A-10s over Kosovo
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Col Al Thompson (40th EOG commander), Maj Scratch Regan (74th EFS commander), Lt Col Coke Koechle (81st EFS operations officer), and I were the normal ROE gatekeepers at Gioia. Perhaps this sounds like a scenario from The Emperor’s New Clothes, but none of us had heard about anyone flying below 2,000 feet during that one night mission against the radars or below standard ROE altitudes during the day missions. We learned afterward that those altitudes were well known to the line pilots, who “assumed” it was an approved exception to the ROEs for that target.
The disconnect between what various pilots understood to be minimum-allowed altitude during an attack on the radar site was illuminated as a result of the debrief of a Flat Face mission flown by Scratch and Maj Dirt Fluhr. Due to the weather along the coast and with CAOC direction, they were forced to fly between cloud decks to search for the radar. As they neared the suspected coordinates of the elusive target, they dropped through a thin “scud” layer at about 4,500 feet. Once below the clouds, they searched the area along the coastline for the radar, threats, and a way back up through the weather, which they knew they would eventually need. During this search the Serbs shot a heat-seeking missile at them. Scratch and Dirt promptly defeated the shot, popped up through the clouds, and returned home.
Following their close call, Scratch and Dirt conducted the standard debrief with our squadron’s intel personnel. They stated that they were probably at about 4,000 feet at the time of the missile shot. Our excellent intel troops faithfully recorded their details and dutifully forwarded the mission report to the CAOC. That statement of flying at 4,000 feet—below the normal ROEs’ 5,000-foot minimum altitude for identifying targets, and 8,000-foot minimum used during attacks—without an operational explanation was certain to draw attention from anyone without our earlier understanding of the ROE “exception.” I learned an important lesson and noted that a timely operations review of the unit’s mission reports by its supervisors will provide a clearer picture of what is actually taking place and help reduce friction and fog. I had suffered a miscommunication on what I thought was a “onetime exception.” to the minimum attack-altitude for that firstnight sortie to use while they attacked the radar. I had understood that we were back to adhering to the normal ROE altitudes. If I had reviewed the mission reports, I would have been alerted to the squadron pilots’ inconsistent understanding of the ROEs’ minimum altitudes. We fixed this immediately. Although it seemed contrary to letting the intel troops do their job, in a shooting war with highly politicized ROEs, it is essential to use every available means to stay informed and ensure a good information flow at all levels.
The lightning bolt from the CAOC was swift and unequivocal. The two pilots involved, plus a supervisor, would be provided a dedicated C-21 aircraft for transport to Vicenza to personally explain the violation of the ROEs to General Short. We understood his concern. He didn’t need “wayward aviators” upsetting the delicate politico-military balance and the alliance’s commitment to the air campaign. Nevertheless, we weren’t looking forward to the encounter, especially since Colonel Thompson, Coke, and I thought we were sitting on a “command ejection seat” with General Short’s hand on the handle after our dressing-down in Tirana.
We had to get the details together fast. We heard pilots express surprise that the CAOC was upset about Scratch and Dirt inadvertently flying at 4,000 feet in daytime since the CAOC had already approved flying below 2,000 feet at night on that target. That’s when I realized the disconnect between the ROEs the CAOC understood to be in place and the ones our pilots were using. I interviewed all the pilots involved and looked over the mission reports from the previous two Flat Face sorties. They all told the same story—they had assumed that low-altitude attacks on the radar were approved. They had not listed their attack altitudes in their mission reports since that data was normally sought only for weapons-release conditions and threat reactions. These were the same guys who had routinely put themselves at risk to comply with the ROEs—as they understood them. They had enforced the ROEs to ensure that they, and the NATO fighters they controlled, would never come close to hurting civilians in Kosovo. I had no reason to doubt their integrity, professionalism, or sense of duty. When it came to accepting a higher personal risk to take out an important target, they went all out. I concluded that a couple of pilots had let their fangs get a mite too long and had taken unnecessary risks. They were grounded a day or more as a result—not to punish them because they went below any particular altitude but to recalibrate their in-flight and on-scene assessment of risk and payoff. These same great pilots justifiably earned important medals for heroism during other sorties.
Colonel Thompson had to decide who would accompany Scratch and Dirt to see “the Man.” I was the commander, present at the beginning of the misunderstanding, and offered to go. Stu nobly offered to explain to General Short his previous sorties and the source of any misunderstanding. Colonel Thompson, although thankful for the offers, doubted General Short would have time to understand all of the convoluted details before grounding our entire group for insubordination. Colonel Thompson had worked for General Short before and decided to lead the two majors to Vicenza. General Short carefully explained to them, Colonel Thompson reported afterward, that he could not tolerate any more ROE deviations, intentional or otherwise. He would expressly approve any exceptions.
Capt Joseph S. “Joe Bro” Brosious’s story provides a happy ending to this tale. One of the guys who had twice been after the Serbs’ pesky Montenegrin acquisition radar finally strafed it with his mighty GAU-8 Avenger cannon. The Hog had proved its versatility once again, showing that it is well adapted to handle some particularly knotty missions. All the guys who had gone after the radar survived, maintained an aggressive edge, and continued to take the fight to the enemy. However, we all learned an important lesson—we could do the enemy’s work for him if we dropped our guard on the ROEs.
The Giraffe
Capt Ron “Stu” Stuewe
I’ll warn you up front that this is a long narrative. I’ve told this story only a handful of times and have found that it’s best received at the bar on a Friday night over a couple of beers. Its telling usually involves a lot of fighter-pilot hand gestures, and a good deal of profanity—sometimes it even evokes audience participation. A buddy of mine describes this as a story about a few days of “knife-in-your-teeth combat flying,” and the attitude—aggressive or foolhardy—that one can develop while attempting to accomplish the mission. It is an important story, however, that has existed only in the memories and personal journals of a few pilots. Even though it will lose a little in translation, it should be preserved in print.
I was “Sandy 1” on the night of 4 May 1999, sitting 30-minute CSAR alert with Maj Dice Kopacz as my number two. I had arrived at the squadron around 2000 hours, in time to be ready for our normal ground alert from 2100 to about 0500. I noticed a buzz in the air about a “priority target,” and Kimos, the squadron commander, was on the secure telephone for a long time. Most of the night flyers had already launched on their sorties, and everyone else was in pilot rest for the next day’s missions. Finally, after a half hour of pondering, Kimos came to me with a set of coordinates on an orange sticky pad. He simply stated, “There’s a Flat Face radar here. Go kill it.” As it was shaping up, the only available bodies for this priority target were the guys on CSAR alert.
Attack pilots find nothing better than having their squadron commander tell them to go kill a target. We tried to plot the coordinates on our maps only to learn it was too far west. We grabbed a computer and found out that this early warning radar wasn’t in Kosovo, or even Serbia for that matter. It was located on the coast of Montenegro—which, incidentally, was supposed to be a third party during this bombing campaign. Not only did the politically sensitive nature of attacking targets in Montenegro worry me, but also I had concerns about the three unlocated SA-6 batteries that intel claimed were in the area.
I put everyone to work: building
maps, working on timing, and getting our night-vision goggles ready. Then I went to the weather shop. The weather forecaster explained that the ceiling was low—real low—2,000-foot overcast with four kilometers of visibility, to be precise. There was not much we could do except fly below the clouds, which would put us well below the altitude prescribed in the ROEs. While I was planning the attack, the weather guy changed his forecast several more times. The lowest forecast was for a 2,000-foot ceiling, and the highest called for a 10,000-foot ceiling. It seemed that the CAOC and Kimos considered this priority target important enough that the normal ROE altitudes would not apply, and I was cleared to go “below the weather.” I found out later, however, that the forecast ceilings that the CAOC, Kimos, and I were planning with were all different. Therefore, the attack altitude that corresponded to the below-the-weather approval meant different things to each of us.
Our planning turned to ordnance and formations. Because our Mk-82s were wired for a high-altitude delivery, they would not have time to arm if we dropped them that close to the ground. I therefore requested that the Mk-82s be replaced by CBU-87s on all four of our aircraft because of their low-altitude employment options and their ability to provide us good firepower and mutual support. A well-respected A-10 rep at the CAOC sent down his attack plan. Unfortunately, this particular evening’s fog and friction prevented most of his ideas from reaching me.
I launched with Dice on my wing, along with Capt Corn Mays and Capt Joe Brosious as my numbers three and four. Capt Larry D. “LD” Card II suggested a little tactical deception which caused the NAEW to make bogus radio calls that indicated to all who were monitoring the transmissions that Sandy flight was going to rendezvous with a tanker and sit airborne alert. Halfway across the Adriatic, we hit the solid-undercast cloud deck that had been predicted by the weather forecaster. We turned off our squawks, blacked out, and “stealthed up” as much as a Hog can. I led the boys down through the weather and leveled off in a black hole at 1,500 feet on the radar altimeter. NAEW played its role perfectly and began giving us phony traffic advisories and then vectors towards an actual tanker that was airborne over Macedonia. We hit the Albanian coast at our control point (CP) and turned north towards the IP. The IP itself was an illuminated boat dock with a 1,500-foot ridge behind it. Finding the IP would update us on the drift of our navigation systems as well as provide us some indirect terrain masking from any radar. With the poor visibility, I couldn’t see the IP until I was right on top of it. I then had to fly a very hard turn to keep from being scraped off on that ridge. Kirk said later that he got much closer to that particular piece of the Balkans than he would have liked. I had the boys throw the master arm switch to “arm” at the IP as we turned west towards Montenegro and the radar.
The ceiling dropped to about 1,500 feet and, with the high humidity and moisture, we couldn’t see anything with the Maverick or NVGs except straight down. I nearly passed over the top of the target coordinates without seeing anything. Kirk did likewise one minute behind me. We proceeded out to the rendezvous point over the water. I’m here to say that India ink cannot compare to the blackness I encountered when I pointed my Hog’s nose out over an open ocean in the middle of the night below a solid overcast. I flew 500 feet above the cold Adriatic off nothing more than a radar altimeter and a green circle in my HUD that said I was wings level. Due to the outstanding skill of my wingmen, I had to expend only two self-protection flares to help regroup the formation as I turned back towards the coast. At this same time NAEW was rendezvousing our imaginary formation with a tanker 120 nautical miles away. I led us back in on a reattack with CBUs. On the way in I slewed an IIR Maverick missile onto the spot where the target was supposed to be. In the midst of a cold, dark background I found a single hot object. It didn’t exactly look like the radar van, but it was in the correct relative position. I locked the Maverick onto the hot object as my thumb gently caressed the pickle button that would unleash the missile.
I don’t care much about CNN or the influence the media has on military operations, but there was no way I was going to mistakenly destroy a Montenegrin hotdog stand. It boiled down to the fact that I had a slight doubt as to the validity of my target, so, as a professional soldier, I couldn’t proceed with the attack. I learned later that Kirk had also found a hot object, possibly the same one, and had similarly forgone indiscriminately attacking it. I called for yet another “Jake”—the reattack code word that I had named after my three-month-old son. I thought that with one more attack we might just get lucky. Someone, however, without the distraction of having their fangs imbedded in the floorboard, made a wise decision and relayed through NAEW that we were done for that particular night. Feeling rather dejected about not finding the target, I led Dice home. Kirk and Joe Bro—without pretending—flew to the tanker, refueled, and assumed their real airborne CSAR alert. This is where the story gets really interesting.
The next two days passed uneventfully as I finished my turn in the barrel on the CSAR alert schedule. I couldn’t forget about that radar because every day ABCCC tasked A-10s with a priority target that had coordinates in Montenegro. On the fourth morning I was the mission commander for the entire KEZ. As we tried to conduct an air war during the Balkan spring, we ended up fighting the weather as much as anything else. The weather was “dog crap,” and I started sending the forces, including me, home. As I returned home at 22,000 feet and turned the corner around Montenegro (our ROEs did not allow us to fly over it), I focused my binos on the area where the Flat Face had been previously reported. I began a structured scan pattern when, low and behold, about 600 meters west of the previous location, I found a van with twin horizontal radar dishes turning on it. I called ABCCC and, via secure means, asked if the Flat Face was still a valid priority target. The response was that I could attack as long as I obtained SEAD support. I called all the other A-10s on VHF while coordinating the SEAD on the UHF radio. Within minutes I had eight Hogs lined up, along with four F-16CJs and an EA-6B Prowler. Even Mr. ABCCC came rumbling over to take a look (or get in the way). I took control of my new strike package. By some crazy luck, my new element leads—“three,” “five,” and “seven”—turned out to be, in perfect order, “two,” “three,” and “four” from Sandy flight on the first night. Since we all had a full load of ordnance and varying amounts of fuel, I sent the fourth element, numbers seven and eight, to the tanker.
During the time it took to rejoin the formation, line up the SEAD, and coordinate the attack, a small, midaltitude deck of clouds had moved in below us. I was the only one who had seen the target, but I thought it would be “no big deal.” I explained to the second and third element leads where the target was in relation to the map study we had accomplished in preparation for the first night’s attack. The briefed plan was a ladder of Hogs (two-ship element orbits with vertical separation between elements) with the wingman providing cover on the right side during an attack from southeast with a southwest pull-off. One, three, and five were shooters with Maverick, while two, four, and six (all of whom had no exact idea of what we were attacking) were supposed to provide cover from any threats that popped up. I briefed the plan. When they reached the cloud layer, they would descend through it as fast as possible, acquire and ID the radar, shoot, and recover quickly back to the clear air above the clouds. Everyone acknowledged that he understood the plan.
One of my most distinct memories of OAF is the feeling of adrenaline building up as I prepared for this attack. However, the tight knot that had formed in my chest quickly unclenched and was replaced with pride and awe when I looked over my right shoulder. I wish I had the eloquence to describe what it is like to watch five Hogs follow your every move—all of them hulking with a full combat load that glistened in the midday sun. I noted the awesome firepower we had available: six tons of bombs, 12 Mavericks, 84 Willy Pete rockets, and almost 7,000 rounds of 30 mm combat mix. The sight of those marvelous airplanes and the pilots who had chosen to fly them humbled me.
> A1C Jerry Herron replenishes the A-10’s 30 mm ammunition. (USAF Photo by SrA Jeffery Allen)
I began the attack and realized the weather was slightly lower than I had expected. However, this was the high-priority target we had been gunning for during the last four days. It was the target the CAOC and my squadron commander had deemed so important that they had sent us to attack it (or so I had believed) when the weather was well below the ROEs. During that attack attempt, I had flown over it at a few hundred feet just three nights before. On this day, therefore, I pressed on with the attack despite the weather. I hit the edge of the clouds about four miles from the target. Unfortunately, there was some misunderstanding as to the in-trail spacing I expected between my element leads, which caused my second element lead to pitch back into the third element. My six-ship had quickly turned into a two-ship below the weather.
It took a few seconds to get my bearings below the cloud deck. I found the original position of the radar, worked my eyes from there to where the target should be, and visually acquired the radar site. I stabilized the Maverick on the radar site and tried to lock onto the van. The missile locked onto the cooled van and also on some cold background clutter that would, most likely, have caused a total miss. I attempted once more to lock just the cold van without any luck. I was now getting close enough to start breaking out the hot radar dish and components within the van. I quickly pulled the pinky switch on the left throttle to the aft position to cause the Maverick seeker to look for hot targets. For the third time in a matter of seconds, I couldn’t get the Maverick to lock onto the van. I then made an extremely superfluous comment, but one I felt had to get across the radio: “One’s going to guns.”