It was not at all unusual for an AOD generated within the strategy division and approved by General Moseley sixty hours before its scheduled execution to be overtaken by events before it reached the MAAP cell twenty-four hours later. Even after the MAAP had been approved and moved along to ATO production, significant changes sometimes had to be entered, often resulting in late dissemination of the ATO to the flying units.
The last 12 hours before an ATO’s execution were the most challenging part of the ATO cycle. The time-sensitive targeting cell, for instance, planned and executed more than 840 emerging targets over the course of the three-week campaign. Most of the officers involved in this demanding process had been handpicked, and some had worked in that capacity during Operation Enduring Freedom. A CENTAF staffer who served in the CAOC during the three-week air war recalled that “these officers were, by and large, experts with can-do attitudes who paid superb attention to detail.”91
At the heart of the CAOC, known more formally as the AN/USQ-163 Falconer in its standard Air Force configuration, were some eighty unique command and control capabilities, the “engine” for which was the TBMCS (Theater Battle Management Core System) that provided General Moseley an integrated set of software that enabled him to control all theater air operations and to coordinate them with the land and maritime components. A CAOC staffer later noted in this regard that “transmission of the [air component commander’s] intent to those executing the ATO is arguably the most critical part of the ATO process. TBMCS is the means by which that intent was passed.”92
The head of the combat plans division during the major combat phase of Iraqi Freedom recalled that
the MAAP cell was never initially intended to be a twenty-four-hour operation. They would begin coordinating on the next ATO once they pushed the MAAP to the ATO “thumpers” who hammered out the actual air tasking plan in TBMCS some twelve hours before execution. What drove us to a twenty-four-hour MAAP process was the ensuing speed of operations. Normally, any changes required for an ATO, once pushed, would take place on the combat operations floor. But the “replanning” cell was not sufficiently robust to handle that. So we had our MAAP staff on call twenty-four hours a day to re-MAAP targets inside twelve hours from execution as necessary, even after the ATO had been pushed. What was good about this was that it proved that our ATO cycle was flexible. I have heard over the years from multiple complainants that our ATO cycle was too long and not flexible. I believe we proved that charge to be false.93
At bottom, TBMCS was the means by which the ATO and each of its subsections were transmitted each day to all operating units assigned to the air component. It also was the central command, control, communications, computers, and intelligence core for both of CENTAF’s CAOCs—the primary one at Prince Sultan and the backup one at Al Udeid. The CAOC at Prince Sultan, which had been declared fully operational in August 2001 just before the start of initial planning for Operation Enduring Freedom, had been configured with the initial Block 10 baseline software, which included TBMCS V1.0.1. As a result of the substantially increased tempo of air operations that ensued throughout Southwest Asia after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, however, CENTAF did not succeed in upgrading its baseline software for TBMCS until December 2002, more than a year later. At that time the system was upgraded to the Block 10+ configuration and subsequently to V1.1.1, the latest version then available.
TBMCS brought together three legacy systems—the contingency theater air planning system (CTAPS, pronounced “see-taps”), the combat intelligence system, and the wing command and control system—into a single, integrated system with common databases and software tools. In contrast to the three older systems that it superseded, TBMCS could generate ATOs containing three times the amount of information regarding scheduled combat sorties and could assign targets in half the time and with a third fewer planners. It also pulled together imagery and other pertinent tactical information to build a common operating picture in the subordinate AOCs and ASOCs that supported allied ground forces. At the wing and squadron level, it offered the tools necessary for enabling aircrews to conduct detailed final mission planning. By early 2003 TBMCS had been installed in twenty American AOCs worldwide, as well as in more than three hundred additional command and control centers all the way down to Air Force wings and squadrons and on board four Navy command ships and all twelve Navy aircraft carriers. By the start of Iraqi Freedom, it was the system of record for the conduct of air operations by air component commanders.94
During the Iraqi Freedom air offensive, TBMCS provided the tools required for managing CENTAF’s air operations, including airspace management, electronic warfare support, airborne battle management and surveillance, and airlift and tanker operations. It enabled the planning of each daily ATO beginning two days in advance. It also included a retasking capability that allowed CAOC operators to reassign aircraft in real time to attack suddenly emerging targets. In addition, TBMCS gathered incoming information from all intelligence sensors and translated that information into usable data for developing targeting concepts and matching aircraft to targets. The CAOC received actionable target intelligence within single-digit minutes, with target-area imagery typically being provided within fifteen minutes. It also generated the assigned SPINs to aircrews each day, which were issued as an attachment to the ATO and which, in effect, represented the CAOC’s daily guidebook for conducting all air operations. The daily SPINs could run to hundreds of pages, covering everything from assigned call signs and radio frequencies for individual allied aircraft to General Moseley’s guidance as air component commander and CENTCOM’s rules of engagement. Finally, it generated the campaign’s airspace control plan in the form of the airspace control order, which, like the ATO, changed every day and could be changed even within a day.95
TBMCS offered the first-ever opportunity for integrated and automated command and control, and it successfully managed some 47,000 sorties during the three-week campaign. In the process it proved to be much faster than the more primitive planning tools that had existed to support the Desert Storm air war. It took the CAOC staff about fourteen hours to plan and execute three thousand sorties during Desert Storm; by March 2003 TBMCS had reduced that time to five or six hours.96 On a typical day during the major combat phase, the CAOC’s targeting cell gathered operationally relevant information on some three hundred targets that might have entailed anywhere from one thousand to two thousand individual weapon aim points.
Indeed, TBMCS proved to be a major mission management facilitator for CENTCOM’s air component throughout the offensive. It pulled together into a single consolidated network what had formerly been handled by a wide variety of disjointed command and control systems, and it allowed CAOC operators to monitor constantly the flow of both strike sorties and support assets. It also fed an extension of its capability into the 4th ASOG’s ASOC that supported V Corps to allow for closer coordination of Army target-servicing requests. TBMCS users were also distributed in twenty subordinate air operations centers and Navy ships.
The CAOC’s director of combat plans during Iraqi Freedom recalled, however, that “TBMCS was not the cure-all. We had significant problems with the database when we arrived at the CAOC in February 2003. Contractors had to construct a ‘patch’ to the software to allow us to push the large sortie count.”97 The system was designed to support the planning and conduct of 1,500 sorties a day. Yet during the first three weeks of Iraqi Freedom, TBMCS supported operations that sometimes exceeded 2,500 sorties a day. CAOC staffers later noted that “exceeding the design limits of the system [sometimes] prevented operations until a patch could be installed. . . . Nevertheless, the system proved stable and reliable.”98 At the same time, although TBMCS was indeed a major force multiplier throughout the campaign, it required continuous human intervention and effort to ensure that its automated processes worked reliably and provided CAOC planners with the mission management support they needed to sustain an effective around-the-clock air t
asking process. And despite the automated mission-planning tools that were available in the CAOC, MAAP planners still had to do manual quality-control checks on the final ATO product going into TBMCS.
To note one example, because the automated targeting tools available in the CAOC varied so widely in the formats they used and the extent of their compatibility, there often were awkward and problematic transfers of targeting data, as well as a continuing need for manpower-intensive manual data entry. General Moseley needed constant support from information technology and TBMCS database administrators to manage target-list transfers satisfactorily because there was no easy means for tracking a target’s status in the ATO cycle.
Whenever a dynamic or time-sensitive target was discovered, a process for weapon aim-point mensuration using an automated system called RainDrop immediately began. If the required attack asset was available and if the threat level in the target area was sufficiently permissive, an airborne aircraft with a targeting pod would be sent to investigate, target, or actually engage and destroy the object in question. According to CAOC planners, RainDrop, the digital imagery workstation suite, and the precision targeting work station were the only systems in use that were certified by NIMA to provide geographic coordinates and elevations sufficiently accurate to enable the targeting of satellite-aided JDAMs. Those planners concluded during their after-action review of the air war at Nellis AFB in July 2003 that coordinate mensuration must become even more automated: “In today’s environment, with mounting collateral damage concerns and ever greater reliance on coordinate-seeking weapons, target coordinate mensuration has become a necessary evil. RainDrop is the only Air Force accredited mensuration tool, and while accurate, it involves a lengthy process and requires highly skilled operators.”99
While TBMCS was not perfect, however, CAOC operators agreed that it provided “an unprecedented level of data visibility across all CAOC functional areas. In addition, it provided interoperability between CENTCOM’s subordinate components and other joint and coalition services to an exponentially greater degree than that achieved during Operation Desert Storm.” Fortunately, CENTCOM’s other warfighting components came to Iraqi Freedom configured and ready to interoperate fully with the CAOC’s mission management systems. CENTAF experts later remarked that “both the Navy and Marine Corps were equipped with TBMCS, and the Army and Air Force had worked together to develop a stable and reliable interface between TBMCS and Army systems. Joint standards were used to bring these component systems together. This resulted in an unprecedented capability to conduct distributed air battle planning across the components.”100
Operation Iraqi Freedom also represented the first air campaign in which an AOD was developed for each day’s ATO. On the one hand, that arrangement offered a notable improvement over the process that had been in effect for Afghanistan, in that the AOD was a single, coherent document that succinctly reflected General Moseley’s strategy and guidance for each ATO. On the other hand, Moseley approved each AOD sixty hours before its execution, and there was no easy way in which his or higher-level guidance could be updated after that point. That being the case, there were times when late-breaking events occurring after the AOD’s approval would render that day’s AOD less applicable, or even inappropriate altogether, to the demands of the moment. “In most cases,” a CENTAF staffer recalled on this count, “the MAAP cell either had to delay its process until appropriate guidance was received or else build the MAAP without the necessary guidance, hoping to receive approval after the fact.”101
Despite the improvements in flexibility noted above, most CAOC planners later agreed that long-established air tasking practices remained “too slow.”102 A senior CAOC staffer remarked in this respect that “the air component’s ability to . . . prosecute mass volumes of targets outpaced its ability to track and assess its progress toward achieving operational objectives. An overarching challenge of mastering digital combat at the operational level of war is to develop new processes that lend more speed and flexibility to operations without sacrificing the coherence and purpose that the established strategy-to-task methodology provides.”103 CAOC planners further concluded that the ATO cycle running from strategy to GAT to MAAP and ATO production was simply “too long, given the mobility of critical targets and the dynamics of the battlespace in a combined-arms environment.”104 They added that the CAOC director, who oversees this process, needs to be able to introduce high-payoff targets into the ATO during its execution.
The British MoD’s after-action report similarly complained that CENTAF’s seventy-two-hour air tasking cycle could bear further compression and noted the need for more flexibility in tasking.105 It should not be forgotten, however, that the ATO planning cycle was premised throughout Iraqi Freedom, and remains premised today, on the fact that the air component commander’s preeminent concern is with the operational—that is to say, theaterwide—level of war. Compressing the ATO cycle too much entails the danger that the ATO will become constructed instead in knee-jerk response to immediate tactical events. Some pressures to compress the ATO, such as that voiced in the MoD’s report and repeatedly heard from many American land combatants as well, reflect shortsighted tactical thinking that loses sight of the effects-based and strategy-driven approach to air employment.106
Only 43 percent of the personnel assigned to the CAOC during the major combat phase of Iraqi Freedom had received formal AOC training. Nevertheless, this staff successfully prosecuted 156 time-sensitive targets (mostly in southern Iraq) and 686 dynamic targets (highly mobile or otherwise important targets) that were struck by aircraft that had been re-roled from other mission taskings. Of these 686, the majority were located in western Iraq and were related to suspected WMD facilities and mobile missile units. (At the height of the air war, the CAOC staff had risen from its previous level of 672 to 1,966 assigned personnel.)107
Notably, Operation Iraqi Freedom was the first conflict in which ISR operations (including collection management and the determination and assignment of aerial platform locations) were brought under the purview of the CAOC’s strategy division. In earlier air wars that function was typically executed by the combat plans division, whose staff tended to view and use ISR assets in support of the combined force commander’s and air component commander’s declared intent rather than as input into the actual shaping of the resultant strategy. In yet another command and control “first” during Iraqi Freedom, an expeditionary intelligence group was established at Langley AFB, Virginia, to coordinate a broad spectrum of intelligence units worldwide to provide as-needed reachback support to the CAOC. This ad hoc group coordinated and directed the nation’s combat intelligence architecture; eliminated bureaucratic bottlenecks and system breakdowns; and enabled a smooth, continuous, and rapid flow of actionable intelligence into the CAOC.108
In a related Iraqi Freedom ISR first, the distributed ground station (DGS) at Beale AFB, California, supported three concurrent U-2 missions over western, southern, and northern Iraq that were exploited at three different ground stations on two continents, with all of the flow going through the distributed processing, exploitation, and dissemination operations center at Langley AFB. In addition, an amalgamation of twelve libraries on SIPRNet and eight on the joint worldwide intelligence communications system (JWICS, pronounced “jay-wicks”) enabled the prompt and uninterrupted provision of imagery products and other pertinent information for every flying unit and component commander in CENTCOM’s area of responsibility entirely by means of e-mail, video teleconferencing, and telephone communications. The overarching ISR campaign plan that leveraged these diverse assets and capabilities allowed for predictive battlespace awareness so that CAOC staffers could anticipate and predict enemy actions such as the movement of mobile SAMs and theater ballistic missiles. In turn, as the head of the CAOC’s strategy division later recalled, “predictive assessments on threat locations, detailed collection planning to find threats, dynamic cross-cueing between multiple sensors to locate them p
recisely, and synchronization with strike packages resulted in increased strike effectiveness.” He called the entire process an “intelligence success story that should serve as a benchmark for future intelligence reachback.”109
The Iraq war also set a new record for close Navy involvement in the high-level planning and command of joint air operations. By its own free admission the Navy was more than adequately represented in the CAOC throughout the major combat phase. As noted earlier, Rear Admiral Nichols, the commander of the Naval Strike and Air Warfare Center at NAS Fallon, served as General Moseley’s deputy air component commander. Capt. William Gortney was the naval air liaison coordinator. Alternating with Col. Douglas Erlenbusch, Capt. Russ Penniman was the co-director of the combat plans division, which, among other functions, did all of the target analysis and weaponeering.110 Other key leadership positions in the CAOC filled by naval officers included deputy chief of the strategy division, chief of combat operations, and deputy chief of the ISR division. In all, 158 Navy personnel (95 active duty and 63 Naval Reserve) were included in the CAOC’s staff, filling a total of 20 percent of the CAOC’s 695 principal operator billets.111
The Navy Reservists assigned to the CAOC had the added advantage of coming from the 2nd and 3rd Fleet staffs and being both formally trained and well versed in the processes of the CAOC. Vice Admiral Keating, the maritime component commander, noted that detailed and coordinated planning had taken place during the buildup for the campaign between the Navy’s 5th Fleet and CENTAF in determining which personnel the Navy would send to the CAOC and what their qualifications needed to be. If a qualification requirement had not been met, selected individuals received rush schooling in the needed skills to enable them to augment the CAOC staff. Thanks to that timely effort, Admiral Nichols had an augmentation team of 101 Navy personnel, about half of whom were reservists; the rest were drawn from the weapons schools, the Naval Strike and Air Warfare Center, and fleet units.
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