The Third World War: The Untold Story

First priority in the British dispersal plan went to the large air tankers, the AEW aircraft, and the Nimrod anti-submarine patrol aircraft, all of which had key roles but existed only in small numbers. They were anyway far too big to be protected in the hardened shelters which had been built with NATO common funds at most of the operational airfields; but the smaller RAF aircraft like the Tornados, Buccaneers and Jaguars, as well as the Hawk jet-trainers in their secondary air-defence role, were also thinned out and sent to the dispersed sites when it looked as if the main bases might become too hot to hold them.

By 1984 British Airways Boeing 757s had been modified to carry out refuelling which was to be invaluable when the almost insatiable demand for air tanking started in the first hours of the war. Sadly a proposal by British Airways in the late 1970s that their new jumbo-jet cargo carriers should be built with floors strengthened for military loads got bogged down in a bureaucratic argument about who would pay for the airline’s payload penalty in peacetime. The Western allies were in consequence denied a very badly needed addition to their airlift for military vehicles.

And so it was that in these sorts of ways, and with a very free exchange of ideas within NATO, the Allied air forces made the best of the seven lean years before the war. But while their attention was turned to improving current effectiveness, rather than to bidding for solutions in the future, technology and its opportunities were of course not standing still.

The airborne warning and control system (AWACS) was arguably the biggest ‘force multiplier’ of any recent developments and its impact on the war exceeded the expectations of even the most ardent proponents of its introduction to USAF service in 1977. The E-3A Sentry aircraft, based on Boeing 707 airframes, were readily distinguished from other 707s by the 30-foot diameter radome enclosing the radar and other antennae by which the aircraft was able to exercise much of the capability which put it so far ahead. An illustration of how it worked is worth giving.

In July 1985 the eighteenth and last of the E-3A Sentries assigned to NATO arrived at the German Air Force base at Geilenkirchen, near the Dutch border, to join the newly-formed European NATO squadron. The last of the thirty-four aircraft retained in the USA had joined 552 Airborne Warning and Control Wing at Tinker Air Force Base near the city of Oklahoma earlier in the year. Crews on this Wing had amassed considerable experience on regular deployments to Keflavik in Iceland, Ramstein in Germany, Cairo West, Dhahran in Saudi Arabia, and in South Korea and Japan. The crews of the NATO squadron, drawn from eleven Allied countries, had not travelled so far afield but had become very familiar with the airspace of central Europe, Norway, Italy and Turkey.

By the beginning of 1985 a regular surveillance pattern had been established in the Central Region of Europe. One Sentry from the NATO squadron was always aloft near Venlo on the German-Dutch border; a second from the USAF flew over Ramstein; and a third, also from the NATO squadron, patrolled to the west of Munich in Bavaria. Stand-by aircraft were held on fifteen minutes’ readiness. Their racetrack patterns were flown at over 25,000 feet. The serviceability of Sentry, based on a well-tried type of aircraft, had always been better than that experienced by new generations of aircraft and by 1985 COMAAFCE could confidently expect a daily 80 per cent serviceability rate from both the USAF and the NATO units. Moreover, with a four-man flight crew, additional to the thirteen men manning the equipment, extensive crew space, in-flight cooking and in-flight refuelling, each Sentry could extend its normal six-hour patrol time by several hours if necessary, which afforded great advantages.

From 1983 onwards, Sentries in both NATO and USAF squadrons had been built with almost identical equipment. The original computer speed had been increased threefold and the storage capacity fivefold. The Sentry computer could now process an incredible 1.25 million operations per second and, if necessary, could communicate with up to 98,000 air and ground users by the joint tactical information distribution system (JTIDS), a digital communications system resistant to ECM. Not surprisingly, in the early years of deployment the technical capacity of the aircraft had tended to outrun the imagination of those responsible for its operation, while there were many who considered its introduction into service premature and its technology potential excessive. In 1981, however, a separate subordinate NATO AWACS Command had been established at Maisieres near Brussels and an Allied staff had worked steadily both to exploit its functions more fully and to integrate Sentry operations with those of the British AEW Nimrod.