Tornado: In the Eye of the Storm

by John Nichol

As a veteran of 500 low-level missions in Vietnam, Vice Admiral Stanley Arthur felt duty-bound to share some hard-won knowledge. From his ship in the Gulf, the Commander of the Seventh Fleet sent a carefully worded message to his senior officers. ‘Gentlemen, far be it for me to dictate specific combat tactics but I must interject my early observations relative to the age-old argument of low altitude delivery versus high with a quick look at what has happened to the multinational 6 air forces to date. One cannot escape the fact that the current AAA environment makes low altitude delivery a non-starter.’ He felt that it couldn’t be successfully achieved without the benefit of surprise, and at that moment, they didn’t have it. ‘We learned a hard lesson in Vietnam relative to AAA,’ he reminded his commanders.