FOD - with respect, there are two records at issue here.
The first is that of his time as the chap who saw the SHAR into service use and then led his squadron during the Falklands. Although there is a clear element of 'The World According To Sharkey and how he was right about almost everything' in his accounts of this time, the wider record shows that he did a damn good job, to put it mildly (save his apparent stupid bid to compromise Blackbuck 1 by breaking radio silence). While not beyond criticism (who's record is?), this record can't and shouldn't easily be deprecated.
The problem, though, is his second record - what he's done since leaving the RN, particularly in what he's written. As time has gone on, he has produced a variety of think-pieces which contain a mixture of gross factual errors, misrepresentations and distortions. And sadly, as time has gone on, the sense that some/most of these observations are not errors but deliberate reconstruction of the evidence in a bid to smear the RAF. He's gone beyond sharp criticism and into polemic - and worse yet, it's inaccurate polemic.
The reason he gets such bile (which I'm sure he can live with) is because he appears to many - rightly or wrongly - to be entirely content to peddle inaccuracies, half-truths and - I am sorry to say - outright falsehoods in an ongoing bid to denigrate the RAF, and, by implication, those who are members of that service. And he seeks to use his writings to influence policy, and is prepared to do so by spinning in a manner redolent of Mandleson, Campbell and Blair where the truth is what you, the spinner, want it to be, no matter the swathes of evidence to the contrary. Mud sticks, and he is flinging it with the frenzy of a demented orang-utan with ADHD which has just consumed 3 litres of Sunny Delight in a bid to make as much of it as possible adhere.
That is what grates and why he causes such vehment reaction. His distinguished record of 30-odd years ago (and before) cannot give him carte blanche to continue in this disreputable fashion without taking incoming. Inevitably, some of that incoming is going to slip over into personal inective. In fact, many of his arguments, particularly on that egregious think tank site, can be taken apart line by line - but there is so much to deconstruct, playing the man rather than the ball probably seems easier. I wouldn't support that, but I can entirely understand it.
It's no good people weighing in to suggest that Ward is a paragon of precise critiques of the RAF, and whose record as a SHAR pilot should protect him from attack - he lays himself open to this by the way he carries on. But he's a big boy and can take it, and if he can't, then he should start to be more objective and accurate in what he writes, rather than maintaining this rather shabby and near-obsessive assault on the RAF - which does him no credit and which I have on fairly decent authority is doing his former service little good in the corridors of power.