Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire A MiG AT YOUR SIX....

I am just an old dumb hillbilly. The closest I have come to flying an aircraft is "Row 3B". And I am not meaning to pick on anyone. However, I am incredulous that:

1) The good guys observed the bad guy taking off from a hostile airfield.
2) The "eye in the sky" painted the bad guy multiple times.
3) An experienced pilot had visual confirmation that the afterburner plume was NOT ONE OF OURS.
4) The craft blew through or by a formation of good guys going the wrong way.
5) And yet he was able to do a 180, sneak in the back door, and lob a Hail Mary non-visual rocket up a good guy's six...

I understand that war is hell and combat is chaos. Was there an AAR? Was the AAR published? Teachable moments from the AAR? Changes to ROE's?

Again, not trying to criticize. I've only ever been a civilian. I understand that the guys who have served want civilians to shut the "eff" up. But this scenario is disappointing...

That was a smart move on behalf of the Govt. We Americans, back home, don't seem to have the stomach for our soldiers getting killed. Keep it out of the news. Report the victories but not the costs of getting them. That lesson was learned in Vietnam. Every night on the news they gave out the total Americans, South Vietnamese, and North Vietnamese and allies KIA and WIA. It was a damn scorecard.

Jim

Actually, the losses we all well publicized in the media as the war went on. Same for the POWs. There was very little misinformation on the part of the Coalition, except in those instances to send false intel to the enemy. A lot of our losses, particularly the ones from Air Wing One (CAG 1) were as a result of the air wing commander, who really was weak on tactics and went in the old fashioned way, "low and fast" on the initial strikes. After we had that sorted, our losses were really pretty minimal, when you consider the tens of thousands of combat sorties flown.,

Orion, you raise some very, very good questions and to fully answer, would take a long post and I'm lazy. I'll just say the first time at bat is always very confusing, with the "fog of war" taking its toll. Also, another BIG issue with the Hornet, is it's lack of an IFF interrogator (for Modes III & IV, the latter being encrypted). Instead, they had a pretty worthless system called NCTR (non-cooperative target recognition) which was basically a "harmonics detector" of the frequency put out by an airplane's engines and it works ONLY in the forward quarter (in other words "beak to beak" only). All our other fighters, Tomcats, Eagles, etc have them but the Hornet does not. So, I can easily accept EITHER theory, that is the MiG bagged him or friendly fire, but I will NOT ACCEPT the authoress' notion we left him behind because of someone's ego. FAR too many people involved to try and hide something like this.
J

Hey Jorge, What about the British, I remember the tornado did not fare too well.

To be fair, while Bird was coming in off a strike, he and his wingman checked other clean of damage. Red Crown followed his jet as it steeped up over the gulf and into the water. He was well known to take his mask off for a smoke post strike and the thought is a cabin pressure leak got him. We put on an extensive search to no avail. Get Zeke to tell you the story. He and "Fox" Fallon, our CAG had words.

Not any worse than our Intruders. Ar first, it all had to do with adjusting tactics.

Orion, we have suffered from "ROE Disease" since Vietnam. Because our military is controlled by politicians, we seem to get political restrictions that are based on somebody's idea of fair play - something which should not exist whatsoever in combat.

In Vietnam, I once discovered a large group (hundreds) of uniformed NVA soldiers lolling about and relaxing in a rubber plantation. I radioed in and was told in no uncertain terms that I could not bomb a Michelin-owned rubber plantation, but I could bomb an adjacent swath of jungle - which had no enemy in it because they had learned we were forbidden to bomb Michelin rubber trees! How's that for ROE disease?

The Navy's excellent F-14 was designed to shoot and kill enemy planes from miles away, beyond visual range. But for a long time, F-14 crews were forbidden to attack until they made a visual ID of whoever they were tracking. In other words, "Let them get close enough to kill you first." Directly counter to what the plane was designed to do.

Jorge, I thought all current air frames had IFF? I was going to include IFF in my list, but forgot. Wow...

Rocky, I am in the mode of avoiding conflict when practical. But when conflict is inevitable, hit the other guy so fast, so hard, so bad, that his friends ballz shrivel up as they watch from the side lines. I can only imagine the frustration over ROE's created by pencil pushers...

The current ones might, I'm just not sure, but I'm betting they do. The FA/18 was the only airframe we've purchased that failed OPEVAL (operational evaluation) and as one Admiral put it, "an airplane doomed to success." It was to replace the A-7 and the F-4 and it did neither. It had (has) horrible endurance, so much so, that carrier Cycles (launches and recoveries, had to be shortened considerably and now with really no organic tanker, they have to rely on shore based tanker assets. It sucks...

The night of the El Dorado Canyon strike, our ROE was a fighter pilot’s dream. “Weapons free” for anything northbound above 1000’. Fortunately for them and unfortunately for us, none of them launched. The Libyans did not like to fly over water at night.

Rumor has it that one Mig sitting on strip alert was told to launch and he told his controller that his a/c was down with something like “the a/c is down due to a knife stuck in the attitude gyro”😀

At the time we were flying with the Television Camera System (TCS) and in the daytime visual ID would not have posed a problem. During one mission on our Airwing workup at Fallon we got a visual ID on an A-4 and could tell it was a TA-4J, not a single seater, well beyond Sparrow range.

That was in the F-14A BTW.

That's a cool article jorge. Thanks for posting.

We had IFF modes III & IV. We were forbidden to take off if our mode IV was inop, wouldn't load, or dropped the current load and none was available to reload. Before shut down both pilots verified the switch was set to hold the data.

While I don't understand but about 1% of what you guys are talking about, I enjoy reading it. Thanks also for your service.

In the story on the original post, the lead F-18 pilot said he had an ID. The problem is the ROE always (well, typically) requires two forms of ID. As mentioned, the F-18 did not have an interrogator to get a second form or any long range visual means. They also apparently weren’t able to effectively communicate with other aircraft who could have solved. That’s a training issue.

ROE's are both necessary and a deadly obstacle amidst the chaos of combat. They evolve over time, but the opening bell for warfare presents a lot of fog. It isn't unusual to see the rules get bent once a conflict has matured to some extent. They do lower the number of friendly fire events

I never did it of course. Between the hours of midnight to 5AM.

What am I missing here? These planes are closing at several hundred miles per hour and several seconds go by but the distance between them only decreases by 4 or 5 miles.

Possible point of confusion: IFF transponders are installed in all aircraft---at least military stuff. It responds to interrogations and transmits back an identification code.

What Jorge was talking about is an IFF Interrogator which issue interrogations. Back in my day, that would have been APX-76---at least on P-3Cs. The Transponder on the P-3C was the APX-72.

Target aspect/geometry.

Best thing about this thread, not a single post from the usualasshole crowd!