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thedrifter
03-19-03, 05:02 PM
March 19, 2003

Troops rely on Lisa to be their ‘eyes and ears’

By Gordon Lubold
Times staff writer



AT AN AIRBASE NEAR IRAQ — Few Marines know Lisa, but she’s got her eye on them. Lisa is dusty green truck sporting a $97 million radar system that in turn is linked to Patriot launchers sitting near the edge of this base.
If Lisa tells them that Saddam Hussein has hurled a ballistic missile this way, she’ll help soldiers working here in this Patriot battery kill the incoming missile.

“She’s our eyes and ears,” said Army Warrant Officer Travis Buffington, system maintainer for the Patriot battery, Delta 2nd Battalion, 1st Air Defense Artillery, part of the Army’s 11th Air Defense Artillery Brigade out of Fort Bliss, Texas.

Any ballistic missile Saddam might launch at U.S. troops here will be tracked by a number of radar systems. Lisa, named after Buffington’s wife, will be just one system. If she senses that Saddam has fired a Scud, for example, the radar system will tell an officer and two enlisted soldiers sitting in a truck nearby.

Depending on what they determine it is, either a computer would make a decision to hit the target, or the officer, a lieutenant, would begin a series of actions that would include punching a button the size of a half-dollar on which the word “engage” is printed.

“We’re going to fire our best capabilities for what is inbound,” said Buffington, who fought the first Persian Gulf War in a Patriot battery from the very same spot.

The reviews on the Patriot system were mixed when it was used in 1991. It was fired at Iraqi scud missiles, but it really only deflected them and was considered ineffective. Major software and hardware upgrades were made to that missile, called PAC-II.

The system being used for this war is all new — radar-guided and designed as a “hit-to-kill” weapon that should take any scud or other ballistic missile right out of the sky, officials said.

“This is not the same Patriot system you saw in the Gulf War,” said Army Capt. Tony Behrens, the 29-year-old commander of the Patriot battery here. “We have the best capabilities of the Patriot system, the hardware and the software.”

Two enlisted soldiers and the officer watch green scopes inside a mobile engagement control station parked near Lisa. They work in four-hour shifts, rotating with other crews who sleep in tents nearby. The work is hard and can be tense because so much depends on their job.

Buffington, from Jackson, Miss., is as fond of poker analogies as he is the Patriot anti-missile defense system he’s worked on since 1989. If he liked the Patriot then, he loves it now. This is one of the first times the new Patriot, the PAC-III, has been deployed. Buffington’s battery has a range of other missiles to use, the PAC-III being only one of them.

“The radar is like a poker player and the PAC-III is the highest card,” he said as the sun set over missile launchers angled to the sky and parked in a field behind him.

Sempers,

Roger