It should be recalled that one important modification to the original E-3A Sentry had been the fitting of hard points under the wings and fuselage which could carry chaff dispensers and air-to-air defensive weapons. Chaff comprised strips of metal foil exactly cut to simulate and amplify a given wavelength. A cloud of these would give the same response as an emitter on the same wavelength, and thus act as a decoy to attract a homing missile. At the same time as the electronic support measure (ESM) refit in 1983, and in a rare example of refusal to spoil a ship for a ha’p’orth of tar, NATO had also funded provision of these chaff dispensers. The USAF had taken a little longer to be convinced that the E-3A might not always see its attacker and be able to avoid him. Consequently, not all their AWACS carried this kind of protection. It was the misfortune of the crew from 965 Squadron that their aircraft that night had not yet been modified.
Lieutenant De Groot in the Venlo Sentry saw on his screen the Backfires suddenly turn for home. He guessed at once why. They would use their stand-off anti-radiation missiles, which had a range of 150 miles, and these would home on the radars of the Sentries and destroy them. Without waiting for any order from his commander he hit the chaff dispenser key and simultaneously shouted his warning. The well-drilled Italian ECM operator in the Bavarian Sentry heard the warning and immediately reacted in the same way. A few seconds later each of these two Sentry aircraft was rocked violently as Soviet anti-radiation missiles exploded harmlessly several hundred feet behind and below them in the cloud of drifting metal foil. The third Sentry, unprovided with chaff, was less fortunate. The missile struck. The seventeen US AF crewmen of the E-3A Sentry of 965 Squadron, far from their Oklahoma home base, became the first airman casualties of the Third World War. The wreckage of the aircraft fell over a wide area in the woods of the upper Mosel valley. The missile had ripped off the radome from the stricken Sentry’s mainframe and the aircraft had disintegrated.
The Backfires, however, had attacked not just the three Sentries. Each Backfire probably carried at least two anti-radiation missiles. They also destroyed six ground surveillance radars and damaged two others between Hanover and Mannheim. Yet, because of the rigid rules of engagement imposed by NATO on its air forces, they were able to return unscathed to their Ukrainian bases. The war had begun, but NATO airspace had not yet ‘officially’ been violated.
The crews in the two remaining Sentries had no time either to applaud the initiative of the Dutch officer or to grieve for their lost colleagues. On the encoded voice-link the clipped tones of the British duty commander, the air vice-marshal acting as deputy in COMAAFCE’s bunker, instructed both aircraft to adjust their patrol racetracks to cover the gap left by the Ramstein E-3A until the relief aircraft could come on station. The Venlo Sentry turned south, the Bavarian north; surveillance across the IGB was uninterrupted. At Geilenkirchen, the NATO Sentry on fifteen minutes’ stand-by was scrambled; at 0329 hours it climbed away, turning south to replace 504826.
The wisdom of placing all such high-value assets under the direct command of COMAAFCE was thus clear from the outset of the war. There was now much to survey. As the Backfires turned for home, swarms of blips began to appear on the Sentries’ radar screens, as, in accordance with well-publicized doctrine, the longer-range offensive Warsaw Pact aircraft prepared to punch through NATO’s air defences in the area already partially blinded by the Backfire attack. Five years before, NATO forces would have had no way of identifying the main axes of the air threat until it struck across the IGB. Now, the Sentry controllers could watch the formations massing in much the same way as forty-five years previously hazy RAF radars had watched the Luftflotten assemble over the Pas-de-Calais. But in 1985 the controllers were assisted by the micro-processor. Warsaw Pact jamming was largely filtered and almost entirely limited to two or more azimuth bearings on the narrow sweeping beam. The keyboards rippled and details of aircraft type, height, speed, heading and numbers were flashed by the computers to the fighter controllers below. The information was there in abundance.
Throughout the 1970s Soviet air power had steadily increased in strength as a new generation of Flogger, Fitter, Fencer and Foxbat fighters and Backfire bombers, supplemented by the Hip and Hind helicopters and the Cock, Candid and Camber transports entered service. In the early 1980s the Soviet Union had flexed these new muscles in several parts of the world. Military strength had been unequivocally used to prepare a more favourable political situation in Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia, South Yemen, Syria, Libya and Afghanistan. All these efforts had not been uniformly successful but the long reach and hitting power of Soviet aircraft had everywhere become more and more apparent.
Western military concern at what was clearly an attempt to close the gap in quality between Warsaw Pact and NATO aircraft was tempered by reassuring knowledge of several serious and apparently endemic weaknesses in the Soviet Air Force itself. Effective air power demands far more than improved aircraft. It must have highly-trained and dedicated people, a professional and complex maintenance system, flexible and resilient command and control organization, and above all the inspiration of imagination and initiative in both practice and theory. The SAF, on the other hand, appeared to be handicapped by the quality of its largely conscript ground crews, by low morale and corruption (as described in such detail in the published accounts of evidence from the defecting Soviet airman Lieutenant Belenko who landed his MiG-25 Foxbat B in Japan in September 1976), by a rigid command structure which hampered the flexible use of air power and by a social and political system in which the encouragement of initiative and imagination was hardly prominent.
Beginning in late 1982, however, shreds of evidence began to reach the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) in the Pentagon and West European intelligence centres which seemed to suggest that the Soviet Union was making determined efforts to eradicate some of these weaknesses and that, despite the deadening effect of the Party bureaucracy on all levels of the SAF, it was having some success. During 1983 clearer evidence began to emerge which ultimately was to compel the NATO air forces to revise their overall estimate of the potential effectiveness of their Warsaw Pact opponents.
As early as 1979 the SAF had attempted to improve the quality of maintenance by introducing new warrant officer ranks and by offering improved pay and promotion incentives to encourage conscript ground crew to extend beyond their mandatory two years’ service. By 1983, as the Soviet colleges of science and technology continued to produce more graduates each year, there was in the conscripted manpower of the SAF an increased proportion of highly-skilled young men. Moreover, as the Soviet Union came to lay greater emphasis on conventional war-fighting methods, previously very much in second place to nuclear doctrines, the pay of SAF ground crew was raised to match that in the nuclear-armed Soviet Strategic Rocket Force (SRF), hitherto the pre-eminent branch of the Soviet armed services. Living and messing conditions were improved and though still far below levels demanded in the West were nevertheless much higher than those of the majority of conscripts in their civilian life. The retention rate of ground crew began to rise, their status began to improve, and during 1985 the serviceability rate of SAF front-line squadrons in Eastern Europe began to show a steady but marked improvement.