Every Man a Tiger: The Gulf War Air Campaign

by Tom Clancy

  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 t
hink 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 tra
cking 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.