Every Man a Tiger: The Gulf War Air Campaign

by Tom Clancy

  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 m
eeting 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.