Every Man a Tiger: The Gulf War Air Campaign

Chuck Horner tells what happened next:

I arrived in the TACC shortly after 0100 on the seventeenth of January 1991. The war, scheduled to start at 0300, Riyadh time, was moments away.

The January 15 U.N. deadline had come and gone. Even the added teeth of President Bush’s threat—“Evacuate Kuwait or face military action”—had produced no concrete results (though there’d been a flurry of diplomatic activity). This didn’t surprise me. I was sure Saddam wouldn’t back down, if for no other reason than he had dug too many trenches, piled too many sandbags, and poured too much concrete in the desert. He must have figured he held a winning hand, which had me worried about an ace up his sleeve. Yet how could he, I’d asked myself over and over, when we hold all four aces?

President Bush had sent a message to General Schwarzkopf: The start of the liberation of Kuwait is up to you, but make it as soon after the fifteenth as possible. The CINC had in turn delegated that responsibility to me. And I had chosen the early hours of January 17 as the best moment to launch the aerial assault.

This plan was based on a single factor. On that date would occur the least possible illumination in the night sky — no moonlight. Our F-117s were virtually invisible to radar, but they were visible to Iraqi fighter pilots; and they were particularly visible against the backdrop of a moonlit sky. They were attacking the toughest, most heavily defended target ever struck from the air — Baghdad. We were going to give them every possible advantage.

★ Knowing that I’d get very little sleep in the next days, I’d gone home to the USMTM compound next door at about 2100 that evening to try to sleep… until midnight, anyway. But sleep did not come. I was too keyed up, too tense. I lay there in the empty apartment (Yeosock and Fong were working at ARCENT and my aide Hoot Gibson had gone to Al Dahfra to fly in combat), trying to get some rest, wondering what I had forgotten, wondering what I had missed that would cost the life of a pilot. Sure, I knew some would die, but I wanted to be certain I had not made the mistake that cost them their lives.

There had been no last-minute phone calls to General Schwarzkopf, or to anyone else. These would not have been appropriate. We didn’t want an increase in communications traffic to tip off the enemy that something big was in the works, though I am sure they expected something after the fifteenth.

Shortly after the deadline passed, wheels had been set in motion. And on January 16, B-52s from the 2d Bombardment Wing of the Mighty Eighth Air Force, armed with conventional air-launched cruise missiles (CALCMs), had departed Barksdale AFB, Louisiana (an event duly reported on CNN). The Mighty Eighth would go to war once more, this time under command of the Ninth Air Force. Quite a turnaround from the days of SAC rule. Seven B-52s were to fly a round trip of 14,000 miles in thirty-five hours (the longest combat mission in history) and fire thirty-five CALCMs at eight targets — military communications sites and power-generation and transmission facilities.

Why send B-52s all the way from Louisiana?

In any war, there were many time-sensitive targets, that is, targets we wanted to hit early — command-and-control nodes, Scud storage areas, airfields, and so on — all of which we wanted to close down quickly so we could hit our other targets more efficiently as assets (fighter-bombers) became available after turnaround. Therefore, it made sense to plan the opening moments of the war to include as many strikes as possible, as quickly as possible; and cruise missiles, though expensive, gave us the ability to hit many targets simultaneously.

In this war, cruise missiles were fired not only from B-52s but from battleships and submarines (thus showcasing the Navy). The Air Force’s B-52s and their cruise missiles were the first to take off and the first to fire a shot in anger (thus showcasing the Air Force’s emerging Global Reach Global Power doctrine). Ordnance from Army Apaches was the first to explode. And Air Force F-117s were the first to penetrate the airspace of Iraq. Lots of firsts for everybody.

Our tankers, AWACS, and fighters flying the air defense combat Air Patrols and training sorties had been flying near the Iraq border every day and night since August 6 (and the RSAF had been doing that alone before we got there). These flights had been carefully increased over the past weeks, so Iraqi radar operators looking across into Saudi Arabia would not be alarmed at the large numbers of radar returns. What they didn’t see were hundreds of aircraft, primarily tankers and bomb-laden fighters, orbiting farther back from the border at altitudes below the Iraqi radar’s line of sight over the horizon.

The first wave of these were deep-penetrating aircraft — F-111s, F-15Es, Tornadoes, F-16s, A-6s, and more F-117s. These had the range and large bomb loads needed to hit Iraqi command-and-control bunkers, Scud launch pads and storage areas, telecommunications and radio facilities, and airfields. They were complemented by F-15Cs, F-14s, and air defense Tornadoes, which would orbit above Iraqi airfields, waiting for Saddam’s Air Force to rise to the defense of its country.

Also prowling over Iraq were a host of vital support aircraft — EF-111s to electronically blind Iraqi radar, Wild Weasels and Navy A-7s, equipped with high-speed radiation missiles to physically blind surface-to-air missile radar, and Special Operations helicopters, waiting near Baghdad to conduct pickup of downed aircrew. Throughout the night and next day, RF-4, U-2, RF-5, and TARPS-configured Navy/Marine aircraft flew reconnaissance and provided battle damage assessment of our opening strikes.

Backing up all of this were countless KC-135, KC-10, KC-130, and A-6 refueling tankers orbiting ever closer to the Iraqi border as the first wave of fuel-thirsty fighters and bombers returned from deep inside Iraq.

While airpower was striking the heart of Iraq, its army in the KTO did not go unnoticed. Waves of B-52s from England, Spain, and Diego Garcia began an unceasing avalanche of flaming iron upon the Republican Guard and other Iraqi troops. The rising sun brought another form of terror, as deadly A-10s dove down with their Maverick missiles, 30mm guns and bombs on tanks, armored personnel carriers, trucks, artillery, supply depots, and air defense SAMs and AAA guns.

Worse was to come, from thousands of other aircraft — versatile F-16s, often quickly turned around at KKMC airport, switching in moments from deep striker to hits on Iraqi Army targets minutes north of the border; F/A-18s from the Navy and Marine Corps; allied Jaguars, Mirages, A-4s, F-5s, and F-16s; and waves of bombers and fighters from Incirlik Air Base in Turkey.[59]

All of these aircraft were waiting for the moment they would start the massive rush across the border that would open the aerial pounding of Iraq, which would go on unabated for the next 1,000 hours. What you don’t know can hurt you.

Meanwhile, the first BGM-109 Tomahawk missiles were launched by Navy ships, aimed at vital targets in Baghdad, our first act that could not be recalled. When those missiles left their launch tubes and cells aboard the battleship Wisconsin, we were committed to war.

Even while the Tomahawks and F-117A Stealth fighters were streaming toward Baghdad, the first blow of the war was struck in Iraq’s western desert, as Task Force NORMANDY — a pair of Special Operations MH-53J PAVE LOW helicopters guiding a force of eight AH-64A Apache helicopter gunships — was approaching air defense early-warning radar sites near the Saudi border. The destruction of these sites would blow a hole in Iraqi’s radar “fence” and buy time for ingressing F-111Fs, F-15Es, and Tornado GR-1s tasked to strike air defense and Scud targets in central and western Iraq. The closer these aircraft came to their targets before the Iraqi air defense radars and ground observers alerted their defenses, the greater the odds they would hit their targets successfully and return home. A lot of folks were depending on those soldiers in their Apaches, as well as the Air Force airmen in the PAVE LOWs, whose elaborate navigation and targeting sensors were leading the Apaches through the dark night.

When the time came, the Apaches launched their Hellfire missiles, and moments later we had our fence hole.

Meanwhile, as the world would soon see on CNN, thousands of guns and surface-to-air guided missiles defended the Iraqi capital city. Airfields ringing the city bristled with some of the most modern air defense interceptors, their pilots eager to get their first kill. The entire network of defenses was tied together with the ultrasophisticated French-built KARI command-and-control system. Though we didn’t know it yet, KARI was about to commit hari-kari, by getting in the way of a bunch of grimly determined airmen.

We truly didn’t know.

How soon would our strikes silence the command and control? How soon would they spark terror in the gunners, SAM operators, and fighter pilots? How many golden BBs (wildly fired stray bullets) would strike our aircraft? How good were our F-117s? Sure, we had all the test data, all the exercise results, and all the theory; but this was the first time this revolutionary aircraft would play in a big game. (Their debut in Panama had been against undefended targets where the goal was to confuse some sleeping soldiers.) Well, the F-117 team had left the practice fields behind them. Tonight they would receive the air warfare equivalent of a Super Bowl kickoff. Not only did they have to penetrate those intense defenses, they had to hit their targets without fail, since all the rest of the crews behind them were depending on the F-117As to devastate the Iraqi air defenses. They had to hit the system’s eyes and brain — radars, command bunkers, communications sites — with never-before-demanded accuracy, and with no collateral damage.

★ At 0100, when I joined our team in the front row of the TACC, almost everyone was there (except for those scheduled to come on the day shift at 0700), watching the growing numbers of radar returns displayed by the AWACS data link on the huge TV screens on the front wall.

One screen gave the AWACS picture. On it, lines showed the boundaries of Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Israel, Syria, Jordan, and Turkey, as well as the northern ends of the Red Sea and the Arabian Gulf. Baghdad was at the center, Riyadh just off the bottom edge of the screen, Incirlik, Turkey, just off the top, the Mediterranean Sea just off the left, and Tehran just off the right. On the screen were red, yellow, or greenish-blue icons. Red was the enemy, yellow unknown, and the others friendly. Beside each icon was a series of four numbers, indicating the track number given by AWACS to the blip they were receiving on their radar.

The AWACS picture was a composite taken from four or five RSAF/ USAF E-3 aircraft. This picture was augmented by U.S. Navy E-2 AWACS aircraft flying over the Navy ships, as well as by specially equipped ships, like the Aegis class, whose radars could be integrated into this picture. AWACS was also linked with the Rivet Joint Signals Intelligence Aircraft. Rivet Joint gave the AWACS controllers information about the ships that helped them more accurately identify them. An aircraft got a blue icon because it squawked on IFF (identification friend or foe) the mode and codes assigned them in the ATO. These told the AWACS who they were, the type, call sign, mission, target, time, tanker, and so on. It was our goal to make sure red returns got minimum flying time and whenever possible to terminate that status with extreme violence. For example, “splash two MiG-23s.”

The other large TV box displayed intelligence information. ELINT data coming from a variety of sources was combined and displayed as symbols. For example, Scud launches observed by an infrared-equipped satellite and encoded into coordinates by Colorado Springs would be first displayed as a line on the map emanating from the Scud’s launch point. This was quickly followed by a fan shape showing the area it was capable of reaching. The whole thing looked like a broom, with the top of the handle being the launch point, and the bristles showing the area where the warhead might fall.

To the right of the TV displays was a small movie screen used to show viewgraphs during shift change or special Intel briefings; and leaning up against the wall was the two-by-three-foot piece of cardboard listing all our airfields and the current weather at that base. (After the first night, we added a TV set tuned to CNN, so we could watch the war.)

★ When I came in at 0100, the TACC was quiet. What was there to say? You could only wait. It was going to be hell watching the war unfold without being in the cockpit.

As I sat down, I was still kicking myself for failing to sleep when I had the chance. But I had not been totally stupid. I’d made sure to put on a clean uniform; it would be some time before I got a chance to shower and change. Still, the air in the TACC was sure to get rank from the coffee and cotton-mouth breath and nervous sweat. Yeah, I was neat and clean, but we all felt like hell.

Those minutes waiting for the war to start, waiting for our plan to unfold, were the worst minutes of my life.

We talked in low voices, as though we were afraid someone would notice us. At one point, Buster Glosson asked me, “How many aircraft are we going to lose before this is all over?”—a question that touched the heart of our collective anxiety.

There had been a number of estimates, ranging from a hundred to three hundred-plus. I checked with my guts, then wrote “42” on a piece of paper, folded it, and passed it to Buster.

My number turned out to be a good guess. But I had meant 42 USAF only, so I can’t take much credit for accuracy.

Actual losses were USAF 14, USN 6, USMC 7, RSAF 2, RAF 7, Italy 1, and Kuwait 1, for a total of 38.

Buster’s question hit us all where we were raw, because we were about to embark on actions that would take many lives. We would send our own friends and allies on missions from which they would never return. The death of friends and enemies alike hung over our heads.

I knew how tough it was to climb the ladder into your jet and fly to where folks were doing their best to kill you, even as you tried your best to wreck their homeland. And yet, as tough as that was, as terrifying as that was, there is a real up-close personal involvement that justifies what you do. When you fly over an enemy target, and the red golf balls are streaming up, and the black mushrooms with orange centers burst all around you, and the SAM missiles streaking toward you once in a while quit moving (meaning, they are homing in on you), and you hear MiG calls in your headset (meaning that those hard-to-see supersonic jets are trying to launch a missile at your jet), when all of that is going on, you develop a personal relationship with the enemy. Then you don’t mind killing him; in fact, it seems like a good idea.

No, that doesn’t justify killing the enemy, nor does it soften your concern about their attempts to kill you, but there is balance, there is some sort of justification for the horrible things you do. Sitting in the TACC, setting the killing in motion, you carry a lot more responsibility, a lot more feeling of dread. It was a burden I’d been carrying around since I’d signed the orders that would start all of this carnage in motion. It was the understanding that someday I would probably have to explain my actions to God, and there was no suitable explanation. When men are imperfect — and God knows we are — then there better be a forgiving God.

Well, it was time to suck it up and go to work. And that’s just what we all did.

★ As we were waiting in the TACC, Mary Jo was eating dinner with her mother, who was visiting from Cresco, Iowa. Sean Cullivan, our aide, came in and announced, “Mrs. Horner, the war has started.” Like many others, she and her mother left the dinner table and went into the family room to watch television. Like many others, they stayed glued to the TV for the next six weeks, morning, noon, and night. The “CNN Effect” bloomed into full flower during this war. (Interestingly, CNN became a major source of intelligence for us in the TACC.)

★ The radar display showed our strikers creep, at 500 to 600 knots, toward their targets. As we watched, someone announced that CNN’s Bernard Shaw was reporting live from Baghdad that the guided missiles were beginning to land on their targets. In my office on the third floor was a television with a CNN hookup. Meanwhile, the critical F-117 strike against the telecommunications building in Baghdad that was the core of Iraqi command and control was about to occur. We called it the AT&T building. Bernie Shaw’s reports were relayed to the United States over Iraqi telephone commercial circuits that passed through this building.

I asked Major Buck Rogers, one of the key Black Hole planners, to go upstairs and turn on my TV and let me know what happened.

The critical bomb impact time over target was to occur at 0302. As the second hand of the big clock on the wall swept toward the designated TOT, I talked to Buck on the hot line that connected my position in the TACC to my office on the third floor. The success or failure of this one F-117 mission, this one bomb, would tell a lot about how our air campaign would fare. If Iraqi telecommunications were destroyed, the air superiority battle became manageable: blind the enemy air defense system, and isolate the elements from the brain, and it is no longer a “system” but individual weapons operating in the dark.

Now we were hearing of the gunfire over Baghdad, intense and seemingly endless streams of bullets and missiles rising from atop every building and open area of the capital. I prayed for the F-117 pilots.

And then, just as the second hand swept past the twelve on the clock, Buck reported, “CNN just went off the air.” That was it. The AT&T building had taken a mortal blow. The report of our success flew across the somber-quiet TACC, and as it did, all of us came out of our shells of silence. Everywhere there was backslapping and boisterous talk. We had gone from the pits of anxiety to the heights of self-confident self-congratulations. (To me it had been close to despair. Fighter pilots are control freaks. When we are not in control, we feel hopeless.) It was a wonderful moment.

Yes, we had a long way to go before the ordeal would be over. But we were off to a good start.

Report after report of mission success began to roll in. It was like putting a puzzle together; as the pieces came together, a picture began to take shape. Each target destroyed added to the picture we had been imagining.

More important, all the aircraft, save a Navy F-18, on a suppression of enemy air defense mission, returned to their bases.

It wasn’t all smooth that night: Some of our 160 tankers ran out of fuel for off-load, and thirsty fighters had to find someone else to give them jet fuel. And the base at Taif, just south of Mecca (home to the F-111 fleet, all airborne striking vital targets across Iraq), was closed due to dense fog.

I was on the point of giving out commands, and then stopped. I needed to have faith in the commanders, in the AWACS crews, and most of all in the aircrews in each fighter. They knew how to figure out what needed to be done and then do it. If I got involved that would only add to the confusion and create dependency. Sure, I’d stay on top of the situation, but I had to let others make the decisions I dearly wanted to make. I had to delegate to others, watch them wrestle with problems that my experience made easy for me, and then watch in amazement when they found solutions I never even considered.

The air-to-air engagements were especially hard to stay out of.

Think about it. You’re a pilot who loves the complex ballet of an aerial engagement. You’ve trained for thousands of hours. Every cell in your body knows how to detect the enemy, bring your aircraft and your flight’s aircraft into the fight, engage the enemy aircraft with your weapons, and herd your team safely out of the fight toward home or into another engagement.

Now you are sitting in a room where a large display shows every aircraft in the battle (except F-117s). You see the friendly fighters going about their appointed rounds, delivering bombs or searching for Iraqi interceptors. All at once new blips appear, as a pair of Iraqi fighters scramble from their airfields. A microphone on the table in front of you connects you to AWACS and then to the fighters. You know almost as much as the AWACS knows. It would be so easy to pick up that microphone and direct, “Have Eagle flight kill the two fighters that just took off from Baland”—a fighter base in Iraq near Baghdad. All I had to do was say it, and it would be done. Even though it’s a no-brainer for the AWACS controller and the F-15 flight leader to handle it, yet I feel good. I even feel important. And we win.

But no. I’m not going to do it the Soviet way, which is the Iraqi way, with the general sitting in a bunker somewhere and telling the pilot where to fly and when to shoot.

The microphone stayed on the table. And Aim 7 missiles, illuminated by F-15 radar, homed in on the Iraqi fighters and blew them out of the sky. Pennzoil 63 and Citgo 65, Captains Kelk and Grater from the 33d Fighter Wing’s 58th Squadron, got kills on the opening night of the war, shooting down a MiG-29 and a Mirage F-1. As the Iraqi blips faded from the screen, the AWACS control team on my left called out, “Splash two,” to a cheering crowd.

★ The plan unfolding that first night had worked, and all of us were uplifted. In retrospect, I think all the folks at home were also uplifted in those early days, as the reports of success vastly outnumbered the painful reports of casualties or mission failures. After the war, people who do not understand or take time to study this part of the battle, thought it was easy, that we easily seized control over Iraq. I will admit our people made it look easy, but it wasn’t, not by any stretch of the imagination.

Meanwhile, my immediate concern now was to keep our folks from losing their intensity.

At the 0730 shift change, even as I congratulated those who were going off duty and brought the oncoming day shift up to speed, I admonished both shifts not to let up. We had a long, hard battle ahead, and they needed to remain grimly determined. “Our job now is to worry,” I told them. “Our job now is to work longer and harder than ever, to be disciplined, be hard-nosed. Do not let the Iraqis up off the floor. Kick the shit out of them.” Then I tried to put a smile on their faces with the inane blessing, “Have a good day.”

And it was.

★ During the first twenty-four hours, we flew 2,775 sorties. We hit thirty-seven targets in the Baghdad area, of which most (about fifteen) were designed to sever communications used by the Iraqi military. The rest hit targets such as the electrical grid and the national headquarters of intelligence, the military, the secret police, and other leadership targets. We had about 200 sorties against airfields, 175 against Scud targets, 750 interdiction sorties against the Iraqi Army and its supplies, 436 CAP or defensive counter-air sorties, 652 offensive counter-air (these included the Wild Weasels and airfield attacks), and 432 tanker sorties. (The USMC called their AV-8 sorties close air support, but by definition that was impossible, since CAS takes place within the FSCL, and their sorties flew beyond the FSCL, which was the Saudi border.)

Our biggest day was February 23, when we flew 3,254 sorties, one-third of which (995) were interdiction in the KTO. Overall, we flew 44,000 sorties against the Iraqi Army, 24,000 sorties to get and maintain control of the air and protect our forces from Iraqi air attack, 16,000 refueling sorties, and 5,000 electronics warfare and command-and-control sorties.

The opening moments of the war demonstrated that we were able to get to our targets and destroy them and for the most part return safely. We had some air-to-air kills, and probably no losses to enemy fighters on our side. That boded well. Though I expected good results over time, I really didn’t expect such good results so soon. Even if we had lost two or three aircraft, I would have marked the opening night as a success.

Still, I knew we were in for a long haul. We had trained for a fifteen-round fight, and I figured it would go the full fifteen — or, as I had told Secretary Cheney, six weeks. So I didn’t read too much into our early success.

★ Like a fool, I stayed in the TACC, fascinated by the unfolding events, and neglecting sleep. I had admonished all the others to rest so they could hold up under the long haul, but neglected to follow my own orders. I was operating on caffeine and adrenaline, the “breakfast of champions” for a fighter pilot.

Meanwhile, the F-117s and F-111s were tearing Iraqi command and control to pieces. The strikes against key airfields and munitions production facilities were going as planned. The B-52s, A-10s, F-16s, Jaguars, FA-18s, and AV-8s were hard at work on the Iraqi Army deployed in the desert.

When we bombed the Iraqi Army with B-52s, we were primarily using them for effect. And they had quite an effect. One POW was asked which aircraft he feared the most, and he said, “The B-52.” He was then asked to describe the experience. To which he replied, “I was never bombed by a B-52; but I visited a friend who had been, and I saw and heard what it was like, and so I feared the B-52 more than anything else.”

After the war, another Iraqi was asked why he had surrendered so quickly. “It was the bombs,” he said, pointing to pictures of B-52s and A-10s. “It was the bombs.”

Little did he realize that he had most likely survived because we had targeted those aircraft to minimize Iraqi deaths. We did that because it was the right thing to do, and because we wanted to exploit the already low morale of the Iraqi soldier in his unholy occupation of a Muslim neighbor. If I had wanted to kill Iraqi soldiers, we could have loaded the B-52 “buffs” with wall-to-wall antipersonnel munitions; and, today, unexploded submunitions (ready to detonate if disturbed) would probably have left Kuwait and southern Iraq uninhabitable.

What we dropped were regular bombs. They made a lot of noise and tore up the desert for miles; and if one hit a bunker, the folks inside died. That couldn’t be called an accident, but if by some miracle we had hit no Iraqi soldiers, and they had all surrendered without fighting, I would not have been unhappy.

★ Before the middle of February, I actually paid little attention to the specifics of the war. I listened to all the BDA bullshit, but only to the extent that it told me what else needed to be done. I was trying not to rest on our laurels. Or, as Bill Creech told us, “Don’t read your own press clippings.” What was important was what was coming next. So I paid attention to what we had done only when it helped me with that. Each day we learned more about the Iraqis, and the thoughts about what that new information meant were my most important thoughts.

You don’t really know about war until you engage in it against a specific enemy in a specific environment. Sure, you can make general assumptions that will in all likelihood hold up when the shooting starts, but you have to be careful about relying on these. It’s like preparing for a boxing match. You study previously demonstrated tendencies, strengths, and weaknesses, but when the bout starts, that has only a limited value. Now you are concerned with your opponent’s punches and openings. Strategies change because of many factors, such as fatigue or injury, that can only be known during the fight.

CONTROL OF THE AIR

Air superiority is not a precise concept. And the process of gaining it is no less fuzzy. What do you mean by air superiority, and how do you know when you’ve got it? There is no handy chart that lets you plot the x- and y-axis and find where the two lines cross.

What I wanted was to operate freely over Iraq and not lose too many aircraft. Okay, what does that mean? What is too many? I don’t know exactly, but I guess I will know if it is too many. Later in the war, too many A-10s targeted against the Republican Guards were getting shot up. Because they were suffering too many casualties, I ordered them to other targets. Were there any specific numbers involved in this decision? No. It was a gut call.

Free operation over Iraq raises other issues. For starters, not every aircraft could be expected to go everywhere. Or if it could go everywhere, it might not do that all the time. The F-117s could go anywhere, but when the Iraqi Air Force was flying, they could only go at night. (Again, we wanted to fly the F-117s in conditions where they wouldn’t be seen.) The A-10s, on the other hand, were never sent to Baghdad, even after we controlled the air.

In other words, control of the air is a complex issue, filled with variables.

To take the question a step further, I considered that I had air superiority when I could do what I wanted to within the strengths and limitations of my force, and when I could hold the Iraqi targets at risk while employing all my air assets as appropriate. That meant, for example, that my strike aircraft did not have to jettison their payload due to Iraqi defenses such as fighter interceptors.

I knew we would have aircraft losses throughout the war, but I wanted those losses to be the lowest possible until the ground war started. Then I expected the aircraft doing close air support would be taking greater risks, flying lower to identify the target or to get under the smoke and weather in order to support our engaged coalition ground forces.

An air commander manages loss rates. If you have time, and the target is not urgent (either in time or in priority), then you back off from great risk (on those occasions, for example, when the weather will make it difficult to visually acquire SAM missiles and outmaneuver them). On the other hand, if the situation is dire — if, say, a ground unit is being overrun — then you order the force into greater danger. At Khafji, we lost an AC-130 that stayed too long over the battlefield. Day came, and the sky grew light enough for an Iraqi shoulder-fired SAM gunner to visually acquire him and shoot his missile. Our pilot was not reckless. He elected to err on the unsafe side because there were lots of high-priority targets for him to shoot. It was a bad judgment, but that’s how airmen think and evaluate risk. If the target had been more ordinary and he had been facing the same risk, he’d have gone somewhere else and hit an easier target.

Because I absolutely had to knock out the Iraqi air defense command and control, I risked sending all the F-117s to Baghdad (I didn’t realize then how good Stealth was). However, if I had the same appreciation of Stealth that I had during the opening moments of the war, and the target was the Baath Party headquarters, I would not have sent the F-117s. That target wasn’t worth the gamble.

To me, the goals of the air superiority campaign were threefold:

(1) To render the Iraqi fighters inoperable. We would blind them by cutting off their command and control, terrorize them by shooting down anything that flew, and make life difficult by bombing airfields and radar sites.

(2) To render the radar-guided surface-to-air missiles impotent. We would attack command and control and use support jamming EA-6Bs and EF-111s, in order to force each piece of the system into autonomous operations (in that way they had to radiate with their own radars to find a target, making them more vulnerable to HARM attacks). We would terrorize the operators to induce them not to use their radars. We would kill them on a priority basis, using Wild Weasels and USN HARM-equipped aircraft. We would self-protect by using ECM pods, and by flying in VFR conditions, so aircraft could see the radar-guided SAMs and outmaneuver them.

(3) To render guns and shoulder-fired IR SAMs useless. We would fly at medium altitude; keep the time at low altitude (such as at the bottom of a dive bomb pass) at a minimum; and — the age-old lesson we always relearn in combat — we would not make multiple passes on the same target.

From the start, General Schwarzkopf was always asking when we would have air superiority, but I would never tell him. I knew we would be able to do anything we wanted to from the start, yet I also knew the Iraqis would contest control of the air as long as Saddam could fire his pistol toward the sky (as he often did in newsreels). The CINC wanted some magic number. I knew there was no such thing. I knew the answer lay in Chuck Horner’s gut, and it was determined by my gut feelings about the losses and efficiency of the operation.

That is why my first stop every day was at the search-and-rescue cell to talk over losses. How did they happen and what was the status of the crews? That stop had many purposes: one, to keep reminding me that war is about death and killing and that our guys were dying, just as the enemy was; two, to keep the faith with the aircrews (we were honor bound to do our best to rescue them if they got shot down); three, to learn what was working and what was failing so that I could crank that information into my targeting, rules, advice, and strategy.

So when did we get air superiority?

We had it before the war began, because we had the means to get it — equipment, intelligence, training, and the courage of the aircrews. We had it the minute Bernard Shaw went off the air, because that told me the central nervous system of the Iraqi air defense system had been severed. We had it when it became clear that Iraqi fighters, their most potent weapon, were being shot down and our fighters were not. We had it when it was clear that Iraqi SAM radar operators were not turning on their radar, even as they shot missiles blindly into the sky. We had it when RAF Tornadoes finally stopped flying at low altitude.

About three days into the war, General Schwarzkopf announced that we had air superiority. This information did not come from me. He just went ahead and said it, I suppose because it was “good news from the front” sort of thing. Later he announced that we had air supremacy. Again, I never told him that, but I guess it provided him a means to show progress. Did I mind? No, of course not. My job was to plan and employ airpower operations against an enemy and to do that as efficiently as possible (realizing that war is about the most inefficient thing man does… and the most stupid). His job was to handle the bigger picture.

★ Here’s how we did all this.

I’ll say it again, the Iraqi air defenses were massive. One had only to tune in to CNN and watch the night sky over Baghdad to get some idea of what our aircraft confronted throughout the war. What you did not see were the Iraqi fighters and surface-to-air missiles.

Our plan to control the air was complex. First, we would blind the Iraqis by destroying communications links between the air defense search radars, the commanders who dispatched interceptor aircraft or assigned targets to individual SAM batteries, and the pilots who would be given vectors toward their target. Second, we would strike fear in the minds of the Iraqi Air Force pilots, SAM radar operators, and antiaircraft artillery gunners. Our goal was to make them hate to come to work. We wanted them convinced that if they tried to engage our aircraft they would die. Nothing subtle, no nuances, just fear. Finally, we would avoid as many defenses as possible.

★ There is a new buzzword going around nowadays—“information war.”

When people talk about it, they usually mean putting viruses in a computer or making networks crash. Information war can do that, but it is really a lot more.

The key concept involves getting inside your enemy’s decision cycle. That is, you know what is going on faster and better than he does, and can therefore make and implement decisions faster. This permits you to take and maintain the initiative, and causes him to lose control.

At Khafji, for example, Joint STARS told me where and when the enemy was moving — which of course told me nothing about his intentions. Nevertheless, I attacked his movement, and as a result destroyed his attack before it started. He could not form up his attacking forces or mass for the attack, because when he tried, his convoys en route to the battle or invasion were destroyed. Perhaps this is stretching a point, but you could make the case that my information superiority and my increased capacity to analyze and decide what that information meant gave me the means to thwart an attack before I even knew I was being attacked.

Information war, then, is primarily a function of the increased pace and accuracy of data now yielded by computers, sensors, and communications systems.

The analysis of the KARI command control and communication system, as well as the subsequent disruption and dismemberment of its elements, was information warfare pure and simple. Our selection of targets was the product of this analysis — who was in charge of which sectors, which kinds of sensors, whether a radar site or a man out in the desert with binoculars and a telephone. We were counting on the Iraqi reliance on centralized control. Once it was gone, the air defense system would be disorganized.

Attacking the KARI computers and links was the divide-and-conquer concept on a massive scale. Our strategy meant the “AT & T” telephone exchange had to go, and it did. Communication cables in the desert and under bridges had to go, and they did. Microwave antennas located throughout the country had to go, and they did. Some of the links were off-limits, owing to their location in hotels or near religious buildings, and so they survived. But in the first forty-eight hours of attacks, we got enough to cripple KARI. After that, individual elements — fighter aircraft, radars, SAM sites, and AAA batteries — had to fight alone and uncoordinated, acting on their own initiative and judgment; and they had not been trained to do that.

★ Meanwhile, I had no doubt that the Iraqi defenders were as intelligent and courageous as any soldiers. I also had no doubt that they loved their country, and were willing to die in its defense, no matter how much they loved or despised Saddam Hussein and his gang. My conclusion: after weakening their systems of defense, we had to weaken their spirit of defense.

To that end, we conducted a campaign to strike fear in their hearts. I knew they would man their radars, fire their SAMs, and shoot their guns at our aircraft. They would do this, first, in defense of their people and their nation, but perhaps more important, to avoid being arrested and executed by their military superiors. I wanted thousands of Iraqi gunners who felt good about shooting (they would under most circumstances) but didn’t feel bad about missing. You know, shoot your SAM missile, especially when the major is around, but don’t bother to turn on the tracking radar needed to guide the SAM to the Coalition aircraft. Bluntly, we were going to bribe the Iraqi air defenders by using their own lives as the payment.

The main target of the intimidation campaign was surface-to-air radar operations. This was nothing new. In Vietnam, we had learned the hard way that the SAM is a tough nut to crack. Now we had a war with lots of SAMs, most of which were more deadly than Vietnam’s SA-2s. We also had F-4G Wild Weasels that were equipped with the new AGM-88 high-speed anti-radiation missile (HARM), a radar-killing weapon more accurate and easier to employ than anything we’d used in Vietnam. Though the F-4Gs were oldsters next to their F-16 wingmen, they were much more capable than the Vietnam-era F-105G Thunderchiefs I had flown. Most of all, we had a host of Wild Weasel aircrews who had benefited from superb electronic training at monthly Red Flag exercises at Nellis AFB in Nevada. The Air Force, Marines, Navy, and allied crews who had flown in Red Flag knew what these Weasels could do. The F-4G “Rhinos” were old and ugly, but now that we were at war the first thing the F-16 flight leaders wanted to know was “Where will the Weasels be during our next mission?”

But first, we had to light up the minds of the SAM operators with fear. And to do this, we staged a party—“Puba’s Party.”

General Larry Henry (“Puba”) had come to me in August to work in the “Black Hole” developing our offensive air campaign. His experience as an electronic-warfare officer in Wild Weasels, and his generally twisted mind, created the party we threw for the Iraqi radar operators.

His script was simple to build but difficult to execute. First, BGM-109 Tomahawk missiles and F-117As would arrive unannounced over Baghdad, their exploding bombs and warheads ensuring that Iraqi defenders who were not awake would get up and report to their units. At that point, the air defenses would be on full alert and fully manned, eager for the forthcoming battle. Puba would then send over Baghdad a host of small unmanned drone aircraft (ground-launched Northrop BQM-74s) that were designed to look like full-size manned aircraft on SAM radarscopes. Immediately behind the drones would be HARM-laden Air Force and Navy fighter aircraft. As the drones entered the SAM-defended areas over Baghdad, the SAM radars would radiate and the Iraqi operators would track their targets and fire their missiles. What they would not see was almost a hundred HARM missiles being launched from just outside their radar coverage.

And so it happened on the first night of the war. The Iraqi SAM operators succeeded in downing nearly all of the drones, and in so doing they provided dozens of targets for the incoming anti-radiation missiles.

The results had to be horrible. And from the horror came fear.

After Puba’s Party, the number of SAM missile firings remained high, while the number of Coalition aircraft shot down remained very low. As we had hoped, the guidance radars were not turned on. This was the feedback that told us Puba’s Party was a stunning success. It was not easy, and it wasn’t cheap (the drones and HARMs cost a bundle!), but it made possible all the efficiencies of precision munitions delivered from medium to high altitude that shortened the war and reduced the loss of life.

It was Puba’s Party that gave us the vital medium-altitude sanctuary. Sure, some continued to try low-level tactics to escape the radar SAMs, but as our losses at low altitude mounted, the message became very plain: get up to altitude and rely on the electronic battle now being directed by General Glenn Profitt, Larry Henry’s replacement.

This lesson did not come easy. During Desert Shield, I had laid down the law to the wing commanders at the bases: no low-level tactics or training unless they could explain to me why they wanted their aircrews to do it. I expected a great gnashing of teeth, wails, and moans (low level keeps coming back, like a monster at the end of a horror movie). In the event, however, only two commanders came forward to argue for low-altitude tactics — Colonels Hal Hornberg of the F-15E wing and Tom Lennon of the F-111 wing. Because I’d promised the wing commanders they could run their own show in areas like tactics, I let them return to low-level attack tactics. But after a few days of real combat, real bullets, and unfortunately, real losses, both wings pitched out low-level operations and joined their friends at medium altitude.

When I asked the F-16 and A-10 wing commanders why they didn’t ask to go back to flying among the rocks, their answer was simple: “We want to survive this war.” Why, then, did the F-111s and F-15Es have to find out the hard way? I thought about that long and hard after the war. It couldn’t have been peacetime training. No one spends more time flying at low altitude than the A-10s. Their slower speed permits the Warthogs to fly legally almost anywhere in the United States at low altitude. And yet, even with the protection of their titanium armor, the A-10s didn’t want to tool around the Iraqis at low altitude. Why F-111s and F-15Es? The answer was twofold, I reasoned. First, except for the infrared sensor, their systems were optimized for low altitude. Their attack radars worked best at the low grazing angles afforded by low-altitude ingress. Most important, in my view, one half of the crew of these two-place fighters — the weapon system operator — earned his living telling the pilot where to go. If you were at low altitude without GPS (and only the F-16s had GPS), the pilot relied on the WSO for navigational assistance. When it came to attack, the WSO was the king; but if they didn’t go low-level, the rest of the trip could be pretty meaningless.

Italian and British Tornadoes also suffered losses — all, save one, the result of low-level, low-altitude tactics. In fact, in the first two days of the war, approximately two-thirds of our losses were suffered by aircraft flying low-level tactics, even as the majority of our sorties were being flown at medium altitude.

Because they were taking on the most difficult, most well-defended targets outside of Baghdad, the RAF GR-1 Tornadoes were especially hard hit. Saudi and British Tornadoes were equipped with a munition designed to shut down airfields, the JP-233, which had to be delivered at low altitude. But the airfields bristled with defenses, especially AAA guns, which continued to take a discouraging toll of Tornadoes well after the F-111s and F-15Es got back up to medium altitude. The Tornadoes had few good alternatives to flying low altitude. And I had no alternative but to let them do it. If I was loath to dictate tactics to USAF wings, I was definitely not going to do it to an ally. But if I could find an opening to introduce the subject, I would.

One night at a gathering of national air commanders, I said, “We’ve gotten some experience in this war. This looks like a good place to take a look at what we are doing right and wrong. I suggest we form a multinational tactics team to evaluate our operations and suggest changes they think appropriate.”

Without hesitation, Air Vice Marshal Bill Wratten spoke up: “I think that’s a good idea, and I’d like to lead the effort.” I couldn’t have been more pleased. Bill, like all the rest of us, had been in anguish over the losses. Even though there had been all sorts of speculation about the causes and the possible fixes, we needed an experienced airman close to the scene of the action to give us an objective view. Bill Wratten was just the man, and with the support of Air Chief Marshall Patty Hine, we were able to stop losses due to low-altitude tactics.

Here are some facts and figures:

We lost twelve GR-1s (of which one was Italian and two were RSAF). Nine were shot down or crashed doing low-level attacks, two were lost at medium altitude, and one ran out of fuel. The GR-1 loss rate was significantly higher than other aircraft:

The Tornado, which flew more low-level tactics than any other aircraft, had a loss rate nine times the F-16s and over six times the fairly slow A-10s.

★ AAA and SAMs were dangerous, but the most lethal threat to our attack was the enemy’s interceptor aircraft.

Why?

Ground-based defenses stayed in one place and could be avoided by flying around them, if we knew where they were (and we usually did), or by high- or medium-altitude attack. If a SAM site shot at you, you could evade the missile and distance yourself from the site at 600 to 800 knots. A MiG, on the other hand, could encounter you anywhere over Iraq. If he jumped you, you might not be able to disengage; and since he was as fast as you, he could take a missile or gun shot if you turned tail to run.

I had studied the Iraqi Air Force for years, and had found many strengths, including a number of first-rate aircraft equipped with adequate missiles, a comprehensive command-and-control structure, and a few excellent pilots. Its single greatest weakness was its reliance on centralized command and control; but the training its pilots received was not uniformly good, and the logistics support was shaky.

To have had a chance against us, the Iraqis needed innovative tactics and an awareness of the air situation. They had neither.

In the hands of a good pilot, virtually any interceptor can badly hurt an attacking air force. Iraq had some excellent aircraft, especially their MiG-29s and Mirage F-1s, as well as an inventory of older aircraft, principally MiG-21s and MiG-23s. Though the older aircraft weren’t much of a threat on their own, if they’d been used in conjunction with the newer Russian and French models, they could have caused us serious problems. Their best tactics would have been to engage our air-to-air fighters with their top-of-the-line fighters, then run the older MiGs in on the bomb-laden aircraft using high-speed hit-and-run tactics. Even if they were unable to achieve a kill, their supersonic bounce would have forced our bombers to jettison their air-to-ground ordnance (externally stored bombs and missiles cause drag and have to be dropped).

The weapons carried by these fighters, on the other hand, were not nearly as good as our radar and heat-seeking missiles. Nevertheless, they were more than adequate if the enemy pilot could put his aircraft in a position to shoot them.

★ I had never been impressed with Iraqi pilots, but that didn’t mean we could always count on running into bad ones. Among the youth of every nation in the world you’ll find a few “aces”—young men, and now women, capable of winning aerial engagements time after time. The traits found in those who consistently shoot down other fighters are found everywhere — though never in abundant supply. Good eyesight doesn’t hurt, but some of our greatest had poor eyesight (they’d purposely select wingmen with good eyes). Courage is required, but that is easy enough to come by in air-to-air combat, where you either fight or die. The trait I most admire in great pilots is “situational awareness.” It is the ability to keep track of what is going on around you and to project that awareness into an accurate mental image of what is about to happen during the next few moments; and it is extremely rare. It’s an ability that has little to do with IQ. Some of our best fighter pilots do not appear outwardly intelligent. On the ground they will do the dumbest things, or get into serious trouble; but in an engagement they process data at speeds and complexities that would defeat our fastest, most powerful computers. Out there in every nation there are a few — very few — individuals with the inborn talent to process supersonic motion and project it in three dimensions. If properly trained and equipped, these people duel with the best in the sky.

During the Iran-Iraq War, our AWACS had maintained a close watch on the aircraft of both countries, and their aerial engagements had been analyzed and briefed by our CENTAF operations/intelligence team. I had also analyzed the few encounters between Iranians and Saudis (which gave me a good benchmark; I was familiar with the great competence of Saudi pilots). The Iranians had excellent, though aging, fighters — F-5s, F-14s, and F-4s — but it was apparent from their lack of success against the Saudis that their aircraft radars were inoperative, or at least poorly tuned. The Iranian pilots, while eager, had obviously suffered as a result of the fundamentalist revolution. When Iranian aircraft challenged Saudi air defenses, they were promptly intercepted and either shot down or driven back.

On the other hand, when Iraqi fighters engaged Iranians — either in defense of Baghdad or supporting air attacks on Iranian targets — they were, to be charitable, ineffective. The engagements were pure Keystone Kops. The Iranian and Iraqi aircraft would be vectored toward one another by ground-based radars. They would close to within a mile, then circle aimlessly, apparently unable to locate each other and shoot their weapons. This “ballet of the blind” occurred time after time. I had no doubt that all the pilots were willing, but they were overly dependent on ground-based radar vectors — once again pointing out the superiority of our F-14, F-15, F-16, and F-18 on-board target-acquisition systems.

★ Iraqi pilot training came from three sources: France, Pakistan, and the former Soviet Union. Lucky for us, Soviet training proved dominant, with their emphasis on rigid rules, strict command arrangements, and standardized tactics. Coupled with this centralized approach, the Soviets were suspicious of non-Russians and disliked Arabs. The Iraqi students were taught to take off and land their aircraft safely, but otherwise their training was so basic, so lacking in advanced tactics, as to be useless.

There was, however, a wild card. Not all Iraqi training came from the Russians.

Iraqi pilots were trained well by their French and Pakistani instructors.

The French training was evidenced by Iraqi attacks on Iranian shipping and the USS Stark. And Iraqi air-to-ground operations against Iran’s oil facilities at Kharg Island and near Bandar Abbas were model operations, worthy of study by all airmen.

Pakistan has one of the best, most combat-ready air forces in the world. They have to; their neighbor to the east is huge, and the two nations have a long history of hostility. For Indian war planners, the Pakistani Air Force is their worst fear. Pakistani pilots are respected throughout the world, especially the Islamic world, because they know how to fly and fight.

On one or two occasions, I had the opportunity to talk with Pakistani instructor pilots who had served in Iraq. These discussions didn’t give me great cause to worry. The Russian domination of training prevented the Pakistanis from having any real influence on the Iraqi aircrew training program.

Still, there had to be a few Iraqi pilots who’d observed and listened to their mentors from France and Pakistan and the useless guidance of their inept leaders. It was those few I was concerned about — the ones with great situational awareness and good eyesight, who had figured out how to effectively use their aircraft and its weapons to defend their nation.

If those gifted Iraqi pilots existed, and I’m certain they did, they probably died on 17, 19, and 24 January. We went after them so hard and so thoroughly that they never had a chance to show that they were respectable.

Our fundamental strategy was simple. Blind them and beat the tar out of them as they groped about. We were going to stomp the Iraqi Air Force into submission. Not fair, not pretty, not poetic. Our goal was to be as vicious and unrelenting as possible. To do otherwise would just prolong the suffering and death.

To blind the Iraqi Air Force, our first bombers fell on its eyes and brains — radars, command bunkers, and communications sites. Of equal importance was the forward movement of our interceptor fighters into Iraq. We put twenty-four-hour CAPs over each of the Iraqi fighter bases.[60] Forward fighters were positioned to intercept the Iraqi jets almost as soon as they broke ground. Our hopes for the Iraqi fighter pilot were very simple: take off and blow up.

For the most part, our hopes became reality. After the first three days of the war, we had seized control of the air over Iraq and Kuwait.

Three days may seem short, and the Iraqi Air Force may look like a push-over. But do not get the idea that gaining control of the air was easy. It was not a “macho,” “no sweat” operation. What turned into a turkey shoot in late January and February started out as a bitter struggle; those first few days were the hardest-fought, most critical aspect of the entire war.

Meanwhile, when the bombs began to fall on Baghdad, Iraqi pilots ran to their planes and took off. I’m sure they sent their best and brightest, and I know they tried their hardest; but in air-to-air combat, it’s win, lose, or get out of town. There is no second place. The Iraqis lost at least eight times on the seventeenth of January. They tried again two days later and lost six more times. Their last try (and their only effort to attack our forces on the ground with aircraft) was on the twenty-fourth, when two Mirage F-1s attempted to penetrate Saudi Arabia for an air-to-ground strike. An RSAF F-15C shot them both down just out to sea in the Arabian Gulf.

After that, they tried to hide in their heavily defended aircraft shelters, also to no avail, when we picked off the shelters, one at a time, with 2,000-pound hard-case, laser-guided bombs.

They were then left with the “get out of town” option. We had actually anticipated that, but felt their destination would be Iraq’s Arab neighbor and sometime friend, Jordan. Wrong. They went to Iran, leaving our carefully placed barrier CAP aircraft orbiting between Baghdad and Jordan in the desert.

On the first night of the exodus, the burning question was whether or not the jets were defecting. Because they were fleeing to an old enemy, that was a possible inference. But when they did it again the next night, I was pretty sure it was organized and not defection.

In order to find out what was really going on, I called Mary Jo, in Sumter, South Carolina. No, she doesn’t operate a spy network; but we had an Iranian-born friend who shared our passion for Persian carpets and whose father was well placed back home. She called our friend, and he called his father, who reported that an Iraqi general had shown up in Iran a few days before and negotiated safe haven for the Iraqi Air Force. The Iranians, justifying their reputation as “bazzaris,” or traders, carefully responded, “We will keep your aircraft for you”; and so, it seems, they have. The aircraft are still there.

Once the exodus started, the Iraqis ceased operating as a fighting force; it was a panic rush to the exits. They’d wait for gaps in our CAP coverage, then bolt in groups for Iran, hoping that if they avoided our fighters, they’d have enough fuel to find an Iranian airfield. The pilots who didn’t had to eject.

BRIEFINGS

We don’t like briefings, because we don’t like to sit around in meetings. But we have to have briefings, because they offer the most efficient way to keep vital information flowing to the largest variety of people. There were three that really mattered every day — the two at our TACC changeover, and the evening briefing at MODA for the CINC.

Since we had two teams, each working twelve hours a day, the changeover briefings occurred twice a day, morning and evening. Here there was no attempt at depth, or to make speculative projections (these came in the meeting that followed). For the most part, the presenters laid out facts and made reasonable projections of trends needed to plan ATOs and bring the staff up-to-date. Intel briefers, for example, would touch on the status of the Iraqi transportation system, the bridges he or she was recommending for strike, the reasons why the Iraqi Air Force was flying to Iran, or possible Scud hiding places. And there was also plenty of BDA, target systems, and current information.

When the incoming staff arrived, they’d gather around, while each section — Intelligence, Weather, Plans, Operations, BCE, Naval Liaison, and Marine Liaison — covered anything they wanted everyone to hear. Though the briefing was directed at me and the other senior leaders of the national air forces, it also allowed the staff coming on duty to get up to speed and to talk about the coming period and beyond. Anyone could ask questions (though few did). Then, at the end, I would make brief remarks designed to keep the staff focused on what I believed important. Most of the time I kept these remarks general, but on a few occasions I outlined specific tasks for the next twelve to twenty-four hours.

After this briefing, I would turn my chair around and face the back of the room, and the senior leaders from the U.S. Navy, Army, Marines, and the Coalition air forces, along with my senior staff — Tom Olsen, Randy Witt, Buster Glosson, John Corder, Bill Rider, Pat Caruana, Ed Tonoso, Glenn Profitt, and especially the four colonels, Crigger, Doman, Reavy, and Harr (two coming on and two going off duty) — would receive a purely speculative intelligence briefing from Chris Christon. (The briefing was not exclusive; anyone could stand around and listen; but as a rule, the duty officers had to get to work, now that the previous person manning their workstation had left for food and rest.)

Here Chris would let his imagination roam and give a far more hypothetical assessment of what we were about to face than was appropriate during the changeover briefing. I wanted him to really guess. Why? Because I had to think ahead. I had to make decisions. And if I used the usual intelligence data, I didn’t have much to go on.

Our peacetime-trained intelligence organizations are taught never to be wrong. They like numbers, and don’t like to talk about what the other guy is thinking. They don’t predict, they just give you the rundown, like TV news anchors. Yet, as a commander, I had to think about what the other guy was thinking. I needed to get inside the other guy in order to find ways to spoil his plans and make his worst fears come true. That meant Chris had to speculate, stimulate our thinking, and provoke the questions we needed to ask. Sure, he might be way off base, but that was expected. And of course, having reviewed all the intelligence derived from our own operations (pilot reports and intelligence reports published by his staff) and from other organizations, he always explained the reasons for his projections.

In addition to providing insight into the enemy, these meetings expanded our collective thinking. For that reason, discussions always followed Chris Christon’s predictions, and these wandered wherever the various leaders wanted. Obviously, there were cultural differences that dictated how and when a particular commander spoke. The Europeans, for instance, were comfortable speaking openly, and they all felt free to take any position on any issue. The Arabs, on the other hand, were more reticent and circumspect. Nonetheless, if they thought we were missing anything important — especially if it concerned the Arab mentality of our enemy — they spoke up.

Inevitably, issues came up that we discussed at length yet never really got a handle on. Some of these, like Scuds, came up frequently.

Finally, these meetings made us a team. Our U.S. Air Force people were already working hard for harmony, side by side, throughout the TACC and at the various bases, on the ground and in the air. I wanted all the national air force leaders to have the same feelings of trust, respect, and unity of effort. That is why it was important for me not to act in charge; and that is why it was important for me to listen to them and actively seek their views. It also didn’t hurt to learn something new, and gain their perceptions, experience, and insights.

We were fortunate in this conflict in that if we failed to accurately gauge the enemy, our strength was so overwhelming that we would still prevail. Nonetheless, our mistakes could cost the lives of aircrew, or later, the lives of airmen and soldiers on the ground. That is why so many people worked so hard at thinking about the enemy, our plan to fight, and our actual minute-by-minute engagement with him.

“It all starts and ends with intelligence,” I like to say. In war, your intelligence has to be the departure point for your thinking or planning. And then, after you execute your actions, your intelligence estimates the results and the effects on the enemy, so you can plan the next move.

War is not unlike chess. But in war, you do not have a clear view of the other side of the board.

★ Just before 2000 each evening, I left the operation to Tom Olsen and headed for the CINC’s meeting at the MODA building bunker. As I ran up the stairs, I usually heard Buster Glosson doing the same thing; he, too, had been busy getting ready, for it was his job to brief the next ATO. We’d both hit the glass doors and race out into the cold night to an armored Mercedes sedan, the back doors open and the motor running. Behind the wheel was Technical Sergeant Mike Brickert, a six-foot-three deputy sheriff from Chelan County, Washington, who was an air policeman in the Air National Guard and an Olympic-class marksman and athlete. His job was to get Buster and me safely and quickly to the MODA so I could be in my seat before General Schwarzkopf called the meeting together. En route, Buster and I would review his briefing.

Most days, I had gone over this new ATO during the morning, when I would wander down to the Black Hole and discuss the infant plan. Buster and his people would then massage it the rest of the day, and from this would emerge a Master Attack Plan, which listed the primary targets we intended to strike. In the car, Buster and I would make changes based on how we felt the CINC would react to comments or targets. The key was to challenge him a little bit but keep him from overreacting. So we were careful to justify each target nomination.

The one area we could not judge accurately — and didn’t really have to — was the number of sorties we needed to apply to the individual Iraqi divisions in the KTO. (All we knew for certain was that the Republican Guard was going to get more attention than conscript infantry units.) In the end, we were going to get them all, so the answer didn’t really matter. Each day we used Sam Baptiste’s and Bill Welch’s best guess (based on ground force inputs) about which units to hit, and then we distributed the rest, based on ARCENT estimates of unit strengths. Every evening, as was his privilege as CINC and land force component commander, Schwarzkopf modified this part of the plan.

My strategy session with Buster usually ended as we hit the front door of MODA and ran to the elevator that took us to the underground command post. We were never late, but we were often in the hall only steps ahead of the CINC.

The meeting that followed (like the changeover briefing we had just left) covered the weather, intelligence updates, the progress of the war, and logistics, communications, and overall support updates provided by the CENTCOM staff. Then came the main order of business — the plans for the day after tomorrow. For the first five weeks of Desert Storm, virtually the only subject discussed was the air war — in other words, Buster Glosson’s briefing. Though the daily plans tended to be an expansion of the previous day’s efforts, each also had to be coherent in and of itself and address any interim changes.

When he came “on stage,” Buster would take out his rolled Plexiglas sheets with the proposed targets outlined and notes written in grease pencil. For example, there might be a circle, with the number 50 inside it, over the general location of the 18th Iraqi Armored Division in Kuwait — meaning that two days from now we intended to task fifty attack sorties against that division (the exact time of each strike would depend on details too numerous to brief, and was anyhow of little importance in the current phase of attriting the Iraqi Army before the ground battle started). Or there might be a green triangle overlaid on a series of bridges, showing how the effort to isolate the battlefield would continue. Or there might be red triangles overlaid on a nuclear research center, a tank repair depot, and a suspected Scud storage area.

Buster would quickly, but in detail, explain the nature of each target and how its destruction fit in the overall campaign plan. Once that was done, he would briefly cover the AWACS tracks, CAPs, Scud patrols, and electronic-warfare packages. The discussion of army targets was left for last. At that point, Buster and I would take out our pencils, ready for the CINC to break in, point to a list of Iraqi divisions posted on the wall, and rattle off the divisions he wanted struck. He always did.

It was the same night after night, never acrimonious, always professional and easy to follow.

Afterward, Buster would roll up his charts and leave. He needed to hurry back to the Black Hole to input the latest guidance into the ATO (which was already starting to run late).

The CINC would then poll the U.S. and Coalition commanders or their representatives to see if they had any pressing concerns, and if the CINC had any special guidance, he gave it out. After the meeting broke up, Schwarzkopf would call Khaled bin Sultan with his update, while I rushed back to the TACC for the evening follies.

BAGHDAD BILLY… AND SOME WINS

The confusion of war breeds endless myths. Some bring laughs, others bring deaths. Ours, sadly, was the tragic kind. It was called “Baghdad Billy”—the Iraqi interceptor from hell.

Soon after the start of air operations over Iraq, pilots flying the EF-111 electronic jamming aircraft began to report interceptions by Iraqi fighters, even when there was no evidence of airborne Iraqis. They claimed they’d seen Iraqi fighter radar signals on their warning scopes, spotlights from Iraqi interceptor aircraft, or even tracers and missiles being fired at them. Yet in no case could intelligence sources or AWACS confirm these sightings. Much of the time, there were no indications that Iraqi aircraft were even airborne. There was one constant: F-15s had been in the vicinity of the EF-111s during their mysterious sightings.

In short, they were imagining things. We called their phantom “Baghdad Billy.”

But that was headquarters wisdom. The crews knew what they’d seen with their own eyes; they knew that they had narrowly escaped death at the hands of an Iraqi fighter pilot.

The sides were drawn. The fat-assed generals in Riyadh who didn’t believe the crew reports, versus the pilots and weapons systems operators who were out there night after night risking their lives.

You don’t enter an argument like this and expect logic to prevail. But these were fighter pilots, and it was all good fun until somebody got hurt. That happened the night of February 13.

Ratchet-75, an EF-111A tasked to support-jam Iraqi radars, was the third aircraft in a flight of three EF-111s crossing the border between Saudi Arabia and Iraq in the vicinity of Ar’ar, a town in northwestern Saudi Arabia. At 1109 Saudi time, Ratchet-75 should have passed Ar’ar at 21,000 feet, four minutes behind the leader, Ratchet-73, and two minutes behind number two, Ratchet-74. At 1128, Ratchet-75 should have been ten minutes south of his jamming orbit, which was located due west of Baghdad halfway to the Jordanian border. He never got there. At 1129, two F-15Es heading south over southern Iraq at 31,000 feet saw an aircraft below them ejecting eight to ten flares. The night sky was lit up by the flares and the blaze of afterburners, as the aircraft rolled out of a hard left turn and began a series of “S-turns” as it descended sharply. Twenty seconds later, the F-15s saw the aircraft eject three more flares, soon followed by a huge fireball as the aircraft hit the ground. The lead F-15E, Pontiac-47, began an orbit over the crash site, while his wingman, Pontiac-48, went to the tanker track to refuel. A little over three hours later, a Special Operations helicopter, Sierra-43, arrived on scene and the rescue team examined the wreckage. They confirmed the loss of the EF-111, its pilot, and the WSO.

Though we will never know what happened, it was reasonable to conclude that the crew of the EF-111, like other -111 crews, had radar warning signals or visual sightings that indicated an Iraqi interceptor approaching for a kill. Once again, the AWACS picture was clean of enemy aircraft, and once again, F-15 aircraft were in the immediate vicinity.

It seemed that Baghdad Billy had finally achieved a shoot-down.

Everyone in the TACC was upset; and — not surprisingly — there was blaming and finger-pointing.

In the hall the next morning, Buster Glosson lit into Chris Christon, whose intelligence shop had passed unedited reports of the phantom interceptor to all the aircrews, thereby giving the story credibility. Chris fought back. As he saw it, his job was to get the word out. If the EF-111 aircrews had observed something, he reported it to the other units. And it was then the job of the local commanders to make sure the aircrews didn’t do anything extreme, like a low-altitude jink-out at night.

Both Buster and Chris were right. It was Chris’s job to get the word out. And it was Buster’s job as the fighter division commander to worry about the lives of his aircrews.

But the real blame was mine. I should have been more forceful about dispelling the Baghdad Billy myth right from the start. I should have seen that a crew would get so engrossed with defeating the apparently real threat that they succumbed to the ever-present killer, the ground. My failure meant two needless deaths and bitter tears for the families of the crew of Ratchet-75.

The message went out to knock off defensive reactions to Baghdad Billy.

The incident wasn’t a total loss. It inspired a song:

BALLAD OF THE F-111 JOCK BY MAJ. ROGER KRAPF

There were other — far less tragic — confusions and mix-ups.

On one occasion, an F-15 pilot from our base at Incirlik in Turkey was lined up on an Iraqi jet ready to squeeze the trigger, when an air-to-air missile flew in from the side, turned the corner behind the Iraqi, and blew the target out of the sky. Chalk up one for the 33d TFW from Tabuk. Not the least bothered, the Incirlik-based F-15 turned his attention to the Iraqi’s wingman and fired an AIM-7 radar-guided missile. It zeroed in on its target and exploded; but much to the amazement of our pilot, the Iraqi jet emerged serenely from the fireball. The intrepid American then fired a heat-seeking AIM-9, which again engulfed the Iraqi in a fireball; and again the Iraqi emerged and flew across the border into Iran. Our pilot may have been luckier than he thought, however. The Iraqi aircraft was either damaged or it ran out of fuel, and the pilot ejected shortly after escaping.

But more often the wins were clear-cut.

Not all our potential aces flew air-to-air fighters. In February, the A-10s at King Fahd bagged a couple of Iraqi helicopters while looking to bomb Iraqi tanks and artillery. Captain Swain, on the sixth of February, and Captain Sheehy, nine days later, observed Iraqi helicopters flying very close to the earth. Bad tactic, helicopters close to the ground stand out clearly to a fighter pilot. Both A-10s used their 30mm guns to dispatch their targets. Up until then, it was normal for the Warthog community to take cheap shots from their interceptor brethren in F-15s. No more. To flag the change, sometime around the middle of February, the A-10 wing commander, Colonel Sandy Sharpe, called the F-15 wing commander at Dhahran, Colonel John McBroom, to offer his A-10s to fly top cover for the F-15s, in case they wanted to do some bombing. After all, it only made sense, now that the A-10s had two kills to the F-15 wing’s single victory. Boomer McBroom was not amused, but hundreds of A-10 pilots howled with glee.

The last kills of the war took out Iraqis flying combat sorties against their own people. In late March, an Iraqi Sukhoi jet fighter and a Swiss Platus propeller-driven PC-9 trainer, pressed into dropping bombs, were flying in eastern Iraq, in violation of the Iraqi no-fly agreement reached at the end of the war. AWACS vectored two F-15s against the aircraft. The flight leader, Captain Dietz, rolled out behind the Sukhoi, fired his AIM-9, and blew the target out of the sky. It was Dietz’s third kill (he’d bagged a pair of MiG-21s in early February). His wingman, Lieutenant Hohemann, also with two aerial victories (he got them the same day Dietz got his), rolled out behind the PC-9. Though our rules discouraged shoot-down of trainers or cargo/ passenger aircraft, and the PC-9 was a trainer-type aircraft, it had just completed a bombing mission against Iraqi civilians and wasn’t supposed to be in the air anyway. Should I shoot or not? Hohemann asked himself. While the lieutenant’s conscience wrestled with this question, the Iraqi pilot ejected! After seeing his leader blow up, the Iraqi wingman wasn’t going to wait around and take his chances. After jinking to avoid the Iraqi’s deploying parachute, Hohemann reached a decision: “It’s a fighter, not a trainer.” But just as he was about to shoot it down, the PC-9 rolled over and smashed into the ground.

Afterward, Jim Crigger awarded Hohemann credit for the kill, which brought his total to three victories, the closest anyone in the Gulf came to the five needed to become an Ace.

The first and last kill scored by the CENTAF staff was racked up by Colonel John Turk from the Black Hole. A longtime fighter pilot, John had been one of our top F-15 instructor pilots at Luke and Tyndall. But to his great disappointment, he’d sat out this war in the Black Hole, hard work and no glory. After the shooting had stopped, Turk hitched a ride up to Tallil AB in southern Iraq. As he was touring the airfield, Turk found a MiG fighter parked on a road. Though U.S. Army troops had destroyed the cockpit, the jet was otherwise fully armed and fueled. Like every fighter pilot, Turk was always looking for a kill. Making sure no one was around watching him, he fired a shot from his 9 mm pistol into the MiG’s drop tank, hoping for a fire. Fuel streamed out but failed to ignite. Undaunted, Turk took out a cigarette lighter and applied a flame to the jet fuel. A second later, it occurred to him that he was standing next to a fully fueled, munition-laden jet that was moments from erupting into a huge fireball. I don’t know the world’s record for the 440-yard dash in combat boots, but I’m sure John Turk set it that day at Tallil.

Chuck Horner continues:

During the first three days of the war, we were euphoric, and so were the folks at home. We were winning. The home team had scored time after time. And our touchdowns had been faithfully transmitted back to the States — amazing pictures of laser-guided bombs slaying doors of bunkers, airshafts of buildings, and the tops of aircraft shelters. For the first time since World War II, generals had become popular — Schwarzkopf with his energy, intensity, and focus, standing up and glaring at dumb questions; Powell with his warmth, intelligence, and smooth confidence.

Even I had a brief moment of fame. During a press conference, we ran a video of the Iraqi Air Force headquarters taken by one of our aircraft. I pointed at the display with my government-issue ballpoint pen. “This is my counterpart’s headquarters,” I announced as the building exploded. I wish I could take credit for the nice line. But the truth was I’d forgotten the name of the target, and it was all I could think of. Sometimes you get lucky; the incident landed on national TV.

It’s just as well that I spent very little time in front of the cameras. I wasn’t eager to press my luck under the glare of the lights when I needed to put all my energy into running the air war.

Most of my time, in fact, was spent urging on the team, deciding what needed to be done next, and trying to bring order to chaos.

Since we had no clear idea of what the enemy was doing, we had to guess. We’d take those guesses — officially called intelligence estimates or analysis — and try to deliver violence in such a way that the enemy could not do what we thought he was trying to do. That was working far better than we had dreamed.

Meanwhile — as in every war I’d seen — the Air Tasking Order was getting out late. Some problems are inevitable. Bad weather over targets required changes in the target lists, and there’d always be computer hiccups. Other problems were less forgivable: planners lust after the perfect plan, and generals like to general; both often pay more attention to doing their own thing than to taking care of the needs of the troops who are getting shot at.

There will never be a perfect plan until the intelligence that drives planning touches perfection. Don’t hold your breath. Yet planners obsessively fiddled and tinkered with the daily plan, trying to squeeze every drop of efficiency out of it… as though it were a work of art and not a rough script. When we stopped the presses to make small changes affecting only a few units, we risked delaying the ATO for everyone. And that risked increasing confusion or, worse, chaos.

Generals don’t feel like generals unless they make their presence felt. Fair enough, when they know where they are going and keep a light hand on the reins. That’s leadership. Too often, though, they don’t know where they are going, yet pretend they do (in the absence of virtue, the appearance of virtue is better than nothing); and then get the staff to plan the trip. Once the staff plan is prepared, the general will inevitably make lots of changes. General-induced changes make big ripples in the planning cycle. In our ATO planning process, we had lots of general-created tidal waves, including too many from me.

Despite the screwups, we gradually brought order to this confusion and speeded up the planning process in an orderly way that allowed humans to accommodate to them. Very early in the war, we learned to make changes early in the ATO, not by stopping the presses, but by sending change sheets directly to the units involved. We’d tell them something like: “When you get the ATO tonight, your F-16s are targeted against Target X. Disregard that and go to Target Y.” At first the new systems confused the wings, but they caught on rapidly.

After the war, the armchair generals had their say about speeding up the planning process. “We’ve got to get the ATO cycle time down,” they’d assert. “Two days is too long.” They were right, we had to speed up the process; but they were blaming the wrong villain. The two-day cycle wasn’t hurting us. You must give people some reasonable planning horizon, and two days is short but manageable. What needs to be worked on is the change cycle — the cycle of gaining intelligence about what you want to do and then implementing the required changes. In other words, we’d use the two-day plan to head the troops in the right general direction, and then we’d fine-tune as needed. For example, because the Iraqi Army units moved daily, we were never able to pinpoint their location in the two-day cycle. At first, we tried to update the ATO. But this only left the ATO in constant flux and therefore late to the customers. Instead, we put the F-16 killer scouts over the Iraqi Army, then sent forth hordes of A-10s, F-16s, and F-18s in a well-planned orderly stream. When they arrived on scene, the killer scouts pointed out targets, and the fighter-bombers dropped their loads and returned home for more.

The timeline we had shortened was the time needed to bring intelligence to the attackers. Because the killer scouts’ eyes were the intelligence collectors, the intelligence was only seconds old when the attacking aircraft acted on it.

For generals who liked being generals, this was not a happy situation; it put them out of the loop. Captains and majors were picking the targets… and it worked. We in Riyadh had succeeded in seizing from Washington the responsibility to pick targets, only to cede it to F-16 pilots over the battlefield. Sure, Washington still provided broad guidance; and sure, the generals in Riyadh told the killer scouts what divisions to orbit over and gave them the rules needed to prevent them from killing one another or breaking international laws; but in large measure, this war now belonged to the folks who were getting shot at.

CUTTING OFF THE SERPENT’S HEAD

In the most efficient of worlds, the centralized, totalitarian dictatorship should be most vulnerable to an efficient shot to the head — a bullet through the presidential window, followed by the quick elimination of presidential cronies, henchmen, military leaders, and possibly family; and then, for thoroughness’ sake, the removal of the party chiefs, the heads of the secret police, and the top people in intelligence. Finally, one cuts off the physical connections between capital and country — the networks of communications, roads, rail, and air. Now headless, the oppressed people ought to rise up to remove and replace the remaining causes of their misery.

Sadly, the world is not so easy to manage. Totalitarian systems are rarely smart and efficient. More often, they are stupid and clumsy and overcomplicated, and therefore not especially vulnerable to neat solutions.

That, at any rate, was one of the lessons of the Gulf War.

The original CHECKMATE offensive plans centered on a strategy of destroying Iraqi leadership. With this accomplished, it was asserted, all other goals — such as the Iraqi withdrawal from occupied Kuwait — would be achieved. The concept was to kill Saddam Hussein, or at least to discredit him, so he could not rule the nation; and a more rational leader or leaders could emerge, probably from the Iraqi Army.

When the CHECKMATE briefing was presented to Chuck Horner in Riyadh, he found this line of thinking intriguing; yet he did not feel he could afford to throw the kind of effort CHECKMATE envisaged into a hunt for Saddam Hussein, or, more broadly, into a campaign to incite an overthrow of his government. Certainly a good case could be made for killing Saddam. He was, after all, the head of Iraqi military forces, he devised its military strategy, and he gave orders about the disposition of forces. Therefore, while President Saddam Hussein was not directly targeted, it is safe to conclude that the Black Hole’s target lists included all the military command centers where Field Marshal Hussein might have been directing his forces.

In their initial plans, the Pentagon planners selected thirty-seven targets associated with Saddam’s hold on Iraq. Some strikes were aimed specifically at the Iraqi leader, others at the tools or symbols of his rule, and some at targets (such as electrical power grids) whose loss would damage both the military capability of the nation and the political power of its leaders. By the start of the war, Black Hole planners had identified an additional 105 “leadership” targets, making a total of 142.

Because most of them were in Baghdad, however, the 142 targets covered a broader range than leadership. Many, such as the attack on the “AT & T building,” served to advance other strategic goals as well. The elimination of the telecommunications center not only hindered Saddam’s ability to issue political and military orders, but prevented Iraqi air defense centers from coordinating air defense.

During the first hours of the air campaign, F-117s and cruise missiles targeted command, control, and communications sites. Two-thousand-pound laser-guided bombs destroyed five major telephone exchange facilities, including the “AT&T building” and its adjacent antenna mast. Telephone switching posts were destroyed, as were bridges over the Tigris River (in order to sever fiber-optic communications cables bolted under the roadway).

Command-and-control bunkers in the presidential palaces were struck, as were command centers for the Republican Guard, the intelligence services, the secret police, the Ministry of Propaganda, and Baath Party headquarters. Most of these targets provided capabilities needed to execute military operations, and General Hussein might also have been on duty at one of them; but, more generally, they represented Saddam’s means of controlling the people of Iraq. Likewise, command post bunkers for the Iraqi Air Force and for air defense operations were attacked, both in an effort to gain control of the air and also because General Hussein might be inside directing the air defense of his nation. A number of such targets were struck in the opening moments of the war, and attacks continued throughout the war.

Did these leadership attacks hurt the Iraqis?

Yes, up to a point, and sometimes very directly: At the primary presidential palace was a hardened concrete bunker, deeply buried under a garden that came to be called the “Rose Garden,” a target so difficult it could not be destroyed by ordinary bombs. Therefore, a pair of laser bombs dug a pit in the earth that covered the concrete shelter. These were followed by a third bomb, with a hardened steel shell and a delayed fuse, which was precisely guided into the crater dug by the first bombs. Because this third bomb did not have to fight its way through tons of earth, it easily penetrated the reinforced concrete roof and exploded inside the shelter. Very bad news for anyone inside.

The attacks also made it difficult for military leaders in Baghdad to communicate with the forces in the field (which might have been a mixed blessing, given the overall foolishness of Iraqi military leadership).

Was the leadership campaign successful?

No. It failed miserably.

American planners like to measure the enemy in numbers of tanks, ships, and aircraft, and shy away from measuring him in less certain terms, such as his morale, military training, or motivation. Yet — for good reasons — American planners endow adversaries with the same intelligence and efficiency as they themselves possess. They tend to attack enemies as though they were housed in some foreign version of Washington, D.C. They “mirror-image” the enemy.

The Iraqis are as intelligent as any people, but, as it turned out, when it came to Saddam’s system of maintaining political and physical control, intelligence and efficiency were beside the point. The Baathists maintained control of the country by creating an Orwellian climate of mistrust. Iraqis not only feared the president and the secret police, they feared each other. Husbands were careful what they told their wives, in case their thoughts were relayed to the secret police. Parents could not trust their children, since the young were raised to inform even on their own fathers and mothers. If a friend confided to you a criticism of Saddam Hussein, you immediately reported it to the secret police, in case the friend had been induced to test your reliability.

And so, all the leadership targets were struck, and the leader stayed in power. The American planners failed to change the government of Iraq, because they did not understand how that government operated, and therefore how to attack it. They did not understand that Saddam stayed in power by creating an aura of crisis that caused his people to need him more than they needed change. The fear that motivated the average Iraqi citizen’s loyalty to Saddam was beyond their comprehension, because they had never experienced life under a repressive regime. They did not understand that they needed to target the fear, and they did not have either the smarts or the intelligence analysis to destroy the hold of fear on the Iraqi people. They did not understand that the bombing of Iraq ensured that hold was increased and not decreased.

And yet, since Iraqi troops in the field had little reason to love their dictator, many were persuaded to surrender without a fight. Thus, the fear by which Saddam maintained control over his nation worked for rather than against the Coalition’s battlefield success. In other words, killing Saddam may have turned out to be a serious mistake.

Likewise, in his paranoia, Saddam often had his top generals executed. The threat of execution sometimes concentrates the mind, but more often it leads to paralysis. This weakening of his military leadership could only benefit the Coalition. And finally, as General Schwarzkopf pointed out after the war, Saddam was a lousy strategist, and thus a good man to have in charge of Iraqi armed forces, under the circumstances.

NBC

In the eyes of tinpot dictators and other insecure regimes, nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons — especially when mated with ballistic missiles — are the visible symbols that make small nations into big players on the world’s stage. The Iraqis have spent billions of dollars in research and development of such weapons.

The potential for large-scale tragedy is obvious, and tinpot dictators are indifferent by nature to the crucial insight that major powers long ago took to heart: that NBC weapons are not weapons of war but weapons of terror. What goes around comes around. You hit me; I hit you. To add to this unsettling thought, Saddam Hussein had already proved willing to use weapons of mass destruction both in foreign wars and against his own people.

Fortunately, the most fearsome of these weapons, the nuclear, are the hardest to make, and the programs to make them are the easiest to discover. The manufacture of nuclear weapons requires skilled engineers and scientists, a vast array of high-technology facilities, weapons-grade nuclear material, and other rare ingredients. Few of these are easily available to nations such as Iraq; and all of them can be protected and tracked. This requires more vigilance than is currently the case, but it can be done.

Unfortunately, the Iraqis have proved to be extremely skilled at avoiding existing protections, and brilliant at shell-game hiding of the pieces of their nuclear program (likewise of their biological and chemical program) — thus exemplifying the uses of paranoia.

Ten years before the 1990 Gulf crisis, the Israelis bombed Iraqi nuclear research laboratories. This delayed but did not stop the nuclear program (and may have encouraged them to greater efforts at concealment).

After the war, United Nations inspection teams uncovered large caches of technical and historical records of Saddam’s nuclear program. These records indicated that U.S. intelligence organizations had been aware of only a portion of the Iraqi nuclear weapons efforts. Though prediction in this area is risky, some estimates claimed that Saddam’s scientists were within months of producing a workable nuclear device. Whether this could have been mated to the warhead of a Scud missile is another matter, and it is doubtful that Iraqi fighter-bomber aircraft could have penetrated the air defenses of Israel or Saudi Arabia.

Still, no matter how close Iraqi scientists were to building deliverable weapons, it was a no-brainer for Iraqi NBC programs to top Black Hole target lists. These facilities were going to be hit, and hit early. The risks were too great.

Precision munitions were dropped on the Baghdad Nuclear Weapons Research Center on the first three days of the war, though to what effect it was hard to say, except by counting holes in buildings and bunkers. Later, a mass raid against the Al Qaim nuclear facility failed. The forty F-16s found it defended by large numbers of AAA and SAM sites and obscured by smoke generators, and then the bombs from the first two aircraft raised so much dust that it was impossible for the remaining thirty-eight pilots to identify their aim points. The facility was later hit by a surprise F-117 night attack, which obliterated every assigned target.

But the fox, it turned out, had fled.

After the war, United Nations inspection teams learned that the Iraqis had already removed vital equipment from these locations and buried it in the desert (not a practice recommended for the sensitive, highly calibrated electronic devices used in nuclear research). In other words, from the Iraqi point of view, the cure may have been no better than the disease. If that was the case, then God was once again on the side of the good guys. Either way, the air attacks delayed the Iraqi quest for nuclear weapons for a few more years.

★ In an earlier chapter the problem of preventing biological attack was discussed. There is little to add to that here.

Because production facilities for biological weapons are difficult to identify, intelligence and planning concentrated on storage facilities, usually in air-conditioned concrete earth-covered bunkers. Attacking these sites, however, remained a dilemma, owing to the possible spread of toxic agents in the dust and debris resulting from bomb explosions.

Despite this risk, the cross-shaped bunkers at the Salman Pak Biological Warfare Center were hit on the first night of the war by the same one-two punch that destroyed the presidential Rose Garden bunker. And, as previously mentioned, the resulting explosion was spectacular. Aircrews reported that heat from the secondary explosions went thousands of feet into the air.

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 — especially 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.

The “Scud Alert” warning also initiated actions in the air defense cell. First, the Army troops would inform their Patriot batteries; civil defense agencies would also be notified, so they could warn civilians to take cover. Then the AWACS display would light up, showing the approximate launch point, missile flight path, and probable impact zone. This information would be relayed automatically throughout the command-and-control network, so F-15 or F-16 pilots could be vectored toward the mobile launchers. At the affected Patriot batteries, systems would be checked to make sure they were ready for computer-initiated firing.

Since to the DSP’s sensors B-52 strikes initially looked very much like a Scud launch, there was a quick check with the AWACS display to discover if the Scud attack was genuine. Once that was determined, Horner would watch CNN for a real-time live report.

Though most Scuds did little damage, there were still bad moments. One that fell in Israel caused a large number of injuries, another destroyed the school attended by General Behery’s children, and another fell in the street outside RSAF headquarters (it was immediately attacked by souvenir hunters). A piece of molten metal from this Scud (or from the Patriot that intercepted it) burned a hole through the roof of the RAF administration building and dropped sizzling onto a desk where a pair of Brits were having a late-night cup of tea. Finally, and tragically, in the waning moments of the war, during a period when the Patriot battery defending the city was off-line, a Scud slammed into a warehouse in Dhahran where U.S. Army transportation troops were sleeping. Over twenty-five troops were killed and nearly a hundred injured — the largest numbers of allied casualties from a single Gulf War event. In fact, Scuds killed more U.S. troops than were killed in any single engagement during the eight months of war on the sea, six weeks of war in the air, and four days of war on the ground (a total of about seventy-five soldiers were killed by the Iraqis, and another seventy-five were killed by blue-on-blue).

The failure to stop the Scud threat was Chuck Horner’s greatest Gulf War failure, the one area where airpower could not secure and maintain the military initiative.

COLLATERAL DAMAGE

A major and largely unsung obsession shared by Chuck Horner, his planners, the Coalition pilots, and the President of the United States, was to prevent needless civilian casualties — collateral damage, in the military euphemism. Military targets and military personnel were fair game, but ordinary Iraqis were not responsible for the criminal acts of their rulers. They had a right to live in safety, as far as humanly possible.

Chuck Horner will never forget George Bush’s anguish in August at Camp David as he contemplated the deaths that would follow the decisions he’d been forced to make — an anguish, Horner is convinced, that was the right response to the actions he was taking. Horner himself has felt similar pain many times. The needless death of civilians had to be avoided.

On the whole, Coalition airmen successfully followed this course. On two occasions, they failed:

The first, simply, was a tragic mistake. During an RAF strike on a bridge, the guidance system of a laser-guided bomb failed, and the bomb fell into a nearby marketplace, killing or injuring several Iraqi civilians. Since the target was legitimate, and reasonable measures had been taken during an attack on a legitimate target, no blame could be attached to this tragedy.

The second was more complicated — the attack on the Al-Firdus command-and-control bunker.

In the planning for the offensive air campaign, a master target list had been created. The list included thirty-three targets designated as command-and-control centers, though what exactly they commanded and controlled was not totally clear. Number thirty on the list was the Al-Firdus bunker in Baghdad, which was initially scheduled to be struck on day three of the war, a day when many targets were scheduled to be hit. (Day-three targets tended to be the leftovers, after the really important targets were struck on the first two and a half days). In the event, Al-Firdus and the other thirty-two bunkers slipped in priority, as the demands of Scud-hunting, more time-sensitive targets, and weather were met.

Still, in the eyes of the Black Hole planners, Al-Firdus remained a legitimate target of some importance to Saddam’s war machine. It was definitely constructed to house military command and control, and it was camouflaged, barb-wired, and guarded (though in truth, hardly anything in Iraq was not camouflaged, barb-wired, and guarded). What Black Hole planners did not know was that hundreds of Iraqi civilians were using the bunker as an air raid shelter.

At last, after nearly four weeks of war, Al-Firdus made it to the top of the list. Planners proposed it for the night of 13–14 February; it was approved as legitimate by the lawyer in the plans shop who watched over the legal aspects of target selection (he could and did veto targets), and then it was approved by Schwarzkopf in the evening briefing.

Chuck Horner reflects:

In retrospect, I should have asked harder questions. For one, if we could wait almost a month to strike this bunker, what made it so important now? For another, how was the bunker actually being used to command Iraqi military forces? Since the real reason we were attacking the bunker was almost certainly the availability of F-117 sorties (we’ve got lots to spend; if we don’t use them, they’re wasted), I doubt that anyone could have given me a good answer to those questions. In the absence of a satisfactory answer, I could have erased that target from the list, and hundreds of Iraqi lives could have been saved and a terrible tragedy avoided. But all of that is hindsight. The reality is F-117s hit the Al-Firdus bunker, and we killed several hundred people.

However, the questions I failed to ask aren’t the only questions that need asking here. For instance, why use the bunker as an air raid shelter? To the Black Hole planners and the F-117 pilots flying the missions, it is inconceivable that any Iraqi in Baghdad would want to be anywhere but in his own home during air attacks. American bombs did not hit family homes. Pilots were painstakingly careful to bomb only militarily significant targets. Their bombing was accurate.

Of course, it wasn’t only American bombs that were falling out of the sky; thousands of artillery shells and hundreds of surface-to-air missiles were thrown up each night. All of that lethal stuff had to fall back to earth. In that case, maybe it made sense to seek shelter.

And yet, other questions remain.

When the other bunkers were struck, no civilian casualties were reported. Why did Al-Firdus and not the other thirty-two bunkers contain civilians? Did the local commander, in a goodwill gesture, invite locals into his bunker? Or did he suck up to his friends and superiors by offering them shelter not available to the average Iraqi? Who knows… except maybe Saddam?

There is one certainty in war: you will always face uncertainty. The enemy does his best to hide the answers to any questions you might ask of him. He tries to tell you that he possesses nothing of value. If Saddam had announced that the Al-Firdus bunker was an air raid shelter, and not a command-and-control center, if he had painted a red crescent or red cross on the roof, would we have believed him? We would probably have asked more questions, but it’s likely that the bunker would still have been hit (though if we had known the truth, that target would not have appeared in the Air Tasking Order).

The bottom line in war is you are always operating with half the story.

My first knowledge of the tragedy came from CNN, with pictures of bodies being carried from the smoking shelter. In a way, I was glad we had to endure those terrible scenes. Too often, we look on war as a game or a noble adventure. Certainly war can pursue noble objectives — stopping the murder, rape, and torture in Kuwait being a prime example. Certainly men and women undergoing the most stressful battlefield conditions rise to unheard-of selflessness. But war is still, when you get to the bottom line, killing, maiming, and wanton destruction — humans at their lowest, trying to impose their will on others. War may be necessary, but it must always be detested.

During the 1700 changeover briefing, I told the troops in the TACC: “Nobody needs to feel bad about the bunker incident in Baghdad, but we all should feel bad about the loss of life, anybody’s life, because every life is precious. It doesn’t matter whether it’s an Iraqi soldier or a kid in a bunker in Baghdad, we should feel bad about the loss of one of God’s creatures. On the other hand, from a professional standpoint, we have nothing to be ashamed of. The mission was planned and executed flawlessly. The intelligence was as good as there is available. As for the people who don’t understand that war is groping in the dark trying to do dastardly things so the war will be over with, well, I don’t have much time for them. You would sure think modern, educated people would understand that truth, but many choose not to, so to hell with them. We’ll have a lot of ‘weak willies’ to worry about now. They worry about whether they’ll get up in the morning, so to hell with them. You just continue what you’re doing, because what you’re doing is right and you’re doing it very well. We’ve got to get Kuwait back to the Kuwaitis.”

Maybe if I’d had more time to think about it, I wouldn’t have made such a hard-assed speech; but I was worried that people would be overconcerned about the political cost of civilian casualties and try to shut down the air campaign. I was not wrong to worry.

Targeting in the Baghdad area all but stopped, and General Schwarzkopf began to anguish over every target we nominated, denying approval of most of them. Okay, this change was not in fact hard to accept. Most of the known high-value targets had already been destroyed or heavily damaged, and by then our main thrust had turned to destroying tanks, artillery, and lines of communication in the KTO. But a notion sticks in my throat that someone above the CINC had issued guidance based on fear of public opinion polls. This is not a fact, it’s a suspicion, and yes, civilian policy-makers must guide the warriors; but it sends trembles through me. War is political. So be it.

We eventually went back to Baghdad.

The lesson must be that war is not antiseptic, that innocent lives will be lost, that commanders in arms will kill one another. It is important that leaders at all levels do their utmost to minimize death and suffering. It must be an obsession with the commanders and planners, and of everyone who has a finger on the trigger. On the other hand, survival on the battlefield and success in war require decisive action in an ill-defined environment while using the most lethal weapons ever devised. That’s the rub. When the laser-guided bomb slips its release hooks, someone is going to die.

Let the deaths of American, Saudi, and British troops, let the deaths of Iraqi civilians, remind each of us that war is a hateful thing.

IN combat operations, aircraft will be shot down; and in any air operation, equipment can fail. When an aircraft is shot down or its engine fails behind enemy lines, surviving crew are perilously exposed — and the people they’ve just bombed are hardly in a welcoming mood. This means, simply, that these crews expect a chance to come home before anyone can give them the welcome “they deserve.” That chance for rescue is a fundamental covenant between combat aircrews and their commanders. Aircrews’ confidence in that covenant is a function of the actual numbers rescued.

In Desert Storm, the numbers rescued, as compared with the numbers downed, was very low: Eighteen men and one woman became prisoners of war as a result of aircraft shoot-downs. Seven combat search-and-rescue (CSAR) missions were launched, resulting in three saves. That’s one saved for every six lost. Not an inspiring record.

It is therefore no surprise that the confidence of aircrews in the fundamental covenant was not high.

To discover the reason for the scarcity of CSAR missions in Desert Storm, one has to go back a few years.

In military doctrine, the rescue of soldiers, sailors, and airmen was originally a service responsibility — that is, the Air Force was responsible for organizing, equipping, and training the forces needed to pick up pilots who were shot down. For years, the Air Force did just that — its Air Rescue Service trained Pararescue Jumpers (PJs), enlisted men ready to parachute into enemy territory, perform emergency medical treatment on downed pilots, and fight off the enemy while the rescued airman was being winched up to a helicopter overhead. During Vietnam, PJs became the most decorated heroes of the war. Pilots admired no one more highly.

In 1983, the Air Rescue Units were transferred en masse to the newly created Special Operations Forces Command. Since the air movement of Special Operations soldiers to and from behind enemy lines is the same function as combat search-and-rescue, this change made great sense. There is one important difference, however, between SOF operations and air rescue. In SOF operations, there is some control over timing. This difference had serious consequences.

Meanwhile, the assets the Air Force had acquired to take people to and from behind enemy lines were placed under SOF command (or CINCSOF — before Goldwater-Nichols, air rescue forces had been assigned to Military Airlift Command). Among these were various helicopters and the HC-130 command-and-control aircraft. This version of the Hercules transport provided a platform for an on-scene director to orchestrate the rescue. Vietnam-era MH-53 Jolly Green Giant helicopters were now called PAVE LOW IIIs, and equipped with devices that permitted low-altitude flight at night. Later, a newer and smaller rescue helicopter was introduced for the SOF, the MH-60G Pave Hawk; it was also equipped for flying at treetop level at night. Though PJs were disappearing, new enlisted crews, called “Special Tactics Personnel,” were being trained to ride the SOF-penetrating helicopters. STPs performed the same functions as Vietnam-era PJs, and trained just as hard.

The monkey wrench in the works was the change in command lines that accompanied the 1983 changeover. The new SOF airmen now worked for an Army colonel whose primary focus was on glamorous missions behind enemy lines. He wanted his “air force” available to support his missions behind enemy lines and not tied up chasing after downed aircrews.

Some basic presuppositions made matters even worse: In their own private view, special forces fight alone, in isolation from other land, sea, air, and space forces. Therefore, for the most part SOF airmen trained for terrain-hugging night flights, which was considered the safest way to enter enemy airspace. In consequence, they felt they were ill-trained to conduct air rescue operations in daylight.

During the Gulf War, as it turned out, SOF airmen operating in Kuwait and southeastern Iraq[61] owed their survival in enemy airspace, not to their night training, but to the grounding of Iraqi fighters by Coalition airpower and to the vastness of the desert, which was so large and inhospitable that Iraqi air defense forces could not cover all of it. And when Iraqi ground forces did locate Special Operations units, these units as often as not had to be picked up and returned to safety during daylight hours — SOF bias notwithstanding.

Meanwhile, reflecting post-Goldwater-Nichols realities, the CENTCOM air force was not the USAF; it was the USAF plus sizable numbers of aircraft from the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps, plus thousands of aircraft from other nations operating under the command of the Joint/Combined Force Air Component Commander, Chuck Horner. In other words, the individual service responsibility to conduct search-and-rescue had grown to include a great deal more than the U.S. Air Force. To handle this new situation, General Schwarzkopf set up a unique combat search-and-rescue organization. While retaining command of CSAR plans and operations in his own staff, the CINC placed his subordinate commander, Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Joe Stillwell, and his rescue cell in Horner’s Tactical Air Control Center. The TACC would likely be the first to learn when an aircraft was shot down and if the aircrew was alive; in the TACC, the CSAR cell could maintain contact with rescue forces in Iraq using the AWACS aircraft to relay commands or information; and the TACC controlled the air-to-air, air-to-ground, and Wild Weasel defense suppression forces needed to protect CSAR forces during a rescue. Finally, pilots orbiting overhead could best determine if a helicopter could survive local enemy defenses and make their pickup.

These sensible command-and-control procedures did not sit well with Colonel Jessie Johnson, the Special Operations commander. To Johnson, it appeared that the CSAR commander worked for Horner (a situation Johnson did not like). Stillwell did not work for Horner. He worked for Schwarzkopf.

For obvious reasons, Schwarzkopf tasked rescues in northern Iraq to the air forces operating out of Incirlik, Turkey.

The mission of combat search-and-rescue in central and southern Iraq and Kuwait went to Jessie Johnson. Colonel Johnson’s MH-53 and MH-60 helicopters were based at King Fahd Air Base in eastern Saudi Arabia, where all SOF aircraft were based. When possible, however, they were placed on alert at forward operating locations at airfields along the Iraqi border, such as those near King Khalid Military City, and the towns of Rafha, Ar’ar, and Al Jouf, where A-10s were also operating in their Scud-hunting mission in the western Iraqi desert.

Unfortunately, for reasons already stated, the air rescue mission was never a top special forces priority. Thus, while the CSAR missions were directed and controlled by the joint recovery coordination cell in the TACC, the SOCCENT commander retained final mission approval and refused to okay a CSAF launch until a survivor could be confirmed on the ground. Yet, as always, the SOF airmen of the Air Force Special Operations command were eager and ready to rescue downed airmen anytime anywhere.[62]

The opportunity came early to test this system. On January 21, 1991, a Navy F-14 pilot, Lieutenant Devon Jones, was picked up in a daring rescue.

Jones’s F-14, call sign Slate 46, was flying over western Iraq looking for Iraqi fighters to shoot down, when an Iraqi SAM slammed into the jet and forced him to eject. Jones came down in the desert, which proved to be blessedly empty of Iraqis. He immediately took out his survival knife and hacked a hole in the hard ground big enough to crouch in. Then he hunkered down on top of his parachute and pulled a scraggly bush over his head. Since he knew the shoot-down had been reported to the AWACS, all he had to do was wait for rescue or capture, whichever came first.

Hundred of miles away, Captain Paul Johnson and his wingman, Captain Randy Goff, were flying up from King Fahd Air Base to King Khalid Military City in their A-10 Warthogs, call signs Sandy 57 and 58. When they landed, they’d sit ground-alert for combat search-and-rescue tasking — not a happy prospect. Their day promised to be wasted on the ground while their squadron buddies were shooting up the Iraqi Army in Kuwait.

The day turned out to be more interesting than they expected.

On a routine check-in with AWACS, Johnson and Goff found that they had new “tasking”: They were to head north to help two other A-10s and a super Jolly Green Giant MH-53J (call sign Moccasin 05) find a downed F-14 pilot somewhere west of Baghdad. That was a big “somewhere,” and it was a long way north of the Saudi border — and a lot farther north than A-10s usually flew. (Up there, their primary fear was to run into a MiG when no F-15s were around. On the other hand, they had little to fear from AAA and SAMs, since the desert was pretty barren.)

Before they headed north into “Indian country,” they pressed west along the border looking for a tanker to fill their fuel tanks. Though the weather was terrible and thunderstorms were all around, they spotted a KC-10 tanker in a clear spot and picked up their gas.

Meanwhile, since the other searchers had so far had no luck, AWACS sent the two Sandys off to check out a suspected Scud hiding place, which turned out to be Bedouin tents. An hour and a half later, after reporting to AWACS, “No luck on the Scuds,” they got vectors to a tanker for another refueling.

Next, they headed north to a new search area, over a hundred miles west of Baghdad. Though fatigue had started to set in, Johnson and Goff really wanted to find and rescue the downed pilot. As they flew deeper into Iraq, Johnson repeatedly tried to contact Slate 46 on the rescue frequency. Just as he was beginning to think he was on a wild-goose chase, he heard Jones calling him with his survival radio. The signal was weak, but still strong enough for the A-10 pilots to take a radio bearing with their direction-finding needles.

On the other hand, they had to wonder if Jones had been captured and an English-speaking Iraqi was leading them into a trap. Better to be sorry than safe, however, in this case. When guys were on the ground, you had to take risks.

As they flew deeper and deeper into bad-guy territory, the radio signal grew louder and louder, telling them they were on the right track. The original searchers had been looking too far to the south.

Now the A-10s were over the downed F-14 pilot, and it was time to hang it all out: they popped down under some clouds on the deck to eyeball Jones’s actual position. The big, ugly Warthogs screaming over his hideout proved to be quite a shock to the Navy pilot, but he still had enough presence of mind to call them on the radio.

The A-10s deliberately did not orbit the site, lest they give away the location to Iraqis in the area. But Johnson did let Jones know that he had seen his location and memorized the surrounding terrain features.

Meanwhile, they had a problem. The Sandys were again nearly out of gas. It would be their third in-flight refueling of the day. As they flew away, they promised Jones they’d be back after they filled up.

No problem, the Navy pilot thought. He’d already been hiding for six hours; occasional Iraqi army trucks had passed by on a nearby road, and so far he hadn’t lost his cool. Now that the A-10s had his position, rescue couldn’t be far away. He knew those A-10s would not let him down.

As it happened, they almost did.

Heading south, Johnson and Goff ran into headwinds. These — and their gritty determination to find Jones — had left them too low on gas to make it back to Saudi Arabia and a tanker aircraft (for obvious reasons, tankers stayed on the Saudi side of the border). When AWACS put them in contact with a tanker, Johnson asked it to fly north to rendezvous with him; the tanker pilot refused. The rules said no tankers in Iraq, and this tanker pilot was going to follow the rules.

Now desperate, Johnson pointed out to the tanker pilot that he just might fly over to him and transfer a full load of 30 mm ammunition into his KC-135. Of course, he wouldn’t do such a thing — and actually he couldn’t. He didn’t have enough gas to fly that far south. For whatever reason — fear, or more likely conscience — the tanker pilot headed across the border and into Iraq for a rendezvous with the nearly empty A-10s. Either way, just then he became a hero to the A-10 drivers.

Though by this time Moccasin 05 (the Jolly Green Giant rescue helicopter, flown by Captain Tom Trask) had returned to its forward operating base at Ar’ar just south of the Iraqi border, its crew had not totally given up the search, and they were monitoring their radio when Sandy 57 made contact with Jones, and later with the tanker. While the A-10s sucked gas out of the KC-135, they launched and headed north. Soon they were joined by the two A-10s.

On the flight north, AWACS controllers vectored them around Iraqi SAM sites in their path. Before long, they were talking to Jones.

The Moccasin 05 crew were going over rescue procedures with the Navy pilot when Johnson and Goff spotted an Iraqi radio direction-finding truck racing toward the pilot’s hiding place; and as Sandy’s 57 and 58 turned their attention to the Iraqi truck, Moccasin 05 swooped down on the pilot, his arms waving like mad. The A-10s rolled in and strafed the Iraqis with their 30 mm cannons, and, in Jones’s words, “the truck vaporized.” It had been close.

As Johnson pulled off the burning truck, Jones was jumping out of his hole in the desert less than a football field away and running to the waiting helicopter. It was a sight Johnson would never forget.

Though many people deserved praise that day, in the end it was the determination and guts of Captains Johnson and Goff that made the mission successful. Nearly nine hours after they’d climbed into them, the two exhausted pilots climbed down from their A-10s.

Months later, their country would reward Paul Johnson and Randy Goff for their efforts on what had started out as a boring day sitting combat search-and-rescue alert. Johnson received the Air Force Cross, the Air Force’s second-highest medal, and Randy Goff was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross.

The Jones rescue was difficult, but it worked. Too many CSAR missions did not come off so well. The most notable of these failures occurred on the night of January 19, when an F-15E hunting Scuds was shot down by an SA-2 missile.

THE ODYSSEY OF TOM GRIFFITH

Tom Griffith was a weapons systems officer, assigned to the 4th Tactical Fighter Wing, flying F-15Es, and first deployed in the rushed chaos of early August to Thumrait Air Base in Oman.

Still locked in his memory is the anxiety of mobility processing, when no one knew where they were being sent or what to expect when they got there. This was swiftly followed by the greater anxiety of imminent war, when he was handed a real gas mask and a real atropine injection pen (which protected against nerve gas).

In Oman, he endured the hot August days and nights, putting up tents in a dust storm, eating MREs until the kitchen tent was set up, sitting alert in a jet loaded with wall-to-wall cluster bomb units. August became September, and he endured that, too.

But when September became October, he was needed back home at Seymour Johnson AFB. So he left Thumrait and went home to train new crew members and spend Christmas with his wife and four young children. Or so he thought.

In December, when the wing was moved up to Al Kharj and a second squadron of F-15Es was deployed into the theater, Tom was at the top of the list to rejoin the unit. Later in December, the call came.

Leaving quickly, he discovered, was a hell of a lot easier than leaving slowly. In August, he just said goodbye and raced off. This time there were days to take last looks at his wife and children. This time there were hundreds of awkward moments when “we don’t talk about it,” until the actual leave-taking finally brought painful release.

Al Kharj — known to Americans as Al’s Garage — was a desolate place. The recently erected neat and orderly tent city did not improve its charm. But when Griffith arrived, he at least had the advantage of experience. The truly new guys, fresh from warm beds, Little League baseball with their kids, and Friday-night beer call, had to endure the barbs and hazing of the old heads, who’d suffered through the desert summer and fall. But not Tom Griffith.

Then December became January, and Griffith, like every aircrew member facing his first combat sortie, had to come to grips with a question that lay heavy in his heart. It was not, Am I going to die? but much more terrible, How am I going to do? Will I screw the pooch? Christ, I hope I don’t screw up!

On Tom’s first mission, he and his pilot, Colonel Dave Eberly, the wing DO, hit a radio transmission tower used by the Iraqi air defense system. It wasn’t pretty, but the strike went okay, and the Iraqi bullets missed them. Other F-15Es hit a nearby airfield, and he watched the seeming miracle of their escape from the waves of tracers thrown against them. Though the naysayers had predicted drastic losses, all the F-15Es came home that night.

After that the confidence swelled their hearts. “Hot shit! We did it! Everybody came back!”

Relief and confidence made everyone bolder… which instantly evaporated when one of the jets was lost following an attack on Basra. He was shaken again when a Wild Weasel tasked to support Griffith’s second mission was unable to find the tanker. It tried to land at fog-shrouded King Khalid Military City, but ran out of fuel and ideas. The crew ejected safely.

Though the losses put a chill in the aircrews, their worst fears had still not been realized. Thus, when a rushed, all-out strike was called against the Scuds in western Iraq, Griffith took in stride the inevitable confusion that accompanied this last-minute change in the ATO, and went about the job of planning his attack while briefing with Dave Eberly.

As usual when higher headquarters threw planning changes at operational people, confusion reigned. This wasn’t helped when the WSOs feverishly crammed in last-minute target and route studies, which made the crews late getting to their jets. After all, it was their reputations on the line. They had to find the target and put them on it.

The pilots only had to work their machines.

That is, a pilot only had to get off the runway without breaking anything, lift the gear handle, avoid hitting the KC-135 during refueling rendezvous, hang on to the boom while gas was pumped, then follow the WSO’s orders and put the jet into a small piece of sky at a speed and heading that would enable the bombs to hit their mark. Once that was done, he could fly back to a tanker, and then home.

During most of the mission, the WSO had it easy. That meant he could do busywork checking out systems or helping with the tanker join-up (if the pilot gave him control of the radar). Later he’d feed the route coordinates into the navigation system, which gave the pilot steering orders in the form of a small circle on his HUD. The hard part came when he took control of the radar and searched ever-smaller pieces of landscape below. When he’d found the target area, he’d work out where the bombs must impact by making a radar picture of the area (this looked like a fuzzy black-and-white photograph), and comparing that with the materials he had studied before takeoff or with drawings or pictures he’d clipped to his kneeboard. Then he would delicately manipulate the tracking handle to place the crosshairs of his radar display directly over the spot representing the target’s location.

No debate. There wasn’t time. The success of the mission, the payoff for this flight into harm’s way, came down to how well the WSO operated his radar, made sense out of the information displayed on his cathode ray tubes, and placed hair-thin bars that showed the pilot how to place the aircraft into that point in the sky that was the right place for releasing the bombs.

In the F-15E, the glory or failure went to the WSO, and it was pass/fail. Either you hit the target, or you didn’t. That night, Tom Griffith never got to try.

Things started to go bad as Eberly and Griffith’s F-15, Buick 04, was finishing with the air-to-air refueling and the flight was sitting in formation with the KC-135s, waiting for their EF-111 electronic jamming and F-4G Wild Weasel SAM attack support aircraft to arrive. But these aircraft called in miles out from the rendezvous: “We’re going to be late” (again, the cost of last-minute changes to the ATO). This put the F-15 flight leader in a bind. He had to leave the tanker now if he expected to make the time over target listed in the ATO. If he was early or late, he would risk interfering with other aircraft. If he went in without the protection of the EF-111s and F-4Gs, he’d risk sending the F-15Es naked into the target. It was a tough call, but he made the best choice he could. The flight left the tanker at the appointed time, and he radioed his EF-111 and F-4G helpers to refuel and join them in the target area as soon as they could catch up.

Sometime later, Buick 04 was somewhere near the Syrian border, just seconds away from weapons release, their F-15 speeding as fast as they could push it. At over 600 miles an hour, time went quickly, especially for someone trying to build a radar picture of an ill-defined target; the tension was building. As Griffith fine-tuned his radar picture, gently moving the crosshairs fractions of an inch, the steering commands in Eberly’s HUD offset ever so slightly, and Eberly smoothly brought his aircraft to the new heading. All of this had been practiced hundreds of times before — except for one never-trained-for factor: Hundreds of people on the ground, equipped with a vast array of weapons, were intent on killing them. They pursued this purpose with passionate intensity.

The F-15E’s warning receiver started to chatter, then displayed the symbols that told both crew members they were being tracked by surface-to-air missile-guidance radars. Griffith tore himself away from his radar and activated the switch that fired an explosive squib on the belly of the jet. This caused thousands of chaff filaments to blossom in the air and — it was hoped — blind and confuse the radar operators on the ground.

Whoosh, whoosh. A pair of guided missiles, probably Vietnam-vintage SA-2s, streaked toward their jet and exploded below and to their left. Putting aside the attack, Griffith dispensed more chaff, and Eberly turned the jet to avoid more missiles. Suddenly there was a flash, and the jet shuddered as if it had struck a wall of water. Surprisingly, they heard no noise.

A microsecond later, a grim but bemused Tom Griffith wondered if it wouldn’t have been better to wait for the EF-111 and F-4G support. A microsecond after that, he moved his right foot to a switch on the cockpit floor that would transmit to the rest of the flight the news that Buick 04 had been hit and would probably abort the attack. But to his sudden amazement, he failed to reach the switch; his feet were lifting off the floor and his ejection seat was traveling up the steel rails that held it in the cockpit. Eberly was ejecting them!

How Eberly accomplished that will probably never be known, for he had suffered a neck wound and lost consciousness. He did not wake up until he was on the ground.

Now Griffith was falling through the night sky, with no sense of up or down, only that he was cold and falling and still in his ejection seat. His mind raced through his emergency training procedures, trying to recall how to free himself from his seat and get his parachute deployed. But then, just as his mind filled with the terrible image of his mangled body in the desert, still attached to the seat, all the magic worked, and at the proper altitude, the tiny explosive charges fired according to schedule and Tom found himself floating beneath his open parachute. Now he knew where the ground was. It was the place where the angry red tracers were coming from, all arcing up toward him. Images of hundreds of bullets striking his parachute flashed across his mind, swiftly followed by the more frightening thoughts of red-hot projectiles ripping into his flesh. Just then, he involuntarily clamped his flight boots together to give some protection to his more precious parts. That lasted until he realized that the explosion of one projectile would remove everything from his navel down, so he might as well be comfortable during the ride to earth.

Always thinking, Tom dug his survival radio out of his vest and, tearing off a glove, set out to flip the switches that would let him broadcast to the others. However, before he could complete the procedure, he was distracted by a large explosion on the ground beneath him. His aircraft, he imagined. Then it hit him that unless he could maneuver his parachute, he was likely to descend into the burning wreckage, not a happy thought. Meanwhile, he discovered that his radio was useless. His cold, numb fingers could not operate the switches. As he was trying to slip it back into its pocket in his survival vest, he hit the ground like a two-hundred-pound bag of fertilizer thrown from the roof of a two-story building.

The impact twisted his left knee. Worse, he was near the fire of his burning jet, its light a beacon to the Iraqis, who would surely come looking for him. Worse still, bombs began exploding nearby, shaking the earth under his feet and filling the air overhead with deadly pieces of red-hot steel.

At that point his survival training took over, and he grabbed a small packet of essential items, called a “dash pack,” from his survival kit. It contained items like a radio and water, and it was small and light enough to be easily portable if an aircrew member had to run from the spot where his parachute might mark his location to enemy soldiers. With his dash pack under his arm, his sore knee sending bolts of pain up his leg, and gallons of adrenaline pouring into his arteries, Griffith stumbled away from the blazing wreckage of his jet.

The terrain quickly became a series of gullies in the hard-packed gravel desert. As soon as he felt hidden in darkness, he sat down and took stock — survival training 101. Aside from the sore knee and pounding heart, he was in pretty good shape, except for one small fact: he was hundreds of miles inside enemy territory, on foot.

Now the guns and the bombs had quit their chorus, and it was quiet. The lights of trucks headed his way as the Iraqis made their way through the desert toward the fire of the crashed F-15E. With no time to worry about his missing front-seater, Griffith began a rapid withdrawal, trying to put as many gullies as possible between himself and the plane wreckage. A plan started to come. He’d walk to nearby Syria and turn himself in to the police or army. Then he reviewed the ATO’s survival procedures. It was time for him to broadcast in the blind on his survival radio. He keyed the mike and sent a mayday call. To his surprise, he was answered by the familiar voice of Dave Eberly. The conversation that followed was comically inane:

Griffith to Eberly: “Is that you?”

Eberly to Griffith: “Yes, is that you?” (An answer probably given with the quiet confidence that there weren’t many other Americans wandering about the western Iraqi desert that particular night.)

Griffith to Eberly: “Yes, it’s me. Where are you?”

Eberly to Griffith: “I don’t know. Where are you?”

Griffith to Eberly: “I have no idea.”

Now that each knew the other was alive, they started working out how to solve the problems confronting them. They quickly discovered that they were both near a dirt road and a parallel power line and that they were close to each other: they could both see the same Iraqi truck go by.

They started toward each other in the pitch-black darkness, until suddenly they walked into each other.

It was a good moment. There weren’t many of them that night.

The two musketeers headed west, following a small compass Griffith dug out of a pocket of his survival vest. Later, as dawn started to gray the desert, they looked for a low spot where they could hide for the day. Once they’d found what seemed to be a suitable hideout, they settled down, and Eberly tried to raise help on his survival radio. Meanwhile, Griffith went through his pockets and culled out anything of value to the enemy. As he buried them in a shallow hole, he mused: Will some desert-dweller, maybe two thousand years from now, dig up my radio frequency card, authenticator code tables, and target drawing, and draw scholarly conclusions about mankind’s follies centuries ago?

By then, the sun was high enough to tell them something about their surroundings, and much to their alarm, they found they’d been trying to hide in a shallow depression on some sort of rock-strewn farmer’s field. “Where will we hide?” they asked themselves. “And now it’s getting light.” But nearby, a hill rose up sharply, maybe three hundred feet, with large rocks on its crest, big enough for two men to hide behind.

Fortunately, fog came with the rising sun, and Eberly and Griffith were able to creep up to the crest and hide among the boulders.

As far as they could tell, the desert was peaceful. No Iraqi Army patrols were beating the bushes trying to capture them. What’s more, the hill provided a good line of sight to look for rescue aircraft and for radio. Here would be a good place to wait for rescue, they decided.

Most of the rest of the day was divided between attempts at sleep and radio calls for help. Two obsessions dominated their minds: Gee, I hope we get out of here. And I wonder when they are going to come and rescue us?

★ Efforts in that direction were under way… but there was no rush.

Though other aircraft in the area had reported the shoot-down and (from “initial voice contact”) likely ejection of Eberly and Griffith, the CSAR cell in the TACC was stymied until they had received confirmation that the two airmen were alive and their exact location was known — the launch criteria the SOF commander had established for his rescue assets.

In point of fact, the SOF criteria were not always enforced. A day earlier, a Rafha-based MH-53 had conducted an unsuccessful search for a downed F-16 pilot in southern Iraq. And two days after the Griffith and Eberly shoot-down, Captain Trask and his MH-53 had joined in the search for Lieutenant Devon Jones without certain knowledge of the F-14 pilot’s location or condition.

So why did the search for the F-15E crew not start immediately? Possibly because their condition and location had not been determined, and possibly because the enemy defenses in this corner of Iraq were considered too severe to risk a rescue attempt. In all fairness, enemy defenses there were heavy. This part of Iraq was known as “Sam’s Town,” after a country-and-western casino in Las Vegas, so named because of the aggressive SAM sites in the area. Yet, when later in the war numerous Special Operations Scud-hunting teams were flown into western Iraq, non-SOF airmen concluded that the rescue assets they relied on were more interested in supporting Special Operations missions than saving their lives.

Whatever the reason, during the following days, three CSAR sorties were flown — to no avail. They went south of Griffith and Eberly. After that, the two men were on their own.

★ After they’d settled in on top of the hill, Griffith used a piece of Eberly’s parachute to clean and bandage his pilot’s neck wound. Later, they could hear the seemingly endless thunder of bombs dropped by B-52s on a target far to the south. Eberly urgently tried to reach the big bombers with his radio, but to no avail. After nightfall, they managed to contact an F-15C fighter patrolling overhead, who disappeared to the south without recontacting them. This was standard procedure. Because of the Iraqi direction-finding trucks, lengthy conversations were avoided. Shortly thereafter, the F-15C pilot relayed their general location to AWACS on secure (encrypted) radio.

After that, it was another day of waiting. Yet they knew they couldn’t stay where they were much longer. Though they could survive for a while without food, they were running short of water, and would have to move before they became too dehydrated to travel. They considered several plans — like stealing an Iraqi car, or highjacking one at gunpoint, and driving into Syria — but none seemed really workable.

Later, they listened on their survival radio to the pickup of Devon Jones. This was exciting — and painful — to hear.

They kept asking themselves questions: “Is this place too hot for the rescue birds? Where are we going to find water? How long will it take to walk to Syria?” And the most dreaded of all: “Does anyone know we are here?”

Late in the afternoon of the second day, they ripped up the remainder of Eberly’s parachute and fashioned what might pass from a distance as Bedouin robes and headdresses. After sunset, they started walking toward Syria.

Soon, the lights of two towns appeared in the distance. From where they stood, they guessed that one was in Iraq and the other in Syria.

Meanwhile, though they tried to walk carefully in the inky darkness, they found themselves stumbling inside a circle of tents. They were in the middle of a Bedouin encampment, where maybe a dozen medium-size but very hostile dogs were doing their best to sound the alarm. For some reason, they failed to wake their Arab masters (no one appeared, or even called out), but they succeeded in thoroughly frightening Griffith and Eberly, both of whom grabbed their 9 mm side arms thinking they might somehow shoot one of the beasts quietly and scare off the others. Then it came to them that the dogs seemed all snarl and bark, and the two pilgrims wandered off into the safety of the night.

After walking for several hours, the pair were crossing one of the many dirt roads that paralleled the border, when a truck roared up out of the night. Eberly and Griffith dropped to the ground, but on the flat featureless surface of the desert, they were still exposed. As it neared them, the truck slowed, but the driver either did not see them or was alone and in no mood to be a hero for Saddam. The truck resumed its speed and drove off.

Shortly, Tom raised another F-15 combat air patrol aircraft on his radio. Easily convinced that they were the crew of Buick 04, the fighter, call sign Mobile 41, did not ask them to authenticate. He told them to wait while he flew south, but promised to be back shortly. He never returned. When it hit them that he wasn’t coming back, their frustrations rose to an all-time high and their spirits dropped to an all-time low.

About two in the morning, they made out the dim outline of a building ahead of them. It was not far away, and there were no lights. No one appeared to be around. When Eberly, now desperately in need of water, announced that he was going to see if he could find something to drink, Griffith cautioned against it. He’d remembered a survival training dictum about avoiding buildings. Besides, he explained, they must be close to Syria. In fact, maybe they were in Syria and just needed to go a little farther to be sure.

But Eberly’s thirst proved too desperate for such cautious considerations, and he approached the building.[63] Since Griffith didn’t want to risk separation in the dark, he followed close behind. Suddenly, gunfire erupted from the top of the building. Someone had obviously been on guard — and doing a good job at it. Then maybe ten other troops came rushing out of the building, all firing wildly in the air or else in the general direction of the two airmen. If they were trying to scare the two Americans, they did an excellent job.

Both raised their hands and shouted, “Don’t shoot! We are friends!”

Who knows? they thought. These guys might be Syrian.

That hope was dashed when they were hustled inside the building and into a small room with a prominent picture of Saddam Hussein on the wall. This was a bad moment for the two American airmen.

The room was packed. In addition to the Americans, there was a flock of seventeen-year-old Iraqi privates, commanded by an Iraqi second lieutenant who appeared to be perhaps twenty-one. Though the Iraqi troops were greatly aroused by their find, they made no move to harm their captives, who, by this time, had concluded they’d run into an Iraqi border patrol guard post about a mile short of their destination. (After the war, Tom Griffith learned that it was fortunate they hadn’t reached the border area. It had been mined.)

After a time, the Iraqis handcuffed the Americans, loaded them into a white Toyota pickup, and delivered them to a larger fort nearby, where they were met by a first lieutenant. Like the border troops, he and his soldiers showed no hatred and treated the two Americans in a civilized manner. Though they did their best to ask questions, they had little success, as the Iraqis spoke no English and the F-15 crew spoke no Arabic.

The Iraqis then delivered Griffith and Eberly to a larger office, where they were met by an Iraqi captain. Also present were a group of officers, one of whom spoke broken English. “I am a doctor,” he explained, then examined Eberly’s neck wound.

After conducting an inventory of the Americans’ survival equipment (it had been taken from them when they were captured) and writing down their names, the Iraqis made some halfhearted attempts at interrogation. Questions like “How far and how fast can your aircraft fly?” brought truthful but useless answers, like “Well, it depends.”

By 4:00 A.M., Griffith and Eberly had been fed and given water. Then they were handcuffed again and placed facedown on the back of a flatbed truck, which carried them to the outskirts of a nearby town. There they stopped at a modest house surrounded by a brick wall, the home of a general, their guards explained. An Iraqi captain and two guards led them past the general’s white 1975 Chevy Impala and inside. Soon the three Iraqis showed them into the general’s office, seated them on a sofa, then waited with them for the general. A few minutes later, the general, in his bathrobe, greeted them. Like their previous captors, he treated them civilly; when they asked if they could get some sleep, he had them taken to a room with two cots. There they were allowed to rest for the next four or five hours.

Now that they were alone, they took the opportunity to put a story together for serious interrogations. In order to keep the Iraqis from probing the defensive strengths and weaknesses of the F-15E, they decided to deny they’d been shot down; it would be easy to claim an electrical fire was the culprit. In any case, they were far from certain about what had actually bagged them (though it was likely a surface-to-air missile).

As they waited in the general’s home, they were visited by a number of curious and not unfriendly guards. One who was especially friendly had studied petroleum engineering and spoke good English. “This is a terrible war,” he confided earnestly. “Don’t you agree?” And, “What do you think is going to happen? Something bad, no?”

But then a heavyset guard appeared, with a far more hostile attitude. “We are going to ask you a lot of questions,” he announced, “and you must cooperate,” implying by his tone serious penalties for noncooperation. As he warmed to his task, his comments grew more and more argumentative: “Why did you start the war?” Or, “You are all going to perish.” Or, “You are all helping Israel.”

Later that day, they were handcuffed and blindfolded, led outside, and loaded into the backseat of a six-passenger pickup truck. When the truck started up, their blindfolds were removed and they were taken into town. There the streets were lined with civilians chanting Arabic curses. They both bore up well under this (After all, they thought, words can’t hurt us, especially if the only ones we can understand are “Saddam! Saddam!”), until a young man hurled a rock through the truck window. Then it became Oh shit, I’m scared! Get us out of here, Lord!

Somehow that demonstration ended without serious consequences, and they were taken back to the general’s house for phase one of their interrogation.

In the beginning, the questions were simple: “Are you able to evade a missile?” And they answered in kind, “Well, that depends.”

But the easy part of their captivity soon proved to be over. They were cuffed, blindfolded, loaded back into a truck, and driven off. The setting sun behind them told them they were headed east, toward Baghdad. They traveled all night, were handed off from one military unit to another. Near morning, Tom Griffith was able to sneak a peek: a road announced in English, “Baghdad 20 km.”

When they reached their first place of confinement in the capital (where it was, they never learned), they were split up. From then on, the interrogation was conducted by professionals.

The next days were not pleasant. Though the questioners were well-versed in technical details—“What was the dispense rate you had set in your ALE-40 chaff dispenser?”—they hadn’t the faintest notion of how American culture worked or how Americans looked at life. One day, the interrogator sat down and announced smugly that George Bush had died, expecting Griffith to break down in tears. Instead, he feigned anguish: “Oh, Christ, that means Dan Quayle is president!”

As the days passed, Griffith was moved from cell to cell and from jail to jail. He quickly lost track of where he was and where he’d been, until one day he was moved to Baath Party headquarters and confined in the cell next to CBS News reporter Bob Simon, who had been picked up on the Iraqi side of the lines, where he’d been trying to scoop the press pool. This had not been a smart place to get caught, since the Iraqis were now convinced that he was a spy and were preparing to execute him — a fact that did not thrill Tom Griffith. Could it mean he was on “death row”?

Meanwhile, by February 25 the Black Hole had picked the last targets in Baghdad, and the Baath Party headquarters became one of the few that were acceptable to Schwarzkopf after the Al-Firdus bunker tragedy. During this strike, a bomb fell short of its aim point and blew in the walls of the prisoners’ cells.

“Oh Christ, I’m going to die in prison!” Griffith cried out to himself, certain that the bombs would set the building on fire.

Three other bombs struck farther away, on the other end of the building, destroying nearby cells (which, fortunately, were empty). Doors were also blown open, temporarily freeing a few POWs, who immediately — and unsuccessfully — went combing the rubble for cell keys that would let them free the others.

Since the building was now a total loss, the inmates were rounded up and sent to military facilities, where they were housed in groups instead of single cells. Tom Griffith was locked up with Jeff “Sly” Fox, who had been captured on February 18.

“How’s the ground war going?” Griffith asked.

“It hasn’t started yet,” Fox answered.

“Ohhhhhh!” Griffith groaned, with a despairing look.

“Hey,” Fox replied, “don’t worry. The air war is going great. It’s not going to be much longer until we get out of here!”

Welcome words indeed. Griffith had by now lost twenty-five pounds. All the old heads in prison were suffering from dysentery, and there was no way to keep clean.

Two days later, it was strangely quiet outside the cells. They could hear no bombers flying overhead. No AAA guns were popping off at F-117s. At first, the POWs thought this was because of weather aborts; but in the morning, the blue sky and warm sunshine made it clear that the bombing had stopped for some other reason. Each POW prayed it was for the right reason: that the war was over.

Very shortly after that, the prisoners were given soap and wash water, there was more and better food, and a barber came around to give them a shave — an Iraqi shave, dry with a rusty razor. (No wonder so many Iraqis wear beards, Tom Griffith told himself.)

“I think you will be going home soon,” an Iraqi officer announced on the fourth of March.

Is this a trick to get our hopes up? Griffith wondered.

But later that day, a bus arrived for Griffith and his fellow prisoners — two special forces troopers, the Army drivers, Specialists Melissa Rathburn-Healy and David Locket, who’d been captured during the battle of Al-Khafji, and two other aircrews. Soon afterward, a representative of the International Red Cross conducted them to the Nova Hotel, where the international press was waiting. After politely thanking them for bringing the captives to safety, the Red Cross representative firmly sent the Iraqis packing (thereby making himself an instant hero in the eyes of the now-former POWs), and the Americans were asked to identify by name any others in captivity (the sins of Vietnam were not going to be repeated).

Then for Tom Griffith it was a bus trip to Jordan, a flight to Oman, and the hospital ship Mercy off the coast of Bahrain. Dave Eberly went from Baghdad to Riyadh, and then to the Mercy for a longer stay.

On the Mercy, Griffith’s first priority was a phone call to his wife in North Carolina. Though he woke her up at 4:00 A.M., she didn’t seem to mind. Tom was safe and coming home!

★ Meanwhile, the failure to rescue Eberly and Griffith did not improve the already strained relations between aircrews and the Special Operations force units tasked to rescue them. The memory still burned after the war, as is evident from this comment about the Griffith and Eberly tale from a 4th Wing F-15E pilot: “Our DO and his backseater were on the ground for three and one-half days in western Iraq. Nobody’d go in and pick them up, and they eventually became prisoners of war. Before the war, the Special Operations guys came down to talk to us. ‘No sweat,’ they said, ‘we’ll come get you anywhere you are.’ That, from my perspective, was a big lie. After my guys were on the ground for three and one-half days, and they didn’t go pick them up, we basically decided that if anybody went down, they were on their own. Nobody was going to come and get you.”

Chuck Horner concludes:

The combat search-and-rescue mission involves lots of heartbreaking decisions. In Vietnam, we tried so hard to rescue all downed pilots that on some occasions we lost more aircraft and aircrews than were saved. CSAR is not a no-risk situation. It requires rescue crews that take risks that are far beyond those normally expected in combat operations. Sometimes you have bad luck, as was the case when a U.S. Army helicopter carrying Major (Dr.) Rhonda Cornum was shot down during an attempted battlefield rescue of a downed A-10 pilot, killing three crew members and leading to the capture of the survivors. Sometimes you have good luck, as was the case with Devon Jones.

The good luck, I hardly have to say, is not the product of luck. It comes from trained aircrews keeping their cool and evading capture. And it takes commanders who are hard-hearted enough to leave a downed airman to the mercies of the enemy when it is likely that more men and women will be killed or captured.

In Desert Storm, there was a failure to fully coordinate these aspects of the CSAR mission. While there were at times brilliant rescues, the aircrews were far from confident in the system. The next Chuck Horner to fight an air war had better pay close attention to the way he (or she) organizes and controls the employment of his or her combat search-and-rescue efforts.

At this point, the focus began to shift from pure air superiority, but it is important to repeat this fundamental: airpower is not discrete, it flows. While it is useful to talk about the discrete elements of airpower (such as gaining control of the air, battlefield interdiction, or preparing the battlefield — that is, limiting the enemy’s ability to harm friendly forces), such talk has limits. One element does not stop and another one start. There may be greater or lesser intensity directed toward one or the other of them, but during any slice of time, all will be working.

In Desert Storm, once air superiority was assured, greater attention was given to battlefield interdiction and to preparing the battlefield — but all the while, air superiority was never ignored.

★ Battlefield interdiction — isolating the battlefield — is a classic role of airpower, and was a natural goal for General Schwarzkopf to set for Chuck Horner.

In the case of Desert Storm, battlefield interdiction meant preventing the resupply of Iraqi forces in occupied Kuwait and southern Iraq. If the enemy was denied access to resupplies of food, water, gasoline, ammunition, and medical supplies, in time he would be rendered helpless. The length of time this form of interdiction warfare took to become effective was the big question.

Answering it depended on the answers to many other questions. How well is the enemy supplied when combat begins? What is the tempo of combat and the demands that tempo will make on his store of supplies? How effective is aerial interdiction on resupply throughput? And so on. During the war in Vietnam, efforts to isolate the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese regular army in South Vietnam failed, both because of the inefficient use of airpower and because of the crude, yet determined, supply system of North Vietnamese forces.

That failure was not repeated in the Gulf conflict.

In order to attain classic battlefield interdiction, General Schwarzkopf expected Chuck Horner to bomb the bridges on the roads and railroads running from Baghdad to Basra and on to Kuwait City. Trucks and military convoys (and indeed any likely vehicles) were to be targeted by fighter-bombers patrolling the desert south of the Iraqi capital. Iraqi aircraft would not be allowed to fly; and whenever they attempted to, they would be discovered by AWACS radar and immediately attacked by Coalition fighter pilots.

However, because of the limitations of classic battlefield interdiction, American planners began to look at new — and potentially quicker — ways to isolate the battlefield. They came to ask: “Can we paralyze the enemy by isolating his fielded forces from their sources of information and from their command and control?” In other words, “Can we practice information warfare against the Iraqi army of occupation?”

In the Iraqi dictatorship, with its fears, suspicions, and terrors, independence of thought or action is instantly uprooted and punished. A military commander who shows independence, no matter how successful, becomes a threat to Saddam Hussein and his few close advisers. Success itself is a threat, since it encourages independence and popularity. Thus, battle plans are scripted with the oversight and approval of Saddam, and deviation from the script is not allowed.

This raised a question in the minds of the air planners: “What if we can isolate the Iraqi ground forces from their supreme leader in Baghdad? Would they become paralyzed? Would the deployed forces in the field freeze in place, awaiting capture, rather than maneuver about the battlefield and oppose Coalition liberation forces?”

Because modern military command and control is accomplished primarily via electronic media — telephones, radios, and computer networks, connected by satellite, microwave nets, telephone lines, and high-data-rate fiber-optic cables — Horner’s planners targeted the connecting links. Thus, Coalition bombers attacked telephone exchange buildings, satellite ground stations, bridges carrying fiber-optic and wire bundles, and cables buried in the desert. Even had there been ASAT missiles available, individual satellites would not have been targeted, since both sides in the conflict used the same satellites.

To stop the radio and television broadcasts that connected Saddam with his army and his people, transmission towers were bombed, but this effort was only partially successful. The problem was in stopping low-powered radio broadcasts emanating from more or less primitive stations scattered throughout the countryside.

Interestingly, the Iraqis themselves put very tight limits on their own radio transmissions, in the apparent belief that the Americans would either listen in on them or target the radio emitter locations. Though this successfully denied intelligence to the Coalition, it also put a chokehold on command and control of their deployed forces.

A telling consequence of the information war (as reported after the war by Iraqi POWs) proved to be the inability of Iraqi headquarters in Baghdad to provide intelligence to the Iraqi Army leadership in the field about Coalition ground force deployments and maneuvers.

It is hard to tell whether this incapacity was a Coalition success or an Iraqi failure… A similar answer, it turns out, has to be given to the larger question: How successful was the air campaign in denying Iraqi command and control of their forces? There’s just no way to know for sure.

For starters, no one has any idea how much Saddam even conferred with his generals, yet he was certainly able to convey to his Third Corps commander enough command information to initiate the invasion of Saudi Arabia in late January 1991 (the Battle of Khafji). Even so, the Coalition information and command-and-control advantage (thanks in large measure to the targeting of airpower by the Joint STARS aircraft) allowed a single brigade under the command of Khaled Bin Sultan to rout three Iraqi divisions.

The Iraqi failure at Al-Khafji raises larger questions for Chuck Horner:

Did we really want Saddam isolated from the battle? Given his lack of military experience, poor judgment, and micromanaging leadership style, perhaps we should have facilitated his presence on the battlefield in every way possible. Of course, that’s not the American way. We like to see others the way we look at ourselves, so cutting Saddam off from his forces in the field seemed the proper thing to do.

But this was not our worst mistake. That mistake was never asking ourselves “So what?” That is, we had no very good ideas about what to do after we’ d succeeded in cutting Saddam off from his forces in the field. Therefore, we continued to plan and conduct a ground campaign that did not fully exploit the success we’d achieved in denying the enemy the capacity to command his forces.

Thus, our fear of Iraqi reconnaissance aircraft caused us to delay moving the U.S. corps into their jump-off positions for the ground war until after the air war began. This caution proved unnecessary, and ignoring it could have speeded up our attack and made the war more efficient. Far more telling, however: when the battle for Al-Khafji made it apparent how thoroughly airpower could destroy Iraqi forces in the attack, why didn’t the Coalition leaders alter their ground campaign plans? And, for that matter, why didn’t the Iraqis alter their strategy after their ground forces proved to be helpless in the face of the aerial onslaught?

Though I cannot answer for the Coalition leadership, the Iraqis in February did in fact alter their strategy: they sought to end the war, offering to withdraw from Kuwait and renounce their claims to sovereignty there. (Their offer, of course, proved to be too little and too late.)

Meanwhile, the campaign to prevent the resupply of logistics to the battlefield proved to be very effective. The Iraqi Army had serious problems providing units in the field with sufficient food and water. On the other hand, efforts to deny resupply of ammunition had little or no impact, as the defeated army surrendered before expending large amounts of ammunition. The joke was, “Come to Kuwait if you want to buy an AK-47. They are like new, shot once, and dropped once.” In this war, we stopped ammunition from reaching the soldiers, but they had all they needed. After enduring six weeks of aerial bombardment, their strongest motive was surrender, not dying for Saddam.

In other words, perhaps our information-warfare attacks proved far more effective than Coalition leaders realized. And perhaps the Iraqi Army failed to maneuver in the face of our ground onslaught because our campaign to deny them intelligence had a far greater impact than we comprehended at the time. Certainly, despite our apparent success with the more traditional means to isolate the battlefield, we need to study this new form of warfare in far more detail to determine which works best — the classical or the new method of interdiction… or both together.

Isolating the battlefield, as General Schwarzkopf conceived it, had one other — perhaps surprising — goal. Not only did he intend to prevent food, ammunition, water, communications, or reinforcements from reaching the enemy; he also intended to prevent the Iraqi Army occupying Kuwait from getting out. Or, in the words of Colin Powell, “We are going to cut off the head of the snake, and then we are going to kill it.”

On the whole, airpower succeeded in that aim… at least in the open country, where roads and bridges were exposed. Airpower so successfully dropped the bridges across the rivers of southern Iraq that, years after the war, it was difficult to travel by car to the countryside. Where airpower did not succeed was in preventing the Iraqis from hiding many of their tanks and armored personnel carriers in the cities of southern Iraq. The only way to hit these from the air would have exposed the populations of the cities to widespread aerial attacks, and the Americans and their Coalition partners were not willing to do that. Attacking the cities from the ground was, of course, another option, but few Coalition leaders were eager to take that step when their stated goal was to eject the Iraqis from Kuwait.

KILLING TANKS AND ARTILLERY

From one point of view, battlefield interdiction is an accessory to battlefield preparation. Putting a wall between an enemy and his sources of sustenance and information obviously seriously restricts his ability to inflict harm on friendly ground forces. Though a number of other elements also fall under the overall rubric of preparing the battlefield, only one of these truly mattered to General Schwarzkopf: “Kill the tanks and artillery.” His reasons for this were simple, and doctrinally correct: tanks and artillery were the Iraqis’ likely means to inflict harm on friendly ground forces.

It was for this reason that plans called for half of the enemy tanks and artillery pieces to be destroyed by airpower before Coalition soldiers and marines crossed into Kuwait and Iraq. From the opening moments of the war, the Air Tasking Order called for strikes against the Iraqi Army in the KTO.

In the west, in front of VIIth Corps, the killing effort was more or less equally divided between tanks and artillery, with perhaps a slight tilt in the direction of the modern T-72 tanks of the Republican Guard. In the east, on the other hand, Walt Boomer wanted emphasis placed on Iraqi artillery. Once the ground war started, he believed he could handle the tanks he would be facing (which were for the most part obsolete), but the artillery would cause problems, especially when he was passing his force through the extensive minefields that lay ahead of him.

Despite the priority of this mission in the mind of the CINC, killing Iraqi tanks and artillery got off to a slow start. In the early moments of the war, when most aircraft were directed to gaining control of the air, only a few sorties were available for tasking against KTO-based targets, and bad weather made it difficult for KTO-bound pilots to find Iraqi tanks and artillery without unnecessarily exposing their aircraft to enemy AAA and shoulder-fired SAMS. Worse, pilots had difficulty hitting their targets when they found them, since they were not used to initiating attacks at 10,000 feet or above. At those altitudes, strong winds often made a pilot’s roll-in unpredictable; it was a struggle to place his aircraft at the right position and speed for the weapons release.

Combat was proving a far cry from the shine-your-ass gunnery meets we had held in the United States, where the pilots were not being shot at, where they had been briefed on the winds affecting their bombing passes, where they were flying on familiar training ranges against familiar targets, and where they could press their attacks so close to the target that there was little opportunity for a bent fin or maladjusted release rack to make a bomb errant. In the meets, you expected the bombs to go inside the open turrets of the tanks; in Iraq you could hardly see where the tanks might be on the desert floor below.

Worst of all, after battling the weather, dodging enemy AAA fire, and straining to find their targets, attacking aircrews were often sent to the wrong place. Because target coordinates were derived from overhead photography that was hours and days old by the time it was received in Riyadh, all too often planes were sent out to kill tanks and artillery in locations the enemy had long since left. Though there were several efforts to speed the information flow, none of these really worked.

The solution, as we’ve already seen, was Killer Scouts — F-16s orbiting thirty-by-thirty-mile sectors of the battlefield and searching for dug-in tanks and artillery. When they found them, they’d direct the oncoming streams of fighter-bombers to their targets.

★ A second addition to tank- and artillery-killing efficiency occurred in late January. By then, control of the air had been assured and the fixed targets in Iraq had been (for the most part) hit, thus allowing more and more F-111F and F-15E[64] sorties to be tasked against Iraqi Army targets. The tank-plinking tactics developed in the Night Camel exercises were now put to the test in the real world. The results were remarkable. On February 11, aircrews claimed 96 armored vehicles — tanks, APCs, and artillery; 22 of these were killed by “plinkers.” On the twelfth, film showed 155 killed; of these 93 were plinked by laser-guided 500-pound bombs. On the fourteenth, 214 were killed, and of these, 129 were “plinked.” The totals grew daily (except for those days when bad weather shrouded the battlefield).

Dollar for dollar, this was the way to kill tanks. If a single F-111F carried eight 500-pound laser-guided bombs at $3,000 each, then for less than $50,000 (which included most of the other costs of a sortie) eight tanks could be destroyed. In the U.S. Army, each tank costs in the neighborhood of $1,000,000. The Russian tanks used by the Iraqi Army cost about half that. So less than $50,000 worth of air offense killed over one hundred times as much ground offense.

COUNTERPUNCH

Not much has been said in favor of Saddam Hussein as a strategist, yet in fact his original strategy for the Gulf War was simple yet brilliant — at least on the face of it. The Iraqi dictator had paid close attention to the lessons of Vietnam. If the United States can lose a war once, he reasoned, they can lose a war twice, and he nominated Iraq for the honor of inflicting that loss. “What led to the defeat?” he asked himself. Casualties on the battlefield produced discontent on the home front. Battlefield carnage translated into television images that so horrified the folks back home that the President of the United States was driven from office, and the Americans left the field of battle undefeated, yet beaten.

With all that in mind, Saddam planned for enduring a short air campaign and a fierce land battle. His troops constructed formidable defensive positions, with minefields, fire trenches, and presurveyed fields of fire for his artillery. When the war came to Kuwait and southern Iraq, perhaps his poorly trained infantry divisions would die in staggering numbers; but in doing so, they would inflict thousands of casualties and deaths on the Americans. Once the Coalition forces had been weakened, they could then be defeated or brutalized by his heavy armor and Republican Guard divisions. And even if all these plans failed and he did not win on the battlefield, the television coverage of the bloodshed would ensure his victory in the streets of Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, and Washington.

Unfortunately for Saddam’s brilliant strategy, things didn’t work out the way he planned.

The war started and the air came, but the air did not cease (as Saddam said it would), and the ground forces failed to take the bait. Unexpectedly, the Iraqi Army was being destroyed from the air. They were totally naked to Chuck Horner’s armada and had no clue about how to fight back.

Saddam had to do something to regain the initiative and resurrect his failing strategy. Otherwise his defeat would be absolute, and his regime might be lost.

★ The first such attempt occurred during the mad rush of Iraqi jets to sanctuary in Iran toward the end of January.

One day, enemy fighters took to the air out of an airfield in eastern Iraq, and AWACS controllers vectored nearby USAF F-15s in CAP orbit toward the fleeing Iraqis. Nothing unusual. But as the air-to-air jets screamed north, a pair of bomb-laden Iraqi Mirage aircraft took off and headed south. Though the AWACS crew spotted this new threat, they could not recall the F-15s, who had their hands full chasing their prey to the north.

Next in line were two F-14s at a CAP point in the northern part of the Arabian Gulf. Because the F-14s were controlled by a Navy Aegis cruiser that would not release them to AWACS (possibly because the Aegis controller feared leaving the Navy naked to the Iraqi bombers that were headed in their general direction), the AWACS controller was unable to vector these interceptors onto the Mirages.

Meanwhile, the Mirages were now flying down the coast of Saudi Arabia, approaching the huge oil refinery south of Dhahran. Saddam surely hoped that by bombing the oil fields, he would bring pain to Saudi Arabia, the same way Coalition air was bringing pain to him. For example, the pumping stations in the refineries have huge one-of-a-kind valves that would take years to obtain. If the Mirages had been able to hit the maze of pipes in the refinery, they could have put the refinery out of action for a very long time.

Unfortunately for the Iraqis, the airborne shield protecting the Saudis was both thicker and tougher than they’d imagined. Waiting next in line to shoot them down were two Royal Saudi Air Force F-15s, USMC Hawk anti-aircraft missile sites, Royal Saudi Air Defense Hawk missile sites, and U.S. Army Patriot missile sites. All of them were closely following AWACS data, and waiting for orders to engage the bandits.

The first of these was Captain Shamrani, the RSAF flight leader. Shamrani took a single vector from the AWACS controller, selected afterburner, and threw his jet into a hard, descending right-hand turn. This screaming dive ended in a roll-out over the water just off the coast. Now headed south, he quickly spotted the Iraqi Mirages racing desperately toward their target. Then training took over, and he locked onto the Iraqi wingman, selected the middle position on his weapons switch, and listened to the warbling tone of his AIM-9L heat-seeking missile, which told him that the IR seeker in the missile had seen the target and was locked on. In scarcely a second, he identified the Mirage to AWACS and received permission to fire. His voice was excited but clear when he sent “Fox Two, kill” over the radio.

After easily avoiding the Mirage blowing up ahead of him, Shamrani rolled his jet sharply to the right to line up on the Iraqi leader.

Seemingly unaware of his wingman’s demise or of the deadly threat behind him, the Iraqi leader drove on toward his target. This time there was no need to identify the target or request clearance to fire. Once he had his missile tone, Shamrani pressed the red button on top of his control stick and hit the toggle switch on the throttle to tell his wingman, AWACS, and anyone else listening in, “Fox Two, kill.”

Scratch one Iraqi hope.

But they were not finished yet. Far from it.

Saddam’s most impressive attempt to regain the initiative and make his strategy work occurred late in January 1991, when he invaded Saudi Arabia.

His thinking was this: Air was killing him; and Coalition ground forces were surprisingly reluctant to impale themselves on his defenses. So, he thought, I’ll bring the battle to them. If I invade Saudi Arabia, the Coalition will have to counterattack. If that jump-starts the ground war, and the Americans rush into my defenses, then I “win”… insofar as American soldiers would die in great numbers. (It should be noted that at that point Gary Luck’s deception operation had lots of radio traffic coming out of an area just south of Al-Khafji, leaving the Iraqis under the impression that the XVIIIth Airborne Corps was poised to attack from there. In fact, the corps was already in transit west to their actual attack locations.) If my invasion succeeds, Saddam continued, then I “win,” because I can attack the Egyptians and Syrians near KKMC. That should inflict chaos on some of the Americans’ Arab lackeys. And who knows where that will lead?

The downside for Saddam was to continue to be destroyed from the air and certain defeat. His next decision was a no-brainer.

★ As a side note: because Saddam’s hopes for his invasion of Saudi Arabia were so resoundingly dashed, several commentators have imagined that the Iraqis could not have been really serious about it — that, in other words, the invasion was not an invasion but a “probe.”

For their “probe,” they used three divisions, one armor and two mechanized infantry, including their 5th Mechanized division, one of their finest armor units (it was considered just below the Republican Guard).[65] Though exact numbers are not available, in all probability these three divisions contained something in the neighborhood of 20,000 troops (and perhaps as many as 40,000), a sizable force.

Meanwhile, Saddam himself thought the probe — or invasion — was of no small importance. After learning that his troops had entered the town, he announced that the attack was “the beginning and omen of the thundering storm that will blow on the Arabian Desert.”

Chuck Horner will take up the story from here.

AL-KHAFJI

The town of Al-Khafji lies on the coast of the Arabian Gulf in the eastern province of Saudi Arabia, approximately ten kilometers south of the Kuwaiti border on the highway connecting Dhahran and Kuwait City. With no more than ten to fifteen thousand inhabitants, it can’t be called big; nor does it have any real reason for existence other than as home for civil administration and a place to buy supplies. In this respect, it is not unlike many small rural towns in our own desert Southwest. On the north side of town, there is a modest desalinization plant. On the south is a modest oil-storage area. If you want a real oil-storage area, fly over Ras Turnira south of Al-Khafji, where you can see hundreds of giant oil-storage tanks. All in all, this little desert outpost has nothing very spectacular to offer — other than that the most important ground battle of the Gulf War was fought there.

Though the battle of Al-Khafji started in the late afternoon of 29 January 1991 and ended midday on the thirty-first, the lead-up to the battle started several months earlier.

Late one night in early August, Prince Khaled, John Yeosock, and I were having a war council. It had been a terrible day of rumors and fears — twenty-seven Iraqi divisions were poised on the border, and we had no means to stop them. Our discussion involved strategies for using the 82d Airborne Division, the Saudi National Guard, and airpower to stem the Iraqi attack, should it occur. During the meeting, Khaled kept making the point that his orders from the King were to make certain that no part — not one inch — of Saudi soil would fall to the invader. That included the town of Al-Khafji.

Unfortunately, not only was the town well within the range of Iraqi artillery, but we did not have the means to prevent its capture. Fortunately, Khaled sensibly realized that the town was a liability; and it was agreed that it should be evacuated. In that way, we would be able to create the free-fire zone that would allow us to attack the Iraqi invaders with air and artillery without the extensive coordination needed to protect friendly civilians and military. It was a tough decision, for Khaled, in effect, had to reject the guidance he had received.

He did the right thing, and from that time on, Al-Khafji became little more than a ghost town.

Not totally, however.

The town was located in the area of responsibility of the commander of the Eastern Area Command, Major General Sultan Sultan Adi al-Mutairi. After the evacuation, General Sultan placed screening forces near the town, as well as a small troop in the town itself, to protect property until the crisis was over. He also had a significant force approximately fifty kilometers south of Al-Khafji.

Most of Sultan’s forces were Royal Saudi Land Force mechanized infantry and Saudi National Guard mechanized forces. Also under his command were mechanized forces from Qatar, and infantry from Oman, the United Arab Republic, Kuwait, Morocco, and Senegal. Rounding out this force was a sizable force of Saudi marines.

To the west of Sultan was the area of responsibility of Walt Boomer’s United States Marine Corps — two divisions, augmented by a division of British armor (later replaced by the U.S. Army Tiger Brigade).

Very significantly for what was to come later, in November Boomer had concluded that he could not support offensive operations into Kuwait with the logistics setup created for the defense of Saudi Arabia (though Walt Boomer is a genius, he has to be a little crazy). At any rate, he built his logistics stockpiles just south of the Kuwaiti border, north of his own defenses. In effect, he took a big risk on the supposition that we would be ordered to attack into Kuwait after the first of the year, and the now heavily dug-in Iraqis would not be coming south into Saudi Arabia. He was half right.

★ To fully understand the Battle of Khafji, we need to understand that it was not a single battle but four. Let me explain:

Battle One was the battle for the town itself — the fight the world watched on CNN.

Battle Two was the skillful and desperate struggle by the U.S. Marines to protect their naked storage depots out in the desert. (As it happened, the Iraqis did not know they were there. If they had, they would likely have put real punch into an attack in that direction, and quite possibly have damaged the allied cause.)

Battle Three was our air attacks on the Iraqi divisions forming up to attack Khafji. Overhead, Joint STARS watched these movements and directed hundreds of sorties against them: tank-killing A-10s with Mavericks; the AC-130 on the coast highway, killing a vehicle every ten to thirty seconds; B-52s bombing the “Kuwaiti National Forest” (so called by the pilots because in that part of the desert the Kuwaitis had been trying to grow scraggly trees that could live on the brackish water under the sand), where the Iraqis had been forming up — and trying to hide — for the attack; F-16s and F/A-18s dropping cluster bombs on the lead and tail vehicles of convoys so the burning vehicles blocked the road and trapped all the rest of the tanks, trucks, and artillery pieces; AV-8s and AH-1s strafing the Iraqis as they fled back across the border.

Battle Four was the battle that never happened — the movement of the Iraqis to position for another attack elsewhere, such as down the Wadi al Batin against the Egyptians and Syrians near KKMC. If the Iraqis had succeeded in engaging the Egyptians and/or the Syrians, it would have given us — to put it mildly — major headaches. Because the Iraqis, the Egyptians, and the Syrians often used the same equipment — Russian tanks versus Russian tanks — we would have had a very difficult time deciding which one to kill. And because there were few English-speaking FACs, we would have had a very difficult time sorting out the good guys from the bad guys. The possible results: lots of casualties and Iraqi forces astride the Tapline Road, the single highway connecting the coast and the west. Its possession would have allowed the enemy to prevent movement west of the U.S. VIIth and XVIIIth Corps to their attack positions.

To make matters more complicated, we were at that point very unsure about how well the Arab forces would fight when the crunch came.

In the event, the Saudis did extremely well at Khafji, and later during what has been misnamed the Hundred-Hour War. But it was their country and their king. Would the Egyptians and Syrians be similarly motivated? No one knew.

In hindsight, Battle Four may have been the one Saddam should have put all his chips on (though, in fact, if he’d tried it, he still didn’t have a chance because of the battlefield situational awareness Joint STARS gave us). A dug-in army is tough to kill; an army on the roads is a piece of cake.

To summarize: Battle Three was the key to winning Battles One and Two, and to never having to fight Battle Four.

★ As early as the twenty-fifth of January, we began to see glimmers that told us something was up.

First, Brigadier General Jack Leide, the CENTCOM J-2, warned of activity by the Iraqi IIId Corps commander, Lieutenant General Salah Abud Mahmud. (We would get to know him better in March, when he showed up at Safwan to surrender the Iraqi Army.)

About the same time, the Kuwaiti resistance leader, Colonel Ahmed Al-Rahamani, hiding in Kuwait City with a suitcase satellite telephone, phoned the TACC and relayed to the Kuwaiti Air Force duty officer, Colonel Samdan, that some generals were meeting in Kuwait City in an hour.[66] Based on the address provided by Colonel Rahamani, Chris Christon used aerial photographs of the neighborhood to pinpoint the meeting’s location. Christon and Buster Glosson immediately examined further evidence provided by CENTCOM, the Kuwaiti resistance, and our own intelligence; and when they were satisfied that this was a valid target, they tasked some of Tom Lennon’s F-111s to pay a call. Soon, four 2,000-pound laser-guided bombs were knocking on the door. A moment later, a massive ball of fire consumed the house and a flock of Mercedes-Benzes parked in the nearby parking lot. I never learned who was at the meeting or what they were planning.

Then, on the twenty-ninth of January, Chris Christon informed me that several FROG (Free Over Ground Rocket) units had deployed into Kuwait, in his view a tip-off that the Iraqis would attack sometime during the next two weeks. He was the only one I know who even came close to predicting the attack (though he missed the date). That night, Iraqi lead elements entered Al-Khafji.

Despite the hints, we were surprised.

Suddenly, thousands of Iraqi soldiers, thinking the night had made them invisible, began to move out of their dug-in defensive positions and mass for the attack.

Because of all the unforeseeable possibilities, an army in transit is an army ill at ease. Units can take the wrong road and arrive at the wrong place, vehicles can break down and fail to arrive in time to support the attack, weather can turn order into confusion. But never before had an army moving to the attack faced what this army was about to face. Because it was moving, it could be seen on the Joint STARS radar. Because it could be seen, it could be targeted and attacked. And because it was out in the open, jammed on narrow roads without shelter or camouflage, it was going to die. The Iraqi generals trusted that darkness would hide their movement, but the reality of modern technology left them naked to massive doses of death, destruction, and terror from the air. It was any ground commander’s worst nightmare.

As the convoys started their march south to the Saudi border, Joint STARS picked them up. Within moments A-10, F-16, B-52, AC-130, AV-8, and F/A-18 aircraft were diverted from other targets to attack the moving Iraqi Army, and the battle grew in intensity as more and more tanks, APCs, and trucks took to the highways leading to Al-Khafji.

Moments later, the large and orderly movement of Iraqi forces into Saudi Arabia had been turned into chaos. A-10s had bottled whole convoys of tanks on roads by killing the lead and the trailing vehicles; they then methodically set each vehicle in between on fire — and lit up two- to five-mile stretches of road like day. As Maverick missiles turned the stalled vehicles into fiery infernos, Iraqi soldiers ran into the desert to save their lives.

The Iraqi Army had been intent on surprise, and they had achieved it; but surprise did them no good. The ground commander had launched his attack against Saudi Arabia and was preparing to reinforce his attack when he ran up against a menace that was not in his script — hundreds of aircraft dropping thousands of lethal munitions on his forces.

On the ground, Battles One and Two erupted almost simultaneously.

To the west of the road to Khafji, the lead elements of the mechanized division the Iraqis had placed on their right flank to screen their main attack ran into company-size Marine elements near the huge storage area just south of the Kuwait border. Instantly concluding that the attack was directed at the thousands of tons of food, fuel, ammunitions, and petroleum stored in the open desert, the Marines sent armored personnel carriers, aided by close air support aircraft, against the Iraqi units and beat them back decisively. Though the fighting was fierce (several Marines were killed), it was not sustained, as the Iraqis had no intention of making this (Battle Two) the decisive battle.

To the east, Battle One got under way when the lead elements of the Iraqi main force (an armored and a mechanized division) entered Al-Khafji.

The problem faced by the Eastern Area commander, General Sultan, was figuring out how to engage and defeat this unknown-size second battle force (and recall that the Iraqi Army had been often portrayed as battle-tested, hard, and experienced, while his own modest force had never experienced combat).

Meanwhile, Battle Three had already started when Jim Crigger, on his own hook, started diverting air into Kuwait. Since the Iraqis would move only at night, this battle had to be conducted at night; and since the weather started to close in on the twenty-ninth, our air attacks had to be conducted at low altitude under the clouds rather than at the far-preferred medium altitudes.

On the ground, close support of EAC forces became the responsibility of the USMC Direct Air Support Center at Walt Boomer’s headquarters, while in the air, the C-130 Airborne Direct Air Support Center command-and-control aircraft was used for this purpose. The TACC flowed or diverted air to the DASC or into Kuwait as fast as it could be targeted. The pace of the air battle was once again dictated by the pace of the tactical air control system’s management of the air.

Later that night, the USMC launched a night-capable TV-equipped drone. As the unmanned aircraft crossed the border, it transmitted pictures of dozens of Iraqi armored personnel carriers lined up behind the earthen berm that marked the border between Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.

When the pictures showed up in my headquarters, I began to understand the warnings we had been receiving during the past few days.

Next, a team of B-52s and A-10s were tasked to bomb the “Kuwaiti National Forest” just north of the Kuwait border. The B-52 strike (filmed by the A-10s) went in first. As the bombs walked through the rows of trees, armored vehicles moved in all directions, fleeing for their lives. Moments later, the A-10s began their attack, carefully picking which target to destroy.

Later, as I watched the film, I noted that the A-10 guys preferred to lock onto and destroy the tanks and APCs that continued to move. Perhaps, I mused, the Warthog drivers thought that was the sporting thing to do — to shoot fleeing vehicles rather than the sitting ducks whose crews had fled on foot. But then I noticed more A-10s arriving to clean up the sitting ducks, and that theory flew out the window. Blazing fuel and exploding ammunitions turned night into day.

Early in the morning of 30 January, Major General Sultan took a force of Saudi and Qatari armored vehicles to the west side of Khafji. When he found Iraqi armor there, he engaged it, destroying some tanks and APCs and capturing an Iraqi officer and several dozen troops (even then the Iraqis were anxious to surrender). Questioning of the captives revealed that two Iraqi battalions were in the town. This information, coupled with earlier reports that more than fifty armored vehicles were also heading toward Khafji, led General Sultan to withdraw until close air support could be secured and a more comprehensive plan of attack could be drawn up.

As daylight broke, the pace of all three battles slowed down. The Iraqis stopped moving; the Saudis withdrew; the USMC began to convoy forces into the desert to the west of Khafji; and our air attacks in Kuwait, while hardly slow or routine, lacked the intensity that occurred every night when the F-117s hit Baghdad, and the Scud hunt and Scud-launching heated up.

Late that afternoon, I was in the TACC with Lieutenant General Ahmed Al Behery, the Royal Saudi Air Force commander, watching the battle over Kuwait unfold. The phone was handed to Behery, who said a few words on channel two (Arabic), then handed the phone to me: “Chuck, it’s Khaled.”

“Khaled, hello, where are you?” I asked.

“Chuck, this is Khaled,” he answered; and then, forcefully, “I’m at Khafji. And I need air.”

“Khaled, how in the hell did you get to Khafji?”

“Chuck,” he replied, “we have a battle up here, and I need air, lots of air. I need B-52s.”

When a ground general says he needs B-52s, you know he’s in trouble. You know he wants an instant solution to a severe problem. As he spoke those words, I glanced up at the AWACS display, which showed flight after flight heading toward southern Kuwait.

“You’re going to get lots of air, Khaled,” I replied in my best bedside manner.

“No, Chuck, you don’t understand. I need air!” Khaled pleaded, with all the intensity and sincerity his voice could produce.

I whipped out the line airmen have used for decades. “Trust me, Khaled, you’re going to get more air than you ever knew existed.”

“No, Chuck, I need air,” he repeated.

As a matter of fact, his anxiety had more behind it than I thought. He did need air.

Though it was true that all available air was being funneled to defeat the Iraqi attack, I was unaware that we had no way to control close air support sorties at Al-Khafji, since, as I learned later, the Marine air controllers who should have been doing that were just then trapped and hiding in the town. The USMC had two ANGLICO (air and naval gunfire liaison company — Marine for forward air controller) teams of five men whose job was to contact the USMC DASC and coordinate and control CAS or artillery fire. These two teams were hiding on a rooftop in Al-Khafji.

Hundreds of sorties were arriving over Khafji, but when they were unable to contact any controlling agency or forward air controller, they just moved north a few miles and continued to pummel the Iraqi forces trying to reinforce the lead elements in Saudi Arabia.

The Marines’ inability to control close air support at Khafji did not please Khaled. Other Marines to the west could have been sent east to handle that. But this did not happen, in Khaled’s view, for the following reasons:

1. The Marines feared they’d hit the Saudi forces — liaison between Marines and Saudis being at best limited.

2. They felt their air was best employed as a combined arms element with their own ground forces and should not be deployed to the east where few of their organic forces were engaged.

3. And anyhow, they were in a big fight out to the west against a mechanized division, and needed all the air they could get.

While I’m sure all of these to some small extent guided Walt Boomer’s decision, the single most important factor remained: the Marines assigned to provide command and control for close air support to the Saudis were just then surrounded by hundreds of armed Iraqis.

I am absolutely certain that Walt Boomer would have given Khaled all the CAS his team could use; unfortunately, the means for Khaled to request and execute close air support was at that time avoiding capture.

After I had once again assured Khaled that he would get more air support than he could imagine, I learned how he’d come to be in Khafji in the first place. When word of the Iraqi invasion broke, he was on his way to Dhahran to give a medal to Captain Shamrani, the RSAF F-15 pilot who’d shot down the two Iraqi Mirages. He’d immediately had his aircraft diverted and joined Major General Sultan.

As he was speaking, other thoughts were running through my mind.

From early August, Khaled had been emphasizing his long-held resolve that when it came down to the crunch, Saudi blood must be the first spilled in the defense of the Kingdom. It was a matter of honor that Saudi military forces do more than their share in defense of their land. Yes, he appreciated the support of the Coalition. Yes, he appreciated the almost overwhelming force from the United States. But when the war was over, it must be clear to all that the Saudis had performed on the battlefield in a manner that brought honor and pride to King and country. Until the Iraqi invasion of the Kingdom at the end of January, the war had been all airpower, and the blood spilled had been U.S., Italian, and British blood — which is not to say that the RSAF had proved wanting. The RSAF had performed magnificently, but no Saudi aircraft had yet been lost. Now it looked as though Khaled’s long-held resolve was about to be fulfilled, and if he wasn’t careful, it might well be his own royal blood.

I wanted to tell Khaled to be careful; he was far more important as a live leader then a dead hero. But there was also a sixteen-year-old kid in me that couldn’t resist adding to my promises of air support:

“Oh, Khaled,” I said just before we said goodbye.

“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 word 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.

Moments after oil started spewing into the Gulf, CENTCOM intelligence had located and debriefed the engineers who’d operated the Kuwaiti oil-storage area before the war. From them came estimates of the amounts of oil that could be dumped (a lot!) and suggestions for ending the dumping. It quickly became clear that the situation was more serious than anyone had realized. Already the spill was many times greater than had been released by the Exxon Valdez tanker accident in Alaska. Something had to be done, and soon, and air was the only force available to do it. Chuck Horner immediately had his targeteers working on the problem. The strategy they came up with was straightforward. They would torch off the oil slick and shut down the pipelines the Iraqis had opened.

Needless to say, the subject came up at General Schwarzkopf’s 1900 meeting. Schwarzkopf asked Horner two questions: “What is required?” and “When can we do it?”

The plan devised by Buster Glosson’s Black Hole wizards called for USMC AV-8s to drop phosphorus flares into the oil slick and ignite the floating crude oil (the flares were normally used to light up the battlefield at night for close air support). Then F-111s would strike the two valves that controlled the outflow of oil. Their destruction would cause the pipeline to switch into its failsafe position, and various manifold controls would seal it off, making it inoperable. Though the pipeline could be repaired, such repairs were considered beyond the abilities of the Iraqi Army.

The AV-8 mission was fairly simple, and did not involve significant enemy defenses; but the F-111s were dropping their bombs from medium altitude in daylight, to ensure they could visually find their aim point in an area very well defended by optically aimed guns and heat-seeking missiles. It would not be easy.

“We can accomplish both missions tomorrow,” Horner told Schwarzkopf.

“I’ll get back to you,” the CINC replied.

All the next day, they waited, but no word came out of the CINC’s staff. Torching the slick was itself environmentally risky. Would a sea of fire spread to shore, where tons of black goo had already washed up? Wouldn’t nature’s own — admittedly slow — cleanup process be ultimately better than a big, soot-producing burn? Though Horner doesn’t know this for sure, such questions were doubtless being asked in Washington. The answer: a “go ahead” for the mission to set the slick on fire never came.

However, early on the afternoon of the twenty-sixth, the “go ahead” came to the TACC for the F-111 strike. The time on target was for three and a half hours later.

Now the pressure was on Tom Lennon and his Aardvark pilots of the 48th TFW (P). The weapons, GBU-15s, had small wings, which allowed them to glide to their target from some distance away. Their guidance was provided by a radio control signal generated from another F-111 (its WSO received a television picture from a TV camera located in the bomb’s nose). As the bomb flew closer, the ground image grew larger, and the WSO could fine-tune the placement of the crosshairs with a small control stick in his cockpit — all this while the bomb was flying at nearly ten miles a minute, leaving no room for error during the final seconds of flight. Meanwhile, the F-111 pilot would put the aircraft on autopilot, watch the television screen to judge how well his WSO was doing, and hope he didn’t spot antiaircraft fire or missiles. During the final microseconds of the bomb’s flight, the target image would swell to take over the entire screen. Then the screen would grow dark picoseconds before 2,000 pounds of tritonal in the warhead went off. All in all, a very tricky operation requiring a great deal of training, planning, and skill.

This particular mission involved four F-111Fs fragged to deliver two GBU-15s. The number three and four aircraft carried the bombs, while the number one and two aircraft carried the radio relay pods that received and transmitted the radio signals to and from the bomb.

As it turned out, when the first bomb was released and the number one WSO began fine-tuning its heading, for some reason his radio relay got interrupted and he lost contact with the bomb. Instantly, he mashed the radio button and called out that he had to abort the drop — but fortunately, the number two WSO had been monitoring the drop and immediately transmitted “I’ve got it,” and proceeded to guide the bomb to the exact place where the first valve was buried.

Except for the hitch, the mission went as planned — two bombs dropped, two valves destroyed, the oil pipeline shut down… and a very happy Norman Schwarzkopf and Chuck Horner.

★ We have already mentioned Iraqi fire trenches — ditches dug in the desert and hooked up to existing crude-oil pipelines and pumping stations. When the invasion came, they were to be filled with oil and set on fire.

Though of all the Iraqi assaults on the environment, this one offered the greatest potential military usefulness, it remained an assault on the environment, or, as Chuck Horner puts it, “I will admit that war is not the place to preach ecological chastity, yet only a criminal or fool goes around pumping crude oil about the landscape.”

At any rate, fire trenches were part of the extensive defense system near the Saudi-Kuwaiti border. The plan was to force Coalition ground troops to penetrate and be channeled through as many casualty-producing hazards as possible before they engaged the Republican Guard and selected armor units. As they were slowed and channeled, Iraqi heavy artillery was scheduled to make mincemeat of them.

Though the trenches themselves may have been intended as a surprise, the Coalition’s control of air and space ended that hope, and taking the trenches out of action actually proved to be fairly easy. Sometimes the oil in the ditches could be ignited simply by having Warthogs strafe them. Keeping them from being resupplied with fuel, however, proved to be a little harder. Each set of trenches was fed by buried pipelines from a common pumping station, usually five or so lines to a station. The pumping stations were then connected to a major east-west oil line to the north.

The pipelines and pumping stations were attacked in mid-February — far enough ahead of “G day” (which was still undetermined) to allow other countermeasures if these attacks failed, but close enough to prevent repair.

A dozen F-117 aircraft were given the job; and it must have seemed like a milk run next to the missions over Baghdad. Ten of them would hit the fire-trench pumping stations, while the final two would drop the master oil pipeline.

This mission also went without a hitch.

As it turned out, the Iraqi Army was so physically and psychologically beat up when the ground war started that their minefields and trench lines proved to be of little value in stopping the Coalition advance.

The ultimate Iraqi environmental madness, the setting on fire of Kuwait’s oil fields on or about the twenty-third of February, still burns in Chuck Horner’s memory:

I have never seen anything so senseless, so evil, so offensive to mankind. Picture if you can dense, black, oily, greasy smoke boiling into the air from a thousand fires. The desert sand is awash with black oil topped with violent red and orange flame balls. Bright orange flames spew upward at each wellhead, with ugly rivers of burning oil spilling into low ground and creating lakes that belong in hell. Angry pillars of dense black smoke rise upward until they are caught by the winds aloft — some days at a few hundred feet, other days at thousands of feet — and then driven by the winds for thousands of miles. As you fly over the area, you gaze down on a solid mass of foul-smelling smoke stretching downwind as far as you can see. When you break out under the overcast, you are inside a dark wilderness.

In Riyadh and Abu Dhabi the sky has a greasy overcast and the air smells of soot. Airplanes flying over Kuwait come back with oily soot all over them, and their canopies have to be cleaned so the pilots can see.

After the war Kuwait City looked like a biblical wasteland. The concrete block houses were all burned out, with black smoke smudge over every window. Everything else was stained with greasy black soot. White cats were black. White cars were charcoal-colored.

What can I say, except to condemn the Iraqis who planned and perpetrated this outrage on our planet? How evil can you get?

Though I’m sure Iraqi citizens who lost loved ones to our bombs have felt similar outrage, to an objective viewer the Iraqi revenge on Kuwait — the Iraqi outrage to the world’s environment — can never be forgotten, and it must not go unpunished. We must find ways to prevent similar despoliation in future armed conflicts.

In February 1991, during the waning moments of the war, a debate went on in the White House about choosing a moment to cease hostilities. As Colin Powell reports in his autobiography, the debate ended when John Sununu suggested 0500 on February 28. That way the “war” would have lasted a hundred hours and could be plausibly named “The Hundred-Hour War.” And so it came about. It was a brilliant idea. The name had PR pizzazz.

There was only one problem: the war did not last one hundred hours. The duration of the war — from mid-January to the end of February — was closer to a thousand hours. Sununu and the others in the White House were thinking of the ground war, of course — an easy misconception, but maddening to Coalition airmen, who bore such a large part of the burden of winning this war. To them, the ground effort was not a Hundred-Hour War, it was a Ten Percent War.

This is not to say that the ground war was a waste or unnecessary — far from it — and as January turned into February, and February wore on, Coalition air devoted an ever-greater portion of their effort to preparing for it. The ground invasion of Kuwait was to come soon, everyone knew, but when? When was G day?

The decision to start the ground war was based on the answers to three questions:

1. Were the Iraqis beaten down enough to allow Coalition ground forces to attack with a minimum of casualties?

2. Would the weather be favorable enough to allow air support?

3. Were Coalition troops trained and logistically ready, and at their assigned starting-out locations?

We’ll look at the answers to these questions over the course of this chapter.

BEATING DOWN THE IRAQIS

The answer to question one depended on three factors. First: battlefield preparation. How successful was Coalition airpower in reducing Iraqi armor and artillery? Second: The choice of which Iraqi units to hit, how hard, and when. (These two issues were related, but they were kept separate at CENTCOM and CENTAF, because of the understandable interest of Coalition ground units in the condition of the Iraqi units they themselves would be facing.) Third: PSYOPS. How successful were Coalition psychological-warfare efforts in undermining the morale of Iraqi ground forces? An army that has no taste to fight is an army that is beaten — even if they are equipped with state-of-the-art equipment in pristine shape.

★ Though air attacks had hurt Iraqi forces in the KTO before the beginning of February, the Iraqis were still a reasonably effective fighting force. February ruined them. The following summary is based on a Chris Christon report from February 10, 1991.

In his view, initial attacks — primarily directed against the air defense system, Scud sites, infrastructure, leadership, and weapons research, development, and production facilities — had had no major impact on the Iraqi Army. Commanders and their staffs had proved very flexible in handling the difficulties that Coalition air attacks had imposed on their operations. For example, when air attacks cut telephone lines, the Iraqis used message carriers on motorcycles. When air disrupted their command-and-control networks (as part of the destruction of the centralized air defense system), the Iraqis developed work-arounds; and their command-and-control network remained effective, secure, and capable of supporting major military operations.

On the front lines, they had adjusted their routines around the timing of air attacks, and for the first part of the war, the Iraqi Army found sanctuary at night. They were able to do this because the most capable Coalition systems for night attack — F-117s, F-111s, and LANTIRN-equipped F-15Es and F-16s — were tied up chasing Scuds or hitting fixed targets outside the KTO, which left the job of hitting the Iraqi Army at night mostly to A-10s, A-6s, and B-52s hitting area targets.

All this changed in February, when most of the air effort was devoted to shaping the battlefield. For example, of the 986 bombing sorties scheduled for February 11, 933 of them were tasked to that mission. And here is how shaping-the-battlefield sorties were allocated by corps during the period from February 10 through February 12:

By mid-February, the total air campaign was well under way. Now the sorties against front-line forces were flying night and day. Now attacks on the Iraqi transportation system were starting to have effect, and enemy reports of food and water shortages began to filter into the intelligence system. Now the war was almost as boring as an airline schedule — except that it wasn’t passengers that were being delivered.

What gave interest to this sea of monotony were the Scuds at night, combat losses, and the weather, which was a constant problem, as waves of low pressure swept down across Baghdad toward Basra.

Meanwhile, the tank plinkers were bagging up to 150 tanks per night, which was the best news Chuck Horner could give General Schwarzkopf, who was by then engrossed with the details of the ground offensive plan. This last was in turn good news to Horner, because, first, it meant they were closer to going home, and, second, it meant that the CINC pretty much stayed out of Horner’s business, except for his nightly reorganizing of the target list of Iraqi Army units.

The question remained: “When will the ground war start?” Part of the answer depended on accurate knowledge of BDA — bomb damage assessment. But here there was controversy. “Have we destroyed a third of the Iraqi tanks? Half? A quarter?” The desired number was 50 percent, but how close or how far Horner’s pilots were to attaining that number was a matter of dispute, according to the estimating body.

A comparison of estimates gives insight into the confusion, the inter-agency bickering, and, in Horner’s words, “the slavish desire to count beans rather than estimate combat power” that surrounded what some call the great Battle Damage Assessment War. On February 23, in an effort to determine when to start the ground war, various intelligence agencies reported the following:

Chuck Horner comments:

Needless to say, such wide variance was not only fiercely debated between Washington and the theater, it turned into an ugly game of intelligence analysts’ one-upmanship. After the war, it was learned that JCS/CENTCOM numbers had been not too far off the mark. Based on this more accurate database, it appears that on or about February 23, the Iraqis had actually lost 48 percent of their tanks, 30 percent of their armored personnel carriers, and 59 percent of their artillery pieces.

In the final analysis, the BDA controversy had nothing to do with the actual success achieved. For in the end it was not the intelligence agencies that would tell Generals Schwarzkopf and Khaled when to start the ground war, it was their gut feelings. Call it intuition, experience, judgment, whatever you like, that is what the commanders were stuck with when they made their life-or-death decision. The decision to send soldiers forward was the province of the commanders, Schwarzkopf and Khaled. That is where it belonged, and they got it right. If they had believed the BDA estimates from Washington, we would have delayed the ground war until after Ramadan. If they had believed their own intelligence count, they might have waited a little longer than they did and perhaps have given Saddam time to put together a diplomatic way to extract his army from the hell of the KTO. But they didn’t do either. In the end, they did what commanders are trained to do. They took the information available, judged it against standards of common sense, swallowed hard, and ordered the troops forward into uncertainty.

In the absolutely final analysis, the ability of Coalition ground forces to defeat the Iraqi Army so rapidly and thoroughly may have had little to do with destroying tanks and artillery. There is powerful evidence from the 88,000 POWs that air’s most significant impact on Iraqi fighting strength was the destruction of morale.

Morale was undermined in several ways. The isolation of the battlefield denied the Iraqi soldier food and water, but he was at the same time worn down by the incessant air attacks, and by the PSYOPS campaign that held out hope in the form of surrender. He was also effectively disarmed, because by the time the ground war started, he and his companions feared going near their vehicles — APCs, tanks, and artillery pieces, which air attacks had made death traps.

So as the ground attack was sweeping the remnants of the Iraqi Army aside, intelligence analysts were still hunched over their overhead photographs of Iraq and Kuwait, trying to count individual tanks and artillery pieces; for these “accountants of war” had no other way to understand airpower, no other way to measure what had happened during the revolution in military actions that was Desert Storm.

There was a second (and related) controversy in February — the prioritization of which units got bombed, when, and how much.

The problem was complex. In order to make a correct determination, the status of particular Iraqi units had to be known with some accuracy. All of them had been bombed for weeks now, some more than others, and many had been seriously degraded. In some cases, Horner’s intelligence people knew the exact condition of a particular unit — often the units were severely debilitated by desertions and destroyed equipment. In other cases, it was anybody’s guess. (It’s doubtful that the Iraqi corps commanders had anything like a clear idea of the condition of their assigned forces.) Either way, the status of individual units often changed daily, just as the status of particular locations changed daily, as individual units moved back and forth, here and there (the Iraqi Army, Fred Franks has pointed out, was not skilled at maneuvering, but annoyingly they could and did shift unit locations).

Just as in the BDA controversy, the various intelligence sources could not agree on the status of individual Iraqi divisions in the KTO. So the question remained: how much more work had to be done before a ground offensive could begin?

★ Meanwhile, each of the ground force corps commanders believed he alone was responsible for success. This is not a criticism. A prudent commander takes nothing for granted; after all, the lives of his troops are at stake. So each corps commander planned his war — his narrow slice of the battlefield — as if it was the only game in town. He didn’t worry about adjacent ground battles as long as the adjacent commander was doing his job, and no one’s flanks were exposed.

Yet for Horner, demands on air now came from three to five directions (not including Schwarzkopf and Khaled). It was his responsibility, when building each day’s tasking order, to service each corps commander’s needs in accordance with the overall guidance set forth by Schwarzkopf and Khaled.

Someone had to decide who got the most, who got the next most, and so on. Someone had to set target priorities, had to make a sequential listing of the Iraqi divisions that were to be bombed each day. In an ideal world this should have been a simple task. Of the approximately forty Iraqi divisions deployed in the desert, some were more important than others by virtue of their equipment, their location, or their current strength.[70]

Their location proved to be the real thorn in Chuck Horner’s side. Each ground commander thought the Iraqis in his own battle space were the most important Iraqis. Though each corps commander was aware of the CINC’s guidance and general battle plan, each still had to win “his war” on his own.

In practical terms, things worked this way:

Walt Boomer in the east coordinated his offensive plan with the Islamic corps on his right, the Eastern Area Command, and with the one on his left, the Northern Area Command. For his part, Boomer was generally confident that the targets of immediate concern to him would be serviced, because USMC aircraft were collocated with him and had limited range. Boomer’s enemy was going to get bombed, simply because the basing and design of Marine air vehicles, such as the AV-8B Harrier, left little other choice. This was in itself fine, until we consider that Boomer faced the largest number of Iraqis, but with aircraft that were the least capable in payload, range, and use of precision munitions.

Fred Franks’s VIIth Corps (including a British division), to the left of the Northern Area Corps, was designated the main attack, because their job was to outflank Kuwait and plunge into the Republican Guard and Iraqi heavy armored divisions. Franks justifiably wanted most of the air to go against these well-equipped divisions, for there the fighting should be the fiercest.

Though the other U.S. and Islamic corps commanders doubtless agreed with him, the lives of their troops were as valuable as the lives of VIIth Corps and British troops; and therefore, they were not about to be submissive when it came time to argue for air. Gary Luck’s XVIIIth Airborne Corps and the French forces in the far west had the big job of driving farther north into Iraq than the other corps, and then swinging to the right and fighting farther east. Though they had the fewest enemies per mile of travel, they had the most miles of travel. Like the other commanders, Luck wanted his share of the air.

On top of all of this, John Yeosock’s Third Army headquarters oversaw Franks’s and Luck’s planning efforts, with Yeosock’s G-3, Brigadier General Steve Arnold, being the man in the middle between the corps commanders and Schwarzkopf. Arnold’s job was to argue Franks’s and Luck’s case against the requirements of the two Islamic corps, represented by C3IC’s Paul Schwartz and Abdullah al-Shaikh, and Schwarzkopf’s other component commander, Walt Boomer.

In point of fact, John Yeosock should have been the man to work the problem out, but he did not command the two Islamic corps (who were under Khaled) or the USMC ground forces (the U.S. ground component commander was Schwarzkopf, remember). There is no doubt in my mind that John Yeosock would have been a superb ground commander, and there is no doubt in my mind that Walt Boomer could have worked for John with the same respect and loyalty he showed the CINC. Finally, there is no doubt in my mind that Paul Schwartz and al-Shaikh at C3IC could have worked with John Yeosock. Yet this was not to be. So we remained in some ways a debating society for air until the evening meeting with Schwarzkopf, when he would decide how much air would be tasked against which Iraqi division two days hence.

The debate was a waste, and never-ending, because some corps commanders were never satisfied with what they were getting and could never accept some kind of rational harmonizing of their needs with those of the other commanders. More important, they could never accept that the Air Force was not under their control. We wanted to service their genuine needs, but we stopped being a branch of the Army fifty years ago. What they could — and should — have done was send in their target nominations and accept whatever they got. If they had a specific need, all they had to do was tell the BCE, and if it made sense they would have gotten it. On the other hand, since the CINC made the final decisions about targets, it was all a tempest in a helmet.

On February 4, an attempt was made to end the logjam among corps commanders. The DCINC, Cal Waller, would develop the prioritized target list, a list that would take into account the needs of all ground components.

The idea was that he would draw up the list of targets. Then the combined Coalition staff in the Black Hole would apply air expertise to determine what could and could not be hit. Then the list would return to the DCINC for approval, after which point the ATO would be cut.

Brigadier General Mike Hall, Horner’s liaison with Cal Waller for this program, would work up a seventy-two-hour rolling target list, based on the requirements of the combined divisions, as modified by their corps headquarters, as modified by the Third U.S. Army, C3IC, and the USMC component. Thus, on a normal day, Waller’s prioritized list would send about 1,000 sorties to strike Iraqi Army units. Buster Glosson’s targeteers would meanwhile continue to work up targets outside the KTO, and these would be serviced by sorties taken off the top, usually by F-117s, F-111s, and half the F-15Es (the rest continued to hunt Scuds).

This should have worked, but it didn’t, and Chuck Horner never expected it would, since he never imagined that Waller would be able to bring into harmony the various corps demands.

Soon after the system was set up, Colonel Clint Williams, Waller’s point man on the effort, relayed to the duty officer in the TACC that the DCINC was unable to come up with a list.

Colonel Dave Schulte, the head of the BCE, was tasked with finding out what was holding things up, and he immediately set out to find out how the ARCENT target list was built. Colonel Schulte spent five hours with the ARCENT Deep Operations shop, where he learned that the VIIth and XVIIIth Corps representatives received and worked their target inputs differently, primarily because each used different software to track Iraqi forces and analyze the target nominations.

But the real problem remained. The representatives from each corps — usually majors — were unable to stop fighting among themselves over air. Each thought he was responsible for grabbing as much for his corps as he could (it was thought of as a zero-sum game), and Waller wasn’t strong enough to bring sense and system to the situation, or to get the majors organized and working in harmony. That’s why I offered to let Waller build the list in the first place. Because I felt he couldn’t do it, and Baptiste and Welch were doing fine as it was, especially since Schwarzkopf made the final decisions anyway.

Meanwhile, a Captain Simms had done what he could to bring order to the building of the priority lists, and had tried to come up with a fair and reasonable way to allocate target selection. His system was to rotate the nominations from each corps on a 5-3-2-2 weighted basis. That is, each list had five ARCENT targets first, followed by three VIIth Corps targets, and two each XVIIIth Airborne Corps and Northern Area Command targets. The next five would come from the ARCENT list, and so on. Any priority among targets was made by the unit nominating it.

At least it was a list. If the Army was happy with it, then I was happy with it. But they weren’t. The corps commanders wouldn’t accept Simms’s system of priorities.

The target priority controversy continued after the war. Various war councils were held, lessons learned were published, and a variety of doctrinal documents were drafted. The goal of these councils was to increase the voice of the ground commanders over where, when, and how air was used. Their basic premise was that the joint force air component commander would misuse his office, ground would not control the air, and air would not be used properly. It made little difference that Desert Storm was a success by most every measure. That aberration was simply the result of the friendship and trust between Yeosock, Boomer, Arthur, and Horner.

Well, let me tell you, this doctrinal bickering is horse manure. First of all, in Desert Storm we had one ground commander for each of the two forces, and they approved every target. Their names were Schwarzkopf and Khaled, and they trusted their air component to organize a daily air campaign, which they reviewed as land component commanders, and then as CINCs either changed or approved. Though all the subordinate ground commanders had their say in the process, they had to understand that they were not in charge of the air effort — or, for that matter, of the ground effort. They could not own the air, and it stuck in their craw.

Secondly, all subordinates in a war must understand that no joint force commander wants to lose. He hopes to use air, land, sea, and space assets in a way that will bring victory on the battlefield. So back in the Pentagon, quit writing doctrine that is a compromise between the way each separate service wants to fight wars, because they don’t fight wars. Unified commanders and their allied commanders (in Desert Storm, Schwarzkopf and Khaled) are in charge. If we follow the doctrines of compromise published by the services and the Joint Staff, we will end up with “war fought by committee”—a sure loser.

I thank God Schwarzkopf was in charge in the Gulf, because there was no wondering about which service doctrine was going to prevail. There no component would dominate the planning. This was not Vietnam, where the Pentagon warriors dictated targets, tactics, and procedures. We were a team with one vision of what needed to be done. It is true that we had to muddle along as we figured it out (as was the case in identifying Iraqi Army target priorities); but I knew we would get the job done, however we decided to do it, because the CINCs were in charge, and the components respected and trusted each other.

PSYCHOLOGICAL WARFARE

Psychological warfare has been an element in all combat, and its importance in warfare will inevitably grow, as skill grows in influencing the moods, motives, and will of others. The range of psychological influence has also grown with the range of media influence. Vietnam was not lost on the streets of American cities, but it’s hard to find another war whose outcome was so affected by television (it’s doubtful, by the way, that the North Vietnamese leadership were aware that their actions would have that effect).

The Gulf crisis saw a new growth in psychological warfare — PSYOPS — which was in part due to the presence of television cameras in Baghdad and on the Coalition battlefield.

The power of live video broadcast to a worldwide audience was not lost on the Iraqis. So, for example, images of Saddam kindly patting a hostage boy on the head were part of an (inept) attempt to influence the world at large of the benevolence of the Iraqi leader and the justice of his cause. It failed miserably.

The Coalition achieved greater success by targeting its message to the Iraqi Army. But it wasn’t easy.

In the beginning, Central Command planners had a hard time putting a psychological-warfare plan together. Though this was historically the responsibility of the Army component, in recent times (such as during the operations in Panama and Grenada), the primary responsibility has gone specifically to Special Operations forces. When the Gulf crisis broke, Central Command, lacking expertise to plan a PSYOPS campaign, requested help from the Commander in Chief Special Operations Command (collocated with CENTCOM, as it happened, at MacDill AFB).

The plan that resulted was useful in identifying targets for PSYOPS efforts, but was an overly “Ameri-centric” view of influencing Arabs. Next, in Riyadh, Schwarzkopf asked John Yeosock to prepare a comprehensive (and less American) PSYOPS campaign. This was completed and published in November, and was meant to guide Coalition efforts to influence Iraq’s leaders, its people, and most of all its forces in the field. The message was simple: “What you are doing in Kuwait is evil and against your religious beliefs. Get out or die.”

Meanwhile, Khaled bin Sultan became interested in the efforts to prepare leaflets and radio and television broadcasts, and to exploit enemy deserters. With his help, the message was made more subtle and complex. Where the American aim had been intimidation, he wanted to emphasize cooperation. In his view, Iraqi soldiers would respond positively to messages like “We know you didn’t want to invade Kuwait, and we, your brothers, will right this wrong. Please don’t oppose us. Join us instead.”

In essence, the enemy was hit with two different messages: The Schwarzkopf tough message showed a B-52 saying, “Desert Storm is coming to your area. Flee immediately.” The Khaled message showed Coalition soldiers sitting around a campfire, eating roast lamb, drinking tea, and saying, “Come and join us; we are your friends. This leaflet will be your ticket to safety.” Both had an impact.

The PSYOPS message was primarily delivered by air. During Desert Shield, Volant Solo aircraft and selected ground radio stations beamed the Voice of America service in Arabic. These broadcasts continued throughout the bombing campaign and the ground war. After the war began, C-130s, B-52s, and F-16s dropped leaflets on the Iraqi Army. Schwarzkopf personally devised a plan whereby air-dropped leaflets would inform a targeted Iraqi division that they were going to be bombed by B-52s the next day. And so it would happen; the next day hundreds of 500-pound bombs would rain on the division. Afterward, more leaflets would be dropped, advising the Iraqis to flee, as more strikes were planned for their area. And the next day, the unit would be hit again.

Debriefings of Iraqi POWs indicated that this operation significantly affected the troops’ morale and was an important factor in their decision to surrender or desert.

★ Because psychological warfare is more art than science, it is very difficult to judge the effectiveness of a PSYOPS campaign.

It is clear that no one in the target audience was missed. Nearly thirty million leaflets were dropped in the KTO, and the world saw Iraqi soldiers surrendering by the thousands, clutching the white leaflets that guaranteed their safe treatment. Radio broadcasts probably also had an effect, as a third of the POWs stated in their debriefings that these affected their decision to surrender.

Nevertheless, a study of PSYOPS after the war concluded that it was not so much the leaflets and the broadcasts as the incessant aerial attacks, the unrelenting presence of Coalition aircraft over the battlefield day and night, that changed people from fighters to quitters. Airpower sent a message to Iraqi soldiers that they had no refuge from attack from above. The noise of jet engines throughout the night, the inability to travel safely, the devastating and sudden attack from an unseen B-52 or F-111 laser-guided bomb drove them into a helpless, hopeless state. The leaflet offered hope of survival. The brutal, unrelenting air campaign made the message on the leaflet count.

However we explain it, nearly 80,000 out of an estimated 200,000 Iraqis in the KTO surrendered, and most of the remaining 120,000 took to their heels when Coalition tanks appeared on the scene.

★ During February, desertion became the number one problem for the Iraqi generals. In some Iraqi divisions, hundreds — even thousands — of troops simply went home. After the Battle of Khafji, the IIId Corps lost at least a further 10 percent of its troops to desertions, and the rate of desertion was accelerating as air continued to pound them. There were even desertions in the pampered, privileged Republican Guard.

Not only were the trigger-pullers walking off the battlefield, but other vital functions were suffering. The logistical resupply of the army was not adequate, and there were shortages of food and water. Essential maintenance was being ignored, and as a result, many of the vehicles, radars, heavy guns, and other machines of war were inoperable or impaired. The lack of maintenance on their fleet of vehicles, combined with air attacks on everything that moved, had reduced the Iraqi logistics teams to using Kuwaiti garbage trucks to carry supplies to their troops dug in on the desert. The trends for Iraq were all bad.

As February wore on, Joint STARS picked up more and more movement at night. Convoys of up to fifty vehicles were trying to evade the ever-present aircraft overhead. Though the darkness of night gave them some shielding, their best ally turned out to be the waves of drizzly weather that passed through the KTO every few days. Unfortunately for the Iraqis, the F-16 pilots developed attack options with the moving target indicator displays on their radar, and took away the Iraqi weather advantage.

At that point, the national community (the intelligence people who didn’t deploy to the war) estimated that the Iraqis could no longer meet the logistic requirements that ground combat would impose. While they were believed to have plenty of ammunition, they would run out of food and fuel.

To the Iraqi generals in Kuwait, withdrawal doubtless seemed the best course; but it was too late for that, unless they could find a way to get the aircraft off their backs.

Schwarzkopf ’s dilemma remained “When do we cross the border? When do we start losing Coalition ground forces to save Kuwait?” To which Chuck Horner added, “When can we get this over with and stop the loss of Coalition airmen’s lives, losses that started on January 17? Too often, these deaths were overlooked by the media and others whose eyes saw only ground combat, as if that were the only game in town.”

MISSION CREEP

As the war went on, the effectiveness of the Iraqi Air Force continued to decline, even as Iraqi aircraft played no part in the defense of the homeland, after their futile attempts during the first few days of the war. The aircraft lost were invariably parked in shelters or fleeing to Iran, and the losses did not always come from Coalition guns and missiles. On February 7, twelve Iraqi jets made a run for Iran. Three of these were shot down by F-15s, and six crashed in Iran, either because they were unable to land safely or because they ran out of fuel. The fear factor must have been very high among Iraqi pilots.

To offset the failure of their most effective air defense systems, fighter aircraft and radar-guided surface-to-air missiles, the Iraqis bolstered defenses in the KTO with short-range, optically aimed heat-seeking surface-to-air missiles, such as the SA-16 or some variant of this Russian-built weapon.

The increased battlefield defenses proved especially dangerous to USAF A-10s. The Warthogs were descendants of World War II P-47 Jugs, as well as the Vietnam-era Thuds that Chuck Horner had flown. They were tough, heavily armored (for aircraft), and very survivable, but slow; and they were used primarily for attacks against enemy armor in close support of friendly ground troops. For that purpose they packed quite a large punch, primarily a 30 mm Gatling gun in the nose, one round from which could destroy a tank over a mile away (the Warthog was designed around this gun, which is as big as a Volkswagen, when you include the ammunition drum). It also carried the IR Maverick missile, as well as regular bombs.

The Warthogs were especially vulnerable to short-range SAMs, because they took such a long time to zoom back to the safety of medium altitude after a bombing, strafing, or missile-diving attack.

The good news was that intelligence estimates placed only about two hundred of these missiles in Iraqi hands. Thus, one strategy Horner considered — and instantly discarded — was to deliberately expose his aircraft, in order to “run them out of bullets.” Not a smart idea, he told himself. There have to be other ways to defeat heat-seekers.

★ At the start of the war, the A-10s were used in the role for which they were designed, attacking enemy armor in close proximity to friendly forces. Warthog pilots described the first day of the war as a “turkey shoot.” Because Sandy Sharpe and Dave Sawyer, the A-10 wing commanders, kept their aircraft above 10,000 feet, they were able to inflict great violence on front-line Iraqi divisions without unnecessarily exposing the aircraft to enemy defenses (though two aircraft were hit by small-arms fire, the damage was negligible).

The picture got complicated after the opening days of the war, when bad weather over the KTO gave the Iraqis time to dig in deeper.

By the time the weather cleared, later in January, the Iraqis had gone to ground and the impact on them of the high-flying A-10s was far less devastating than before. Consequently, on the thirty-first of January, it was decided that the Warthogs could initiate their attacks from 4,000 to 7,000 feet. In that way, the pilots would be closer to their targets and could more easily spot the dug-in and camouflaged tanks, APCs, and artillery pieces. It also put the aircraft closer to the Iraqis, so they could more accurately aim their guns and heat-seeking missiles.

Despite the increased risk, the A-10s were getting the job done very well, and this encouraged their commanders to task them against other targets, such as SAM sites, fixed structures, and logistical storage areas. The commanders in the TACC, and even at the wing, did not realize that they were all in the process of “mission creep.” As a result, they were putting this aircraft and their pilots in needless jeopardy.

For a time, everything went along just fine. The lower altitude allowed the A-10 pilots to find their targets more easily than before, and the tank kills rose. Meanwhile, the defensive threat seemed pretty much unchanged, as the pilots followed the daily directives Sandy Sharpe and Dave Sawyer gave them both verbally and in the pilots’ “Read File.” Then came A-10 successes hunting Scuds in Iraq and as a “Wart Weasel,” and mission creep went into high gear.

Soon, TACC commanders were sending A-10s against targets deep in the KTO, and the command element aboard the ABCCC EC-130 began to divert the A-10s deeper and deeper into Kuwait and Iraq.

Though the A-10 pilots questioned this ever-increasing tasking of the A-10 deeper into harm’s way, headquarters ignored their fears (though the two wing commanders did manage to work with the Black Hole and choke off the truly insane mission creep jobs, such as a proposal to bomb an SA-2 storage site near Basra).

Now that A-10s were flying deep behind the lines, battle damage to the aircraft began to mount, and some serious hits were tearing off major portions of the aircraft structure. The pilots were attacking the Tawalkana and Medina divisions of the Republican Guard at 4,000 feet above the ground and sixty to seventy miles north of the border and safety. On the fifteenth of February, the Republican Guard stopped taking it lying down and launched eight SAMs, which knocked down two aircraft and extensively damaged Dave Sawyer’s jet.

Sawyer climbed out over the hostile desert at a sizzling 200 knots, with thousands of holes in his engines and tail, and the top of his right empennage blown off. Just as he crossed the last Iraqis, some fifteen miles north of the border and safety, he looked down to see a flight of faster F-16s working over a huddled third-string Iraqi infantry division that Saddam had staked out to absorb our ground offensive’s first blow. A lonely moment. Also an angry one. Somebody had badly screwed up priorities.

We had a problem. Our most effective tank killer was being shot up at an alarming rate. In fact, before February 15, we had lost only one A-10 (on February 2 to an IR SAM), while suffering a little over twenty-five other aircraft shot down. Still, before February 15, the large number of battle-damaged A-10s was wearing on my mind. Thirty or forty had been hit, yet had survived and limped home for repairs — a tribute to their rugged design and safety features. But a lot of hits was a lot of hits. Too many hits.

On the fifteenth, when I walked into the TACC, I learned that two A-10s were down and three damaged, with one of these losing much of its tail. The airplanes were too valuable in a variety of roles, from Scud-hunting to close air support, to have them grounded by battle damage. There was a strong possibility that the Iraqis would run me out of airplanes before they ran out of SAMs.

With a heavy heart, I told the battle staff we were going to pull the A-10s back and use them only against the Iraqi divisions near the border. The Republican Guard and other armored divisions being held in reserve would now be off-limits to the A-10s, until later in the war, when the Iraqis had run out of heat-seeking missiles. Though I was worried that my decision would sting the egos of the Warthog drivers (a fate they sure didn’t deserve, since they were excelling at everything they’d been tasked to do), I just couldn’t stand by and watch them take hits and now losses.

But Dave Sawyer wrote me the next day, the sixteenth, and (without really meaning to) relieved my worries. “Your guidance to limit A-10s to southern areas is appropriate and timely,” he wrote. (That’s military for “Thank you, boss. We were being given more than our share of pain and suffering.”) He went on to relate the specific procedures he and Sandy Sharpe had worked out:

“We have prohibited daytime strafe for the present, except in true close air support, search and rescue, or troops in contact situations. With the OA-10 forward air control spotters, flight leads using binoculars, or a high (relative) speed recce pass in the 4–7,000 foot range, we should be able to determine worthwhile armor targets, then stand off and kill them with Mavericks. We’ll save the gun (and our aircraft) for the ground offensive. The OA-10s and our two night A-10 squadrons have yet to receive battle damage. There’s safety in altitude and darkness. When the ground war starts, we’ ll strafe up a storm and get in as close as we need to to get the job done. No A-10 pilot should ever have to buy a drink at any Army bar in the future. Until G day, request you task A-10s only in air interdiction kill boxes you’ve now limited us to. If you need us to go to deeper AI targets, we plan to impose a 10,000-foot above-the-ground minimum altitude there, and employ only free-fall ordnance and Mavericks. We’ll promptly exit any AI area in which we get an IR or radar SAM launch.”

It wasn’t a case of the A-10s failing to do the job, it was rather a matter of building on the strengths of our overall force. We would use the strengths of the F-16s, with their speed and automated bombing systems, to attack the heavily defended divisions deep in the KTO, while the more capable close-in capabilities of the A-10’s 30mm cannon would be reserved for the more heavily dug-in, but more lightly defended, Iraqis just across the Saudi border.

Later — after the results of the war were compiled — the superior survivability of the Warthogs was amply demonstrated. Of the U.S. aircraft tasked to carry the mail against the Iraqi Army, only the F-16s and USMC F/A-18s exceeded the A-10s in fewest losses per 1,000 sorties.

There is a story about a young fighter pilot who walks into a saloon in some faraway place and sits down at a table with a tough old veteran, deep in thought and drink.

“What is the secret to life and success in flying fighters?” the youngster asks the old hero.

And the steely-eyed, well-worn fighter pilot sings out, “More whiskey, more women, and faster airplanes.”

Well, in this war the Warthogs had a lot of success, but they sure didn’t have much whiskey, women, or a fast airplane; they did it with brains and courage.

APPROACHING G DAY

Since the Schwarzkopf plan for the ground offensive involved a massive, surprise flanking attack (which was to be anchored by a direct assault into Kuwait), the ground forces slated for the flanking attack had to secretly relocate to assembly areas west of their original positions. The secrecy was crucial to the plan, and the CINC had been adamant about maintaining it. As we have already seen, he had refused to let the Army start its movements until the air war started, lest the Iraqi Air Force discover his preparation for the “end run” of their defenses.

For Gary Luck’s XVIIIth Airborne Corps, this directive proved to be a big problem, for they had the farthest to go — over 400 miles, with nearly 15,000 troops and their equipment — at the same time that Fred Franks’s VIIth Corps was making its own way west over the same, two-lane Tapline Road. Despite the obstacles, Luck and his two heavy division commanders, Major Generals McCaffery and Peay, worked out how to make this difficult movement.

Luck had one serious advantage over Franks’s heavily armored corps, in that his own corps was more easily transported by air. In fact, the 82d Airborne and to some extent the 101st Air Assault division were designed for air transport.

Enter the USAF’s General Ed Tenoso and his fleet of C-130s.

Up until the move west, the C-130s’ main task had been in high-priority cargo-moving — supporting all the Coalition forces (though with emphasis on United States forces). Where they went and what they moved was decided by Major General Dane Starling, Schwarzkopf’s J-4, or logistician.

Early in Desert Shield, Bill Rider, the CENTAF logistician, and his director of transportation, Bob Edminsten, had set up a C-130 airline in the theater. The C-130s flew regular, scheduled passenger flights, called Star routes, and cargo flights, called Camel routes. Starling determined what had priority on these flights, and Tenoso’s airlifters put that in the Air Tasking Order.

This “airline” was already a vast operation before the move west, but the effort associated with that move was simply staggering (and largely unsung), with a big C-130 landing every five to ten minutes, every hour of the day, every day of the week, for two weeks after the start of the war on the seventeenth of January, hauling the vast army to faraway places like Rafhah, hundreds of miles up the Tapline Road — a nose-to-tail stream of C-130s.

★ As the armies completed their moves to the west, and the forces south of Kuwait came up on line, weather became the enemy.

Chuck Horner now takes up the story:

★ As February wound down, General Schwarzkopf was under great pressure from Washington to initiate the ground attack before the Iraqi Army was able to negotiate a surrender that would allow them to leave Kuwait with their remaining tanks and guns. The date Schwarzkopf selected for G day was the twenty-fourth of February.

A few days before the big moment, we had had our final war council before the ground war. Generals Franks, Luck, and Boomer had come to Riyadh to brief their final schemes of maneuver to Schwarzkopf, while the Egyptian, Syrian, Saudi, and Gulf Cooperation Council forces were doing the same with Khaled. For all the others, this meeting had to be a high-anxiety affair (they were, after all, on the line), but for me it was a relief. For once, someone else was briefing the CINC, and the airmen were (sort of) getting the day off after being the only show in town for thirty-seven days.

So when the war council started, I relaxed in my chair, wondering how well plans would be executed, and how many men would die bravely, needlessly, or because of our failures of leadership. All three U.S. generals were calm and deliberate. No surprises.

Then the weatherman got up and briefed the weather forecast for the night of February 23–24, and it was going to be terrible — rain, fog, winds, and cold temperatures. Cloud bases would be touching the ground, so visibility for the troops would be measured in yards, not miles. That in itself would not be so bad, as enemy troops would suffer the same limitations. In fact, that would cause them far greater problems, since they had to see attacking troops in order to direct their fires. But the bad weather would cause us one problem: it would keep our aircraft and helicopters from providing close air support to attacking forces. Not only would they be denied the power of massed aircraft striking at enemy strong points in their path, but if they chanced to be pinned down in a minefield by Iraqi artillery, they would find themselves in a seriously bad way. This situation, predictably, left the CINC visibly anguished.

Though he was under intense pressure to start the ground war, his obligation to the troops not to spend their lives needlessly always came first with him, and he was prepared to delay the ground attack, no matter how great the pressure from Washington. Still, this decision, if he had to make it, would not come easy (it would have left him naked to Washington’s slings and arrows). So when the CENTCOM weatherman briefed rain, fog, and misery, Schwarzkopf ’s shoulders slumped, and he placed his huge head in his hands.

Meanwhile, my own weatherman, Colonel Jerry Riley, had already given me a preview of the likely weather on the night of the twenty-third and twenty-fourth. Riley was a spectacular weather “guesser,” both as a scientist and as a seer, reading tea leaves. He not only brilliantly grasped the scientific data sent by satellites and aircraft over the battle space and from meteorological stations all around the world, but he had a record of accurate “gut guesses” as well. Before Schwarzkopf’s high council, Riley assured me that the CENTCOM forecaster’s reading of the tea leaves of isobars, low-pressure areas, upper winds aloft, and frontal passages was wrong. As Riley read them, the worst the weather would throw at us that night would be cloud bases one to two thousand feet above the ground, with visibility of three miles in light rain and fog. I believed him. He had been forecasting the weather over Iraq and Kuwait for the previous five-plus weeks with uncanny accuracy. Though we had faced abysmal weather (it had been one of the wettest, coldest winters on record in the region), time and time again he had figured out the weather we would encounter — where, when, and how severe — well enough to let us plan our air campaign. Though the weather was going to be far from ideal on G day, he assured me that it would be good enough for our jets to slip under the clouds and hit the targets the ground forces needed hit.

So there I was, with positive weather information that I believed; and there was Norman Schwarzkopf, actually suffering over the negative report from his own weather guy. And just then I did something I’d never imagined I would do. I put my right arm around his shoulders and whispered in his ear: “Boss, I have a weatherman who’s been calling the weather accurately for the past six weeks, and he tells me that the weather is not going to be all that bad. The worst we’ll see, he tells me, is a couple of thousand feet of ceiling and a few miles of visibility. We can handle that. I promise you we can provide the close air support your guys are going to need. Trust me on this one, boss. The weather is going to be okay.”

I don’t know whether or not he believed me, but a burden seemed to lift, and we continued the meeting.

Later, he ordered the ground war to go as scheduled.

And when the troops began their attack of Kuwait and Iraq, they did it in the worst damned weather we encountered during the entire war, with rain, fog, low ceilings, and blowing mud.

Because our troops were ready, and the Iraqis debilitated, we began a ground offensive that turned out to be over more quickly, with fewer casualties, than anyone had ever dreamed. So in the end my weatherman wasn’t wrong — the weather was good enough to start the ground war. He just got the numbers wrong, as the weather was for the most part ghastly — zero ceiling, zero visibility.

THE GROUND WAR

At four o’clock on the morning of February 24, 1991, the ground war to free Kuwait began.

That night I had checked into the TACC early. The weather reports were horrible — cold, fog, rain, and drizzle, with blowing winds.

As morning approached and we waited for progress reports from the BCE, the room was filled with tension, even dread. Yet we were also relieved. For airmen, this moment marked the last spurt in a long and difficult struggle. And we were quite simply exhausted.

I tried to imagine what the Marines were going through as they picked their way through the barbed wire and minefields, always waiting for an artillery barrage to rain down on them, which they could only take or retreat.

I knew that the Marines and the Eastern Area Corps were going to give us our best clue about what was really going on. Out to the west, it was going to be more difficult to track the XVIIIth Airborne Corps and French Army, as they became strung out over miles of desert. Though they did not have to confront the massed defensive works that faced Walt Boomer, Gary Luck had problems of his own. Primarily, he had to take his forces and their logistics tails deep into Iraq before the Iraqis discovered they were there, and then he had to place his forces in position to cut off retreat of the forces facing Fred Franks’s VIIth Corps, the British, and the Northern Area Corps (Franks’s main attack was scheduled for launch on the twenty-fifth).

We were, of course, also aware that the Iraqi Army had crumbled, and that Saddam had desperately tried to escape the battlefield and occupied Kuwait. Hours before the attack, the Russians had delivered a desperate message to Washington, promising unconditional Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait, if they were allowed a twenty-one-day cease-fire. No way. Because we wanted their army destroyed, we would not permit them to leave with their equipment, so our response was: “You have twenty-four hours to clear out, not three weeks.”

As early as February 20, Army Apaches flying strikes against Iraqi targets in southern Kuwait had reported that the noise of their helicopters had brought Iraqi soldiers streaming out of their bunkers to surrender. These prisoners reported that whole units were prepared to surrender en masse, and were just waiting for our attacking army. Even so, there was plenty of Iraqi Army left to inflict casualties on Coalition ground forces.

No one can overstate the courage of those first ground forces as they carefully picked their way into Kuwait and Iraq in the cold wet darkness of that opening night of the ground campaign.

★ The opening reports were confused. The lousy weather added to the natural confusion, and the troops in the attack had better things to do than send messages to higher headquarters.

Later, reports began to dribble in, and the lines on the maps began to move; but there were no reports of engagements, only the slow, agonizing movement as the two corps in the east moved into occupied Kuwait. Best of all, there were no reports of our losses.

By midmorning, CENTCOM started to send us information: the Marines were through the wire and minefields and moving ahead at speeds five to ten times greater than expected, there were very few casualties, and the Iraqis were surrendering in such numbers that the advancing infantrymen were having trouble handling them.

Meanwhile, aircraft were streaming over the battlefield, hitting the armored and Republican Guard divisions, as they were, we thought, preparing to maneuver for a counterattack. Though our air attacks were severely hampered by the weather, we dropped thousands of bombs on enemy encampments, trying to obstruct their movement in any way possible. Joint STARS had very few meaningful reports of movement. The Iraqi Army was frozen in place.

By noon, it looked like a rout. Though there had been some sharp engagements, our worst fears were not being realized. Iraqi artillery positions had been found unoccupied, and when Iraqi armored vehicles attempted to engage the Marines, they were quickly silenced. The Eastern Area Corps on Walt Boomer’s right flank were advancing apace, rolling up Iraqi defensive positions designed to repel the mythical amphibious landing.

When it became obvious that the Marines were advancing much faster than anticipated, I knew that Schwarzkopf ’s plans for the main attack would be disrupted.

The original plan called for Walt Boomer and the two Islamic corps to initiate an attack into the teeth of the Iraqi defenses, leading Saddam to think that theirs was the main attack. In the far west, Gary Luck would race north and then swing east behind the Iraqi Army, cutting off their escape. Twenty-four hours after the first units had crossed into Kuwait and caused the Iraqis to react to this three-corps attack in the east, VIIth Corps would launch a devastating blow into the flanks of the Republican Guard and armored divisions (for the most part located near the northwest of Kuwait) as they maneuvered to their left to engage the fake main attack.

But the Iraqis refused to act as predicted. As the attack in the east raced north, the Republican Guard and armored divisions stayed put, probably in the belief that if they moved, they would suffer air attacks like those at Al-Khafji.

Meanwhile, as the Marines and the Northern Area Corps moved forward, their own left flank became increasingly exposed to the Iraqi armor located west of Kuwait City.

The only solution was to push up the launch of VIIth Corps. In that way, the Republican Guard and other Iraqi armor would stay pinned, but the flanks of the Marines and the NAC would be protected.

When I heard that the CINC was contemplating this move, I thought to myself, It needs to be done, but it is sure going to cause problems for Fred Franks. The coordinated movement toward a common goal of a large mass of people and equipment is difficult, no matter whether it’s third-graders on a field trip or an army corps about to violently encounter a large enemy force. And keep in mind the weather, with visibility in feet and yards, as blowing sand mixed with rain and fog to produce blowing mud.

CENTCOM kept us informed about the traffic between Schwarzkopf and Fred Franks, as they discussed changing the launch of VIIth Corps’ attack. I could imagine the confusion this introduced into the carefully planned operation. Nonetheless, the order went out for the VIIth Corps to move up the attack, and the race was on.

Soon, all five corps were in Iraq and Kuwait. The weather was getting better, but there were few requests for close air support. The fighters were ranging ahead of our forces on the ground.

★ Earlier, during the “air-only war,” we had done everything in our power to minimize aircraft losses. Thus, my orders then had stated, “No enemy target is worth one of our aircraft. If you can’t hit it today, because of weather or enemy defenses, go somewhere else and we will come back tomorrow.” But now the orders were just the reverse: “You have a sacred duty to help the men on the ground. If they need you, you go, even if it means that you may stand a good chance of being shot down or losing your life… Now is the time for you to risk your jet, to risk your life, because they are down there engaged in combat and are for sure risking their lives.”

At the same time, we had to make sure that our close air support did not endanger the lives of the ground troops. From the start of the war, I had agonized about air-delivered weapons falling on friendly forces.

Modern air war was so deadly that even the slightest mistake was catastrophic. In other wars, if you bombed a friendly position or vehicle, someone might be killed or wounded. In this war, if we mistakenly unleashed our deadly guided weapons or fragmentation bombs on a friendly position, everyone in the vicinity of the attack would be killed. Airpower had grown too deadly for the mistakes one expects in the fog of war. I knew such mistakes would happen; they always do; and they had — during the battle of Al-Khafji, an A-10’s errant Maverick missile and bombs from A-6s had killed Marines and Saudis on the ground — but I wanted to make sure we had done everything within our power to prevent more.

Thus, I gave an “if in doubt, don’t” order. And I had challenged everyone on the staff, especially the tactics team headed by Lieutenant Colonel Joe Bob Phillips, to figure out ways to avoid hitting Coalition ground forces, and a number of measures, rules, and guidance had been worked out between the Black Hole planners and the BCE.

The factor that drives our approach to close air support is not what one might think. Though bombing or strafing of enemy positions is certainly important, the chief aim of CAS is to avoid bombing and strafing our own forces. We do this by establishing boundaries, using ground references to guide our operations.

The first such boundary is usually called the Front Line of Own Troops, or FLOT (though there are other names for it, such as FEBA, Forward Edge of the Battle Area). Whatever it’s called, the concept is simple: Your guys are behind a line (the FLOT), and ahead of them is a no-man’s-land or else enemy. You don’t drop bombs behind the FLOT.

A second line is called the Fire Support Coordination Line, or FSCL, pronounced “fissile.” Between the FLOT and the FSCL are enemy ground forces opposing your own ground forces. If you drop a bomb in this region, you stand a good chance of killing an enemy soldier.

The complication comes because of the fluid nature of warfare. That is, the close air support pilot wants to make sure there are systems and procedures that let him avoid hitting friendly soldiers who have advanced since the FLOT/FSCL lines were determined. Thus the role of forward air controllers, and the rule “When air operates in close proximity to friendly ground forces, it must be under the control of a forward air controller.” A FAC is an airman who is in contact both with the ground commander and with the CAS aircraft, so he understands what the ground commander wants done and can convey that to the pilot, while making sure the pilot does not mistakenly attack friendly ground forces.

This rule always applies — except during emergencies, as when the guy on the ground is being overrun and says, “To hell with it, my only hope is for air to bomb my position. Maybe the enemy soldier with the knife at my throat will get hit instead of me.”

The area between the FLOT and FSCL defines close proximity, meaning that if you are attacking a ground target between these two lines, you are doing close air support and are by definition in close proximity. On the other side of the FSCL, any military target could be hit.

The FSCL is usually placed where it makes sense. For example, in a static situation where neither side is moving on the ground, a good place to put it is somewhere near the outer range of friendly artillery along some clearly recognizable feature, like a line of hills. If the ground forces are in the defense and expecting to fall back, you want the FSCL quite close to the FLOT, so you can attack the enemy ground forces with the least restrictions as they mass for the attack. If friendly ground forces are attacking and moving forward, then the FSCL should be reasonably far out, because of the greater risk of hitting your own troops as they overrun the enemy.

To accommodate the rapid advance we expected during ground operations, the land forces and airmen had arranged a whole series of “on-call preplanned FSCLs”—lines on maps that could be activated as the attacks progressed. Thus, if one corps didn’t move forward as fast as expected, its FSCL would remain close to the Saudi border. If, on the other hand, the adjacent corps moved faster than anticipated, its commander could push to the next preplanned FSCL (or at least the segment in front of his FLOT).

During the nine hundred hours of war that preceded the ground offensive in Desert Storm, the FSCL was the border between Saudi Arabia and Iraq-occupied Kuwait.

First, there were no friendly ground forces north of that line (except for a few Special Air Service and U.S. Special Forces hunting Scuds, and we had special measures in place to protect them). Second, there was a bulldozed berm marking the frontiers between Saudi Arabia and its neighbors to the north. Every pilot could easily see if he was over friendly forces or the enemy.

Who decides where to put these lines?

Since the FLOT is determined by the actual placement of friendly forces, you simply find out where your own guys are and draw a line on the maps.

Placing the FSCL, however, is much more difficult. As I pointed out earlier, a number of factors are involved: Are you on the offense, defense, or holding ground? Are the friendly ground forces using weapons that must be deconflicted with the air strike? You don’t want a midair collision between an Army artillery round or rocket and your fighter-bomber. One must also consider the terrain — that is, the pilot needs some ground reference for his lines (this last requirement will in fact soon pass away, with the introduction of moving map displays and Global Positioning System satellite navigation systems and displays).

In practice, the ground commander defines the FSCL relative to his needs and his position on the battlefield, but — and this is a big but — he must coordinate with the air commander who is providing the close air support sorties.

Why must the Army coordinate with the Air Force? Because the FSCL limits the airman’s flexibility in killing the enemy. If a fighter pilot flying between the FLOT and the FSCL spots an enemy tank, he cannot attack it unless he is cleared and controlled by a forward air controller.

★ During the Gulf War, the placing of the FSCL caused a number of problems.

At the opening of ground operations on February 24, when the BCE ground representatives posted the FSCL in the TACC, it became instantly clear that the Army units were not talking to each other: their FSCLs looked like teeth on a saw blade. (For obvious reasons, the line has to be reasonably neat and uncomplicated.) So the FSCL would be drawn ahead of one corps. Then, when it reached the boundary with the adjacent corps, it would drop or advance tens of miles.

Now, this was serious business. Even in the best of situations, the FAC might miscommunicate the relative positions of the target and friendly forces. Visual identification of the enemy target was not always possible, as friendly vehicles became covered with desert mud and dust. Engagements became fierce and confused, as pilots dodged ground fire while trying to locate targets hidden by the smoke and dust of the battlefield.

Fortunately, we were able to work out the sawtooth FSCL problem. The BCE got in touch with Third Army headquarters and made them see the light.

We encountered a worse problem toward the end of the war.

When I came to work on the last morning (after finally getting a full night’s sleep; I’d left the night before around 2200) and reviewed the ground situation, I noticed to my amazement that during the night, the FSCL had been drawn well north of the Tigris River, in a straight line running east to west. This made no sense.

First of all, we had no forces north of the river and very few north of the major highway south of the river. In other words, the river made an excellent FSCL boundary.

Second of all — and far worse — this FSCL placement ruled out the independent operations of air to halt the Iraqi tanks that had crossed the river and were fleeing north. Our planes could fly over them, but could not bomb them without permission and control from a FAC.

When I asked the BCE duty officer who in the hell had placed the FSCL that far north of the river and why, there was a long and sheepish silence. “It was General Schwarzkopf,” he answered finally.

So I said to my own duty officer, “Get General Schwarzkopf on the phone. He’s done a dumb thing and needs to be told. He’s letting the Iraqis escape the noose he himself built when he sent XVIIIth Corps around from the west.”

But then it got very quiet, and the Army duty officer said, “Please wait a minute, sir.” And I knew something was up. I waited while he called Third Army headquarters to let them know that I was angry, and why.

It turned out that the CINC had not actually drawn that FSCL. Rather, Third Army headquarters had indicated to my duty officer that he had. Though my duty officer would have protested the stupid placement at any other time, since the war was almost over, and since the CINC apparently wanted it, my colonel had gone along with the change. In reality, Schwarzkopf knew nothing about it, and would have probably objected if he had.

When I challenged all this (even to the point of risking exposure to Schwarzkopf ’s wrath), then the jig was up, and the Army had to come clean. The FSCL was immediately renegotiated and placed on the river, but too late to hit a great many fleeing Iraqi tanks that had poured through the open door we’d given them.

To this day, I do not know why anyone wanted the FSCL so far north. My theory at the time was that the 101st Air Assault wanted to use their Apache gunships to attack the enemy, and if the FSCL was on the river they would have to coordinate their actions with the TACC (or else they might have been mistaken for Iraqi helicopters by our fighters).

In fact, all they needed to do was let us know their desires, and we could have easily coordinated operations. But joint operations require give-and-take, and often the land, sea, or air unit will cut corners rather than take the time to coordinate and cooperate. In this case, taking time to work with the TACC was apparently considered too difficult, when it was easier to bluster a FSCL well north of the river. Well, it worked for the Iraqis and not our side.

★ As the army drove forward, stories began to come into the TACC from our tactical air control parties with the Army battalions, divisions, and corps. Some were funny, some showed the tragic stupidity of men at war, and some were heroic.

One forward air controller reported that his battalion commander provided him with a lightly skinned M-113 armored personnel carrier while he himself and his operations officers mounted the attack in more survivable Bradley fighting vehicles. Well, as they moved into Iraq, the team suddenly discovered their maps were next to useless in the trackless desert, but the FAC’s Global Positioning Satellite receiver was invaluable. Rather than risking the loss of their Air Force guest in his M-113, the two Bradleys closed to positions on either side of the M-113 as they roared through the desert. If they encountered enemy fire, the Bradleys were likely to absorb the first round. Meanwhile, the Air Force “fly boy” would periodically use his GPS receiver to find their location, write the coordinates on a piece of cardboard, and stick his head up through the observers’ hatch in the M-113 to show the commander and his operations officer their position.

On another occasion, two battalions were advancing line abreast through the Iraqi desert, when Iraqi long-range artillery in one sector began to fire on the U.S. troops in the adjacent sector. Since the artillery was inside the FSCL, air could not be tasked to hit the artillery without the close control of the FACs. When his Army counterparts told the FAC under fire the location of the enemy artillery, he called his fellow FAC miles away to coordinate an attack, and the second FAC diverted fighter-bombers from their preplanned targets and directed them against the artillery several kilometers away. The fighters spotted the guns and silenced them with bombing and strafing attacks.

One of the most poignant of these stories came from a FAC with VIIth Corps, also in an M-113 armored vehicle. His unit had progressed rapidly into Iraq and already overrun a lot of Iraqis, most of whom had surrendered without firing a round, when they came upon a prepared defensive position consisting of fortified rifle and machine-gun positions. As they proceeded slowly into the apparently abandoned complex, the FAC noticed movement in a nearby trench. Suddenly, a few Iraqi soldiers leapt out of the trenches, threw down their weapons, and started running toward the American vehicles with their hands over their heads. Just as suddenly, an Iraqi machine gun a little farther away opened up on the surrendering Iraqis, cutting them down from behind. At that point, the FAC, seeing one of the Iraqis writhing on the ground, called for his Army driver to move ahead. Disregarding his own safety, the FAC climbed out of the forward hatch of his vehicle, picked up the wounded and badly bleeding Iraqi, and, shielding him with his own body, carried him back to the vehicle. After the driver had pulled back to safety, the FAC did what he could to prevent shock and stop the loss of blood, but it looked very likely that the Iraqi had had it. His flesh had been torn from his arms and legs, and he’d lost a lot of blood. As the Army driver rushed them to a forward medical aid station, in a weak voice, but in clear English, the Iraqi explained that he was a doctor who’d trained in America before he was drafted. When the U.S. Army doctors at the aid station heard that one of their own was wounded, even though he was an Iraqi, they took heroic measures to save his life; and they were successful.

BLUE-ON-BLUE

Friendly fire — blue-on-blue, fratricide, whatever you wish to call it — has been around as long as war. During the Gulf War, we put greater efforts than ever before into reducing this tragedy. Though we tried hard, and can take satisfaction from our efforts, it was a battle we did not win. The blue-on-blue statistics from the Gulf War are shocking. After-action reports of U.S. Army deaths indicate that about half of their losses were caused by friendly fire, and over 70 percent of U.S. Army tanks and APCs that were hit were hit by friendly ground fire.

In the Gulf, the majority of friendly-fire incidents occurred ground-to-ground; that is, people on the ground were hit by fire from ground-bound platforms.

On the other hand, there were no air-to-air blue-on-blue incidents — the result of stringent rules of engagement, modern technology, aircrew discipline… and luck.

Here is a story to illustrate all that:

Captain Gentner Drummond was an F-15C pilot assigned to Boomer McBroom’s 1st Tactical Fighter Wing at Dhahran, and he looked every inch like the central casting dream of a fighter pilot — tall, slim, handsome, steely-eyed, with a soft Oklahoma drawl. Of course, his name, “Gentner,” was a negative. It should have been Spike or Rip or Killer.

At any rate, this misnamed, but highly talented, fighter pilot was leading an element on MiG CAP south of Baghdad the first night of the war, when AWACS called out a bandit — high-speed, low-level, headed south out of the Baghdad area.

Gentner came hard left and rolled out on the vector he got from AWACS. He then pointed his antenna down and got an immediate lock on a target heading south 1,000 feet above ground level at very high speed. He began pushing the buttons on his stick and throttles that would identify the target and tell him whether or not it was friendly, and if friendly, what type of aircraft.

In the meantime, AWACS was calling for him to shoot.

Gentner knew that the AWACS controller had access to intelligence information from the Rivet Joint Aircraft that would confirm that the aircraft was Iraqi. Still, there was room for doubt.

As the F-15 pilot streaked through the night at 30,000 feet, he worked his system on the target. Time was running out. In a few moments, he’d be inside R minimum, which is the closest in range he could get to the target and still use his AIM-7 missile. There was still no ID.

Meanwhile, the AWACS controller was ordering Gentner to shoot.

He decided not to. He wanted to be sure in his own mind, and he figured that his altitude advantage would allow him to perform a stern conversion. That way he could get a better ID of the target, and then down it if it was an Iraqi.

Pulling his Eagle around hard left and down, he screamed into the night and pulled up alongside a Saudi Tornado on his way home from a successful strike deep into Iraq.

For this act of restraint, Gentner received a Distinguished Flying Cross — that is, he received it for not shooting down an aircraft. His composure under the most extreme stress, his use of logic and judgment, and his concern for human life prevented what could easily have been a tragic mistake.

In fact, his was not the only such story, yet it is typical of the stress our aircrews had to endure, as well as the high standards of conduct expected of them.

★ Unfortunately, our record in air-to-ground combat was not perfect.

More than twenty friendly ground forces, U.S., Saudi, and British, were killed by weapons delivered from the air.

Thus, during the confusion at the Battle of Al-Khafji, a USAF A-10’s Maverick hit a U.S. Marine armored vehicle, a Marine A-6 bombed a Marine convoy, a Marine gunship attacked a Saudi National Guard armored car, and an unknown aircraft strafed Saudi troops who had wandered into a free-fire zone. Later in the war, a pair of Air Force A-10s attacked two British armored personnel carriers, Army Apaches destroyed two Army APCs, and our airmen destroyed two more British armored vehicles.

Lives were lost in each of these tragic events.

Though all were great tragedies, when placed against the total of air-to-ground attacks, their numbers were quite small — especially compared with other wars. Moreover, we must also weigh in the lives of friendly ground forces saved because air attacks on the Iraqis were so devastating. Of course, no saving of friendly lives makes any loss of friendly life “acceptable” to a commander. Mistakes happen, to be sure, but every effort should be made to prevent needless killings.

★ The officer I tapped to work the fratricide-prevention problem was Lieutenant Colonel Joe Bob Phillips and his fighter Weapons Tactics Team. Joe Bob and his team of eight fighter weapons school instructors had arrived early in February, after General “Tiny” (six feet four and three hundred pounds) West, the commander of the Fighter Weapons School at Nellis, had offered them, both to augment our staff in Riyadh and to capture Gulf war experiences. They’d come not as experts—“We’ll tell you how to win this one”—but as field hands. After the war, they could go home to train others, using what we had learned in the only school for combat — war.

With typical fighter-pilot confidence and enthusiasm, Joe Bob and his team went to work. They had a big question to answer: if we had four incidents at Al-Khafji, how many would we face when five corps were unleashed on the Iraqis?

Here are some quotes from Joe Bob’s notes: “Working the CAS problem hard. Basically, the mechanics of generating the flow and communication are OK. We’re working backups for traffic jams. We have a shortage of airborne FACs and need tighter rules for TICs [troops in combat] situations. Seems that we have forgotten the need for fighter pilots to have guidance on ordnance type and distances from friendly forces, unwise delivery modes, etc., for TIC contact. Also, have only twelve OA-10s [airborne FAC aircraft] in theater — not enough to provide coverage for a hooba of this size. We are working out procedure and agreements with the corps commanders to keep the Killer Scouts employed both inside and outside the FSCL. Inside the FSCL, the attack aircraft must be under control of a forward air controller and prevent attacks on friendly forces and to hit the targets the Army wants hit. Outside the FSCL, the attacking aircraft is cleared to strike without any additional control. He may use J-STARS or Killer Scout, but a FAC is not required.”

By mid-February, these efforts were starting to make sense. As previously mentioned, we developed preplanned FSCLs, so that no matter how fast the ground war went, we could stay ahead of it. The more than 2,000 U.S. Air Force people assigned to work forward air control with the ground forces (except for the British and Marines, who provided their own FACs) would be adequate for that job, and our shortage of airborne forward air controls would be augmented by the Killer Scouts. Using AWACS, Joint STARS, and airborne command-and-control aircraft of the USAF and USMC, we were able to meter the flow and provide the needed control that would let us put bombs on target in a timely fashion, while avoiding friendly forces. Though it was a huge and complex undertaking, Joe Bob stuck to it, in spite of occasional abuse from me.

These are from his notes for February 19: “Have been continuing to work the CAS issue hard over the past several days. General Horner has thrown us out a couple of times. I think we are getting closer to understanding his approach. The closest analogy I can come up with is Force Protection. Only, the protected force is super-large and undisciplined, and both sides look the same. Our job is to anticipate what the enemy will throw at the force and come up with a plan and ROE [rules of engagement] to maximize enemy kills while preventing fratricide. VID [visual identification] is out. Assuming that the Army knows where its forces are is out. Earlier approved concepts of providing CAS for an advancing friendly force are out, because they emphasized a superior force attacking a retreating enemy. Kill zones are okay, when the friendlies are in dire straits and need air at any cost. ‘Figure it out, shit-head, that’s your job’ is a phrase I’m getting accustomed to from General Horner.”

When Joe Bob’s plan was published, it provided guidance to FACs, Scouts, Planners, and Air Tasking Order writers. Its basic messages were: “If in doubt, don’t. Service CAS requests first. Don’t even assume things will be easy or go as planned.” And for the most part, they worked.

AND THEN THERE WERE NONE

As the days of the ground war continued, the attitude in the TACC grew ever more relieved. Spirits were high. At each shift change, you could hear the upbeat buzz as the guys related how well the troops in the sand of Kuwait and Iraq were doing. Most important, there were few reports of casualties, and incredible reports of Iraqis surrendering in such numbers that our forces could only give them food and water and tell them where they needed to go to be picked up.

To be sure, we had problems — placement of the FSCL, the weather, friendly-fire incidents, and trying to keep track of all that was going on on the battlefield, with its hellish oil fires and rainy weather — but the good news continued.

By February 26, Walt Boomer was a few miles south of the major highway intersection west of Kuwait City; Gary Luck had turned the corner and was racing down the Iraqi highway south of the Euphrates; and Fred Franks was advancing toward the Republican Guard, his ultimate target.

At that point, the Iraqis totally lost heart and started to evacuate occupied Kuwait, but airpower halted the caravan of Iraqi Army and plunderers fleeing toward Basra. This event was later called by the media “The Highway of Death.” There were certainly a lot of dead vehicles, but not so many dead Iraqis. They’d already learned to scamper off into the desert when our aircraft started to attack. Nevertheless, some people back home wrongly chose to believe we were cruelly and unusually punishing our already whipped foes.

Meanwhile, numerous tank engagements shredded the myth of Iraqi Army “battle hardness.” Fred Franks’s VIIth Corps slammed into the heavy divisions of the Republican Guard and other Iraqi armor. And always POWs, and more POWs.

It wasn’t all easy. An A-10 was shot down; and an Army helicopter attempting to rescue the pilot was itself shot down, killing several of the crew, with the rest being taken prisoner. Even though it was absolutely clear that the Iraqis were thoroughly defeated, they still remained dangerous, simply because they remain armed, and were frightened and disorganized, in many cases an armed rabble.

By February 27, talk had turned toward terminating the hostilities. Kuwait was free. We were not interested in governing Iraq. So the question became “How do we stop the killing?”

I knew we were close to answering that question when General Schwarzkopf asked me how much notification I would need to turn off our attacks. He was trying to come up with a plan for stopping the war. He knew Washington was going to be asking him very soon, “When can you stop? How long will it take to turn off the ground fires and air fires?”

“I figure two hours,” I said, “will be enough to get the word to the pilots before they take off, or drop off a tanker, en route to their targets.

“Once there’s a cessation of hostilities,” I went on to explain, “we will still maintain fighter patrols over the country, in case the Iraqis attempt a sneak punch with their remaining fighters or bombers. We’ll also keep aircraft on the ground loaded with bombs and missiles, in case the cease-fire fails and Iraqi ground forces threaten Coalition ground forces.”

But I knew this was just playing it safe. In reality, all that was left to do was begin the talks at Safwan that would make the end official.

After Schwarzkopf’s call, I sat in the now very hushed TACC as the duty officers busied themselves reading books or trying to figure how to get back home. There was still flying to do over Iraq, but it was routine. There were still a few engagements on the ground as the Iraqis stumbled into our ground forces and a firefight broke out. We still shot down a few Iraqis who thought it was okay to attack their insurgents in the south and north. But in our hearts, the war was over. We knew it was time to stop the insanity.

The war to liberate Kuwait ended on February 28, 1991. To be sure, conflict in the region did not cease; armed revolts broke out throughout Iraq. Nonetheless, the purpose of the Coalition forces had been achieved. Kuwait was free. But what did we learn from all this? Chuck Horner continues:

★ As Coalition forces packed up their kits and headed home, historians began analyzing and comparing — and some comparisons are enlightening; see the accompanying charts — while military staffs began compiling studies (in militarese, these are often referred to as “Lessons Learned”). A problem quickly became apparent: This war was so different from — and in many ways so much more successful than — any other example of armed conflict, it offered advocates of practically any point of view an opening to make a favorable case. In the United States, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and each of the service departments published “Lessons Learned” documents that were in fact advertisements for individual programs, requirements, or services. This is not to say they were totally dishonest. Some of them actually uncovered areas that needed to be fixed.

Still, the so-called “studies” tended to be self-supporting rather than critical of the agency that sponsored the work. And too many of the books, articles, studies, and official documents misstated the facts, with the aim of salvaging a weapon system, military doctrine, or reputation whose worth could not otherwise be supported. They were public relations documents, not clear-eyed, honest appraisals, and they were aimed at influencing the soon-to-come budget reductions and debates over each service’s roles and missions.

Since the various conclusions tended to be contradictory, there were inevitable battles. The pie was finite.

These battles were best summed up in the debate over whether or not the Gulf War was a “revolution in military affairs,” or RMA, as it was expressed in the acronym-happy Pentagon.

The RMA debate divided those who wished to continue business as usual from those who believed that war had changed so fundamentally that new organizations, strategies, doctrines, and military forces were needed. The former tended to come from the land services. They took it as an article of faith that war was a matter of meeting the enemy army, navy, and/or air force on the battlefield, and inflicting such damage that he could no longer resist the will of the dominant military force. The goal was to destroy the enemy military so greatly that resistance was impossible or futile.

The revolutionaries — often air, sea, and space advocates — tended to talk about asymmetric warfare. In asymmetric warfare, an apparently weak nation (call it nation A) will refuse to engage its stronger enemy (nation B) in the areas of its strength, and instead will attack where B is most vulnerable. Thus, if B has a large land army, A will avoid ground combat, and perhaps use computer attacks against B’s national infrastructure to weaken it, while inflicting large numbers of casualties on B’s army with weapons of mass destruction. In asymmetric warfare, A’s forces may not even engage B’s in direct battle. For example, A might try to isolate B’s economy or to debilitate its political leadership to the point where A’s will could be imposed, while B’s military forces remained relatively intact.

In fact, both schools have missed the point of the Gulf War. Desert Storm was not about a revolution in military affairs, it was a demonstration of the revolution that had already occurred in technology. The RMA has not happened to any great extent because neither the United States military nor its counterparts around the world have been able to fully exploit the technological revolution revealed during the Gulf War.

The Gulf War demonstrated the possibilities available to a nation that decides to revolutionize its military operations. If used effectively, precision weapons, Stealth aircraft, space reconnaissance, and rapid communications would so change military affairs that today’s military leaders would no longer recognize the military in which they served. Certainly, Schwarzkopf, Yeosock, Boomer, Arthur, and I did not fully understand how to exploit these revolutionary capabilities. Yet we perceived the clues and (within our own limitations) tried our best to use the resources available, to free Kuwait as soon as possible, while keeping the loss of life at a minimum.

Since this book is about airpower, what is the future of air, looked at from the light of the coming revolution? The best way to get a handle on that, I think, is to examine how we dealt with the new technologies during the war, and then to use that as an entry into the coming revolution in military affairs. Parts of this story will be familiar, but not from this angle.

★ The Coalition strategy was simple — to gain control of the air, use airpower to isolate and debilitate the Iraqi Army, and then use ground forces to drive them from Kuwait. The war in Vietnam did not have air superiority as a pressing goal; the result was a drawn-out conflict with thousands of aircraft shot down. I could never forget that lesson. Therefore, the first step, gaining control of the air, was key.

For this, I had advantages no other commander in history had enjoyed. For starters, a U.S. Navy analysis of Iraqi air defenses provided a system-wide understanding of the role of each element that had been designed to protect Iraq from air attack. The point to pay attention to is the system, not the elements. No longer would I have to bomb every enemy airfield, or shoot down every enemy fighter, or destroy every enemy surface-to-air missile site. If I could isolate and destroy the heart and brain of the Iraqi air defenses, then the arms and legs could not function, and attacking them would only use precious resources that would be better used in attacks on other target sets.

The analysis of the system told the air planners what nodes should be attacked, in what sequence, and when the attacks should be repeated. These attacks would be conducted with such ferocity and accuracy that the air defenders would be shocked into a state of awe and helplessness. The tools, Stealth and precision, would exploit the opportunities revealed by the complete knowledge of the Iraqi air defense system.

And so it happened.

Because the planners who devised this brilliant takeover of Iraqi airspace had available to them the knowledge of Iraq’s air defense system as a living organism, they knew precisely where to inflict wounds, and they had the means to conduct the attacks at low risk and with great precision. The result was the imposition of a regime of shock and awe so great that the Iraqi military situation became hopeless soon after the opening minutes of the war.

“Shock and Awe” (sometimes also called “Rapid Dominance”) — a relatively simple concept — is one of the foundations of an understanding of the coming revolution in military affairs.

In war, the goal is to make the enemy accede to your will, to make him do what you want him to do. Traditionally, you accomplish this by destroying his means to resist, as we did with Germany in World War II, but that is not the only way. For example, why not catch his attention in such a way that he is unwilling to resist you? In World War II, Japan was worn down as Germany was, but not to the point of total surrender. Then a pair of A-bombs induced such shock into the nation, causing the enemy to hold us in such awe, that they surrendered rather than conduct a bloody defense of the home islands.

In the Gulf in February 1991, Iraqi soldiers were in a state of shock and awe, and surrendered.

★ Today, a B-2 carries sixteen precision bombs (the F-117 carries two) and can strike with the same impunity as the smaller Stealth aircraft. Each of these sixteen precision munitions are guided by signals from global positioning satellites; they can be programmed in the air to strike any target; and unlike the laser-guided bombs of the Gulf War, they can operate effectively in any weather, day or night.

Imagine the impact of a flight of four unstoppable B-2s arriving over an enemy capital and releasing sixty-four 2,000-pound guided bombs on sixty-four targets the enemy deems vital. Instantly, the enemy leader could be denied control of his military forces, his people, and his own governing apparatus. A second wave of four aircraft could then inject shock into another key sector of the enemy’s controlling system.

What is required to exploit this revolutionary technology?

First, we must think in terms of what Admiral Bill Owens, a former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called “systems of systems.” That is, we must think of an enemy not as an army, navy, and/or air force, but as a system much like the human body. For example, if we wish someone to miss when they shoot at us, we could blind them temporarily with a bright flash of light. If they are chasing us, we might disable the nerves that operate their leg muscles. In other words, we must analyze the weaknesses and strengths of the adversary and apply our force quickly and precisely. The first trick is knowing what we wish to achieve, the second is knowing how to apply our forces, and the easiest trick is to apply the force.

The kind of knowledge I’m talking about requires a break from traditional methods of evaluating our enemies. In the past, we counted ships, planes, and tanks; and then, to impose our will, we destroyed as many of them as possible. Now we must learn how to look at an enemy through his own eyes, so we can attack him where he knows he will feel pain. This will require training not only in how we fight, but more important, in how we think and plan for war. We must have new ways to conduct intelligence analysis.

★ We can learn from the battle for Al-Khafji.

There, once again, the revolutionary technology available to Coalition forces was not known or appreciated by the Iraqis who planned the attack.

On January 25, a prototype Joint STARS aircraft used its revolutionary technology to report in real time the movement of Iraqi forces massing for the attack. The Joint STARS radar discovered and identified military vehicles as they left the protection of their bunkers and moved toward their assembly areas, mistakenly thinking that night and weather made them immune to detection and air attack. They soon learned otherwise.

Their forces were decimated long before they were able to conduct their attack. In the nights and days that followed, the Iraqis gamely attempted to continue their attack, but any movement brought an immediate Coalition air response. As one captured Iraqi said after the battle, “My division lost more vehicles in thirty minutes of air attack than we did in six years of war with the Iranians.”

Though the Coalition response was confused, poorly coordinated, and slow to recognize the enemy plan, Coalition forces fought with great courage and dedication, and a force of about 5,000 soldiers defeated an invading heavy armor force that may have had 25,000 to 35,000 soldiers.

There has to be a reason for this success other than the élan and excellence of the Coalition ground forces, and that reason has to be the revolutionary nature of Coalition technology, especially the technology of the Coalition air forces.

Armies depend on movement. They use it to create surprise and to provide protection (by denying certainty of their location and strength). They move to place themselves beyond the reach of their opponent army’s weapons. They rely on vehicles for heavy firepower, armored protection, supplies, engineering support, and face-to-face meetings between command echelons.

Yet at Khafji, the Iraqis found that to move was to be discovered, to be discovered was to be attacked, and to be attacked was to die, if you stayed in your vehicle (no matter how much armor plating protected you). They quickly found that when they saw or heard aircraft, their best course was to abandon their vehicle. “In the Iran-Iraq War,” a captured Iraqi general reported, “my tank was my friend, because I could sleep my soldiers in it and keep them safe from Iranian artillery. In this war, my tank was my enemy,” because it was constantly attacked by aircraft day and night. If his soldiers slept in their tanks, they were sure to die.

This fact did not impact on our planning as forcefully as it should have. During the Gulf War, we had almost unrestricted information about the size and location of the enemy forces but failed to appreciate all his real strengths and weaknesses. We could count his tanks and locate them daily with overhead intelligence, Joint STARS, or Killer Scouts, but we missed the implications of the Iraqi soldiers’ terror of sleeping in their tanks. Our reconnaissance pictures showed us parked tanks with new slit trenches nearby. Those who measure effectiveness by the number of tanks destroyed fail to understand that sleeping away from your tank means that you are highly unlikely to get the first shot off if you are suddenly attacked, and are therefore likely to lose the engagement.

★ The aircraft and weapons of today are far more capable than those used in the Gulf War. With more modern computers and improved radar, the Joint STARS aircraft now has a far greater capacity to detect and identify moving vehicles. GPS bombs can now be dropped in any weather. The wide-area munitions, such as the sensor-fused weapon, permit aerial attack of massed armor columns, with tens to hundreds of sub-munitions homing in on individual vehicles.

What does the denial of movement mean for battlefields of the future?

Certainly it means that you have to control the air if you want to maneuver your forces. It also means that you should no longer prepare your ground forces to fight force-on-force against a slow-maneuvering enemy. Given that our control of the air puts severe limits on an enemy’s ability to survive the lethal battlefield of the future, expect him to feature small, fast, stealthy movement, and expect him to collapse into urban areas, jungle, or mountainous terrain and to avoid combat in the wide-open spaces.

Meanwhile, if our own ground forces continue to follow current doctrine, our enemy army can expect to find large, massed U.S. ground forces opposing him, but with our mobility and capacity to maneuver hampered by our own ponderous logistical tail. As a result, he will attempt to employ his own form of airpower — guided missiles, ballistic and cruise — to weaken or even defeat this easy target.

This means that the intelligent commander of the future will configure his land forces to mass and disperse quickly. He will reduce the size of his force while increasing the lethality of his firepower. He will select transportation systems that can rapidly move his forces about the battle space with minimum fuel (to reduce the logistics tail). He will be hard to find, yet able quickly to exploit the advantages his superior surveillance of the battlefield affords him.

To bring all of this about will mean that land forces’ equipment, organizations, tactics, and strategy at the operational level of war will change drastically.

So the question is not whether or not there has been a revolution. There has certainly been a revolution in military technology, but not in how the military fight, or plan to fight.

★ Let’s look at how some of these technological changes affect the individual fighting man.

In the Gulf War, close air support relied on visual acquisition of the target by the pilot in the fighter aircraft, who was guided to his target by voice directions from a forward air controller located on the battlefield. The procedure was cumbersome and imperfect, and too often pilots misidentified the target and attacked Coalition ground forces. Fortunately, such mistakes happened more rarely than in wars in the past; unfortunately, the mistakes were far more devastating than they were in past wars.

Using present technology, however, we can virtually eliminate such mistakes.

For example, our soldiers in Bosnia are now equipped with small Global Positioning Satellite receivers that are coupled with a small laser range finder and radio transmitter. When the soldier sees a target threatening him — say, a tank or a sniper — he simply points his aiming device at it and initiates laser ranging. The device knows where it is in the GPS coordinate system, knows the heading and distance to the target, and relays that information to a nearby F-16 equipped with an improved data modem. The information from the ground is received in the form of a data burst, which is not audible to the pilot but is translated into words that appear on his heads-up display which describe the target and its GPS coordinates. The fighter pilot can either slave his radar crosshairs onto the target; or, when he’s in the clear, superimpose the target on the ground with the target designation box and gunsight on his heads-up display; or insert the target’s coordinates into a GPS-guided precision weapon. In effect, we are giving the individual soldier a 2,000-pound hand grenade.

This raises questions about how the land and air arms of our military services are developing tactical doctrine to exploit this unique capability. How are they exercising to develop procedures for the soldier to call upon air, and how are we examining command-and-control measures to make sure the weapons are used on the highest-priority targets? These questions will be increasingly important, as potential enemies study the Gulf War and conclude that the best way to avoid destruction from U.S. airpower is to hug their opposite U.S. land force member as closely as possible.

CONTROL

Control is the goal of most warfare. When we are unable to achieve our political ends through persuasion or threat, then physical attack, with the goal of controlling the behavior of our enemy, looks increasingly attractive.

In the past, achieving control has required the physical dominance of one side over the other. Today, new technology provides other means of control. For example, with information technology, we can dominate his senses, reasoning, or mental faculties.

During the Gulf War, the vast majority of the Iraqi Army who had not already deserted, surrendered to Coalition land forces. Both the surrenders and the desertions came about because Iraqi soldiers had been dominated by the psychological campaign we had waged. This campaign came with both a stick and a carrot.

The stick: We fatigued and terrified them with unwavering air attack. They knew no peace; they were always in danger; they could not easily be resupplied with food and water; and communications between levels of command were close to impossible.

The carrot: The Arab elements of the Coalition understood which arguments would sway the Iraqis away from their own leadership. Saddam had insisted that Kuwait was part of Iraq, and that it was right and just to return it to the fold, while at the same time he exploited the normal dislike Iraqis felt for Kuwaitis. By way of contrast (and with the help of our Arab allies), we played on their faith in Islam and Arab brotherhood. We told them they were Muslims and Arabs, just as the Kuwaitis were Muslims and Arabs, and it was sinful to make war on brothers of the same faith. While they did not like the Kuwaitis, they felt guilty about the evils the occupation was bringing to Kuwait City. While they were loyal to their families in Iraq, they had no loyalty to Saddam.

For those themes to take root, we needed to control the environment. The air attacks did that.

The Iraqi soldier became fearful. Often, our advancing ground forces found vehicles, tanks, and artillery positions abandoned and filled with blowing sand. With Iraqi soldiers hiding in their bunkers and wondering when the next B-52 strike or A-10 attack would kill them, leaflet, radio, and television messages telling them to give up this unholy occupation of Kuwait easily took root.

Soon, those who could, went home. Those who couldn’t desert, waited for the chance to surrender.

By the time Coalition ground forces moved into the Iraqi lines, we had clearly established control over most of the Iraqi Army, as was evident by the surrender of nearly 88,000 Iraqi soldiers. Most had not fired a shot.

★ Control can also be exerted on the environment.

For example, during the Gulf War, we made extensive use of electronic countermeasures (ECM) and anti-radiation missiles to exert control over Iraqi air defense radar sensors. The ECM hindered the effectiveness of individual radars and confused the long-range search radars used to cue the short-range, and more accurate, radars used to control guided antiaircraft missiles.

This war also featured a new and highly successful form of control, Stealth. The F-117 proved to be the only aircraft we could send into the air defense cauldron of Baghdad and be certain it would survive, and it could do that with unprecedented efficiency — that is, it did not require large support forces of air-to-air escort, ECM support jamming aircraft, and Wild Weasels carrying anti-radiation missiles, while its laser-guided bombs made it truly efficient in terms of targets destroyed per sortie.

The secret of Stealth: it controls its environment.

The F-117 can go anywhere its pilot commands, and it cannot be sensed by the enemy except visually, meaning that it flies only at night and/or during adverse weather. Though an enemy may be aware that an F-117 is present (he can, after all, see or hear bombs exploding), he cannot locate it with enough accuracy to shoot it down.

Stealth and supercruise will give the F-22 even greater control of the environment. With supercruise, F-22s will fly at supersonic speeds without using afterburner. Thus they can cruise at speeds above Mach 1 with their engines at fairly economical fuel flows. Flying that fast cuts down an enemy’s time for action once he detects you — and with Stealth, he will detect you very late in the game. Supercruise and Stealth also collapse the envelope for the employment of his weapons. An air-to-air missile shot from a tail aspect at a supersonic jet has a very small effective range, since the missile has to spend all its energy catching up.

With these advantages, F-22s will almost certainly achieve air superiority over enemy aircraft, and in turn this will permit the entire spectrum of the joint force’s non-Stealth aircraft to operate unhindered by enemy defenses.

★ Another good way to control the environment is by using information warfare — the current hot topic in military circles, and for good reason.

Everyone talks about weirdo, geek computer hackers who break into heavily protected bank or military computer systems. But imagine using hacker skills for military purposes. For instance, imagine the military value of taking an enemy’s command-and-control system, and inserting a depiction of forces you want him to see, instead of the real-world situation. How about entering his air defense system and letting him “see” false attacks to the west, while your real attack comes from the east? Why not lead him to believe that your ground forces are located where they are not, so he will exhaust his artillery ammunition pounding barren land, while your force escapes unharmed? Or even make him believe the forces arrayed against him are so vast and dominating that he will sue for peace before the battle begins?

Information warfare can be conducted at all levels of conflict, and includes a defensive side as well.

Of all the nations of the world, the United States is the most vulnerable to computer attacks. We use computers everywhere. Our telephones are now simple computer entry pads. Our wristwatches are computers. We plan our days, operate our automobiles, and communicate with computers. Our military equipment is so advanced largely because computers aim our guns, fly our planes, and operate our ships.

Therefore, even as we do our best to control the inputs to an enemy’s computers and knowledge system, we must also protect the integrity of the knowledge systems we are using to prosecute the battle.

Most easily understood is the need to protect our own computer databases from corruption or other manipulation. Though private industry and the military have been working this problem for years, the threat has grown at a pace equal only to the raging change in computer capabilities worldwide. There are no longer “have” and “have not” nations when it comes to the capacity to access and manipulate computer databases and programs.

Meanwhile, most current users are in a state of denial about the vulnerability of their data systems, simply because they have some small protection — and the alternative is too terrible to contemplate.

For example, the banking industry loses millions of dollars each year to computer crime. They can afford to overlook that loss. But what if computer criminals learned how to attack the customer trust and confidence on which their industry is built and relies? Could they afford to overlook that? Other financial markets, such as stock exchanges, suffer the same vulnerability.

The military operates under far different expectations. Where the financial industry likes to operate in a precise world, down to the fourth decimal point, the military is used to operating in the fog of war, a world of uncertainty, and at levels of efficiency that might reach 5 or 10 percent — that is, a soldier has less than one chance in ten of hitting the enemy when he fires his rifle. Such levels of uncertainty mean that we in the military so overload our capacity to conduct warfare that a hacker who steals our secrets, inserts misleading information, or injects confusion will not cripple a military operation, only lower its efficiency.

Still, if the opposing military forces are somewhat close to parity, then computer attacks might spell the difference between victory and defeat in battle.

This is the good news. The bad news is that the U.S. military has an extensive capacity to fool itself.

We can talk ourselves into believing our own lies.

Imagine the situation I described earlier: We have entered the computer system associated with the enemy’s command and control for air defense, and have depicted a mythical raid in the western part of his country, while our Stealth bombers are in the east. Believing what he sees on his displays, he sends his interceptor forces to the west.

In the meantime, another echelon of U.S. command is secretly pirating the enemy air defense command-and-control data and feeding this information to our air defense units. However, owing to the classification of the computer insertion activity, some good guys don’t know what the other good guys are doing. As a result, the intelligence gatherers believe we are really attacking to the west. As a result, when our attacking force returns to friendly territory after their unopposed attacks, they are engaged by their own friendly air defenses, who have concluded that they are enemy attackers.

This example is simplistic, yet it illustrates how complicated new forms of warfare can become, and how dangerous can be the failure to work as one force, one team. Control must be all-encompassing in every aspect of the conflict, and it must be coordinated both offensively and defensively. Modern warfare’s widespread communications, computer-assisted information systems, and surveillance of the battle space will dictate that the dominant forces have full knowledge of the battle and control of its environment.

They also mean that the victor will be the combatant who can act with the greatest speed.

SPEED

In future wars, the warring parties may not be equal in size or firepower, yet one side’s numerical advantages may be offset by a smaller opponent who acts rapidly, decisively, and accurately. Because any nation or group participating in organized warfare can now access computers, space systems, and commercial communications, any warring party can now act rapidly, decisively, and accurately. They can review and analyze data, decide to act, and then commit with such speed that their opponent is reacting to these actions rather than initiating actions that facilitate his own advantages.

This is the advantage of surprise and initiative: long prized by United States military doctrine, and exemplified by the German blitzkrieg of World War II — but a difficult goal for the regimented military mind and ponderous ground armies.

In the future, rapid movement over strategic distances will be required if our military power is to be deployed in time to prevent a crisis from escalating to war or to halt an invasion. This is why American military forces so highly value our vast strategic fleet of airlift aircraft. Going one step further, imagine conventional-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles, based in the United States but capable of delivering a crippling blow within thirty minutes anywhere in the world. Surely, in that future, the words of warning delivered by the United States ambassador to a dictator marshaling his forces on his neighbor’s border would be more carefully evaluated than was the case in 1990.

The essence of modern airpower is rapidity. It is truly the forte of the B-2. Though based in Missouri, it can reach anywhere on the globe in hours, with little preparation or support.

★ For the United States military, “rapidity” has strategic as well as tactical implications.

The United States is blessed with good strategic location, safely tucked as it is between two large oceans on its east and west, and two friendly nations to its north and south. While it is subject to attack from the sea, air, and space, such attacks can be contained, given an adequate navy, air force, and ballistic missile defenses. Since naval, air, and space forces are highly mobile, they can be sized and operated both for domestic defense and warfare throughout the world. U.S. land forces, on the other hand, must expect to engage in faraway parts of the world and not in homeland defense, but their mobility is limited, and it takes time.

Thus, in conflicts far from our shores, the maritime, air, and space forces will either already be on scene or will quickly arrive on scene; the limiting factor will be the arrival of ground forces. Space is on scene at any given time, based on the orbital characteristics of the system. Airpower can arrive in minutes or hours, depending on basing. Sea power may be on scene, or can arrive in days, depending on the location of the ships. But the ever-increasing CONUS basing of land forces means that they will take weeks or months to arrive in strength in a conflict region far from the United States.

It follows that if we are to use military force to deter or resolve conflict in its earliest stages, then we must exploit the rapid strategic mobility of space, air, and naval forces. And if we are to advance the capability of our military forces to deter or resolve conflict, we must increase the rapidity of the land forces’ strategic mobility.

Since we are seldom able to predict the outbreak of hostilities, it is vital that the United States have forces that can reach the scene of conflict as quickly as possible, and then move quickly within a battle space.

★ Any future enemy will surely have precision attack weapons that exploit standoff. This means that our military forces must be able to hide or disguise themselves (control the environment) and to rapidly relocate (to areas where enemy weapons are not aimed). This also means that air weapons systems must have longer range, to allow them to be based under our own defensive umbrellas or at airfields or on ships beyond the reach of enemy missiles. This also means that land forces must be able to mass and disperse rapidly in order to accumulate the decisive power needed to win a battle, while denying enemy standoff weapons large, lucrative targets. Tactical mobility is achieved in the air by high-performance aircraft, at sea by long-endurance powerful turbine engines, and on land by high-speed vehicles and by forces that are not tied to large logistic support lines.

While military forces throughout the world are seeking these capabilities — long range, high speed, and freedom from encumbering supply trains — they are not always training and organizing to exploit the advantages of rapid thinking and acting.

BRILLIANCE

This brings me to the last of the elements needed to attain victory in the future — the “brilliance” with which we employ advanced technology. Brilliance is a code word for initiative, and is therefore nothing more than the decisions produced by humans in a decentralized environment.

This is a revolution, not because it is new but because we live in an age when all the natural tendencies drive us toward centralization.

So, for example, the revolution in computers and communications means that information can be transferred on an unprecedented scale from the battle back to some headquarters. From this, some conclude an increased value in centralized analysis and decision making. Why not, they claim, watch over the battle in the calm, cool environment of some headquarters that is close to the President and far from the agony of war?

Wrong!

This is the false trail that (at least in part) led to our failures in Vietnam, where targets were picked in the White House by leaders with immense knowledge of the politics of the war and little comprehension of battle. We must accept the reality that the closer we come to the battle, the more we are likely to know what it takes to fight effectively.

Though each succeeding higher headquarters will — rightly — have a role in determining goals and objectives, we must keep in mind that those who are closest to the action are the most important participants in the action. They are the ones the so-called higher echelons are there to support.

SPACE

Any discussion of Desert Storm cannot ignore the immense contribution made by our space forces. Even less will we be able to ignore their contributions in the future. In Desert Storm, the primary role of space was to provide knowledge. Space, of course, has many other military uses.

Space operations fall into one of two areas — information or combat. Information operations provide data, either as a medium (such as communications satellites) or as a source (such as ballistic missile launch warning, imagery, GPS navigation, and time data). Combat operations include weapons that pass through space (Scuds and ICBMs arrive through space), weapons that defend against such weapons (either lasers, target trackers,[71] or kinetic impact devices), and weapons that shoot down satellites (in the 1980s, the USAF shot down a satellite using a missile launched from an F-15).

The Air Force has been an able steward of space. The ballistic missile programs of the fifties, sixties, and seventies have matured into the space lift of today, and now upward of 95 percent of our military space assets and operations are acquired and operated by USAF programs and organizations. Blue suits dominate the military cooperative programs with NASA and the National Reconnaissance Office, and Patrick, Vandenberg, and Falcon Air Force Bases have become the core of our military space launch and on-orbit operations.

This situation is not without problems. For starters, our reliance and ability to exploit space grew from support of Cold War deterrence operations. Some of these mind-sets still remain. Second, space is often seen as a subset of air operations.

In fact, as Desert Storm has shown, space has become a pervasive influence in almost every aspect of military operations.

Take GPS.

The GPS system not only tells everyone where they are, it provides everyone the same time (which is vital to such things as the synchronization of encrypting devices on radios), and it is everywhere accessible to all.

Take reconnaissance.

We can watch the enemy nation and adjacent seas anytime in any condition.

Take global broadcast.

We can beam two hundred channels to our forces deployed in any country. The Army can watch updates of battle maps; the Air Force can get target information; the Navy can get weather reports; the chaplain can air his message for the day; and the commander can brief the troops on the upcoming offensive. Anything that is classified will require a decoder box for that channel; no problem.

In other words, space has become too big, too important, to be treated as a subset of air operations or of the Cold War.

Airmen now face a difficult choice: either to define space as air operations at a higher altitude, or to develop doctrine that describes space operations in terms as different from air as air is from land or sea. For the time being, the Air Force has crafted a course of action that defines itself as an “air and space” force that could become the “space and air” force. But that may not be enough.

Our space force is the servant to all our military services. The Army and Marine Corps rely more heavily on global positioning satellite information than do their comrades in the air or on the sea. The Navy requires satellite communications to coordinate the activities of their far-flung fleets. As a result, the land and sea forces are deeply concerned that they rely almost exclusively on the USAF to satisfy their space needs. The problem here is that the Air Force has its own needs (many of which have little to do with space), and these needs have to be funded. As long as each service is funded at an artificial rate almost equal to one-third of the defense budget, the Air Force will be hard-pressed to fill its core air responsibilities while growing its role in space.

All of this means that our space force may need to become a military entity in its own right, equal and apart from our air, land, and maritime forces. At some point the nation must ask itself if we should artificially limit our space and air capabilities with the present budgeting methodology, when both are growing in importance to our defense strategy.

CINCSPACE

I have a particular interest in space because, after the war, from 1992 to my retirement in 1994, I was commander of the U.S. space forces.

Space people are interesting. By that I mean that most of them don’t seem very much like most of us — not X-Files different, but definitely leaning toward strange.

For one thing, you’d think space people would be the most flexible, daring, and future-oriented individuals you’re likely to meet. In fact, that is not usually the case. Most of them are incredibly cautious. Many bad things can go wrong in their world; and when they do, the results can be catastrophic. Even a little glitch can be a big problem when the glitch is 22,500 miles above the surface of the Earth. Each space launch is a unique event (just as it was forty years ago). Every time space folks put a satellite on tons of explosive fuel, their memories retain the scars of huge explosions on the launch pad or shortly after liftoff. We all saw the Challenger tragedy on our television sets.

In other words, space folks are the most conservative group you will find. They make Swiss bankers look like druggy surfers. They agonize over every aspect of their trade. The design and construction of satellites can take many years. There are inevitable delays — often measured in years. Nothing is left to chance.

Once the bird is in orbit and functioning, it is turned over to the satellite flyers, men and women who work in windowless rooms in front of flickering computer screens. They are backed up by the men and women stationed around the globe (usually at lonely, faraway locations such as island atolls and Arctic wastelands) who operate the radio net that communicates with the orbiting vehicles.

In the control rooms, you’ll find computer geeks, people who are among the most highly trained, motivated, educated, disciplined, and competent professionals in our military.

When you enter the room, you notice the hush. The hum of air conditioners is about the only sound present, until you begin to realize there’s also a click, click, click of computer keys. That’s the noise the space pilots make when they fly their vehicles.

Occasionally, there’ll be an anomaly that the operator cannot fix — say, an overheating transmitter as the sun bakes the side of the bird facing its rays. The operator desperately tries to coax the bird to turn so more heat-dissipating material will protect the affected part, but to no avail. When the operator finally realizes he (or she) can’t resolve the anomaly on his (or her) own and turns to the supervisor on duty for help, they don’t yell “Help” or “Mayday” or “SOS”; they look up from their screens and wave their hand to beckon their leader to their station. The expert then quietly rises from his/ her own computer station, walks to the unhappy operator, and bends down to look at the flashing red numbers to which the operator is pointing on the computer screen. These are code for the problem occurring halfway around the world and thousands of miles out in space. The supervisor reaches over and moves the computer keyboard where he or she can tap the “backspace” key to clear the command column, then types in a series of numbers and letters to command the bird to take healing action. Both watch the numbers on the reporting display change as the action takes effect and the bird is saved. Then both go back to their normal work.

The battle was fought without anyone speaking a word. Welcome to the silent world of space.

Is it surprising that such people have made little impact on the guys with guns and bayonets, or that the warriors have had little understanding of how space can support their operations?

When I arrived at SPACECOM, I very quickly found the reason for this. It was fear. The space people were afraid that the mean, ugly warriors would laugh at them for being geeks, and the warriors were afraid the space geeks would laugh at them for being stupid. I knew I had to do something.

First, I accused the space people of doing “a war dance in their own tepees.” That is, they were busy creating systems to support military operations, but they were not out marketing their wares, for fear they’d get laughed at or rejected. Then I publicly announced that I was Geek Number One and that I was going to learn all I could about their black art. Since I had some experience getting shot at, I figured this was one geek the warriors would not reject. Then I started marketing the wares space could provide the warriors.

At the same time, I made sure that the often hobby-shop efforts of the space people actually related to the needs of the folks pulling triggers in anger.

Soon it became fun for everyone, as the warriors began to realize more and more the immense contributions space systems and products could make to their efforts; and the space geeks began to gain confidence, not only because of the excellence of their work, but because national heroes thought highly of them and their work.

We are not there yet, but I long for the day when a space geek walks into a fighter pilot bar and announces, “You boys better get out of here. I’ve had a bad day flying my satellite, I intend to get drunk, and if that happens I may get mean and hurt one of you.” At that point, the space pilots will have earned their spurs. “Every man a tiger” applies to all the skies, those above the air included.

These are some of the first things I learned as Geek Number One:

To start with, keep in mind that when you enter space, nothing is there. That’s good if you want to fly without drag, or if you want to use a laser without the attenuation problems one gets in air, or if you want to see without clouds or dust getting in the way. But living and breathing don’t come as easily as down here.

So why go there? Because you can do a lot of things you can’t do on Earth. Satellites offer a very convenient platform.

How do satellites work?

Imagine a big cannon. Shoot a projectile out of it at, say, a forty-five-degree angle; the projectile makes an arc and hits some distance away. Shoot the projectile with greater velocity; the projectile makes a longer arc and falls farther away. If you keep increasing the velocity, eventually the projectile falls completely around the Earth, and it has become a satellite. It is now in orbit.

An infinite variety of orbits are possible, and various orbits have various useful purposes.

For example, if you place a satellite at approximately 22,300 miles above the equator and set it in motion with a speed that matches the Earth’s rotation, then it just sits there (at least from the point of view of the Earth). Looked at from below, it’s stationary — or geosynchronous (GEO), to use the technical term — with a little less than half the world in its field of view (the exceptions are the polar areas). That means it can receive line-of-sight signals from Earth and beam them back to a receiver located anywhere else in the world that is in its field of view. Hooking these two stations up would mean a lot of copper wire; plus, you can send transmissions to intermediate stations in between. Best of all, you can send the radio beam to another satellite, also hovering over the equator, and that one can send it to another. Either of these can send the message down to a station within its field of view. In that way, you can contact anyplace on Earth (except at its very top and very bottom).

This orbit is best for communications satellites. It is also the home of our Cold War infrared satellites, such as the ones that detected the ballistic missiles launched at Riyadh or Israel.

If you want your satellite to listen to radio broadcasts from some station on Earth — say, KRNT radio in Des Moines, Iowa — it turns out that GEO may not provide a view of an area you want covered. That means you want your satellite to be closer to the station. The problem is that a GEO orbit is the only place in which the satellite will stand still over the surface of the earth; and besides, since you don’t care to listen to ABC in Perth, Australia, on the other side of the world, you want your orbiting satellite to float over Des Moines and whiz by Perth. That means you’ll want to create an egg-shaped orbital path, with the Earth located at the bottom of the small part of the oval. In that way, your satellite will spend most of its time looking down on Iowa and very little time looking down on down-under. This kind of elliptical orbit is called a “Molniya” orbit (the word is Russian; I don’t know what it means).

If you want to use a satellite to look closely at the surface of the earth, then you’ll want to fly it as close to it as you can get, because the closer you are, the better you can see things. So you put your satellite in as low an orbit as possible. The problem now is that if you get too low, you start scraping air, and your bird slows down and eventually falls to earth. This orbit is called Low Earth Orbit, or LEO (about 60 to 300 miles up).

If you want to listen instead of look, then you might go higher, so your satellite has more of the Earth’s surface in its field of view. This is called Medium Earth Orbit, or MEO (anything between LEO and GEO). Hence, the space geeks talk about LEO and MEO, GEO and Molniya. And if you learn to say “anomaly” when something is screwing up, and “effemerius” when you mean speed, altitude, and heading, then you’re well on your way to becoming a true space cadet.

★ As CINCSPACE, I had three jobs.

First, I was CINC NORAD. There, it was my responsibility to maintain the air sovereignty of the United States and Canada. Though watching over sovereignty involved keeping track of what flew over our nations from outside our borders, the real job was to evaluate the indications of a ballistic missile attack on the United States and Canada, in order to advise the President and the Prime Minister, so the President could order the nuclear response that would end the world. NORAD handled this warning and evaluation (rather than, say, CINCSTRAT, who would order the attack, should that come) to keep the evaluator separate from the trigger-puller. Of course, the biggest tip-off would have been the radar and IR satellite detection of an ICBM attack.

Second, I was CINCSPACE. There, I commanded components from Army, Navy, and Air Force (of which Air Force Space Command was the largest).

As CINCSPACE, I evaluated and influenced the space programs of the various services. I also validated the requirements documents used by the services to support the funding of their programs and made sure that the service programs coordinated with, and supported, the efforts of the sister services. I provided space services to the regional CINCS through the components. So, for example, I made sure the AFSPACE flyers of the comm satellites positioned their birds to support the needs of a CINC — say, the CINC Korea (technically, the commander combined forces Korea), who had a special need and had been authorized access to the satellite by the JCS and DISA (Defense Information Systems Agency, which handles long-haul communication and tries to make the services’ programs interoperable or joint). I worked with other space agencies, not the least of which was the National Reconnaissance Office (which is responsible for acquiring and operating space vehicles that provide national intelligence, and is headed by an Assistant Secretary of the Air Force). This made sure that the services’ interests were represented in the national community requirements documents. In the past, this had been a big problem, as the NRO mainly responded to the Cold War and did not like to get close to regional conflicts. Though that changed after Desert Storm, I still had problems with the CIA, who wanted the Cold War to remain, so they could do business as usual.

Third, I commanded AFSPACE, the Air Force space component, by far the largest of the three service components working for CINCSPACE. My job there was to make sure operations went as planned and that satellites were maintained and controlled. I also operated ground stations around the world that collected intelligence, talked to satellites, tracked objects in space, launched satellites, or operated the bases that controlled civilian and NRO-launched satellites. I was additionally responsible for recovery of the space shuttle, should there be a problem. If launches or landings went as advertised, then NASA did the job. But if things went bad, then the job was mine. This is because I had the rescue helicopters and military crews capable of reaching and recovering survivors.

As the commander of AFSPACE, I supervised the staff that built the requirements documents that led to new space systems. I managed the funds needed to operate the space networks, maintained the bases, and had a full staff, like any large component.

And finally, I was responsible for the creation of a pair of institutions of which I remain particularly proud, Fourteenth Air Force and the Space Weapons Center.

Fourteenth AF has assigned to it all the space assets of the USAF and serves as a space component in the event of war.

Its assets include both launch complexes at Vandenburg AFB, California, and Patrick AFB at Cape Canaveral, Florida; Falcon AFB (now Schriever, named after General Bernard A. Schriever, who was the genius behind our development of ICBMs, as well as the engines we use to put satellites into orbit — Atlas, Titan, and Delta) east of Colorado Springs, where the actual flying of satellites is managed; and units around the world that make up the AFCN (Air Force Control Network).

Until Fourteenth AF came into existence, there was no specific space component responsible for war-fighting. Space “products” were simply delivered haphazardly.[72]

As I said earlier, the space folks didn’t know war, and the warriors did not know space. Therefore the spacers had capabilities that could help the troops with guns, but since they had no idea what the armed mob did, they could not tell them what they had to offer. On the other hand, the armed mob had no idea what was available. Keep in mind, as well, that most of space is highly classified, owing to its long association with the Cold War and national agencies. Is it surprising that the left hand hardly ever knew what the right hand was doing?

The Space Warfare Center was set up to allow a group of people (half of whom were space warriors and half of whom were air warriors) to think about space war and to exercise space war in the same manner that the Fighter Weapons Center had done since the 1960s. They would then bring space to unified command exercises in Korea or the Middle East, or to service war games such as Blue Flag and Red Flag.

My role at Space was to bring as much war-fighting awareness to the space people, to organize them to respond to the needs of people in combat or crisis management. I pushed for systems that would pay off in regional war and tried to kill everything that addressed only Cold War requirements, such as low data rate communications satellites (satellites that could withstand a nuclear burst in space and thus maintain CINCSTRAT’s command-and-control communications, so his airborne bombers could execute their missions).

Most of all, I worked on the awareness, attitude, and motivation of the space people. In other words, lots of Bill Creech — Pride, Product, Professionalism, Initiative.

★ I couldn’t close out any discussion of space without a discussion of space exploration. This may seem like a long way from Iraq and Desert Storm, but it’s all on the same continuum of what man can dream and achieve.

People talk about space as the last frontier. It’s right that they should. Oh, there are people who oppose it, mostly among those who call themselves intellectuals and opinion makers. Their objections take two forms.

First, these people want to see space free from human contamination. “Why subject humans to the intolerable risk of space travel, when robots do a better job?” True, space is not safe, but that’s not the point. The point is that men and women will go where men and women want to go.

Second, they want to keep space free from the contamination of weapons. “Why not keep the contagion localized?” Their argument is stronger here, but they may as well try to keep their daughters virgins. Weapons are already in space. See above.

In the sixteenth century, there were Europeans who argued against exploring and settling the new continents to the West. They are now forgotten.

There seems to be enough water on Mars to support life — if not Martian life, then the earthly kind. Let’s go there. Let’s mine the asteroids. Let’s go to Titan and gaze meditatively at Saturn’s rings. And why stop there?

As we fly beyond earthly bonds, let’s face it, we’re likely to get into fights. We’re contentious. Sure, there’s a possibility that sanity will prevail (and I pray that it will), but, humans being humans, don’t count on it.

But so what?

Humankind needs expanding frontiers. We are a curious, questioning, outward-going (in every sense), contentious, competitive bunch. We don’t like confinement — even when the boundaries of our confinement are as wide as the world that gave us birth.

Man will not be contained.

So let him soar!

When we talk about “Lessons Learned,” there is one that hasn’t been emphasized enough in the literature I’ve read about the Gulf War, and I want to underline it here, at the end of this book. Desert Storm was an international team effort. It couldn’t possibly have worked as well as it did — or maybe even worked at all — if all the nations hadn’t cooperated, paid respect to one another, and shouldered equal portions of the burden. This was not an American war. It was a Coalition war. And we’d better remember how we did it if we’re to be successful in the wars of the future.

The same thought occurred to Chuck Horner on a day in mid-February 1991, a time when the air war was on autopilot. The planes took off in the morning and sallied forth to bomb the Iraqi Army. They returned to bases in Saudi Arabia to load more bombs, then continued the pounding of Saddam’s helpless troops — now little more than an armed rabble, hunkering down anywhere that offered safety from the aerial onslaught.

Among Coalition airmen, everyone was tired, worn down, fatigued, for this was the hard part of war — the unnecessary part. The outcome of the war had been decided, yet the killing went on. Even after his losses of the first month of the war, and even after days upon days of mind-numbing bombing attacks, the contest of wills between the Coalition and the Iraqi leader continued. Saddam Hussein still held on to the notion that he could somehow win this conflict and keep his stolen treasure, Kuwait.

In mid-February, a new addition to the Coalition air force arrived, when Korea sent four C-130 transports to help move the armies to the west for the ground offensive. The day they landed at their new home at Al-Ain Air Base in the United Arab Emirates, Chuck Horner greeted the senior representative of the Republic of Korea Air Force, Major General Lee. Lee would go on to command the ROKAF, become the chairman of their military forces, and eventually become the Secretary of Defense of his country; but that day he was another member of the Coalition, an equal.

At their initial meeting, Horner was surprised at Lee’s quiet, humble, and somewhat abashed tone.

At that point, Horner was totally unaware that the ROKAF had never engaged in foreign deployed operations — operations the USAF takes for granted. Thus they were not equipped with the kits of aircraft spare parts, maps, radio navigation charts, tents, fuel bladders, and bags of individual equipment (such as helmets and chemical weapons protection gear) that are everyday life to an American C-130 squadron. They had simply loaded up their transports with maintenance personnel and whatever spare tires and maintenance equipment they could carry, and had flown off to the unknown. The possibility that they might get shot down and die was of little concern. The questions General Lee faced were far more troubling: How would he feed and house his men? Where would they get fuel and supplies to maintain their jets? Most of all — as newcomers to a war that was well into its fourth week — would they be accepted? The honor of an entire nation rested on his troubled shoulders.

He had no doubt that his men would work tirelessly to do whatever was asked of them. He knew that they would risk their lives to fly missions in support of the Coalition ground forces as they advanced into occupied Kuwait and Iraq. But he also knew that without a helping hand, he would fail, and his aircraft would sit on the ground, idle, even a burden, while others fought and died. Despite this profound unease, he was too proud to beg.

As they talked, Horner began to realize how truly worried and anxious the Korean was — even as he himself knew for certain that most of General Lee’s worries were groundless.

And at that moment, he had a small revelation. It hit Horner as it had never hit him before what the Coalition was all about. Let him tell you his ideas on that.

★ When I met General Lee, my first thoughts were Gee, another nation is joining us, and we can sure use their transports. Our airlifters are worn out moving the armies to the west. But when I met him, I was struck with his apologetic, almost embarrassed, manner. He was worried that he might not have the wherewithal to accomplish his mission. I quickly put those fears to rest with a warm handshake, and with assurances that whatever his people needed would be provided: housing and meals courtesy of the UAE Air Force hosts, spare parts and command and control from his USAF counterparts, and lots of productive work from everybody. We’re all partners in the war to free Kuwait, I concluded.

After my assurances, a huge wave of relief came over him, and in a moment, he and I became friends.

Up until that instant, I had almost taken the Coalition for granted.

It was then that I began to comprehend the nature of this Coalition, its uniqueness in history, and its importance as a defining aspect to future warfare. It was then that I began to treasure the — what was the right word? Brotherhood? Fellowship? The precise term didn’t come easy; we were in a new world here — which I had been too busy to comprehend since those early days of August.

For the first time I realized that this coalition was far different from the joining of forces that had occurred in World Wars I and II… that we were a team, not the augmented American force of the Korean War and our ill-fated attempt to fight as a coalition in Vietnam… that we Americans were in a position of leadership — yet were truly not in charge… that the other national leaders on the team were aware that we were big, had all the nicest equipment, and could be painfully self-assured and arrogant; yet that equality with us was their right and privilege — even though they could never ask for, much less demand, that status, because to do so would be an admission that we were in fact in charge.

General Lee had hit me right between the eyes. He’d made me awaken to the sacrifice it must have been for the other members — especially those from outside NATO — to trust the Americans. And suddenly I began to actually identify with my fellow airmen from this rainbow of nations, joined under a common command in a common purpose.

★ Later that week, I ran into Colonel Mohammed Al-Ayeesh in the Black Hole. This Saudi fighter pilot and Major Turki bin Bandar (called Little Turki) had been the first foreign officers to join the Black Hole planning group in September.[73]

In September, we had had no foreign officers assisting our planning for offensive air operations, and that had troubled me. Yet I knew that if I asked permission from Schwarzkopf, he would be concerned about security leaks and deny my request. Still, in the belief that it was better to seek forgiveness than to live a life of indecision, I’d gone to General Behery.

“Ahmed,” I said, “you must know we are planning offensive operations against the Iraqis.”

With a smile, he assured me he was well aware that all those Americans shuttling to and from the large conference room next to both our offices must have been involved in something beyond the defense of Saudi Arabia.

I then explained that I did not want to commit his nation to a war in Iraq, but we both knew that such a thing would be required if Saddam did not terminate the occupation of Kuwait.

He agreed.

Then I took a deep breath, prayed that Schwarzkopf would not kill me when he found out, and asked if General Behery had a couple of bright young officers who could participate in our planning efforts. If we were to be a true coalition, we needed representation from the other nations that would join in the fight to free Kuwait. I assured him that this did not constitute a formal agreement by his government, and added that, though I fully expected them to keep him informed, anyone he gave me would be sworn to secrecy.

He nodded. Then we turned our conversation to other matters.

Later that day, Ayeesh and Little Turki reported to my office, and I took them to the Black Hole to meet their new boss, Buster Glosson.

★ When I ran into Ayeesh that day in February, I asked him about those opening days back in September, and especially about how the Americans had accepted his presence. I wanted to understand how we treated Coalition members from other nations.

Breaking into a huge smile, his eyes sparkling, he asked me, “You really want to know?” When I nodded, yes, he bluntly told me, “They treated me like a dumb officer. The moment I walked in, they shunted me to the side.

“General Glosson was a great boss,” he went on to explain, “and he treated us with respect; but we didn’t work with him. We had to work with our counterparts in your air force; and with them I was reluctant to speak, and they were not interested in what some Arab who had never been to war had to offer.”

By February, of course, the two Saudis had become full partners in the Black Hole team, but I realized what a high hill they’d had to climb to overcome the inherent prejudices of the Americans.

I thought back then to the beginning of the war, when Sheikh Mohammed from the United Arab Emirates had flown to Riyadh with his two planners in order to ensure that the largely American staff accepted them. I recalled the first time I had met Colonels Khalid and Faris as they and the Sheikh had nervously ridden down the elevator with me to go meet Buster.[74] Because their Chief of Staff had trusted them to ensure that their fledgling air force was well represented in our councils of power, they were proud, almost arrogant; yet they were also afraid. You could see it in their eyes as they entered this den of Americans — violent, self-assured people who liked to call Arabs “ragheads” behind their backs, and whose movies about terrorism always seemed to feature bad guys who looked very much like they did.

It was Ayeesh who made me ponder the importance of this coalition and how hard it was to form it and sustain it.

★ What set this coalition apart from other military associations of states was not the nobility of their cause. Certainly the mission of the Allies who liberated occupied nations in World War II was measurably more important on that scale. What set this coalition apart was the attitude of the Americans.

It all started with the President. George Bush instinctively knew the role he had to play, and it was far from the interventionist role that had characterized the attitude of his predecessors in Vietnam. It was not his role to dictate the contribution of others, to tell them how they would fit into an American war. Rather, George Bush’s experience as head of the CIA and Ambassador to China and the United Nations had taught him that Americans did not have all the answers and that others could contribute more than just the lives of their fighting men. For that reason, he had sent Dick Cheney to Jeddah in August to ask King Fahd what he thought we should do after the invasion of Kuwait. And as the days dragged on, the Coalition grew stronger, not weaker, despite the difficulties that countries of such diverse cultures and interests experienced working side by side. In large measure, that was because the American President did not throw his weight around. He listened and sought counsel from the others.

As a result, the men and women from other Coalition states did not receive secret phone calls from their capitals warning them to watch the Americans, telling them to be careful lest the United States military lead them down the path taken in Vietnam.

The Americans needed this Coalition as much as those fighting to defend their countries in the Gulf needed us.

At the end of the Cold War, there remained a single superpower, the United States. How long she will remain so, only God knows, but for now we are it. This is a very dangerous thing. Our economy dominates the economies of other nations. Or as the Saudis (whose riyal is tied to the dollar) say, “When America gets a cold, we get pneumonia.” If the President of the United States decides to bomb another nation, who can stop him? Sure, other nations can condemn our actions, and Russia retains the means to rain thousands of nuclear weapons on North America. But the size, economic strength, and military power of the United States is without equal.

Therefore, it is incumbent on the American president to walk carefully and to think before acting, as unintended consequences of military action — no matter how noble the cause — can have far-reaching effect.

This is why the Gulf Coalition and the way it was formed and maintained is so important. The cause was noble — to free Kuwait. The Americans were needed, because of their military power and leadership roles in organizations such as the United Nations. But the Americans needed the other Coalition partners: to provide bases and ports for access; to provide soldiers, sailors, and airmen to confront a huge Iraqi military machine fighting on their own soil; but most of all, to provide counsel and legitimacy for a superpower that, left to its own devices, could fall into a pit of quicksand like Vietnam.

Because of the divergent cultures, self-interests, and experiences of its partners, the Coalition was hugely difficult to form and maintain. The biggest divergence was between Americans and Arabs.

The four-decade-plus existence of NATO provided common experience for American, Canadian, French, Italian, and English members of the Coalition. And for airmen, integration was further eased because they all spoke English and (as noted earlier) flight operations are task-organized. Thus, they could fight in the same piece of sky and work as one, using the common Air Tasking Order as guidance while retaining prerogatives appropriate to their national identities.

By way of contrast, the Gulf Cooperation Council nations did not share an experience like those from NATO. More important, they did not have the combat experience of Korea, Vietnam, and the Cold War. Thus, they entered the fight as an equal partner who did not feel equal. More important still, their air forces were young. If it was troubling to a young USAF pilot to wonder how he would do his first time in combat, consider how troubling it must have been to an Arab fighter pilot to wonder how he would do his first time in combat.

In fact, the Arabs had nothing to worry about on that score.

Let’s look at the record.

In their brief combat in a life-or-death losing cause, the Kuwaiti Air Force did very well. When the Iraqis came across the border that night long ago in August, the air force of Kuwait rose to meet them.

A key ingredient of the Iraqi plan had been to capture the emir of Kuwait and his family, so the invaders could establish a puppet government and legitimize their theft of the nation and its people. In advance of the attacking tanks, Iraqi special forces, some of Saddam’s best-trained, best-equipped, and most loyal troops, were flying in helicopters to Kuwait City to surround the royal palace, overwhelm the royal guard, and capture the emir.

It didn’t happen. KAF fighter aircraft and surface-to-air missiles shot down thirty-three of the Iraqi vanguard.

Though the fight was over quickly, and Kuwaiti air bases were overrun by tanks early the next morning, the KAF had bought the time the emir needed to flee to Saudi Arabia. Having saved their emir, the KAF fighters had to turn themselves and flee to Saudi Arabia. While they were bitterly ashamed of their defeat, they had fought well and now only wanted another chance to avenge the unholy occupation of their land and to liberate their wives and children in occupied Kuwait. Men like Lieutenant Colonel Al-Samdan, who represented his nation in the TACC, had only one fear — that the Coalition would not go to war, that Kuwait would not be freed, and that they could never go home to their families.

For the other GCC nations, the choices were less clear.

The year before, Bahrain had received brand-new F-16s, the world’s premium multirole aircraft, after its pilots and ground crews had operated F-5 fighters for years. Though F-16s are easy jets to fly and maintain, it is difficult to maximize the full capabilities of this amazing aircraft’s avionics suite. In the USAF, years of training are required before pilots are capable of using the F-16 to its fullest. The Bahrainis didn’t have a year, and they didn’t have homegrown leaders who had fought in Vietnam to guide them.

But they did have “Saint”—the call sign used by an American who had left the USAF and taken a job in Bahrain as an instructor pilot. I cannot use his real name. A typical fighter pilot, Saint loved flying more than anything else. So when the chance came to fly with the Bahrainis — to fly daily, with no paperwork other than filling out grade sheets — he jumped at it.

When Iraq invaded Kuwait, the emir offered his nation’s squadrons of F-5s and F-16s to the task of aiding Kuwait, and he asked Saint to help.

This request meant problems for Saint. As an American citizen and not a member of our military forces, it was legally forbidden for him to take part in another nation’s combat operations. So when the Iraqis threatened Bahrain, he should have joined those who fled the region. Instead, he stayed on where he was needed, training pilots.

After the war began, Major Hamad, the commander of the Bahraini Air Force, was faced with a dilemma: His air force was eager to enter the war; his pilots were well trained; he had some of the best-maintained jets in the world; but he had no one with combat experience — no one with the self-confidence that combat instills. He didn’t have to look far for a solution.

He went to Saint and asked him to help get them started, and Saint was not only delighted to help, he was overjoyed at the chance to return to combat, and honored that Hamad had asked him.

Saint flew the first Bahraini combat mission as leader. He flew the next one as number three. Then, as the Bahrainis gained combat experience, he flew as number four.

He did this fully aware that flying combat for Bahrain was putting him into a legal no-man’s-land. At worst, if he was shot down, he had no status as a prisoner of war and could be executed as a spy. He could also lose his citizenship, as our State Department takes a very dim view of Americans running around the world fighting for other people. But he was a fighter pilot, and such insignificant details couldn’t keep him from strapping on his G suit.

Saint flew as many missions as he could, but reckoning had to come, and finally, friends in the American embassy warned him that the State Department had heard rumors about his activities and were preparing to investigate.

Though his combat missions had to stop, Saint’s experience and example had made a significant contribution to the Bahraini pilots’ self-confidence. Day in and out, they flew combat air patrols and bombed targets in Kuwait.

Were they afraid? Certainly. Was it a huge challenge? Yes. But they did everything asked of them with professionalism and pride.

After the war, I visited Sheikh Isa Air Base and pinned air medals on the chests of twenty-two extremely proud Bahraini fighter pilots. In the back of the room stood Saint. He had no medals on his chest, yet there was just as much pride on his beaming face.

Bahrain may have had the smallest air forces to fly combat in the Gulf War, but their record in the war was second to none.

★ The United Arab Emirates received new Mirage fighters in late 1990. So getting them into the war was a very near thing.

When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, Sheikh Zayed had been the first Arab leader to ask for American military assistance. We had deployed two KC-135 tanker aircraft to conduct air refueling exercises with UAEAF aircraft flying defensive air patrols in the Arabian Gulf. Later, Sheikh Zayed’s pilots and their new French fighters joined the Coalition air forces working to free Kuwait. The only problem: his pilots were not trained to operate the new jets, let alone fly them into combat.

Many people believe Arabs are lazy. I can tell you that when the temperature is over 120 degrees Fahrenheit, no one wants to engage in physical labor out-of-doors. Nonetheless, these men from the UAE had no other options. They worked. They put in eighteen-hour days, in ground school and in the air, learning how to fly their new jets, learning how to use their electronic warfare systems, radar, missiles and bombs, and honing combat skills in air-to-air and air-to-ground combat.

Young Colonel Abdullah led their first combat sorties. Though these didn’t go perfectly, the pilots got the job done; they got better; and day after day, they joined the stream of Coalition fighters coming out of the air bases in the UAE and going forward to free Kuwait.

★ Perhaps the biggest hurdle Coalition airmen had to overcome was the fear of failure.

Even Saudi pilots had to face such fears — though they are among the most experienced in the world. Their commanding general, Behery, for example, had flown an F-86 on the national acrobatic team, and their Ambassador to the United States, Bandar bin Sultan, had been a skilled F-5 and F-15 pilot before his king assigned him to duties in Washington.

Even so, young Saudi pilots still had to confront the fear that every fighter pilot faces on his first combat sortie. And for the Saudis, the stakes were higher than normal. After all, the Iraqis were on their border.

The following story of one young Saudi pilot on his first combat mission is not atypical.

SOMETIMES IT TAKES A HERO

Imagine you are a young man who has caught the bug to fly.

Though you live in a nation that has not known war since its birth in the early days of the century, you join your country’s air force, and they send you off to fly the most wonderful airplanes, sleek F-5s and the awkward but powerful high-tech Tornado. You love the freedom of flight, and you are good at it, so there is the pride that comes from competence, and you are proud to serve your king and country.

It is not all easy. Some of your mates do not survive the hazards of flying fighters. You are often away from home, attending schools in the United States. And because you are a Type A personality, you put in more hours around the squadron than do some of the others. Still, it is an idyllic existence — until Saddam Hussein decides to rape Kuwait and threaten the safety of your nation, family, and home.

“Errr,” you think, “maybe being in the Air Force has some drawbacks… Oh what the heck, we’ve been training for this for years… Still, I wonder if I can hack it?”

Lieutenant Colonel Sultan Farhan Al-Milhim — our young aggressive Tornado pilot — loved flying, his country, his family, his base commander General Turki (who was his role model), and his God. Everything else was down in the noise level.

After the dust settled in August, the Royal Saudi Air Force got back into a training routine. Flying out of Dhahran’s King Abdullah Aziz Air Base, Sultan prepared to repel the Iraqi Army if it came across the border from occupied Kuwait.

Later, he planned strikes into Iraq. His target was an airfield, and his sortie on the war’s first night would be part of a major effort involving RSAF Tornadoes, U.S. Navy F-14s, and USAF Wild Weasels.

Early in January, with things heating up, the overall mission commander for the target Sultan had called a meeting of all the flight leaders aboard the aircraft carrier USS Kennedy. The mission commander was responsible for making sure all the planning bugs were worked out and that everyone understood what needed to be done for a successful strike. Once the mission was initiated, the mission commander could call a change or abort — depending on weather, enemy defenses, or the condition of the target.

The meeting went well; the U.S. Navy F-14 WSO mission commander and the Saudi Tornado pilot strike leader were on the same wavelength. Because the plans had meshed so quickly, Sultan was able to slip out to take care of the real reason he’d wanted to visit the carrier: to watch takeoffs and landings — among the most difficult operations performed by any fighter pilot. Though he’d love the challenge of trying that himself, he knew he’d never have the chance. His country didn’t have a carrier.

On January 16, with no inkling yet that war was only moments away, Lieutenant Colonel Sultan put in a long day at work, mostly going over maps and tactics the squadron aircrews would use to attack a variety of targets in Iraq. He worked well past midnight and then headed for home, a lonely place now, as his wife and children had gone to Jeddah to escape the threat of Iraqi Scuds.

On the way home, he stopped at a small restaurant in El-Kobar, a nearby town, for a bite to eat. At home, he called his wife to reassure her that all was well, turned on CNN, and slipped off his flying boots.

The phone rang. It was his squadron commander. “Sultan?”

“Yes,” he answered. (Who else would be here? he asked himself.)

“I want you to come back here,” the squadron commander said.

“Why?” Lieutenant Colonel Sultan asked. “Is there anything wrong?”

“You need to come back. Something has come up.”

“What kind of thing?”

“Maybe we are going to war.”

“Are you serious? You’re not joking?”

“No, come to the squadron.”

The young pilot quickly put his boots back on, turned off the television, and ran to his car. On the way to the base, he drove slowly, thinking about what might be ahead, and as a devout Muslim, his thoughts soon turned to prayer — a prayer shared by all the aircrews that night… not for the protection of his life or forgiveness for the horrible acts he was about to do. It was the universal fighter-pilot prayer: “Please God, don’t let me make a mistake.”

At the base, everything was quiet. He wondered where everyone had gone, but then he noticed lights in the mission planning room. When he got there, the room was crowded. Everybody was there, from General Turki, the base commander, on down; and everybody was talking, trying to brief Turki on the details of the mission they’d been tasked to fly.

Sultan walked across the room to the general, saluted, and asked, “What is going on?”

His squadron commander answered, “We are going to war.”

Sultan then asked, “Is it real?”

The general slowly and sadly answered, “Yes, this is real.”

The aircrews were now assembled, and now it was time for the mission commanders — like Sultan — to lead them. The young lieutenant colonel was one of the oldest fliers in this young squadron in this young Air Force, and now it was time for him to take charge.

Sultan walked to the mission planning table, where the crews were poring over maps and intelligence plots of Iraqi air defense guns and surface-to-air missile sites. At that point, Lieutenant Mohammed Raja, Sultan’s weapons system officer, gave him some disturbing yet exciting news: “Colonel Sultan, sir, I think it’s our time!”

Sultan looked at him. “Are you sure?” he asked, and Mohammed nodded yes.

As they turned to leave, General Turki stopped them. All the pilots at Dhahran’s King Abdullah Aziz Air Base respected Turki. Not only was he a superb aviator, he listened when they needed to get anything off their chests, he chewed them out when they made a mistake, and he praised them when they shined. Because the aircrews loved their commander, they wanted to please him; and because he was one of them, he loved them in return.

Now they had to go on the RSAF mission of war.

Colonel Assura, the chief of logistics, who was standing beside Turki, took Sultan’s hand. “I wish you good luck,” he said.

Then Turki put an arm around him. “Just go for it,” he said. “Good luck. I wish I was with you.”

Moments later, Sultan had assembled the crews in the personal equipment shop. There they donned their survival vests and G suits. Once they were suited up and gathered close around him, he could sense their eagerness and fear. “I know you are used to having a briefing before we fly,” he told them. “Tonight this is war. We will fly off the plan. Don’t change anything. We have been planning this strike for six months. Just follow the plan and you’ll be all right.”

Though he was the oldest man there and was doing all he could to calm them, in his heart Sultan himself was deeply troubled. Most were his students. They hung on his words. But this night would see the birth of a combat air force. After tonight, they would be the old heads, the veterans — but first they had to make it through the night. This was a first time for everything — first time into combat, first time to carry and drop the huge JP-233 runway-busting munitions, and the first time someone would make a concentrated effort to kill them.

The bus ride to the aircraft shelters was deathly quiet. Each man was locked in his own thoughts. For his part, Sultan wondered why they were fighting this war. He thought about the Iraqis, brother Arabs, united in Islam, who had savagely violated Kuwait, also brothers. He thought about an old adage: If someone points a gun at you, and you think he’ll shoot, then you must kill him. Well, the Iraqis were pointing their gun at Saudi Arabia, so he and his WSO Mohammed had killing work to do.

At the aircraft, number 760, the crew chief was busy pulling off the dust covers. Sultan did not do a preflight, since the crew chief had already done that, and he appreciated Sultan’s trust and confidence. As he swung his right leg into the cockpit, a warrant officer on the ground crew asked if they could write a message on the bomb load slung under the fighter’s belly. With a grin, Sultan told them to write whatever they wanted to, then went through the time-honored procedures of strapping the jet to his body. He never learned what message he carried to Iraq, because he was too engrossed with engine start and system check to find out.

Because Sultan had skipped the preflight, he and Mohammed reached the runway first. Though they rolled into their takeoff position eight minutes behind schedule, they knew they could make up the time because slack had been built into the inflight refueling delay. The engine run-up was good, and the afterburners lit off, blasting the night’s silence and darkness with a roar and yellow-blue flames. As they rolled down the runway, however, Sultan realized he had never flown so heavily loaded and had not computed the takeoff data, check speed, nosewheel liftoff speed, takeoff speed, and distance.

“What’s the takeoff speed?” he asked Mohammed on the intercom.

“I don’t know,” Mohammed replied. In true WSO fashion, the backseater had no intention of doing the pilot’s job for him, even if it meant he might wind up in a ball of blazing twisted metal off the end of the runway.

“Okay,” Sultan told Mohammed, “I’ll take her to the end of the runway, and then if we can’t get off, I’ll eject and take you with me, okay?”

Mohammed did not answer, as the fighter was now going over 150 miles per hour.

Aware that the heavy bomb dispenser fastened under the aircraft required added speed for a safe takeoff, Sultan watched until the “3,000 Feet Remaining” sign flashed by, then tenderly pressed the front part of the control stick, and the nose of the Tornado started to fly off the runway. As the last of the runway flashed by, the jet was waddling into the darkness.

Sultan had never flown in worse weather — thunderstorms, rain, and lightning buffeted the jet as they searched the night sky for their RSAF KC-130 tanker aircraft; yet when they reached the air refueling contact point over northern Saudi Arabia, they were now only four minutes behind schedule… only, there was no tanker. They had to refuel or they could not get to the target and make it back home.

This really must be war, Sultan thought, because things are rapidly getting all screwed up.

Breaking radio silence, he called the “Camel” aircraft, asking for his position (“Camel” was the call sign used by Saudi pilots for their refuelers).

His tanker answered that he was a hundred miles to the south, too far for Sultan to make a rendezvous, refuel, and make it to the target on time. In other words, Sultan and Mohammed were out of the show their very first try at combat.

Just then, another Camel aircraft called, its pilot a longtime flying buddy of Sultan’s. “Sultan, is that you? Do you need gas? I’m at the refueling track at the next block altitude, sixteen thousand feet.”

In their excitement, Sultan and his KC-130 pilot friend were talking in Arabic instead of the more correct English, until someone else came up on frequency to tell them to keep quiet (they were supposed to be comm out). Sultan then climbed up 4,000 feet and put his Tornado behind this new tanker. Now he had to get hooked up to the basket trailing a hundred feet behind the KC-130. During daylight and in good weather, this was a demanding task. At night and in thunderstorms with a heavily loaded jet, it proved close to impossible.

Sultan called his tanker friend: “If you really want to help me, climb another four thousand feet so we can get on top of this weather.”

“I can’t,” Camel replied. “There are aircraft above us.” (He had read the Air Tasking Order, good man.)

Always the fighter pilot, Sultan simply hooked up and said, “Then keep your eyes open and give me high flow.” (That meant pump the gas at maximum pressure, so the receiver aircraft would fill its tanks in the minimum time.)

As they bounced through the night sky, riding the tops of angry clouds, desperately hanging on to the hose of a pirated tanker, risking collision with other aircraft scheduled to use that same piece of sky, Sultan asked Mohammed to let him know exactly when they had enough fuel to get to the target and back. Though they were now eight minutes late and still short on gas, Mohammed advised Sultan that they could do that.

Sultan thanked the tanker and backed off, then rolled the fighter onto its back and split “S”s down into the inky blackness. Because of their high-speed descent, and because the tanker had dropped them off at the north end of the refueling track, they were able to save six minutes. Now they needed only to fly faster and make their appointed time over target.

Leveling off at 3,000 feet, Sultan checked out the terrain-following radar and its connections with the jet’s autopilot. Since everything was working, he selected 1,500 feet, soon followed by 1,000 feet; and then, swallowing hard, he flipped the switch that caused the fighter to drop to 200 feet above the ground.

This was another first — the first time this crew had operated this close to the ground using the terrain-following system.

Mohammed extinguished the aircraft’s exterior lights, and now, the only light came from the eerie glow of the cockpit displays.

Meanwhile, Sultan watched his moving map display, which showed them where they were located at any given time. He watched with fascination as the Saudi border with Iraq began to approach. This looks like the real thing, he thought, ten miles to the border. Perhaps they’ll call us back. Surely they will call this off.

When they flashed across the border at 200 feet above the desert, Sultan sadly concluded, “Well, so it’s war!” and armed up his weapons dispenser.

On the radio, two squadron mates called that they were three minutes behind and low on fuel. Sultan ordered them home, as they could not possibly catch up, and they must not be late. Meaning: Sultan and Mohammed were now alone.

Mohammed then said to his pilot, “We’re on track and on time.”

Sultan looked ahead, but saw nothing except darkness. At thirty-five miles out, he concluded they were headed for the wrong target, or else nothing was there. At twenty-five miles, the supporting Wild Weasel launched a high-speed antiradiation missile at a SAM radar, and suddenly night turned to day, as thousands of tracers lit the night sky.

In his surprise, Sultan cried out, “My God, look at this, Mohammed!”

But Mohammed, ever the quiet one, had nothing to say about the show. And anyhow, he had more important things to do than gawk at fireworks; he had the exacting work of putting the crosshairs on the target.

At fifteen miles, Sultan asked his mate if he was happy with the target. Meaning, is the radar picture good enough for an accurate release of their weapons?

“See that big fire?” Mohammed answered, meaning the SAMs and tracers rising from the airfield ahead. “That’s it.”

It’s a beautiful thing when your WSO is cool, while you are thinking you’ll never see your wife and children again.

Sultan then realized that it was time to pay more attention to what he’d been sent out to do. At the same instant, it occurred to him that he was likely to die. Thinking he’d better let Mohammed have a vote, he asked, “Mohammed, we can turn back. It’s up to you. Will you go with me?”

The taciturn Mohammed replied simply, “I’ll go.”

Then Sultan repeated the Islamic prayer uttered by those about to die.

As they neared the target, Mohammed got a perfect placement of the crosshairs on the runway that was their target.

Meanwhile, Sultan had grown concerned that the terrain-following autopilot might give a fly-up command because of all the debris being thrown up in front of them. He toggled off the automatic flight system and began to hand-fly the aircraft, easing it down to below 100 feet.

His preplanned attack had him flying across the runway, so bombing errors would be canceled out by the long string of bomblets carried in the JP-233 dispenser. However, since the other Tornadoes tasked to cut the runway would not be coming, he made an instant decision to fly down the runway to ensure it was rendered inoperable for its entire length. Even though this change in plan would expose their aircraft to the maximum gauntlet of enemy fire, he knew he had to do what he had to do.

Slamming his jet around in the night at hundreds of miles per hour, only tens of feet above the ground, he lined up on the long runway now located somewhere in the holocaust of bullets and rockets shooting into the sky. He pressed down with his right thumb on the red button on top of the stick, and the fire-control computer initiated the process that would dispense the runway-cratering bomb over the target.

The jet flashed into the bright streaks from the bullets and rockets meant to kill them, and Sultan spent his longest six seconds, flying down the Iraqi runway.

Then they were streaking back into the darkness and Sultan was about to sigh with relief, when he heard a loud thump, and the aircraft made a shudder. He froze, certain they had been hit by the antiaircraft fire. He nervously checked his dials and lights to see where the problem was. Are we on fire? Are we streaming precious fuel? Is this the end just when I’ve cheated death?

He shouted to Mohammed on the interphone, “We’ve been hit!”

“No, no,” Mohammed answered with his usual cool, “that’s just the empty weapons dispenser.” The dispenser automatically jettisoned when all the bombs were gone. Then he implored his fearless leader, “Please turn back, or else we are going to Baghdad!”

Filled with relief, the pilot pulled his aircraft around to a southerly heading and climbed away from the place of terror and death toward home.

As they crossed the border into the safety of the Kingdom, Sultan and Mohammed were filled with pride — and with gratitude that they hadn’t screwed up. A month earlier, Sultan had gotten into trouble for doing an aileron roll during a night flight. But now as they crossed the border, he made a series of celebratory rolls to the right and then to the left. They were both alive!

At home in the shelter, the crew debriefed to a wildly enthusiastic ground crew. They had successfully brought off a lot of firsts for their young air force.

The next day, I reported the success of their mission success on worldwide news. Their attack had been so precise, I said, that you couldn’t have placed their munitions more accurately if you had driven them out to the runway in a pickup truck.

Meanwhile, after the laughter and crying, General Turki sent Sultan and Mohammed home and told them to take the next day off, which they did; but these combat veterans quickly discovered that in war you don’t relax, except through exhaustion. After they returned to the flying schedule, they flew thirty missions.

Let me add that after his first experience of low-level ground fire, Sultan demanded that they stop flying low-altitude bomb runs, and Turki backed him up. This paid off, for the only Saudi Tornado lost in the war ran out of fuel trying to land in fog at the King Khalid Military City forward operating base (where there was no approach control capable of handling such emergencies).

Some jobs require heroes. Someone has to set the records for others to follow. The hero is afraid, sure: afraid of enemy fire, afraid of being killed, but most of all afraid of screwing up and letting his mates down, afraid of failure. In spite of their fear, Captain Sultan and Lieutenant Mohammed fought the people like me at headquarters who failed to give them adequate warning, fought the weather that dark and stormy night, fought the disruptions that left them the sole aircraft to attack the target, and fought the Iraqis, who had not yet learned to fear and respect our Coalition airpower. They fought and won.

Thank God for heroes.

BUILDING COALITIONS

The key ingredients to forming and maintaining a military coalition are common purpose, political leadership, and military forces that can work together.

The common purpose removes the tendency to define national interests, as in, “What’s in this for me?”

The coalition that fought in the Gulf had one common purpose, to liberate occupied Kuwait. Sure, there were other national interests at stake. For the Europeans, it was access to affordable oil. To the Arabs, it was national survival. Nevertheless, the overarching purpose, the one used to goad the United Nations into action, was to stop the rape, murder, and robbery of one nation by another.

It’s easy enough to say that we need to have a common purpose. The trick is to understand and articulate it. Or, as General George Marshall said, “The hardest thing to do is define the political objectives of war. Once that is done, a lieutenant can lay out an appropriate military strategy.”

★ The political leadership President Bush provided the Desert Storm Coalition was critical to its success. Because he listened to and consulted with the political leaders of the Coalition nations, they were confident that their views and concerns were being considered as the Americans formulated policy and actions. The outgrowth of this trust at the top was trust at the military levels below. And so as the military leaders met, there were no hidden agendas. Certainly there are already enough honest differences between air, land, sea, and space approaches to war; suspicions of national agendas could only have made it far more difficult to plan and execute military operations.

For our part, we among the military worked hard to respect the rights of other sovereign nations. Where a nation had concerns and sensitivities, we modified our rules of engagement, our proposed operations, or our tactics to accommodate them.

We also worked hard to develop interpersonal relationships with our Coalition partners. This was not easy, as rank, egos, and the size of each nation’s military contribution could cause divisiveness.

For airmen, fortunately, rank had little importance, and all spoke the common language of aviation, English. But egos were inevitably a problem, especially for United States personnel who have been taught to swagger from the first day of pilot training and have been brought up in a nation that has little experience of international tact. The size of a nation’s contribution could also have led military leaders to conclude that one nation had more combat expertise than another. Yet superior equipment and more personnel did not automatically translate to wisdom. All had to listen to the others, and where there was honest difference of opinion, it had to be resolved by hard-fought, respectful, but honest debate.

Here the United States military was at a disadvantage, as we are so certain of ourselves. Since we are usually the biggest player, without meaning to, we tend to intimidate our partners. Sure, the others want Americans to lead, but they resent it that we act as though we are in charge.

★ Being in a coalition means doing business the hard way. It takes time and patience. Ego has to be set aside, as the lives of men and women hang in the balance. You won’t have all the answers, and mistakes will be made. But if you build a relationship of trust and openness, respect and acceptance, then you can work through the difficult times.

The immediate success of the Gulf War was the liberation of Kuwait. Perhaps the more enduring success was the working together of the Coalition nations.

In the future, the United States will face many national security challenges that will require military operations ranging from humanitarian aid to war. We already see the United States in a NATO-led coalition doing housekeeping (technically termed “out-of-area operations”) in the former Yugoslavia. It is likely that similar combined military operations will be the pattern for the future — ad hoc coalitions that provide room for many nations to be united in a common cause, with the United States providing leadership but not necessarily in charge.

We were lucky in the Gulf. We had a history of working with the Gulf nations and our NATO partners. But how will we prepare for the future?

Coalition operations are not easy. Command arrangements can be difficult. So can communications (radio equipment is often incompatible, even when the language is common). Intelligence must be shared (the United States often classifies for “U.S. eyes only” even the most obvious details about an enemy). Yet the last remaining superpower needs international partners. We not only gain valuable insights from our compatriots about what needs to be done and how to do it, but we are inhibited from making stupid mistakes. Our combined efforts gain legitimacy because they come from many nations, not just one. Therefore, we need to prepare in peacetime to undertake combined operations during a crisis.

This has begun to happen. Already, United States military forces train with the men and women of other nations. Blue Flag exercises at Hurlburt Field bring together the Gulf War nations to plan and execute air operations, should they be needed in that part of the world. As our focus turns from the Cold War to a more complex new world of ethnic violence, proliferating weapons of mass destruction, and peacekeeping operations, U.S. forces in Europe work with new partners from Poland, the Czech Republic, Ukraine, and Russia.

Annually, our airmen, sailors, soldiers, and marines deploy to Korea, the Middle East, and Africa to train alongside our friends around the world, and our sale of American equipment to other nations ensures we will be capable of operating side by side.

The only question that remains is this: Will our future political leadership have the wisdom and training to form a coalition like the magnificent team that fought in the Gulf? Or will we repeat the mistakes of Vietnam?

A little over a decade after Operation Desert Storm (1991), when Coalition forces liberated Kuwait following the 1990 Iraqi invasion, General Tommy Franks and his air boss Lieutenant General Michael (Buzz) Mosley, initiated Operation Iraqi Freedom; this time to liberate the Iraqi people from the rule of fear imposed by Saddam Hussein. This action, often referred to as Gulf War II, was undertaken for a number of reasons and envisaged a number of goals.

The immediate causes for the new war included a firm belief that Saddam had reinitiated his efforts to produce — or at least acquire — Weapons of Mass Destruction: Defecting Iraqi scientists had outlined his efforts to create mobile laboratories capable of growing spores for anthrax. There was evidence that he was acquiring equipment needed to produce weapons-grade radioactive materials. Large amounts of his pre-1991 war poison gas stockpile had not been accounted for by the United Nations inspection teams. And during the years following 1991, the Iraqi dictator had cunningly thwarted the efforts of the UN weapons inspection teams, sent to Iraq in accordance with the agreements that ended the Desert Storm conflict.

The longer-term causes go back to Desert Storm itself and its aftermath.

We can start with the widespread opinion, which grew up after Desert Storm, that we had halted the operation short of its necessary goal, the removal of Saddam Hussein and his criminal cronies… a view stated publicly by former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and other world leaders. Given the terrorist atrocities of 2001 and later, they may well have been right.

But history has twenty-twenty hindsight.

At the end of February 1991, we had achieved our stated goal in Desert Storm, the liberation of occupied Kuwait. Though the total liberation of Iraq was always an obvious option, we rejected that option in our military councils. There we had discussed the difficulty we would incur fighting an Iraqi enemy defending his home as opposed to one who was pillaging and raping a fellow Arab nation. We were also concerned about adding the severe problems of administering aid to a large and complex country like Iraq to the already daunting problems of assisting current refugees and those ravaged by war in Kuwait.

It must also be understood that the liberation of Kuwait was achieved by a coalition of military forces, not by a single force under a single, unified command. In 1991 ours was a “coalition of the willing,” who were united in the goal of liberating Kuwait, but far less unified in the approach to handling the source of the problem, Saddam’s Iraq. Many of our Coalition allies — most notably our Arab allies, who played a major role in the conflict and were eager to help overturn the occupation of Arab Kuwait — would have had reservations about taking the ground war to Baghdad. Most did not want to be seen as aggressors against an equally Arab Iraq, while some would have objected to a large non-Arab, non-Islamic occupation force in Iraq, with its many historic shrines and Muslim holy places. Some also viewed an evil Saddam more acceptable than a weak Iraq that could not prevent the political/ military force of Iran from encroaching on the borders of the Gulf Arab states. Some members of the Coalition may even have abhorred the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, yet had strong commercial ties to the leadership in Baghdad and wanted a tamed Saddam to remain in power. These were issues for the political, not the military, leadership to sort out.

If our failing in Desert Storm was stopping too soon — and I don’t know that to be the case — the failing came about in part because we did not understand our enemy: Saddam Hussein. Those of us who grew up in the United States, England, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates all came from diverse cultures, but none of us had experienced or understood life under the rule of Saddam and his Baath party colleagues.

That lack of understanding changed after the war, when we were able to learn the truth about conditions inside Iraq from discussions with ordinary Iraqi citizens and captured military personnel. After the war we were able to document the horrific acts committed by the Iraqi secret services against the people of Kuwait. After the war we were able to witness from afar the brutal subjugation of the Kurds, the Marsh Arabs, and other Iraqi people who had attempted to rise up against the dictator in rebellions that we had tacitly encouraged by our defeat of Saddam’s military forces. As we watched Iraqi Army helicopters savage their own citizens, the part we had played, our unwillingness — or inability — to intervene to halt these tragedies, left a bitter taste in our mouths. What could we do? What should we have done?

Such complexities — and the many other complexities of postconflict Iraq in 1991 and 2003—show that while our military is amazingly capable of ever-increasingly efficient and successful conduct of warfare, both our own nation and the coalitions of nations of which we have been part remain much less capable of resolving the effects that result from our use of military force, regardless of our strategies and goals.

Meanwhile, the mission we were sent to launch on January 17, 1991, was to liberate occupied Kuwait, and that is what we did. At the end of February 1991, we had driven the Iraqi Army out of Kuwait City, and shown the vaunted Iraqi Republican Guard to be inept and impotent. Our military had done what was asked of us and had done it in a manner of which we were proud. We had been in the desert for three-quarters of a year — the soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines of the Coalition were tired of the killing and were eager to go home. Unfortunately our desires may have caused the next generation of soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines to spend a much longer period of time in the vast deserts of the Middle East. But then in 1991, who foresaw September 11, 2001?

THE NEW THREATS

The attacks on New York’s twin towers and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., changed the United States, her people, and their leaders.

Before the events of 2001 we had weathered a host of attacks carried out by Al-Qaeda and the agents of Saddam Hussein. These events involved a number of actors and may or may not have been related, yet all were aimed at the United States. The bombings by Al-Qaeda agents of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania caused large numbers of civilian casualties. An Al-Qaeda attack in Yemen nearly sank a U.S. Navy ship, the Cole, and caused the deaths of several of our service men and women. Earlier, agents of Saddam had attempted to assassinate former President George Bush in Kuwait. Later, Iraq expelled the United Nations Weapons of Mass Destruction inspectors and then was caught building surface-to-surface missiles that failed to comply with the agreements that ended Gulf War I.

While these events drew condemnation from many nations, America was seen as big, strong, and resilient, and so reactions out in the world were less vocal than if a smaller, more helpless country had been exposed to actions and attacks such as these. And even in the United States, though our citizens were seriously concerned about these events, they were not outraged enough to be moved toward significant action.

That does not mean that we did nothing. We did retaliate with cruise missiles fired against Al-Qaeda facilities in Afghanistan. We punished Saddam’s misdeeds with air attacks (which seriously damaged his W.M.D. capabilities). We brought our concerns to the UN and other international forums (though such diplomatic efforts were often stifled by other nations, for reasons of their own). Yet none of those actions could be called significant, much less decisive.

It was the stunning visual displays of two Boeing 767 aircraft slicing into the twin towers in New York City, and the smoke and debris of those mighty buildings crashing to the ground, that changed things. It was also the sight of smoke and flames rising around the Pentagon, while our F-16 jet fighters roared overhead looking for the enemy who had just completed his mission, that changed things. It was the recordings of the voices of Americans on an airliner over Pennsylvania that changed things — calling their loved ones on cell phones to tell them of their decision to overpower their hijackers, dying in the effort, and saving the lives of the terrorist target where their aircraft would have been turned into a guided bomb.

The nation was energized on September 11, 2001. It was a shocked nation that quickly became united in grim determination that we had not seen since December 7, 1941.

At that time this was a nation whose military was in the midst of significant reforms, which in some ways made it superbly ready to face the challenges thrown at it by this new war, “a war on terror.” But there was still a long way to go to reshape a military organized, trained, and equipped to fight the Soviet Union into the force needed to counter those who now threatened our national security and the security of our allies around the world.

RAPID DOMINANCE

In January of 1991, Desert Storm unveiled military capabilities that the general public had not previously appreciated. Precision-guided bombs, aircraft that could see moving targets in the air and on the ground, and infrared sights that allowed both pilots in the air and soldiers on the ground to target the enemy in the dead of night all became popular fare on evening television during that dramatic month. Modern warfare had evolved in ways that many considered revolutionary. In the years between Desert Storm and our later wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, military leaders searched for concepts that might explain what was revolutionary in Desert Storm and what was needed and possible in future wars.

In 2001 incoming Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld used the word “transformation” to describe his plans to adapt new ways of operating our military forces, based on exploiting new capabilities and combining these systems with legacy systems, while fighting as a joint land, sea, air, and space team.

Another concept phrase that has been used to describe future warfare is “Rapid Dominance.” The Rapid Dominance approach to defeating the enemy relies heavily on achieving effects against an enemy’s vital systems and institutions — sometimes instead of, sometimes in addition to, destroying his military might. Effects-based operations may include destroying an adversary’s military force, but they may also choose more radical means to influence the enemy to conform to our desired outcome.

In Kosovo, for example, our goal was to remove Serbian forces conducting ethnic cleansing. After fifty-five days of air strikes against Serbian armor had failed to deter the Serbs, NATO forces changed to an effects-based operations strategy that attacked the Serbian leaders’ economic power base. Within three weeks the Serbian forces surrendered Kosovo to the United Nations peacekeepers. The Serbs left the province undefeated in battle, yet NATO had achieved its desired outcome.

★ In order to be effective, Rapid Dominance requires four major elements:

First: Effects-based operations require that their implementers have thorough knowledge of their enemy and of themselves. This goes well beyond the traditional counting of ships, planes, and troops. It requires that the strategists have awareness of what makes the enemy tick — its leadership, populace, economy, and so on. It requires that planners understand how to influence both the enemy leadership and the general populace, and then how to judge the effects of the measures taken to achieve that influence. It requires that new strategies be undertaken as the enemy moves toward the end state desired and also what unintended consequences may result from the military force applied to achieve those goals. Lastly, war impacts both sides. An understanding of how the conflict will affect your own side is needed to avoid undesirable effects to you, even while achieving success over an enemy.

In Vietnam, the enemy was defeated on the battlefield, but the war was lost because of the effects visited on the American public by inept strategies and shoddy execution of military force.

In Operation Iraqi Freedom, we had excellent knowledge of how to defeat the Iraqi forces, but we lacked understanding of the best postconflict strategy. We were aware, for example, that the Iraqi Army was often indifferent, even hostile, to Saddam Hussein’s leadership — and if given alternatives, would not fight. Yet instead of taking this reality into account and acting on it, Coalition forces followed traditional procedures after Iraqi soldiers surrendered. They disarmed them, vetted them for possible war crimes, and then returned them to their homes, if they proved to be guilt-free.

Several Iraq experts are convinced that many Iraqi soldiers felt so shamed by the deprivation of their professional identities and livelihoods that they were driven either to join the armed resistance or to suicide. If these soldiers had been allowed to retain their uniforms and arms, the experts believe, and had been given proper leadership, they would have been useful in combating the postconflict resistance. Without the support of this large contingent of recruits, the former regime members and foreign terrorists who form the core of the resistance would have had a far harder time generating an insurgency. True or not, this analysis demonstrates the kind of intellectual understanding needed to approach the many dimensions of modern warfare.

Second: Once the required knowledge is gained, operations must be undertaken in a rapid manner.

The time dimension has always been an important factor in military operations. But today, due to virtually instant communications, time has become critical. Compare the speed and volume of communication of mail packets between England and the American colonies. Or look at today’s airmail compared to the speed and volume of communications possible using global cell phones or E-mail. An image of an enemy sniper hiding in an enemy stronghold can be transmitted around the world for analysis and identification. Within seconds the sniper can be targeted and killed with a precision weapon.

It is vital that modern military forces learn how to exploit this time factor.

In Operation Iraqi Freedom, the 3rd Infantry Division (ID) closed on Baghdad with astonishing speed. In so doing they broke with traditional doctrine on movement of ground forces, which emphasizes the maintenance of orderly boundaries with allied forces and the importance of logistical supply. In Iraq, as the 3rd ID moved toward Baghdad, they did none of that. They isolated pockets of enemy forces in their rear, lost contact with adjacent friendly forces, and hurtled forward, even when their lines of logistics support became vulnerable to enemy attack or were unable to keep up. The swiftness of their advance was so great that it preempted the enemy’s ability to create defensive rings around Baghdad. By ignoring the traditional doctrine, the 3rd ID and adjacent Marine Corps units imposed their own time-lines on the enemy; and the enemy was unable to keep up with the pace of the battle. The ponderous command-and-control system of the Iraqis, their inability to move freely (due to Coalition airpower), and the speed of our Abrams tanks overwhelmed an Iraqi defense that was never able to establish itself. Even as the Iraqi propaganda spokesman, dubbed “Baghdad Bob,” claimed that Coalition forces were being defeated, Coalition tanks were rumbling up the streets of Baghdad a few blocks away.

Third: To exploit knowledge and act quickly one needs to control the environment.

The environments associated with combat come in many forms. These could include weather, public opinion, electronics, communications, cultures, and peoples, as well as geography and the many other environments associated with war.

In Operation Iraqi Freedom a very harsh sandstorm threatened to mask the movement of Iraqi tanks from Coalition airpower. This would have allowed Iraqi forces to directly engage Coalition ground forces closing on Baghdad and disrupt our uniquely rapid pace of attack. In Operation Desert Storm, an aircraft called Joint STARS made its debut — a Boeing 707 with a large radar system mounted under the fuselage. This radar system can see through sandstorms and observe the movement of ground forces en route to attack our forces. In Iraq, bomber aircraft equipped with bombs guided by Global Positioning Satellite navigation signals were able to take the Joint STARS target coordinates and guide these weapons to the Iraqi tank columns, even though the pilots were unable to see their targets. The combination of the Joint STARS radar and the GPS-guided bombs defeated the effects of the sandstorm; and we were able to control the weather environment.

Meanwhile, we were able to influence our own American media environment by embedding print, TV, and radio reporters in troop formations. The reporters provided firsthand objective reporting of events, without censorship. In spite of the ugliness of war, this worked in the favor of the Coalition because of the courageous and honorable way Coalition forces conducted themselves in combat.

Fourth: The individual constitutes the fourth dimension of Rapid Dominance.

The successful military is a well-disciplined team. Individual heroics, while prized, do not provide the foundation for success in battle. Rigorous training, iron discipline, dedicated reliance on one another, and strict adherence to orders are the attributes that make a team prevail during combat. The team — whether it is a flight of bombers, a flotilla of ships, or a squad of riflemen — must also have leadership… leadership that resides at many levels. The best leaders understand the doctrines and history of their military art and have the judgment and initiative to direct their team(s) when the killing starts. The rigidity of command must not conflict with informed judgment and initiative to change plans once our forces are engaged with the enemy. This is true both for commanders in their headquarters and for subordinates locked in the fight.

The single biggest impediment to such initiative is the rapid growth in information grids, the communications nets that pass the information, and the computers that correlate and display the information. While the ability of the national leader to see into the gun sights of an individual rifle or into the bomb sight of bomb-laden aircraft is undeniably impressive, this ability can also elevate decision making to levels that deny the on-scene leader the freedom to use his own judgment and initiative. Wise leaders at increasing senior levels therefore provide appropriate guidance and authority that empower subordinate leaders to make decisions while engaged in the struggle.

TRANSFORMATION

This kind of enlightened leadership lies at the heart of the so-called Rumsfeld “Transformation” of our military.

But transformation has also — predictably — become the fashionable Pentagon buzz word. The word means many things to many people, according to their agendas. A plan to acquire a new ship, plane, or tank was labeled transformational by the program’s advocates. Individual service leaders seeking to protect their budgets from being trimmed recast outmoded doctrines, force structures, and strategies as transformational.

Yet a few truly brilliant individuals understood that transformation was not about money, programs, or forces; it was about the nature of the threats and challenges to our national security in the future and how we should train, configure, and plan to best protect our vital interests. It meant that military Services were going to change if only to better integrate their individual strengths. It meant that the components of battle would not be Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, but land, maritime, air, and space. It meant that capabilities would not be capital “A” as in Army but small “a” as in armies, and that the great and useful pride each Service has in its history, uniforms, and ways of doing business would have to be subordinated to what makes best sense when fighting a particular enemy. Transformation was about comparing the Service weapons needed to conduct a mission or do a task — eliminating duplication. It meant training as one, with members from all the Services, in order to build the trust and confidence of a team. It meant that we had to think about war in new ways.

In the operations to stop the ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, the forces were joint (meaning elements of two or more U.S. Services operated as one force), and combined (meaning forces of two or more nations operated as one). Because of the nature of the enemy force, the terrain, and the constraints placed on the use of force by the political leadership, the primary combat tasks were most often conducted from the air. Once the military leadership gained an understanding of how to transition the conflict from an attrition-based strategy to an effects-based strategy that put unbearable pressure on the Serbian leadership, the conflict was terminated.

One may then ask why this need to transform has been emphasized only recently? Surely our military forces have been fighting jointly since World War II, so what is the big deal?

The big deal has been the emergence of airpower as the dominant force in war fighting. Though this statement was true in 1941–1945, it was not then recognized as such, since the massive scope of the conflict gave opportunities for all forms of military power to claim dominance. In Desert Storm, airpower was only one form of military power used to drive the Iraqis out of Kuwait, but it was clearly the dominant force. Airmen from the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force understand how to employ airpower efficiently. All too often nonairmen misuse its capabilities. They tend to think they understand how to employ airpower, but more often, they think solely in terms of their own domain. A soldier normally sees airpower as a means to provide fire support to his engaged troops. A sailor will often have a better understanding of airpower, because he thinks in terms that are theater wide and involve maneuver as an essential element. But the simple truth that too many soldiers and sailors ignore is that they cannot maneuver, prevail in battle, or even survive if they are subject to attack from powerful air elements. Likewise, their success in battle is facilitated increasingly by airpower; and in some instances, such as the Kosovo campaign, airpower is the only element required. This a bitter pill for some land and sea advocates to swallow; they work hard at belittling airpower and at marginalizing those who seek to understand better how we should fight in the future.

If airmen have a problem, it is that too often they fail to understand the needs and doctrines of their land and sea counterparts.

It is incumbent on airmen to understand and appreciate how land, sea, and now space warriors see their respective worlds and how they believe they should employ military power. This is because airpower has become the enabling force for all forms of military power, whether it is providing air cover for ships, close air support for embattled troops, or platforms that carry sensors to detect the enemy moving to battle or hiding in urban areas, or simply by providing the means for rapid movement of men and equipment. Before airpower came of age, armies and navies were created to fight their counterparts. After the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Balkans, it is apparent that the employment of military force has become much more complex, and must be thoroughly integrated. Most importantly, this integration must come with a view that exceeds the narrow visions solely of land, sea, air, or space advocates. Transformation is about breaking away from outmoded doctrines and challenging the intellectual capabilities of those who plan and execute military operations.

We have made some advances in transforming military capabilities and operations. In Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan, close coordination between air and land forces allowed the defeat of a large, well-equipped force by a smaller less heavily armed coalition made up of U.S. Special Forces supporting the forces of local warlords. This new model was successfully expanded in Operation Iraqi Freedom, when an airman, Lieutenant General Buzz Mosley, commanded air and land elements used to keep the Iraqi Army off balance in the desert expanses of western Iraq. This broke the tradition — or perhaps myth — that only leaders with experience as soldiers could command land forces.

Elsewhere in Iraq, land commanders with far less experience employing airpower sent a large force of Apache gunships against Iraqi divisions defending the southern approach to Baghdad. Because they did not understand how to employ these elements, the raid was unsuccessful, and all the gun-ships were hit with ground-to-air fire, while inflicting little or no damage on the Iraqi tanks and artillery. Most airmen would have known that the helicopters needed fixed-wing support to suppress the enemy antiaircraft fire and to gain the air superiority needed for the slow-moving helicopters to survive.

This lack of appreciation and understanding underscores the reasons behind the Goldwater-Nichols legislation in the 1980s, and the Rumsfeld Transformation efforts after the turn of the millennium. Transformation took the joint team approach inherent in the Goldwater-Nichols Defense Reform Act to new levels of intensity.

COMMAND AND CONTROL

In every major military operation since the Vietnam War, U.S. forces have operated as a joint force. Yet problems remained, primarily in the areas referred to as command and control. In military terms, “command” often translates to mean ownership; “control” tracks what a force is doing and how commands are relayed. The underlying basis for debates about who has command is that previously noted failure of land, sea, air, or space elements to trust one another.

If I am a land commander and I have command of airpower, then I know it will be there when my land forces need support. Unfortunately, this attitude may actually be shortsighted, for the airpower may be used to destroy the enemy attackers even before they can start to engage the friendly land forces. In Desert Storm the land forces’ surface-to-air radar-guided Patriot missiles were placed under my command as the air-component commander. My job was to make sure no Iraqi aircraft could drop bombs on our Coalition ground forces.

But in the second war in Iraq, owing in large measure to the cruise missile threat posed by Iraq, the land commander retained control of these weapons. In the event, the cruise missile launch sites were quickly overrun in the opening days of the war, and the Iraqi Air Force, having learned its lesson in 1991, did not challenge our air superiority team of radars and fighter aircraft. Many have concluded — given the nature of the threat and the tragic mistakes resulting from the kind of control in place — that the air-component commander, General Mosley, should have been given command of the Patriots. If that had been the case, it is doubtful that the Patriots would have shot down two allied aircraft by mistake, killing their crews. Another time, because of confusion over the rules of engagement and faulty operations by Patriot crews, a defense-suppression F-16 armed with radar homing missiles destroyed a Patriot radar when it illuminated the aircraft. Fortunately, no one on the ground was injured.

Because land forces often still believe they are the main element in the battle and therefore must own all other elements deployed to the fight, the issue of command is still argued strenuously — especially by older officers. Younger officers, however, are much more attuned to how best to organize efficiently and to coordinate land, sea, air, and space operations on a trust not ownership basis. On those occasions when the Services do have command issues, the effects are likely to be worse when the forces of other nations are brought together with ours.

Because they do not require stringent command or ownership arrangements to accomplish their missions, air and sea forces normally find it easy to operate together. Land forces, however, normally do require stringent command arrangements, and as a result geographical separation is used to resolve difficult command issues. This works in wars with orderly, linear battle lines. But it cannot work in modern wars where the battlefield is increasingly chaotic and high-speed maneuver takes the place of orderly arrangements of forces. The maintenance of order inhibits speed, which is now the vital element in achieving dominance over your enemy. Furthermore, in future wars like those in Kosovo and Afghanistan, where coalition ground forces are of greater importance than those of the United States, command of U.S. ground forces may be delegated to foreign generals… a situation our military has forcefully resisted since Pershing led the American Expeditionary Force in 1917.

The command aspects of warfare will continue to challenge our coalition military and political leaders as each new conflict is addressed. The control of military operations is also fraught with issues that must be resolved.

In every war since Vietnam, control of air operations has relied on capabilities fielded by the United States. During Desert Storm our allies were collocated with U.S. Air Force squadrons so that our communications and computer systems were available for all the Coalition partners’ use. This is how we transmitted the Air Tasking Order and received the intelligence from postmission debriefings. In the air, control nodes included the E-3 Airborne Warning And Control System (AWACS) aircraft that provided traffic control, information updates, and the means for the Tactical Air Control Center to recall or re-task individual sorties. All Coalition aircraft were equipped with Identification Friend or Foe, IFF, transponders… although only U.S. forces had the classified coded devices needed to provide absolute identification of friendly aircraft. However, since the air component commander had weapons-release control of the radar-guided surface-to-air missiles and air-to-air fighters, the coded signals were not needed and no friendly aircraft were shot down. Contrast this with the second Iraq war, where a British Tornado and a U.S. F/A-18 were downed by our own Patriot missiles operating under control of the ground forces, and you can see clearly why having good control of air operations capabilities is critical.

Command and control of air operations extends into all aspects of the battle. Due to the potential for killing our own troops, close air support of ground forces requires exacting control measures. In both Iraq wars and in Afghanistan, our own air attacks caused the needless deaths of U.S. and Coalition forces. The two most frequent errors: either the attacking pilot misidentifies our forces, or our forces on the ground provide the pilot with the wrong target coordinates. But a new problem was encountered in Afghanistan, when troops on the ground provided the attacking pilot with their own location rather than that of the Taliban fighters they were trying to target. This came about because they misunderstood how the laser-ranging Global Positioning Satellite system processed its information. They took readings on the enemy position, but transmitted their own location to the attacking pilot, who programmed his guided weapons with the friendly position coordinates and fired.

In this age of advanced information systems and precision munitions, we obviously must increase our ability to closely control air operations. Unfortunately, command and control issues are not always well understood. Or worse, they are formulated with an eye to the past, when armies maneuvered using flags, signal flares, or bugle calls.

LOOKING FORWARD

Meanwhile, new actors are appearing on and over the battle — unmanned aerial and land vehicles.

Imagine a war where one side’s soldiers, sailors, and airmen sit in air-conditioned buildings ten thousand miles from the battle. George Patton would curse such an ignominious situation, where troops need not suffer the hardships of the field, sea, or air; where fear and courage do not guide the actions of combatants; and where the warrior neither bleeds nor dies. Yet we are approaching such a state of affairs. Unmanned vehicles operating in the sea, on land, in the air, and in space are filling missions previously conducted by human beings. Precision munitions allow the combatant to attack and kill the enemy from distances measured in hundreds of miles… Not too long ago, a warrior’s ability to strike an enemy was limited to what he could reach with his sword or his spear.

Aerial reconnaissance is now almost exclusively the realm of unmanned aircraft. Battles for control of the sea will increasingly be fought using cruise missiles. The demand for robotic devices that can explore buildings and attack individuals hidden inside is increasing (a radical change from yesterday’s urban warfare, when the presence of an enemy was first known when he opened fire on you). Other battles will be fought using nonkinetic methods of attack.

Throughout history, psychological methods have been used to traumatize an enemy. The Mongols would slaughter all the inhabitants of a town that resisted their attacks to ensure the inhabitants of other towns would surrender when they arrived there. Today we use far more sophisticated psychological methods to achieve the same results.

Today computer viruses can disable vital utility, banking, or communications-control devices. The use of standoff weapons, unmanned vehicles, and nonkinetic attacks raises a number of moral considerations. To be sure, war — killing people and destroying things — is immoral. Yet using military force is often the question of the lesser evil: Do I kill my enemy before he or she kills me? Do I kill the enemy to halt the pillage, rape, and murder being inflicted on a helpless third party?

In the past, the battle — getting shot at — imparted some measure of emotional relief to those engaged in the killing and destruction. Now one can kill the enemy or destroy the target while drinking a cup of coffee, and then go to a nearby Taco Bell for lunch. What will be the effect of a war on such a warrior where only his low-tech enemy bleeds and dies? Will it make war a more acceptable alternative for the resolution of conflicting nations’ interests? Will it inflict long-lasting, perhaps debilitating, psychological scars on combatants who do not feel the fear and anger currently found in battle, yet still turn their opponents into piles of burnt and bloody flesh?

We are not yet at such a point, but with the advent of each new unmanned system and new nonkinetic weapon, and with the increasing range of precision munitions, we approach an age where the nature of warfare will pose many painful new dilemmas.

CHALLENGES AND DILEMMAS

The recent conflicts in the Balkans, Afghanistan, and Iraq have also posed unique dilemmas for military forces in what is commonly referred to as the postconflict or stabilization phase. Current military doctrine, training, equipment, and procedures do not adequately address the missions required by the war now being waged against radical Islamic terrorists and their state sponsors.

In 1991—even though the local populace welcomed our liberating forces, even though the Kuwaitis had large cash reserves that could be used to rehabilitate themselves, and even though Kuwait’s Arab neighbors, like Saudi Arabia, made great efforts to provide for the immediate needs of refugees and thousands of Iraqi prisoners of war — it was a struggle to stabilize postwar Kuwait. Our Air Force had to get the International Airport running as soon as possible to support the airlift bringing in emergency supplies, while our Navy did the same for the port and adjacent waters mined by the Iraqi Navy. Civilian contractors rushed to Kuwait to extinguish the fires burning fiercely in the oil fields. But the role of rehabilitation fell mainly on the U.S. Army, a force that was trained and configured to fight tank battles and capture territory. Our Army had to ensure adequate food, water, utilities, transportation, police protection, and security forces were available so the citizens of the razed and looted country did not suffer inordinately. Though Lieutenant General John Yeosock, Commander 3rd Army, took control, and his forces worked tirelessly to ensure the pain and suffering of Kuwaitis was minimized, it nevertheless took many months to bring normalcy to the nation that had suffered so horribly from seven months of Iraqi occupation.

The same tasks arose after Serbian military forces were driven out of Kosovo, after the Taliban and Al-Qaeda military were defeated in Afghanistan, and after Saddam Hussein’s rule over Iraq was broken. But in those countries we faced a very different situation. There the populace had mixed views about our postconflict presence, capabilities available to restore basic services were limited, and in many locations the security situation was tenuous. Though the international community supported the postconflict efforts, in each case the chief responsibility fell once again on the U.S. military — primarily on its Army.

It was recognized early in the planning for the second war against Iraq that the postconflict tasks would be huge. Our experience in postwar Germany in 1945 provided a model for ensuring that members of the former regime, who had directly participated in Saddam’s reign of suppression and terror, would not escape judgment nor be placed in new positions of authority. Our military police had the doctrine and training to handle large numbers of prisoners of war. Our logistics teams, engineering battalions, and medical cadres knew how to quickly bring support to a country ravaged by war. What we lacked was an appreciation of the extent our efforts would be frustrated by terrorists who saw postwar Iraq as their battleground, by former regime members who fought fiercely to seize back control of the country, and by a people traumatized by an evil dictator’s decades of rule.

Our efforts were often also hampered by a lack of cooperation and coordination among various U.S. government and international agencies. Many turf battles in Washington, Europe, and the United Nations migrated to Iraq. Though valiant efforts were made, all soon learned that postconflict is the most difficult phase in this type of war. Serious mistakes were made, which made the job even more difficult.

The most notable problem was the handling of prisoners in facilities where it is impossible to separate the military prisoner from a terrorist from a common criminal from an innocent person who was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Pictures of the shameful abuse of Iraqi prisoners at the American-run Abu Ghraib prison made sensational news, and were used to castigate our country by everyone opposed to our interests, to our efforts in Iraq, or to the war there.

There is no excuse for the actions of those who abused the prisoners. But their criminal behavior was investigated fully, and those charged were tried and punished in accordance with the Code of Military Justice.

The larger question is: How could this have happened? The answer: We as a military are ill-prepared to conduct the missions thrust upon us after the battles have been won. Abu Ghraib is a sterling example of how the military needs to change to meet the demands of postconflict stabilization.

The prison at Abu Ghraib was filled to capacity. The inmates were mixed with legitimate prisoners of war, terrorists, common criminals, and innocent citizens (including women and children). Our Military Police are trained to process and contain those prisoners of war who bring with them standards of conduct, a chain of command, and protections under the Geneva Convention. Undertrained for the task they were sent to perform, they guarded murderous individuals and vile sexual deviants, along with innocent men, women, and children. To further complicate this explosive environment, there was a need to interrogate the prisoners in order to assist in the fight to provide security to the countryside outside the prison walls, as well as to identify those individuals who should be released immediately. Meanwhile, the internal organization of our Military Police and Military Intelligence hampered the coordination and cooperation between these two disciplines, while long tours of duty in the region led to rotation policies that resulted in a lack of unit cohesion, inexperienced or weak leadership, and inconsistent procedures. All of this blew up after those Military Police at Abu Ghraib, who were responsible for the criminal abuse, tried to excuse their behavior as part of a process to extract intelligence information from their Iraqi prisoners. Neither was it helpful when hostile critics attempted to portray this crime as typical of all the military, or as a result of political policies they believed wrong.

What should be the lesson learned from Abu Ghraib? Our military, and even our government beyond the Pentagon, must examine our capabilities in order to bring together the elements needed to stabilize another postwar situation such as we find in Iraq today.

★ Historically the church and the military are highly resistant to change. The dogmas of both are etched in stone; their self-images are articles of faith, not of reflection; and their leaders are more concerned with preservation of the institution than with change. The military can no longer remain that inflexible. Technology, the challenges it must confront, and the means by which it plies its trade are simply changing too rapidly to allow it to maintain those traditions. Today’s wars are fought in a revolutionary manner, with new capabilities emerging every few months. The pace of information technology revolutions is even quicker. Land, sea, air, and space vehicles become obsolete more rapidly than in the past, and in some cases even before they can be deployed, as new materials are invented, microprocessors shrink in size and balloon in capacity, and new countermeasures are created to offset advantages in armor, speed, stealth, or range.

Technology is not the only consideration that demands rapid and constant change in our military. As the United States military forces prove their prowess in battle, potential enemies take note and later tailor the threats they pose to our vital interests in ways that take advantage of holes and weaknesses they perceive in our capabilities. The guided weapon of the terrorist is a human being with an explosive vest ready to die for his cause. The B-2 bomber of a radical Islamic terrorist is a B-767 filled with fuel and flown into the Pentagon. The battlefield is no longer the deserts of Iraq but the minds of young Islamic people forced to choose how they see the world and what their place is in it.

A huge role remains for military forces to protect our country’s vital interests and its citizens, but the challenges and the threats to those interests are changing almost more rapidly than our military forces can adapt to them. The need to change, and the pace of that change, are the greatest challenge our military forces face today. Fortunately, because we live in a free and profoundly diverse society, and because of our ability to master technology and our willingness to be self-critical, our nation and our military are highly adaptable. We will confront the changes and institute the needed reforms.