Bringing offensive air support to bear on the enemy’s vulnerable articulation points in a fast-moving battle places a high premium on tactical air reconnaissance, with its rapid reporting and subsequent response. This was done in the main by interdictor or fighter aircraft operating with specialized crews and equipment. Over the sea, maritime aircraft patrolled against submarines and surface ships, with land-based helicopters working closer inshore. The whole Western European theatre was enclosed by the NATO air defence ground environment (NADGE), a radar warning system within which, in addition to the air fighters, there were arrays of ground-based surface-to-air missiles (SAM) for point and area defence. In the event the demand for air reconnaissance far exceeded the limited numbers of aircraft and crews available to carry it out. Whether there should have been more tactical reconnaissance squadrons must remain a moot point. More here would have meant less somewhere else. To give an idea of scale, it is worth noting that the USAF possessed approximately five times the number of aircraft of the whole of the RAF and GAF together.
On the broader front of intelligence — and that was very broad indeed — it had always been feared by the sceptics that in a major war the Allied intelligence system with its computerized ‘fusion centres’ would get clogged up — and it did. The input from satellites, airborne radars, electronic sensors, photography, and a host of other sources was vast and although the computers swallowed it all at great speed and spat it out again obligingly enough, they did so in an uncomprehending way. When war broke out intelligence centres had to be diluted with inexperienced or out-of-practice staffs and this was to hinder the speed at which the significance of bald data could be appreciated — as for example after the Gdansk incident, described at the end of this chapter, when the crucial information about the Soviet Air Force Cooker frequencies took forty-eight hours to reach the operating units that so desperately needed it. But the learning curve is steep in war and processing and evaluating times were to be greatly reduced in the first few days. Nevertheless, the human burden in handling the nearly overwhelming volume of data that the sensors, computers and communications could collect, store and deliver was tremendous and was to remain so throughout the war.
The British and German air force commanders had long seen that they would need an agile air-superiority fighter to replace their Phantoms in the 1980s, in order to counter the growing tactical air power that the Warsaw Pact would be able to bring to bear over a land battle in the Central Region. For political reasons this had to be tackled as a multi-national collaborative project and joint studies were started by the UK and the FRG with the French, who had a similar need. This well-intentioned collaboration got nowhere and the project was dropped. Differences in specifications and timescales could not be reconciled and the costs of the Tornado, which were getting badly out of control, squeezed out what little room was left in the forward defence budgets of the Federal Republic and the UK. The French kept their thoughts and their plans to themselves as the British and German staffs accepted that they would have to make do with their Phantoms for the rest of the decade. This was unfortunate but for the British there was at least the consolation that there was now room for a handsome increase of some eighty aircraft in the Harrier force. This would be welcome in the land battle but one result would be that Britain and Germany, if forced into a war in the 1980s, would be using fighter aircraft that were more than twenty years old in concept and design — the Tornado excepted — and that they would have no contemporary air-superiority fighter for the air battle.
The smaller northern NATO countries had managed their admittedly simpler resource problems rather better by plumping for the US F-16 Fighting Falcon tactical fighter in the mid-seventies. Although ‘buying American’ when there was so much drive behind the idea of developing the European aerospace industry had been a controversial decision, the war was to show that the Norwegian, Belgian, Dutch, and Danish air forces had made a sound and timely choice. Although the separate national air force orders were not large, the aggregate of more than 200 F-16 Fighting Falcon fighters, some with an enhanced night and bad-weather capability, together with the new Mirage 2000 of the French Air Force, did much to redress the RAF and GAF deficiencies in this area.
The French Air Force could not of course be included in the NATO order of battle — nor in any formal NATO plans or calculations. But its air defence was tied in with NADGE and military liaison with NATO was close. Although France had an interest in a new tactical fighter its need was not as pressing as that of Germany and Britain. The French Air Force had a satisfactory and well-assured programme for the early 1980s of replacing its earlier Mirage interceptors with the Mirage 2000 in both the tactical and interceptor roles. The interdiction and tactical attack roles were covered by the Anglo-French Jaguar. The French Air Force, with ample opportunities for dispersal and the advantage of operating on internal lines of communication, looked, and turned out to be, an effective, well balanced and modern force.
The British and German dilemma was critical. The turn of the decade saw a conservative government in Britain (as in the USA) committed to defence improvement. The United Kingdom soon ran into budgetary difficulties, while in Germany economic stringency and the soaring costs of the Tornado had already produced a virtual freeze on all air force procurement plans.
It was here that the Spinney Report made a quiet but telling entry. Franklin C. Spinney, an analyst, headed a research team in the USA tasked by the Pentagon with analysing the day-to-day availability of tactical aircraft. He unearthed some disquieting facts, not least that the reliability and serviceability factors for USAF front-line aircraft were far below what would be needed for intensive operations in war. Spinney concluded his astringent report in 1980 with the painful conclusion that ‘Our strategy of pursuing ever-increasing technical complexity and sophistication has made high technology solutions and combat readiness mutually exclusive.’
This conclusion, although unlikely to be universally true, chimed sufficiently well with the experience of the air forces of the larger powers to make the report very uncomfortable reading. Although obviously unwelcome, the report was taken seriously and had a significant impact on later events. Understandably, it was played down publicly and those few commentators in the media who latched on to what sounded like bad news missed the point that Spinney had been inveighing against complexity rather than high technology. There could be no question of air power turning its back on science and technology, for to do so would be to turn its back upon itself. In different ways, however, and sometimes for different immediate reasons, the Allied air forces started taking account of what Spinney had said.
While the big increases in the US defence appropriations for fiscal years (FY) 1980 and 1981, and their five-year projections, swung resources for the US AF back to the strategic elements (for well recognized politico-strategic reasons) they still left substantial room for improvements in the tactical forces. These took the form of further purchases of F-15 Eagle and F-16 Fighting Falcon fighters, more A-10 Thunderbolts and eight more KC-10 air refuelling tankers, which were to be so important for the trans-Atlantic reinforcement of Europe by fleets of tactical bombers and fighters. In FY 1983, perhaps with an eye to Spinney, no less than $3.6 billion was included for increased spare-part holdings and reliability improvements.