expected a great gnashing of teeth, wails, and moans (low level keeps coming back, like a monster at the end of a horror movie). In the event, however, only two commanders came forward to argue for low-altitude tactics — Colonels Hal Hornberg of the F-15E wing and Tom Lennon of the F-111 wing. Because I’d promised the wing commanders they could run their own show in areas like tactics, I let them return to low-level attack tactics. But after a few days of real combat, real bullets, and unfortunately, real losses, both wings pitched out low-level operations and joined their friends at medium altitude.
When I asked the F-16 and A-10 wing commanders why they didn’t ask to go back to flying among the rocks, their answer was simple: “We want to survive this war.” Why, then, did the F-111s and F-15Es have to find out the hard way? I thought about that long and hard after the war. It couldn’t have been peacetime training. No one spends more time flying at low altitude than the A-10s. Their slower speed permits the Warthogs to fly legally almost anywhere in the United States at low altitude. And yet, even with the protection of their titanium armor, the A-10s didn’t want to tool around the Iraqis at low altitude. Why F-111s and F-15Es? The answer was twofold, I reasoned. First, except for the infrared sensor, their systems were optimized for low altitude. Their attack radars worked best at the low grazing angles afforded by low-altitude ingress. Most important, in my view, one half of the crew of these two-place fighters — the weapon system operator — earned his living telling the pilot where to go. If you were at low altitude without GPS (and only the F-16s had GPS), the pilot relied on the WSO for navigational assistance. When it came to attack, the WSO was the king; but if they didn’t go low-level, the rest of the trip could be pretty meaningless.
Italian and British Tornadoes also suffered losses — all, save one, the result of low-level, low-altitude tactics. In fact, in the first two days of the war, approximately two-thirds of our losses were suffered by aircraft flying low-level tactics, even as the majority of our sorties were being flown at medium altitude.
Because they were taking on the most difficult, most well-defended targets outside of Baghdad, the RAF GR-1 Tornadoes were especially hard hit. Saudi and British Tornadoes were equipped with a munition designed to shut down airfields, the JP-233, which had to be delivered at low altitude. But the airfields bristled with defenses, especially AAA guns, which continued to take a discouraging toll of Tornadoes well after the F-111s and F-15Es got back up to medium altitude. The Tornadoes had few good alternatives to flying low altitude. And I had no alternative but to let them do it. If I was loath to dictate tactics to USAF wings, I was definitely not going to do it to an ally. But if I could find an opening to introduce the subject, I would.
One night at a gathering of national air commanders, I said, “We’ve gotten some experience in this war. This looks like a good place to take a look at what we are doing right and wrong. I suggest we form a multinational tactics team to evaluate our operations and suggest changes they think appropriate.”
Without hesitation, Air Vice Marshal Bill Wratten spoke up: “I think that’s a good idea, and I’d like to lead the effort.” I couldn’t have been more pleased. Bill, like all the rest of us, had been in anguish over the losses. Even though there had been all sorts of speculation about the causes and the possible fixes, we needed an experienced airman close to the scene of the action to give us an objective view. Bill Wratten was just the man, and with the support of Air Chief Marshall Patty Hine, we were able to stop losses due to low-altitude tactics.
Here are some facts and figures:
We lost twelve GR-1s (of which one was Italian and two were RSAF). Nine were shot down or crashed doing low-level attacks, two were lost at medium altitude, and one ran out of fuel. The GR-1 loss rate was significantly higher than other aircraft:
The Tornado, which flew more low-level tactics than any other aircraft, had a loss rate nine times the F-16s and over six times the fairly slow A-10s.
? AAA and SAMs were dangerous, but the most lethal threat to our attack was the enemy’s interceptor aircraft.
Why?
Ground-based defenses stayed in one place and could be avoided by flying around them, if we knew where they were (and we usually did), or by high- or medium-altitude attack. If a SAM site shot at you, you could evade the missile and distance yourself from the site at 600 to 800 knots. A MiG, on the other hand, could encounter you anywhere over Iraq. If he jumped you, you might not be able to disengage; and since he was as fast as you, he could take a missile or gun shot if you turned tail to run.
I had studied the Iraqi Air Force for years, and had found many strengths, including a number of first-rate aircraft equipped with adequate missiles, a comprehensive command-and-control structure, and a few excellent pilots. Its single greatest weakness was its reliance on centralized command and control; but the training its pilots received was not uniformly good, and the logistics support was shaky.
To have had a chance against us, the Iraqis needed innovative tactics and an awareness of the air situation. They had neither.
In the hands of a good pilot, virtually any interceptor can badly hurt an attacking air force. Iraq had some excellent aircraft, especially their MiG-29s and Mirage F-1s, as well as an inventory of older aircraft, principally MiG-21s and MiG-23s. Though the older aircraft weren’t much of a threat on their own, if they’d been used in conjunction with the newer Russian and French models, they could have caused us serious problems. Their best tactics would have been to engage our air-to-air fighters with their top-of-the-line fighters, then run the older MiGs in on the bomb-laden aircraft using high-speed hit-and-run tactics. Even if they were unable to achieve a kill, their supersonic bounce would have forced our bombers to jettison their air-to-ground ordnance (externally stored bombs and missiles cause drag and have to be dropped).
The weapons carried by these fighters, on the other hand, were not nearly as good as our radar and heat- seeking missiles. Nevertheless, they were more than adequate if the enemy pilot could put his aircraft in a position to shoot them.
? I had never been impressed with Iraqi pilots, but that didn’t mean we could always count on running into bad ones. Among the youth of every nation in the world you’ll find a few “aces”—young men, and now women, capable of winning aerial engagements time after time. The traits found in those who consistently shoot down other fighters are found everywhere — though never in abundant supply. Good eyesight doesn’t hurt, but some of our greatest had poor eyesight (they’d purposely select wingmen with good eyes). Courage is required, but that is easy enough to come by in air-to-air combat, where you either fight or die. The trait I most admire in great pilots is “situational awareness.” It is the ability to keep track of what is going on around you and to project that awareness into an accurate mental image of what is about to happen during the next few moments; and it is extremely rare. It’s an ability that has little to do with IQ. Some of our best fighter pilots do not appear outwardly intelligent. On the ground they will do the dumbest things, or get into serious trouble; but in an engagement they process data at speeds and complexities that would defeat our fastest, most powerful computers. Out there in every nation there are a few — very few — individuals with the inborn talent to process supersonic motion and project it in three dimensions. If properly trained and equipped, these people duel with the best in the sky.
During the Iran-Iraq War, our AWACS had maintained a close watch on the aircraft of both countries, and their aerial engagements had been analyzed and briefed by our CENTAF operations/intelligence team. I had also analyzed the few encounters between Iranians and Saudis (which gave me a good benchmark; I was familiar with the great competence of Saudi pilots). The Iranians had excellent, though aging, fighters — F-5s, F-14s, and F-4s — but it was apparent from their lack of success against the Saudis that their aircraft radars were inoperative, or at least poorly tuned. The Iranian pilots, while eager, had obviously suffered as a result of the fundamentalist revolution. When Iranian aircraft challenged Saudi air defenses, they were promptly intercepted and either shot down or driven back.
On the other hand, when Iraqi fighters engaged Iranians — either in defense of Baghdad or supporting air attacks on Iranian targets — they were, to be charitable, ineffective. The engagements were pure Keystone Kops. The Iranian and Iraqi aircraft would be vectored toward one another by ground-based radars. They would close to within a mile, then circle aimlessly, apparently unable to locate each other and shoot their weapons. This “ballet of the blind” occurred time after time. I had no doubt that all the pilots were willing, but they were overly dependent on ground-based radar vectors — once again pointing out the superiority of our F-14, F-15, F-16, and F-18 on-board
