Every Man a Tiger: The Gulf War Air Campaign

by Tom Clancy

  Unfortunately for Saddam’s brilliant strategy, things didn’t work out the way he planned.

  The war started and the air came, but the air did not cease (as Saddam said it would), and the ground forces failed to take the bait. Unexpectedly, the Iraqi Army was being destroyed from the air. They were totally naked to Chuck Horner’s armada and had no clue about how to fight back.

  Saddam had to do something to regain the initiative and resurrect his failing strategy. Otherwise his defeat would be absolute, and his regime might be lost.

  ★ The first such attempt occurred during the mad rush of Iraqi jets to sanctuary in Iran toward the end of January.

  One day, enemy fighters took to the air out of an airfield in eastern Iraq, and AWACS controllers vectored nearby USAF F-15s in CAP orbit toward the fleeing Iraqis. Nothing unusual. But as the air-to-air jets screamed north, a pair of bomb-laden Iraqi Mirage aircraft took off and headed south. Though the AWACS crew spotted this new threat, they could not recall the F-15s, who had their hands full chasing their prey to the north.

  Next in line were two F-14s at a CAP point in the northern part of the Arabian Gulf. Because the F-14s were controlled by a Navy Aegis cruiser that would not release them to AWACS (possibly because the Aegis controller feared leaving the Navy naked to the Iraqi bombers that were headed in their general direction), the AWACS controller was unable to vector these interceptors onto the Mirages.

  Meanwhile, the Mirages were now flying down the coast of Saudi Arabia, approaching the huge oil refinery south of Dhahran. Saddam surely hoped that by bombing the oil fields, he would bring pain to Saudi Arabia, the same way Coalition air was bringing pain to him. For example, the pumping stations in the refineries have huge one-of-a-kind valves that would take years to obtain. If the Mirages had been able to hit the maze of pipes in the refinery, they could have put the refinery out of action for a very long time.

  Unfortunately for the Iraqis, the airborne shield protecting the Saudis was both thicker and tougher than they’d imagined. Waiting next in line to shoot them down were two Royal Saudi Air Force F-15s, USMC Hawk anti-aircraft missile sites, Royal Saudi Air Defense Hawk missile sites, and U.S. Army Patriot missile sites. All of them were closely following AWACS data, and waiting for orders to engage the bandits.

  The first of these was Captain Shamrani, the RSAF flight leader. Shamrani took a single vector from the AWACS controller, selected afterburner, and threw his jet into a hard, descending right-hand turn. This screaming dive ended in a roll-out over the water just off the coast. Now headed south, he quickly spotted the Iraqi Mirages racing desperately toward their target. Then training took over, and he locked onto the Iraqi wingman, selected the middle position on his weapons switch, and listened to the warbling tone of his AIM-9L heat-seeking missile, which told him that the IR seeker in the missile had seen the target and was locked on. In scarcely a second, he identified the Mirage to AWACS and received permission to fire. His voice was excited but clear when he sent “Fox Two, kill” over the radio.

  After easily avoiding the Mirage blowing up ahead of him, Shamrani rolled his jet sharply to the right to line up on the Iraqi leader.

  Seemingly unaware of his wingman’s demise or of the deadly threat behind him, the Iraqi leader drove on toward his target. This time there was no need to identify the target or request clearance to fire. Once he had his missile tone, Shamrani pressed the red button on top of his control stick and hit the toggle switch on the throttle to tell his wingman, AWACS, and anyone else listening in, “Fox Two, kill.”

  Scratch one Iraqi hope.

  But they were not finished yet. Far from it.

  Saddam’s most impressive attempt to regain the initiative and make his strategy work occurred late in January 1991, when he invaded Saudi Arabia.

  His thinking was this: Air was killing him; and Coalition ground forces were surprisingly reluctant to impale themselves on his defenses. So, he thought, I’ll bring the battle to them. If I invade Saudi Arabia, the Coalition will have to counterattack. If that jump-starts the ground war, and the Americans rush into my defenses, then I “win” . . . insofar as American soldiers would die in great numbers. (It should be noted that at that point Gary Luck’s deception operation had lots of radio traffic coming out of an area just south of Al-Khafji, leaving the Iraqis under the impression that the XVIIIth Airborne Corps was poised to attack from there. In fact, the corps was already in transit west to their actual attack locations.) If my invasion succeeds, Saddam continued, then I “win,” because I can attack the Egyptians and Syrians near KKMC. That should inflict chaos on some of the Americans’ Arab lackeys. And who knows where that will lead?

  The downside for Saddam was to continue to be destroyed from the air and certain defeat. His next decision was a no-brainer.

  ★ As a side note: because Saddam’s hopes for his invasion of Saudi Arabia were so resoundingly dashed, several commentators have imagined that the Iraqis could not have been really serious about it—that, in other words, the invasion was not an invasion but a “probe.”

  For their “probe,” they used three divisions, one armor and two mechanized infantry, including their 5th Mechanized division, one of their finest armor units (it was considered just below the Republican Guard).65 Though exact numbers are not available, in all probability these three divisions contained something in the neighborhood of 20,000 troops (and perhaps as many as 40,000), a sizable force.

  Meanwhile, Saddam himself thought the probe—or invasion—was of no small importance. After learning that his troops had entered the town, he announced that the attack was “the beginning and omen of the thundering storm that will blow on the Arabian Desert.”

  Chuck Horner will take up the story from here.

  AL-KHAFJI

  The town of Al-Khafji lies on the coast of the Arabian Gulf in the eastern province of Saudi Arabia, approximately ten kilometers south of the Kuwaiti border on the highway connecting Dhahran and Kuwait City. With no more than ten to fifteen thousand inhabitants, it can’t be called big; nor does it have any real reason for existence other than as home for civil administration and a place to buy supplies. In this respect, it is not unlike many small rural towns in our own desert Southwest. On the north side of town, there is a modest desalinization plant. On the south is a modest oil-storage area. If you want a real oil-storage area, fly over Ras Turnira south of Al-Khafji, where you can see hundreds of giant oil-storage tanks. All in all, this little desert outpost has nothing very spectacular to offer—other than that the most important ground battle of the Gulf War was fought there.

  Though the battle of Al-Khafji started in the late afternoon of 29 January 1991 and ended midday on the thirty-first, the lead-up to the battle started several months earlier.

  Late one night in early August, Prince Khaled, John Yeosock, and I were having a war council. It had been a terrible day of rumors and fears—twenty-seven Iraqi divisions were poised on the border, and we had no means to stop them. Our discussion involved strategies for using the 82d Airborne Division, the Saudi National Guard, and airpower to stem the Iraqi attack, should it occur. During the meeting, Khaled kept making the point that his orders from the King were to make certain that no part—not one inch—of Saudi soil would fall to the invader. That included the town of Al-Khafji.

  Unfortunately, not only was the town well within the range of Iraqi artillery, but we did not have the means to prevent its capture. Fortunately, Khaled sensibly realized that the town was a liability; and it was agreed that it should be evacuated. In that way, we would be able to create the free-fire zone that would allow us to attack the Iraqi invaders with air and artillery without the extensive coordination needed to protect friendly civilians and military. It was a tough decision, for Khaled, in effect, had to reject the guidance he had received.

  He did the right thing, and from that time on, Al-Khafji became little more than a ghost town.

  Not totally, however.

  The town was
located in the area of responsibility of the commander of the Eastern Area Command, Major General Sultan Sultan Adi al-Mutairi. After the evacuation, General Sultan placed screening forces near the town, as well as a small troop in the town itself, to protect property until the crisis was over. He also had a significant force approximately fifty kilometers south of Al-Khafji.

  Most of Sultan’s forces were Royal Saudi Land Force mechanized infantry and Saudi National Guard mechanized forces. Also under his command were mechanized forces from Qatar, and infantry from Oman, the United Arab Republic, Kuwait, Morocco, and Senegal. Rounding out this force was a sizable force of Saudi marines.

  To the west of Sultan was the area of responsibility of Walt Boomer’s United States Marine Corps—two divisions, augmented by a division of British armor (later replaced by the U.S. Army Tiger Brigade).

  Very significantly for what was to come later, in November Boomer had concluded that he could not support offensive operations into Kuwait with the logistics setup created for the defense of Saudi Arabia (though Walt Boomer is a genius, he has to be a little crazy). At any rate, he built his logistics stockpiles just south of the Kuwaiti border, north of his own defenses. In effect, he took a big risk on the supposition that we would be ordered to attack into Kuwait after the first of the year, and the now heavily dug-in Iraqis would not be coming south into Saudi Arabia. He was half right.

  ★ To fully understand the Battle of Khafji, we need to understand that it was not a single battle but four. Let me explain:

  Battle One was the battle for the town itself—the fight the world watched on CNN.

  Battle Two was the skillful and desperate struggle by the U.S. Marines to protect their naked storage depots out in the desert. (As it happened, the Iraqis did not know they were there. If they had, they would likely have put real punch into an attack in that direction, and quite possibly have damaged the allied cause.)

  Battle Three was our air attacks on the Iraqi divisions forming up to attack Khafji. Overhead, Joint STARS watched these movements and directed hundreds of sorties against them: tank-killing A-10s with Mavericks; the AC-130 on the coast highway, killing a vehicle every ten to thirty seconds; B-52s bombing the “Kuwaiti National Forest” (so called by the pilots because in that part of the desert the Kuwaitis had been trying to grow scraggly trees that could live on the brackish water under the sand), where the Iraqis had been forming up—and trying to hide—for the attack; F-16s and F/A-18s dropping cluster bombs on the lead and tail vehicles of convoys so the burning vehicles blocked the road and trapped all the rest of the tanks, trucks, and artillery pieces; AV-8s and AH-1s strafing the Iraqis as they fled back across the border.

  Battle Four was the battle that never happened—the movement of the Iraqis to position for another attack elsewhere, such as down the Wadi al Batin against the Egyptians and Syrians near KKMC. If the Iraqis had succeeded in engaging the Egyptians and/or the Syrians, it would have given us—to put it mildly—major headaches. Because the Iraqis, the Egyptians, and the Syrians often used the same equipment—Russian tanks versus Russian tanks—we would have had a very difficult time deciding which one to kill. And because there were few English-speaking FACs, we would have had a very difficult time sorting out the good guys from the bad guys. The possible results: lots of casualties and Iraqi forces astride the Tapline Road, the single highway connecting the coast and the west. Its possession would have allowed the enemy to prevent movement west of the U.S. VIIth and XVIIIth Corps to their attack positions.

  To make matters more complicated, we were at that point very unsure about how well the Arab forces would fight when the crunch came.

  In the event, the Saudis did extremely well at Khafji, and later during what has been misnamed the Hundred-Hour War. But it was their country and their king. Would the Egyptians and Syrians be similarly motivated? No one knew.

  In hindsight, Battle Four may have been the one Saddam should have put all his chips on (though, in fact, if he’d tried it, he still didn’t have a chance because of the battlefield situational awareness Joint STARS gave us). A dug-in army is tough to kill; an army on the roads is a piece of cake.

  To summarize: Battle Three was the key to winning Battles One and Two, and to never having to fight Battle Four.

  ★ As early as the twenty-fifth of January, we began to see glimmers that told us something was up.

  First, Brigadier General Jack Leide, the CENTCOM J-2, warned of activity by the Iraqi IIId Corps commander, Lieutenant General Salah Abud Mahmud. (We would get to know him better in March, when he showed up at Safwan to surrender the Iraqi Army.)

  About the same time, the Kuwaiti resistance leader, Colonel Ahmed Al-Rahamani, hiding in Kuwait City with a suitcase satellite telephone, phoned the TACC and relayed to the Kuwaiti Air Force duty officer, Colonel Samdan, that some generals were meeting in Kuwait City in an hour.66 Based on the address provided by Colonel Rahamani, Chris Christon used aerial photographs of the neighborhood to pinpoint the meeting’s location. Christon and Buster Glosson immediately examined further evidence provided by CENTCOM, the Kuwaiti resistance, and our own intelligence; and when they were satisfied that this was a valid target, they tasked some of Tom Lennon’s F-111s to pay a call. Soon, four 2,000-pound laser-guided bombs were knocking on the door. A moment later, a massive ball of fire consumed the house and a flock of Mercedes-Benzes parked in the nearby parking lot. I never learned who was at the meeting or what they were planning.

  Then, on the twenty-ninth of January, Chris Christon informed me that several FROG (Free Over Ground Rocket) units had deployed into Kuwait, in his view a tip-off that the Iraqis would attack sometime during the next two weeks. He was the only one I know who even came close to predicting the attack (though he missed the date). That night, Iraqi lead elements entered Al-Khafji.

  Despite the hints, we were surprised.

  Suddenly, thousands of Iraqi soldiers, thinking the night had made them invisible, began to move out of their dug-in defensive positions and mass for the attack.

  Because of all the unforeseeable possibilities, an army in transit is an army ill at ease. Units can take the wrong road and arrive at the wrong place, vehicles can break down and fail to arrive in time to support the attack, weather can turn order into confusion. But never before had an army moving to the attack faced what this army was about to face. Because it was moving, it could be seen on the Joint STARS radar. Because it could be seen, it could be targeted and attacked. And because it was out in the open, jammed on narrow roads without shelter or camouflage, it was going to die. The Iraqi generals trusted that darkness would hide their movement, but the reality of modern technology left them naked to massive doses of death, destruction, and terror from the air. It was any ground commander’s worst nightmare.

  As the convoys started their march south to the Saudi border, Joint STARS picked them up. Within moments A-10, F-16, B-52, AC-130, AV-8, and F/A-18 aircraft were diverted from other targets to attack the moving Iraqi Army, and the battle grew in intensity as more and more tanks, APCs, and trucks took to the highways leading to Al-Khafji.

  Moments later, the large and orderly movement of Iraqi forces into Saudi Arabia had been turned into chaos. A-10s had bottled whole convoys of tanks on roads by killing the lead and the trailing vehicles; they then methodically set each vehicle in between on fire—and lit up two- to five-mile stretches of road like day. As Maverick missiles turned the stalled vehicles into fiery infernos, Iraqi soldiers ran into the desert to save their lives.

  The Iraqi Army had been intent on surprise, and they had achieved it; but surprise did them no good. The ground commander had launched his attack against Saudi Arabia and was preparing to reinforce his attack when he ran up against a menace that was not in his script—hundreds of aircraft dropping thousands of lethal munitions on his forces.

  On the ground, Battles One and Two erupted almost simultaneously.

  To the west of the road to Khafji, the lead elements of the mechani
zed division the Iraqis had placed on their right flank to screen their main attack ran into company-size Marine elements near the huge storage area just south of the Kuwait border. Instantly concluding that the attack was directed at the thousands of tons of food, fuel, ammunitions, and petroleum stored in the open desert, the Marines sent armored personnel carriers, aided by close air support aircraft, against the Iraqi units and beat them back decisively. Though the fighting was fierce (several Marines were killed), it was not sustained, as the Iraqis had no intention of making this (Battle Two) the decisive battle.

  To the east, Battle One got under way when the lead elements of the Iraqi main force (an armored and a mechanized division) entered Al-Khafji.

  The problem faced by the Eastern Area commander, General Sultan, was figuring out how to engage and defeat this unknown-size second battle force (and recall that the Iraqi Army had been often portrayed as battle-tested, hard, and experienced, while his own modest force had never experienced combat).

  Meanwhile, Battle Three had already started when Jim Crigger, on his own hook, started diverting air into Kuwait. Since the Iraqis would move only at night, this battle had to be conducted at night; and since the weather started to close in on the twenty-ninth, our air attacks had to be conducted at low altitude under the clouds rather than at the far-preferred medium altitudes.

  On the ground, close support of EAC forces became the responsibility of the USMC Direct Air Support Center at Walt Boomer’s headquarters, while in the air, the C-130 Airborne Direct Air Support Center command-and-control aircraft was used for this purpose. The TACC flowed or diverted air to the DASC or into Kuwait as fast as it could be targeted. The pace of the air battle was once again dictated by the pace of the tactical air control system’s management of the air.