Fighter Losses to Friendly Fire
Three particularly disturbing incidents of surface-to-air fratricide against allied aircraft (the second barely averted) occurred during the three-week campaign. The first took place on March 23 when an Army Patriot PAC-3 SAM crew accidentally shot down an RAF Tornado GR4 (call sign Yahoo 76), killing its two crewmembers, as the aircraft was returning to its base in Kuwait after a strike mission near Baghdad. Early speculation attributed the incident to either a failure of the Tornado crew to identify their aircraft properly to allied acquisition and tracking radar controllers or a failure of the Patriot battery operators to interpret correctly the Tornado’s IFF signal.226 The Patriot system is designed to classify a target based on its speed, trajectory, altitude, and IFF response, as well as its character as a fixed- or rotary-wing aircraft, antiradiation missile, or ballistic missile.227 By one unofficial account, Army air defense logs showed that the offending battery manually fired a single missile at the aircraft after the battery’s radar symbology indicated an incoming antiradiation missile 9 miles downrange at 18,300 feet with an airspeed of 511 knots, an improbably slow speed for an antiradiation missile.228 Whatever the case, the aircraft, having just initiated its descent and not yet having established radio contact with air traffic controllers in Kuwait, was plainly misidentified as something other than a friendly fighter, and the Patriot battery fired in self-defense.229 A subsequent British military investigation determined that the Tornado’s IFF system had not been working properly.230
A second Blue-on-Blue surface-to-air incident occurred south of An Najaf nearly twenty-four hours later when another Patriot battery locked onto an Air Force F-16CJ with its fire control radar.231 Remarkably, the F-16CJ’s HARM targeting system was not programmed to recognize and identify the Patriot’s radar signature, and the aircraft’s radar warning receiver displayed it as an “unknown” threat. The F-16 pilot responded accordingly by firing a HARM into the Patriot’s radar dish, effectively disabling it. Fortunately, no one was hurt in this incident.232 After this near miss, another F-16 pilot remarked unapologetically: “We had no idea where the Patriots were, and those guys were locking us up on a regular basis. No one was hurt when the Patriot was hit, thank God, but from our perspective they’re now down one radar. That’s one radar they can’t target us with any more.”233 Regardless of that angry remark, the Army’s Patriots in-theater were an indispensable—and frequently utilized—defense against a very real Iraqi theater ballistic missile (TBM) arsenal that threatened exposed troops marshaled in Kuwait as the allied land offensive was in its final stages of preparing to push northward.
Nevertheless, many allied pilots believed that the Patriot posed a greater threat to them than did any SAM in Iraq’s inventory. Among the main problems associated with the Patriot batteries was their failure to remain linked into the overall air picture as they moved forward along with the ground forces’ advance. An Air Force analyst noted that “in many cases they would set up and go operational before linking back into the air picture—or even notify the CAOC of their new location. This is why the Viper [F-16 ] drivers and others ‘never knew where the Patriots were.’ It also contributed to fratricide potential, in that disconnected but operating Patriots could not use the common air picture to help identify radar targets as friendlies.”234
The third Blue-on-Blue surface-to-air incident involved a Navy F/A-18C from the carrier Kitty Hawk that was downed by a Patriot over southern Iraq on April 2 while conducting a strike mission over Karbala. The pilot was killed. Both he and his wingman, who observed the entire evolution, had taken evasive action to avoid the incoming SAM.235 The Navy leadership was understandably distressed that the Patriot battery had failed to distinguish the F/A-18 from a faster-moving enemy missile, and that it was even scanning for aircraft targets at all, considering that the Iraqi air force had not generated a single sortie since the invasion began.
The three Patriot-related incidents prompted the former director of the Defense Department’s operational testing and evaluation, Philip Coyle, to ask pointedly why the Army’s SAM batteries had been paying attention to fixed-wing aircraft in the first place: “We ruled the skies in Iraq, so almost by definition any aircraft up there was either ours or British.”236 After an initial inquiry by CENTCOM, General Moseley insisted that the Patriot crews stop using the automatic target engagement mode. “Although it might take a little longer for a Patriot battery to get a defensive shot off in manual mode,” Moseley’s chief strategist later noted, “that risk was clearly better than the alternative of continuing to take friendly losses, all the more so since we had attained unquestioned air supremacy over all of Iraq except the immediate Baghdad area.”237
The third instance of friendly fire described above begot another when two Air Force F-15Es were vectored to search for the F/A-18’s crash site and look for signs that the pilot had survived the attack. The F-15E crews were not informed that the F/A-18 had likely been lost to a Blue-on-Blue engagement. Consequently, when they saw flashes on the ground near the estimated impact point, they evidently concluded that they had been targeted by the same Iraqi SAM battery that had shot down the F/A-18. They attempted to establish contact with V Corps, which was coordinating air operations behind the FSCL in that area. That failing, they contacted the nearest E-3 AWACS, whose controller for the area cleared an attack on the suspected SAM site after gaining approval from the CAOC. In fact, the source of the flashes was a V Corps artillery battery, which the F-15Es targeted and attacked with GBU-12 LGBs. That error, which resulted in three Army soldiers killed and six wounded, was later attributed in part to the CAOC’s decision not to inform the F-15E aircrews that they were responding to a suspected fratricidal surface-to-air incident.238
The director of the Missile Defense Agency, Lt. Gen. Ronald Kadish, later told a Senate investigating committee that these Blue-on-Blue incidents could have resulted from both mechanical and human errors. A subsequent report indicated that the downed Tornado GR4 had failed to reenter Kuwait through one of the air corridors that had been cleared for that purpose. “You have to remember that this is a very complicated business,” General Moseley said of that incident. “So when things like this happen, you do step back and begin to investigate the process, the procedures, the tactics, and the techniques, and you begin to look and see if we have hardware issues or people issues.”239
Whatever the explanation, the Patriot quickly became the main concern of coalition aircrews operating over and in the vicinity of U.S. Army troop positions in Iraq. To ensure that Army operators manning Patriot batteries could clearly identify CENTAF’s aircraft, the CAOC advised pilots to use not only their encrypted Mode 4 military IFF transponders but their civilian Mode 2 systems as well. Although the latter measure made them less likely to be inadvertently targeted by Patriot operators, it also provided Iraq’s SAM operators with an added means of tracking their movements.240
With regard to the Patriot incidents discussed above, an experienced F-16 pilot later said: “I think that the responsibility for the weapon’s use falls squarely with the Army. The whole thing about losing a British jet and a Hornet to the Patriot is the ROE that goes into it. When is the Army allowed to put the system into automatic mode? When can they pull the trigger? If the ROE is stringent, then you don’t have a problem, but if it’s too free or loose, then you open the door up for decisions to be made that have tragic consequences.”241
Another Air Force pilot fingered the absence of adequate communications standards between the Army and Air Force as one explanation for the F-16CJ’s HARM self-defense shot against the Patriot site:
The Army was not coordinating with us to tell us where they were, who they were, and what was going on. In my opinion, we didn’t have a good enough picture of what the Army had. And it’s not just what’s located on the ground—it’s what emitters do they have, what radars and what electrons are they throwing out into the air? Our airplane is mechanized to sense all of these things an
d adapt accordingly. We have to know what both the good guys and the bad guys are throwing out electronically so that we can distinguish between them. If we don’t know, we can’t program the software to do that.242
This pilot almost surely was alluding to the fact that the F-16CJ was not programmed to recognize the signature of the friendly Patriot’s radar, thus forcing the aircraft’s radar warning receiver to display the offending Patriot radar as an “unknown” SAM (see Chapter 5 for more on friendly fire).
From SEAD to DEAD
The intense Iraqi IADS activity that planners had expected in response to the allies’ opening-night air operations never occurred. On the contrary, Iraqi acquisition and tracking radars did not emit even once over the course of nearly a month of virtually nonstop air attacks, and allied aircraft encountered no radar-guided SAM or AAA fire from Iraq’s air defenses. The initial allied SEAD effort concentrated on enemy sector operations centers, early-warning radars, and associated communications nodes. Subsequent attacks went after SAM radars and launchers. Iraq’s radar-guided SAMs were not initially struck on a massive scale because they were hard to locate; the Iraqis repositioned them every eight to twelve hours and withheld radar emissions. That tactic increased the survivability of Iraq’s SAMs even as it all but negated their operational effectiveness.243 The SAM and AAA fire that did occur was invariably unguided, although these barrages came increasingly closer to the targeted aircraft, sometimes within a mile or less. Nevertheless, this sporadic fire, most of which occurred after allied bombs had already hit their targets, had thus far failed to down a single coalition aircraft. This was no doubt due in part to the four thousand sorties flown over the nearly nine months of Operation Southern Focus.244 The CAOC had put considerable effort into piecemeal attacks against Iraqi SAMs and radars, as well as toward breaking open fiber-optic vaults to complicate enemy command and control arrangements.245
F-16CJ pilots nevertheless earned their flight pay on these often harrowing forays into Iraq’s still heavily defended airspace. Capt. Gene Sherer had a hair-raising experience on one such foray.
I was SEAD mission commander, call-sign Vouch 61, and we were flying in the Super MEZ in the southwest corner of Baghdad. We were a four-ship supporting a B-1B, with some EA-6B Prowlers doing some jamming and some F-16CGs, F/A-18s and F-14s bombing targets. . . . We had one vul [period of vulnerability] time that was supposed to be 25 minutes. . . . Flying on station, the next thing I know, [my wingman] calls for a break turn. In the break, I look and see a missile go straight past him, and I think, “Oh, sh*t!” We started to get a heartbeat going, and we’re using the [electronic jamming] pod trying to do our stuff. Well, I ended up seeing another three missiles unguided, and at least two more that guide [optically] on me and my wingman, who was a mile and a half to the east in line-abreast formation. All of it was unguided, but I later saw on my HARM tape that an SA-3 came on line. I didn’t see it at the time because we had AAA all over the place and my wingman was defensively maneuvering. It was squirrelly [and] the most incredible thing I’ve done. We all shot HARMs that day except [one member of the four-ship flight]. We were in the MEZ for 45 to 50 minutes.246
“After the first three days,” General Moseley noted as the three-week campaign was reaching endgame,
we switched from a suppression campaign to a destruction campaign, and we’ve been literally hunting them down one by one and killing multiples of them every day. We use our F-16CJs and the F/A-18s with the munitions they carry, and our Rivet Joint and the Global Hawk and the F-15E . . . and we have a . . . specific mission to go hunt them down and kill them. Kill the antennas, kill the launchers, kill the support vans, the comm vans, break up their command and control, and force them to move. And as they’re moving, they’re not setting up and plugging in and getting their systems up. And every time they move one of those things, they have a tendency to break something on them, and by forcing them up and by individually hunting them down and keeping them on the run, you begin to be able to control the airspace. That’s exactly how we’ve been able to transition from the starting condition of air superiority now to air supremacy.247
SEAD escort and on-call SEAD operations were highly successful in that Iraqi SAM operators were simply not emitting with their radars. As one Air Force pilot later summarized it concisely, “Iraqi radar was a no-show.”248 Virtually all of the observed AAA fire and SAM launches were unguided. Accordingly, CAOC planners decided to take a more a proactive approach toward dealing with Iraq’s IADS. Major Roberson explained:
The strategy that the Iraqis elected to follow meant that they did not come up and actively engage our aircraft, which presented a big challenge for us. So long as the threat is emitting, we have the sensor suite to detect it across a large frequency range, but because they chose not to emit and overtly target our aircraft, it made it very challenging to locate those threats. One can argue that because they chose to do that, that was suppression in and of itself. The very presence of the CJ meant that we [had] achieved SEAD. But that wasn’t enough. We still had to execute an air campaign, so we needed to go to downtown into Baghdad and downtown into Tikrit with LGBs and JDAM and hit some very important targets, and we had to get close to do that.249
In this move from SEAD to the actual physical destruction of enemy air defenses (DEAD, pronounced “deed”) on the campaign’s third day, Air Force F-16CJ pilots went after Iraqi SAM and AAA sites with mixed munitions loads that included the satellite-aided GBU-31 JDAM and the CBU-103 WCMD, as well as the infrared-imaging AGM-65 Maverick air-to-ground missile, giving them both SEAD and DEAD capability. Navy and Marine Corps EA-6Bs provided vital electronic jamming support. This transition was not part of any coordinated shift to a preplanned DEAD campaign. It occurred because the situation no longer required each CJ to carry two HARMs per aircraft. The resultant hard-target capability added much greater mission flexibility to CENTAF’s SEAD assets.
A more comprehensive and coordinated DEAD effort began six days later, on D+9. As allied ground forces pushed ever closer to Baghdad and Iraq’s IADS remained silent, CAOC planners realized that a determined DEAD effort would be required. The majority of Iraq’s SAM inventory remained intact and operationally usable. Accordingly, a concentrated effort began on March 28 to draw down Iraq’s SAM capability in the Baghdad area. The U-2 and the Global Hawk were enlisted to find and geolocate SAM targets. The DEAD strike force consisted mainly of Air Force F-16CJs armed with GBU-31s, CBU-103s, and Maverick missiles, and Navy and Marine Corps F/A-18Cs carrying joint standoff weapons (JSOWs). These aircraft, supported by EA-6B Prowlers and further augmented by B-2s, maintained around-the-clock DEAD CAPs over Baghdad. Lt. Col. Scott Manning, a CJ pilot with the 20th Fighter Wing, recalled, “DEAD wasn’t so much a coordinated mission against specific objectives, but more a case of ‘if you find it and you can get permission to strike it, then go ahead and kill it.’”250 The move from SEAD to DEAD entailed “a scary decision” for General Moseley, but, he explained, “we needed to kill those SAMs.”251 In the end, the DEAD effort succeeded in considerable part because effective ISR platforms were used directly in a focused operation that commanded both an abundance of appropriately loaded attack assets and the required command and control backup to link the sensors to the shooters.
The Counterair Effort
The Iraqi air force did not launch even one fighter sortie during the allied campaign. Nor, in a welcome surprise, did Iraq launch any cruise missiles at allied naval forces. Nevertheless, allied offensive counterair missions continued throughout the war because the Iraqi air force had been generating as many as 150 sorties a day before the war started on March 19. That earlier flight activity had occasioned legitimate concern in the CAOC that enemy aircraft might deliver biological or chemical weapons with little or no warning in suicide attacks against allied forces. Enemy airfields were heavily targeted to prevent Iraqi fighters from taking off on such missions.
General Moseley assured General Franks during the
final countdown to war: “I will make it my life’s work that the Iraqi air force will not fly.”252 Toward that end, he instructed Lieutenant Colonel Hathaway to deny the enemy even a remote chance of getting an aircraft airborne by marking target aim points on every runway and other flyable surface on and immediately adjacent to all of the active Iraqi fighter airfields and cratering them during the first night, as well as locating and destroying all identifiable squadron buildings, fuel storage facilities, and command and control sites. Should any evidence be detected of attempted enemy runway repair efforts, those airfields were to be promptly reattacked as a top priority. Because civilian airliners were the only long-range aircraft at Hussein’s disposal, General Moseley ordered their destruction as a hedge against their use as suicide weapons. (Evidently anticipating this, the Iraqis removed the engine nacelles from their airliners before the campaign’s start, providing observable confirmation of their inability to fly. That had the effect of getting them removed from the CAOC’s target list at the last minute.)253
The initial attacks against Iraq’s fighter airfields focused on runways and aircraft parked in the open, with the first bombs fused to detonate about fifteen minutes after the initial time-on-target for the A-hour strategic strikes throughout the country. Follow-up attacks were visited on all airfields on which the Iraqis made attempts to repair runway damage. Not only did the Iraqi air force make no attempt to fly during the war, many fighter aircraft were actually moved away from their bases and buried. One intelligence report indicated that Saddam Hussein did not trust his air force and had ordered pilots to remain on the ground.254 Subsequent allied interviews with senior Iraqi leaders who had surrendered or were captured after the campaign amply validated this assessment. Interviews with dozens of Iraqi military and political leaders as well as literally hundreds of thousands of captured Iraqi documents indicated that Hussein had so little confidence in the combat capability of his air force that he elected to husband what remained of it as a hedge against possible future needs. The commander of Iraq’s air force and air defense force admitted to coalition interrogators that Hussein had decided two months before the start of the war that the air force would not participate.255 Instead, Hussein decided to move the combat aircraft away from their bases and conceal them from coalition ISR assets so he might later dig them out and return them to service—yet another testament to his refusal to believe that allied ground forces would ever reach the Iraqi heartland. Once it became clear that Iraq’s fighter pilots would not be a factor in the war, sorties originally dedicated to offensive counterair missions were re-roled to support advancing allied ground forces.256
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