In telling the story of The Royal Scots Battle Group, Laurie Milner reveals the remarkable single-mindedness and courage of the soldiers of Britain's present-day Army in the face of a numerically superior, well-equipped and well dug-in enemy, whose level of resistance could not be accurately assessed.
With a limited flow of information and direction, the individual four-ship force elements tended to turn inwards and fight their own war in their own way.One important lesson I drew from this (and I accept this is based entirely on my own personal experience) was that Lord Trenchard saw the squadron as the building block of the RAF for a very good reason.
Iraq Ground Forces Order of Battle - 1991 Provisional Iraq Army Order of Battle S.A.S. The majority of the available fast jet force was committed to battle, giving a whole generation of RAF personnel — including myself — their first taste of combat. In combination these generated a fourth: the particular and peculiar mind-set and institutional culture they engendered.As has now been well documented, the RAF took a ‘doctrine holiday’ for a protracted period leading up to the Gulf War. Just over a quarter of a century ago, on 20 January 1991, I flew my first combat mission. By the end of the war, press reports of the massive numbers of Iraqi prisoners taken, and equipment destroyed, compared to our own losses, suggested that it was a walkover.
The ‘Kiss principle’ (Keep it Simple, Stupid!) With the arrogance of youth (and to my eternal shame) I was inwardly dismissive of him at the time, but with hindsight recognise he was a much braver man than I to find the courage to contain his feelings and still function effectively. Amazon calculates a product’s star ratings based on a machine learned model instead of a raw data average. This perception was only reinforced by the steady drumbeat of peacetime attrition that was accepted at the time as a matter of course.
My interpretation of events is purely my own; many of those also there will have seen and experienced the same events in a different way and will, no doubt, wish to challenge my assertions. On Operations with C Squadron SAS: Terrorist Pursuit and Rebel Attacks in Cold War Africa Stand Up Straight: 10 Life Lessons from the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst Enter your mobile number or email address below and we'll send you a link to download the free Kindle App.
However, the Pave Spike pods were old and weather-limited; the failure of one pod just after weapons release resulted in ‘wild’ (unguided) bombs and a major collateral event which, in a harbinger of things to come, attracted considerable press scrutiny and subsequently prompted a much greater focus on limiting collateral damage in the target selection and planning process.We experienced only one more combat loss, our sixth, on St Valentine’s Day 1991, when a Tornado at the rear of a long ‘daisy chain’ of aircraft prosecuting a single axis attack was destroyed by a surface-to-air missile at medium altitude. To get the free app, enter your mobile phone number. His successor had already been nominated as part of the routine command rotation process and naturally wanted to go to war with his new squadron following the loss of his predecessor. The extent of their final preparations and potential is chilling. So perhaps my feelings at the time — and those of the rest of the force, particularly during that first, difficult week — are, as always, best encapsulated by a little Shakespeare:1 Even in the Korea War RAF combat air engagement was limited. Within the expected context of global Armageddon and the near certainty of our eventual demise, the emphasis was on buying time and selling ourselves as expensively as possible, reflected in the number and type of weapons we would drop, from tactical nuclear bombs at one end of the scale to cluster munitions at the other. For example, the planning assumption for the RAF Marham Tornado Wing’s ‘Day One’ of the war ‘Option Alpha’ pre-planned conventional attack mission was up to a 50% attrition rate. If anything, it was heightened, when the Kuwait crisis erupted in the summer of 1990, when we learned the Iraqi armed forces were largely equipped with the same types of Soviet aircraft and air defence systems we expected to encounter in Europe, so it was easy to assume this would be the sort of conflict we had prepared for: ‘One manifestation of the lack of previous combat experience was a certain naivety and the rules-free, ‘all bets are off’ approach that was sometimes apparent in the preparation phase in theatre. The best account of battle during Operation Granby (Desert Storm). The Tornado itself is a good example.
As a force, it is much smaller, but far more capable and, dare I say, professional than the force I went to war with back on that humid Gulf night in January 1991. The Tornado’s ground mapping radar and main computer were optimised and harmonised for low level, and we had to rediscover arcane planning features like mid-altitude winds and ‘D’-factors.