Joint Force Harrier

by Adrian Orchard

  Just then I saw a couple of explosions on the ground below. They looked like RPGs going off, which might be good news.

  ‘Two explosions,’ Bernard said, before I could press my transmit button. ‘If the bad guys are still firing, the good guys must still be shooting back.’

  ‘Agreed. I’m going a bit lower, see if I can work out where they are.’

  I dropped the Harrier closer to the ground and flew a quick, tight circuit round the top of the ridgeline where I could see the patrol’s stationary vehicles. Then I pulled up, grabbing height to keep me clear of any of the enemy’s weapons.

  ‘Their vehicles have stopped,’ I told Bernard, ‘and I can see that the troops have scattered. Most of them seem to be pinned down behind the trucks.’

  Without two-way radio contact, we had no way of knowing either exactly where the enemy forces were or, just as important, where all the patrol members were. The last thing any soldier or pilot wants is to be involved in a blue-on-blue incident, and there was a clear danger of that happening if we released any of our weapons without being fully aware of the exact locations of all the coalition troops on the ground below us. Yet we had to do something – those troops were taking a hell of a beating, and the only people who could do anything to stop it were the two of us. But there was still no response to any of our radio calls.

  Then I had an idea.

  ‘Four Four, Four Three. We can’t release anything unless we get two-way with these guys – they’re just too close to the Taliban. Your cab’s better configured than mine for this, so I suggest you just put some noise down. At the very least it’ll deafen the bastards.’

  ‘Four Four, copied.’

  Without radio contact, the only thing we could safely do was try to show the Taliban attackers that we were serious about ending their ambush, and the only way to do that was by putting on a low-level show of force, flying one of our aircraft very, very close to the enemy positions.

  Bernard ran out about ten miles and then screamed back over where we thought the insurgents were, driving his Harrier low and fast. It wouldn’t do any damage to the Taliban, except to momentarily deafen them and, because they didn’t usually see the aircraft coming, it had impressive shock value. But they’d get a good look at the stores underneath the aircraft and guess that our next move would be to release a weapon at them. That might make them back off, though the Taliban were such dedicated fighters that the prospect of instant annihilation might well have no effect on their actions at all.

  Going down to about 100 feet, Bernard ran at full power over the ridgeline, then pulled up. And that was about all we could do until we established radio contact with the patrol.

  ‘I see two groups of Taliban,’ he radioed, as he pulled his Harrier into a full-power climb. ‘They’re dug in on the other side of the ridgeline. It’s a good location for an ambush.’

  ‘I agree, but we still don’t know how close the patrol is. Break, break. Victor Two Seven, Recoil Four Three, radio check.’

  If we’d known the friendly troops were a safe distance away, we could have put a 1,000lb bomb on the other side of the mountain, where we’d both seen some of the Taliban firing positions, but lacking communication with the patrol, and especially being unable to talk to a JTAC, that was far too risky. So Bernard and I continued flying around the top of the ridgeline, close enough so that the Taliban could clearly see and hear us, and I kept trying to raise the patrol.

  ‘Victor Two Seven, Recoil Four Three.’

  And then, finally, they answered.

  ‘Recoil Four – er – Four Three, this is Victor Two Seven.’

  ‘Victor Two Seven, request SITREP. We can see two groups of Taliban behind the ridgeline. What is your location?’

  The information was bitty, but within a couple of minutes we’d established that the patrol was much too close to the insurgents for us to safely drop a bomb. But that wasn’t all we were carrying.

  ‘Four Four, Four Three. I’ll take them with rockets.’

  ‘Roger.’

  We swung round, in loose battle formation, me leading and Bernard on my left and some distance back, and again headed towards the ridgeline at high speed. As we ran in I reached forward to the right hand flat screen to select the CRV-7 rockets. A salvo of ten, five from each pod. Perhaps the Taliban thought we were just going to do another low pass – or maybe they just didn’t care – but they held their positions, firing everything they had at the patrol opposite.

  For the delivery of rockets, the attack run is much more aggressive. I accelerated to over 400 knots, maybe 420 or 430, and rolled into a twenty to thirty-degree dive. Then, a little over two miles from the target, I checked the ‘death dot’ in the HUD. Projecting on to the glass screen ahead of me, the HUD gave me speed, height, track and so on. I just had to put the dot on the target and keep it there. And press the WRB to fire the weapons. (Or, as Neil Bing would say: ‘You put the thing on the thing and press the thing.’)

  The CRV-7s were unguided but very fast – about Mach 5 – and very accurate. The term death dot was not an idle one. There was so little dispersion that the effect of a salvo of CRV-7 rockets was quite devastating.

  I pressed the pickle button and watched as the unguided missiles streaked off towards the ridgeline, leaving yellow-white trails as they ripple-fired. I eased the aircraft round in a turn as the rockets screamed into the area where I’d seen the shadowy figures of the Taliban. The ground around them suddenly blossomed with a succession of explosions as the 4.5kg warheads detonated, soundless to me in the cockpit as I turned away – but catastrophic where they impacted the ground at five times the speed of sound.

  ‘Recoil Four Three, this is Victor Two Seven. Nice shooting. That’s stopped the machine-guns.’

  A couple of minutes later it was clear that the rest of the enemy were retreating, just firing a few sporadic rounds from their assault rifles as they scrambled away from the ridge and into cover.

  But our job wasn’t over. The troops still had to get off the ridgeline and continue their patrol, so we provided overwatch as they got back in their vehicles and continued down the track. We overflew the route they were going to follow and checked that there were no Taliban anywhere along it, and then returned to Kandahar once they were safely clear of danger.

  That was one of those situations where you can go from complete calm to the possibility of having to make high-end decisions without the benefit of knowing the full picture. In this case it was clear that the situation was so dangerous that, even without speaking to the patrol members, we believed the risk to their lives was real and imminent. If we’d been unable to talk to them we would probably have had to engage the enemy anyway, and make a decision we would have to live with for the rest of our lives. Fortunately, once we did establish two-way communications we were able to carry out a surgical strike and there were no serious casualties in the patrol.

  And at last I had managed to deliver some ordnance, though I was very much aware that both my five-forties were still hanging under my wings, so I knew I would get some more flak from the boys when I landed.

  As Bernard and I headed back towards Kandahar I thought about the problems we’d faced in bailing out the ambushed patrol.

  In combat these days almost all of the responsibility is placed on the man in the cockpit. He needs to know the Rules of Engagement intimately, and has to understand the laws of armed conflict, in particular those relating to proportionality. He has to ensure that any action he decides to take is both legitimate and in proportion to the threat. For example, dropping a 540lb bomb on a single Talib armed with a Kalashnikov is clearly not proportional. But if there were twenty or so insurgents armed with RPGs and heavy machine-guns pinning down a coalition patrol, using that weapon probably would be considered a suitable response.

  It’s quite a responsibility to place on young pilots, most of whom were experiencing combat for the first time. In Afghanistan the combat rules were intended to ensure that the lo
ss of life – to coalition troops, and the Taliban and their supporters – was minimized. Obviously, once a firefight was in progress, pilots and soldiers would respond to their attackers with whatever force seemed appropriate.

  It was a much more difficult decision to make once the firing had stopped. The question then was: ‘Does that person or group of people still pose any direct threat?’ Because the mere fact that they’d stopped shooting might only mean they were relocating to a better – and more dangerous for the coalition troops – position. They would of course still be there, and still have their weapons. One of the most difficult decisions any combatant has to make is whether or not it’s legitimate to release a weapon on a target that isn’t firing at that precise moment. The Rules of Engagement were supposed to help the decision-making process and ensure that only legitimate targets were prosecuted by coalition forces.

  A further difficulty was that when we were in the air we almost never had to decide whether or not to actually carry out an attack. That was the job of the commander on the ground, for the simple reason that we lacked the fidelity of information that the ground commander possessed. Normally when we were overhead an incident we were just reacting to the orders we’d received over the radio.

  The advent of precision-guided munitions has added a new dimension to the ground-attack discipline, as have the very different yields available. Today it’s possible to deliver a genuine surgical strike by selecting a weapon of precisely the right yield and placing it exactly where it’s needed. That minimizes the possible collateral damage but maximizes the effectiveness of the weapon. And it also gives us the ability to drop bombs closer to our own troops than earlier generations of pilots would ever have dared to.

  Even so, there were a number of occasions during the detachment when our pilots didn’t drop their weapons because of fears of collateral damage to the troops on the ground.

  The Taliban weren’t slow to figure this out for themselves and began to take up positions in which they knew they were safe from a ‘fast air’ attack. Usually they either dug themselves into a compound where we knew there were a number of civilians, especially women and children, or they fired from a mosque. There was also a third option: getting in danger close to coalition troops themselves.

  For just a few weeks the situation in Afghanistan – at least from our perspective in the squadron – seemed to quieten down a little. This was towards the time when the British Army’s 16 Air Assault Brigade were approaching the end of their time in theatre.

  My wing-man and I had been tasked with carrying out a surveillance routine colloquially known as the ‘Pattern of Life’. I was flying with Adam Hogg, a tall, slim youngster with a slightly large nose and longish, fair hair that always looked a bit scruffy. He would have missed it if I’d stopped asking him when he was going to get his hair cut. But Hoggy was an exceptional pilot, even if, whenever he was outside the aircraft, he was invariably plugged into his iPod.

  Our two aircraft were above Musa Qala, flying off-set egg shapes. One end of the ‘egg’ was based on the town or other point of interest, and while the aircraft was overhead we would be running our surveillance routines using various onboard sensors, the binoculars, targeting pod or whatever was appropriate. On the outbound leg we would reset our equipment and get ready for the next run, and at the same time talk to 16 Air Assault Brigade’s FAC. There was nobody else on the circuit, and we were using a secure radio, so we could speak freely.

  ‘How’s it been for you?’ I asked, knowing that the brigade had been in theatre for about three months and had to be somewhat shell-shocked by the whole thing. ‘How’s your war been?’

  But the reply from the FAC, who I knew was a young corporal, surprised me.

  ‘It’s fine. It’s been good. We’ve had quite a lot of action.’

  ‘Any particular dodgy moments?’ I asked. ‘Because it’s looked pretty busy on the news.’

  ‘Yeah,’ the corporal replied. ‘It’s been quite dicey. We’ve almost been overrun several times. But the delivery of air ordnance has been brilliant – we’ve been able to put it exactly where we needed it. Right up close and personal sometimes.’

  ‘How close?’ I asked. ‘Four or five hundred yards?’

  ‘Oh no,’ his voice crackled back over the radio. ‘I delivered a 2,000lb bomb from an American aircraft in the compound one down from us.’

  ‘Bloody hell,’ I muttered. As I overflew the compound where the FAC was based, I looked down and saw the crater the weapon had left. I quickly calculated the distance and worked out that it was only about 230 yards away from his location.

  ‘Christ,’ I said. ‘Didn’t that sting?’

  ‘We’ve got really big thick walls here,’ he laughed. ‘When the aircraft started its attack run we just got down behind the wall and covered our ears. But it did crack the roof of the house, though, the platoon house. I couldn’t hear that well afterwards, but I turned the radio up and after a while the ringing stopped and we just carried on.’

  As I started the outbound run I thought about the plight of the men on the ground, and was grateful – not for the first time – that I was fighting this war from the cockpit of a jet aircraft. The men of 16 Air Assault Brigade had been in theatre for about three months, and shortly before my conversation with the FAC they’d had forty-three days of continuous daily contact with the Taliban. They had been exchanging fire with the insurgents every day for a month and a half, in a period that had seen the highest tempo of sustained military operations since the Korean War. No other units had taken that level of continuous barrage, of exchanges of fire and daily contact with the enemy. And yet this young corporal was so matter-of-fact about delivering massive weapons so close to his position.

  There is a military codeword – ‘Broken Arrow’ – which simply means ‘direct all fire on my position’ (it can also mean the accidental detonation of a nuclear weapon, but the meaning is usually clear from the context). What this corporal was doing was essentially just that, tweaked slightly, simply because he had to. He was bringing down high-yield bombs – in fact the highest-power weapons available in theatre at that time – within a couple of hundred yards of his own position. And he had to do this, had to risk the collateral damage and possible injuries to his own comrades, because the Taliban knew that getting as close as possible to the coalition troops significantly reduced the chances that they would face air-delivered ordnance. So in any contact they always tried to get as close as they possibly could, as quickly as possible.

  Extreme situations call for extreme responses, and in the case of 16 Air Assault Brigade, that meant dropping weapons at a distance that was well inside the normal safety range. The simple fact was that, if they hadn’t, the Taliban would have overrun their positions. And nobody was in the slightest doubt about what would have happened to the coalition troops then. It wouldn’t have been pretty.

  18

  Back on the ground, I shut down the Harrier and slid back the canopy. As always, the heat hit me like a hammer as I took off my helmet and climbed out. I signed in the aircraft in the F700 maintenance logbook, removed the rest of my survival gear and did the sortie debrief with Hoggy. Then I headed off in search of caffeine.

  A few minutes later I was sitting by myself at the Tim Hortons just as the sun was starting to go down behind Three Mile Mountain. Drinking fresh coffee and eating a freshly baked muffin that was still warm, I mulled things over. In front of me, a hockey game was being played on a small pitch that the Canadians had built for their own recreation.

  As I watched citizens of forty countries all based at Kandahar go about their business, I considered the squadron’s performance to date. The squadron was getting tired now, for sure, but we were still performing exactly as we should. We’d not dropped the ball. The det was doing its job, because we knew we were saving the lives of coalition soldiers every time we responded to a TIC or were launched on a GCAS scramble. And we’d suffered no casualties. But, much to my annoyance,
I couldn’t shake the distinct feeling that we were to some extent just rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic.

  Fighting the Taliban never brought a sense of lasting success. Even if coalition forces managed to completely eliminate the Taliban from a particular area or village, this had no long-term effect. The moment the troops began to withdraw – as they always had to because they aren’t in Afghanistan in sufficient numbers to hold the territory they gain in the way that an occupying army would do, and this is not, in any case, their reason for being there – the Taliban would begin moving back in.

  The enemy of the coalition forces in Afghanistan comprised three main groups. There were the Taliban themselves and the groups that were associated with them, the two most evident being Al Qaeda and the HIG. The latter was the Hezb-es-Islami Gulbuddin, which was founded in 1977 by a man named Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, and is now the larger of the two sections of the country’s Hezbi Islami Party. Like the Taliban and Al Qaeda, the HIG was regarded as a terrorist organization by the coalition. And there were multiple other smaller groups of insurgents – at least twenty in all – with allegiances to one or more of these. But as far as we and the troops on the ground were concerned, they were all a part of the ‘Taliban regime’.

  In practice these distinctions meant little, as none of the three groups wore a uniform or displayed any other means of ready identification, though many of the Taliban tended to wear a black shalwar-kameez – an outfit comprising a long shirt and wide trousers – and black lungi turbans. The Taliban also all wore beards for religious reasons, but even this wasn’t particularly useful in a country where few men shaved. And the fact that an individual might be carrying a Kalashnikov was irrelevant because almost every adult male in Afghanistan owned a weapon of some kind. But if that Afghan aimed and fired the weapon at coalition troops, this would be a fairly reliable indicator of his intentions and affiliation.

  There was also the ‘smoke and mirrors’ aspect of the situation. Fighting the Taliban is not like fighting any other enemy. Coalition troops have no idea, no way of telling, if a handful of Afghan men standing beside a compound are just a group of poppy farmers discussing the price of raw opium, or Taliban fighters concealing a heavy machine-gun and a cache of assault rifles that they’ll open up with the moment they spot an opportunity. And a man who’s a farmer today might decide he’s a Talib tomorrow, or vice versa. The Taliban are in a constant state of flux, with volunteers constantly joining their ranks as others leave. It’s impossible to quantify the number or disposition of enemy forces, and it’s almost certain that even the Taliban leaders have no real idea of the number of men they have under their command.