The Unseen War

by Lambeth, Benjamin S.

  The Iraqi air force had continued to fly as many as a thousand training sorties a month in the airspace between the two no-fly zones right up to the eve of the campaign’s start, and thus could not be completely discounted as a threat to allied forces.42 Just a month before the campaign began, the Iraqis conducted a rare MiG-25 reconnaissance mission toward the west in an attempt to assess allied force dispositions.43 Barely a month before that, on December 23, 2002, a MiG-25 had succeeded in downing an MQ-1 Predator that had been especially configured with a Stinger infrared missile.44 General Moseley later explained that a special projects effort had been initiated to configure the Predator, which normally mounts AGM-114 Hellfire air-to-ground missiles, with the infrared-guided Stinger with the intent to lure the Iraqi air force to come up and engage it with a fighter. Although the Predator was shot down in the end, the bait worked and provided valuable updated intelligence on the MiG-25’s radar performance parameters and the Iraqi command and control system.45

  Within the context of Operation Southern Focus, the coalition responded to 651 incidents of Iraqi firing on allied aircraft by dropping 606 bombs on what General Moseley called a “wider set of air defense and related targets.”46 Under Southern Focus, allied aircrews were authorized to attack Iraqi IADS-related facilities that had not directly threatened allied aircraft but were associated with the air defense system. Fiber-optic cable repeaters were of particular interest. Because they are about the size of manhole covers, they called for especially precise munitions delivery. Allied aircrews attacked known fiber-optic nodes whenever possible in an attempt to force Iraqi air defenders to rely on their more vulnerable shorter-range acquisition and tracking radars, which could be more easily monitored and jammed. These expanded responses continued right up to the formal start of Operation Iraqi Freedom on the night of March 19.

  Toward the end of Southern Focus, three defensive counterair CAP stations were established inside southern Iraq, with the western position moved forward to include the airspace above the 33rd parallel at the time initial SOF operations began on the ground on March 19 (see below). Although no Iraqi aircraft attempted to fly at any time during the three-week campaign, those CAP stations were established and maintained lest Iraqi pilots try desperation attacks against vulnerable allied aircraft like tankers and ISR platforms operating in rear areas.47

  By March 18, 2003, CENTCOM’s air component had flown 21,736 combat sorties into the southern no-fly zone under the aegis of Southern Focus and had destroyed or damaged 349 specific targets. The 651 known instances of Iraqi surface-to-air fire directed against CENTAF aircraft during this eight-month period were all ineffective.48 After the campaign ended, General Moseley acknowledged that the heightened intensity of allied air operations may have elicited a more intense Iraqi response, giving allied aircrews more opportunities to attack ground targets of all types: “We became a little more aggressive based on them shooting more at us, which allowed us to respond more. Then the question is whether they were shooting at us because we were up there more. So there is a chicken-and-egg thing here.”49

  Viewed in hindsight, Southern Focus conferred an early advantage on CENTCOM’s effort to gain total control of the air over a large portion of Iraq once the full-up campaign was ready to be launched. More important yet, it also was a key enabler of CENTCOM’s ultimate decision to commence air and ground operations almost simultaneously because it allowed General Moseley, in effect, to start the air war more than eight months in advance of the formal execution of OPLAN 1003V. By that time, General Jumper observed, “we felt that [Iraq’s air defenses] were pretty much out of business.”50 Former Air Force chief of staff Gen. Merrill McPeak later added that it was incorrect, strictly speaking, to suggest that there had been no independent preparatory air offensive prior to the unleashing of allied ground forces against Iraq from Kuwait, as had been the case for nearly six weeks during Operation Desert Storm in 1991. On the contrary, McPeak noted, because of the prior air preparation that had been made possible under the aegis of Southern Focus, “Iraq’s air defenses stayed mostly silent, and our aircraft were able to begin reducing opposing ground forces immediately” once the major combat phase of Iraqi Freedom was under way.51

  Preparatory Air-Supported SOF Operations

  Precursor operations to pave the way for Iraqi Freedom also took place on the ground. Months before the campaign began, Army Special Forces A-teams (the nickname commonly used to denote numbered twelve-man Operational Detachments Alpha) were assigned individual provinces in Iraq and were directed to study their populations, terrain, infrastructure, and social setting.52 As the onset of formal combat neared, allied SOF teams rehearsed activities planned for the western Iraqi desert in the Nellis AFB range complex in Nevada. They subsequently deployed to the war zone as an integrated and combat-ready force because they had already trained together as such.53

  In a related move, on February 20, 2002, the first CIA team entered the Kurdish area of northern Iraq to lay the groundwork for a planned insertion of paramilitary teams that would comprise the CIA’s northern Iraq liaison elements.54 CIA operatives on the ground in Iraq soon began providing solid human intelligence reports on Iraqi air defenses hitherto unknown to CENTCOM.55 CENTCOM asked the CIA to provide geographic coordinates for the reported sites, and once those coordinates were in hand, successfully struck the sites during Southern Focus operations. Woodward later reported that “the quantity and quality of [this] intelligence . . . was dwarfing everything else.”56

  As allied preparations for war continued toward the final countdown, CIA operatives reportedly recruited an active-duty Iraqi air force Mirage pilot and a MiG-29 mechanic. From those two sources the CIA learned that Iraq’s air arm was in a state of near-collapse and was capable of performing only suicide missions, and that Iraqi pilots were feigning illness on scheduled flying days to avoid having to fly barely airworthy aircraft.57

  On March 19 at 2100 local time, nine hours before the scheduled start of the ground war, more than fifty allied SOF units (including both Special Forces A-teams and similar British and Australian units) covertly entered Iraq’s western desert and neutralized some fifty enemy observation posts along Iraq’s borders with Jordan and Saudi Arabia. As those initial SOF operations began to unfold, RQ-1 Predator UAVs flying overhead streamed live video into the CAOC, showing the observation posts being systematically taken down in accordance with the plan. Additional SOF teams poured into the western desert and fought a series of fierce battles to secure the areas from which Iraq had launched Scud missiles against Israel in 1991. The principal aim of this operation was to give Israel every incentive to refrain from intervening militarily.58 Allied SOF units also promptly isolated and captured the H-1, H-2, and H-3 military airfields in Iraq’s western desert where chemical munitions and Scud missiles had been stored prior to Operation Desert Storm.

  The SOF operations were backed up by airborne strike aircraft armed with PGMs, including thirty-six F-16C+ fighters of the Air National Guard and Air Force Reserve Command, eighteen A-10s, eight RAF Harrier GR7s, ten B-1s, four RAF Tornado GR4s on call if needed, and a variety of airborne and space-based ISR assets.59 To support the counter-Scud mission and other SOF operations in the western desert, General Moseley had established the 410th Air Expeditionary Wing composed of aircraft from the RAF in addition to the Guard and Reserve. This was the first instance in which a SOF task force drew all of its apportioned CAS, as well as much of its air interdiction support, from a single wing that had been expressly task-organized for the purpose. In a major first in the annals of air-land operations, General Franks gave General Moseley control of the counter-Scud mission as the supported component commander. He also gave the subordinate commander of Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force (CJSOTF) West the responsibility for interdicting ground-based time-sensitive targets in support of that mission. Never before had the air component of a joint task force been given operational control of an extensive portion of enemy territory
; nor had a SOF task force commander on the ground served in a supporting role to the air component commander.60

  The vice director of operations on the Joint Staff at the time, Maj. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, noted later during the campaign that these SOF-dominated operations represented “probably the widest and most effective use of special operations forces in recent history.”61 In contrast to the five hundred or so coalition SOF troops who deployed for Operation Enduring Freedom, active SOF involvement in Iraqi Freedom soared to nearly ten thousand personnel from U.S. and allied services. During the counter-Scud operations in the Iraqi western desert, a commentator noted, allied SOF teams went “quail hunting” with harassing raids intended to flush out Iraqi military units, “which then became targets for U.S. air strikes. Indeed, air power proved to be the Special Forces’ trump card.”62

  The B-1s used in these operations were essentially precision bomb-carrying trucks, each loaded with as many as twenty-four JDAMs. They also were equipped with a Ground Moving Target Indicator (GMTI) radar that could detect any Iraqi ground force movement.63 (At a unit cost of less than $20,000, the JDAM tail-kit that was affixed to standard 2,000-pound and 1,000-pound general-purpose high-explosive bombs during the major combat phase of Iraqi Freedom in 2003 yielded a nominal 10-meter attack accuracy against mensurated target coordinates that had been further reduced to a 3-meter circular error probable, barely more than the length of the munition.)64 New onboard jamming systems and ALE-50 towed decoys protected the B-1s in defended Iraqi airspace, with the decoy reportedly having performed “smashingly.”65

  Allied SOF teams operating in the western desert encountered unanticipated resistance from Iraqi ground units and required greater-than-expected air interdiction and CAS. The counter-Scud mission eventually evolved into three additional missions: maintaining an allied western presence, blocking attempted escape of Ba’athist leaders, and direct action against Iraqi ground forces. The SOF units, supported by the air assets noted above, quickly established fairly secure operating areas and were able to block both escape and incoming materiel reinforcements. In the process, all Iraqi forces in the region were destroyed or forced to surrender, obviating the need for allied conventional ground forces.66 Commenting on this operation shortly after the campaign ended, a senior U.S. official noted that “there were a lot of dead bad guys left in that desert who were planning some really nasty things, from shooting Scuds at Israel to blowing up oil and air fields to messing with Jordan.”67 In fact, there was no indication after the campaign ended that any of the allied SOF teams encountered Iraqi Scuds.68

  Allied SOF operations in northern Iraq followed a roughly similar pattern. Because the issue of Turkish basing and overflight had not yet been resolved, the SOF component started with only a small presence of forces on the ground, with B-1s providing support. The CAOC was unable to provide more significant air support because CENTAF could not use its strike aircraft based at Incirlik. As a result, air superiority over the area had not yet been established in a situation in which tankers had to be pushed into Iraq to refuel the fighters that were escorting the B-1s. Iraqi troops attempted some halfhearted attacks on Kurdish forces in the north, but they made no determined effort actually to penetrate Kurdish-controlled areas. Iraqi AAA positions did on one occasion fire on 6 MC-130s that were attempting to insert some 250 allied SOF personnel into a predesignated operating area, hitting one and forcing it to make an emergency landing at Incirlik on 3 engines.69

  A typical tactical air control party (TACP) of Air Force joint terminal attack controllers (JTACs) operating in northern Iraq consisted of two SOF airmen paired up with a Kurdish Peshmerga militiaman and armed with a .50 caliber sniper rifle and a Viper laser target designator configured with a 50´ magnification telescope.70 The fire support procedures involving kill boxes and the fire support coordination line (FSCL, pronounced “fissile”) that predominated in kill-box interdiction and close air support (KI/CAS) operations in the south (see below) generally did not apply in northern Iraq because there was never a clear moving line of advance for allied forces.71 In light of the largely guerilla-type war that Kurdish Peshmerga fighters were conducting in this part of the war zone, allied aircrews performing CAS missions could determine the precise location of friendly troops on the ground only by contacting them by radio during the final stages of preparation for an air-support attack.72

  For the first two days of the war, the aircraft of Carrier Air Wing (CVW) 3 embarked in Harry S. Truman and those of Air Wing 8 in Theodore Roosevelt operating in the eastern Mediterranean could not support allied SOF operations in northern Iraq because they lacked permission to transit the airspace of any of the countries that lay between the carrier operating areas and their likely targets. After Turkish airspace was finally made available to the coalition by D+3, however, numerous carrier-based strike sorties were flown over Turkey and were pivotal in forcing the eventual surrender of Iraqi army units in the north. In the end, having sustained no combat fatalities as a result of enemy fire, a mere thousand SOF combatants enabled by allied air power effectively neutralized eleven Iraqi army divisions in the north, whose troops, by one account, “simply took off their uniforms and walked home.”73 This successful synchronization of allied SOF teams and air power was a direct result of the deep mutual trust relations between the two communities that had been cemented by their highly successful joint combat operations during Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan.74

  An Unplanned Start

  As D-day neared, CENTCOM had settled on a plan that called for the allied air and ground offensives to kick off more or less concurrently, with a view toward undermining the cohesiveness of Iraq’s highly centralized political and military establishment. A heavy opening round of air attacks would be closely followed by allied ground forces advancing in strength to secure such time-sensitive objectives as the oil fields in southern Iraq. This carefully arranged plan was abruptly preempted on the afternoon of March 19, 2003, however, by an eleventh-hour report from CIA director George Tenet that the intelligence community had learned of a “high probability” that Saddam Hussein and his two sons Qusay and Uday would be closeted with their advisers for several hours in a private residence in a part of southern Baghdad known as Dora Farms.75 Tenet took this information directly to Secretary Rumsfeld, and both men went to President Bush with the news that a timely decapitation opportunity had arisen that might bring down the Ba’athist regime in a single stroke and perhaps make the full-scale allied offensive unnecessary.

  Earlier that day, President Bush had held a final video teleconference with General Franks, who was in the CAOC at Prince Sultan Air Base with General Moseley, and CENTCOM’s other component commanders. The president had polled the component commanders one by one, asking each in turn if he had what he needed to proceed comfortably with the planned campaign. General Moseley replied: “My command and control is all up. I’ve received and distributed the rules of engagement. I have no issues. I am in place and ready. I have everything we need to win.” The other commanders replied in much the same way. Franks then reported to Bush: “The force is ready to go.” Bush replied: “I hereby give the order to execute Operation Iraqi Freedom.”76 The plan called for forty-eight hours of covert operations to insert SOF teams into Iraq as the campaign’s initial moves. At that point, thirty-one SOF teams quietly entered western and northern Iraq.

  Up to that point, CENTCOM’s campaign plan had called for A-day to commence two days later on March 21 at 2100 local time, nearly 24 hours after the scheduled start of the allied ground push. The tantalizing prospect of beginning—and ending—the campaign with a single surgical strike, however, was simply too good to pass up. President Bush approved the decapitation attempt. A CAOC staffer later observed that OPLAN 1003V in its initial planning stages had been aimed at Hussein principally in a figurative sense; now, the Iraqi dictator “would literally be in the crosshairs.”77

  General Myers immediately phoned General Franks and asked him
if he could prepare the needed TLAMs within two hours to meet the required time-on-target. Franks replied that he could. General Myers subsequently reported intelligence indications that there was a hardened bunker within the target complex that TLAMs could not penetrate, thus necessitating the use of 2,000-pound penetrating EGBU-27 laser-guided and satellite-aided bombs that could be delivered only by F-117 stealth attack aircraft. Franks initially told Myers that he did not believe he could have an F-117 ready to launch in sufficient time, but then he checked with General Moseley in the CAOC.

  The air component commander immediately summoned his subject-matter expert on the F-117, Maj. Clinton Hinote, and told him: “The answer I owe the president is, is this doable, and what is the risk?” Major Hinote pondered the question for a moment and replied: “Sir, it is doable, but the risk is high.”78 Hinote outlined various operational considerations that would figure in any such gamble, offered a couple of alternative strike options that might work, and listed support assets that would be needed to maximize the chance of mission success. Armed with Hinote’s input, General Moseley informed Franks that a single F-117 could promise only a 50 percent chance of mission success and that it would take two of the stealth aircraft to ensure an effective target attack. Moseley added that the bombs could be salvoed in pairs, even though that delivery mode had never before been attempted.

  As good operators would naturally be expected to do with a major offensive looming, mission planners in the 8th Fighter Squadron that operated the forward-deployed F-117s had already been “leaning forward” and had arranged to have one aircraft fully loaded with the penetrating munitions that would be required for any such short-notice mission. Intelligence experts in the CAOC, however, did not have accurate information regarding the precise location of the presumed bunker. CAOC weaponeers hypothesized that the bunker would most likely be buried beneath a field near the main house in the Dora Farms complex, and accordingly spread four weapon aim points across the field to maximize the likelihood that one bomb would penetrate the suspected bunker.79 (Only after the campaign ended and U.S. forces were able to examine the site did it become certain that there was no underground bunker and no evidence that Saddam Hussein had been at Dora Farms at the time.)80