The Unseen War

by Lambeth, Benjamin S.

  191.Franks with McConnell, American Soldier, 434.

  192.In a sidebar comment titled “Sometimes Even a Nonlethal Attack Can Be Lethal,” Lt. Col. Carl Ayers, commander of the Army’s 9th PSYOP (Psychological Operations) Battalion, described the unusual death of an Iraqi border guard in the western desert: “The cause of death was a box of leaflets that fell out of a [C-130] Combat Talon aircraft when the static line broke. The box impacted on the Iraqi guard’s head, and 9th PSYOP Battalion may have achieved the first enemy KIA [killed in action] of Operation Iraqi Freedom” (Fontenot, Degen, and Tohn, On Point, 108).

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

  194.There is no evidence that any Air Force leader at any time in the planning for Iraqi Freedom insisted on the Air Force being the first in “for matters of pride,” as was later alleged by CENTCOM’s deputy commander in his memoirs. See Lt. Gen. Michael DeLong, USMC (Ret.), Inside CentCom: The Unvarnished Truth about the Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 2004), 86.

  195.Franks with McConnell, American Soldier, 439.

  196.Steve Davies and Doug Dildy, F-16 Fighting Falcon Units of Operation Iraqi Freedom, Osprey Combat Aircraft No. 61 (Oxford, England: Osprey Publishing, 2006), 16. The rules of engagement for Iraqi Freedom were substantially simplified compared with those that had prevailed throughout Operations Northern Watch and Southern Watch. During those operations, aircrews were prohibited from attacking a target unless it could be confirmed to lie within fifty feet of the geographic coordinates that had been provided for the target by the CAOC. Once Iraqi Freedom was under way, any target inside a kill box assigned to be attacked could be struck so long as positive identification could be made and collateral damage estimates were satisfactorily met, and there were no friendly ground forces in the area. Conversations with Colonel Erlenbusch, Major Roberson, and other CENTAF staff, January 29, 2007.

  197.The SPINs document itself was divided into eight sections: commander’s guidance, flight planning, communications and data links, airspace, rules of engagement, operations, personnel recovery, and air defense. CENTAF staffers continually updated and refined this document as the air operations plan evolved. For the sake of continuity, General Moseley determined that the format of the daily SPINs for the war against Iraq would be essentially the same as the earlier SPINs documents for Operations Northern Watch, Southern Watch, and Enduring Freedom. During the actual campaign, the daily document averaged more than 350 pages in length and contained a variety of matrices, graphs, diagrams, and illustrations. Conversations with Colonel Erlenbusch, Major Roberson, and other CENTAF staff, January 29, 2007.

  Chapter 2. CENTCOM’s Air Offensive

  1.Franks with McConnell, American Soldier, 348–349.

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

  3.Lessons of Iraq: Third Report of Session 2003–04, vol. 3 (London: House of Commons, Defence Committee, HC 57-III, March 16, 2004), Ev 414 (hereinafter cited as Lessons of Iraq, vol. 3).

  4.Woodward, Plan of Attack, 102.

  5.A sortie is one mission flown by one aircraft.

  6.Conversation with General Moseley, August 2, 2006.

  7.Actually, as early as November 2001, on assuming command at CENTAF, General Moseley had already begun to refocus no-fly zone operations over southern Iraq expressly toward what he called “increased air defense threat mitigation” (Moseley, “Operation Iraqi Freedom: Initial CFACC Roll-up”).

  8.Steve Davies, F-15C/E Eagle Units of Operation Iraqi Freedom, Osprey Combat Aircraft No. 47 (Oxford, England: Osprey Publishing, 2004), 19.

  9.Woodward, Plan of Attack, 10–11.

  10.Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown, 418–419.

  11.Woodward, Plan of Attack, 14.

  12.Knights, Cradle of Conflict, 258.

  13.Ibid., 235.

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

  15.Carlo Kopp, “Iraqi Freedom—the Hammer and Anvil,” Australian Aviation, May 2003, 26.

  16.For further details, see Knights, Cradle of Conflict, 236–238.

  17.Thomas Ricks and Alan Sipress, “Cuts Urged in Patrols over Iraq,” Washington Post, May 9, 2001, quoted in Knights, Cradle of Conflict, 239.

  18.The CAOC later determined that the E-2C pilot had reacted to self-defense flares fired from a flight of fighters that was conducting a flare check above him. The reported missile shot was never validated, and Iraq’s IADS did not have SA-3s positioned that far south at the time the alleged incident was reported. Comments by Colonel Neuenswander, March 6, 2007.

  19.Knights, Cradle of Conflict, 256–257.

  20.Quoted in ibid., 257.

  21.Ibid., 257.

  22.Ibid., 258.

  23.Neil Tweedie and Michael Smith, “Britain ‘To Play Full Role in Iraq Invasion,’” London Daily Telegraph, March 13, 2003.

  24.Lt. Col. Rob Givens, USAF, “‘Let Slip the Dogs of War’: Leadership in the Air War over Iraq,” student term paper, National War College, Washington, D.C., 2005, 11.

  25.Franks with McConnell, American Soldier, 388.

  26.Davies and Dildy, F-16 Fighting Falcon Units of Operation Iraqi Freedom, 55.

  27.Knights, Cradle of Conflict, 241–242.

  28.This escalated effort in no way entailed a purposeful misuse by CENTCOM of its no-fly-zone mandate from the UN. The CAOC always worked within the established Southern Watch rules of engagement, the subtle difference being that rather than being constrained to respond only against the specific system that had threatened a coalition aircraft, allied aircrews were now authorized to respond against related targets, so long as such targets were expressly associated with the Iraqi IADS and command and control networks. E-mail communication to the author by Air Chief Marshal Sir Glenn Torpy, chief of the air staff, RAF, March 17, 2007. General Moseley later explained that Southern Focus operations “never expanded attacks beyond what [were] necessary, proportional, and authorized . . . in self-defense” (quoted in SSgt Jason L. Haag, USAF, “OIF Veterans Discuss Lessons,” Air Force Print News, USAF Air Warfare Center Public Affairs, Nellis AFB, Nev., July 31, 2003).

  29.Knights, Cradle of Conflict, 258–259.

  30.Carpenter, “Rapid, Deliberate, Disciplined, Proportional, and Precise,” 4.

  31.The targets that were attacked included Ababil 100, FROG 7, and other missile launchers.

  32.Knights, Cradle of Conflict, 263.

  33.Ibid., 259.

  34.Davies and Dildy, F-16 Fighting Falcon Units of Operation Iraqi Freedom, 13.

  35.Ibid., 14. There also was a significant concurrent nontraditional ISR effort over western Iraq involving F-16C+s of the Alabama Air National Guard (ANG) (F-16C+ is an unofficial designation given to ANG aircraft equipped with the AN/AAQ-28 Litening II target pod). In addition to gathering intelligence on possible Iraqi Scud-related activities, this effort contributed to clearing the way for SOF team operations on the ground once the campaign began in earnest.

  36.Robert Wall, “Time Runs Short: Final War Preparations Continue Even as Controversy Keeps a Start Date Uncertain,” Aviation Week and Space Technology, March 17, 2003, 28. The E-8 uses advanced synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and ground moving-target indicator (GMTI) radar to find and monitor fixed and moving vehicles and other objects on the ground. It allows commanders and mission planners to detect, locate, classify, track, and target hostile ground movements irrespective of weather or smoke obscuration.

  37.Karen DeYoung and Colum Lynch, “Three Countries Vow to Block U.S. on Iraq,” Washington Post, March 6, 2003.

  38.Mike Allen and Bradley Graham, “Franks Briefs Bush on War Plans, Says Military Is Ready,” Washington Post, March 6, 2003. See also “U.S., Britain Double Daily Flights over Southern Iraq,” Baltimore Sun, March 6, 2003.

  39.Davies and Dildy, F-16 Fighting Falcon Units of Operation Iraqi Freedom, 16.

  40.Michael R. Gordon with John F. Burns, “Iraq’s Air Defense Is Concentrated around Bagh
dad,” New York Times, March 17, 2003.

  41.Tom Squitieri, “What Could Go Wrong in War,” USA Today, March 13, 2003. For more on Serb tactics, see Benjamin S. Lambeth, NATO’s Air War for Kosovo: A Strategic and Operational Assessment (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corporation, MR-1365-AF, 2001), 102–120.

  42.David A. Fulghum, “Frustrations and Backlogs,” Aviation Week and Space Technology, March 10, 2003, 33.

  43.Carpenter, “Rapid, Deliberate, Disciplined, Proportional, and Precise,” 24.

  44.Jim Krane, “Pilotless Warriors Soar to Success,” CBS News, April 25, 2003.

  45.Conversation with General Moseley, August 2, 2006.

  46.“Moseley Details ‘The War before the War,’” Air Force Magazine, October 2003, 14.

  47.Carpenter, “Rapid, Deliberate, Disciplined, Proportional, and Precise,” 11.

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

  49.Elaine Grossman, “Critics Decry 2002 Air Attacks on Iraq That Predated Key U.S., UN Votes,” Inside the Pentagon, July 24, 2003, 19–20.

  50.Suzann Chapman, “The ‘War’ before the War,” Air Force Magazine, February 2004, 53.

  51.Merrill A. McPeak, “Leave the Flying to Us,” Washington Post, June 5, 2003.

  52.Linda Robinson, “The Men in the Shadows,” U.S. News and World Report, May 19, 2003.

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

  54.Woodward, Plan of Attack, 108–109.

  55.Ibid., 301.

  56.Ibid., 304.

  57.Ibid., 42.

  58.As a further hedge against that eventuality, CENTCOM had sent a small team to Israel headed by Maj. Gen. Charles Simpson, director of air and space operations at USAFE headquarters, and Peter Flory, the principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, to help ensure Israel’s noninvolvement by providing daily campaign progress briefings to the Israeli military leadership.

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

  60.Col. Robert B. Green, USAR, “Joint Fires Support, the Joint Fires Element and the CGRS [Common Grid Reference System]: Keys to Success for CJSOTF West,” Special Warfare, April 2005, 12.

  61.Jack Kelly, “Covert Troops Fight Shadow War Off-Camera,” USA Today, April 7, 2003.

  62.Andrew F. Krepinevich, Operation Iraqi Freedom: A First-Blush Assessment (Washington, D.C.: Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, 2003), 18.

  63.The GBU-31 JDAM’s 2,000-lb Mk 84 bomb core contains 945 pounds of tritonal, which consists of solid TNT laced with aluminum for stability. The bomb’s 14-inch-wide steel casing expands to almost twice its normal size before the steel shears, at which point 1,000 pounds of white-hot steel fragments fly out at 6,000 feet per second with an initial overpressure of several thousand pounds per square inch and a fireball 8,500 °F. The bomb can produce a 20-foot crater and throw off as much as 10,000 pounds of dirt and rocks at supersonic speed. David Wood, “New Workhorse of U.S. Military: A Bomb with Devastating Effects,” Newhouse.com, March 13, 2003.

  64.Nick Cook, “Shock and Awe?” Jane’s Defence Weekly, April 2, 2003, 21.

  65.Lorenzo Cortes, “B-1 Crews Moved Quickly with JDAM Loads during Iraqi Freedom, Pilot Says,” Defense Daily, April 22, 2003, 1.

  66.Carpenter, “Rapid, Deliberate, Disciplined, Proportional, and Precise,” 10.

  67.Vago Muradian, “Allied Special Forces Took Western Iraq,” Defense News, May 19, 2003, 1.

  68.General Moseley later conceded his personal doubt at that time that Saddam Hussein still maintained a viable Scud launch capability in Iraq’s western desert. Yet because of the clear precedent of Desert Storm in 1991, when Iraq fired eighty-eight Scuds into Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain from western-desert launch sites, the possibility had to be taken seriously. Accordingly, using known Desert Storm launch information as a starting point, CENTAF conducted a massive precampaign ISR effort to map out and subsequently plan and rehearse attacks against every potential Scud hide site and key transportation node while minimizing to the fullest extent possible unnecessary damage to Iraqi infrastructure. The joint air and SOF attacks that were ultimately executed in the western desert against the assessed Scud threat included the immediate seizure of the H-1 and H-3 airfields and precision air attacks against some eighty plausible Scud transportation nodes, including thirteen or fourteen bridges to prevent the crossing of any possible Scud transporters and launch vehicles. Conversation with General Moseley, August 2, 2006.

  69.Ibid.

  70.Tony Holmes, U.S. Navy Hornet Units of Operation Iraqi Freedom, pt. 2, Osprey Combat Aircraft No. 58 (Oxford, England: Osprey Publishing, 2005), 46.

  71.The FSCL is a procedural device for controlling and managing standoff fire support to ground combat operations that is established by the land component commander and adjusted by him as deemed necessary, but at intervals of no less than twelve hours.

  72.Holmes, U.S. Navy Hornet Units of Operation Iraqi Freedom, pt. 2, 59.

  73.Carpenter, “Rapid, Deliberate, Disciplined, Proportional, and Precise,” 15–16.

  74.The senior CAOC director during the three-week campaign recalled that allied SOF teams operating in northern Iraq confronted a large contingent of Iraqi conventional and paramilitary forces and later provided “overwhelming” feedback to the air component in enabling them to neutralize those superior numbers of enemy forces in short order. He added that the SOF land warfare community now “gets” air power and its potential for contributing to joint operations. Conversation with Maj. Gen. Daniel J. Darnell, USAF, director of legislative liaison, Headquarters U.S. Air Force, Washington, D.C., August 2, 2006.

  75.Barton Gellman and Dana Priest, “CIA Had Fix on Hussein,” Washington Post, March 20, 2003.

  76.Franks with McConnell, American Soldier, 378–379.

  77.Maj. S. Clinton Hinote, USAF, “More than Bombing Saddam: Attacking the Leadership in Operation Iraqi Freedom,” master’s thesis, School of Advanced Air and Space Studies, Air University, Maxwell AFB, Ala., June 2006, 114.

  78.Ibid., 188.

  79.Ibid., 136–137.

  80.Gordon and Trainor, Cobra II, 177. Hussein’s personal secretary, Abd Hamid, was apprehended after the regime’s collapse and told U.S. interrogators that Hussein had not been to Dora Farms since 1995 and was nowhere near the site on the night of the attack (ibid.).

  81.Davies, F-15C/E Eagle Units of Operation Iraqi Freedom, 40.

  82.All of the TLAMs fired were Block IIIC variants, which featured not only the inertial navigation system and terrain contour–matching and digital scene-matching area-correlation systems of earlier versions, but also a GPS receiver that made the missile much easier to update with target information, increasing its accuracy. Only one failed on launch. With the addition of GPS and other guidance system improvements, the Navy had shortened the length of time required to detect, classify, and attack targets with TLAMs from days to hours. Hunter Keeter, “Navy Fire Control, Targeting Capability Improvements Shorten Strike Timeline,” Defense Daily, March 21, 2003, 7. On the night of this first decapitation attempt, the reported position accuracy of GPS was 2.2 meters, thanks to careful system refinement by Air Force Space Command. The average reported GPS accuracy for targeting between March 19 and April 18 was 3.08 meters, with a 95 percent confidence level. William B. Scott, “‘Sweetening’ GPS: Squadron Boosted GPS Accuracy ‘Window’ to Support Iraq Air Campaign,” Aviation Week and Space Technology, June 9, 2003, 49. Of the more than five hundred TLAMs that were fired during the three-week campaign, there were reportedly only six or seven failures—duds that either never left the launch tube or else fell into the sea before getting successfully airborne. Cordesman, “The ‘Instant Lessons’ of the Iraq War,” 27.

  83.Lorenzo Cortes, “Air Force F-117s Open Coalition Air Strikes with EGBU-27s,” Defense Daily, March 21, 2003, 1.

  84.Purdum, A Time of Our Choosing, 110.

  85.Davies and D
ildy, F-16 Fighting Falcon Units of Operation Iraqi Freedom, 25.

  86.Ibid., 25–26.

  87.Purdum, A Time of Our Choosing, 111.

  88.Franks with McConnell, American Soldier, 459.

  89.John Liang, “Myers: Saddam Hussein Is a Legitimate Target,” Inside the Air Force, March 21, 2003, 15.

  90.Five days after the abortive attack, the CIA officer who was running the Rockstars operation personally visited the Dora Farms complex and found no sign that a bunker had been there. Likewise, a U.S. Army colonel in charge of inspecting targeted sites in Baghdad reported that giant holes had been created but “no underground facilities, no bodies” were found. See “No Bunker Found under Bomb Site,” New York Times, May 29, 2003.

  91.The Army’s theater air and missile defense (TAMD) was fielded to protect not only coalition forces in CENTCOM’s area of operations but also the nearby friendly countries of Kuwait, Turkey, Qatar, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and Israel. Improvements to the Patriot advanced capabilities version 2 (PAC 2) that was deployed to the region included software upgrades and hardware changes that enabled better target acquisition and tracking, with the PAC 3 version putatively offering even greater capability and reliability. Fontenot, Degen, and Tohn, On Point, 65.

  92.Franks with McConnell, American Soldier, 65.

  93.Elaine M. Grossman, “First Attacks on Coalition Were Iraqi Missiles Aimed at Kuwait,” Inside the Air Force, March 21, 2003, 1, 13–14.

  94.Lorenzo Cortes, “Patriots Intercept Eight Iraqi Ballistic Missiles, Involved in Two Friendly Fire Incidents,” Defense Daily, March 28, 2003, 3.

  95.Franks with McConnell, American Soldier, 468.

  96.Walter Pincus, Bob Woodward, and Dana Priest, “Hussein’s Fate Still Uncertain,” Washington Post, March 21, 2003.

  97.Fontenot, Degen, and Tohn, On Point, 88, 99.

  98.Gordon and Trainor, Cobra II, 331–332.

  99.“Flexibility: Rumsfeld Tactical Signature Writ Large,” London Daily Telegraph, March 21, 2003.

  100.Thomas E. Ricks, “Calibrated War Makes Comeback,” Washington Post, March 21, 2003.