The Unseen War

by Lambeth, Benjamin S.

  Regardless of the wisdom of the Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq in the first place, there seems to be no question that the invasion was badly underresourced for the many needs of postwar stabilization and transition to democratic rule, about which senior administration leaders had been more than amply warned before the invasion by a multitude of credible advisers both in and out of government. This book, however, focuses on the strategic and operational use of air power in pursuit of CENTCOM’s more immediate combat objectives during the three-week regime-removal phase of the campaign. By that more narrow measure, it is fair to conclude that those who conducted the campaign at all levels turned in a performance that was both exemplary and rich with useful lessons for the next major conflict the United States may face. Vice Adm. Joseph Dyer, the commander of Naval Air Systems Command, observed afterward in that respect, “Almost all of our thinking is proactive and looking toward future developments and amazingly little of it in terms of correcting deficiencies that were in evidence in this conflict.”4 CENTCOM’s deputy air component commander, Rear Admiral Nichols, made the same point even more directly in stating that instead of thinking in terms of revealed problems in need of fixing, U.S. and allied airmen should be reflecting on “what we validated.”5 During the course of a two-week Iraqi Freedom “lessons learned” symposium conducted by CENTAF at Nellis AFB in July 2003, numerous air component representatives in attendance who had been personally involved in the planning and conduct of the campaign at all levels suggested that unlike previous air wars from Desert Storm through Enduring Freedom, this one celebrated air power’s successes and would offer relatively few suggested equipment and procedural improvements for future campaigns. The collective sense of the participants was that few findings from the symposium would challenge prevailing service trends that had been established and validated in previous wars.6

  Nevertheless, although the campaign to topple Hussein set new records for air power achievement and broader joint force effectiveness, its execution was not without certain areas of combat performance that, in the words of JFCOM’s commander at the time, Admiral Giambastiani, “fell short of expectations.”7 General Moseley, also in attendance at the after-action review symposium, denoted seven areas of activity that, in his view, “worked less well” during the campaign: (1) insufficiently timely BDA, especially with respect to strategic targets and KI/CAS; (2) inadequate information transfer between the CAOC and shooter aircraft; (3) inadequate battlespace deconfliction; (4) totally unsatisfactory Army Patriot missile deconfliction and firing logic; (5) inadequate prioritization of theaterwide information operations; (6) a relatively poor performance by the ASOC supporting V Corps in comparison with the ASOC’s more professionally manned and more efficient Marine Corps DASC counterpart; (7) and speed, range, maximum service ceiling, and defensive system inadequacies with respect to CSAR platforms.8 The most notable air-related problems identified during the review were a succession of friendly fire incidents, continuing friction points in the air-ground interface, insufficiently timely provision of battle damage assessment, inefficiencies in the management of in-flight refueling support, and inadequate arrangements for the timely sharing of sensitive information with the nation’s coalition partners.9

  Incidents of Fratricide

  The coalition’s combat fratricide rate was lower during the three-week campaign to topple Hussein than it was during Operation Desert Storm, when 35 of the 148 U.S. fatalities (24 percent) and an even higher proportion of the British casualties incurred resulted from friendly fire. All the same, a postcampaign report by the Center for Army Lessons Learned identified 17 friendly-fire incidents during the major combat phase of Iraqi Freedom.10

  The three episodes of Blue-on-Blue surface-to-air fire that occurred involved the Army’s Patriot SAM system and allied combat aircraft. In the first, a Patriot PAC-2 missile struck an RAF Tornado GR4 on March 23 as the aircraft was returning to its base in Kuwait, instantly killing the crew, Flight Lieutenant Kevin Barry Main and Flight Lieutenant David Rhys Williams. The next day, a U.S. Air Force F-16 pilot whose aircraft had been locked up by a Patriot acquisition and tracking radar about thirty miles south of An Najaf fired an AGM-88 HARM at the offending radar in presumed self-defense, destroying the radar but remarkably causing no friendly injuries or loss of life. And on April 2, near Karbala, a Patriot PAC-3 missile struck a U.S. Navy F/A-18C operating from Kitty Hawk and killed the pilot, Lt. Nathan White.11 Neither of the two downed allied fighters in these Blue-on-Blue incidents appeared on the Patriot’s threat display as an aircraft.

  Investigators who reviewed the details of the three incidents considered the possibility that the Patriot system’s tracking radars had generated false targets and the Patriot operators had believed they were engaging enemy missiles rather than aircraft. Because aircraft and missiles have such different radar profiles, the investigators further considered the possibility of electromagnetic interference caused by the close proximity of the offending Patriot batteries to such other friendly radio frequency emitters as ground-based artillery radars, airborne surveillance sensors, and electronic jammers. In this regard the chief of Army air defenses, Brig. General Howard B. Bromberg, commented, “This is the densest battlefield we’ve seen. I believe there could be something there.” The Patriot batteries were clustered together looking northward toward Iraq from Kuwait, with PAC-2 and PAC-3 radars reflecting back on one another. General Bromberg added: “You have three incidents like that—they’ve all got to have some interrelationship. I’m convinced they did.”12

  Other early speculation pointed to a possible failure by the downed Tornado crew to transmit the proper IFF code, as well as to a possible use of improper settings by the offending Patriot crew to identify tracked targets accurately by correlating their speed, altitude, trajectory, and other flight characteristics. A board of inquiry convened by CENTCOM ultimately exonerated the Patriot battery crew who downed the GR4 during the latter’s approach to landing at Ali Al Salem Air Base in Kuwait, reportedly concluding that the crew “mistook the aircraft for an antiradiation missile based on its high-speed descent and lack of a functioning IFF.”13 The British MoD refused at first to comment on that finding, although RAF sources insisted that IFF is a go/no-go checklist item. Informed sources initially deemed it unlikely that the aircraft’s IFF could have failed in flight without the pilot noticing the failure and promptly alerting ground controllers. AWACS operators monitoring the airspace over southern Iraq likewise should have noticed immediately had the aircraft’s IFF suite not been functioning.

  A subsequent investigation revealed that although the Tornado crew believed that they were properly squawking in all assigned IFF modes, the aircraft’s IFF system had indeed failed completely. The investigation further determined that the Patriot crew had been undertrained and should not have assumed that the Tornado was hostile simply because it was not squawking IFF Mode 4—or, for that matter, any other transponder mode.14 An early assessment by a long-established specialist in Patriot performance at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, based on careful examination of a 32nd AAMDC briefing released shortly after the campaign ended, determined that a large number of Patriot radars were operating in close proximity to one another in the immediate war zone; that those multiple, independently operating radars were often in line of sight and tracking the same aircraft; that their target contacts could be displayed as spurious ballistic missile tracks; that the Patriot unit would automatically engage the false target; and that Patriot operators could have intervened to stop the engagement, but only if they acted within a time window of less than a minute. He further reported that Patriot operators “were not trained to deal with this scenario, and this scenario was not incorporated in engagement training software embedded in deployed Patriot units. . . . Thus the combination of lack of timely information from other air defense surveillance assets, timelines of tens of seconds or less to fire on the believed target, and no software support or traini
ng to recognize and deal with such situations put the Patriot crews in an impossible situation.”15

  In early 2004 a television reporter who had been embedded with a Patriot battery during the campaign uncovered evidence that friendly aircraft had been showing up on Patriot radars as incoming enemy missiles and that this problem had first surfaced with a forward-deployed Patriot unit a month before the campaign’s start. The reporter discovered that the Army had not alerted other Patriot operators or coalition aircrews to the problem. The deployed Patriot batteries had been operating in “weapons free” mode at the time of the two fratricide incidents, meaning that the launch crews could fire the missiles without first seeking higher approval. The account also reported that the battery that downed the Tornado GR4 was showing the incoming fighter as an enemy cruise missile, and that the one that subsequently downed the Navy F/A-18 had displayed its target “as a highly credible enemy ballistic missile symbol that did not resemble any false missile track that had been seen before.”16

  Whatever the explanation, allied aircrews soon developed a deep distrust of the Patriot system and made every effort to remain a healthy distance from its threat envelopes in their mission planning. One F-16 flight leader recalled what that effort entailed for his four-ship flight launching with no notice against an emerging target complex in the heart of Baghdad on March 30: “We . . . got airborne heading straight for the targets. Normally, we would have taken a westerly course in order to stay behind the northwest/southeast running line of our ground advance. The main reason for this was to stay behind the two Patriot batteries that had already been involved in two friendly fire incidents. To put it bluntly, the Patriots scared the hell out of us.”17

  The assessed threat to friendly aircraft presented by the Patriot SAM system had at least two undesirable consequences. First, it obliged allied aircrews to squawk secondary and unencrypted civilian Mode 2 IFF codes with their transponders, which could be tracked by Patriot but also by some Iraqi SAM systems. Second, allied aircrews experienced a notable spike in their stress levels whenever they operated within a Patriot threat envelope. More than a few who were locked up by a Patriot radar had been forced to drop chaff, engage in aggressive countermaneuvering, and make frantic radio calls to the AWACS to get the offending Patriot to break its lock.18

  Starting in August 2003 and continuing into June of the following year, a Defense Science Board (DSB) task force on Patriot system performance examined the Patriot’s operating experience during the campaign looking for lessons that might be incorporated into the continued development of Patriot and its planned follow-on system, the medium extended air defense system (MEADS). One of the key issue areas the DSB explored was the blend of causal factors that most likely accounted for the two Patriot-related fratricide incidents. The DSB’s findings, issued in January 2005, noted that the Patriot’s role in the campaign had been defense against enemy tactical ballistic missiles, with a secondary self-defense role against enemy antiradiation missiles, and that the system had no assigned air defense role. The board adjudged the Patriot’s service in its primary combat role a “substantial success.” The system had engaged all nine Iraqi TBMs that were fired against coalition forces; eight of those intercepts were confirmed kills, and the ninth engagement was deemed a probable kill. Given the reality of the Iraqi TBM threat and these manifest accomplishments against it, there was no question that the substantial deployment of Patriots, entailing up to forty U.S. Army fire units and twenty-two more from four coalition countries, was an essential ingredient of CENTCOM’s overall force mix.19

  With respect to the two surface-to-air fratricide incidents, the DSB cited “a complex chain of events and failures,” noting that there was “insufficient data to pin down the exact causes of failure” that occasioned the two inadvertent downings of coalition aircraft. Among the known shortfalls in CENTCOM’s capabilities and operating modes that might have been contributing factors, however, were consistently poor performance of the combat identification capability embodied in the Mode 4 IFF systems carried on allied aircraft; an absence of adequate situational awareness in CENTCOM’s combined air defense system; and the Patriot system’s “operating philosophy, protocols, displays, and software, which seemed to be a poor match to the conditions of [Operation Iraqi Freedom].” The report added that the Patriot’s operating protocol “was largely automatic, and the operators were trained to trust the system’s software,” which was designed to accommodate the possibility of “heavy missile attacks.” The task force further noted that with the “enormous” number of coalition aircraft sorties flown during the campaign (some 41,000) and the large deployment of Patriot fire units in-theater (62 in all), “the possible Patriot friendly aircraft observations were in the millions, and even very low-probability failures could result in regrettable fratricide incidents.”20

  With respect to minimizing the likelihood of future surface-to-air fratricide incidents, the DSB’s report concluded that the Department of Defense needed to “find and fix the Mode 4 IFF problem” and “improve the situational awareness of [the U.S. defense establishment’s] air defense systems.” As for the Patriot system in particular, the DSB further spotlighted a need “to shift its operation and control philosophy to deal with the complex environments of today’s and future conflicts,” especially conflicts that “will likely be more stressing than [Iraqi Freedom] and [will] involve Patriot in simultaneous missile and air defense engagements.” Key to such a system improvement, the DSB concluded, will be “a protocol that allows more operator oversight and control of major system actions.”21

  Despite such efforts to get to the bottom of the fratricide incidents and correct their causes, however, General Moseley concluded more than three years after the campaign ended that the Patriot problem “is still not fixed.”22 For its part, the Army would say for public consumption only that “application of lessons learned . . . has already improved upon Patriot’s performance and the system will be continuously refined. . . . Some changes include the integration of satellite radio technology at the battalion information coordination center which provides improved situational awareness through voice and data connectivity with higher headquarters identification and engagement authority, as well as enhanced command and control and software improvements that enable better identification, classification, and correlation of airborne objects.”23

  The Army’s Patriot operators were not the only ones culpable in inadvertent friendly fire occurrences. Air-to-ground fratricide was also significant during the three weeks of major combat. An especially notable incident took place on March 23 when a two-ship element of Air Force A-10s was targeted against a group of what turned out to be friendlies by a Marine Corps ground FAC and subsequently fired on those troops near An Nasiriyah, disabling tanks, APCs, and Humvees and killing an undetermined number of Marines. In what the official history of I MEF’s contribution to the campaign later characterized as “arguably . . . the most notorious friendly fire incident of the war,” that A-10 formation (call sign Gyrate 73) responded to a call for immediate CAS from the commander of Bravo Company of the 2nd Marine Regiment’s 1st Battalion, which had been assigned the mission of securing two bridges on Highway 8 over the Euphrates River (the southern bridge) and Saddam Canal (the northern bridge) in An Nasiriyah. The account noted that the A-10 was “usually a welcome sight on the battlefield and had already done good work on March 23 against other targets. But now it was bearing down on friendlies.”24

  A postmortem report on the incident issued by a CENTAF investigating board two months later noted that “witness statements and testimony indicate that the majority of [friendly] casualties were most likely caused by friendly fire.” The report went on to say, however: “Considering information made available upon reconvening, this is no longer the board’s opinion. . . . Of those 18 Marines [killed during the encounter], it is the opinion of the board that enemy fire killed 8 Marines. Due to the mixture of intense enemy fire, combined with friendly fire
from Gyrate 73 flight, the board is unable to determine, by clear and convincing evidence, which type of fire killed the remaining 10 Marines.” In a cover memorandum forwarding the report to General Franks, General Moseley noted that “the investigating board concluded that the primary cause of the incident was a lack of coordination regarding the location of friendly forces due to a number of contributing factors.”25

  A subsequent CENTCOM assessment of the incident issued on March 6, 2004, reported that the battalion’s Charlie Company “began taking heavy enemy fire from artillery, rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs), mortar and small-arms fire. At approximately the same time, the air officer, located with the forward command post, called the Bravo Company forward air controller (FAC) . . . requesting CAS to combat enemy forces attacking their location. . . . The A-10s targeted what turned out to be Charlie Company assets, making multiple passes against them. Eventually, the A-10s were told to cease fire, which they did.”26