The Unseen War

by Lambeth, Benjamin S.

  As soon as it was clear that the two F-117s could be made ready in sufficient time, General Franks told the president that he needed a committal decision from the White House by 1915 eastern standard time if the aircraft were to have any chance of safely exiting Iraqi airspace before dawn. The sun would rise over Baghdad the following morning at 0609 local time, with first light occurring about a half-hour earlier, rendering the F-117s visible and hence vulnerable to optically guided Iraqi AAA fire. President Bush gave the “go” order at 1912, three minutes before Franks’ stipulated deadline.

  The F-117s took off from Al Udeid Air Base at 0338 local time, less than ten minutes before the cutoff time of 0345 local. CAOC mission planners hastily scrambled to round up needed tanker support for the F-117s by diverting tankers that had been flying night missions near southern Iraq in connection with Southern Focus. The TLAMs in the scheduled strike package were then launched in sequence as planned, starting at 0439. They would arrive at their assigned aim points within minutes after the impact of the EGBU-27s as SOF operations concurrently unfolded in the west and south and on the Al Faw Peninsula. Immediately before the F-117s’ scheduled time-on-target, four F-15E Strike Eagles, in the one and only use of the GBU-28 hard-structure munition throughout the entire campaign, successfully neutralized the interceptor operations center at the H-3 airfield in the western Iraqi desert.81 That was the last bomb dropped during a Southern Watch mission.

  The aerial attack against the three-building Dora Farms complex was conducted just before sunrise at 0536 Baghdad time by the two F-117s, each of which dropped two EGBU-27s directly on their assigned aim points. Scant minutes after those four bombs detonated, a wave of conventional air-launched cruise missiles (CALCMs) from B-52s operating at safe standoff ranges struck the Dora Farms compound, followed by forty Navy TLAMs launched from the North Arabian Gulf and Red Sea by four surface warships (Milius, Donald Cook, Bunker Hill, and Cowpens) and two nuclear fast-attack submarines (Montpelier and Cheyenne), partly to help further suppress Iraqi radar-guided SAM defenses in the area.82

  This was the first combat use of the EGBU-27, which featured both laser guidance for precision targeting and GPS guidance for all-weather use, a combination that greatly improved its combat versatility.83 The F-117s were supported by Air Force F-16CJs that performed preemptive defense-suppression attacks against selected Iraqi SAM sites and by three Navy EA-6B Prowlers that were launched on short notice from Constellation to jam enemy IADS radars.84 As the preplanned time for EGBU-27 weapon release neared, a partial cloud cover obscured the designated aim points within the target complex. A lucky break in the cover gave the F-117 pilots roughly six seconds to identify the target visually and drop their bombs. The pairs of munitions in each drop were clustered so closely together after release that they almost collided on their way to the target. The two pilots observed all four detonations, which occurred about ninety minutes after President Bush’s deadline for Hussein and his two sons to leave Iraq had expired.

  Capt. Paul Carlton III, an F-16CJ pilot who was airborne that night leading a two-ship element, later recalled the campaign’s impromptu opening as he observed hints of its evolution from a distance:

  On March 19/20, we were flying on-call SEAD. . . . I was a night guy, flying only at night, and it was early in the morning. I had one more vul [vulnerability period] to cover before I went home. We were covering six-hour vul times, where we’d come away to get gas when we needed it and then go back in again. I came out of the [operating area], contacted the appropriate agency, and they said, “Copy. You’re going to support Ram 01.” That’s all I got. Who’s Ram 01!? I had no idea what was going on. I asked, “Can you tell me who Ram 01 is, what their TOT [time-on-target] is and where they’re going?” I got nothing back. . . . The [rules of engagement] at the time were that we couldn’t shoot or drop anything unless we were given permission to do so. . . . So I sent [my wingman] off to get permission to fire our weapons if needed, and at the same time I start looking for Ram 01 on the radio. I had no idea what he was or what was going on. . . .

  Ram 01 came up on the radio and told me roughly where he was and the coordinates of where he was going. He also gave me the coordinates of his IP [initial point] and his target, which I plugged into my jet so as to figure out where he was going and what his target was. His target plot fell into the little map of Baghdad. That clued me in to what he was about to do, and I knew that things were about to get much more exciting.

  Having learned the TOT and seen where he was going, I knew all I needed to know. I knew what threats he was up against, and now I was thinking about how best I could support him. . . . Having devised a basic strategy, I flew back into the [area of operations], but chose not to go up near his target, even though we were now allowed to cross the no-fly zone. The F-16 is a radar-significant target, and I didn’t want to trip anything off or stimulate the air defenses before they needed to be. I never heard anything else from Ram 01, which, thinking about it now, makes sense to me as the pilot always “cleans up” as they go to war [i.e., the F-117 retracts its communications antennas when entering defended airspace].85

  Carlton and his wingman continued to watch the Super MEZ for about an hour. “Then,” he said,

  I hit Bingo fuel [the fuel level at which an aircraft must either initiate a return to base or depart the area to seek a tanker]. I’ve not seen anything happen or anything to suggest what’s happened to Ram 01, so I told the controlling agency, “I’m Bingo and have to go home.” I got handed off to different agencies and headed back to the tanker down south to get gas for the trip home. We were on the tanker when Ram 01 came over the radio and said, “Tanker 51, Ram 01 behind you and checking in for gas.” As I came off the tanker with my wingman, I looked behind me and there’s this Stinkbug [fighter-pilot slang for the F-117] taxiing up. That was the first clue that I had that we’d just helped start the war.86

  Roughly two hours after the mission had been completed and all its aircraft had safely returned, President Bush announced to the nation and the world: “On my orders, coalition forces have begun striking selected targets of military importance to undermine Hussein’s ability to wage war. These are the opening stages of what will be a broad and concerted campaign. . . . I assure you this will not be a campaign of half measures, and we will accept no outcome but victory.”87 Franks later recalled: “We did not want President Bush to speak in a way that sounded good to America and our allies, but inadvertently compromised our plan.”88 Shortly after the eleventh-hour decapitation attempt, the chairman of the JCS, General Myers, declared that “regime leadership command and control is a legitimate target in any conflict, and that was the target that was struck last night.”89 Early reports that Hussein had been killed or injured in the attack proved to be false.90

  Iraq promptly responded to the attempted decapitation attack by launching five surface-to-surface missiles into Kuwait in a move that obliged allied troops and Kuwaiti civilians to don chemical warfare protective garb. One of those missiles, an Ababil 100 (an Iraqi variant of the Soviet FROG [free rocket over ground] missile), was fired from a launch basket south of Basra. USS Higgins, a Navy Aegis destroyer positioned in the North Arabian Gulf, detected the missile on radar within two seconds after its launch, determined its launch point, and generated a firing solution within fourteen seconds. An Army Patriot PAC-3 SAM from one of the twenty-seven Patriot batteries stationed in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia destroyed the Iraqi missile in flight.91 Moments thereafter, a pair of airborne F-16s geolocated the two offending Iraqi mobile missile launchers and destroyed them.92

  Technical evidence suggested that Patriot PAC-3 SAMs destroyed all of the intercepted Iraqi missiles, including the Ababil 100 and an Al Samoud 2 (an Iraqi modification of the Soviet SA-2 SAM with a maximum range of about 112 miles). One Iraqi missile that got through allied defenses was believed to have been a Chinese-made CSSC-3 Seersucker cruise missile that flew low over the water from the Al Faw Peninsula in
to Kuwait, beneath the field of regard of nearby Patriot radars that were scanning for higher-flying ballistic missiles.93 Four of the incoming Iraqi missiles were intentionally not fired at because they posed no threat. Two landed in the water, one impacted in the empty desert, and the fourth exploded shortly after being launched.94 Later that day, Franks reported to Rumsfeld that “we have air supremacy in the battlespace.”95

  The abrupt change in the initially planned timeline for Iraqi Freedom occasioned by the decapitation attempt had far-reaching consequences. Fearing a loss of tactical surprise, heightened vulnerability of exposed allied ground troops in Kuwait to missile and artillery attack, and an Iraqi move to torch the country’s vital oil wells in a punitive response, CENTCOM unleashed the lead elements of deployed Army, Marine Corps, and British ground troops thirty-six hours ahead of the originally planned start of heavy air operations, essentially reversing the plan that had been so painstakingly developed during the preceding months.96 That eleventh-hour reversal was rendered more palatable for CENTCOM because its air component had already established air superiority over southern Iraq by means of Operation Southern Focus, thereby freeing up the coalition’s strike aircraft to concentrate almost entirely on supporting the allied ground units.

  The most detailed of the postcampaign assessments of V Corps’ land offensive noted that

  crossing the berm [into southern Iraq] was a major combat operation. Erected to defend the Kuwaiti border by delaying attacking Iraqi troops, the berm now had the same effect on coalition troops heading the other way. Breaching in the presence of Iraqi outposts required rapid action to deny the Iraqis the opportunity to attack vulnerable coalition units while they were constrained to advance slowly and in single file through the lanes in the berms. . . . Literally a line in the sand, the berm was a combination of massive tank ditches, concertina wire, electrified fencing, and, of course, berms of dirt. The breaching operation required four major tasks—reducing the berms, destroying the defending Iraqi forces along the border (mostly observation posts), establishing secure lanes through the berms, and then passing follow-on forces through to continue the attack into Iraq.97

  In conjunction with this major movement into southern Iraq by V Corps, Navy sea-air-land commandos (SEALs) and British Special Air Service (SAS) troops conducted an air assault on an oil manifold and metering station on the tip of the peninsula and promptly secured that high-value objective. The start of the allied push into the Al Faw Peninsula was set for 2200 local time on the night of March 20, 2003. It was preceded by supporting JDAM attacks by carrier-based F/A-18s as well as by highly accurate optically directed cannon fire from AC-130 gunships that were orbiting nearby. Carrier-based jets also attacked command and control targets in southern Iraq and delivered leaflets containing capitulation instructions to Iraqi troops who might be inclined to surrender without a fight. Promptly on the heels of these preparatory air attacks, allied SOF and regular forces entered on the ground and secured the remainder of the objective.

  A coalition SOF contingent crossed into Iraq from Arar in Saudi Arabia that same night, with a similar contingent launching from a more northward departure point to seize and hold the strategically vital H-2 and H-3 airfields in the Iraqi western desert and the equally important Haditha dam. This operation was backed by a strong air element of B-1s, F-15Es, and F-16s carrying LGBs and satellite-aided JDAMs. The SOF teams marked Iraqi vehicles and other targets with hand-held laser designators, and the strike aircraft destroyed or disabled seventeen ZSU-23/4 AAA guns and some twenty-three other Iraqi armored vehicles, as well as numerous trucks and barracks. Shortly thereafter, two C-17s that had flown nonstop from North Carolina landed on an unprepared strip in western Iraq, in the first direct combat insertion of a U.S. mechanized force.98

  Allied strike and combat support aircraft were subsequently launched from carriers in the North Arabian Gulf and selected land bases throughout the theater to begin the air war in a measured fashion during the night of March 19–20. Although the ATO for that day (the carefully preplanned D-day for Operation Iraqi Freedom) generated 2,184 sorties in all, the initial round of air strikes was carefully meted out, as one defense official put it, to “see if we can try to tip things first.”99 Secretary Rumsfeld continued to urge Hussein’s government to concede, saying, “We continue to feel that there’s no need for a broader conflict if the Iraqi leaders act to save themselves.”100

  The initial strikes were directed mainly against Republican Guard headquarters and related targets with the goal of trying to separate the Iraqi rank and file from the regime. As one account later recalled in this respect, the allied coalition “did not attack with overwhelming force, and operations over the first 40 hours were characterized by judicious use of the minimum force necessary.”101 General Moseley’s chief of strategy described the underlying nuances of the minimum-force approach as follows:

  While all planners, both air and ground, began with a desire to go in with overwhelming force (General Franks’ initial Generated Start), the president and secretary of defense kept pushing us toward a leaner and more quickly moving force. This forced me to be more deliberate with effects-based planning. It is fairly easy to get many of the desired effects when you have overwhelming force. In the end, with a more fine-tuned effects-based approach, we found ways (both kinetic and nonkinetic) to achieve the desired effects with our forces split against all of the planned major combat phase objectives at once.102

  By the end of the campaign’s first full day on March 20, the air component was well into the Scud hunt in the Iraqi western desert; allied SOF teams had begun infiltrating into the west, north, and south of Iraq and were in partial control of the western desert that constituted a quarter of Iraq’s entire territory; and the land component’s forces were fully poised in attack positions on the planned line of departure.103 Remarking on CENTCOM’s last-minute need to reset its plans, British defense analyst Michael Knights observed that “in contrast to the beginning of Operation Desert Storm, which had been a triumph of orchestration, the opening of Operation Iraqi Freedom would prove to be a triumph of improvisation.”104

  The initial hope that Hussein’s regime might quickly implode led CENTCOM at the last minute to remove many high-value targets within the city limits of Baghdad from the initial target list (see below). A senior CAOC staffer later explained this sudden truncation of the initially planned ATO for that day: “There was a hope that there would be a complete and utter collapse of the regime early on. In order to let that come to fruition, [CENTCOM’s leaders] initially held back on those targets.”105 As it turned out, however, many of the air component’s planned A-day southern targets had been either already destroyed by earlier Southern Focus attacks or overrun by the advancing land component and SOF units during the first day.

  The Full Campaign Begins

  The actual start of preplanned offensive air operations, designated A-hour by CENTCOM, took place precisely on schedule at 2100 Baghdad time on the night of March 21 with large-scale air attacks that would total more than 1,700 sorties in all, including 700 strike sorties against roughly 1,000 target aim points and an additional 504 cruise-missile attacks in the opening round. This start sequence had been essentially set in stone almost from the outset of campaign planning because of the complex and inflexible orchestration of allied strike platform takeoff times required to enable those aircraft to achieve a simultaneous time-on-target in the Baghdad area from widely dispersed operating locations ranging from nearby Kuwait all the way to the United Kingdom and the continental United States.

  The commander of Carrier Air Wing 2 in Constellation, who led the initial strike force, recalled that he deemed the potential for midair collisions both inside and outside Iraq

  one of the greatest risks we faced. . . . In concert with the CAOC planners and our CVW-14 teammates, we created simple procedural airspace deconfliction measures—three-dimensional “highways in the skies,” complete with off-ramps, reporting points, and
altitude splits that helped mitigate the midair hazard. Still, the prudent aviator always stayed on altitude, did belly checks, and kept his head on a swivel when joining the tanker. . . . The indispensable U.S. Navy and Marine Corps EA-6B Prowlers provided continuous multiple-axis jamming in support of approximately 70 aircraft attacking nearly 100 different targets throughout Baghdad.106

  The target list for the opening-night attacks consisted of known or suspected leadership locations, regime security, communications nodes, airfields, IADS facilities, suspected WMD sites, and elements of Iraq’s fielded forces. Regime security targets on the initial strike list, approximately 104 in all, included facilities of the Ba’ath Party, Fedayeen Saddam, Internal Intelligence Service, Special Security Organization, Directorate of General Security, Special Republican Guard, and the personal security units that were assigned to protect the regime’s leaders. The roughly 112 communications targets that were attacked during the initial round consisted of cable and fiber-optic relays, repeater stations, exchanges, microwave cable vaults, radio and television transmitters, switch banks, satellite antennas, and satellite downlinks. Sea- and air-launched cruise missiles were the main weapons used in the initial wave, followed by a concentration of F-117 and B-2 stealth attack aircraft that were supported by fully integrated conventional strike and electronic warfare aircraft packages. During one of those attack segments, a B-2 dropped two 4,700-pound GBU-37 satellite-aided hard-structure penetrators on an Iraqi communications tower in Baghdad. (The B-2 can carry eight GBU-37s and is the only aircraft in the Air Force’s inventory configured to deliver the munition.)107