Battle Ready

by Tom Clancy

  Galvin’s direction to the staffs and commands was simple: “When you get a request for support from CENTCOM, the answer is yes. Then you can ask what the question is.”

  During Operation Desert Shield, the buildup phase of the war, the EUCOM J-3 formed the Battle Staff to handle the massive transit of air and sea craft moving forces and supplies to the Persian Gulf. Early in this process, they were tasked with sending the U.S. Army Europe’s (US-AREUR) largest fighting unit, the heavily armored 7th Corps,42 plus other units and material to the U.S. Central Command in the Gulf. This significant accomplishment was superbly handled by General Butch Saint’s USAREUR.

  Though the EUCOM staffs were working round the clock on the massive logistics effort, they all hoped for a more direct involvement. But it appeared that this would be their only role in the conflict . . . until a much more interesting mission dropped in their lap (and allowed Zinni to “get out in the field” on a series of operations generated by the Desert Storm attack).

  Tony Zinni continues:

  As Desert Shield was beginning to fall in place, Major General Jim Jamerson, the USAFE43 operations officer, called up and said, “Hey, for what it’s worth, a number of our young, energetic, bright young majors have looked at the upcoming attack on Iraq and come up with a pretty good new idea. This is what they’ve been saying: ‘Look, we have a chance to open up a northern second front in the air. The air defenses at that end of Iraq are not very formidable. If we could base out of Turkey, we could conduct air operations from up there.’ ”

  My first reaction was, “No way. Turkey will never approve this, and neither will CENTCOM. This is CENTCOM’s fight; they’re not going to like EUCOM coming in and adding their piece.”

  But the plan caught the interest of Generals Galvin and McCarthy; and the young majors came down to EUCOM headquarters, bearing maps, intel on the Iraqi radar rings and air defenses, info on the bases in Turkey—and all the other elements a good plan requires.

  “Well, hell,” McCarthy said when he’d given it a look, “let’s give it a shot.”

  After clearing the proposal with Washington and the Central Command, Jim Jamerson, Snuffy Smith, and I went down to Ankara to brief our ambassador, Mort Abramowitz, and (if all went well) to present the plan to the Turkish general staff.

  Again, my expectations were not high. I thought we’d get told: “Dumb idea. Go home. Are you kidding?”

  But Mort Abramowitz proved to be positive. “It’s possible,” he said. “Let’s do it. I think the Turks will be open to the idea.”

  He was right. When we briefed the Turks, they approved the plan to conduct the operations from air bases in southeastern Turkey. I was amazed not only that this thing was falling into place, but how quickly.

  A joint task force was formed under Jim Jamerson’s command, consisting of the air component to conduct attacks in northern Iraq and a Special Operations component, under Dick Potter, tasked to provide Combat Search and Rescue (CSAR) and some psyops. Both the JTF and the operation were called “Proven Force.”

  During Desert Storm, the JTF attacked numerous targets that would have been difficult or impossible for allied air forces based in the south to hit. The sanctuary of Iraq’s northern air bases was taken away and Saddam was forced to send his planes to Iran in order to avoid destruction.

  The EUCOM planners kept thinking: “Since the Turks were being so remarkably cooperative, maybe we could open up a second ground front.” When we talked about the possibility, the Turks seemed game to do it. But by the time we took the plan to Schwarzkopf, it was fairly late in the air war (and too close to the launch of the ground attack), and he said no. “I don’t object to the principle,” he said, “but it’s too late. My plan is in place. Adding to it now would screw things up too much.”

  Back to the drawing board: The Army had developed a deception capability that created the appearance of a major headquarters. Now seemed to be a good time to use it. The idea was to seem to move 5th Corps headquarters down to Turkey as a prelude to a major ground effort from the north.

  But once again, we came in too late. “It’s a great idea,” CENTCOM said, “but we just can’t accommodate it. We’re just too far into our other plans.” If we had come to him earlier, I think Schwarzkopf would have bought into it.

  Another disappointment came when they were making the choice for Jim Jamerson’s ground deputy. I would have loved the job, but Snuffy wouldn’t let me go. However, at my suggestion, the job went to Charlie Wilhelm, another Marine. It actually worked out later that I was able to spend a lot of time down in the AOR; Snuffy and I were down there often. And I also had a chance to spend time in the field with Dick Potter and his troops doing CSAR training exercises in the snow-covered hills of southeastern Turkey.

  I also had the opportunity to fly on the AWACS over Mosul and Kirkuk in northern Iraq as B-52s and F-111s bombed airfields there. You can’t beat the view from the cockpit as the bombs explode and the sky is filled with antiaircraft fire.

  These missions were obviously interesting and exciting, but the real learning experience for me came from getting ready for them—going through the planning and briefs. Because Jamerson and Potter let me spend a great deal of time both with the planners and the troops who executed these operations, I was able to get a detailed understanding of how air campaigns and special operations missions were run. This invaluable joint experience served me well in the future.

  I was especially fascinated with the complexities of air campaigning, a new experience for me. Though I had run air operations at a much smaller level in the Marine Corps as a Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU) commander, this was my first exposure to planning and developing an air mission, generating the air tasking orders, and actually taking part in the operation. . . . And watching the operation unfold with a master like Jim Jamerson was worth a year at War College. I went through all the briefings, the planning, the workups; and during the AWACS mission, I was in back with the guys watching them pull all their thousands of pieces together—the barrier CAPs (Combat Air Patrols—the fighter umbrella), the tankers, and the bombers.

  Later on, when I was CENTCOM commander running air attacks against Iraq, my familiarity with master air attack plans came in very handy. Not a bad piece of acquired knowledge for a Marine infantrymen.

  DURING THE WAR, Iraq struck Israel with Scud missiles. Because of their range and their potential lethality (they could carry nuclear, biological, or chemical warheads), Scuds can be delivery systems for weapons of mass destruction. Actually, their uncertain accuracy and Saddam’s well-founded fear that using his WMD would provoke even worse retaliation limited the Iraqi Scuds to use as terror weapons. Though they did little damage, the terror they caused was very real; and the Israelis were outraged. It doesn’t take much to provoke the Israelis into acts of retaliation. As Saddam knew very well, an Israeli retaliatory air attack on Iraq stood a strong chance of causing the breakup of the Coalition President Bush had carefully constructed. We wanted to prevent that.

  Iraqi Scuds were first launched at Israel on the afternoon of January 17. EUCOM immediately dispatched a U.S. Army Patriot unit to Israel. And an Israeli battery that was then training stateside was rushed home and put into operation; a Dutch battery also joined the force. The operation, called “Patriot Defender,” was under the command of a superb U.S. Army colonel, Dave Heebner (later a general).

  The Patriots in Israel were then linked to our early warning facilities, whose hub was in the U.S. This system was a complicated, jerry-rigged affair: from satellite indications of missile launchings, to the U.S. base for analysis and determination of the missile’s flight path, to the EUCOM command center, and then to the Patriot unit. In seven to eight minutes, the Patriot batteries could be cued to the incoming Scuds for engagement and destruction. Seconds later, the Patriots began actual engagement.

  Because of the continuing questions about Israel’s commitment to stay out of the fight, a decision was made to send a not-too-s
enior general officer from EUCOM to Israel to check on our Patriot unit and to provide a friendly presence to reassure the Israelis.

  I jumped at the opportunity and was on a jet to Tel Aviv a few hours later.

  I moved in with the Patriot unit . . . actually lived in the tents with the young troops in the Patriot battery, observed their operations in the command and control vans, and watched them go through their procedures when they shot.

  I also spent time at the Israeli battery, and of course paid calls on a number of senior Israeli commanders . . . not always an experience I’d care to repeat. In their view, America was holding them back from the retaliatory attack that was their right and their obligation. They were incredibly determined and incredibly frustrated, and they really beat up on me about it. Though they understood why we’d asked them to refrain from retaliating, this did not sit well with them, and I felt they would not sit back much longer.

  Meanwhile, the Patriot crews had learned from each Scud attack.

  There’ve been a lot of misconceptions about the Patriots and their capabilities . . . and about their perceived failures. Some reports even claimed—falsely—that they didn’t work at all, as though all the Scud warheads got through untouched. Let’s set the record straight.

  First, the Patriots were designed to be point defense systems. That is, they were built to protect small areas like air bases or command centers. So if you’re at air base X, and you have your Patriots there, and the Patriots intercept and stop an attacking missile, fine. But whatever’s in the sky still has to come down. When all the junk left over from the Patriot and the attacking missile doesn’t crash down on the air base, that’s a success. But our Patriots had to defend the Tel Aviv-Haifa megalopolis. (We set up our batteries there; the Dutch battery was sent to defend Jerusalem.) When all that junk scatters over a metropolitan area like that, you’ve got problems. People say, “Wait a minute. What the hell? You obviously didn’t vaporize the thing. And a piece the size of an engine block just came through my roof.” I don’t want to deny this guy’s distress. His complaint’s legitimate. But we should also be aware that a Scud warhead going off in the same place would have ruined his day even worse.

  Second, these were new systems. When the Patriots first went in, we had never used them in battle. The crews had to learn how best to engage them. They made mistakes. For instance, at first they put them on what you might call “automatic mode” (which is the fastest way to get missiles into the air against attacking missiles). But when they were on automatic, some of the Patriots were launching on atmospheric clutter. The lessons learned from these Patriot Gulf War experiences led to many needed improvements in the system.

  To make matters even more difficult and complicated: The Iraqis were often shooting their Scuds at greater ranges than they were designed for (the Iraqi scientists had hot-rodded modifications that allowed them to reach Israel from western Iraq; some of their Scuds landed in the Mediterranean). But since the Scuds weren’t designed to take that kind of stress, they frequently broke up into hundreds of pieces during their descent.

  When the lieutenant in the van saw these breakups in his scope, he had to make a choice fast: “What do I shoot at?” He’d pick out a likely piece in all the clutter, and shoot at it. If he didn’t pick the warhead, then it would continue on and blow up somewhere in Israel.

  I know what the guys in the vans had to deal with. I saw the tape replays of previous engagements.

  But these were very resourceful guys.

  Later on, as they studied the tapes (they replayed them over and over), they came to realize that it was possible to distinguish the warhead from the clutter. The warhead, they began to see, continued to travel at its original velocity, while the other pieces slowed down. This was not at all obvious to an untrained eye. The difference was almost imperceptible. I couldn’t see it. These sharp young soldiers could.

  Once they had that little gleam of an advantage, they began to be able to pick out the warhead and hit it. And as time went on, they got even more proficient.

  All the noise about the shortcomings of the Patriots did not affect the Israeli public. The Patriot soldiers were their heroes. You could see Patriot logos on signs everywhere; and “Patriot” became the name du jour for all sorts of new products (I saw an advertisement for Patriot condoms). Now that the Israeli Patriot crews were the darlings of the people (my Israeli air defense officer escort, Colonel Romen Moshe, told me), everyone in the Air Force wanted to join the unit, which upset the pilots (who always consider themselves the elites in any air force).

  Another learning experience for me took place at an Israeli military base where top Israeli missile experts had been gathered and set up at what they called “the Scud Farm.” The experts would go out the instant a Scud impacted, gather up all the pieces they could find, and bring them back and reconstruct what they could. (It was amazing how fast they could do that.) They’d lay them out in a large open area outside like a big 3-D jigsaw puzzle and study the configuration of the missile. There were several possible variations. What they learned gave them insights into Iraqi missile capabilities and how to counter them.

  On a tour of the reconstructed Scuds at the Scud Farm (a few partially reconstructed Patriots were also there), I was given insights into what they had learned. “Look,” they said, pointing to a collection of Scud pieces, “here Saddam tried to enlarge the warhead.” And pointing toward another set: “In this case, he tried to increase its fuel capacity and give it more range.”

  The Iraqis were running all kinds of science projects, using a long-obsolete Soviet missile as their test bed.

  The last shot they took at Israel used an all-concrete warhead, which hit somewhere in the more or less trackless southern desert. Everybody laughed. “Well, Saddam is shooting a practice round,” they said. “He’s desperate. He’s run out of warheads.”

  A scientist at the Scud Farm showed me a map on the wall with all the trajectories of the Scud shots. All of them were aimed in the general direction of Tel Aviv or Haifa except this one. It had a really weird trajectory, and they were seriously concerned about it. Rumors later floated that an Israeli nuclear plant facility was the actual target. If the concrete warhead had penetrated the plant’s containment shield, there could have been a terrible catastrophe.

  A few days into my trip, I had visited all the Patriot batteries except the Dutch battery on a hill outside Jerusalem. “While you’re here,” my Israeli escort suggested, “you ought to visit the Dutch battery.”

  “Sure,” I said. “It would be a great experience for me.” I had never been to Jerusalem before. Here was an opportunity not only to show the flag for the Dutch but to encounter the spiritual home of my own religion.

  But when I checked in with the U.S. Embassy to get their okay for the visit, the ambassador turned me down. There was a lot of sensitivity and tension in Jerusalem at that time. The Palestinians had supported Saddam; and the ambassador thought it was best to low-key the American presence until things got quieter in the city. He didn’t want any Americans there, especially senior American military.

  When I told that to my escort, the Israeli colonel, he was incensed. “The hell with that,” he announced. “That’s like saying we can’t protect you. This is our country. We can take you to Jerusalem. You’re safe with us. No problem.”

  “This is not a security issue,” I protested, giving him the ambassador’s position as best I could. “It’s political sensitivities.”

  “Well, to hell with that,” he said, all fired up. “It’s an insult to us.” And then he took the issue up with his bosses, who agreed with him: They all wanted Zinni to visit Jerusalem. It had become a matter of face to them.

  At this point, I said to myself, “Hey, Zinni, the Israelis are already angry and poised to attack, and you’re down here to keep them happy.” For the past few days, we’d worked our tails off and I’d subjected myself to a lot of slings and arrows to keep them calm and now this Jerusalem
thing could maybe get them upset. I knew I had to go to Jerusalem, but I also knew I had to minimize my footprint there.

  “Look,” I told the Israelis, “I’ll go to Jerusalem, but we have to do it without stirring up anybody. We just visit the battery and come back.”

  “Not a problem,” my escort said. “We’ll drive out very quietly, visit the battery, and that’s it.”

  We took our trip out to the Dutch battery on February 28, and it went without a hitch. We met the commander and talked to the troops. Since no Scuds had been fired at Jerusalem, they hadn’t seen action, so they didn’t have a lot of operational information; but it was a good, friendly meeting. The view from their hill overlooking Jerusalem, however, was spectacular. This was the first time I’d seen the Old City of Jerusalem, and the religious and historical significance hit me powerfully.

  As Colonel Moshe and I were chatting about this, he said, “Let’s go down to the Old City.”

  “No, I’d better not do that,” I thought to myself. “I’m already out here when I shouldn’t be; I shouldn’t push this thing.”

  “Look,” he said. “Nobody’s around. I’ll take you to West Jerusalem; the Jewish section. You can see the city’s empty.”

  He was right. Everything was quiet. People were all indoors, hunkered down.

  “Listen,” he said. “We go into the Old City, go to a cafe, have a little coffee or something, and it’ll all be okay.”

  And that’s what we did. We found a little cafe, with all its doors closed and its windows shuttered and taped in anticipation of Scud shots; but we could still get coffee.

  We were sitting there with our cups when the end of the war hit.

  It was like an angel had passed overhead. Suddenly, there was a rumbling sound. It quickly grew louder, and before we knew it thousands of people burst outdoors and came into the streets yelling. Everybody in West Jerusalem was in the streets cheering. We were swarmed (I was in my Marine cammies). Women ran up and kissed us. “The war’s over!” they screamed. “The Iraqis have just surrendered!”