The Unseen War

by Lambeth, Benjamin S.

  On the positive side, there was a clear contrast between the air tasking process employed throughout Iraqi Freedom and the one used during Operation Allied Force against Serbia in 1999, when the air component developed two separate ATOs each day as a result of EUCOM’s determination to keep sorties using NATO assets and approved through NATO channels separate and deconflicted from the more sensitive use of U.S.-only assets, such as B-2 and F-117 stealth aircraft.159 From the very beginning, CENTAF’s planners maintained a “seamless integration” of U.S.-only stealth assets with other American and allied conventional aircraft. Previously, planners had thought that the stealthy F-117 and B-2 demanded special compartmentalization in any air operation involving allied participation to protect their most sensitive operational and performance details. During the buildup for and conduct of Operation Iraqi Freedom, however, stealth platforms were woven into the CAOC’s conventional planning process from the very start, making the integration of stealth aircraft with conventional assets much more efficient and effective.160

  As was the case with participating units from the RAF, the RAAF units and personnel seconded to CENTAF for the duration of the three-week campaign encountered few problems in the realm of force interoperability. A subsequent bilateral review of interoperability issues between the ADF and the U.S. armed forces conducted in 2004 at Victoria Barracks in Sydney, Australia, however, concluded that “not all interoperability achieved was the result of systematic planning and training. Shortfalls arose, and the high degree of operational-level interoperability achieved during the conflicts [both] in Afghanistan and Iraq often reflected the use of workarounds and ad hoc solutions.” One of three broad categories of identified interoperability shortcomings concerned “information exchange issues, including the use of computer networks to plan, execute, and monitor operations and the extent to which national information policy architectures could respond to coalition information needs.”161

  An initial problem faced by the ADF that was not shared by the British contingent, owing to the latter’s previous intimate involvement in Operations Northern Watch and Southern Watch, was near-total unfamiliarity with CENTCOM and its mode of operations. CENTCOM likewise had limited knowledge and appreciation of the ADF’s breadth of capabilities. By the time the final countdown for Operation Iraqi Freedom began in early 2003, however, that issue had largely been resolved as a result of the ADF’s contribution to CENTCOM operations in Afghanistan since October 2001 through Operation Slipper, the air portion of which consisted of the provision of four RAAF F/A-18s to provide local air defense of Diego Garcia and two Boeing 707 tankers operating out of Ganci Air Base near Manas, Kyrgyzstan, with two RAAF P-3 long-range maritime patrol aircraft being added in 2003.

  Nevertheless, the Australians still faced an initial disadvantage when compared with their RAF compatriots. The air wing commander for the RAAF F/A-18s that deployed to Al Udeid recalled: “I never knew what an air expeditionary wing was, or what they did prior to getting there. Very few people [in the RAAF] had any idea of what a CAOC was and how it conducted operations and how the [United States] did its business. If you had asked me in November prior to being briefed in how we would conduct business with the [United States], I’d be at a loss to tell you.”162 The chief of intelligence and targeting within the Australian CAOC contingent under Group Captain Brown similarly remarked in his after-action observations: “Working with the U.S. Air Force at Shaw was definitely a highlight. They were extremely professional guys and had been doing Operation Southern Watch for quite some time, so what they didn’t know about Iraq wasn’t worth knowing. [Yet] this was an out-of-area operation for us, so there was a lot to learn and not a lot of time. It wasn’t like being in the comfort zone of the Southwest Pacific or Southeast Asia, and even knowing the lay of the land, you had to learn pretty much everything from scratch.”163

  With respect to the sharing of sensitive U.S.-controlled information, however, the RAAF contingent embedded in CENTAF’s CAOC reported very much the same experience as did the RAF contingent, namely, a U.S.-imposed firewall that blocked their direct access to needed mission planning information transmitted via SIPRNet and the necessity for jury-rigged workarounds. To be sure, that was not the case during the initial planning for prospective coalition air operations that took place at Shaw AFB in late 2002. The RAAF’s chief of intelligence and targeting experienced outright astonishment at the remarkable openness of CENTAF’s willingness to share sensitive intelligence information: “I walked in and I got a pass that let me in anywhere. It was quite amazing, actually. I didn’t expect that. And I actually always felt a bit embarrassed letting myself into their [intelligence] area without knocking and saying ‘I’m here’ before I took a few steps. I can’t recall any situation where I felt they weren’t telling you something.’”164

  Once the war was on, however, that openness changed. A senior air planner attached to the Australian contingent in the CAOC recalled in a postcampaign interview:

  General Moseley . . . and his deputy, Brigadier General [Robert] Elder, were both excellent. [General Moseley] just directed that whatever the Australians want, give it to them. . . . The biggest problem we had, [however], was plugging into their secure information technology systems and their communications, because that was a national sensitivity issue. The Brits had the same problem. . . . The TBMCS ran on SIPRNet, the secure system. That was where all the reporting occurred and where all the air tasking was issued. . . . They couldn’t give us access to it, and there was a huge problem with that. . . . It was eventually resolved, and I’m not clear how it exactly was resolved, but I know General Moseley had a major hand in it, and it went extremely high in their [the American] system. I heard a report . . . [that] it went as high as the president to get approval to give the United Kingdom and Australia access to SIPRNet. Until we got that, we could not operate. We couldn’t access the ATO, and all the command and control structure ran on that.165

  The U.S.-Australian bilateral review committee’s postcampaign assessment of interoperability issues between the two countries concluded that the impromptu informal workarounds that eventually triumphed over the ingrained obstructions to information sharing, albeit successful in the end, involved “departures from established, approved operating procedures”; were “usually based on a personal, trusted relationship”; and had “the net ongoing operational-level effect of . . . [degrading] the ability of Australian and U.S. forces” to interact seamlessly when it came to the most efficient planning and conduct of combat operations in a fast-paced and high-intensity coalition campaign context.166 The review team singled out as the main culprits the American SIPRNet system at the Secret level and the JWICS at the Top Secret level. Both “by definition and design, [those pivotal planning systems] cannot be used for campaigns involving meaningful contributions from other countries.”167 Fortunately, however, such workarounds as the provision of relevant country-specific sections extracted from the ATO via a SIPRNet terminal either in hard copy or on a compact disc for the British and Australian contingents “were developed [and employed in a way] that allowed allies access to mission-critical information that was essential for their effective and safe participation” in the campaign. Nevertheless, the team added, such workarounds “are a poor solution to problems with information sharing among coalition members.” Furthermore, consistent with the overarching stumbling block with regard to intracoalition interoperability that the British contingent repeatedly spotlighted in its postcampaign assessments, the U.S.-Australian review team also pointedly cited a statement by General Franks in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee on July 9, 2003, that identified “coalition information sharing in [Operation Iraqi Freedom] as an area that must be improved at all levels.”168

  Toward a New Era of Warfare

  Operation Iraqi Freedom began as a preventive war in that the United States attacked another country because of an assessed future threat rather than in response to a blatantly hostile act or t
o preempt an imminent danger that the targeted country represented. As such, it was the first (and, with the advent of a successor U.S. administration in 2009, only) exercise of the then-emergent George W. Bush doctrine, which was distinguished by a willingness on the part of the administration to use force to protect the nation’s avowed interests without an immediate provocation and without the support of a formal alliance.

  During the final countdown that preceded the start of full-scale combat operations, Jessica Tuchman Matthews, the president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, rightly characterized the impending campaign as an “optional war.”1 Vice President Dick Cheney justified Operation Iraqi Freedom somewhat differently as a proactive rather than reactive response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001: “We had certain strategies and policies and institutions that were built to deal with the conflicts of the 20th century. They may not be the right strategies and policies and institutions to deal with the kind of threat we now face.”2 Explaining this shift in strategy from deterring enemies to forcefully eliminating their ability to inflict direct harm on the United States, Cheney added that the September 11 attacks had changed the preexisting rules: “If we simply sit back and operate by 20th-century standards, we say wait until we’re hit by an identifiable attack from Iraq. The consequences could be devastating.”3 He later observed that the Bush administration’s dominant concern after the September 11 attacks was that the next threat to American security would not be box-cutters but nuclear weapons, that the nation’s leaders could accordingly no longer fail to connect the dots as they had done before the terrorist attacks, and that no responsible American president could have ignored the potential for an Al Qaeda–WMD connection in Iraq.4

  Allied air operations against the enemy’s ground forces were uniquely effective throughout the major combat phase of Iraqi Freedom. Yet in marked contrast to the first Persian Gulf War of 1991, they took a backseat to the ground effort not only in their sequencing in the joint campaign but also in the amount of information that was publicly released about them. In point of fact, the bombing attacks in downtown Baghdad during the air war’s first two nights were the only visible parts of that effort to most observers who were watching the war unfold on their home television sets. What remained unseen was the constant pounding that allied air attacks were delivering elsewhere throughout the country with unremitting accuracy against Iraqi tanks, artillery emplacements, and IADS facilities. While those on the home front were riveted to television reportage of friendly ground troops tied down by the sandstorm and engaged by Fedayeen Saddam hit-and-run attacks, allied strike aircraft were shredding Republican Guard units wholesale by means of JDAM attacks into the gloom, thanks to Global Hawk and other ISR assets that could geolocate those enemy assets unerringly through the weather. As the Air Force chief of staff, General Jumper, later put it, “We killed a lot of those guys, that equipment, during the sandstorm when those people assumed that because they couldn’t see ten feet in front of their face, neither could we.”5

  As if to reinforce this assessment, the most authoritative review of the U.S. Army’s contribution to the campaign noted: “It is difficult to overstate the importance of air operations in the context of [Operation Iraqi Freedom]. By dominating the air over Iraq, coalition air forces shaped the fight to allow for rapid dominance on the ground. Air power decisively turned the tide in tactical operations on the ground on several occasions. . . . Integration of precision munitions with ground operations, supported by a largely space-based command and control network, enabled combat operations to occur in ways only imagined a decade ago.”6 The study cited “lethal combinations of A-10s, F-15s, F-16s, F/A-18s, B-1s, B-52s and a host of other aircraft” as being “absolutely essential to the ground campaign’s success. The Air Force’s investment of air liaison officers and enlisted terminal attack controllers embedded into the maneuver units paid off in spades.” The only complaint voiced by Army commanders—one universally shared by Air Force airmen as well—was that “the clearance-of-fires process was sometimes unwieldy.”7

  CENTCOM enjoyed complete control of the air over Iraq essentially from the opening moments of formal combat. The earlier Desert Storm experience had started out with thirty-eight days of air-only operations that were obliged to focus on suppressing the Iraqi air force and Iraq’s ground-based IADS before the campaign could proceed to attack Hussein’s occupying forces in the Kuwaiti theater of operations. In contrast, this war, in Anthony Cordesman’s words, “began with air superiority and moved swiftly to air dominance” thanks to more than a decade of prior Northern Watch and Southern Watch operations plus seven months of escalated Southern Focus attacks to further degrade the Iraqi IADS and prepare the battlespace for the impending second campaign.8

  The immediate goals of the campaign were the neutralization of Iraq’s armed forces and the expeditious takedown of Hussein’s regime with minimal collateral damage by achieving tactical surprise, getting inside the regime’s decision loop, severing its command and control links, and undermining its capacity for collective action. “Violating virtually all of the traditional wisdom about how to prepare for a campaign of this scope,” the Army assessment noted, “the V Corps and I MEF forces appear to have achieved operational and tactical surprise when they started their attack before all of the ‘necessary’ forces had arrived and without a lengthy air effort. . . . The running start appears to have thrown the Iraqis off their defensive plan, and they were never able to regain their footing.”9 As coalition operations moved ever closer to direct contact with Iraqi troop positions, allied air power and light but high-impact SOF forces working in combination stayed ahead of the enemy at every step, often achieving specific mission objectives either before or independently of direct engagement by the main opposing forces on the ground. An American reporter captured the essence of the campaign when he described CENTCOM’s strategy as “premised on the synergy of disorienting air power, faster-moving ground forces, information dominance of the digital battlefield, and greater reliance on special forces.”10

  Yet the war was more than just a preventive exercise in regime takedown. It also turned out to be a live battle laboratory for refining some novel approaches to joint and combined warfare that had first been conceptualized and applied during Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan in 2001. To begin with, a major improvement during the preceding year in the trust relationship between President Bush and General Franks, as well as between General Franks and General Moseley, gave the latter essentially full autonomy in approving target nominations as well as allowing an autodelegation arrangement from CENTCOM to the CAOC for nearly all target categories. The senior CAOC director for the major combat phase of Iraqi Freedom recalled that the number of “Mother may I’s” from the CAOC staff to him or to General Moseley, let alone from General Moseley to General Franks or to higher authority, could almost be counted on one hand, and none of those rare instances, in contrast to the Enduring Freedom experience, resulted in lost opportunities.11

  Indeed, improved working relations both within and across CENTCOM’s components proved indispensable in enabling the successful prosecution of Iraqi Freedom. In particular, CENTAF intelligence experts and operations planners brought together many outside individuals who had worked together just a year before in Operation Enduring Freedom. For example, the principal command and control planners for Enduring Freedom were reconvened to lead the Iraqi Freedom force enhancement and force application cells in the CAOC’s MAAP team. Equally important, strong trust relationships between CENTAF and CENTCOM that were painstakingly developed by General Moseley and his key subordinates during the latter months and early aftermath of the major combat portion of Enduring Freedom went far toward eliminating previous tensions and ill will among CENTCOM’s warfighting components and services. Many members of the CAOC’s special operations liaison element in Enduring Freedom were likewise retained as primary planners for Iraqi Freedom. By the same token, operations planners
in CENTAF’s CAOC developed close and harmonious working ties with their counterparts at CENTCOM. “The daily contact with our CENTCOM counterparts during Operation Enduring Freedom continued throughout the buildup to Iraqi Freedom,” a senior CENTAF planner recalled. “While the key players on each side did not always see things the same way, there was never distrust or secrets.”12

  As for bottom-line conclusions aimed at capturing the war’s most memorable achievements from his personal perspective, General Moseley put at the top of his list General Franks’ decisive “fast and final” plan, which was distinguished by an unprecedented level of jointness and coalition cooperation. He further noted the willing acceptance of risk across all components at the operational level, the integration of all theater air assets into a single focus, the close integration of air and SOF operations, and the air component’s ability to operate deep inside defended Iraqi airspace right up to the edge of Baghdad from the campaign’s opening moments. General Moseley also spotlighted as major campaign accomplishments the land component’s march to Baghdad, which was the fastest mechanized ground advance in the history of modern warfare; CENTCOM’s complete crushing of the Iraqi air force, navy, Republican Guard, Special Republican Guard, and Special Security Organization as coherent and functioning entities; and the offensive’s all but complete dismantling of Iraq’s command and control network. The Iraqi air force launched no sorties, and there were no attacks by other means against CENTAF’s airfields, the U.S. Navy’s carrier battle groups, constantly incoming sustainment trains of fuel trucks, or any other coalition facilities. Finally, with respect to the air component’s carefully disciplined targeting and force employment, he pointed out that the air offensive had caused no catastrophic environmental effects, strategically dislocating collateral damage, or significant deleterious effects on Iraq’s civilian and economic infrastructure, transportation infrastructure, key southern and northern oil fields, or associated petroleum, oil, and lubricants infrastructure.13