Every Man a Tiger: The Gulf War Air Campaign

by Tom Clancy

  ★ Meanwhile, the failure to rescue Eberly and Griffith did not improve the already strained relations between aircrews and the Special Operations force units tasked to rescue them. The memory still burned after the war, as is evident from this comment about the Griffith and Eberly tale from a 4th Wing F-15E pilot: “Our DO and his backseater were on the ground for three and one-half days in western Iraq. Nobody’d go in and pick them up, and they eventually became prisoners of war. Before the war, the Special Operations guys came down to talk to us. ‘No sweat,’ they said, ‘we’ll come get you anywhere you are.’ That, from my perspective, was a big lie. After my guys were on the ground for three and one-half days, and they didn’t go pick them up, we basically decided that if anybody went down, they were on their own. Nobody was going to come and get you.”

  Chuck Horner concludes:

  The combat search-and-rescue mission involves lots of heartbreaking decisions. In Vietnam, we tried so hard to rescue all downed pilots that on some occasions we lost more aircraft and aircrews than were saved. CSAR is not a no-risk situation. It requires rescue crews that take risks that are far beyond those normally expected in combat operations. Sometimes you have bad luck, as was the case when a U.S. Army helicopter carrying Major (Dr.) Rhonda Cornum was shot down during an attempted battlefield rescue of a downed A-10 pilot, killing three crew members and leading to the capture of the survivors. Sometimes you have good luck, as was the case with Devon Jones.

  The good luck, I hardly have to say, is not the product of luck. It comes from trained aircrews keeping their cool and evading capture. And it takes commanders who are hard-hearted enough to leave a downed airman to the mercies of the enemy when it is likely that more men and women will be killed or captured.

  In Desert Storm, there was a failure to fully coordinate these aspects of the CSAR mission. While there were at times brilliant rescues, the aircrews were far from confident in the system. The next Chuck Horner to fight an air war had better pay close attention to the way he (or she) organizes and controls the employment of his or her combat search-and-rescue efforts.

  11

  Punch and Counterpunch

  AT this point, the focus began to shift from pure air superiority, but it is important to repeat this fundamental: airpower is not discrete, it flows. While it is useful to talk about the discrete elements of airpower (such as gaining control of the air, battlefield interdiction, or preparing the battlefield—that is, limiting the enemy’s ability to harm friendly forces), such talk has limits. One element does not stop and another one start. There may be greater or lesser intensity directed toward one or the other of them, but during any slice of time, all will be working.

  In Desert Storm, once air superiority was assured, greater attention was given to battlefield interdiction and to preparing the battlefield—but all the while, air superiority was never ignored.

  ★ Battlefield interdiction—isolating the battlefield—is a classic role of airpower, and was a natural goal for General Schwarzkopf to set for Chuck Horner.

  In the case of Desert Storm, battlefield interdiction meant preventing the resupply of Iraqi forces in occupied Kuwait and southern Iraq. If the enemy was denied access to resupplies of food, water, gasoline, ammunition, and medical supplies, in time he would be rendered helpless. The length of time this form of interdiction warfare took to become effective was the big question.

  Answering it depended on the answers to many other questions. How well is the enemy supplied when combat begins? What is the tempo of combat and the demands that tempo will make on his store of supplies? How effective is aerial interdiction on resupply throughput? And so on. During the war in Vietnam, efforts to isolate the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese regular army in South Vietnam failed, both because of the inefficient use of airpower and because of the crude, yet determined, supply system of North Vietnamese forces.

  That failure was not repeated in the Gulf conflict.

  In order to attain classic battlefield interdiction, General Schwarzkopf expected Chuck Horner to bomb the bridges on the roads and railroads running from Baghdad to Basra and on to Kuwait City. Trucks and military convoys (and indeed any likely vehicles) were to be targeted by fighter-bombers patrolling the desert south of the Iraqi capital. Iraqi aircraft would not be allowed to fly; and whenever they attempted to, they would be discovered by AWACS radar and immediately attacked by Coalition fighter pilots.

  However, because of the limitations of classic battlefield interdiction, American planners began to look at new—and potentially quicker—ways to isolate the battlefield. They came to ask: “Can we paralyze the enemy by isolating his fielded forces from their sources of information and from their command and control?” In other words, “Can we practice information warfare against the Iraqi army of occupation?”

  In the Iraqi dictatorship, with its fears, suspicions, and terrors, independence of thought or action is instantly uprooted and punished. A military commander who shows independence, no matter how successful, becomes a threat to Saddam Hussein and his few close advisers. Success itself is a threat, since it encourages independence and popularity. Thus, battle plans are scripted with the oversight and approval of Saddam, and deviation from the script is not allowed.

  This raised a question in the minds of the air planners: “What if we can isolate the Iraqi ground forces from their supreme leader in Baghdad? Would they become paralyzed? Would the deployed forces in the field freeze in place, awaiting capture, rather than maneuver about the battlefield and oppose Coalition liberation forces?”

  Because modern military command and control is accomplished primarily via electronic media—telephones, radios, and computer networks, connected by satellite, microwave nets, telephone lines, and high-data-rate fiber-optic cables—Horner’s planners targeted the connecting links. Thus, Coalition bombers attacked telephone exchange buildings, satellite ground stations, bridges carrying fiber-optic and wire bundles, and cables buried in the desert. Even had there been ASAT missiles available, individual satellites would not have been targeted, since both sides in the conflict used the same satellites.

  To stop the radio and television broadcasts that connected Saddam with his army and his people, transmission towers were bombed, but this effort was only partially successful. The problem was in stopping low-powered radio broadcasts emanating from more or less primitive stations scattered throughout the countryside.

  Interestingly, the Iraqis themselves put very tight limits on their own radio transmissions, in the apparent belief that the Americans would either listen in on them or target the radio emitter locations. Though this successfully denied intelligence to the Coalition, it also put a chokehold on command and control of their deployed forces.

  A telling consequence of the information war (as reported after the war by Iraqi POWs) proved to be the inability of Iraqi headquarters in Baghdad to provide intelligence to the Iraqi Army leadership in the field about Coalition ground force deployments and maneuvers.

  It is hard to tell whether this incapacity was a Coalition success or an Iraqi failure. . . . A similar answer, it turns out, has to be given to the larger question: How successful was the air campaign in denying Iraqi command and control of their forces? There’s just no way to know for sure.

  For starters, no one has any idea how much Saddam even conferred with his generals, yet he was certainly able to convey to his Third Corps commander enough command information to initiate the invasion of Saudi Arabia in late January 1991 (the Battle of Khafji). Even so, the Coalition information and command-and-control advantage (thanks in large measure to the targeting of airpower by the Joint STARS aircraft) allowed a single brigade under the command of Khaled Bin Sultan to rout three Iraqi divisions.

  The Iraqi failure at Al-Khafji raises larger questions for Chuck Horner:

  Did we really want Saddam isolated from the battle? Given his lack of military experience, poor judgment, and micromanaging leadership style, perhaps we should have facilitate
d his presence on the battlefield in every way possible. Of course, that’s not the American way. We like to see others the way we look at ourselves, so cutting Saddam off from his forces in the field seemed the proper thing to do.

  But this was not our worst mistake. That mistake was never asking ourselves “So what?” That is, we had no very good ideas about what to do after we’ d succeeded in cutting Saddam off from his forces in the field. Therefore, we continued to plan and conduct a ground campaign that did not fully exploit the success we’d achieved in denying the enemy the capacity to command his forces.

  Thus, our fear of Iraqi reconnaissance aircraft caused us to delay moving the U.S. corps into their jump-off positions for the ground war until after the air war began. This caution proved unnecessary, and ignoring it could have speeded up our attack and made the war more efficient. Far more telling, however: when the battle for Al-Khafji made it apparent how thoroughly airpower could destroy Iraqi forces in the attack, why didn’t the Coalition leaders alter their ground campaign plans? And, for that matter, why didn’t the Iraqis alter their strategy after their ground forces proved to be helpless in the face of the aerial onslaught?

  Though I cannot answer for the Coalition leadership, the Iraqis in February did in fact alter their strategy: they sought to end the war, offering to withdraw from Kuwait and renounce their claims to sovereignty there. (Their offer, of course, proved to be too little and too late.)

  Meanwhile, the campaign to prevent the resupply of logistics to the battlefield proved to be very effective. The Iraqi Army had serious problems providing units in the field with sufficient food and water. On the other hand, efforts to deny resupply of ammunition had little or no impact, as the defeated army surrendered before expending large amounts of ammunition. The joke was, “Come to Kuwait if you want to buy an AK-47. They are like new, shot once, and dropped once.” In this war, we stopped ammunition from reaching the soldiers, but they had all they needed. After enduring six weeks of aerial bombardment, their strongest motive was surrender, not dying for Saddam.

  In other words, perhaps our information-warfare attacks proved far more effective than Coalition leaders realized. And perhaps the Iraqi Army failed to maneuver in the face of our ground onslaught because our campaign to deny them intelligence had a far greater impact than we comprehended at the time. Certainly, despite our apparent success with the more traditional means to isolate the battlefield, we need to study this new form of warfare in far more detail to determine which works best—the classical or the new method of interdiction . . . or both together.

  Isolating the battlefield, as General Schwarzkopf conceived it, had one other—perhaps surprising—goal. Not only did he intend to prevent food, ammunition, water, communications, or reinforcements from reaching the enemy; he also intended to prevent the Iraqi Army occupying Kuwait from getting out. Or, in the words of Colin Powell, “We are going to cut off the head of the snake, and then we are going to kill it.”

  On the whole, airpower succeeded in that aim . . . at least in the open country, where roads and bridges were exposed. Airpower so successfully dropped the bridges across the rivers of southern Iraq that, years after the war, it was difficult to travel by car to the countryside. Where airpower did not succeed was in preventing the Iraqis from hiding many of their tanks and armored personnel carriers in the cities of southern Iraq. The only way to hit these from the air would have exposed the populations of the cities to widespread aerial attacks, and the Americans and their Coalition partners were not willing to do that. Attacking the cities from the ground was, of course, another option, but few Coalition leaders were eager to take that step when their stated goal was to eject the Iraqis from Kuwait.

  KILLING TANKS AND ARTILLERY

  From one point of view, battlefield interdiction is an accessory to battlefield preparation. Putting a wall between an enemy and his sources of sustenance and information obviously seriously restricts his ability to inflict harm on friendly ground forces. Though a number of other elements also fall under the overall rubric of preparing the battlefield, only one of these truly mattered to General Schwarzkopf: “Kill the tanks and artillery.” His reasons for this were simple, and doctrinally correct: tanks and artillery were the Iraqis’ likely means to inflict harm on friendly ground forces.

  It was for this reason that plans called for half of the enemy tanks and artillery pieces to be destroyed by airpower before Coalition soldiers and marines crossed into Kuwait and Iraq. From the opening moments of the war, the Air Tasking Order called for strikes against the Iraqi Army in the KTO.

  In the west, in front of VIIth Corps, the killing effort was more or less equally divided between tanks and artillery, with perhaps a slight tilt in the direction of the modern T-72 tanks of the Republican Guard. In the east, on the other hand, Walt Boomer wanted emphasis placed on Iraqi artillery. Once the ground war started, he believed he could handle the tanks he would be facing (which were for the most part obsolete), but the artillery would cause problems, especially when he was passing his force through the extensive minefields that lay ahead of him.

  Despite the priority of this mission in the mind of the CINC, killing Iraqi tanks and artillery got off to a slow start. In the early moments of the war, when most aircraft were directed to gaining control of the air, only a few sorties were available for tasking against KTO-based targets, and bad weather made it difficult for KTO-bound pilots to find Iraqi tanks and artillery without unnecessarily exposing their aircraft to enemy AAA and shoulder-fired SAMS. Worse, pilots had difficulty hitting their targets when they found them, since they were not used to initiating attacks at 10,000 feet or above. At those altitudes, strong winds often made a pilot’s roll-in unpredictable; it was a struggle to place his aircraft at the right position and speed for the weapons release.

  Combat was proving a far cry from the shine-your-ass gunnery meets we had held in the United States, where the pilots were not being shot at, where they had been briefed on the winds affecting their bombing passes, where they were flying on familiar training ranges against familiar targets, and where they could press their attacks so close to the target that there was little opportunity for a bent fin or maladjusted release rack to make a bomb errant. In the meets, you expected the bombs to go inside the open turrets of the tanks; in Iraq you could hardly see where the tanks might be on the desert floor below.

  Worst of all, after battling the weather, dodging enemy AAA fire, and straining to find their targets, attacking aircrews were often sent to the wrong place. Because target coordinates were derived from overhead photography that was hours and days old by the time it was received in Riyadh, all too often planes were sent out to kill tanks and artillery in locations the enemy had long since left. Though there were several efforts to speed the information flow, none of these really worked.

  The solution, as we’ve already seen, was Killer Scouts—F-16s orbiting thirty-by-thirty-mile sectors of the battlefield and searching for dug-in tanks and artillery. When they found them, they’d direct the oncoming streams of fighter-bombers to their targets.

  ★ A second addition to tank- and artillery-killing efficiency occurred in late January. By then, control of the air had been assured and the fixed targets in Iraq had been (for the most part) hit, thus allowing more and more F-111F and F-15E64 sorties to be tasked against Iraqi Army targets. The tank-plinking tactics developed in the Night Camel exercises were now put to the test in the real world. The results were remarkable. On February 11, aircrews claimed 96 armored vehicles—tanks, APCs, and artillery; 22 of these were killed by “plinkers.” On the twelfth, film showed 155 killed; of these 93 were plinked by laser-guided 500-pound bombs. On the fourteenth, 214 were killed, and of these, 129 were “plinked.” The totals grew daily (except for those days when bad weather shrouded the battlefield).

  Dollar for dollar, this was the way to kill tanks. If a single F-111F carried eight 500-pound laser-guided bombs at $3,000 each, then for less than $50,000 (which
included most of the other costs of a sortie) eight tanks could be destroyed. In the U.S. Army, each tank costs in the neighborhood of $1,000,000. The Russian tanks used by the Iraqi Army cost about half that. So less than $50,000 worth of air offense killed over one hundred times as much ground offense.

  COUNTERPUNCH

  Not much has been said in favor of Saddam Hussein as a strategist, yet in fact his original strategy for the Gulf War was simple yet brilliant—at least on the face of it. The Iraqi dictator had paid close attention to the lessons of Vietnam. If the United States can lose a war once, he reasoned, they can lose a war twice, and he nominated Iraq for the honor of inflicting that loss. “What led to the defeat?” he asked himself. Casualties on the battlefield produced discontent on the home front. Battlefield carnage translated into television images that so horrified the folks back home that the President of the United States was driven from office, and the Americans left the field of battle undefeated, yet beaten.

  With all that in mind, Saddam planned for enduring a short air campaign and a fierce land battle. His troops constructed formidable defensive positions, with minefields, fire trenches, and presurveyed fields of fire for his artillery. When the war came to Kuwait and southern Iraq, perhaps his poorly trained infantry divisions would die in staggering numbers; but in doing so, they would inflict thousands of casualties and deaths on the Americans. Once the Coalition forces had been weakened, they could then be defeated or brutalized by his heavy armor and Republican Guard divisions. And even if all these plans failed and he did not win on the battlefield, the television coverage of the bloodshed would ensure his victory in the streets of Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, and Washington.