As the start of Iraqi Freedom neared, palpable tensions arose again between CENTCOM’s air and land components, each of which was now tightly bore-sighted on its respective assigned tasks. Discussions at lower levels in each component took on a typically parochial tone, although both land and air commanders credited General Leaf and his ACCE staff with resolving major eleventh-hour differences between the two components. For example, during the back-and-forth between the components over the precise timing of G-day, General Leaf sought to ensure that ground commanders, in his words, “understood the risk and the airman’s perspective” that would attend moving G-day up to precede the start of major air operations by twenty-four hours. The ensuing exchange provided the land component’s unit commanders with “realistic expectations” of what the air component could provide them in the changed circumstances and thus “helped limit emotionalism.” In a reflection on that important achievement, the land component’s assistant chief of staff for operations, Maj. Gen. J. D. Thurman, recalled that General Moseley “told us before we started the war: ‘If it was a [land component] target, it was [an air component] target.”181
In the compromise arrangement that was ultimately worked out, General Moseley and General McKiernan shared the risk of compressed timing occasioned by CENTCOM’s decision to start air and ground operations on the same day. General McKiernan further accepted that he would not have on call all of the dedicated CAS sorties that he might want during the first days of the ground offensive. General Moseley accepted a reduced length of time for establishing control of the air over Iraq and conducting attacks against Iraqi leadership and command and control targets. “The basic elements of the plan remained intact,” General Leaf later said, but “the time lines changed. For example, given the need to support ground operations earlier in the war, it was expected to take longer to accomplish the destruction of regime [or] strategic targets.” In the end, added Leaf, the tradeoffs that General Moseley had accepted in assigning targets in the midst of the competing priorities “turned out to be sufficient. The initial ground attack went very well, the Iraqi air force did not fly, and there weren’t any other major surprises that further stretched air assets.”182
Turkey’s eleventh-hour refusal to allow coalition forces to use its airspace was a blow to planners. The Turkish parliament, mindful of the fact that Turkey had lost $100 billion after having supported allied combat operations in the 1991 Gulf War, also turned down a U.S. request to use Turkey as a launch point from which to insert some 62,000 U.S. troops into Iraq to open up a northern front.183 The Bush administration promptly withdrew a promised $15 billion in aid to Turkey and continued to apply diplomatic pressure. In the meantime, thirty U.S. Navy cargo ships waiting to unload tanks and other heavy equipment of the Army’s 4th ID stood by in the eastern Mediterranean.
Turkey’s denial of access to its airspace promised to complicate the impending allied war effort greatly because the carrier-based aircrews in the eastern Mediterranean had planned to transit Turkish airspace en route to targets in northern Iraq, with Air Force tankers supporting them out of Incirlik. The Navy also had planned to fire TLAMs through Turkish airspace into Iraq. Without access to that airspace, one alternative would have been to reroute the carrier-based strike aircraft and TLAMs into Iraq from the west through Israeli and Jordanian airspace, which would be an even shorter route than transiting Turkey’s airspace, and some administration officials pressed hard for the use of Israeli airspace if Turkey continued to balk on the issue. Secretary Rumsfeld, however, backed by his senior military advisers both in the Pentagon and at CENTCOM, concluded that attacking along a course that crossed Israel would be too politically risky because it would further inflame Arab anti-American passions.184
Alternatively, strike aircraft from the carriers Theodore Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman could fly over Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula and then turn north into Jordan before entering Iraqi airspace.185 Or the two carriers could redeploy from the eastern Mediterranean through the Suez Canal to the Red Sea, a move that would force them to launch their aircraft several hundred miles farther away from Iraq. The land-based tankers slated to support those aircraft would have to operate from even more distant shore bases. The Navy was not yet ready to relocate its carriers, however, because leaving them on station in the eastern Mediterranean would send Turkey a clear message of continued American determination. One Navy spokesman noted: “The minute you start to move the carriers, it will be seen as a sign that we have given up the Turkish option. We are not quite there yet.”186
When Turkey remained firm in denying the use of its territory in support of allied combat operations, and acting on a decision made by General Franks on March 10, CENTCOM began moving some ships from the eastern Mediterranean to the Red Sea on March 16 so that they would be positioned to fire TLAMs at Iraq through Saudi airspace when the war commenced.187 Franks also decided to hold Theodore Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman in the Mediterranean, where they were repositioned to a new operating location from which they could most effectively provide around-the-clock strike fighter coverage for the allied SOF troops who would soon be engaged in combat in northern Iraq. “One of the ways you make up for the difference in a light force,” General Myers remarked, “ . . . is with air power.”188 In a largely unnoted side development that, in hindsight, may have been a serendipitous stroke of good luck, the failure of the Turkey option to materialize had the effect of taking EUCOM out of the picture, because Turkey was in EUCOM’s rather than CENTCOM’s area of responsibility. One commentator observed later that “having both CENTCOM and EUCOM in the operations would have added an extra dimension, and an already complex situation would have been even more so.”189
The initial goal of the first allied SOF teams slated to enter Iraq was to take down the visual observation posts along Iraq’s western border. The SOF troops were to laser-designate the targeted structures for SOF AH-6 Little Bird and MH-60 armed helicopters and Air Force fixed-wing strike aircraft, which would attack them with Hellfire missiles and 500-pound laser-guided bombs (LGBs), in the process blinding the Iraqis as follow-on allied SOF teams fanned out into the night to seize Scud launch baskets and a number of airfields in Iraq’s western desert.190 Nine such towers facing Jordan were disabled first, followed by twenty-four more along the Saudi border several hours later. Those attacks on the night of March 19 marked the start of the war’s preplanned kinetic phase.191 They also featured the initial delivery of leaflets containing surrender instructions for Iraqi troops that were dropped into the western desert by Air Force SOF aircraft.192
CENTCOM planned to begin the move into southern Iraq on March 20 with allied SOF teams seizing the offshore gas and oil platforms and the main oil-loading terminal on the Al Faw Peninsula near the Iran-Iraq border. Concerned that the Iraqis were planning to torch the oilfields and the gas and oil platforms, General Franks asked the component commanders if they could execute OPLAN 1003V ahead of schedule. The CAOC’s chief of strategy later recounted that “General Moseley asked the chief of the MAAP cell and me if we could move it up. We both replied that any dismantling and reassembling of the plan at that point on such short notice would sacrifice the intended impact of the planned A-day attacks on the Iraqi regime. We both felt that it would be better to leave the initial MAAP intact and execute it as planned, even if the land component and its SOF teams would start their opening moves early.”193
The plan’s initial timeline stipulated that G-day would begin at 0600 on March 21. A-day was scheduled to start at 2100 on March 21 with strikes from Navy aircraft carriers and from three Air Force land-based expeditionary air wings. In the end, G-day was advanced eight and a half hours to 2130 on March 20, or D+1. As a result, G-day would commence almost twenty-four hours before the initial wave of air strikes.194 This change represented a major planning departure from CENTCOM’s original concept of operations, which had envisaged sixteen days of air-only operations to shape the battlespace before the start of major ground comba
t. With this new sequencing of joint and combined offensive operations, allied tanks would already be deep into Iraq when the air component launched its initial air attacks.195 In deciding on it, Franks calculated that moving G-day ahead of A-day at the last minute would allow U.S. and British SOF teams to secure the Rumaila oil field and, in the process, attain tactical surprise, because the Iraqis would be expecting an air offensive first.
On March 19, 2003, CENTCOM’s evolved Hybrid plan was redesignated Operation Iraqi Freedom by President Bush as the CAOC, at 0300Z (Zulu, or Greenwich Mean Time), transitioned from Southern Watch to OPLAN 1003V airspace rules, thus instantly changing the routes, altitudes, and call signs for allied aircraft entering Iraqi airspace and also moving the location of airborne tanker tracks. At the same time, both V Corps and I MEF moved into their final attack positions as General Franks signed Fragmentary Order 09-009 directing the early start of G-day. At 1800Z the new SPINs for Operation Iraqi Freedom’s opening ATO went into effect, substantially altering the rules of engagement from those that had governed CENTAF’s air operations throughout the preceding twelve years of Operation Southern Watch.196
The final rules of engagement and SPINs for the impending campaign had already been disseminated to the wing commanders and weapons officers of those units slated to participate in the campaign in mid-February so that those key personnel could start familiarizing themselves with what was soon to come. The aircrews themselves, however, were not given access to those documents until the campaign was about to commence. Because the SPINs for Iraqi Freedom were written as full-up combat SPINs, General Moseley wanted to withhold their release to line aircrews as long as possible to preclude any potential confusion with the different SPINs that were still in effect for Southern Watch. In the end, the definitive combat SPINs for the first day of Iraqi Freedom were not approved and released by CENTCOM until seventy-two hours before the first combat mission was flown in OPLAN 1003V.197
CENTCOM’s Air Offensive
The United States and the United Kingdom went into the second Persian Gulf War with three significant military advantages compared with the 1991 war. First, their own combat capability, particularly in the strike warfare arena, had improved substantially since the time of Operation Desert Storm. Both countries commanded unprecedented defense-suppression, all-weather precision attack, and battlespace awareness assets. Second, and more important, Iraq’s military posture was only a shadow of what it had been when a much larger allied coalition mobilized forces to liberate Kuwait in 1991. Third, the coalition’s air contribution to Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan in 2001 and 2002 had taught valuable lessons that would apply directly to facilitating CENTCOM’s air war against Iraq.
With respect to its land warfare potential, Iraq’s ground order of battle had declined from more than a million men under arms in January 1991 to only some 350,000 over the decade since Desert Storm. The regular Iraqi army had fallen in strength from 68 to 23 divisions, from 6,000 to 2,660 tanks, from 4,800 to 1,780 armored personnel carriers, and from 4,000 to about 2,700 rocket launchers and artillery pieces. The once-elite Republican Guard had been reduced from ten divisions to six, only four of which were heavy divisions equipped with T-72 tanks.1 That still, however, gave Iraq more than twice as many tanks and artillery pieces than the United States and the United Kingdom deployed for Iraqi Freedom (see map 2.1 for the disposition of those ground units on the eve of the campaign).
Iraq’s ground order of battle included 11 regular army divisions and 2 Republican Guard divisions positioned in the north, with 5 regular army divisions and the remaining Republican Guard and Special Republican Guard divisions concentrated around Baghdad. The Iraqi navy had just 2 or 3 warships remaining in service, and the number of still-operational Iraqi radar-guided SAM sites was down from 100 to only slightly more than 60, consisting of 14 MSA-2, 10 SA-2, 24 SA-3, and 15 SA-6 sites.2 Finally, Iraq’s air order of battle had declined from 820 to fewer than 300 fighter and attack aircraft, including 29 Mirage F1s, 14 MiG-29s, 12 MiG-25s, 44 MiG-23s, 98 MiG-21s, 28 Su-25s, 1 Su-24, and 51 Su-17/20/22s.3 Many of those aircraft, moreover, were thought to be unflyable because of an acute lack of periodic maintenance and spare parts. CENTCOM’s main concern with respect to the Iraqi air threat was the possibility that Iraqi UAVs carrying chemical or biological agents might be used against coalition troop concentrations as a desperation measure. The UN Security Council had limited the permissible range of Iraqi UAVs to only 150 kilometers; however, one Iraqi UAV type being flown off the backs of trucks was demonstrating a range capability of 500 kilometers. CENTCOM also had a related concern that unmanned Iraqi L-29 jet trainers might be pressed into service as drones for delivering chemical or biological weapons.
Source: Adaptation by Charles Grear based on CENTAF map
Prewar Defense-Suppression Moves
To prepare the expected battlespace in ways that would give the coalition the greatest possible starting advantage once Operation Iraqi Freedom was formally under way, CENTCOM undertook a number of measures well before the commencement of overt hostilities to diminish Iraq’s ability to resist the impending offensive. The most notable of these was a concentrated effort by CENTCOM’s air component to begin systematically degrading Iraq’s air defenses whenever and wherever opportunities to do so might present themselves.
During the briefing of the Generated Start option by Secretary Rumsfeld and General Franks to the president on February 7, 2002, a question had arisen concerning how CENTCOM might take advantage of Operation Southern Watch as a framework within which to increase the intensity of the bombing, with a view toward eliminating some critical Iraqi IADS nodes before the scheduled start of decisive combat operations.4 Over the course of the preceding 10 years, allied aircrews had flown nearly 200,000 armed overwatch sorties into Iraq’s northern and southern no-fly zones.5 They had been fired on by Iraqi air defenses numerous times, albeit with no loss of any aircraft over Iraq. That was a remarkable accomplishment, considering that the normal peacetime accident rate for that number of sorties would have occasioned as many as a dozen or more aircraft lost to in-flight mechanical failures or pilot error. Since January 2002 alone, CENTCOM had flown more than 4,000 sorties over southern Iraq, during which time Iraq’s IADS had targeted coalition aircraft at more than twice the rate registered throughout the preceding year.
Accordingly, on June 1, 2002, CENTAF initiated Operation Southern Focus, a determined effort to use Operation Southern Watch as a legitimate aegis under which to conduct intensified attacks against the Iraqi IADS in response to what General Moseley described as “more numerous and more threatening attacks” against allied combat aircraft patrolling the no-fly zones.6 Three months earlier, Moseley had laid the essential groundwork for this new undertaking by initiating a systematic transition from Southern Watch, which was geared toward maintaining the status quo in the southern no-fly zone, toward an operation aimed at “mapping the south” (i.e., cataloguing the Iraqi IADS in southern Iraq) through what he called “intrusive ISR.” That effort reflected his “desire to reseize the initiative and ensure air superiority in the southern no-fly zone and establish conditions for potential future operations to remove the Ba’athist Iraqi regime.” He also wanted to “expand targets beyond ‘self-defense’ solely against identified Iraqi ‘shooters’ to new target systems that also embraced Iraq’s IADS, regime command and control, and possible systems for the delivery of weapons of mass destruction.”7 What set this escalated concept of operations apart from the more straightforward tit-for-tat nature of Operation Southern Watch was the assumption by Southern Focus of the right to strike any IADS-related target in the southern no-fly zone in response to an Iraqi provocation, not merely the specific offending SAM or AAA site. An F-15E pilot, Capt. Randall Haskin, explained the logic: “This philosophy was basically that it was better to come back later with all of the appropriate assets on hand than it was to knee-jerk react to getting shot at and risk actually getting hit.”8
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br /> In connection with Operation Southern Watch, CENTAF had long maintained five graduated standing response options from which to choose when Iraqi air defenses fired on an allied aircraft. Counterattacks were mandatory and automatic in all cases, with the most forceful response option entailing concurrent or sequential attacks against multiple targets outside the no-fly zone. Such preplanned counterattacks required higher-level approval, in some cases from the president himself. Operation Desert Badger, to be executed in case an allied aircraft was downed by Iraqi fire, aimed at disrupting Iraq’s ability to capture the downed aircrew by attacking key command and control nodes in the heart of downtown Baghdad. Additional preplanned options were available in case an allied aircrew member was actually captured. Operation Desert Thunder was on tap in case of a Ba’athist assault against the Kurds in northern Iraq.9
The Unseen War Page 10