The Unseen War

by Lambeth, Benjamin S.

  In addition, General Moseley suggested that JSTARS may have played a role in helping to prevent Iraqi Scud missile launches against Israel or other friendly countries in the region. “I believe [Saddam Hussein] has not shot one because we’ve been out there,” he declared on April 5. “We’ve been out there on the ground, we’ve been out there in the air, we’ve been out there with sensors, we’ve been out there with special ops, with conventional forces. . . . We’ve worked this problem very hard. . . . I’ll tell you that we’re closing down on the opportunities for him to get one of those things out and shoot it without us finding it.”148 (In the end, of course, no Scuds were ever found in Iraq’s western desert.) This seemed to validate a comment by the former commander of U.S. Strategic Command, Adm. James Ellis Jr., that a major desired end state of the Department of Defense’s ongoing “transformation” enterprise at the time was to develop and maintain an ISR capability so effective that it is a deterrent in and of itself. As the Air Force’s Transformation Flight Plan issued in 2004 noted, such a capability forces an enemy to “fight blind, deaf, and dumb.”149

  To be sure, allied situation awareness was less fine-grained when friendly convoys were attacked by dismounted Iraqi troops or by Fedayeen Saddam paramilitary fighters on foot.150 Otherwise, however, coalition forces were able to respond to enemy ground threats of any significant size by repositioning and by countering those threats with timely air attacks, even at the height of the three-day shamal. Although Iraqi ground forces outnumbered coalition forces, they never achieved tactical surprise or were able to mask their movements. With its broad and persistent target area coverage, JSTARS also was a critical enabler of time-sensitive targeting, directing strike aircraft onto targets of opportunity and cueing other allied ISR platforms onto emerging targets.151 This capability allowed CENTCOM’s ground commanders to substitute information, precision, and speed for mass and firepower. In the words of three JSTARS experts, the combination of near-real-time dynamic GMTI targeting information and satellite-aided JDAMs “redefined both close air support and battlefield air interdiction, air power’s two major ground-support functions.” By allowing these functions to be performed effectively irrespective of weather and visibility conditions by high-altitude strike platforms armed with large munitions loads, “GMTI and JDAMs [opened up] major opportunities for joint campaign planners to rewrite the book on integrating aerial fires with ground maneuver.”152

  Information Operations

  CENTCOM undertook perhaps the most determined U.S. effort ever mounted to conduct information operations against key elements of the Ba’athist regime. At their core, such operations essentially entail measures aimed at influencing the perceptions of the enemy’s leadership and rank and file, with the goal of producing a military advantage for the side that conducts them. Defined in that way, information warfare played a significant part in the major combat phase of Iraqi Freedom. CENTCOM’s director of operations, Major General Renuart, later recalled that “perceptions had a big part to play in the power of the regime, and we [in CENTCOM’s senior leadership] felt that those perceptions could have an important part to play as we began and conducted combat operations.”153

  One information warfare stratagem that CENTCOM applied from the campaign’s very start was the generally successful effort to persuade regular Iraqi army troops to remain in their barracks or to desert once the pressure ramped up so that allied forces might concentrate on the Republican Guard and other regime targets. This effort began some nineteen days before the formal start of the campaign with a concentration of measures against what General Renuart called those in Iraq “who were smart enough to understand that the regime was going to come to an end.” Regular army troops were targeted for this effort because they were deemed most likely to choose not to fight.154

  Another part of the information war entailed keeping the U.S. Army’s 4th ID afloat off the Turkish coast long after it had become clear that the Turkish government would not allow those troops to use Turkey as a springboard for offensive operations. This diversionary measure was meant to persuade the Iraqi leadership that the 4th ID’s combat assets remained a vital part of CENTCOM’s campaign strategy. Another such effort entailed CENTCOM’s attempt to minimize incentives for destroying Iraq’s oilfields. With respect to those equities and to Iraq’s dams, both of which would be essential to underwrite postwar reconstruction, General Renuart recalled that “we felt like there was no good kinetic way to prevent bad things from happening. We either had to go occupy them or we had to convince the people occupying them not to destroy them.”155 As evidence that the effort worked, he cited instances in which explosives planted in Iraqi oilfields had been deliberately set incorrectly so that they would cause no damage and explosives that had been planted but never connected. Iraqi detainees later told their interrogators that they had been persuaded to undertake these measures by CENTCOM’s targeted radio transmissions.

  Propaganda leaflets were another of CENTCOM’s successful information warfare stratagems. On March 19, the first day of scheduled operations involving the insertion of allied SOF units, CENTCOM’s leaders were encouraged to learn that Iraqi formations that had left their garrisons after President Bush’s March 17 ultimatum had assumed only defensive battle positions. Based on that determination, CENTCOM directed Air Force A-10 pilots to drop the first “capitulation” leaflets over enemy troops fielded in southern Iraq. The leaflets urged Iraqi troops who wished to avoid being killed by allied air and ground attacks to park all military vehicles in public squares, stow artillery and AAA pieces in travel configuration, display white flags on vehicles, show no visible man-portable air defense weapons, gather in groups at least a kilometer away from their vehicles, disarm (other than officers, who could retain their sidearms), avoid approaching coalition forces, and await further instructions. The correct timing of this stratagem was critical. One planner noted: “The main reason we haven’t dropped capitulation leaflets before is that we did not want to invite Iraqi soldiers to surrender before there was anyone there to surrender to.”156

  The operation was not without problems. On one occasion the land component requested specific messages to be delivered with only a day’s prior notice, and the air component could not comply. Leaflet delivery required special canisters loaded with the right combinations of leaflet messages and flight plans that took due account of wind speed and direction at the scheduled time of drop. For their part, ground commanders could rarely predict four days in advance when the battlefield situation might be right for specific messages to be delivered. The challenge, General Leaf observed, was “the lead time required not just to produce the products, but also to ensure [that] the message [was] clear, accurate, and properly translated into local languages and dialects.” Another officer later reported that the “nonkinetic targeting process was still undergoing major refinements well into the conflict” and that the air and land component headquarters “were never able to develop a process that appropriately reflected the needs of both components. . . . There’s a very narrow window to try to get capitulation leaflets [dropped] in, to be effective. . . . You don’t want them to get there too early. You don’t want them to get there too late, obviously, either.” More to the point, added General Leaf: “While the risk is different than dropping a bomb on the wrong target, mistargeted information operations ‘weapons’ like leaflets could have just as negative an effect on military operations.” Leaflet “BDA” was also problematic. For example, although Iraq’s forces did not, as initially anticipated, set many oil wells afire, there was no way of determining the extent to which leaflets were responsible for that.157

  In contrast to the aerial leaflet drops, which reportedly were relatively well planned before the start of the campaign, CENTCOM had not prepared adequately for nonkinetic information warfare attacks against, for example, the Ba’athist regime’s computer networks. Most such operations were conceived and cobbled together on the run.158 General Renuart indicated that compu
ter network attack represented only a small part of the overall information campaign, largely because there were only some 15,000 computers in Iraq with access to the Internet and access was closely controlled by Hussein’s regime. However, computer network operations were conducted to send messages directly to key Iraqi commanders, as well as to try to judge the effectiveness of CENTCOM’s larger perceptions management effort against specific targets.159

  On balance, CENTCOM did not do as well as its leaders would have liked at manipulating Iraqi and international perceptions during the three-week campaign and its early aftermath. Nevertheless, General Moseley established a combat information cell in the CAOC whose primary responsibility was to gather information quickly on all reported instances of collateral damage with a view toward developing information release strategies aimed at heading off and correcting any misstatements of the facts that appeared in both friendly and hostile media.160 As for key information-related “lessons” from this collective experience, General Renuart cited the need “to step forward to create information operations units and to create tools that are agile, mobile, and are technically a step beyond Commando Solo [the EC-130],” as well as the need for a government-wide group to oversee information operations at a national and strategic level rather than the current profusion of niche capabilities in each service. A persistent problem in this respect, he added, was the absence of a common and accepted definition among the various concerned agencies as to what information warfare is and involves.161

  New Munitions and Technologies

  The air portion of the three-week campaign was largely a JDAM and LGB war, with various versions of those two precision-guided munitions making up about two-thirds of the total number of bombs dropped. The JDAM was a particularly welcome addition to CENTAF’s munitions lineup not only because of its consistently high accuracy (generally landing within a bomb’s length of the designated target aim point), but also because it could be released from level flight at high altitude even above a solid cloud cover, thereby allowing the delivery aircraft to remain outside the lethal envelope of most of the Iraqi SAM and AAA threats. Depending on the altitude and airspeed of the dispensing aircraft, a JDAM can be released as far away as fifteen miles from its target in ideal conditions.162

  The greater availability of precision-guided weapons and the heightened imperatives of collateral damage avoidance also drove a progressive trend toward the use of smaller munitions in Iraqi Freedom. Lt. Gen. James Cartwright, USMC, at the time the Joint Staff’s director for force structure, resources, and assessments, commented on that score, “We are still early in this game, but it appears that we moved off of the 2,000-pound [bomb] area down into the 500-pound area.”163 The ground attack munition of choice for the Air Force’s F-15E Strike Eagle, for example, was the 500-pound GBU-12 LGB. With each aircraft able to carry nine of these, a two-ship flight of F-15Es could engage as many as eighteen target aim points on a single mission.

  The expanded availability of advanced infrared navigation and targeting pods greatly increased the types of allied aircraft that could carry LGBs and self-designate targets for them. For example, B-52H heavy bombers dropped LGBs for the first time in combat using the AN/AAQ-28 Litening II targeting pod. This new system, configured with a laser spot tracker and an optical sensor in addition to an upgrade of its LANTIRN predecessor’s forward-looking infrared sensor, had been integrated into the aircraft by mid-February 2003, with initial work on system compatibility having begun in October 2002. The Litening II pod allowed the aircraft’s bombardier to visually identify and confirm the target under his display cursor from an altitude of 35,000 feet, a capability that the B-52 had not previously possessed.164 Twelve B-52s were slated for conversion to this capability, but only two were available for use during the three-week campaign. The pod was useful not only for guiding LGBs, but also for marking targets for other strike aircraft and for providing irrefutable videotaped bomb hit assessments. Litening II pods were also carried by the A-10 and by all versions of the F-16C.165 They were described as easy to use, easy to maintain, and reliable.

  In addition, for the first time, a B-52 dropped six CBU-105 sensor fused weapons on a column of enemy military vehicles. The CBU-105 is a WCMD-equipped version of the CBU-97 dispenser, which carries ten BLU-108 submunition packages, each of which contains four “skeet” warheads with side-mounted, dual-mode infrared and active laser seekers to initiate the warhead charge and then fire a shaped projectile into an armored target. The munition was developed during the 1980s as a part of the Assault Breaker program directed against massed Warsaw Pact tank formations in Central Europe. (WCMD-equipped cluster munitions first saw combat use in Afghanistan in 2001 when WCMD-aided CBU-87s were employed against Al Qaeda and Taliban troop concentrations.)166

  Other ground attack munitions available to CENTCOM included the AGM-154A joint standoff weapon (JSOW), a gliding submunition dispenser carried exclusively by the F/A-18 that was inertially guided and GPS aided, and could, under ideal conditions, be released twenty miles away from the target. It was effective during the initial days of the campaign, particularly against Iraqi IADS-related targets in the north.167 Preproduction versions of the joint air-to-surface standoff missile (JASSM) were delivered to the 2nd Bomb Wing, a B-52 unit based at Barksdale AFB, Louisiana, for possible use during the air offensive, but were not employed.

  Finally, the Air Force introduced the CBU-107 passive attack weapon, which it used at least once against an unspecified target. That munition was designed to disable nonhardened targets such as storage facilities while minimizing unwanted collateral damage. The thousands of steel and tungsten penetrating rods it released were designed to disable whatever might be inside without actually taking down the targeted building. The Air Force fielded this 1,000-pound-class munition through a $40 million quick-reaction initiative that was funded by the Office of the Secretary of Defense. The development program for the munition commenced in September 2002, and the first units were reported ready for the B-52, F-15E, and F-16 within just 98 days. Developed at the Air Force Armaments Center at Eglin AFB, Florida, the CBU-107 consists of a tactical munition dispenser that contains 3,700 penetrating rods and includes a WCMD tail guidance kit. Its destructive core consists of 340 14-inch-long tungsten rods that are ejected during the munition’s descent, followed by 1,000 medium-sized (7-inch-long) tungsten rods and then by 2,400 2-inch-long steel rods that are the last to leave the unit. The larger rods are intended to breach the harder aspects of a target, such as fairly thick steel; the others damage softer elements within the targeted structure. The weapon, which appears capable of neutralizing large stores of chemical or biological agents (or at least denying the enemy access to such facilities), emerged from a multiyear Air Force study of alternatives for implementing a targeting concept called “agent defeat.”168 The weapon was first publicly described during a subcommittee hearing of the House Armed Services Committee on April 3, 2003, by the Air Force’s chief acquisition official, Marvin Sambur, who testified that production had been completed on time and under budget and with 15 percent more munitions delivered than had been originally proposed.169

  Some of Secretary Rumsfeld’s deputies reportedly had pressed CENTCOM to use a 21,700-pound monstrosity called the massive ordnance air blast (MOAB) bomb, more colloquially known as the “mother of all bombs,” which was designed to produce a tremendous explosion that would terrorize an enemy into submission. Although the Air Force chief of staff, General Jumper, was “not excited” about that suggestion, General Franks yielded to pressure from above and directed General Moseley to have two sent to the war zone “so we can help the designers do their work.”170 CAOC planners were hard put to come up with a suitable target for the bomb, especially given the Bush administration’s insistence on avoiding collateral damage, because it was dropped from medium altitude from a C-130 to descend by parachute at the mercy of the wind. General Moseley remained unenthusiastic as well, stating that “unless we have a differe
nt mindset, dropping them in a city with a [circular error probable] of about 3,000 feet does not make much sense.” “To the relief of the Air Force,” authors Gordon and Trainor reported, “the war ended before the bomb was used.”171

  In contrast to the outsized MOAB, whose practical utility to combatant commanders has yet to be persuasively demonstrated, a real deficiency in strike warfare capability unmasked by the campaign experience was at the opposite end of the weapon-size spectrum. There is an increasingly pressing need for smaller munitions in the 250-pound category that will allow engagement of more target aim points during a single strike mission while being less likely to cause unwanted collateral damage. Both needs can now be met by the unprecedented accuracy of modern munitions. So-called small-diameter bombs (SDBs) in the 250-pound class with GPS and laser guidance and with extendable vanes enabling greater standoff capability have been introduced into the line inventories of the Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps. These versatile new munitions have been used to consistently great effect toward both precision target attack and collateral damage mitigation in danger-close conditions in the nation’s continuing counterinsurgency operations since the end of major combat in Iraq.

  Overall Effects Achieved

  Throughout the course of its campaign planning in 2002 and early 2003, CENTCOM sought multiple concurrent ways to get at the heart of Hussein’s regime. First, it sought to attack key Iraqi leaders directly. Second, allied forces struck Iraqi command centers and communications infrastructure at virtually every significant node. Third, those same forces sought to fragment the regime with inducements aimed at subordinate leaders and with associated psychological warfare efforts to drive a wedge between the regime and its fielded forces. Finally, through focused information operations to impair the Iraqi dictator’s assessment of the battlefield situation, CENTCOM worked hard to mislead Hussein regarding coalition activities.172 The command’s overall approach to leadership attack was, as one subsequent assessment put it, “comprehensive. It had physical and psychological components; it aimed at Saddam, his sons, their subordinate commanders, and the general population; and it employed both kinetic and nonkinetic means [that] included attacking command centers from the national level down to corps and division level.”173 The campaign further sought more directly, through the sustained application of kinetic measures by every asset at CENTCOM’s disposal, to beat down Iraq’s fielded forces to a point where they would be incapable of meaningful collective action.