Special Ops: Four Accounts of the Military's Elite Forces

by Orr Kelly

  The obvious solution was to streak in toward the target at a low altitude to prevent detection, then pull up sharply to avoid ground fire and bomb fragments. The attack would be made from a safer altitude, and the planes would need only a few seconds of separation rather than a half-minute. But the older A-6 and A-7 bombers didn’t have the energy for such a maneuver. As the pilots at Lemoore began to experiment with the F/A-18 with its two powerful engines, they found they had the energy to do what they had never been able to do in the older planes. What evolved is called the “Hornet high pop.”

  In this tactic, the pilot begins his run toward the target about five miles out and 200 feet above the ground (or lower in combat), and flying about 600 miles an hour. As he approaches the target, he kicks in his afterburners, pulls hard back on the stick, and streaks upward at a forty-five-degree angle to 10,000 feet. There, two miles above the target—and well above the threat of small-arms fire and the frag envelope—he rolls, recovers, and drops his bombs from about 8,000 feet.

  Increasingly, Hornet pilots are relying on tactics that take advantage of the plane’s power to keep them out of the range of deadly small-arms fire from the ground. They also attack from different altitudes. In one experiment at Fallon, thirteen planes dropped their bombs from 16,000 feet, with all of them in and out of the target area in forty-five seconds.

  In an actual bombing attack, the planes fly in a “battle box,” with two Hornets in the lead spread 4,000 to 6,000 feet apart, followed by one or two trail sections of two planes each, flying three to four nautical miles back. The approach is at high altitude to conserve fuel. Then, at about a hundred miles out, each of the two-plane sections takes a different route, adjusting their airspeed so they will all reach their goal from a different direction at the same time, about twelve minutes later.

  Despite the rule drilled into the consciousness of every attack pilot that “speed is life,” the fliers experimenting at Lemoore found that it may be better to approach the target at a comfortable speed of about 500 knots and as high as 500 feet, rather than to fly faster and lower where the increased sensation of speed, cockpit noise, and increased sensitivity of the flight controls all make the pilot’s basic job of controlling the plane more difficult.

  In a well-coordinated attack, a flight of Hornets can be in and out of the target zone in a few seconds, flying at different altitudes and from different directions, presenting a dizzying problem for the defenders.

  As they leave the target area, the pilots go to full power and jink rapidly from side to side so they don’t remain on the same heading for more than three to five seconds. The Hornet is capable of putting on speed rapidly as it climbs away from the target, and here it is very true that “speed is life.” This burst of vertical speed makes the F/A-18 a difficult target for enemy aircraft. It is safer from surface-to-air missiles (SAMs), however, if it stays low. Tactics will depend on which threat seems most dangerous.

  If the SAM threat is severe, the pilots are likely to see telephone pole-sized missiles rising toward them, riding a plume of fire. The standard tactic is to turn sharply toward the missile, trying to make it stall out in the attempt to follow the wildly jinking plane. An A-6 or A-7 may be able to make one or two such violent maneuvers, but then they run out of energy. The Hornet, on the other hand, has the power and agility to outmaneuver a missile if the pilot sees it in time.

  The pilots in training also began to find some encouraging answers to questions about the Hornet’s range.

  In the spring of 1981, Admiral Gillcrist, then a wing commander at Miramar, visited Lemoore, where Lenox held a similar post. He found two air force F-15 pilots whom Lenox had invited in to engage them in a dogfight. This was part of Lenox’s continuing campaign to “sell” the Hornet to the navy. Flying in a two-seat plane with another pilot, Gillcrist’s inclination was to enter the fight at about 600 knots. He was alarmed when his co-pilot suggested they hold their speed to about 340 knots, the speed at which the Hornet turns best, as the F-15s streaked toward them at almost twice that rate.

  “I felt absolutely obscene staying at 340 knots while the enemy, now in full view, were roaring in at twice our velocity,” Gillcrist says. As his adversary passed about a hundred feet to his right, the Eagle pilot broke toward him, streaking almost straight up. Gillcrist slammed his plane into afterburner and followed the F-15. As they completed a full circle, he had turned tightly enough to put the F-15 at a clear disadvantage. Moments later, Gillcrist pulled in behind him and the fight ended.

  Three more encounters brought the same result. Then the battle ended abruptly when one of the F-15 pilots called “bingo.” His plane, with its larger load of fuel, had run out of gas. The two F/A-18s still had enough fuel left for another round of combat between themselves before they had to go home.

  “I was totally astonished,” Gillcrist recalled later. “Here I was flying in an airplane that had been highly criticized for its lack of internal fuel capacity, and I just ran the highly touted long-range Eagle out of fuel. Amazing! The real operational significance of the Hornet had finally sunk in.”

  When Gillcrist was assigned to the Pentagon the following year as director of aviation plans and requirements, he didn’t realize at first that he had walked into a big controversy over the results of the operational evaluation run by Admiral Carter. His suspicions were raised, he says, when Carter ordered his pilots not to answer calls from Gillcrist. So Gillcrist called Lemoore and arranged for the pilots there to fly their own simulated missions to check the range.

  The data they sent back provided a much more optimistic picture of the Hornet’s range than that coming from Carter, and Gillcrist used it to the utmost in the debates within the navy. “That saved the plane,” Gillcrist concluded.

  The controversy was still going on in Washington when the marines finished their training at Lemoore and moved to their own base at El Toro, where VMFA 314, the first squadron of Hornets, was commissioned on 7 January 1983. The commander was Lt. Col. Pete Field, who, as a test pilot, was the first to encounter the roll rate problem at Patuxent three years before.

  When the first Hornets came on the scene, pilots of the new plane were not permitted to participate in the Navy Fighter Weapons School at Miramar. The school—popularly known as “Top Gun”—had been formed in 1969 in a successful effort to improve the combat skills of navy and marine pilots, whose performance against MiGs in Vietnam had left much to be desired. By the early 1980s, Top Gun had become an F-14 enclave, and Hornets were not welcome. As soon as this parochial rule was sensibly set aside, the marines, from their vantage point at nearby El Toro, made it a practice to volunteer to fill any vacancies in the Top Gun classes. As a result, marine Hornet squadrons have a higher percentage of these highly skilled fighter pilots than any other fighting units in the world.

  It was not very long, as we have seen, after the marines began flying the Hornet in their normal operations that the first tail cracks were found. The discovery of this problem could not have come at a worse time because the pilots and mechanics forming the first two navy squadrons were under a tight training schedule, preparing to go to sea early in 1985.

  Strangely, the disruption resulting from the grounding of the planes caused more distress for the mechanics than for the pilots. While the pilots continued with their ground school and flew the plane frequently in the simulators, the mechanics had become emotionally attached to “their” planes and fretted as they were taken away from them to be modified by McDonnell Douglas experts.

  Master Chief Don Leap, who was at Lemoore then, says: “We got very possessive of the aircraft. When there was talk they might be giving us another aircraft, morale of the squadron went down real quick. We wanted to take our own planes on the cruise, the ones we’d groomed, the ones we’d babied.”

  The mechanics’ fears, as it turned out, were not justified. They got their own planes back and the navy’s first two Hornet squadrons, VFA 113, the Stingers, and VFA 25, the Fist of the Fleet
, or Fisties, embarked on the U.S.S. Constellation and set sail for the western Pacific and the Indian Ocean late in February 1985.

  For Leap and many of the other mechanics in the two squadrons, the cruise was, for the large part, almost boring. All the effort put into making the plane reliable and easy to maintain paid off. Often, at the end of a day of flying, the F-14s and A-6s were in for repairs, but the F/A-18s were ready to fly again.

  Two serious problems did, however, require far more work by the mechanics than had been expected.

  The first problem involved the fuel cells inside the plane. During the Vietnam War, North Vietnamese infantrymen were taught to lie on their backs as a plane approached, point their rifles skyward and fire in unison on a whistled signal. It was a simple, primitive tactic—and it brought down more planes than MiG fighters, missiles, and rapid-fire antiaircraft guns. To make the Hornet less vulnerable to such cheap kills, the plane’s fuel is contained in self-sealing cells with most of the plumbing inside the cells. Thus, if a cell is hit it seals itself; if a fuel line is hit the leak is inside the cell, and fuel is not lost.

  The result is a complex maze of plumbing with many points where fuel lines go through the side of one cell and connect into another cell. These connections turned out to be highly susceptible to leakage. Poor quality control in the manufacture of the rubberized cells themselves created even more leakage problems.

  Will Willoughby, the navy’s reliability and maintenance guru, had quickly spotted the fuel leak problem. When one of the first Hornets was put on view for the assembled brass at Patuxent, Willoughby noted a McDonnell Douglas employee, wearing sparkling new coveralls, standing under the wing of the plane and surreptitiously reaching up from time to time to wipe leaking fuel from the wing so it would not form a visible puddle on the hangar floor.

  With an admiral in tow, Willoughby indulged a fiendish sense of humor by approaching the man and engaging him in conversation, pretending not to notice the fuel slowly flowing, drip, drip, drip, on the man’s head.

  The fuel leakage was finally brought under control but not before mechanics had spent thousands of frustrating hours tracking down and fixing leaks.

  Even more surprising when the Hornet went to sea was the amount of corrosion that occurred in a plane that had been carefully designed to be corrosion-proof. One particularly puzzling problem was the corrosion where the plane’s composite skin covers the avionics and radar compartments. Supposedly, the composite material, which doesn’t corrode, would protect the metal underneath. To their surprise, the mechanics found instances in which the metal was badly corroded. Tests revealed that an electrical current, much like that in an automobile battery, was flowing between the skin and the metal, eating away the metal. The problem was finally solved by carefully coating the joint between the two with a special sealing material.

  Fighting corrosion became a constant battle. With the limited supply of fresh water on a carrier, it was impossible to run out a hose and wash down the planes, even though they became coated, overnight, with a visible residue of salt. Instead, crews attacked the planes with backpack sprayers, trying to get the salt off the most susceptible areas without rubbing it into the cracks. Crews also kept canopies closed to protect the cockpits from salt spray. Even when pilots sat in their planes on fiveminute alert, they raised the canopies only enough for a slight breath of air to blow through.

  Normally, five-minute alert is one of the least sought-after assignments on a carrier. The pilot gets dressed in all his flying gear, checks out his plane, climbs into the cockpit, and then sits there, ready to be catapulted into the air at any moment. Finally, after four boring, uncomfortable hours, another pilot takes his place. Since the Hornet was not expected to stay aloft for very long, it was built without a relief tube. If the pilot has been imprudent enough to drink too much before climbing into the cockpit, he is forced to unloosen his gear as much as possible and relieve himself into his “piddle pack”—a plastic bag containing a sponge.

  As the Constellation sailed out across the Pacific and came within range of Bear bombers flying out of bases in the western Soviet Union, assignment to five-minute alert suddenly became prized duty. One of the pilots on alert would be the first Hornet driver to make contact with a Soviet plane.

  For several tantalizing days, Bears showed up in the vicinity of the ship, although they did not fly over it, and it was not clear if they had spotted it. On several occasions, Tomcats from the Connie rendezvoused with the Bears, but the F/A-18s sat on the deck. Battle group commanders had decided to use the F-14s, with their longer loiter time, to watch the Bears. On 18 March 1985, about a month out of San Diego, between Guam and the Philippines, Comdr. Tom (“Smooth Dog”) Vaughn, maintenance officer of the Stingers, was on five-minute alert. As his four-hour stint wore on, he heard a tap on the side of the plane and his relief made the unusual gesture of offering to take his place early. Vaughn declined. Nearby, Lt. Dave (“Red Bone”) Martin of the Fisties sat in his F/A-18.

  Suddenly, about fifteen minutes before their time was up, Vaughn and Martin heard the order: “Launch the F/A-18s!” Vaughn tells what happened next:

  “Within seconds, we launched. The Bears were out quite a way, and they had turned back. We’re seeing opportunity slip between our fingers. I told old Red Bone, ‘light the burners, we’re going after these guys.’ We plugged in the burners and started zorching out there after the Bears. For whatever reason, they turned around.”

  Vaughn, then a lieutenant commander, outranked Martin, so he was the first to pull up alongside a Bear. Martin, who had cameras loaded with both color and black-and-white film, snapped the historic encounter. Vaughn could see a Soviet crewman just as eagerly taking his own pictures of the new American planes. Then Vaughn and Martin changed places. But Vaughn had only black-and-white film, and his pictures didn’t turn out very well. It was Martin’s shots of Vaughn making the contact that were published. Squadron mates later accused Vaughn of planning it that way.

  The Bear is, of course, an old, lumbering, propeller-driven bomber now used primarily for long-range patrol. A still-unanswered question was how well the Hornet would perform if it were called upon to protect the fleet against the fast, modern Backfire bomber, a plane built in a naval version specifically for attacks against American carriers. Would the F/A-18, with its relatively limited range, be able to reach out far enough to take on the Backfires before they launched their missiles and headed for home?

  This was precisely the question raised more than a decade before, when Kent Lee argued that the ability of a carrier skipper to arm all his Hornets as interceptors would greatly increase his protection against air attack. Lee had, of course, been laughed out of the room by the F-14 proponents, who contended that only the Tomcat could reach out and hit the enemy bombers far enough from the fleet.

  Adm. Leon Edney, who was commander of Carrier Group One, aboard the Constellation, and later vice chief of naval operations, was aware of the attention focused on this first test of the Hornet, and he was very concerned about the range. In an attempt to answer the question of the F/A-18’s effectiveness against a Backfire raid, Edney set up a series of exercises in which the Hornets were called upon to help protect the Constellation from simulated attacks by a regiment of Backfires, as many as twenty-five to forty planes.

  In an extreme case, he found the Hornet could pick up attackers as far as 800 miles from the carrier, and it was used often as a deck-launched interceptor to go after planes 450 miles away. In such a role, the Hornet would be most effective in a head-on shot, trying to hit the Backfire before it launched its missiles. The F-14, on the other hand, with its greater ability to loiter far from the carrier and its longer-range radar and missile, would be the first line of defense.

  In wartime, he concluded, the range of the Hornet could be stretched at least another fifty miles by reducing the amount of fuel reserved for return to the carrier. In peacetime, pilots like to keep an extra 1,500 pounds of fuel or so to pe
rmit as many as three passes at landing on the ship. But, during the Constellation’s deployment, the Hornets routinely made it aboard the ship on the first pass more than ninety percent of the time, even at night. In combat, they would use that fuel rather than bring it back aboard.

  In other training exercises, Edney sent Hornets out on strikes against targets 500 miles away, using refueling. But unlike an A-6, which, in “truck mode,” carries as many as sixteen 500-pound bombs to blanket the target, the F/A-18s carried a small number of bigger bombs—three to five 1,000-pounders—and relied on their computerized bombing system to drop them precisely on the target.

  One of the most interesting experiments conducted aboard the Constellation involved mixed sections in which an F-14 and an F/A-18 flew together. At first, it seemed logical to put the Tomcat, with its more powerful radar and its two-man crew, in the lead, with the single-place Hornet flying wing. That was soon recognized as a bad idea. Pilots found it much better to put the Hornet out in front, leaving the added burden of flying formation to the pilot of the two-man plane.

  Quickly it became apparent that the Tomcat-Hornet team is a deadly combination. The F-14’s radar can see farther, but the radar on the F/A-18 is better able to separate out individual targets. The F/A-18’s radar also does a better job than that in the F-14 in picking out surface targets, especially over land. The two planes also have two different methods for identifying distant targets. The F-14 has a telescopic television viewer that can see well beyond the range of human eyes, and the Hornet has a still-secret method for telling friend from foe at long ranges.

  But while, in many ways, the two planes work beautifully together, pilots also learned that they have to be careful. The Tomcat quickly runs low on fuel if it tries to keep up with the Hornet’s high cruising speed. But the F-14 has a higher top speed than the F/A-18, which can go just under twice the speed of sound, so the pilot has to be careful not to run away from his teammate when it is time to bug out and go home.