In a triumph of military daring and precision bombing public relations, the Royal Air Force has demonstrated the ground-attack capability of their Eurofighter Typhoon aircraft:
The RAF has blown up two apparently abandoned Libyan tanks using a Eurofighter Typhoon jet in a move which appears to have been motivated more by Whitehall infighting than by any attempt to battle the forces of dictator Muammar Gaddafi.
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The video appears to show a T-72 tank neatly parked, stationary and unmanned: the target was plainly not in use. The Telegraph reports that the location struck was “an abandoned tank park”. Many Libyan armoured vehicles are old and not serviceable due to lack of parts and servicing. RAF sources admitted to the paper that the jets making the strike had had to spend “a long time” searching before they could find a valid target to hit, and that the timing of the strike was “no coincidence”.
So why is the RAF not only conducting unnecessary air attacks on useless hunks of metal? The answer is not so much military as it is political:
This hasty effort by the RAF to get Typhoons into ground-attack action took place just ahead of the scheduled release by the Parliamentary Public Accounts Committee of a damning report on the Eurofighter, titled Management of the Typhoon project. This report had been expected to be highly critical of the Typhoon, and indeed it is. It says:
In 2004, the Department decided to retire the ground attack Jaguar aircraft early and to spend £119 million to install ground attack upgrades on early Typhoons to cover the resulting capability gap. These upgrades were ready for use by 2008. A year later, the Department decided to retire the air defence Tornado F3 aircraft early to save money and therefore re-prioritised Typhoon away from ground attack missions to air defence tasks. It is now not using Typhoon’s ground attack capability.
So, absent some secret plan of the Libyan army to somehow put their abandoned equipment back into immediate use, this was a PR strike to rally public opinion against parliamentary interference.
I am not a fighter pilot – carrying a rifle and getting yelled at by mean sergeants for eight years was more than enough excitement – but I’d prefer to shoot at targets that don’t shoot back, or drive around in circles making life difficult.
So, absent some secret plan of the Libyan army to somehow put their abandoned equipment back into immediate use,
Could be: it’s easier to repair busted vehicles than to buy new ones. One reason why modern armies like to have control of the battlefield after the battle is so they can repair the shot-up vehicles, wash out the blood and gore, and re-issue.
Comment by Brian Dunbar — April 15, 2011 @ 12:27
Oh, agreed. When I fired the Carl Gustav, it was always easier to hit that stationary tank than if it had been both moving and returning fire. That’s not really at issue.
The point Page is making in the linked article is that the RAF is desperate to deflect attention away from the report being tabled in the Commons, and rushed this video “to market” in order to show that they can, too, hit ground targets with their ultra-spendy Eurofighters. It’d be far more newsworthy if the spiffy new superjets couldn’t hit stationary targets!
Also true, but requires a functioning recovery/repair organization to do this, especially for specialized equipment like MBTs. Even without a rebellion going on, the Libyan forces would be slow to turn around damaged heavy equipment.
Comment by Nicholas — April 15, 2011 @ 13:12