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

by Tom Clancy

  Unfortunately, not only was the town well within the range of Iraqi artillery, but we did not have the means to prevent its capture. Fortunately, Khaled sensibly realized that the town was a liability; and it was agreed that it should be evacuated. In that way, we would be able to create the free-fire zone that would allow us to attack the Iraqi invaders with air and artillery without the extensive coordination needed to protect friendly civilians and military. It was a tough decision, for Khaled, in effect, had to reject the guidance he had received.

  He did the right thing, and from that time on, Al-Khafji became little more than a ghost town.

  Not totally, however.

  The town was located in the area of responsibility of the commander of the Eastern Area Command, Major General Sultan Sultan Adi al-Mutairi. After the evacuation, General Sultan placed screening forces near the town, as well as a small troop in the town itself, to protect property until the crisis was over. He also had a significant force approximately fifty kilometers south of Al-Khafji.

  Most of Sultan’s forces were Royal Saudi Land Force mechanized infantry and Saudi National Guard mechanized forces. Also under his command were mechanized forces from Qatar, and infantry from Oman, the United Arab Republic, Kuwait, Morocco, and Senegal. Rounding out this force was a sizable force of Saudi marines.

  To the west of Sultan was the area of responsibility of Walt Boomer’s United States Marine Corps — two divisions, augmented by a division of British armor (later replaced by the U.S. Army Tiger Brigade).

  Very significantly for what was to come later, in November Boomer had concluded that he could not support offensive operations into Kuwait with the logistics setup created for the defense of Saudi Arabia (though Walt Boomer is a genius, he has to be a little crazy). At any rate, he built his logistics stockpiles just south of the Kuwaiti border, north of his own defenses. In effect, he took a big risk on the supposition that we would be ordered to attack into Kuwait after the first of the year, and the now heavily dug-in Iraqis would not be coming south into Saudi Arabia. He was half right.

  ★ To fully understand the Battle of Khafji, we need to understand that it was not a single battle but four. Let me explain:

  Battle One was the battle for the town itself — the fight the world watched on CNN.

  Battle Two was the skillful and desperate struggle by the U.S. Marines to protect their naked storage depots out in the desert. (As it happened, the Iraqis did not know they were there. If they had, they would likely have put real punch into an attack in that direction, and quite possibly have damaged the allied cause.)

  Battle Three was our air attacks on the Iraqi divisions forming up to attack Khafji. Overhead, Joint STARS watched these movements and directed hundreds of sorties against them: tank-killing A-10s with Mavericks; the AC-130 on the coast highway, killing a vehicle every ten to thirty seconds; B-52s bombing the “Kuwaiti National Forest” (so called by the pilots because in that part of the desert the Kuwaitis had been trying to grow scraggly trees that could live on the brackish water under the sand), where the Iraqis had been forming up — and trying to hide — for the attack; F-16s and F/A-18s dropping cluster bombs on the lead and tail vehicles of convoys so the burning vehicles blocked the road and trapped all the rest of the tanks, trucks, and artillery pieces; AV-8s and AH-1s strafing the Iraqis as they fled back across the border.

  Battle Four was the battle that never happened — the movement of the Iraqis to position for another attack elsewhere, such as down the Wadi al Batin against the Egyptians and Syrians near KKMC. If the Iraqis had succeeded in engaging the Egyptians and/or the Syrians, it would have given us — to put it mildly — major headaches. Because the Iraqis, the Egyptians, and the Syrians often used the same equipment — Russian tanks versus Russian tanks — we would have had a very difficult time deciding which one to kill. And because there were few English-speaking FACs, we would have had a very difficult time sorting out the good guys from the bad guys. The possible results: lots of casualties and Iraqi forces astride the Tapline Road, the single highway connecting the coast and the west. Its possession would have allowed the enemy to prevent movement west of the U.S. VIIth and XVIIIth Corps to their attack positions.

  To make matters more complicated, we were at that point very unsure about how well the Arab forces would fight when the crunch came.

  In the event, the Saudis did extremely well at Khafji, and later during what has been misnamed the Hundred-Hour War. But it was their country and their king. Would the Egyptians and Syrians be similarly motivated? No one knew.

  In hindsight, Battle Four may have been the one Saddam should have put all his chips on (though, in fact, if he’d tried it, he still didn’t have a chance because of the battlefield situational awareness Joint STARS gave us). A dug-in army is tough to kill; an army on the roads is a piece of cake.

  To summarize: Battle Three was the key to winning Battles One and Two, and to never having to fight Battle Four.

  ★ As early as the twenty-fifth of January, we began to see glimmers that told us something was up.

  First, Brigadier General Jack Leide, the CENTCOM J-2, warned of activity by the Iraqi IIId Corps commander, Lieutenant General Salah Abud Mahmud. (We would get to know him better in March, when he showed up at Safwan to surrender the Iraqi Army.)

  About the same time, the Kuwaiti resistance leader, Colonel Ahmed Al-Rahamani, hiding in Kuwait City with a suitcase satellite telephone, phoned the TACC and relayed to the Kuwaiti Air Force duty officer, Colonel Samdan, that some generals were meeting in Kuwait City in an hour.[66] Based on the address provided by Colonel Rahamani, Chris Christon used aerial photographs of the neighborhood to pinpoint the meeting’s location. Christon and Buster Glosson immediately examined further evidence provided by CENTCOM, the Kuwaiti resistance, and our own intelligence; and when they were satisfied that this was a valid target, they tasked some of Tom Lennon’s F-111s to pay a call. Soon, four 2,000-pound laser-guided bombs were knocking on the door. A moment later, a massive ball of fire consumed the house and a flock of Mercedes-Benzes parked in the nearby parking lot. I never learned who was at the meeting or what they were planning.

  Then, on the twenty-ninth of January, Chris Christon informed me that several FROG (Free Over Ground Rocket) units had deployed into Kuwait, in his view a tip-off that the Iraqis would attack sometime during the next two weeks. He was the only one I know who even came close to predicting the attack (though he missed the date). That night, Iraqi lead elements entered Al-Khafji.

  Despite the hints, we were surprised.

  Suddenly, thousands of Iraqi soldiers, thinking the night had made them invisible, began to move out of their dug-in defensive positions and mass for the attack.

  Because of all the unforeseeable possibilities, an army in transit is an army ill at ease. Units can take the wrong road and arrive at the wrong place, vehicles can break down and fail to arrive in time to support the attack, weather can turn order into confusion. But never before had an army moving to the attack faced what this army was about to face. Because it was moving, it could be seen on the Joint STARS radar. Because it could be seen, it could be targeted and attacked. And because it was out in the open, jammed on narrow roads without shelter or camouflage, it was going to die. The Iraqi generals trusted that darkness would hide their movement, but the reality of modern technology left them naked to massive doses of death, destruction, and terror from the air. It was any ground commander’s worst nightmare.

  As the convoys started their march south to the Saudi border, Joint STARS picked them up. Within moments A-10, F-16, B-52, AC-130, AV-8, and F/A-18 aircraft were diverted from other targets to attack the moving Iraqi Army, and the battle grew in intensity as more and more tanks, APCs, and trucks took to the highways leading to Al-Khafji.

  Moments later, the large and orderly movement of Iraqi forces into Saudi Arabia had been turned into chaos. A-10s had bottled whole convoys of tanks on roads by killing the lead and the trailing vehi
cles; they then methodically set each vehicle in between on fire — and lit up two- to five-mile stretches of road like day. As Maverick missiles turned the stalled vehicles into fiery infernos, Iraqi soldiers ran into the desert to save their lives.

  The Iraqi Army had been intent on surprise, and they had achieved it; but surprise did them no good. The ground commander had launched his attack against Saudi Arabia and was preparing to reinforce his attack when he ran up against a menace that was not in his script — hundreds of aircraft dropping thousands of lethal munitions on his forces.

  On the ground, Battles One and Two erupted almost simultaneously.

  To the west of the road to Khafji, the lead elements of the mechanized division the Iraqis had placed on their right flank to screen their main attack ran into company-size Marine elements near the huge storage area just south of the Kuwait border. Instantly concluding that the attack was directed at the thousands of tons of food, fuel, ammunitions, and petroleum stored in the open desert, the Marines sent armored personnel carriers, aided by close air support aircraft, against the Iraqi units and beat them back decisively. Though the fighting was fierce (several Marines were killed), it was not sustained, as the Iraqis had no intention of making this (Battle Two) the decisive battle.

  To the east, Battle One got under way when the lead elements of the Iraqi main force (an armored and a mechanized division) entered Al-Khafji.

  The problem faced by the Eastern Area commander, General Sultan, was figuring out how to engage and defeat this unknown-size second battle force (and recall that the Iraqi Army had been often portrayed as battle-tested, hard, and experienced, while his own modest force had never experienced combat).

  Meanwhile, Battle Three had already started when Jim Crigger, on his own hook, started diverting air into Kuwait. Since the Iraqis would move only at night, this battle had to be conducted at night; and since the weather started to close in on the twenty-ninth, our air attacks had to be conducted at low altitude under the clouds rather than at the far-preferred medium altitudes.

  On the ground, close support of EAC forces became the responsibility of the USMC Direct Air Support Center at Walt Boomer’s headquarters, while in the air, the C-130 Airborne Direct Air Support Center command-and-control aircraft was used for this purpose. The TACC flowed or diverted air to the DASC or into Kuwait as fast as it could be targeted. The pace of the air battle was once again dictated by the pace of the tactical air control system’s management of the air.

  Later that night, the USMC launched a night-capable TV-equipped drone. As the unmanned aircraft crossed the border, it transmitted pictures of dozens of Iraqi armored personnel carriers lined up behind the earthen berm that marked the border between Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.

  When the pictures showed up in my headquarters, I began to understand the warnings we had been receiving during the past few days.

  Next, a team of B-52s and A-10s were tasked to bomb the “Kuwaiti National Forest” just north of the Kuwait border. The B-52 strike (filmed by the A-10s) went in first. As the bombs walked through the rows of trees, armored vehicles moved in all directions, fleeing for their lives. Moments later, the A-10s began their attack, carefully picking which target to destroy.

  Later, as I watched the film, I noted that the A-10 guys preferred to lock onto and destroy the tanks and APCs that continued to move. Perhaps, I mused, the Warthog drivers thought that was the sporting thing to do — to shoot fleeing vehicles rather than the sitting ducks whose crews had fled on foot. But then I noticed more A-10s arriving to clean up the sitting ducks, and that theory flew out the window. Blazing fuel and exploding ammunitions turned night into day.

  Early in the morning of 30 January, Major General Sultan took a force of Saudi and Qatari armored vehicles to the west side of Khafji. When he found Iraqi armor there, he engaged it, destroying some tanks and APCs and capturing an Iraqi officer and several dozen troops (even then the Iraqis were anxious to surrender). Questioning of the captives revealed that two Iraqi battalions were in the town. This information, coupled with earlier reports that more than fifty armored vehicles were also heading toward Khafji, led General Sultan to withdraw until close air support could be secured and a more comprehensive plan of attack could be drawn up.

  As daylight broke, the pace of all three battles slowed down. The Iraqis stopped moving; the Saudis withdrew; the USMC began to convoy forces into the desert to the west of Khafji; and our air attacks in Kuwait, while hardly slow or routine, lacked the intensity that occurred every night when the F-117s hit Baghdad, and the Scud hunt and Scud-launching heated up.

  Late that afternoon, I was in the TACC with Lieutenant General Ahmed Al Behery, the Royal Saudi Air Force commander, watching the battle over Kuwait unfold. The phone was handed to Behery, who said a few words on channel two (Arabic), then handed the phone to me: “Chuck, it’s Khaled.”

  “Khaled, hello, where are you?” I asked.

  “Chuck, this is Khaled,” he answered; and then, forcefully, “I’m at Khafji. And I need air.”

  “Khaled, how in the hell did you get to Khafji?”

  “Chuck,” he replied, “we have a battle up here, and I need air, lots of air. I need B-52s.”

  When a ground general says he needs B-52s, you know he’s in trouble. You know he wants an instant solution to a severe problem. As he spoke those words, I glanced up at the AWACS display, which showed flight after flight heading toward southern Kuwait.

  “You’re going to get lots of air, Khaled,” I replied in my best bedside manner.

  “No, Chuck, you don’t understand. I need air!” Khaled pleaded, with all the intensity and sincerity his voice could produce.

  I whipped out the line airmen have used for decades. “Trust me, Khaled, you’re going to get more air than you ever knew existed.”

  “No, Chuck, I need air,” he repeated.

  As a matter of fact, his anxiety had more behind it than I thought. He did need air.

  Though it was true that all available air was being funneled to defeat the Iraqi attack, I was unaware that we had no way to control close air support sorties at Al-Khafji, since, as I learned later, the Marine air controllers who should have been doing that were just then trapped and hiding in the town. The USMC had two ANGLICO (air and naval gunfire liaison company — Marine for forward air controller) teams of five men whose job was to contact the USMC DASC and coordinate and control CAS or artillery fire. These two teams were hiding on a rooftop in Al-Khafji.

  Hundreds of sorties were arriving over Khafji, but when they were unable to contact any controlling agency or forward air controller, they just moved north a few miles and continued to pummel the Iraqi forces trying to reinforce the lead elements in Saudi Arabia.

  The Marines’ inability to control close air support at Khafji did not please Khaled. Other Marines to the west could have been sent east to handle that. But this did not happen, in Khaled’s view, for the following reasons:

  1. The Marines feared they’d hit the Saudi forces — liaison between Marines and Saudis being at best limited.

  2. They felt their air was best employed as a combined arms element with their own ground forces and should not be deployed to the east where few of their organic forces were engaged.

  3. And anyhow, they were in a big fight out to the west against a mechanized division, and needed all the air they could get.

  While I’m sure all of these to some small extent guided Walt Boomer’s decision, the single most important factor remained: the Marines assigned to provide command and control for close air support to the Saudis were just then surrounded by hundreds of armed Iraqis.

  I am absolutely certain that Walt Boomer would have given Khaled all the CAS his team could use; unfortunately, the means for Khaled to request and execute close air support was at that time avoiding capture.

  After I had once again assured Khaled that he would get more air support than he could imagine, I learned how he’d come to be in Khafji in the firs
t place. When word of the Iraqi invasion broke, he was on his way to Dhahran to give a medal to Captain Shamrani, the RSAF F-15 pilot who’d shot down the two Iraqi Mirages. He’d immediately had his aircraft diverted and joined Major General Sultan.

  As he was speaking, other thoughts were running through my mind.

  From early August, Khaled had been emphasizing his long-held resolve that when it came down to the crunch, Saudi blood must be the first spilled in the defense of the Kingdom. It was a matter of honor that Saudi military forces do more than their share in defense of their land. Yes, he appreciated the support of the Coalition. Yes, he appreciated the almost overwhelming force from the United States. But when the war was over, it must be clear to all that the Saudis had performed on the battlefield in a manner that brought honor and pride to King and country. Until the Iraqi invasion of the Kingdom at the end of January, the war had been all airpower, and the blood spilled had been U.S., Italian, and British blood — which is not to say that the RSAF had proved wanting. The RSAF had performed magnificently, but no Saudi aircraft had yet been lost. Now it looked as though Khaled’s long-held resolve was about to be fulfilled, and if he wasn’t careful, it might well be his own royal blood.

  I wanted to tell Khaled to be careful; he was far more important as a live leader then a dead hero. But there was also a sixteen-year-old kid in me that couldn’t resist adding to my promises of air support:

  “Oh, Khaled,” I said just before we said goodbye.