General Moseley summoned a Red Team of experts from Air Combat Command to Nellis during the first week of November so that the team could be briefed on all aspects of CENTAF’s emerging air offensive plan.88 In addition to personnel from Air Combat Command, the Red Team also included appropriate subject-matter experts from USAFE’s 32nd Air Operations Group, the Navy’s Deep Blue staff, the Air Staff’s Project Checkmate, and other organizations. During the course of this meeting CAOC planners further fine-tuned the emerging MAAP for the first days of the impending air war. Because many of the Red Team invitees had by now been in-briefed on the emerging plan in full detail, General Moseley recruited them to join his battle staff.89
A related conference convened at Air Combat Command’s Air-Ground Operations School (AGOS) at Nellis starting on November 2 focused on refining CENTAF’s emerging concept of operations for kill-box interdiction and close air support (KI/CAS). Col. Matt Neuenswander, the AGOS commander at that time, later recalled that General Moseley directed the attendees to ensure that CENTAF’s emerging KI/CAS plan was both workable and in close harmony with the Army’s anticipated fire support needs. Among the main breakthroughs that emerged from this effort was a set of executable air-ground SPINs that enabled the fullest possible air-component support to engaged Army ground forces. Colonel Neuenswander later remarked that “General Moseley bent over backwards from the beginning to support the Army.”90 CENTAF’s rear air operations center at Shaw concurrently underwent an expansion of its already numerous campaign management functions and was staffed by most of the air component’s key planners and operators who would ultimately populate the forward CAOC at Prince Sultan Air Base. That effort provided yet another opportunity for the air component to dry-run the CAOC’s anticipated battle rhythm while at the same time building working and trust relationships within the CAOC.91
The final campaign plan aimed at seizing key objectives as rapidly as possible, which inevitably dictated concurrent air and ground operations. The plan also sought to keep Iraq from using WMD against coalition forces, firing ballistic missiles at Israel, and sabotaging its own oil fields, while simultaneously discouraging the regular Iraqi army from fighting and also making every reasonable effort to keep Iraq’s infrastructure intact. In Desert Storm such Iraqi infrastructure elements as electrical power generation, oil refineries and distribution and storage facilities, and transportation nodes—including bridges and rail junctions—had been attacked and destroyed on a substantial scale. CENTCOM was determined this time not to appear to be at war against the Iraqi people. The targeting of such infrastructure facilities during the first Gulf War had not achieved the intended goal of undermining Iraq’s immediate warfighting potential. Such assets were also included on the no-strike list to spare the United States the burden of having to rebuild them after the war and because the expected rapid success of the ground offensive did not require their destruction.92 Only command and control networks, regime security forces, select palaces, government ministries, command bunkers, counterair and countermaritime targets, and facilities associated with Iraq’s ability to produce and deliver WMD were to be struck in the air component’s initial “strategic” attacks.93 Offensive air operations this time were to be studiously effects based, seeking desired outcomes and not just attacking targets for the sake of destroying them.
CENTAF’s staff employed a strategy-to-tasks approach in accomodating these mission requirements. Targeting began with General Moseley’s operational objectives, such as achieving and maintaining air and space supremacy. Operational objectives led to tactical-level objectives, such as neutralizing Iraq’s IADS in order to mitigate its assessed threat potential. These tactical objectives drove such tactical tasks as destroying IADS command and control nodes by A+1 (the start of preplanned offensive air operations being A-day). The CENTAF staff assigned a desired effect to each tactical task (such as rendering the enemy’s IADS unable to coordinate a coherent air defense throughout the campaign’s major combat phase), a focus of effort (for example, on such key command and control enablers as the air defense operations centers, sector operations centers, and intercept operations centers), and a measure of physical achievement (for example, 100 percent of all targeted enablers destroyed). Each target aim point chosen was tied to a specific tactical task that could be traced back to General Moseley’s operational-level objectives, which supported General Franks’ operational objectives, which in turn supported the president’s strategic objectives.94
CENTAF’s planners spent most of 2002 and the initial months of 2003 studying Iraq first as a “system of systems,” then looking at candidate targets, and finally drilling down to the aim-point placement level, consulting experts from a variety of concerned national agencies who worked closely with CENTCOM’s intelligence and operations staffs. The Joint Warfare Analysis Center provided detailed targeting analysis of Iraq’s airfields and communications nodes, as well as empirically substantiated recommendations as to how best to attack certain hardened targets using particular warheads, impact angles, and impact velocities.95
Lt. Col. Mark Cline, a key participant in this process, recalled that “CENTAF’s planners and targeteers were figuratively tied at the hip for days at a time, producing several iterations of the first seventy-two hours of the air campaign from February 2002 all the way through the campaign’s commencement on March 19, 2003.” At a five-day conference in late January 2003, all of the concerned national agencies, CENTCOM’s intelligence and operations staffers, and cruise-missile operations planners reviewed every aim point associated with the most significant targets. This process was then repeated in-theater at the CAOC. “Simply put,” Cline said, “the placement of every aim point had a focused purpose.”96 In later characterizing this process in a press interview General Leaf observed: “We are working very hard to make the difficult intellectual leap to ask what it is we want to achieve instead of going right to the weapon, the platform, or the results in terms of rubble.”97
CENTAF developed a strategy that envisaged six parallel and concurrent air offensive missions: strategic attack, to include strikes against leadership, regime security and support, command and control, WMD and associated delivery systems, and the Special Republican Guard; air and space supremacy, to include disabling Iraqi access to space support and neutralizing the Iraqi air force and IADS; operations to prevent Iraqi theater ballistic missile launches and to destroy any targeted missiles that might attack Israel or Jordan; counterland operations and providing support to the land component commander by interdicting and destroying Iraqi ground forces and providing on-call CAS; supporting the SOF component commander by means of airlift, ISR, and on-call strike operations; and supporting the maritime component commander and achieving maritime supremacy by neutralizing Iraqi weapons that might threaten allied vessels and lines of communication in the Persian Gulf.98
With respect to the prodigious amount of jet fuel that would be required to sustain such large-scale air operations, General Moseley’s chief of strategy recalled:
One of the huge constraints that was imposed on CENTAF’s planners going into the initial workups for the air contribution to OPLAN 1003V was that we were not allowed to assume the availability of any provision of basing or fuel from Saudi Arabia. From the very beginning, we realized that this plan was not executable without Saudi basing and fuel, especially as the ever-evolving plan moved toward a near-simultaneous execution of air and ground operations. However, the Office of the Secretary of Defense kept this constraint on planning until the start of January 2003. Throughout the preceding months, CENTAF planners had continued to voice their concerns about the constraint until the Pentagon finally relented and gave General Moseley the go-ahead to seek basing and fuel from the Saudi government. The resultant short-notice permission granted by the Saudis for coalition basing in their country resulted in their having to contract thousands of fuel trucks to keep facilities such as Prince Sultan Air Base operating.99
As of January 2
003, the overall campaign plan still envisaged 16 days of preparation (5 days to mobilize and establish an air bridge and 11 days to deploy the forces forward), followed by 16 days of shaping the battlespace (including continued SOF insertions and selective air-only attacks), leading into an anticipated 125 days of decisive offensive operations (including the start of major ground combat), and then a post-hostilities phase of unknowable duration.100 The concept of operations for the opening round was simultaneity in an aerial onslaught that envisaged 80 percent or more of the target attacks being carried out with precision-guided munitions. An Air Force planner predicted that the air employment strategy would be “highly kinetic.”101 The plan entailed the delivery of some three thousand precision-guided bombs and cruise missiles within the first forty-eight hours—ten times the number used during the first two days of Desert Storm—directed against enemy air defenses, political and military headquarters facilities, communications nodes, and suspected WMD delivery systems, followed quickly thereafter by the start of the allied ground offensive. That prospect promised an anticipated air campaign that many in the media soon came to characterize by the term “shock and awe,” an expression that had gained popular currency after Rumsfeld sent a note to General Franks in December 2002 suggesting that Franks and his planners at CENTCOM review a recent study bearing that title that maintained that precision weapons could neutralize an enemy’s command and control and thereby achieve “rapid dominance” in major combat.102
On February 5, 2003, Secretary of State Powell briefed the UN Security Council on the Bush administration’s many premises and assumptions regarding Iraq’s presumed WMD efforts. With CIA director Tenet sitting behind him, Powell laid out a raft of raw intelligence facts and figures, recited Iraq’s known UAV violations, alluded to indications of Iraqi links with Al Qaeda, and suggested that despite the contrasting religious fanaticism of Al Qaeda and secular nature of Saddam Hussein, “ambition and hatred are enough to bring Iraq and Al Qaeda together.”103 Powell argued for a UN resolution authorizing the use of “all necessary means” to prevent any such possibility from occurring. France and Russia, however, refused to endorse the stronger language. As always, Powell counseled caution. He later told President Bush privately that once Bush committed the nation to war, he would immediately become “the proud owner of 25 million people. You will own all their hopes, aspirations, and problems.” (Powell and Under Secretary of State Richard Armitage characterized this cautionary injunction as the Pottery Barn rule—if you break it, you own it.)104
Flowing the Forces
On November 26, 2002, nearly a year to the day after the president had asked Secretary Rumsfeld to get started on a war plan for Iraq, General Franks sent a mobilization deployment order to Rumsfeld for his approval. This was the first concrete step taken by CENTCOM toward implementing the planning that had taken place throughout the preceding year. The order directed an incremental movement of forces, including two Navy carrier battle groups, and notified all tasked units to prepare to deploy their forces forward to the war-zone-to-be. Rumsfeld responded: “We’re going to dribble this out slowly so that it’s enough to keep the pressure on for the diplomacy but not so much as to discredit the diplomacy.”105 The issuance of this initial deployment order represented one aspect of a two-pronged approach, one part diplomatic and the other military.106 The first deployment order approved by Rumsfeld was issued on December 6.
In January 2003, in one of the first major deployment moves for the impending invasion, Secretary Rumsfeld ordered the USS Abraham Lincoln carrier battle group to redeploy to the North Arabian Gulf from its holding area near Australia. The group was en route home from a six-month deployment in the Middle East but was directed to remain in CENTCOM’s area of responsibility as a contingency measure. The USS Theodore Roosevelt battle group, just completing a predeployment workup in the Caribbean, received orders to move as quickly as possible to reinforce USS Constellation, already in the Gulf, and USS Harry S. Truman in the eastern Mediterranean for possible operations against Iraq. A fifth carrier battle group spearheaded by USS Carl Vinson moved into the Western Pacific to complement two dozen Air Force heavy bombers that had been forward-deployed to Guam. U.S. Air Force F-15E Strike Eagles were sent to Japan and Korea as backfills to cover Northeast Asia as USS Kitty Hawk moved from the Western Pacific to the North Arabian Gulf. The USS Nimitz carrier battle group got under way from San Diego in mid-January, wrapped up an already compressed three-week training exercise, and headed for the Western Pacific. Finally, the USS George Washington battle group, which had just returned home to the East Coast in December following a six-month deployment in support of Operation Southern Watch, was placed on ninety-six-hour standby alert.107
The six carrier battle groups that were committed to the impending campaign were the core of a larger U.S. naval presence comprising 3 amphibious ready groups (ARGs) and 2 amphibious task forces (ATFs) totaling nearly 180 U.S. and allied ships, 80,800 sailors, and 15,500 Marines. The carrier battle groups were all under the operational control of Vice Adm. Timothy Keating, 5th Fleet’s commander and CENTCOM’s maritime component commander. Admiral Keating wrote that “never before in history [had] one naval force projected such a concentrated amount of firepower and technology in such a small geographic area, and not since World War II [had] a larger logistics force been assembled.”108 In late February Secretary of the Navy Hansford Johnson and the chief of naval operations, Admiral Clark, testified before the House Armed Services Committee that the Navy’s inventory of precision-guided munitions (PGMs) had been replenished since the drawdown that had resulted from major combat operations in Afghanistan and that the six forward-deployed carriers were adequately stocked for a possible conflict with Iraq. “Two years ago,” Clark told the committee, “I could not have deployed the force structure I have out there and be in the green across the board.”109
In yet another indication of ongoing preparations for major combat, the Air Force canceled its regularly scheduled bimonthly Red Flag large-force training exercise at Nellis AFB planned for the second week of January 2003 after its 4th Fighter Wing, an F-15E unit based at Seymour Johnson AFB, North Carolina, and the designated lead wing for that exercise, received deployment orders to CENTCOM’s area of responsibility.110 Two months later, the next scheduled Red Flag exercise was also canceled because at least 50 percent of the more than two thousand slated participants, many of whom were from the designated lead unit, the 48th Fighter Wing at RAF Lakenheath in the United Kingdom, could not marshal the assets needed for transportation to Nellis.111 Throughput figures at Rhein-Main Air Base, Germany, for the months of January and February 2003 attest to the increased flow rate of U.S. military personnel being airlifted to Turkey, Qatar, and elsewhere in Southwest Asia. C-17 transports averaged 30 to 35 transits a day, two-thirds of which were bound for Turkey and Southwest Asia. The ramp activity at Rhein-Main, which one official there characterized as “staggering,” saw upward of 32,000 passengers, or about 2,000 a day, in just the first half of February, up from a flow of only 10,000 passengers a month the previous November.112
The commander of the Air Force’s Air Mobility Command (AMC) later called the airlift contribution to the buildup for Iraqi Freedom “one of the most challenging force deployments in recent memory.”113 AMC’s tankers delivered 405 fighters and bombers and also supported 570 airlift and 80 ISR missions. The KC-135’s multipoint refueling system and the KC-10’s wing air refueling pods were indispensable force multipliers in supporting Navy, Marine Corps, and allied aircraft that used the probe-and-drogue in-flight refueling system. The deployment phase required 1,696 tanker sorties, with the tanker force offloading more than 245 million pounds of fuel and achieving a 92 percent effectiveness rate in 82 days of operations. At the peak of the deployment flow on March 6–7, 2003, AMC moved more than 180 aircraft, with more than 120 of those airborne simultaneously.114 To support this effort, AMC used 222 KC-135s and 35 KC-10s that were deployed to 17 locations. This
air mobility effort was conducted by a total-force team, with 51 percent of the deployed AMC force made up of active-duty personnel and 49 percent by Air National Guard and Air Force Reserve Command personnel during the peak periods of deployment operations.
On February 8, 2003, to support the deployment of U.S. military personnel who would take part in the campaign, Secretary Rumsfeld activated the CRAF Stage 1 long-range passenger segment, only the second CRAF activation in the program’s fifty-one-year history (Operation Desert Storm having entailed the first). The American airline industry responded by providing forty-seven aircraft and aircrews to support AMC’s aerial deployment and sustainment mission needs for the upcoming campaign. Because voluntary airline contributions exceeded Stage 1 levels, the long-range cargo segment of the CRAF was not needed. During the CRAF’s time of activation, which lasted until June 18, 2003, civilian airliner contributions moved more than 250,000 U.S. troops into CENTCOM’s area of responsibility.115
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