Naval Aviators Detail Iraqi Freedom Triumphs, Travails at Air Symposium

Naval aviation personnel — active, reserve, former or retired — and their supporters gathered last month at the National Museum of Naval Aviation in Pensacola, Fla., for the annual Naval Aviation Symposium. The event was sponsored by the Naval Aviation Museum Foundation and the Tailhook Association. Attendees took in updates from a panel that included many senior aviation flag officers and lessons learned from veterans of last year’s lightning campaign in Iraq.

During a May 6 session on Navy and Marine Corps aviation participation in the war, sea service aviation veterans of Operation Iraqi Freedom provided details and anecdotes from their experiences during the campaign.

‘Dancing Elephants’ And Decisive Capability

Capt. David A. “Roy” Rogers, operations officer for the Combined Force Air Component Commander at Prince Sultan Air Base, Saudi Arabia, during the assault on Iraq, illustrated the maxim that plans never survive the first shot. He said air planners were preparing for a 16-day phase — an “optimum situation” — to soften up Iraqi defenses before the ground assault was launched. That shrank to less than a day when coalition forces rolled into Iraq on March 20, 2003.

Rogers said there were 89 flag and general officers and more than 600 colonels and Navy captains in-theater during the war. “When you get that many elephants dancing around, the grass tends to suffer a bit,” he noted.

Rogers said the operation’s commander, Gen. Tommy Franks, commander of U.S. Central Command, pleaded with the “elephants” to lighten up on the supervision. “The sooner you can get the fight into the hands of the tacticians — lieutenants and below — the sooner we will win this fight.”

Despite marginally safe flying conditions, carriers were able to launch and recover sorties when land-based aircraft were prevented from flying by a March 25 sandstorm, Rogers said, calling it “naval aviation’s finest hour.” Carrier-based aircraft responded in force with satellite-guided Joint Direct-Attack Attack Munitions (JDAMs).

Rogers said that the decisive capability of the air war — epitomized by the strikes during the sandstorm — was “our ability to kill things in less-than-optimum weather conditions … without being able to see the targets.” When Iraqi soldiers saw themselves being hit during the sandstorm, “they really started taking off their uniforms.”

Turkey Overflight Refusal Makes Refueling Tough

For Capt. Mark A. “Cyrus” Vance, commander of Carrier Air Wing Three in the Mediterranean, “The war could not have started more differently than we had planned.” Because of Turkey’s initial refusal to allow overflights, his air wing had to fly over Egypt, the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aqaba and Saudi Arabia to reach targets in Iraq for its initial strikes.

During the mission, Vance spent two-and-a-half hours looking for a refueling tanker. He initially was vectored to an Air Force tanker, which turned out to be configured for refueling aircraft with receptacles, not the probe his carrier-based fighter was equipped with. He finally was able to rendezvous with an Australian tanker and took on fuel as both low-fuel indicator lights illuminated in his cockpit.

The Turkish government soon relented, and the Mediterranean-based strike fighters were able to fly their next missions into Iraq via Turkey.

Pilots Opt for Low-Tech Over Northern Iraq

The aerial campaign over northern Iraq took on a different character than the one over the south, said one of Vance’s F/A-18 Hornet pilots, Lt. Geoffrey P. Bowman. After initial strikes with JDAMs, ordnance expenditures switched to 85-to-90 percent (in his estimation) “dumb” bombs.

The reason was that most of the forward controllers on the ground in northern Iraq lacked the means to determine precise coordinates of a target — necessary for guiding JDAMs — or laser designators for guiding laser-guided bombs.

Also in the north, the Hornet’s cannon was used for strafing ground targets on about 85 percent of his air wing’s strike sorties, Bowman said, a surprising retro-development in the age of precision-strike weapons. On one sortie, Bowman’s cannon exploded when a round prematurely detonated; he returned safely to his carrier.

Equipment Earns High Marks From Fighter, Chopper Pilots

Cmdr. Jeffrey R. Penfield, commanding officer of Strike Fighter Squadron 115, which took the F/A-18E Super Hornet to war, praised the combination of JDAM and night-vision goggles on his aircraft. The use of JDAM instead of laser-guided bombs enabled him to keep his head “out of the cockpit,” allowing him to be on the lookout for the surface-to-air missiles fired at him. Night-vision goggles provided more prompt warning of missile launches than the aircraft’s electronic radar warning systems.

Col. Robert E. Milstead Jr., a Marine Corps aircraft group commander during the war, noted with amazement the greater than 85 percent aircraft availability of his old CH-46E helicopters despite the ever-present blowing sand. He credits the wet manufacturing processes used to build naval aircraft — intended to keep out corrosive salt spray — as minimizing the problem of sand, an advantage unavailable to Army helicopters.

Reporting by Sea Power Managing Editor Richard R. Burgess.