by Tom Clancy
Buster would quickly, but in detail, explain the nature of each target and how its destruction fit in the overall campaign plan. Once that was done, he would briefly cover the AWACS tracks, CAPs, Scud patrols, and electronic-warfare packages. The discussion of army targets was left for last. At that point, Buster and I would take out our pencils, ready for the CINC to break in, point to a list of Iraqi divisions posted on the wall, and rattle off the divisions he wanted struck. He always did.
It was the same night after night, never acrimonious, always professional and easy to follow.
Afterward, Buster would roll up his charts and leave. He needed to hurry back to the Black Hole to input the latest guidance into the ATO (which was already starting to run late).
The CINC would then poll the U.S. and Coalition commanders or their representatives to see if they had any pressing concerns, and if the CINC had any special guidance, he gave it out. After the meeting broke up, Schwarzkopf would call Khaled bin Sultan with his update, while I rushed back to the TACC for the evening follies.
BAGHDAD BILLY… AND SOME WINS
The confusion of war breeds endless myths. Some bring laughs, others bring deaths. Ours, sadly, was the tragic kind. It was called “Baghdad Billy”—the Iraqi interceptor from hell.
Soon after the start of air operations over Iraq, pilots flying the EF-111 electronic jamming aircraft began to report interceptions by Iraqi fighters, even when there was no evidence of airborne Iraqis. They claimed they’d seen Iraqi fighter radar signals on their warning scopes, spotlights from Iraqi interceptor aircraft, or even tracers and missiles being fired at them. Yet in no case could intelligence sources or AWACS confirm these sightings. Much of the time, there were no indications that Iraqi aircraft were even airborne. There was one constant: F-15s had been in the vicinity of the EF-111s during their mysterious sightings.
In short, they were imagining things. We called their phantom “Baghdad Billy.”
But that was headquarters wisdom. The crews knew what they’d seen with their own eyes; they knew that they had narrowly escaped death at the hands of an Iraqi fighter pilot.
The sides were drawn. The fat-assed generals in Riyadh who didn’t believe the crew reports, versus the pilots and weapons systems operators who were out there night after night risking their lives.
You don’t enter an argument like this and expect logic to prevail. But these were fighter pilots, and it was all good fun until somebody got hurt. That happened the night of February 13.
Ratchet-75, an EF-111A tasked to support-jam Iraqi radars, was the third aircraft in a flight of three EF-111s crossing the border between Saudi Arabia and Iraq in the vicinity of Ar’ar, a town in northwestern Saudi Arabia. At 1109 Saudi time, Ratchet-75 should have passed Ar’ar at 21,000 feet, four minutes behind the leader, Ratchet-73, and two minutes behind number two, Ratchet-74. At 1128, Ratchet-75 should have been ten minutes south of his jamming orbit, which was located due west of Baghdad halfway to the Jordanian border. He never got there. At 1129, two F-15Es heading south over southern Iraq at 31,000 feet saw an aircraft below them ejecting eight to ten flares. The night sky was lit up by the flares and the blaze of afterburners, as the aircraft rolled out of a hard left turn and began a series of “S-turns” as it descended sharply. Twenty seconds later, the F-15s saw the aircraft eject three more flares, soon followed by a huge fireball as the aircraft hit the ground. The lead F-15E, Pontiac-47, began an orbit over the crash site, while his wingman, Pontiac-48, went to the tanker track to refuel. A little over three hours later, a Special Operations helicopter, Sierra-43, arrived on scene and the rescue team examined the wreckage. They confirmed the loss of the EF-111, its pilot, and the WSO.
Though we will never know what happened, it was reasonable to conclude that the crew of the EF-111, like other -111 crews, had radar warning signals or visual sightings that indicated an Iraqi interceptor approaching for a kill. Once again, the AWACS picture was clean of enemy aircraft, and once again, F-15 aircraft were in the immediate vicinity.
It seemed that Baghdad Billy had finally achieved a shoot-down.
Everyone in the TACC was upset; and — not surprisingly — there was blaming and finger-pointing.
In the hall the next morning, Buster Glosson lit into Chris Christon, whose intelligence shop had passed unedited reports of the phantom interceptor to all the aircrews, thereby giving the story credibility. Chris fought back. As he saw it, his job was to get the word out. If the EF-111 aircrews had observed something, he reported it to the other units. And it was then the job of the local commanders to make sure the aircrews didn’t do anything extreme, like a low-altitude jink-out at night.
Both Buster and Chris were right. It was Chris’s job to get the word out. And it was Buster’s job as the fighter division commander to worry about the lives of his aircrews.
But the real blame was mine. I should have been more forceful about dispelling the Baghdad Billy myth right from the start. I should have seen that a crew would get so engrossed with defeating the apparently real threat that they succumbed to the ever-present killer, the ground. My failure meant two needless deaths and bitter tears for the families of the crew of Ratchet-75.
The message went out to knock off defensive reactions to Baghdad Billy.
The incident wasn’t a total loss. It inspired a song:
BALLAD OF THE F-111 JOCK BY MAJ. ROGER KRAPF
I’m an F-111 Jock, and I’m here to tell
of Baghdad Billy and his jet from hell.
We were well protected with Eagles in tight
but that didn’t stop the man with the light.
RJ and AWACS, they didn’t see,
as BAGHDAD BILLY snuck up on me.
Then I found a spotlight shining at my six
and my Whoozoo said, “HOOLLYY SHEEIT.”
I popped some chaff and I popped a flare
but the Iraqi bandit, he didn’t care.
I had tracers on my left, and tracers on my right,
with a load of bombs, I had to run from the fight.
I rolled my VARK over and took her down
into the darkness and finally lost the clown.
When I landed back at Taif and gave this rap,
CENTAF said I was full of crap.
I’m here to tell you the God’s own truth.
That Iraqi bandit, he ain’t no spoof.
You don’t have to worry, there is no way
you’ll see Baghdad Billy if you fly in the day.
But listen to me, son, for I am right.
Watch out for BILLY if you fly at night!!!
There were other — far less tragic — confusions and mix-ups.
On one occasion, an F-15 pilot from our base at Incirlik in Turkey was lined up on an Iraqi jet ready to squeeze the trigger, when an air-to-air missile flew in from the side, turned the corner behind the Iraqi, and blew the target out of the sky. Chalk up one for the 33d TFW from Tabuk. Not the least bothered, the Incirlik-based F-15 turned his attention to the Iraqi’s wingman and fired an AIM-7 radar-guided missile. It zeroed in on its target and exploded; but much to the amazement of our pilot, the Iraqi jet emerged serenely from the fireball. The intrepid American then fired a heat-seeking AIM-9, which again engulfed the Iraqi in a fireball; and again the Iraqi emerged and flew across the border into Iran. Our pilot may have been luckier than he thought, however. The Iraqi aircraft was either damaged or it ran out of fuel, and the pilot ejected shortly after escaping.
But more often the wins were clear-cut.
Not all our potential aces flew air-to-air fighters. In February, the A-10s at King Fahd bagged a couple of Iraqi helicopters while looking to bomb Iraqi tanks and artillery. Captain Swain, on the sixth of February, and Captain Sheehy, nine days later, observed Iraqi helicopters flying very close to the earth. Bad tactic, helicopters close to the ground stand out clearly to a fighter pilot. Both A-10s used their 30mm guns to dispatch their targets. Up until then, it was normal for the Warthog
community to take cheap shots from their interceptor brethren in F-15s. No more. To flag the change, sometime around the middle of February, the A-10 wing commander, Colonel Sandy Sharpe, called the F-15 wing commander at Dhahran, Colonel John McBroom, to offer his A-10s to fly top cover for the F-15s, in case they wanted to do some bombing. After all, it only made sense, now that the A-10s had two kills to the F-15 wing’s single victory. Boomer McBroom was not amused, but hundreds of A-10 pilots howled with glee.
The last kills of the war took out Iraqis flying combat sorties against their own people. In late March, an Iraqi Sukhoi jet fighter and a Swiss Platus propeller-driven PC-9 trainer, pressed into dropping bombs, were flying in eastern Iraq, in violation of the Iraqi no-fly agreement reached at the end of the war. AWACS vectored two F-15s against the aircraft. The flight leader, Captain Dietz, rolled out behind the Sukhoi, fired his AIM-9, and blew the target out of the sky. It was Dietz’s third kill (he’d bagged a pair of MiG-21s in early February). His wingman, Lieutenant Hohemann, also with two aerial victories (he got them the same day Dietz got his), rolled out behind the PC-9. Though our rules discouraged shoot-down of trainers or cargo/ passenger aircraft, and the PC-9 was a trainer-type aircraft, it had just completed a bombing mission against Iraqi civilians and wasn’t supposed to be in the air anyway. Should I shoot or not? Hohemann asked himself. While the lieutenant’s conscience wrestled with this question, the Iraqi pilot ejected! After seeing his leader blow up, the Iraqi wingman wasn’t going to wait around and take his chances. After jinking to avoid the Iraqi’s deploying parachute, Hohemann reached a decision: “It’s a fighter, not a trainer.” But just as he was about to shoot it down, the PC-9 rolled over and smashed into the ground.
Coalition Aerial Victories by Unit
Afterward, Jim Crigger awarded Hohemann credit for the kill, which brought his total to three victories, the closest anyone in the Gulf came to the five needed to become an Ace.
The first and last kill scored by the CENTAF staff was racked up by Colonel John Turk from the Black Hole. A longtime fighter pilot, John had been one of our top F-15 instructor pilots at Luke and Tyndall. But to his great disappointment, he’d sat out this war in the Black Hole, hard work and no glory. After the shooting had stopped, Turk hitched a ride up to Tallil AB in southern Iraq. As he was touring the airfield, Turk found a MiG fighter parked on a road. Though U.S. Army troops had destroyed the cockpit, the jet was otherwise fully armed and fueled. Like every fighter pilot, Turk was always looking for a kill. Making sure no one was around watching him, he fired a shot from his 9 mm pistol into the MiG’s drop tank, hoping for a fire. Fuel streamed out but failed to ignite. Undaunted, Turk took out a cigarette lighter and applied a flame to the jet fuel. A second later, it occurred to him that he was standing next to a fully fueled, munition-laden jet that was moments from erupting into a huge fireball. I don’t know the world’s record for the 440-yard dash in combat boots, but I’m sure John Turk set it that day at Tallil.
9
Hits and Misses
Chuck Horner continues:
During the first three days of the war, we were euphoric, and so were the folks at home. We were winning. The home team had scored time after time. And our touchdowns had been faithfully transmitted back to the States — amazing pictures of laser-guided bombs slaying doors of bunkers, airshafts of buildings, and the tops of aircraft shelters. For the first time since World War II, generals had become popular — Schwarzkopf with his energy, intensity, and focus, standing up and glaring at dumb questions; Powell with his warmth, intelligence, and smooth confidence.
Even I had a brief moment of fame. During a press conference, we ran a video of the Iraqi Air Force headquarters taken by one of our aircraft. I pointed at the display with my government-issue ballpoint pen. “This is my counterpart’s headquarters,” I announced as the building exploded. I wish I could take credit for the nice line. But the truth was I’d forgotten the name of the target, and it was all I could think of. Sometimes you get lucky; the incident landed on national TV.
It’s just as well that I spent very little time in front of the cameras. I wasn’t eager to press my luck under the glare of the lights when I needed to put all my energy into running the air war.
Most of my time, in fact, was spent urging on the team, deciding what needed to be done next, and trying to bring order to chaos.
Since we had no clear idea of what the enemy was doing, we had to guess. We’d take those guesses — officially called intelligence estimates or analysis — and try to deliver violence in such a way that the enemy could not do what we thought he was trying to do. That was working far better than we had dreamed.
Meanwhile — as in every war I’d seen — the Air Tasking Order was getting out late. Some problems are inevitable. Bad weather over targets required changes in the target lists, and there’d always be computer hiccups. Other problems were less forgivable: planners lust after the perfect plan, and generals like to general; both often pay more attention to doing their own thing than to taking care of the needs of the troops who are getting shot at.
There will never be a perfect plan until the intelligence that drives planning touches perfection. Don’t hold your breath. Yet planners obsessively fiddled and tinkered with the daily plan, trying to squeeze every drop of efficiency out of it… as though it were a work of art and not a rough script. When we stopped the presses to make small changes affecting only a few units, we risked delaying the ATO for everyone. And that risked increasing confusion or, worse, chaos.
Generals don’t feel like generals unless they make their presence felt. Fair enough, when they know where they are going and keep a light hand on the reins. That’s leadership. Too often, though, they don’t know where they are going, yet pretend they do (in the absence of virtue, the appearance of virtue is better than nothing); and then get the staff to plan the trip. Once the staff plan is prepared, the general will inevitably make lots of changes. General-induced changes make big ripples in the planning cycle. In our ATO planning process, we had lots of general-created tidal waves, including too many from me.
Despite the screwups, we gradually brought order to this confusion and speeded up the planning process in an orderly way that allowed humans to accommodate to them. Very early in the war, we learned to make changes early in the ATO, not by stopping the presses, but by sending change sheets directly to the units involved. We’d tell them something like: “When you get the ATO tonight, your F-16s are targeted against Target X. Disregard that and go to Target Y.” At first the new systems confused the wings, but they caught on rapidly.
After the war, the armchair generals had their say about speeding up the planning process. “We’ve got to get the ATO cycle time down,” they’d assert. “Two days is too long.” They were right, we had to speed up the process; but they were blaming the wrong villain. The two-day cycle wasn’t hurting us. You must give people some reasonable planning horizon, and two days is short but manageable. What needs to be worked on is the change cycle — the cycle of gaining intelligence about what you want to do and then implementing the required changes. In other words, we’d use the two-day plan to head the troops in the right general direction, and then we’d fine-tune as needed. For example, because the Iraqi Army units moved daily, we were never able to pinpoint their location in the two-day cycle. At first, we tried to update the ATO. But this only left the ATO in constant flux and therefore late to the customers. Instead, we put the F-16 killer scouts over the Iraqi Army, then sent forth hordes of A-10s, F-16s, and F-18s in a well-planned orderly stream. When they arrived on scene, the killer scouts pointed out targets, and the fighter-bombers dropped their loads and returned home for more.
The timeline we had shortened was the time needed to bring intelligence to the attackers. Because the killer scouts’ eyes were the intelligence collectors, the intelligence was only seconds old when the attacking aircraft acted on it.
For generals who liked being generals, this was not
a happy situation; it put them out of the loop. Captains and majors were picking the targets… and it worked. We in Riyadh had succeeded in seizing from Washington the responsibility to pick targets, only to cede it to F-16 pilots over the battlefield. Sure, Washington still provided broad guidance; and sure, the generals in Riyadh told the killer scouts what divisions to orbit over and gave them the rules needed to prevent them from killing one another or breaking international laws; but in large measure, this war now belonged to the folks who were getting shot at.
CUTTING OFF THE SERPENT’S HEAD
In the most efficient of worlds, the centralized, totalitarian dictatorship should be most vulnerable to an efficient shot to the head — a bullet through the presidential window, followed by the quick elimination of presidential cronies, henchmen, military leaders, and possibly family; and then, for thoroughness’ sake, the removal of the party chiefs, the heads of the secret police, and the top people in intelligence. Finally, one cuts off the physical connections between capital and country — the networks of communications, roads, rail, and air. Now headless, the oppressed people ought to rise up to remove and replace the remaining causes of their misery.
Sadly, the world is not so easy to manage. Totalitarian systems are rarely smart and efficient. More often, they are stupid and clumsy and overcomplicated, and therefore not especially vulnerable to neat solutions.
That, at any rate, was one of the lessons of the Gulf War.
The original CHECKMATE offensive plans centered on a strategy of destroying Iraqi leadership. With this accomplished, it was asserted, all other goals — such as the Iraqi withdrawal from occupied Kuwait — would be achieved. The concept was to kill Saddam Hussein, or at least to discredit him, so he could not rule the nation; and a more rational leader or leaders could emerge, probably from the Iraqi Army.