A View from Canberra: F-111 - Paving the way | ADM Feb 2011

A Special Correspondent | Canberra

On December 16, 1980, the government of Malcolm Fraser made a decision crucial to the shape of the current RAAF and that was to acquire the Pave Tack laser target designation system for the F-111 strike bombers.

That created an autonomous all-weather day and night precision strike capability.

The F-111s have now gone (see page 42 for more) but that high technology exists on legacy Hornets and new Rhino aircraft and will exist on Joint Strike Fighters (JSF) and probably every other RAAF strike aircraft from now until the end of time.

It’s now so intrinsic to the RAAF’s ability to deliver high explosives on places and wreck people and their stuff that it’s curious to acknowledge that this is under three decades old.

F-111 finally reached Australia in 1973. After the protracted and difficult delivery, beset by technical problems, delays and cost blowouts, the powers that be perhaps weren’t about to shout too loudly about the shortcomings.

The RAAF took delivery of an aircraft able to deliver a very large quantity of dumb bombs - admittedly at long range and low level - not all that different to what a Lancaster could do in 1943.

Had Australia gone down a particular road, F-111 could have been adapted to deliver an Aussie nuke. In USAF service, the F-111s formed part of the strategic strike force and Australian aircraft came with some of the necessary internal equipment.

Australia closed off the nuclear option with the signing of the non-proliferation treaty in 1970. Labor defence minister Kim Beazley directed the removal of the nuclear equipment from the RAAF aircraft in the 1980s.

Cabinet papers for 1980 - released by the National Archives on January 1 under the 30-year rule - show Fraser and his government decided to acquire Pave Tack plus the necessary aircraft mods at an estimated total cost of $129 million in November 1980 prices. That seems pretty reasonable on today’s project costs. But in 1980, the defence budget was $3.35 billion or just under $12 billion in today’s dollars.

This was all part of a flurry of defence spending prompted by events in Afghanistan, invaded by the Soviet Union in December 1979. That event brought out the Cold War warrior instinct in Malcolm Fraser.

In the media reporting of the 1980 Cabinet papers, much has been made of Fraser’s extraordinary campaign to orchestrate an Australian and global boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympic games.

That was no more than partly successful, with veteran News Limited correspondent Paul Kelly making the pertinent observation that then, as now, the government was far more enthusiastic about things to do with Afghanistan than the Australian public ever was.

Fraser had outlined his plans for a defence build-up in a speech to parliament on February 19, 1980, detailing that weapons and sensors of ships and aircraft would be upgraded, including giving the F-111s an enhanced capability to carry precision guided munitions.

This must have come as happy news to the RAAF which was only too aware that its capabilities were lagging in this area. It had launched various study programs to assess the state of the technology landscape, particularly that giving the F-111s capability to deliver laser-guided munitions.

Without Afghanistan, it’s possible the RAAF would have had to wait a good deal longer. The boost in defence spending - from $2.8 billion in 1979 to just over $5 billion in 1983 according to the very useful Australian Strategic Policy Institute defence almanac - pushed along plenty of defence projects.

In his submission to Cabinet in December, Defence Minister Jim Killen said there had been public criticism of F-111 inability deliver modern weapons.

“Pave Tack will facilitate this and strong community support can be expected,” he said, although noting that criticism of the high cost could also be expected. “Our F-111 strike aircraft have several limitations. They cannot identify targets at stand-off ranges, they can deliver only conventional bombs with relative inaccuracy. The Pave Tack target acquisition, tracking and designation system is designed to overcome these limitations.”

Killen said Pave Tack would enter service by mid-1986. But, he noted, there were some potential issues - the kind which would strike fear into any current day defence project manager - relating to system integration.

The key problem was that pave Tack was digital whereas Australia’s F-111s had analogue systems - requiring a unique and as yet undeveloped analogue-to-digital interface. The US didn’t have this problem as its later F-111F aircraft all had digital avionics.

Killen courageously stated that this could be done at low risk and General Dynamics and the RAAF had started work on configuration of the necessary package. He also told Cabinet that we needed to buy now or pay more later or maybe even miss out as the USAF had placed their last Pave Tack order and once that was fulfilled the production line could close, perhaps never to reopen.

He said 16 aircraft would be modified for Pave Tack but just 10 pods were ordered.

Killen gave Cabinet several options - approve the whole package, wait until there was a better idea of the cost of the prototype avionics or proceed with a limited upgrade that would give F-111 the capability to launch Harpoon in the maritime strike role. He recommended the government go for the whole deal. Perhaps with the vision of the Soviet hordes heading from Afghanistan into the Persian Gulf, Cabinet readily agreed.

It was left to the new Labor government of Bob Hawke, elected in March 1983, to see the project through to the finish. The finished aircraft were officially rolled out in September 1985 in a ceremony presided over by the new minister, still occasionally referred to as “Bomber Beazley”.

Sadly for a whole generation of RAAF pilots, Australia never got to use Pave Tack for real. The USAF did in the 1991 Iraq war, with F-111 pilots discovering their thermal imager showed camouflaged Iraqi tanks clearly on the cold desert nights thanks to the unfortunate habit of the Iraqi crews of leaving the engine idling to keep batteries charged. And so developed the enjoyable (for the aircrew) practice of “tank plinking” through use of a single laser guided bomb per tank.

The F-111 did cause early grief to Labor but that was more to do with ministerial inexperience than to any aircraft shortcoming. That relates to the decision of the then new Labor government to use the RAAF to photograph the site of the controversial Franklin Dam project in Tasmania in order to acquire high quality images for use in a High Court challenge.

In an act of startling impetuosity, then Attorney General Gareth directed a staff member to call up RAAF operations on a weekend and told the duty officer to get on with it. The officer complied and on the afternoon of April 7, a Mirage made several low level passes over the construction site, producing no worthwhile images and leaving not a soul on the ground under any illusion that something odd was up.

The next day an RF-111 did the job right from high level but by then every newspaper in the country was onto the story, as was the opposition. In his memoirs, then defence chief Neville McNamara said this incident highlighted what is now an accepted convention - politicians can’t blithely use defence assets for political purposes.

So why did Evans do it? Labor had been in government less than a month and this appears to have been a fine example of a new and over-confident minister who suddenly discovered he had all this neat kit at his disposal. The opposition christened him “Biggles”, a moniker which occasionally still surfaces.

Labor did eventually succeed in its High Court challenge but the major beneficiary of the whole controversy appears to have been an up and coming environmental activist, Bob Brown.