Shadow Warriors: Inside the Special Forces sic-3

by Tom Clancy

  SOF planners also mapped operations against Saddam.

  The Iraqi dictator's normal procedure was to disguise his movements, use doubles, and move constantly among temporary headquarters (i.e., converted recreation vehicles) and permanent ones, as well as sleeping quarters. The SOF plan was to strike him in one of his rec vehicles; or, as Stiner put it, "We'd hit him one night while he was laughing at us in one of his Winnebagos."

  There were a few little problems with this plan: In addition to the massive operational difficulties of such a risky operation, U.S. law forbade assassination of heads of state. True, once combat had been initiated, Saddam would become a legitimate target, but as it was, the plan withered and died.

  So did others. In December, Saddam released the American hostages, including those at the Embassy he called "guests." PACIFIC WIND and similar plans were quietly shelved.

  THE AIR WAR

  Other plans, however, moved forward. As the buildup of allied troops progressed, the United States shaped a strategy for driving the Iraqis out of Kuwait. The war would take place in two distinct stages:

  • An aerial assault was designed to neutralize Iraqi units, deprive Saddam Hussein of command and control over his forces, and weaken the country's ability to resist attack.

  • A ground attack would then physically confront Iraqi ground forces and drive them from Kuwait and positions threatening Saudi Arabia.

  From the very beginning, the air campaign was seen as essential to the success of the mission. The coalition planners hoped to decimate and terrorize the Iraqis before launching ground troops. Not only would that increase the odds of quick success, but it would lessen the number of casualties, an important political consideration.

  The air attack itself could be broken into distinct phases. The most critical would occur at the very beginning, when the Iraqis' vast network of integrated antiair defenses had to be neutralized. Based largely on a Soviet model and heavily reliant on Russian weapons, Iraqi air defenses included a sophisticated network of advance warning and localized radars, a wide range of surface-to-air missiles, front-line fighters like the MiG-29, and a large number of antiaircraft artillery batteries that, though primitive, remained deadly. The multilayered defenses had to be neutralized as quickly as possible to give coalition aircraft freedom to operate over Iraq at will.

  The first strike had to be massive and quick, but it also had to be stealthy. That meant cruise missiles and the still largely untested F-117A Stealth Fighter would have key roles in the operation. But there were too few of these to cover the vast number of Iraqi air defense units, and the sheer size of the country made it difficult to orchestrate an effective attack everywhere at once.

  As plans developed, it became clear that one of the keys to the first-day mission would be the destruction of two Iraqi early-warning radars guarding the country's southwestern frontier. While most of Iraq's early-warning radars were sited to cover one another (if one went out, others made up for the loss), eliminating these two sites would provide a "black" corridor for planes flving north.

  The hole would be especially useful for F-15E Strike Eagles targeted to hit Scud missiles in the first hours of the air war. Destroying those missiles had become a top priority, since their launch against Israel might prompt retaliatory raids, which in turn could threaten the fragile allied coalition.

  However, striking the radars, though obviously desirable, brought serious problems. An attack on these sites would take resources from other high-priority Iraqi assets. More important, it could also warn the rest of the defense network. To avoid such a result, the sites would have to be knocked out simultancously, but the large number of individual radars and support facilities at each site made it difficult to coordinate comprehensive, effective bombing raids that would achieve that end.

  As General Glosson contemplated the plans, a Special Forces officer, Captain Randy O'Boyle, joined his staff to help coordinate Special Forces operations. An experienced flight examiner and planner, Captain O'Boyle had particular expertise with MH-53J Pave Low helicopters, which had come to the Gulf with the 20th Special Operations Squadron, part of the Air Force Special Operations Command. In September, he became the helicopter advisor in the planning cell for the air campaign.

  After examining the developing plans, O'Boyle realized that the early-warning radars would be perfect targets for Special Operations ground forces. Glosson agreed. General Schwarzkopf did not. When this plan was presented to him, he exploded. The CINC was not prepared to commit ground forces across the border until he was ready. An alternative had to be found.

  In the meantime, the radars were moved back about twenty miles from their original position a mile or so from the border. A ground assault became impractical.

  Jesse Johnson then considered making the attack with his Pave Lows, but while the MH-53s were highly capable aircraft, they were optimized for clandestine insertion and extraction missions, not blowing things up. They were big and fast, and able to operate in bad weather and at night, but their heaviest weapons were only. 50-caliber machine guns. The helicopters' commander, Lieutenant Colonel Rich Comer, believed his machine guns could destroy the large dishes, but probably not before the Iraqis had time to call their headquarters.

  There were helicopters in the Gulf that had more than enough firepower to eliminate the dishes quickly, however — Army Apaches. Decked out with I Iellfire missiles and 30mm chain guns, the AH-64s could make short work of the installations.

  If they could find them. Though their pilots were well-versed in night fighting, the Apache helicopters were primarily designed for engagements with tanks and armored formations, which are easy to find, even at night. The desert in that part of the world is empty, landmarks arc virtually nonexistent, and Apaches did not come equipped with the sophisticated navigation and sensor equipment aboard the Air Force birds. The Apaches would have trouble finding the targets at night.

  The obvious solution was to combine Pave Lows (for guidance) with Apaches (for firepower). And that was the solution chosen. The Pave Lows would lead the Apaches to the sites, then step aside as their smaller brethren went to work. A simple notion, yet one that had never been tried, even in training. And it wasn't simply a situation where Air Force guys would climb in their birds, take off, and let the Army guys hang on to their tails. Different service cultures had to be coordinated; likewise communications gear. There were other, even more practical, problems: The Apaches' limited range would have to be increased, and their weapons, optimized for armor attacks, would have to be tested for effectiveness against radars and their vans.

  The Apache commander, Lieutenant Colonel Dick Cody, quickly came on board and adapted his unit's tactics and aircraft for the mission. He welded 1,500-gallon tanks to the bottom of his helos and conducted live-fire practice sessions with Hellfire antitank missiles to make sure they would explode when striking the comparatively soft targets.

  They did. The plan — called EAGER ANVIL — proceeded.

  It would be the first strike of the war.

  General Schwarzkopf, suspicious as ever of special operations, somewhat reluctantly blessed it, but kept close tabs on the training. The story goes that he allowed the operation to proceed with one overriding order: "Do not screw this up."

  The Saudi desert stretched out in endless darkness as White Team skittered toward Iraq during the early-morning hours of January 17, 1991. In the lead Pave Low, Pilot Captain Mike Kingsley and his copilot took turns scanning the green screen of the FLIR. They had been flying now for just over an hour at a relatively leisurely pace — no strain for the powerful helicopter; the same could not be said for the crew. The six men — two pilots, two flight engineers, two para-rescue men, or PJs — had been practicing this gig for weeks, but even the most realistic exercise was still simply an exercise. The standard "test guns" order shortly after takeoff had blown away only a portion of the jitters. They were going to start a war and they knew it.

  A few hundred yards b
ack, the pilot in the second Pave Low, Major Bob Leonik, rechecked his navigation set, which had gone flaky shortly after takeoff when the Enhanced Navigation System (ENS) had inexplicably "dumped." The crew had had to work feverishly to reset the system. At the same time, a glitch in their SATCOM coding had deprived them of a secure way to talk to Command. Both problems had been solved, the helicopter was precisely on course, and relatively unimportant transmissions were now coming over the radio. Mission Commander Comer, listening to the SATCOM from the left-hand seat of the Pave Low cockpit, resisted the impulse to tell them all to shut up.

  Farther back, the Apaches flew in a four-ship, staggered-line formation. Each attack helicopter carried two crew members and was loaded with Hellfires, rockets, and 30mm machine-gun shells.

  White Team pushed over the border, dropping to fifty feet over the shifting dunes. The pilot pulled right, ducking toward the dry bed of a large wadi that would hide the flight's approach toward its target. The crew doused the last lights in the cabin.

  "We're in Iraq," said the copilot laconically. It was just past 0213. Their attack was to begin at 0238. H-hour for the war was 0300.

  The west and east radar sites — called "California" and "Nevada" — were very similar. Each contained a number of Soviet-made radars and support vans. Each radar sat on its own van or truck, either buried in the sand or placed in a revetment. Antennas were either the familiar rotating dishes or else something more like fixed radio masts. Together, they scanned a wide area and covered both high and low altitudes. An assortment of support trailers or vans were arrayed around for communications and other functions, and there were also troop quarters.

  Neutralizing the sites meant hitting not just radars but their control and communications facilities.

  One big problem with launching a surprise attack on an early-warning site is that it is itself designed to keep such attacks from being a surprise. But no radar will give one hundred percent coverage. EAGER ANVIL'S tactics had been drawn up to take advantage of known holes in California's and Nevada's capabilities. Different radars have different capabilities, but in general they have trouble picking out objects very close to the ground. Even radars designed to detect low-flying airplanes — such as the P-15M Squat Eyes at each of the target sites — have limited detection envelopes because of ground clutter and physical limitations in the equipment. In this case, the helicopters would be essentially invisible at fifty feet off the ground even at close range. If they got higher than that, however, they could be easily spotted.

  They could also be heard, no matter what altitude they flew, and so the routes of both attack groups carefully avoided known Iraqi installations. When the Pave Lows in Red Team detected an unexpected Iraqi formation in their path, they doglegged around them, hoping to prevent the troops from hearing the very loud rotors of the MH-53s and AH-64s.

  The Pave Lows in White Team drove up the wadi to a point about ten miles southeast of the radar sites, then swung left, the pilot pushing the throttle for more speed as White Team whipped over a road. He listened intently, hoping that the PJs in the back wouldn't see anything on the highway.

  Nothing. They were ghosts, wandering across the desert undetected.

  2:36. They reached the IP 7.5 miles southeast of their target — the "no-shit point," they called it. One of the crew members ignited chemical glow sticks in the back of the helicopter, waving his arm through the open doorway and dropping the bundle on the desert floor, a literal "X" marking the navigation spot. All the high-tech equipment aboard the Pave Lows notwithstanding, the success of the mission came down to a PJ's steady hand.

  The Apaches sped forward at sixty knots, using the glowing sticks to orient themselves for the attack. They updated their guidance systems, then kicked on their target-acquisition computers and continued in toward the targets. A dozen buildings, clusters of command vans, radar dishes, a troposcatter radar antenna — the site began to reveal itself in their night goggles. One by one, the interphones in the helos buzzed: "I've got the target." Lasers beamed.

  Lights popped on in the buildings as they closed to 5,000 meters.

  "Party in ten," commanded the Apache fire team leader, Lieutenant Tom Drew.

  Figures began running toward the three antiaircraft pits guarding the base.

  "Five… four… three…," said Drew calmly.

  Before he reached "one," Thomas "Tip" O'Neal pickled a Hellfire. "This one's for you, Saddam," said Dave Jones, O'Neal's copilot, as the Hellfire whisked off the left rail of the Apache. It was the first shot of the war.

  Twenty seconds later, the missile hit home, incinerating a set of generators providing power for the radars. By then, a host of missiles were under way. Hellfires, then Hydra-70 rockets, then 30mm chain guns gouged a gaping hole in the Iraqi air defense systems. Less than five minutes after the attacks began, both Iraqi sites had been damaged beyond repair—"Condition Alpha," as the coded message back to base put it.

  The Special Forces crews in the Pave Lows watched the destruction with fascination and some trepidation; they'd be called on if the sporadic answering fire managed to bring down any helicopters.

  As the Red Team Pave Lows waited for their Apaches, Iraqi ground forces fired two SA-7 heat-seekers at one of the MH-53s. The pilot managed to duck the shoulder-launched SAMs with the help of decoy flares and some quick jinking across the sand. "We were too busy trying to dodge the missiles to see where they went," said Captain Corby Martin, one of the pilots.

  Before the early-morning strike had knocked out the radars, an operator at one of the sites had apparently managed to get off part of a message indicating that they were under attack. Relayed to Baghdad, the warning seems to have caused antiaircraft units in the enemy capital to begin firing into the air willy-nilly. That turned out to be a good thing. By the time the first F-117 attack on the city actually began about fifteen minutes later, they had expended their ammunition and overheated much of their gear.

  Crossing the border behind the EAGER ANVIL helos, SOF troops in Chinook CH-47s touched down to plant beacons to help guide American raiders.

  American bombers were soon streaming through the hole poked by the SOF and Apache units….

  MH — 5 3 J Pave Lows played an important role throughout the war, inserting SOF units and flying combat and search-and-rescue (CSAR) missions.

  The CSAR missions were controversial, since combat rescue was not a traditional SOF task, and the Air Force and Navy were never convinced either that it was a high enough priority or that SOF was devoting enough resources to it.

  Schwarzkopf tasked Special Operations with combat rescue partly because of the hazardous conditions inside Iraq, partly because Special Forces had the deep infiltration and exfiltration capability required, and partly because the Air Force's own rescue capability had been allowed to atrophy after the Vietnam War, and there was no other alternative but to task SOCOM for assets.

  Seven bases, five in Saudi Arabia and two in Turkey, were used to stage the missions. At the very beginning of the air war, the helos loitered over Iraq at night in case they were needed. But this was obviously hazardous, and Johnson soon ordered the units to scramble over the line only if they had a "reasonable confirmation" of a pilot's location. During the early stages of the war, rescues were also restricted to nighttime.

  While there was no denying the capability of the SOF crews or the helicopters, some Air Force and Navy officers bristled that their service was not directly responsible for its own search and rescue. (Though they were Air Force aircraft, the Pave Lows were SOCOM assets.) Johnson's restrictions, while protecting the helicopter crews, lessened the odds of recovering pilots, especially since U.S. air crews were equipped with obsolete emergency radios, whose limited range and frequencies exposed them to the enemy. The other services also felt that not enough resources were devoted to the CSAR mission.

  Nonetheless, Pave Low crews accounted for one of the most daring operations of the war, a full daylight rescue of a downed Na
vy pilot under fire. And they did it with help from a number of Air Force units, including a pair of A-10A attack planes (called Warthogs, because that's what they look and act like), flying far behind the lines.

  On January 21, several days after the start of the air war, Lieutenant Devon Jones and Lieutenant Lawrence R. Slade were flying "Slate 46," an F-14A escorting a Navy EA-6B Prowler on a strike against a radar installation protecting the Al Asad airfield in northern Iraq, roughly fifty miles west of Baghdad. After the Prowler had completed its mission, Jones banked his plane and began heading back toward the USS Saratoga, his squadron's floating home in the Red Sea. As he turned, he saw a missile coming up for him. He started evasive maneuvers, but the SAM managed to detonate close enough to his Tomcat to rip its tail apart and render the plane uncontrollable.

  Both Jones and Slade, his radar intercept officer, bailed out. Separated as they left the plane, the men quickly lost track of each other in the dim light of early dawn. After they reached the ground, they unwittingly headed in different directions.

  Meanwhile, Captain Tom Trask was sitting with his crew in an Air Force Pave Low at Ar-Ar, a tiny base near the Iraqi border. Tired from a succession of missions, Trask's squadron had been slotted "last in line" behind some Air Force and Navy Blackhawks; their priority today was supposed to be some well-deserved rest.

  But neither Saddam nor the weather cooperated. Heavy fog soched in the airfield. When the call came at about 7:15 A.M. that American fliers were down, the Blackhawk pilots couldn't see to take off. Two Pave Lows, including Trask's, took over the job.

  The initial information about the shootdown came in muddled, and at first the Special Operations airmen thought they were trying to rescue crews from the A-6 as well as the F-14. Breaking with their usual tactics, the helicopters "chopped" their flight in half, each focusing on a separate crew. Though they were flying a preplanned route that snaked across Iraq and avoided the most potent defenses, Trask's helicopter was sighted by an Iraqi border unit. They escaped easily, and their luck continued when the fog lifted, allowing them to nick down to fifteen feet above the ground.