We could see things from the air that troops on the ground calling for us to strike couldn’t. They’d be asking us to take out a target, but we might see schoolchildren or livestock appearing from around the corner of a building that might or might not be sheltering a gunman. So, we’d make the decision to hold fire. This might not always have been what those talking to us on the ground felt they needed at that exact moment, but we had to make those instant judgments. We didn’t want to kill a single person too many. And the animals mattered, too. Imagine if we had killed a local farmer’s livestock; this would destroy his livelihood and in all probability turn him against us and into the arms of the Taliban.
For Smyth, the commanding officer of IV Squadron in Afghanistan, this kind of situation was also the reason why, for all the talk of a future dominated by pilotless strike aircraft, it will always be preferable to have someone looking down from a cockpit, peering hard, thinking harder and making the kind of judgment that might simply not be possible for a virtual pilot sitting in front of a computer screen in a bunker thousands of miles away. ‘That virtual pilot inevitably sees the world through a pair of “drinking straws”,’ Smyth added. ‘He can’t see the whole picture, the children, the farmer, the cattle around the corner and off the edge of the computer screen.’ He continued:
We were scrambled one day from Kandahar on Christmas Eve to take out a ‘high value’ Taliban target driving along a road and being tracked by an unmanned Predator drone. I picked up the target, was given all necessary clearances, and then dropped two laser-guided bombs that would have destroyed the moving car. But sixth sense – instinct – made me look out of the corner of my eye. The car was heading towards a compound where kids were playing. I was able to move the bombs away from the target. The ‘bad guy’ escaped, which might not have gone down too well with the virtual team in the bunker over in the States, but although you could say this was a tactical failure, it was a strategic success: we didn’t kill a group of schoolchildren. With the latest laser technology, we could drop a bomb on a single person three or four miles away from 25,000 feet up; but sometimes you have to wait for a moment. Can I drop this bomb? Sure. Should I drop it? That’s another question. We have a decision cycle, a mantra going in to attack: Find. Fix. Track. Target. Engage. Assess. The last is often the most important of all; a pilot might make a braver decision by not dropping a bomb. It’s not a computer game out there; it’s real people and their lives.
Smyth, who had flown Harriers in action in Bosnia, Kosovo and Iraq, and on reconnaissance missions in Jordan in early 2003, was able to cite many examples of ways in which the small JFH fleet had been able to defuse dangerous situations on the ground without firing rockets or dropping bombs. This did cause clashes with American colleagues who, perhaps keen to imitate the creaking script of some Hollywood war movie, tended to believe in firing first and asking questions afterwards. Smyth recalled:
US Army guys in a pair of Humvees found a giant weapons cache in a village. As they took a closer look, a big and angry mob of local people moved in on them. We were called in. ‘Do something,’ the Yanks told us, ‘drop a bomb on the crowd.’ I decided a low-level show of force might do the trick. We [Harriers always flew in pairs] came down to 100 feet and shot over the town’s high street at 500 knots putting out flares. It was enough to scare the Jesus out of them. It worked. The Yanks were amazed and no one was hurt.
A combination of pilot judgment and hi-tech wizardry – notably the GR.9A’s Joint Reconnaissance Pod and hi-fidelity Advanced Targeting Pod (SNIPER) – made the Harrier, in Smyth’s words, ‘the aircraft of choice’ for ground troops seeking help from the air in Afghanistan. As he had said at the time:
A lesser known piece of what we do is what has colloquially become known as non-traditional ISR [Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance]. We have for a long time studied how the Taliban do their business, and we know nine times out of ten where we think they will put IEDs [improvised explosive devices]… Certainly in recent months our non-traditional ISR capability is coming more and more into play to counter IEDs; looking at vulnerable points, picking up areas of interest and trying to work out whether they were there two days ago.
The Tactical Imagery Wing guys can exploit these high-fidelity images [captured at high altitude by Harriers]; for example, determining the thickness of the compound’s walls, which will then dictate how much explosive charge is needed to get through that wall first time, whether the windows have glass in them, if doors open out or in, and presence of livestock and dogs and potential escape routes. With this intelligence and information at his fingertips, the ground commander can develop an incredibly robust plan of how to execute the deliberate assault. It brings the fight to the here and now and allows us to keep one step ahead of the Taliban.
Meanwhile, women were now flying in action. One of Smyth’s IV(AC) Squadron pilots was Flight Lieutenant, now Squadron Leader, Em Rickards, whom he described as ‘exceptional’. Rickards wrote tellingly of her experience in the December 2006 edition of the RAF’s Spirit of the Air magazine:
No day is ever the same in Afghanistan. Past are the pre-planned missions of Op Telic and Op Allied Force with detailed routes, maps and target study. Instead, the Harriers of 1(F), IV(AC) and 800(NAS) Sqns typically launch into the brilliant blue skies (and occasional dust storms!) above Kandahar, never quite sure what mission awaits them.
This was indeed a new kind of aerial warfare, with highly intelligent and well-informed pilots being asked to take on any mission that might crop up, familiar or otherwise. Despite the focus on sophisticated weaponry and guidance systems, Rickards remembered to look out of the window:
For the pilots there is the added bonus of taking in some of the breathtaking scenery of Afghanistan: from thousands of acres of red desert, to thousands of metres of soaring, jagged mountains that extend north-east to the foothills of the Himalayas, and vary from beige-brown to snow-clad through the changing seasons. Indigenous living accommodation consists of various sized compounds, housing beige-coloured buildings, and surrounded by well-irrigated and cultivated fields. In sharp contrast, on the edge of this green area of civilization, arid landscape begins again and stretches for hundreds of miles. From several thousand feet it looks deceptively still and peaceful on the ground, but clearly there is great instability and insecurity.
During their five long years in Afghanistan – they were initially expected to serve six months – the Harriers flew mostly from land bases. But up to the end of their service with the British armed forces, the Harriers were based on carriers, too. One of the pilots to fly Harriers from the deck of HMS Ark Royal for the last time, on 24 November 2011, was Lieutenant Abi Marks. Speaking in 2010 to Gary Parsons of the website Key-Aero: the Homepage of Aviation, she had recalled her first deck take-off and landing:
One of the most distinct memories is leaving the ramp on your first launch from the ship thinking, ‘That’s brilliant!’ You don’t carry a great deal of fuel for the first trip, as you’re just going to do some circuits and then bring it back for the finale, the landing. I remember looking back at the ship from just 1,000 feet thinking, ‘That’s really small, I’ve got to get back on that!’ and feeling a bit anxious. You’re just concentrating on doing what you need to do to get it back on deck; you don’t really have time to be nervous. It was when I got back down I was greeted by the boss, who said, ‘Congratulations – welcome to naval aviation!’ Finally I felt like a naval pilot.
Marks’s senior officer, Lieutenant Commander Paul ‘Tremors’ Tremelling, explained further:
It’s one of the few human experiences that actually lives up to its billing. When you’re doing a deck landing, particularly your first one or in poor weather, and you finally hit the deck, it’s ‘Wow, that’s not a way to pay the mortgage!’ I wouldn’t trade this job for the world, but it does ‘ring the juice’ out of you on some occasions. You shouldn’t have a cross wind if the chaps steering the boat are doing their job prope
rly – they should keep it pointing into the wind – but it’s the classic situation when into wind is also into the fog bank. Then you start to earn your pay.
Back in June 2009, however, the Afghan Harriers had returned to RAF Cottesmore, handing over their role to Tornados. The Americans, though, hung on to their AV-8Bs. A stark reminder of the sudden dangers they faced made headlines worldwide in September 2012 when Camp Bastion, the main British military base in Afghanistan, and the largest British overseas military camp built since the Second World War, was attacked by a Taliban suicide squad dressed in American uniforms. Camp Bastion is home to several US Marine aviation units. The squad destroyed six AV-8Bs and damaged two more. Not since the Vietnam War had so many US military aircraft been lost in a single day. Lieutenant Colonel Christopher Raible, commanding officer of the USMC Harrier unit, and Sergeant Bradley Atwell were killed as they led a counter-attack against the enemy.
The bodies of seventeen attackers were found when the shooting stopped. Afterwards, a Taliban spokesman said the attack had been aimed at Prince Harry – Captain Harry Wales – grandson of Queen Elizabeth II and an army helicopter pilot based at Camp Bastion. Later on, the spokesman added that the attack was also a riposte to a moronic video made in the United States, apparently by a Coptic Christian Egyptian, that had mocked the prophet Mohammed and resulted in violent protests in Egypt and elsewhere.
Meanwhile, US Harriers had been in action elsewhere in the Muslim world in previous months. Operation Odyssey Dawn was a UN mission aimed at maintaining a No Fly Zone over Libya during the uprising that led to the downfall and humiliating death of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, the country’s eccentric leader who had exported violence and supported a variety of unpleasant terrorist factions and regimes around the world. In February 2011, Gaddafi launched major attacks against his own people. The UN reacted quickly. Eight Italian Navy AV-8Bs from the Giuseppe Garibaldi joined USMC Harriers from USS Kearsange in attacks against Gaddafi’s air capability between 19 and 31 March 2011. The League of Arab States recognized the anti-Gaddafi National Transitional Council as the legitimate government of Libya in August; the dictator was killed in October.
The intervention in Libya came too late for Britain’s Harriers, however. The Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government’s Strategic Defence and Security Review had been published on 19 October 2010 and among its many recommendations were that the MRA4 Nimrod Maritime Reconnaissance Programme should be scrapped and that the Harrier GR.9 should be withdrawn from service. There was a certain grim logic to the Nimrod decision – the project was running late and hugely over-budget – but common sense should have dictated that the Harriers would stay on until their replacement by F-35Bs from 2018. The decision to axe them was, though, ultimately made by politicians – and politicians, however well, or badly, they are advised by their civil servants and the military, tend to possess scant knowledge of warplanes and even less of the changing ways of warfare. Had the Harrier suddenly become a luxury the UK could no longer afford? Or was it now deemed surplus to operational requirements? Either way, it seemed perverse to get rid of an aircraft that was currently fighting an all too modern ‘asymmetric’ war in Afghanistan, and doing so very effectively.
Whatever the real whys and wherefores of the defence review, and we shall probably never be vouchsafed them, the Harrier has been placed in the role of aerial police officer for more than thirty years, and has performed this role remarkably well. It is an aircraft that air forces and navies will miss when it bows out for good. For the British, though, the Harrier’s premature departure has been an especially hard blow, not least because there is a pervasive sense that the Harrier, along with the Hawk, will prove to be the last of this country’s genuinely home-grown military aircraft. Of course, it was a Frenchman, Michel Wibault, who first conceived of how a V/STOL machine like the Harrier might be efficiently powered, just as it was the Americans who contributed financially and in other vital respects to what became the Mk 1 version of the aircraft and were instrumental in the development of the Mk 2. But the particular concept of the prototype aircraft, and the impetus to refine and develop it, were very British indeed. Without Hawker, without Camm, Hooper and Fozard in Kingston upon Thames, without Hooker and the engine wizards in Bristol, there would have been no P.1127, no Kestrel, Harrier or Sea Harrier, no AV-8A or AV-8B. This is an aircraft that still haunts us with its absence, reminding us that we are no longer a nation able to produce such superb machinery – except perhaps in the guise of Airfix kits, and even these are now manufactured in India – or to encourage our young people to become engineers, let alone pilots who actually fly.
Ralph Hooper’s reaction to the coalition’s decision was unequivocal and echoed that of his former boss, Sydney Camm. He told the Daily Mail, ‘There is no one in the Cabinet with any kind of expertise in aviation. They are bloody politicians. God help us all!’ He was, he added, ‘both sad and angry. I was amazed when I found out. Everyone went home on Friday evening believing the government was going to run down the Tornados and keep the Harriers. They came to work on Monday and found out it had been turned around the other way.’
Meanwhile, in 2011 BAE Systems – which had long subsumed Hawker Aircraft – was to slip from second to third place in a league table of the world’s biggest arms manufacturers compiled by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). Boeing took second place, with Lockheed Martin, the maker of the F-35, maintaining its lead. In some ways, and given that the overall sale of arms fell by 5 per cent – although SIPRI lacked figures for China – this might seem a good thing to those in Britain and elsewhere who abhor war and believe that far too much money is invested in instruments of death. Equally, it is interesting to note that arms companies including BAE have been shifting some of their focus on to defence systems designed to counter cyber-attacks, which can, of course, wreak havoc on modern digital economies. And yet, it is hard – very hard – not to think that the Harrier’s half-century traces a technological and cultural revolution in a Britain that yearns to consume ever more and to make ever less, a nation that reaches puffily for the screen rather energetically for the sky.
And a year later, in 2012, Abi Marks, who had dreamed for so long of being a Navy fighter pilot, took redundancy.
CHAPTER 7
WING FEATHERS CLIPPED
The final new Harrier airframes were manufactured in 1995, as were the last Pegasus engines. The aircraft, however, continued to develop, with the last British upgrade of the type – the GR.9A – entering squadron service between 2003 and as late as 2009, the year before the government issued its compulsory redundancy notice on the Harrier. Further upgrades had been planned until the end of 2015, ensuring that the Joint Force Harriers would remain fighting fit until replaced by the Lockheed Martin F-35B. The Harrier has certainly had a long run, and Hawker’s unusual little aircraft has proved to be highly successful. It still flies with the US Marine Corps, and with the Italian, Spanish and Indian navies, and these forces will only replace their Harriers when their chosen variants of the stealthy, supersonic Lockheed Martin F-35 are ready for action.
The British, though, have become a nation fixated with novelty. This chronic and galloping neophilia appears to have set in at much the same time as the government-endorsed consumer boom of the late 1950s, when Harold Macmillan, the Tory prime minister who despised old buildings, announced in a speech he gave to a Conservative party rally in Bedford in July 1957:
Go around the country, go to the industrial towns, go to the farms and you will see a state of prosperity such as we have never had in my lifetime, nor indeed in the history of this country… Indeed, let us be frank about it, most of our people have never had it so good.
Shortly afterwards, in the early 1960s, highly competent and newly upgraded express passenger steam locomotives were ditched – damn the cost – with just a few miles under their steel belts and replaced with very expensive, underperforming and unreliable diesels. Common sense
was bundled unceremoniously out of the station entrance as the railways were modernized by an odd new breed of men more concerned with image, consumerism, career status, the latest thing and what we know today, sadly, as ‘brands’.
Now, five decades later, we have become stupefied by an ever-greater flow of ever-cheaper consumer gewgaws unloaded from container ships that have made the long journey from the Far East. Even as a dolefully deep recession hit Britain, Europe, the United States and much of the rest of the world from 2008 onwards, the lesson of countries like Germany and China, both of which remained keen on manufacturing and, as a result, less prone to the roller-coaster economic rides experienced by Britain and the United States, went unlearned. The idea of Britain reassessing its priorities and moving forward into broad sunlit uplands of futuristic design, engineering and manufacturing remained seemingly abhorrent to a nation still wracked by fervid consumerism.
Britain does still make some military machines – including Ralph Hooper and John Fozard’s BAE Systems Hawk – and parts of several others including components of the Eurofighter Typhoon and the F-35B. Rolls-Royce continues to develop and manufacture civil and military aero-engines of the highest quality. And yet, unlike in Germany, which has a more or less integrated culture of design, research, innovation, engineering and manufacture, and finds relatively little need to outsource production to countries where wages are endemically low, what remains of British manufacturing industry works in a far more piecemeal fashion, with little intelligent or sustained support from either government or its system of education, one that continues to look down on industry, engineering, craft and the making of things.
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