Joint Force Harrier

by Adrian Orchard

  But, on this occasion, when they were paged they were told it wasn’t a regular GCAS 120 scramble, and they needed to get airborne as soon as possible. They went from being on a treadmill in the gym to getting airborne, wheels in the well, in exactly twenty-seven minutes. That was extremely impressive because normally, from the bell going on a GCAS scramble to getting airborne, it took us about fifteen minutes, well inside the thirty-minute response time that we were allocated.

  It only really worked because these guys shared a room, had flown together for ages and were able to brief each other on the run as they went from the gym and through the dressing and briefing process. So it took them just twelve minutes longer than normal and that time was mostly taken up running from the gym to Ops and getting dressed.

  Twenty-seven minutes was a really fast response time in the circumstances, and they handled the delivery of their weapons as professionally as anyone would expect.

  But for the guys on the ground, the troops being engaged by Taliban heavy machine-guns and RPGs, every second before the Harriers arrived on station must have seemed like an eternity. That was the message I was always pushing to the aircrew, and that was what we were always so aware of. Time wasted meant lives lost, and I knew that the Harriers’ arrival at a TIC frequently meant the difference between life and death to the troops on the ground.

  But it wasn’t always about killing the bad guys. Sometimes it was just a question of scaring them shitless.

  As well as carrying out attacks on Taliban warriors in support of ISAF troops, the Harrier det was also tasked with what might be termed intimidation tactics, employing a low-level show of force, a low, fast run that never included the delivery of any weapons. This approach was a vital part of our arsenal in a war that was almost defined by the central importance of proportionality.

  Our intention was to show the Taliban – and the Afghan locals, for that matter – that the coalition forces were in the area and were there to stay, and to demonstrate one of the weapons available to them in the form of the Harrier, which is quite an impressive, and certainly a very noisy, aircraft. We would fly very low and very fast, creating a lot of noise that would hopefully give them pause for thought.

  The thinking was that if we could convince the Taliban and their sympathizers that we possessed overwhelming military strength, they might decide not to attack us, and then we wouldn’t have to shoot or bomb them.

  As Wedge and Flatters – Lieutenant Tim Flatman – arrived back in the squadron buildings after landing, they filled me in on what had happened. They had been out supporting Widow Eight Four, one of the British JTACs, on the ground, laying down some noise in an attempt to make the Taliban keep their heads down, and Flatters had conducted a low-level show of force.

  ‘I ran out about ten miles,’ he explained back at Kandahar after he’d landed. ‘I did my usual checks, including making sure my Walther was snug in its holster, just in case it all turned to rat shit and I had to jump out. Then I turned back in towards the target area, dropped down to low level and started the run-in.’

  Contrary to both popular belief and the images so dear to Hollywood, the world does not rush past in a blur when you’re flying an aircraft fast at low level. We actually have plenty of time to see what’s around us and pick out details. We can see rugs and washing hanging on lines, kids running around, the locals doing whatever they’re up to, and almost count the number of animals – which in that area were mainly goats. We’d see horses and carts going up and down the wadis, or dry river beds, which were almost always the flattest ground and so made for the smoothest progress. Real life continued everywhere in Afghanistan, despite the presence of the coalition forces and the depredations of the Taliban.

  Time, on these sorties, often seemed to slow down as our level of concentration rose. And we were supremely conscious that the slightest nudge of the control column would turn the aircraft into a spectacular fireball on the ground from which we wouldn’t have the slightest chance of escape. And that really concentrated the mind.

  Our biggest enemy in doing these low-level runs was the ground itself, or rather any obstacles on it that we hadn’t seen, closely followed by the possibility of the Taliban taking potshots at us.

  Bringing down, or even hitting, a high-speed, low-level aircraft would be difficult with the sort of weapons we knew the Taliban carried. They were mostly armed with Kalashnikov AK-47 assault rifles and RPG launchers, and heavy machine-guns that they used when ambushing coalition troops, but it was known that they also had access to Stinger surface-to-air missiles and possibly other types of SAM.

  We knew that even small-arms fire posed a real threat to us. Although it was unlikely, one lucky bullet could bring down a jet if it hit the right place.

  The Harrier GR7 is fitted with the highly capable Marconi Zeus ECM system, though this is optimized against radar threats, of which there were very few in Afghanistan. Zeus has a radar warning receiver – the RWR, or ‘RAW’ – that is able to identify over 1,000 different radar signals and automatically activate a jammer to counter any of them.

  Of more immediate use in the Afghan theatre, we also carried a missile approach warning system, or MAW, linked to chaff dispensers that fired thin strips of reflective metal foil automatically whenever a missile was detected. The idea was that this cloud of foil would break a radar lock on our jets by presenting what appeared to be a juicier target. The aircraft were also fitted with a variety of expendables, primarily flares of various types, which were effective against heat-seeking missiles. Whenever carrying out an attack run we made sure all our self-defence systems were online, set to automatic mode and working properly, and that the appropriate expendables programme was running.

  On our way in to the area, running at high speed and already at very low level, we were always totally aware of what was happening on the ground in front of us. We tried wherever possible to avoid overflying villages, but sometimes it was unavoidable.

  ‘The ride was pretty bloody bumpy,’ Flatters continued. ‘The Harrier was bouncing about all over the place with the turbulence. I pulled it up another fifty feet and eased off the throttle a tad, just to give myself a bit of a safety margin, but it was still really uncomfortable. Mind you, there’s nothing quite like barrelling along at 400 knots in a jet 100 feet above the ground,’ he added with a smile.

  ‘I had to pass close to a small village on the way in, and the moment I cleared the edge of it I saw a single figure standing there right in front of me holding a long, dark object, and I knew immediately what it was. Oh, fuck, I thought. Wrong place, wrong time. That’s a Talib with a Stinger.

  ‘I jinked sideways and slammed the throttle fully open, the g-suit barely coping with the sudden change of direction. Then I dropped back down again, maybe seventy feet, to try to get below the missile’s acquisition envelope, and checked again that the self-defence systems were online and, I hoped, working properly.

  ‘That took me right over the top of the man I’d seen, and as soon as I looked down at him I realized I was completely wrong. He was just a goatherd holding a staff, and all I’d managed to do was frighten him and terrify his animals. And cock up my approach to the target area. That wasn’t my finest hour.

  ‘Anyway, I turned back on track and a minute or so later steamed in over the Taliban positions, and I was pretty bloody pleased with the result, bearing in mind the problems I’d had on the approach. That sense of satisfaction lasted about fifteen seconds.’

  As soon as he’d completed the run, Widow Eight Four came up on the radio.

  ‘We’ve just heard the Taliban commander say that’s the worst show of force he’s ever seen!’

  To add insult to injury, it turned out that it wasn’t even a joke made by the JTAC: it’s what the unimpressed Taliban had actually been heard to say. Apparently the report made its way quickly up the line and was later reputedly mentioned by the US General at the CAOC in his weekly brief.

  9

  The squadr
on arrived in Afghanistan in September, at the end of the summer, and very quickly got used to the fact that in the early morning it was really cold. Like most desert environments – and deserts almost always have the greatest diurnal temperature difference – in Afghanistan the temperature would swing from well below freezing to very hot indeed in a matter of hours as the sun rose into the sky. In the winter a daily temperature difference of thirty to thirty-five degrees Celsius was not unusual, though in the summer it would be slightly less, perhaps only twenty or twenty-five.

  It was routine for the squadron personnel to wake up to a freezing day, perhaps with an air temperature of minus one or two, or even less, and be sweltering in thirty-plus by early afternoon. Getting up and driving to work in the morning would require heavy jackets or parkas, but by lunchtime shorts were more appropriate wear.

  The squadron was billeted closer to Poo Pond – the open cesspit that struggled to cope with the number of people based at Kandahar – than any of us liked, and the unmistakable odour of decaying piss and shit was always there as an unwelcome reminder of the environment when we stepped outside our quarters. Taking a deep breath as you walked out of the building to greet the new day was not to be recommended.

  Thank God, then, for the sanitized and air-conditioned Ops building, at the other end of the airfield. This was where, apart from planning and briefing all the squadron’s sorties, I tried to keep on top of the admin. As I read through the reports, they made for startling reading.

  During that first, very busy, period of about six weeks we were usually flying four pairs of aircraft every day, or twenty-four-hour period, to be exact. Usually this would be three daylight sorties and one during the night, and during this period at least one of those missions each day would drop one, and often more than one, weapon. And in addition to our regular sorties, every two or three days we would get involved in a GCAS scramble, and that would normally result in the delivery of additional munitions.

  At the end of October 2006, our first month at KAF, we’d flown over 503 hours and dropped more than 32,000lb of ordnance. That’s over 1,000lb every day and more than IV (AC) had dropped in support of coalition troops during their whole det. It was an impressive total but one that I personally, as Dunc Mason pointed out with delight and increasing frequency, had barely contributed to. It certainly wasn’t deliberate. And I felt sure my luck would change.

  It’s also worth adding that a considerable number of the incidents we’d been involved in had resulted in our engaging the enemy with CRV-7 rockets and I had, at least, managed to fire a few of those. But they weighed very little and made up a tiny percentage of the total weight of ordnance. If we maintained a similar level of delivery throughout our entire four-month detachment to Kandahar, the squadron was going to get through over 100,000lb of bombs and rockets.

  This was a stark contrast to the other theatre in which I had been involved previously. Back in 2003, when I was in Iraq as part of TELIC, we did deliver munitions at a fairly high rate during the combat phase, which itself only lasted a few weeks, but since the end of that year the rate has dropped steadily and at present the Tornados there are only releasing about one weapon every twelve to eighteen months.

  The reason for this difference is simple enough. In Afghanistan we were fighting what is essentially an all-out war against the Taliban, who are desperate to regain their former power and position at any cost, a war that has grown steadily more intense since 2004 and which peaked in its intensity in the autumn of 2006. In Iraq the situation is far more like a low-intensity civil war, with the principal weapons being IEDs, and with suicide bombers used to ambush either coalition troops or members of rival factions and religious groups as they jockey for position. There are few battles in that theatre of the kind that have become so familiar to us in Afghanistan.

  When assessing the expenditure of munitions, it’s important to remember the incredible accuracy of the laser-guided weapons we were using. If that figure of 100,000lb of munitions is compared with the type of bombs used during the Second World War, it becomes apparent that to achieve the same results with those unguided weapons we would probably have needed something like ten times that weight of bombs – around a million pounds. And, of course, this would have caused enormous collateral damage. It’s regrettable that bombs of any type have to be used, but at least modern munitions ensure that the target, and only the target, is hit. And, overall, probably half the attacks we carried out during our detachment used CRV-7s, a very low-yield weapon.

  In modern warfare the yield of most weapons has been decreasing as their accuracy has improved simply because, if the bomb can be delivered precisely on target, a high yield is actually counter-productive because of the collateral damage it causes. Unguided bombs were essentially the ground-attack version of a shotgun. You dropped a large number of them in the hope that one would hit the intended target, much as a hunter would fire a shell containing fifty or so pellets at a flying bird, expecting to hit it with just a handful of them.

  Every bomb dropped generated more paperwork, and as squadron boss I seemed to have rather more of it to do than anyone else. But I refused to sit in my office hunched over a desk all afternoon. I rubbed my eyes, grabbed my jacket and set out for the Boardwalk to clear my head with some fresh air and then coffee. As I walked the air was filled with the thumping beat of the rotor from the UN’s resident Mi-24 Halo. Moments later the distinctive white form of the big Russian-made chopper accelerated across the horizon.

  ‘The Boardwalk’ was what the Americans called a refreshment area a couple of hundred yards square that had a Pizza Hut, a Subway, a Burger King and a Tim Hortons, the Canadian coffee shop. It’s important in a war zone to make life as comfortable as possible, and the Boardwalk gave everyone confined to the base a choice of where to eat and drink apart from the DIFACs.

  Some people changed into civilian clothing when they were off duty, feeling this distanced them from the reality of where they were and what they were doing. It was slightly odd, the first few times I walked into the crew room, to see a couple of my pilots sitting there in civvies watching the TV in the corner, while everyone around them was in uniform and hard at work.

  The impression of strangeness was confirmed suddenly by the sound of the attack siren. When the wailing started we always reacted the same way, grabbing our body armour and helmet and diving on to the ground, then running for the air-raid shelters once the first salvo had landed.

  The conversations in the shelters were usually ridiculous. We were just shooting the breeze and waiting either for the second salvo to land or for confirmation that there was only one, so we could all get back to bed, work or whatever. People talked about everything from football matches to the operations being carried out, to the snoring of the blokes they had been billeted with – most squadron personnel were sleeping four to a room because the accommodation was at best compact.

  Somebody in the squadron dreamt up a game they called Rocket O’Clock. With more than a nod to Spot the Ball, this involved an enlarged picture of the airfield pasted on a board with a transparent grid superimposed on it, letters along one edge and numbers on another. Every day participants paid $1 and put a cross where they thought the next rocket was going to land.

  The problem dawned on everyone fairly quickly – as time passed and the board began to fill up, sooner or later the only square left would be the accommodation block. And if a rocket did land there, the winner would certainly be able to collect his half-share of the roughly $100 ‘pot’ (half was given to charity), but posthumously. This didn’t seem like a good idea to anyone, so after a few weeks we stopped tempting fate and abandoned it.

  In truth, the RAF Regiment had really got to work on the threat from rockets. Although the airfield was subjected to attacks for the whole time we were in theatre – and probably still is – the accuracy of the attacks got worse and worse as time went on, because the Taliban insurgents were pushed further and further away from the perimeter. A
nd for that the Royal Air Force Regiment was entirely responsible.

  Anyone who has read anything about the Afghanistan campaign will be familiar with the major forces taking part: 3 Para, the Royal Marines and others. But the RAF Regiment guys were the real unsung heroes during our det.

  Before they arrived to take over the force protection of the airfield, the task seemed to have been approached less proactively. A swift and violent retaliation to Taliban attacks was always guaranteed, but there were fewer patrols outside the wire. And it was these that made it more difficult for the Taliban to set up their rocket batteries within range.

  Most of the rocket attacks came from the sector that lay to the north-east of the airfield, with just a handful from the south. The reason for this was clear to us: Highway One, the main road that runs from one end of the country to the other, passed right through that area, allowing attackers an easy route both in and out.

  But all that changed as soon as the RAF Regiment took over. Their policy was completely different to that of their predecessors. They identified where the attacks were coming from and began mounting aggressive patrols outside the wire in those areas, and succeeded in pushing their safe perimeter so far out that the Taliban were having to fire their rockets from extreme range, with very little chance of even hitting the airfield itself, let alone any specific targets on it.

  The guys from the RAF Regiment achieved their success not only by their patrolling, which often located rocket batteries before the Taliban had a chance to fire them – the rockets were normally fired by remote control – but also by having excellent sniper teams.