In the event, attacking bio-weapons storage may have been just as futile as attacking nuclear production—though for different reasons. After the war, credible reports (from Saddam’s sons-in-law, later murdered) indicated that the Iraqis were just as worried as Americans that biological agents could infect the entire region, and had therefore destroyed their anthrax and botulism spores before the aerial onslaught risked spreading them. If this was true—and Chuck Horner believes it was likely (due to the absence of cases of either disease during the war)—then greater effort should have been aimed at identifying and targeting biological research and production facilities.
★ Though chemical weapons are far from precision munitions, they pose less of a danger to attackers than biological agents, and their effects on an enemy are more immediate. Saddam possessed lots of them. U.S. intelligence sources indicated that large numbers of artillery shells and rockets were available for delivery of nerve and mustard gas.
The problem: though U.S. intelligence had located the manufacturing facilities for these weapons, there were so many of them, there wasn’t enough time for Chuck Horner’s bombers to destroy them all.
The initial attacks hit the largest of these facilities, at Samarra and Al-Habbanilyah near Baghdad, as well as chemical weapons, bombs, artillery, and missile warheads located in close proximity to delivery systems. For example, bunkers at Tallil Airfield were targeted the first night. And throughout the war, any indication of chemical weapons near Iraqi units that could face Coalition ground forces brought quick attack.
Just as with biological agents, the unintended release of chemical agents as a by-product of air attacks brought potential problems. Fortunately, the fallout of poisonous chemical debris had fewer long-term effects, since the hot dry desert air quickly degraded the potency of chemical agents, even in winter months.
THE GREAT SCUD HUNT
Finding and killing Scuds was part of the anti-NBC effort. No one in the Coalition or in Israel was eager to witness the successful mating of a weapon of mass destruction to a ballistic missile launched at Riyadh or Tel Aviv. In the event, finding and killing mobile Scuds proved to be a nightmare.
During the War of the Cities phase of the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, both nations tossed Scuds at each other’s capital. To military analysts, not much was achieved by this seemingly senseless expenditure of obsolete ballistic missiles. To civilians in Tehran and Baghdad, however, it was a very significant event indeed when an Iraqi or Iranian missile slammed into some neighborhood they knew. Later, Chuck Horner made himself familiar with that war (since it was waged in a part of the world he was expected to know well), yet these missile attacks did not greatly concern him. As he quickly came to learn in the early weeks of 1991, however, the people living near Iran and Iraq were not so sanguine. After the War of the Cities, Saudi Arabia had acquired very expensive long-range ballistic missiles, to deter its neighbors to the north and east. Israel also had missiles—and very likely the nuclear weapons to go with them.
No one had any doubt that Saddam expected to use his Scuds, and in October, his threats couldn’t have been more emphatic. “In the event of war,” he announced, “I’ll attack Saudi Arabia and Israel with long-range missiles. . . . And I’ll burn Israel.” In December, he had test-fired his modified, longer-range Scuds. (This had a consequence he did not foresee: It gave U.S. space forces an invaluable opportunity to check out the space-based warning satellites and communications link from the U.S. Space command in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Now they could read out the infrared signals sent by the satellites, and from the template they put together after the December tests, they could tell with reasonable certainty whether or not a Scud had been launched.)
Chuck Horner’s team was ready.
Plans called for preemptive attacks against Scud production facilities and storage areas (including missile fuel tanks). All the fixed launch pads painstakingly erected in Iraq’s western desert were bombed in the opening moments of the war. And on day two, multiple attacks were made on the Latifiyah rocket-fuel plants and on rocket-motor production facilities at Shahiyat, all near Baghdad. Because the fuel the Scuds used was unstable, it could be stored for only perhaps four to six weeks. Therefore, fuel-production facilities were bombed, with the expectation that Scud attacks would stop when the “good” fuel was used up. Unfortunately, the Iraqis didn’t follow this script, either because the Coalition failed to destroy all the Scud fuel-production facilities, or because the Iraqis failed to read the instructions that told them not to use old fuel. They were able to fire the missiles well into the last nights of the war.
Meanwhile, billions of dollars of satellites over Iraq searched for the hot flash of a launching Scud and predicted the warhead’s target. There were civil defense warning systems. And there was the Patriot. In September, the antiballistic missile version, the PAC-2s, had been rushed to the region and deployed near airports and seaports, in order to protect entryways for forces deploying into the Arabian peninsula.
What was lacking, as Horner had informed Secretary Cheney, was the means to locate and kill the mobile Scud launchers.
The first of Saddam’s Scud launches were directed at Israel on the afternoon of January 17. Early next morning, Scuds fell on Dhahran and Riyadh.
Phone calls from Washington quickly followed: “Do whatever you need to to shut down the Scuds.” The great Scud hunt had begun.
From the first, Horner’s planners had expected to hunt mobile Scuds, even though there was never great confidence that they would find them all. Still, until the hunt was on, no one realized the resources they would have to commit, even less how little the hunt would succeed. The day after the first attacks, A-10s, F-16s, F-15s, and an AC-130 gunship were deployed to search the deserts of Iraq, day and night.
First reports looked encouraging: A-10s in south central Iraq attacked a convoy of trucks that appeared to be carrying Scuds. However, it quickly became evident that if the trucks had in fact carried missiles, and if the missiles were Scuds (and not, say, shorter-range FROG 6s), the attack had had little effect on Scud launches, as missiles continued to rain down on Israel and Saudi Arabia.
Night after night missiles came down, five or more per night, and as Scuds fell, more and more scarce air assets were dedicated to hunting them: flights of four F-15Es were sent to orbit likely launch boxes in western Iraq. Any vehicle on the Baghdad-to-Amman interstate highway was attacked, much to the distress of fuel-truck drivers smuggling fuel to Jordan.
In Riyadh, the pressure for action was strong; in Tel Aviv, it was explosive. The Scud attacks had filled Israeli civilians with terror and outrage. They wanted revenge. Traditionally, Israelis did not delegate military action, and their traditional strategy was an eye for an eye. At the minimum, they expected to send their excellent air force against the Scuds. More dangerously, there was a real possibility that they would retaliate with nuclear weapons.
Hoping to put a lid on all this, Horner sent a delegation to Tel Aviv—including his deputy, Major General Tom Olsen, and one of the four TACC operations directors, Colonel Mike Reavy—to explain how Americans were working to suppress the Scuds. He also wanted high-level people there to consult in the event of an Israeli attack. If the Israelis weighed in, tangles between Israeli and Coalition air forces would have been very possible, and would have only helped the enemy. Washington wanted Coalition forces out of their way. Meanwhile, Washington was putting full diplomatic pressure into preventing Israeli action.
Chuck Horner observes:
Israeli retaliation would have been a terrible political mistake, and its chances of military success were not high, either.
Though Israeli pilots were among the best in the world, they were less well-equipped than we were to hunt mobile Scuds. Consequently, their only real contribution to the war would have been to boost the morale of their own people. Far more important, however, the Coalition was always a very fragile thing. Any Israeli retaliation on an Arab state—especial
ly nuclear retaliation—no matter how justified, would have at best weakened the Coalition. At worst, it would have destroyed it. Though it is my belief that the Chief of the Israeli Air Force, General Ben-Nun (a dear friend and first-rate F-15 pilot), understood all this, he was under pressure to act. So planning went on day and night in Tel Aviv.
Relief in Tel Aviv came with the arrival of the U.S. Army’s Patriot missiles. Though many will claim that the Patriots failed to stop the Scuds, the question about their success is really beside the point. The Scuds themselves failed to perform well, except to bring terror. By bringing relief from terror to the people in Israel, the Patriots succeeded magnificently. The relief was important enough to allow the release of Tom Olsen and Mike Reavy to come back to run the air war, where they were sorely needed.
On the downside, Israeli worries meant pressure on Schwarzkopf from Washington to start a ground war in the west just to shut down Scud attacks on Israel. This also would have been a terrible mistake, and a logistical horror.
★ Though efforts to halt Scud launches were never completely successful, neither were they futile. Flights of F-15Es and F-16s at night, and A-10s during the days, combed the desert Scud boxes (areas where Scuds could be successfully launched against a particular target, such as Tel Aviv). Though confirmed kills were few—and for the A-10s there were none—their pressure kept launches down. In time, the Iraqis risked their Scuds only when skies were overcast and U.S. aircraft couldn’t see them. January 25, when ten were launched, was the high-water mark for Scuds. After that, the average fell to about one per day (though during the last days of the war, Saddam used up his reserves, and launches increased).
The A-10 search in the western desert was far from a total loss, for they discovered there an enormous unprotected storage area—munitions bunkers, tanks, APCs, and many other vehicles. What all that equipment was doing out there is a good question. Was Saddam preparing for an invasion to the west through Jordan into Israel? Or was this his idea of the best way to prepare for an Israeli attack against Baghdad? At any rate, the A-10s named the cache they’d found the “Target of God” and quickly turned it into a giant scrap heap. After the war, a high-ranking Iraqi confided to a Russian friend that 1,800 of Iraq’s 2,400 tanks were destroyed by air before the Desert Storm ground war. How much of that was destroyed by A-10s in the western desert is hard to say, yet it gives a sense of the enormity of Iraq’s war machine.
Meanwhile, it was not U.S. aircraft, but Lieutenant General Sir Peter de la Billiere’s British special forces teams that had the greatest impact on Scud launches. Sir Peter had a long career in Special Operations, including service in the Middle East. His taciturn, calm, well-mannered demeanor masked a warrior ready to rip an enemy’s throat with a large knife.
As de la Billiere was well aware, General Schwarzkopf had serious concerns about using special forces behind enemy lines, where they risked trouble that would require rescue by regular army forces (and perhaps start an unwanted battle). After somehow persuading the CINC that his worries were misplaced, Sir Peter approved several British Special Air Service Scud-hunting missions behind enemy lines.
Chuck Horner never actually received a formal briefing about this operation. The Brits simply implemented it. One day an SAS officer showed up in the TACC and, without fanfare or cloak-and-dagger secrecy, started working with Horner’s people to coordinate the planning. “I’m going to send some lads up into western Iraq,” he explained. “How’s the best way for us to cooperate?”
“That’s easy,” Horner’s planners said. “But aren’t you worried that our Scud-hunting aircraft might attack your guys by mistake?”
“Actually, no,” he said. “My lads have to hide from the Iraqis. That’s far harder than hiding from a few high-flying jets. So if your folks find them, my folks are fair game.”
The procedures they worked out were simple: his “lads” on the ground used handheld aircrew survival radios to communicate with U.S. aircraft—a very dicey business, because the Iraqis monitored the radio frequencies used by these radios and had extensive direction-finding equipment.
As with aircraft, hard evidence of their Scud-killing success is slim, but Scud launches diminished; and the SAS troops certainly helped U.S. aircraft find launchers, as one data-recording videotape from an F-15E testifies: the world viewed on CNN a laser-guided bomb hitting what certainly seemed to be a Scud on a transporter erector vehicle. What CNN didn’t broadcast was the audio portion of that tape, in which a British SAS officer talked the fighter aircrew onto a Scud target. As he calmly directed the F-15, its crew spotted a missile much nearer his location than the one he’d seen, and they proceeded to put a 2,000-pound laser-guided bomb on the target. The resulting fireball was close enough to the Brit to singe his hair. The audio of their radio communication went something like this:
SAS: “I say, Eagle II, I have a Scud located at the following coordinates,” which he read.
Eagle II pilot: “Roger. Am one minute out, approaching your position from the south.”
SAS: “Understand you will be making your run from south to north. The target is in a small wadi, running southwest by northeast. And I can hear you approaching the target.”
Eagle II pilot: “Roger. We have the target and have bombs away.”
Soon the aircraft’s laser was pointed at what appeared to be either a Scud or a tank truck filled with fuel just south of the SAS man. Then a very large bomb was headed through the air at near supersonic speeds. Just prior to impact, the SAS officer came on the air and said: “Understand you are bombs away. I’m observing some activity on the road just—”
At that moment, the bomb hit, the fireball of the secondary explosion rolled over the SAS man, and the loudest “JESUS CHRIST!” ever transmitted on the airways interrupted what had been a cool, professional conversation. Fortunately, he was not injured, and the tape delivered more than a good laugh to the commanders in Riyadh. For Horner, it showed they were making progress in an otherwise frustrating job. For Schwarzkopf, this evidence of success took off some of the heat from Washington to start a ground war in the west.
SAS operations in Iraq sometimes ran into difficulties. On one occasion, a three-man SAS team was captured by Iraqis. Two of the team managed to escape, while the third was beat up and tortured. Of the two who got away, however, only one trekked to safety in Syria; the other died of exposure (it was fiercely cold in Iraq). Later, from the man who reached Syria, the TACC planners learned the location of the torture site. That night, a pair of 2,000-pound bombs were dropped through its roof.
★ Some weeks after the SAS first went out to hunt Scuds, Major General Wayne Downing’s U.S. Special Operations force began to share those duties. This operation caused surprising friction with Horner’s TACC team. The problem, in Horner’s view, was their go-it-alone attitude and their emphasis on secrecy and rank:
When a U.S. special forces colonel would come into our headquarters to brief an upcoming mission, he would have great difficulty discussing its details with anyone of subordinate rank. That’s fine unless you want to get the job done. The people who make decisions in air operations are often the majors and captains. You have to trust them.
On one occasion, their secrecy nearly led to the shoot-down of some Special Operations helicopters, who neither informed the TACC of their operation or followed the rules laid out in the Air Tasking Order. Once they were in Iraq, they were detected by AWACS, then locked onto by eager F-15s. Luckily, Mike Reavy, the senior director on duty, denied permission to fire while he desperately tried to confirm whether the target was hostile. At the last moment, the Special Operations liaison realized the helicopters were his, thus avoiding a terrible blue-on-blue engagement.
On the ground, there is no better military force than U.S. special forces, but I pray they can lighten up a little and coordinate in the manner of the SAS.
Another group of troopers who were vital to the war on Scuds got no medals and very little appreciation�
�the men and women of Space Command.
Throughout the Cold War, U.S. deterrence strategy had relied on detecting an attack on the United States in sufficient time to launch retaliatory strikes. A cornerstone of this strategy was the Defense Support Program (DSP) satellites, huge cylinder-shaped objects in geosynchronous orbits. Each DSP had an infrared telescope that kept track of hot spots on earth. If the hot spot started moving across the earth’s surface, the satellite reported the event to the command center in Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado Springs. There, the men and women of the U.S. Space Command would evaluate the event to see if it was a threat to North America. Though the DSP had not been built to fight theater war, and was sensitive only to the high-intensity rocket plumes made by ICBMs, the wizards of space altered the computers in August 1990 to sort out the DSP data more finely. The Iraqi test firings in December proved this would work.
Of almost equal importance for Horner’s people was knowledge of launch site locations.
In the Cold War, once you knew an attack was coming from Russia, you had about all the information you needed, and this was about all DSPs would tell you. DSPs were not designed to project the accuracy required to attack a launch site with iron bombs. This was a serious deficiency that could never be totally overcome. Nevertheless, the contractor, TRW, and the military wizards of space had vastly improved the design by the time the guns started to shoot, and the DSP was able to give some rough idea of launch points.
These modifications helped, but DSP’s greatest contribution to the war was to provide warnings of attack, so civil defense agencies could be alerted.
Those in the TACC can never forget those chilling words, “Scud Alert!” In the early days of the war, the words ignited near panic; until the Patriots proved their worth, almost everyone donned chemical-biological protection gear and headed for a deep underground bunker.
Every Man a Tiger (1999) Page 46
