Kabul, Dec 22:
Cmdr. Layne McDowell glanced over his left shoulder, through the canopy of a
Navy F/A-18, to an Afghan canyon 9,000 feet below. An American infantry company
was down there.
The soldiers had been inserted by helicopter. Now a ground controller wanted the three strike fighters circling overhead to send a sign — both to the grunts and to any Taliban fighters shadowing them as they walked.
Commander McDowell banked and aligned his jet’s nose with the canyon’s northeastern end. Then he followed his wingmen’s lead. He dived, pulled level at 5,000 feet and accelerated down the canyon’s axis at 620 miles per hour, broadcasting his proximity with an extended engine roar.
In the lexicon of close air support, his maneuver was a “show of presence” — a mid-altitude, nonlethal display intended to reassure ground troops and signal to the Taliban that the soldiers were not alone. It reflected a sharp shift in the application of American air power, de-emphasizing overpowering violence in favor of sorties that often end without munitions being dropped.
The use of air power has changed markedly during the long Afghan conflict, reflecting the political costs and sensitivities of civilian casualties caused by errant or indiscriminate strikes and the increasing use of aerial drones, which can watch over potential targets for extended periods with no risk to pilots or more expensive aircraft.
Fighter jets with pilots, however, remain an essential component of the war, in part because little else in the allied arsenal is considered as versatile or imposing, and because of improvements in the aircraft’s sensors.
Commander McDowell’s career has followed the arc of this changing role. At the outset of the war in 2001, American aircraft often attacked in ways that maximized violence, including carpet bombing, dropping cluster munitions and conducting weeks of strikes with precision-guided munitions.
Flying in an F-14 squadron from the aircraft carrier Enterprise, then-Lieutenant McDowell dropped 6,000 pounds of munitions in the war’s first week, destroying Taliban aircraft and vehicles at Herat airfield and striking training camps and barracks in Kandahar Province.
He had already flown the past two years in Kosovo and Iraq, where in 32 combat sorties he dropped 35,000 pounds of guided munitions, including on Serbian barracks that were struck when the largest number of soldiers were believed to be inside.
“Our culture is a fangs-out, kill-kill-kill culture,” he said. “That’s how we train. And back then, the mind-set was: maximum number of enemy killed, maximum number of bombs on deck, to achieve a maximum psychological effect.”
That was then. A little more than a decade on, his most common mission is what is called an “overwatch,” scanning the ground via infrared sensors and radioing what he sees to troops below.
In 953 close-air support sorties by the 44 F/A-18 Super Hornets aboard the aircraft carrier John C. Stennis, from where Commander McDowell flies now, aircraft struck only 17 times. They flew low- or mid-elevation passes 115 times.
The shifts in missions and tactics partly reflect adaptations by the Taliban. But guided by complex rules of engagement and by doctrine emphasizing proportionality and restraint, they also reflect what Commander McDowell calls “a different mentality.”
These days, striving for certitude in target selection and minimizing civilian casualties have become standard practice. Projecting power nonlethally is routine. Dropping bombs is not.
“So much has changed from when I was here the first time,” he said, looking down at Afghanistan on a six-hour flight early last week. “Now I prefer not dropping — if I can accomplish the mission other ways.”
Commander McDowell’s workday began at 4:30 a.m., when he woke in a small stateroom and readied for a long sortie. At 5:30 a.m., he gathered for his preflight briefing.
Lt. Cmdr. Fran Catalina, a pilot who would be one of his wingmen, offered a reminder that the Afghan war, in its 11th winter, was grinding on, and that the reach of the Navy’s carrier aircraft was welcome — even far inland. “There were 43 enemy-initiated attacks in the last reporting period,” he said, showing a map. “Lots of kinetics yesterday.”
Each pilot and weapons-systems officer, who flies in the rear seat of an F/A-18F, was assigned a mission supporting a different ground unit.
At 7:15 a.m., after donning ejection-seat torso harnesses and survival vests and collecting their pistols, they climbed into their aircraft, which waited, armed and fueled, on the flight deck. The carrier was steaming into the wind in the North Arabian Sea.
The aircraft carried a mix of laser- and G.P.S.-guided bombs, heat-seeking air-to-air missiles and ammunition for 20-millimeter cannon.
Shortly before 8 a.m., after preflight checks, Commander McDowell taxied to one of the ship’s four catapults, where sailors attached a hold-back bar to the jet’s nose wheel. He pushed Vengeance 13’s dual engines to full power. The engines roared. The aircraft shook.
He saluted a sailor on the flight deck. The sailor saluted back. “Five seconds,” Commander McDowell said.
He raised his chin, pressed the back of his helmet against the seat and flexed his muscles as he braced for the rush.
The bar released. The steam-driven catapult slammed forward. Vengeance 13 accelerated to 180 miles an hour in about 200 feet. It vaulted off the carrier’s bow. Perhaps two seconds had passed. He had just experienced 3.5 Gs, and he was flying, just above the waves.
“And we’re airborne,” he said.
Commander McDowell is scheduled to assume command of an F/A-18 squadron in May. He is 38, a graduate of the Naval Academy and a former test pilot. His call-sign — Keebler — reflects what he calls his elfin stature (he is 5 feet 7 inches tall) and insatiable sweet tooth.
The nickname also suggests a compliment. Shorter pilots can typically withstand greater gravitational forces when in fast minimum-radius turns or the dives, rolls and climbs involved in dogfighting and strafing. Commander McDowell, who has withstood seven Gs without losing consciousness, is known, in his trade, as “a G-monster.”
On a previous flight from the carrier he had demonstrated for a reporter in the back seat some of what an F/A-18F can do, making the reporter disoriented — and airsick — at 6.5 Gs, chatting calmly as he put the aircraft into a supersonic dive and a series of maneuvers over the Gulf of Oman.
For a combat flight into Afghanistan, however, he would conserve energy and fuel. He flew level at 500 feet for seven miles, banked left and climbed to 25,000 feet, where he was joined by two other Super Hornets.
The trio headed north for their first mission, to support the company freshly landed in the valley in Kandahar.
To get there, they flew toward a designated slot of airspace in western Pakistan. Known as “the Boulevard,” the corridor is a busy air bridge — the route through which Pakistan allows NATO aircraft access to Afghanistan. For planes from air bases in the Persian Gulf, this is the way around Iran.
Commander McDowell’s flight, commanded by Capt. Dell Bull in Vengeance 11, overtook slower aircraft heading to the war. Around 9:15 a.m., the flight crossed over the Afghan border.
An Air Force KC-10 tanker waited ahead, flying a wide circle over a Central Asian desert. It dragged a hose ending in a basket surrounding a small valve. It was time to refuel.
Vengeance 13 went first. After Vengeance 11 had refueled, too, the two aircraft broke off and headed to their mission; Vengeance 12 would join them later. Captain Dell checked in with the ground controller, who said the company had taken fire earlier in the morning.
For about an hour, the aircraft used infrared sensors to watch buildings and the canyon, covering the soldiers’ movement. The Taliban did not show themselves.
After refueling a second time, the jets checked in with a ground controller near the Arghandab River, the area that in late 2010 was a high-profile part of the offensive to displace the Taliban.
Before that offensive, the American presence along the river had been light. Now, from the air, the military footprint was clear. The river was a network of outposts and bases with high walls, many watched over by cameras mounted on tethered blimp-like balloons.
If one place might suggest the way Commander McDowell’s role on the battlefield had changed over his career, this was it. He flew a slow left turn, pointing to an area where several days before an infantry patrol had skirmished with Afghan gunmen.
The gunmen had fired from a field not far from Forward Operating Base Wilson and then dashed into a cluster of mud-walled buildings, he said. Commander McDowell had arrived overhead within minutes.
What happened next framed the contrast between the old practices and the new.
The infantrymen talked him toward the building. Then they marked it by firing a smoke grenade at its walls. Above the river, Commander McDowell fixed his infrared sensor on the compound, sharing the video feed with a ground controller, who confirmed he was looking at the right place. What to do?
In 1999, late in the war in Kosovo, Commander McDowell said pilots routinely killed. On one sortie, in the rush to stop Serbs from killing ethnic Albanians, Commander McDowell dropped a 1,000-pound, laser-guided bomb at the mouth of a tunnel that five trucks carrying Serbian soldiers had just entered. The shrapnel and pressure wave from the blast probably killed every man.
Back then, the rules of engagement allowed pilots to track suspected military vehicles.
“And if a military vehicle stopped at a house, we would get a reading of where the driver went,” he said. “If we were able to identify that the truck was Serbian military, and it stopped for a long period of time at the house, we made the assumption that they were stopping for resupply and within a couple days that house was taken out.”
A little more than a dozen years later, he was above a home in which at least two Taliban fighters had taken shelter after firing on an American patrol. But he did not know who else might be inside. Neither he nor the soldiers requested clearance for an airstrike.
“What if we hit that house and two guys inside had guns and we get eight kids, too?” he said.
High over the Arghandab River, he banked over the home that he and the rules had spared.
Referring to the targeting display in the cockpit, he pointed out its proximity to other homes, and described the limits of what he knew about so-called “patterns of life” — the rhythm of the human activity at the compound where Taliban fighters hid.
“I didn’t think about these things at all in Kosovo,” he said.
The reach of a nuclear carrier, augmented with aerial tankers, made it possible for strike aircraft to penetrate 800 miles from the ship. But what was the point of projecting power if it was not projected responsibly? The changes, he said, have been good.
“I would say that in my younger days I would have been frustrated, because we have ordnance and we know where the enemy is, and I would have wanted permission to strike that building,” he said. “Did I feel frustrated this time? Not in the slightest. It is a different mission. It calls for a different mentality.”
Ends
SA/EN
The soldiers had been inserted by helicopter. Now a ground controller wanted the three strike fighters circling overhead to send a sign — both to the grunts and to any Taliban fighters shadowing them as they walked.
Commander McDowell banked and aligned his jet’s nose with the canyon’s northeastern end. Then he followed his wingmen’s lead. He dived, pulled level at 5,000 feet and accelerated down the canyon’s axis at 620 miles per hour, broadcasting his proximity with an extended engine roar.
In the lexicon of close air support, his maneuver was a “show of presence” — a mid-altitude, nonlethal display intended to reassure ground troops and signal to the Taliban that the soldiers were not alone. It reflected a sharp shift in the application of American air power, de-emphasizing overpowering violence in favor of sorties that often end without munitions being dropped.
The use of air power has changed markedly during the long Afghan conflict, reflecting the political costs and sensitivities of civilian casualties caused by errant or indiscriminate strikes and the increasing use of aerial drones, which can watch over potential targets for extended periods with no risk to pilots or more expensive aircraft.
Fighter jets with pilots, however, remain an essential component of the war, in part because little else in the allied arsenal is considered as versatile or imposing, and because of improvements in the aircraft’s sensors.
Commander McDowell’s career has followed the arc of this changing role. At the outset of the war in 2001, American aircraft often attacked in ways that maximized violence, including carpet bombing, dropping cluster munitions and conducting weeks of strikes with precision-guided munitions.
Flying in an F-14 squadron from the aircraft carrier Enterprise, then-Lieutenant McDowell dropped 6,000 pounds of munitions in the war’s first week, destroying Taliban aircraft and vehicles at Herat airfield and striking training camps and barracks in Kandahar Province.
He had already flown the past two years in Kosovo and Iraq, where in 32 combat sorties he dropped 35,000 pounds of guided munitions, including on Serbian barracks that were struck when the largest number of soldiers were believed to be inside.
“Our culture is a fangs-out, kill-kill-kill culture,” he said. “That’s how we train. And back then, the mind-set was: maximum number of enemy killed, maximum number of bombs on deck, to achieve a maximum psychological effect.”
That was then. A little more than a decade on, his most common mission is what is called an “overwatch,” scanning the ground via infrared sensors and radioing what he sees to troops below.
In 953 close-air support sorties by the 44 F/A-18 Super Hornets aboard the aircraft carrier John C. Stennis, from where Commander McDowell flies now, aircraft struck only 17 times. They flew low- or mid-elevation passes 115 times.
The shifts in missions and tactics partly reflect adaptations by the Taliban. But guided by complex rules of engagement and by doctrine emphasizing proportionality and restraint, they also reflect what Commander McDowell calls “a different mentality.”
These days, striving for certitude in target selection and minimizing civilian casualties have become standard practice. Projecting power nonlethally is routine. Dropping bombs is not.
“So much has changed from when I was here the first time,” he said, looking down at Afghanistan on a six-hour flight early last week. “Now I prefer not dropping — if I can accomplish the mission other ways.”
Commander McDowell’s workday began at 4:30 a.m., when he woke in a small stateroom and readied for a long sortie. At 5:30 a.m., he gathered for his preflight briefing.
Lt. Cmdr. Fran Catalina, a pilot who would be one of his wingmen, offered a reminder that the Afghan war, in its 11th winter, was grinding on, and that the reach of the Navy’s carrier aircraft was welcome — even far inland. “There were 43 enemy-initiated attacks in the last reporting period,” he said, showing a map. “Lots of kinetics yesterday.”
Each pilot and weapons-systems officer, who flies in the rear seat of an F/A-18F, was assigned a mission supporting a different ground unit.
At 7:15 a.m., after donning ejection-seat torso harnesses and survival vests and collecting their pistols, they climbed into their aircraft, which waited, armed and fueled, on the flight deck. The carrier was steaming into the wind in the North Arabian Sea.
The aircraft carried a mix of laser- and G.P.S.-guided bombs, heat-seeking air-to-air missiles and ammunition for 20-millimeter cannon.
Shortly before 8 a.m., after preflight checks, Commander McDowell taxied to one of the ship’s four catapults, where sailors attached a hold-back bar to the jet’s nose wheel. He pushed Vengeance 13’s dual engines to full power. The engines roared. The aircraft shook.
He saluted a sailor on the flight deck. The sailor saluted back. “Five seconds,” Commander McDowell said.
He raised his chin, pressed the back of his helmet against the seat and flexed his muscles as he braced for the rush.
The bar released. The steam-driven catapult slammed forward. Vengeance 13 accelerated to 180 miles an hour in about 200 feet. It vaulted off the carrier’s bow. Perhaps two seconds had passed. He had just experienced 3.5 Gs, and he was flying, just above the waves.
“And we’re airborne,” he said.
Commander McDowell is scheduled to assume command of an F/A-18 squadron in May. He is 38, a graduate of the Naval Academy and a former test pilot. His call-sign — Keebler — reflects what he calls his elfin stature (he is 5 feet 7 inches tall) and insatiable sweet tooth.
The nickname also suggests a compliment. Shorter pilots can typically withstand greater gravitational forces when in fast minimum-radius turns or the dives, rolls and climbs involved in dogfighting and strafing. Commander McDowell, who has withstood seven Gs without losing consciousness, is known, in his trade, as “a G-monster.”
On a previous flight from the carrier he had demonstrated for a reporter in the back seat some of what an F/A-18F can do, making the reporter disoriented — and airsick — at 6.5 Gs, chatting calmly as he put the aircraft into a supersonic dive and a series of maneuvers over the Gulf of Oman.
For a combat flight into Afghanistan, however, he would conserve energy and fuel. He flew level at 500 feet for seven miles, banked left and climbed to 25,000 feet, where he was joined by two other Super Hornets.
The trio headed north for their first mission, to support the company freshly landed in the valley in Kandahar.
To get there, they flew toward a designated slot of airspace in western Pakistan. Known as “the Boulevard,” the corridor is a busy air bridge — the route through which Pakistan allows NATO aircraft access to Afghanistan. For planes from air bases in the Persian Gulf, this is the way around Iran.
Commander McDowell’s flight, commanded by Capt. Dell Bull in Vengeance 11, overtook slower aircraft heading to the war. Around 9:15 a.m., the flight crossed over the Afghan border.
An Air Force KC-10 tanker waited ahead, flying a wide circle over a Central Asian desert. It dragged a hose ending in a basket surrounding a small valve. It was time to refuel.
Vengeance 13 went first. After Vengeance 11 had refueled, too, the two aircraft broke off and headed to their mission; Vengeance 12 would join them later. Captain Dell checked in with the ground controller, who said the company had taken fire earlier in the morning.
For about an hour, the aircraft used infrared sensors to watch buildings and the canyon, covering the soldiers’ movement. The Taliban did not show themselves.
After refueling a second time, the jets checked in with a ground controller near the Arghandab River, the area that in late 2010 was a high-profile part of the offensive to displace the Taliban.
Before that offensive, the American presence along the river had been light. Now, from the air, the military footprint was clear. The river was a network of outposts and bases with high walls, many watched over by cameras mounted on tethered blimp-like balloons.
If one place might suggest the way Commander McDowell’s role on the battlefield had changed over his career, this was it. He flew a slow left turn, pointing to an area where several days before an infantry patrol had skirmished with Afghan gunmen.
The gunmen had fired from a field not far from Forward Operating Base Wilson and then dashed into a cluster of mud-walled buildings, he said. Commander McDowell had arrived overhead within minutes.
What happened next framed the contrast between the old practices and the new.
The infantrymen talked him toward the building. Then they marked it by firing a smoke grenade at its walls. Above the river, Commander McDowell fixed his infrared sensor on the compound, sharing the video feed with a ground controller, who confirmed he was looking at the right place. What to do?
In 1999, late in the war in Kosovo, Commander McDowell said pilots routinely killed. On one sortie, in the rush to stop Serbs from killing ethnic Albanians, Commander McDowell dropped a 1,000-pound, laser-guided bomb at the mouth of a tunnel that five trucks carrying Serbian soldiers had just entered. The shrapnel and pressure wave from the blast probably killed every man.
Back then, the rules of engagement allowed pilots to track suspected military vehicles.
“And if a military vehicle stopped at a house, we would get a reading of where the driver went,” he said. “If we were able to identify that the truck was Serbian military, and it stopped for a long period of time at the house, we made the assumption that they were stopping for resupply and within a couple days that house was taken out.”
A little more than a dozen years later, he was above a home in which at least two Taliban fighters had taken shelter after firing on an American patrol. But he did not know who else might be inside. Neither he nor the soldiers requested clearance for an airstrike.
“What if we hit that house and two guys inside had guns and we get eight kids, too?” he said.
High over the Arghandab River, he banked over the home that he and the rules had spared.
Referring to the targeting display in the cockpit, he pointed out its proximity to other homes, and described the limits of what he knew about so-called “patterns of life” — the rhythm of the human activity at the compound where Taliban fighters hid.
“I didn’t think about these things at all in Kosovo,” he said.
The reach of a nuclear carrier, augmented with aerial tankers, made it possible for strike aircraft to penetrate 800 miles from the ship. But what was the point of projecting power if it was not projected responsibly? The changes, he said, have been good.
“I would say that in my younger days I would have been frustrated, because we have ordnance and we know where the enemy is, and I would have wanted permission to strike that building,” he said. “Did I feel frustrated this time? Not in the slightest. It is a different mission. It calls for a different mentality.”
Ends
SA/EN
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