by John Hackett
The Franco-German HOT (high-subsonic optically teleguided) anti-tank missile system, used in the helicopters of both France and the FRG, with a range from 75 to 4,000 metres and sufficiently massive penetration to defeat any known tank in service in the mid-eighties, could not fail to make a valuable addition to the NATO anti-tank armoury.
The part likely to be played by rotary-wing aircraft has been stressed here because of its intimate association with the land battle. A truer air war could also be expected to range widely and deeply, with 2 and 4 ATAF (Allied Tactical Air Forces) initially intent on winning the air battle in the face of greater numbers of aircraft and of really formidable Warsaw Pact air defence. The opening high explosive and chemical attack on NATO airfields could expect success to the extent that, delivered with surprise, it would leave the Western allies with somewhat reduced resources and less flexibility. Defence against chemical warfare would severely reduce the efficiency of personnel and increase turn-round time on airfields. Shelters had been hardened, however, and alert procedures improved to ensure the survival of as many as possible of the aircraft attacked on the ground.
Interdiction, wherever possible, and attrition of enemy forces in depth would form the major offensive role of the Allied air forces, with the ground forces getting relatively little close support in the early stages except in cases of extreme urgency. The devastating tank-busting capability of the US A-10 Thunderbolt, though its full exploitation invited uncomfortably high losses, would be especially effective in these emergency situations, as well as when working with anti-tank helicopters in seeking out and destroying the Soviet armour, as is described in the next chapter.
In its ground forces the United States had by the summer of 1985 replaced many of its M-113 APC with the new Bradley M-2 infantry fighting vehicle. The Bradley M-2, which was not just a new ‘battle taxi’ but a true fighting machine, could make a world of difference since it gave each squad its own tow missile, to be fired from under the shield of armour, and for close-in protection a 25 mm electrically-fired Bushmaster gun capable of destroying light armour and firing a high-explosive anti-personnel round as well. The squad also had the Dragon medium-range ATGW (anti-tank guided weapon). The infantry could not yet be said to be a match for armour but it could certainly now give a better account of itself under armoured attack than before.
If there was one area of almost desperate deficiency in Allied Command Europe (ACE) in the middle 1980s it was in air defence. Overall air defence planning in NATO only began to take real shape at the beginning of the eighties with the formulation of the Air Defence Planning Group’s programme. This was to take in all air command and control (both offensive and defensive), NATO airborne early warning, NATO IFF (identification friend or foe), the multi-functional information distribution system (MIDS) and air defence weapons. In a programme initiated in 1980, intended to be implemented over fifteen years, it was sad, if inevitable, that little progress had been made in the five years before the war. NATO looked like going to war with air defences of very uneven capability which cried out, as with so much else in NATO, for standardization.
Medium- and high-level missile air defence in ACE was still provided by Hawk (homing-all-the-way killer) and Nike. Patriot, a far superior system to either, could probably have replaced both, operating (as the sales talk put it) ‘from treetop level to very high altitude’. It had proved expensive to develop and was not available in time to be generally deployed in Europe before the outbreak of war, though it was just coming into service in early 1985. Its absence would be felt. At lower levels, protection was afforded by Rapier. The new type of tracked Rapier system introduced in the early eighties enormously enhanced air defence in both Northern and Central army groups in the Central Region. The very low-level cover provided by the American man-portable Redeye (in British and Canadian formations by Blowpipe), all too sparsely spread, would leave vulnerable points too often totally exposed. Stinger, a US shoulder-fired anti-aircraft weapon, began to supersede Redeye in 1981 and was generally in service in USAREUR in 1985. It used passive infra-red (IR) homing, the missile operating independently after initial arming and launch by the operator. This was a great step forward in low-level air defence. Among NATO allies the Federal Republic of Germany was the first to adopt Stinger but others followed. It was in wide (but unhappily not general) use in the Central Region in 1985. The US, German and Dutch formations had air defence weapons not greatly dissimilar from the Soviet ZSU-23-4 radar-controlled anti-aircraft gun. The US divisional air defence system (DIVADS) offered promise and the German SP armoured anti-aircraft system Gepard (Cheetah), with its twin 35 mm guns, was costly but might prove its value against air attack, even at $4 million per copy. One advantage to NATO was that Soviet pilots had neither the equipment nor the training to fly quite as low as those of 2 and 4 ATAF. They would therefore be more exposed to earlier radar detection and subsequent attack.
In the whole vital problem of controlling battlefield airspace, NATO IFF was one case of particularly badly needed rationalization and improvement. It is worth enlarging upon this as an example.
It is essential to know very quickly whether an approaching aircraft is hostile, IFF interrogates it by sending out a group of pulses to which another group of pulses is sent back in reply by what is known as a transponder. If this answer is correct — that is, as expected — the aircraft is friendly. If not, it is hostile.
The system, long in use, had been adequate when warfare was less complex, electronics less advanced, and airspace, especially lower airspace, less crowded. It was scarcely adequate in the 1980s. It could be jammed, either accidentally or deliberately. It could be ‘spoofed’ by an imitation of the right answer. The emission, whether of interrogation or answer, could be tracked to source and serve as a beacon to bring in guided- or homing-attack. It had blind spots. It had reliability problems. What was good for the 1960s was hardly good enough for the higher pressures of the 1980s. A soldier in a trench with a Stinger would have an advanced IFF with him but if he got it wrong, and pressed the trigger when he should not, he could destroy a $20 million aircraft and a pilot. It is said that in the early days of the 1973 Arab-Israeli war the Egyptians shot down eighty-one Israeli aircraft and sixty-nine of their own.
As the 1980s opened, the urgent need for a new identification system for NATO was realized and a development programme launched. Its cost was estimated to be at least $250 million, and the resultant replacement of the current IFF, in which some $2,000 million had already been invested, could hardly be complete by the end of the century. NATO would have to go to war with the IFF it had, depending more and more upon procedural method in the management of airspace.
Soviet air defence systems in the probable battle zone ranged from SA-2 up to SA-14, with the new generation starting at SA-8. The mobile medium- to low-level SA-6 and the hand-held low-level SA-7 had proved themselves, without any question, many years before in Sinai, and the successor equipments were even more effective, lethal and mobile. The ZSU-23-4 radar controlled anti-aircraft gun was still in service in 1985 in spite of its age and no equivalent equipment in NATO came anywhere near to matching it in terms of numbers. It was probably the most feared item of the Warsaw Pact battlefield air defence armoury.
In the US artillery the automated tactical fire-direction system (TACFIRE), so long awaited, began to come into service in USAREUR in 1981 and was well established in 1985, giving much increased responsiveness and control. The British battlefield artillery target engagement system (BATES) was another example of the application of microprocessor technology to the central control of artillery, transmitting accurate fire orders from observer to gun in milliseconds and producing the swift response necessary for the engagement of fleeting targets. The use of this system, though it had faults, marked a quantum jump in British methods of artillery control and was expected to do much to compensate for the shortage of guns in the two British corps in NORTHAG. In both cases, in TACFIRE and BATES, the failure of g
overnment, in the US no less than in the UK, to ensure adequate and timely funding resulted in dangerous delays in bringing systems of incalculable value into service.
It was fortunate for NATO in 1985 that the Assault Breaker concept, already in 1978 under research and development in the United States but threatened by budgetary hazards thereafter, had been at least partially rescued in time. This was an attempt to provide non-nuclear response to armoured superiority, with improved effectiveness against first-echelon forces but with the emphasis on second and third echelons up to 160 kilometres in depth. It had been from the first a joint US Army/Air Force project, involving an airborne target acquisition and weapons delivery system (TAWDS) and a ground-based army element. The full exploitation of the potential of Assault Breaker depended on the development of systems such as the helicopter-borne SOTAS mentioned earlier. The Patriot missile (originally intended as a surface-to-air missile, or SAM, but now also to be used as a surface-to-surface missile, or SSM) could be guided both from a ground-based command and control centre or from an airborne command post if the ground centre were out of action. An essential element in Assault Breaker was to be the use of terminally- guided sub-munitions. Each bomblet (or Smartlet, as these developments of ‘smart’ munitions came to be called) was furnished with a terminal seeker and a limited degree of manoeuvrability. The seeker would send out a millimetric wave signal to which there would be from the unwitting target an involuntary response. The weapon would then lock on to the response and find its path to the target. It was unfortunate that funding in the US for the development of Assault Breaker was so far reduced in the early 1980s that the whole system was only partially in troop service by 19 84.
In the field of chemical warfare (CW) the offensive capability available to Warsaw Pact armies in the field was well known, as well as the use to which in Soviet military practice it could be put. Specialist CW personnel, perhaps numbering in the aggregate 150,000, were deployed in the Red Army down to battalions. Some 15 per cent of all Soviet artillery ammunition carried chemical fillings, with up to 50 per cent of theatre and strategic missiles armed in the same way. The availability of aircraft fitted with spray tanks was high.
The practice would be to employ non-persistent non-lethal or incapacitating agents in the advance in bombardment preparatory to attack, for example, on positions it was intended to overrun or occupy. Such agents would disperse in a matter of minutes. Tear gas, or the CS used in civil disturbance, are good examples of such agents. What are known in the West as DM and DC, with secondary effects such as nausea, giddiness and reduction of the will to fight, are military versions. Non-persistent agents include chlorine and phosgene, lethal when sufficient is inhaled, but by the early 1980s thought to be of little use on account of unreliability.
More persistent agents, including blister gases — for example mustard and nerve agents such as the highly lethal Tabun (GA) and Soman (DC) — would be used to seal flanks and deny areas not intended for occupation, as well as to attack airfields, often in conjunction with delayed-action bombs.
The purpose of all CW attack would be twofold: to inflict casualties, and by causing opponents to take full protective action to impede performance.
It is difficult for anyone without experience of exacting work done under full CW protection to realize how far it saps efficiency. Protective clothing is burdensome and hot, and physical work in it is very exhausting. Staff work, though not so demanding physically, is difficult in respirators and thick gloves. The maintenance of effective seals over apertures such as windows, doors and hatches is time-consuming and involves severe self-discipline. Decontamination demands not only appropriate equipment and a plentiful water supply, but also minute care, which diverts attention and resource from other essential tasks. Men get accustomed to some degree to the discomforts and distractions of CW precautions but they are rarely more than 50 per cent efficient under them and tire quickly.
It was known that Warsaw Pact defensive capabilities in the field were inferior to those of the West, where British protective clothing and equipment were of outstanding quality, and alarm and other precautionary procedures were well practised. Other NATO members followed in varying degrees of effectiveness. The great disadvantage on the Western side was the general lack of a retaliatory capability everywhere but in USAREUR. Stocks of offensive toxic agents in the US had once been high but had deteriorated, or been dispersed, or destroyed so far that by 1980 they could be said (and were, by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) to be virtually non-existent. One SACEUR after another from the late 1970s onwards had emphasized that only the availability of an adequate retaliatory capability could be considered an effective defence against Soviet CW.
Interest lay chiefly in what is known as the binary round, a projectile in which two substances of a non-toxic nature are combined in flight and become a toxic substance before impact. Though there were technical difficulties (a short flight, for example, put obstacles in the way of effective combination of ingredients), the great merit of the binary round lay in safety of handling and storage, and a possible reduction in the sensitivity of Allied countries about hosting it in peacetime. The production of the binary round was recommended in the US in the early 1980s but it had not proved possible to store any in European countries by the summer of 1985. A useful step forward, however, had been the bilateral agreements between the United States on the one hand and Federal Germany and the UK on the other for the manufacture of quantities of such munitions for 155 mm artillery. They were to be stored for the time being in the US and brought forward when required.
Thus the armed forces on the Soviet side were in 1985 well prepared for offensive CW action but not over-well equipped to withstand attack, and on the other side quite well (in the case of the British, very well) prepared in defence but with a retaliatory capability confined entirely to the Americans. It was unlikely that, if a Warsaw Pact attack involved early and widespread use of CW in the field, the Western allies would fail to make use of the US capability to respond. This, however, would involve delay on the Western side and give the Soviets some initial advantage. This was almost certainly what was intended.
The Soviets would without doubt employ CW from the start of any offensive and the Western allies were well and truly warned to expect it. It was also highly probable that the two US corps would not be attacked in this way since it was a fair guess that the Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR) would find some way of employing the American retaliatory capability on his own authority in support of US troops, using munitions flown in for the purpose. This would be well known on the other side, as would also be the inability of other Western allies to retaliate in kind, at least for the time being, on their own behalf. Allied casualties, if war broke out, could be confidently expected but if precautions were taken and discipline prevailed they need not be high.
In aircraft the Alliance was compelled on the whole, in the years leading up to the war, to make do with what it had, or at any rate to improve it as best it might by stretching existing capabilities a little further, rather than to try to introduce far-reaching innovations. Given the financial constraints, Allied air forces, with an immense concentration of effort, did not do too badly.
The EF-111, for example, was an improved jammer built into an F-111 airframe, capable of Mach 2-plus speeds at height and a supersonic performance at sea level. Being also highly manoeuvrable it was a good survivor. The EF-111 carried ten high-powered jammer transmitters and a terminal-threat warning system which detected weapons-associated radar emissions and would provide flight crews with warning of impending attack from SAM anti-aircraft artillery or interceptors. These aircraft, beginning to enter service in 1983, were expected to prove very effective as deep-penetration escorts. In the Second World War the protection of deep penetration by an air force was provided by fighter escort or, when beyond its range, by the capacity of the bomber to fight its own way through the enemy’s interceptors, as in the US 8th Air Force.
In the 1980s the penetrating aircraft had to be protected primarily from the result of electromagnetic emissions, whether its own or the enemy’s, which would serve to guide gun, missile or interceptor attack towards it. The EF-111 development typified modern trends.
So did the TR-1, a retooled version of the old U-2 (what the press called the ‘spy plane’), a high-altitude (over 70,000 feet), long-range (over 3,000 miles) reconnaissance and surveillance platform providing battlefield information to tactical commanders. This aircraft, too, was a definite plus. It had advanced electronic counter-measures (ECM), synthetic aperture radar systems, and capability to direct precision strikes against enemy radar emitters (PLSS — precision location strike system) and to collect ELINT (electronic intelligence) data. It began coming into NATO service in the early 1980s.
The story was the same with the F-4G, a modified F-4E Phantom, containing advanced electronic warfare equipment and armed with anti-radiation missiles, of which the latest, AGM-88 — HARM (high-speed anti-radiation missile) — was just coming into service when war broke out.