The Unseen War

by Lambeth, Benjamin S.

  Several weeks before the war began nearly a year later, in a joint press conference with Prime Minister Tony Blair of Great Britain, the president reaffirmed that determination when he commented: “After September 11, the doctrine of containment just doesn’t hold any water as far as I’m concerned.”7 By that time, his decision to go to war had been made. The resultant campaign’s quick success in toppling Hussein’s regime attested not only to the underlying fragility of Hussein’s despotic rule and the general incompetence of his military forces (to say nothing of Hussein’s personal incompetence in deploying them), but also to the mature and robust combat capability that the United States and its allies had steadily developed since Desert Storm.

  The subsequent revelations that Hussein and his Ba’athist regime neither possessed WMD stocks nor had any direct complicity with Al Qaeda thrust the United States and much of the rest of the world into an acrimonious debate over the wisdom and propriety of the administration’s decision to initiate the war. That debate grew all the more heated with the steady rise of American combat fatalities (nearly 4,300, with more than 30,000 additional troops wounded, many grievously, as of mid-2011) and the 111,000 Iraqi civilian fatalities incurred as a result of the festering insurgency and sectarian violence that ensued in Iraq after the three weeks of major combat ended in early April 2003.8 That costly follow-on war appeared by 2007 to be nearing an end as the result of a shift in U.S. strategy from brute-force efforts to defeat the insurgency to a more sophisticated counterinsurgency (COIN) approach that has offered a real sense of personal security to the Iraqi rank and file.

  The Iraq war and its steadily mounting costs and implications were by far the most inflammatory issues in the 2004 U.S. presidential election campaign. One scholarly assessment that appeared three years after the regime takedown observed that the expanding insurgency in Iraq a year later “heightened popular reservations in the United States about the original decision to go to war and cast a shadow on the president’s bid for reelection.”9 A subsequent formal determination by the special adviser to the director of central intelligence (DCI), following a fruitless year-long weapons hunt by the government’s Iraq Survey Group, that the U.S. intelligence community had failed completely to call the facts of Iraq’s prewar WMD involvement correctly, helped to keep the war a burning issue in the United States for more than five years. The capture of Hussein in December 2003, the successful completion of long-awaited Iraqi free elections in January 2005, and the creation of a functioning, if shaky, post-Hussein Iraqi democratic government have done much to dispel the controversy.10 These and other developments since Hussein’s regime was toppled in 2003 have led a growing number of once-doubtful observers to suggest that history may yet vindicate President Bush’s decision to go to war against Iraq.11 Whether this happens or not, the three-week period of major combat that ended Hussein’s rule has now become an almost forgotten footnote to that more recent and still-unsettled history. Nevertheless, the three weeks of major combat that ended Hussein’s rule are a case-book example of successful joint and combined warfare at the operational and tactical levels (leaving aside the administration’s colossal strategic error of failing to understand that providing sufficient forces to ensure a stable and secure postwar Iraq was an essential ingredient of any effective coalition campaign plan, a failure that led to manifold and cascading unanticipated consequences).12

  This book seeks to cast instructive light on the crucial but still largely unexplored and unappreciated contributions of allied air power to the successful first phase of the political transformation of Iraq. The initial round of Operation Iraqi Freedom was the first major U.S. combat involvement in recent times in which virtually all of the nation’s force elements other than nuclear weapons played a role. Unlike the operations that preceded it—Desert Storm, Deliberate Force, Allied Force, and Enduring Freedom—the second Gulf War was not primarily an air war, even though allied air power, including the critical supporting air- and space-based intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) aspects of it, contributed significantly toward setting the conditions for its outcome.

  Nor was the major combat phase of Operation Iraqi Freedom predominantly a ground combat affair, despite the fact that nearly everything written about it has focused almost exclusively on the land portion of the three-week campaign. Even the most widely cited campaign assessment to have appeared to date, which purported “not to offer up a slice of the war” but “to prepare a contemporary history of the entire conflict,” focused all but entirely on the allied land offensive.13 A more scholarly treatment that likewise presumed to address the campaign holistically and that attracted considerable attention in academic circles when it first appeared also spoke solely to ground operations, even going so far as to characterize the major combat phase of Iraqi Freedom as a “mechanized” campaign—a term commonly used to denote land encounters between opposed armored forces.14

  In fact, again leaving aside its gross underresourcing by the Bush administration at the most crucial strategic level, the campaign that brought down Saddam Hussein was an all but flawless undertaking by joint and combined forces that included not just the land component of U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) but also the indispensable involvement of virtually the entire spectrum of allied air, maritime, and space capabilities. Indeed, each allied force element played a crucial role in producing the campaign’s unexpectedly rapid outcome. Just as the toppling of Hussein’s regime could not have occurred without a substantial allied ground presence to seize and occupy Baghdad, the ground offensive could not have succeeded with such speed and such a relatively small loss of friendly life (only 108 American and 27 British military personnel during the campaign’s 23 days of formal combat) without the contribution of allied air power toward establishing prompt air supremacy over Iraq and then beating down enemy ground forces to a point where they lost both their will and their capacity to continue organized fighting.

  By the same token, allied ground forces could not have progressed from Kuwait to the heart of Baghdad in just three weeks without the contribution of the ISR portion of the air- and space-power equation in providing ground commanders the needed confidence that their exposed flanks were free of enemy threats. That unblinking ISR eye over the war zone gave allied ground commanders at the brigade level and above a high-fidelity picture of the entire Iraqi battlespace along their line of northward movement. As a well-researched operational assessment of the campaign from the Army’s perspective summed up the point that matters most in this regard, within just days after the start of CENTCOM’s combined-arms offensive, the air component “transitioned from its initial strategic air focus to concentrate on destroying Iraqi ground forces. With a level of air-ground integration not seen before, the [air component’s] CAS [close air support] and interdiction operations destroyed threatening Iraqis and enabled ground maneuver.”15

  Coming as it did only a scant year after Operation Enduring Freedom against the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, the war against Hussein’s Iraq featured many of the same tactics and equipment innovations that were battle-tested during that earlier campaign. In addition, Iraqi Freedom’s major combat phase was planned and led largely by the same principals who were responsible for the success of Enduring Freedom: President Bush; Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld; the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), Gen. Richard Myers; the commander of CENTCOM, Gen. Tommy Franks; and CENTCOM’s air component commander, Lt. Gen. T. Michael Moseley. The Iraqi Freedom experience thus offers a rare opportunity for analysts to examine the procedural and operational errors made during the six-month war in Afghanistan that were systematically corrected in time for the subsequent campaign against Hussein. Such corrections included bringing General Franks and General Moseley within the same time zone; providing more efficient target approval procedures to meet the expected higher demands for quick-response target attacks; and assigning a two-star air component representative, Maj. Gen. Daniel Leaf, to CENTCOM’s
land component commander, Lt. Gen. David McKiernan, to help ensure closer and more harmonious air-ground coordination.16

  An especially novel feature of Iraqi Freedom was CENTCOM’s decision to embed some five hundred civilian reporters within many of the combat units that would conduct the war in the interest of fostering journalistic accounts informed by firsthand observation. Correspondents had been kept away from direct contact with combat operations in Afghanistan, and General Franks felt that the resulting reportage had been “error-ridden and mediocre.” Although initially reluctant, Franks eventually decided that reporters who were permitted to accompany allied fighting units into battle would “experience war from the perspective of the soldier or Marine” and would at least “get their facts straight.”17

  Allied air operations over Iraq did not benefit from such firsthand reportage, in part because there was no ready way for journalists to fly routinely in allied combat aircraft on strike missions, but even more so because various host-nation sensitivities precluded the presence of foreign journalists in CENTCOM’s combined air operations center (CAOC, pronounced “kay-ock”) in Saudi Arabia and at most other pertinent locations throughout the region from which they could have observed the conduct of the air war. Of the roughly 500 embedded reporters who accompanied U.S. forces, some 150 were in Navy ships at sea and nearly all of the rest accompanied U.S. Army and Marine Corps ground units during their advance into the heart of Ba’athist Iraq. A mere 28 journalists, roughly 6 percent, were assigned to selected Air Force units that operated from four locations.

  Because most of the media representatives were embedded within CENTCOM’s ground units, the vast majority of the subsequent firsthand journalistic accounts of the war have naturally been exclusively ground-focused.18 For their part, allied air operations and their effects were all but unseen by outside observers. Air power’s pivotal role during Operation Desert Storm in 1991 received far more media coverage because for all but the last four days of that war, coalition operations had little else to report. Video clips of precision weapon attacks from the cockpit displays of coalition strike fighters did not have to compete on the evening news with reporters in Kevlar helmets racing across the Iraqi desert in armored fighting vehicles.19 The Air Force’s top public affairs officer during the campaign, Brig. Gen. Ronald Rand, summarized the air component’s predicament in this respect as CENTCOM was completing its final preparations for combat: “The challenge for us is finding ways—through real-time transmission of information and imagery, use of websites, interviews and everything else we can think of while respecting the conditions of our host nations—to create virtual access to our bases and people.”20

  Even after the major combat phase of Iraqi Freedom reached peak intensity and allied air attacks moved from fixed targets to Hussein’s fielded forces, the vast majority of reportage was provided through the eyes of journalists who were embedded with advancing allied ground units. Anyone who watched the three-week campaign unfold solely through the lenses of CNN or Fox News would inevitably have been left with the impression that the war had been fought and won by allied soldiers and Marines equipped with tanks, rifles, and other appurtenances of land warfare. As the initial coordinating draft of a major postcampaign “lessons-learned” assessment of the war experience produced by U.S. Joint Forces Command (JFCOM, pronounced “jif-com”) rightly pointed out in this regard, although the embedding of reporters with combat forces represented “a public relations milestone” for the U.S. armed forces, it also “supported coverage of events and activities only within the view of the embedded reporter. Without a balance of coverage to provide context and perspective, embedded reporting could not always, in itself, provide comprehensive understanding of the overall effort.”21 That was an understatement when it came to the almost completely unrecognized contribution of CENTCOM’s air component.

  To be sure, televised video clips showed U.S. Navy and Marine Corps strike fighters being launched from aircraft carrier flight decks and Air Force aircraft operating from selected forward land bases. Those images, however, did not convey the full extent and accuracy of CENTCOM’s bombing effort and its profound physical and psychological effects on Iraqi ground forces, which were overwhelming in their contribution to the course and outcome of the three-week campaign. Anthony Cordesman correctly pointed out that regardless of the “near-reversal” of media coverage from Desert Storm to Iraqi Freedom, it was CENTCOM’s “ability to tailor new joint mixes of ground-air-sea power to the needs of a particular campaign that proved decisive.”22 Similarly reflecting on how the air war over Iraq in 2003 “received far less media attention than did the air effort in 1991,” military historian Williamson Murray and Maj. Gen. Robert Scales commented that notwithstanding “the spectacular footage of the massive [allied air attacks] on the Iraq government’s infrastructure, . . . the reporters and cameramen in Baghdad could offer little insight into the purpose and context of these missions.” Moreover, they added, “the air campaign was competing with hundreds of TV and newsprint stories from reporters embedded in ground units. Yet the importance of the air campaign should not be underestimated.”23

  The chapters that follow begin with a review of the high-level planning that took place in Washington, D.C.; at CENTCOM’s headquarters at MacDill Air Force Base (AFB), Florida; and at the headquarters of Central Command Air Forces (CENTAF) at Shaw AFB, South Carolina, to prepare for the campaign and the subsequent mobilization and deployment of allied forces. The book next turns to early kinetic and nonkinetic air operations undertaken to prepare the Iraqi battlespace for the impending war. This discussion is followed by a reconstruction of the air war in its most significant operational and strategic dimensions, with occasional vignettes of experiences at the tactical level to depict how the air war looked to those who fought it at the point of contact with the enemy.

  The book concludes with a synopsis of the Iraqi Freedom campaign: what worked well; unanticipated problems; and identifiable shortcomings in execution that might be corrected (and, in some cases, already have been corrected) by improved training, tactics, command and control arrangements, and equipment capability and interoperability. The final chapter also addresses the interaction of the involved services in pursuit of areas of activity that could stand further improvement in the continuing maturation of joint and combined warfare.

  The Road to War

  America’s second war against Saddam Hussein was all but foreordained even before the dust from Desert Storm had fully settled. The authors of the first book on Iraqi Freedom to appear in print attributed the second Gulf War, “on the simplest level,” to “the failure of the United States’ policy makers to seize the victory its armed forces had so decisively won in the winter of 1991.”1 The allies had indeed succeeded in evicting Iraqi forces from Kuwait in less than six weeks of fighting, but the campaign did not break the back of Hussein’s Republican Guard. More important, it left the Iraqi dictator in power and allowed him to convince himself that he had actually “won” the war, thanks to the incompleteness of the allied coalition’s victory. Emboldened by Iraq’s ostensible “victory,” Hussein and his senior subordinates taunted the United States and the UN throughout the 1990s by repeatedly violating UN-imposed disciplinary resolutions and then retreating only at the last minute when confronted with a credible show of U.S. force.

  In the early aftermath of Desert Storm, many observers asked why the coalition’s ground advance had ended after only four days of uninterrupted progress, just as allied air and land operations had moved into what is commonly called the exploitation phase of war, with Iraq’s occupation forces in Kuwait not just in retreat but in uncontrolled flight. In response, the first Bush administration’s leadership insisted that the intent of the campaign plan and of the crucial UN and congressional resolutions that had authorized and enabled it had never been to knock Iraq out of the regional security picture altogether, but merely to free Kuwait from Hussein’s military occupation. President Bush and his m
ost senior associates further insisted that had the United States pressed all the way to Baghdad in an effort to end Hussein’s rule, America would have found itself bogged down in an Iraqi quagmire.2 Secretary Rumsfeld recalled in his memoirs that “regime change in Baghdad had not been among the U.S. goals when the pledge to liberate Kuwait was first made. The [first Bush] administration felt it would not have full coalition support if it [had] decided to continue on to Baghdad.”3

  Yet a full-blown invasion of Iraq with a view toward driving out Hussein and his Ba’athist regime was not the only alternative to declaring a cease-fire just as the allied air and land offensive had moved into high gear. A less ambitious and problematic alternative might simply have been for the coalition to continue its ongoing air-land assault against the fleeing Iraqi forces for another twenty-four to forty-eight hours. Not only would such an alternative have remained within the spirit and letter of UN Resolution 678 authorizing the use of “all means necessary” to undo Hussein’s conquest of Kuwait, it might also have broken the back of the Iraqi military and unleashed internal forces that might have brought down Hussein’s regime on their own. Whether such an outcome would have ensued from the exercise of that alternative option will never be known. It remains, however, a telling fact of Desert Storm history that perhaps the war’s single most memorable quotation—Gen. Colin Powell’s confident assertion on the eve of the war, on being asked by a reporter what the allied strategy against Iraq’s army would be, that “first, we’re going to cut it off, and then we’re going to kill it”—was only half correct.4