Every Man a Tiger: The Gulf War Air Campaign sic-2

by Tom Clancy

  “Yes, Chuck.”

  “Just keep one thing in mind. I’m asking you to trust me while my ass is in a bunker in Riyadh and yours is on the battlefield of Al-Khafji.”

  ★ In fact, even after all my hopeful words, I don’t think Khaled fully trusted me; and later he called Brigadier General Ahmed Sudairy to demand air from him. However, Sudairy could tell him only what I had already said, that hundreds of sorties were being sent to the battle (again, we did not know how much air was used to intercept the Iraqi advance and how much was being used by the DASC for CAS in Khafji and in the desert).

  Meanwhile, as the sun went down on the evening of the thirtieth, Battles One, Two, and Three began seriously heating up. Not to fear, we had a pair of golden arrows in our quiver — Joint STARS and AC-130 gunships.

  Joint STARS could look hundreds of miles into enemy territory and detect and identify individual vehicles — that is, it could distinguish cars, trucks, APCs, and tanks. J-STARS was a new system, never tested in battle, and Khafji was its first use in combat.

  On the other hand, the AC-130 gunship system had been around since Vietnam. Though it was old, it was still deadly: its night-vision sights made it a fearsome nighttime threat, and its side-firing 105 mm howitzer could pump out three to five shots a minute. In Grenada, AC-130 gunships had picked off the Cuban snipers hiding around the airfield and allowed the first elements of the XVIIIth Corps to advance from what had been a death trap. On the night of the thirtieth, this same aircraft was killing every Iraqi vehicle they saw venturing on the coastal highway into Saudi Arabia.

  If I’d been the Iraqi commander that night, one question would have kept coming up: “How do they know?”

  Every time Iraqi vehicles began to march south, A-10s, FA-18Bs, or even the odd Pave TAC F-111 or F-15E would show up, and all hell would break loose. Every time I tried to move my force to the battles in Saudi Arabia, the commander must have been thinking, my troops come under attack, and then abandon their tanks and APCs on the sand. Would it never cease?

  The onslaught from the air that night was ceaseless. The fires flaming the skies of the coast road marked the trail of an army defeated before it ever reached the battle. By the morning of the thirty-first, the Iraqi Army along the coast highway was in disarray.

  But it didn’t all go our way.

  Early on the morning of the thirty-first, the AWACS controller called the AC-130 pummeling the coast highway: “Dawn approaching, you’d better go home.” (In daylight, the enemy could spot the lumbering aircraft and shoot it down with a heat-seeking missile.)

  “I can’t go right now,” the pilot answered, “I have too many targets left on the road.” It was his last transmission. Thirty seconds later, the AC-130 disappeared from the AWACS radar screen; the plane had crashed into the sea, killing all fourteen crewmen aboard. In the predawn light, an Iraqi soldier had fired a heat-seeking antiaircraft missile into the AC-130’s port engine. This was our single biggest loss of airmen during the entire war.

  ★ By midday of the thirty-first, the battles for Khafji were over. The remaining Iraqis in the desert and in town were stranded. Saudi and Qatari forces had attacked and performed flawlessly with grit and determination, and Khaled had proved he could lead under fire (I think even he had had doubts about this prior to the battle). The results to the bean counters must have been wonderful — hundreds of pieces of armor destroyed in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, and almost five hundred Iraqi prisoners taken (a clue that we needed to prepare for an onslaught of POWs).

  This victory did not come free. Approximately fifty Islamic soldiers from the Saudi Northern Area corps were killed or wounded.

  The most important outcome of the battle is that the Iraqis were now left without options to take the initiative offensively. Specifically, Battle Four was never fought. The Iraqis could no longer muster forces to attack the Egyptians and Syrians in the Northern Area command.

  What had the Iraqis hoped to gain by the Al-Khafji incursion? Did they expect to draw the Coalition ground forces into an attack before the Iraqi forces were further decimated by our airpower? It didn’t happen. Did they expect to inflict casualties on the Coalition forces, take prisoners, and make headlines in the United States? It didn’t happen. Did they want to show the Arabian and other Islamic forces up as soft, ill-trained, or even cowardly? It didn’t happen. Was Khafji part of a larger scheme, the first phase of an overall plan to go on the initiative against other Coalition forces? It never happened. Those Iraqi hopes and plans died on the way to battle under a twenty-four-hour nonstop pounding from above.

  Colonel Dave Schulte, the BCE commander in the TACC, summed up the lessons learned from Khafji (my comments follow, in parentheses):

  1. The Iraqis couldn’t mass forces due to Blue Air; therefore they must mass air defenses first. (They tried, but we would not permit it.)

  2. Iraqi battlefield intelligence was poor because they failed to predict our response. (That is why controlling air and space is so important. Imagine the consequences if the Iraqis had known about Walt Boomer’s exposed logistic bases. Imagine the impact if they had been able to bring artillery to bear on the Tapline Road.)

  3. The Iraqis had good command and control of their forces. This was evident during execution of the attack and retreat. (Okay. But we would do our best to destroy that command control before our ground attack started.)

  4. The Iraqis fought well. (And yet they were already surrendering in large numbers, disillusioned, ashamed, tired of war, worn out from constant air attack. Their motivation to surrender was to increase as the bombardment continued.)

  The Iraqi IIId Corps commander summed it up another way. When he saw what was happening to his forces in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, he called Saddam and asked for permission to break off the attack on Al-Khafji and begin a withdrawal.

  “No, continue the attack,” Saddam replied. “I want you to make this the mother of all battles!”

  To which the IIId Corps Commander replied, “Sir, the mother is killing her children,” and hung up. He then ordered his remaining forces to withdraw.

  And this is what I said at the January 31 1700 meeting in the TACC:

  “The effort last night went very well. Though there was a lot of confusion, you have to live with that. Still, there’s no doubt about it, the Saudis inflicted a tremendous defeat on Saddam at Khafji. The word I got was they captured 200 [it was actually 463] and killed over 10 [actually 32], and I think the Saudis lost one guy [actually 18 KIA and 32 WIA]. That’s a very important victory.

  “Unfortunately, our press will make it look like we somehow bungled it; but that’s all right.

  “I don’t know what’s going to happen tonight. People are concerned about another attack in the Khafji area. It is probably likely. We also have to beware of another attack in the border area. That could be a disaster.

  “The Scuds continue to be a problem, and weather is going to complicate the search tonight. But we’ll work on that.

  “We’re not getting a lot of feedback on the Republican Guard. But the only reason I could think of for him to do the attacks at Khafji and in the Marine sector was because he felt a compulsion to force the action. He feels that we are hurting him, and that he’s got to step up the pace or the train is going to leave the station, and he’s not going to be on board. Of course we would like to see that happen. We would like to destroy him at our own pace; but he may not allow us to do that. So we have got to be prepared to manage chaos, we’ve got to keep the units informed, and we have got to be able to react without jerking the flying units around too much. It’s going to be a lot of pain for everybody if we change or divert flights and we get into changing ordnances and all that. We will do our best to keep that from happening. But you’ve got to convey to the units down in the field that this could invoke some very quiet changes this evening. We could have — like Khafji — a lot of serious battles go on that we don’t anticipate right now.

  “Another thing — get the w
ord out — the people at KKMC, and to a lesser extent at Dhahran and Riyadh, need to be prepared to respond to a chemical attack, because that’s one of the tricks left in his bag. I don’t know whether he can do it or not. I don’t think he can; but we can never allow him to have the initiative. So anything he does, we have to be able to counter and then just stick it right up his nose. I think the team that worked the Khafji problem last night [Colonel Joe Bob Phillips and his team from Nellis AFB] did a magnificent job.

  “We are in the work phase of the war now. Shooting down the MiGs is pretty much over with; all the glorious laser-guided bombs and telephone exchanges, that’s all history. Now it’s digging him out of the ground and stomping his military forces in the field into the dirt. There is no turning back for him. The battle of Khafji proved that. So let’s just get on with it; and let’s be home before Ramadan, so the people in this country can celebrate their holy days without a bunch of Americans, French, Italians, Brits, and Canadians hanging around.”

  To which Lt. General Behery added “and Iraqis,” as the meeting broke up.

  ★ Tom Clancy resumes the story.

  BRIDGES

  After the battle of Khafji, an even greater emphasis was put on efforts to isolate the battlefield by shutting down the transportation system. Iraq had an excellent road system, with more than 50,000 military trucks and nearly 200,000 commercial vehicles capable of hauling supplies to the army of occupation in the KTO. Since it would clearly take a very long time to shut down transportation by attacking individual vehicles (there were simply too many of them), Horner and his planners had to try something else. They’d hit the roads and bridges.

  Fortunately for Coalition planners, the major road and railroad lines paralleled the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers south of the Iraqi capital, and major road and rail bridges could be found at key cities along each route. For example, five major roads and the railroad to Basra all converged and crossed various waterways at the town of An Nasiriyah in southern Iraq.

  The problem for planners was that finding suitable roads to target grew harder as one got closer to the KTO. Since craters could be rapidly repaired or bypassed on roads south and west of Basra, bombing them had little effect. As a result, planners placed most of the targeting effort on crossings over waterways and rivers. In essence, it became a bridge-busting campaign.

  Where possible, laser-guided bombs were used to drop individual concrete spans over major highways — and the films from these attacks gave Schwarzkopf some of his best television one-liners: “Now you are going to see the luckiest man alive,” he intoned as a vehicle barely cleared a targeted bridge microseconds ahead of the spectacular blast of a laser-guided bomb.

  Early in January, the CENTAF intelligence staff had identified 579 highway, 155 railroad, and 17 inland waterway targets. Since laser-guided bombs made “one bomb one target” practical, it was estimated that fewer than 1,000 bombs, or about 200 to 300 sorties, would be needed to accomplish the mission.

  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.