The Unseen War

by Lambeth, Benjamin S.

  147.Cdr. James Paulsen, USN, “Naval Aviation Delivered in Iraq,” Proceedings, June 2003, 35.

  148.Davies and Dildy, F-16 Fighting Falcon Units of Operation Iraqi Freedom, 52.

  149.On this point, the commander of one F-15E wing that participated in the war recalled: “We did some creative things to ensure that our jets had significant loiter time and the ability to penetrate deep into Iraq, given the loss of Incirlik. For example, we dumped gas all the way up the Persian Gulf to be light enough to land at Al Jaber with a full load of nine GBU-12s, hot-pitted at Al Jaber, then went deep and long. Our guys did the Al Jaber hot-pits twice and sometimes three times before returning to Al Udeid. The average Strike Eagle mission was six to nine hours during the surge period. We also flew the jets [more than twice a day each] the entire time—unprecedented” (comments by Major General Rosborg, March 16, 2007).

  150.Conversations with Colonel Erlenbusch, Major Roberson, and other CENTAF staff, January 29, 2007. The doctrine referred to here presumes that intratheater tankers are inherent parts of a global aerial refueling mobility scheme that requires direct control by the CAOC’s air mobility division (AMD), which is also subordinated to the Air Force’s Air Mobility Command. Yet as CAOC planners later noted, “in reality, once major combat operations commence, virtually 100 percent of all intratheater tankers, which are operationally controlled by the air component commander, are used for direct combat support missions within CENTCOM’s area of responsibility. These missions do not require any special global AMD coordination. Current doctrinal guidance usurps planning control of combat assets from the CAOC, negatively affecting the air component commander’s ability to perform his missions” (ibid.).

  151.Ibid.

  152.Gardner, “Operation Iraqi Freedom: Coalition Operations,” 95.

  153.SIPRNet “is a classified Defense Department network that is functionally equivalent to the civilian World Wide Web.” In the ten years prior to Iraqi Freedom it had become “ubiquitous, with units at every echelon having access to a secure network where classified plans, discussions, and information could be shared free.” Obviating the need to mail classified data or to talk over a secure telephone, it made for “a quantum leap in efficiency and effectiveness. In addition to desktop access to the latest plans and intelligence information, the secure e-mail and chat rooms fostered crosstalk at all levels. Planners and home stations could follow current operations and conduct parallel planning to anticipate requirements” (Fontenot, Degen, and Tohn, On Point, 11).

  154.Ibid., 95.

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

  156.This point was driven home emphatically during a conversation with Air Commodore Chris Nickols, RAF, commander, Air Warfare Center, RAF Waddington, UK, October 29, 2004. Air Commodore Nickols served as one of CENTAF’s three rotating CAOC directors during Operation Iraqi Freedom and was uniquely well placed to appreciate the real-time opportunity costs of the NOFORN caveat in intracoalition relations during an ongoing multilateral campaign.

  157.Lessons of Iraq, vol. 2, Ev 44.

  158.Ibid.

  159.For further discussion of that earlier dual-ATO arrangement and the strain that it placed on the cohesion and ease of execution of the joint and combined air operation, see Lambeth, NATO’s Air War for Kosovo, 188–189.

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

  161.Review of Operational-Level Interoperability between the Military Forces of Australia and the United States of America (Camp H. M. Smith, Hawaii: U.S. Pacific Command; and Canberra, Australia: Department of Defence, October 2004), 15, 17. The other two identified categories entailed issues relating to security cooperation arrangements and the management of the relationship and separate issues of a more technical nature involving capability development and force transformation.

  162.Official interview with Group Captain Henman, April 9, 2007.

  163.Official interview with Wing Commander Keir, February 19, 2007.

  164.Review of Operational-Level Interoperability between the Military Forces of Australia and the United States of America, 15.

  165.Official interview with Group Captain Halupka, May 14, 2008.

  166.Review of Operational-Level Interoperability between the Military Forces of Australia and the United States of America, 27.

  167.Ibid., 48–51.

  168.Ibid.

  Chapter 6. Toward a New Era of Warfare

  1.Susan Page, “War May Realign World and Define a Presidency,” USA Today, March 17, 2003.

  2.Ibid. The intellectual foundation for such a change was laid down in the administration’s new national security strategy released in September 2002, which stated the logic of a strategy of preemption: “We must be prepared to stop rogue states and their terrorist clients before they are able to threaten or use weapons of mass destruction against the United States and our allies and friends” (ibid.).

  3.Carla Anne Robbins, “U.S. Nears War in Embrace of Strategy of Preemption,” Wall Street Journal, March 18, 2003.

  4.Woodward, Plan of Attack, 428. Box-cutters were the weapon of choice for the September 11 terrorist hijackers.

  5.Peter Spiegel, “Thinking ahead with the Pentagon’s Planners,” London Financial Times, April 16, 2003.

  6.Fontenot, Degen, and Tohn, On Point, xvi.

  7.Ibid., 249–250.

  8.Cordesman, “The ‘Instant Lessons’ of the Iraq War,” 5.

  9.Fontenot, Degen, and Tohn, On Point, 102.

  10.Vernon Loeb, “Sniping at the ‘Plan’ Strikes Some Nerves,” Washington Post, April 2, 2003.

  11.Conversation with Major General Darnell, August 2, 2006.

  12.Conversations with Colonel Erlenbusch, Major Roberson, and other CENTAF staff, January 29, 2007. A CENTAF planner who served in key CAOC positions in both Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom stressed the indispensable role played by General Moseley in setting the right tone at all levels in building those close trust relationships, noting emphatically how “his attitude pervaded our staff as we worked with our lower-level component counterparts” (comments by Lieutenant Colonel Cline, January 11, 2008).

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

  14.Conversation with General Moseley, August 2, 2006. Indeed, as General Moseley went on to observe, Enduring Freedom was a “microcosm” of the subsequent joint and combined campaign against Iraq when it came to such crucial functions as the buildup of forces, the establishment of air superiority, the extensive use of GPS- and inertially aided munitions, cruise missile operations, and the introduction and support of SOF teams and conventional ground forces. A senior CENTAF planner pointed out that “many of the successes enjoyed during [Iraqi Freedom] were a direct result of the ‘smart’ application of the successes [achieved earlier in Afghanistan] and the determination not to repeat the mistakes” (conversations with Colonel Erlenbusch, Major Roberson, and other CENTAF staff, January 29, 2007).

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

  16.Ibid.

  17.Koven, “Improvements in Joint Forces,” 8. As an example of the sort of joint counterland training that is arguably required to exercise and validate new concepts of operations, CENTAF planners pointed to the notable success of the counter-Scud concept of operations that was repeatedly tested and ultimately validated in the Nellis range complex by joint and combined forces before being actually executed in Iraq’s western desert. Conversations with Colonel Erlenbusch, Major Roberson, and other CENTAF staff, January 29, 2007.

  18.Simpson, “Air Power Lessons from Operation Iraqi Freedom.”

  19.Lessons for the Future, 9.

  20.Simpson, “Air Power Lessons from Operation Iraqi Freedom.”

  21.Ibid.

  22.Ibid.

  23.Knights, Cradle of Conflict, 304.

  24.DeLong, Inside Ce
ntCom, 129.

  25.Michael Knights, “Iraqi Freedom Displays the Transformation of U.S. Air Power,” Jane’s Intelligence Review, May 2003, 19.

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

  27.Carpenter, “Rapid, Deliberate, Disciplined, Proportional, and Precise,” 25.

  28.Ibid., 2.

  29.Lessons of Iraq, vol. 2, Ev 60.

  30.Woods and others, Iraqi Perspectives Project, passim.

  31.Dunn, Bingham, and Fowler, Ground Moving Target Indicator Radar and the Transformation of U.S. Warfighting, 5.

  32.Carpenter, “Rapid, Deliberate, Disciplined, Proportional, and Precise,” 2.

  33.Fick, One Bullet Away, 289.

  34.Comments by Lieutenant Colonel Hunerwadel, May 23, 2007.

  35.Thomas E. Ricks, “What Counted: People, Plan, Inept Enemy,” Washington Post, April 10, 2003.

  36.Woodward, Plan of Attack, 118. Despite his avowed emphasis on “jointness,” however, Franks clearly brought a pronounced land-centric bias to his war planning, routinely characterizing allied ground forces as “supported [emphasis added] by overwhelming air power” and portraying the overall concept of operations as one in which slow-reacting Iraqi ground formations would be fixed and ultimately destroyed by the combined effects of artillery, air “support,” and attack helicopters (Franks with McConnell, American Soldier, 415).

  37.Fontenot, Degen, and Tohn, On Point, xv, xvii. The landmark Goldwater-Nichols Defense Reorganization Act of 1986, among other things, reduced the uniformed services from fighting forces in and of themselves to being simply force providers to joint force combatant commanders who reported directly to the secretary of defense and who, at least in theory, were expected to plan and conduct military operations in their respective regional areas of responsibility around the world in a manifestly integrated and joint way. For a good overview of the origins, nature, and intent of this game-changing legislation regarding the way in which the United States has conducted its defense enterprise ever since, see Vincent Davis, “Organization and Management,” in American Defense Annual, 1987–1988, ed. Joseph Kruzel (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1987).

  38.Cordesman, “The ‘Instant Lessons’ of the Iraq War,” 23.

  39.Quoted in Amy Svitak, “Force of the Future,” Army Times, November 25, 2002.

  40.Cordesman, “The ‘Instant Lessons’ of the Iraq War,” 8.

  41.Murray and Scales, The Iraq War, 163.

  42.DeLong, Inside CentCom, 110.

  43.Carpenter, “Rapid, Deliberate, Disciplined, Proportional, and Precise,” 1.

  44.Stephen Trimble, “Cebrowski: Iraq War Offers Clues for Transformation Agenda,” Aerospace Daily, April 23, 2003.

  45.Hunter Keeter, “Cebrowski: Iraq Shows Network-Centric Warfare Implementation,” Defense Daily, April 23, 2003, 4.

  46.Knights, “Iraqi Freedom Displays the Transformation of U.S. Air Power,” 16.

  47.Elaine M. Grossman, “Key Generals: Response to ‘Fedayeen’ a Vital Milestone in Iraq War,” Inside the Pentagon, May 8, 2003, 14.

  48.Ripley, “Closing the Gap,” 27.

  49.Vernon Loeb, “Pentagon Credits Success in Iraq War to Joint Operations,” Washington Post, October 3, 2003.

  50.Thom Shanker, “Pentagon Criticizes High Rate of Allied Deaths by Allied Fire,” New York Times, October 3, 2003. A substantially larger allied ground presence from the outset almost certainly would have been the preferred alternative for either heading off or better containing the postcampaign insurgency, sectarian violence, and rampant civil disorder that persisted in Iraq for nearly six years after Hussein’s regime was driven from power.

  51.Statement of Brig. Gen. Marc Rogers, USAF, director for joint requirements and integration, U.S. Joint Forces Command, before the House Armed Services Committee, Subcommittee on Terrorism and Unconventional Threats, House of Representatives, 108th Congress, Washington, D.C., October 21, 2003.

  52.Scarborough, “Myers Says ‘Annihilation’ of Iraqi Army Wasn’t Goal.”

  53.Jeremy Feiler, “Speed, Unpredictability Led to Victory in Iraq, Defense Officials Say,” Inside the Pentagon, March 4, 2004, 1, 14.

  54.Conversation with then Wing Commander Stuart Atha, RAF, Ministry of Defence, London, October 27, 2004.

  55.Davies and Dildy, F-16 Fighting Falcon Units of Operation Iraqi Freedom, 68–69.

  56.Carpenter, “Rapid, Deliberate, Disciplined, Proportional, and Precise,” 1.

  57.Robert A. Pape, “The True Worth of Air Power,” Foreign Affairs, March–April 2004, 127.

  58.Murray and Scales, The Iraq War, 114.

  59.Interview with Lt. Gen. David D. McKiernan, USA, U.S. Army Center of Military History, Washington, D.C., June 30, 2003, cited in Reynolds, Basrah, Baghdad, and Beyond, 12.

  60.Elaine M. Grossman, “A-10 Aircraft Took Heavy Fire while Performing Unusual Mission,” Inside the Air Force, April 11, 2003, 10.

  61.John M. Broder, “General Franks Makes First Visit to Troops in the Battle Zone,” New York Times, April 8, 2003. The “pot” mentioned by Franks referred to a reporter’s earlier allusion to the Ba’athist regime as a large clay pot against which allied forces were constantly tapping in different ways and at different times.

  62.Vince Crawley, “Less Is More,” Army Times, April 21, 2003.

  63.Jeremy Feiler, “Goldwater-Nichols Changes Key to U.S. Success in Iraq, Pace Says,” Inside the Pentagon, September 25, 2003, 2.

  64.Interview with Vice Adm. Timothy J. Keating, USN, “This Was a Different War,” Proceedings, June 2003, 30.

  65.Joint Lessons Learned, 14, 21.

  66.For amplification on this point, see Lambeth, Combat Pair.

  67.Johnson, Learning Large Lessons, 195, 197.

  68.Ibid., 199–200, 206–207. Writing a year later, the USAF’s Lt. Gen. David Deptula similarly observed that as the American defense establishment has evolved since the end of the Cold War, “Goldwater-Nichols has created unintended consequences. It has resulted in a focus on military integration, but failing to develop a corresponding focus on incorporating all the elements of national power has delayed us from achieving true integration of all the pillars of national security. It has also led to an unsophisticated interpretation of jointness that drives some to seek homogeneity among the services, while others use ‘jointness’ as an excuse to participate in every mission. This has led some services to seek self-sufficiency rather than synergy—and to the degree that they have been allowed to do so has actually resulted in divergence from the tenets of Goldwater-Nichols by some as they replicate other services’ core competencies” (“Toward Restructuring National Security,” Strategic Studies Quarterly, winter 2007, 16).

  69.Comments by Colonel Fontenot, October 13, 2010. Colonel Fontenot hastened to add that “despite that, the [fact remains] that the V Corps troops truly appreciated the role that fixed-wing air played. CAS played a decisive role in more than one fight.”

  70.Whether it also was a lesson “learned” and duly assimilated remains to be determined, given the continued inefficiencies in air-land interaction that predominated in the nation’s subsequent counterinsurgency operations in Iraq through 2010 and that persist to this day in CENTCOM’s continuing counterinsurgency effort against the Taliban in Afghanistan.

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

  72.Knights, “Iraqi Freedom Displays the Transformation of U.S. Air Power,” 19.

  73.Commenting on the bottom-line meaning of the above, a Russian defense analyst, Yevgeny Pashentsev, said immediately after the campaign ended: “The Americans have rewritten the textbook, and every country had better take note.” Likewise, a former Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces general and later head of the Russian military’s official research organization, Vladimir Dvorkin, remarked that “the gap between our capabilities and those of the Americans has been revealed, and it is vast” (quoted in Fred Weir, “Iraqi Defeat Jolts Russian Military,” Ch
ristian Science Monitor, April 16, 2003).

  74.Comments by Colonel Fontenot, October 22, 2010.

  75.Among the many books that have been written on the American postcampaign experience in Iraq since April 2003, particularly notable are Fouad Ajami, The Foreigner’s Gift: The Americans, the Arabs, and the Iraqis in Iraq (New York: Free Press, 2006); Ali A. Allawi, The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing the Peace (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007); Nora Bensahel et al., After Saddam: Prewar Planning and the Occupation of Iraq (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corporation, MG-642-A, 2008); Larry Diamond, Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq (New York: Times Books, 2005); James Dobbins et al., Occupying Iraq: A History of the Coalition Provisional Authority (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corporation, MG-847-CC, 2009); Michael R. Gordon and Bernard E. Trainor, The Endgame: The Inside Story of the Struggle for Iraq from George W. Bush to Barack Obama (New York: Random House, 2012); Peter R. Mansoor, Baghdad at Sunrise: A Brigade Commander’s War in Iraq (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008); Thomas E. Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (New York: Penguin Press, 2006); Thomas E. Ricks, The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006–2008 (New York: Penguin Press, 2009); Linda Robinson, Tell Me How This Ends: General David Petraeus and the Search for a Way out of Iraq (New York: Public Affairs, 2008); Bing West, The Strongest Tribe: War, Politics, and the Endgame in Iraq (New York: Random House, 2008); Bob Woodward, State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006); and Bob Woodward, The War Within: A Secret White House History, 2006–2008 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2008). For the personal recollections of the Bush administration’s proconsul to Iraq, who headed the Coalition Provisional Authority and oversaw the badly flawed allied occupation of Iraq from May 2003 to June 2004, see L. Paul Bremer III, My Year in Iraq: The Struggle to Build a Future of Hope (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006).