This problem could have been easily anticipated and headed off had V Corps’ most senior planners harked back to very similar situations that had arisen during Operation Desert Storm. In his presentation to the Commission on Roles and Missions in September 1994, then Air Force chief of staff General McPeak noted Army commanders’ decision, on the third day of the ground offensive, to fix the FSCL well beyond their ability to affect the close battle with their own organic artillery and attack helicopters. In doing so, the XVIII Airborne Corps commander prevented the air component from interdicting the main resupply line connecting Baghdad and Kuwait for seventeen hours. General McPeak mentioned a similar extension of the FSCL inside the Kuwaiti theater of operations by the VII Corps commander that had essentially created a sanctuary for Republican Guard units, whose commanders took advantage of the opportunity to escape to Basra. Although the overall joint force commander, Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, had expressly directed the air component commander, Lt. Gen. Charles Horner, to engage and destroy those forces, Schwarzkopf’s ground commanders, according to McPeak, “unilaterally placed boundaries that effectively contradicted [Schwarzkopf’s] theater priorities.” That, said McPeak, showed clearly “what can happen when boundaries are set by people who do not have full authority over military operations on both sides of the seam.”57 An Air Force pilot who served as an ALO with the 101st Airborne Division during Desert Storm pointed out that a big part of the problem was an outdated conception of “close air support.” As this pilot bluntly put it, “what we really have is either air power applied in close proximity to troops or air power applied not in close proximity to troops. Definitions and lines on maps that don’t allow the flexibility required by nonlinear battle plans should be scrapped.”58
In the case of air component KI/CAS planning on behalf of V Corps in Iraqi Freedom, the coordination in ATO preparation was conducted through the Army’s BCD in the CAOC. V Corps positioned FSCLs farther ahead of the forward line of friendly troops than usual because of an anticipated rapid rate of advance. An assistant to General Leaf recalled on this point: “Every day, General Leaf would arrange for the FSCL to be pulled a little back, but every night the Army majors would throw it far out again.”59 The land component would then request ground support sorties from the CAOC through the normal process. Within the V Corps area of operations, General McKiernan opened and closed kill boxes for interdiction attacks as he deemed appropriate, and the Air Force ASOC attached to V Corps provided terminal attack control for CAS strikes.
There was on occasion a pronounced disconnect between the CAOC and the Air Force’s battlefield airmen who staffed the ASOC supporting V Corps with respect to the proper roles and responsibilities of an ASOC, with each entity harboring a different understanding of how land combat operations between a division’s line of advance and the FSCL should be conducted.60 Indeed, as one CAOC planner later recalled, “the single greatest issue that arose during Iraqi Freedom concerned the prosecution of counterland targets in the V Corps area.”61 Much of the difficulty alluded to here emerged from contrasting perspectives within the air component as to how best to employ fixed-wing air power in support of counterland operations. The CAOC planners who had developed CENTAF’s KI/CAS concept of operations insisted that unless friendly forces were present in a way that absolutely required detailed air-land integration, the kill boxes in that particular area should be opened for unrestricted air operations as targets of opportunity presented themselves. For its part, the ASOC sought instead to extract the most from the air component assets that were available to it by means of a procedure called “corps CAS.”
V Corps used the term “corps CAS” to refer to its intended use of CAOC-supplied air power to prosecute or shape targets in its assigned area of operations. Yet from the CAOC’s perspective, certain aspects of that concept needlessly hampered the shaping effort. For example, V Corps and its supporting ASOC considered the aerial engagement of any target on their side of the FSCL to be CAS, which, by definition, requires rigorous and time-consuming communications and command and control procedures. Yet in the view of those in the CAOC, those complicated CAS procedures were not required because the “corps shaping” in question was not conducted in even remote proximity to friendly ground troops.
Indeed, from the CAOC’s perspective, “corps CAS” was not CAS at all. It was de facto interdiction, which, according to accepted joint doctrine, lies beyond the roles and responsibilities of an ASOC. CAOC planners recalled that “the V Corps area of operations began at the division’s forward boundary, approximately fifteen nautical miles ahead of the forward line of own troops (FLOT), and extended to the FSCL. . . . Unfortunately, the ASOC was unable to conduct corps CAS at a rate commensurate with the number of air assets that were allocated to it.”62 As one might expect, friction ensued when the ASOC requested air support and then used it to conduct what were essentially battlefield interdiction operations. The ASOC also encountered problems in exercising the required degree of command and control throughout its assigned battlespace because the rapid forward movement of coalition ground troops typically exceeded the ASOC’s ability to communicate with CAS aircraft. As a result, there were often times when a large percentage of the aircraft sent by the CAOC to an airborne CAS stack in V Corps’ area of operations at the request of the ASOC were not used and had to return to their bases with unexpended ordnance. This inefficient force management exasperated aircrews. One F-16 pilot complained:
We’d take off without a target, fly for eight hours trying to get someone on the ground to give us something to drop on, and then we’d come home with our bombs on board. It was frustrating for guys who wanted to feel like they’d contributed to the mission. [So a friend of mine who was a CAOC planner] sent us an e-mail saying, “Okay, I hear you guys. We’re going to start Operation Home Depot, and we’re going to go out in the desert and build you some targets so you can drop your bombs!” That made us laugh, but what he was really saying to us was that we’d still done our jobs, even if we came home with all our bombs.63
To be sure, such recurrent “no-drop” incidents were by no means invariably the fault of the ASOC’s close control of open kill boxes in its battlespace at the insistence of V Corps. Some instances involving aircraft that had been holding overhead in CAS stacks to support V Corps rightly suggested a basic force utilization deficiency within the system.64 Yet in other cases, weapons bring-back did not necessarily indicate a misutilization problem so much as the natural inefficiency that is part and parcel of CAS operations. Factors that affected the weapons bring-back rate ranged from an absence of assigned targets to communications problems, a lack of available tankers, and a less than ideal allocation of CAS assets by the ASOC.
The CAOC did indeed use bring-back rate as one measure of the efficiency of air support to the land component. Without more specific facts that might account for the number of prospective targets that went unserviced, however, weapons bring-back numbers did not, in and of themselves, provide a reliable measure of mission effectiveness. Simple communications deficiencies occasioned an appreciable number of combat aircraft returning to their bases without their pilots’ having even established radio contact with the ASOC. Added to that, the initial shortage of available tankers and the considerable distances that orbiting strike aircraft had to travel to return to their bases sometimes meant that those aircraft could not deliver their munitions within the scant on-station time they were allowed.65
But the main problem lay in the fact that the common geographic reference system based on kill boxes and keypads had never been formally ratified in joint doctrine. Accordingly, Army operators did not naturally accept that system in their own tactical contingency planning. Although the kill-box approach had been amply validated as an effective alternative to the FSCL in Desert Storm and had since been refined in a succession of combat-related SPINs, the FSCL for its Army benefactors continued to be a more familiar and comfortable artifact signifying Army ownership and control of
joint battlespace.
The senior CAOC director later reported that the Army’s principals in the land component had agreed before the start of Iraqi Freedom to accede to the kill-box method but had reverted to the classic FSCL approach once the fight was under way.66 CENTAF had offered training on kill-box operations to V Corps prior to the campaign, but the latter “chose instead to concentrate on other phases of their spin-up training. As a result, when the war started, their staff was not familiar with kill-box operations or the KI/CAS concept of operations, having never practiced it. So they fell back on more traditional methods that were less appropriate for the rapidly advancing ground situation.”67
Viewed in hindsight, CENTAF was itself largely to blame for the situation. The commander of the USAF Air Ground Operations School at Nellis AFB at the time the Army’s spin-up training for the looming campaign was in full swing recalled that “the big lesson I learned—and have continued to learn since 2003—is that the ‘good idea cutoff point’ for a major Army event is the mission rehearsal exercise (MRX). The final [CENTAF] KI/CAS planning occurred while V Corps was doing its MRX in Poland. Like it or not, the Air Force missed the opportunity to get kill-box operations integrated into the Army’s planning for the event. When we went in after the fact and attempted to change peoples’ minds or add a new way to do business, we failed.”68
The Air Force ASOC that was supporting V Corps was organized, trained, and equipped to prosecute CAS missions with an FSCL positioned only some eighteen to twenty-two miles forward of the FLOT. Extending the FSCL outward to eighty-four miles allowed General McKiernan and his subordinate commanders to control a larger portion of the battlespace in front of their advancing units, an entirely appropriate fires management measure for a linear engagement against massed enemy ground forces in open terrain. Yet Operation Iraqi Freedom was envisaged and planned to include nonlinear engagements in or near congested urban areas.69 By pushing the FSCL some sixty miles farther out than normal, V Corps’ commander extended the battlespace beyond his force’s ability to deliver usable combat effects. As one airman pithily put it, “Although the Army has some organic assets that can reach out to targets that far away from the FLOT (i.e., ATACMS), for the most part, most organic fires for the Army can only affect targets at a range of 32 kilometers, or about 20 miles. From 20 miles to the 84-mile FSCL is essentially a sanctuary for the enemy.”70
Indeed, some Air Force airmen viewed V Corps’ unusual extension of the FSCL as directly contravening the guidance promulgated in Joint Publication 3–0, Doctrine for Joint Operations, which stipulates that “placement of the FSCL should strike a balance so as not to unduly inhibit operational tempo while maximizing the effectiveness of organic and joint force interdiction assets.”71 In a similar spirit, Joint Publication 3–09, Doctrine for Joint Fire Support, stipulates that “the decision on where to place or even whether to use an FSCL requires careful consideration. If used, its location is based on estimates of the situation and [concepts of operations]. Location of enemy forces, anticipated rates of movement, the concept and tempo of the operation, organic weapon capabilities, and other factors are all considered by the commander. . . . Placing the FSCL at greater depths will typically require support from higher organic [headquarters] and other supporting commanders.”72 For its part, Air Force Doctrine Document 2–1.3, Counterland Operations, specifies that “the optimum placement of the FSCL varies with specific battlefield circumstances, but typically it should be placed where the preponderance of effects on the battlefield shifts from the ground component to the air component. In this way, the FSCL placement maximizes the overall effectiveness of the joint force, and each component will suffer only a small reduction in efficiency.”73 During at least portions of the three-week campaign, V Corps clearly failed to honor these accepted stipulations of joint doctrine.
In fairness to General Wallace and his preferred approach to managing the battlespace on his side of the FSCL, however, a subsequent assessment of issues in command and control in air warfare rightly noted that the air component’s inability to track the effects of its operations figured prominently in justifying the V Corps commander’s determination to maintain close control over deep operations in his immediate area of regard. According to this account,
Army officers who worked for the BCD in the CAOC . . . pointed out that the inability of the air component to determine and communicate the effects of air power was the biggest source of friction between the air and land components. As the ground troops made their way through the sandstorms, they needed to know how big an effect the [air] attacks were having on the Iraqi Republican Guard units. When the storms were finished, even General McKiernan, the CFLCC [combined force land component commander, pronounced “see-flick”], was unable to pinpoint weaknesses in the enemy toward which he could have directed offensive actions to fracture them. . . . The air component’s practice of satisfying many of the land component’s air support requests (ASRs) with kill-box interdiction did not give land commanders visibility into the results. . . . These were missions sent to a patch of airspace, not to a target, so the land component was unable to tell whether its requests were being serviced by the air component.74
The assessment concluded on this point that “the components had good relationships at the top, and they had worked out a joint strategy. Nonetheless, they had different and somewhat incompatible local systems for developing and tracking target data.”75 In explaining this disconnect, the assessment noted that Wallace viewed corps shaping as more effective than KI: “His data showed that enemy strength did not decrease appreciably after KI, but did after his Corps shaping.”76 In a postcampaign interview that further helped explain his preference for corps shaping over kill-box interdiction, Wallace recalled that every advance by V Corps troops at the platoon through brigade levels during the three-week land offensive ultimately became a “movement to contact” because his command had been consistently unable to acquire a clear picture of enemy force dispositions.77
More telling yet, Wallace observed that from his vantage point, the corps-shaping sorties that had serviced targets beyond the 3rd ID’s forward boundary “were 270 percent more effective [in terms of targets destroyed per sortie] than kill box interdiction in V Corps’ [area of operations.]” He freely conceded that with respect to the contentious issue of the FSCL versus KI as the preferred battlespace management tool, “both control measures are commonly used,” the use of both entails “a continuous debate across the services,” and “doctrinal definitions and [the] use of both are not consistent across the services.”78
After acknowledging the need for the Army and the Air Force to reconcile these unsettled issues, Wallace addressed complaints that V Corps had “pushed the FSCL too deep during [the campaign] and made attack short of the FSCL difficult.” He countered by noting that it was CENTCOM (with inputs from the CFLCC), not V Corps or its ASOC, that determined FSCL placement; that the FSCL was usually no more than thirty nautical miles from the FLOT during the three-week campaign; that the FSCL was more than fifty nautical miles deep for only eight hours (less than 2 percent) during the campaign, and was more than twenty nautical miles deep for only three days (less than 15 percent of the campaign).79
Wallace’s recollections provide an important backdrop against which to examine the practical import of the assessed inefficiencies in joint battlespace management. Clearly, the CAOC, on the one hand, and the CAOC’s subordinate ASOC that was channeling air support to V Corps, on the other, had contrasting views with respect to the relative effectiveness of corps shaping versus kill-box interdiction. In this regard, the lead author of the most thorough account of Army operations during the three-week campaign was on solid ground in noting that “the CAOC versus ASOC differences [reflected] an internecine argument within the Air Force and not between the Air Force and Army.”80 From the perspective of V Corps, however, the ASOC clearly met the command’s tactical- and operational-level needs throughout the land offensive. In all,
2,117 CAS missions were assigned to the ASOC, with 625 of those missions retasked to other agencies. The ASOC itself thus controlled 1,492 missions, 886 of which were so-called corps-shaping missions. Of all the corps-shaping missions, 525 (or 62 percent) ultimately dropped ordnance. In the case of division CAS, 307 of 606 missions (51 percent) dropped ordnance against valid targets. As one authoritative assessment of this performance later reported, “combining those two mission areas [corps shaping and division CAS], 55 percent of the missions executed by the ASOC and its subordinate TACPs dropped munitions on valid targets. That percentage is by far the highest ever seen in major combat.”81
General Wallace carefully avoided taking sides in the intra–Air Force and cross-service disagreements over the relative merits of ASOC-controlled corps shaping versus CAOC-controlled KI/CAS. Instead, he offered an equitable solution by concluding that achieving desired effects against enemy force dispositions as expeditiously as possible is what matters most in the air-ground interface. Toward that end, he added, “the FSCL, if retained, must be modified to facilitate rapid joint attack short of the FSCL” and “kill boxes, if used, must be more precise” because “joint effects in complex terrain demands it.”82 Of greatest importance by far with respect to the proclaimed inefficiencies in air apportionment discussed above is that the V Corps commander himself, the ultimate Army consumer of the air component’s contribution to the land battle, was, by all indications, more than content with the CAS that he and his troops received throughout the three weeks of major fighting.83
The Unseen War Page 38
