Every Man a Tiger: The Gulf War Air Campaign

by Tom Clancy

  The system also required a number of support and liaison elements, such as weather, intelligence, search and rescue, air defense, AWACS, airspace management (to keep objects from occupying the same place at the same time), electronic warfare, special operations, and the BCE (the liaison between the Air Force and the Army).

  All of these elements were important. A few deserve more explanation:

  The air is the Air Force’s sea, so weather was obviously important—far more important than knowing whether or not it was going to rain. The decision to load TV-guided Maverick missiles, for instance, depended on the forecast of optical slant ranges: Could the pilot see through the haze with his Maverick so he could lock the missile onto the target? The current operations weather section (supported by Colonel Jerry Riley’s larger weather shop across from the Black Hole down the hall) answered such questions and kept everyone in the TACC advised about weather in the target areas, refueling tracks, and airbases.

  The large intelligence section in Current Operations received data from several sources: national intelligence sources (such as the DIA); units flying missions (their intelligence shops would debrief the pilots and call in anything hot); and analysts in tents on the soccer field in the USMTM compound next to the RSAF headquarters. The soccer field also sent target materials to the wings and made studies of the Iraqis (which went, for example, to the Black Hole, so the findings could be incorporated into the targeting process).

  In the rear corner of the operations room was the search-and-rescue cell, led by Colonel Joe Stillwell. His team initiated, coordinated, and tracked rescues. For this they could call upon any available asset—navy ships, army helicopters, or Special Operations infiltration capabilities. Because search and rescue required joint resources, the SAR team in the TACC worked officially for the CINC and not for Chuck Horner. However, since search and rescue efforts were directed primarily toward downed aircrew in territory that was accessible only to air, and since the first indication of a loss, as well as its location, came from the AWACS picture, the team was located in the air operations center in the TACC.

  Each morning that Horner entered the TACC, his first stop was at this cell, to check on losses and rescue efforts. As he saw it, there was no more fitting way for a commander in wartime to start the day than to be reminded of the cost of his mistakes.

  NIGHT CAMEL

  Airmen are always experimenting with better ways to fight.

  During Desert Shield, 48th Wing F-111F aircrews flying over the Saudi desert discovered somewhat unexpectedly that friendly tanks were visible on their PAVE TAC screens, even when the tanks were dug into revetments in the sand.

  The PAVE TAC pod was located under the F-111F fuselage. This pod housed an infrared scanner that gave a fuzzy television picture of the ground 10,000 to 15,000 feet beneath the aircraft. Since the metal in the tanks heated and cooled more rapidly than the surrounding desert, the tanks showed up brightly when the aircraft pointed its sensor in their direction. Once they got a glimpse of a hot or cold spot, they’d lock the sensor onto the target, and it would track the target as the aircraft moved overhead. The sensor was quite sensitive and could present an excellent picture of anything in its field of view; but there was a trade-off. The field of view was very narrow. For the aircrew, it was like looking through a soda straw at objects three to five miles away.

  Also in the pod turret was a laser slaved to the IR sensor. After the air crew had found a tank and locked the sensor in a track mode, they would confirm the sighting with their cockpit television scope. The weapons system officer would then illuminate the tank with the laser and send a laser-guided bomb homing in on the laser reflection (F-15Es and F-16s equipped with LANTIRN Pods achieved similar results).

  These tactics and procedures, practiced and refined during the Night Camel exercises in November and December, became tank plinking in Desert Storm. At the height of the Storm, the 48th Wing were killing over a hundred tanks a night.

  Plinking had unintended effects. Soon after the campaign began in mid-January, reconnaissance photos began to show slit trenches some distance away from the parked tanks. During the war with Iran, Iraqi tankers had gotten into the habit of sleeping in their tanks—tanks being on the whole safer than the surrounding desert. Tank plinking ended that haven.

  Later, during the ground war, U.S. tankers always seemed to get off the first shot against Iraqi dug-in tanks; and as the battles progressed, enemy tank fire was often sparse. Later analysis showed that when U.S. ground forces approached, the Iraqis were not in their tanks, and then as the first shots hit the Iraqis, the Iraqi tankers concluded they were under air attack and went into bunkers. By the time the truth hit them, it was too late. Though the bravest tried to crawl back to their tanks, they were often cut down by U.S. machine guns; and those who reached their tanks successfully were too confused to fight effectively.

  Night Camel not only seriously weakened the Iraqi Army, it had a major impact on the ground war.

  DECEMBER BRIEFING

  In December, General Schwarzkopf called a command performance for his component commanders on the twentieth of the month to brief Secretary Cheney, General Powell, and Assistant Secretary Paul Wolfowitz at his headquarters at MODA. This was to be the last major war council before the proposed January U.N. deadline.

  Though all the components were scheduled to participate, discussion of Army plans was to be minimal. Because the only war in the immediate, post-January 15 period would be the air war, the air campaign was to be the central focus. It was also Schwarzkopf’s intention (Horner suspects) to limit the land force briefing to logistical matters, in order to avoid premature judgments about the tactical details of the proposed ground attack. There would be time for that after the progress of the air war could be analyzed.

  The Navy and Marine discussion would also be kept to a minimum. Though the Navy was handling the embargo of Iraqi shipping in their usual solid, professional way, there was little to be said about that. There were, however, potential questions about a Marine amphibious operation into Kuwait, which a few Marine leaders in Washington were pressing for—though enthusiasm for such an operation died the closer one came to Riyadh (neither Schwarzkopf nor Boomer wanted one). The defenses the Iraqis were setting up on the shores of Kuwait looked murderous. In the end, an amphibious deception was part of the final ground plan, and it tied down several Iraqi divisions during the land phase of the war.

  The briefing was held in Schwarzkopf’s war room at MODA, and it was scheduled to last an hour, of which Horner had been allotted fifteen minutes; but since air would be the major topic, he prepared a fifty-viewgraph update of the briefing Buster Glosson had presented to the Secretary in October. That briefing had laid out a picture of the first three days of the war and a general look at the activities beyond that. Now Horner would explain in detail how all that would be accomplished, how long it would take, how the Air Force planned to fight as part of a coalition, and how they were going to support the ground forces when they came up at bat. Finally, he had been warned by Cheney’s military assistant that the Secretary was especially concerned about Iraq’s ballistic-missile and germ-warfare threats (in Horner’s shorthand, Scuds and Bugs), and for that reason, he had prepared two separate briefings about his plans to handle them.

  Horner expected to be candid and straightforward, and to tell the Secretary honestly what airpower could and couldn’t do. For instance, he expected efficiency to drop for a time after the first three days. There would be an unavoidable lag until intelligence could be exploited and aircraft directed onto new targets (though this new targeting would be done in a matter of minutes). During the briefing, the Secretary seemed to welcome the candor, and in retrospect, it is clear that he would not have accepted a slick presentation that promised smooth and easy success.

  When Horner made his presentation, he stood in front of a table where Cheney was sitting, with Schwarzkopf on Cheney’s left, Powell on his right, and Wolfowitz on Powell
’s right. The other key component commanders were seated in the back, and the lights were low. As far as Horner was concerned, there were just five people in the room. Nobody else mattered. Though Cheney, Powell, and Wolfowitz did not expect him to fail, and they were not there to score debating points, their questions and comments were intense and probing; they intended to examine their concerns in detail.

  The results, though, were rewarding. After it was all over, it was clear that the Secretary fully understood Horner’s intentions and accepted his inability to answer every question as one of the prices of honesty.

  Schwarzkopf made few initial comments. He seemed to be waiting to see how Horner made out before he took sides.

  As it turned out, hopes for an hourlong briefing were misplaced. It went three hours that day, and continued into the next.

  The first hard questions addressed the destruction of Iraqi forces in the Kuwaiti theater of operations—specifically, how long would it take to destroy 50 percent of Iraqi armor and artillery. Because different studies gave different answers, Horner walked Cheney through the analytical effort that provided the basis for his own estimate.

  A Pentagon air staff study had claimed the 50 percent goal would be achieved in less than a week, but that just didn’t pass the common-sense test, so Buster Glosson had asked the Plans and Analysis people to change their assumptions and fine-tune the data. Their new study expanded the campaign to three weeks—still unrealistic, in Horner’s view. In his best judgment, it would take up to six weeks of air combat to prepare the battlefield.

  Cheney gave a nod to indicate that this made sense to him, and the briefing continued (the six weeks figure turned out to be substantially accurate).

  The two hardest issues concerned Scuds and biological weapons. Though chemical weapons were also discussed, these were expected to be delivered by artillery shells and used primarily against military targets. Since the military had protection against these weapons,56 Cheney was not greatly worried about them.

  The “Bugs” were another thing. Not only could biological agents be spread in Israel and the populated areas of Saudi Arabia with relative ease, but there were no effective antidotes against them.

  Earlier that month, Saddam Hussein had test-fired his homebuilt, “improved” version of the Soviet Scud missiles. To double the range of his Scuds, Saddam had to cut his warhead in half. Moreover, the Scud was already terribly inaccurate. To a military person like Horner, this meant the weapon was insignificant. To a civilian, however, a wildly inaccurate, seemingly unstoppable weapon capable of randomly destroying your house and family was very significant. As was demonstrated by the V-2 attacks in World War II and the Scud attacks in the 1980s War of the Cities between Iran and Iraq, even inaccurate ballistic missiles can terrorize civilian populations. Horner missed the point about the Scuds. Dick Cheney did not. He was a lot closer to the voters.

  Horner outlined for the Secretary how his bombers would attack the fixed Scud erector launchers in western Iraq during the first hours of the air campaign. This was followed by a description of the strikes planned for Scud production, storage, fuel production, and repair facilities (although he believed most of these would be empty of the Scuds and their mobile launchers). Finally came the words Cheney was not eager to hear: “There is no way I can stop the Iraqis from launching Scuds at Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Israel from their fleet of mobile launchers.” When the Secretary pressed further, Horner wanted to assure him that the problem would be temporary and the solution was at hand; but there was no way he could honestly claim that. At best he could only describe their measures to suppress Scud launches, or, failing that, to defend against them with Patriot batteries once they were launched. Stopping the Scuds, Horner had to admit, was hopeless.

  This did not please Cheney, but he was a realist. He understood that if Horner had possessed a bullet—magic or otherwise—that prevented Scuds from falling on Israel or Saudi Arabia, he would have used it.

  ★ Saddam Hussein’s use of poison gas on his own people and during the Iran-Iraq War was widely known. Less was known about Iraqi research and production of germ-warfare weapons. That meant there were a number of “what-ifs” to consider long before the Cheney briefing, all posing a number of dilemmas. The first problem was to isolate the Iraqi capabilities to produce, store, and deliver biological weapons.

  Though intelligence information pointed to a number of laboratories capable of producing such agents, targeting production facilities was difficult, since very little was required to grow the agents—especially for people indifferent to protecting their work force from inadvertent exposure. To manufacture biological agents, no special chemicals (as in the case of most poison gases) or special equipment (as in the case of nuclear weapons) were required. Every hospital has a laboratory capable of producing biological agents, and food-production facilities can be changed into germ factories without difficulty.

  If production facilities were hard to counter, delivery was even harder. Biological agents can be distributed to their intended victims any number of ways.

  Against military forces, these were the choices:

  The most effective delivery system would have been an aerosol-fogging machine (like those used for mosquito control) pulled behind a car or truck; but driving such a device into Israel or Saudi Arabia presented obvious problems. A helicopter equipped with spray bars could also have worked, but given the effectiveness of U.S.-Saudi air defenses, its potential for harm was limited. The agents could have been shot in artillery shells, placed in missile warheads, or dropped in bombs, but in each of these cases, dispersal patterns are small, and any explosion used to break open the projectile case would have proved fatal to some of its payload. In short, delivering biological agents against Coalition troops in the field would not have been efficient, especially since those forces were already prepared to endure attack from chemical weapons. The suit and mask designed to protect the soldier from gas attack also provided a measure of protection from biological weapons.

  Biological agents could possibly have damaged Coalition armies and even terrorized many of the troops, but they would have been far more effective in terrorizing and killing civilians in large cities. In cities are herded men, women, and children who don’t have available the gas masks and impregnated clothing needed to counter harmful agents. Because people are packed closely, small numbers of weapons offer effective coverage. Because the diseases can take several days to harm their victims, terror and confusion have ample time to get out of control. And because cities are usually dependent on centralized sources of fresh food and water, these sources are easy to contaminate. One scenario imagined Iraqi infiltrators entering Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf countries and releasing anthrax or botulism spores into water supplies.

  Though air defenses and counter-ballistic missile operations could shield against most aircraft or missile-dispersed biological agents,57 and Saudi border guards were doing a superb job picking up Iraqi infiltrators, such measures could only suppress delivery of biological agents. Total prevention could not be guaranteed.

  That left storage as the best place to attack. And intelligence information pointed to Salman Park, just south of Baghdad, where botulism and anthrax spores were stored in Teflon containers in massive, well-constructed, environmentally controlled bunkers.

  Yet bombing these bunkers posed a dilemma for Horner and his planners. Would that destroy the spores, or would it release them into the atmosphere, where they could spread and contaminate the entire Arabian Peninsula? The choice then was this: To blow up the bunkers and kill every living thing on the Arabian Peninsula—a position given authoritative voice in a pair of scientific white papers published in England and the United States.58 Or to let Saddam Hussein release the spores himself, which might also kill every living thing on the Arabian Peninsula.

  As he was currently stationed on the Arabian Peninsula, Horner took the warning seriously, and there was no clear answer about the best course of act
ion.

  A solution to the dilemma came from an unexpected source.

  One day in early December, an Army major, a biological-warfare expert from Fort Meade, Maryland, appeared at Horner’s door and presented his credentials (Horner never actually learned his name). “I understand you are concerned about Iraqi biological agents,” he said. Interested, Horner listened: “While the white papers often lead readers to conclude that any minute exposure to anthrax or botulism will be lethal,” he explained, “anthrax and botulism spores are not in fact as deadly as many so-called experts fear. In fact,” he noted, “we are often exposed to anthrax, perhaps every day; the spores live for years in the soil. Exposure itself is not a problem. It is the amount of exposure that constitutes the danger. And it takes a lot. Or,” he bluntly put it, “the best way to die from anthrax is to kiss a sick sheep.” He then pointed out that while heat, sunlight, and water—especially chlorinated water—killed the spores, these were no guarantees. Therefore, at the risk of fallout (primarily in Iraq), the most reasonable course was to destroy the agents and deny the enemy their use.

  That seemed like a good idea to Chuck Horner.

  Already, plans for the destruction of the bunkers had been made to minimize fallout. The idea was to crack open the bunkers when the wind was calm just before first light, then put cluster-bomb units on the stored agents to create the maximum heat with the minimum blast. For good measure, the attack would be ended by dropping randomly exploding land mines, in order to prevent the Iraqis from scavenging undamaged Teflon bottles of agents.