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2021-11-24 Iraq
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Striking at the heart of the enemy: In the final part of our series from brave pilot's gripping memoir, a nerve shredding account of how the RAF blasted an Isis bomb factory to smithereens
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[Daily Mail, where America gets its news] After a spell of good weather, thunderstorms had returned, and the Mediterranean air at our base in Cyprus was unusually humid as I walked back to Ops after a trip over Syria.
Two of my flight commanders approached me with an urgent request that had come in from Air Operations while I was airborne.
'They want an IED [improvised explosive device] factory destroyed. As soon as possible.
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'It's huge. Several large buildings. They want it completely destroyed in a single attack to make sure none of the bomb-makers' stuff can be salvaged in the event of partial damage.
'They think it will need 16 weapons to destroy it. The strike has to be simultaneous with U.S. aircraft hitting other nearby targets at the same time. It will be a coordinated push, so the timeline is fixed. Do we think we can take it on?'
The need to annihilate the IED factory was absolutely clear and justified.
The bomb-makers assembled suicide vests in all sizes, and land mines which they buried on roads and randomly in the desert.
They concealed booby traps in houses and in plastic toys that contained sufficient explosives to blow off the hands of the children who found them. Nowhere was safe from them.
But hitting 16 different targets from a single formation in a single pass was a tall order. It had not been conducted by the RAF for some considerable time, and never by the Typhoon Force.
Before precision-guided weapons, this would have been an impossibility. 'Dumb' weapons in previous conflicts had only worked by saturation, often causing extensive collateral damage. During World War II, more than 90 per cent of bombs had missed their targets.
When Churchill wanted to strike the Nazi experimental-weapons factory at Peenemunde — a secret facility developing the V2 rockets that would later terrorise London — the RAF used 596 heavy bombers for a so-called 'precision' attack.
Even by the first Gulf War, smart weaponry remained in its infancy, and unguided rockets and bombs were still being used at the start of the Afghanistan campaign in 2004.
But now expectations had reached the point that we would be tasked to strike within a few feet of accuracy. And without delay. It was Thursday afternoon, and the raid was scheduled for Saturday. We had just 36 hours to prepare.
In a professional sense, I felt excited by the mission — load four Paveway 4 bombs onto each of four aircraft, fly a four-ship group over the target and release all 16 at different aiming points at the same time.
We had trained for multiple targets like this, but 16 was such an unlikely event that we had rarely practised anything like it, except to prove the concept was possible. Nonetheless, though it had never actually been done before, I was confident it was within the Typhoon's capability.
My top team agreed it was workable and that the boys were up to it. They had been flying in pairs on two-man missions for weeks but would have to step up to working as fours. It would need serious, detailed planning.
Launching four jets would put immense pressure on the squadron's maintenance engineers and mechanics. As it was, they were worked to a standstill. Fast jets are not like cars, clocking up the miles then booking a service when the warning light flashes.
The aircraft needed checking over daily. Engineering for every sortie had to be managed, programmed, planned for. The Typhoon was always hungry for maintenance and servicing.
Every aircraft component was tracked and subject to a strict maintenance schedule and a logistics chain reliant on an air bridge from the UK. It was demanding work, especially since we had deployed from the UK with the absolute minimum number of engineers.
It was Sod's Law that the mission was planned for Saturday. The jets flew six days out of seven. Saturday maintenance day enabled in-depth servicing and time for more serious corrections and refinements. But for this mission we would have to ask the engineers to bin maintenance day, work around the clock and double their usual output.
Even so, we had just four serviceable jets for the job, which was bloody tight for a critical mission. Ordinarily, to guarantee a successful launch, you would plan for 50 per cent redundancy, so six aircraft for four separate tasks. Five at a pinch.
Given the constraints, timeline and lack of backup, I was sure most squadrons would have baulked at the request. But so far we had delivered on every single task. Day, night, good weather and bad, across multiple countries and in the most challenging of conditions.
Every day, the guys returned with incredible stories after precision strikes in the most complex scenarios. They had tracked units of Isis fighters as they moved through urban areas, cleared roads of IEDs, and seamlessly integrated with unmanned aerial vehicles and foreign fast jets.
They were showing restraint, professionalism and tactical confidence. The most extreme circumstances had gradually become the new norm. We were thinking cleanly, unemotionally, ruthlessly about the task.
Yes, we had endured the odd scrape and close call but the team had just rolled with the tackles and continued the flow. Every set-back had just made everyone stronger and closer.
Since I joined the RAF, I had never seen such a robust and healthy relationship between the engineers, pilots and operations staff. The support and willingness to deliver were truly extraordinary. It felt like we were capable of anything.
So, with the nodded agreement of Tim Lowing, the senior engineering officer, and Jonny Anderson, who was in charge of squadron weapons and tactics, the decision was made. We were on.
If I'd had any doubts, they would have been dispelled by the intelligence briefing we'd received that day. Isis had begun organ harvesting from prisoners, and had hanged two teenage girls in the centre of Mosul, Iraq, for posting on Twitter. The suffering was unimaginable, not acts of war but acts of sheer evil.
If we could get it right and destroy this house of horrors in one fell swoop, it would not only be a huge tactical success, it would strike a significant blow to Islamic State's campaign of terror.
Adapted from Typhoon: The Inside Story Of An RAF Fighter Squadron At War by Mike Sutton 
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Posted by Skidmark 2021-11-24 00:00||
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