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

by Tom Clancy

  The good news was that intelligence estimates placed only about two hundred of these missiles in Iraqi hands. Thus, one strategy Horner considered — and instantly discarded — was to deliberately expose his aircraft, in order to “run them out of bullets.” Not a smart idea, he told himself. There have to be other ways to defeat heat-seekers.

  ★ At the start of the war, the A-10s were used in the role for which they were designed, attacking enemy armor in close proximity to friendly forces. Warthog pilots described the first day of the war as a “turkey shoot.” Because Sandy Sharpe and Dave Sawyer, the A-10 wing commanders, kept their aircraft above 10,000 feet, they were able to inflict great violence on front-line Iraqi divisions without unnecessarily exposing the aircraft to enemy defenses (though two aircraft were hit by small-arms fire, the damage was negligible).

  The picture got complicated after the opening days of the war, when bad weather over the KTO gave the Iraqis time to dig in deeper.

  By the time the weather cleared, later in January, the Iraqis had gone to ground and the impact on them of the high-flying A-10s was far less devastating than before. Consequently, on the thirty-first of January, it was decided that the Warthogs could initiate their attacks from 4,000 to 7,000 feet. In that way, the pilots would be closer to their targets and could more easily spot the dug-in and camouflaged tanks, APCs, and artillery pieces. It also put the aircraft closer to the Iraqis, so they could more accurately aim their guns and heat-seeking missiles.

  Despite the increased risk, the A-10s were getting the job done very well, and this encouraged their commanders to task them against other targets, such as SAM sites, fixed structures, and logistical storage areas. The commanders in the TACC, and even at the wing, did not realize that they were all in the process of “mission creep.” As a result, they were putting this aircraft and their pilots in needless jeopardy.

  For a time, everything went along just fine. The lower altitude allowed the A-10 pilots to find their targets more easily than before, and the tank kills rose. Meanwhile, the defensive threat seemed pretty much unchanged, as the pilots followed the daily directives Sandy Sharpe and Dave Sawyer gave them both verbally and in the pilots’ “Read File.” Then came A-10 successes hunting Scuds in Iraq and as a “Wart Weasel,” and mission creep went into high gear.

  Soon, TACC commanders were sending A-10s against targets deep in the KTO, and the command element aboard the ABCCC EC-130 began to divert the A-10s deeper and deeper into Kuwait and Iraq.

  Though the A-10 pilots questioned this ever-increasing tasking of the A-10 deeper into harm’s way, headquarters ignored their fears (though the two wing commanders did manage to work with the Black Hole and choke off the truly insane mission creep jobs, such as a proposal to bomb an SA-2 storage site near Basra).

  Now that A-10s were flying deep behind the lines, battle damage to the aircraft began to mount, and some serious hits were tearing off major portions of the aircraft structure. The pilots were attacking the Tawalkana and Medina divisions of the Republican Guard at 4,000 feet above the ground and sixty to seventy miles north of the border and safety. On the fifteenth of February, the Republican Guard stopped taking it lying down and launched eight SAMs, which knocked down two aircraft and extensively damaged Dave Sawyer’s jet.

  Sawyer climbed out over the hostile desert at a sizzling 200 knots, with thousands of holes in his engines and tail, and the top of his right empennage blown off. Just as he crossed the last Iraqis, some fifteen miles north of the border and safety, he looked down to see a flight of faster F-16s working over a huddled third-string Iraqi infantry division that Saddam had staked out to absorb our ground offensive’s first blow. A lonely moment. Also an angry one. Somebody had badly screwed up priorities.

  We had a problem. Our most effective tank killer was being shot up at an alarming rate. In fact, before February 15, we had lost only one A-10 (on February 2 to an IR SAM), while suffering a little over twenty-five other aircraft shot down. Still, before February 15, the large number of battle-damaged A-10s was wearing on my mind. Thirty or forty had been hit, yet had survived and limped home for repairs — a tribute to their rugged design and safety features. But a lot of hits was a lot of hits. Too many hits.

  On the fifteenth, when I walked into the TACC, I learned that two A-10s were down and three damaged, with one of these losing much of its tail. The airplanes were too valuable in a variety of roles, from Scud-hunting to close air support, to have them grounded by battle damage. There was a strong possibility that the Iraqis would run me out of airplanes before they ran out of SAMs.

  With a heavy heart, I told the battle staff we were going to pull the A-10s back and use them only against the Iraqi divisions near the border. The Republican Guard and other armored divisions being held in reserve would now be off-limits to the A-10s, until later in the war, when the Iraqis had run out of heat-seeking missiles. Though I was worried that my decision would sting the egos of the Warthog drivers (a fate they sure didn’t deserve, since they were excelling at everything they’d been tasked to do), I just couldn’t stand by and watch them take hits and now losses.

  But Dave Sawyer wrote me the next day, the sixteenth, and (without really meaning to) relieved my worries. “Your guidance to limit A-10s to southern areas is appropriate and timely,” he wrote. (That’s military for “Thank you, boss. We were being given more than our share of pain and suffering.”) He went on to relate the specific procedures he and Sandy Sharpe had worked out:

  “We have prohibited daytime strafe for the present, except in true close air support, search and rescue, or troops in contact situations. With the OA-10 forward air control spotters, flight leads using binoculars, or a high (relative) speed recce pass in the 4–7,000 foot range, we should be able to determine worthwhile armor targets, then stand off and kill them with Mavericks. We’ll save the gun (and our aircraft) for the ground offensive. The OA-10s and our two night A-10 squadrons have yet to receive battle damage. There’s safety in altitude and darkness. When the ground war starts, we’ ll strafe up a storm and get in as close as we need to to get the job done. No A-10 pilot should ever have to buy a drink at any Army bar in the future. Until G day, request you task A-10s only in air interdiction kill boxes you’ve now limited us to. If you need us to go to deeper AI targets, we plan to impose a 10,000-foot above-the-ground minimum altitude there, and employ only free-fall ordnance and Mavericks. We’ll promptly exit any AI area in which we get an IR or radar SAM launch.”

  It wasn’t a case of the A-10s failing to do the job, it was rather a matter of building on the strengths of our overall force. We would use the strengths of the F-16s, with their speed and automated bombing systems, to attack the heavily defended divisions deep in the KTO, while the more capable close-in capabilities of the A-10’s 30mm cannon would be reserved for the more heavily dug-in, but more lightly defended, Iraqis just across the Saudi border.

  Later — after the results of the war were compiled — the superior survivability of the Warthogs was amply demonstrated. Of the U.S. aircraft tasked to carry the mail against the Iraqi Army, only the F-16s and USMC F/A-18s exceeded the A-10s in fewest losses per 1,000 sorties.

  There is a story about a young fighter pilot who walks into a saloon in some faraway place and sits down at a table with a tough old veteran, deep in thought and drink.

  “What is the secret to life and success in flying fighters?” the youngster asks the old hero.

  And the steely-eyed, well-worn fighter pilot sings out, “More whiskey, more women, and faster airplanes.”

  Well, in this war the Warthogs had a lot of success, but they sure didn’t have much whiskey, women, or a fast airplane; they did it with brains and courage.

  APPROACHING G DAY

  Since the Schwarzkopf plan for the ground offensive involved a massive, surprise flanking attack (which was to be anchored by a direct assault into Kuwait), the ground forces slated for the flanking attack had to secretly relocate to assembly areas west
of their original positions. The secrecy was crucial to the plan, and the CINC had been adamant about maintaining it. As we have already seen, he had refused to let the Army start its movements until the air war started, lest the Iraqi Air Force discover his preparation for the “end run” of their defenses.

  For Gary Luck’s XVIIIth Airborne Corps, this directive proved to be a big problem, for they had the farthest to go — over 400 miles, with nearly 15,000 troops and their equipment — at the same time that Fred Franks’s VIIth Corps was making its own way west over the same, two-lane Tapline Road. Despite the obstacles, Luck and his two heavy division commanders, Major Generals McCaffery and Peay, worked out how to make this difficult movement.

  Luck had one serious advantage over Franks’s heavily armored corps, in that his own corps was more easily transported by air. In fact, the 82d Airborne and to some extent the 101st Air Assault division were designed for air transport.

  Enter the USAF’s General Ed Tenoso and his fleet of C-130s.

  Up until the move west, the C-130s’ main task had been in high-priority cargo-moving — supporting all the Coalition forces (though with emphasis on United States forces). Where they went and what they moved was decided by Major General Dane Starling, Schwarzkopf’s J-4, or logistician.

  Early in Desert Shield, Bill Rider, the CENTAF logistician, and his director of transportation, Bob Edminsten, had set up a C-130 airline in the theater. The C-130s flew regular, scheduled passenger flights, called Star routes, and cargo flights, called Camel routes. Starling determined what had priority on these flights, and Tenoso’s airlifters put that in the Air Tasking Order.

  This “airline” was already a vast operation before the move west, but the effort associated with that move was simply staggering (and largely unsung), with a big C-130 landing every five to ten minutes, every hour of the day, every day of the week, for two weeks after the start of the war on the seventeenth of January, hauling the vast army to faraway places like Rafhah, hundreds of miles up the Tapline Road — a nose-to-tail stream of C-130s.

  ★ As the armies completed their moves to the west, and the forces south of Kuwait came up on line, weather became the enemy.

  Chuck Horner now takes up the story:

  ★ As February wound down, General Schwarzkopf was under great pressure from Washington to initiate the ground attack before the Iraqi Army was able to negotiate a surrender that would allow them to leave Kuwait with their remaining tanks and guns. The date Schwarzkopf selected for G day was the twenty-fourth of February.

  A few days before the big moment, we had had our final war council before the ground war. Generals Franks, Luck, and Boomer had come to Riyadh to brief their final schemes of maneuver to Schwarzkopf, while the Egyptian, Syrian, Saudi, and Gulf Cooperation Council forces were doing the same with Khaled. For all the others, this meeting had to be a high-anxiety affair (they were, after all, on the line), but for me it was a relief. For once, someone else was briefing the CINC, and the airmen were (sort of) getting the day off after being the only show in town for thirty-seven days.

  So when the war council started, I relaxed in my chair, wondering how well plans would be executed, and how many men would die bravely, needlessly, or because of our failures of leadership. All three U.S. generals were calm and deliberate. No surprises.

  Then the weatherman got up and briefed the weather forecast for the night of February 23–24, and it was going to be terrible — rain, fog, winds, and cold temperatures. Cloud bases would be touching the ground, so visibility for the troops would be measured in yards, not miles. That in itself would not be so bad, as enemy troops would suffer the same limitations. In fact, that would cause them far greater problems, since they had to see attacking troops in order to direct their fires. But the bad weather would cause us one problem: it would keep our aircraft and helicopters from providing close air support to attacking forces. Not only would they be denied the power of massed aircraft striking at enemy strong points in their path, but if they chanced to be pinned down in a minefield by Iraqi artillery, they would find themselves in a seriously bad way. This situation, predictably, left the CINC visibly anguished.

  Though he was under intense pressure to start the ground war, his obligation to the troops not to spend their lives needlessly always came first with him, and he was prepared to delay the ground attack, no matter how great the pressure from Washington. Still, this decision, if he had to make it, would not come easy (it would have left him naked to Washington’s slings and arrows). So when the CENTCOM weatherman briefed rain, fog, and misery, Schwarzkopf ’s shoulders slumped, and he placed his huge head in his hands.

  Meanwhile, my own weatherman, Colonel Jerry Riley, had already given me a preview of the likely weather on the night of the twenty-third and twenty-fourth. Riley was a spectacular weather “guesser,” both as a scientist and as a seer, reading tea leaves. He not only brilliantly grasped the scientific data sent by satellites and aircraft over the battle space and from meteorological stations all around the world, but he had a record of accurate “gut guesses” as well. Before Schwarzkopf’s high council, Riley assured me that the CENTCOM forecaster’s reading of the tea leaves of isobars, low-pressure areas, upper winds aloft, and frontal passages was wrong. As Riley read them, the worst the weather would throw at us that night would be cloud bases one to two thousand feet above the ground, with visibility of three miles in light rain and fog. I believed him. He had been forecasting the weather over Iraq and Kuwait for the previous five-plus weeks with uncanny accuracy. Though we had faced abysmal weather (it had been one of the wettest, coldest winters on record in the region), time and time again he had figured out the weather we would encounter — where, when, and how severe — well enough to let us plan our air campaign. Though the weather was going to be far from ideal on G day, he assured me that it would be good enough for our jets to slip under the clouds and hit the targets the ground forces needed hit.

  So there I was, with positive weather information that I believed; and there was Norman Schwarzkopf, actually suffering over the negative report from his own weather guy. And just then I did something I’d never imagined I would do. I put my right arm around his shoulders and whispered in his ear: “Boss, I have a weatherman who’s been calling the weather accurately for the past six weeks, and he tells me that the weather is not going to be all that bad. The worst we’ll see, he tells me, is a couple of thousand feet of ceiling and a few miles of visibility. We can handle that. I promise you we can provide the close air support your guys are going to need. Trust me on this one, boss. The weather is going to be okay.”

  I don’t know whether or not he believed me, but a burden seemed to lift, and we continued the meeting.

  Later, he ordered the ground war to go as scheduled.

  And when the troops began their attack of Kuwait and Iraq, they did it in the worst damned weather we encountered during the entire war, with rain, fog, low ceilings, and blowing mud.

  Because our troops were ready, and the Iraqis debilitated, we began a ground offensive that turned out to be over more quickly, with fewer casualties, than anyone had ever dreamed. So in the end my weatherman wasn’t wrong — the weather was good enough to start the ground war. He just got the numbers wrong, as the weather was for the most part ghastly — zero ceiling, zero visibility.

  THE GROUND WAR

  At four o’clock on the morning of February 24, 1991, the ground war to free Kuwait began.

  That night I had checked into the TACC early. The weather reports were horrible — cold, fog, rain, and drizzle, with blowing winds.

  As morning approached and we waited for progress reports from the BCE, the room was filled with tension, even dread. Yet we were also relieved. For airmen, this moment marked the last spurt in a long and difficult struggle. And we were quite simply exhausted.

  I tried to imagine what the Marines were going through as they picked their way through the barbed wire and minefields, always waiting for an artillery
barrage to rain down on them, which they could only take or retreat.

  I knew that the Marines and the Eastern Area Corps were going to give us our best clue about what was really going on. Out to the west, it was going to be more difficult to track the XVIIIth Airborne Corps and French Army, as they became strung out over miles of desert. Though they did not have to confront the massed defensive works that faced Walt Boomer, Gary Luck had problems of his own. Primarily, he had to take his forces and their logistics tails deep into Iraq before the Iraqis discovered they were there, and then he had to place his forces in position to cut off retreat of the forces facing Fred Franks’s VIIth Corps, the British, and the Northern Area Corps (Franks’s main attack was scheduled for launch on the twenty-fifth).

  We were, of course, also aware that the Iraqi Army had crumbled, and that Saddam had desperately tried to escape the battlefield and occupied Kuwait. Hours before the attack, the Russians had delivered a desperate message to Washington, promising unconditional Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait, if they were allowed a twenty-one-day cease-fire. No way. Because we wanted their army destroyed, we would not permit them to leave with their equipment, so our response was: “You have twenty-four hours to clear out, not three weeks.”

  As early as February 20, Army Apaches flying strikes against Iraqi targets in southern Kuwait had reported that the noise of their helicopters had brought Iraqi soldiers streaming out of their bunkers to surrender. These prisoners reported that whole units were prepared to surrender en masse, and were just waiting for our attacking army. Even so, there was plenty of Iraqi Army left to inflict casualties on Coalition ground forces.

  No one can overstate the courage of those first ground forces as they carefully picked their way into Kuwait and Iraq in the cold wet darkness of that opening night of the ground campaign.