Force Identification Supervisor & Libya '86

 Background

Libya's leader, Qaddafi, an ally of the USSR during the still-unresolved Cold War, aggressively claimed Libyan domain over all of the Gulf of Sidra, violating international law, which set every nation's territorial waters at 12 nautical miles. He also bombed a Berlin disco, killing several U.S. service members. Reagan sent a 3-carrier battle group to the Gulf in response.

Force Identification Supervisor

It didn't take long for me to become the general quarters GQ Identification Supervisor (IDS), so I was the Force Identification Supervisor during combat operations in Libya, the Gulf of Sidra, in the spring of '86 for a 3-carrier battle group. The Admiral ran the show from about 20' away from me. Meanwhile, those 3 carriers and their defending ships sat at the northwest corner of the Gulf, while we were about 2/3rds down into the Gulf, roughly North of Sirte. During this time, I also served as the Positive Identification and Radar Advisory Zone (PIRAZ) Operator, further asserting control over all contacts, including commercial aircraft. (We let commercial aircraft fly during the many weeks we sat on watch in the Gulf.)

The desert's hot, sand-laden air filled the atmosphere above the Gulf, stretching all the way up into Italy. This created a duct where radar and radio signals could bounce off this dense, low ceiling and extend over long distances, bending over the horizon. This made sensors effective over much longer distances, creating a more dangerous combat zone.

The ducting also created mystical holy days when my radiotelephone frequency picked up harmonic bleedthrough* and one could hear both the Catholic church bells of the Vatican and the Islamic call to prayer of Libya intermingling in the background of our military transmissions. The contrast was emphatic.

We Saved an F-14 Pilot

One watch, Qaddafi launched two missiles in our direction. I picked them up immediately, and ID'd them as hostile. They kept climbing in altitude, so they couldn't be surface-to-surface missiles. Nope. They were aiming for the F-14 flying around his Combat Air Patrol station north of us. We called the ship controlling that F-14, but they weren't!

Our two Air Intercept Controllers (AIC)—the guys you would have constantly heard in the ear of every Top Gun fighter pilot if it hadn't been a Hollywood movie—got on AIC radio channels 1 and 20 and worked their way inward, finally finding him on channel 11 to give him the one-word command: "SCRAM!" Meaning: drop out of the sky immediately, which he did. This forced the missiles to burn their remaining fuel, altering their trajectory so steeply that they fell harmlessly into the ocean.

A couple of seconds late on that missile ID could have been catastrophic for that pilot.

F-18s and Corvettes

A few days later, their corvette (very small but fast) boats loaded with surface-to-surface cruise missiles were hunting for us. Our Air Intercept Controllers worked with a couple of F-18 Marine pilots and took them out.

One of the F-18 pilots said he was taking small-arms fire from survivors in the water and requested release of weaponry several times, but the Admiral denied it each time. So, yes, the adrenaline-charged, dogged service member stereotype exists, but so do very rational Admirals asserting rules of engagement that comply with international conventions. Now, if they were shooting, shooting back would have been a legal defense. But as the Admiral could see, they were at our mercy now in the balance of power. He wouldn't expend more weaponry than necessary to neutralize the primary threat.

Bombing Libya

Then, on 15 April, 1986, we coordinated the bombing of the entire Libyan coastline. Libya reported 34 casualties after we had taken out every coastal missile station and every radar, fire control, and electronic warfare site. 34 was probably the smallest believable number Libya dared come up with. But they're the only source of casualty reporting, naturally. Not that I don't like the idea of keeping the number as small as possible. I just know this number insults their uncounted service members who died for their country.

Other Events

We lost an FB-111 Air Force bomber. We all listened to the pilot's cool, calm voice over the radio: "Sorry, guys, just can't make it." They went down "feet wet", lost at sea.

Our sister ship, USS Yorktown (CG-48), took out a Corvette up by the carriers with a cruise missile, which made headlines stateside, but which I'm highly skeptical of and cannot explain without using classified information.

I always express it as, "Technically, I'm a combat vet."

For our combat operations, we were awarded the Armed Forces Expeditionary and Navy Expeditionary combat medals, which would also qualify us for membership in the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) and the American Legion—not that I ever have registered with either group. I enlisted, yes, but I'm not normally much of a group joiner. And the men of our "War on Terror," namely Iraq and Iran—now, they've seen combat, or guys serving on ships involved in Hormuz or the Red Sea this last year (2026)— they've shot how many missiles and drones down?

The truth of the matter is that I've never been in a bloody trench fighting with bayonets and bullets, yet one misstep by an IDS and you could get 360 of your shipmates killed, or 268 civilians in an Airbus misidentified and killed, as happened with our sister ship, USS Vincennes (CG-50). [Disclaimer: Had they listened to their IDS, Petty Officer Anderson, whom I'd previously served with on the Tico, the incident never would have happened.]

Also, I'm a little jealous of today's Operations Specialists because they get to control drones, not just plan missions for them.

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* "Harmonic bleedthrough occurs when a radio transmitter unintentionally radiates radio frequency (RF) energy at harmonics—integer multiples—of its intended operating frequency (the fundamental)."