Reports that the Gorgon Stare pod set isn’t working properly are overblown, Air Combat Command chief Gen. William Fraser said Thursday. The pod set, meant to vastly multiply the sensor take from MQ-9 Reaper remotely piloted aircraft, is designed to collect wide-area surveillance imagery and “it is doing exactly that,” said Fraser Thursday in his speech at AFA’s Air Warfare Symposium and Technology Exposition in Orlando, Fla. He continued, “Yes, we identified some issues and some challenges in operational . . . evaluation. But now we have fixes in place and crews are being trained, and we do not expect any delay in getting this capability forward to the theater. In fact, we are on track to deploy it next month.” Fraser said he’s sure that “we’ll learn more about it and its capability as we employ it in theater,” and after airmen have a chance to exploit its unanticipated uses.
U.S. C-17s have now flown 104 loads of materiel out of Afghanistan as the retrograde continues, and U.S. Central Command plans to destroy more than 1,800 pieces of equipment. Between six and 12 percent of the entire retrograde process is complete since, CENTCOM said in a May 11 statement.