61.Conversations with Colonel Erlenbusch, Major Roberson, and other CENTAF staff, January 29, 2007.
62.Ibid.
63.Davies and Dildy, F-16 Fighting Falcon Units of Operation Iraqi Freedom, 52.
64.Most of the requests from V Corps for both preplanned and immediate CAS were fulfilled by allied strike aircraft that were either pushed to or pulled from the airborne CAS stack nearest to the requesting ground unit. CAS stacks were typically maintained at altitudes between 10,000 and 20,000 feet. Because of the total air dominance enjoyed by the coalition, these CAS stacks were able to operate very close to the land battle and were accordingly moved forward as the ground offensive advanced northward, such that they were able essentially to provide almost constant overhead coverage. As a rule, the ASOC supporting V Corps typically had at least four available aircraft in the CAS stack for immediate on-call response to air support requests. CENTAF planners later recalled that the synergistic combination of numerous forward-positioned orbiting CAS stacks and the more than ample supply of appropriately armed aircraft populating those stacks were major reasons not only for the effectiveness but also for the responsiveness of the CAS that the CAOC provided V Corps throughout the campaign. Conversations with Colonel Erlenbusch, Major Roberson, and other CENTAF staff, January 29, 2007.
65.The Afghan and Iraq air war experiences showcased the ability of today’s air assets to exhaust even a substantial fixed target list in a very short time. In contrast, the inherently more difficult challenges of conducting the mobile target attacks that often distinguish counterland operations inevitably lead to weapons bring-back by strike aircraft. CENTAF planners concluded in this respect that “future mission planners should be prepared for this” and, “when it occurs, not react emotionally but rather view it as a predictable occurrence. In this manner, CAOC operators and aircrews can ‘stick with the plan’ instead of creating more confusion by ‘trying to make something happen’” (conversations with Colonel Erlenbusch, Major Roberson, and other CENTAF staff, January 29, 2007).
66.Conversation with Major General Darnell, August 2, 2006.
67.Comments by Lieutenant Colonel Hunerwadel, May 23, 2007.
68.Comments by Colonel Neuenswander, October 26, 2010.
69.A knowledgeable former U.S. Army officer affirmed that the coalition’s war plan “emphasized nonlinear ground operations,” the result of which was “a battlefield with no clear front and rear areas” (Krepinevich, Operation Iraqi Freedom: A First-Blush Assessment, 14).
70.Maj. Kenneth A. Smith, USAF, “Joint Transformation of Aerial Interdiction by Enhancing Kill-Box Operations,” research report, Air Command and Staff College, Air University, Maxwell AFB, Ala., April 2006, 22.
71.Joint Chiefs of Staff, Doctrine for Joint Operations, Joint Publication 3-0 (Washington, D.C.: Department of Defense, September 10, 2001), III-44.
72.Joint Chiefs of Staff, Joint Fire Support, Joint Publication 3-09 (Washington, D.C.: Department of Defense, November 13, 2006), A-4.
73.Secretary of the Air Force, Counterland Operations, Air Force Doctrine Document 2–1.3 (Maxwell AFB, Ala.: Air Force Doctrine Center, September 11, 2006), 69.
74.Kometer, Command in Air War, 175.
75.Ibid.
76.Ibid., 206, citing Lt. Gen. William S. Wallace, USA, “Joint Fires in OIF: What Worked for the V (U.S.) Corps,” briefing slides, U.S. Army Combined Arms Center, Fort Leavenworth, Kans., no date. “The problem with this claim,” the assessment citing it added, “is that there was no good way to keep track of the damage done by KI” (ibid.).
77.Patrecia Slayden Hollis, “Trained, Adaptable, Flexible Forces = Victory in Iraq,” interview with Lt. Gen. W. Scott Wallace, Field Artillery, September–October 2003, 5–9.
78.Wallace, “Joint Fires in OIF.”
79.Ibid.
80.Comments on an earlier draft by Col. Gregory Fontenot, USA (Ret.), October 25, 2010.
81.Lt. Col. Michael B. McGee Jr., USAF, “Air-Ground Operations during Operation Iraqi Freedom: Successes, Failures, and Lessons of Air Force and Army Integration,” research report, Air War College, Maxwell AFB, Ala., February 25, 2005, 55-56. Among the 660 missions that did not drop ordnance, 126 of their aircrews could not find the target, 177 could not positively identify the target, 188 were unable to drop because of weather considerations, 130 had to depart the area because of low fuel, and 39 were noneffective for assorted other reasons.
82.Lt. Gen. William S. Wallace, USA, “Joint Effects in OIF [Operation Iraqi Freedom]: A V Corps Perspective,” briefing slides, U.S. Army Combined Arms Center, Fort Leavenworth, Kans., no date, slide 21.
83.Further testifying to his satisfaction, General Wallace quoted Lt. Col. J. R. Sanderson, the commander of Task Force 2-69 in the fight for Objective Titans north of Baghdad: “The F-15s and F-16s were good. The A-10s were absolutely fantastic. It is my favorite airplane. I love those people. If I had enough coins, I would send one to every A-10 driver in the Air Force just to tell them how much I appreciate them, because when those guys come down and they start those strafing runs, it is flat awesome. It is just flat awesome” (ibid.).
84.Stout, Hammer from Above, 114.
85.Comments on an earlier draft by Col. Scott Walker, USAF, Air Force Studies and Analysis Agency (AF/A9L), Washington, D.C., February 16, 2007.
86.Carpenter, “Rapid, Deliberate, Disciplined, Proportional, and Precise,” 14; Grant, “Saddam’s Elite in the Meat Grinder,” 43.
87.Ibid.
88.Lessons of Iraq, vol. 1, 60.
89.Jacobs and others, Enhancing Fires and Maneuver through Greater Air-Ground Joint Interdependence, 10. This experience highlighted for General Moseley the need for air component commanders to insist on more—and more realistic—air-ground integration in routine peacetime large-force joint training as well as more realistic joint force training. For decades, the joint Air Warrior training program has placed artificial constraints on air power so that the Army captain can see the tank-on-tank battle from the opening round of a training engagement, resulting in a misleading and negative impression of air power’s true effectiveness. If properly employed in actual joint and combined warfare, allied air power would never allow that tank-on-tank battle to occur. I am indebted to Lt. Col. Mark Cline for bringing this important point to my attention.
90.Kometer, Command in Air War, 143–144.
91.Third Infantry Division (Mechanized) After Action Report: Operation Iraqi Freedom, 108–109.
92.Knights, Cradle of Conflict, 303. In the MAGTF construct, the BCL was the main measure of fire support control, roughly analogous to the FSCL in Army–Air Force practice, but the BCL was extended only to the maximum range of the MAGTF’s organic artillery. Every kill box inside the BCL was closed to air attack unless expressly declared otherwise by prior arrangement. Kill boxes on the far side of the BCL but still inside the FSCL, however, were open to the MAGTF’s organic fixed- and rotary-wing strike assets unless declared otherwise.
93.McGee, “Air-Ground Operations during Operation Iraqi Freedom,” 2, 4, 7. This outspokenly argumentative yet also scrupulously professional assessment is the most comprehensive account available of the ASOC’s perspective with respect to the relative merits of ASOC-controlled “corps shaping” versus CAOC-controlled KI/CAS in V Corps’ area of operations. Although many CAOC principals would emphatically disagree, the lead author of the best study to date of U.S. Army operations during the campaign commented that “McGee has it pretty close to right,” bearing strong testimony to the abiding axiom of organizational life that where you stand depends on where you sit (comments by Colonel Fontenot, October 22, 2010).
94.Conversations with Colonel Erlenbusch, Major Roberson, and other CENTAF staff, January 29, 2007.
95.Third Infantry Division (Mechanized) After Action Report: Operation Iraqi Freedom, 108.
96.Ibid.
97.“Lapses in Coordinating Missile Launches in Iraq Pinned on V Corps,” Inside the Pentagon, June 19, 2003, 1.
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98.Comments on an earlier draft by Col. Richard Turner, USAF, commander, 479th Flying Training Group, Moody AFB, Georgia, April 24, 2007.
99.Ripley, “Closing the Gap,” 25–26.
100.Conversations with Colonel Erlenbusch, Major Roberson, and other CENTAF staff, January 29, 2007.
101.Quoted in “Air Support Operations Center (ASOC) Employment.”
102.Ibid.
103.Bill Kaczor, “Air Force Chief Says Military Must Cooperate,” Miami Herald, October 22, 2003.
104.This was decidedly not the case, however, when it came to joint and combined air component and SOF training for the impending counter-Scud effort in Iraq’s western desert. On the contrary, the air and land components of the counter-Scud team, allied as well as American, enjoyed ample opportunities to work together in realistic large-force training exercises in the Nellis range complex in 2002 and early 2003 aimed at developing, validating, and refining tactics, techniques, and procedures for nonlinear CAS and SOF support. Conversations with Colonel Erlenbusch, Major Roberson, and other CENTAF staff, January 29, 2007.
105.Joint Lessons Learned, 22.
106.Conversation with Air Vice-Marshal Andy White, RAF, October 28, 2004; comments on an earlier draft by Air Chief Marshal Sir Brian Burridge, RAF.
107.Lessons for the Future, 9.
108.Ibid., 29.
109.In the view of a former CAOC planner, since the ASOC is really an extension of the CAOC, this ultimately represents a problem that demands the attention of both the air and land component commanders. CAS is inherently inefficient because it is impossible to predict what kind of support will be needed and when and where it will be needed. When one adds to that the fact that none of the players (other than perhaps the Marines) had done CAS operations on such a large and sustained scale, the air and land components arguably need to address this problem from the top down. Comments by Lieutenant Colonel Cline, January 11, 2008.
110.Lessons of Iraq, vol. 1, 61. Reflecting further on this point, the same former CAOC planner remarked: “I’m not so sure we were great at CAS [even] in 1989 when I started flying F-16s. But I will say that after Desert Storm, there seemed to be a move away from CAS in a lot of F-16 wings as LANTIRN came on board and as many F-16s transitioned to SEAD. In addition, the F-15E was viewed almost as a ‘strategic’ asset that was too good for CAS because of its precision strike capability. (Ironically, they were the only aircraft that could not employ JDAMs at the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom.) Also, the focus of exercises like Red Flag tended to be more ‘strategic attack’ strike-package-oriented, since that was what occurred in Desert Storm. Air Warrior became the only major CAS training and [as noted above] was actually negative training for Air Force aircrews and ground maneuver commanders. Finally, we failed to evolve our joint doctrine to keep up with technology. After the initial stages of Operation Enduring Freedom, we tried to catch up rapidly in January 2002 as we rewrote [joint manual] 3-09.3 to come up with Types I, II, and III CAS. . . . [T]oo many still think of CAS as the air marshal described” (comments by Lieutenant Colonel Cline, January 11, 2008).
111.Lessons of Iraq, vol. 2, Ev 62.
112.Lessons of Iraq: Government Response to the Committee’s Third Report of Session, 2003–2004 (London: House of Commons, Defence Committee, HC 635, June 8, 2004), 7; and “UK Multiplying Close Air Support Capability,” Jane’s International Defence Review, October 1, 2005. By the same token, members of the Australian national contingent noted similar shortfalls within their own force contingent, as a result of which notable improvements were subsequently made in JTAC training and standardization in air-land integration within the ADF. Comments by Group Captain Keir, July 2, 2009.
113.Hathaway, “Operational Assessment during Operation Iraqi Freedom,” 12.
114.Ibid., 2.
115.“Task Force Enduring Look Lessons Learned,” briefing, as quoted in Kometer, Command in Air War, 177.
116.Kometer, Command in Air War, 177.
117.Johnson, Learning Large Lessons, 126.
118.Conversations with Colonel Erlenbusch, Major Roberson, and other CENTAF staff, January 29, 2007.
119.Commanding General, 1st Marine Division, “Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF): Lessons Learned,” MEF-FRAGO 279–03, May 29, 2003, quoted in Johnson, Learning Large Lessons, 196.
120.Hathaway, “Operational Assessment during Operation Iraqi Freedom,” 15–16.
121.Ibid., 18.
122.Conversations with Colonel Erlenbusch, Major Roberson, and other CENTAF staff, January 29, 2007.
123.Simpson, “Air Power Lessons from Operation Iraqi Freedom.”
124.The same could be said for equally accurate inertially aided munitions. An F-16 pilot recalled that on arriving in their assigned area of operations, he and his wingman received immediate tasking to drop CBU-103s on a SAM site south of Baghdad: “There was an undercast, but the CBU-103 is fairly accurate and has its own inertial guidance system. When I released the bombs, I watched them fall toward the white clouds below. The dark green contrast against the sunlit clouds was a picture that is hard to describe, but as they fell, I knew that they were going to hit their assigned targets, which would soon cease to exist” (Davies and Dildy, F-16 Fighting Falcon Units of Operation Iraqi Freedom, 31).
125.Conversations with Colonel Erlenbusch, Major Roberson, and other CENTAF staff, January 29, 2007.
126.Ibid.
127.The lack of adequate situation awareness that ensued from the CAOC’s inability to track accurately the status of potential targets throughout the three-week campaign proved highly detrimental to the target development process. CAOC staffers noted that “the JIPTL tracker was responsible for reporting which targets on each JIPTL were actually struck. Unfortunately, this process failed to account for the many strikes performed against targets that were not on the JIPTL for any given ATO day. CAOC leadership accordingly identified a requirement for tracking the history of every target aim point in existence for Iraq, to include (1) what JIPTL, if any, the aim point had been placed on; (2) if the aim point had been MAAPed; (3) if the aim point was struck; and (4) if it was struck, what were the results of that strike” (ibid.).
128.Conversation with Major General Darnell, August 2, 2006.
129.Hathaway, “Operational Assessment during Operation Iraqi Freedom,” 20. Colonel Hathaway further observed that “improvements in air and space technology have greatly enhanced our ability to find, fix, and target. Consequently, we have greater demands to assess the resulting effects. This, in turn, requires a greater demand on the same technology used to find, fix, and target. It is a self-perpetuating cycle that the CAOC must balance to ensure that execution does not get blindly in front of assessment” (p. 21).
130.Elaine M. Grossman, “JFCOM Draft Report Finds U.S. Forces Reverted to Attrition in Iraq,” Inside the Air Force, March 26, 2004, 14–15. Another after-action inquiry that bears mention here was the CENTAF-led analysis done by the combined weapons effectiveness assessment team (CWEAT) that sent nearly one hundred experts in targeting, weapons, engineering, and intelligence throughout Iraq, starting on June 8, 2003, to more than five hundred weapon impact points targeted by the CAOC to assess the performance of air component weapons. The team consisted of civilian and military members from all branches of the U.S. armed services, U.S. Department of Defense agencies, the Royal Navy, the British Army, and the RAAF. As this investigation entered its second week, the CENTAF team chief, Col. Tom Entwhistle, said that its “ultimate goal . . . [was] to learn [from the campaign experience] so that in the future we can operate with increased precision” (“Team Assessing OIF Air Component Effectiveness,” Camp As Sayliyah, Qatar: AFPN [Air Force Print News] news story, June 13, 2003).
131.Elaine Grossman, “Battle Damage Assessment Process Found Unwieldy in Iraq Combat,” Inside the Pentagon, June 19, 2003, 10.
132.Ibid., 11.
133.Simpson, “Air Power Lessons from Operation Iraqi Freedom.”
134.Anne
Barnard, “Death Lurks in Unspent U.S. ‘Bomblets,’” Boston Globe, May 1, 2003.
135.A former senior CAOC planner noted emphatically that “we as a CAOC staff did not help the BDA effort. . . . Even against non-KI/CAS targets, we were hard-pressed to accurately track what munitions went against what set of coordinates. If we could not give the raw data to CENTCOM, we were not helping the assessment efforts” (comments by Lieutenant Colonel Cline, January 11, 2008).
136.Conversation with General Moseley, August 2, 2006.
137.Holmes, U.S. Navy Hornet Units of Operation Iraqi Freedom, pt. 2, 36.
138.Carpenter, “Rapid, Deliberate, Disciplined, Proportional, and Precise,” 18.
139.Comments by Lieutenant Colonel Cline, January 11, 2008.
140.Remarks at a flag panel presentation during the Tailhook Association’s 2003 annual symposium, Reno, Nev., September 20, 2003.
141.David A. Fulghum, “Tanker Puzzle: Aggressive Tactics, Shrinking Tanker Force Challenge Both Planners and Aircrews,” Aviation Week and Space Technology, April 14, 2003, 23–26.
142.Ibid.
143.Carpenter, “Rapid, Deliberate, Disciplined, Proportional, and Precise,” 18.
144.Lorenzo Cortes, “Seizure of Tallil Base Improved A-10’s Effectiveness in Iraqi Freedom, Commander Says,” Defense Daily, April 18, 2003, 8.
145.General Moseley personally flew on one of those early tanker sorties inside Iraqi airspace to demonstrate his confidence in their tactical soundness from an aircrew safety point of view.
146.So-called flex-deck operations, a more frenetically paced activity than normal cyclic operations involving waves of launches and recoveries at carefully selected intervals, typically have at least one of the carrier’s two bow catapults firing continually while the two waist catapults in the landing area are kept clear to accommodate a steady stream of recovering aircraft.
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