The Unseen War

by Lambeth, Benjamin S.

  This Internal Look exercise also gave CENTAF an opportunity to hand-pick personnel for eventual CAOC assignments and to further cement early working ties with other important centers of air warfare expertise such as Project Checkmate on the Air Staff; the Navy’s Deep Blue staff in the office of the chief of naval operations; the USAF Weapons School at Nellis AFB; the Naval Strike and Air Warfare Center at NAS Fallon, Nevada; and the Joint Warfare Analysis Center. In marked contrast to its earlier rushed experience of getting ready for Operation Enduring Freedom after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, CENTAF had the opportunity to marshal the most expert and capable air warfare professionals available. In addition, CENTAF was able to take the first steps toward developing and testing the CAOC’s proposed wartime processes, which provided an opportunity to train key personnel at all levels on new systems, to practice and refine CAOC procedures, and to form personal cross-service relationships that would pay handsome dividends once the campaign was finally under way. In many respects it was a “worthwhile dress rehearsal” for the entire CAOC staff in preparing for the challenges to come.148

  The exercise entailed ensuring that the deployed tactical operations center at CENTCOM’s forward headquarters in Doha had sufficient bandwidth to conduct combat operations and that it was adequately interoperable with CENTCOM’s land, air, maritime, and SOF components.149 The deployable joint tactical operations center, known in its prototype form as XC4I, was designed to provide command and control connectivity through commercially developed computer tools and common operating systems software, including near-real-time friendly force tracking.150 Ultimately the center was deployed to provide a forward headquarters for General Franks and his staff.151

  During the course of the Internal Look exercise, differences of view emerged between the air and land components over the planned sequencing of force employment during the campaign’s opening round. General McKiernan, the land component commander, proposed that General Franks forgo the sixteen-day air-only offensive included in the Hybrid plan. As he had during the previous component commanders’ meeting at Ramstein, General Moseley countered that the air component needed adequate time to weaken Iraqi air defenses and disable key leadership and command and control targets before any significant ground push could be safely undertaken.152 Although it would ultimately be Secretary Rumsfeld’s call, Franks split the difference between his two component commanders by ruling that the war would start with a determined SOF and air effort to secure western Iraq with the goal of preventing any Iraqi launch of theater ballistic missiles toward Israel, after which the air and ground offensives would commence almost simultaneously. This session convinced Franks that the Hybrid plan did not allow enough flexibility for adaptive planning.153 Identified shortcomings, he later said, included “communications bandwidth problems, misinterpreted orders, timing-and-distance issues, [and] seams between elements of the joint force.”154 Allied commanders on the eve of Operation Iraqi Freedom reportedly had more than forty times the bandwidth that had been available during the 1991 Persian Gulf War, and that still proved insufficient to meet their anticipated needs.155

  Air Marshal Glenn Torpy, the British air contingent commander, recalled that CENTCOM and the Bush administration had decided early on not to start the campaign with a preparatory air phase. The initial planning prior to that decision had followed the familiar template of Operation Desert Storm, with a discrete opening phase in which air attacks would shape the battlespace. But in early 2003, as the planning evolved and as operational-level intelligence continued to flow in from Iraq, the preparatory phase of air-only attacks was reduced from sixteen days to about five days. Torpy attributed the change to at least three considerations. First, CENTCOM’s leaders realized the need to secure the oil fields in southern Iraq as quickly as possible; second, General Franks and the land component were concerned that a large ground force concentrated in a small area in Kuwait was vulnerable to Iraqi WMD; and finally, General Franks was convinced that close synchronization of the air and land components would offer the best chance of dislocating the Ba’athist regime and ending the campaign quickly.156

  This reasoning eventually resulted in A-day and G-day (as the start of the air and ground offensives were respectively called) converging. The convergence entailed a risk in that it placed great pressure on General Moseley to undertake his five air-warfare tasks simultaneously and to prioritize his resources correctly in the process. Torpy noted that “the air component’s nervousness in compressing the campaign was (1) would [General Moseley] have the resources to carry out those tasks, and (2) would he be able to execute, for instance, gaining air superiority in sufficient time for him to be able to do some of the other tasks?”157 In the end, the near-simultaneous start of air and land combat would be enabled by the land component commander’s willingness to rely on such organic platforms as his attack helicopters and Marine Corps fixed-wing strike fighters for the first few days, with the clear understanding that the air component would provide additional as-needed CAS should the coalition’s ground offensive bog down, even if this might require diverting allied strike aircraft from regime, command and control, and WMD targets and a consequent major divergence from the initially planned air offensive.158

  By late 2002, President Bush had privately decided that war with Iraq was all but inevitable, yet he continued with at least an appearance of diplomatic efforts. CENTCOM’s deployment of forces was now under way at full speed, and the president asked Franks when the final go/no-go commitment point would be at hand. Franks replied that the president’s point of no return would be when the first allied SOF teams were inserted on the ground in Iraq to commence offensive operations.159

  At CENTCOM’s request, General Moseley hosted a strategy conference at Shaw AFB on January 7–8, 2003, aimed at bringing all of the strategy team members up to speed with the permanent CAOC party. Later that month, instructors from the F-15C, F-15E, F-16, A-10, HH-60, and command and control divisions of the USAF Weapons School visited Shaw to offer quality-control checks on various aspects of the emerging air offensive plan in their specific areas of expertise. Many of these highly pedigreed subject-matter experts would later serve as tactical coordinators in the CAOC during Operation Iraqi Freedom.160

  On January 11, 2003, Rumsfeld and the JCS chairman, General Myers, met with the president in the White House to brief the Saudi ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar bin Sultan. General Myers gave Bandar an overview briefing on the war plan, outlining its anticipated start with an intensive bombing campaign aimed primarily at the Republican Guard, Hussein’s security services, and command and control targets. After the briefing ended, Rumsfeld said to Bandar: “You can count on this. You can take that to the bank. This is going to happen.”161

  On January 20–24 CENTAF convened a targeting conference to produce an updated four-day MAAP to determine which target aim points had to be struck and in what order to achieve the desired effects. During this extremely labor-intensive planning session, representatives from CENTCOM, CENTAF, USAFE, the land and maritime components, I MEF, the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA), and the Joint Warfare Analysis Center examined each selected target and each individual weapon aim-point placement to ensure that General Franks’ commander’s intent would be met. A CENTAF participant later recalled: “This meeting was crucial, and although things would change, it provided the 95 percent targeting solution.”162

  CENTAF later convened another targeting conference focused expressly on U.S. air-launched cruise missiles, TLAMs, and the RAF’s Storm Shadow missiles to ensure optimal targeting of those standoff-attack weapons. CENTAF planners deemed an early sorting-out of the many and varied intended targets for these weapons necessary in light of the large number of cruise missiles that would figure in the ultimate air offensive plan. Again, as participating CENTAF staffers later recalled, although new target information would inevitably occasion
changes, “this conference provided the 90 percent solution and gave the cruise-missile planners ample lead time.”163

  The following month, CENTAF’s core planning staff deployed forward en masse to the CAOC in Saudi Arabia to join up with their Internal Look teammates who were already in place there. On February 22–23, at General Moseley’s direction, the planners convened yet another conference that was attended by the in-theater Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps wing and squadron commanders and weapons officers whose flying units were slated to participate in the upcoming air war. In addition to getting updated on all aspects of the plan and on the latest SPINs, they all had an opportunity to “chair-fly” the A-day sequencing and deconfliction procedures that were crucial to enabling a serviceable ATO on the air war’s opening day. A participating CENTAF planner later recalled of the convocation, “Given the complexity of operations, this conference paid large dividends in ensuring that the planners and executors were synchronized.”164

  Throughout February 2003 the CAOC staff undertook steps to ensure a smooth transition from Operation Southern Watch to OPLAN 1003V. The first step was to establish an around-the-clock rhythm of operations that would approximate the actual flow of a full-fledged air war. Second, the CAOC’s standard operating procedures were amended to reflect CENTAF’s new procedures that had been developed and refined in the most recent Internal Look exercise. Third, and equally important, new systems such as the CAOC’s MAAP toolkit were brought on line to give CAOC personnel training in their use. Finally, combat operations in connection with Operation Southern Focus (discussed in detail in Chapter 2) were gradually increased in both intensity and breadth of target coverage to generate more of a full-up air campaign tempo. A last-chance targeting and commanders’ conference was held on March 2, 2003, to allow CENTCOM and CAOC planners their final major update with respect to planned target aim points, as well as to enable a final consensus between the CAOC’s apportionment and targeting chiefs, on the one hand, and CENTCOM’s operations and intelligence planners, on the other.165

  Nearly all of the required weaponeering for CENTAF’s planned operations had been attended to well in advance of the campaign’s actual start. Yet CENTAF staffers would not have been able to complete this daunting process without marshaling the weaponeering talent of a variety of centers of excellence for such highly specialized work, such as Air Combat Command’s 480th Intelligence Group and CENTCOM’s maritime component, both of which provided indispensable targeting support.166

  CENTAF staffers later recalled that the targeting information that had been available to them going into the war had been little short of “phenomenal.” In their collective opinion, the ultimate success of the three-week air war was attributable largely to the extent of prewar collaboration that had taken place among CENTCOM, its subordinate warfighting components, and the national intelligence community. Proposed MAAPs for the first three days of the war were studied and reviewed down to the individual weapon aim-point placement level on at least three occasions at conferences attended by the national intelligence community’s top experts on each target category. A final conference held at CENTCOM’s forward headquarters in Qatar two weeks before the onset of major combat aimed at eliciting recommendations for final tweaks to the A-day MAAP capped off the effort. That individual target review and MAAP refinement was said to have been key to ensuring the successful execution of the A-day ATO and all that followed.167

  Two weeks before the campaign’s start, General Myers remarked to the press that were President Bush to decide to commit the nation to action, the ensuing war would unfold in a way “much, much different” than the forty-three-day Operation Desert Storm had in 1991. The JCS chair said that the goal this time would be a shorter war in order to minimize civilian casualties to the greatest extent possible. In fact, he said, the war might end before a battle for Baghdad was required. The best guarantee of a short war, he added, would be to impose “such a shock on the system that the Iraqi regime would have to assume early on [that] the end was inevitable.”168

  At roughly the same time, the director of the National Security Agency, Lt. Gen. Michael Hayden, decided, against all the inclinations of his community’s tightly closed culture, to open up his agency’s “national vaults” to American warfighters at the tactical level, a move that would enable senior noncommissioned officers on the ground to tap directly into the most sensitive signals intelligence for gaining real-time awareness of ongoing Iraqi military activity of immediate tactical concern to them. This arrangement was reportedly provided by means of a computer chat room assigned the code name Zircon Chat. It offered CENTCOM unprecedented wherewithal for enabling combat operations informed by undeniably accurate real-time intelligence reporting at the tactical level.169

  On March 4 General Franks arrived in Washington for final prewar briefings with the president and Secretary Rumsfeld. After a meeting of the Bush war cabinet on March 5, the last face-to-face encounter between the combatant commander and the administration’s leadership in Washington, General Franks declared: “If the president of the United States decides to undertake action, we are in a position to provide a military option.” Franks added: “There is no doubt we will prevail.” He subsequently proceeded to his forward headquarters in Qatar, where he met with his land, maritime, and Marine Corps commanders, and then flew to Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia for final consultations with General Moseley. General Franks characterized what was about to unfold as “the most complex and fully integrated joint-service military operation in history.”170

  By March 17 it was clear that France would veto any attempted second UN resolution to empower the coalition against Iraq, and the president accordingly reaffirmed his determination to forgo any further effort at seeking such a resolution. White House press secretary Ari Fleischer told reporters: “The United Nations has failed to enforce its own demands that Iraq immediately disarm. As a result, the diplomatic window has now been closed.”171 Later that evening the president issued an ultimatum to Hussein and his two sons to leave Iraq within forty-eight hours. Should they fail to comply, Bush promised an attack “commenced at a time of our choosing [with the] full force and might” of the assembled coalition. The president also declared that “the United States of America has the sovereign authority to use force in assuring its own national security.”172 He added: “The United Nations Security Council has not lived up to its responsibilities. So we will rise to ours.”173 The wording of his warning left open the possibility that allied forces might attack in less than two days if Hussein openly refused to comply.

  At that point during the final force buildup, the CIA reportedly had eighty-seven “Rockstars” agents at work inside Iraq communicating with their handlers via Thuraya satellite telephones, which the agency had determined that Iraqi intelligence could not intercept.174 These agents provided updated and in some cases fresh intelligence on Iraqi SAM and antiaircraft artillery (AAA, pronounced “triple-A”) positions, which CENTCOM subsequently geolocated by means of overhead imagery. Some agents reported that Iraqi unit commanders had said that they would refrain from fighting in the event of an allied attack. These announcements briefly raised hopes at CENTCOM for a possible capitulation strategy that would rely on surrendered Iraqi units for postwar stabilization efforts in Iraq.175

  In a clear sign of Iraq’s awareness that a major showdown was impending, Iraqi troops began moving military equipment into civilian areas and positioning combat aircraft, munitions, and communications equipment near warehouses, mosques, and schools. More than two hundred American, Canadian, Australian, and European peace activists flocked to Baghdad and elsewhere, including to the northern city of Kirkuk, to volunteer their services as human shields to protect Iraqi assets. More than half of those activists left in frustration shortly afterward when their Iraqi handlers insisted that they stay away from low-risk facilities like hospitals and instead cluster around such dual-use target candidates as electrical power plants, water pumping
stations, and communications centers.176 U.S. defense officials had identified Iraq’s communications facilities as “extremely significant command and control targets.”177 A CENTCOM briefer warned obliquely that “if a government chooses to collocate those weapons with one of these protected sites, [the latter] lose their status under international law as a protected target.”178

  As the start of combat operations neared, General Leaf noted increasing concern on General Moseley’s part that CENTCOM’s air component might not be able to achieve, in a mere twenty-four hours, all of the strategic objectives that General Franks wanted completed before the start of the land offensive. General Moseley, Leaf recalled, was “especially concerned about having his support assets spread too thin.”179

  Assets in particularly short supply included aircraft for conducting suppression of enemy air defenses (SEAD, pronounced “seed”) operations, ISR platforms, electronic jammer aircraft, and tankers. In particular, Moseley voiced concern that overtasking his air assets might jeopardize allied ground forces. He felt that if the planned attacks against potential Iraqi Scud capabilities and leadership targets could precede the ground push by at least a few days, he could then swing more assets to the south in support of coalition land operations when the time came. His concern grew even more pronounced when the Turkish parliament voted on March 1 to deny permission to the 4th ID’s 16,000 troops to open a second front from the north, suggesting to some in the CAOC that a longer air-only offensive was now more than ever needed to offset the less-than-expected strength of allied ground forces. The land component’s unit commanders, however, were determined to lose no time in commencing offensive ground operations because allied ground forces massed in place and waiting along the southern border of Iraq were highly vulnerable to enemy artillery and missile attacks. The land component also pressed to have the Iraqi artillery positions along the southern border within range of U.S. and British troops attacked and neutralized by Southern Focus sorties before the campaign got formally under way. CENTCOM elected to defer any such attacks until other operations were already in progress inside Iraq, believing that such precursor strikes would not fall within the broadened but still-limited mandate of Southern Focus and also would appear excessively provocative at a time when the command was still not ready to execute OPLAN 1003V.180