Every Man a Tiger (1999)

by Tom - Nf - Commanders Clancy

  By mid-February, the total air campaign was well under way. Now the sorties against front-line forces were flying night and day. Now attacks on the Iraqi transportation system were starting to have effect, and enemy reports of food and water shortages began to filter into the intelligence system. Now the war was almost as boring as an airline schedule—except that it wasn’t passengers that were being delivered.

  What gave interest to this sea of monotony were the Scuds at night, combat losses, and the weather, which was a constant problem, as waves of low pressure swept down across Baghdad toward Basra.

  Meanwhile, the tank plinkers were bagging up to 150 tanks per night, which was the best news Chuck Horner could give General Schwarzkopf, who was by then engrossed with the details of the ground offensive plan. This last was in turn good news to Horner, because, first, it meant they were closer to going home, and, second, it meant that the CINC pretty much stayed out of Horner’s business, except for his nightly reorganizing of the target list of Iraqi Army units.

  The question remained: “When will the ground war start?” Part of the answer depended on accurate knowledge of BDA—bomb damage assessment. But here there was controversy. “Have we destroyed a third of the Iraqi tanks? Half? A quarter?” The desired number was 50 percent, but how close or how far Horner’s pilots were to attaining that number was a matter of dispute, according to the estimating body.

  A comparison of estimates gives insight into the confusion, the inter-agency bickering, and, in Horner’s words, “the slavish desire to count beans rather than estimate combat power” that surrounded what some call the great Battle Damage Assessment War. On February 23, in an effort to determine when to start the ground war, various intelligence agencies reported the following:

  Numbers (percent) of Reported Iraqi Equipment Losses

  Chuck Horner comments:

  Needless to say, such wide variance was not only fiercely debated between Washington and the theater, it turned into an ugly game of intelligence analysts’ one-upmanship. After the war, it was learned that JCS/CENTCOM numbers had been not too far off the mark. Based on this more accurate database, it appears that on or about February 23, the Iraqis had actually lost 48 percent of their tanks, 30 percent of their armored personnel carriers, and 59 percent of their artillery pieces.

  In the final analysis, the BDA controversy had nothing to do with the actual success achieved. For in the end it was not the intelligence agencies that would tell Generals Schwarzkopf and Khaled when to start the ground war, it was their gut feelings. Call it intuition, experience, judgment, whatever you like, that is what the commanders were stuck with when they made their life-or-death decision. The decision to send soldiers forward was the province of the commanders, Schwarzkopf and Khaled. That is where it belonged, and they got it right. If they had believed the BDA estimates from Washington, we would have delayed the ground war until after Ramadan. If they had believed their own intelligence count, they might have waited a little longer than they did and perhaps have given Saddam time to put together a diplomatic way to extract his army from the hell of the KTO. But they didn’t do either. In the end, they did what commanders are trained to do. They took the information available, judged it against standards of common sense, swallowed hard, and ordered the troops forward into uncertainty.

  In the absolutely final analysis, the ability of Coalition ground forces to defeat the Iraqi Army so rapidly and thoroughly may have had little to do with destroying tanks and artillery. There is powerful evidence from the 88,000 POWs that air’s most significant impact on Iraqi fighting strength was the destruction of morale.

  Morale was undermined in several ways. The isolation of the battlefield denied the Iraqi soldier food and water, but he was at the same time worn down by the incessant air attacks, and by the PSYOPS campaign that held out hope in the form of surrender. He was also effectively disarmed, because by the time the ground war started, he and his companions feared going near their vehicles—APCs, tanks, and artillery pieces, which air attacks had made death traps.

  So as the ground attack was sweeping the remnants of the Iraqi Army aside, intelligence analysts were still hunched over their overhead photographs of Iraq and Kuwait, trying to count individual tanks and artillery pieces; for these “accountants of war” had no other way to understand airpower, no other way to measure what had happened during the revolution in military actions that was Desert Storm.

  There was a second (and related) controversy in February—the prioritization of which units got bombed, when, and how much.

  The problem was complex. In order to make a correct determination, the status of particular Iraqi units had to be known with some accuracy. All of them had been bombed for weeks now, some more than others, and many had been seriously degraded. In some cases, Horner’s intelligence people knew the exact condition of a particular unit—often the units were severely debilitated by desertions and destroyed equipment. In other cases, it was anybody’s guess. (It’s doubtful that the Iraqi corps commanders had anything like a clear idea of the condition of their assigned forces.) Either way, the status of individual units often changed daily, just as the status of particular locations changed daily, as individual units moved back and forth, here and there (the Iraqi Army, Fred Franks has pointed out, was not skilled at maneuvering, but annoyingly they could and did shift unit locations).

  Just as in the BDA controversy, the various intelligence sources could not agree on the status of individual Iraqi divisions in the KTO. So the question remained: how much more work had to be done before a ground offensive could begin?

  ★ Meanwhile, each of the ground force corps commanders believed he alone was responsible for success. This is not a criticism. A prudent commander takes nothing for granted; after all, the lives of his troops are at stake. So each corps commander planned his war—his narrow slice of the battlefield—as if it was the only game in town. He didn’t worry about adjacent ground battles as long as the adjacent commander was doing his job, and no one’s flanks were exposed.

  Yet for Horner, demands on air now came from three to five directions (not including Schwarzkopf and Khaled). It was his responsibility, when building each day’s tasking order, to service each corps commander’s needs in accordance with the overall guidance set forth by Schwarzkopf and Khaled.

  Someone had to decide who got the most, who got the next most, and so on. Someone had to set target priorities, had to make a sequential listing of the Iraqi divisions that were to be bombed each day. In an ideal world this should have been a simple task. Of the approximately forty Iraqi divisions deployed in the desert, some were more important than others by virtue of their equipment, their location, or their current strength.70

  Their location proved to be the real thorn in Chuck Horner’s side. Each ground commander thought the Iraqis in his own battle space were the most important Iraqis. Though each corps commander was aware of the CINC’s guidance and general battle plan, each still had to win “his war” on his own.

  In practical terms, things worked this way:

  Walt Boomer in the east coordinated his offensive plan with the Islamic corps on his right, the Eastern Area Command, and with the one on his left, the Northern Area Command. For his part, Boomer was generally confident that the targets of immediate concern to him would be serviced, because USMC aircraft were collocated with him and had limited range. Boomer’s enemy was going to get bombed, simply because the basing and design of Marine air vehicles, such as the AV-8B Harrier, left little other choice. This was in itself fine, until we consider that Boomer faced the largest number of Iraqis, but with aircraft that were the least capable in payload, range, and use of precision munitions.

  Fred Franks’s VIIth Corps (including a British division), to the left of the Northern Area Corps, was designated the main attack, because their job was to outflank Kuwait and plunge into the Republican Guard and Iraqi heavy armored divisions. Franks justifiably wanted most of the air to go against these wel
l-equipped divisions, for there the fighting should be the fiercest.

  Though the other U.S. and Islamic corps commanders doubtless agreed with him, the lives of their troops were as valuable as the lives of VIIth Corps and British troops; and therefore, they were not about to be submissive when it came time to argue for air. Gary Luck’s XVIIIth Airborne Corps and the French forces in the far west had the big job of driving farther north into Iraq than the other corps, and then swinging to the right and fighting farther east. Though they had the fewest enemies per mile of travel, they had the most miles of travel. Like the other commanders, Luck wanted his share of the air.

  On top of all of this, John Yeosock’s Third Army headquarters oversaw Franks’s and Luck’s planning efforts, with Yeosock’s G-3, Brigadier General Steve Arnold, being the man in the middle between the corps commanders and Schwarzkopf. Arnold’s job was to argue Franks’s and Luck’s case against the requirements of the two Islamic corps, represented by C3IC’s Paul Schwartz and Abdullah al-Shaikh, and Schwarzkopf’s other component commander, Walt Boomer.

  In point of fact, John Yeosock should have been the man to work the problem out, but he did not command the two Islamic corps (who were under Khaled) or the USMC ground forces (the U.S. ground component commander was Schwarzkopf, remember). There is no doubt in my mind that John Yeosock would have been a superb ground commander, and there is no doubt in my mind that Walt Boomer could have worked for John with the same respect and loyalty he showed the CINC. Finally, there is no doubt in my mind that Paul Schwartz and al-Shaikh at C3IC could have worked with John Yeosock. Yet this was not to be. So we remained in some ways a debating society for air until the evening meeting with Schwarzkopf, when he would decide how much air would be tasked against which Iraqi division two days hence.

  The debate was a waste, and never-ending, because some corps commanders were never satisfied with what they were getting and could never accept some kind of rational harmonizing of their needs with those of the other commanders. More important, they could never accept that the Air Force was not under their control. We wanted to service their genuine needs, but we stopped being a branch of the Army fifty years ago. What they could—and should—have done was send in their target nominations and accept whatever they got. If they had a specific need, all they had to do was tell the BCE, and if it made sense they would have gotten it. On the other hand, since the CINC made the final decisions about targets, it was all a tempest in a helmet.

  On February 4, an attempt was made to end the logjam among corps commanders. The DCINC, Cal Waller, would develop the prioritized target list, a list that would take into account the needs of all ground components.

  The idea was that he would draw up the list of targets. Then the combined Coalition staff in the Black Hole would apply air expertise to determine what could and could not be hit. Then the list would return to the DCINC for approval, after which point the ATO would be cut.

  Brigadier General Mike Hall, Horner’s liaison with Cal Waller for this program, would work up a seventy-two-hour rolling target list, based on the requirements of the combined divisions, as modified by their corps headquarters, as modified by the Third U.S. Army, C3IC, and the USMC component. Thus, on a normal day, Waller’s prioritized list would send about 1,000 sorties to strike Iraqi Army units. Buster Glosson’s targeteers would meanwhile continue to work up targets outside the KTO, and these would be serviced by sorties taken off the top, usually by F-117s, F-111s, and half the F-15Es (the rest continued to hunt Scuds).

  This should have worked, but it didn’t, and Chuck Horner never expected it would, since he never imagined that Waller would be able to bring into harmony the various corps demands.

  Soon after the system was set up, Colonel Clint Williams, Waller’s point man on the effort, relayed to the duty officer in the TACC that the DCINC was unable to come up with a list.

  Colonel Dave Schulte, the head of the BCE, was tasked with finding out what was holding things up, and he immediately set out to find out how the ARCENT target list was built. Colonel Schulte spent five hours with the ARCENT Deep Operations shop, where he learned that the VIIth and XVIIIth Corps representatives received and worked their target inputs differently, primarily because each used different software to track Iraqi forces and analyze the target nominations.

  But the real problem remained. The representatives from each corps—usually majors—were unable to stop fighting among themselves over air. Each thought he was responsible for grabbing as much for his corps as he could (it was thought of as a zero-sum game), and Waller wasn’t strong enough to bring sense and system to the situation, or to get the majors organized and working in harmony. That’s why I offered to let Waller build the list in the first place. Because I felt he couldn’t do it, and Baptiste and Welch were doing fine as it was, especially since Schwarzkopf made the final decisions anyway.

  Meanwhile, a Captain Simms had done what he could to bring order to the building of the priority lists, and had tried to come up with a fair and reasonable way to allocate target selection. His system was to rotate the nominations from each corps on a 5-3-2-2 weighted basis. That is, each list had five ARCENT targets first, followed by three VIIth Corps targets, and two each XVIIIth Airborne Corps and Northern Area Command targets. The next five would come from the ARCENT list, and so on. Any priority among targets was made by the unit nominating it.

  At least it was a list. If the Army was happy with it, then I was happy with it. But they weren’t. The corps commanders wouldn’t accept Simms’s system of priorities.

  The target priority controversy continued after the war. Various war councils were held, lessons learned were published, and a variety of doctrinal documents were drafted. The goal of these councils was to increase the voice of the ground commanders over where, when, and how air was used. Their basic premise was that the joint force air component commander would misuse his office, ground would not control the air, and air would not be used properly. It made little difference that Desert Storm was a success by most every measure. That aberration was simply the result of the friendship and trust between Yeosock, Boomer, Arthur, and Horner.

  Well, let me tell you, this doctrinal bickering is horse manure. First of all, in Desert Storm we had one ground commander for each of the two forces, and they approved every target. Their names were Schwarzkopf and Khaled, and they trusted their air component to organize a daily air campaign, which they reviewed as land component commanders, and then as CINCs either changed or approved. Though all the subordinate ground commanders had their say in the process, they had to understand that they were not in charge of the air effort—or, for that matter, of the ground effort. They could not own the air, and it stuck in their craw.

  Secondly, all subordinates in a war must understand that no joint force commander wants to lose. He hopes to use air, land, sea, and space assets in a way that will bring victory on the battlefield. So back in the Pentagon, quit writing doctrine that is a compromise between the way each separate service wants to fight wars, because they don’t fight wars. Unified commanders and their allied commanders (in Desert Storm, Schwarzkopf and Khaled) are in charge. If we follow the doctrines of compromise published by the services and the Joint Staff, we will end up with “war fought by committee”—a sure loser.

  I thank God Schwarzkopf was in charge in the Gulf, because there was no wondering about which service doctrine was going to prevail. There no component would dominate the planning. This was not Vietnam, where the Pentagon warriors dictated targets, tactics, and procedures. We were a team with one vision of what needed to be done. It is true that we had to muddle along as we figured it out (as was the case in identifying Iraqi Army target priorities); but I knew we would get the job done, however we decided to do it, because the CINCs were in charge, and the components respected and trusted each other.

  PSYCHOLOGICAL WARFARE

  Psychological warfare has been an element in all combat, and its importance in warfare will inevitabl
y grow, as skill grows in influencing the moods, motives, and will of others. The range of psychological influence has also grown with the range of media influence. Vietnam was not lost on the streets of American cities, but it’s hard to find another war whose outcome was so affected by television (it’s doubtful, by the way, that the North Vietnamese leadership were aware that their actions would have that effect).

  The Gulf crisis saw a new growth in psychological warfare—PSYOPS—which was in part due to the presence of television cameras in Baghdad and on the Coalition battlefield.

  The power of live video broadcast to a worldwide audience was not lost on the Iraqis. So, for example, images of Saddam kindly patting a hostage boy on the head were part of an (inept) attempt to influence the world at large of the benevolence of the Iraqi leader and the justice of his cause. It failed miserably.

  The Coalition achieved greater success by targeting its message to the Iraqi Army. But it wasn’t easy.

  In the beginning, Central Command planners had a hard time putting a psychological-warfare plan together. Though this was historically the responsibility of the Army component, in recent times (such as during the operations in Panama and Grenada), the primary responsibility has gone specifically to Special Operations forces. When the Gulf crisis broke, Central Command, lacking expertise to plan a PSYOPS campaign, requested help from the Commander in Chief Special Operations Command (collocated with CENTCOM, as it happened, at MacDill AFB).

  The plan that resulted was useful in identifying targets for PSYOPS efforts, but was an overly “Ameri-centric” view of influencing Arabs. Next, in Riyadh, Schwarzkopf asked John Yeosock to prepare a comprehensive (and less American ) PSYOPS campaign. This was completed and published in November, and was meant to guide Coalition efforts to influence Iraq’s leaders, its people, and most of all its forces in the field. The message was simple: “What you are doing in Kuwait is evil and against your religious beliefs. Get out or die.”