Using once more the British model, things would have been a lot worse but for the sound foundations laid in the seventies. Aircraft such as the Tornado, the Nimrod in its maritime and airborne early warning (AEW) roles, and the latest Blindfire all-weather version of the Rapier air defence missile, were among the leaders in the world league. Apart from having to keep the older aircraft in service much beyond what was originally planned, some other weaknesses lay in the increasing vulnerability to the developing Soviet Air Force of airfields in the UK and the shortage of alternative bases for dispersal — especially with the need to accept large reinforcements from the United States in war and the possibility of rearward redeployments of aircraft from the continent of Europe. Average experience levels in the front-line squadrons in some roles were uncomfortably low and the big gap for the rest of the decade was going to be the lack of a current-generation tactical fighter for operations over the forward area in Germany. It must also be said that ECM equipment, while all right as far as it went, was well behind the general state of this important art. Precious little extra resources would be forthcoming — that much was clear — and remedies would have to be sought by making better use of what there was or what was in near prospect.
Inevitably some good came from this enforced period of austerity. Some of the changes it imposed were radical. The opening of all ground branches not involved in direct combat duties to women, for example, tapped a reservoir of valuable recruits. Similarly, wider uses were found for auxiliaries and reservists of both sexes to considerable advantage. The USAF went further, in allowing women to be employed on flying duties. It was not long before this was extended to combat duties. In fact, it was a 29-year-old woman who was to lead the first offensive action from the United States in the Third World War. This deserves closer attention.
For some years the Soviet Navy had been using Conakry in Guinea, West Africa, as a turn-round base for their long-range Bear maritime reconnaissance aircraft and, occasionally also, Backfire bombers and supporting air tankers. In this way their aircraft could sweep down the length of the North Atlantic one day and up again the next. All of this was well observed by the US and British surveillance systems and it was naive if the Soviet Navy expected aircraft at Conakry to be unmolested in war. Nevertheless, on the evening of 4 August 1985 there were four Bears, two Backfires and a tanker on the airfield and the USAF responded promptly.
At midnight a mission of four B-52D bombers from the California Wing at March Air Force base took off from their war deployment base in Florida for a direct attack with 120 tons of high-explosive bombs under the command of Major Ed Lodge in the lead aircraft. They started their bomb runs to the target nine hours later from a clear blue sky. There was no fighter opposition and the Soviet SAM, which only started coming up as the bombing neared its end, were easily confused by the B-52s’ ECM. Runways, control facilities, hangars and fuel installations were taken as precision targets and systematically destroyed as the B-52s ploughed their furrows 10,000 metres up in the sky. Their success was total and the airfield was put out of use to such a degree that the Soviet Navy made no attempt to use it again.
Some of the wiser leaders in Africa saw the moral. Client states or surrogates would do well to ensure that their patron countries had the power and the reach to protect them from the dangers to which politics and geography might expose them. Guinea had painfully failed to foresee these risks.
Back at their base in Florida, as the citations for medals for the bomber crews were read out, the media were electrified to discover that the mission commander’s full name was Edwina Tinkle Lodge. She was among the first of a small group of young women who graduated from the US Air Force Academy and was accepted for training in the Military Airlift Command in the 1970s, where she had excelled as a pilot and aircraft captain. With a little help from her congressman, who was out for the women’s vote, she had been transferred to the B-52 Bomber Wing at March Air Force base which trained for a wide range of conventional bombing tasks. The Conakry raid was just one of them.
The example of the USAF was not generally followed in other Allied air forces even though there was an all-round shortage of experienced pilots stemming from the lean recruiting years of the 1970s. The critical difficulty lay in the restrictions placed on flying hours by governments for economic reasons. In due course corrective action had to be taken and in the RAF, for example, measures to keep experienced pilots longer on front-line duties helped to offset the dilution of experience which was exacerbated in the early 1980s by the need to cream off the best of the ‘fast jet-set’ to man the Tornado as it came into service. An important step in tackling that problem was when the British Government and its Treasury advisers were at last shaken out of the wrong-headed notion that there was an easy money-saving Midas touch in cutting back on flying and training. But it took a costly accident rate to persuade them of the folly of keeping an air force out of the air. A sustained drive was mounted to improve reliability of all equipment and to streamline the flow of logistics to the flight lines in the forward areas — wherever the fortunes of war might decide that they would be. This campaign paid off handsomely when the war came. Spinney’s report turned out to have had a very long tail.
What was done in the RAF was characteristic of the sort of effort and improvement programmes mounted by all the Allied air forces. The benefit of such measures came through steadily to the front line and evidence of this showed up in the rigorous evaluations under simulated war conditions imposed by independent multi-national NATO inspection teams. But certain innovations in the use of civil resources in Britain were of a rather special nature and deserve mention because they played a positive part in preserving and exploiting the strategic importance of the UK base within the Alliance.
In this connection it is worth recalling that in 1979 the United States Strategic Air Command (SAC) first publicly announced the intention to designate eighty B-52Ds in support of NATO forces. The bomb bay of the B-52Ds had been enlarged in 1967 to carry up to 70,000 lb of conventional free-fall bombs and in 1977 the aircraft were given further structural and avionic improvements to extend their operational life and to enhance their conventional bombing capability. In September 1978, B-52s from 7 Bomber Wing at Cars-well, Texas, participated for the first time in the NATO exercise ‘Cold Fire’. Thereafter, they trained more and more frequently in European conditions.
On some occasions in their training they flew directly across the Atlantic, simulated attacks on ‘hostile’ forces in Western Europe and returned to their bases in Texas and California with the assistance of air-to-air refuelling. By 1981, regular deployments were being made to forward operating bases such as Brize Norton or Marham in England. Tactical response was thus being quickened without the political implications of permanent basing. But this exacerbated the nagging problem that air bases in the United Kingdom were becoming heavily overcrowded, and therefore increasingly attractive as targets to an enemy. While regular SAC deployments to Lajes in the Azores, which began in 1983, eased the overcrowding to some extent, the problem remained.
Although there had been hundreds of airfields in Britain by the end of the Second World War, by 1982 there were less than fifty in the hands of the RAF and the USAF — the latter having long maintained both strategic and tactical wings in the UK. Recovering the old wartime airfields was out of the question and for some years the RAF had been eyeing the civil airports with their modern runways and ground facilities. But nothwithstanding goodwill from national and municipal authorities, commercial, constitutional and communications problems had always stood in the way of their military use. By 1984, however, twenty-three airports had been earmarked and were exercised as satellites of main RAF and USAF bases. The rationalization of military and civil communications had been the main hurdle to clear; once that was done, and with a wider public appreciation of the threat to the country, the other difficulties fell away. The plan was to use these civil airports as dispersed sites for flights of up to eight aircraft and thereby distribute the precious air eggs in that many more ground baskets.