Military seeing different applications, wider use of aerostats and airships.

• Author: Magnuson, Stew
• Position: Homeland Security News

* Just east of busy Interstate 95 at Aberdeen Proving Grounds in Maryland, a powerful radar attached to an aerostat scans the air and sea for threats.

On the U.S. border with Mexico near El Paso, Texas, a similar tethered system employs sensors looking for drug smugglers and illegal migrants.

Aerostats and airships are old ideas that are in vogue again in military and homeland security applications. Two programs that used aerostats for perimeter defense in Iraq and Afghanistan are making the transition to an Army program of record.

Meanwhile on Capitol Hill, House members have formed a bipartisan Cargo Airship Caucus to promote the technology's use in the transportation industry and military'.

Airships and aerostats have been around since the dawn of the aviation age. They were employed in both World Wars, mostly for intelligence, reconnaissance and surveillance.

"Traditionally, aerostats have been used for ISR. You throw a camera up there and you get a wider view and longer range," said Drew Shoemaker, director of the Washington office for Aeros, a small business based in Montebello, California, that develops aerostats and airships.

But the military has used them recently for any application that benefits from being at higher altitude such as communications relay, atmosphere testing and radio frequency jamming, he said.

Aerostats, as the term suggests, are tethered and remain in one place. The lines keeping them in one spot can also serve as communications and power links, as is the case with the joint land attack cruise missile defense elevated netted sensor system (JLENS) currently being deployed at Aberdeen Proving Grounds.

"Aerostats have unmatched persistence," said Doug Burgess, Raytheon's JLENS program director. "JLENS stays aloft for 30 days at a time before they have to come down for minor maintenance, and because there are two of them in an orbit, you can stagger the downtime, so you have radar coverage 365 days a year. And because JLENS' operators are on the ground, you don't have to worry about crew endurance or those type of issues."

Raytheon integrated the radar onto the aerostat, which is manufactured by TCOM L.P. of Columbia, Maryland.

JLENS is a strategic missile and air defense system and is not envisioned to change locations often, he said. Smaller aerostats over the last dozen years have been used in more tactical applications, particularly at forward operating bases (FOBs), Burgess noted.

Several vendors such as Aeros...