Chapter 14
Finishing with War – Only Two Average Days
After two weeks of unlaunched deck alerts, tuned to the fight but hearing the ‘do not fire’ orders from the decision men in the CAOC to jet man in the sky, we knew our work was done. There were no more opportunities without tightly coordinated and dynamic targeting. We needed live eyes on the target to launch and talk us on. With no boots on the ground, the eyes had to be airborne at the same time as us.
We tried it once with a UK Joint Terminal Attack Controller (JTAC) in a maritime patrol aircraft off the coast of Zlitan. The JTAC spent three hours watching tanks and artillery arriving in the vicinity of pro-Gad positions. I was on deck with Reuben and JB as the wing, all systems checked, all ready to go, Ocean primed, everyone on their silent timeline. In the aircraft we listened to the Strike net.
JTAC to Matrix: ‘Five Main Battle Tanks, three multi-launch rocket systems on trucks. All pointing east towards Zlitan.’
Me to John: ‘Yes, in just a minute we’ll get the signal to launch…’
Matrix: ‘Roger.’
JTAC: ‘They came from the west, from the pro-Gad lines.’
Me: ‘Ready for rotors…’
‘Roger. We are uncertain of the pattern of life. It is considered an ambiguous situation,’ came the view from Italy.
Me: ‘What?! He’s not making it up!’
JTAC: ‘I have been observing for three hours. I understand this pattern of life. This is my positive identification. These are pro-Gad targets! What do I need to do to get you to launch AH?’ His frustration loaded the transmission.
Me: ‘Three hours! Let’s launch!’
Matrix: ‘AH have been stood down. No target.’
Me: ‘What?!’
Silence. Darkness and silence. And, just west of Zlitan, 32 Brigade covered their retreat.
Back on Ocean I leant back in my seat, powered down the weapon systems and let my thoughts out: ‘That’s it. Our work is done. If they won’t launch us to that target we won’t do any more of this.’
A minute later Doug tapped on the canopy. ‘It’s a cancel! Stand down, no target!’ he yelled through the engine noise.
The targeting decisions made in the CAOC had been very sound in the preceding months. Now, with the front lines broken out and fighting springing up in new areas hourly, understanding the ground truth had changed. They could no longer huddle round reconnaissance photographs, reflect on legal advice and spend an afternoon arriving at a decision. The situation on the ground was changing quickly and the established method of target decision-making was no longer valid. The comfort of time had gone, and along with it went the certainty of being right. The decision men in the CAOC could either delegate or say ‘no’. They said ‘no’ and thus regained certainty.
What was once a clear picture of pro-Gad, front line and FLF was now one large contested space. Targets identified by reconnaissance in the morning had moved by midday, got engaged in fights, were abandoned, deserted or destroyed. The regime and the rebels had the same equipment, and there was no way of telling who was who except, perhaps, by spending time observing what they were doing. To launch strikes into this risked ruining the now tentative opportunity of success. NATO, who for months had stared at an impasse, was trying to make sense of the rebel advance and needed to put the brakes on air strikes until the hundreds of men in flying suits watching screens and holding meetings understood the ground.
Off the coast of Zlitan the maritime patrol aircraft continued its observation. The JTAC was a soldier and he’d spent more than a decade understanding ground in combat, intuitively knowing the difference between normal and hostile. He could see and understand. He hadn’t thrashed past at 500 knots and taken a photograph – a fraction of a second – for someone else to analyse. He was watching, and had been watching for hours. And he was there, in the present. He understood the pattern of life and he knew he was right. Pro-Gad was on the move; Khamis had lost Misrata and was knocking over Zlitan on his way back west. The JTAC, in a maritime patrol aircraft, was witnessing and relaying the whole retreat.
We could launch. He could talk us on. He knew the situation on the ground. We had sixteen Hellfire between us and well over a thousand rounds of 30mm. The last fighting forces of 32 Brigade could be stopped and the regime could be presented with another problem as they searched for an escape from the growing rebel advance. But there was a residual risk – ‘maybe, just maybe, the tanks and artillery now bombarding civilian Zlitan could be FLF’. It was easier to say ‘no’, whatever the reality, however absurd the ‘no’ was at the time. It was their civil war after all.
With the FLF on the march and pro-Gad increasingly in disarray, NATO sensed it was time to shelve risk. No need to launch vulnerable helicopters when jets could burn holes in the sky with invulnerable abandon; and there was not even any need for those jets to be given authority to launch their weapons. The stalemate was over and the tipping point had arrived. The risk-versus-reward calculation for NATO was now about securing a quick clean exit, reputation protected and enhanced, with no unnecessary damage – even if that meant not shooting targets that would have been taken on the previous week.
Nine deck alert missions in twelve nights had resulted in no target and no launch; almost half of our cancellations had occurred in the two weeks after the rebel advance. That so many missions were cancelled would later be considered a statistic somehow underpinning failure, an easy number for the naysayers to embrace. Someone totalled up our combat flying hours and inaccurately worked out how long it would take to fly the same in 24/7 Helmand, then adding their own easy-chair opinion that our total was equivalent to just a couple of days’ work for the Apache in Afghanistan.
Facile comparisons with gold-plated Helmand were disappointing. Our work in Helmand had gone on since 656 was first across the line five years earlier; in Libya, however, we were involved in a new and unprecedented operation given to us with just six days’ notice. To compare the high profile security presence of a counter-insurgency campaign with the high intensity fight of air to ground combat misinterprets the character of both types of conflict.
On Operation Ellamy we flew to targets to shoot them, not to reassure them, escort them or watch over them. We were direct and clinical, and we were not in the business of waiting around. We shot our way into Libya, shot the targets and shot our way out again, all the while being shot at ourselves. To strike all our targets, and survive that hell from the ground, could only be done with minimum exposure. To do it with a small team and only five aircraft, given all the layers of constraint and scrutiny, and to base the entire enterprise from a ship – this was exceptional. To paint that achievement as a negative is bizarre.
I defy those commentators to fly hundreds of hours a week over such a hostile place and see if they come back! Libya in the summer of 2011 was not a place to accumulate flying hours day and night, it was a place to be survived. Libya was precision fighting with specific targets for the Apache. A comparison of hours flown in Libya with hours flown in Helmand was meaningless.