Radio Program Enables Speedy Personnel Recovery

HANSCOM AIR FORCE BASE, Mass. --- Officials of the Electronic Systems Center delivered the 20,000th Combat Survivor Evader Locator radio to operators in the fall of 2008, and now are on track to deliver an additional 20,000 to warfighters.>> Credited with saving many lives, CSELs have been in use in Iraq and in Afghanistan for several years.>> In 2007 and 2008, the joint program office staff managing the effort received a significant amount of war on terrorism supplemental funding to procure radios for U.S. Central Command theater operators.>> However, the program's history runs deep. Shortly after Capt. Scott O'Grady and his F-16 Fighting Falcon were shot down over Serbia in June 1995, Department of Defense officials accelerated the CSEL program. Captain O'Grady survived for six days on the ground in hostile territory, eating leaves, grass and ants, until he was finally rescued.>> Because the likelihood of rescue decreases exponentially with time, this incident could have ended in disaster, so U.S. officials set a course for reducing such possibilities in the future.>> "This program came about because of the lack of capability to quickly locate and positively identify a survivor," said Maj. Charles Leonard of the CSEL Joint Program Office at Hanscom Air Force Base. "The early capabilities in survival radios were almost exclusively dependent on line of sight, so unless the rescue forces were overhead and the rescuer was in direct communication with the downed personnel, it was often difficult to locate them.">> Improvement efforts centered on fully exploiting over-the-horizon communications and Global Positioning System technology, and "precision-code" GPS in particular," Major Leonard said. CSEL, in fact, was the first survival radio to use the precision code, which offers far greater security and accuracy than commercial GPS.