Up to this point the results had been marginal for the level of effort the pilots were putting into missions. They were being sent in to targets in long sequences of four-ship flights. Going in at intervals, of course, gave the North Vietnamese gunners all the opportunity they needed to shoot at every flight as it came by. On top of that, maintenance had been severely hampered and compromised by a sortie generation test program called “Rapid Roger” that had started in August. The 8th Wing had lost twelve aircraft during August and September alone. We weren’t suffering as badly as the F-105 crews out of Takhli and Korat, but, clearly the war was costing us dearly.
I looked at those losses as a new commander and believed I had justification to question them. Did they really have to happen? Was the environment really so tough here, or was the wing making mistakes? This is kind of presumptuous for a new guy because, hell, you haven’t been shot at in their situation. If I could do better, I’d have to figure it out. There were some obvious places where improvements could be made. For one thing, they had been dropping napalm, using an awful lot of gun work in Route Pack 1, making multiple passes and really pressing in on low-value targets. I couldn’t see any necessity for it. There were very few targets in Route Pack I that you could blunder across in broad daylight that were worth your ass and an airplane. You’ve got to kill a lot of beat-up old trucks to balance the books against one Phantom. So why not learn to deliver ordnance, with exceptions of course, in Route Pack 1 with the same techniques used in the harder packages? I became quite sure that 50 percent of the losses since January ’66 in Route Pack 1 had been needless.
For the guys flying over the part of North Vietnam called Route Pack VI the situation was much worse. The Russians supplied the Communist North with all the matériel needed for fighting a protracted war: guns, ammo, food, clothing, trucks, gas, everything. There were more antiaircraft guns within a 60-mile radius of Hanoi than Germany had possessed in all of Europe. The guns ranged from automatic weapons like our .50 caliber machine guns up through batteries of larger radar-directed artillery spanning the gamut from 23 mm to more than 100 mm. Add the surface-to-air missiles and the MiGs supplied by China and Russia, and North Vietnam had a well-integrated and very effective air defense network. This was a very efficient and sophisticated adversary we faced.
In September we had introduced the surprisingly effective QRC-160 ECM pods carried by F-105 Thunderchiefs. Their initial results looked as though the pods significantly reduced the effect of the radar-guided guns and SAMs, but they also drastically changed the role of the MiGs. They had not been particularly aggressive or a nuisance before. The pods forced the North Vietnamese to increase the role of the MiG fighters for defense. As we entered the winter of 1966, the MiGs began increased efforts to harass U.S. strike forces. The later-model MiG-21s had the capability to carry radar-guided or heat-seeking missiles. They and the highly maneuverable MiG-17s constituted a serious threat. It became imperative for U.S. forces to bring counteraction to bear on the MiG fighter threat.
The Rapid Roger program had also taken a toll on the 8th TFW in a short time. We knew RR was an order concocted by Robert McNamara and others with an obsession with statistics, who got LBJ to agree to it. The objective was ridiculous: “Produce a higher sortie rate with fewer aircraft.” It meant airplanes that flew day missions had to turn around and fly at night, then be reconfigured again to fly the next day. That would be hell on the maintenance crews. During the day, bombers carried a 370-gallon fuel tank on each wing, plus bombs and missiles. For night flying, the birds had to be equipped with a flare dispenser in place of a wing tank and a centerline 600-gallon fuel tank. Added to the insanity of changing the aircraft configuration at dawn and dusk, the ground crews had to refuel, rearm, and repair. The maintenance crews did their absolute best, but how could they do their jobs when promised parts and personnel didn’t show up, shifts were doubled, and there was little time for sleep?
If you fly one aircraft three times a day for three and a half hours each sortie, can you fly that same aircraft five times a day for the same sortie duration? Probably not. So what do you do to meet the requirement? Easy, fly it five times a day for one hour each trip—isn’t that simple? You get five rides, five hours of combat, and fourteen hours in between to fix it and turn it around. What is the impact on your missions that took three and a half hours? What do you do, go faster to get to the same place? Move your base closer to the action? Or maybe encourage the enemy to come closer to you? Maybe you can load just one bomb between flights. That’ll reduce turnaround time and increase rates. At the same time you might wonder how much effort you are putting up to produce what level of damage to the enemy. Am I being sarcastic? You bet.
When I got to Ubon, wing records showed that the “operationally ready” rate for aircraft had dropped from 74 percent to 55 percent between August 6 and September 22. Convinced of the failure, 7th AF HQ stopped the program for a while in an attempt to figure things out. The problem was evident to me. Promised personnel and parts never showed up. Lieutenants and captains were the ones fragged to go north, since the CO and senior officers seldom flew. The round-the-clock sortie schedule often had the guys going up without a wingman, and the loss of men and aircraft increased exponentially. It was bad news all around.
Washington had no clear idea that air power, particularly tactical air power, had to be flexible to be useful. Units were manned, equipped, and organized to produce a certain average output on a sustained basis. The entire support effort all the way back to programmed dollars was geared to that planned output. We bought gas, aircraft parts, food, munitions, aircraft ground equipment, blankets, vehicles, lox, oil, and even people on a preplanned basis. At the far end of this entire pipeline was the combat unit. That unit was flexible, up to a point. It could “surge” to a higher-than-normal sortie rate per assigned bird/aircrew, but you didn’t get something for nothing. How long could you safely or efficiently compress or ignore maintenance phase cycles? How many delayed discrepancies, broken gadgets that you put off repairing, could you afford to accumulate fleetwide? How far down could you deplete spares and bench stocks? Could you ignore prudence and common sense in a turnaround cycle for very long? Were you willing to risk the degradation of weapon-system serviceability? Did you accept the high potential for a major catastrophe out on your ramp when you tried to repair a radar set, load bombs, and refuel the bird all at the same time?
For the first two weeks, as I flew tail-end Charlie, my eyes were opened to the mess the 8th was in on every level. Finally, after feeling that I knew enough to have a plan, I got a bunch of the guys together in a briefing and told them, “Captain so-and-so, who was here TDY from such-and-such place, is no longer here. He led me on a mission this morning, and we made a big turn over Route Pack I and then we bombed the doghouse down below Mu Gia Pass, and he briefed the flight when we landed to log a counter. Now, I went and changed that with the ops clerks. I told them, ‘That was a noncounter. The mission wasn’t into North Vietnam, but into Laos.’ That captain is no longer with us. Now, I know a lot of you guys are old-timers here on your second or third tours and you’re all kinda frustrated because you’ve had nothing to do but kill monkeys and snakes, but I’m going to offer a suggestion. If any of you guys want to be recce pilots and fly a quick turn over Route Pack I and then bomb in Laos claiming a counter, my good friend Brigadier General Vic Cabas up at Udorn is in real need of some recce jocks. I will be glad to transfer you right now. But, my friends, you log where you drop, and I don’t want any mission faking or counter-sniveling going on around here, because I want you to leave this place tall and I want you to be proud of yourselves!”
The counter-faking bullshit had to be stopped. A lot of guys had gotten away with it, but I believed it would stop soon if they had a commander who led the flights. They would follow a commander into hell if he flew out front. Well, this wing commander wanted results, not statistics. One morning, I really got mad. A bunch of medal requests fille
d out by flight leaders for my signature showed up on my desk. I stormed into the briefing room with those papers crunched up in my fist and confronted the guys. “There sure is a shitload of interesting reading in these forms, a lot about flak, SAMs, and MiGs, but not very much about targets being destroyed. Some of you want medals just for showing up. Well, here’s what I think about that!” I dropped the whole stack into the trash can.
I also learned a big lesson on my first flight lead up to Route Pack VI. We had come off the tankers and I had been briefed to follow the last Thud flight into the target. It was soon obvious to me that the F-105 flight leader ahead hadn’t a clue where he was or where he was going. He certainly wasn’t any two minutes behind the flight in front of him, wherever they might be. We were snaking along at 540 knots, weaving this way and that, at about 3,500 feet above the ground. This was the tactic at the time: going in low, flights supposedly at two-minute intervals, stroking the afterburner at a pop-up point, then zooming to a predetermined roll-in altitude and pulling down on the target for bomb release in a 30- to 45-degree dive. I was almost at the point of breaking off when bomb impacts off to our right gave the F-105 flight lead the location of the target his buddies were hitting. He broke violently in that direction. I followed him through his pop-up and thought this was perhaps the dumbest thing I had ever done in an airplane, especially when there were a whole bunch of bad guys down below throwing up a thick barrage of flak to the same piece of sky all the rest of the attackers had just passed through. I might be the new guy in town, but I knew that doing the same thing along the same route and from the same direction one after another wasn’t a survivable tactic. It was the same old crunch: “We’ve been here, this is the way it is, and this is how we’re going to do it.” The mission stands out in my mind, not for where we went or what we bombed, but for how we went about it. On recovery that day I headed for intel again and dug out the records for the missions and tactics for the flights flown in the previous year to Pack VI. It wasn’t a pretty picture.
I had never seen such a gaggle as a Pack VI strike package. I had the greatest and deepest respect for the F-105 guys, individually and collectively, but that business of going in at low altitude, jinking and weaving, pulling three negative and four positive g’s at 4,500 feet, going like the hammers of hell in flights of four, in trail, was perhaps one of the dumbest things I had ever seen. You couldn’t see to navigate, you were past points before you knew it, you weren’t surprising the enemy, and you were taking incredible small-arms gunfire. If the pods were any good, they didn’t need to do that anymore. We still didn’t have our pods yet, so we had it all hung out, but we didn’t lose very much by staying higher. I found out that there was some difference between the two F-105 wings, the Takhli bunch embracing the low-altitude, every-man-for-himself sort of rush into the target and the Korat flights doing it higher and with a bit more coordination between the flight members, but our Phantoms didn’t work well that fast and we didn’t have the radar for ground mapping that the Thud guys had. We did better with more altitude and a better chance with our air-to-air radar system. Our tactics were going to have to change, and we might benefit from talking between the wings to share what worked and what didn’t.
I changed the tactics as efficiently and gradually as possible. In late October the MiGs were getting really brazen in reaction to the success of the QRC-160 ECM pods and they knocked down a couple of Thuds. The pods might muddy up the SAM radar picture, but they lit up the interceptor controller’s radars as well. I hadn’t been there long enough to know everything that was going on, but I was getting a pretty good idea. It was obvious that the three strike wings at Takhli, Korat, and Ubon were not really communicating with one another. There was an awful lot of bad-mouthing going on, particularly from Takhli about the other wings and specifically about F-4s. Maybe the F-4s had earned the reputation for themselves. I couldn’t pretend to judge something that went on before I got there, but the bad rap seemed ill-deserved. We also had an increasing lack of radio discipline in the big strike packages. Chatter on the strike frequency as shoddy leads tried to herd their wingmen to the targets often blocked out essential communication needed to alert people to threats. In World War II, we went in and we never opened our mouths, even if someone was shot down. We would know it so there was no sense telling one another about it. We just kept our mouths shut. We had signals. We had wing rocks or rudder kicks, but we did not talk on the air unless it was absolutely necessary. It was a hard-and-fast rule. Communications were a mess among the three strike wings, both in the air and on the ground.
Contributing to the problems was a policy of the USAF not to share critical current intel with the combat units. We had facilities with information, but the aircrews were told they didn’t have “a need to know.” They were monitoring and translating everything the VPAF was doing, when it was doing it. Did they pass that info along to us guys in the line of fire? Of course not! We know what they are doing, we know it poses a threat, but if we tell you and you act upon it, the enemy will know they have been compromised, and we won’t be able to know what they are doing in the future. Therefore we will know but we won’t tell you. What logic!
The first fix had to start at home base: getting the guys talking openly to one another. I had learned it in World War II and it had worked over the years. You have to give your people an opportunity to think and express themselves. You can’t knock them down if you don’t agree with them. Think, talk things through, and keep minds open. Be flexible. I spent hours reading every combat report written by any outfit that went to Route VI. I read every damn one of them, where our guys were when they had MiGs sighted and where the rest of the force was. I would plot it all on a map kept in my desk drawer, so I knew what was happening up there. I made myself learn, and then I worked with J.B. and the guys in the intel room. Working like this, in short order you can see what is done wrong and recognize what needs to be done to fix it. It does not take great intellect to do this. Just study, learn, and listen. This is the situational awareness a guy has to have BEFORE he gets into the airplane.
After every mission in Pack VI, or a tough one in IV or V, we would gather for debrief. After all the debriefings, after all the reports were made out and all the maintenance forms were filled in, we would lock the doors in the wing’s briefing room and I would say, “OK, guys, let me go over today’s mission from my point of view. I want to point out a few things.” I’d recap the parts I wanted to talk about by saying, “I screwed up today. I intended to do such and such at this point and I didn’t do it for this reason,” which I would then explain. Then I’d continue, “Looking back, now I realize I should have done what I first planned. That was a mistake. It didn’t cost us anything, but I’m sorry I didn’t do it. I goofed. Now you”—and I’d look at one of the guys—“you were one of the reasons I didn’t, because you were out of position at that particular moment and I couldn’t move without jeopardizing you.”
Then the kid would stand up and say, “Yes, Colonel, but you just turned hard into me, or we just did thus and so, or I thought I saw thus and so, or you did not see the SAM that came up.”
“Rog, sorry about that,” I’d reply, and if I did wrong I would want them to tell me. They’d look around the room and someone would say to another guy, “Well, goddamn it, you were out of position,” and the other guy would say, “Yes, but,” and others would say, “You should have,” and he’d say, “OK, OK.” Then we’d go to the bar and that was all that was ever said about that. Every guy there would learn something. That’s how it was done. We communicated, we learned, we improved. I decided at that point we should get pilots from other wings to come to Ubon for face-to-face meetings just like this. Our first tactics conference was a huge success, guys got to know each other, tactics were actually discussed, and the whole thing turned into a big party. This led to many future conferences at other bases.
Strike forces began to get on and off targets a lot faster. From studying the
intel scoop, we decided to start staying away from the smaller guns by never releasing bombs below 6,500. The night owls got better at their night tactics. Through the latter part of October and into November things changed, and the 8th Wing’s “operationally ready” rate rose while losses dropped dramatically. In a bad way, all the good news worked against us because General Momyer announced he was starting Rapid Roger again. I knew that McNamara’s obsession with statistics was pulling the Pentagon puppet strings. Our sortie rates drifted back down. Those numbers didn’t look good. I fumed and protested with the other wing bosses, to no avail. We had to reinstitute Rapid Roger.
This made it even more interesting for me with the guys in the intel room. The F-105 use of jamming pods screwed up the VPAF’s ability to use SAMs and radar-directed AA artillery. The new tactic of keeping the Thuds above 6,500 kept our guys safer, which was good, but Hanoi started sending up MiGs to attack the force, which was bad. We were hampered by the U.S. policy of not attacking North Vietnamese airfields in the heavily populated areas right around Hanoi, so we couldn’t get at the MiGs on the ground. A few tricks had been tried by flights of F-4s from other bases to get the MiGs, but nothing had really worked. By November, MiGs were coming up to attack U.S. flights aggressively and pursuing strike forces on egress beyond the Red River, often down to the Black River. Tactics were still not right. Since I was the new kid on the block and hadn’t yet earned my spurs, it would have been fatal to come right out and speak my mind to HQ. Staff egos were easily bruised and a wing commander with any brains at all suggests changes only with consummate tact and deliberate subterfuge. Consequently, I had to bide my time, meanwhile watching the MiGs, reading daily mission reports, studying photographs, plotting the sightings and engagements on the map I kept in my desk drawer, and poring over intel reports trying to find clues about the operational habits of the North Vietnamese at that stage of the war.
Fighter Pilot Page 34