Viper Pilot: A Memoir of Air Combat (15 page)

Basic Fighter Maneuvers (BFM) is the first phase of the course. It’s anything but basic and much too complex to describe on paper, but I’ll attempt an overview. BFM is aerial hand-to-hand combat at 400 knots. Its purpose is to teach the pilot to truly fly and fight the aircraft. Nothing reveals the physical limits of yourself and the jet like BFM. It is fast, violent, and death is literally a few seconds away. There are midair collisions, out-of-control situations, and blackouts from G-locks. This is the blood-draining agony of sustained, multidimensional maneuvering at seven to nine times the force of gravity.

It will kill you.

There are four types of BFM. Offensive, which puts you at a starting point behind your adversary. He reacts, and you have to kill him before he can reverse positions and kill you. Defensive, where you’re the meat and the enemy is behind you. You’ve got to defeat his initial shots and then stay alive long enough to take away his advantage and kill him. In neutral BFM, the fight begins as both aircraft pass nose-to-nose at about a thousand knots. Each guy then claws through various options at 800 feet per second and tries to arrive at a position to employ his weapons. In this case, barring a mistake, it all comes down to experience and who can outperform the other soonest. Dissimilar BFM is when any of the above are fought against another type of aircraft. This, especially if it’s from a neutral setup, is the most realistic dogfighting training there is. In the real world, you rarely know exactly who all the bad guys are, and you’re much more likely to meet one head-on rather than sneak up behind him.

BFM is only the beginning.

Air Combat Maneuvering (ACM) is next, and it’s BFM on steroids. Here you fight as a
pair
against one enemy fighter. Again, there’s Offensive, Defensive, Neutral, and Dissimilar. Communicating with your wingman is vital, and together you must locate the threat, identify it, react, and then kill it. Remember, you’re doing all this while zipping around at rifle-bullet speeds.

Air Combat Tactics (ACT) is fighting as a pair against an unknown number of adversaries—because in combat you never really know how many bad guys are out there. Again, this approximates real-world confusion and tests a pilot’s ability to be able to think, fight, and win against any number or type of threat.

There are two main categories of air-to-air tactics. Within Visual Range (WVR) is where you’re fighting an opponent you can see with your eyes. This usually means short-range weapons, like heat-seeking Sidewinder missiles and the 20-mm cannon. Beyond Visual Range (BVR) is meant to take advantage of the American technical superiority that permits long-range missile employment. If you can kill a guy before he gets close enough to shoot at you, it’s always better. Think about a man coming at you with a knife, but you’ve got a loaded gun in your hand. Would you pull your own knife or just shoot him in the head?

The best part of ACT was the dissimilar combat. We usually fought against American F-15s or F/A-18s, both of which are very tough fights. There were even some Navy F-14 Tomcats (you know, Maverick and Goose) still creaking around, but they were more for trophy-hunting rather than fighting. Sparing no expense, the Air Force also brought over foreign aircraft and their pilots when available. French Mirages, Israeli KIFRs, and German Tornados were all on the menu.

These international guys always had a good time flying across the world to Sin City to dogfight in the sun. One night in downtown Vegas, I watched a British fighter squadron get thrown out of a casino and arrested en masse. The Brits were confused, because it’s simply Royal Air Force tradition to get plastered, sing songs, and perform the Prang Concerto—that is, burn a piano. Unfortunately, this particular piano was in the lobby of a very large and prominent downtown casino. If we’d done that, we’d be in jail for a while, but these guys got a headline in the
Daily Mirror
and a hero’s welcome back in England. We thought it was great. Do you want fighter pilots or overgrown Boy Scouts?

ACT was also important, because it was more or less the halfway point of the program, and I finally felt I might make it. Maybe. Again, it was a real shock for someone who’d aced everything to date to consider failing a formal course. Shocking and scary. But fear is a very useful motivator.

Throughout the program, we also attended classes every day. More than three hundred hours of academic instruction covering all the aircraft systems at engineering-level detail. All the weapons we could use were dissected and rebuilt. Tactics, countertactics, and every threat we could face in the world was analyzed in detail. We also had to research and write a graduate school–level paper on a related classified subject, and then present it before a panel of FWIC instructors. All of this was commingled with nonstop flying, briefing, and debriefing. I used to fall asleep standing up in the shower at the end of the day. It sucked. I loved it.

The last few flights in the air-to-air phase were called four v. fours—meaning four of us against four of something else. In our case, we traveled to Florida and flew against the F-15s from the 33rd Fighter Wing (Eglin AFB) and the 325th Fighter Wing (Tyndall AFB). Air-to-air fighting in all its variations is what Eagles do. It’s all they do. And the advantage to flying only one type of mission is that you have the luxury of becoming extremely good at it.

However, we were all F-16 instructors
and
we’d been FWIC students for three months. We’d recovered some confidence and were ready to finish ACT and move on. Besides, it was Florida, and everyone, the FWIC instructors included, was looking forward to a little wind-down before we started the most complex sections of the course. Killing Eagles at the beach was fun. I smiled for the first time in three months.

With the air-to-air phase complete, the FWIC course switched into high gear. Viper pilots regard dogfighting as something we might have to do on our way to killing things on the ground. No one ever won a war solely through air superiority. Don’t get me wrong—you have to own the air in order to win on the ground, but rarely can you be victorious with airplanes alone. Every American war fought since 1917 is proof of that.

Bomb-dropping in support of ground operations, generally referred to as “Surface Attack,” is the bread and butter of the F-16 world. There are low- and medium-altitude attacks with different bombs, strafing with the 20-mm cannon, precision-guided munitions like the Maverick missile, laser and TV bombs, cluster bombs . . . the list goes on.

The point is, as a Target Arm, you’ve got to be the best at this. From your own jet, you have to be able to watch pilots executing these attacks and be instantly able to gauge their effectiveness. Or prevent fatalities. Several thousand pounds of high explosives delivered in the wrong place can kill you. Or blow up the wrong people on the ground. Missing a target also means someone else will have to fight his way in and risk his life to fix your fuckup. It could also lead to ground troops getting overrun and never coming home again. So we take it seriously—and so did the FWIC instructors.

Basic Surface Attack leads into Surface Attack Tactics (SAT). A student is given “objectives”—the desired results—and a few other specifics, like the Time Over Target (TOT) and the
known
threats. He then designs, plans, briefs, and leads the attacks against the entire catalog of possible threats.

Now, the Nellis threat array is infamous for its lethality, in a training sense. In any given year, more than five hundred aircraft from all over the world fly twenty thousand training sorties against these threats. All U.S. tactical flying units cycle through every few years, including USAF fighter squadrons based in Europe and the Far East. All the NATO air forces attend if they can afford it, and occasionally you can see Israelis and some of the friendlier Arab nations, like Egypt or Morocco. Even the French show up occasionally, when they can find it.

After SAT comes the Mission Employment (ME) phase. Every aspect of the course is rolled into four separate missions. You’re given tactical problems with targets, threats, and timing windows. How you solve the problems is up to you. I’ve seen perfect plans that are poorly executed and bad plans that are overcome by superb execution. You just never know how it’s going to play out, and a student’s adaptability is a key issue with surviving this phase—or not.

The FWIC student, now only several flights away from hopefully graduating, is the Mission Commander. He has to decide, based on the threats and the target, how to plan and orchestrate the attack. He chooses the weapons, routes, tactics, and designs the attacks. He also runs the entire mass briefing and debriefing.

Each aircraft that flies on the Nellis range carries an Air Combat Maneuvering Instrumentation (ACMI) pod. All the flight parameters and even the pilot’s HUD view is fed back to a huge building containing the mission debriefing system. RFMDS, the Red Flag Mission Debriefing System, is the heart of all tactical training at Nellis. Every mission and every flight can be picked apart thanks to the ACMI pods. It’s a tremendous advantage, to be able to sit with a cup of coffee at zero miles per hour and totally reconstruct a mission. All maneuvers, tactics, and every weapon that is dropped or shot is analyzed. This is how we learn, improve, evaluate, and this is another reason for American air supremacy.

For a FWIC student, the ME phase is a rite of passage. However, I knew two pilots who washed out in this final part of the course. If you do survive, your immediate reaction is disbelief. At least it was in my case. That, and the weak-limbed numbness that comes from profound relief. I’d been through every other formal course and training possible for a fighter pilot—
and
had seen action in the Gulf War. Fighter Weapons School was by far the most difficult.

After my final flight, I drove back to the Visiting Officer’s Quarters and sat outside on the Wailing Bench. Normally, you only sat on this thing when you busted (failed) a flight. You’d carve your call sign and the mission number into the bench and wait for your buddies to pass you a shot of scotch by way of solace. Needless to say, there were hundreds of names and dates, because everyone busts rides. So I sat there, let the sweat dry, and the realization sink in that I was almost a Patchwearer. There was one final, very closely held initiation that would take place during Patch Night. After this, graduates received the gray-and-black patch they’d proudly wear for the rest of their careers. The idea was now to go back to a fighter squadron with the latest techniques and tactics and pass it along to everyone else.

I’d known for months that my combat experiences in the Gulf were at odds with some of the tactics being taught at Nellis. But remember the environment. FWIC instructors fight other elite American pilots, so their tactics tend to reflect that level of threat—and not necessarily those posed by poorly trained Russian, Chinese, or Middle Eastern aviators. Besides, if you can defeat the Nellis “threat,” you can beat anything in the world. One curious result I’ve noticed is that we often falsely equate the threat’s capability with our own standards. We give them too much credit and occasionally derive some flawed tactics from this outlook. I was determined not to do this. I wanted to combine all my previous experience with the magic I’d just been taught—a perfect marriage of real-world lessons with the most lethal fighter training in the world. In retrospect, it was a nice thought.

Fighter Weapons School was a tremendous, life-altering experience and you truly do emerge as someone else. Anyone who has survived to be part of an elite group knows this feeling. No matter what unmanned space-based crap they’re gluing to the Nellis main gate these days, that place will always be “The Home of Fighter Pilot” to me and those like me. I’m sure that’ll piss off the politically correct ground-pounders, but really, who cares?

6

Intermission

S
INCE
I
WAS ONE OF THE FEW
V
IPER PILOTS WHO’D STARTED AS
a Wild Weasel, I was especially eager to apply what I’d learned from the Fighter Weapons School and Operation Desert Storm to the newly fielded F-16CJ. The F-16CJ, called a CeeJay, was a quantum leap forward in technology. Tremendously versatile, with an amazing capacity for adaptation, the F-16 is a natural Weasel. Due to its composite-material construction, it was difficult to see on radar and nearly impossible to see with the naked eye. The engines didn’t smoke and it was the most maneuverable fighter in the world. This meant it was as deadly to enemy fighters as it was to SAMs and, unlike the F-4G, it didn’t require escort. Its only shortcoming, due to the relatively small size, was a smaller weapons payload. To compensate, the CeeJay carried precision-guided munitions, like laser-guided bombs and air-to-ground missiles, the rationale being that if you could put a bomb within three feet of its target, then you didn’t need to carry many of them.

It was during these years that the pace of deployments to Southwest Asia moved into high gear. George Bush’s rush to claim a victory in 1991 had left us with another war to fight, and anyone with a working brain knew this was inevitable. You see, Iraq was basically quarantined between the wars. This meant they owned the ground but we controlled the air, so we really controlled most of the country. No-fly zones were established above the 34th Parallel north to Turkey, and from the 32nd Parallel south to the Kuwaiti/Saudi border. These were patrolled by fighter squadrons that continuously rotated in theater for over ten years. Not just fighters, but the aerial tankers, transports, AWACS, and everything else needed to support them.

It was a colossal drain on our resources, immensely expensive, and an overall pain in the ass. Aircraft service life was shortened by at least 50 percent, due to the added hours flown, and we missed a lot of Christmas holidays, kids’ birthdays, and wedding anniversaries. Divorce rates skyrocketed and the fabric of the Air Force was permanently altered as general officers and policy-makers strove mightily to create a replacement threat for the Soviet Union. A military—and most nations—need at least one enemy to grease industry and keep everyone on their toes.

The Air Force and Army particularly needed the Iraqi threat to justify their budgets. The Navy has aircraft carriers and can go virtually anywhere, but they can’t remain at sea indefinitely. A carrier battle group also requires significant resupply to remain effective. As for the Army, well, one look at a Forward Operating Base (FOB) is enough. They’re not intended to be permanent and it shows.

Only the Air Force has the global logistical capability to sustain long-term, heavy operations. No-fly zone (NFZ) enforcement in the south could be done in a limited way from carriers in the Gulf or from shore-based fighters. But, with the exception of Bahrain, any shore-basing of naval air was done from a USAF air base in Saudi Arabia or Kuwait. NFZ operations from the north could only be done from Incirlik Air Base in Turkey.

However, we now had several footholds in the region from big bases that had been built with all the engineering and logistical expertise of the U.S. military. It is a truly impressive display of American power to see empty desert transformed into self-contained, fortified cities within weeks.

Now, the Air Force has always had the idea that if you take care of your people then they’ll take care of whatever needs to be done. Also, the Air Force usually
remains
deployed, so air bases today are what naval bases were in the past: stepping-stones across the world and vital links for force-projection. So bases are built to last, with at least some thought given to those who will serve there. In any event, air bases are built around flying operations. The runways, ammunition dumps, operations and maintenance facilities are the best in the world. I mean, there’s no point to having an air base if the aircraft can’t fly the missions.

The living facilities are also pretty good, relatively speaking. I’ve seen little condominiums, prefabricated apartments, and containerized housing. Only in rare cases does the Air Force use tents, and then never for very long. A huge part of any air base is the Morale, Welfare and Recreation (MWR) area. This includes dining facilities, fitness centers, and, if at all practical, a swimming pool—no kidding. Of course, since most of the Middle East is sand, beach-volleyball courts are always a necessity. Depending on the intensity of operations and the longevity of the base, there is also a food court of some kind. I’ve seen Chinese, Turkish, and Indian restaurants, usually a burger joint, and always some type of pizza parlor.

But no alcohol. General Order No. 1 from Operation Desert Shield reads:

Operation Desert Shield places United States Armed Forces into USCENTCOM AOR countries where Islamic law and Arabic customs prohibit or restrict certain activities which are generally permissible in Western societies. Restrictions upon these activities are essential to preserving U.S. host nation relations and the combined operations of U.S. and friendly forces.

Just to be clear—we weren’t on holiday as guests in another country, so the “host nation” statement was always bullshit. We weren’t there to promote democracy, save souls, or make friends. Oil, economics, and politics aside, we were in the Middle East because Saudi Arabia and Kuwait couldn’t protect themselves. They were frightened enough of the Iraqi threat to beg our help and, for many reasons, we gave it. Do you really think any of them would protest the personal conduct of the soldiers who were saving their wealth and way of life?

I don’t either.

Most of the Saudi officers I knew drank more than we did, and, during the war, Cairo was full of Kuwaitis who were content to party while the Americans protected their country. The British and French military also had a large presence in the region, and they didn’t inflict similar restrictions on their people. In fact, the Brits loved Jell-O parties. They’d put the stuff in ice trays, mixed with vodka or gin, and slurp it down. During twelve rotations to Southwest Asia, I never heard of one alcohol-related incident.

By the way, the civilians working for oil companies, like Aramco, drank like fishes. So did the U.S.-government types assigned to Saudi Arabia. Drinking isn’t that important to me personally and it was certainly no hardship to do without. In the Army’s case, it’s not a bad idea to keep booze away from minimally educated kids with guns. However, regardless of the pros and cons, our government’s rush to placate people who weren’t in a position to object rubbed us the wrong way. I mean, if you have the biggest stick and you’re waving it in everyone’s face, then why be afraid to use it? Appeasement nearly always has far-reaching security ramifications and this was no exception, as we shall see.

Aside from being away from home and civilization as we knew it, these weren’t really tough deployments. We lived in decent conditions, had lots of time to work out, and very few distractions. Some guys took classes for the master’s degree required by the Air Force for promotion beyond the rank of captain. Others indulged in hobbies. I know one guy who made stained-glass windows from bits of broken glass he found around the compound, and another who trained for Iron Man competitions. Some guys chased skirts and others built toys for their kids. You just never knew.

Tactics took up most of my brain bytes. We all knew there would be a reckoning with Iraq. The Air Force closet had been cleaned out, so to speak, and almost all of the older weapons and jets had been retired. What was left was considerably streamlined and there were a lot fewer of us around to fight. The technological advances had evened this up but it was left to us to make the most of these advantages.

Iraq was a relatively simple theater for combat, and the terrain, at least from the air, was fairly permissive. Mountains were only in the far north and east. The far west, near the Jordanian and Syrian borders, was a morass of twisted wadis and rugged low hills. Most of the population was concentrated in Mesopotamia, the land between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers.

So it makes sense, defensively, to protect the large important focal points rather than the entire country, and this is precisely what the Iraqis did. The cities of Kirkuk and Mosul in the north, Baghdad in the center, Nasiriyah and Basrah in the south were all heavily defended. There were dozens of fortified rings for smaller towns or military complexes, and mobile SAM systems could be anywhere. In fact, the Iraqis had over eight thousand mobile SAMs, not including the thousands of shoulder-launched MANPADS that any soldier could carry. These complimented and overlapped the four hundred larger SA-2s, SA-3s, and SA-6s. Anti-aircraft artillery estimates were in the tens of thousands.

The big stuff was centered around important cities to protect airfields, train stations, communications nodes, and other vital bits of infrastructure. Tracking information from surveillance radars, air traffic radars, and long-range search radars was all brought together in an Integrated Air Defense System (IADS) called KARI. In theory, this would tie all inbound radar tracks on people like me together into a consolidated air “picture.” Based on this, the Iraqi Air Defense Commander would then parcel out the interception and targeting responsibilities to the appropriate Iraqi SAM and fighter units.

There were several problems with this. First, KARI was designed by the French, who, though first-class vintners, are usually hopeless as warriors. Ask the Germans or the Vietnamese or the Algerians. Second, Iraqi systems didn’t handle jamming very well, and Americans are masters of electronic combat. We could, and did, blank out entire sectors so the Iraqis couldn’t see what was coming. Many of our initial targets were long-range search radars that could detect us crossing the Saudi border. We would also destroy telephone relay stations, cell towers, and all other forms of communications equipment. It’s a basic concept in any fight: punch out their eyes and mouth so they can’t see to react or call for help.

The Russians, who trained most of the Iraqis, are very centralized in their battlefield thinking, and they instilled this in their students. So, cutting units off from their commanders would force independent thought, and this was something most Iraqis didn’t handle well. Battles are chaotic enough anyway, and without direction from above many Iraqi units initially did nothing at all.

Then there was saturation. KARI worked okay against the ten or twenty aircraft-strike packages from the Iran-Iraq War, but we had over three hundred aircraft hitting them every day and they were overwhelmed. Throw in the communications disruption and jamming that had them chasing false targets, and it’s obvious why we gained air supremacy in two days.

When their MiGs and Mirages did take off to gloriously battle the infidel invaders (that would be us again), none of them ever came back. I helped chase a flight of Mirage fighters into Iran one day as they bravely ran away. Another morning, I watched two MiG-23s fly into the ground as they tried to shake off a horde of U.S. jets swarming in their direction. So, in addition to their technical shortcomings, the Iraqis had a critical morale problem.

We’d gone into this more or less ad hoc in 1991, but by 2003 we’d figured it out. Extreme adaptability is one of the most defining characteristics of the American military, and we adapted. We also function very well as small independent units that don’t require a lot of supervision. In fact, supervision is usually highly resented.

Now, with lots of time between the wars, we had the luxury of really picking the threat apart and studying it. Remember, the goal of Operation Desert Storm had been to save Kuwaiti and Saudi oil, not to invade Iraq. But we knew the next war would be different. Next time we’d have to go to Baghdad.

No one liked rotating to Saudi or Kuwait twice per year, but we made the most of it. It was, in fact, terrific practical experience and afforded us a superb opportunity to know the terrain, the weather, and build up our knowledge of a threat we’d face eventually. We still hated it.

The Weasels from the 20th Fighter Wing did this from Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. This base was left over from Desert Storm and sat south of Iraq on the Persian Gulf. Dhahran wasn’t too bad for several reasons. First, it was only a hundred miles from the Iraqi border, and in a region so vast this made response times very quick and our missions that much shorter. Second, unlike the rest of the Kingdom, the city of Dhahran actually had a few amenities. The downtown area had been built with petrodollars and boasted good restaurants and even a shopping mall. Because of the oil fields, the locals were accustomed to Westerners and were relatively tolerant.

Last (and most important), there was a causeway across the water to the island of Bahrain. This causeway had been built for Saudis who needed a break from condemning godless Americans and Europeans. They’d race across the narrow highway, shedding robes and headdresses as they drove, to get to the bars and women on the island—apparently, Allah doesn’t see them if they’re not in Saudi Arabia. We didn’t care. We’d go there to eat and shop and sometimes spend the night at a nice beachside resort. No scorpions, camel spiders, or military meals. Bahrain was only a few miles off the coast but was truly another world compared to the Arabian Peninsula.

In 1979, the Saudi government, feeling nostalgic about its desert past, built a complex outside Dhahran for Bedouin tribesmen. This was intended for the elderly, the sick, and those awaiting air-transportation to Mecca for the annual hajj. Over fifty modern condos were built, with four units per floor and eight floors per building. Each unit had a large living room with a kitchen on one end and a window wall opening to a narrow balcony on the opposite side. Four bedrooms, each with a bath and bidet, were accessible from this central area. Everything the modern Bedouin family needed.

Except Bedouins don’t live in condos.

They don’t put their sick or old in hospitals and they don’t fly to the hajj. So, this huge complex stood empty for eleven years until housing was needed for American, British, and French pilots who arrived in 1990 to save the Ghawar oil fields. Sorry—to save the peaceful and progressive Saudi people from their monstrous northern neighbor.