Every Man a Tiger: The Gulf War Air Campaign

by Tom Clancy

  In the event, “one bomb one target” wasn’t far off the mark. And so the single-track rail line between Baghdad and Basra was cut by destroying bridges at As Samawah, Saquash, and Basra. These bridges were not repaired during the war, and no goods moved by rail.

  But no one had considered the Iraqis’ ingenuity in repairing or bypassing damaged road bridges. (They seemed to have on hand an inexhaustible supply of pontoon bridges.) As a result, nearly 5,000 weapons and 1,000 sorties were needed to close down the Iraqi vehicle-transportation system.

  Yet even before the Iraqi make-dos began to frustrate Chuck Horner’s planners and airmen, Coalition mistakes limited bridge-busting success. F-111Fs, Tornadoes, and F-15Es would easily place a single 2,000-pound LGB on a bridge span, yet the next day photography showed traffic moving over the bridge.

  The problem: bomb fuses had been set to allow the bomb a chance to penetrate fixed structures before exploding. Though this was fine for a hangar or a hardened bunker, it meant that bombs were punching round holes in the roadway and exploding under the span—and scarcely denting the overall bridge structure. The fix was to reduce the delay on the bomb fuse, which let the weapon explode on impact with the road surface.

  Next came the pontoon bridges. A bridge span would be dropped, and the next day the Iraqis would float a pontoon bridge across the waterway. A sortie launched against the new pontoon bridge would destroy or scatter tens of pontoon boats and splinter the roadway they supported, and within hours new pontoons were in place and the crossing was back in business. In some marshy or low-water areas, the Iraqis simply used bulldozers to push dirt into the waterway and bypass busted bridges. When Horner bombed the dirt, they bulldozed more dirt.

  Finally tiring of all this, Coalition planners set up “bridge patrols.” F-16s by day and F-111s and F-15Es at night would fly visual reconnaissance missions along specified river segments, destroying any bridges, bridging materials, or ferryboats that they found.

  Shutting down the Iraqi lines of communication turned into a full-time job, but the Coalition air forces got the job done.

  ★ Once the bridges and ferries had been severed, Coalition aircraft were tasked to attack the vehicles in the resulting jam-up at the closed crossings. This mission initially yielded good results, but in time the Iraqis gave up trying to resupply their army from Baghdad and tried to sneak supplies over the desert from Basra; or else supplies were shifted as best they could manage among units in the KTO. Neither did them any good. During the day, A-10s, F-18s, AV-8s, Jaguars, and F-16s were on the lookout for any movement on the desert, while at night, A-10s with IR Maverick missiles were on watch. And always there was Joint STARS. One Iraqi truck unit reported that out of eighty vehicles, only ten remained after the war; and prisoners told stories of men who refused resupply missions. Air not only choked off supplies into the KTO, it allowed only a trickle of supplies to units deployed throughout the desert.

  The measure of interdiction effectiveness is the effect on throughput measured in metric tons per day (T/D). Chris Christon’s intelligence section estimated prewar Iraqi throughput for rail, highway, and boat at more than 200,000 T/D. By the first week in February, this had been cut in half. At the end of the war, throughput was estimated to be 20,000 tons per day.

  To really understand what this means, one needs to ask what the Iraqi Army of occupation actually needed to sustain itself. That answer depends: if they were on the attack (as they were during the battle of Khafji) or fighting (as they were during the Coalition invasion of the last few days of the war), then they needed substantial quantities of supplies. But if they were simply sitting in the desert doing very little more than moving tanks and artillery around (as they were doing for the five weeks before the ground attack), they needed considerably less. Coalition intelligence estimated that when Iraqi forces in the KTO were engaged in battle, they required a minimum of 45,000 to 50,000 tons per day of supplies, while sustaining the Iraqi Army when it was not fighting required 10,000 to 20,000 tons per day.

  In other words, by the time the ground war began in late February, the Iraqi resupply system could barely meet the subsistence needs of its army—food, water, and medical supplies.

  Air interdiction not only prevented the Iraqis from meeting the needs of their army, it limited their ability to take advantage of the significant amounts of supplies they had deployed to the field before the war began.

  For instance, the air attacks forced the Iraqis to disperse ammunition storage areas throughout the desert. In that way, a single bomb would destroy only a small part of the ammunition stored at an artillery position, but the gunners had to travel long distances to obtain shells. And travel in the desert under the ever-present umbrella of Coalition aircraft was hazardous to the health.

  Supply shortages took other tolls. For example, low-priority infantry units had very little to eat, with some receiving food supplies no more than once every three or four days. When the war came, several units surrendered because they were hungry.

  Perhaps most tellingly, when the Iraqi generals were ordered to travel from Basra to Safwan for the cease-fire talks (a distance of thirty miles), they requested permission to make the trip by helicopter, because the road was impassable.

  ★ Meanwhile, there were losses. Though these were surprisingly few, any loss hurt.

  On the night of 18 January, an A-6 went missing. The crew were never recovered. An A-10 was shot down on the twenty-third of January, and its pilot was captured. Early in the predawn hours of 3 February, an electrical generator failure caused a B-52 from the 430th Bomb Wing to crash into the sea while landing at Diego Garcia. When the pilot activated the wing flaps on his final approach, the electrical demand caused a massive loss of electrical power, which led to the loss of fuel to the engines. Fortunately, three of the crew ejected and were safely rescued.

  TANTRUMS

  Not all Iraqi sallies in the direction of regaining the military initiative took a conventional form, and some were until that time unique—deliberate assaults on the environment of Kuwait and the region. Though calling these actions “military” is stretching the term quite a lot, there may in fact have been some small military utility.

  Was military gain the prime motive for the Iraqi desecration of the environment? Hardly. The motive was pure and simple revenge. “You’re hurting me. I’ll hurt you back. You’re going to undo my theft of Kuwait. Then I’ll turn Kuwait into a wasteland and leave you with nothing there you’d want.” Saddam Hussein made threats like these openly and often. He tried to carry them out.

  On 25 January, the Iraqis opened the pipelines that carried crude oil from the huge storage tanks south of Kuwait City out to tanker terminals just offshore. Thousands of tons of oil were now gushing into the waters of the Arabian Gulf, polluting beaches, killing waterfowl. Since there was some likelihood that the oil would float down the Gulf and eventually clog up the desalinization plants on the east coast of Saudi Arabia, this particular act of environmental terrorism may have given Saddam a small military victory. The Saudis depended on those plants for much of their water. But again, was military gain his aim? Not likely. He was just plain being ornery.

  Moments after oil started spewing into the Gulf, CENTCOM intelligence had located and debriefed the engineers who’d operated the Kuwaiti oil-storage area before the war. From them came estimates of the amounts of oil that could be dumped (a lot!) and suggestions for ending the dumping. It quickly became clear that the situation was more serious than anyone had realized. Already the spill was many times greater than had been released by the Exxon Valdez tanker accident in Alaska. Something had to be done, and soon, and air was the only force available to do it. Chuck Horner immediately had his targeteers working on the problem. The strategy they came up with was straightforward. They would torch off the oil slick and shut down the pipelines the Iraqis had opened.

  Needless to say, the subject came up at General Schwarzkopf’s 1900 meeting. Schwarzkopf asked Horner two qu
estions: “What is required?” and “When can we do it?”

  The plan devised by Buster Glosson’s Black Hole wizards called for USMC AV-8s to drop phosphorus flares into the oil slick and ignite the floating crude oil (the flares were normally used to light up the battlefield at night for close air support). Then F-111s would strike the two valves that controlled the outflow of oil. Their destruction would cause the pipeline to switch into its failsafe position, and various manifold controls would seal it off, making it inoperable. Though the pipeline could be repaired, such repairs were considered beyond the abilities of the Iraqi Army.

  The AV-8 mission was fairly simple, and did not involve significant enemy defenses; but the F-111s were dropping their bombs from medium altitude in daylight, to ensure they could visually find their aim point in an area very well defended by optically aimed guns and heat-seeking missiles. It would not be easy.

  “We can accomplish both missions tomorrow,” Horner told Schwarzkopf.

  “I’ll get back to you,” the CINC replied.

  All the next day, they waited, but no word came out of the CINC’s staff. Torching the slick was itself environmentally risky. Would a sea of fire spread to shore, where tons of black goo had already washed up? Wouldn’t nature’s own—admittedly slow—cleanup process be ultimately better than a big, soot-producing burn? Though Horner doesn’t know this for sure, such questions were doubtless being asked in Washington. The answer: a “go ahead” for the mission to set the slick on fire never came.

  However, early on the afternoon of the twenty-sixth, the “go ahead” came to the TACC for the F-111 strike. The time on target was for three and a half hours later.

  Now the pressure was on Tom Lennon and his Aardvark pilots of the 48th TFW (P). The weapons, GBU-15s, had small wings, which allowed them to glide to their target from some distance away. Their guidance was provided by a radio control signal generated from another F-111 (its WSO received a television picture from a TV camera located in the bomb’s nose). As the bomb flew closer, the ground image grew larger, and the WSO could fine-tune the placement of the crosshairs with a small control stick in his cockpit—all this while the bomb was flying at nearly ten miles a minute, leaving no room for error during the final seconds of flight. Meanwhile, the F-111 pilot would put the aircraft on autopilot, watch the television screen to judge how well his WSO was doing, and hope he didn’t spot antiaircraft fire or missiles. During the final microseconds of the bomb’s flight, the target image would swell to take over the entire screen. Then the screen would grow dark picoseconds before 2,000 pounds of tritonal in the warhead went off. All in all, a very tricky operation requiring a great deal of training, planning, and skill.

  This particular mission involved four F-111Fs fragged to deliver two GBU-15s. The number three and four aircraft carried the bombs, while the number one and two aircraft carried the radio relay pods that received and transmitted the radio signals to and from the bomb.

  As it turned out, when the first bomb was released and the number one WSO began fine-tuning its heading, for some reason his radio relay got interrupted and he lost contact with the bomb. Instantly, he mashed the radio button and called out that he had to abort the drop—but fortunately, the number two WSO had been monitoring the drop and immediately transmitted “I’ve got it,” and proceeded to guide the bomb to the exact place where the first valve was buried.

  Except for the hitch, the mission went as planned—two bombs dropped, two valves destroyed, the oil pipeline shut down . . . and a very happy Norman Schwarzkopf and Chuck Horner.

  ★ We have already mentioned Iraqi fire trenches—ditches dug in the desert and hooked up to existing crude-oil pipelines and pumping stations. When the invasion came, they were to be filled with oil and set on fire.

  Though of all the Iraqi assaults on the environment, this one offered the greatest potential military usefulness, it remained an assault on the environment, or, as Chuck Horner puts it, “I will admit that war is not the place to preach ecological chastity, yet only a criminal or fool goes around pumping crude oil about the landscape.”

  At any rate, fire trenches were part of the extensive defense system near the Saudi-Kuwaiti border. The plan was to force Coalition ground troops to penetrate and be channeled through as many casualty-producing hazards as possible before they engaged the Republican Guard and selected armor units. As they were slowed and channeled, Iraqi heavy artillery was scheduled to make mincemeat of them.

  Though the trenches themselves may have been intended as a surprise, the Coalition’s control of air and space ended that hope, and taking the trenches out of action actually proved to be fairly easy. Sometimes the oil in the ditches could be ignited simply by having Warthogs strafe them. Keeping them from being resupplied with fuel, however, proved to be a little harder. Each set of trenches was fed by buried pipelines from a common pumping station, usually five or so lines to a station. The pumping stations were then connected to a major east-west oil line to the north.

  The pipelines and pumping stations were attacked in mid-February—far enough ahead of “G day” (which was still undetermined) to allow other countermeasures if these attacks failed, but close enough to prevent repair.

  A dozen F-117 aircraft were given the job; and it must have seemed like a milk run next to the missions over Baghdad. Ten of them would hit the fire-trench pumping stations, while the final two would drop the master oil pipeline.

  This mission also went without a hitch.

  As it turned out, the Iraqi Army was so physically and psychologically beat up when the ground war started that their minefields and trench lines proved to be of little value in stopping the Coalition advance.

  The ultimate Iraqi environmental madness, the setting on fire of Kuwait’s oil fields on or about the twenty-third of February, still burns in Chuck Horner’s memory:

  I have never seen anything so senseless, so evil, so offensive to mankind. Picture if you can dense, black, oily, greasy smoke boiling into the air from a thousand fires. The desert sand is awash with black oil topped with violent red and orange flame balls. Bright orange flames spew upward at each wellhead, with ugly rivers of burning oil spilling into low ground and creating lakes that belong in hell. Angry pillars of dense black smoke rise upward until they are caught by the winds aloft—some days at a few hundred feet, other days at thousands of feet—and then driven by the winds for thousands of miles. As you fly over the area, you gaze down on a solid mass of foul-smelling smoke stretching downwind as far as you can see. When you break out under the overcast, you are inside a dark wilderness.

  In Riyadh and Abu Dhabi the sky has a greasy overcast and the air smells of soot. Airplanes flying over Kuwait come back with oily soot all over them, and their canopies have to be cleaned so the pilots can see.

  After the war Kuwait City looked like a biblical wasteland. The concrete block houses were all burned out, with black smoke smudge over every window. Everything else was stained with greasy black soot. White cats were black. White cars were charcoal-colored.

  What can I say, except to condemn the Iraqis who planned and perpetrated this outrage on our planet? How evil can you get?

  Though I’m sure Iraqi citizens who lost loved ones to our bombs have felt similar outrage, to an objective viewer the Iraqi revenge on Kuwait—the Iraqi outrage to the world’s environment—can never be forgotten, and it must not go unpunished. We must find ways to prevent similar despoliation in future armed conflicts.

  12

  A Day in the War

  CHUCK HORNER

  3 February 1991

  0300 I go to bed, extremely tired but feeling good. The war is going well.

  0345 I wake up to Scud sirens going off in Riyadh. I lie there and think, Should I get up, put on chem protection, and go to the shelter in the basement? Well, assuming the Scud is aimed at the RSAF building next door: since it will be coming from the north, and since my bedroom is facing south toward the RSAF headquarters, and since I am on
the top floor, and since the Scud will have a parabolic not a vertical descent, then the Scud is liable to come through my room en route to the RSAF headquarters, and I will be killed. The RSAF headquarters, on the other hand, will suffer little damage, since most of the blast will be confined to my room.

  Better yet, the Patriot at Riyadh Air Base, about half a mile to my north, may hit the missile before it gets to me, which means only debris will hit me.

  About then, I hear the sonic booms of two Patriot missiles taking off to the north, followed by the pop of the intercept.

  Now I am going back to sleep. I always do after Scud alarms. I guess staying in bed is more attractive than making sure I save my life.

  ★ 0415 The phone beside the bed goes off, and I answer, “General Horner, how may I help you?” (Old habits drilled into me at the fraternity house in Iowa City die hard.) BeBe Bell, General Schwarzkopf ’s executive officer, is on the other end.

  “General Schwarzkopf wants to talk to General Yeosock,” he says. Though Yeosock usually sleeps at ARCENT headquarters in Eskan Village south of town, he had a late night at MODA and stopped here for rest.

  “Okay, hold on, I’ll get him,” I answer. “By the way, how are things going?”

  “Don’t ask,” BeBe says.

  So I slide out of bed and go to John’s door about thirty feet away. I knock, open it a crack, and hear snoring. “John, it’s BeBe on the phone. The CINC wants to talk with”—thinking “at”—“you.”

  John wakes up immediately, sits up on the edge of the bed, and says, “Thanks, I’ll take it in the living room.”