by Tom Clancy
The weapons carried by these fighters, on the other hand, were not nearly as good as our radar and heat-seeking missiles. Nevertheless, they were more than adequate if the enemy pilot could put his aircraft in a position to shoot them.
★ I had never been impressed with Iraqi pilots, but that didn’t mean we could always count on running into bad ones. Among the youth of every nation in the world you’ll find a few “aces”—young men, and now women, capable of winning aerial engagements time after time. The traits found in those who consistently shoot down other fighters are found everywhere — though never in abundant supply. Good eyesight doesn’t hurt, but some of our greatest had poor eyesight (they’d purposely select wingmen with good eyes). Courage is required, but that is easy enough to come by in air-to-air combat, where you either fight or die. The trait I most admire in great pilots is “situational awareness.” It is the ability to keep track of what is going on around you and to project that awareness into an accurate mental image of what is about to happen during the next few moments; and it is extremely rare. It’s an ability that has little to do with IQ. Some of our best fighter pilots do not appear outwardly intelligent. On the ground they will do the dumbest things, or get into serious trouble; but in an engagement they process data at speeds and complexities that would defeat our fastest, most powerful computers. Out there in every nation there are a few — very few — individuals with the inborn talent to process supersonic motion and project it in three dimensions. If properly trained and equipped, these people duel with the best in the sky.
During the Iran-Iraq War, our AWACS had maintained a close watch on the aircraft of both countries, and their aerial engagements had been analyzed and briefed by our CENTAF operations/intelligence team. I had also analyzed the few encounters between Iranians and Saudis (which gave me a good benchmark; I was familiar with the great competence of Saudi pilots). The Iranians had excellent, though aging, fighters — F-5s, F-14s, and F-4s — but it was apparent from their lack of success against the Saudis that their aircraft radars were inoperative, or at least poorly tuned. The Iranian pilots, while eager, had obviously suffered as a result of the fundamentalist revolution. When Iranian aircraft challenged Saudi air defenses, they were promptly intercepted and either shot down or driven back.
On the other hand, when Iraqi fighters engaged Iranians — either in defense of Baghdad or supporting air attacks on Iranian targets — they were, to be charitable, ineffective. The engagements were pure Keystone Kops. The Iranian and Iraqi aircraft would be vectored toward one another by ground-based radars. They would close to within a mile, then circle aimlessly, apparently unable to locate each other and shoot their weapons. This “ballet of the blind” occurred time after time. I had no doubt that all the pilots were willing, but they were overly dependent on ground-based radar vectors — once again pointing out the superiority of our F-14, F-15, F-16, and F-18 on-board target-acquisition systems.
★ Iraqi pilot training came from three sources: France, Pakistan, and the former Soviet Union. Lucky for us, Soviet training proved dominant, with their emphasis on rigid rules, strict command arrangements, and standardized tactics. Coupled with this centralized approach, the Soviets were suspicious of non-Russians and disliked Arabs. The Iraqi students were taught to take off and land their aircraft safely, but otherwise their training was so basic, so lacking in advanced tactics, as to be useless.
There was, however, a wild card. Not all Iraqi training came from the Russians.
Iraqi pilots were trained well by their French and Pakistani instructors.
The French training was evidenced by Iraqi attacks on Iranian shipping and the USS Stark. And Iraqi air-to-ground operations against Iran’s oil facilities at Kharg Island and near Bandar Abbas were model operations, worthy of study by all airmen.
Pakistan has one of the best, most combat-ready air forces in the world. They have to; their neighbor to the east is huge, and the two nations have a long history of hostility. For Indian war planners, the Pakistani Air Force is their worst fear. Pakistani pilots are respected throughout the world, especially the Islamic world, because they know how to fly and fight.
On one or two occasions, I had the opportunity to talk with Pakistani instructor pilots who had served in Iraq. These discussions didn’t give me great cause to worry. The Russian domination of training prevented the Pakistanis from having any real influence on the Iraqi aircrew training program.
Still, there had to be a few Iraqi pilots who’d observed and listened to their mentors from France and Pakistan and the useless guidance of their inept leaders. It was those few I was concerned about — the ones with great situational awareness and good eyesight, who had figured out how to effectively use their aircraft and its weapons to defend their nation.
If those gifted Iraqi pilots existed, and I’m certain they did, they probably died on 17, 19, and 24 January. We went after them so hard and so thoroughly that they never had a chance to show that they were respectable.
Our fundamental strategy was simple. Blind them and beat the tar out of them as they groped about. We were going to stomp the Iraqi Air Force into submission. Not fair, not pretty, not poetic. Our goal was to be as vicious and unrelenting as possible. To do otherwise would just prolong the suffering and death.
To blind the Iraqi Air Force, our first bombers fell on its eyes and brains — radars, command bunkers, and communications sites. Of equal importance was the forward movement of our interceptor fighters into Iraq. We put twenty-four-hour CAPs over each of the Iraqi fighter bases.[60] Forward fighters were positioned to intercept the Iraqi jets almost as soon as they broke ground. Our hopes for the Iraqi fighter pilot were very simple: take off and blow up.
For the most part, our hopes became reality. After the first three days of the war, we had seized control of the air over Iraq and Kuwait.
Three days may seem short, and the Iraqi Air Force may look like a push-over. But do not get the idea that gaining control of the air was easy. It was not a “macho,” “no sweat” operation. What turned into a turkey shoot in late January and February started out as a bitter struggle; those first few days were the hardest-fought, most critical aspect of the entire war.
Meanwhile, when the bombs began to fall on Baghdad, Iraqi pilots ran to their planes and took off. I’m sure they sent their best and brightest, and I know they tried their hardest; but in air-to-air combat, it’s win, lose, or get out of town. There is no second place. The Iraqis lost at least eight times on the seventeenth of January. They tried again two days later and lost six more times. Their last try (and their only effort to attack our forces on the ground with aircraft) was on the twenty-fourth, when two Mirage F-1s attempted to penetrate Saudi Arabia for an air-to-ground strike. An RSAF F-15C shot them both down just out to sea in the Arabian Gulf.
After that, they tried to hide in their heavily defended aircraft shelters, also to no avail, when we picked off the shelters, one at a time, with 2,000-pound hard-case, laser-guided bombs.
They were then left with the “get out of town” option. We had actually anticipated that, but felt their destination would be Iraq’s Arab neighbor and sometime friend, Jordan. Wrong. They went to Iran, leaving our carefully placed barrier CAP aircraft orbiting between Baghdad and Jordan in the desert.
On the first night of the exodus, the burning question was whether or not the jets were defecting. Because they were fleeing to an old enemy, that was a possible inference. But when they did it again the next night, I was pretty sure it was organized and not defection.
In order to find out what was really going on, I called Mary Jo, in Sumter, South Carolina. No, she doesn’t operate a spy network; but we had an Iranian-born friend who shared our passion for Persian carpets and whose father was well placed back home. She called our friend, and he called his father, who reported that an Iraqi general had shown up in Iran a few days before and negotiated safe haven for the Iraqi Air Force. The Iranians, justifying their reputation as “bazz
aris,” or traders, carefully responded, “We will keep your aircraft for you”; and so, it seems, they have. The aircraft are still there.
Once the exodus started, the Iraqis ceased operating as a fighting force; it was a panic rush to the exits. They’d wait for gaps in our CAP coverage, then bolt in groups for Iran, hoping that if they avoided our fighters, they’d have enough fuel to find an Iranian airfield. The pilots who didn’t had to eject.
BRIEFINGS
We don’t like briefings, because we don’t like to sit around in meetings. But we have to have briefings, because they offer the most efficient way to keep vital information flowing to the largest variety of people. There were three that really mattered every day — the two at our TACC changeover, and the evening briefing at MODA for the CINC.
Since we had two teams, each working twelve hours a day, the changeover briefings occurred twice a day, morning and evening. Here there was no attempt at depth, or to make speculative projections (these came in the meeting that followed). For the most part, the presenters laid out facts and made reasonable projections of trends needed to plan ATOs and bring the staff up-to-date. Intel briefers, for example, would touch on the status of the Iraqi transportation system, the bridges he or she was recommending for strike, the reasons why the Iraqi Air Force was flying to Iran, or possible Scud hiding places. And there was also plenty of BDA, target systems, and current information.
When the incoming staff arrived, they’d gather around, while each section — Intelligence, Weather, Plans, Operations, BCE, Naval Liaison, and Marine Liaison — covered anything they wanted everyone to hear. Though the briefing was directed at me and the other senior leaders of the national air forces, it also allowed the staff coming on duty to get up to speed and to talk about the coming period and beyond. Anyone could ask questions (though few did). Then, at the end, I would make brief remarks designed to keep the staff focused on what I believed important. Most of the time I kept these remarks general, but on a few occasions I outlined specific tasks for the next twelve to twenty-four hours.
After this briefing, I would turn my chair around and face the back of the room, and the senior leaders from the U.S. Navy, Army, Marines, and the Coalition air forces, along with my senior staff — Tom Olsen, Randy Witt, Buster Glosson, John Corder, Bill Rider, Pat Caruana, Ed Tonoso, Glenn Profitt, and especially the four colonels, Crigger, Doman, Reavy, and Harr (two coming on and two going off duty) — would receive a purely speculative intelligence briefing from Chris Christon. (The briefing was not exclusive; anyone could stand around and listen; but as a rule, the duty officers had to get to work, now that the previous person manning their workstation had left for food and rest.)
Here Chris would let his imagination roam and give a far more hypothetical assessment of what we were about to face than was appropriate during the changeover briefing. I wanted him to really guess. Why? Because I had to think ahead. I had to make decisions. And if I used the usual intelligence data, I didn’t have much to go on.
Our peacetime-trained intelligence organizations are taught never to be wrong. They like numbers, and don’t like to talk about what the other guy is thinking. They don’t predict, they just give you the rundown, like TV news anchors. Yet, as a commander, I had to think about what the other guy was thinking. I needed to get inside the other guy in order to find ways to spoil his plans and make his worst fears come true. That meant Chris had to speculate, stimulate our thinking, and provoke the questions we needed to ask. Sure, he might be way off base, but that was expected. And of course, having reviewed all the intelligence derived from our own operations (pilot reports and intelligence reports published by his staff) and from other organizations, he always explained the reasons for his projections.
In addition to providing insight into the enemy, these meetings expanded our collective thinking. For that reason, discussions always followed Chris Christon’s predictions, and these wandered wherever the various leaders wanted. Obviously, there were cultural differences that dictated how and when a particular commander spoke. The Europeans, for instance, were comfortable speaking openly, and they all felt free to take any position on any issue. The Arabs, on the other hand, were more reticent and circumspect. Nonetheless, if they thought we were missing anything important — especially if it concerned the Arab mentality of our enemy — they spoke up.
Inevitably, issues came up that we discussed at length yet never really got a handle on. Some of these, like Scuds, came up frequently.
Finally, these meetings made us a team. Our U.S. Air Force people were already working hard for harmony, side by side, throughout the TACC and at the various bases, on the ground and in the air. I wanted all the national air force leaders to have the same feelings of trust, respect, and unity of effort. That is why it was important for me not to act in charge; and that is why it was important for me to listen to them and actively seek their views. It also didn’t hurt to learn something new, and gain their perceptions, experience, and insights.
We were fortunate in this conflict in that if we failed to accurately gauge the enemy, our strength was so overwhelming that we would still prevail. Nonetheless, our mistakes could cost the lives of aircrew, or later, the lives of airmen and soldiers on the ground. That is why so many people worked so hard at thinking about the enemy, our plan to fight, and our actual minute-by-minute engagement with him.
“It all starts and ends with intelligence,” I like to say. In war, your intelligence has to be the departure point for your thinking or planning. And then, after you execute your actions, your intelligence estimates the results and the effects on the enemy, so you can plan the next move.
War is not unlike chess. But in war, you do not have a clear view of the other side of the board.
★ Just before 2000 each evening, I left the operation to Tom Olsen and headed for the CINC’s meeting at the MODA building bunker. As I ran up the stairs, I usually heard Buster Glosson doing the same thing; he, too, had been busy getting ready, for it was his job to brief the next ATO. We’d both hit the glass doors and race out into the cold night to an armored Mercedes sedan, the back doors open and the motor running. Behind the wheel was Technical Sergeant Mike Brickert, a six-foot-three deputy sheriff from Chelan County, Washington, who was an air policeman in the Air National Guard and an Olympic-class marksman and athlete. His job was to get Buster and me safely and quickly to the MODA so I could be in my seat before General Schwarzkopf called the meeting together. En route, Buster and I would review his briefing.
Most days, I had gone over this new ATO during the morning, when I would wander down to the Black Hole and discuss the infant plan. Buster and his people would then massage it the rest of the day, and from this would emerge a Master Attack Plan, which listed the primary targets we intended to strike. In the car, Buster and I would make changes based on how we felt the CINC would react to comments or targets. The key was to challenge him a little bit but keep him from overreacting. So we were careful to justify each target nomination.
The one area we could not judge accurately — and didn’t really have to — was the number of sorties we needed to apply to the individual Iraqi divisions in the KTO. (All we knew for certain was that the Republican Guard was going to get more attention than conscript infantry units.) In the end, we were going to get them all, so the answer didn’t really matter. Each day we used Sam Baptiste’s and Bill Welch’s best guess (based on ground force inputs) about which units to hit, and then we distributed the rest, based on ARCENT estimates of unit strengths. Every evening, as was his privilege as CINC and land force component commander, Schwarzkopf modified this part of the plan.
My strategy session with Buster usually ended as we hit the front door of MODA and ran to the elevator that took us to the underground command post. We were never late, but we were often in the hall only steps ahead of the CINC.
The meeting that followed (like the changeover briefing we had just left) covered the weather, intelligence updates, the prog
ress of the war, and logistics, communications, and overall support updates provided by the CENTCOM staff. Then came the main order of business — the plans for the day after tomorrow. For the first five weeks of Desert Storm, virtually the only subject discussed was the air war — in other words, Buster Glosson’s briefing. Though the daily plans tended to be an expansion of the previous day’s efforts, each also had to be coherent in and of itself and address any interim changes.
When he came “on stage,” Buster would take out his rolled Plexiglas sheets with the proposed targets outlined and notes written in grease pencil. For example, there might be a circle, with the number 50 inside it, over the general location of the 18th Iraqi Armored Division in Kuwait — meaning that two days from now we intended to task fifty attack sorties against that division (the exact time of each strike would depend on details too numerous to brief, and was anyhow of little importance in the current phase of attriting the Iraqi Army before the ground battle started). Or there might be a green triangle overlaid on a series of bridges, showing how the effort to isolate the battlefield would continue. Or there might be red triangles overlaid on a nuclear research center, a tank repair depot, and a suspected Scud storage area.