Marine: A Guided Tour of a Marine Expeditionary Unit

Suddenly, the Harrier had become a war-winner. Spain and India ordered various models of Harrier to operate off their small forces of aircraft carriers, and the little aircraft began to develop an international following.

^{A Marine AV-8B Harrier II of VMA-231, assigned to HMM-264, sits on the deck of the USS Wasp (LHD-1). Six of these birds from MCAS Cherry Point, N.C., were assigned to the air component of the 26th MEU (SOC) for their 1995/96 cruise.}

^{JOHN D. GRESHAM}

In U.S. naval aviation circles, where doctrine prohibits using the word 'small' in the same sentence with 'aircraft carrier,' the Harrier was regarded as an aberration; and the Marines had to fight a series of bitter budget battles during the late 70s and early 80s to keep the program alive. But they did more than that. In cooperation with British Aerospace, McDonnell Douglas proposed an improved 'big wing' version of the Harrier, the AV-8B, Harrier II, which entered service in 1984. The Marines originally hoped to procure 336 of these aircraft to equip every light attack squadron. But by the end of 1993, only some 276 were delivered, including 17 two-seat TAV-8B trainers. At the beginning of 1995, the Marine Harrier force, a small community of eight 20-plane squadrons, was evenly split between the East (Atlantic) and West (Pacific) Coasts. One squadron from Yuma has often been forward-deployed on rotation to Iwakuni, Japan. Squadrons provide detachments of six aircraft for six-month deployments aboard amphibious ships around the world.

The key feature of the AV-8B is an advanced graphite-epoxy composite wing, with integral fuel tankage providing up to 100 % greater range than the AV-8A. A built-in-air-refueling probe makes it possible to extend the range even further. The larger wing provides six hard-points, rather than the four on the AV-8A, a 50 % increase in armament options. The engine intakes and nozzles were redesigned to reduce drag, and an automatic stability- augmentation system was provided, with small 'puffer' jets at the nose, tail, and wingtips, using high-pressure bleed air from the engine. The landing gear is unusual, with a steerable nosewheel and twin-wheel main gear retracting into the fuselage; spindly outriggers at half-span on the wings retract rearward, where the wheels dangle freely in the slipstream.

Visually, the Harrier's most distinctive feature is the sharp angle at which the wings droop downward from root to tip; aeronautical engineers call this 'anhedral.' This helps to trap a cushion of air under the wing during VTOL operation. The wingspan is 30 ft, 4 in./9.25 m, small enough to fit on shipboard elevators without the added design complexity and weight penalty of folding wings. The Harrier's length is 46 ft, 4 in./14.12 m, and the Harrier does not have (or need) a tailhook. Empty weight is only 13,086 1b/5,936 kg, compared with an F/A-18C fighterbomber, which tips the scales at 24,600 1b/11,182 kg empty! Maximum vertical takeoff weight is 18,930 lb/8,587 kg, while maximum horizontal takeoff weight is 31,000 1b/14,061 kg, showing the dramatic benefit of a short takeoff roll.

The heart of the Harrier is the Pegasus vectored thrust engine, which gives it such unique qualities. Over the years, the engineers at Rolls Royce have managed to tweak additional thrust out of the Pegasus engine through a series of incremental upgrades. These are shown in the table below:

Maximum speed in a 'clean' (without external stores) configuration at sea level is 661 mph/1,065 kph. A new bubble canopy greatly improves the pilot's view to the sides and rear. The original twin 30mm ADEN-DEFA cannon (a joint British-French design from the late 1950s) in removable pods under the fuselage have been replaced by the awesome five-barrel rotary 25mm General Electric GAU-12, with the gun in one pod and a three hundred- round ammunition magazine in the other. There are six underwing hard-points, and one on the centerline. The four inboard hard-points have plumbing to accommodate 300-gal/1,135-L drop tanks; and for air-to-air missions up to four AIM-9 Sidewinder or AIM-120 AMRAAM air-to-air missiles (AAMs) can be carried. With regards to air-to-ground ordnance, the following maximum loads can be carried along with the GAU-12 gun pods:

• Up to sixteen Mk 82 500-1b/227-kg general-purpose or Mk 20 Rockeye cluster bombs.

• Up to six Mk 83 1,000-1b/454-kg general-purpose or CBU-87/89/97 cluster bombs.

• Up to four 2.75-in./70mm Hydra 70 Rocket pods (each with ten unguided rockets).

• Up to four AGM-65 Maverick air-to-surface missiles.

Accurate delivery of unguided and laser-guided weapons is ensured by the Hughes AN/ASB-19 Angle Rate Bombing Set (ARBS). In addition, an ALR-67 radar warning receiver and ALE-39 chaff/flare dispensers are fitted in the tail. In high-threat environments the centerline hard-point would be occupied by an ALQ- 164 or ALQ-167 defensive-electronics-countermeasures (ECM) pod.

As with so many other weapons systems, the 1991 Persian Gulf War gave the Marines and the Harrier II a chance to prove themselves in combat. Only seventeen days after Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1991, forty AV-8Bs of Marine Attack Squadrons VMA-311 and VMA-542 arrived at Sheikh Isa Air Base (also known as 'Shakey's Pizza') in Bahrain after a grueling trans-Atlantic flight. An additional twenty aircraft arrived with VMA-331 aboard the USS Nassau (LHA-4). And at the end of August 1990, VMA-311 moved up the Saudi coast to King Abdul Azziz Air Base. By late December, another squadron had arrived, VMA-231, flying eighteen thousand miles — more than halfway around the world — from Iwakuni, Japan, across the Pacific, the United States, and the Atlantic. As the start of the air war approached, in order to get really close to the action, a forward operating location was established at Tanajib, a helicopter field only 40 mi/64 km south of the Saudi/Kuwait border. The narrow 6,000 ft/ 1,828-m runway provided space for about a dozen Harriers at a time, but a good truck road allowed continuous delivery of fuel and ordnance. The Desert Storm air campaign plan envisioned holding the Harriers in reserve until they were needed for direct support of Marines in the ground war. But early on January 17th, 1991, Iraqi artillery batteries fired on Marine positions near the Saudi coastal town of Khafji, and the Harriers were called in to deal with the situation:

'We launched four aircraft. They made two passes each, releasing the one-thousand-pound bombs right onto the artillery pieces themselves.

We watched the video of the sortie, and you could actually see the big 122mm guns going end over end as though they were toys.'

— Lieutenant Colonel Dick White, USMC, VMA-311

You can appreciate the skill of the Marine pilots when you remember that these were unguided, 'dumb'- bomb attacks. To avoid Iraqi SAMs and gunfire, Harriers tried to stay above 10,000 ft/3,048 m, making targets relatively difficult to spot. The typical attack profile was a 45deg jinking dive at 525-kt/960-kph airspeed, with bomb release at between 10,000 and 7,000 ft/3,048 and 2,134 m. Chaff would be dispensed on the way in to confuse enemy radar, and flares would be dropped on the way out to decoy heat-seeking SAMs. By the end of the war, Harriers were ranging up to 210 mi/338 km deep into Kuwait to find targets. Pairs of aircraft would attack from different directions, often relying on targeting information from a forward air controller in a low-flying Marine OV-10 Bronco or Navy/Marine F/A-18 Hornet.

^{A pair of Marine AV-8B Harrier IIs operate on the deck of the USS Wasp (LHD-1) during operations in a Norwegian fjord in 1994.}

^{OFFICIAL U.S. NAVY PHOTO}

During the first week of the air war, Harriers carried one or two Sidewinders for self-defense, but the Iraqi Air Force was neutralized so quickly that no Harrier pilot even saw an enemy aircraft. Of eighty-six Harriers that operated over Kuwait, five were lost to enemy ground fire during the war, and one to a non-combat accident. Since they had experienced the joys of Yuma, Arizona, and Cherry Point, North Carolina, the desert heat of Saudi Arabia was nothing special to the Harrier squadrons, and there were remarkably few problems caused by the blowing powdery sand. In total, Harriers flew 9,353 sorties during Desert Shield and Desert Storm, including 3,380 combat missions, which delivered almost six million pounds of ordnance onto enemy targets. During the war, Harriers rarely flew more than two missions in a day, due to the bad weather.

During Desert Storm, the Harrier was largely limited to its designed role as a daylight/clear-weather aircraft, due to its lack of radar or precision-targeting electro-optical systems. Since wars don't stop at night or take breaks for bad weather, this was a serious limitation. Beginning in mid-1987 (with initial deliveries in September 1989), sixty AV-8Bs have been converted to Night Harriers through the installation of an FLIR sensor and new