill chain. If I can introduce false targets or if I can make a processor over speed itself or something like that so that they can't make a decision. And it's certainly within the realm of the possible. It happens every day. So as you're driving your car, I'm driving around here. I'm listening to 91x. I can hear Bob Marley on the radio, but then if I look at the digital display in my car, it'll tell me that it's Weebie Jammin by Bob Marley. So I can see that, but that's a digital cyber inject into my car radio system. It just rides on top of those frequencies. And as my car gets it, it translates it and displays it to me. So it's already happening every day. It's happening in your car as you drive around. I would assess that that's probably where I would take it to see what I could do. If you think that an I add is going to be linked by wireless network or some sort of communication network like that. How can you disrupt that in much the same way? Maybe not even so overtly because let's say you were trying to jam my situational awareness and you sent a packet that I don't know you're there, but all of a sudden instead of saying it's Bob Marley, it says it's Van Halen. Absolutely. I get confused and I miss my turn off or something. I mean, yeah, weird analogy, but the point being is there's a lot of different ways to disrupt. Yes, absolutely. Well, that's the future of EA. What's the future for you? I mean, we're just going to start wrapping this up. But by the way, what is the USS Somerset? The USS Somerset is amphibious transport dock, LPD 25. We have a crew of 400 or so and we're going to go out to see with about 700 Marines on board. So it's a our job is to deliver Marines to the beach. We've gotten multiple levels in there in a well deck. We have a flight deck on there. So we're capable of launching H1's H60s MV22s 53s. Yeah, in fact, in June, I'm going to go get my swimfizz, react. I'm looking forward to trying to fly the V22s on deployment, which is fun. But I'm going to be in command here for what I suspect is the next year. Then I'm just waiting to find out about aircraft carrier command. Okay. And if all goes well, you will be selected to command a nuclear powered aircraft carrier. Yes. All right. That's correct. And then based on how that goes, we could see Admiral Dave Kurt someday theoretically. Yeah. That is laughable. All right. Well, fair enough. And you know the drill here. The last question on the show for you always is how did you earn your call sign? And I'm going to guess that many of me is maybe one of those like we had the guy buttercup who was like 63 and 220. Yeah. You stand about what? What, six two, so that's what I was going to tell everyone in podcasts. Lance, as they can't see me, there's one of those ironic call signs. Either that or that the jamming had shrunk me from six to two, five, five, but a short guy. And when I joined my first squad or VHK 138, the yellow jackets, they were deployed to Aviano in Italy for Operation Allied Force. And that was in the early part of 1999. They come back home and the second Austin Powers movie had been released while they were gone. So as everybody gets back, they go see the, the new Austin Powers movie and mini me sticks. But I like it. It's unique. I've only heard of one other person that has mini me as a call sign. It gets a chuckle from leaders. And I did once get in modest for a signing off an email to chairman of the joint chiefs general Dempsey. I was sending him an email as an update when I was working in the Pentagon. And I said, you know, very respectfully, mini me with my boss came down who I had no new pretty well. It worked with him a lot. He came down. He's like, you can't tell the chairman. You can't sign off with mini me. You're first a navigator. It was. He's a vice admiral now. So I won't throw him under the bus. Well, at least it's not one of those. Just when you hear it, you blush kind of call signs like some have been around there. All right. Well, that's cool, buddy. Thanks for talking about this. Was really amazing. And I learned a lot as I always do on the show. Now, before we wrap up, though, I want to tell the DCS players in the audience that this week were thrilled to be sponsored by thrust master who is celebrating 30 years of developing Flight Sim hardware, as well as the 10 year anniversary of the warthog stick. And then thrust master is expanding their combat sim ecosystem to allow you the gamer to pick the base and the stick. In fact, a couple of months ago, I made a review of the thrust master F 18 stick. I did that on a video. We adapted the F 18 stick to the warthog base. And you can find that video on our YouTube channel. If you fly the DCS F 16 module, they have an F 16 stick add on as well with more ecosystem additions to come and to help celebrate their 30th anniversary thrust master and the Fighter pilot podcast have teamed up to run a promotion, giving away a warthog stick and base to one lucky winner. Entry is free. And you can find the link in the show notes and on our various social media platforms. It will be talking more about our new partnership with thrust master in the episodes to come. Before we wrap up today, we want to recognize our new supporters that includes Patreon, Strike Leads, Jackson Reams, Peter Farmer, B.J. Kerwin, Matthew Edwards, and Robert Colin. We also have a new mission commander, Brock Creckleberg and a new Airbus Matt Sodorn. The views expressed in this presentation are the personal views of myself and my guest. And do not necessarily represent the position of the Department of Defense or its components. Many that was a lot of fun and hugely informative. Thanks for joining us today to explain electronic attack. I had a great time. Appreciate it. You're welcome. All right. And for the rest of you, thanks for joining us. We'll see you back here next time on the Fighter Pilot podcast. So long. You've been listening to the Fighter Pilot podcast brought to you by BBR productions. Got a question for the show send an email to questions at fighterpilotpodcast.com or leave a message on our listener line at 877 Mach 101. That's 877 622 4101. Be sure to check out our website at fighterpilotpodcast.com. You can also find us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube. For exclusive Fighter Pilot podcast content, check out our Patreon page. Please like, follow, and subscribe to the show and don't forget to share us with your network. Thanks for listening. Hey, everyone. Just a quick note before you go. Our friend and former guest Kevin Miller, well, he's back with another exciting book just in time to celebrate the 78th anniversary of the Battle of Midway tomorrow, June 4th, 2020. The silver waterfall is historical fiction, offering a glimpse into the lives of the American and Japanese sailors and airmen involved in this epic and pivotal naval battle. The book is available on Amazon. And if you purchase it through the shop page on our website, fighterpilotpodcast.com, it costs you nothing more, but it helps support your favorite show. Thanks.