by Tom Clancy
It is hard to tell whether this incapacity was a Coalition success or an Iraqi failure… A similar answer, it turns out, has to be given to the larger question: How successful was the air campaign in denying Iraqi command and control of their forces? There’s just no way to know for sure.
For starters, no one has any idea how much Saddam even conferred with his generals, yet he was certainly able to convey to his Third Corps commander enough command information to initiate the invasion of Saudi Arabia in late January 1991 (the Battle of Khafji). Even so, the Coalition information and command-and-control advantage (thanks in large measure to the targeting of airpower by the Joint STARS aircraft) allowed a single brigade under the command of Khaled Bin Sultan to rout three Iraqi divisions.
The Iraqi failure at Al-Khafji raises larger questions for Chuck Horner:
Did we really want Saddam isolated from the battle? Given his lack of military experience, poor judgment, and micromanaging leadership style, perhaps we should have facilitated his presence on the battlefield in every way possible. Of course, that’s not the American way. We like to see others the way we look at ourselves, so cutting Saddam off from his forces in the field seemed the proper thing to do.
But this was not our worst mistake. That mistake was never asking ourselves “So what?” That is, we had no very good ideas about what to do after we’ d succeeded in cutting Saddam off from his forces in the field. Therefore, we continued to plan and conduct a ground campaign that did not fully exploit the success we’d achieved in denying the enemy the capacity to command his forces.
Thus, our fear of Iraqi reconnaissance aircraft caused us to delay moving the U.S. corps into their jump-off positions for the ground war until after the air war began. This caution proved unnecessary, and ignoring it could have speeded up our attack and made the war more efficient. Far more telling, however: when the battle for Al-Khafji made it apparent how thoroughly airpower could destroy Iraqi forces in the attack, why didn’t the Coalition leaders alter their ground campaign plans? And, for that matter, why didn’t the Iraqis alter their strategy after their ground forces proved to be helpless in the face of the aerial onslaught?
Though I cannot answer for the Coalition leadership, the Iraqis in February did in fact alter their strategy: they sought to end the war, offering to withdraw from Kuwait and renounce their claims to sovereignty there. (Their offer, of course, proved to be too little and too late.)
Meanwhile, the campaign to prevent the resupply of logistics to the battlefield proved to be very effective. The Iraqi Army had serious problems providing units in the field with sufficient food and water. On the other hand, efforts to deny resupply of ammunition had little or no impact, as the defeated army surrendered before expending large amounts of ammunition. The joke was, “Come to Kuwait if you want to buy an AK-47. They are like new, shot once, and dropped once.” In this war, we stopped ammunition from reaching the soldiers, but they had all they needed. After enduring six weeks of aerial bombardment, their strongest motive was surrender, not dying for Saddam.
In other words, perhaps our information-warfare attacks proved far more effective than Coalition leaders realized. And perhaps the Iraqi Army failed to maneuver in the face of our ground onslaught because our campaign to deny them intelligence had a far greater impact than we comprehended at the time. Certainly, despite our apparent success with the more traditional means to isolate the battlefield, we need to study this new form of warfare in far more detail to determine which works best — the classical or the new method of interdiction… or both together.
Isolating the battlefield, as General Schwarzkopf conceived it, had one other — perhaps surprising — goal. Not only did he intend to prevent food, ammunition, water, communications, or reinforcements from reaching the enemy; he also intended to prevent the Iraqi Army occupying Kuwait from getting out. Or, in the words of Colin Powell, “We are going to cut off the head of the snake, and then we are going to kill it.”
On the whole, airpower succeeded in that aim… at least in the open country, where roads and bridges were exposed. Airpower so successfully dropped the bridges across the rivers of southern Iraq that, years after the war, it was difficult to travel by car to the countryside. Where airpower did not succeed was in preventing the Iraqis from hiding many of their tanks and armored personnel carriers in the cities of southern Iraq. The only way to hit these from the air would have exposed the populations of the cities to widespread aerial attacks, and the Americans and their Coalition partners were not willing to do that. Attacking the cities from the ground was, of course, another option, but few Coalition leaders were eager to take that step when their stated goal was to eject the Iraqis from Kuwait.
KILLING TANKS AND ARTILLERY
From one point of view, battlefield interdiction is an accessory to battlefield preparation. Putting a wall between an enemy and his sources of sustenance and information obviously seriously restricts his ability to inflict harm on friendly ground forces. Though a number of other elements also fall under the overall rubric of preparing the battlefield, only one of these truly mattered to General Schwarzkopf: “Kill the tanks and artillery.” His reasons for this were simple, and doctrinally correct: tanks and artillery were the Iraqis’ likely means to inflict harm on friendly ground forces.
It was for this reason that plans called for half of the enemy tanks and artillery pieces to be destroyed by airpower before Coalition soldiers and marines crossed into Kuwait and Iraq. From the opening moments of the war, the Air Tasking Order called for strikes against the Iraqi Army in the KTO.
In the west, in front of VIIth Corps, the killing effort was more or less equally divided between tanks and artillery, with perhaps a slight tilt in the direction of the modern T-72 tanks of the Republican Guard. In the east, on the other hand, Walt Boomer wanted emphasis placed on Iraqi artillery. Once the ground war started, he believed he could handle the tanks he would be facing (which were for the most part obsolete), but the artillery would cause problems, especially when he was passing his force through the extensive minefields that lay ahead of him.
Despite the priority of this mission in the mind of the CINC, killing Iraqi tanks and artillery got off to a slow start. In the early moments of the war, when most aircraft were directed to gaining control of the air, only a few sorties were available for tasking against KTO-based targets, and bad weather made it difficult for KTO-bound pilots to find Iraqi tanks and artillery without unnecessarily exposing their aircraft to enemy AAA and shoulder-fired SAMS. Worse, pilots had difficulty hitting their targets when they found them, since they were not used to initiating attacks at 10,000 feet or above. At those altitudes, strong winds often made a pilot’s roll-in unpredictable; it was a struggle to place his aircraft at the right position and speed for the weapons release.
Combat was proving a far cry from the shine-your-ass gunnery meets we had held in the United States, where the pilots were not being shot at, where they had been briefed on the winds affecting their bombing passes, where they were flying on familiar training ranges against familiar targets, and where they could press their attacks so close to the target that there was little opportunity for a bent fin or maladjusted release rack to make a bomb errant. In the meets, you expected the bombs to go inside the open turrets of the tanks; in Iraq you could hardly see where the tanks might be on the desert floor below.
Worst of all, after battling the weather, dodging enemy AAA fire, and straining to find their targets, attacking aircrews were often sent to the wrong place. Because target coordinates were derived from overhead photography that was hours and days old by the time it was received in Riyadh, all too often planes were sent out to kill tanks and artillery in locations the enemy had long since left. Though there were several efforts to speed the information flow, none of these really worked.
The solution, as we’ve already seen, was Killer Scouts — F-16s orbiting thirty-by-thirty-mile sectors of the battlefield and searching for dug-in tanks and
artillery. When they found them, they’d direct the oncoming streams of fighter-bombers to their targets.
★ A second addition to tank- and artillery-killing efficiency occurred in late January. By then, control of the air had been assured and the fixed targets in Iraq had been (for the most part) hit, thus allowing more and more F-111F and F-15E[64] sorties to be tasked against Iraqi Army targets. The tank-plinking tactics developed in the Night Camel exercises were now put to the test in the real world. The results were remarkable. On February 11, aircrews claimed 96 armored vehicles — tanks, APCs, and artillery; 22 of these were killed by “plinkers.” On the twelfth, film showed 155 killed; of these 93 were plinked by laser-guided 500-pound bombs. On the fourteenth, 214 were killed, and of these, 129 were “plinked.” The totals grew daily (except for those days when bad weather shrouded the battlefield).
Dollar for dollar, this was the way to kill tanks. If a single F-111F carried eight 500-pound laser-guided bombs at $3,000 each, then for less than $50,000 (which included most of the other costs of a sortie) eight tanks could be destroyed. In the U.S. Army, each tank costs in the neighborhood of $1,000,000. The Russian tanks used by the Iraqi Army cost about half that. So less than $50,000 worth of air offense killed over one hundred times as much ground offense.
COUNTERPUNCH
Not much has been said in favor of Saddam Hussein as a strategist, yet in fact his original strategy for the Gulf War was simple yet brilliant — at least on the face of it. The Iraqi dictator had paid close attention to the lessons of Vietnam. If the United States can lose a war once, he reasoned, they can lose a war twice, and he nominated Iraq for the honor of inflicting that loss. “What led to the defeat?” he asked himself. Casualties on the battlefield produced discontent on the home front. Battlefield carnage translated into television images that so horrified the folks back home that the President of the United States was driven from office, and the Americans left the field of battle undefeated, yet beaten.
With all that in mind, Saddam planned for enduring a short air campaign and a fierce land battle. His troops constructed formidable defensive positions, with minefields, fire trenches, and presurveyed fields of fire for his artillery. When the war came to Kuwait and southern Iraq, perhaps his poorly trained infantry divisions would die in staggering numbers; but in doing so, they would inflict thousands of casualties and deaths on the Americans. Once the Coalition forces had been weakened, they could then be defeated or brutalized by his heavy armor and Republican Guard divisions. And even if all these plans failed and he did not win on the battlefield, the television coverage of the bloodshed would ensure his victory in the streets of Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, and Washington.
Unfortunately for Saddam’s brilliant strategy, things didn’t work out the way he planned.
The war started and the air came, but the air did not cease (as Saddam said it would), and the ground forces failed to take the bait. Unexpectedly, the Iraqi Army was being destroyed from the air. They were totally naked to Chuck Horner’s armada and had no clue about how to fight back.
Saddam had to do something to regain the initiative and resurrect his failing strategy. Otherwise his defeat would be absolute, and his regime might be lost.
★ The first such attempt occurred during the mad rush of Iraqi jets to sanctuary in Iran toward the end of January.
One day, enemy fighters took to the air out of an airfield in eastern Iraq, and AWACS controllers vectored nearby USAF F-15s in CAP orbit toward the fleeing Iraqis. Nothing unusual. But as the air-to-air jets screamed north, a pair of bomb-laden Iraqi Mirage aircraft took off and headed south. Though the AWACS crew spotted this new threat, they could not recall the F-15s, who had their hands full chasing their prey to the north.
Next in line were two F-14s at a CAP point in the northern part of the Arabian Gulf. Because the F-14s were controlled by a Navy Aegis cruiser that would not release them to AWACS (possibly because the Aegis controller feared leaving the Navy naked to the Iraqi bombers that were headed in their general direction), the AWACS controller was unable to vector these interceptors onto the Mirages.
Meanwhile, the Mirages were now flying down the coast of Saudi Arabia, approaching the huge oil refinery south of Dhahran. Saddam surely hoped that by bombing the oil fields, he would bring pain to Saudi Arabia, the same way Coalition air was bringing pain to him. For example, the pumping stations in the refineries have huge one-of-a-kind valves that would take years to obtain. If the Mirages had been able to hit the maze of pipes in the refinery, they could have put the refinery out of action for a very long time.
Unfortunately for the Iraqis, the airborne shield protecting the Saudis was both thicker and tougher than they’d imagined. Waiting next in line to shoot them down were two Royal Saudi Air Force F-15s, USMC Hawk anti-aircraft missile sites, Royal Saudi Air Defense Hawk missile sites, and U.S. Army Patriot missile sites. All of them were closely following AWACS data, and waiting for orders to engage the bandits.
The first of these was Captain Shamrani, the RSAF flight leader. Shamrani took a single vector from the AWACS controller, selected afterburner, and threw his jet into a hard, descending right-hand turn. This screaming dive ended in a roll-out over the water just off the coast. Now headed south, he quickly spotted the Iraqi Mirages racing desperately toward their target. Then training took over, and he locked onto the Iraqi wingman, selected the middle position on his weapons switch, and listened to the warbling tone of his AIM-9L heat-seeking missile, which told him that the IR seeker in the missile had seen the target and was locked on. In scarcely a second, he identified the Mirage to AWACS and received permission to fire. His voice was excited but clear when he sent “Fox Two, kill” over the radio.
After easily avoiding the Mirage blowing up ahead of him, Shamrani rolled his jet sharply to the right to line up on the Iraqi leader.
Seemingly unaware of his wingman’s demise or of the deadly threat behind him, the Iraqi leader drove on toward his target. This time there was no need to identify the target or request clearance to fire. Once he had his missile tone, Shamrani pressed the red button on top of his control stick and hit the toggle switch on the throttle to tell his wingman, AWACS, and anyone else listening in, “Fox Two, kill.”
Scratch one Iraqi hope.
But they were not finished yet. Far from it.
Saddam’s most impressive attempt to regain the initiative and make his strategy work occurred late in January 1991, when he invaded Saudi Arabia.
His thinking was this: Air was killing him; and Coalition ground forces were surprisingly reluctant to impale themselves on his defenses. So, he thought, I’ll bring the battle to them. If I invade Saudi Arabia, the Coalition will have to counterattack. If that jump-starts the ground war, and the Americans rush into my defenses, then I “win”… insofar as American soldiers would die in great numbers. (It should be noted that at that point Gary Luck’s deception operation had lots of radio traffic coming out of an area just south of Al-Khafji, leaving the Iraqis under the impression that the XVIIIth Airborne Corps was poised to attack from there. In fact, the corps was already in transit west to their actual attack locations.) If my invasion succeeds, Saddam continued, then I “win,” because I can attack the Egyptians and Syrians near KKMC. That should inflict chaos on some of the Americans’ Arab lackeys. And who knows where that will lead?
The downside for Saddam was to continue to be destroyed from the air and certain defeat. His next decision was a no-brainer.
★ As a side note: because Saddam’s hopes for his invasion of Saudi Arabia were so resoundingly dashed, several commentators have imagined that the Iraqis could not have been really serious about it — that, in other words, the invasion was not an invasion but a “probe.”
For their “probe,” they used three divisions, one armor and two mechanized infantry, including their 5th Mechanized division, one of their finest armor units (it was considered just below the Republican Guard).[65] Though exact numbers are not
available, in all probability these three divisions contained something in the neighborhood of 20,000 troops (and perhaps as many as 40,000), a sizable force.
Meanwhile, Saddam himself thought the probe — or invasion — was of no small importance. After learning that his troops had entered the town, he announced that the attack was “the beginning and omen of the thundering storm that will blow on the Arabian Desert.”
Chuck Horner will take up the story from here.
AL-KHAFJI
The town of Al-Khafji lies on the coast of the Arabian Gulf in the eastern province of Saudi Arabia, approximately ten kilometers south of the Kuwaiti border on the highway connecting Dhahran and Kuwait City. With no more than ten to fifteen thousand inhabitants, it can’t be called big; nor does it have any real reason for existence other than as home for civil administration and a place to buy supplies. In this respect, it is not unlike many small rural towns in our own desert Southwest. On the north side of town, there is a modest desalinization plant. On the south is a modest oil-storage area. If you want a real oil-storage area, fly over Ras Turnira south of Al-Khafji, where you can see hundreds of giant oil-storage tanks. All in all, this little desert outpost has nothing very spectacular to offer — other than that the most important ground battle of the Gulf War was fought there.
Though the battle of Al-Khafji started in the late afternoon of 29 January 1991 and ended midday on the thirty-first, the lead-up to the battle started several months earlier.
Late one night in early August, Prince Khaled, John Yeosock, and I were having a war council. It had been a terrible day of rumors and fears — twenty-seven Iraqi divisions were poised on the border, and we had no means to stop them. Our discussion involved strategies for using the 82d Airborne Division, the Saudi National Guard, and airpower to stem the Iraqi attack, should it occur. During the meeting, Khaled kept making the point that his orders from the King were to make certain that no part — not one inch — of Saudi soil would fall to the invader. That included the town of Al-Khafji.