The Unseen War

by Lambeth, Benjamin S.

  A more effective air power performance associated with the fighting near An Najaf occurred when orbiting UAVs and an E-8 JSTARS detected a formation of Iraqi T-72 tanks and other vehicles moving into position to attack U.S. forces. A well-aimed barrage of JDAMs delivered by fixed-wing aircraft destroyed some thirty of the armored vehicles and broke up the formation before it could get under way.173 At this point in the land offensive, the forward line of allied troops had moved so far northward into Iraq that single-cycle carrier operations from the North Arabian Gulf (see below) could no longer reach the fight without refueling, prompting the Navy to press a number of tanker-configured F/A-18E/F Super Hornets into an organic tanking role. Concurrently, CENTAF moved two tanker tracks into Iraqi airspace, declared the captured Jalibah airfield operational for allied forces, and began kill-box operations in the land component’s battlespace as approved transit of Turkish airspace by allied tankers and strike fighters finally began to ramp up.174 “Throughout it all,” the most thorough reconstruction of the Army’s performance in the campaign noted, CENTCOM’s air component “continued to degrade the regime’s ability to command and control its forces and provided exceptional CAS to the coalition ground forces in contact. Coalition air forces roamed the skies over Iraq at will, providing CAS, interdicting enemy forces, and striking strategic targets across all of Iraq. Coalition ground forces maneuvered with impunity, knowing that the coalition determined what flew. Coalition air attacks were responsive, accurate, and precise.”175

  The forces of nature came to the forefront on March 24 when a massive sandstorm, or shamal (derived from the Arabic word for “north”), slowed the northward pace of allied ground units, which had advanced beyond An Najaf and had begun to encounter increased resistance. It was not, as General Renuart remarked at the time, “a terribly comfortable day on the battlefield.”176 The sudden storm was triggered by the passage of a strong, synoptically driven cold front through CENTCOM’s area of operations. Such storms, which typically last three to five days, are common in Southwest Asia during the winter, spring, and summer months and represent the most hazardous weather condition associated with the region. They can stir up tremendous amounts of dust as they sweep across the Arabian Peninsula, Iraq, and Kuwait, often resulting in surface winds of greater than fifty knots and producing ten- to thirteen-foot sea swells throughout the North Arabian Gulf. The strongest storms can reduce visibilities to zero within hours, as occurred in this case.

  Fortunately, CENTAF’s weather experts predicted this shamal some five days before its onset, after a pass by a NOAA-17 polar orbiting satellite showed indications of surface winds activating the dust-source regions in northern Saudi Arabia. The commander of the 28th Operational Weather Squadron, the main Air Force entity responsible for Middle East weather forecasting, later remarked, “It’s one thing to say there’s going to be a big storm, but another thing to say where and when [and if] it’s going to be sand or a thunderstorm and where there’ll be cloud cover and rain. We hit this one pretty darn well.”177 That forecast gave mission planners in the CAOC ample time to front-load ATOs scheduled for execution during the sandstorm’s estimated course with an extra allotment of sorties, as well as to make appropriate changes to previously planned weapons loads in favor of GPS-aided munitions over LGBs, which were more likely to be adversely affected by the sandstorm. By March 24, with the predicted storm rapidly approaching, CAOC weaponeers began calling for JDAM-only loadouts in an effort to minimize the anticipated effects of the upcoming storm on overall mission effectiveness.178

  The sandstorm effectively grounded Army and Marine Corps attack helicopters, rendering fixed-wing aircraft the only platforms that could deliver needed direct and indirect fire support to allied ground troops who were sometimes surrounded by enemy troops in close proximity. One unit of the U.S. Army’s 3rd ID was trapped for two days on the enemy side of the Euphrates River, surrounded by Iraqi forces who were equally blinded by the storm. The Air Force JTAC attached to the unit called in hundreds of JDAM strikes all around the unit, killing Iraqi troops on all sides.

  A postcampaign assessment from the Army’s perspective praised the air component’s contribution to the joint and combined battle:

  Although hampered by severe sandstorms, coalition aircraft continued to attack air defense, command and control, and intelligence facilities in the Baghdad area. Coalition aircraft continued to achieve high sortie rates despite the weather. The focus of strike missions began to shift to the Republican Guard divisions in the vicinity of Baghdad. Control of the air allowed the employment of slow-moving intelligence-gathering aircraft such as the E-8C . . . and the RC-135 Rivet Joint. . . . The majority of the effort was against discrete targets designed to achieve specific effects against the regime, to interdict enemy movement, or in close support of ground forces. Even during the sandstorm, surveillance aircraft continued to provide data that enabled the coalition to target Iraqi units over an area of several hundred square miles during weather the Iraqis thought would shield them from air attack. . . . Coalition air forces operated against strategic, operational, and tactical targets, demonstrating both the efficacy and flexibility of air power.179

  Lieutenant Colonel Carlton, again leading a two-ship element of F-16CJs, launched from Prince Sultan Air Base into the teeth of the storm. Having been told that there were no suitable alternate landing fields in the entire theater, Carlton and his wingman headed for a tanker. “We made our way to the tanker, passing through a thunderstorm. . . . When we got to the tanker tracks, there should have been about 25 to choose from, but there were only three or four that had made it out there in the weather. I found my tanker on the radar and then broke out of the weather about two miles in trail. As we got our gas, I looked north and there was a wall of cloud as far as the eye could see from west to east, going up to 36,000 feet.”180 At that point Carlton heard a request for help over Guard channel: “Anybody with JDAM contact me on this frequency.” The request for emergency air support had come from the U.S. Army’s 3rd Squadron 7th Cavalry (3-7 Cav), which was hunkered down just south of An Najaf waiting out the shamal. Carlton described the reported situation on the ground: “The Iraqi Fedayeen are starting to suicide-bomb them with cars and are shooting at them. They’ve got a couple of ground FACs with them, and they can’t see more than 10 to 15 meters at best, and there are no [other remaining] air-to-ground guys nearby to help them out because they’ve gone.”181 While Carlton and his wingman made their way toward An Najaf as fast as they could without using full afterburner, the Air Force JTAC (call sign Vance 47) supporting the embattled Army unit directed his TACP team to determine the perimeter of the friendly troops on the ground.

  “We got there and start talking to Vance 47,” Carlton said, “and we worked out our coordination to drop. One of my WCMDs failed, and I didn’t drop it because the problem was with the guidance system, but the other one went straight through the weather and hit the target. . . . The feedback from the ground was very direct. They [the TACP operators supporting the Army unit] immediately came up on the radio and told us that they were no longer being shot at.”182

  Although the combination of the sandstorm and the concurrent (and completely unexpected) harassment efforts by the Ba’ath regime’s paramilitary Fedayeen Saddam brought the allied ground advance to a temporary halt, neither of those fleeting impediments materially affected the tempo or intensity of allied air operations.183 A series of smaller-unit allied ground attacks and feints allowed very effective air strikes against Iraqi ground forces. However, CENTCOM’s initial hope of persuading large elements of the Iraqi armed forces to surrender at the outset rather than fight proved ill founded. The morale of Iraq’s combatants appeared better than anticipated, and paramilitary forces of the Fedayeen Saddam and Special Security Organization fought tenaciously.184

  Fedayeen Saddam documents seized and exploited by JFCOM after the regime collapsed on April 9 explained the tenacity of these typically dismounted, exposed, and ligh
tly armed paramilitary combatants. The documents declared that the organization’s main mission was to protect Iraq “from any threats inside and outside.” In 1998 the organization’s secretariat had promulgated “regulations for an execution order against the commanders of the various Fedayeen” should they fail in that duty: any section commander would be executed if his section was defeated, any platoon commander would be executed if two of his sections were defeated, any company commander would be executed if two of his platoons were defeated, any regiment commander would be executed if two of his companies were defeated, and any area commander would be executed if his governate was defeated. JFCOM’s subsequent assessment remarked, “No wonder that the Fedayeen Saddam often proved the most fanatical fighters among the various Iraqi forces during Operation Iraqi Freedom,” even though they were “totally unprepared for the kind of war they were asked to fight, dying by the thousands.”185

  The defending Iraqi ground units had been positioned and dispersed to allow for the greatest possible survival against air attack. Once directly threatened by the advancing allied forces, however, they were forced to move into more concentrated defensive positions, thereby rendering themselves more vulnerable to attack from the air.186 As columns of Republican Guard vehicles attempted to move under what their commanders wrongly presumed would be the protective cover of the shamal, allied air strikes disabled a convoy of several hundred vehicles that were believed to be ferrying troops of the Medina Division toward forward elements of the 3rd ID encamped near Karbala, about fifty miles south of Baghdad. Air Force and Navy aircrews mainly used satellite-aided JDAMs for these attacks because LGBs, while still usable, did not perform quite as well in reduced-visibility weather conditions.187 Although the JDAMs were unusable against moving vehicles, they were precisely what was needed when delivered through the weather against fixed targets with known coordinates. Recalling this experience, General Leaf later spoke of “our pause that wasn’t a pause,” since the air component never slackened its high tempo of operations throughout the shamal. General Moseley also later noted that 650–700 strike sorties had been directed against the Republican Guard over the three-day course of the shamal. Both he and General McKiernan agreed that allied air attacks against fixed leadership targets should be matched by concurrent attacks against the Medina and Hammurabi Divisions of the Republican Guard, which were expected to present the greatest threat to advancing allied ground forces.188

  A CAOC planner said that when the shamal made classic CAS unworkable, “we went straight to the battlefield coordination detachment [the Army representatives in the CAOC] and said, ‘Give us all the targets you want to hit in the next few days,’ and they handed over 3,000 [target aim points]. They were the coordinates of every known revetment, every defensive area, every ammo storage dump. We didn’t have any imagery to validate them by, so we just grabbed the Global Hawk [UAV] liaison community and sent them all 3,000 DMPIs [desired mean points of impact]. We said ‘image these.’ This broke all the rules regarding tasking of ISR, but it worked.”189 Other synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging for what CAOC planners called the “smackdown” effort against Iraqi ground forces included JSTARS, U-2s, and various satellites on orbit, as the single Global Hawk dedicated to the campaign remained airborne for twenty-six-hour sorties every other day, imaging 200 to 300 objects of interest to CAOC targeteers per sortie. With the coalition’s ground advance virtually at a halt and the location of all friendly forces well known and confirmed via Blue Force Tracker, mission planners did not require fine-grained situation awareness.190 “All they needed to know,” Knights wrote, “was whether a revetment or a tactical assembly area was empty or full. Anything that resembled a threat was going to get bombed.”191 As the battle for Baghdad took shape, what Knights called “a synergistic combination of ground- and air-combat power . . . shared the battlespace as never before.”192

  Although CENTCOM’s most senior commanders insisted that there was never a real “pause” during the shamal, because heavy air attacks continued, the commander of I MEF’s 1st Marine Division, Maj. Gen. James Mattis, stressed that his Marines had been told to hold their offensive toward Baghdad just as they were becoming vulnerable to an Iraqi counterattack. “I didn’t want the pause,” Mattis said. “Nothing was holding us up. The toughest order I had to give [throughout] the whole campaign was to call back the assault units when the pause happened.” Mattis added that Lieutenant General Conway, the commander of I MEF, and Maj. Gen. Buford Blount, the commander of the Army 3rd ID, had shared his desire to continue pressing the ground advance.193

  General Leaf, the head of the ACCE at General McKiernan’s headquarters, insisted that

  the pace of the defeat of the Iraqi armed forces . . . accelerated—it didn’t slow. That didn’t mean that the pace of advance didn’t slow. But in that environment, the pace of destruction of Iraqi fielded forces accelerated. They were moving to contact, they moved to contact, they got killed. It was that simple. . . . If you can find an Iraqi field commander who says he thinks he got a break for a couple of days, I’d like to meet that guy. . . . An example of this supposed pause, one troop from 3-7 Cav was surrounded at night in a dust storm. . . . At the end of the engagement, the Iraqi force and a reinforcing element were destroyed with, I think, about 150 prisoners from the reinforcing element that surrendered before ever making contact because of a B-52 strike. And the particular troop, Charlie 3-7 Cav, suffered zero wounded, zero killed. That’s when everybody thought things were grinding to a halt. As I said, the Iraqis were being ground up.194

  TSgt. Michael Keehan, an Air Force JTAC assigned to a team of controllers from the 15th Expeditionary Air Support Operations Squadron, offered a riveting recollection of how things looked from the ground as the Army’s 7th Cavalry Regiment was moving toward Baghdad during the battle of As Samawah, just as the three-day shamal had begun to develop. The regiment was crossing the Euphrates River at about 2230, well after nightfall.

  Both sides of the road were taking fire. I had two A-10s overhead and used my IR [infrared] pointer to get their eyes on the target east of us. They strafed the entire area with 30 mm, which illuminated the area with brilliant white light. Enemy activity ceased to exist. Then I worked the west side of the road with eight 500-lb bombs and white phosphorous rockets. We were about 700 meters away when the bombs hit, and everyone felt the shock waves in their bodies. I think that last strike, so near the convoy, brought us new-found respect. I think the Army hadn’t any idea of what we do. This display of sheer brute power was proof.195

  At about 0100 or 0200, after crossing the river, Keehan’s unit ran into another ambush—the third within eight hours.

  I had called the ASOC and told them of our situation and to keep sending us aircraft. I had two A-10s overhead in a matter of minutes with a full load of eight 500-lb bombs, full guns and rockets—standard load. The enemy positions hit us from both sides of the road [with] small arms and mortars. Most of the left-flank enemy positions were neutralized by Bradley [armored fighting vehicle] fire, so I concentrated CAS on the right side of the road near a long line of palm trees that lined the adjacent river. . . . I had the aircraft first strafe the area along the riverbank, making sure they had the right area that I was illuminating with my IR pointer. . . . The winds were picking up off to the northwest, the first telltale sign of a sandstorm brewing. . . . We were down to 50 feet or less of visibility. We still had to take the bridge near An Najaf, the bridge across the Euphrates River. We would be the first unit to cross it, the first unit right of the river.196

  As they neared the bridge, “Staff Sergeant Schrop [Michael Shropshire] took over the controlling, as he was closer to the bridge and could better coordinate the friendly posture as we laid down steel close to their positions. . . . We both worked all night over maps and tons of coordinates. I believe by this time we were in almost catatonic states of mind. How long had we been up now? Who knows? That night, Staff Sergeant Shropshire controlled more missions, and
we made sure no friendlies were harmed. That was the main thing.”197 During that engagement Sergeant Keehan called in a dozen 2,000-pound JDAMs, another dozen 1,000-pound JDAMs, 2 500-pound JDAMs, and 1,200 rounds of 30-mm A-10 cannon fire. He also got 4 personal kills with his .50-caliber machine gun and M4 carbine. The repeated CAS attacks that he and Sergeant Shropshire called in destroyed some 30 Iraqi tanks and killed more than 100 enemy troops. In the midst of these events, a feint by other elements of the 3rd ID forced the opposing Iraqi Medina Division to begin repositioning its forces in an effort to block the American advance between the Tigris and Euphrates. After an E-8 JSTARS detected the ensuing movement of enemy armor and artillery on transporter trucks with its SAR and GMTI radars through the dust storm, CENTAF’s now-alerted air component began, in General Wallace’s words, “whacking the hell out of the Medina [Division].”198

  During the combined-arms battle at Objective Montgomery, closer to Baghdad, the shamal hit Sergeant Keehan’s unit with full force.

  The sandstorm was just an eerie catalyst of what was to come our way. Since the first three ambushes thus far this night, there was worse to come. I remembered a jumbled quote from Abe Lincoln that goes something like “thank God the future only comes one day at a time.” We were living hour to hour, kilometer to kilometer, and battle to battle. There was not a moment when I had time to think more than five minutes into the future, and that was more than likely terrain study up the road or looking off into the distant brush and rooftops for enemy soldiers. We were going into a populated area. That meant more places to hide, more ambushes, snipers, suicide-car bombers, and just plain fanatics. . . . I was the focal point for coordination and execution of CAS sorties. Thus far, I had controlled all the missions for 3-7 Cav’s defense. . . . The daylight had turned into an almost indescribable orange hue. This was something none of us had ever experienced, something you might read in a Ray Bradbury book or see in a sci-fi movie. Visibility was 50 feet at best with heavy winds, everything was orange, and there were enemy soldiers out there set up to kill us as we drove through their city. The OK Corral on Mars. . . . Huge explosions rocked off our left flanks, we had no idea what they were or how close. But it was close enough for me. . . .