Joint Force Harrier

by Adrian Orchard

  The Maverick air-to-surface missile, weighing about 600lb, is one of the Harrier’s primary weapons against moving targets. It’s a subsonic rocket of fairly old design, but it’s very good at what it does, and is equipped with either infrared or TV guidance systems.

  The heaviest weapons carried by the Harriers in Afghanistan are the 1,000lb bombs. And these can be hugely destructive. Dropped through a hangar roof to detonate inside, the shockwave from one of these monsters would blow all the walls out, leaving nothing much more than a crater twenty feet deep and thirty across. Thousand-pounders can be ‘dumb’ – completely unguided, though nowadays they are rarely used in this way because of their inherent inaccuracy – or laser-guided. They can be laser-guided in isolation or laser-guided with GPS, and are spectacularly flexible and very accurate weapons. We can ‘lase’ the target without knowing its geographical coordinates, just by aiming a targeting pod at the objective or, with the latest version of the Harrier, the GR9 – which is a genuine digital aircraft – the pilot can create a set of coordinates from his own targeting system. The system transfers the GPS coordinates into the bomb and, when the weapon is released, it will automatically be guided to impact the GPS coordinate point. However, if it subsequently detects laser energy it will alter its flight path to follow the laser beam, ensuring pinpoint accuracy and flexibility after release.

  The 1,000-pounder is the biggest weapon we use in Afghanistan. The Americans also use 2,000lb ‘stores’ there, but a bomb of this size is often too big to use – a sledgehammer to crack a nut. Bearing in mind the usual nature of the targets, it’s rarely called for.

  I set up the radios – the front one for talking to the JTAC and other control units, and the back for internal communication with my wing-man Squid; the airborne TACAN system that would tell me where my wing-man was in relation to my own aircraft; and dialled the last two digits of my callsign into the IFF (Identification Friend or Foe) transponder. ‘Recoil Four Two’ was ready to go.

  As I glanced across at Squid’s aircraft I was suddenly very conscious of his much greater experience in theatre. I knew the aircraft I was flying as well as any pilot, but what was waiting for me – and for all my pilots – beyond the blast walls and razor wire of Kandahar Airfield was entirely new to us. I just hoped that we’d have a few days to get accustomed to the area, to finding landmarks and reporting points, and to RT, radio-telephony, procedures, before we got too involved with our primary tasking – taking on the Taliban.

  That, it turned out, was a vain hope indeed.

  6

  Squid and I climbed up to medium altitude – each of us levelling at a different height for de-confliction purposes – as quickly as possible. Throughout our time in Afghanistan we were always very much aware that the climb to 10,000 feet was the most dangerous part of the flight, so we’d be watching the three rear-view mirrors around the frame of the canopy for any signs of missile attack.

  Once established at altitude, I took a few seconds to look down at Afghanistan’s stark, unfamiliar beauty. Almost as far as the horizon, the ground below me was a sea of reddish sand dunes, sculpted by the wind into shapes that looked remarkably like frozen waves. In the far distance a few steep-sided hills rose abruptly from the dunes, but for the most part the terrain was flat and largely featureless. A river snaked through the dunes off to my right, and I could clearly see a multitude of vehicle tracks that joined and crossed the river where it was shallow. Near the ford were dozens of sheep or goats, a number of people and a small cluster of tents erected close to the river bank.

  Peculiarly, on the opposite side of the water the terrain was more grey and white than red. It was as if the river was a kind of demarcation line between two different soil types of different colours. And on the grey side there were again people wandering about and a few tents, but no animals as far as I could see.

  As we cruised west, all the jet’s systems were online. The relatively delicate heads on the targeting pods – easily damaged if hit by a stray stone on the ground – were uncaged.

  The air-to-air TACAN counted down the range as I closed in on Squid’s aircraft and, as soon as we were both visual, we joined up as a pair. Flying well above the threat envelope of any weapons likely to be in the hands of the Taliban, and with all our checks completed, Squid advised the air traffic controller back at Kandahar that we were ‘going tactical’. Then he checked in with the Command and Control (C2) authority at Camp Bastion, the main British military base in Afghanistan, located near Lashkar Gah in Helmand.

  ‘Trumpcard, this is Recoil Four One.’

  ‘Recoil Four One, Trumpcard, roger. Traffic information for you. Bone One Two is working the block two seven zero to two nine zero. Whistler Eight Nine is working Perch Modified.’

  ‘Bone’ was a B-1 bomber callsign, ‘Whistler’ a fuel tanker and ‘Perch Modified’ one of the tanker tracks in the area. There were almost always tankers in the air over Afghanistan, simply because of the intensity of the air activity, and tanker tracks all over the place. The tracks’ locations were repeatedly changed to keep the aircraft safe from possible surface-to-air missile attacks, and these locations were biased to the areas where it was anticipated that most of the trade would be coming from.

  The callsign we used for the Harriers for most of this detachment was ‘Recoil’, followed by a number beginning with ‘Four’. So the first sortie of the day would involve ‘Recoil Four One’ and ‘Recoil Four Two’, as listed on the daily Air Tasking Order (ATO) issued by the Combined Air Operations Centre (CAOC), followed by ‘Recoil Four Three’ and ‘Recoil Four Four’, and so on. ‘Recoil Four Seven’ and ‘Recoil Four Eight’ were always the two night-flying aircraft. Another callsign we were allocated was ‘Junta Zero One’, but this was purely for test flights, and at various times we also used the callsigns ‘Devil’ and ‘Mamba’. Predictably enough, the American F-15 jockeys have always used ‘Dude’.

  There are various ways of indicating a target or other object of interest, but the way we did it in Afghanistan was to use keypoint descriptors – appropriate names given to shapes on the ground – and the first thing Squid did was show me how this worked. We flew to the Panjwayi district, to the west of Kandahar Airfield. This was the heartland of the Taliban, the very area where the radical group originally formed.

  ‘OK,’ Squid said on the radio, ‘we’re more or less directly over Panjwayi now. Look down and to your right. There’s a large field with a smaller field directly beyond it. See them?’

  It took a few moments, but then I saw what he was indicating. ‘Got them,’ I said.

  ‘Right. Look above the small field, and there’s an even smaller enclosure. Now look on either side of the big field. What does the whole shape remind you of?’

  It took me few seconds to identify the entire shape, but then it was obvious. The conjoined set of fields formed a shape like a big fat body, smaller head, two arms sticking out, almost a carrot nose formed from a jagged tree, and a small square field above it that looked like a top hat.

  ‘A snowman,’ I said. ‘A classic child’s snowman.’

  ‘Excellent,’ Squid said. ‘That’s what we call it.’

  So instead of the FAC – the forward air controller – trying to direct a Harrier pilot to a specific location through a maze of small fields and trenches and compounds or whatever, he could just say, ‘Can you see the Snowman? Right, go two clicks east-north-east,’ and the pilot would know exactly where he meant. It was a quick, unambiguous and very effective method of indicating a target or position.

  This might seem a strange method of reporting locations and contacts, but it allowed both new and experienced pilots to get familiar with their theatre of operations very quickly. Although there are other ways of doing the same thing – various classified methods – using keypoint descriptors was probably the easiest.

  We had barely started following Squid’s route when our plans were thrown out of the window.

  ‘Recoil Four One,
Trumpcard. TIC Charlie declared at Garmsir.’

  ‘Recoil Four One, roger. Enroute,’ Squid acknowledged.

  We turned the two Harriers south and gathered speed. I could feel the acceleration pressing my body back in the seat as I advanced the throttle to the stops.

  On the way to Garmsir we learnt the rest of the story. Most actions involving coalition troops in Afghanistan take place when patrol members come under fire somewhere and call in air support if they find themselves outnumbered or for some other reason are unable to handle the contact themselves.

  I thought about what we could do to help. Both our Harriers were armed with bombs – Squid’s with two five-forties and mine with a pair of 1,000lb Paveways. His aircraft was also carrying rocket pods and mine was fitted with a laser targeting pod under the fuselage.

  ‘Widow Zero Two, this is Recoil Four One.’ The ‘Widow’ callsign indicated that we were talking to a British JTAC.

  ‘Recoil Four One, Widow Zero Two. Ready for fighter check-in.’

  ‘Widow Zero Two, Recoil Four One. We’re two UK Harriers. Playtime is fifty minutes. Recoil Four One has thirty-eight rockets and two five-forties, one impact and one airburst. Recoil Four Two has two 1,000lb laser-guided and GPS-guided bombs. All aborts will be in the clear. Estimate one minute to your overhead, and approaching from the north.’

  ‘Recoil Four One, roger. Stand by for SITREP. We’re a British TACP on JTAC Hill, and taking heavy fire from a compound about 500 yards down to the south. No other friendlies known to be in the area apart from the normal coalition checkpoints near the district centre.’

  JTAC Hill was on the outskirts of Garmsir District Centre, on which there was a near-permanent Tactical Air Control Party (TACP) consisting of four men – the JTAC himself, two signallers and a trooper – and they had come under heavy fire from a group of Taliban close to the end of one of the roads below the hill.

  The TACP’s job was to call in ‘fast air’ in support of troops on the ground, because that area had been the scene of countless clashes between coalition forces and the Taliban. Indeed the area below JTAC Hill looked very much like the Somme in the First World War, pockmarked with numerous craters testifying to the intensity of the coalition’s bombing. JTAC Hill was such a well-established location in the area that it was both a regular visual reporting point – it was one of the keypoint descriptors we used from the air – and also a normal waypoint in our navigation kit. So Squid had no problem at all in identifying the patrol’s location and pointing it out to me, and I could see it clearly enough through the onboard optics.

  ‘Roger, Widow Zero Two.’

  ‘Recoil Four One, Widow Zero Two. We called up an Apache to try to suppress the enemy fire, but he’s just been engaged by an RPG so he’s had to haul off. It was a real near-miss: it passed within about thirty yards of his tail rotor. He’s now moved to the western side of the river, out of range, and he’s unable to continue the attack.’

  The Boeing AH-64 Apache attack helicopter is designed to be tough enough to withstand the half-inch rounds fired from a heavy machine-gun, but a rocket-propelled grenade, or RPG, is altogether a far more serious weapon. A direct hit from one of those, anywhere on the airframe or on the rotors, would almost certainly cause the loss of the Apache and its crew. It was no wonder that the helicopter had sensibly withdrawn to wait for the cavalry – which was us.

  A further complication was that, although the JTAC had established the location of one group of Taliban, there was a strong possibility that other groups were lying in wait elsewhere in the immediate area, hoping either to bring down the Apache with another RPG or just to kill the members of the TACP.

  ‘Recoil Four One, Widow Zero Two. Type Two control, and we’ll take one of the five-forties.’

  ‘Roger, Recoil Four One.’

  Every conflict has extremely detailed Rules of Engagement, and Afghanistan was no exception. Our two Harriers were carrying very different weapons, and the JTAC had decided, quite correctly, that the most appropriate one for the target we were facing was hanging under the wing of Squid’s aircraft. My Harrier’s weapons – 1,000lb bombs – were simply too big, on grounds of collateral damage and proportionality.

  When he calls in ‘fast air’ a JTAC offers one of three different kinds of control. Type One is something of a hangover from the Cold War, a classic run-in from an Initial Point, where the JTAC can see both the target and the attacking aircraft and will clear the aircraft in as soon as he’s certain that the pilot has seen and identified the correct target.

  Type Two means that the JTAC can see the target from the ground – not difficult in the present circumstances as the Taliban were just a few hundred yards away from him on the other side of the river – but can’t necessarily see the responding aircraft either because they are too high, as we were in this case, or are approaching from a direction where he lacks a clear line of sight. For Type Two control, the JTAC needs confirmation from the pilot that he can see and has properly identified the target, and he will only call him in and clear him to drop when he is satisfied.

  Type Three control means that the JTAC can see neither the target nor the attacking aircraft – there can be a number of reasons for this – and all he is able to do is tell the pilot that there’s a target out there, and place the onus on the aircrew to find, identify and engage it.

  As we overflew the target area for the first time, our immediate problem was to identify the specific compound where the Taliban gunmen were hiding out. I looked down from the cockpit as I pulled the Harrier into a turn. JTAC Hill was clearly visible, but there were a number of compounds that could have been where the insurgents were hiding out. One of the problems with picking out areas occupied by hostile forces from the air is that we can neither see nor hear firing that is perfectly evident to the troops on the ground. An additional problem in Afghanistan is that there are usually very few ground features clear and distinctive enough to use as markers.

  Then I had an idea. The Apache had been attacked by an RPG. The pilot was going to remember exactly where the weapon had been fired at him. I thumbed the RT button.

  ‘Squid,’ I called over the back radio, ‘why not get the Apache to fire a laser at the target for us?’

  ‘Good idea.’

  ‘Widow Zero Two, Recoil Four One. We’re having problems identifying the target. Can you call the Apache pilot and ask him to lase it for us?’

  ‘Roger. Stand by.’

  Moments later the Apache moved closer to the target, though still doing his best to keep out of range of any Taliban armed with RPGs, and illuminated the target compound for us. We both tracked his laser and that enabled us to identify the appropriate spot in the correct compound, which confirmed the exact position of the target. But Squid couldn’t enter the location into his kit because the laser spot doesn’t automatically produce a designation for the aircraft systems.

  ‘Ade, Squid. I’m happy with the location now. I’ll open out to the west for the attack run.’

  ‘Roger that. I’ll lase the target for you.’

  Although Squid could probably have identified the target for himself as he ran in over the compounds, now that the Apache had designated it, I knew if I marked it for him with my laser it would make his job a lot easier. This is what’s normally termed a cooperative attack: two aircraft working together to achieve the aim.

  ‘Widow Zero Two, Recoil Four One. Estimate two minutes.’

  In those two minutes both of us had a lot to do. Squid had to start his aircraft heading in the right direction, which at that stage meant away from the target, before turning round to start the attack run. Each of us would read through a brief checklist of actions on our knee board, beginning with confirming which of the two 540lb bombs the JTAC has selected, either the airburst or the impact weapon.

  On the back radio we chatted between the cockpits – what’s known as Crew Resource Management – to ensure that the pilot carrying out the attack had correctly selected the
airburst weapon. We cross-referred the target location again, just as a final confirmation, to ensure that we were both confident that we’d selected the right target. Then I said: ‘Call one minute and then I’ll lase the target for you.’

  Coming inbound from three or four miles away, Squid accelerated. His Harrier needed to be flying at above 300 knots for the bomb to arm as it came off the aircraft.

  Shortly afterwards Squid called: ‘One minute.’

  I set up a wagon-wheel round the target, timing the positioning of my Harrier so that, as Squid ran in, I was approaching the target on a more or less parallel track, but higher so that there was no danger of confliction. That meant I would be firing the laser from the same piece of the sky that he was approaching from – the ideal solution and one that would give him the best possible opportunity to detect the reflected laser energy.

  I hauled my aeroplane round and unmasked my laser so that I could see the target. Once I was happy I was tracking it, I called: ‘Laser fires.’

  Squid pushed the nose of the Harrier down into a thirty to forty degree dive and began trying to acquire the target.

  A few seconds later he located the reflected laser energy.

  ‘Good spot,’ he confirmed.

  He’d identified the laser spot and was tracking it. With the target acquired and tracking started, the aircraft systems automatically updated the targeting solution. Now Squid could commit to an automatic attack.

  I concentrated on keeping my laser properly locked on to the compound that was our target. I could tell that my aircraft was detecting the laser because the indicator on the targeting pod was showing this clearly.

  Then, on the front radio, Squid told the JTAC he was inbound.

  ‘Widow Zero Two, Recoil Four One, sixty seconds.’

  ‘Call wings level with direction.’

  Squid replied: ‘Recoil Four One, wings level from the west, in hot.’ He was running in, the weapon prepared, and he was ready to carry out the attack.