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

by Tom Clancy

  Meanwhile, we were able to influence our own American media environment by embedding print, TV, and radio reporters in troop formations. The reporters provided firsthand objective reporting of events, without censorship. In spite of the ugliness of war, this worked in the favor of the Coalition because of the courageous and honorable way Coalition forces conducted themselves in combat.

  Fourth: The individual constitutes the fourth dimension of Rapid Dominance.

  The successful military is a well-disciplined team. Individual heroics, while prized, do not provide the foundation for success in battle. Rigorous training, iron discipline, dedicated reliance on one another, and strict adherence to orders are the attributes that make a team prevail during combat. The team — whether it is a flight of bombers, a flotilla of ships, or a squad of riflemen — must also have leadership… leadership that resides at many levels. The best leaders understand the doctrines and history of their military art and have the judgment and initiative to direct their team(s) when the killing starts. The rigidity of command must not conflict with informed judgment and initiative to change plans once our forces are engaged with the enemy. This is true both for commanders in their headquarters and for subordinates locked in the fight.

  The single biggest impediment to such initiative is the rapid growth in information grids, the communications nets that pass the information, and the computers that correlate and display the information. While the ability of the national leader to see into the gun sights of an individual rifle or into the bomb sight of bomb-laden aircraft is undeniably impressive, this ability can also elevate decision making to levels that deny the on-scene leader the freedom to use his own judgment and initiative. Wise leaders at increasing senior levels therefore provide appropriate guidance and authority that empower subordinate leaders to make decisions while engaged in the struggle.

  TRANSFORMATION

  This kind of enlightened leadership lies at the heart of the so-called Rumsfeld “Transformation” of our military.

  But transformation has also — predictably — become the fashionable Pentagon buzz word. The word means many things to many people, according to their agendas. A plan to acquire a new ship, plane, or tank was labeled transformational by the program’s advocates. Individual service leaders seeking to protect their budgets from being trimmed recast outmoded doctrines, force structures, and strategies as transformational.

  Yet a few truly brilliant individuals understood that transformation was not about money, programs, or forces; it was about the nature of the threats and challenges to our national security in the future and how we should train, configure, and plan to best protect our vital interests. It meant that military Services were going to change if only to better integrate their individual strengths. It meant that the components of battle would not be Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, but land, maritime, air, and space. It meant that capabilities would not be capital “A” as in Army but small “a” as in armies, and that the great and useful pride each Service has in its history, uniforms, and ways of doing business would have to be subordinated to what makes best sense when fighting a particular enemy. Transformation was about comparing the Service weapons needed to conduct a mission or do a task — eliminating duplication. It meant training as one, with members from all the Services, in order to build the trust and confidence of a team. It meant that we had to think about war in new ways.

  In the operations to stop the ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, the forces were joint (meaning elements of two or more U.S. Services operated as one force), and combined (meaning forces of two or more nations operated as one). Because of the nature of the enemy force, the terrain, and the constraints placed on the use of force by the political leadership, the primary combat tasks were most often conducted from the air. Once the military leadership gained an understanding of how to transition the conflict from an attrition-based strategy to an effects-based strategy that put unbearable pressure on the Serbian leadership, the conflict was terminated.

  One may then ask why this need to transform has been emphasized only recently? Surely our military forces have been fighting jointly since World War II, so what is the big deal?

  The big deal has been the emergence of airpower as the dominant force in war fighting. Though this statement was true in 1941–1945, it was not then recognized as such, since the massive scope of the conflict gave opportunities for all forms of military power to claim dominance. In Desert Storm, airpower was only one form of military power used to drive the Iraqis out of Kuwait, but it was clearly the dominant force. Airmen from the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force understand how to employ airpower efficiently. All too often nonairmen misuse its capabilities. They tend to think they understand how to employ airpower, but more often, they think solely in terms of their own domain. A soldier normally sees airpower as a means to provide fire support to his engaged troops. A sailor will often have a better understanding of airpower, because he thinks in terms that are theater wide and involve maneuver as an essential element. But the simple truth that too many soldiers and sailors ignore is that they cannot maneuver, prevail in battle, or even survive if they are subject to attack from powerful air elements. Likewise, their success in battle is facilitated increasingly by airpower; and in some instances, such as the Kosovo campaign, airpower is the only element required. This a bitter pill for some land and sea advocates to swallow; they work hard at belittling airpower and at marginalizing those who seek to understand better how we should fight in the future.

  If airmen have a problem, it is that too often they fail to understand the needs and doctrines of their land and sea counterparts.

  It is incumbent on airmen to understand and appreciate how land, sea, and now space warriors see their respective worlds and how they believe they should employ military power. This is because airpower has become the enabling force for all forms of military power, whether it is providing air cover for ships, close air support for embattled troops, or platforms that carry sensors to detect the enemy moving to battle or hiding in urban areas, or simply by providing the means for rapid movement of men and equipment. Before airpower came of age, armies and navies were created to fight their counterparts. After the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Balkans, it is apparent that the employment of military force has become much more complex, and must be thoroughly integrated. Most importantly, this integration must come with a view that exceeds the narrow visions solely of land, sea, air, or space advocates. Transformation is about breaking away from outmoded doctrines and challenging the intellectual capabilities of those who plan and execute military operations.

  We have made some advances in transforming military capabilities and operations. In Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan, close coordination between air and land forces allowed the defeat of a large, well-equipped force by a smaller less heavily armed coalition made up of U.S. Special Forces supporting the forces of local warlords. This new model was successfully expanded in Operation Iraqi Freedom, when an airman, Lieutenant General Buzz Mosley, commanded air and land elements used to keep the Iraqi Army off balance in the desert expanses of western Iraq. This broke the tradition — or perhaps myth — that only leaders with experience as soldiers could command land forces.

  Elsewhere in Iraq, land commanders with far less experience employing airpower sent a large force of Apache gunships against Iraqi divisions defending the southern approach to Baghdad. Because they did not understand how to employ these elements, the raid was unsuccessful, and all the gun-ships were hit with ground-to-air fire, while inflicting little or no damage on the Iraqi tanks and artillery. Most airmen would have known that the helicopters needed fixed-wing support to suppress the enemy antiaircraft fire and to gain the air superiority needed for the slow-moving helicopters to survive.

  This lack of appreciation and understanding underscores the reasons behind the Goldwater-Nichols legislation in the 1980s, and the Rumsfeld Transformation efforts after the turn of the millennium. Transfor
mation took the joint team approach inherent in the Goldwater-Nichols Defense Reform Act to new levels of intensity.

  COMMAND AND CONTROL

  In every major military operation since the Vietnam War, U.S. forces have operated as a joint force. Yet problems remained, primarily in the areas referred to as command and control. In military terms, “command” often translates to mean ownership; “control” tracks what a force is doing and how commands are relayed. The underlying basis for debates about who has command is that previously noted failure of land, sea, air, or space elements to trust one another.

  If I am a land commander and I have command of airpower, then I know it will be there when my land forces need support. Unfortunately, this attitude may actually be shortsighted, for the airpower may be used to destroy the enemy attackers even before they can start to engage the friendly land forces. In Desert Storm the land forces’ surface-to-air radar-guided Patriot missiles were placed under my command as the air-component commander. My job was to make sure no Iraqi aircraft could drop bombs on our Coalition ground forces.

  But in the second war in Iraq, owing in large measure to the cruise missile threat posed by Iraq, the land commander retained control of these weapons. In the event, the cruise missile launch sites were quickly overrun in the opening days of the war, and the Iraqi Air Force, having learned its lesson in 1991, did not challenge our air superiority team of radars and fighter aircraft. Many have concluded — given the nature of the threat and the tragic mistakes resulting from the kind of control in place — that the air-component commander, General Mosley, should have been given command of the Patriots. If that had been the case, it is doubtful that the Patriots would have shot down two allied aircraft by mistake, killing their crews. Another time, because of confusion over the rules of engagement and faulty operations by Patriot crews, a defense-suppression F-16 armed with radar homing missiles destroyed a Patriot radar when it illuminated the aircraft. Fortunately, no one on the ground was injured.

  Because land forces often still believe they are the main element in the battle and therefore must own all other elements deployed to the fight, the issue of command is still argued strenuously — especially by older officers. Younger officers, however, are much more attuned to how best to organize efficiently and to coordinate land, sea, air, and space operations on a trust not ownership basis. On those occasions when the Services do have command issues, the effects are likely to be worse when the forces of other nations are brought together with ours.

  Because they do not require stringent command or ownership arrangements to accomplish their missions, air and sea forces normally find it easy to operate together. Land forces, however, normally do require stringent command arrangements, and as a result geographical separation is used to resolve difficult command issues. This works in wars with orderly, linear battle lines. But it cannot work in modern wars where the battlefield is increasingly chaotic and high-speed maneuver takes the place of orderly arrangements of forces. The maintenance of order inhibits speed, which is now the vital element in achieving dominance over your enemy. Furthermore, in future wars like those in Kosovo and Afghanistan, where coalition ground forces are of greater importance than those of the United States, command of U.S. ground forces may be delegated to foreign generals… a situation our military has forcefully resisted since Pershing led the American Expeditionary Force in 1917.

  The command aspects of warfare will continue to challenge our coalition military and political leaders as each new conflict is addressed. The control of military operations is also fraught with issues that must be resolved.

  In every war since Vietnam, control of air operations has relied on capabilities fielded by the United States. During Desert Storm our allies were collocated with U.S. Air Force squadrons so that our communications and computer systems were available for all the Coalition partners’ use. This is how we transmitted the Air Tasking Order and received the intelligence from postmission debriefings. In the air, control nodes included the E-3 Airborne Warning And Control System (AWACS) aircraft that provided traffic control, information updates, and the means for the Tactical Air Control Center to recall or re-task individual sorties. All Coalition aircraft were equipped with Identification Friend or Foe, IFF, transponders… although only U.S. forces had the classified coded devices needed to provide absolute identification of friendly aircraft. However, since the air component commander had weapons-release control of the radar-guided surface-to-air missiles and air-to-air fighters, the coded signals were not needed and no friendly aircraft were shot down. Contrast this with the second Iraq war, where a British Tornado and a U.S. F/A-18 were downed by our own Patriot missiles operating under control of the ground forces, and you can see clearly why having good control of air operations capabilities is critical.

  Command and control of air operations extends into all aspects of the battle. Due to the potential for killing our own troops, close air support of ground forces requires exacting control measures. In both Iraq wars and in Afghanistan, our own air attacks caused the needless deaths of U.S. and Coalition forces. The two most frequent errors: either the attacking pilot misidentifies our forces, or our forces on the ground provide the pilot with the wrong target coordinates. But a new problem was encountered in Afghanistan, when troops on the ground provided the attacking pilot with their own location rather than that of the Taliban fighters they were trying to target. This came about because they misunderstood how the laser-ranging Global Positioning Satellite system processed its information. They took readings on the enemy position, but transmitted their own location to the attacking pilot, who programmed his guided weapons with the friendly position coordinates and fired.

  In this age of advanced information systems and precision munitions, we obviously must increase our ability to closely control air operations. Unfortunately, command and control issues are not always well understood. Or worse, they are formulated with an eye to the past, when armies maneuvered using flags, signal flares, or bugle calls.

  LOOKING FORWARD

  Meanwhile, new actors are appearing on and over the battle — unmanned aerial and land vehicles.

  Imagine a war where one side’s soldiers, sailors, and airmen sit in air-conditioned buildings ten thousand miles from the battle. George Patton would curse such an ignominious situation, where troops need not suffer the hardships of the field, sea, or air; where fear and courage do not guide the actions of combatants; and where the warrior neither bleeds nor dies. Yet we are approaching such a state of affairs. Unmanned vehicles operating in the sea, on land, in the air, and in space are filling missions previously conducted by human beings. Precision munitions allow the combatant to attack and kill the enemy from distances measured in hundreds of miles… Not too long ago, a warrior’s ability to strike an enemy was limited to what he could reach with his sword or his spear.

  Aerial reconnaissance is now almost exclusively the realm of unmanned aircraft. Battles for control of the sea will increasingly be fought using cruise missiles. The demand for robotic devices that can explore buildings and attack individuals hidden inside is increasing (a radical change from yesterday’s urban warfare, when the presence of an enemy was first known when he opened fire on you). Other battles will be fought using nonkinetic methods of attack.

  Throughout history, psychological methods have been used to traumatize an enemy. The Mongols would slaughter all the inhabitants of a town that resisted their attacks to ensure the inhabitants of other towns would surrender when they arrived there. Today we use far more sophisticated psychological methods to achieve the same results.

  Today computer viruses can disable vital utility, banking, or communications-control devices. The use of standoff weapons, unmanned vehicles, and nonkinetic attacks raises a number of moral considerations. To be sure, war — killing people and destroying things — is immoral. Yet using military force is often the question of the lesser evil: Do I kill my enemy before he or she kills me? Do I kill the enemy to
halt the pillage, rape, and murder being inflicted on a helpless third party?

  In the past, the battle — getting shot at — imparted some measure of emotional relief to those engaged in the killing and destruction. Now one can kill the enemy or destroy the target while drinking a cup of coffee, and then go to a nearby Taco Bell for lunch. What will be the effect of a war on such a warrior where only his low-tech enemy bleeds and dies? Will it make war a more acceptable alternative for the resolution of conflicting nations’ interests? Will it inflict long-lasting, perhaps debilitating, psychological scars on combatants who do not feel the fear and anger currently found in battle, yet still turn their opponents into piles of burnt and bloody flesh?

  We are not yet at such a point, but with the advent of each new unmanned system and new nonkinetic weapon, and with the increasing range of precision munitions, we approach an age where the nature of warfare will pose many painful new dilemmas.