scrambled; at 0329 hours it climbed away, turning south to replace 504826.
The wisdom of placing all such high-value assets under the direct command of COMAAFCE was thus clear from the outset of the war. There was now much to survey. As the Backfires turned for home, swarms of blips began to appear on the Sentries’ radar screens, as, in accordance with well-publicized doctrine, the longer-range offensive Warsaw Pact aircraft prepared to punch through NATO’s air defences in the area already partially blinded by the Backfire attack. Five years before, NATO forces would have had no way of identifying the main axes of the air threat until it struck across the IGB. Now, the Sentry controllers could watch the formations massing in much the same way as forty-five years previously hazy RAF radars had watched the Luftflotten assemble over the Pas-de-Calais. But in 1985 the controllers were assisted by the micro-processor. Warsaw Pact jamming was largely filtered and almost entirely limited to two or more azimuth bearings on the narrow sweeping beam. The keyboards rippled and details of aircraft type, height, speed, heading and numbers were flashed by the computers to the fighter controllers below. The information was there in abundance.
Throughout the 1970s Soviet air power had steadily increased in strength as a new generation of Flogger, Fitter, Fencer and Foxbat fighters and Backfire bombers, supplemented by the Hip and Hind helicopters and the Cock, Candid and Camber transports entered service. In the early 1980s the Soviet Union had flexed these new muscles in several parts of the world. Military strength had been unequivocally used to prepare a more favourable political situation in Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia, South Yemen, Syria, Libya and Afghanistan. All these efforts had not been uniformly successful but the long reach and hitting power of Soviet aircraft had everywhere become more and more apparent.
Western military concern at what was clearly an attempt to close the gap in quality between Warsaw Pact and NATO aircraft was tempered by reassuring knowledge of several serious and apparently endemic weaknesses in the Soviet Air Force itself. Effective air power demands far more than improved aircraft. It must have highly- trained and dedicated people, a professional and complex maintenance system, flexible and resilient command and control organization, and above all the inspiration of imagination and initiative in both practice and theory. The SAF, on the other hand, appeared to be handicapped by the quality of its largely conscript ground crews, by low morale and corruption (as described in such detail in the published accounts of evidence from the defecting Soviet airman Lieutenant Belenko who landed his MiG-25 Foxbat B in Japan in September 1976), by a rigid command structure which hampered the flexible use of air power and by a social and political system in which the encouragement of initiative and imagination was hardly prominent.
Beginning in late 1982, however, shreds of evidence began to reach the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) in the Pentagon and West European intelligence centres which seemed to suggest that the Soviet Union was making determined efforts to eradicate some of these weaknesses and that, despite the deadening effect of the Party bureaucracy on all levels of the SAF, it was having some success. During 1983 clearer evidence began to emerge which ultimately was to compel the NATO air forces to revise their overall estimate of the potential effectiveness of their Warsaw Pact opponents.
As early as 1979 the SAF had attempted to improve the quality of maintenance by introducing new warrant officer ranks and by offering improved pay and promotion incentives to encourage conscript ground crew to extend beyond their mandatory two years’ service. By 1983, as the Soviet colleges of science and technology continued to produce more graduates each year, there was in the conscripted manpower of the SAF an increased proportion of highly-skilled young men. Moreover, as the Soviet Union came to lay greater emphasis on conventional war-fighting methods, previously very much in second place to nuclear doctrines, the pay of SAF ground crew was raised to match that in the nuclear-armed Soviet Strategic Rocket Force (SRF), hitherto the pre-eminent branch of the Soviet armed services. Living and messing conditions were improved and though still far below levels demanded in the West were nevertheless much higher than those of the majority of conscripts in their civilian life. The retention rate of ground crew began to rise, their status began to improve, and during 1985 the serviceability rate of SAF front-line squadrons in Eastern Europe began to show a steady but marked improvement.
The second cause for unease concerned changes in SAF operational procedures. Throughout the 1970s, although the SAF re-equipped with aircraft able to carry three times the payload over twice the range of their predecessors, its squadrons tended to fly the same rigidly controlled, highly predictable patterns of attack and defence which had been evident for thirty years. From 1979 onwards, however, articles began to appear in Red Star and some air force journals, purporting to be written by senior officers, which openly commended pilots who had shown initiative in departing from prearranged plans and procedures which, in exercises, they had found to be inadequate. No such noises were heard from the Red Army, which was carrying on in the old familiar straitjacket.
The causes of these changes in the SAF can now be seen more clearly. To operate the Fencer under conditions of inflexible command and control would undermine its long-range potential. Moreover, the considerable investment which the Soviet Union had made in computer-assisted command and control procedures was beginning to pay dividends in easing the enormous airspace management problems created by the large-scale SAM deployment in Eastern Europe. Hitherto, rigid control had not only been politically desirable but it had been adequate for short-range offensive operations and air defence, and had enhanced flight safety in airspace shared at many heights with SAM and guns. There was another factor. Soviet air power doctrine assumed the application of large numbers over very large areas. In the Red Army, with a similar basic philosophy, initiative was expected not so much from a lieutenant as from the commanders at not less than divisional level. In the SAF the operational concept required control and command to be exercised at a level appropriate to the reach and hitting power of the aircraft concerned. Moreover, in pre-planned offensive operations of a kind envisaged by the Warsaw Pact, conformity on the part of individual air crew to the plan had seemed more important than an ability to exercise initiative in adversity. This was the exact opposite of what was to be found in the numerically inferior NATO air forces.
By 1985, however, it was apparent that far-reaching reorganization of command and control in the SAF had been completed. The general staff now controlled the heavy bombers, Bears and Bisons, and the medium bombers, Badgers and Backfires, as two virtually independent air armies. They could, therefore, be directed not only against targets in Europe but in the Mediterranean, the Middle East and, if necessary, the Far East. The shorter-range Floggers and Fencers were controlled at the lower theatre headquarters level, while the fixed-wing aircraft with the shortest range, the SU-17 Fitter Js and SU-25s and remaining MiG-21 Fishbeds, stayed under control of frontal aviation headquarters. Below them, the close air support Hip and Hind helicopters were controlled by the armies. The net result of this reorganization had been to match the level of command with the combat radius of the aircraft, thereby ensuring greater flexibility and concentration of force in relation to the demands of tactical control and rapid response. As has been indicated, however (and we shall be seeing some lively evidence of this in chapter 11), there was room for difference of opinion on what was really meant by flexibility.
At the same time as the command infrastructure had been revised, Soviet operational training also began to approach more closely the potential of the new aircraft. The MiG-23 Flogger G, hitherto flown only as an interceptor, was fitted with underwing rails to take air-to-surface rockets. Flogger squadrons in Eastern Europe began to assume multi-role commitments. Periodically they would deploy to armament camps in central USSR to develop new ground-attack techniques away from the prying eyes of Sentry. On their return, each would demonstrate a marked improvement in weapon delivery. More ominously, exercises involving the co-ordination of three or more air regiments increased in frequency. In the 1970s it had not been uncommon for a squadron of ground-attack Fitters, for example, to be given top cover by a squadron of MiG-21 Fishbeds. By 1984, Flogger Gs or Js could be escorted by entire regiments of other Flogger Gs. Some Western military analysts had expected to see such escort provided by the most recent addition to the MiG-25 family: the two-seat Foxbat F with its improved pulse-doppler radar and long-range air-to-air missiles (AAM). But its basic airframe still made it quite unsuitable for the low-level
