Every Man a Tiger: The Gulf War Air Campaign sic-2

by Tom Clancy

  Chuck Horner observes:

  Israeli retaliation would have been a terrible political mistake, and its chances of military success were not high, either.

  Though Israeli pilots were among the best in the world, they were less well-equipped than we were to hunt mobile Scuds. Consequently, their only real contribution to the war would have been to boost the morale of their own people. Far more important, however, the Coalition was always a very fragile thing. Any Israeli retaliation on an Arab state — especially nuclear retaliation — no matter how justified, would have at best weakened the Coalition. At worst, it would have destroyed it. Though it is my belief that the Chief of the Israeli Air Force, General Ben-Nun (a dear friend and first-rate F-15 pilot), understood all this, he was under pressure to act. So planning went on day and night in Tel Aviv.

  Relief in Tel Aviv came with the arrival of the U.S. Army’s Patriot missiles. Though many will claim that the Patriots failed to stop the Scuds, the question about their success is really beside the point. The Scuds themselves failed to perform well, except to bring terror. By bringing relief from terror to the people in Israel, the Patriots succeeded magnificently. The relief was important enough to allow the release of Tom Olsen and Mike Reavy to come back to run the air war, where they were sorely needed.

  On the downside, Israeli worries meant pressure on Schwarzkopf from Washington to start a ground war in the west just to shut down Scud attacks on Israel. This also would have been a terrible mistake, and a logistical horror.

  ★ Though efforts to halt Scud launches were never completely successful, neither were they futile. Flights of F-15Es and F-16s at night, and A-10s during the days, combed the desert Scud boxes (areas where Scuds could be successfully launched against a particular target, such as Tel Aviv). Though confirmed kills were few — and for the A-10s there were none — their pressure kept launches down. In time, the Iraqis risked their Scuds only when skies were overcast and U.S. aircraft couldn’t see them. January 25, when ten were launched, was the high-water mark for Scuds. After that, the average fell to about one per day (though during the last days of the war, Saddam used up his reserves, and launches increased).

  The A-10 search in the western desert was far from a total loss, for they discovered there an enormous unprotected storage area — munitions bunkers, tanks, APCs, and many other vehicles. What all that equipment was doing out there is a good question. Was Saddam preparing for an invasion to the west through Jordan into Israel? Or was this his idea of the best way to prepare for an Israeli attack against Baghdad? At any rate, the A-10s named the cache they’d found the “Target of God” and quickly turned it into a giant scrap heap. After the war, a high-ranking Iraqi confided to a Russian friend that 1,800 of Iraq’s 2,400 tanks were destroyed by air before the Desert Storm ground war. How much of that was destroyed by A-10s in the western desert is hard to say, yet it gives a sense of the enormity of Iraq’s war machine.

  Meanwhile, it was not U.S. aircraft, but Lieutenant General Sir Peter de la Billiere’s British special forces teams that had the greatest impact on Scud launches. Sir Peter had a long career in Special Operations, including service in the Middle East. His taciturn, calm, well-mannered demeanor masked a warrior ready to rip an enemy’s throat with a large knife.

  As de la Billiere was well aware, General Schwarzkopf had serious concerns about using special forces behind enemy lines, where they risked trouble that would require rescue by regular army forces (and perhaps start an unwanted battle). After somehow persuading the CINC that his worries were misplaced, Sir Peter approved several British Special Air Service Scud-hunting missions behind enemy lines.

  Chuck Horner never actually received a formal briefing about this operation. The Brits simply implemented it. One day an SAS officer showed up in the TACC and, without fanfare or cloak-and-dagger secrecy, started working with Horner’s people to coordinate the planning. “I’m going to send some lads up into western Iraq,” he explained. “How’s the best way for us to cooperate?”

  “That’s easy,” Horner’s planners said. “But aren’t you worried that our Scud-hunting aircraft might attack your guys by mistake?”

  “Actually, no,” he said. “My lads have to hide from the Iraqis. That’s far harder than hiding from a few high-flying jets. So if your folks find them, my folks are fair game.”

  The procedures they worked out were simple: his “lads” on the ground used handheld aircrew survival radios to communicate with U.S. aircraft — a very dicey business, because the Iraqis monitored the radio frequencies used by these radios and had extensive direction-finding equipment.

  As with aircraft, hard evidence of their Scud-killing success is slim, but Scud launches diminished; and the SAS troops certainly helped U.S. aircraft find launchers, as one data-recording videotape from an F-15E testifies: the world viewed on CNN a laser-guided bomb hitting what certainly seemed to be a Scud on a transporter erector vehicle. What CNN didn’t broadcast was the audio portion of that tape, in which a British SAS officer talked the fighter aircrew onto a Scud target. As he calmly directed the F-15, its crew spotted a missile much nearer his location than the one he’d seen, and they proceeded to put a 2,000-pound laser-guided bomb on the target. The resulting fireball was close enough to the Brit to singe his hair. The audio of their radio communication went something like this:

  SAS: “I say, Eagle II, I have a Scud located at the following coordinates,” which he read.

  Eagle II pilot: “Roger. Am one minute out, approaching your position from the south.”

  SAS: “Understand you will be making your run from south to north. The target is in a small wadi, running southwest by northeast. And I can hear you approaching the target.”

  Eagle II pilot: “Roger. We have the target and have bombs away.”

  Soon the aircraft’s laser was pointed at what appeared to be either a Scud or a tank truck filled with fuel just south of the SAS man. Then a very large bomb was headed through the air at near supersonic speeds. Just prior to impact, the SAS officer came on the air and said: “Understand you are bombs away. I’m observing some activity on the road just—”

  At that moment, the bomb hit, the fireball of the secondary explosion rolled over the SAS man, and the loudest “JESUS CHRIST!” ever transmitted on the airways interrupted what had been a cool, professional conversation. Fortunately, he was not injured, and the tape delivered more than a good laugh to the commanders in Riyadh. For Horner, it showed they were making progress in an otherwise frustrating job. For Schwarzkopf, this evidence of success took off some of the heat from Washington to start a ground war in the west.

  SAS operations in Iraq sometimes ran into difficulties. On one occasion, a three-man SAS team was captured by Iraqis. Two of the team managed to escape, while the third was beat up and tortured. Of the two who got away, however, only one trekked to safety in Syria; the other died of exposure (it was fiercely cold in Iraq). Later, from the man who reached Syria, the TACC planners learned the location of the torture site. That night, a pair of 2,000-pound bombs were dropped through its roof.

  ★ Some weeks after the SAS first went out to hunt Scuds, Major General Wayne Downing’s U.S. Special Operations force began to share those duties. This operation caused surprising friction with Horner’s TACC team. The problem, in Horner’s view, was their go-it-alone attitude and their emphasis on secrecy and rank:

  When a U.S. special forces colonel would come into our headquarters to brief an upcoming mission, he would have great difficulty discussing its details with anyone of subordinate rank. That’s fine unless you want to get the job done. The people who make decisions in air operations are often the majors and captains. You have to trust them.

  On one occasion, their secrecy nearly led to the shoot-down of some Special Operations helicopters, who neither informed the TACC of their operation or followed the rules laid out in the Air Tasking Order. Once they were in Iraq, they were detected by AWACS, then locked onto by eager F-15s. Lucki
ly, Mike Reavy, the senior director on duty, denied permission to fire while he desperately tried to confirm whether the target was hostile. At the last moment, the Special Operations liaison realized the helicopters were his, thus avoiding a terrible blue-on-blue engagement.

  On the ground, there is no better military force than U.S. special forces, but I pray they can lighten up a little and coordinate in the manner of the SAS.

  Another group of troopers who were vital to the war on Scuds got no medals and very little appreciation — the men and women of Space Command.

  Throughout the Cold War, U.S. deterrence strategy had relied on detecting an attack on the United States in sufficient time to launch retaliatory strikes. A cornerstone of this strategy was the Defense Support Program (DSP) satellites, huge cylinder-shaped objects in geosynchronous orbits. Each DSP had an infrared telescope that kept track of hot spots on earth. If the hot spot started moving across the earth’s surface, the satellite reported the event to the command center in Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado Springs. There, the men and women of the U.S. Space Command would evaluate the event to see if it was a threat to North America. Though the DSP had not been built to fight theater war, and was sensitive only to the high-intensity rocket plumes made by ICBMs, the wizards of space altered the computers in August 1990 to sort out the DSP data more finely. The Iraqi test firings in December proved this would work.

  Of almost equal importance for Horner’s people was knowledge of launch site locations.

  In the Cold War, once you knew an attack was coming from Russia, you had about all the information you needed, and this was about all DSPs would tell you. DSPs were not designed to project the accuracy required to attack a launch site with iron bombs. This was a serious deficiency that could never be totally overcome. Nevertheless, the contractor, TRW, and the military wizards of space had vastly improved the design by the time the guns started to shoot, and the DSP was able to give some rough idea of launch points.

  These modifications helped, but DSP’s greatest contribution to the war was to provide warnings of attack, so civil defense agencies could be alerted.

  Those in the TACC can never forget those chilling words, “Scud Alert!” In the early days of the war, the words ignited near panic; until the Patriots proved their worth, almost everyone donned chemical-biological protection gear and headed for a deep underground bunker.

  The “Scud Alert” warning also initiated actions in the air defense cell. First, the Army troops would inform their Patriot batteries; civil defense agencies would also be notified, so they could warn civilians to take cover. Then the AWACS display would light up, showing the approximate launch point, missile flight path, and probable impact zone. This information would be relayed automatically throughout the command-and-control network, so F-15 or F-16 pilots could be vectored toward the mobile launchers. At the affected Patriot batteries, systems would be checked to make sure they were ready for computer-initiated firing.

  Since to the DSP’s sensors B-52 strikes initially looked very much like a Scud launch, there was a quick check with the AWACS display to discover if the Scud attack was genuine. Once that was determined, Horner would watch CNN for a real-time live report.

  Though most Scuds did little damage, there were still bad moments. One that fell in Israel caused a large number of injuries, another destroyed the school attended by General Behery’s children, and another fell in the street outside RSAF headquarters (it was immediately attacked by souvenir hunters). A piece of molten metal from this Scud (or from the Patriot that intercepted it) burned a hole through the roof of the RAF administration building and dropped sizzling onto a desk where a pair of Brits were having a late-night cup of tea. Finally, and tragically, in the waning moments of the war, during a period when the Patriot battery defending the city was off-line, a Scud slammed into a warehouse in Dhahran where U.S. Army transportation troops were sleeping. Over twenty-five troops were killed and nearly a hundred injured — the largest numbers of allied casualties from a single Gulf War event. In fact, Scuds killed more U.S. troops than were killed in any single engagement during the eight months of war on the sea, six weeks of war in the air, and four days of war on the ground (a total of about seventy-five soldiers were killed by the Iraqis, and another seventy-five were killed by blue-on-blue).

  The failure to stop the Scud threat was Chuck Horner’s greatest Gulf War failure, the one area where airpower could not secure and maintain the military initiative.

  COLLATERAL DAMAGE

  A major and largely unsung obsession shared by Chuck Horner, his planners, the Coalition pilots, and the President of the United States, was to prevent needless civilian casualties — collateral damage, in the military euphemism. Military targets and military personnel were fair game, but ordinary Iraqis were not responsible for the criminal acts of their rulers. They had a right to live in safety, as far as humanly possible.

  Chuck Horner will never forget George Bush’s anguish in August at Camp David as he contemplated the deaths that would follow the decisions he’d been forced to make — an anguish, Horner is convinced, that was the right response to the actions he was taking. Horner himself has felt similar pain many times. The needless death of civilians had to be avoided.

  On the whole, Coalition airmen successfully followed this course. On two occasions, they failed:

  The first, simply, was a tragic mistake. During an RAF strike on a bridge, the guidance system of a laser-guided bomb failed, and the bomb fell into a nearby marketplace, killing or injuring several Iraqi civilians. Since the target was legitimate, and reasonable measures had been taken during an attack on a legitimate target, no blame could be attached to this tragedy.

  The second was more complicated — the attack on the Al-Firdus command-and-control bunker.

  In the planning for the offensive air campaign, a master target list had been created. The list included thirty-three targets designated as command-and-control centers, though what exactly they commanded and controlled was not totally clear. Number thirty on the list was the Al-Firdus bunker in Baghdad, which was initially scheduled to be struck on day three of the war, a day when many targets were scheduled to be hit. (Day-three targets tended to be the leftovers, after the really important targets were struck on the first two and a half days). In the event, Al-Firdus and the other thirty-two bunkers slipped in priority, as the demands of Scud-hunting, more time-sensitive targets, and weather were met.

  Still, in the eyes of the Black Hole planners, Al-Firdus remained a legitimate target of some importance to Saddam’s war machine. It was definitely constructed to house military command and control, and it was camouflaged, barb-wired, and guarded (though in truth, hardly anything in Iraq was not camouflaged, barb-wired, and guarded). What Black Hole planners did not know was that hundreds of Iraqi civilians were using the bunker as an air raid shelter.

  At last, after nearly four weeks of war, Al-Firdus made it to the top of the list. Planners proposed it for the night of 13–14 February; it was approved as legitimate by the lawyer in the plans shop who watched over the legal aspects of target selection (he could and did veto targets), and then it was approved by Schwarzkopf in the evening briefing.

  Chuck Horner reflects:

  In retrospect, I should have asked harder questions. For one, if we could wait almost a month to strike this bunker, what made it so important now? For another, how was the bunker actually being used to command Iraqi military forces? Since the real reason we were attacking the bunker was almost certainly the availability of F-117 sorties (we’ve got lots to spend; if we don’t use them, they’re wasted), I doubt that anyone could have given me a good answer to those questions. In the absence of a satisfactory answer, I could have erased that target from the list, and hundreds of Iraqi lives could have been saved and a terrible tragedy avoided. But all of that is hindsight. The reality is F-117s hit the Al-Firdus bunker, and we killed several hundred people.

  However, the questions I failed to ask aren�
��t the only questions that need asking here. For instance, why use the bunker as an air raid shelter? To the Black Hole planners and the F-117 pilots flying the missions, it is inconceivable that any Iraqi in Baghdad would want to be anywhere but in his own home during air attacks. American bombs did not hit family homes. Pilots were painstakingly careful to bomb only militarily significant targets. Their bombing was accurate.

  Of course, it wasn’t only American bombs that were falling out of the sky; thousands of artillery shells and hundreds of surface-to-air missiles were thrown up each night. All of that lethal stuff had to fall back to earth. In that case, maybe it made sense to seek shelter.

  And yet, other questions remain.

  When the other bunkers were struck, no civilian casualties were reported. Why did Al-Firdus and not the other thirty-two bunkers contain civilians? Did the local commander, in a goodwill gesture, invite locals into his bunker? Or did he suck up to his friends and superiors by offering them shelter not available to the average Iraqi? Who knows… except maybe Saddam?

  There is one certainty in war: you will always face uncertainty. The enemy does his best to hide the answers to any questions you might ask of him. He tries to tell you that he possesses nothing of value. If Saddam had announced that the Al-Firdus bunker was an air raid shelter, and not a command-and-control center, if he had painted a red crescent or red cross on the roof, would we have believed him? We would probably have asked more questions, but it’s likely that the bunker would still have been hit (though if we had known the truth, that target would not have appeared in the Air Tasking Order).