Every Man a Tiger: The Gulf War Air Campaign

by Tom Clancy

  9

  Hits and Misses

  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 p
ilots 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.