The Unseen War

by Lambeth, Benjamin S.

  A widely acclaimed account of the allied invasion of Iraq concluded that “declining morale and an abiding fear of U.S. air power had clearly taken their toll on what was supposed to be one of the premier Republican Guard divisions.”296 Intelligence gathered by U.S. occupation forces after the regime fell plainly attested that

  the Al Nida [division] was nowhere near full strength when [American Marines] smashed into it. The commander of the unit later told his interrogators that the leaflets dropped on his troops telling them to depart the area or be bombed by U.S. warplanes had had a tremendous effect. The soldiers became demoralized when they realized that allied aircraft could fly over their positions with virtual impunity and that the leaflets could just as easily have been bombs. Originally a division of 13,000 soldiers and 500 vehicles, it had been reduced to 2,000 troops and 50 vehicles of all sorts by the time the Marines closed on the Iraqi capital. . . . Like the Medina Division, the Al Nida was just a shell of itself when it was attacked by U.S. troops.297

  This account tellingly concluded, “The Iraqis’ fear of U.S. air power was as crippling as the air strikes themselves. . . . In the final days, it was impossible to tell from the air which Iraqi tanks were operational and which had been abandoned, so Moseley instructed his aircrews to ‘keep killing it all.’”298 The CAOC even used inert cement-filled GBU-12 500-pound LGBs (redesignated BDU-50s) during the urban CAS endgame of Iraqi Freedom, essentially “bombing with concrete” to disable Iraqi tanks and other armored vehicles through the munition’s kinetic-energy effect alone rather than risk inflicting collateral damage on surrounding buildings and killing noncombatants.299

  Carrier-Based Operations

  Like all of the allied air assets that took part in the three-week campaign, the five carrier air wings that were committed to Iraqi Freedom operated around the clock, with Theodore Roosevelt taking the night shift in the eastern Mediterranean and Constellation taking the night shift in the North Arabian Gulf.300 The average flight operations day was sixteen hours during the first twenty-three days of the war, after which it ramped down to thirteen to fourteen hours.301 Each air wing averaged fifty to sixty sorties a day, perhaps an unimpressive number until one considers that all were staggered multicycle missions lasting six or more hours and often entailing four or more in-flight refuelings. Carrier flight decks were manned twenty-four hours a day for long stretches because strike aircraft and tankers frequently recovered later than planned as a result of repeated requests for on-call CAS. Sea-based strike aircraft were airborne twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. As had been the case in Operation Enduring Freedom, alert strike packages were also launched every day as previously undiscovered targets of interest were identified. Also as in Enduring Freedom, carrier-based aircraft relied heavily on land-based U.S. Air Force and RAF tankers. That access allowed mission lengths to be extended from one to three or more launch-and-recovery cycles, which in turn eased carrier deck loading and increased the flexibility of the air wings.

  These references to aircraft launch-and-recovery cycles speak to a fundamental aspect of carrier air operations that warrants further explanation. Every minute a carrier is headed into the wind during ongoing flight operations, it is committed to a predictable course that opponents can detect and track. Fleet tactics thus dictate that launches and recoveries take place as rapidly as possible while allowing for the routine problems that inevitably arise in the course of such operations, such as a temporarily fouled deck and occasional bolters.302 Cyclic operations offer the best way to deal with these requirements.

  In such operations, a 1+0 cycle is one that lasts an hour from an aircraft’s launch to its recovery. A 1+15 cycle lasts an hour and fifteen minutes. In the instance of a notional 1+15 cycle, while one wave of aircraft is being launched, the preceding wave that was launched an hour and fifteen minutes earlier will be holding overhead, its pilots watching their constantly dwindling fuel levels and, as may be required, refueling in flight from recovery tankers near the carrier as they await the signal to extend their tailhooks and commence their approach to the carrier in sequence. Twenty to thirty aircraft can be kept airborne at any given time using such an approach to operations, while the extra space thus freed up on the flight deck can be exploited for respotting aircraft to prepare for the next launch. During these gaps in flight operations, aircraft can also be moved back and forth to the hangar bay as may be required by the flight schedule or maintenance needs.303

  A continuous cycle of launches followed by immediate recovery of the preceding wave of aircraft reduces the time the carrier needs to remain on a predictable course into the wind. It also gives the flight deck crews sufficient time to ready the deck for the next cycle. A Nimitz-class carrier’s two bow catapults and two waist catapults can launch twenty aircraft in approximately ten minutes. In ideal conditions, the carrier can recover twenty aircraft on its angled deck in as little as fifteen minutes. A total of twenty-five minutes on a predictable course is ideal for a twenty-aircraft cycle and is generally achieved when the embarked air wing and the carrier’s crew work harmoniously together.

  Within the span of a single deck cycle, whatever its duration, an air wing’s aircraft are launched, recovered, dearmed, spotted, repaired, exchanged with hangar-deck aircraft, serviced, fueled, reconfigured with ordnance, and made ready for the next cycle. Managing the flight deck and respotting aircraft during such an intense operations flow involves an exquisitely complex choreography in which the manipulation of assets and proper timing are crucial. After the last cycle during a day of flight operations has been concluded, as many as forty aircraft may be parked on the flight deck, each carefully spotted to take up the least amount of deck space while allowing a clear path to at least one of the carrier’s catapults for the next cycle’s initial launch. Aircraft parked on the flight deck are often only inches apart, with their landing gear sometimes perilously close to the flight deck’s edge. The carrier’s air department monitors all this activity from flight deck control, where a tabletop representation of the flight deck indicates each aircraft’s location on the deck and is updated whenever aircraft are respotted. Any disruption of this complex and carefully managed choreography can foul the landing area and force aircraft on final approach to be waved off, consuming more fuel as a result and, at worst, creating gridlock.

  During the three weeks of major combat in Iraqi Freedom, E-2C Hawkeye early-warning and battle management aircraft played an indispensable role in getting carrier-based strikers to the right kill boxes. They frequently served as communications links between the carriers, the CAOC, and ground tactical commanders. EA-6B Prowlers also played a pivotal part in the air war. The availability of support jamming was an ironclad go/no-go criterion for all strike missions, including those that involved B-2 and F-117 stealth aircraft. Throughout the three-week campaign, the Navy continued its practice of assigning four EA-6Bs to each embarked squadron. With five air wings participating, along with additional land-based Prowlers, mission planners in the air wings and the CAOC were satisfied that sufficient support jammers were available.304

  U.S. Naval Reserve squadrons also played an important part in carrier-based strike operations, as perhaps best represented by VFA (Navy Fighter-Attack Squadron)-201, home-stationed at Joint Reserve Base Fort Worth, Texas. That unit was administratively attached to CVW-8 embarked in Theodore Roosevelt, making it the first Naval Reserve squadron to deploy for combat since the Korean War. The squadron had only recently converted to the F/A-18+ and joined the air wing during the final phases of the latter’s predeployment workups at NAS Fallon. It offered a uniformly high experience level and integrated well with the wing’s active-duty squadrons. Unlike a normal fleet squadron, which typically features a younger and less seasoned aircrew complement, VFA-201’s pilots averaged 35 years of age, 350 arrested carrier landings, and 2,700 flight hours. Moreover, fourteen of the eighteen were graduates of Navy Fighter Weapons School (Topgun). The executive officer of VFA-15, the fleet squadron
that mentored the pilots as they joined CVW-8 for this precedent-setting deployment for a reserve unit, recalled: “The biggest problem they faced was the fact that they had operated almost exclusively as adversary pilots [in the air-to-air training role] for so long. This meant that they did not routinely practice ‘Blue air,’ or offensive [strike] mission tactics. However, being very high-time Hornet pilots, they quickly ironed out these tactical wrinkles.”305

  Adequate stocks of LGBs and JDAMs allowed the deployed air wings to play a significant role in seeking out and attacking enemy theater ballistic missile launchers. The two wings operating out of the eastern Mediterranean focused on suppressing Scud launches into Israel from Iraq’s western desert. The three Gulf-based wings concentrated on potential missile launches from southern Iraq against Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and other neighboring Gulf states. Each carrier possessed about forty magazines for munitions storage, with row after row of GBU-12 and GBU-16 LGBs stacked up for use. Ten or so crewmembers needed roughly ten to twelve minutes to build up a bomb ready for use.306 Because the CAOC could not always guarantee targets that could be positively identified and attacked without an unacceptable risk of collateral damage, Navy strike fighters sometimes recovered with unexpended ordnance. A maximum of two thousand pounds of allowable bring-back ordnance was eventually dictated for most carrier-based fighters by the circumstances of the ground advance.307

  Carrier aircraft losses were almost nil. In one such case, an S-3B tanker veered off the flight deck of Constellation and into the water following a suspected runaway throttle or brake failure. The two crewmembers ejected safely and were promptly recovered. Also, an F-14 went down over Iraq due to a mechanical failure involving the aircraft’s fuel system.308 The pilot and radar intercept officer likewise ejected safely and were recovered shortly thereafter. A Marine AV-8B Harrier crashed during a night mission from the assault ship Nassau. The pilot ejected and was recovered from the North Arabian Gulf.309

  The sandstorm that essentially halted the allied ground advance for three days also affected carrier operations in the North Arabian Gulf. At times, the shamal generated sustained winds of twenty-five knots gusting to fifty and visibility that was often less than three hundred feet. Desert dust penetrated aircraft inlets and orifices, caused damage to canopies and engines, and occasioned some harrowing aircraft recoveries. Carrier landings into whiteouts occurred more than a few times, with cockpit sensor display videotapes showing eye-watering arrested landings that were performed flawlessly in visibilities of less than half a mile. Landing signal officers would talk each aircraft down the centerline of the carrier’s recovery area, sometimes with the aircraft becoming visible only seconds before it trapped.

  Throughout the shamal, air wing tanker squadrons flew twice their normal number of sorties to refuel fighters that were orbiting above the carrier and waiting for openings through which they could penetrate and trap.310 Tankers transferred fuel to strike fighters and to EA-6Bs, typically in heavy turbulence and at altitudes as high as 30,000 feet, where in-flight refueling evolutions would not normally take place. Six launch and recovery cycles on the three carriers in the North Arabian Gulf had to be canceled because of persistent airborne grit, lightning, and wind shear. Despite these challenging conditions, the Navy did not dramatically reduce its overall sortie rate during the sandstorm, and the coalition continued to fly as many as two thousand ATO sorties daily. CVW-5 launched one hundred strike sorties a day and also conducted organic tanking, with its eight S-3B tankers flying thirty or more refueling sorties a day.

  The F/A-18E Super Hornet had entered squadron service only nine months before the start of Iraqi Freedom with VFA-115 of CVW-14 embarked in Abraham Lincoln. In November 2002, shortly after its maiden deployment, the F/A-18E saw its first exposure to combat in Operation Southern Watch, dropping GPS-aided JDAMs on targets in southern Iraq. This combat first for the aircraft also marked the first successful operational use of the GBU-35, a 1,000-pound JDAM variant that the Navy prefers over the original 2,000-pound version because it is a lighter load to bring back to the carrier in the event the munition is not dropped during the sortie. (The Boeing Company had delivered an initial batch of 434 of the weapons to the Navy the previous March.)311

  At the start of Iraqi Freedom, VFA-115 had been averaging about fifteen maintenance man-hours per flight hour with the F/A-18E, as compared with twenty for the older F/A-18C and sixty for the F-14. The electronic technical publications (about 80 percent of the required documentation) supplied to the squadron and the F/A-18E’s ability to upload technical updates added to the ease of maintenance, as did the fact that the aircraft were the newest in the Navy’s inventory, some having come straight to the squadron off the production line. Initially, the F/A-18E was assigned missions in Iraqi Freedom that did not utilize its increased endurance or greater load-carrying capability. That practice was later changed as pilots gained more combat experience with the aircraft. The Super Hornet’s increased payload capability over that of the earlier F/A-18C meant the same number of targets (or more) could be attacked while exposing fewer aircraft to danger.

  During VFA-115’s initial workups, the F/A-18E had been used extensively as a mission tanker to refuel combat-configured Super Hornets and other air wing aircraft. In Iraqi Freedom, one F/A-18E out of the squadron’s dozen was fully dedicated to tanking, although the wing’s S-3Bs retained the recovery tanking role. Because the Super Hornet, unlike the S-3B, has a self-protection capability with its AIM-9M and AIM-120 air-to-air missiles and an electronic warfare suite for protection against surface-to-air threats, it can accompany strikers into enemy airspace in its tanker role and can escort damaged aircraft back to friendly airspace. The aircraft also was equipped with the ALQ-165 advanced self-protection jammer and the ALE-50 towed decoy—the first pairing of such a decoy with a Navy aircraft. In all, Super Hornet tankers transferred more than 3.5 million pounds of fuel to receiver aircraft.

  On March 31 an embarked squadron of 12 F/A-18F two-seat Super Hornets arrived in-theater in CVW-11 on board Nimitz, the first carrier to deploy with the new aircraft, en route to the North Arabian Gulf to relieve Abraham Lincoln. Two E-models from VFA-14 and two F-models from VFA-41 were flown four thousand miles from Nimitz in the Strait of Malacca to Abraham Lincoln to augment CVW-14 and to give the two-seat F model an early first exposure to combat. The addition of those extra four Super Hornets gave CVW-14 a more flexible mix of strike and tanker capability as well as additional FAC-A support. (Nimitz herself was expected to arrive on station in the Gulf in early April.) As with VFA-115 embarked in Abraham Lincoln, the Super Hornets in Nimitz had deployed without all of their equipment, most notably the shared reconnaissance pod, fully tested. Although the pod, called SHARP, had no data-link capability and was equipped only with a medium-altitude sensor package, it performed adequately. (Data-link capability and a high-altitude digital camera were to be added later.)

  The F/A-18F was the first Navy aircraft to be equipped with the advanced technology forward-looking infrared (ATFLIR) pod, which by the start of Iraqi Freedom was in full-rate production.312 Problems with the initial ATFLIR pods in Abraham Lincoln were overcome with the successor generation of pods provided to another F/A-18E squadron and to the first F/A-18F squadron embarked in Nimitz. Four Super Hornets in the deployed F/A-18E/F squadrons were configured for use primarily as tankers. As the campaign unfolded, some in the F/A-18E/F community pressed for an early integration of the extended-range standoff land attack missile (SLAM-ER), as well as a 500-pound LGB and eventually the 500-pound JDAM. At the time, the smallest precision weapon the aircraft could carry was a 1,000-pound LGB, which was too large for some CAS mission requirements.313 The aircraft also lacked a long-range standoff weapon as it awaited provision of the U.S. Air Force–developed joint air-to-surface standoff missile (JASSM).

  Even with the recent introduction of the Super Hornet into fleet service, the F-14 remained a viable platform because it offered greater range than the Super
Hornet and its LANTIRN targeting pod was available in greater numbers than the F/A-18E’s new ATFLIR pod. Tactics and operating procedures for the F-14 focused on hunting down mobile targets. Because friendly ground forces did not have the technical wherewithal to generate mensurated target coordinates, the F-14’s full-capability tactical air reconnaissance pod system (TARPS) and fighter tactical imagery (FTI) suite enabled real-time imagery transfers whereby SOF teams on the ground could cue F-14s to locate and attack moving targets with LGBs.314 The F-14’s sensor and targeting systems were also being provided to the F/A-18F, whose aircrews could thus acquire, view, send, and receive electro-optical imagery in near-real time, along with text messages that might be sent either as attachments or as stand-alone transmissions. Receivers of such transmissions could include other aircraft as well as land combatants ranging from senior commanders to SOF teams in the field using laptop computers as downlinks.315 Spare parts for the F-14Ds turned out to be the parent air wing’s single greatest challenge, although it was never so acute as to prevent the wing from meeting its goal of having seven of its ten F-14Ds operational at all times.316