Buccaneer 1981 - 1984 (8)
Air Defence system. And by this time, CTF60 had drawn up a detailed concept of Combined Air Operations giving Buccaneers on attack ops in Lebanon priority over all other air traffic in the area.
However, the first question remained – what were the Buccaneers going to hit?
Many, many guns could threaten the block of flats from any direction and these artillery pieces would fire off a few rounds in quick succession then move. Today that’s called “Shoot and Scoot!” A minimum response time of 45 minutes for the Buccaneers to reach the target meant that the artillery could “Shoot and Scoot” with impunity! And we didn’t even know which artillery pieces had fired the offending rounds! However, some CTF60 intelligence reports revealed that several of the firing sites were permanently manned, they didn’t Shoot and Scoot. And they were large enough to present an adequate chance of visual acquisition from the air. One option, therefore, would be to preplan attacks against these permanent sites regardless of whether they had fired the offending rounds or not. But these big guns, on permanent sites, were all Syrian. I requested permission to target these sites but got a muted response. MOD authorised the detachment to preplan these attacks but Ministerial approval was very definitely needed before flying any such sorties. Reading between the lines, I felt we would never get the right approval in time for this option to be of any use.
With the concept of operations, the comms plan and the targeting now all roughly sorted, the Detachment swung into the Standby routine. That was two Buccaneers and crews on 30 minutes, two more on one hour, and the third pair on call. Because Pavespike is a daylight only system, the standbys were from sunrise to sunset. I established practice call outs. We called the non-flying practice call outs Ex Kelly and generally, the reaction times from receipt of task to reaching the marshalling point were pretty good. Because of the need to practice short notice co-ordination with CTF60, we also designed flying practice call outs. These we called Ex Tephrite and they consisted of an Ex Kelly plus the extra element of getting airborne and flying through CTF 60 airspace to a point just short of the Beirut coast. Another aspect of our training was, “Know your enemy!” The Intelligence Section provided photographs of individuals from the 20 or so different Arab factions operating in Beirut at that time including the Druze Militia, the Lebanese Army, the Sunni Muslims and the Shi’ite Muslims and so on. There was only one drawback – all the photos were absolutely identical!
