The Unseen War

by Lambeth, Benjamin S.

  The services are still in the process of going from “technology push” to “technology pull” by moving away from an operating framework in which forces “kind of send the information to the shooter and let him shoot,” as described by then Rear Adm. Mark Fitzgerald, to one in which “the shooter pulls the information he needs from an enormous network of information.” Fitzgerald added, “We’re still in the push area. The Navy does a little pull, but it’s manual pull. It is very rudimentary, but it’s a start [to] where we need to get to.”73

  The inability of strike aircrews to obtain refined target coordinates in a timely manner was another impediment to more effective operations that continues to beg for attention. One possible solution might lie in a methodology that would allow faster weapon and target pairing. The war experience also suggested that a mission-specific rather than a platform-centric focus in future force management would better enable combatant commanders to receive the air support they need.

  After the major combat phase of Iraqi Freedom was over, Lt. Gen. Ronald Keys, at that time the Air Force’s deputy chief of staff for air and space operations, characterized ISR connectivity as having made possible a “war of neighborhood nets.” He suggested further interconnecting these nets and integrating them into “citywide nets” with a view toward “a global, commercial internet-type of capability. No matter where I am or in what platform, I should be able to log onto this net. We must discipline ourselves to adopt a common architecture that really enables the plug-and-play approach,” devoting special attention to broadening “machine-to-machine language cross-cueing” such that “we get our machines, our sensors, our weapons to talk to each other, to automatically exchange and share information.” Keys stressed the need to bring coalition partners into this net to make them more effective players.74

  The absolute requirement for all fighter, bomber, attack, combat support, and command and control aircraft to be equipped with common link systems that can receive real-time data and imagery directly into the cockpit also came to the fore during Iraqi Freedom. The CAOC, which routinely uses these capabilities, will always oversee joint and combined air operations, and it must be able to transmit common data messages and mission-essential imagery to all participating aerial platforms, which must likewise be able to report back to CAOC command and control entities via the same link with real-time in-flight tactical information.

  Officials from the Air Force’s command and control constellation and the Navy’s FORCENet initiatives teamed up after the campaign to work toward developing a common architecture for network-enabled operations aimed at merging their current service-specific nets into something that can be used by all four services and eventually can be turned over to an appropriate program office. Similar cross-service efforts were initiated in such related areas as ISR management, target aim-point generation, tactical data links, and joint tactical radios. The Air Force’s constellation network connects such sensor platforms as Global Hawk, AWACS, and Predator UAVs. Its ultimate intent is to provide uniform information to all activities in the kill chain. This linking of network-enabling capabilities has been rendered easier because Air Force and Navy strike warfare operations have become increasingly similar since Operation Desert Storm.75

  Greater Targeting Efficiency

  The delays in securing timely target approvals from higher headquarters that had repeatedly plagued the CAOC’s effectiveness in prosecuting time-critical targets in Afghanistan had been largely eliminated by the time Iraqi Freedom commenced. In a fundamental departure from the Enduring Freedom experience, General Franks elected to delegate to General Moseley and his planners in the CAOC full control over the daily process of preparing the joint integrated and prioritized target list, or JIPTL, for the major combat portion of Iraqi Freedom. Throughout the months that had spanned the end of major combat operations in Afghanistan and the start of initial planning for Iraqi Freedom, the air component, under General Moseley’s leadership, had made major improvements in its working relations with CENTCOM.76 After months of negotiations, General Franks ceded to General Moseley not only control over the daily JIPTL development process, but also the authority and tools required to conduct collateral damage estimation and casualty estimation for targets in Iraq, activities over which CENTCOM had retained close control throughout the war in Afghanistan. The only consent authority that remained at a higher level than the CAOC, either with Franks or with Secretary Rumsfeld, entailed requests to attack politically sensitive targets having to do with leadership, WMD, or high collateral damage expectations.77 A study of the U.S. experience in this arena summed up the essence of this changed arrangement: “The resulting process called for the air component to run the joint guidance, apportionment, and targeting (JGAT) process that assembled all target requests and made recommendations to Franks. . . . CENTCOM still held a [daily] targeting VTC [video teleconference] . . . but, unlike in Afghanistan, it was an approval authority now—not a target development authority. . . . Authority for most of the important emerging targets was pushed down to the air component. . . . Moseley had forcefully argued for this change, so he had to organize and plan to handle it.”78

  General Moseley later amplified with respect to the dissatisfying Afghan experience: “When I took over [from then Lieutenant General Wald] in November [2001] and began to plug in some of the big pieces of Afghanistan after the fixed targets were hit . . . [General Franks] and I agreed that we needed to look at a different way of striking this Taliban and Al Qaeda target set and we needed to look at something much more akin to time-sensitive targets and dynamic targets. That is how we began to work this prior to the fall of Mazari-Sharif.”79 Before that realization set in, staffers in the CAOC’s time-sensitive target cell routinely had to seek target attack approval from their counterpart cell at CENTCOM headquarters in Florida.80

  It was principally because he recognized the much higher target-servicing demands that Iraqi Freedom would entail that General Franks decided to delegate most of the approval authority for attacking fleeting targets to General Moseley. Moseley later recalled in connection with this decision:

  I think as we came through the Operations Northern Watch and Southern Watch habit pattern of 10- or 11-plus years of doing this, [we took on] the notion of a time-sensitive target being a reaction to being fired upon in the no-fly zone, which means you have to go back and go through an approval process. But when you get into [the war against the Taliban and Al Qaeda], we find that we need to go faster. We don’t have the luxury of time to go back and go through all of that. We learned lessons from November and December and January of 2001 and 2002 of how to streamline that process and how, effectively, to formalize these processes and delegate as much of it as possible to the [air] component.

  Once CENTCOM made the necessary procedural changes to avoid a replay of that earlier war’s initial errors, Moseley added, its efficiency in attacking time-sensitive targets went up from 50 to 100 percent in Iraqi Freedom.81

  A key CAOC planner for both Afghanistan and Iraq later recalled that

  there was a huge difference between Operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom when it came to operational-level execution. Throughout the major combat portion of Enduring Freedom, the JIPTL was closely controlled by CENTCOM for a number of reasons, distrust of the air component and the limited scope of the conflict being only two. During the initial planning stages of Operation Iraqi Freedom, General Moseley and his closest subordinate air operations planners stressed repeatedly to CENTCOM’s operations staff that CENTAF would have to be granted control of the JIPTL by General Franks if it was to be expected to conduct and effectively manage a major theater air offensive on the scale and at the pace of execution that were anticipated. Throughout the two years in which OPLAN 1003V gradually evolved and came together, CENTCOM’s leaders steadily acquired the essential trust in CENTAF’s planners that would be required if they were to relinquish control of the JIPTL to the latter. In the end, the CAOC became a truly joint
enterprise, with representatives of each of CENTCOM’s subordinate warfighting components shaping the JIPTL each day in support of the collective campaign.82

  General Moseley’s arrangements for time-sensitive targeting in Iraqi Freedom represented what CAOC planners called “a quantum leap” over the experience in Enduring Freedom.83 The experience acquired in Afghanistan and in subsequent joint training exercises was encapsulated in new techniques and procedures aimed at better codifying the overall targeting process. In the end, the CAOC’s time-sensitive targeting cell and its offensive operations duty officers effectively worked more than 3,000 targets and tasked 2,100 of those for attack during the 3 weeks of major combat.

  Maj. Gen. Daniel Darnell, the senior CAOC director who ran the most mission-intensive night air operations shift, recalled:

  The joint target coordinating board met every evening at CENTCOM, and I always had the distinct pleasure (in the middle of the night) of trying to balance the target list they came up with (supposedly sanctioned by General Franks) and what I knew were General Moseley’s priorities. . . . I discussed with General Moseley the targeting issues and centralization they dealt with in Operation Enduring Freedom. He didn’t want a repeat in Iraqi Freedom. . . . The sheer enormity and pace of the effort (over 2,000 sorties a day) did not allow micromanaging of the targeting effort. We had a parallel conflict (war of simultaneity, I often call it) going on across the entire country. We were supporting SOF operations in all quadrants of the country, offensive counterair missions against airfields and suspected WMD storage sites and SAM sites, strategic strikes on leadership locations, defensive counterair, CSAR, KI/CAS in support of the 3rd ID and I MEF, tactical and strategic airlift, ISR . . . and aerial refueling. Lots of fog of war involved. Not to mention . . . a couple of nightly calls from Washington concerned that we were going to whack one of their covert personnel during a time-sensitive targeting event. These types of things occurred at about 0200–0300 every night. We did not have the time . . . to micromanage anything.

  Remarkably, as General Darnell affirmed, top-down micromanagement of tactical-level events was largely avoided:

  The only time we reached down to the tactical level (one time) was during a Predator Hellfire shot on a SATCOM [satellite communications] antenna behind the ministry of information (again at 0300). . . . We made a decision that the potential for collateral damage was way too high. . . . I gave my consent to launch when ready. . . . The obvious question is why did I get involved at my level? It was a very high-priority mission. The regime was using the antenna for propaganda purposes to embolden the population and Iraqi military to continue fighting, and the secretary of defense and the president wanted the propaganda to stop. . . . Fortunately, all went perfectly. The Predator was never detected on ingress, the crew immediately identified the correct target, I concurred, and they shacked it with a direct hit.84

  The after-action study of Iraqi Freedom’s major combat phase commissioned by Secretary Rumsfeld and conducted by JFCOM attributed the remarkable improvement in CENTCOM’s ability to service emerging targets in a timely manner to the use of a single, common process for time-sensitive target coordination and execution; the use of common coordination and collaboration tools; the disciplined use of a focused, high-priority target set; and extensive training and realistic battle drills.85 In large measure, this achievement was a direct result of lessons learned from initial errors made at the command level in Operation Enduring Freedom. As the first air component commander for the Afghan campaign (then Lieutenant General Wald) flatly declared in retrospect, “without the educational experience of Enduring Freedom as a basis for planning the Iraq War, CENTCOM would never have succeeded in getting its approach to emerging targets right.”86

  The practice of having military lawyers routinely inserted as essential advisers in CENTCOM’s daily target vetting and approval process finally gained general air-component approval in Iraqi Freedom. Air Chief Marshal Burridge summed up the consensus of the senior CAOC leadership when he declared without hesitation: “I feel extremely comfortable with the construct we use embracing legal advice, because it protects me and it protects the person who is delivering the weapon. . . . We train our lawyers as operational lawyers, so they do get lots of practice with how to deal with targets. . . . I am very happy and most of us operators are very happy about having a lawyer alongside.”87

  The CAOC’s Contributions

  Having been duly seasoned by the Enduring Freedom experience of 2001 and 2002, CENTCOM’s CAOC at Prince Sultan Air Base was primed and ready for the more concentrated air operations of Iraqi Freedom. Most of the CAOC’s team for the latter campaign was in place about a month before the start of major combat, by which time Operation Southern Focus against the Iraqi IADS had become a full-time force employment activity. The CAOC organization itself was headed by General Moseley as the overall air component commander; below him were his principal deputy, then Rear Adm. David Nichols of the U.S. Navy, three alternating day and night one-star CAOC directors, and five major divisions with varied combat planning and mission management responsibilities. The CAOC’s staff of nearly two thousand personnel included representatives from all four of the U.S. services as well as other U.S. government agencies, the RAF, and the RAAF.88

  To support the daily air tasking cycle, targeteers were assigned to work in all five of the CAOC’s divisions: strategy, combat plans, combat operations, ISR, and assessments. The series of steps that were involved in generating the daily ATO passed from the CAOC’s strategy division to the combat plans and then combat operations divisions for promulgation and execution, finally returning again full circle to the strategy division for execution assessment. General Moseley’s chief strategist explained the ATO cycle as the means by which the air component commander seeks to provide the most efficient and effective employment of coalition air capabilities:

  The cycle begins with joint force commander [JFC] and component commander guidance. The CAOC strategy division then determines the tasks to be accomplished in the next cycle. This, in turn, is developed into targets that are vetted through a joint and coalition selection and approval process. This prioritized list then goes to the master air attack plan (MAAP) team that assigns air assets to the targets. The ATO production team then builds the ATO and sends it out to the various units for execution. After execution, the results flow back into the CAOC, where the assessment team determines the outcome and the combat effects achieved. This feedback then flows back to the JFC, the component commanders, and the strategy division, where the cycle starts all over [see figure 4.1].89

  The combat plans division comprised four subordinate cells: guidance, apportionment, and targeting (GAT); master air attack planning (MAAP); ATO production; and command and control planning. The MAAP cell consisted of fifty-three highly qualified professionals from all services and coalition partner-nations who normally worked in two twelve-hour shifts. That cell was responsible for producing the daily MAAP in two phases, the first from thirty-six to twenty-four hours before ATO execution, and the second from twenty-four to twelve hours before execution. The MAAP cell was further divided into subcells that included force allocation, force enhancement, defensive counterair, force application, KI/CAS, and air refueling. The force allocation group was responsible for coordinating all participating flying units, including the U.S. Navy’s five carrier air wings and all RAF and RAAF aircraft, as well as for developing sortie flows and aircraft turn schemes at each operating facility. Force enhancement was tasked with planning all command and control and ISR employment, as well as with managing the many changes in individual force package commitments that were generated by the air component’s theater air control system (TACS) that supported the land component.90 The defensive counterair group determined CAP compositions and locations and recommended changes to General Moseley as counterair requirements evolved over the course of the campaign.

  FIGURE 4.1 Air Tasking Order Processing Cycle

  Source:
CENTAF

  The force allocation group within the MAAP cell was responsible for matching up available strike assets against fixed targets on the JIPTL and for ensuring that those assets were assigned adequate SEAD protection. The KI/CAS team saw to pairing combat assets against mobile target nominations and to fulfilling incoming air support requests from both the Army’s BCD and the SOF component’s special operations liaison element (SOLE) in the CAOC. Finally, the air refueling group was responsible for all in-flight refueling operations other than the organic tanking that the Navy provided for its carrier-based aircraft.

  The MAAP cell chief’s responsibilities included chairing a pre-MAAP meeting that occurred thirty-six hours prior to every ATO execution at which he presented the AOD, the JIPTL, tentative aircraft flows, and appropriate notices to airmen (or NOTAMs) for that day. The Army, Navy, Marine Corps, SOF, and air mobility team chiefs would then present their intended schemes of maneuver and air support requests. After this initial planning process the team prepared the MAAP decision brief, which was in turn briefed to General Moseley or, in his absence, to Admiral Nichols for approval.

  The workload associated with this fast-paced flow of activity was onerous. Although the daily shifts in the MAAP cell were nominally slated to last twelve hours, the constantly changing nature of the air war frequently drove MAAP team members to work fifteen to eighteen hours or longer. Unlike Afghanistan operations, when the daily sortie rate was typically rather modest and easily manageable, the pace of both air and land operations during the major combat phase of Iraqi Freedom required significant and often rapid changes every day inside the ATO cycle, which often necessitated last-minute changes in force commitments.