Joint Force Harrier

by Adrian Orchard

  In contrast, everything at the American DIFAC was frozen, prepared somewhere else or, more often, had come out of a packet. The food was full of preservatives, colourings and flavour enhancers, and the main courses all came with the mandatory ‘Freedom Fries’. Dessert was usually Häagen-Dazs ice cream, piled high.

  The Romanian DIFAC, so called because it was where most of the Romanians ate, was actually run by the Americans.

  Each was a good place to socialize but we’d pick and choose between them. On a Thursday evening we might go for the Americans’ seafood special with its huge Alaskan snow-crab claws. Traditional meals like this and meat loaf or steak with all the trimmings reminded their people of home. The American DIFAC was also big on theme nights like Halloween, which kept the troops happy.

  I drained my drink and got up to leave. Behind me I heard the buzzsaw sound of a C-130 taxiing out to the runway, the latest in a never-ending stream of aircraft movements.

  As I returned to the squadron buildings, the scramble bell rang. We had inherited an excellent specimen, just like those used in the Second World War to get the Spitfires and Hurricanes into the air, and for exactly the same reason – in both cases, time really was of the essence. When the GCAS system called for air support, it meant now, not in half an hour or an hour, or whenever the pilots felt like it. So it was the old Battle of Britain motto ‘Ring the bell, run like hell!’ brought right up to date.

  A GCAS scramble was the ultimate test of the whole squadron. It demonstrated whether or not all of our personnel, from the aircrew to every last engineer and naval airman in the team, had done their job properly. In those hectic minutes after the scramble had been called, we pilots had to have absolute confidence that the aircraft were ready, had been fitted with the right weapons and would start, so that we could get airborne within a certain time and carry out a successful mission.

  Every time it was as adrenalin-filled as you wanted it to be, just like in those old war movies. The moment the call came into the Ops room, always on a special phone, everybody stopped whatever they were doing and waited while the closest officer or senior rating ran to answer it. Meanwhile one of the staff rang the scramble bell to let the ground engineers in the dispersal know a scramble was on.

  All kitted up and ready to go, the duty pilots got to the dispersal as quickly as possible from wherever they were on the base. The ground engineers rushed down to the pan area, so that by the time the pilots climbed in, the GR7s were fully prepped, with all systems switched on.

  On every scramble we achieved the minimum required time to get the Harriers airborne. Each team member was aware that every second’s delay in the scramble meant another second’s delay in getting to the target area. And that extra second could be all it took for one of the troops in contact with the Taliban to die.

  I watched from Ops and saw some squadron personnel – including a few that I had never expected to see running – covering the ground at a startling rate. The pilots started their engines. Capable of churning out around 24,000lb of thrust, the Rolls Royce Pegasus engine makes a noise of biblical proportions. It’s an amazing sight too, creating a huge cloud of black smoke when it fires up. The exhaust gases emitted from the engine’s back nozzles are at between 700 and 800 degrees Celsius; even the front nozzles expel air at 300–400 degrees. The heat rippled through the air around the aircraft in a fierce haze. Then it was chocks away and the two jets rolled towards the runway.

  A few minutes later the distinctive scream of the Pegasus engines running at full chat echoed around the airfield as the pair of 800 squadron jets powered down the runway, one behind the other.

  The two Harriers stayed low and fast, gathering speed, then pulled up, climbing like rockets as they completed their individual tactical departures.

  I watched them reach top of climb and swing round to the west, towards Helmand Province, and mentally wished them happy hunting and a safe return.

  8

  ‘How’s it going, Andy?’ I asked as I walked into the briefing room.

  ‘Fine, boss, we’re all ready.’

  Andy Baverstock, the Squinto and hard-core Royal Navy history buff, was preparing to give the aircrew a general overview of the situation in Afghanistan.

  I’d known Andy for years, first meeting him in the nineties on the Ark Royal and then again out in Bosnia. He was originally a photographer who’d come up through the ranks to take a commission, and I’d always known he was excellent at his job. He was forever smiling and had a very positive outlook on life, but perhaps his most distinguishing feature, apart from his ginger hair and slight pot belly, was his ‘red wine teeth’. Whenever he drank red wine, his teeth turned dark red, almost purple, almost immediately. Of course, we never saw this interesting phenomenon out in Afghanistan, because the det was ‘dry’.

  The Royal Navy has only fairly recently started employing dedicated intelligence officers to cope with the ever-increasing amounts of data available to front-line squadrons. Previously we had a small number of photographic interpretation specialists, or PIs, but they have now vanished.

  Today’s intelligence officers need to have a much broader skill base than just interpreting photographic data – though this can be an extremely difficult discipline to master – and need to be able to process the entire battlefield picture. Every day the Squinto gave us the general intelligence briefing, plus every sortie had its own dedicated and much more detailed briefing, and he was able to put into context what was happening out in the field. He was essentially everything from a News at Ten-style announcer, providing general information about what was going on in our violent little corner of Afghanistan, right down to delivering classified information about the threats it was believed we would be likely to encounter in a specific location.

  ‘Right,’ Andy said, ‘I’m going to start with a bit of background, for those of you who don’t know too much about the history of this region. Ask questions whenever you want – don’t wait until the end.

  ‘Afghanistan is arguably one of the most war-torn nations on earth. Now at first sight this is somewhat peculiar for a country that has virtually no natural resources to fight over. Officially, its exports include natural gas, fruits, nuts, hand-woven carpets, wool, cotton, animal hides and skins, precious and semi-precious stones. According to government sources, these currently amount to a little over $450 million annually, an extraordinarily low figure from a population of just under 32 million.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous,’ somebody called out. ‘That’s only about $15 per person per year.’

  ‘Fourteen actually,’ Andy said, ‘but the future for the country is brighter than you might think. Some recent geological reports suggest that Afghanistan has significant reserves of natural gas and petroleum, and huge quantities of iron ore, gold, copper, coal and various minerals. The government is already beginning to exploit the country’s copper reserves, and these could earn over one billion dollars annually for some thirty years. There’s a lot of potential here, which is probably one reason why the Taliban are so determined to regain control.’

  ‘What about the drugs?’ the same officer asked.

  Andy nodded. ‘As you probably all know, that’s Afghanistan’s “hidden” export. Opium accounts for between thirty and fifty per cent of the nation’s gross domestic product. The country is the world’s principal source of the drug, producing about ninety per cent of all opium, most of which is processed into heroin and then sold illegally in Europe, Russia and America.

  ‘Now, to understand the present-day situation in Afghanistan, it helps to know a little bit about the country’s history.’

  Andy explained that battles had been fought for centuries on Afghanistan’s high plains and mountain passes. The nation could trace its history back to around 2000 BC, when Aryan invaders swept across the country. They were followed by Persian, Median, Greek, Mauryan, Bactrian, Indo-Greek, Scythian, Kushan, Parthian, White Hun and Göktürk armies. Even Alexander the Great turned up ther
e.

  ‘They kicked the crap out of us a few times, as well,’ came a voice from the back of the room.

  ‘Quite right. In the past two centuries British forces have entered Afghanistan three times – in 1839, in 1843 and finally in 1919 – with a marked lack of success on each occasion.’

  The reason for this almost unbroken succession of invaders, Andy explained, was simply the location of the country. Afghanistan sits virtually at the crossroads of south, west and central Asia, and this accident of geography means its territory has been crossed and re-crossed countless times over the past three millennia by both migrating peoples and invading armies.

  This confused and fluid history has resulted in a wild diversity of people from a host of different tribes and nations, who are now known generically as ‘Afghans’ or ‘Afghanis’. They occupy a land whose boundaries weren’t even finalized until the nineteenth century, and whose name – Afghanistan – referred to only one section of the Peshawar Valley until about the same time, and only became internationally accepted as the official name of the country in 1923.

  This melting pot of nationalities is reflected in the number of languages still spoken in Afghanistan today, said Andy. The three official tongues are Dari, Farsi and Pashto, which are spoken by about ninety per cent of the population, but there are at least thirty other languages in use. These range alphabetically from Aimaq, spoken by about half a million people in central and north-west Afghanistan, to Wotapuri-Katarqalai, spoken by some 2,000. The least-used language is probably Mogholi, which has fewer than 200 remaining speakers who live only in the villages of Kundur and Karez-i-Mulla, near Herat.

  ‘The result of all this is that there’s really no such person as an Afghan in the way that you can describe somebody as being a Frenchman or a German,’ Andy went on. ‘Instead you have numerous different tribes who happen to live in Afghanistan. Roughly speaking, about forty per cent of Afghans are Pashtun, but these are subdivided into several tribal groups, the biggest of which are the Durrani and Ghilzai. The next largest ethnic group are the Tajiks, about twenty-five per cent of the population, then the Hazaras, representing some twenty per cent. Then there are the Uzbeks, Turkmen, Qizilbash and dozens of others. It probably won’t surprise you to learn that most of these tribes don’t get on with each other, and the country’s been in an almost constant state of civil unrest for centuries.

  ‘As far as the government’s concerned, for most of the twentieth century Afghanistan was headed by a monarchy that later began experimenting with democratic ideas, but in the 1970s two successive coups resulted in the creation of a communist state. In 1978 Russian forces arrived in Afghanistan to help support the government, and stayed until 1989, when they were finally forced to withdraw, having suffered a series of humiliating defeats at the hands of the Mujahidin guerrillas.’

  Like others before them, Andy explained, the Russians discovered that the people of the high mountains were almost impossible to defeat, because the terrain wouldn’t permit conventional military operations, and always favoured the guerrilla-style tactics for which the Afghans seemed to have a particular aptitude.

  Once their common enemy had been vanquished, the different tribes that had banded together to battle the Soviet invaders once again split into factions and resumed fighting one another in a continuation of the civil war that they had been engaged in for decades. From this chaos, an extreme Islamic breakaway group known as the Taliban – the word means ‘students’ – arose in Kandahar Province and began attacking just about everyone else, and achieved considerable success.

  Composed of former Mujahidin and religious scholars, but with a preponderance of Pakistani members, the Taliban were armed, equipped and, to a large extent, directed by the ISI, the Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence, Pakistan’s principal intelligence organization. The idea behind the Taliban was clear – through the movement, Pakistan hoped to impose a measure of direction and control over its lawless and politically chaotic neighbour.

  By the end of 2000 the Taliban controlled about ninety-five per cent of Afghanistan. Their only opposition was the Northern Alliance, based in the extreme north-east of the country, but that group was, somewhat bizarrely, still acknowledged by the United Nations as the Afghan government.

  ‘Now,’ Andy went on, ‘we come right up to date. The reason that America decided to launch attacks on Afghanistan was because it was known that the alleged architect of the 9/11 terror attacks on New York, Osama bin Laden, had been involved with the Taliban since about 1997, and it was believed that this renegade Saudi had taken refuge in the country. Requests made to the Taliban by the Americans to hand him over were ignored. The initial attacks on the mountain strongholds of the Taliban were followed by a peaceful invasion of the country by a coalition of nations acting as a peacekeeping force in Afghanistan operating with the authority of the United Nations and at the request of the Afghan government headed by Hamid Karzai in Kabul. Britain is a part of that coalition, and, as you know, we’ve been supplying ground troops, pilots and aircraft to what’s now become the International Security Assistance Force, or ISAF.

  ‘And we’ve already discovered, just like the Russians did, that the Afghan fighters are no pushover. Although the Taliban are comparatively lightly armed, they’re a formidable and implacably determined enemy.

  ‘To put that into perspective, the IV (AC) Squadron guys who’ve just left were involved in the fiercest fighting ISAF has seen out here so far, and most of it centred on 3 Para. According to figures from the MoD, 3 Para fired 450,000 machine-gun and rifle rounds, and launched 7,500 mortars and 4,000 light artillery rounds against the Taliban, and they were only in theatre for six months.’

  ‘Bloody hell.’

  ‘Exactly. That’s the highest tempo of operations any British forces have experienced since Korea. Compared with this, Iraq was a walk in the park. And, so you know what you’re all facing here, in their last month in theatre IV (AC) Squadron dropped about 30,000lb – that’s fifteen tons – of ordnance on the Taliban.’

  ‘So ground forces are fighting pitched battles with the Taliban?’ The surprise in the question was evident.

  ‘Sometimes they do, but that’s not their intention. Usually the troops are sent out to secure a specific objective – a strategic location or a village where the Taliban are known to be established – and that’s usually where the fiercest fighting takes place, because the insurgents don’t give up ground easily.

  ‘One of the tactics being used here,’ Andy went on, ‘is what’s known as the “platoon house” concept. The idea is that ISAF forces establish a presence in an area known to be under Taliban control or influence. They establish a secure base – that’s the platoon house – and then start mounting aggressive patrols in the area, designed to flush out the insurgents and at the same time establish good relations with the locals. It’s a combination of hearts-and-minds and mailed fist, I suppose.’

  ‘Does that work?’

  ‘Yes and no. There have been a few cases where it seems to have gone quite well, and others where the platoon house has ended up being virtually besieged by the Taliban, under fire almost every day. But you’ve got to remember that we’re not here to take and hold ground as if this were an old-style invasion. The coalition doesn’t have the boots on the ground here to do that, and in any case an occupation would be totally counter-productive. Instead the key is to protect vital strategic points and aid all-important reconstruction. There have been reverses, of course, but we’re playing a long game.

  ‘Anything to add, boss?’ Andy turned to me and asked.

  ‘No, thanks, Andy.’ I stood up and faced the squadron members. ‘I think we’ve all learnt a lot from that. All I’d like to say is that we’ve arrived in theatre at a time when the level of fighting is at its highest ever, and when coalition troops on the ground are at their most vulnerable. That means they’re most dependent on our support, so it’s vital that every time we’re scrambled, and every time
we’re called to a TIC we get there as quickly as possible and deliver our weapons with speed and accuracy. Quite literally, the lives of our troops depend entirely upon our proficiency and ability.’

  ‘So no pressure, then?’ Wedge called out from his seat at the back of the room, and most of the pilots laughed.

  I grinned. ‘No, no pressure, Wedge. Just get up there and do your stuff like you normally do.’

  Wedge – Lieutenant Ed Philips – was pretty much as wide as he was tall, hence his nickname, and I did sometimes wonder how he managed to fit in a Harrier’s cockpit, which is not the most spacious ‘office’ in the world. He wasn’t fat, just solid, and a real Fleet Air Arm buff. He read naval history constantly and knew everything there was to know about the Royal Navy, especially about the Fleet Air Arm.

  It was Andy’s joke that if you cut him in half you’d find the words ‘Royal Navy’ running through his body like the writing inside a stick of rock, but if you did the same for Wedge, it would read ‘Fleet Air Arm’.

  The importance of a rapid response was emphasized a few days later. We were augmented by two pilots from the Harrier Training Squadron, Lieutenant Commander Dave Lindsay and Squadron Leader Chris Rogers. They stayed with us for the first two weeks as night flyers while we started night-flying and got fully up to speed, then they went home.

  The squadron worked a ten-day cycle, which meant that every ten days we stood down from the Air Tasking Order and reverted to holding a two-hour GCAS alert for two aeroplanes. That day gave the engineers the opportunity to shift their routine from working days to working nights and vice versa, and gave them a twenty-four-hour acclimatization period to make the change.

  Chris and Dave were teamed up as a pair. On the first maintenance day in theatre they were the duty GCAS pilots and were in the gym getting a bit of exercise on the running machines. The GCAS 120 meant that, in the event of a scramble, they had two hours to get back to Ops, dress, get briefed and get the aircraft airborne. The engineers had the same two hours to ready a couple of the aircraft to fly.