Ready! Ready? Not Ready …

It is the job of the military to have contingency plans for every conceivable scenario sitting on the shelf, ready to execute and to ensure that the force is properly trained, maintained, and equipped to execute those plans on a (figurative) moment’s notice.
 
When the Administration decided to strike Iran, it should have required nothing more than to pick a plan off the shelf and assemble the required assets.  We should have been ready and able.
 
Let’s digress for a moment.  How many aircraft carriers did we use during Desert Storm?  The answer is 6.  They were:
 

• USS Midway
• USS Roosevelt
• USS America
• USS Kennedy
• USS Saratoga
• USS Ranger

 
Compare that assemblage of power to the current Iran conflict.  How many carriers are active for this?  The answer is 2.  They are:
 

• USS Ford
• USS Lincoln

 
And Ford was at the end of a long deployment and overdue to return home.  We should also note that air wings during Desert Storm were larger than today’s air wings which makes the two carriers for Iran more like one and a half carriers!
 
An obvious question arises;  did operational requirements only need two carriers or were there only two carriers physically available?  Not knowing the detailed operational plan, we can’t say for sure but a common sense assessment sure seems to indicate that we needed more especially when we compare the needs of Desert Storm to this conflict.
 
Consider:
 
-We seem to lack sufficient air and naval coverage to keep the strait open.
-We clearly lack the air coverage to protect our bases and our Middle East allies from Iranian drones and missiles.
-USS Ford is approaching its one year deployment anniversary which clearly says that the vessel was used because no other carriers were available.
 
 
Were we ready or were we caught unprepared? 
 
A peripheral piece of evidence is the attempted deployment of a MEU during the early Ukraine conflict.  Despite having around 30 amphibious ships, the Navy was unable to form a ARG and provide ships for the MEU.  This suggests that the Navy is nowhere near combat ready and, further, has zero surge capability.
 
One might also ask why the Japan based carrier was not moved to the Middle East?  It’s not as if anyone believes that carrier serves any legitimated purpose in Japan.
 
I can’t offer any definitive answers but the circumstantial evidence suggests that the Navy is woefully unprepared for combat.

Strike-Fighter Example

As the navy contemplates the next carrier aircraft, it is well to recall the state we’re in and how we got here.  The ‘state’ I’m referring to is a carrier air wing with only one type of combat aircraft, the F-18 Hornet.  The F-18 was designed as a combination strike and fighter aircraft and, as a combination, is badly flawed since it is optimized for neither the strike nor fighter role (see, “The Strikefighter Myth”).  It is not well suited for pure air combat as it lacks maneuverability, speed, acceleration, endurance/range, sensors, and other aspects that a modern air superiority fighter must have.  Similarly, the F-18 is not well suited for pure strike as it lacks a degree of all-weather/night effectiveness in terms of dedicated air-to-ground sensors, terrain following, targeting, speed, range, maneuverability, and other aspects that a modern strike aircraft must have.

 

We used to have dedicated strike aircraft such as the A-6 Intruder and dedicated fighters such as the F-14 Tomcat.  How did we neck down to a single, compromised, inadequate aircraft?  There’s a variety of reasons but they boil down to trying to build an air wing based on a business case instead of a combat effectiveness case.  The F-18 was a cost saving, business aircraft instead of a supremely effective combat aircraft.

 

What does this mean for our next aircraft?

 

The most important lesson from the F-18 is not to try to build a do-everything, combination strike-fighter.  We need to return to dedicated fighters and dedicated strike aircraft (if we even want strike aircraft ?!).

 

Many of you are already pounding out replies about the much hyped benefits of combination strike-fighters.  Before you finish your misguided comments, let’s take a closer look at the combination, strike-fighter concept by looking at the most famous example the Navy has of the ‘success’ of the strike-fighter.  Yeah, you know the one – it’s the only one.  It’s the Jan 17, 1991, Desert Storm mission by a pair of VFA-81 Sunliners, Lieutenant Commander Mark Fox and Lieutenant Nick Mongillo with CVW-17 flying off the USS Saratoga.  During the mission which was intended as a strike mission, the F-18 Hornets encountered enemy aircraft, shot down two of them with air-to-air missiles, and then continued on to bomb their original targets.

 

Wow!  This is the perfect example of why the strike-fighter combination is so awesome, right?  The aircraft are self-escorting and can fight their way through to the target, taking on all enemy aircraft, destroy the ground targets, and then fight their way back home.  What’s not to like about this?

 

Well, the reality is that this example was a one-in-a-million scenario that just happened to work out perfectly for a variety of reasons and is unlikely to ever be repeated and certainly not during a peer war.

 

An aircraft loaded with weapons for a strike mission cannot successfully engage in air-to-air combat.  The weapons load renders the aircraft non-stealthy, slow, and unmaneuverable.  The air combat word for that combination of characteristics is ‘dead’.  The only reason the F-18s were able to succeed in this scenario was the total ineptness of the Iraqi pilots. 

 

LtCdr Fox acknowledges this.  In his own words,

 

Talking about the strike-fighter concept that the F/A-18 represents, Fox has a definite opinion.  “This is the first time to my knowledge that an airplane scored a kill while carrying four 2,000-lb bombs, then continued on to hit its target.  If the MiGs had got behind us, we would have had no choice but to honor their threat.  You can’t do that with 8,000 lb of bombs.  We would have had to jettison ordnance to face them, and would have served their purpose in stopping our strike.  They failed, we succeeded.” (1)

 

Fox recognizes what so many outsiders don’t:  the strike-fighter is not a capable fighter in any scenario more challenging than a drone shoot down which is, essentially, what the Iraqi incident was.  The added drag and weight of bombs and missiles significantly impacts the aircraft’s already sub-optimal fighter characteristics.

 

VFA-81 Sunliner

As a point of interest, here’s the weapons load the aircraft carried for that Desert Storm mission :

 

• 4x 2,000-lb Mk84 Low Drag, General Purpose Bomb
• 2x AIM-9L Sidewinder
• 2x AIM-7 Sparrow

 

Examining the weapons load we note that attempting to conduct aerial combat against a competent enemy peer fighter while lugging 4x 2,000 lb bombs would be suicidal.  Here’s the other overlooked aspect:  if the strike-fighter jettisons the ground attack weapons, it is left with a very minimal air-to-air weapons load – 2 Sidewinders and 2 Sparrows, in this case.  That kind of a minimal air-to-air load is starting the fight at a decided disadvantage.

 

A strike-fighter, by definition, carries a less than optimum load of ground attack weapons since it has to give up hard points to the air-to-air missiles and it carries a less than optimum load of air combat weapons since it has to give up hard points to the ground attack weapons.  Thus, both missions are compromised and sub-optimal right from the start.

 

The next issue for a strike-fighter is training time and, hence, competence.  There is simply not enough flight training time for pilots to be supremely competent at both missions.  In fact, today’s pilots are barely staying flight certified when not deployed and the use of waivers to maintain flight certification is becoming commonplace.  How can a pilot be supremely skilled at both missions when he can’t even get enough monthly flight hours to remain flight certified without waivers?

 

The only possible conclusion from this is that a strike-fighter can only succeed when the opponent is so incompetent as to be barely flight-capable, as was the case in the Desert Storm incident.  In any other scenario, the strike-fighter is a kill or, at best, a mission kill, waiting to happen.  It is certainly not a viable concept against a competent, peer enemy.

 

What does all of this tell us about the next Navy fighter?  The answer is crystal clear:  do not attempt to produce another strike-fighter.  Make the next fighter a pure fighter.  The A-6/F-14 combination is the example to follow, not the F-18/F-35.  The A-6 and F-14 were huge successes, for their time, whereas the F-18 and F-35 are mediocre and marginally successful, at best.

 

The next fighter must be a pure fighter.

 

 

 

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(1)https://theaviationgeekclub.com/this-vfa-81-f-a-18c-driver-scored-the-first-of-only-two-u-s-navy-mig-kill-during-operation-desert-storm/

Book Review - "Hornets Over Kuwait"

ComNavOps has offered occasional book reviews and I’ll try to include a few more in the upcoming year.  ComNavOps loves books written by the men who were there.  There’s nothing like hearing it from the horse’s mouth.  Of course, that doesn’t guarantee that the horse is right but it’s a pretty good start.  One such book is “Hornets Over Kuwait” (1) which, as the title indicates, is about a Marine Hornet pilot in Desert Storm.  The pilot was, at the time, a 30 year old Marine Corps Captain flying with VMFA-451 (Warlords).  The book is written from the day to day perspective of the pilot rather than attempting to delve into the larger strategic or operational picture.  As such, we get a fantastic glimpse of the pilot’s limited but up close view of the war. 

He describes:

• The striking degree of confusion and uncertainty surrounding the initial movement to the Gulf and the sheer magnitude of the logistics required to get a squadron into theater.
• Problems caused by women deploying with the unit.
• Interesting assessments of the F-18 including a somewhat surprising comparison of its air-to-air capabilities against the F-15 Eagle and F-16.
• The monotony of endless, routine CAPs.
• The adrenaline and terror of the first strike mission and the feelings associated with being shot at by AAA and SAMs.
• The Hornet’s air-to-ground performance.
• The overwhelming importance of tankers on nearly every mission.
• Interesting thoughts about the two seat F/A-18D which the author deems useful for FAC but not much else.
• The confusion of the Close Air Support (CAS) effort and the lack of peacetime training for the task.
• Aerial communications problems and overuse of the radio.
• Intel and bomb damage assessment (BDA) as being woefully lacking due to lack of peacetime training.
• The high and unexplained dud rate for iron bombs and the failure of electrical fuzes.
• Base life between missions which consisted of TV, cards, food, and mail and packages from home, among other activities.

The book is as noteworthy for what it doesn’t describe as what it does.  What it doesn’t describe is peer-opposed air operations.  Instead, the book clearly conveys that Desert Storm was, essentially, a live fire exercise conducted in a leisurely manner, the more so after the first few days.  The author/pilot even acknowledges this in his preface and throughout the book.  Thus, the applicability of the author’s experience to a peer level war is quite limited.

The author has done a magnificent job of providing a head down, lower level perspective of a pilot in Desert Storm combat.  The gems and insights scattered throughout the book make for a completely absorbing tale that is every bit as entertaining as fiction but carries with it the fascination of reality.  I highly recommend it.

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(1)“Hornets Over Kuwait”, Jay A. Stout, Naval Institute Press, Annapolis, Maryland, 1997, ISBN 1-55750-835-6

Marine Corps in Desert Storm - The Great Diversion

In the 1991 Desert Storm campaign, the Marines threatened, but did not conduct, an amphibious assault.  Their efforts created a diversion that tied up large numbers of Iraqi troops (60,000 – 80,000 depending on the source) defending against an assault that never materialized.  This reduced the numbers that the Coalition faced during the actual ground assault.  Most people believe that the diversion was a brilliant example of the value of amphibious forces.  To some extent, that’s true, however, in this case, the diversion was never a serious, viable threat due to the presence of mines.

“At the inception of Operation Desert Storm, it was unlikely that amphibious operations would take place, because of the minefields that lay along the Kuwaiti and Iraqi coast, and the threat posed by Iraqi antiship-missile capabilities.” (1)

Coalition planners did, indeed, consider the possibility of an amphibious assault with the goal of seizing the port at Ash Shuaybah, on the Kuwaiti coast.  However, when the Tripoli (LPH-10) and the Princeton (CG-59) struck mines on 18 February 1991, any thought of an actual assault was abandoned.  The U.S. and Coalition lacked the capacity to clear mines in a combat assault scenario.

“The force planners estimated any assault would need ten days of concentrated mine clearance to clear a path and three to five days of naval gunfire support to clear Iraqi beach defences. Air strikes and naval gunfire would also have to be used while the mines that were within range of Iraqi artillery were cleared. Before then, the amphibious force would have to stay over 70 miles from the coast.” (2)

Ten days to clear a path for an amphibious assault – and this did not include clearance of the more widespread minefields that prevented the amphibious ships from even reaching the area – as Tripoli and Princeton found out.

Had Saddam Hussein realized this, and he should have, he could have dismissed the amphibious possibility as the non-existent threat that it was.  However, no one ever accused Hussein of being a strategic or operational genius and he treated the non-existent threat as real.  Of course, in the end, it made no difference either way.

The salient point from this is that the presence of mines completely removed the realistic possibility of amphibious assault from the operational table.  Not only has nothing changed today but our mine countermeasures (MCM) capability has atrophied even further.  We have no realistic possibility of conducting amphibious assaults or port seizures when mines are present.  Given the vast inventories of mines possessed by all our likely enemies, those enemies are effectively immune from amphibious assault. 

The Marines and Navy can talk all they want about amphibious assault but until they begin to acquire the basic, non-glamorous capabilities like MCM, naval fire support, C-RAM, functional first wave connectors, etc., amphibious assault will remain just talk.

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(1)United States Naval Institute Proceedings magazine, “Marine Amphibious Force Operations in the Persian Gulf War”, 2nd Lt. Michael Russ, USMC, July 1997, Vol 123/7

(2)History of War website,

http://www.historyofwar.org/articles/wars_gulf_amphibious.html