by Tom Clancy
Fred Franks’s VIIth Corps (including a British division), to the left of the Northern Area Corps, was designated the main attack, because their job was to outflank Kuwait and plunge into the Republican Guard and Iraqi heavy armored divisions. Franks justifiably wanted most of the air to go against these well-equipped divisions, for there the fighting should be the fiercest.
Though the other U.S. and Islamic corps commanders doubtless agreed with him, the lives of their troops were as valuable as the lives of VIIth Corps and British troops; and therefore, they were not about to be submissive when it came time to argue for air. Gary Luck’s XVIIIth Airborne Corps and the French forces in the far west had the big job of driving farther north into Iraq than the other corps, and then swinging to the right and fighting farther east. Though they had the fewest enemies per mile of travel, they had the most miles of travel. Like the other commanders, Luck wanted his share of the air.
On top of all of this, John Yeosock’s Third Army headquarters oversaw Franks’s and Luck’s planning efforts, with Yeosock’s G-3, Brigadier General Steve Arnold, being the man in the middle between the corps commanders and Schwarzkopf. Arnold’s job was to argue Franks’s and Luck’s case against the requirements of the two Islamic corps, represented by C3IC’s Paul Schwartz and Abdullah al-Shaikh, and Schwarzkopf’s other component commander, Walt Boomer.
In point of fact, John Yeosock should have been the man to work the problem out, but he did not command the two Islamic corps (who were under Khaled) or the USMC ground forces (the U.S. ground component commander was Schwarzkopf, remember). There is no doubt in my mind that John Yeosock would have been a superb ground commander, and there is no doubt in my mind that Walt Boomer could have worked for John with the same respect and loyalty he showed the CINC. Finally, there is no doubt in my mind that Paul Schwartz and al-Shaikh at C3IC could have worked with John Yeosock. Yet this was not to be. So we remained in some ways a debating society for air until the evening meeting with Schwarzkopf, when he would decide how much air would be tasked against which Iraqi division two days hence.
The debate was a waste, and never-ending, because some corps commanders were never satisfied with what they were getting and could never accept some kind of rational harmonizing of their needs with those of the other commanders. More important, they could never accept that the Air Force was not under their control. We wanted to service their genuine needs, but we stopped being a branch of the Army fifty years ago. What they could — and should — have done was send in their target nominations and accept whatever they got. If they had a specific need, all they had to do was tell the BCE, and if it made sense they would have gotten it. On the other hand, since the CINC made the final decisions about targets, it was all a tempest in a helmet.
On February 4, an attempt was made to end the logjam among corps commanders. The DCINC, Cal Waller, would develop the prioritized target list, a list that would take into account the needs of all ground components.
The idea was that he would draw up the list of targets. Then the combined Coalition staff in the Black Hole would apply air expertise to determine what could and could not be hit. Then the list would return to the DCINC for approval, after which point the ATO would be cut.
Brigadier General Mike Hall, Horner’s liaison with Cal Waller for this program, would work up a seventy-two-hour rolling target list, based on the requirements of the combined divisions, as modified by their corps headquarters, as modified by the Third U.S. Army, C3IC, and the USMC component. Thus, on a normal day, Waller’s prioritized list would send about 1,000 sorties to strike Iraqi Army units. Buster Glosson’s targeteers would meanwhile continue to work up targets outside the KTO, and these would be serviced by sorties taken off the top, usually by F-117s, F-111s, and half the F-15Es (the rest continued to hunt Scuds).
This should have worked, but it didn’t, and Chuck Horner never expected it would, since he never imagined that Waller would be able to bring into harmony the various corps demands.
Soon after the system was set up, Colonel Clint Williams, Waller’s point man on the effort, relayed to the duty officer in the TACC that the DCINC was unable to come up with a list.
Colonel Dave Schulte, the head of the BCE, was tasked with finding out what was holding things up, and he immediately set out to find out how the ARCENT target list was built. Colonel Schulte spent five hours with the ARCENT Deep Operations shop, where he learned that the VIIth and XVIIIth Corps representatives received and worked their target inputs differently, primarily because each used different software to track Iraqi forces and analyze the target nominations.
But the real problem remained. The representatives from each corps — usually majors — were unable to stop fighting among themselves over air. Each thought he was responsible for grabbing as much for his corps as he could (it was thought of as a zero-sum game), and Waller wasn’t strong enough to bring sense and system to the situation, or to get the majors organized and working in harmony. That’s why I offered to let Waller build the list in the first place. Because I felt he couldn’t do it, and Baptiste and Welch were doing fine as it was, especially since Schwarzkopf made the final decisions anyway.
Meanwhile, a Captain Simms had done what he could to bring order to the building of the priority lists, and had tried to come up with a fair and reasonable way to allocate target selection. His system was to rotate the nominations from each corps on a 5-3-2-2 weighted basis. That is, each list had five ARCENT targets first, followed by three VIIth Corps targets, and two each XVIIIth Airborne Corps and Northern Area Command targets. The next five would come from the ARCENT list, and so on. Any priority among targets was made by the unit nominating it.
At least it was a list. If the Army was happy with it, then I was happy with it. But they weren’t. The corps commanders wouldn’t accept Simms’s system of priorities.
The target priority controversy continued after the war. Various war councils were held, lessons learned were published, and a variety of doctrinal documents were drafted. The goal of these councils was to increase the voice of the ground commanders over where, when, and how air was used. Their basic premise was that the joint force air component commander would misuse his office, ground would not control the air, and air would not be used properly. It made little difference that Desert Storm was a success by most every measure. That aberration was simply the result of the friendship and trust between Yeosock, Boomer, Arthur, and Horner.
Well, let me tell you, this doctrinal bickering is horse manure. First of all, in Desert Storm we had one ground commander for each of the two forces, and they approved every target. Their names were Schwarzkopf and Khaled, and they trusted their air component to organize a daily air campaign, which they reviewed as land component commanders, and then as CINCs either changed or approved. Though all the subordinate ground commanders had their say in the process, they had to understand that they were not in charge of the air effort — or, for that matter, of the ground effort. They could not own the air, and it stuck in their craw.
Secondly, all subordinates in a war must understand that no joint force commander wants to lose. He hopes to use air, land, sea, and space assets in a way that will bring victory on the battlefield. So back in the Pentagon, quit writing doctrine that is a compromise between the way each separate service wants to fight wars, because they don’t fight wars. Unified commanders and their allied commanders (in Desert Storm, Schwarzkopf and Khaled) are in charge. If we follow the doctrines of compromise published by the services and the Joint Staff, we will end up with “war fought by committee”—a sure loser.
I thank God Schwarzkopf was in charge in the Gulf, because there was no wondering about which service doctrine was going to prevail. There no component would dominate the planning. This was not Vietnam, where the Pentagon warriors dictated targets, tactics, and procedures. We were a team with one vision of what needed to be done. It is true that we had to muddle along as we figured it out (as was the case in identifying Iraqi
Army target priorities); but I knew we would get the job done, however we decided to do it, because the CINCs were in charge, and the components respected and trusted each other.
PSYCHOLOGICAL WARFARE
Psychological warfare has been an element in all combat, and its importance in warfare will inevitably grow, as skill grows in influencing the moods, motives, and will of others. The range of psychological influence has also grown with the range of media influence. Vietnam was not lost on the streets of American cities, but it’s hard to find another war whose outcome was so affected by television (it’s doubtful, by the way, that the North Vietnamese leadership were aware that their actions would have that effect).
The Gulf crisis saw a new growth in psychological warfare — PSYOPS — which was in part due to the presence of television cameras in Baghdad and on the Coalition battlefield.
The power of live video broadcast to a worldwide audience was not lost on the Iraqis. So, for example, images of Saddam kindly patting a hostage boy on the head were part of an (inept) attempt to influence the world at large of the benevolence of the Iraqi leader and the justice of his cause. It failed miserably.
The Coalition achieved greater success by targeting its message to the Iraqi Army. But it wasn’t easy.
In the beginning, Central Command planners had a hard time putting a psychological-warfare plan together. Though this was historically the responsibility of the Army component, in recent times (such as during the operations in Panama and Grenada), the primary responsibility has gone specifically to Special Operations forces. When the Gulf crisis broke, Central Command, lacking expertise to plan a PSYOPS campaign, requested help from the Commander in Chief Special Operations Command (collocated with CENTCOM, as it happened, at MacDill AFB).
The plan that resulted was useful in identifying targets for PSYOPS efforts, but was an overly “Ameri-centric” view of influencing Arabs. Next, in Riyadh, Schwarzkopf asked John Yeosock to prepare a comprehensive (and less American) PSYOPS campaign. This was completed and published in November, and was meant to guide Coalition efforts to influence Iraq’s leaders, its people, and most of all its forces in the field. The message was simple: “What you are doing in Kuwait is evil and against your religious beliefs. Get out or die.”
Meanwhile, Khaled bin Sultan became interested in the efforts to prepare leaflets and radio and television broadcasts, and to exploit enemy deserters. With his help, the message was made more subtle and complex. Where the American aim had been intimidation, he wanted to emphasize cooperation. In his view, Iraqi soldiers would respond positively to messages like “We know you didn’t want to invade Kuwait, and we, your brothers, will right this wrong. Please don’t oppose us. Join us instead.”
In essence, the enemy was hit with two different messages: The Schwarzkopf tough message showed a B-52 saying, “Desert Storm is coming to your area. Flee immediately.” The Khaled message showed Coalition soldiers sitting around a campfire, eating roast lamb, drinking tea, and saying, “Come and join us; we are your friends. This leaflet will be your ticket to safety.” Both had an impact.
The PSYOPS message was primarily delivered by air. During Desert Shield, Volant Solo aircraft and selected ground radio stations beamed the Voice of America service in Arabic. These broadcasts continued throughout the bombing campaign and the ground war. After the war began, C-130s, B-52s, and F-16s dropped leaflets on the Iraqi Army. Schwarzkopf personally devised a plan whereby air-dropped leaflets would inform a targeted Iraqi division that they were going to be bombed by B-52s the next day. And so it would happen; the next day hundreds of 500-pound bombs would rain on the division. Afterward, more leaflets would be dropped, advising the Iraqis to flee, as more strikes were planned for their area. And the next day, the unit would be hit again.
Debriefings of Iraqi POWs indicated that this operation significantly affected the troops’ morale and was an important factor in their decision to surrender or desert.
★ Because psychological warfare is more art than science, it is very difficult to judge the effectiveness of a PSYOPS campaign.
It is clear that no one in the target audience was missed. Nearly thirty million leaflets were dropped in the KTO, and the world saw Iraqi soldiers surrendering by the thousands, clutching the white leaflets that guaranteed their safe treatment. Radio broadcasts probably also had an effect, as a third of the POWs stated in their debriefings that these affected their decision to surrender.
Nevertheless, a study of PSYOPS after the war concluded that it was not so much the leaflets and the broadcasts as the incessant aerial attacks, the unrelenting presence of Coalition aircraft over the battlefield day and night, that changed people from fighters to quitters. Airpower sent a message to Iraqi soldiers that they had no refuge from attack from above. The noise of jet engines throughout the night, the inability to travel safely, the devastating and sudden attack from an unseen B-52 or F-111 laser-guided bomb drove them into a helpless, hopeless state. The leaflet offered hope of survival. The brutal, unrelenting air campaign made the message on the leaflet count.
However we explain it, nearly 80,000 out of an estimated 200,000 Iraqis in the KTO surrendered, and most of the remaining 120,000 took to their heels when Coalition tanks appeared on the scene.
★ During February, desertion became the number one problem for the Iraqi generals. In some Iraqi divisions, hundreds — even thousands — of troops simply went home. After the Battle of Khafji, the IIId Corps lost at least a further 10 percent of its troops to desertions, and the rate of desertion was accelerating as air continued to pound them. There were even desertions in the pampered, privileged Republican Guard.
Not only were the trigger-pullers walking off the battlefield, but other vital functions were suffering. The logistical resupply of the army was not adequate, and there were shortages of food and water. Essential maintenance was being ignored, and as a result, many of the vehicles, radars, heavy guns, and other machines of war were inoperable or impaired. The lack of maintenance on their fleet of vehicles, combined with air attacks on everything that moved, had reduced the Iraqi logistics teams to using Kuwaiti garbage trucks to carry supplies to their troops dug in on the desert. The trends for Iraq were all bad.
As February wore on, Joint STARS picked up more and more movement at night. Convoys of up to fifty vehicles were trying to evade the ever-present aircraft overhead. Though the darkness of night gave them some shielding, their best ally turned out to be the waves of drizzly weather that passed through the KTO every few days. Unfortunately for the Iraqis, the F-16 pilots developed attack options with the moving target indicator displays on their radar, and took away the Iraqi weather advantage.
At that point, the national community (the intelligence people who didn’t deploy to the war) estimated that the Iraqis could no longer meet the logistic requirements that ground combat would impose. While they were believed to have plenty of ammunition, they would run out of food and fuel.
To the Iraqi generals in Kuwait, withdrawal doubtless seemed the best course; but it was too late for that, unless they could find a way to get the aircraft off their backs.
Schwarzkopf ’s dilemma remained “When do we cross the border? When do we start losing Coalition ground forces to save Kuwait?” To which Chuck Horner added, “When can we get this over with and stop the loss of Coalition airmen’s lives, losses that started on January 17? Too often, these deaths were overlooked by the media and others whose eyes saw only ground combat, as if that were the only game in town.”
MISSION CREEP
As the war went on, the effectiveness of the Iraqi Air Force continued to decline, even as Iraqi aircraft played no part in the defense of the homeland, after their futile attempts during the first few days of the war. The aircraft lost were invariably parked in shelters or fleeing to Iran, and the losses did not always come from Coalition guns and missiles. On February 7, twelve Iraqi jets made a run for Iran. Three of these were shot down by F-15s, and six crashed in Ir
an, either because they were unable to land safely or because they ran out of fuel. The fear factor must have been very high among Iraqi pilots.
To offset the failure of their most effective air defense systems, fighter aircraft and radar-guided surface-to-air missiles, the Iraqis bolstered defenses in the KTO with short-range, optically aimed heat-seeking surface-to-air missiles, such as the SA-16 or some variant of this Russian-built weapon.
The increased battlefield defenses proved especially dangerous to USAF A-10s. The Warthogs were descendants of World War II P-47 Jugs, as well as the Vietnam-era Thuds that Chuck Horner had flown. They were tough, heavily armored (for aircraft), and very survivable, but slow; and they were used primarily for attacks against enemy armor in close support of friendly ground troops. For that purpose they packed quite a large punch, primarily a 30 mm Gatling gun in the nose, one round from which could destroy a tank over a mile away (the Warthog was designed around this gun, which is as big as a Volkswagen, when you include the ammunition drum). It also carried the IR Maverick missile, as well as regular bombs.
The Warthogs were especially vulnerable to short-range SAMs, because they took such a long time to zoom back to the safety of medium altitude after a bombing, strafing, or missile-diving attack.