A-10s over Kosovo (illustrations removed)

As I rolled out, pointed at the APC moving down the road, I looked at the TV screen and watched the picture change from crisp and clear to a wavy-lined mess. I couldn’t believe it. I thought maybe just the one missile had gone bad and had thrown the switches that called up the missile on the other wing. The picture there was just as bad—the 1960s technology in my TV monitor had failed; maintenance guys say this has been a problem for years. The Maverick pass had taken me too low to be able to switch to the gun, continue the attack, and recover before busting the ROEs’ minimum-altitude limit. However, I had developed plenty of speed during that long dive and was able to pull the plane up to near vertical to gain altitude while I set the switches for a gun attack. I was still below the minimum altitude that I generally used for starting attacks—especially for consecutive attacks in a handheld SAM area—but I was mad. I pulled the jet out of its steep climb and pointed its nose at the APC rolling down the road. It was moving faster than any target I had ever tried to attack (moving targets are hard to come by in training). I aimed in front of the APC by a distance I thought would work, and planned to walk my rounds down the road to make sure I got some hits. Because each round from a 30 mm Avenger cannon weighs three quarters of a pound, it doesn’t take many hits to destroy an APC. I squeezed the trigger and heard the gun rotate—something was wrong—no rounds came out. I held the trigger down for a while longer, thinking there might be a blank spot in the shell train. I got nothing and was now far lower than I wanted to be. I pulled off target—again trading airspeed for altitude. I was beside myself. I rechecked switches—all were correct. I could not believe what had just happened. All the effort that had gone into this sortie and all the time it took to get approval for the attack would not matter, it seemed, for today was not going to be my day to kill armor.

I had bled off too much energy, so it took a while to climb back to altitude. That gave me time to cool off and decide that, even though I couldn’t get a kill today, I could make sure that others would. By this time the APC had escaped. It made it to the safety of the town and was off limits. I started looking for the three tanks that I had last seen moving slowly to the northeast. They were gone. I cursed myself for not assigning the job of watching those tanks to the A-10 strikers holding in the south. Too late now—I had to find them. I did not think they could have gotten far, but the area to the north and east was heavily wooded. I searched for a while before finding one. It had pulled about 20 feet off a dirt road and into some trees. I called the strike leader to bring his flight forward. He told me they were low on gas and had only a little time before they had to depart. I quickly deconflicted our flights and brought him to a point over the target while I worked out a new target elevation. It took a few minutes for the strikers to get their eyes onto the target. They were near their bingo (required recovery fuel), so I told them that my wingman and I could cover their attack. That would allow them to roll in, one after the other, and save time. The leader agreed. He rolled in from the west, and his CBU pattern impacted the ground just short of the target. I passed the correction to the wingman as he rolled out in his dive. His two CBU cans also hit a bit short. The tank appeared to be just in the edge of the bomblet pattern. This was certainly not our best day.

As the strikers departed, I decided we had just enough gas to allow my wingman to try a Maverick attack on the target. I had him try passes from several directions, but the trees prevented him from getting a good lock-on with his missile seeker. We were now bingo and had to depart the area. It was a long, quiet flight home—my most frustrating sortie of the war. We had started with one of the best targets we had seen in a long time and ended up with only the possibility of having damaged one tank.

There were numerous failures. Two different weapons systems had failed on my jet and I had failed to have striker flight track the three tanks as they headed off to the northeast while I attacked the APC. Nevertheless, the biggest failure of all was a process that required us to wait more than 40 minutes for approval to attack a lucrative target located far away from any civilians or buildings. The ROEs that had helped us for much of the war had now—for mostly political reasons—been turned against us. On this day they really bit us.

Humor in the Midst of Controlled Chaos Maj Pete “Bro” Brotherton