Scorched Earth

by George Galdorisi

  Seconds later, the Super Hornet on cat three went through the same minuet, roaring down the track and climbing steeply to join up with the lead jet. Soon after that, the JBDs behind cats two and four popped up, the aircraft on those two cats came alive, and another two Super Hornets clawed their way into the air.

  No matter how many times he did this—as an aviator in a cockpit or as an onlooker—Bruner still marveled at the precise choreography that took place on an aircraft carrier’s flight deck. Ghostly figures stalked the four-and-a-half acre deck, their shapes barely discernible in the glow of the light wands they carried to direct aircraft. Once the Air Boss issued his original order to the flight deck crew, there were no more shouted commands. Instead, the yellow-shirted directors and blue-shirted aircraft handlers went through well-rehearsed procedures that brought aircraft up on deck from TR’s cavernous, three-deck-high hangar, loaded them with ordnance, started each bird, taxied them to the appropriate catapult, and then finally thrust them into the air.

  More aircraft roared off TR’s cats and into the dark sky. Finally, as the last aircraft leapt off the deck and clawed its way skyward, Bruner heard the Air Boss’s voice again. He knew he would be respotting the deck and ordering a FOD—or foreign object damage—walk-down to clear the flight deck of any debris that could be ingested into an aircraft’s multimillion-dollar engine:

  Now on the flight deck, launch complete. I say again, launch complete. Respot the deck. All hands get ready for FOD walk-down. Now FOD walk-down.

  As the last jet—a Growler—disappeared into the predawn sky, Bruner hopped down from his flag-bridge chair and headed for the Theodore Roosevelt’s O-3 level and TFCC—his tactical flag coordination center—to track the progress of his strike.

  * * *

  There was a time when what happened aboard navy ships at sea was completely opaque to those ashore, but that was before systems like the Global Command and Control System—GCCS (pronounced “geeks”)—and the emerging Joint Information Environment gave commanders anywhere the chance to see exactly what the local on-scene commander saw. Some commanders feared that if higher headquarters could see the same picture they were looking at, they would get unsolicited—and even gratuitous—advice from those senior commanders. But those fears never materialized. In fact, what junior commanders experienced was that when senior commanders could see what they were doing on-scene, their comfort level increased, and they tended to ask fewer questions and also didn’t second-guess those closer to the action as often.

  The display Bruner saw in TFCC showed the same picture viewed in the Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain, in the CENTCOM command center at MacDill Air Force Base, and in the National Military Command Center in the Pentagon. In each of these command centers, senior commanders viewed the progress of the strike Bruner had unleashed.

  As the last thirsty Super Hornet finished taking a drink from one of the Air Force KC-135s and the strikers formed up to push the final two hundred miles to Mosul, Bruner liked what he saw on the GCCS display. The jets were well beyond Theodore Roosevelt’s radar range, but their positions were tracked by the VAW-123 E-2D Hawkeye radar aircraft anchored north of TR and just twenty miles east-southeast of Iraq’s Bubiyan Island. The Hawkeye’s Link 16 piped the picture directly to Theodore Roosevelt, as well as to other command centers via the Navy’s MUOS—Mobile User Objective System—satellite constellation.

  What Bruner saw on the GCCS display was as familiar to him as the position of eleven players on the field was to an offensive or defensive football coordinator. Two mixed divisions, each comprising two Hornets and two Super Hornets, were grouped together and were bore-sighted on Mosul. They were flanked by two sections of EA-18G Growlers and their wingmen providing electronic jamming and offensive EW, short for electronic warfare. Each Growler carried two AGM-88 high-speed, antiradiation missiles. The HARM, as it was known to the Growler crews, had acquitted itself well in conflicts over the past three decades. Designed to home in on electronic transmissions coming from surface-to-air radar systems, the old but reliable HARM was a Mach 2, fire-and-forget weapon that would protect the strikers against any pop-up threat.

  When a TFCC watchstander clicked on—or “hooked”—an individual aircraft, that jet’s weapons load-out was displayed. For this strike, each Hornet and Super Hornet carried two one-thousand-pound GBU-32 JDAM precision-guided bombs, a FLIR—forwardlooking infrared—pod and two wingtip AIM-120 advanced medium-range, air-to-air missiles—AMRAAMs for short—to deal with any jets ISIL might send up to oppose them.

  * * *

  It was just after dawn, and, as was his custom, Mabad al-Dosari and a few of his more senior lieutenants embarked on their walk. They had commandeered a few of the strongest buildings in the Az Zanjili section of the city, hard by the Tigris River, and had moved their close and extended family members into these apartments. From a security perspective, it made sense, but the sheer number of people stuffed into these buildings made their compound in central Mosul cramped and noisy.

  With women rising early to cook and children and babies stirring, al-Dosari found this the perfect time to get away from the compound and talk with his closest lieutenants as they walked about. Today, as he had on many previous occasions, al-Dosari’s only son asked to walk along with him. The boy was only eleven, but he wanted to follow in his father’s footsteps and become a fighter as soon as possible. He thought joining these walks would help him become a fighter sooner. But as he had done every time the child had asked before, al-Dosari had told him no.

  Today, they walked toward the Al Shohada Bridge and then turned southeast and walked along the Tigris. Al-Dosari liked walking along the waterfront; it helped clear his mind. Although they had repulsed the Iraqi Army, the Peshmerga, and others who had tried to oust them from the city, it had taken a toll on his forces and damaged or destroyed many caches of equipment his fighters had captured from the Iraqi Army. This morning he would talk with his men about a raid he planned on an Iraqi Army depot northeast of Erbil.

  * * *

  One hundred and fifty miles southeast of where al-Dosari and his men walked, Deputy CAG, Pete “Shooter” Wallace, was leading the fourteen-aircraft strike package that was bore-sighted on the ISIL compound in Mosul. Flying at sixteen thousand feet, Wallace looked at the situational awareness display in his Super Hornet and saw the other jets arrayed around him.

  His division of two F/A-18F Super Hornets and two Marine Corps F/A-18C Hornets was in the lead and flying in a wall formation. Thirty seconds behind them was a similarly configured division, also flying in a wall formation. On their flanks were two sections of two EA-18G Growlers, each with a Super Hornet wingman. One section of Growlers was assigned to CAP—combat air patrol—the ingress route, and one was tasked to CAP the egress route.

  Wallace hadn’t expected to be leading this strike; that was a role typically given to one of the air wing’s senior squadron commanding officers. Those more junior officers were better trained and more current with the myriad of sensors and weapons carried by the strike aircraft, but Admiral Bruner was old school and wanted a senior man airborne for this crucial mission.

  While he was happy—overjoyed really—to be leading this strike, Wallace wondered about the impact they’d have. It was well known that in the past, ISIL had routinely moved their location in central Mosul just to make themselves immune from targeted airstrikes like this. And it was also generally understood that ISIL periodically threatened to behead Iraqi citizens who tried to leave buildings surrounding their compound. They wanted them there as human shields.

  Eight jets, with two GBU-32 JDAM bombs each, seemed like overkill to him—way too much to take out just one guy. But he knew their mission was to decapitate the ISIL leadership, and this was the way his government had decided to do it. He feared there would be civilian casualties, but he also knew why other options to eliminate Mabad al-Dosari had been taken off the table.

  * * *

  While the U.S. military
had trained and equipped the Iraqi Army, that army still had military gear Saddam Hussein had purchased from a number of nations over the course of his years as Iraq’s dictator. As ISIS ranged freely across wide swaths of Iraq, it captured massive quantities of that equipment. And as United States and coalition forces continued to try to destroy ISIS from the air, anti-aircraft missiles became some of the terror group’s most-prized assets.

  The Russian-made SA-15 Gauntlet was one such weapon. Produced in the early 1990s, it wasn’t a sophisticated missile, but it had many advantages. It was mobile, completely autonomous, easy to operate, and was a highly reliable system capable of surveillance, command and control, and missile launch and guidance from a single vehicle. It was the perfect weapon for a crew with minimal training to man and operate.

  Mabad al-Dosari considered these SA-15s some of his most valuable possessions and had his three remaining Gauntlets deployed around his compound in Mosul. His instructions to his crews were simple and straightforward—don’t wait for orders or ask permission—shoot down any aircraft that approached their compound.

  * * *

  Back aboard Theodore Roosevelt, Jay Bruner was camped out in TFCC with CAG Michaels. As strike commander, it was Michaels’s job not just to plan and order the strikes, but to also determine BDA—battle damage assessment—to ensure that the mission was successful. Michaels had his ops officer by his side and the man had a secure iPad with a chat window open with the Air Force’s 13th Intelligence Squadron at Beale Air Force Base north of Sacramento, California. The 13th IS was part of the 548th Intelligence Group and operated the RQ-4B Global Hawk. Soon after the strikers were on their egress route, he’d tell the pilots in their air-conditioned spaces at Beale to fly their unmanned aerial vehicle—UAV for short—over the compound to determine BDA. If the first strike didn’t destroy the target, the air wing would have to conduct another attack on the compound.

  * * *

  The Tigris River is the eastern member of the two great rivers that define the ancient land of Mesopotamia, the other being the Euphrates River. The river flows south from the Taurus Mountains of southeastern Turkey, through Syria and Iraq. The Tigris and Euphrates, with their tributaries, form one of the most prominent river systems in Western Asia. And the land they irrigate is some of the most fertile in the world.

  None of that mattered to Shooter Wallace at the moment. What did matter was that the Tigris presented a perfect navigation aid to guide him and his strikers directly to Mosul’s Az Zanjili neighborhood. Wallace was no throttle-jockey—far from it—he had a math degree from Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo. But say what you will about the high-tech wizardry the U.S. military had available: GPS—global positioning system—satellites, inertial navigation computers, high-fidelity data links and the like, following the river that pointed at the ISIS compound like a dagger gave him the kind of assurance he needed to be completely certain he was headed for his target.

  Wallace and his flight streaked north at Mach .85—almost six hundred and fifty miles per hour—following the Tigris. They would arm their weapons systems when they were twenty miles from the target. The mission was proceeding as planned.

  * * *

  At the southern end of Mosul’s Az Zanjili neighborhood, the Gauntlet vehicle commander, system operator, and vehicle driver were bored senseless. They were assigned to man their Soviet-designed anti-aircraft vehicle for 24-hour watch shifts—one day on and one day off—for weeks at a time. Each one of them cursed their luck. They’d much rather be ranging freely across Iraq and Syria with their fellow fighters, destroying everything in their path.

  The vehicle commander, a forty-five-year-old veteran of Saddam’s army who had been trained by the Russians to operate the SA-15, was one of the few ISIS fighters who understood this system well. He knew he was doomed to be chained to the Gauntlet until some coalition airstrike destroyed his machine as they had so many others.

  Suddenly, the sensor operator cried out, “I have something!”

  “What?” the vehicle commander asked.

  “Right here, see? I have multiple aircraft coming from the south; they look like they’re following the Tigris and are headed straight this way.”

  “Wait until they get into range, and then prepare to fire on my command! I’ll alert the other batteries!” the vehicle commander shouted.

  The veteran of many campaigns did some quick mental calculations. The SA-15’s H-band Doppler radar could pick up targets at up to twenty-five kilometers and could effectively track them inside twenty kilometers. But the Gauntlet had a range of only twelve thousand meters and could reach up to an altitude of only six thousand meters. Waiting until the aircraft got close—uncomfortably close—was their only option.

  Within minutes, the radars on the other two SA-15 batteries were also searching the sky for the approaching aircraft.

  * * *

  Wallace’s wingman was the first to pick up the screaming alert from his radar-warning receiver—the RWR. There on his UFCD—the up-front control display—was the unmistakable indication of a targeting radar. “Dealer One-One, Dealer One-Three, I’m spiked, bearing zero-one-five!”

  DCAG looked down at the bottom of his instrument panel, right in front of his control stick. There on his MPCD—the multipurpose color display—was the moving map with the threat info just where his wingman had said it would be. Wallace recalled the intel brief they had gotten in Theodore Roosevelt’s CVIC—the carrier’s intelligence center—less than two hours ago. There had been no mention of an anti-air threat.

  “Dealer One-One, Dealer Two-Two,” came the call from a Super Hornet in the second division. “I’m spiked, bearing zero-one-zero.”

  Twenty years of flying and fighting let Wallace make an instantaneous decision. “Dealer Two-One and flight, detach and climb, return to Tango-Golf,” he began, using Theodore Roosevelt’s daily changing call sign. “Dealer One-Three and One-Four, you do the same,” he continued. “Dealer One-Two and I will make this a one-section attack, over.”

  In the severely abbreviated vocabulary of naval aviation, no further words were needed. The division comprising the second wall of aircraft began a high-G turn and climb, and the two Hornets in Wallace’s flight did so as well. As they did, the two Growlers assigned to cover the ingress picked up the same threat on their displays, lit off the AN/ALQ-198 low-band jamming pods, and began to jam along the threat axis.

  Shooter Wallace wondered—but only for a moment—if he was being too cautious in telling six of his eight attacking aircraft to break off the engagement while he pressed the attack with only two jets. He knew his mission was important—but so was the safety of his junior pilots. And he was confident the sophisticated systems on his aircraft and that of his wingman were more than up to the task of taking out a single terrorist.

  * * *

  “We’re being jammed!” the Gauntlet sensor operator shouted.

  “Where?” the vehicle commander asked.

  “From the south. Just where we picked up the approaching aircraft.”

  Like Shooter Wallace, the vehicle commander was a veteran with years of training. He reacted instantly. “Fire along the bearing line.”

  * * *

  “Dealer One-One, Dealer One-Two, I’ve got a target acquisition radar on the nose!”

  “Looking,” Wallace replied, as he searched for the unmistakable sign of smoke from an ascending missile.

  He didn’t have to look for long. Wallace jinked hard to the right in an effort to break lock and his wingman followed. Training kicked in as the section began to execute a bow-tie pattern, long called a “SAM weave,” designed to keep an anti-air missile from getting a good lock, or if it did manage to lock on, to force it to deplete its energy before it could rise high enough in its trajectory to hit them. Their MPCDs showed them descending as they loaded up their jets to four Gs.

  “I see smoke, one o’clock!” Wallace’s wingman shouted. Time stood still as they watched the SA-15 climb toward them.


  Wallace jinked left and his wingman followed, pulling even more Gs as they tried to defeat the deadly missile.

  As they continued their SAM weave, jinking hard while craning their necks to keep an eye on the threat, Wallace watched the faint trace of smoke as the missile reached the top of its parabolic arc, hesitated for a split second, and then, its energy depleted, began to fall back to earth. No words needed to be exchanged as they broke off from their SAM weave, climbed, and once again headed north along the Tigris.

  * * *

  “Look!” one of Mabad al-Dosari’s men shouted as he pointed at the smoke trail of the SA-15 Gauntlet as it streaked up into the sky.

  The ISIS leader followed the smoke and searched the sky for threats. He saw none.

  “It looks like one of our batteries fired at something,” one of his lieutenants said. “Or maybe they just got spooked and shot at ghosts.”

  “I don’t know,” al-Dosari replied. “But we can’t wait to find out. We need to return to the compound.”

  With that, the small group of men began running toward Mosul’s Az Zanjili neighborhood.

  * * *

  “Reload, reload!” the vehicle commander shouted.

  The other two men scrambled to comply, but they all knew that in the time it would take to load another SA-15 on the launcher, the aircraft they were aiming at would be long gone. It was up to the other two Gauntlet batteries now.

  * * *

  As al-Dosari and his men ran toward their compound, they instinctively scanned the sky to the south—the direction that first one, and then another, smoke trail headed. They knew that previous air attacks against them had all come from the south and it was the most likely route enemy aircraft would take.

  “Look!” one of his men shouted as he pointed to two small shapes in the sky high above the Tigris River. “They look like military aircraft.”

  Al-Dosari and his men broke out into a dead run. There was little doubt in their minds about what was happening.

  * * *