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

by Tom Clancy

  Finally, Buster gets up and briefs the forthcoming air campaign. This goes well, because that is the way it should go. A lot of thought and effort have gone into our planning and presentation. If either Buster or I sense we are heading toward a possible train wreck, we avoid it by softening the briefing.

  Toward the end, we come to the KTO targeting. At this point, Buster takes out a notebook; we know we are going to get new guidance. Without any bluster (other than to ask who was the dumb SOB who nominated these targets, at which John Yeosock winces), the CINC turns to a map on his right and points to the Iraqi divisions he wants struck. Not a problem, as they are all in the same general locale, and the flyers are going to strike what is hot anyway, based on Killer Scouts, Joint STARS, or newer intelligence.

  The meeting finishes with a swing around the table, to give each of the top commanders a chance to speak. And then Schwarzkopf does some schmoozing with the foreign officers — a reinforcing-the-Coalition sort of thing.

  If I need to discuss anything with him, I will ask for time in his office after the meeting. If it is a small matter, we take care of it in quiet whispers right there. This drives the staff crazy, because they want in on what I am telling him; but I have learned never to talk to him in front of anyone, as it forces him to agree, or worse, disagree. Once it is public, you have great difficulty walking the cat back.

  After the meeting breaks up, Buster often stays behind to work with the CENTCOM staffers. He has spies in place there gathering information that will concern tomorrow night’s presentation. This is serious business, and we take it seriously.

  ★ 2230 Back in the TACC. Deptula is already working the changes from the CENTCOM meeting. He probably had them reworked before the meeting took place, as we have become good at anticipating the CINC, and feed in those decisions we want changed, so the ones we don’t want changed will not suffer.

  Now it’s fun time. The Iraqis are on the move, relocating their vehicles, scaring the Army strung out along Tapline Road, or shooting Scuds. The place heats up.

  Event One: Joint STARS reports a small column of twenty armored vehicles moving in the vicinity of Jabar airfield in south central Kuwait. Solution: divert a flight of IR Maverick A-10s. They work with Joint STARS, find the column, and hit the lead and tail vehicle. Once these are ablaze, the column is halted, and F/A-18s, F-16s, and more A-10s finish off the survivors.

  Event Two: We get reports that the Iraqis are attacking in the vicinity of Listening Post 11.

  “Intel, what do you have?”

  “Nothing.”

  “No signals?”

  “No.”

  “AWACS, do you see anything [such as helicopters]?”

  “No.”

  Twenty minutes of “What the hell is going on?” follow, until we realize that it is some of our troops who went sightseeing into Kuwait to check out the wire and mine fields and decided to come home another way (which is code for they got scared and lost, but managed to find a way out).

  Event Three: Intel shows a Scud en route to western launch boxes. “Get F-15Es on that.”

  They attack four large vehicles with 500-pound bombs and CBUs, and the targets blaze in the night sky. It all probably means that four Jordanian families have lost their fuel-truck-driving fathers on the highway between Baghdad and Amman. Sorry, but they need to stay off the road. It’s dangerous out there.

  Event Four: AWACS calls out that an Iraqi helicopter is in the west near the Saudi border and headed west. Two F-15Cs call tally and are cleared to fire by AWACS, since there is no friendly traffic fragged for that area.

  Reavy is skeptical, because the Iraqis have pretty much shown good sense about where and when they fly. Thinking it is probably a Special Ops mission, he calls the Special Ops liaison and tells him to get his ass into the TACC (Special Ops had a little private room of their own just outside the TACC).

  When the guy comes out, he says the helicopters are not his, and they can die as far as he cares.

  Mike Reavy still thinks something is wrong here and tells the major to get his ass back into his secret room to check.

  He comes out minutes later, pale as a ghost. They are Special Ops choppers, inbound to a drop zone.

  Event Five: The young lady on my left has stopped reading her romance novel and announces a Scud attack in a very loud but controlled voice. The room stirs, but holds off a response. I pick up the master attack list and look at the clock: 1235. Then I scan the TOT listings. Sure enough, there is a flight of three B-52s dropping on the Tawalkana Republican Guard. At 1236, there they are on the AWACS display.

  Fifty seconds later, the same young lady in the same very loud but controlled voice announces, “Disregard the Scud alert. False alarm.” (The DSP IR satellites had seen the intense heat across the earth made by a string of bombs and duly reported it to the ground station in Colorado. However, when the watts per steradian did not match the Scud profile loaded into the computer, the event was reported as an “anomaly,” which is space-geek talk for “hell if I know.”)

  In between events, I read my mail, lots of it, and I love it all — from Mary Jo, from friends, from people I’ve never met and probably never will. It is a lifesaver for all of us and a great source of energy.

  ★ It is now 0200 in the morning, and Tom is fully in charge. Things have quieted down, and I am very, very tired. I’ve already fallen asleep twice in my chair, but this is not an uncommon sight when things are slowing down and you have someone next to you who can fill in if needed. It’s not like guard duty.

  It’s time to haul my tail upstairs, put on the pistola and bulletproof vest, and head back out through the wall, talking calmly to all the guard posts en route. I do not want to get killed in this war.

  The apartment is dark, but I don’t bother to turn on the lights or hang up my uniform. I just place it over the chair and crash into the bed. Fortunately, there will be a clean bed and fresh underwear, thanks to the house boy, Chris from Sri Lanka. He is never there when I come and go, but he always picks up after me and keeps the laundry clean and ready.

  I will change fatigues in the morning, so I’ll get up a little earlier than usual. But then, since John is not sleeping here tonight, at least the phone won’t be ringing. I am asleep in seconds.

  13

  The Ten Percent War

  In February 1991, during the waning moments of the war, a debate went on in the White House about choosing a moment to cease hostilities. As Colin Powell reports in his autobiography, the debate ended when John Sununu suggested 0500 on February 28. That way the “war” would have lasted a hundred hours and could be plausibly named “The Hundred-Hour War.” And so it came about. It was a brilliant idea. The name had PR pizzazz.

  There was only one problem: the war did not last one hundred hours. The duration of the war — from mid-January to the end of February — was closer to a thousand hours. Sununu and the others in the White House were thinking of the ground war, of course — an easy misconception, but maddening to Coalition airmen, who bore such a large part of the burden of winning this war. To them, the ground effort was not a Hundred-Hour War, it was a Ten Percent War.

  This is not to say that the ground war was a waste or unnecessary — far from it — and as January turned into February, and February wore on, Coalition air devoted an ever-greater portion of their effort to preparing for it. The ground invasion of Kuwait was to come soon, everyone knew, but when? When was G day?

  The decision to start the ground war was based on the answers to three questions:

  1. Were the Iraqis beaten down enough to allow Coalition ground forces to attack with a minimum of casualties?

  2. Would the weather be favorable enough to allow air support?

  3. Were Coalition troops trained and logistically ready, and at their assigned starting-out locations?

  We’ll look at the answers to these questions over the course of this chapter.

  BEATING DOWN THE IRAQIS

  The answer to q
uestion one depended on three factors. First: battlefield preparation. How successful was Coalition airpower in reducing Iraqi armor and artillery? Second: The choice of which Iraqi units to hit, how hard, and when. (These two issues were related, but they were kept separate at CENTCOM and CENTAF, because of the understandable interest of Coalition ground units in the condition of the Iraqi units they themselves would be facing.) Third: PSYOPS. How successful were Coalition psychological-warfare efforts in undermining the morale of Iraqi ground forces? An army that has no taste to fight is an army that is beaten — even if they are equipped with state-of-the-art equipment in pristine shape.

  ★ Though air attacks had hurt Iraqi forces in the KTO before the beginning of February, the Iraqis were still a reasonably effective fighting force. February ruined them. The following summary is based on a Chris Christon report from February 10, 1991.

  In his view, initial attacks — primarily directed against the air defense system, Scud sites, infrastructure, leadership, and weapons research, development, and production facilities — had had no major impact on the Iraqi Army. Commanders and their staffs had proved very flexible in handling the difficulties that Coalition air attacks had imposed on their operations. For example, when air attacks cut telephone lines, the Iraqis used message carriers on motorcycles. When air disrupted their command-and-control networks (as part of the destruction of the centralized air defense system), the Iraqis developed work-arounds; and their command-and-control network remained effective, secure, and capable of supporting major military operations.

  On the front lines, they had adjusted their routines around the timing of air attacks, and for the first part of the war, the Iraqi Army found sanctuary at night. They were able to do this because the most capable Coalition systems for night attack — F-117s, F-111s, and LANTIRN-equipped F-15Es and F-16s — were tied up chasing Scuds or hitting fixed targets outside the KTO, which left the job of hitting the Iraqi Army at night mostly to A-10s, A-6s, and B-52s hitting area targets.

  All this changed in February, when most of the air effort was devoted to shaping the battlefield. For example, of the 986 bombing sorties scheduled for February 11, 933 of them were tasked to that mission. And here is how shaping-the-battlefield sorties were allocated by corps during the period from February 10 through February 12:

  Sample Sortie Allocations[69] (in percents)

  By mid-February, the total air campaign was well under way. Now the sorties against front-line forces were flying night and day. Now attacks on the Iraqi transportation system were starting to have effect, and enemy reports of food and water shortages began to filter into the intelligence system. Now the war was almost as boring as an airline schedule — except that it wasn’t passengers that were being delivered.

  What gave interest to this sea of monotony were the Scuds at night, combat losses, and the weather, which was a constant problem, as waves of low pressure swept down across Baghdad toward Basra.

  Meanwhile, the tank plinkers were bagging up to 150 tanks per night, which was the best news Chuck Horner could give General Schwarzkopf, who was by then engrossed with the details of the ground offensive plan. This last was in turn good news to Horner, because, first, it meant they were closer to going home, and, second, it meant that the CINC pretty much stayed out of Horner’s business, except for his nightly reorganizing of the target list of Iraqi Army units.

  The question remained: “When will the ground war start?” Part of the answer depended on accurate knowledge of BDA — bomb damage assessment. But here there was controversy. “Have we destroyed a third of the Iraqi tanks? Half? A quarter?” The desired number was 50 percent, but how close or how far Horner’s pilots were to attaining that number was a matter of dispute, according to the estimating body.

  A comparison of estimates gives insight into the confusion, the inter-agency bickering, and, in Horner’s words, “the slavish desire to count beans rather than estimate combat power” that surrounded what some call the great Battle Damage Assessment War. On February 23, in an effort to determine when to start the ground war, various intelligence agencies reported the following:

  Numbers (percent) of Reported Iraqi Equipment Losses

  Chuck Horner comments:

  Needless to say, such wide variance was not only fiercely debated between Washington and the theater, it turned into an ugly game of intelligence analysts’ one-upmanship. After the war, it was learned that JCS/CENTCOM numbers had been not too far off the mark. Based on this more accurate database, it appears that on or about February 23, the Iraqis had actually lost 48 percent of their tanks, 30 percent of their armored personnel carriers, and 59 percent of their artillery pieces.

  In the final analysis, the BDA controversy had nothing to do with the actual success achieved. For in the end it was not the intelligence agencies that would tell Generals Schwarzkopf and Khaled when to start the ground war, it was their gut feelings. Call it intuition, experience, judgment, whatever you like, that is what the commanders were stuck with when they made their life-or-death decision. The decision to send soldiers forward was the province of the commanders, Schwarzkopf and Khaled. That is where it belonged, and they got it right. If they had believed the BDA estimates from Washington, we would have delayed the ground war until after Ramadan. If they had believed their own intelligence count, they might have waited a little longer than they did and perhaps have given Saddam time to put together a diplomatic way to extract his army from the hell of the KTO. But they didn’t do either. In the end, they did what commanders are trained to do. They took the information available, judged it against standards of common sense, swallowed hard, and ordered the troops forward into uncertainty.

  In the absolutely final analysis, the ability of Coalition ground forces to defeat the Iraqi Army so rapidly and thoroughly may have had little to do with destroying tanks and artillery. There is powerful evidence from the 88,000 POWs that air’s most significant impact on Iraqi fighting strength was the destruction of morale.

  Morale was undermined in several ways. The isolation of the battlefield denied the Iraqi soldier food and water, but he was at the same time worn down by the incessant air attacks, and by the PSYOPS campaign that held out hope in the form of surrender. He was also effectively disarmed, because by the time the ground war started, he and his companions feared going near their vehicles — APCs, tanks, and artillery pieces, which air attacks had made death traps.

  So as the ground attack was sweeping the remnants of the Iraqi Army aside, intelligence analysts were still hunched over their overhead photographs of Iraq and Kuwait, trying to count individual tanks and artillery pieces; for these “accountants of war” had no other way to understand airpower, no other way to measure what had happened during the revolution in military actions that was Desert Storm.

  There was a second (and related) controversy in February — the prioritization of which units got bombed, when, and how much.

  The problem was complex. In order to make a correct determination, the status of particular Iraqi units had to be known with some accuracy. All of them had been bombed for weeks now, some more than others, and many had been seriously degraded. In some cases, Horner’s intelligence people knew the exact condition of a particular unit — often the units were severely debilitated by desertions and destroyed equipment. In other cases, it was anybody’s guess. (It’s doubtful that the Iraqi corps commanders had anything like a clear idea of the condition of their assigned forces.) Either way, the status of individual units often changed daily, just as the status of particular locations changed daily, as individual units moved back and forth, here and there (the Iraqi Army, Fred Franks has pointed out, was not skilled at maneuvering, but annoyingly they could and did shift unit locations).

  Just as in the BDA controversy, the various intelligence sources could not agree on the status of individual Iraqi divisions in the KTO. So the question remained: how much more work had to be done before a ground offensive could begin?

  �
� Meanwhile, each of the ground force corps commanders believed he alone was responsible for success. This is not a criticism. A prudent commander takes nothing for granted; after all, the lives of his troops are at stake. So each corps commander planned his war — his narrow slice of the battlefield — as if it was the only game in town. He didn’t worry about adjacent ground battles as long as the adjacent commander was doing his job, and no one’s flanks were exposed.

  Yet for Horner, demands on air now came from three to five directions (not including Schwarzkopf and Khaled). It was his responsibility, when building each day’s tasking order, to service each corps commander’s needs in accordance with the overall guidance set forth by Schwarzkopf and Khaled.

  Someone had to decide who got the most, who got the next most, and so on. Someone had to set target priorities, had to make a sequential listing of the Iraqi divisions that were to be bombed each day. In an ideal world this should have been a simple task. Of the approximately forty Iraqi divisions deployed in the desert, some were more important than others by virtue of their equipment, their location, or their current strength.[70]

  Their location proved to be the real thorn in Chuck Horner’s side. Each ground commander thought the Iraqis in his own battle space were the most important Iraqis. Though each corps commander was aware of the CINC’s guidance and general battle plan, each still had to win “his war” on his own.

  In practical terms, things worked this way:

  Walt Boomer in the east coordinated his offensive plan with the Islamic corps on his right, the Eastern Area Command, and with the one on his left, the Northern Area Command. For his part, Boomer was generally confident that the targets of immediate concern to him would be serviced, because USMC aircraft were collocated with him and had limited range. Boomer’s enemy was going to get bombed, simply because the basing and design of Marine air vehicles, such as the AV-8B Harrier, left little other choice. This was in itself fine, until we consider that Boomer faced the largest number of Iraqis, but with aircraft that were the least capable in payload, range, and use of precision munitions.