Haven't The Gear

Many years ago I was sent to England on business. A driver picked me up at Heathrow to drive me to my place of work in Basingstoke. Nice car, too - a big comfy Mercedes so shiny and black I could practically hear Darth Vader's heavy breathing every time I glanced at it. But some sort of irritating flying insect had gone up the driver's nose and he had an axe to grind. This was not long after Operation Desert Storm in the early 1990s, and my British driver felt the need to tell me what he thought of Americans in general, and the US Air Force in specific. The American military was a bunch of amateurs, he claimed, and the Royal Air Force had had to carry the bulk of the burden in Desert Storm because "you Yanks haven't the gear." According to him, the British had flown most of the sorties in Desert Storm because US aircraft and weapons were inferior, US pilots were untrained rabble, American junk was shot out of the sky as soon as it appeared, and only the British could get the job done.

At the time I'd already helped myself to a series of reports submitted to the Office of Management and Budget, which included among other things a very detailed inventory of "select aircraft types" that flew missions in Desert Storm. Certain aircraft were not listed. The AC-130 was not in the report, for example, because its mission profile didn't fit the "sortie" model that the report was based on. F-15C Eagles were not included, as they flew air superiority missions and had no ground attack mission programming (though a separate section on the report on F-15C Eagle air-to-air kills in USAF and Saudi hands made fascinating reading). Other aircraft, such as United Arab Emirates Mirage IIIs or Kuwaiti A-4s, were not in the report because they were felt to be statistically insignificant. And some aircraft were excluded for reasons I simply can't fathom, such as F-4G Wild Weasels, B-52 Stratofortresses, A-7 Corsairs, USMC AV-8 Harriers, and F-111Es (the report only included F-111Fs).

So the data aren't entirely complete, but the report does paint a pretty clear picture, and several conclusions could be drawn from it. The most obvious one is that the vast majority of programmed strike missions in Desert Storm were flown by US aircraft, and specifically USAF aircraft. In fact, the breakdown looks a bit like this:

Aircraft Percentage of Strikes

F-117 Stealth Fighter 5.03%

A-6E Intruder: 7.36%

A-10 Thunderbolt: 24.31%

F-111F: 7.88%

F-15E Strike Eagle: 5.98%

F-16C Falcon: 32.92%

F-18 Hornet: 12.81%

Tornado GR.1: 3.71%

Two USAF types, the A-10 and the F-16, flew over half of all programmed strike missions in Desert Storm, and the total USAF contribution amounted to about 76% of all missions, and that doesn't include F-111Es, B-52s, or F-4Gs. Not bad for people who "haven't the gear."

Another interesting part of the report listed Coalition air losses. Here are the tabulated air losses from Desert Storm:

Aircraft Number Lost

F-117: 0

F-111F: 0

F-15E: 2

A-6E: 3

A-10: 5

OA-10: 2

F-16: 3

F-18: 3

B-52: 0

Tornado GR.1: 9

F-4G: 1

F-14 Tomcat: 1

EF-111A "Sparkvark": 1

OV-10 Bronco: 2

AV-8B Harrier: 5

AC-130 Spectre: 1

F-5E Tiger II: 1

A-4 Skyhawk: 1

The striking thing here is the Tornado GR.1, which suffered by far the highest absolute and percentage loss rate of any airplane in Desert Storm. The Tornado GR.1 loss rate per mission was twenty-six times higher than the F-16s, which isn't very good for an aircraft which, presumably, "has the gear". (There are reasons why the Tornado's loss rate was so high. The Tornado's low-altitude, high-speed mission profile is very demanding even in peacetime, and I can't imagine the balls of the British and Saudi pilots who flew those missions at night, with tracers and missiles coming up, in hostile territory. But it is interesting to note that once the RAF abandoned these low-altitude missions and adopted the USAF model of dropping PGMs from medium altitude, using Buccaneers as marker aircraft, Tornado losses dropped to about what one would expect - basically zero, in other words.)

Someone Famous once said that there are lies, damned lies, and statistics, and the accuracy of my analysis can be no more accurate than the data that was in the reports submitted to the OMB. And institutions (such as the USAF, the RAF, and even NASA) have on occasion been known to spin statistics in their favor. But it's hard to fake things like the numbers of aircraft committed, the numbers of missions flown, and the numbers of aircraft shot down. Where the fudging may have taken place is in the part of the report that listed "fully successful" missions as opposed to "not fully successful" missions, and I won't speculate on that data. It is altogether too easy for analysts to adjust the success criteria to make whatever point they want to make, and in any event, it's hard to tell in the real world if a given strike has been fully successful or not. When you attack a single tank with a GBU-10, success is pretty easy to determine. But when you attack the Baghdad Nuclear Research Center with a strike package of 60+ assorted aircraft, how exactly do you determine whether you were "fully successful" or not?

I knew all this, but I didn't argue with the driver. Mistaking my silence for agreement, he seemed very pleased with himself, as though he'd scored some sort of moral victory over those awful, amateurish Colonials, and restored the Crown to its rightful stature. But I've rarely been so happy to get out of a car as I was that day, and I drew considerable comfort from the fact that I'd never see him again.

But not because of his obvious and fairly impassioned anti-American bias. He has the perfect right to think whatever he wants about Americans, or Germans, or Brazilians, or about the Scots, for that matter. I really couldn't have cared less what he thought of America or Americans. I disliked him because I am readily irked by ignorant, uninformed people who won't keep their ignorant, uninformed cake-holes shut. I don't mind ignorance. And I don't mind obstreperousness. But obstreperous ignorance really wears me out. So if you're going to give me a 45 minute lecture on something, please endeavor to know about it than I do. There are a great many subjects that I know nothing about. Public education, psychology, gene splicing, TCP/IP protocols, cell phone apps, Russian politics, child-rearing, Paris Hilton, the stock market, monetary policy, Hinduism, class warfare in Brazil, narco-trafficking, HDTV, fashion, book publishing, tensor calculus and a hundred others. So please lecture me on something I don't know about, so it's a win-win all the way around.

The car driver's impression of the US military isn't exactly unique. There's a widespread bias in books written by British authors against the US military. Some of their criticisms are certainly valid, such as the observation that the US Army worried so much about the old threat (the Soviet Group of Forces in Germany) that it was poorly trained and poorly equipped to deal with the new threat (Osama bin Laden on horseback escaping from Tora Bora). British critics who pointed out that the US Army's tendency to relentlessly escalate the application of firepower in any given situation was counterproductive in an insurgency were right - there were even Americans who said that, chiefly US Marine Corps counterinsurgency experts, who seemed to be the only people in the US military who did any serious thinking about asymmetrical warfare at all.

Mostly the European bias against the US military is expressed in glossy photograph-laden popular books about weapons, especially tanks and airplanes. There's often a sort of sports mentality to the thing, where Some British Guy asserts that the Tornado is way better than any stinking American airplane simply because it's British. And if you read enough of these books, you find yourself inhabiting a world where European and especially British weapons are always superior because Americans are bumpkins fascinated with gadgets. The Eurofighter Typhoon is way better than the F-16. The Tornado is way better than the F-15E. The Rafale is way better than the F-18. The Vulcan was way better than the B-52. And certain notorious program failures, like the TSR.2 and the Avro Arrow, always seem to end up being my fault in some way (as an American, I am apparently an accessory after the fact to whatever nefarious American schemes that led to the cancellation of the TRS.2 or the Arrow or whatever).

To be fair, there are plenty of American writers who do the same thing, only in reverse. The F-16 becomes the most amazing fighter ever built simply because it wears stars-and-bars instead of roundels, and the whole thing turns into slightly goofy boosterism - my football team is better than your football team because everyone knows that red jerseys are better than green jerseys! My football team is better than your football team because you live in a warm city and the climate makes people soft and flaccid, while my cold and demanding climate makes linemen tough and mean! My football team is better than your football team because... Well, because I've attached my ego to my football team and I demand that it's better!

This doesn't bother me. I generally hew to the Trevor Dupuy school of thought anyway, which is that in the end, the exact operational parameters of any given weapon aren't nearly as important as the uses to which you put it - that leadership, logistics, organization, surprise, training, and even numbers are in the end considerably more important than whether this airplane is a bit faster than that one, or whether this airplane can turn at 9.5 gees and that one can only turn at 8.5 gees. One wouldn't expect a Sopwith Camel to prevail against a Focke-Wulf Fw 190 in air combat too many times, but as long as the airplanes are reasonably comparable - a Spitfire V against an Fw 190 - the "paper" advantages of one airplane over the other are largely swamped by other, often intangible factors (maybe, on the day in question, Fritz had a hangover and never saw Nigel in his Spitfire until it was too late).

So I was driving home from work the other day, listening to the BBC news on NPR, and some NATO "defence" spokesman was pleading for help from - gasp - the United States Air Force. Apparently, according to this spokesman, NATO lacks aircraft with "precision ground attack capability." But wait a minute, haven't you guys been cudgeling my brain for the last ten years on the superiority of the Tornado, and the even more sheer superiority of the Typhoon? If they're so good (and they are good, I don't doubt that) why does NATO need "precision ground attack capability" from the US Air Force? Are you admitting, in your roundabout fashion, that the US Air Force possesses capabilities that your air forces don't?

Of course it does.

What this NATO spokesman was asking for were two USAF aircraft in particular, the A-10 Thunderbolt and the AC-130. Yes, I know most people call A-10s "Warthogs", but for some reason I just don't feel entitled to use insider jargon in such matters. My friend may have served on the "Bonnie Dick", but to me, it was the USS Bonhomme Richard. My uncle may have worked on "Aardvarks", but to me, they're F-111s. A distant, distant uncle may have flown a "Gustav", but to me it's an Me 109G.

But whatever I call it, it seems clear to me that NATO is asking for A-10s and AC-130s, aircraft that are capable of attacking ground targets in a fairly heavy-duty way. As far as I know, no other air force has aircraft like the A-10 or the AC-130, the nearest analog to the former being the Russian Su-25, and nobody else has anything like the AC-130.

They don't have a single good thing to say about the US Air Force, but when it turns out that they can't destroy elderly Libyan T-55 tanks that are almost completely unprotected by battlefield air defense systems, they plead for A-10s and AC-130s.

It must gall my British car driver to no end to realize that, in the end, "they haven't the gear."