Masters of None
Forward air control in the balance as U.S. Marine Corps aviators diversify
This story originally appeared in 2006.
In January 2005, Marine All Weather Fighter Squadron 224 “Bengals” deployed 38 fliers, 210 maintainers and all 12 of its two-seat Boeing F/A-18D Hornets to Al Asad airbase, 150 miles west of Baghdad, for a seven-month tour supporting coalition ground forces.
In August, the Bengals returned to their home station at Beaufort, in coastal South Carolina, having flown 7,500 accident-free flight hours over Iraq—70 percent at night—and dropped 32 tons of bombs.
“Round-the-clock flying” is how squadron commander Lt. Col. Wilbert Thomas, 42, describes the Bengals’ stint in Iraq. He says his aviators focused on three missions: forward air control-airborne, or FAC-A; tactical air control, or what he calls “battlefield management”; and armed reconnaissance.
These are only three of the many roles the Marines’ two-seater fighter community trains for. Their other missions include air combat, deep strike, close air support and traditional photo-reconnaissance: in other words, pretty much the entire TACAIR portfolio.
Thomas calls training for multiple roles “the challenge of the two-seater, and of the F-18 [in general].” “There are not enough flying days to do everything.”
An uncertain world, rising expenses and declining resources place incredible demands on all Marine aviators—and two-seat Hornet crews especially. Gone are single-mission platforms like the A-6E Intruder and highly-specialized crews like the warrant officer controllers that refined their art over Vietnam. These days, both men and machines must be capable of multiple roles.
Versatile new tools like data-links and targeting pods arrive in quick succession and with little time to train on them before it’s time to use them in combat. While no one questions the courage and dedication of the aviators and maintainers themselves, at least one critic is asking if the demand for multi-mission jets and fliers has shortchanged the Marines’ FAC-A capability, a traditional strength of Corps aviation.
“I'm afraid of multitasking,” says retired Marine warrant officer Jim Doner, 65, an airborne controller in Vietnam. Doner says doing FAC-A well demands specialized personnel, equipment and training. In other words, mission focus. It was mission focus that let airborne controllers in Vietnam reach what Doner calls the “zenith of aerial observation.”
“The Marine Corps in Vietnam was hands down the absolute expert in close air support,” Doner says. “And when I say close, I mean close.”
Doner recalls one mission north of Khe San where he had to tell Marines on the ground to get under their ponchos—because he was guiding some fast-movers with napalm in on an enemy that was so close that the Marines might get splattered.
In the immediate aftermath of the Vietnam War, the Corps took steps to preserve and refine its airborne controllers’ experience. There were exercises, symposia, new field manuals and new project offices. While with a FAC-A project in 1977, Doner brainstormed the nine-line brief that has become standard for FACs across the services.
And in the late ’80s, as a civilian contractor, Doner helped write the FAC curriculum for the F/A-18D—a curriculum he says has been largely abandoned as a result of the current multi-role obsession.
The introduction of the two-seat Hornet beginning in the late 1980s precipitated changes in the Marines’ FAC-A community.
In his 18 years as a controller, before retiring in 1987, Doner played FAC from the backseats of a variety of platforms, from Huey helicopters to Douglas OA-4 Skyhawks. But most of his 3,500 flight hours were in North American Rockwell OV-10 Broncos, twin-engine propeller-driven observation planes used by both the Air Force and the Marines in the FAC-A role.
The last OV-10s were retired from U.S. military service in 1995. With them went the Marines’ dedicated FAC-A force, its VMO squadrons.
“The VMO had one mission,” Doner says. “It was hyphen in ‘air-ground team.’”
When the Marines began phasing out the VMOs and their OV-10s, the FAC-A mission passed to the six-squadron VMA(AW) community, then trading its attack-dedicated Grumman A-6Es for multi-role F/A-18Ds to become the VMFA(AW) community.
At the same time, the Marines were retiring other single-mission platforms including the photo-reconnaissance-tasked McDonnell Douglas RF-4B, passing their missions to the VMFA(AW) squadrons too. Soon the Marines’ only airborne controllers were embedded in squadrons that, in just a few years, had gone from performing one basic mission—attack—to performing no fewer than four: attack, fighter, reconnaissance and observation (including FAC-A).
Mercifully, the F/A-18D squadrons surrendered their carrier-borne role in the mid-1990s.
Still, after 15 years of shouldering the burden once borne by several separate communities, today’s F/A-18D crews are “jacks of all trades and masters of none,” in the words of Capt. Mike Raiff, a naval flight officer and backseater with the Bengals. “[With the F/A-18D], we perform as well as any aircraft in [beyond-visual-range air combat]. But we don’t do any one particular thing the best in the world.”
“We consistently practice to the … FAC-A mission in the traditional radio-based nine-line brief format,” Thomas says. “As far as a percentage of our overall effort, it depends on where we are in our training cycle. For example, in the six months prior to our deployment … we exclusively trained to the mission in order to qualify the majority of our crews in the FAC-A mission.
“But in the entire training syllabus of the F/A-18D, FAC-A is just one of 14 core skills that we train to, but it is our bread and butter mission, so over time I would say that F/A-18D squadrons devote on the order of 50 percent of our effort to it.”
Doner says the FAC-A mission requires the full attention of practitioners all the time.
Even if they didn’t have 13 other missions to train for, the weapon systems officers (who do the actual controlling from the back seats of the F/A-18D are all naval flight officers and have administrative duties on the ground that distract from their combat training.
In his day, Doner says, many FACs were warrant officers who did nothing but fly and control—and who rose up through the infantry or artillery ranks to become warrants.
“The aerial observer in the OV-10 … brought that empathy for the ground situation to the cockpit,” Doner says, “because he was an infantry officer or an artillery officer.”
Doner, himself an infantryman early in his career, laments that the Marines’ controller community is populated with NFO controllers with little or no ground experience and ground-based controllers who are often junior NCOs who’ve never flown.
“They understood flying,” Doner says of his fellow Vietnam-era airborne FACs. He says that in each of the squadrons he flew with, there were as many as 10 warrant-officer controllers, each with a decade or more of ground experience under his belt plus hundreds of flight hours.
While it’s true that many of today’s aviators have no ground combat experience, and that many members of battalion tactical air control parties are enlisted, the Marines do have a program to chop aviators to line battalions as ground FACs. During the fight for Fallujah in 2004, there were around 30 FACs, many of them aviators, involved in the fighting, according to Marine Corps News.
Besides, Thomas says, the Bengals feel that empathy for the Marine on the ground. “We’re the airborne extension of him.”
But that there are still aviator ground FACs in the Corps—and that the Bengals do empathize with the grunts—doesn’t necessarily solve the fundamental problem in Marine Corps FAC-A, which is that the only squadrons performing the role have been told to do a dozen other things, and there just isn’t time to do it all well.
“The reality is that you prepare for the likely mission,” Thomas says, adding that for the Bengals’ recent deployment, the likely missions happened to be FAC-A, battlefield management and reconnaissance. So in the months leading up to their departure for Iraq, the Bengals dropped air-to-air training entirely. As a result of their last-minute focus, Raiff says, “we were actually over-prepared.”
Critics might say that the problem with this solution to the multi-mission problem is that it hinges on knowing the future. Not all wars will be as predictable and drawn-out as the one in Iraq. A sudden crisis could find VMFA(AW)-224 and its fellow F/A-18D squadrons focusing on the wrong subset of their many missions.
The Corps seems to think advanced technology is at least a partial solution to the problem. But the way Thomas describes it, new hardware intended to improve Marine squadrons’ multi-role flexibility can further complicate their already-hectic training schedules. He says timely training on a steady supply of new systems is a challenge.
Over the years, the Marines’ F/A-18Ds have received a bewildering number of modifications to enable their mission schizophrenia. The Bengals’ jets feature night vision goggle-compatible cockpits, Link-16 datalinks, GPS and, most recently, Litening AT targeting pods. Four jets are equipped with palletized cameras for photo-reconnaissance. All are wired for long-range AMRAAM air-to-air missiles and, soon, the new AIM-9X dogfighting missile.
The Sniper pod, according to Thomas, has proved indispensable since its combat debut on Marine Boeing AV-8Bs during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. “Over there [in Iraq], there’s no reason to take off without one.”
But the Bengals received their first pods—just four of them—only four months before deploying. Balancing the urgent need to work up on the pods against other training requirements, and all on such short notice, proved a headache for Thomas. “How do I train everybody?” he says he asked himself.
At least one Bengals pilot relishes the training challenge. “The aircraft is fun to fly because it’s multi-role. It’s a challenge keeping up with all the missions,” says Capt. Erik Peterson, 27. “It’s never dull.”
As far as Peterson is describing the Bengals’ pre-deployment work-up, “never dull” is an understatement. There was time for the Bengals’ 38 aviators to get only three or four looks apiece at their new pods before they left for Iraq. Fortunately, that proved to be just enough, and at Al Asad the Bengals maintained a high operational tempo, new pods and all.
“Once we got [to Iraq],” Thomas says, “we totally concentrated on the missions we were expected to perform there.” That meant a lot of FAC-A, some battlefield management and attack and daily photo-recon missions. The Bengals let air-to-air and other skills deteriorate for the time being.
The relatively benign environment—and a dearth of major targets—perhaps helped. It’s telling that the Bengals dropped only 65,000 pounds of ordnance in seven months. That’s the equivalent of just 32 JDAMs.
Upon returning home to Beaufort, the squadron picked up where it had left off, training for nearly every mission under the sun. Thomas says he’s especially looking forward to getting his crews some dissimilar air combat training to sharpen their dogfighting skills.
Dogfights against real enemies have been rare in recent years, but when you’re preparing for almost every contingency, you can’t neglect even the improbable ones—and you can’t afford to get too good at any one thing.
Fortunately the apparent decay of Marine Corps FAC-A skills hasn’t resulted in any recent friendly-fire incidents—at least none that were newsworthy. And while the Corps may have let its FAC-A skills decay, there has been a renewed emphasis on the mission in both the Navy and Air Force.
Today, there are Defense Department-wide standards for forward air control. Pitched battles in western Iraqi cities like Fallujah have seen effective synchronization of aircraft and ground units from across the services.
But then, the Marines have always taken pride in supporting their own—and even the fight for Fallujah represented only low-intensity warfare. What happens when the Marines again face the level of threat they faced in Vietnam, and face it alone?
“The lessons learned here will at minimum rewrite how the Marine Corps and our brethren in other services conduct close air support,” Maj. Rick Uribe, a Lockheed Martin KC-130 pilot, said of his and other FACs’ involvement in Fallujah, where dozens of FACs had air support stacked up for miles over the city waiting to drop ordnance.
But Doner counters that close air support is essentially the same today as it was 30 years ago. It still requires competent and courageous controllers in the air and on the ground to accurately place bombs on target. It requires focused training.
The book on FAC-A was written in Vietnam. Doner argues that the Marine Corps threw out that book—or several key chapters, at least—when it made its FAC-A specialists jacks of all trades … and masters of none.
Note: VMFA(AW)-224 is scheduled to convert to the Lockheed Martin F-35 stealth fighter in the coming few years, likely losing its forward-air-control mission in the process.
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