The Unseen War

by Lambeth, Benjamin S.

  64.They also pointed up some clear limitations on the use of electro-optical and infrared targeting pods for positive target identification. Most pods of that sort used during Iraqi Freedom required that their aircraft operate at altitudes between 5,000 and 10,000 feet in order to provide sufficient resolution to enable such identification. That operating limitation highlighted a major unsatisfied need for combat aircraft to be able to identify positively such tactical-sized targets as tanks and other armored vehicles while maintaining sufficient standoff to survive in a medium and high surface-to-air threat environment.

  65.Lorenzo Cortes, “Air Force Offered Improved Networking Capabilities during OIF,” Defense Daily, June 4, 2003, 5.

  66.Ibid., 46.

  67.Capt. David C. Hardesty, USN, “Fix Net Centric for the Operators,” Proceedings, September 2003, 69.

  68.Sandra I. Irwin, “Iraqi Freedom Tests Naval Aviation’s Flexibility,” The Hook, summer 2003, 65.

  69.Knights, Cradle of Conflict, 286–287.

  70.Gordon and Trainor, Cobra II, 352.

  71.John Gordon IV and Bruce Pirnie, “‘Everybody Wanted Tanks’: Heavy Forces in Operation Iraqi Freedom,” Joint Force Quarterly, 4th quarter, 2005, 86, 89.

  72.In particular, as an Air Force space officer who served on the ACCE staff with Major General Leaf recalled four years later, “there was a big problem getting enough satellite communications so that all the mission reports could get through in a timely fashion. This created major difficulties for making timely assessments of targets to attack for the next [ATO] cycle, especially as the ground forces approached to contact. We were able to work additional communications, but the problem was never completely resolved before we departed” (comments on an earlier draft by Lt. Col. Chris Crawford, USAF, National Security Fellows Program, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass., March 4, 2007).

  73.John T. Bennett, “Smaller Bombs among Needs Revealed In Iraq, Navy Officers Say,” Inside the Pentagon, August 7, 2003, 4.

  74.Joris Janssen Lok, “Communication Weaknesses Endanger Allied Integration in U.S.-Led Air Campaigns,” Jane’s International Defence Review, March 2004, 4.

  75.For a thorough assessment of this important development in U.S. joint force interoperability, see Lambeth, Combat Pair.

  76.For a full discussion of the earlier complications in the relationship between CENTCOM and its air component principals in the CAOC that had necessitated General Moseley’s intervention, see Lambeth, Air Power against Terror, 295–311.

  77.There were, however, numerous instances within a given ATO cycle in which targets on the joint target list (JTL) that had been approved by General Moseley for inclusion on the JIPTL were subsequently moved by CENTCOM to either the restricted target list (RTL) or the no-strike target list (NSTL). The head of the CAOC’s combat plans division later recalled in this regard, “We had a problem with CENTCOM moving targets onto and off of the JTL to the RTL and the NSTL inside the ATO cycle. That required a manual scrub of the ATO to ensure that we were not hitting targets on restricted and no-strike lists. The MAAP cycle, accordingly, had to run for twenty-four hours rather than the normal twelve to fourteen hours due to the rapid pace of land component movement and the need to continually adjust each ATO right up to its moment of execution” (comments on an earlier draft by Col. Douglas Erlenbusch, USAF, CENTAF director of operations, February 4, 2007). Throughout the three weeks of major combat, CENTCOM updated the JTL, RTL, and NSTL every twelve hours. That meant that there were three changes to those three lists between the approval of the JIPTL and the execution of each ATO. On several occasions aircraft in the midst of conducting scheduled attacks had those attacks aborted at the last minute because their target had been moved from the JTL to the RTL. In a few instances targets were struck after they had been moved to the RTL. As CAOC planners later recounted, neither the MAAP toolkit nor TBMCS had the ability to take an updated RTL and NSTL and reconcile them against an already approved JIPTL. Fortunately, none of these residual limitations on the CAOC’s freedom of action turned out to have been serious complicating factors affecting the conduct of the air war to the latter’s detriment.

  78.Kometer, Command in Air War, 140, 169.

  79.Amy Butler, “Moseley: Time-Sensitive Targeting Improved from Afghanistan to Iraq,” Inside the Air Force, June 20, 2003, 1.

  80.A “time-sensitive target” is any target identified within an ATO cycle that is deemed to be of such importance to the combined force commander that it must be struck as soon as possible with any available asset, regardless of that asset’s prior tasking. During Operation Iraqi Freedom, CENTCOM determined which target sets would be designated time-sensitive. A “dynamic target” is any target identified within an ATO cycle that is deemed of sufficient importance to all components that it should be struck within the ATO with any assets available. During Iraqi Freedom, those targets were determined by the chief of the guidance, apportionment, and targeting (GAT) cell in the CAOC.

  81.Butler, “Moseley: Time-Sensitive Targeting Improved from Afghanistan to Iraq,” 10. The highly disciplined rules of engagement of Southern Watch that had generated the “Mother may I?” attitude among allied strike pilots persisted well into the first week of the Iraqi Freedom campaign. Such initial hesitancy did not inhibit those Air Force A-10 pilots who were working in support of I MEF ground operations, because they had never played a part in Southern Watch. Conversation with Major General Darnell, August 2, 2006.

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

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

  84.Maj. Gen. Daniel J. Darnell, e-mail communication to the author, January 11, 2006.

  85.Keith J. Costa, “Draft JFCOM ‘Lessons Learned’ Study Examines Early Iraq War Moves,” Inside the Pentagon, March 18, 2004, 1, 12–13.

  86.Conversation with Gen. Charles F. Wald, USAF (Ret.), Washington, D.C., August 1, 2006.

  87.Lessons of Iraq, vol. 2, Ev 52.

  88.The entire “process” narrative that follows below was informed by conversations with Colonel Erlenbusch, Major Roberson, and other CENTAF staff, January 29, 2007.

  89.Lt. Col. David C. Hathaway, USAF, “Operational Assessment during Operation Iraqi Freedom—Assessment or Assumption?” research report, Air War College, Maxwell AFB, Ala., May 25, 2005, 5–6.

  90.The mechanism that had been established within the land component for providing CAS to Army ground forces was the Air Force’s TACS, which in turn was closely aligned with the counterpart Army air-ground system (AGS). Within that arrangement, the air component’s ground command and control elements were the ASOC, collocated with V Corps at its rear headquarters, and the ASOC’s subordinate tactical air control party (TACP) staffed by air liaison officers (ALOs) and joint terminal attack controllers (JTACs) assigned directly to and in direct support of forward fighting elements at the division level and below. The primary mission of TACPs from corps level down to brigade level was to advise their supported ground commanders on the capabilities and limitations of air power and to help those commanders in planning, requesting, and coordinating CAS. The TACP also provided the principal means for the terminal control of CAS in support of friendly ground troops. The CAOC served as the senior element of the TACS and thus as the direct overseer of both the ASOC and the latter’s TACPs. The TACPs processed and executed both preplanned and immediate CAS requests, although the majority of those requests were for immediate CAS. Only about 6 percent of those immediate air support requests entailed direct troops-in-contact situations, unless one considers such broader categories as “troops taking mortar or artillery fire.” I am grateful to my RAND colleague Jody Jacobs for helping me to better understand this process and its complex inner workings.

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

  92.Ibid.

  93.E-mail message to the au
thor from Col. Douglas Erlenbusch, USAF, former CENTAF director of operations, then serving as commander of Air Force ROTC Detachment 40, Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, Calif., April 21, 2009. With respect to concerns over the timeliness of the AOD, Colonel Erlenbusch added, “The strategy division also tried to flex with the speed of operations by publishing multiple AODs for a single ATO (for example, ‘Change 1, Change 2,’ and so on). This was a bit cumbersome for the planners to get their hands around and to merge into the ATO cycle, but it at least provided some up-to-date guidance. Target sets that were proposed by CENTCOM and then inserted into the ATO outside the cycle also made it necessary for us to have qualified MAAP staff available around the clock.”

  94.Mark Hewish, “Out of CAOCs Comes Order,” Jane’s International Defence Review, May 2003, 23–24.

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

  96.Kerry Gildea, “Air Force Says TBMCS Played Critical Role in Air War Execution,” Defense Daily, May 6, 2003, 1–2.

  97.Comments by Colonel Erlenbusch, February 4, 2007.

  98.The combat air forces and military airlift forces use different systems to plan and conduct their respective missions. The combat air forces use TBMCS, and the airlift community uses C2IPS (for command and control information processing system). An interface between C2IPS and TBMCS was developed to integrate airlift mission data in the daily ATO, but it was cumbersome and unreliable. Conversations with Colonel Erlenbusch, Major Roberson, and other CENTAF staff, January 29, 2007.

  99.Ibid.

  100.Ibid.

  101.As yet another example of the assorted minor frictions the CAOC staff encountered from time to time, the air component’s target development team was located in a separate and extra-secure ISR division building, whereas the key combat plans cells were located in the CAOC proper. This physical separation of the two groups often complicated communications and the synchronization of target information. Numerous occasions arose when ISR division target development team members were processing target candidates to be nominated for the ATO, only to learn later that combat plans staffers had already nominated those targets for previous ATOs, making for a needless duplication of effort. Ibid.

  102.Ibid.

  103.Ibid.

  104.Ibid.

  105.Lessons for the Future, 27.

  106.Conversation with Air Chief Marshal Burridge, October 27, 2004.

  107.Amy Butler, “Iraq War Underscores Need for Improved and Standardized AOCs,” Inside the Air Force, May 16, 2003, 3.

  108.Carpenter, “Rapid, Deliberate, Disciplined, Proportional, and Precise,” 20–21.

  109.Ibid.

  110.Murphy and Miller, “The Team That Picks the Targets.”

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

  112.Paul Dolson, “Expeditionary Airborne Battlefield Command and Control,” Joint Force Quarterly, 4th quarter, 2005, 68–75.

  113.Crews of AWACS and JSTARS aircraft operating in an ABCCC capacity were sometimes so overtasked that they could not receive and forward higher-priority assignments to available strike aircraft in the target’s vicinity. In at least two instances, B-1B missions took on 140,000 pounds of fuel from tankers and still ran out of fuel while awaiting CAOC tasking from airborne AWACS or JSTARS aircraft whose crews were preoccupied with ABCCC tasking. Conversations with Colonel Erlenbusch, Major Roberson, and other CENTAF staff, January 29, 2007.

  114.Quoted in Maj. Joseph G. Matthews, USA, “The E-8 Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System Support to Counterinsurgency Operations,” research report, Air University, Air Command and Staff College, Maxwell AFB, Ala., April 11, 2006, vii.

  115.Dolson, “Expeditionary Airborne Battlefield Command and Control.”

  116.Matthews, “The E-8 Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System Support to Counterinsurgency Operations,” 22.

  117.Ripley, “Closing the Gap,” 27. The Marine Corps employed its palletized direct air support center (DASC) in a KC-130 tanker aircraft to overcome such problems in I MEF’s sector.

  118.Butler, “Iraq War Underscores Need for Improved and Standardized AOCs,” 3.

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

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

  121.Ibid.

  122.Comments by Colonel Neuenswander, March 6, 2007. The former commander of the 4th Fighter Wing, one of the two Air Force F-15E Strike Eagle wings that took part in the air war, aptly noted four years later: “One of the great weaknesses of all the post–Iraqi Freedom literature [on the air contribution] is that it generally does not capture the ‘color’ of combat operations at the wing level. It only focuses on the CAOC and higher. Although the CAOC in this instance indeed represented the supreme evolution to date of air and space power command and control, there was still a lot going on in the trenches” (comments by Major General Rosborg, March 16, 2007).

  123.Thompson, “ISR Lessons of Iraq.”

  124.Jeremy Feiler, “CSIS Report: U.S. Victory in Iraq Showed ‘Flexibility’ of U.S. Planning,” Inside the Pentagon, May 1, 2003, 19.

  125.Lorenzo Cortes, “Coalition Forces Have Fired 15,000 Guided Munitions during Iraqi Freedom,” Defense Daily, April 11, 2003, 7. See also Carpenter, “Rapid, Deliberate, Disciplined, Proportional, and Precise,” 22. This assured navigation accuracy was crucial for the effective delivery of more than 5,600 satellite-aided JDAMs that relied on GPS signals for achieving pinpoint accuracy. As the campaign unfolded, space operators in the CAOC provided daily assessments of the GPS constellation’s predicted geometry and accuracy. During the three-day shamal, coalition aircraft destroyed entire divisions of the Iraqi Republican Guard using GPS-aided munitions against targeted positions that had been detected and geolocated by space-based synthetic aperture radar.

  126.Gen. Lance W. Lord, USAF, commander, Air Force Space Command, address to the 2005 Air Force Defense Strategy and Transformation Seminar Series sponsored by DFI International, Washington, D.C., March 9, 2005.

  127.Kerry Gildea, “Next-Generation Imaging Satellite Team Formed with News of Bush Policy Shift,” Defense Daily, May 14, 2003, 7.

  128.James Hackett, “Tracking Targets from Space,” Washington Times, July 8, 2003.

  129.Carpenter, “Rapid, Deliberate, Disciplined, Proportional, and Precise,” 22.

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

  131.Elizabeth Rees, “USAF Moves Space Forces Director Back into Iraq Air Ops Center,” Inside the Air Force, June 4, 2004, 4.

  132.One notable downside of space support to combat operations had to do with repeated shortfalls in satellite communications capacity. “With demand already high due to operations in Afghanistan, CENTCOM struggled to find enough UHF [ultra-high frequency] tactical satellite channels and was just able to address the critical operational needs for [the campaign]. To complicate matters [was] the fact that many [satellite communications] systems did not support mobile communications at the data rates needed” (Joint Lessons Learned, 31).

  133.William B. Scott and Craig Covault, “High Ground over Iraq,” Aviation Week and Space Technology, June 9, 2003, 44, as cited in Kometer, Command in Air War, 170.

  134.Jeremy Feiler, “Pentagon Officials Examine UAV ‘Lessons Learned’ in Iraq,” Inside the Pentagon, December 11, 2003, 15.

  135.Willis, “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” 22.

  136.Cook, “Shock and Awe?” 21.

  137.Eric Schmitt, “In the Skies over Iraq, Silent Observers Become Futuristic Weapons,” New York Times, April 18, 2003. Operating out of a base in the United Arab Emirates, the RQ-4 flew combat support missions every day of the war, in the process imaging some two hundred to three hundred sites of interest to CENTCOM during sorties that lasted up to twenty-six hours.

  138.“Unmanned Systems: UAV Shows Effectiveness a
s a Targeting Platform,” Flight International, April 22–28, 2003, 9.

  139.The ground stations required to support such UAV operations include nearly thirty interconnected trailers that require seventeen C-5 sorties to be deployed forward. For that reason, it makes more sense to leave those facilities at their home bases in the United States whenever possible. Technical panel presentation, 2003 Tailhook Association annual symposium, Reno, Nev., September 20, 2003; Jeremy Feiler, “Officials: UAV Lessons among Most Vital Gleaned in Iraq War,” Inside the Pentagon, July 17, 2003, 1, 10.

  140.Rowan Scarborough, “Hovering Spy Plane Helps Rout Iraqis,” Washington Times, April 3, 2003.

  141.Richard J. Newman, “The Joystick War,” U.S. News and World Report, May 19, 2003.

  142.Lorenzo Cortes, “Operation Iraqi Freedom Required Unique Wartime Use of E-8C Joint STARS,” Defense Daily, June 11, 2003, 5.

  143.Amy Butler, “JSTARS Faced ‘Learning Curve’ for CAOC Officials Unfamiliar with System,” Inside the Air Force, May 30, 2003, 9.

  144.Cortes, “Operation Iraqi Freedom Required Unique Wartime Use of E-8C Joint STARS,” 5.

  145.William M. Arkin, “Fliers Rose to Occasion: In Iraq, a Pause Refreshed Ground Troops and Let Planes Inflict Major Damage,” Los Angeles Times, June 1, 2003.

  146.Richard J. Dunn III, Price T. Bingham, and Charles A. Fowler, Ground Moving Target Indicator Radar and the Transformation of U.S. Warfighting (Arlington, Va.: Northrop Grumman Analysis Center, February 2004), 25.

  147.Butler, “JSTARS Faced ‘Learning Curve’ for CAOC Officials Unfamiliar with System,” 8.

  148.“Coalition Forces Air Component Command Briefing.”

  149.Adam J. Hebert, “Building Battlespace Awareness,” Air Force Magazine, October 2003, 66–67.

  150.U.S. commanders experienced difficulty keeping track of Iraqi force positions once the Iraqis began dispersing to avoid allied air strikes. Costa, “Draft JFCOM ‘Lessons Learned’ Study Examines Early Iraq War Moves,” 1, 12–13.

  151.Dunn, Bingham, and Fowler, Ground Moving Target Indicator Radar and the Transformation of U.S. Warfighting, 16–17.