The Unseen War

by Lambeth, Benjamin S.

  89.CENTAF staffers also met about this time with their counterpart planners at CENTCOM headquarters to clarify the emerging war plan’s various operational objectives and anticipated “supported” and “supporting” command relationships to ensure synchronization across the involved warfighting components. Conversations with Colonel Erlenbusch, Major Roberson, and other CENTAF staff, January 29, 2007.

  90.Comments on an earlier draft by Col. Matt Neuenswander, USAF (Ret.), October 22, 2010.

  91.Comments by Lieutenant Colonel Cline, January 11, 2008.

  92.Carpenter, “Rapid, Deliberate, Disciplined, Proportional, and Precise,” 9.

  93.Tim Ripley, “Planning for Iraqi Freedom,” Jane’s Intelligence Review, July 2003, 10.

  94.Comments by Lieutenant Colonel Cline, January 11, 2008.

  95.Conversations with Colonel Erlenbusch, Major Roberson, and other CENTAF staff, January 29, 2007.

  96.Comments by Lieutenant Colonel Cline, January 11, 2008.

  97.Michael R. Gordon, “The U.S. Battle Plan: Make Friends and War,” New York Times, March 11, 2003.

  98.Carpenter, “Rapid, Deliberate, Disciplined, Proportional, and Precise,” 5.

  99.Comments by Lieutenant Colonel Hathaway, February 19, 2007.

  100.Nichols, “Operation Iraqi Freedom: CFACC/CAOC/NALE.”

  101.Mark Thompson, “Opening with a Bang,” Time, March 17, 2003.

  102.Gordon and Trainor, Cobra II, 35. For the work in question, see Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade, Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance (Washington, D.C.: National Defense University Press, December 1996). “Shock and awe” was never used, let alone promoted, by CENTCOM’s air component. It was entirely a construct that emanated from and was popularized by the Office of the Secretary of Defense with a view toward shaping the tone and focus of Secretary Rumsfeld’s desired battle plan for Operation Iraqi Freedom and reflecting his personal determination to see the plan embody less “massive build-up and overwhelming force” and more “light, lean, speed, and agility.” Colonel Hathaway later recalled that the construct did affect the evolution of OPLAN 1003V as CENTCOM moved toward a more operationally risky simultaneous execution of major air and land operations, but “none of the planners actually expected the visually awe-inspiring orgy of air-delivered fire and destruction that the press had begun to envision. My goal was to build a plan that would deliver a blow to the Ba’athist regime on Day One and never allow it to recover or regroup. To this extent, we did have ‘shock and awe’” (comments by Lieutenant Colonel Hathaway, February 19, 2007).

  103.Woodward, Plan of Attack, 311. In his memoirs President Bush freely acknowledged that “later, many of the assertions in Colin’s speech would prove inaccurate. But at the time, his words reflected the considered judgment of intelligence agencies at home and around the world” (Bush, Decision Points, 245).

  104.Woodward, Plan of Attack, 150.

  105.Ibid., 233.

  106.CENTAF staffers strongly preferred the long-established time-phased force and deployment data (TPFDD, pronounced “tip-fid”) procedures rather than the multiple individual ad hoc deployment orders that Secretary Rumsfeld insisted on. CENTAF planners did, however, press for an early flow of forces in order to meet the growing demands that CENTCOM’s emerging war plan was placing on the air component. These mission support needs included forces for strategic attack, counterair, SOF support, and now earlier-than-anticipated support to the land component. Conversations with Colonel Erlenbusch, Major Roberson, and other CENTAF staff, January 29, 2007. Army planners were likewise unhappy with Rumsfeld’s insistence on piecemeal deployment orders in lieu of the time-tested TPFDD approach. A postcampaign assessment from the Army’s perspective candidly noted that deviating from the detailed TPFDD “had unintended consequences as logistics units fell farther back in the force flow. This affected not only Army units but also those from sister services that depended on Army supporters. . . . As the campaign progressed, the force flow never caught up with the operational requirements; the approach ultimately failed to provide either the flexibility or responsiveness anticipated” (Fontenot, Degen, and Tohn, On Point, 74).

  107.Scott C. Truver, “The U.S. Navy in Review,” Proceedings, May 2003, 94.

  108.Vice Adm. Timothy J. Keating, USN, “Naval Aviation Key to Iraqi Freedom Victory,” The Hook, winter 2003, 4.

  109.Kerry Gildea, “Ammunition Stocks Ready for War, Navy, Marine Corps Leaders Report,” Defense Daily, February 27, 2003, 4.

  110.Hampton Stephens, “Deployments Force Cancellation of January Red Flag,” Inside the Air Force, January 17, 2003, 5.

  111.Hampton Stephens, “USAF Cancels Second Red Flag in a Row, Citing Lack of Available Assets,” Inside the Air Force, March 14, 2003, 2.

  112.Hampton Stephens, “At Rhein-Main, Activity Increases as U.S. Prepares for Iraq War,” Inside the Air Force, February 28, 2003, 4–5.

  113.Gen. John W. Handy, USAF, Operation Iraqi Freedom—Air Mobility by the Numbers (Scott AFB, Ill.: Headquarters Air Mobility Command, October 1, 2003), 3.

  114.Ibid., 5.

  115.Ibid., 18.

  116.Gordon and Trainor, Cobra II, 48.

  117.Franks with McConnell, American Soldier, 342. These “spikes” in force deployment and use were directly connected to Operation Southern Focus, CENTCOM’s concurrent expanded use of reactive air attacks in response to Iraqi provocations against coalition aircraft operating in the southern no-fly zone (see Chapter 2). Lieutenant Colonel Hathaway later explained, “We didn’t want to trip them [the Iraqis] into any action that would trigger the start of major hostilities until we were ready. During the final weeks before the actual execution of OPLAN 1003V, General Franks directed that we terminate the ‘spikes’ to ensure that we wouldn’t inadvertently do anything that might force a premature execution of the plan, as well as to allow the President’s last-chance diplomatic effort to play out unimpeded” (comments, February 19, 2007).

  118.Not only was General Leaf an experienced fighter pilot, he also was intimately familiar with U.S. Army operations, having been an honor graduate of the Army’s Command and General Staff Officer Course and a graduate of the Army’s pre-command course. Fontenot, Degen, and Tohn, On Point, 31.

  119.For detailed discussion, see Benjamin S. Lambeth, Air Power against Terror: America’s Conduct of Operation Enduring Freedom (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corporation, MG-166–1-CENTAF, 2005), 163–231.

  120.Col. Matthew D. Neuenswander, USAF, “JCAS in Operation Anaconda—It’s Not All Bad News,” Field Artillery, May–June 2003, 2.

  121.General Moseley created the first ACCE organization in May 2002, shortly after Anaconda. It was established with the SOF community’s Combined Joint Task Force (CJTF) 180 in Afghanistan to provide senior air-component representation to other fighting elements of CENTCOM, much as those elements provided representation to the CAOC. This was a new idea that paid off impressively in improved intercomponent operations. The arrangement became the template for the ACCE that was subsequently established with the land component for Operation Iraqi Freedom. CENTAF staffers later called the concept “new doctrinal territory” and an initiative that “paid huge dividends by improving communications and staff relationships” (conversations with Colonel Erlenbusch, Major Roberson, and other CENTAF staff, January 29, 2007).

  122.Amy Butler, “As A-10 Shines in Iraq War, Officials Look to JSF [Joint Strike Fighter] for Future CAS Role,” Inside the Air Force, May 23, 2003, 13.

  123.Elaine M. Grossman, “Iraq War Could Feature Unprecedented Air-Land Collaboration,” Inside the Pentagon, February 13, 2003, 1, 16–18. The fact that an ACCE was needed at all for Iraqi Freedom reflects the widespread geographical distribution of CENTCOM’s subordinate warfighting components, requiring a ponderous CAOC that, in the case of Afghanistan, had been located thousands of miles to the rear of the fight. There was no ACCE arrangement in Operation Desert Storm because joint theater headquarters were all collocated in Saudi Arabia. In
the case of current counterinsurgency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, with the air component commander and the CAOC both far removed from the center of action, one has begun to hear increasingly compelling arguments that what is really needed is not just an ACCE, but even more a pushing of some CAOC tactical-level functions down to the Air Force air support operations centers in Baghdad and Kabul that are collocated with U.S. ground commanders to ensure that the air component’s potential contributions are fully engaged in the joint fight. For an insightful recent commentary along these lines, see Lt. Col. Jeffrey Hukill, USAF (Ret.), and Daniel R. Mortensen, “Developing Flexible Command and Control of Air Power,” Air and Space Power Journal, spring 2011, 53–63.

  124.This willingness bore out an observation later put forward in the U.S. Marine Corps’ official postmortem on I MEF’s role in the campaign that General McKiernan “was not afraid of new ideas and wanted to find the best organization for the fight—as opposed to doing things the way they always had been done.” The same account also noted that McKiernan “had what Newsweek was to call ‘a temperament as . . . even as the desert,’ which also made it easy for him to work with other services” (Col. Nicholas E. Reynolds, USMC [Ret.], Basrah, Baghdad, and Beyond: The U.S. Marine Corps in the Second Iraq War [Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 2005], 13). Before the campaign kicked off, General McKiernan made it a special point to stress that “there will never be a Third Army fight. We will always be in a combined [and] joint contest” (interview by Maj. John Aarson with Lt. Gen. David McKiernan, November 17, 2002, as quoted in Fontenot, Degen, and Tohn, On Point, 31).

  125.Comments by Lieutenant Colonel Cline, January 11, 2008.

  126.Robert Wall, “Rescue Enhancements: U.S. Air Force Helicopters Employ Longer-Range Guns and New Threat-Avoidance Technology,” Aviation Week and Space Technology, June 16, 2003, 168.

  127.Franks with McConnell, American Soldier, 398.

  128.General Moseley played a major role in negotiating many of these forward basing arrangements. The senior Australian air planner in the CAOC later remembered “Moseley complaining at one stage that he was dispatched again to the Middle East to talk to the minister of defense in Saudi or wherever and saying, ‘I’m supposed to be planning the air war. Why the heck am I doing all this?’ But the reality was that Moseley had a very good working relationship with all the defense organizations in the area, had a very good network. He was well known to a lot of the politicians, the ministers of defense and the governments in that area, and he became the front man. Without his efforts, the State Department would have had a lot of problems” (official interview with Group Captain Otto Halupka, RAAF, Operation Falconer Air Planner, May 14, 2008, provided to the author by the RAAF Air Power Development Centre, Canberra, Australia).

  129.By the account of one key planner, CENTAF’s logistics personnel were heroic in working munitions issues, getting the munitions into the theater, and setting up all the bases. British and Australian logisticians were also fully engaged in this planning activity at Shaw AFB. “I don’t know who said it,” he added, “but it’s true—amateurs do strategy, professionals do logistics” (comments by Lieutenant Colonel Cline, January 11, 2008). See Kristin F. Lynch, John G. Drew, Robert S. Tripp, and Charles Robert Roll Jr., Supporting Air and Space Expeditionary Forces: Lessons from Operation Iraqi Freedom (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corporation, MG-193-AF, 2005).

  130.Esther Schrader and Richard Boudreaux, “U.S. Seeks Overflights in Turkey,” Los Angeles Times, March 12, 2003.

  131.Ibid.

  132.Elaine Grossman, “U.S. Air Force Spent Millions on Turkish Bases Unused in Iraq War,” Inside the Pentagon, August 14, 2003, 1, 12–13.

  133.Franks with McConnell, American Soldier, 428.

  134.Woodward, Plan of Attack, 330–331.

  135.Robert Burns, “U.S. Gulf Force Nears 300,000 as Commander, Bush Consult,” Philadelphia Inquirer, March 5, 2003.

  136.Nimitz, with her embarked air wing and crew, had sustained a record-setting nine-and-a-half-month deployment more than two decades before in 1979 and 1980 when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan and the Iranian hostage crisis first kicked off.

  137.Eric Schmitt, “Pentagon Ready to Strike Iraq within Days if Bush Gives the Word, Officials Say,” New York Times, March 6, 2003.

  138.David E. Sanger with Warren Hoge, “U.S. May Abandon UN Vote on Iraq, Powell Testifies,” New York Times, March 14, 2003.

  139.Reynolds, Basrah, Baghdad, and Beyond, 50.

  140.Jay A. Stout, Hammer from Above: Marine Air Combat over Iraq (New York: Presidio Press, 2009), 27–28.

  141.Lt. Gen. T. Michael Moseley, USAF, Operation Iraqi Freedom—by the Numbers (Shaw AFB, S.C.: Headquarters U.S. Central Command Air Forces, Assessment and Analysis Division, April 30, 2003), 6–10.

  142.Christopher Cooper and Greg Jaffe, “U.S. Use of Saudi Air Base Shows Kingdom’s Quiet Commitment,” Wall Street Journal, March 12, 2003.

  143.David Lynch and John Diamond, “U.S., British Forces Are ‘Ready Today’ for Invasion,” USA Today, March 17, 2003.

  144.Moseley, “Operation Iraqi Freedom: Initial CFACC Roll-up.”

  145.Ibid.

  146.Elaine M. Grossman, “U.S. Forces to Take Close Battlefield Approach into Baghdad Fight,” Inside the Pentagon, March 20, 2003, 2–3.

  147.Ripley, “Planning for Iraqi Freedom,” 9.

  148.Conversations with Colonel Erlenbusch, Major Roberson, and other CENTAF staff, January 29, 2007.

  149.Hunter Keeter, “Next Internal Look to Spotlight Deployable Command and Control,” Defense Daily, October 31, 2002, 6.

  150.“XC4I” stands for experimental command, control, communications, computers, and intelligence.

  151.Hunter Keeter, “Exercise Internal Look to Evaluate Joint Task Force Command Capability,” Defense Daily, December 5, 2002, 4.

  152.Gordon and Trainor, Cobra II, 89.

  153.Woodward, Plan of Attack, 237.

  154.Franks with McConnell, American Soldier, 414.

  155.Jeremy Feiler, “Iraqi Campaign Lessons Show Shift to ‘Overmatching Power’ Doctrine,” Inside the Pentagon, October 9, 2003, 13.

  156.One might add here, as a fourth consideration, the important fact that allied air superiority had already been established over Iraq’s northern and southern no-fly zones. Comments by Lieutenant Colonel Cline, January 11, 2008.

  157.Lessons of Iraq: Third Report of Session 2003–04, vol. 1 (London: House of Commons, Defence Committee, HC 57-I/II/III, March 16, 2004), 35 (hereinafter cited as Lessons of Iraq, vol. 1).

  158.Comments by Lieutenant Colonel Hathaway, February 19, 2007.

  159.Woodward, Plan of Attack, 257.

  160.Conversations with Colonel Erlenbusch, Major Roberson, and other CENTAF staff, January 29, 2007.

  161.Woodward, Plan of Attack, 264–265.

  162.Conversations with Colonel Erlenbusch, Major Roberson, and other CENTAF staff, January 29, 2007.

  163.Ibid.

  164.Ibid. U.S. air-launched cruise missiles delivered by B-52s were mainly used during the first days of the air war against preplanned targets but also were employed as an alert response capability and in reactive targeting.

  165.Ibid.

  166.Ibid.

  167.Ibid.

  168.Eric Schmitt and Elisabeth Bumiller, “Top General Sees Plan to Shock Iraq into Surrender,” New York Times, March 5, 2003.

  169.Woodward, Plan of Attack, 217–218.

  170.Franks with McConnell, American Soldier, 440.

  171.Woodward, Plan of Attack, 365.

  172.Dana Milbank and Mike Allen, “President Tells Hussein to Leave Iraq within 48 Hours or Face Invasion,” Washington Post, March 18, 2003.

  173.Richard W. Stevenson, “As Diplomatic Effort Ends, President Vows to Act,” New York Times, March 18, 2003.

  174.Woodward, Plan of Attack, 335.

  175.Ibid., 352.

  176.Betsy Pisik, “Human Shields Take a Powder,” Washington Times, March 5, 2
003.

  177.Tom Bowman, “U.S. Aims to Curtail Civilian Casualties,” Baltimore Sun, March 5, 2003.

  178.Rowan Scarborough, “Bush Convenes War Cabinet,” Washington Times, March 6, 2003.

  179.Elaine M. Grossman, “Decision to Hasten Ground Attack into Iraq Presented New Risks,” Inside the Pentagon, March 18, 2004, 1, 14–17.

  180.Comments by Lieutenant Colonel Hathaway, February 19, 2007.

  181.Ibid.

  182.Ibid.

  183.Prior to Operation Desert Storm, Iraq was Turkey’s second-largest trading partner, with $3 billion in exchange each year. See Jeremy Feiler, “Turkey Could Move Forces into Northern Iraq to Thwart Refugee Crisis,” Inside the Pentagon, March 13, 2003, 11–12.

  184.Thom Shanker and Eric Schmitt, “Rumsfeld Seeks Consensus through Jousting,” New York Times, March 19, 2003; and Eric Schmitt with Dexter Filkins, “Erdogan to Form New Turkish Government as U.S. Presses for Use of Military Bases,” New York Times, March 12, 2003.

  185.Rowan Scarborough, “Lightning Air Strikes, Then March to Baghdad,” Washington Times, March 18, 2003.

  186.Greg Jaffe, “U.S. Rushes to Upgrade Base for Attack Aircraft,” Wall Street Journal, March 14, 2003.

  187.Peter Baker, “Marine Predicts Brief Bombing, Then Land Assault,” Washington Post, March 17, 2003.

  188.Thomas E. Ricks, “Myers Depicts War on Two Fronts,” Washington Post, March 5, 2003.

  189.Squadron Leader Sophy Gardner, RAF, “Operation Iraqi Freedom: Coalition Operations,” Air and Space Power Journal, winter 2004, 88. At the outset, CENTAF had not anticipated this prospective complication. Eventually, it enlisted the help of two airmen from the Air Force Doctrine Center at Maxwell AFB, Ala., to assist in working through the associated command and control issues. Comments by Lieutenant Colonel Cline, January 11, 2008.

  190.B-1Bs carrying twenty-four JDAMs were used extensively in the counter-Scud effort in the western desert. CAOC planners understood that if those munitions were not required to support that mission during any given aircraft time on station, the B-1s would undertake dynamic or time-sensitive targeting elsewhere in the war zone.