PART II: MiG Menace
Chapter Six
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Rolling Thunder[AB1]
August, 1967
Over North Vietnam
Over North Vietnam, August 1967[AB2]
Forty-planes strong, the American formation streaked high over the jungle landscape, bound for the North Vietnamese capital of Hanoi. The heart of the raid consisted of Republic F-105 Thunderchief fighter-bombers, each armed with iron bombs destined for military targets around the city. The Iron Hand flight--bait aircraft for the surface-to-air missiles--patrolled the formation’s flanks. If the North Vietnamese painted them with their ground radars, they would send anti-radiation missiles sizzling off their weapon’s pylons to ride the radar beam down to the facility. Take out their radars and the Soviet-built surface to air missile batteries guarding the capital would be blinded, unable to launch on the fleeting U.S. jets.
Stacked above and behind the coke-bottle shaped Thunderchiefs, a squadron of brand-new F-4 Phantom fighters followed, searching for enemy interceptors. The Phantom represented the newest generation American fighter, the one designed to smack Soviet-built MiGs out of the air as the F-86 had done a decade before during the Korean War.
Just short of the target area, the North Vietnamese radars switched on and scanned the American raiders. The Iron Hand pilots cooked off their rockets. Anti-aircraft cannon fire filled the sky. Dodging and weaving, the big “Thuds” evaded the flak and drove for Hanoi.
Suddenly, a pair of MiG-21 interceptors, Russia’s latest and greatest air superiority weapon, launched from a nearby airfield. In the past, the MiG’s would get high and dive on the Americans. This time, the two MiG-21 jocks had stayed low over the jungle treetops, hiding from the American airborne radar systems among the ground clutter they picked up as they raced along the formation’s left flank.
Behind the Americans, a Super Constellation [AB3]equipped with a superb airborne radar system discovered the threat. The plane radioed a warning to the strike formation, but the F-4 Phantoms tasked with protecting the Thuds ignored it. That was until the MiG pilots firewalled their throttles and hit Mach 2. They pulled up, broke out of the ground clutter and rocketed to 28,000 feet. A quick 180-degree turn to the left put the MiG’s in perfect attack position—above and behind an unsuspecting force.
They dropped down, speeding along until they reached missile range behind the Phantom’s escorting the F-105’s. They launched their Atoll radar-guided missiles, then broke away, hitting Mach 2 as they escaped.
The missiles tore apart two F-4 Phantoms before any of the Americans realized they were under attack. The Phantoms evaded while the F-105 jocks opened up their throttles and dashed away.
They weren’t fast enough, and they weren’t agile enough. Despite being outnumbered twenty to one, the cagey MiG pilots flitted around the Americans like gnats. More MiGs joined the fight, and missiles filled the sky. Laden with fuel and bombs, the F-105 was anything but the agile fighter its manufacturer had advertised. In fact, the Thud pilots derisively called their planes “Lead Sleds.”
There was no escape. The missile blew Lt. Elmo Baker’s F-105 right out of the sky. [AB4]Two more Phantoms fell that day over Hanoi. A fifth barely managed to limp home with critical battle damage. Ten percent of the strike force had gone down, a loss rate so high that even during World War II it could not have been sustained for long.
Welcome to the United States Air Force’s dirty secret over Vietnam. After dominating the skies in every conflict since 1944, a small but well-equipped Third World air force outfought the Americans and denied the USAF control of the air over North Vietnam.
There could be no larger blow to the prestige and purpose of the Cold War-era USAF. Within its ranks, the young officers sent into battle day after day against the People’s Air Force of Vietnam faced appalling loss rates. An F-105 Thunderchief pilot’s life expectancy was sixty-six missions. It took a hundred to complete a tour and get home.
Even as they faced off against the North Vietnamese MiG’s and surface to air missile batteries, the American fighter-bomber pilots could not help but wonder what would happen to them if war broke out in Europe someday and they would be forced to fight the full might of the Soviet Red Air Force.
In that respect, the air war in Southeast Asia had become a proving ground that pitted the latest Soviet aircraft and technology against the best the United States had to offer. What it proved was the Soviets would have absolutely slaughtered the USAF over Europe had a general war in Europe erupted in the late 1960’s.
How had the USAF gone from the unstoppable force of World War II to such a disastrous state in under a quarter of a century? What had happened to the fierce fighting force of that had crushed the Soviet-flown jets it encountered over North Korea’s notorious MiG Alley from 1950-53?
During the Korean War, the USAF claimed a 7:1 kill rate over the Communist MiG-15’s it faced. Despite being heavily outnumbered and facing a very good fighter in the MiG-15, the tactics and training employed by the USAF carried the day. Yet, only a generation later, the USAF could not defeat an air force a fraction its size over North Vietnam. Even worse, that air force kept inflicting jarring defeats on the USAF’s strike aircraft.
By late 1967, gone were the days of the 7:1 kill ratios of Korean War fame. From October 1967 until President Johnson suspended air operations over North Vietnam in 1968, the PAFV MiG’s scored a 5:1 kill rate against the USAF’s latest jet fighters and fighter-bombers. The Pentagon brass viewed the disaster in Southeast Asia through the prism of a potential world war in Europe and grew extremely worried. The Soviets were better trained and even better equipped than the PAFV, and outnumbered the NATO air forces by a huge margin. A 1:5 kill rate in a European war would ensure a complete aerial defeat.
Shockingly, the USAF knew this would happen. In the spring of 1966, a series of training operations, known as Featherduster I and II, tested its F-4 and F-105 pilots in mock combat against the older, but more maneuverable F-86 Sabre. The F-86’s were filling the shoes of the lightweight MiG-17’s and MiG-21’s the North Vietnamese fielded at the time. Based on these mock air combat exercises, a report called SEACAAL predicted the MiG-21’s would dominate the F-4 and F-105’s with a 3:1 to 4:1 kill rate.
When this prediction came true the following year, the daily air battles over North Vietnam triggered a crisis within the United States military establishment. In the Pengtagon, the Defense Department’s Weapons System Evaluation Group undertook a series of analytical studies, called the Red Baron Reports, that examined every single air-to-air engagement of the Vietnam War to date based on interviews with all the surviving American air crews, after action debriefing notes and other documents.
The Red Baron reports concluded that the U.S. Navy was substantially outperforming the USAF in the skies over North Vietnam. As if struggling against a Third World MiG force wasn’t humiliating enough, to learn the Navy’s jets and pilots were winning their chunk of the air war led to considerable inter-service rancor.
The Red Baron reports placed the blame squarely on the USAF’s lack of realistic air combat training for its fighter pilots. Post war interviews with USAF air crew dovetailed with this conclusion, as almost everyone interviewed stated they had not received the training needed to survive in the hostile skies over North Vietnam.
The Red Baron Reports only touched on the heart of the matter. Revamping the training program fighter pilots received would not have been all that difficult had not a number of deeply-rooted dysfunctional issues existed in the air force of the 1960’s. All had their origins in the aftermath of the Korean War as new technologies were developed and the air force decided how they should be used in battle.
By the mid-1950’s, the first jets capable of breaking Mach 2 (twice the speed of sound) came into service. Some of the fastest jets, such as the F-102 Delta Dart and F-104 Starfighter, were designed from the ground up to be ultra-fast interceptors that could shoot down incoming Russian nuclear bombers before they could reach targets in the United States. Coupled with the development of guided missiles, such as the Sidewinder and Sparrow, air force thinkers concluded that the day of the twisting, turning dogfights of World War I, World War II and Korea were a thing of the past. Future air wars, they believed, would be fought over the horizon with radar and long-range guided missiles.
In such an environment, when even sighting an enemy plane would be a rarity, why would future fighters need guns? Couldn’t the weight and space be used to carry extra missiles instead? Defense Secretary Robert McNamara summed it up best in 1964, “In the context of modern air warfare, the idea of a fighter being equipped with a gun is as archaic as warfare with a bow and arrow.”
The McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom became the first American fighter to embrace this new concept of air warfare. Republic’s F-105 also originally lacked a gun, but a huge inter-service fight erupted over that point and ultimately the Thunderchief did get produced with a 20mm cannon.
As these design and doctrine developments took place in the 1950’s, the air force changed how it trained its pilots for air combat. Part of this was traced to the new philosophy of air warfare. Why did pilots need to practice air combat maneuvering—dogfighting—when the day of the dogfight had been eclipsed by the missile age? It seemed a pointless waste of time. Worse, actually, as such maneuvering was always dangerous and pushed both planes and pilots to the edge of their envelopes.
With the arrival of Mach 2 jets, missiles and the first electronic avionics came the inevitable afterbirth of revolutionary technology: frequent system failures. Throughout the decade, the air force suffered from an exceptionally high loss rate during normal peacetime flying operations. Jets went down and pilots died every day. Al Dymock, a fighter pilot who served in the Korean War and continued his USAF career afterwards, once noted that the majority of his flight school classmates died in accidents. He was one of the lucky few to survive.
The situation did not improve in the 1960’s. When the F-102’s eventual replacement, known as the F-106, entered service it did so with a faulty ejection seat. It was so bad that when its pilots tried to eject after catastrophic engine or control failures, not a single one survived. Twelve pilots died before the USAF’s Air Defense Command even undertook a study of the problem.
With the incredible speeds and immature technology claiming lives every day, the Air Force sought to minimize risks in training operations. Safe flying became the order of the day. Horsing fighters around in seven-G turns in mock dogfights not only became frowned upon, ultimately the Air Force banned it altogether. Pilots caught dogfighting could face court martials and the end of their careers.
As a result, institutional knowledge of dogfighting ebbed away. To succeed in AC (Air Combat Maneuvering) takes considerable practice, knowledge and tactical savvy—all perishable skills in the flying business. The die-hard pilots who didn’t buy into the new doctrine went underground and did their best to pass on the knowledge to their younger pilots when they could, but the fact was the farther removed the air force went from its peak successes over North Korea’s MiG Alley, the less capable its fighter pilots became should they ever face a close-range fight with enemy aircraft.
A perfect storm of faulty tactics, training, aircraft and weapons design was brewing by the time the Air Force met the latest generation MiG’s over Hanoi in 1966. Combat has a way of unmasking all of these deficiencies quite quickly and at the needless cost of courageous men.
The problems were legion. First, the Soviet-built MiG-17 and MiG-21’s were small, hard to see and extremely elusive. The American F-4’s and F-105s were fast and powerful, but heavy and not nearly as maneuverable as the MiG’s. Time and again, the MiG’s darted and danced around the American strike packages, nipping at the formations with cannon and missiles. The Soviets had not discarded guns as a weapon of air combat, and their faith in that old standby was soon justified.
Over-the-horizon battles like the ones envisioned by the air force’s planners a decade before simply did not exist over North Vietnam. First, the Rules of Engagement required that USAF pilots have a visual confirmation of their target before they launched a missile. MiG’s, being small, were very hard to see and required getting in close to score the kill. This led to a whole host of problems. First, the American missiles had minimum as well as maximum ranges. All too often, the F-4 pilots found themselves behind a MiG in a position to kill it, only to watch helplessly as it escaped because they were too close to fire a Sidewinder.
In Vietnam, the Air Force had brought a grenade launcher to a knife fight.
Even worse, the missile technology failed to perform as advertised. The vaunted Sparrow missile suffered an astonishing 70% failure rate in combat. Some exploded a thousand feet in front of the launching F-4. Some came off the Phantom’s hard points and never fired their rocket motors. They tumbled earthward, useless.
When they did work as advertised, their performance envelopes were so narrow that the pilots found themselves unable to score kills with them. Early sidewinders could not be fired at an enemy coming head-on. Sparrows required the firing aircraft to lock on to the target with its radar system. But the F-4’s radar had a hard time detecting the small MiG’s when they operated down low in the ground clutter. Ultimately, slightly over ten percent of all the Sidewinders and Sparrows fired over North Vietnam hit their MiG targets.
The American pilots pleaded for guns. The F-4E became the first Phantom to carry an internal 20mm cannon, but it did not arrive in theater until the last stages of Operation Rolling Thunder. As a stop gap, gun pods were sometimes slung under wings of the earlier Phantoms, but these were drag-inducing and not particularly accurate.
The F-105 pilots at least had a cannon. But in Southeast Asia, their main role was to bomb ground targets, and their gun sight system focused on that role. To change the sight from its air-to-ground mode to its air-to-air function required flipping five different switches located all over the cockpit. This proved ridiculously complicated in combat, and the pilots learned they could not afford to take their eyes off the MiG’s long enough to do it without risking losing track of their target. “Lose sight, lose the fight,” was an old fighter pilot adage that still held true. Consquently, the F-105 pilots didn’t bother to use the sight and simply sprayed and prayed. In this regard, the Fokker Triplanes of World War I yore had a better sighting system than the F-105.
When they did use their cannon, the Thunderchief pilots discovered the immature 20mm Vulcan gatling gun design was fraught with problems. One in eight trigger pulls resulted in a jammed weapon. Between its marginal ability to defend itself against MiG attacks and the deadly SAM batteries deployed around the targets in North Vietnam, it is no wonder that just about half of all the F-105s produced were shot down during the war. By the end of Rolling Thunder in 1968, the North Vietnamese MiG-21’s had racked up an astonishing 15:0 kill ratio against the Thunderchief.
It was a disgraceful situation, made worse by an entrenched generation of air force senior officers who resisted attempts to change. But those fighting the war in Southeast Asia, the young turks and squadron leaders who risked their lives every day, came home with a new vision of how business needed to be conducted. They began to agitate for change. A battle erupted within the air force ranks, one that the young officers won piece by piece.