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The Coalition is to scrap the Harrier jump jet, while sparing the less effective Tornado. Little wonder the pilots are up in arms, says Con Coughlin.
October 23, 2010
They have dedicated their careers to flying one of the world’s most iconic jet fighters. They have flown hundreds of combat missions in Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, Iraq and Afghanistan again. But from now on the elite group of pilots that flew the Harrier jump jet find themselves kicking their heels on the tarmac with no planes to fly.
Of all the painful decisions announced at the conclusion of the Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR) this week, the announcement that the Government is to retire the 80-strong fleet of Harriers with immediate effect has been the bitterest pill to swallow, especially for the pilots who fly them.
“Betrayal – that is the only word to describe our emotions right now,” one of the Harrier’s leading pilots told me when I met him shortly after David Cameron had made the announcement to the Commons.
“Every one of us feels this great sense of betrayal that we have been risking our lives for our country, and this is our reward.”
Mr Cameron witnessed first-hand the visceral anger the Harrier pilots feel over the decision to abandon the Harrier fleet to save money when he addressed members of the Armed Forces working at the Permanent Joint Headquarters at Northwood. There he encountered Lt Cdr Kris Ward, 37, who has flown more than 140 combats in Afghanistan and also happens to be the son of Cdr Nigel “Sharkey” Ward, who commanded the Harrier Squadron during the Falklands conflict. “I am now potentially facing unemployment,” Ward Jr told the Prime Minister. “How am I supposed to feel about that, sir?”
But the anger is about more than unemployment, as I discovered when I caught up with some of our leading fighter pilots after the announcement. The main cause of the Harrier pilots’ fury is their belief that they have been the victims of a brutal power-play by their fellow pilots in the RAF that has resulted in the RAF hanging on to its fleet of equally aged Tornados at the expense of the Harrier.
“We have been under relentless pressure from an Air Force system that simply wanted us to fail,” says a senior Harrier pilot with many years of combat experience. “There is absolutely no doubt that the RAF has been working against us from the start of the whole process.”
One issue that particularly angers the pilots is their conviction that the Harrier is better suited to supporting the current military campaign in Afghanistan, even though the RAF insisted on withdrawing the Harriers last year and replacing them with the Tornado.
“This is all about Service politics, rather than making decisions based on the suitability of the aircraft for this particular combat environment,” the pilot explains. “The Harrier was doing a brilliant job in Afghanistan and then suddenly it was withdrawn so that the RAF could deploy their Tornados simply so that the RAF could justify their existence.”
In the cut-throat world of Ministry of Defence politics, everyone in the Armed Forces is desperate to prove that their equipment is operationally relevant. When the Tornados were withdrawn from Iraq at the end of their combat mission, the RAF was concerned that they would not be operational when the bean-counters working for the SDSR came to assess which planes to keep, as they sought to meet the Government’s demand for savage cuts to the defence budget.
In this military equivalent of musical chairs, the fact that it was the Tornados, rather than the Harriers, that were flying combat missions in Afghanistan at the time SDSR finished its deliberations sounded the death knell for the Harrier fleet.
“It would be easier to accept this decision if the Tornado was a better fighter,” says the pilot. “But the simple truth is that it isn’t. You need three Tornados to do the same work as one Harrier in Afghanistan. Where’s the sense in that?”
It is certainly a sorry end to the career of a fighter that will for ever be remembered as one of the most versatile and effective combat aircraft that Britain has produced.
Conceived in the late 1950s by a French engineer, the original Harrier jump jet was produced by Hawker Siddeley to meet Nato’s requirement for a “light tactical support fighter”. The first test flights in the 1960s proved a national sensation as the public marvelled at the ability of a heavily armed warplane to rise vertically above the ground before soaring off to attack its target. The development of the Harrier was part of a golden era in British aviation history that included the first test flights of the Concorde supersonic jet. The fact that there is a Harrier hanging at Tate Britain tells you all you need to know about its iconic status in British military history.
But the Harrier came into its own during the Falklands conflict when its manoeuvrability and fire power made it an exceptionally effective weapon against the Argentine military. It was employed to fight off Argentine aircraft as well as to bomb enemy positions ashore, and most military experts believe the aircraft’s dynamic capability, together with the skill and bravery of the pilots, gave Britain a decisive edge. In all, the Harriers shot down 20 enemy aircraft without a single combat loss in return, earning them the nickname “the black death” by the Argentine pilots.
And it was the Harriers that were responsible for the BBC journalist Brian Hanrahan’s unforgettable remark during the heat of the conflict, when he was restricted from revealing specific aircraft numbers by the MOD censor. Having observed 15 Harriers set off on combat sorties and return safely to the Royal Navy carrier, he informed BBC viewers: “I counted them all out, and I counted them all in.”
Since the Falklands, the Harrier has provided the air attack backbone of all Britain’s overseas military operations. It saw action in both Gulf wars against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, and provided vital air cover during the Blair government’s military intervention in Sierra Leone. More recently it has provided air support in Afghanistan for British forces fighting the Taliban.
“Its ability to attack at close range is really important to us in this type of conflict,” one senior Army officer tells me. “The Harrier is perfect for the kind of terrain we are fighting in today in Afghanistan.”
This is hardly surprising as the Harrier was developed specifically to take part in expeditionary operations, while the Tornado is a Cold War aircraft designed to be launched from a properly constructed airstrip, rather than a strip of grass in the jungle, which is the Harrier’s natural habitat. And while the British Government believes it can live without the Harrier, that is not how the US Marines regard its capabilities. They are still flying them regularly on combat operations in southern Afghanistan.
“The Government could have kept them flying if it wanted to,” says one Harrier pilot. “It could have made cuts to both the Harrier and the Tornado squadrons. That would have been the fair thing to do, but fairness did not come into it.”
And so the MOD has decided that it can do without the Harrier until its replacement, the Joint Strike Aircraft, comes into service at the end of the decade. In the meantime a lot of work needs to be done to rebuild the trust between the Harrier pilots and the RAF officers they believe betrayed them.
