The Unseen War

by Lambeth, Benjamin S.

  Combat operations conducted by the two Mediterranean-based carrier air wings differed markedly from those flown by the three air wings that operated in the congested waters of the North Arabian Gulf. The former had initially been tasked with supporting the planned invasion by U.S. Army ground forces from Turkey. After the Turkish government ruled out that option, the Mediterranean-based air wings were re-roled to support the allied SOF teams operating in northern Iraq and the western desert. When the war began, however, the Turkish government was also denying its airspace to allied strike operations against Iraq, a measure that threatened to keep the two air wings in Carrier Task Force 60 out of the fight altogether as the three carriers in the North Arabian Gulf made their contribution to the war effort from the south. Fortunately for CENTCOM, that changed on March 20 when Saudi Arabia relented under U.S. diplomatic pressure and granted transit approval for allied combat aircraft to pass through its previously restricted airspace. The commanding officer of VFA-105, embarked in Harry S. Truman, recalled his relief: “We had a way in! The new route was going to be long. From a position just off the Nile Delta, CVW-3 aircraft flew down the Sinai Peninsula, around the southern tip of Israel and Jordan and worked their way across the Saudi desert to refuel from Air Force tankers just short of the Iraqi border. Once topped off, F/A-18s and F-14s, supported by EA-6Bs, would strike at targets located west and northwest of Baghdad.”317

  As the campaign entered its third and final week, that sea-based capability allowed General Moseley to report that “the Navy is carrying a large, large load up there [in northern Iraq] operating out of the eastern Mediterranean and flying across Turkey. . . . With two aircraft carriers in the eastern Med and with our tankers, we’re able to provide near-continuous pressure.”318 More to the point, those sea-based strike fighters, along with Air Force B-52s operating out of RAF Fairford in the United Kingdom, made some things possible in northern Iraq that could not have been accomplished otherwise. Because of range-payload limitations and tanker-related operating restrictions, the CAOC could not range land-based U.S. Air Force and RAF strike fighters, even the exceptionally long-legged RAF Tornado GR4s based in Qatar and Kuwait, very far north of Baghdad. Moreover, during the three-day shamal, Navy strike fighters from the carrier operating areas in the eastern Mediterranean and the North Arabian Gulf were the only allied fighters that could play in the air effort against Republican Guard and other Iraqi ground forces, because Al Udeid and Al Jaber Air Bases in Qatar and Kuwait were both completely weathered in. The senior CAOC director recalled that Navy aircrews were “absolute heroes” during that critical time window, saving a lot of Army lives when a convoy of Iraqi vehicles began heading south toward their positions. More than one aircraft returned to its carrier with severe hail damage and even radomes ripped off as a result of the storm.319

  Cdr. Andy Lewis, the commanding officer of VFA-15 in CVW-8 on board Theodore Roosevelt, implemented a pilot management plan that proved to be a perceptible force multiplier: “One thing that we did in our squadron that I think paid big dividends when [Iraqi Freedom] started was to create a tactical organization, or, in other words, assign permanent lead-wingman combinations. We took the most experienced pilots and paired them with the least experienced. After that, pilots were assigned by tactical pairs as strike sorties were given to the squadron. As a result, my young guys were never without guidance either before or during the war, and this allowed even the most junior ‘nugget’ to fly strikes starting from Day One regardless of their overall experience.”320

  The five carrier air wings that took part in the campaign were better integrated into the ATO process than ever before, with each wing having representatives in the CAOC where the daily ATO was assembled to ensure that the wings were assigned appropriate missions. Lessons learned during Enduring Freedom carried over into the now much-improved joint force planning for Iraqi Freedom, with CENTAF staffers at all levels coordinating seamlessly with their counterparts in the maritime component and with at least one Navy Fighter Weapons School graduate eventually embedded full time in the CENTAF planning staff.

  The Navy’s carrier air wings also had ready access to software that automatically searched the complex ATO for Navy-specific sections, eliminating the need for air wing mission planners and aircrews to sort through the entire immense document. Closer cooperation in recent years between their weapons schools yielded still further dividends in improved joint Air Force–Navy interoperability. By all accounts, the Navy and the Air Force worked together unprecedentedly well in integrating their respective air operations. Almost all strike packages were joint operations, with Air Force F-16CJs and Navy EA-6B Prowlers routinely embedded together to enable the most robust possible defense suppression capability.321

  Of the 41,404 combat and combat support sorties flown during the three weeks of major combat in Iraqi Freedom, Navy and Marine Corps aircraft flying from carriers and large-deck amphibious ships flew nearly 14,000. Of those, 5,568 were fighter sorties, 2,058 were tanker sorties, 442 were E-2C sorties, and 357 were ISR sorties. Of the roughly 5,300 bombs dropped by Navy and Marine Corps strike aircraft, fewer than 230 were unguided. More than 75 percent of the precision weapons delivered by Navy strike aircraft were JDAMs. In addition, Navy F/A-18Cs flew 24 of the 158 propaganda leaflet delivery missions. Most of the Navy’s fighter sorties were dedicated to providing CAS.322 Fully mission-capable (FMC) rates for carrier-based aircraft throughout the campaign were significantly higher than the normal peacetime rates for deployed air wings. The FMC rate was 89 percent for the F-14A, 98 percent for the F-14B, 78 percent for the F-14D, 80 percent for the F/A-18A, 87 percent for the F/A-18C, 90 percent for the F/A-18E, 91 percent for the F/A-18F, 80 percent for the EA-6B, 89 percent for the S-3B, and 79 percent for the E-2C.323

  The End of the Ba’athist Regime

  By April 4, 85 percent of the allied air effort was concentrated on drawing down the Medina, Hammurabi, and Baghdad Divisions of the Republican Guard that were defending the approaches to Baghdad. Army intelligence reported that day that allied air attacks had degraded the Hammurabi Division to 44 percent of its assessed full-up effectiveness and the Medina Division to 18 percent.324 That same day saw the first deployment of allied fixed-wing combat aircraft into Iraq when Air Force A-10s began operating out of the Iraqi air force’s Tallil airfield after Marine Corps and RAF Harriers had established a forward arming and refueling point one hundred miles inside Iraq. That forward move eliminated some of the burden on the coalition’s heavily taxed tanker force.

  General Moseley reported during a press conference on April 5 that Iraq’s military airfields “for the most part, are not flyable. This morning we had only a handful of landing surfaces that could be used, and as we go through the day we will crater those again, as we do every day to attempt to minimize the opportunity to fly. . . . That does not mean that he [Saddam Hussein] won’t be able to get an airplane airborne somewhere, . . . [but if] he does get something airborne, it will not have a strategic dislocating impact on us.” As to why the Iraqi air force had remained out of the fight throughout the campaign, General Moseley replied: “I believe that he has not flown because in their mind they’ve made calculation that they will not survive.”325

  On April 6 Major General McChrystal reported: “Coalition air forces have established air supremacy over the entire country, which means the enemy is incapable of effective interference with coalition air operations.”326 Iraq’s air defenses had not yet been completely neutralized, however. Lt. Col. Raymond Strasburger was leading an element of A-10s that same day in support of Advance 33, an Air Force JTAC team attached to the Army’s Task Force 2/69 Armor, when he observed enemy tanks and armored fighting vehicles engaging the force’s lead company from the east end of a bridge spanning the Tigris River. In an ensuing sequence of events for which he was awarded the Silver Star, Lieutenant Colonel Strasburger led his element through heavy AAA fire despite severely reduced visibility and conducted an initial reconnaissance
run against the target.

  Relinquishing the element of surprise to Iraqi AAA gunners, he used the same attack heading to protect friendly forces and repeatedly attacked a battalion-sized enemy armor element that was dug in on the east side of the bridge. For 33 minutes, he continued with his wingman to press the attack in the face of heavy AAA fire, demobilizing three T-72 tanks, six APCs, and multiple utility vehicles that were within striking distance of the friendly ground force. His effort ultimately allowed TF 2/69 Armor to press their northward attack with minimal combat losses, linking up with adjoining coalition forces and completing the 360-degree encirclement of Baghdad.327

  On April 7 General Moseley reported that the CAOC was running out of worthwhile targets.328 That same day, however, allied intelligence sensors reportedly intercepted a telephone conversation that suggested that Saddam Hussein and his two sons were in downtown Baghdad’s Al Mansoor district. A signals intelligence cut from the intercepted cell phone exchange provided exact GPS coordinates for the location. The crew of a B-1 bomber orbiting nearby was given mensurated target coordinates by the CAOC and dropped two deep-penetrating and two delay-fused GBU-31 2,000-pound JDAMs on the target within twelve minutes after the CAOC had received the raw target coordinates from an E-3 AWACS.329 The entire sequence between the identification of the target and the attack reportedly took less than an hour.330 Once again, Hussein was not at the site, but the attack nevertheless confirmed that CENTCOM was continuing to exert every effort to hunt him down and kill him.

  On April 8, thanks mainly to the unrelenting precision air attacks throughout the preceding three weeks, CENTCOM intelligence reported that only 19 of the roughly 850 tanks of the Republican Guard divisions defending Baghdad at the beginning of the campaign remained intact, and that only 40 of the Iraqis’ 550 artillery pieces were still serviceable.331 In effect, the Republican Guard had lost nearly all of its tanks and artillery to allied air attacks. When the 3rd ID was ordered to send its 2nd Brigade on a raid into central Baghdad to capture the presidential district, the brigade penetrated to its objective opposed only by dismounted paramilitary harassment. Iraqi resistance was highly fragmented and confused, and seemed unable to organize.332 The most thorough review of the U.S. Army’s contribution to the three-week campaign noted that the advancing armored task force’s encounter with exclusively dismounted resistance “would become de rigueur all the way to Baghdad. . . . The enemy used innocent men, women, and children as human shields. Iraqi forces also used trucks, taxis, and ambulances to transport fighters onto the battlefield. . . . This pattern of operation became routine as the war wore on.”333

  A former Marine Corps F/A-18 pilot later wrote that “the Iraqi army was notable during the campaign for the incredible fact that it never really showed up. . . . American air power vaporized a great number of Iraqi formations before they could even start toward the fighting, while some enemy units just chose not to do battle and never left their garrisons.”334 This observer went on to note that the continuous air strikes well in front of advancing coalition ground forces were “an undeniable factor, indeed, perhaps the most important factor, in the success of the ground effort. . . . Quite simply put, the Iraqis were never able to mass in units large enough to slow the American advance. This fact was sometimes lost on ground commanders whose awareness of the battlefield was often no more than what they could see from the road.”335 RAND analyst David Johnson echoed this assessment in noting that “the importance of ‘shaping’ the battlefield with air power, enabled through high levels of operational situational awareness, was that it created a tactical condition whereby coalition ground forces never faced large Iraqi formations ‘eyeball-to-eyeball.’”336 On the contrary, the ground component mainly confronted fanatically tenacious but disorganized and suicidal dismounted Iraqi paramilitary fighters in repeated skirmishes in which “after the AK-47 [rifle], the RPG was the most ubiquitous weapon of the war.”337

  After allied ground forces had enveloped Baghdad, the CAOC began shifting its kinetic effort toward Tikrit and Mosul farther north. Already, B-52s and Navy strike fighters had been conducting armed overwatch operations in that area in support of JSOTF North. On April 9, A-10s and RAF Harrier GR7s were folded into that effort to increase the pressure on enemy units in the area and accelerate their surrender. Saddam Hussein’s regime finally collapsed that same day. The U.S. troops that drove through the streets of Baghdad encountered only scattered resistance as thousands of residents poured into the streets to celebrate the regime’s defeat. By this time, U.S. and British forces were in control of at least two-thirds of the country and all of its main centers south of Baghdad. Hussein, his family, his ministers, and other key members of the ruling Revolutionary Command Council still remained at large.338 The noose on most of those holdouts, however, tightened relentlessly.339

  By mid-April, allied combat and combat support sorties were down to about seven hundred a day, only a third of the peak rate that had been sustained through the previous three weeks. The Kitty Hawk and Constellation carrier battle groups and their embarked air wings were sent home from the North Arabian Gulf on the war’s twenty-seventh day, leaving one carrier remaining in the Gulf and two in the eastern Mediterranean within range of Iraq should CENTCOM need their services. By D+31 the Navy’s carrier presence in the region had ramped down to a single battle group headed by Nimitz with CVW-11 on board.340 The Air Force’s four B-2s on Diego Garcia and forward-deployed F-117s at Al Udeid also returned to their home bases in the United States. At that point the U.S. Defense Department’s public affairs chief, Victoria Clarke, declared that “the [Hussein] regime is at its end, and its leaders are either dead, surrendered, or on the run.”341 President Bush later added an important qualifying note: “Our victory in Iraq is certain, but it is not complete.” He emphasized that a final allied victory over Iraq would not be declared until General Franks had determined that all allied military objectives had been obtained.342

  In the end, it was the combination of allied air power as an effective shaper of events and the speed of the ground advance that got allied forces to Baghdad before the enemy could mount a viable defense, a process greatly aided by the ineptitude of the Iraqi armed forces. As a senior military official put it, “we executed faster than they could react.” The Iraqi troops that were rushed to the field found themselves on a killing ground for allied air power, in what CENTCOM staffers called “reinforcing failure.”343 Vice President Cheney quoted historian Victor Davis Hansen in assessing the coalition’s unexpectedly rapid success: “By any fair standard of even the most dazzling charges in military history, . . . the present race to Baghdad is unprecedented in its speed and daring and in the lightness of its casualties.”344

  Although the “shock and awe” blitz the media anticipated against enemy urban targets never materialized, the CAOC nonetheless succeeded in hitting what its planners had wanted to hit in Baghdad during the first night of the air war. It also excelled uniformly in providing a measured and steady concentration of allied air power against the Republican Guard. Col. Michael Longoria, the commander of the Air Force’s 484th Air Expeditionary Wing, described the effects of the air war on the coalition’s ground effort: “It’s just awesome the number of tanks, APCs, tracked vehicles and enemy positions that were attacked. . . . I don’t know if we are going to understand how significant this effort was until we do more analysis. But when you can destroy over three divisions worth of heavy armor in a period of about a week and reduce each of these Iraqi divisions down to even 15, 20 percent of their strength, it’s going to have an effect.”345 The coalition lost only twenty manned aircraft in achieving this effect, including six helicopters and one A-10 that were downed by enemy fire.

  A report in the British press suggested that an F-15E that went down on April 7 during the war’s last days may have been hit by a Stinger missile that had been abandoned by British special forces during their retreat from an ambush, but CENTCOM immediately discounted that suggestion a
s pure hearsay with no evidentiary basis whatever. A senior British Special Boat Service source likewise greeted the dubious report with skepticism, saying: “You would rather leave a man behind than equipment like that.”346 The aircraft had been bombing enemy positions near the northern town of Tikrit. The pilot, Capt. Eric Das, and his weapons systems officer, Maj. William Watkins, did not attempt to eject and were killed. A closer inquiry ruled out radar-guided SAMs or AAA, and the cause of the loss was never determined.347

  As for the joint and combined campaign’s bottom-line results at the strategic level, the Republican Guard and Special Republican Guard had been crushed, Iraqi mines and coastal cruise missiles had been neutralized, the southern and northern oil fields had been secured, and the Iraqi air force had been grounded. The three-week campaign brought a decisive end to Operations Northern Watch and Southern Watch. The former ran for 4,365 days (just 2 weeks short of 12 years) and generated 106,170 armed overwatch and combat support sorties out of Turkey; the latter lasted 3,857 days (10.5 years) and generated almost 3 time as many sorties—285,681—out of bases in Saudi Arabia and from carrier air wings operating in the North Arabian Gulf.348 In planning the campaign, General Franks had mitigated strategic-level risk by accepting risk at the operational level, and that operational-level risk had been mitigated by audacity, speed of movement, combined arms lethality, and tactical-level acumen, with more than a little help from Iraq’s military incompetence. In all, the twenty-one-day experience showed that overwhelming force is not just about numbers and that jointness can be a true force multiplier when pursued and applied with commitment and conviction by all players from the most senior echelons on down.349

  To be sure, the campaign’s planning and conduct had its share of critics on the American domestic front who complained for a time that the ground offensive, with only one Army division and one MEF attacking from the south with unprotected flanks on both sides, represented a needlessly risky gamble by the Bush administration and by CENTCOM.350 Those critics, however, failed to recognize the effectiveness of the transformed allied air capability against fielded enemy ground forces that had evolved since the first Persian Gulf War in 1991. Gen. Charles Horner, the air component commander during Desert Storm, explained that improvements in air-delivered precision target attack had “made it possible [in Iraqi Freedom] to destroy a very large number of Iraqi ground forces in a short period of time. Moreover, the attacks were made from medium or higher altitudes, which eliminated exposure to short-range air defenses. And, from these altitudes, Iraqi soldiers had little or no warning time to disperse and take cover.” Horner added: “Iraqi units were being targeted with precision air attacks before they could pose a threat to advancing U.S. land forces or were within range of the cameras of embedded news media.”351 He further noted the psychological effects of constant exposure to such attacks, which are almost never taken into account in the archaic attrition warfare models that continue to be used in official war games.352