Army-Air Force spent $225 million per aircraft to peer 150 miles behind hostile borders
By Marcus Boone ·
People deep behind hostile borders were tracked from 150 miles away by operators who paired weapons and targets from a modified Boeing 707.
Under the forward fuselage of a modified Boeing 707-300 sits a "canoe shaped radome." It houses a 24-foot side-looking phased array antenna that allows the aircraft to see things the human eye cannot, across distances the human mind struggles to scale. According to a specifications page mirrored by the FAS Intelligence Resource Program, this system—the Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System, or Joint STARS—was designed to "locate, classify and track ground targets in all weather conditions."
"Look deep behind hostile borders"
The technical capacity of the E-8 is not merely about sight, but about the distance that sight can travel without the aircraft ever crossing a line on a map. The FAS mirror records a range of "more than 150 miles (250 km)." This distance allows the joint Army-Air Force program to "look deep behind hostile borders to detect and track ground movements in both forward and rear areas."
When a government describes a border as "hostile," the moral geography changes. The 150-mile gaze transforms from a defensive measure into a tool of intrusion. The record notes that these capabilities make the system effective for everything from "international treaty verification" to "impending military aggression." In the clinical language of the specifications, the act of peering into another sovereign state's interior is framed as a "contingency."
Document imagery from irp.fas.org From the files: irp.fas.org
The $225 Million Unit
The cost of this gaze is steep. The FAS document lists the unit cost of a Joint STARS aircraft at $225 million. For that price, the government acquired a modified Boeing 707-300 series aircraft powered by four JT3D engines, capable of reaching a service ceiling of 42,000 feet.
Maintaining this capability requires a massive human investment. A standard mission crew consists of 21 people, but for long-endurance flights—which can last up to 20 hours with air refueling—the crew swells to 34. Of those 34, only six are flight crew; the other 28 are operators. These operators are the translators, the people tasked with turning raw radar returns into actionable intelligence.
Document imagery from irp.fas.org From the files: irp.fas.org
17 Identical Workstations
Inside the aircraft, the operation is managed via "one navigation and self defense workstation" and "seventeen identical operator workstations." The list of functions for these stations reads like a manual for the total management of a landscape. The operators handle flight path planning, the generation of "cartographic and hypsographic map data," and the location of jammers.
But the most stark entry in the list of duties is the "pairing of weapons and targets."
This is where the surveillance ends and the strike begins. The E-8 does not just watch; it organizes the battlefield for the purpose of destruction. The radar operates in multiple modes—wide area surveillance, fixed target indication, and moving target indicator—to ensure that nothing on the ground remains anonymous. The "target classification" mode ensures that the shapes appearing on the operators' screens are assigned a category, a value, and eventually, a weapon.
This process is supported by a complex communications suite, including twelve encrypted UHF radios and a "Surveillance and control data link (SCDL)" for transmitting data to mobile ground stations. The system is designed to ensure that the image captured by the "canoe" under the belly is relayed instantly to those with the authority to act on it.
Public records indicate that the E-8 Joint STARS was retired in 2023 after decades of service. The FAS mirror, updated as recently as August 9, 2005, lists an inventory of 17 production aircraft. While the hardware has been phased out, the precedent of the 150-mile gaze remains.
Related files regarding the system's operation and potential legal challenges exist in other archives, including references to the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois in documents held by the NSArchive. The specifications provided by FAS tell us exactly what the E-8 could see and how much it cost, but they leave the actual targets of that 150-mile reach unnamed.