DECIMOMANNU (CAGLIARI) – The guardian angel stands on top of the clouds and watches so that no one gets hurt. Especially in Afghanistan and Iraq, when the night amplifies the threats: no one sees him but many owe their lives to his protection. After all, this is the mission of one of the Air Force’s most sophisticated instruments: the twin-engine C-27 Jedi. The name evokes the knights of Star Wars and indicates a complex acronym – Jamming and Electronic Defense Instrumentation – which essentially means “electronic warfare”, the most secret of contemporary challenges. A fight fought with electromagnetic waves, deciding the fate of battles without exploding a shot. In fact, in the hold of the plane there is a system capable of detecting, disturbing or blinding any frequency: they are called “attacks”, even if only pulses are fired.
The Italian Jedi have been in action for seven years, with an activity kept top secret. Every now and then on websites that display the routes of the skies one appears, always grappling with mysterious trajectories: it takes off from Erbil and makes circular turns on the mountains of Kurdistan. What does he do? Escort an expedition from the sky against ISIS shelters, accompanying Iraqi forces or those of the international coalition. Its apparatuses pick up the frequencies used by the jihadists and obstruct their transmissions to the point of blocking them: thus they prevent the militiamen from communicating, leaving them without the possibility of agreeing on the moves. Then in the critical points of the route, those where an ambush could be triggered, literally everything is “turned off”: if the terrorists tried to activate a device, using a radio or a mobile phone, they would find a useless remote control in their hand. In practice, electronic bombing robs them of their deadliest weapon.
We witnessed one of these operations in the Sardinian Salto di Quirra polygon, where the Jedi train to perfect the procedures in a scenario of mountains and gorges very similar to Iraq. At Decimomannu airport, the mission is carefully planned. A troop convoy must reach an isolated base and intelligence describes the route, reporting thirteen high-risk points, each marked with a code name. Portable surface-to-air missiles and heavy machine gunners have been sighted, so the plane will not have to descend below 5,000 meters. The pilot studies the weather conditions: “We are lucky, there will be a carpet of clouds just below us and it will make us totally invisible”.
There is a mixed crew on board. The aircraft are taken care of by the aviators of the 98th group of Pisa – the “Wolves” – while the specialists of the Restoge – the “Corvi” – manage the electronic warfare system. Time to fly to the coast and the “buzzer on” is triggered: the system is turned on to begin the search for frequencies. Eight enemies engage, which obviously alternate with the rest of the communications; for this it will be necessary to continue to trace only the opposing ones and to study every change. The pilots follow the instructions of the technicians, keeping the twin engine at a useful distance to “hit”. All aboard obey the requests coming from the camp, where an officer – in JTAC jargon – coordinates the advance of the convoy with “the guardian angel”: we speak only in English, as in expeditions abroad.
Moving along the dirt roads is tiring: at least two hours to travel thirty-five kilometers, a procession always full of unknowns. Depending on the situation, from the ground they choose the type of intervention. They ask to silence only some frequencies or disturb them all. Until the most delicate moment, when suspicious movements are noticed or there are critical traits, and then the “strike” starts: the impulses reset all communication, preventing the remote control of the explosive traps. On the screen, this invisible bombardment is transformed into histograms, reminiscent of the images of an old science fiction film. Waves of a darker and darker blue crash on the red line of the enemy frequency. It is an electronic tsunami: in a few moments it bends the opponent’s signal, then overwhelms it and breaks it. At the keyboard there are two officers, they select the targets, verify their nature and modulate the attack. Despite computers, there is a great deal of manual skills: “We prefer it to automatisms, it always allows you to have everything under control”.
For over an hour the convoy goes on unhindered. Then suddenly from the rocks they open fire on the trucks with rockets and machine guns. The activity on the plane becomes hectic. The pilots push the C-27J lower: getting closer to the ground, it will increase the power of the pulses. But also the dangers and for this they activate the self-defense screen, with radar sensors that spot any missiles and release explosive charges to deceive the infrared warheads. The simulation is highly realistic, even for the women and men of the Restoge who have conducted dozens of real missions: the joint polygon of the Salto di Quirra now manages to perfectly reproduce the situations experienced at the front. Orders overlap, the echo of the battle can be heard in the headphones, but everyone remains calm. There is a wounded man and a helicopter ambulance must be called, protecting him “electronically” as he lands in the valley.
Fifteen minutes of maximum tension. When silence returns, they take a break on the ground to put in place their weapons and vehicles. But first they ask to “play the wild card”: the Jedi obscures all hostile frequencies, except for a specific one. The terrorists are forced to use it and do not know that the intelligence is listening to it: an interpreter hears what they say and what they are preparing. They speak of a bomb placed a few kilometers ahead, where they hope to surprise the convoy already tried by the ambush. The plane lowers again and “turns off” the area, while the bomb squads defuse the bomb. It is the ultimate threat: the expedition can finish its journey smoothly.
In Afghanistan, the Jedi have made more than four hundred operations of this kind. The crew remembers the months of 2014 when the Italians handed over the outposts to the army of Kabul: they had to bring back long lines of trucks, very slow because they were full of equipment and forced to follow the most solid roads. “We landed, filled up, a fresh team got on and left for another six hours”. There have also been combined actions against radio links set up by the Taliban to broadcast from one valley to another. The C-27J located the antennas, a Predator drone focused on them and an Amx jet proceeded to destroy them with a laser-guided bomb.
In the Iraqi campaign against the Islamic State, the commitment is even more massive. 5200 hours of flight already. “Often even the Americans ask us to escort them, because they have very few such means”, comments an officer without hiding his pride. This is in fact a totally Italian instrument. The plane is produced by Leonardo and is considered “the custom-built transport aircraft”: it carries over 30 tons of cargo but has the agility of a fighter. Hardware and software were created by the Restoge military in Pratica di Mare, in one of the first laboratories created in the world for electronic warfare. Colonel Stefano Rigoni commands it, for years pilot of the Tornadoes that annihilate the anti-aircraft defenses: an activity in which the radar frequency archives prepared by Restoge are fundamental. “We were not concerned with building a system intended for the market, but only with obtaining the capabilities we needed”, explains General Alberto Rosso, Chief of Staff of the Air Force: “Being able to operate in the electromagnetic spectrum today is essential and we have excellence in this field. I would define it as artisanal, in the best sense of the term. We hope to implement the availability of the C-27J with new resources and improve it further: it is a unique instrument, with a low cost and great flexibility of use ” . In fact, it is modular: just remove the special instrumentation and in an hour the hold is ready for cargo flights.
Among the many tasks of the Jedi there is also a very particular one: to combine electronic warfare with psychological warfare. From the plane, a voice recorded in the broadcasts of a Taliban radio station can be inserted, replacing the sermons of hatred with a message of peace for the population. Or enter the phone call of an ISIS sniper, with phrases that make him understand that he has been unmasked. Words often more effective than any weapon.
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