CHAPTER 20
THE LONG AND WINDING ROAD
Today’s Tornado GR4 has extraordinary capabilities, undreamed of when the GR1 entered service in 1982. Given that this volume has covered virtually all of the aircraft’s thirty-five-year service life I would like to have included at least one chapter in which we could look in detail at the marvellous new suite of weapons with which the aircraft now operates. But readers will appreciate, I have no doubt, the sensitivities surrounding currently in-service systems. Notwithstanding that much information is already available in open sources, today’s ‘Tornado Boys’ are, quite rightly, keen not to betray confidences.
But the long and winding road to the current state is nevertheless curious in many ways, and I was able to follow much of it from the differing perspectives of my three ground tours. The progress of various projects as staffs struggled to get them into service was extraordinarily convoluted and elongated. As always in life, chance played a part along the way.
I first began to be aware of all this when, as a squadron leader in 1985, I was posted to lecture in the Department of Air Warfare at Cranwell. I was to be the ‘attack weapons specialist’ and it was a fascinating time for weapons development. And indeed a demanding time for a new lecturer; I remember on day one having to deliver a session to the aerosystems course on anti-radiation missiles – a breed of creatures (the missiles, as well as the course members) I had never met in my life. But there is no quicker way to learn than becoming an instructor, and I was soon happily lecturing to the weapons employment and air warfare courses. It was a great life, with many course visits to defence industry sites – whose locations, for inexplicable reasons, always seemed to be adjacent either to breweries or Soho.
The hot topic at the time was the weapons planned to replace the elderly equipment that still armed the ground-attack force. Many recent aircraft types had staggered into service only half ready for combat, equipped with weapons already a couple of generations old. The Phantom, in its early ground-attack days, had used the Canberra’s (Lancaster’s?) iron bombs, a fixed weapon-aiming system, and the Hunter’s SNEB rockets. The Jaguar, which had succeeded it, inherited those ‘dumb’ bombs, although gaining an improved aiming system. Additionally, unguided rockets were superseded by the (still unguided) BL755 cluster bomb unit. The latter’s advantage was that it could be delivered from ultra-low level, but the fact that each weapon scattered 147 sub-munitions in a huge pattern gave away the fact that aiming inaccuracies were still considerable.
One of the coming technologies in the anti-armour area was recognition of targets by ‘intelligent’ gizmos mounted in weapons; they would image the vehicles in their view, compare those pictures with a stored data bank, and steer the weapon towards the recognised ‘enemy’ target. The imaging would be performed either by millimetric wave radar or imaging infra-red seekers.
This all seemed to me at the time to be somewhat pie in the sky, although the project was being pursued for real by the MoD (in fact they had been doing so since about 1982) in the form of air staff targets (ASTs) 1238 and 1241; the former was for a short-range weapon, the latter for a powered, stand-off system. But a measure of how far this sort of thing was from maturity was that I was able to complete that tour, disappear for a while on a staff college course, and re-emerge in 1988 as a wing commander in a new ground tour in the MoD – to find them still years from service entry. In that MoD post I was concerned with the future equipment programme, and I was relieved, and perhaps slightly surprised, that 1238 and 1241 remained in the plan. I also had the reassurance that the projects had been firmed up into ‘requirements’ (ASRs) rather than ASTs.
I was the department’s Harrier and Jaguar man, a part of the team constructing the ten-year forward financial programme that would, year on year, neatly accommodate the phased expenditure on coming projects. It was a tri-service business, with army, navy and RAF competing for funds and all three having plenty to say about each other’s projects. For example when it came to airborne anti-submarine warfare, the RN, unsurprisingly, would champion frigate-mounted systems and helicopters, while the RAF would advocate the merits of Nimrod. Oddly, though, given the subject, the army would be allowed to throw in their two-penn’th as well, mainly it seemed in a bid to upset the (metaphorical) boat.
Similarly, with the two anti-armour projects we’ve been discussing, I had to be prepared to deal with the army’s views on their competing systems, while still having to watch out for the navy’s salvoes from left field. It was a good game, keeping us all extremely busy.
In fact killing tanks leads me to mention that during the time I was in the job the army was signing up to buying the Apache helicopter. With its Hellfire missile it was a formidable system, I had to agree, but as it proceeded through the funding, approval and procurement process, the army did find themselves fighting one unexpected rearguard action. Apache was so good that its imminent introduction put a spoke in the wheels of their case for new main battle tanks.
Money (lack of) was the recurring problem, with ways having to be found to cope with escalating costs. One source of difficulty was the regular under-estimation of bills when new projects were inserted into the programme. This was partly, perhaps understandably, because of initial lack of appreciation of the full complexity of new systems. But there also appeared to be a tactical tendency for services and industry to deliberately underestimate costs in deference to the ‘foot-in-the-door’ principle; if the true price were revealed straight away, pet projects would never have found their way into the programme at all.
One of the solutions to the continual pressure to finance the programme was to ‘move projects to the right’ – in other words to shift expenditure out of one fiscal year and into the next. This could occur at the MoD’s request, although there were obvious downsides when much-needed new equipment was delayed. Apart from the capability loss there were usually costs involved in the necessary running on of old equipment to compensate; moreover, there would inevitably be a price increase when the buyer caused the rescheduling. But delays were often because the manufacturer couldn’t achieve the planned into-service date, usually because technology which had been optimistically promised was proving harder than expected to put into production form.
As an aside, I mentioned earlier the ‘EFA introduction to service plan’ with which I was involved during that MoD tour. It defined how Jaguar and Phantom squadrons would progressively be replaced by EFA from 1996 onwards. As we know now, the Phantoms disappeared in 1992 (without being replaced), while EFA progressively became Eurofighter, Eurofighter 2000, and then Typhoon, eventually beginning in 2003 to replace Tornado F3 and the few remaining Jaguars. Truly, one needed to be flexible when dealing with defence planning and procurement!
All that was then, of course, and we are assured that ‘smart procurement’ now eradicates many of the old problems. Just as importantly, the vast ‘black hole’ in funding is, apparently, being addressed, with the defence programme being made affordable. We can only hope that all this is so.
Anyway, I forget what the specific problems were at the time with my projects 1238 and 1241, but for whatever reason they didn’t seem to be much further on when I left the MoD in 1991 than they had been when I first met them in 1985.
During those two and a half years in Whitehall I shared an office with my Tornado oppo, and for all that time he was beavering away at ASR1236, the CASOM – or conventionally armed stand-off missile. I knew very few details at the time of that aspiration, but I was conscious that he seemed to be having about as much success with it as I was with 1238 and 1241. Time would show, though, how our respective projects would cross each other’s paths.
We’ve spent a while discussing anti-armour, and although the Tornado was to be capable of carrying those new weapons, killing tanks was not the aircraft’s primary role. And although Tornado did indeed employ iron bombs in its early days, it had broken the mould by entering service equipped with JP233, a brand-new weapon designed specifically for its primary role – which was offensive counter air.
OCA was designed to reduce, or preferably neutralise, the enemy’s air effort so that our own aircraft could operate freely and, just as importantly, our troops could operate free from enemy air interference. In the early 1980s when Tornado was approaching service entry there were reckoned to be several methods of contributing to this objective.
The first was to attack enemy radars and surface-to-air missile sites, a dangerous business but potentially achievable with dumb bombs. Secondly, one could engage enemy fighters whilst airborne and shoot them down. This was the job of our own fighter boys – always assuming they had the spare capacity over and above last-ditch defence of the home base.
The third method would be to attack and destroy enemy aircraft on the ground. Given that the opposition, like ourselves, had opted to house their aircraft in hardened aircraft shelters, this had become something of a long shot. Granted, a direct hit on a HAS would likely put it, and probably the aircraft inside, out of action – always assuming that the weapon impacted squarely on the exterior surface rather than glancing off. But given the accuracies of the dumb bombs available, the chances weren’t good. At that time, by the way, it was not reckoned that PGMs could be employed effectively against heavily defended airfields in the envisaged conflict area, central Europe.
Finally one could degrade the enemy’s operating surfaces such that he couldn’t take off. The Warsaw Pact (for this was whom the Tornado was designed to engage) had not adopted the dispersed, Harrier-style concept, nor the autobahn-operating idea of the Swedes, so bombing their runways/dispersals seemed a good option. Not crudely, with dumb bombs which might ricochet off, but surgically, with many, specifically designed cratering submunitions.
Such was the concept of JP233. Because the weapon contained many submunitions (airfield operating surfaces were huge) each couldn’t be all that large, so the possibility remained that the opposition could fill in the holes relatively quickly and resume operations. But JP233’s designers had thought of that, adding a complementary dispenser full of mines to deter repair teams. The aim was to keep the enemy base out of action for, perhaps, twenty-four hours, with JP233 re-attacks scheduled as necessary to keep the base closed.
That was the theory, but how about the results? The weapon’s only operational use was during the Gulf Conflict, and I don’t recall seeing any definitive battle damage assessments. But word has it that the cratering was not as effective as expected – possibly affected by the sandy sub-strata. At any event, in that war it didn’t really matter, as the Iraqi air force had opted not to fight.
By the time I finished that MoD tour, Gulf War One had come and gone. I departed to fly my own Tornado, enjoying a couple of years running a squadron on ops. CBUs, dumb bombs and JP233 were still in the inventory, although the post-Cold War situation and experience from the Gulf Conflict was leading to lots of new thinking. Most importantly, Tornado now had, in TIALD, its own highly capable laser designator pod (two pre-production models, ‘Sharon’ and ‘Tracy’, had actually served in the Gulf Conflict). This, together with operating Tornados within coalition ‘packages’ complete with all manner of enabling assets, was changing everything. Stand-off weapons delivery was very much the name of the game rather than overflying the target, so all that was now needed was to get some of those advanced weapons onto the front line.
Five years after leaving the MoD I returned, now as a group captain, and this time working in the air commitments area. The calendar had flipped over to 1996, and SR(A)s 1236, 1238 and 1241 had still not entered service – at least not in their envisaged form. Indeed such had been the delays and so urgent was now the need for a degree of stand-off that what might be described as interim weapons had been procured – the American Maverick missile for the Harrier and the Canadian CRV-7 high-velocity rocket for the Jaguar. Oh, and perhaps I shouldn’t claim that no progress had been made – you’ll have noted that ‘ASR’ had become ‘SR(A)’. This change was designed to reinforce the notion that control of procurement was a central function rather than a single-service business – but one might be forgiven for perceiving it more as a cosmetic adjustment than as substantive progress.
But not long into that tour we found ourselves in one of those circumstances when, the soothsayers would say, constellations move into conjunction with planets. The spotlight was falling on cluster bombs which, in the case of the RAF’s BL755, contained anti-armour submunitions. But other major nations had produced dispensers containing a range of alternative submunition types, some of which were small mines. These were intended to deny use of an area to enemy forces and could be of the anti-armour, anti-soft-skinned vehicle or anti-personnel variety. Unsurprisingly, such weapons had now found their way into the arsenals of third world nations – with the inevitable result that innocent passers-by had had limbs blown off.
In fact it wasn’t only mines that were doing the damage. Submunitions such as those in BL755, whose targets were tanks, were designed to detonate on impact. But inevitably, given the spread of the dispenser, most of them missed their targets. They would, perhaps, detonate on the ground. However, at shallow impact angles and on variable surfaces, a proportion could be expected to remain as unexploded ordnance, littering the countryside and lying, ready to trap the unwary, concealed in undergrowth long after the conflict had moved on.
News media and humanitarian organisations began to bring this issue to the attention of world opinion, and before long a substantial head of steam built up, against mines in particular and cluster weapons in general. Prominent personalities, not least the late HRH the Princess of Wales, became involved in the campaign, which eventually bore fruit in the adoption of an international anti-mine protocol. The British signed up, although in the drafting and discussions prior to the signing a most unexpected issue had become apparent. It was HB876.
The HB876 mines in JP233 could in no way be equated to the types of bomblets which the protocol was intended to eradicate. They were huge pieces of kit, standing up visibly (to deter approach) on spindly metal legs. And JP233 was an anti-runway weapon so, even allowing for inevitable aiming errors which could lead to a few being scattered outside the airfield perimeter, one would hardly expect many HB876 submunitions to pose a threat to innocent civilians.
It could have been argued, of course, that JP233 had utility against other area targets such as railway marshalling yards – which would have countered any assertion that its mines would be confined to military airfields. There was indeed some background to this suggestion. The Germans and Italians, who had not bought JP233, had procured a similar weapon, MW-1 (Mehrzweckwaffe Eins), which did indeed have a capability against targets other than airfields. But, although I did hear of such employment being mooted on several occasions for JP233, those discussions concerned more a theoretical option rather than a serious move to expand the target range. To my knowledge JP233 remained, to the RAF, strictly a counter-air weapon.
So it might have been possible to argue exemption for JP233 from an anti-mine protocol which was, primarily, targeted at eradicating anti-personnel mines. It was even suggested that JP233 could, if necessary, be modified to carry just the cratering submunitions (the mines were carried and dispensed from a separate container, so this should not have been impossible). But this option was swiftly discarded; the craters made by the primary submunitions were relatively small and, although there would, it was hoped, have been many of them, it was reckoned that, without the harassing effect of the mines, repairs sufficient to make the strip operable again could be effected fairly quickly.
All in all, it might have been possible to save JP233 – given the will. But the fact was that there was little love in the RAF for the weapon. Many weren’t persuaded by the efficacy of flying straight and level at low level across a heavily defended enemy airfield. And in any case, weapons technology was now developing to the extent that it was possible to find better ways of carrying out the counter-air role than destroying the operating surfaces. Advances in precision guidance were making it possible to target HASs with a high chance of hitting them; and, because it was now possible to shape trajectories to optimise impact angle and velocity, a hit would usually now mean a kill. The other variable in the equation, the believed impossibility of reaching a heavily defended target at anything other than ultra-low level, was also being affected by vastly improved intelligence, electronic countermeasures and defence suppression. Not to mention that, with the collapse of the Warsaw Pact, the primary target was now perceived to be quite different.
So JP233 was, in the eyes of many senior RAF people, not worth fighting for. And here’s where further chance came into play. The air staffs had been dearly wishing for years to bring SR(A)1236 to fruition. Given that the service would now, for reasons beyond its control, have to relinquish Tornado’s primary heavy weapon, the urgency of a replacement was reinforced – even to those in the MoD and the Treasury who had hitherto been intent on delaying matters. Although SR(A)1236 was by no means a direct equivalent to JP233, obstacles to its progress suddenly evaporated, and CASOM accelerated towards service entry. Truly, it was an ill wind …
The kind of damage that can be done by PGMs, nowadays, to ‘hardened’ aircraft shelters. These HASs are on a Kuwaiti airfield which was attacked during Gulf War One.
There were other fortuitous twists in the story. Not only the mine, or unexploded ordnance, connection, but also the lack of stand-off and general ineffectiveness, was now making BL755’s position increasingly untenable, reinvigorating the urgency of SR(A)1238/1241. Remember Hellfire, the Apache helicopter’s anti-tank missile? Well its British derivative, Brimstone, eventually fulfilled 1238 (by now a requirement for a powered, stand-off weapon) when it entered service in 2005 – twenty years after the project had first come to my notice. By this time there were no more Jaguars and would soon be no Harriers, and against all the odds Tornado was picking up the close-air-support task. Some expected the Cold War nuclear bomber to be unsuited to this role but, in its GR4 guise, Tornado excelled.
Moreover Brimstone, with several modes of employment, has become the weapon of choice against many targets other than armour. Besides its great attribute of stand-off, its extreme precision and small size make it ideal in situations where it is of the utmost importance to avoid collateral damage. Thus, in its several versatile variants, it has found gainful employment in Afghanistan and Libya. As well as, most recently, in Iraq and Syria in operations against Islamic State (also known as ISIL, ISIS and Daesh) forces. Indeed, during November 2015’s parliamentary debate and division which preceded the Syrian phase of these operations, the weapon’s (and the GR4’s) excellence was seemingly on the lips of every MP, media commentator and coalition commander.
The question of avoiding collateral damage has, since Gulf War One, been of paramount importance, not least because current conflicts are conducted so much in the spotlight of the world’s media gaze. And this was one benefit of advanced laser-guided bombs. The Tornado began with Paveway II, a relatively crude LGB, but the later models Paveway III and IV brought tremendous accuracy and the ability to shape trajectories to optimise weapon effects. While PWIII is a heavy, 2,000-lb class weapon, PWIV is, at 500 lbs, much smaller, minimising the likelihood of collateral damage. Indeed it is remarkable to note in this respect that, during the Iraq War of 2003, a number of weapons equipped with the full guidance kit on practice, inert weapon bodies were dropped. So in particularly sensitive operations it was possible to do the job using purely kinetic energy, eliminating the collateral effects of high explosive.
Another great development has been the introduction of GPS guidance as an option for these weapons, thereby enabling attacks to be made when weather precludes other forms of guidance. CASOM, the erstwhile SR(A)1236, is a major beneficiary of this, giving Tornado GR4 a stand-off, all-weather heavy weapon. As we’ve already chronicled, Storm Shadow achieved an initial operating capability in Gulf War Two, bringing with it the other major characteristic of being capable of penetrating the most heavily-hardened targets before detonating. Hence the extraordinary post-strike recce pictures showing, sometimes, only a small, neat hole on the surface – betraying nothing of the carnage deep inside.
At service entry the Tornado was already an extraordinary machine. But with Storm Shadow, Brimstone, Paveway III and IV, the complementary sensors and designators – and of course the upgrade to GR4 standard itself – the Tornado has achieved a capability never envisaged in the beginning. It’s been a long and winding journey from precision to even greater precision.
The RAF originally had eleven squadrons of GR1s plus the conversion units. Remotely piloted air systems have already taken on some of the load, while the two remaining GR4 squadrons were scheduled to be replaced in 2018/19 by a small number of F-35 Lightning II aircraft. But plans continually evolve. With the current operational commitment against the Islamic State putting such a strain on those two squadrons, a third has been run on to help spread the load. In this unstable world, who would bet against further changes?
So it’s too early for an epilogue, but it’s already easy to see why the ‘Fin’ attracts such respect from its operators. No wonder, either, that the Tornado boys and girls continue to regard it with such pride and affection. It has already undoubtedly proved to be one of the great strike/attack aircraft – and indeed reconnaissance and close air support aircraft – of modern times.