Harrier

by Jonathan Glancey

  Huckstep explained what might happen next:

  [I would be on the radio] saying, ‘Found the target, happy with that. I can see the little tiny vehicles that we’re talking about.’ And then just as I round out to set up for the attack, the American calls. You know, ‘Hold it!’ or words to that effect. ‘There’s a civilian bus pulled up next to them.’

  It was not just that Harrier pilots had to be sure what they were hitting when they went into the attack, but the fact that there were so many chains of command, so many checks and agreements to be made in this coalition war, all of which made their missions complex and highly demanding affairs. And, as Major Feldhausen remarked as he summed up the situation in Kosovo, ‘Air power can do an awful lot of good, but it’s never going to stop the ability of a guy on the ground of taking a can of gasoline and lighting a house on fire or lining a group of civilians up against a wall and shooting them.’

  Deployed on board USS Nassau, and later USS Kearsarge, US Marines flew a dozen AV-8Bs over Kosovo from 14 April for the loss of one aircraft that crashed into the Adriatic while returning to the Kearsarge from a training mission. The American view of how the war should have been conducted was summed up for Frontline by Lieutenant General Michael C. Short, the Allied Air Force commander, and a highly decorated Vietnam veteran with 276 combat missions and 4,600 hours flying fighters under his gold-braided cap:

  Let me shoot very straight with you. I believe before the first bomb was dropped that the door should have been closed with all those who wished to go to war. And the United States should have said very clearly, ‘It appears NATO wants to go to war in the air, and in the air only. If that is the case and that is the sentiment of the nations here, we will lead you to war. We, the United States, will provide the leadership, the enabling force, the majority of the striking power, the technology required. We will take the alliance to war, and we will win this thing for you. But the price to be paid is we call the tune. We are not just one of nineteen.’

  Short may well have had a point. As it was, Britain went alone into Sierra Leone, with RAF Harriers of the newly formed Joint Harrier Force, the following year. This beautiful West African country, a British colony from 1808 until 1961, was rich in diamonds, gold, titanium and bauxite, and yet the vast majority of its six million people lived in dire poverty. To make matters worse, the country was torn apart by a savage civil war that spanned the 1990s. Corrupt governments were challenged by the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), a guerrilla army of malcontents formed by Foday Saybana Sankoh, a British-trained former corporal with the Sierra Leone Army, with the backing of Charles Taylor, leader of the National Patriotic Front of Liberia.

  The civil war was a complex, ever-shifting affair involving coups, changes of government and national leadership, and atrocities that shocked a world that, by now, ought to have been unshockable. Sankoh’s Army looted and raped with impunity, and chopped off the limbs of men, women, children and babies to get their own way, to spread terror and for fun. Fuelled by drugs, drink and savagery, the RUF killed at least 50,000 people, mutilated many more and displaced a third of the country’s population. Boys and girls, fed on drugs and forced to kill their own parents, were abducted to serve as soldiers and prostitutes for RUF guerrillas.

  UN peacekeeping forces sent late in the day came under attack, and 500 were kidnapped. In 2000, Britain’s war-hungry prime minister Tony Blair made his one popular military intervention overseas: Operation Palliser. The idea had been to rescue British and other foreign nationals under threat in Sierra Leone. But when Brigadier David Richards arrived in Sierra Leone with 800 British paratroopers flown in from England via Dakar in Senegal, he was deeply shocked by the sights that greeted him.

  Hospitals were crowded with those hacked by the machetes of the RUF; there were amputees on the streets of Freetown and crowds of desperate refugees. All were victims of Sankoh’s own ‘Operation No Living Thing’. Richards made a decision to arm government troops, to protect Freetown and the people of Sierra Leone, and to stop the president, the economist and barrister Ahmad Kabbah, from fleeing the country in a helicopter.

  ‘It is the best thing I have ever done in the British Army,’ Richards said later. ‘I have no regrets, none at all. You can’t look at a kid with his hand chopped off and just walk away. You have to sometimes make this choice, do what you think is right, even if people above you don’t approve.’ In London, however, Blair approved. Richards, now General Sir David Richards and currently Chief of the Defence Staff, was vindicated. The British pushed back the rebels and took on splinter groups like the murderous West Side Niggaz (known in the Western media as the West Side Boys), a loose group of brutalized young men, some of whom had tortured their own parents to death and were either drunk or as high as kites most of the time. They were influenced, they said, by American ‘gangsta rap’ culture.

  Sea Harriers, at first, and then GR.7s – thirteen altogether – were flown from HMS Illustrious over rebel troops in May and June 2000, mostly to frighten them. This will sound hare-brained only to those who have not stood under a pair of low-flying, full-throttle Harriers: it is an aircraft that speaks with a voice of intense thunder. These sorties, though, also impressed upon rebels the power of the forces that might yet be stacked up against them, although it was difficult to see quite how effective the Harriers would have been in a prolonged guerrilla war with a light-footed enemy using dense jungle as cover.

  From 1 April 2000 – an odd date to choose – the Royal Navy’s Sea Harrier FA.2 squadrons and the RAF’s Harrier GR.7 squadrons had been brought together as Joint Force Harrier (JFH) within RAF Strike Command. When the Sea Harriers were withdrawn in 2006 to save yet more money, 800 NAS was re-formed and equipped with GR.7s from 3 Squadron as it changed over to Eurofighter Typhoons. At the same time, the strength of Harrier squadrons was cut from twelve to nine aircraft. This allowed 801 NAS to convert from Sea Harriers to GR.9s.

  Tony Blair, meanwhile, had won plaudits for the action taken in Sierra Leone, yet was to lose much of his credibility in Britain, if not in the United States, when he teamed up in gun-slinging fashion with President George W. Bush to invade Iraq in 2003, this time with the intention of instigating ‘regime change’, or ridding the country of Saddam Hussein. The invasion was based on absurd premises, among them the utterly mistaken supposition that Saddam possessed nuclear weapons he could deploy both quickly and credibly, and the erroneous belief that he had given succour to al-Qaeda. Worse still, no plans were made for the future of Iraq post-Saddam, and it seemed as if the British Cabinet had absolutely no clue about either the history of Iraq or the obvious fact that, nasty as he might be, Saddam was holding together ideological factions that would inevitably try and tear one another apart once the West’s former strongman had been forcibly removed from office. In short, the wise counsel of both diplomats and foreign affairs specialists with first-hand knowledge of the area was either not asked for or simply ignored.

  The force deployed against Saddam was astonishing, although not as massive as it had been in 1991. The Bush Jr regime had been limbering up for a showdown in the area with Operation Enduring Freedom, an attack on terrorist training bases and al-Qaeda strongholds in Afghanistan weeks after the breathtaking al-Qaeda assault on the World Trade Center in Manhattan on 11 September 2001. US Marines arrived off the coast of Pakistan the following month and flew attack missions from 3 November. In December, the USMC AV-8Bs were deployed from a base at Kandahar, and from Bagram the following October. It was the start of a war that continues to this day.

  The assault on Iraq began in 20 March 2003, when Baghdad was heavily bombed in a show of what the Americans called ‘Shock and Awe’. Protests against the invasion held around the world on 15 February by some ten million in 800 cities had been dismissed by Washington and London; according to the Guinness Book of Records, it had been the largest protest in history. Well organized and largely well equipped, the invasion force – including a number of Polish and Austral
ian troops – swept through Iraq in three weeks. Baghdad was seized, Saddam toppled and Bush announced, ‘Mission accomplished.’ Well, not quite. The last British and American combat troops finally left Iraq at the end of 2011 and the country in a mess. The British, in particular, had been humiliated; they might have helped win the war but they could not hold the peace, being eventually compelled to evacuate their forces from the southern city of Basra under cover of darkness. At least scores of thousands of civilians had been killed and the liberal democracy Bush and Blair believed would suddenly flourish in Iraq had unsurprisingly failed to take root.

  In purely military terms, the invasion was quick and, for the British at least, as clinical an operation as possible. Operation Telic, commanded by Air Marshal Brian Burridge, saw 46,000 British soldiers scythe through Iraq by land and air. The RAF flew round-the-clock missions with impunity, even refuelling aircraft over Iraq. Twenty Harriers were based at Ahmed Al Jaber airbase in Kuwait, as were USMC AV-8Bs. The use of BAE Systems Thermal Imaging Airborne Laser Designator Pods allowed Harrier pilots to attack targets within what had become strict rules of engagement to ensure, as far as possible, that only legitimate military targets were attacked and hit. Pilots made use of GPS as well as hand-held binoculars: their attacks tended to be highly accurate. Tactical liaison between troops on the ground and Harrier pilots was close and reliable: about 30 per cent of all RAF Harrier operations were close air-support missions. Burridge spoke convincingly of the RAF and British troops moving ‘nimbly’ through Iraq, of trying ‘not to break china’ and of swift humanitarian aid. The Americans did not necessarily share the same view, although they did listen, sometimes, when Burridge explained how a particular air strike might look ‘viewed from Paris, Berlin or wherever’. Warfare was coming under increasing scrutiny. It had done so since Vietnam, and even though George Bush Jr had got the United States excited about the fight against Iraq – one poll showed that, in January 2003, 44 per cent of Americans had been persuaded to believe ‘some’ or ‘most’ of the 9/11 hijackers were Iraqis – the president knew there had to be a limit to the number of US casualties, although he had little or nothing to say about the deaths, torture and mutilation of Iraqi civilians.

  American Harriers flew in Iraq from 2003 to 2010. Over a thousand sorties were flown from sea during the 2003 war, the aircraft moving up to land bases when possible for closer and more urgent co-operation with the army. The aircraft were used successfully as tank-busters and as aerial artillery during the siege of Fallujah in 2004 – an operation that, while successful, witnessed the United States using white-phosphorus incendiary shells to flush insurgents from city-centre buildings.

  By the summer of 2003, British Harriers had left Iraq. Fifteen months later, six GR.7s replaced USMC AV-8Bs at Kandahar, Afghanistan. Harriers would fly here for the following five years in a war that will have lasted for thirteen years by the time Britain and the United States pull out at the end of 2014. It was here that the Harrier mutated into its final form, the GR.9 and GR.9A. It does seem a little odd that the most impressive attack version of the Harrier should have been employed against such a low-tech enemy as the Taliban in a war that should never have dragged on for anything like so long.

  The Taliban, a fundamentalist Islamic movement, established the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, with Kandahar as its capital, in 1996. It was recognized by just three other countries – Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Its other great unofficial supporter was the United States. Washington liked the anti-Shia stance of the Taliban because this meant it was axiomatically anti-Iranian. The Taliban was also keen, or so it seemed, on plans for a trans-Afghanistan pipeline proposed by Unocal (Union Oil Company of California; now a part of Chevron). The Taliban’s extreme behaviour could be laughed off when it appeared to be merely eccentric. According to Amy Waldman, then a reporter with the New York Times, one list of prohibitions made by the movement included satellite dishes, cinematography, musical equipment, pool tables, chess, masks, tapes, computers, lobsters, nail polish, fireworks, sewing catalogues, pictures and Christmas cards. According to an official US report, the Taliban had also banned clapping during sports events, kite-flying, drawings, stuffed animals and dolls. Men had to wear beards and hats while women were no longer to be educated or employed or allowed to play sport.

  There was, though, nothing funny in these prohibitions; they were issued by unkind zealots who were soon enough doing terrible things to their fellow citizens. And the borders of Afghanistan and Pakistan were indeed safe havens for jihadist terrorists. Even so, the escalation of international war within this remote and largely poor country was a sorry episode. The very presence of British and US forces attracted fundamentalist fighters from various parts of the world, including those born and bred in Britain itself, while local farmers took down their guns from their racks and were loosely labelled ‘Taliban’, even though all they wanted was for the British and the Yanks to go home.

  And given that military targets were often blurred with everyday civilian activities, it was very hard indeed to fight anything like a clean and just war against an enemy who could vanish as easily into a crowd in a marketplace as into mountain hideouts. As Colonel Richard Kemp, commander of British forces in Afghanistan from 2003 to 2006, remarked:

  The Taliban in southern Afghanistan are masters at shielding themselves behind the civilian population and then melting in among them for protection. Women and children are trained and equipped to fight, collect intelligence, and ferry arms and ammunition between battles. Female suicide bombers are increasingly common. The use of women to shield gunmen as they engage NATO forces is now so normal it is deemed barely worthy of comment. Schools and houses are routinely booby-trapped. Snipers shelter in houses deliberately filled with women and children.

  The Joint Force Harrier (JFH) squadrons were on duty in Afghanistan as part of Britain’s Operation Herrick and NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) for five years. They returned home in June 2009 having flown more than 8,500 day and night sorties and having spent over 22,000 hours airborne. There were normally eight Harriers on duty – at first GR.7s and then the more powerful, digitally wired GR.9s – and eleven pilots supported by around a hundred engineers and fitters. Each sortie lasted an average of eight hours with the Harriers loaded to their aerial gunwales with every piece of weaponry and hi-tech gadgetry they could carry. Each pilot, as Lieutenant Commander James Blackmore, who flew many of those sorties over Afghanistan and around its borders, has written, was ‘pilot, navigator, engineer, communicator, weapons officer and lawyer’.

  The world of JFH pilots during those five years was as unlike that of Battle of Britain Spitfire and Hurricane pilots, or indeed jet pilots at any time during the Cold War, as can possibly be imagined. There were no enemy aircraft to worry about or intercept and little danger from weapons fired from the ground. Instead, patrols and sorties were flown to support British and coalition troops on the ground, to frighten and disturb Taliban positions, using ‘shows of force’, and to maintain a presence over warring territories. Contrary to the American experience of the Harrier reported in the Los Angeles Times in 2003, the JFH Harriers performed extremely well. According to Lieutenant Commander Blackmore, ‘Harriers never once lost a mission due to an unserviceable aircraft… the only times that the Harrier failed to get airborne in the five years of operations was if the weather curtailed flying.’ And that wasn’t often. When conventional jets were unable to take off because the airfields at Bagram, Kabul and Kandahar were snowed or iced in, the Harriers usually carried on with their relentless day-in, day-out close air-support missions.

  When called by troops on the ground, Harriers were expected to be in the air within thirty minutes. The average time of a ‘scramble’ from Kandahar was sixteen minutes, with a record of eleven. This, as the pilots themselves say, was not bad considering the Harriers were a two-minute drive from their ops room. Take-off from Kandahar was not, however, a piece of c
ake. The elevation of the airfield is 3,330 feet, so the Harriers, unable to take off vertically when so heavily laden, needed to accelerate to about 200 mph before lifting into the thin air. As the speed limit for their tyres was a little under 210 mph, this left little margin, especially in hot weather. (The average high temperature in Kandahar in July is 40.2 °C, or 104.4 °F.) Levelling off at 100 feet, the aircraft would begin their climbing turns at 345 mph, soaring above this ancient settlement.

  Kandahar may well take its name from Alexander the Great, who laid out a Greek-style city here in the fourth century BC; even then, the young Macedonian king was building on the foundations of one of the world’s first cities. It seems such a shame that Afghanistan is known today mostly for ignorance, war, terrorism and the smashing of ancient monuments by religious bigots. It is a stunningly beautiful country, as those of us know who have had the privilege of travelling through it in interstices between its wars, and one with a thrilling past and a great culture. It is also, of course, a land of loosely aligned and warring tribes and factions who, in recent history, have taken on and defeated both the might of the British empire in the nineteenth century and that of the USSR in the twentieth. There is, in fact, nothing for the British, the Americans and coalition forces to win in Afghanistan in the twenty-first century. When foreign troops leave in 2014, the country will return to being what it has always been, a law unto itself. The one great hope, although a faint one, is that religious extremism there will abate and that people – especially women – will be able to lead educated, free and fulfilled lives.

  As it was, the view of Afghanistan for Harrier pilots was usually at 16,000 feet, and either through binoculars or through their Digital Joint Reconnaissance Pods, which allowed them to zoom in to high-resolution images on the ground. This ability proved to be very important indeed and, doubtless, saved the lives of countless civilians and animals as well as soldiers. As Group Captain Harv Smyth told me recently: