The Unseen War

by Lambeth, Benjamin S.

  Maj. Gen. Robert Scales, the lead author of the Army’s after-action account of Desert Storm and no air power enthusiast, succinctly summed up this newly emergent fact of modern military life when he remarked that “the American way of war substitutes firepower for manpower. We expose as few troops as possible to close contact with the enemy. We do that by killing as many enemy as we can with precision weapons.”353 Air Chief Marshal Burridge echoed that assessment during his postcampaign testimony before the British House of Commons: “Von Clausewitz always told us that if you are going to invade somebody’s country, go at three to one. . . . We did it the other way around, but von Clausewitz did not have the understanding of air power. Air power was decisive in the maneuver battle.”354

  Critical to allied air power’s decisiveness in the campaign’s ground maneuver battle was its remarkable effectiveness against Iraqi armored forces. After the campaign ended, an assessment by the U.S. Department of Defense determined that all but two dozen Republican Guard tanks had been either destroyed or abandoned. There was no indication, however, that many crewmembers had been killed inside them. A group of Time magazine reporters who later visited a number of the most notable land battlefields discovered that most Iraqi soldiers had survived by staying away from their tanks as the latter were being destroyed with unerring precision by allied air power. Those troops simply fled as allied ground forces moved northward. This may help explain why those Iraqi units defending Baghdad put up virtually no resistance to CENTCOM’s prompt capture of the city. The Baghdad, Medina, Nebuchadnezzar, and Hammurabi Divisions of the Republican Guard had been deployed in two defensive arcs south of the capital, an outer arc about one hundred miles long and an inner arc spanning some thirty miles from Yusifiyah to Suwayrah. All of these troop positions had reportedly been undermanned. Each division had a strength of about 10,000 troops on paper, but the Department of Defense later estimated that the Iraqi troops who had been positioned against attacking allied forces actually numbered only between 16,000 and 24,000 in all. For the most part, those troop positions were attacked by allied air forces, with JSTARS, Predator, and Global Hawk geolocating enemy tanks and allied strike aircraft then being called in to engage and destroy them.355

  In telling testimony to the accuracy of those attacks, five Iraqi tanks in an open marketplace in Mahmudiyah were struck from the air while they were sequestered in alleyways so cramped that the turrets of the tanks could not be turned. Some storefront windows just a few feet away from the tanks were blown out, but no harm was done otherwise to the surrounding buildings. Iraqi troops sometimes parked tanks and other vehicles beneath overpasses to prevent detection from above, only to have them destroyed or disabled by LGBs that entered from the side and left the bridges overhead intact. More than a few tanks that were hidden under trees were also destroyed because the Iraqi unit commanders and soldiers who placed them there failed to realize that the palm fronds offered no sanctuary from modern thermal imaging technology.356

  In yet another testament to the consistent precision of allied air attacks, the battlefields south of Baghdad featured few of the sorts of craters that carpet-bombing attacks would have produced. Instead, combat effects assessors found blown-out Iraqi tanks and other vehicle hulks standing alone in ones and twos, most having been destroyed from the air before advancing U.S. ground forces arrived within weapons range. A Republican Guard colonel on the Iraqi General Staff later told his allied interrogators that “the . . . divisions were essentially destroyed by air strikes when they were still about 30 miles from their destination. . . . The Iraqi will to fight was broken outside Baghdad.” This colonel added: “Defeat was in large part due to our inability to move troops and equipment because of the devastating U.S. air power.” Similarly, a Republican Guard captain said of his recollections of the shamal experience: “It was night and in the middle of a severe sandstorm. The troops and vehicles were hidden under trees. The soldiers thought they were safe, but two enormous bombs and a load of cluster munitions found their targets. Some soldiers left their positions and ran away. When the big bombs hit their targets, the vehicles just melted away.”357

  Allied psychological warfare operations in the form of leaflets dropped on Iraqi positions and e-mail messages sent directly to Iraqi commanders may have helped considerably in eliminating the Iraqis’ will to fight. Iraqi military survivors who subsequently spoke with Time reporters were anything but belligerent. The survival of so many Iraqi troops did not concern U.S. commanders, because their intent was not to kill large numbers of Iraqis but to break down their resistance. As further evidence that little significant ground combat took place, earthwork bunkers, trenches, and sandbagged enemy gun emplacements facing southward showed few traces of the shell casings, cartridges, and scorch marks that are the normal residue of ground warfare.358

  Iraqi soldiers interrogated both during and after the campaign freely admitted that their morale had quickly collapsed when their armored vehicles began exploding all around them in the midst of the blinding three-day sandstorm (see Chapter 4 for more on the views of Iraqi commanders). In those circumstances Iraqi troops simply had no place to hide. As CENTCOM’s deputy commander, Lieutenant General DeLong, pointed out, “after fourteen days of bombing, Baghdad’s Republican Guard troops were down to minimum capacity, numerous key leadership targets were taken out, and Iraqi military communications were in disarray.”359 Offering his own perspective on this achievement in subsequent testimony to a defense committee of the British Parliament, Air Chief Marshal Burridge similarly remarked: “I suspect that we disrupted his command and control very early on, and I think they simply lost the ability to mount any sort of coherent defense. They were also surprised by the speed of advance, particularly from the Karbala gap up to Baghdad airport. . . . I think they were incapable of responding.”360

  Overall, CENTCOM achieved tactical surprise at the outset and, with the singular exception of the unsuccessful Apache deep-attack attempt on March 24, retained its offensive momentum throughout the major combat phase of Iraqi Freedom. Iraqi forces were never able to mount a coherent counter to the allied offensive. Saddam Hussein never stopped believing that an attack would come through the north from Turkey and Jordan. As a result, he kept eleven Iraqi army divisions tied down there as insurance against a second front, which was never a possibility after Turkey refused to grant CENTCOM the use of its territory. In the end, noted one assessment, “rather than the Grozny-like carnage and destruction predicted—and feared, Baghdad fell and the regime fell after only three days of hard [localized] fighting. . . . With soldiers and Marines able to move at will throughout the city, the regime evaporated.”361

  Postcampaign interrogations of Iraqi political and military leaders revealed that right up to the start of the campaign, Hussein believed that the United States would not invade Iraq because timely French and Russian intervention would prevent it. He also was said to have believed that in the event the United States did invade, it would quickly yield to international pressure to halt the war; that no coalition forces would ever reach Baghdad; and that the Bush administration would be content to settle for an outcome that fell short of regime change.362

  Looking back over the campaign experience, the deputy air component commander, Admiral Nichols, remarked, “We were much more successful than even the most optimistic among us had predicted. We moved farther and faster than projected, and our combined arms fires set new standards for persistence, volume, and lethality, day and night in all-weather conditions. The Iraqi military tried but could not react to the tempo we set on the battlefield. By the time they made a decision to do something, we had foreclosed that option.”363 An assessment of the U.S. Army’s contribution to the campaign aptly noted that “the essential lesson of these urban fights was that integrating combined arms, heavy and light forces, armored raids, and a liberal application of precision air power applied in each case. . . . Coalition airmen delivered responsive and highly accurate close air support, turnin
g the tide of battle in ground tactical engagements on more than one occasion in the final assault on Baghdad.”364 CENTCOM’s leaders would not know until the Ba’athist regime had been toppled and its former principals could be interrogated, however, that Hussein had been mainly concerned with the threat from within and accordingly had configured and fielded his forces to address that concern above all else.365

  The Allies’ Contribution

  As in the first Persian Gulf War in 1991, Washington’s main partner in Operation Iraqi Freedom was the United Kingdom. By every measure that matters, especially given its small size and limited resources, the United Kingdom was a coequal player with the United States when it came to the quality of its equipment, military leadership, concepts of operations, and combat prowess. Such close involvement was hardly surprising; the United States and Great Britain have had a long-standing special relationship dating back to the early twentieth century. The United Kingdom was a similarly pivotal participant in Operation Desert Storm, as well as a close partner of the United States in a succession of subsequent UN-approved military contingency responses, including Operation Deliberate Force and Operation Allied Force over the Balkans during the 1990s, and the decade-long enforcement of the UN-mandated no-fly zones over post–Desert Storm Iraq through Operations Northern Watch and Southern Watch (the British portions of which were code-named Operation Resinate).1

  In addition, the RAF had routinely trained with the U.S. Air Force in realistic large-force exercises such as Red Flag at Nellis AFB, Nevada, and similar training evolutions elsewhere around the world. Perhaps most important of all, ever since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the British Ministry of Defence (MoD) had maintained an embedded senior leadership and staff presence at CENTCOM’s headquarters at MacDill AFB, Florida, in connection with Operation Enduring Freedom, to which the RAF contributed notably in the support role by providing VC-10 and Tristar tankers, E-3D Sentry AWACS and Canberra PR9 reconnaissance aircraft, and intratheater airlifters, as well as basing provisions at the British island base of Diego Garcia that were crucial for supporting U.S. bomber operations.2

  Yet the United Kingdom’s participation in the second Gulf War was by no means a foregone conclusion. On the contrary, Britain’s close involvement in the planning for the campaign from its earliest months continued, almost up to the beginning of combat operations, against a backdrop of persistent uncertainty as to whether British forces would actually take part in those operations.3 Prime Minister Tony Blair faced substantial opposition in that regard both within the Labour Party and among the British public. Barely a day before the first bombs fell, he was subjected by his own party to what was, in effect, a vote of confidence in Parliament. The vote passed by a comfortable margin of 396 to 217, largely on the strength of Blair’s compelling performance in laying out the case for war.4 After that, the British government secured parliamentary approval to use “all means necessary” in the conduct of the impending campaign, albeit with the backing of only about a third of British public opinion.5

  In the end, however, all of the required pieces fell into place in time for the United Kingdom’s combat involvement, code-named Operation Telic, to commence at the war’s opening moments. There was, moreover, a closer alignment of American and British campaign objectives for Iraqi Freedom than had been the case for enforcing the no-fly zones over northern and southern Iraq. That allowed the campaign to be conducted at the optimum tempo and with minimum political friction. On March 20, just as the campaign was getting under way, Britain’s secretary of state for defence declared the campaign’s objectives in Parliament as being to disarm Iraq of WMD and to secure key elements of Iraq’s economic infrastructure from sabotage and willful destruction by the Ba’athist regime of Saddam Hussein. After the campaign ended, the initial after-action report by the MoD affirmed that the nation’s “overriding political objective [had been] to disarm Saddam of his weapons of mass destruction.”6 A subsequent report by Britain’s comptroller and auditor general further affirmed that a second key task had been the elimination of Hussein’s regime.7

  Toward both ends the United Kingdom contributed, among other assets, some 46,000 military personnel, 19 warships, 115 fixed-wing aircraft, and nearly 100 helicopters.8 That contribution made Operation Telic Great Britain’s largest force deployment for combat since Operation Granby, its contribution to the first Gulf War, in late 1990 and early 1991. The deployment entailed moving a highly capable force some 3,400 miles in just 10 weeks, less than half the time that had been required to deploy a roughly similar-sized force to take part in the 1991 war. It occurred against a backdrop of concurrent British operations in the Balkans, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, and Northern Ireland and at a time when the RAF was already overflying northern and southern Iraq as a part of the twelve-year UN effort to enforce the no-fly zones.9

  Australia likewise offered a spirited and substantial military contribution to Operation Iraqi Freedom that reflected a deep and politically courageous national commitment. Under the successive code names Operation Bastille and Operation Falconer, the Australian government provided twenty-two aircraft—nineteen from the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) and three from the Australian Army—and upward of two thousand military personnel to the coalition effort. That contribution included a national headquarters similar to but smaller than that of the British contingent that was collocated with CENTCOM’s forward headquarters at Camp As Saliyah in Qatar.10 In addition to the RAAF contingent, the Australians committed HMAS (Her Majesty’s Australian Ship) Kanimbla, an amphibious landing ship with three Sea King helicopters; HMAS Darwin, an Oliver Hazard Perry–class guided missile frigate (FFG) with two S-70B-2 Sea Hawk helicopters; HMAS ANZAC, a light frigate (FFH) with one S-70B-2 Sea Hawk helicopter; a clearance diving team from the Royal Navy; thirty Australians on exchange assignment with deployed U.S. and UK units; and an Army Special Operations Task Group (SOTG) built around a Special Air Service Regiment (SASR) squadron supported by a reinforced commando platoon as a quick-reaction force. The Australian Army also provided three CH-47D Chinook helicopters to support the SOTG. 11

  Australia’s contribution to Iraqi Freedom likewise stemmed from a long history of close bilateral ties with the United States, in this case going back to the Australian government’s decision in 1941 to align itself formally with Washington in the security arena, an agreement that was subsequently ratified in the ANZUS (Australia–New Zealand–United States) Treaty of 1951 and that has been sustained ever since by an extensive and continuing series of bilateral service-to-service relationships in such areas as joint training (the RAAF, like the RAF, had participated for years in the USAF’s recurrent Red Flag exercises), contingency planning, intelligence sharing, and, in the cases of Korea and Vietnam, actual combat as partners in arms.

  Australia’s input consisted first of Operation Bastille, the forward deployment of Australian forces to CENTCOM’s area of responsibility and initial area orientation and in-theater training, followed thereafter by Operation Falconer, the actual participation of Australian forces in combined coalition combat to help disarm Hussein’s regime. This contribution, moreover, came at a time when the Australian Defence Forces (ADF) were heavily engaged in other forward-deployed military commitments, including Operation Citadel, Australia’s involvement in UN peacekeeping operations in East Timor; Operation Relex, the protection of Australia’s northern borders against illegal immigration; and Operation Slipper, the ADF’s involvement in the U.S.-led Operation Enduring Freedom against the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan that commenced immediately after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.12

  As in Great Britain, popular opinion in Australia ran against involvement in Iraqi Freedom. The leader of the opposition Australian Labor Party, Simon Crean, vocally declined to support Prime Minister John Howard’s effort to make Australia part of the coalition. The minister for defence and the government’s leader in the Australian Senate, Robert Hill, responded to Crean in a press in
terview as Operation Bastille’s initial force deployment was getting under way: “I’d like to think that the Australian Labor Party . . . are nevertheless totally behind the forces as they are deployed. And I think that’s the case. Again, the Australian way is that once forces are deployed, the community does come together and back them 100 percent.” Senator Hill added: “The alliance is a strong and important alliance. It’s not the primary reason why we are predeploying these forces. We’re predeploying these forces in our own national interest. But the alliance is very important as our ultimate form of national security.”13

  Although the RAAF’s initial involvement in CENTAF’s early planning workups began in late summer 2002, it was not until January 10, 2003, that the Australian government formally announced that it would deploy ADF units to the Middle East in case such a commitment should become necessary to help implement UN Security Council resolutions calling for a disarmament of Iraq—by means of force should matters come to that.14 Three weeks later, on February 1, the government declared that the ADF would commit a squadron of fourteen F/A-18 Hornet strike fighters, as well as three C-130s (two C-130Hs and a C-130J), two AP-3C maritime patrol and surveillance aircraft, and three Australian Army CH-47D Chinook helicopters, along with a forward air command element that, according to an ADF spokesman, would reside in the CAOC and be “responsible for coordinating air operations with coalition partners and providing national control of Royal Australian Air Force assets.”15