CENTCOM’s Air Offensive

The United States and the United Kingdom went into the second Persian Gulf War with three significant military advantages compared with the 1991 war. First, their own combat capability, particularly in the strike warfare arena, had improved substantially since the time of Operation Desert Storm. Both countries commanded unprecedented defense-suppression, all-weather precision attack, and battlespace awareness assets. Second, and more important, Iraq’s military posture was only a shadow of what it had been when a much larger allied coalition mobilized forces to liberate Kuwait in 1991. Third, the coalition’s air contribution to Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan in 2001 and 2002 had taught valuable lessons that would apply directly to facilitating CENTCOM’s air war against Iraq.

With respect to its land warfare potential, Iraq’s ground order of battle had declined from more than a million men under arms in January 1991 to only some 350,000 over the decade since Desert Storm. The regular Iraqi army had fallen in strength from 68 to 23 divisions, from 6,000 to 2,660 tanks, from 4,800 to 1,780 armored personnel carriers, and from 4,000 to about 2,700 rocket launchers and artillery pieces. The once-elite Republican Guard had been reduced from ten divisions to six, only four of which were heavy divisions equipped with T-72 tanks.¹ That still, however, gave Iraq more than twice as many tanks and artillery pieces than the United States and the United Kingdom deployed for Iraqi Freedom (see map 2.1 for the disposition of those ground units on the eve of the campaign).

Iraq’s ground order of battle included 11 regular army divisions and 2 Republican Guard divisions positioned in the north, with 5 regular army divisions and the remaining Republican Guard and Special Republican Guard divisions concentrated around Baghdad. The Iraqi navy had just 2 or 3 warships remaining in service, and the number of still-operational Iraqi radar-guided SAM sites was down from 100 to only slightly more than 60, consisting of 14 MSA-2, 10 SA-2, 24 SA-3, and 15 SA-6 sites.2 Finally, Iraq’s air order of battle had declined from 820 to fewer than 300 fighter and attack aircraft, including 29 Mirage F1s, 14 MiG-29s, 12 MiG-25s, 44 MiG-23s, 98 MiG-21s, 28 Su-25s, 1 Su-24, and 51 Su-17/20/22s.³ Many of those aircraft, moreover, were thought to be unflyable because of an acute lack of periodic maintenance and spare parts. CENTCOM’s main concern with respect to the Iraqi air threat was the possibility that Iraqi UAVs carrying chemical or biological agents might be used against coalition troop concentrations as a desperation measure. The UN Security Council had limited the permissible range of Iraqi UAVs to only 150 kilometers; however, one Iraqi UAV type being flown off the backs of trucks was demonstrating a range capability of 500 kilometers. CENTCOM also had a related concern that unmanned Iraqi L-29 jet trainers might be pressed into service as drones for delivering chemical or biological weapons.

Source: Adaptation by Charles Grear based on CENTAF map

Prewar Defense-Suppression Moves

To prepare the expected battlespace in ways that would give the coalition the greatest possible starting advantage once Operation Iraqi Freedom was formally under way, CENTCOM undertook a number of measures well before the commencement of overt hostilities to diminish Iraq’s ability to resist the impending offensive. The most notable of these was a concentrated effort by CENTCOM’s air component to begin systematically degrading Iraq’s air defenses whenever and wherever opportunities to do so might present themselves.

During the briefing of the Generated Start option by Secretary Rumsfeld and General Franks to the president on February 7, 2002, a question had arisen concerning how CENTCOM might take advantage of Operation Southern Watch as a framework within which to increase the intensity of the bombing, with a view toward eliminating some critical Iraqi IADS nodes before the scheduled start of decisive combat operations.4 Over the course of the preceding 10 years, allied aircrews had flown nearly 200,000 armed overwatch sorties into Iraq’s northern and southern no-fly zones.⁵ They had been fired on by Iraqi air defenses numerous times, albeit with no loss of any aircraft over Iraq. That was a remarkable accomplishment, considering that the normal peacetime accident rate for that number of sorties would have occasioned as many as a dozen or more aircraft lost to in-flight mechanical failures or pilot error. Since January 2002 alone, CENTCOM had flown more than 4,000 sorties over southern Iraq, during which time Iraq’s IADS had targeted coalition aircraft at more than twice the rate registered throughout the preceding year.

Accordingly, on June 1, 2002, CENTAF initiated Operation Southern Focus, a determined effort to use Operation Southern Watch as a legitimate aegis under which to conduct intensified attacks against the Iraqi IADS in response to what General Moseley described as “more numerous and more threatening attacks” against allied combat aircraft patrolling the no-fly zones.⁶ Three months earlier, Moseley had laid the essential groundwork for this new undertaking by initiating a systematic transition from Southern Watch, which was geared toward maintaining the status quo in the southern no-fly zone, toward an operation aimed at “mapping the south” (i.e., cataloguing the Iraqi IADS in southern Iraq) through what he called “intrusive ISR.” That effort reflected his “desire to reseize the initiative and ensure air superiority in the southern no-fly zone and establish conditions for potential future operations to remove the Ba’athist Iraqi regime.” He also wanted to “expand targets beyond ‘self-defense’ solely against identified Iraqi ‘shooters’ to new target systems that also embraced Iraq’s IADS, regime command and control, and possible systems for the delivery of weapons of mass destruction.”⁷ What set this escalated concept of operations apart from the more straightforward tit-for-tat nature of Operation Southern Watch was the assumption by Southern Focus of the right to strike any IADS-related target in the southern no-fly zone in response to an Iraqi provocation, not merely the specific offending SAM or AAA site. An F-15E pilot, Capt. Randall Haskin, explained the logic: “This philosophy was basically that it was better to come back later with all of the appropriate assets on hand than it was to knee-jerk react to getting shot at and risk actually getting hit.”8

In connection with Operation Southern Watch, CENTAF had long maintained five graduated standing response options from which to choose when Iraqi air defenses fired on an allied aircraft. Counterattacks were mandatory and automatic in all cases, with the most forceful response option entailing concurrent or sequential attacks against multiple targets outside the no-fly zone. Such preplanned counterattacks required higher-level approval, in some cases from the president himself. Operation Desert Badger, to be executed in case an allied aircraft was downed by Iraqi fire, aimed at disrupting Iraq’s ability to capture the downed aircrew by attacking key command and control nodes in the heart of downtown Baghdad. Additional preplanned options were available in case an allied aircrew member was actually captured. Operation Desert Thunder was on tap in case of a Ba’athist assault against the Kurds in northern Iraq.⁹

Secretary Rumsfeld wielded an aggressive hand in seeking to bolster these anemic response options, which CENTCOM had inherited from the previous eight years of the Clinton administration. “Iraq’s repeated efforts to shoot down our aircraft weighed heavily on my mind,” he wrote in his memoirs. “ . . . I was concerned, as were the CENTCOM commander and the Joint Chiefs, that one of our aircraft would soon be shot down and its crew killed or captured. . . . The plan code-named Desert Badger was seriously limited. Its goal was to rescue the crew of a downed aircraft—but it had no component to inflict any damage or to send any kind of message to Saddam Hussein that such provocations were unacceptable.” Rumsfeld went on to recall: “Our friends in the region had criticized previous American responses to Iraqi aggression as weak and indecisive and had advised us that our enemies had taken comfort from America’s timidity. The Desert Badger plan was clear evidence of that problem. . . . If an aircraft was downed, I wanted to be sure we had ideas for the president that would enable him to inflict a memorable cost. The new proposals I ordered included attacks on Iraq’s air defense systems and their command and control facilities to enable us to cripple the regime’s abilities to attack our planes.”¹⁰

In a precursor to Operation Southern Focus, two dozen American and RAF aircraft had struck some twenty radar and command and control nodes throughout Iraq on February 16, 2001, some as close to the country’s heartland as the suburbs of Baghdad, in prompt response to intelligence reports that Iraq’s IADS was nearing a point of interconnecting some critical command and control sites with underground fiber-optic cables that were very difficult to locate. The intent of that attack, the most massive in two years, and conducted under the aegis of enforcing the southern no-fly zone, was to negate or at least hinder any such development before the installation could be completed.11 This effort by Hussein’s regime to enhance its IADS with a fiber-optic network was in part the result of an earlier loosening of economic sanctions against Iraq that had allowed French and Chinese commercial firms to provide Hussein with $133 million of telecommunications improvements, including fiber-optic cable installations and other digital enhancements to telecommunications that could be leveraged to increase the lethality of Iraq’s radar-guided SAMs.¹²

Indeed, well before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, CENTAF’s commander at the time, then Lt. Gen. Charles Wald, had fought to gain approval for more appropriate coalition responses to increasingly aggressive attempts by Iraq’s IADS to fire on coalition aircraft patrolling the no-fly zones in an apparent effort to shoot one down. With respect to his growing concern regarding the need for more forceful strike options, General Wald commented in an interview: “When I became the commander at CENTAF, I was not interested in just doing the status quo. My feeling was that we needed to do something different. . . . So we built a briefing and gave it to the CINC [commander in chief of CENTCOM] and the [Air Force] chief of staff, and in that briefing we recommended a change in how we did business—either we push it up, or we do the status quo, or we do hardly anything, we quit. We needed to get out of this middle road that was really dangerous . . . this cynical status quo approach to the no-fly zones and to Iraq. You can’t do this tit-for-tat thing. Our recommendation was that we do something more aggressive.”¹³ Rather than risk coalition aircraft in such small-scale retaliations, General Wald sought to establish restricted operating zones and gun-engagement zones that coalition aircraft were to avoid due to the concentration of Iraqi defenses, a measure that, in effect, ceded parts of the southern no-fly zone back to the Iraqis.

All of that changed dramatically with the onset in June 2002 of Operation Southern Focus, a substantially escalated initiative that allowed the coalition to reclaim the entire southern no-fly zone while at the same time drawing down Iraq’s command and control network in the southern half of the country by systematically going after enemy systems that allowed Iraq’s IADS to acquire and threaten coalition aircraft. Lt. Col. David Hathaway, General Moseley’s chief of strategy, explained how targets were chosen.

           After I pitched the Southern Focus plan at CENTCOM, General Franks asked all the other component commanders for their proposed lists of desired Southern Focus targets. Both the land and maritime component commanders proposed targets in the vicinity of the Al Faw peninsula and the city of Basra, ranging from long-range artillery to Seersucker missile, naval command and control, and mine storage locations. Initially, those target nominations were deemed by CENTCOM to be insufficiently related to hostile Iraqi actions taken against coalition aircraft operating in the southern no-fly zone. It was not until the execution of OPLAN 1003V drew closer that such targets were considered and ultimately approved by General Franks.14

A pair of B-1s, for example, attacked and destroyed a Soviet-built P-15 Flat Face SAM acquisition radar near the H-3 airfield and an Italian-built Selena Pluto low-altitude surveillance radar near the Saudi and Jordanian borders.¹⁵

In a follow-up to this initiative, staff planners at CENTAF, in conjunction with those assigned to Joint Task Force Southwest Asia operating out of Saudi Arabia, generated an “RO-4” response option aimed at systematically taking down Iraq’s increasingly interconnected IADS by attacking the static surveillance radar and fiber-optic cable nodes inside the southern no-fly zone that had been providing enhanced early-warning information to Iraq’s southern air defenses. Iraq had directed AAA fire at allied aircraft at least fifty-one times since January 1, 2001, and had launched SAMs with hostile intent fourteen times. In light of this, General Franks, who had replaced Gen. Anthony Zinni as CENTCOM’s commander in chief in July 2000, approved sending the RO-4 option on to the Joint Staff for approval by the new civilian leadership of the recently inaugurated administration of President George W. Bush.¹⁶

A report of slightly more than one hundred Iraqi SAM launches against U.S. and RAF aircraft between February 16 and May 9, 2001, that were characterized as “an unusually determined effort to shoot down an [allied] aircraft” added incentive for the new administration to approve this ramped-up effort against Iraq’s air defenses.¹⁷ Furthermore, there had been a significant spike in recent incursions into the no-fly zones by Iraqi MiG-25 interceptors flying at speeds of up to Mach 2.4 at times when patrolling allied aircraft were either leaving the zones or were known to be low on fuel. By the summer of 2001 the Iraqi IADS had also begun targeting U.S. Navy E-2C Hawkeye surveillance aircraft. One Hawkeye crew reported observing the smoke trail of what its pilot thought at the time was an Iraqi SA-3 SAM that had been fired into Kuwaiti airspace (where the Hawkeye was orbiting) in an attempt to shoot it down.¹⁸

It was in light of this increasingly aggressive Iraqi activity that General Franks suggested during his briefing to President Bush on December 28, 2001, that the no-fly zones might be leveraged as a convenient framework within which to conduct the initial preparation of the battlespace for any future allied campaign against Hussein’s regime. Shortly thereafter, at the March 2002 CENTCOM component commanders’ conference at Ramstein, General Moseley formally suggested that CENTAF’s planners begin thinking about how they might take advantage of a stepped-up pace of operations in the no-fly zones to help shorten the time between A-day and G-day. By this time it had become clear that only Operation Southern Watch would be involved because the Turkish government was unlikely ever again to authorize an expanded Operation Northern Watch out of Incirlik to include major offensive strikes.19

Once this idea gained the blessing of CENTCOM and the Bush administration in principle, a more detailed concept of operations for the stepped-up patrolling of the southern no-fly zone was considered and refined at a meeting of air operations planners from CENTAF, USAFE, and Joint Task Force Southwest Asia at Camp Doha, Kuwait, on April 24, 2002. Those planners proposed that allied sorties return to patrolling north of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in aggressive pursuit of opportunities to impart real combat effectiveness to Southern Watch by using the operation as a means for both tactical intelligence collection and gradual kinetic preparation of the battlefield for what might eventually become a major offensive to liberate Iraq. CENTCOM’s director of operations, Major General Renuart, recalled in an interview with respect to this changed planning focus: “If the Iraqis keep giving us ROE [rules-of-engagement] triggers, we’ll keep degrading them.”²⁰

The standing ROE for Southern Watch were restructured to meet a new set of operational goals in an expanded effort, now formally code-named Operation Southern Focus, that was scheduled to get under way in June 2002. Those goals included gaining and maintaining air superiority, degrading Iraqi tactical communications, using information operations to achieve strategic and tactical surprise, and eliminating surface-to-surface and antiship missiles.²¹ A comprehensive new target list was built at a meeting at CENTCOM headquarters in Florida between May 8 and May 10, 2002, characterized by Lieutenant Colonel Hathaway as a “systems approach to targeting” that concentrated on command and control targets associated with Iraq’s IADS in the southern no-fly area. Hathaway noted that “the list was put together using nodal analysis, fused from two separate efforts, one done by the CENTAF information operations flight and the other built at [the Joint Warfare Analysis Center]. It aimed to achieve the most effect with the least damage. It also had ‘revisit’ windows built in, allowing restrikes to be regularly undertaken if our leaflets hadn’t persuaded the Iraqis to desist from repairing the sites.”22

Accordingly, with Operation Southern Focus now shaped by this new planning emphasis and slowly ramping up as the summer of 2002 approached, a de facto undeclared allied air war against Iraq was under way aimed at taking advantage of every opportunity to neutralize key components of Iraq’s IADS and command and control network south of Baghdad piece by piece.²³ By that time, even American fighter pilots still at their home bases had begun memorizing mission-specific details of the Iraqi threat environment. One F-16 squadron operations officer recalled efforts by squadron pilots who were preparing to deploy forward in the coming months to “learn everything possible about Iraq’s air defense structure and, more importantly, about their ground forces. Pilots would understand the Iraqi ground order of battle as well as be able to identify doctrinal Iraqi defensive formations from the air.”²⁴ In connection with this expanded effort, General Franks indicated his determination to continue using CENTCOM’s standing response options in prompt reaction to any and all Iraqi provocations, with a view toward rendering Iraq’s IADS “as weak as possible.”²⁵

As the intensity of Southern Focus strike operations mounted, CENTAF planners placed some air-to-air fighters on “Apollo alert” to provide a quick-turn hedge in case the Iraqi air force tried to use the twice-daily Baghdad-to-Basra shuttle flown by an Iraqi Airlines Airbus A320 to mask the movement of its fighters southward into the no-fly zone.²⁶ Evidently undaunted by the escalated allied strikes, an Iraqi SA-2 crew on July 25, 2002, fired at a U-2 flying over southern Iraq at 70,000 feet. The missile’s warhead detonated close enough for its shock wave to reach the aircraft.²⁷

Operation Southern Focus reached full swing in September when General Moseley received approval from Secretary Rumsfeld to begin attacking Iraqi command and control targets routinely.²⁸ This escalated effort was spearheaded by a major strike on September 5, 2002, against the nerve center of Iraq’s western air defenses, the sector operations center at the H-3 airfield in western Iraq. That attack represented the leading edge of a rolling minicampaign to grind down the Iraqi IADS. Not long thereafter, every other sector and interceptor operations center south of the 33rd parallel was successfully attacked and neutralized by precision hard-structure munitions. Concurrently with this expanded effort to chip away at Iraq’s air defense communications network, CENTAF dropped more than four million propaganda leaflets instructing Iraqi IADS operators to refrain from firing on coalition aircraft and warning Iraqi civilians to remain clear of already destroyed IADS fiber-optic nodes.²⁹

During the last week before the formal start of Iraqi Freedom, Southern Watch operations surged to nearly eight hundred sorties a day.30 Halfway through February 2003, reflecting an evident change in the rules of engagement as the formal start of the campaign approached, CENTAF struck identified Iraqi SAM launchers in response to repeated Iraqi AAA firing at coalition aircraft, instances of which had totaled more than 170 since the beginning of 2003.³¹ Two days before the commencement of the campaign, CENTAF also struck Iraqi long-range artillery positions along the Kuwaiti border and on the Al Faw Peninsula. Several days before that, allied aircraft had begun attacking Iraqi early-warning radars along the Kuwaiti and Jordanian borders, as well as the air traffic control radar at Basra airport, which CENTCOM had determined to be a dual-use facility but had hitherto kept on its no-strike list.³²

Allied aircrews operating within the southern no-fly zone were instructed to keep meticulous track of observed enemy tanks, artillery, and other military assets. Some missions were devoted exclusively to such reconnaissance. These so-called nontraditional ISR sorties flown by allied strike aircraft using their Low-Altitude Navigation and Targeting Infrared for Night (LANTIRN) and Litening II targeting pods, radar, fighter data link, and ZSW-1 data link pods for intelligence collection were supplemented by high-flying U-2 reconnaissance aircraft to gather signals intelligence from central Iraq, as well as by a multitude of multispectral imaging satellites. The one RQ-4 Global Hawk high-altitude UAV that was dedicated to Iraqi Freedom began flying long-duration sorties to observe changing patterns in the Iraqi order of battle and monitor movements of Iraqi SAMs and surface-to-surface missiles.³³ Fine-grained mapping of the Iraqi early-warning radar system was one critical goal of these sorties. Another was scanning for any signs that Hussein and other top Ba’athist leaders might attempt a dash to political sanctuary in Syria.

Some F-16 pilots initially misunderstood this pioneering use of nontraditional ISR. Maj. Anthony Roberson, an F-16 weapons officer who had been recruited from USAFE’s 32nd Air Operations Group, where he had been serving as head of the combat plans division, to join General Moseley’s CAOC team during the workups for Iraqi Freedom, explained that the tactic required “a different mindset. For a Block 52 [the SEAD version of the F-16 called F-16CJ] guy to be told, ‘I just want you to fly to this destination and take a picture of this, then come back and show it to me,’ would seem to most fighter pilots as a total waste of time. They don’t think it’s an effect, and . . . the value of this mission was misunderstood.”³⁴ Major Roberson went on to point out that such mission applications provided General Moseley with a much-needed picture of Iraq’s most current electronic order of battle. He added: “It is critical for an F-16CJ to be able to swing to that role and use its array of pods to get our pre-strike reconnaissance, thus providing coherent change detection—something that was there yesterday is not there today. We needed to get that information back into the analysts’ hands so that they could tell us what the adversary was doing. The Viper [its pilots’ term of endearment for the F-16] is a good platform for this tasking.”35 The various collection platforms CENTAF employed toward this end revealed the Iraqis to be repositioning high-value military equipment nearly every day, but always in ones and twos or small groups, hoping to avoid the merciless gaze of the E-8 JSTARS.³⁶

During the first week of March 2003, the number of allied CAPs flown over southern Iraq was doubled to give aircrews more experience at operating in a high-threat environment.³⁷ From March 1 until the start of major combat on March 19, allied aircrews flew four thousand sorties into the no-fly zones, in the process acquainting themselves with various procedures that had been established for the impending campaign and further familiarizing themselves with mission-related details of southern Iraq. Of this heightened operating tempo, a Pentagon spokesman noted that “we also want to establish different looks, different flight patterns, in order to preserve some element of tactical surprise.”³⁸ The carrier air wings embarked in Kitty Hawk, Constellation, and Abraham Lincoln took turns participating in these patrols, with F-14s and F/A-18s armed with LGBs and supported by E-2Cs launching on combat sorties day and night. The heightened sortie rate in such a small and congested block of airspace made mission management particularly demanding.

The assistant director of operations of the 77th Expeditionary Fighter Squadron at the time, Lt. Col. Scott Manning, described a harrowing near-miss during the night of March 5, 2003, while he was leading the SEAD escort force in support of a U-2 as the latter skirted the Baghdad-area Super MEZ:

           During the second refueling between tanker operations and NVG [night-vision goggles] transition, I had a very close call with [my wingman,] Rowdy. We pulled off the tanker in a right-hand climbing turn, and it was pitch black. Rowdy rotated his light switch to “off.” Having been watching him in the right turn, I could not see that he had stopped his turn. I, however, stayed in my right turn while perceiving him to still be in his. In retrospect, I should have rolled out and called for his lights. Instead, I stayed in the turn and reached up to pull my goggles down. I heard the blast of the mighty GE-129 [jet engine] pass right over my canopy, at which point I looked up to the left (keep in mind I am still in my right turn) only to see Rowdy now out on my left side and only about 20 feet away. I was fortunate that Rowdy had looked at me during this and pulled back on his stick to let my aircraft pass underneath him.39

The minicampaign against the Iraqi IADS that unfolded under the aegis of Southern Watch during the months immediately preceding the war significantly degraded Iraq’s air defense capabilities within the southern no-fly zone. That ramped-up effort had no effect in the least, however, against Iraqi IADS assets fielded in and around Baghdad, which General Leaf characterized as more robust than the defenses that had been in place there on the eve of Desert Storm more than a decade before. Iraq, Leaf said, had marshaled all of its assets for a vigorous defense of its capital city: “Countrywide, they are weaker. In Baghdad, they are stronger because they have brought everything in.” Iraq’s echeloned defenses around the capital included SA-2, SA-3, and SA-6 radar-guided SAMs; man-portable infrared SAMs; and AAA.⁴⁰ Furthermore, Iraqi air defense technicians had met with their Serbian counterparts after Operation Allied Force in 1999 and had carefully studied the unique tactics Serb air defenders had applied against NATO’s combat aircraft.⁴¹

The Iraqi air force had continued to fly as many as a thousand training sorties a month in the airspace between the two no-fly zones right up to the eve of the campaign’s start, and thus could not be completely discounted as a threat to allied forces.⁴² Just a month before the campaign began, the Iraqis conducted a rare MiG-25 reconnaissance mission toward the west in an attempt to assess allied force dispositions.⁴³ Barely a month before that, on December 23, 2002, a MiG-25 had succeeded in downing an MQ-1 Predator that had been especially configured with a Stinger infrared missile.⁴⁴ General Moseley later explained that a special projects effort had been initiated to configure the Predator, which normally mounts AGM-114 Hellfire air-to-ground missiles, with the infrared-guided Stinger with the intent to lure the Iraqi air force to come up and engage it with a fighter. Although the Predator was shot down in the end, the bait worked and provided valuable updated intelligence on the MiG-25’s radar performance parameters and the Iraqi command and control system.⁴⁵

Within the context of Operation Southern Focus, the coalition responded to 651 incidents of Iraqi firing on allied aircraft by dropping 606 bombs on what General Moseley called a “wider set of air defense and related targets.”⁴⁶ Under Southern Focus, allied aircrews were authorized to attack Iraqi IADS-related facilities that had not directly threatened allied aircraft but were associated with the air defense system. Fiber-optic cable repeaters were of particular interest. Because they are about the size of manhole covers, they called for especially precise munitions delivery. Allied aircrews attacked known fiber-optic nodes whenever possible in an attempt to force Iraqi air defenders to rely on their more vulnerable shorter-range acquisition and tracking radars, which could be more easily monitored and jammed. These expanded responses continued right up to the formal start of Operation Iraqi Freedom on the night of March 19.

Toward the end of Southern Focus, three defensive counterair CAP stations were established inside southern Iraq, with the western position moved forward to include the airspace above the 33rd parallel at the time initial SOF operations began on the ground on March 19 (see below). Although no Iraqi aircraft attempted to fly at any time during the three-week campaign, those CAP stations were established and maintained lest Iraqi pilots try desperation attacks against vulnerable allied aircraft like tankers and ISR platforms operating in rear areas.47

By March 18, 2003, CENTCOM’s air component had flown 21,736 combat sorties into the southern no-fly zone under the aegis of Southern Focus and had destroyed or damaged 349 specific targets. The 651 known instances of Iraqi surface-to-air fire directed against CENTAF aircraft during this eight-month period were all ineffective.⁴⁸ After the campaign ended, General Moseley acknowledged that the heightened intensity of allied air operations may have elicited a more intense Iraqi response, giving allied aircrews more opportunities to attack ground targets of all types: “We became a little more aggressive based on them shooting more at us, which allowed us to respond more. Then the question is whether they were shooting at us because we were up there more. So there is a chicken-and-egg thing here.”⁴⁹

Viewed in hindsight, Southern Focus conferred an early advantage on CENTCOM’s effort to gain total control of the air over a large portion of Iraq once the full-up campaign was ready to be launched. More important yet, it also was a key enabler of CENTCOM’s ultimate decision to commence air and ground operations almost simultaneously because it allowed General Moseley, in effect, to start the air war more than eight months in advance of the formal execution of OPLAN 1003V. By that time, General Jumper observed, “we felt that [Iraq’s air defenses] were pretty much out of business.”⁵⁰ Former Air Force chief of staff Gen. Merrill McPeak later added that it was incorrect, strictly speaking, to suggest that there had been no independent preparatory air offensive prior to the unleashing of allied ground forces against Iraq from Kuwait, as had been the case for nearly six weeks during Operation Desert Storm in 1991. On the contrary, McPeak noted, because of the prior air preparation that had been made possible under the aegis of Southern Focus, “Iraq’s air defenses stayed mostly silent, and our aircraft were able to begin reducing opposing ground forces immediately” once the major combat phase of Iraqi Freedom was under way.51

Preparatory Air-Supported SOF Operations

Precursor operations to pave the way for Iraqi Freedom also took place on the ground. Months before the campaign began, Army Special Forces A-teams (the nickname commonly used to denote numbered twelve-man Operational Detachments Alpha) were assigned individual provinces in Iraq and were directed to study their populations, terrain, infrastructure, and social setting.⁵² As the onset of formal combat neared, allied SOF teams rehearsed activities planned for the western Iraqi desert in the Nellis AFB range complex in Nevada. They subsequently deployed to the war zone as an integrated and combat-ready force because they had already trained together as such.⁵³

In a related move, on February 20, 2002, the first CIA team entered the Kurdish area of northern Iraq to lay the groundwork for a planned insertion of paramilitary teams that would comprise the CIA’s northern Iraq liaison elements.⁵⁴ CIA operatives on the ground in Iraq soon began providing solid human intelligence reports on Iraqi air defenses hitherto unknown to CENTCOM.⁵⁵ CENTCOM asked the CIA to provide geographic coordinates for the reported sites, and once those coordinates were in hand, successfully struck the sites during Southern Focus operations. Woodward later reported that “the quantity and quality of [this] intelligence . . . was dwarfing everything else.”⁵⁶

As allied preparations for war continued toward the final countdown, CIA operatives reportedly recruited an active-duty Iraqi air force Mirage pilot and a MiG-29 mechanic. From those two sources the CIA learned that Iraq’s air arm was in a state of near-collapse and was capable of performing only suicide missions, and that Iraqi pilots were feigning illness on scheduled flying days to avoid having to fly barely airworthy aircraft.⁵⁷

On March 19 at 2100 local time, nine hours before the scheduled start of the ground war, more than fifty allied SOF units (including both Special Forces A-teams and similar British and Australian units) covertly entered Iraq’s western desert and neutralized some fifty enemy observation posts along Iraq’s borders with Jordan and Saudi Arabia. As those initial SOF operations began to unfold, RQ-1 Predator UAVs flying overhead streamed live video into the CAOC, showing the observation posts being systematically taken down in accordance with the plan. Additional SOF teams poured into the western desert and fought a series of fierce battles to secure the areas from which Iraq had launched Scud missiles against Israel in 1991. The principal aim of this operation was to give Israel every incentive to refrain from intervening militarily.58 Allied SOF units also promptly isolated and captured the H-1, H-2, and H-3 military airfields in Iraq’s western desert where chemical munitions and Scud missiles had been stored prior to Operation Desert Storm.

The SOF operations were backed up by airborne strike aircraft armed with PGMs, including thirty-six F-16C+ fighters of the Air National Guard and Air Force Reserve Command, eighteen A-10s, eight RAF Harrier GR7s, ten B-1s, four RAF Tornado GR4s on call if needed, and a variety of airborne and space-based ISR assets.⁵⁹ To support the counter-Scud mission and other SOF operations in the western desert, General Moseley had established the 410th Air Expeditionary Wing composed of aircraft from the RAF in addition to the Guard and Reserve. This was the first instance in which a SOF task force drew all of its apportioned CAS, as well as much of its air interdiction support, from a single wing that had been expressly task-organized for the purpose. In a major first in the annals of air-land operations, General Franks gave General Moseley control of the counter-Scud mission as the supported component commander. He also gave the subordinate commander of Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force (CJSOTF) West the responsibility for interdicting ground-based time-sensitive targets in support of that mission. Never before had the air component of a joint task force been given operational control of an extensive portion of enemy territory; nor had a SOF task force commander on the ground served in a supporting role to the air component commander.⁶⁰

The vice director of operations on the Joint Staff at the time, Maj. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, noted later during the campaign that these SOF-dominated operations represented “probably the widest and most effective use of special operations forces in recent history.”⁶¹ In contrast to the five hundred or so coalition SOF troops who deployed for Operation Enduring Freedom, active SOF involvement in Iraqi Freedom soared to nearly ten thousand personnel from U.S. and allied services. During the counter-Scud operations in the Iraqi western desert, a commentator noted, allied SOF teams went “quail hunting” with harassing raids intended to flush out Iraqi military units, “which then became targets for U.S. air strikes. Indeed, air power proved to be the Special Forces’ trump card.”⁶²

The B-1s used in these operations were essentially precision bomb-carrying trucks, each loaded with as many as twenty-four JDAMs. They also were equipped with a Ground Moving Target Indicator (GMTI) radar that could detect any Iraqi ground force movement.63 (At a unit cost of less than $20,000, the JDAM tail-kit that was affixed to standard 2,000-pound and 1,000-pound general-purpose high-explosive bombs during the major combat phase of Iraqi Freedom in 2003 yielded a nominal 10-meter attack accuracy against mensurated target coordinates that had been further reduced to a 3-meter circular error probable, barely more than the length of the munition.)⁶⁴ New onboard jamming systems and ALE-50 towed decoys protected the B-1s in defended Iraqi airspace, with the decoy reportedly having performed “smashingly.”⁶⁵

Allied SOF teams operating in the western desert encountered unanticipated resistance from Iraqi ground units and required greater-than-expected air interdiction and CAS. The counter-Scud mission eventually evolved into three additional missions: maintaining an allied western presence, blocking attempted escape of Ba’athist leaders, and direct action against Iraqi ground forces. The SOF units, supported by the air assets noted above, quickly established fairly secure operating areas and were able to block both escape and incoming materiel reinforcements. In the process, all Iraqi forces in the region were destroyed or forced to surrender, obviating the need for allied conventional ground forces.⁶⁶ Commenting on this operation shortly after the campaign ended, a senior U.S. official noted that “there were a lot of dead bad guys left in that desert who were planning some really nasty things, from shooting Scuds at Israel to blowing up oil and air fields to messing with Jordan.”⁶⁷ In fact, there was no indication after the campaign ended that any of the allied SOF teams encountered Iraqi Scuds.⁶⁸

Allied SOF operations in northern Iraq followed a roughly similar pattern. Because the issue of Turkish basing and overflight had not yet been resolved, the SOF component started with only a small presence of forces on the ground, with B-1s providing support. The CAOC was unable to provide more significant air support because CENTAF could not use its strike aircraft based at Incirlik. As a result, air superiority over the area had not yet been established in a situation in which tankers had to be pushed into Iraq to refuel the fighters that were escorting the B-1s. Iraqi troops attempted some halfhearted attacks on Kurdish forces in the north, but they made no determined effort actually to penetrate Kurdish-controlled areas. Iraqi AAA positions did on one occasion fire on 6 MC-130s that were attempting to insert some 250 allied SOF personnel into a predesignated operating area, hitting one and forcing it to make an emergency landing at Incirlik on 3 engines.⁶⁹

A typical tactical air control party (TACP) of Air Force joint terminal attack controllers (JTACs) operating in northern Iraq consisted of two SOF airmen paired up with a Kurdish Peshmerga militiaman and armed with a .50 caliber sniper rifle and a Viper laser target designator configured with a 50´ magnification telescope.70 The fire support procedures involving kill boxes and the fire support coordination line (FSCL, pronounced “fissile”) that predominated in kill-box interdiction and close air support (KI/CAS) operations in the south (see below) generally did not apply in northern Iraq because there was never a clear moving line of advance for allied forces.⁷¹ In light of the largely guerilla-type war that Kurdish Peshmerga fighters were conducting in this part of the war zone, allied aircrews performing CAS missions could determine the precise location of friendly troops on the ground only by contacting them by radio during the final stages of preparation for an air-support attack.⁷²

For the first two days of the war, the aircraft of Carrier Air Wing (CVW) 3 embarked in Harry S. Truman and those of Air Wing 8 in Theodore Roosevelt operating in the eastern Mediterranean could not support allied SOF operations in northern Iraq because they lacked permission to transit the airspace of any of the countries that lay between the carrier operating areas and their likely targets. After Turkish airspace was finally made available to the coalition by D+3, however, numerous carrier-based strike sorties were flown over Turkey and were pivotal in forcing the eventual surrender of Iraqi army units in the north. In the end, having sustained no combat fatalities as a result of enemy fire, a mere thousand SOF combatants enabled by allied air power effectively neutralized eleven Iraqi army divisions in the north, whose troops, by one account, “simply took off their uniforms and walked home.”⁷³ This successful synchronization of allied SOF teams and air power was a direct result of the deep mutual trust relations between the two communities that had been cemented by their highly successful joint combat operations during Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan.⁷⁴

An Unplanned Start

As D-day neared, CENTCOM had settled on a plan that called for the allied air and ground offensives to kick off more or less concurrently, with a view toward undermining the cohesiveness of Iraq’s highly centralized political and military establishment. A heavy opening round of air attacks would be closely followed by allied ground forces advancing in strength to secure such time-sensitive objectives as the oil fields in southern Iraq. This carefully arranged plan was abruptly preempted on the afternoon of March 19, 2003, however, by an eleventh-hour report from CIA director George Tenet that the intelligence community had learned of a “high probability” that Saddam Hussein and his two sons Qusay and Uday would be closeted with their advisers for several hours in a private residence in a part of southern Baghdad known as Dora Farms.⁷⁵ Tenet took this information directly to Secretary Rumsfeld, and both men went to President Bush with the news that a timely decapitation opportunity had arisen that might bring down the Ba’athist regime in a single stroke and perhaps make the full-scale allied offensive unnecessary.

Earlier that day, President Bush had held a final video teleconference with General Franks, who was in the CAOC at Prince Sultan Air Base with General Moseley, and CENTCOM’s other component commanders. The president had polled the component commanders one by one, asking each in turn if he had what he needed to proceed comfortably with the planned campaign. General Moseley replied: “My command and control is all up. I’ve received and distributed the rules of engagement. I have no issues. I am in place and ready. I have everything we need to win.” The other commanders replied in much the same way. Franks then reported to Bush: “The force is ready to go.” Bush replied: “I hereby give the order to execute Operation Iraqi Freedom.”76 The plan called for forty-eight hours of covert operations to insert SOF teams into Iraq as the campaign’s initial moves. At that point, thirty-one SOF teams quietly entered western and northern Iraq.

Up to that point, CENTCOM’s campaign plan had called for A-day to commence two days later on March 21 at 2100 local time, nearly 24 hours after the scheduled start of the allied ground push. The tantalizing prospect of beginning—and ending—the campaign with a single surgical strike, however, was simply too good to pass up. President Bush approved the decapitation attempt. A CAOC staffer later observed that OPLAN 1003V in its initial planning stages had been aimed at Hussein principally in a figurative sense; now, the Iraqi dictator “would literally be in the crosshairs.”⁷⁷

General Myers immediately phoned General Franks and asked him if he could prepare the needed TLAMs within two hours to meet the required time-on-target. Franks replied that he could. General Myers subsequently reported intelligence indications that there was a hardened bunker within the target complex that TLAMs could not penetrate, thus necessitating the use of 2,000-pound penetrating EGBU-27 laser-guided and satellite-aided bombs that could be delivered only by F-117 stealth attack aircraft. Franks initially told Myers that he did not believe he could have an F-117 ready to launch in sufficient time, but then he checked with General Moseley in the CAOC.

The air component commander immediately summoned his subject-matter expert on the F-117, Maj. Clinton Hinote, and told him: “The answer I owe the president is, is this doable, and what is the risk?” Major Hinote pondered the question for a moment and replied: “Sir, it is doable, but the risk is high.”78 Hinote outlined various operational considerations that would figure in any such gamble, offered a couple of alternative strike options that might work, and listed support assets that would be needed to maximize the chance of mission success. Armed with Hinote’s input, General Moseley informed Franks that a single F-117 could promise only a 50 percent chance of mission success and that it would take two of the stealth aircraft to ensure an effective target attack. Moseley added that the bombs could be salvoed in pairs, even though that delivery mode had never before been attempted.

As good operators would naturally be expected to do with a major offensive looming, mission planners in the 8th Fighter Squadron that operated the forward-deployed F-117s had already been “leaning forward” and had arranged to have one aircraft fully loaded with the penetrating munitions that would be required for any such short-notice mission. Intelligence experts in the CAOC, however, did not have accurate information regarding the precise location of the presumed bunker. CAOC weaponeers hypothesized that the bunker would most likely be buried beneath a field near the main house in the Dora Farms complex, and accordingly spread four weapon aim points across the field to maximize the likelihood that one bomb would penetrate the suspected bunker.⁷⁹ (Only after the campaign ended and U.S. forces were able to examine the site did it become certain that there was no underground bunker and no evidence that Saddam Hussein had been at Dora Farms at the time.)⁸⁰

As soon as it was clear that the two F-117s could be made ready in sufficient time, General Franks told the president that he needed a committal decision from the White House by 1915 eastern standard time if the aircraft were to have any chance of safely exiting Iraqi airspace before dawn. The sun would rise over Baghdad the following morning at 0609 local time, with first light occurring about a half-hour earlier, rendering the F-117s visible and hence vulnerable to optically guided Iraqi AAA fire. President Bush gave the “go” order at 1912, three minutes before Franks’ stipulated deadline.

The F-117s took off from Al Udeid Air Base at 0338 local time, less than ten minutes before the cutoff time of 0345 local. CAOC mission planners hastily scrambled to round up needed tanker support for the F-117s by diverting tankers that had been flying night missions near southern Iraq in connection with Southern Focus. The TLAMs in the scheduled strike package were then launched in sequence as planned, starting at 0439. They would arrive at their assigned aim points within minutes after the impact of the EGBU-27s as SOF operations concurrently unfolded in the west and south and on the Al Faw Peninsula. Immediately before the F-117s’ scheduled time-on-target, four F-15E Strike Eagles, in the one and only use of the GBU-28 hard-structure munition throughout the entire campaign, successfully neutralized the interceptor operations center at the H-3 airfield in the western Iraqi desert.81 That was the last bomb dropped during a Southern Watch mission.

The aerial attack against the three-building Dora Farms complex was conducted just before sunrise at 0536 Baghdad time by the two F-117s, each of which dropped two EGBU-27s directly on their assigned aim points. Scant minutes after those four bombs detonated, a wave of conventional air-launched cruise missiles (CALCMs) from B-52s operating at safe standoff ranges struck the Dora Farms compound, followed by forty Navy TLAMs launched from the North Arabian Gulf and Red Sea by four surface warships (Milius, Donald Cook, Bunker Hill, and Cowpens) and two nuclear fast-attack submarines (Montpelier and Cheyenne), partly to help further suppress Iraqi radar-guided SAM defenses in the area.⁸²

This was the first combat use of the EGBU-27, which featured both laser guidance for precision targeting and GPS guidance for all-weather use, a combination that greatly improved its combat versatility.⁸³ The F-117s were supported by Air Force F-16CJs that performed preemptive defense-suppression attacks against selected Iraqi SAM sites and by three Navy EA-6B Prowlers that were launched on short notice from Constellation to jam enemy IADS radars.⁸⁴ As the preplanned time for EGBU-27 weapon release neared, a partial cloud cover obscured the designated aim points within the target complex. A lucky break in the cover gave the F-117 pilots roughly six seconds to identify the target visually and drop their bombs. The pairs of munitions in each drop were clustered so closely together after release that they almost collided on their way to the target. The two pilots observed all four detonations, which occurred about ninety minutes after President Bush’s deadline for Hussein and his two sons to leave Iraq had expired.

Capt. Paul Carlton III, an F-16CJ pilot who was airborne that night leading a two-ship element, later recalled the campaign’s impromptu opening as he observed hints of its evolution from a distance:

           On March 19/20, we were flying on-call SEAD. . . . I was a night guy, flying only at night, and it was early in the morning. I had one more vul [vulnerability period] to cover before I went home. We were covering six-hour vul times, where we’d come away to get gas when we needed it and then go back in again. I came out of the [operating area], contacted the appropriate agency, and they said, “Copy. You’re going to support Ram 01.” That’s all I got. Who’s Ram 01!? I had no idea what was going on. I asked, “Can you tell me who Ram 01 is, what their TOT [time-on-target] is and where they’re going?” I got nothing back. . . . The [rules of engagement] at the time were that we couldn’t shoot or drop anything unless we were given permission to do so. . . . So I sent [my wingman] off to get permission to fire our weapons if needed, and at the same time I start looking for Ram 01 on the radio. I had no idea what he was or what was going on. . . .

                Ram 01 came up on the radio and told me roughly where he was and the coordinates of where he was going. He also gave me the coordinates of his IP [initial point] and his target, which I plugged into my jet so as to figure out where he was going and what his target was. His target plot fell into the little map of Baghdad. That clued me in to what he was about to do, and I knew that things were about to get much more exciting.

                Having learned the TOT and seen where he was going, I knew all I needed to know. I knew what threats he was up against, and now I was thinking about how best I could support him. . . . Having devised a basic strategy, I flew back into the [area of operations], but chose not to go up near his target, even though we were now allowed to cross the no-fly zone. The F-16 is a radar-significant target, and I didn’t want to trip anything off or stimulate the air defenses before they needed to be. I never heard anything else from Ram 01, which, thinking about it now, makes sense to me as the pilot always “cleans up” as they go to war [i.e., the F-117 retracts its communications antennas when entering defended airspace].85

Carlton and his wingman continued to watch the Super MEZ for about an hour. “Then,” he said,

           I hit Bingo fuel [the fuel level at which an aircraft must either initiate a return to base or depart the area to seek a tanker]. I’ve not seen anything happen or anything to suggest what’s happened to Ram 01, so I told the controlling agency, “I’m Bingo and have to go home.” I got handed off to different agencies and headed back to the tanker down south to get gas for the trip home. We were on the tanker when Ram 01 came over the radio and said, “Tanker 51, Ram 01 behind you and checking in for gas.” As I came off the tanker with my wingman, I looked behind me and there’s this Stinkbug [fighter-pilot slang for the F-117] taxiing up. That was the first clue that I had that we’d just helped start the war.86

Roughly two hours after the mission had been completed and all its aircraft had safely returned, President Bush announced to the nation and the world: “On my orders, coalition forces have begun striking selected targets of military importance to undermine Hussein’s ability to wage war. These are the opening stages of what will be a broad and concerted campaign. . . . I assure you this will not be a campaign of half measures, and we will accept no outcome but victory.”⁸⁷ Franks later recalled: “We did not want President Bush to speak in a way that sounded good to America and our allies, but inadvertently compromised our plan.”⁸⁸ Shortly after the eleventh-hour decapitation attempt, the chairman of the JCS, General Myers, declared that “regime leadership command and control is a legitimate target in any conflict, and that was the target that was struck last night.”⁸⁹ Early reports that Hussein had been killed or injured in the attack proved to be false.⁹⁰

Iraq promptly responded to the attempted decapitation attack by launching five surface-to-surface missiles into Kuwait in a move that obliged allied troops and Kuwaiti civilians to don chemical warfare protective garb. One of those missiles, an Ababil 100 (an Iraqi variant of the Soviet FROG [free rocket over ground] missile), was fired from a launch basket south of Basra. USS Higgins, a Navy Aegis destroyer positioned in the North Arabian Gulf, detected the missile on radar within two seconds after its launch, determined its launch point, and generated a firing solution within fourteen seconds. An Army Patriot PAC-3 SAM from one of the twenty-seven Patriot batteries stationed in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia destroyed the Iraqi missile in flight.⁹¹ Moments thereafter, a pair of airborne F-16s geolocated the two offending Iraqi mobile missile launchers and destroyed them.⁹²

Technical evidence suggested that Patriot PAC-3 SAMs destroyed all of the intercepted Iraqi missiles, including the Ababil 100 and an Al Samoud 2 (an Iraqi modification of the Soviet SA-2 SAM with a maximum range of about 112 miles). One Iraqi missile that got through allied defenses was believed to have been a Chinese-made CSSC-3 Seersucker cruise missile that flew low over the water from the Al Faw Peninsula into Kuwait, beneath the field of regard of nearby Patriot radars that were scanning for higher-flying ballistic missiles.⁹³ Four of the incoming Iraqi missiles were intentionally not fired at because they posed no threat. Two landed in the water, one impacted in the empty desert, and the fourth exploded shortly after being launched.94 Later that day, Franks reported to Rumsfeld that “we have air supremacy in the battlespace.”⁹⁵

The abrupt change in the initially planned timeline for Iraqi Freedom occasioned by the decapitation attempt had far-reaching consequences. Fearing a loss of tactical surprise, heightened vulnerability of exposed allied ground troops in Kuwait to missile and artillery attack, and an Iraqi move to torch the country’s vital oil wells in a punitive response, CENTCOM unleashed the lead elements of deployed Army, Marine Corps, and British ground troops thirty-six hours ahead of the originally planned start of heavy air operations, essentially reversing the plan that had been so painstakingly developed during the preceding months.⁹⁶ That eleventh-hour reversal was rendered more palatable for CENTCOM because its air component had already established air superiority over southern Iraq by means of Operation Southern Focus, thereby freeing up the coalition’s strike aircraft to concentrate almost entirely on supporting the allied ground units.

The most detailed of the postcampaign assessments of V Corps’ land offensive noted that

           crossing the berm [into southern Iraq] was a major combat operation. Erected to defend the Kuwaiti border by delaying attacking Iraqi troops, the berm now had the same effect on coalition troops heading the other way. Breaching in the presence of Iraqi outposts required rapid action to deny the Iraqis the opportunity to attack vulnerable coalition units while they were constrained to advance slowly and in single file through the lanes in the berms. . . . Literally a line in the sand, the berm was a combination of massive tank ditches, concertina wire, electrified fencing, and, of course, berms of dirt. The breaching operation required four major tasks—reducing the berms, destroying the defending Iraqi forces along the border (mostly observation posts), establishing secure lanes through the berms, and then passing follow-on forces through to continue the attack into Iraq.⁹⁷

In conjunction with this major movement into southern Iraq by V Corps, Navy sea-air-land commandos (SEALs) and British Special Air Service (SAS) troops conducted an air assault on an oil manifold and metering station on the tip of the peninsula and promptly secured that high-value objective. The start of the allied push into the Al Faw Peninsula was set for 2200 local time on the night of March 20, 2003. It was preceded by supporting JDAM attacks by carrier-based F/A-18s as well as by highly accurate optically directed cannon fire from AC-130 gunships that were orbiting nearby. Carrier-based jets also attacked command and control targets in southern Iraq and delivered leaflets containing capitulation instructions to Iraqi troops who might be inclined to surrender without a fight. Promptly on the heels of these preparatory air attacks, allied SOF and regular forces entered on the ground and secured the remainder of the objective.

A coalition SOF contingent crossed into Iraq from Arar in Saudi Arabia that same night, with a similar contingent launching from a more northward departure point to seize and hold the strategically vital H-2 and H-3 airfields in the Iraqi western desert and the equally important Haditha dam. This operation was backed by a strong air element of B-1s, F-15Es, and F-16s carrying LGBs and satellite-aided JDAMs. The SOF teams marked Iraqi vehicles and other targets with hand-held laser designators, and the strike aircraft destroyed or disabled seventeen ZSU-23/4 AAA guns and some twenty-three other Iraqi armored vehicles, as well as numerous trucks and barracks. Shortly thereafter, two C-17s that had flown nonstop from North Carolina landed on an unprepared strip in western Iraq, in the first direct combat insertion of a U.S. mechanized force.98

Allied strike and combat support aircraft were subsequently launched from carriers in the North Arabian Gulf and selected land bases throughout the theater to begin the air war in a measured fashion during the night of March 19–20. Although the ATO for that day (the carefully preplanned D-day for Operation Iraqi Freedom) generated 2,184 sorties in all, the initial round of air strikes was carefully meted out, as one defense official put it, to “see if we can try to tip things first.”⁹⁹ Secretary Rumsfeld continued to urge Hussein’s government to concede, saying, “We continue to feel that there’s no need for a broader conflict if the Iraqi leaders act to save themselves.”¹⁰⁰

The initial strikes were directed mainly against Republican Guard headquarters and related targets with the goal of trying to separate the Iraqi rank and file from the regime. As one account later recalled in this respect, the allied coalition “did not attack with overwhelming force, and operations over the first 40 hours were characterized by judicious use of the minimum force necessary.”¹⁰¹ General Moseley’s chief of strategy described the underlying nuances of the minimum-force approach as follows:

           While all planners, both air and ground, began with a desire to go in with overwhelming force (General Franks’ initial Generated Start), the president and secretary of defense kept pushing us toward a leaner and more quickly moving force. This forced me to be more deliberate with effects-based planning. It is fairly easy to get many of the desired effects when you have overwhelming force. In the end, with a more fine-tuned effects-based approach, we found ways (both kinetic and nonkinetic) to achieve the desired effects with our forces split against all of the planned major combat phase objectives at once.102

By the end of the campaign’s first full day on March 20, the air component was well into the Scud hunt in the Iraqi western desert; allied SOF teams had begun infiltrating into the west, north, and south of Iraq and were in partial control of the western desert that constituted a quarter of Iraq’s entire territory; and the land component’s forces were fully poised in attack positions on the planned line of departure.¹⁰³ Remarking on CENTCOM’s last-minute need to reset its plans, British defense analyst Michael Knights observed that “in contrast to the beginning of Operation Desert Storm, which had been a triumph of orchestration, the opening of Operation Iraqi Freedom would prove to be a triumph of improvisation.”¹⁰⁴

The initial hope that Hussein’s regime might quickly implode led CENTCOM at the last minute to remove many high-value targets within the city limits of Baghdad from the initial target list (see below). A senior CAOC staffer later explained this sudden truncation of the initially planned ATO for that day: “There was a hope that there would be a complete and utter collapse of the regime early on. In order to let that come to fruition, [CENTCOM’s leaders] initially held back on those targets.”¹⁰⁵ As it turned out, however, many of the air component’s planned A-day southern targets had been either already destroyed by earlier Southern Focus attacks or overrun by the advancing land component and SOF units during the first day.

The Full Campaign Begins

The actual start of preplanned offensive air operations, designated A-hour by CENTCOM, took place precisely on schedule at 2100 Baghdad time on the night of March 21 with large-scale air attacks that would total more than 1,700 sorties in all, including 700 strike sorties against roughly 1,000 target aim points and an additional 504 cruise-missile attacks in the opening round. This start sequence had been essentially set in stone almost from the outset of campaign planning because of the complex and inflexible orchestration of allied strike platform takeoff times required to enable those aircraft to achieve a simultaneous time-on-target in the Baghdad area from widely dispersed operating locations ranging from nearby Kuwait all the way to the United Kingdom and the continental United States.

The commander of Carrier Air Wing 2 in Constellation, who led the initial strike force, recalled that he deemed the potential for midair collisions both inside and outside Iraq

           one of the greatest risks we faced. . . . In concert with the CAOC planners and our CVW-14 teammates, we created simple procedural airspace deconfliction measures—three-dimensional “highways in the skies,” complete with off-ramps, reporting points, and altitude splits that helped mitigate the midair hazard. Still, the prudent aviator always stayed on altitude, did belly checks, and kept his head on a swivel when joining the tanker. . . . The indispensable U.S. Navy and Marine Corps EA-6B Prowlers provided continuous multiple-axis jamming in support of approximately 70 aircraft attacking nearly 100 different targets throughout Baghdad.106

The target list for the opening-night attacks consisted of known or suspected leadership locations, regime security, communications nodes, airfields, IADS facilities, suspected WMD sites, and elements of Iraq’s fielded forces. Regime security targets on the initial strike list, approximately 104 in all, included facilities of the Ba’ath Party, Fedayeen Saddam, Internal Intelligence Service, Special Security Organization, Directorate of General Security, Special Republican Guard, and the personal security units that were assigned to protect the regime’s leaders. The roughly 112 communications targets that were attacked during the initial round consisted of cable and fiber-optic relays, repeater stations, exchanges, microwave cable vaults, radio and television transmitters, switch banks, satellite antennas, and satellite downlinks. Sea- and air-launched cruise missiles were the main weapons used in the initial wave, followed by a concentration of F-117 and B-2 stealth attack aircraft that were supported by fully integrated conventional strike and electronic warfare aircraft packages. During one of those attack segments, a B-2 dropped two 4,700-pound GBU-37 satellite-aided hard-structure penetrators on an Iraqi communications tower in Baghdad. (The B-2 can carry eight GBU-37s and is the only aircraft in the Air Force’s inventory configured to deliver the munition.)¹⁰⁷

Although it could not be immediately determined how many Ba’ath regime leaders, if any, were caught by surprise and killed in these attacks against headquarters buildings, command centers, and official residences—some fifty-nine buildings in all—the impact of the attacks was broadly reflected in the failure of the leadership to attempt to rally the Iraqi people, the limited scope and impact of Iraqi information operations, the slowness of the Iraqi army to react, the absence of any observed enemy ground maneuver above the battalion level, the slowness of Iraqi forces to reinforce Baghdad, and the complete failure of the Iraqi air force to defend Iraqi airspace. The general absence of hard and reliable intelligence on Iraqi WMD sites precluded a robust attempt against that target set, although such WMD delivery systems as surface-to-surface missiles, artillery, and UAVs were struck whenever they were located and positively identified. CENTCOM made a high-level decision not to focus attacks on WMD infrastructure unless there were indications of an imminent threat to coalition forces.108

Initial SEAD Operations

The defense-suppression portion of the A-hour offensive unleashed on the night of March 21 was led by a barrage of allied sea- and air-launched cruise missiles that were targeted against the eyes, ears, and lifeblood of Iraq’s still-intact and highly distributed IADS. In this initial assault wave, more than one hundred TLAMs took down the ring of high-power, low-frequency acquisition and tracking radars that surrounded Baghdad. The capital city’s main defense node was its air defense operations center, which fed threat information to subordinate sector operations centers that, in turn, fed that information to interceptor operations centers. All of these nodes were attacked, as were microwave landlines and fiber-optic cables that relayed air defense information and key long-range early-warning radars.¹⁰⁹

These initial counter-IADS attacks struck the most critical fire control and communications nodes of the many SAM batteries aggregated in the Super MEZ around Baghdad and Tikrit, as well as leadership and other regime facilities in central Iraq. The Super MEZ, which appeared on aircrew navigational charts as a racetrack with extensions on the opposite sides of each end (see map 2.2), consisted of a profusion of SA-2, SA-3, and SA-6 missile launchers, as well as some French-made Roland SAMs and at least one American-produced I-Hawk SAM complex that had been captured when Iraq occupied Kuwait in late 1990 and early 1991. Each radar-guided SAM site was also accompanied by a profusion of AAA guns of calibers ranging up to 100 mm.¹¹⁰ Many of these sites had never been precisely geolocated by U.S. intelligence.¹¹¹

Concurrently, all major airfields of the Iraqi air force were rendered unusable by JDAM attacks that cratered the main runways and taxiways (see map 2.3). CENTAF planners had intended to use TLAMs against the SA-2 and SA-3 sites defending fighter airfields, but the absence of good real-time intelligence confirming their locations most likely precluded those attacks.¹¹² These cruise missile strikes were followed at 2146 by the first attacks by stealthy B-2s and F-117s. Eight of the twelve F-117s scheduled in this initial attack wave had to abort without expending their munitions because of their inability, in the confusion of the opening hours, to make their scheduled tanker connections. By 2300, nonstealthy Air Force and Navy strike aircraft had entered the fray in large numbers, bringing the total number of target aim points attacked to about a thousand by the end of the first night of air attacks. As a result of the assessed effectiveness of these attacks, General Moseley deemed it safe to push the first E-3 AWACS aircraft into Iraqi airspace to support joint and combined air and SOF operations in northern Iraq.¹¹³ As a testament to the extent of air dominance achieved by the coalition at that point, B-1s operated in the heart of the most heavily defended Iraqi airspace, including night missions on the campaign’s second day and daylight missions beginning on the third.¹¹⁴

Source: Adaptation by Charles Grear based on CENTAF map

Source: Adaptation by Charles Grear based on CENTAF map

During the course of these initial counter-IADS attacks, allied strike aircraft, supported by SEAD assets armed with AGM-88B/C high-speed antiradiation missiles (HARMs), used penetrating hard-structure munitions to attack underground command centers and overwhelm Iraq’s IADS operators, who thereafter elected to launch all of their SAM shots ballistically (i.e., without radar guidance). The cutting edge of the air component’s SEAD capability during these initial forays into still heavily defended Iraqi airspace was the Air Force’s F-16CJ, which had been expressly configured to perform this demanding mission.115

The SEAD escort mission required the F-16CJs fly in close coordination with strike aircraft en route to their targets, remaining alert to Iraqi IADS radar activity and specific pop-up SAM threats, and firing HARMs periodically from standoff ranges in a preemptive effort to suppress the Iraqis’ ability to engage the strikers with radar-guided SAMs. One account explained that this preplanned HARM operating mode, called preemptive targeting (PET),

           allows [the missile] to be fired at a suspected [SAM] site regardless of whether [the site] is emitting or not. Based on precise and thorough preflight planning, the timings are calculated so that the HARM will be in the air as the strikers are over the target, or at their most vulnerable point. If the threat radar comes on line during the missile’s time of flight, the HARM’s seeker will detect the radar energy and issue corresponding guidance commands to steer it toward the source. The main priority . . . was to get threat emitters off the air as soon as possible, or to dissuade them from coming on line at all.¹¹⁶

A related tasking for the F-16CJs came in the form of so-called lane SEAD, in which the aircraft patrolled the ingress and egress lanes used by coalition strike aircraft. Because seeking out enemy IADS targets of opportunity required flexibility, aircraft assigned to lane SEAD missions typically carried, in addition to their standard HARMs, GBU-31 JDAMs and CBU-103 wind-corrected munitions dispenser (or WCMD, pronounced “wick-mid”) canisters for potential pop-up hard-kill opportunities. During the campaign’s first five days, the HARM was used almost exclusively in its preemptive targeting mode because pilots flying the SEAD missions had no way of knowing what tactics the Iraqi SAM operators might attempt or which enemy threat systems might suddenly come up and start emitting—although, as one F-16CJ pilot noted, “the Iraqis knew for sure that if they came on the air, they were going to get a face full of HARM.”117 SEAD sorties typically lasted six to nine hours, with the longest ones continuing up to twelve hours, during which time the pilot could anticipate as many as nine tanker hookups.

Allied strike aircraft kept up the pressure on Iraq’s IADS in the Super MEZ for three days. During that time General Moseley continued to limit offensive air operations to night missions flown solely by stealthy B-2s and F-117s (only twelve of the latter had deployed forward for the war) or to standoff missile attacks either from high altitude, such as conventional air-launched cruise missiles carried by B-52s, or from ship-launched TLAMs.¹¹⁸ He directed a “staggering” of alternating waves of TLAM and manned aircraft attacks so that the enemy’s air raid alarms would be going off constantly.¹¹⁹ Only when Iraq’s air defenses in the Baghdad area were assessed without question to be down for the count did the CAOC begin operating nonstealthy aircraft throughout Iraqi airspace during daylight hours.¹²⁰ It was only during the first week of the campaign that allied fighter aircrews operating in the relatively safe altitude regime above 20,000 feet repeatedly encountered heavy, if ineffective, Iraqi AAA fire.¹²¹ The commander of CVW-14, who led the opening-night strike package, recalled that “the Iraqi defenses were spectacular but ineffective. None of the SAMs were guiding, no one had any indication of being illuminated by fire control or target track radars, and the vast majority of the fireworks were in front of and mostly below us. Still, co-altitude AAA bursts and SAM trajectories rising through our altitude kept our jets in constant maneuver and our eyes out of the cockpit for the entire attack.”¹²²

An F-16CJ pilot who was supporting a night F-117 strike near the heart of the Super MEZ recounted his tense experience while conducting such operations:

           It was my first ride in country, and I had no idea. We had the Navy guys, who also wanted to go downtown, on our assigned tanker, and they wouldn’t let us get gas. . . . We all had HARMs, eight in total, and we didn’t know if the Iraqis were going to turn on their radars or not, so we were going to be firing preemptive shots. [W]e only got about 2,000 lb of gas each [from the tanker], meaning that our external tanks were still dry and that we had only our internal fuel to rely on. We turned off all our lights and pressed downtown in an offset container [box formation] in full afterburner. I was on NVGs, and all I could see were three big afterburner plumes racing downtown. Flying at 30,000 feet and Mach 1.2, I wanted to know what the guys in the AWACS must have been thinking. It was full on. I was a little light on gas, so I kept creeping up on everyone else, trying to find the right afterburner setting to keep in position. We got to about two minutes from Baghdad, and we knew that the F-117s should be just about to reach downtown. In plain English, we worked our target sorting—“I’ll take this one, you take that one”—and I was ready to shoot. I didn’t want to shoot first, though, as I wasn’t keen to be the one who screwed everything up! I was waiting and waiting, and nothing happened. Then there was this big freakin’ freight train of a missile whooshing right next to my canopy. You could smell the burnt powder of the rocket motor. What I didn’t realize was that it wouldn’t go high straight away. Instead, it was heading straight for [my flight leader and his wingman]. I was scared stiff until the missile eventually climbed and did its thing. . . .

                We were still over the Mach [the speed of sound], and there was all this stuff coming up from the city. I was thinking to myself, “It’s going to be the one you don’t see that gets you.” My head was now literally looking everywhere in the sky and on the ground. In fact, I don’t think I was actually looking at anything, because my head was moving so fast. We finally shot our second missiles, and then we realized we had used up a lot of gas. We were right over the Super MEZ, and we turned around nice and slowly and went looking for a tanker. At this time, the tankers were still over Saudi Arabia, but we eventually found a guy who flew into Iraq with all his lights on, blinking away. Everyone else in Iraq must also have seen him, and then [my wingman] overshot him! We asked if he’d make another turn north, and he told us that he’d do it, but that it would be better for him if he headed south, as he was already over Iraq! I [finally] hooked up with only 800 lb of gas remaining. That’s about five minutes’ flying time, and we were still about an hour away from [our home base].123

The four F-16CJs took turns taking fuel from the tanker until each had enough to make it home.

Also in connection with the counter-IADS effort, several BQM-34 Firebee drones equipped with chaff dispensers and launched from airborne DC-130s were used as decoys to draw Iraqi SAM and AAA fire. Two Predator UAVs at the end of their service life (characterized by their operators as “chum”) were likewise pressed into service. These Predators, the oldest in the Air Force’s inventory, were stripped of their sensors and weapons and launched on missions that lasted between twenty-four and thirty-six hours to try to provoke a response from Iraqi air defenses and expose any remaining pockets of potential threats. The fact that the Predators survived as long as they did in the still-defended Super MEZ before running out of fuel was yet another testament to the intimidation effect that the coalition’s SEAD capabilities had on Iraq’s SAM operators in the Baghdad region.¹²⁴

Leadership and Other Strategic Attacks

Some strikes against leadership targets were largely symbolic, aimed at projecting a recognizable pattern of avoiding collateral damage within walled compounds and at targeting Hussein’s regime rather than the Iraqi rank and file.¹²⁵ Others sought to achieve highly functional effects, making the most of fused imagery, human intelligence, and signals intelligence to attack specific nodes in or underneath government structures based on their actual known usage, such as forcing the regime to abandon the use of fiber-optic communications early on during the campaign.¹²⁶

Just the day before this initial night of sustained air attacks, the Turkish parliament finally relented and voted to allow coalition aircraft to transit Turkish airspace en route to their operating areas in Iraq.¹²⁷ At the same time, however, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan decided to forgo further efforts to seek parliamentary approval for the allied use of Turkish air bases as well, which meant that Air Force tankers initially slated to operate from those bases had to operate instead out of Bulgaria, some five hundred miles farther away. But the overflight approval did at least allow the carrier-based strike aircraft operating from the eastern Mediterranean to use an air transit corridor over Turkey rather than flying a far more circuitous route.¹²⁸

At 0600 local time on March 21 (now both G-day and A-day), I MEF pressed northward from Kuwait into Iraq, followed shortly thereafter by the Army’s 3rd ID to the west. On that first day, the 3rd ID advanced more than eighty miles into Iraq. In the face of this coordinated land onslaught, Iraqi army troops by the thousands simply took off their uniforms and melted away into the civilian population, with only scant individual or unit defections or surrenders.129 At that point, President Bush informed Prime Minister Blair that coalition ground forces already had 85 percent of Iraq’s oil fields and 40 percent of the entire country secured. Thanks to that prompt and coordinated ground offensive, only eight Iraqi oil wells were set on fire, and no other significant Iraqi oil infrastructure was destroyed.¹³⁰

Both the Army’s V Corps and the Marine Corps’ I MEF were well into Iraq when CENTCOM’s main air offensive finally began. An important subsidiary goal of the overall air effort was ensuring that the five main Iraqi military airfields remained incapable of supporting enemy air operations. That objective was achieved during the first night of Iraqi Freedom. Air Marshal Torpy, the United Kingdom’s air contingent commander, later recalled that there also had been “a very robust defensive counterair plan, with fighters deployed 24 hours of the day to ensure that if an [enemy] aircraft did fly, we would be able to make sure it did not fly for very long.”¹³¹

In a CENTCOM briefing to reporters on March 22, General Franks declared, “This will be a campaign unlike any other in history, a campaign characterized by shock, by surprise, by the employment of precise munitions on a scale never seen, and by the application of overwhelming force.”¹³² Yet despite that extravagant characterization, and for all the early media anticipation of an impending “shock and awe” air campaign, coalition attacks against Iraq once the full air offensive was under way were actually quite measured. CENTCOM removed hundreds of initially planned strikes from its target list in an effort to limit noncombatant casualties and unintended damage to Iraqi infrastructure.¹³³ Thanks in part to the unexpectedly rapid advance of the allied ground offensive, all leadership and command and control targets within the land component’s battlespace (including 301 target aim points and 124 planned TLAM launches) were withdrawn from the ATO almost literally at the last minute as the CAOC re-roled many sorties initially scheduled against infrastructure targets to support the land component instead.¹³⁴ For example, allied aircraft struck none of the bridges across the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers that had been dropped during the Desert Storm air war, because such attacks would not serve any tactical objective that was tied to any of General Franks’ broader operational goals. On the contrary, CENTCOM intended to use those bridges to move allied ground troops who would be advancing northward toward Baghdad. As Michael Knights later observed, “although the opening strike had a sense of occasion, it could never match the suspense of the initial strikes of Desert Storm. The opening of air operations in 1991 had been a thunderclap, the first shots in anger between the United States and Iraq, but the commencement of the strategic air campaign in Operation Iraqi Freedom felt like an afterthought, coming days after the beginning of hostilities when coalition ground forces were lodged scores, even hundreds of kilometers in Iraq.”135 To be sure, the actual damage inflicted on Baghdad during the first three weeks of Iraqi Freedom far exceeded that of the earlier Desert Storm campaign because of the extensive use of GPS-aided munitions that did not require clear weather for conducting precision target attacks. To this extent, the loss of the anticipated “thunderclap” in no way diminished the well-thought-out, highly accurate, and effective strikes that occurred. One air campaign planner recalled that “the original first strike was very, very thorough. There wasn’t a target we hadn’t accounted for.”¹³⁶ At the heart of the planned operation lay the innermost elements of the Ba’ath regime’s security apparatus, including government command and control facilities, the Republican Guard, the Special Republican Guard, and Hussein’s family and bodyguards. To support this targeting plan, CENTCOM and its national intelligence providers had spent the last nine months of 2002 profiling the Iraqi military and civilian communications network, during the course of which the Joint Warfare Analysis Center singled out thirty-five critical nodes that would be exceptionally lucrative targets.¹³⁷

At the same time, CENTCOM’s planners bent every effort to minimize unintended civilian fatalities. An informed report noted that “of the 4,000 targets and 11,000 [more specific target aim points] the military reviewed at the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom, advanced weaponeering and tactical solutions (including axis and angle, timing variation, fusing and size-of-weapon tweaks) were able to reduce the collateral damage risk until merely 24 carried a collateral damage estimate of 30 or more probable civilian deaths.”¹³⁸ CENTCOM compiled a no-target list of several thousand clearly identified civilian entities that was, according to Maj. Gen. Glenn Shaffer, a senior Air Force intelligence official, many times longer than the target list itself: “We had people looking at Iraq every day of every year, constantly generating new no-strike locations that they had identified as cultural, religious, or archaeological sites, schools or hospitals, or foreign embassies and nongovernmental organizations.”¹³⁹

Col. Gary Crowder, the chief of the strategy and plans division at Air Combat Command, described CENTCOM’s plan to eliminate the government: We “wanted to kill the guys in those offices. Detailed analysis was undertaken showing when those guys were in the building. It showed that after a leisurely breakfast, they tended to be at the offices around nine in the morning, so that was when the time on target was set for. If [the attack] had been undertaken simultaneously with the beginning of ground operations, it would have gutted the regime’s loyal manpower.”140 In yet another eleventh-hour change to the initially planned A-day air offensive, however, CENTCOM abandoned the 0900 time-on-target for the opening strikes against leadership targets. Some observers speculated that advocates of using the stealthy F-117 and B-2 had prevailed over those who had espoused a massive TLAM opening strike to breach the Baghdad-area Super MEZ during daylight hours. As Michael Knights reported in this regard, based on postcampaign interviews with some CAOC planners, “by changing the time of the assault, the only chance of effectively targeting regime forces was lost because only a daylight surprise strike could catch meaningful numbers of intelligence and security officers at key installations.”¹⁴¹

The CAOC’s chief strategist later explained the actual underlying facts behind this change in plan:

           We discussed the day versus night issue with General Moseley. Although a night strike would indeed allow us the use of our stealth aircraft, a daylight offensive using a large number of TLAMS in the Baghdad area was more in keeping with the effects-based decapitation strategy that we were pursuing. At the outset, we were hoping to catch as many as possible of the regime’s leaders at work in their offices. Yet as we moved ever closer to execution and as the likelihood of our achieving operational and tactical surprise waned ever more, intelligence reporting indicated that many of the key regime officials had by that time either relocated or just stopped coming to work. Once our initial hope of achieving the desired decapitation effect began to dissipate, the stealth option at night made greater sense. Ultimately, therefore, we amended our A-day operations plan to start at night.¹⁴²

Twenty-four targets with an assigned high collateral damage expectancy were deleted from the list of targets in the Baghdad area scheduled to be attacked at the slated A-hour of 2100 on March 21. A CAOC planner recalled that “due to the presumed success of the decapitation strike, General Franks placed a call to Moseley and told him that they didn’t want to appear to be piling on. At the four-star and political level, they hoped it was enough and that we had proved our offensive capability was way beyond the regime’s ability to protect themselves. At that point, the fear in Washington was that we would launch our main blow just as the Iraqis surrendered. . . . Within six hours, we had removed 300 [weapon aim points] from the target list—it felt like we had stripped out half the ATO.”143 Three years after the campaign’s major combat phase ended, General Moseley frankly admitted that he had been “concerned” at the time that this decision to gut the opening-night ATO was “not right.” On further reflection he concluded that it had been “a mistake.”¹⁴⁴

General Franks’ decision to begin the ground offensive early left General Moseley with difficult choices. He could not reschedule CENTAF’s attack to begin any earlier, because the five B-2 stealth bombers committed to the opening wave required fifteen hours of flight time to their targets from their launch point at Whiteman AFB, Missouri. That meant that CENTAF’s long-awaited major air offensive would not begin until twenty-eight hours after the first wave of U.S. Army, U.S. Marine Corps, and British Army ground forces had advanced northward from Kuwait into Iraq and Iraq’s leaders understood that they were facing a full-scale allied invasion. It was, as Michael Knights aptly remarked in this regard, “the complete opposite of tactical surprise.”¹⁴⁵

Many of the air component’s scheduled targets now lay inside the land component’s FSCL, an area of Iraqi terrain that extended roughly eighty-four miles in front of the advancing ground forces. These were deleted from the ATO because they had been overrun during the fifteen hours that now separated the start of the ground offensive and the scheduled start of major air operations. In the end, only 39 percent of the leadership, command and control, and regime security targets that had been initially slated for attack were actually struck by coalition air forces during the three-week campaign.

Of this toned-down opening air offensive, one F-15E crewmember recalled: “What we all saw was a scaled-back version of the original plan. When we were briefed on the original plan, everyone was shocked and awed. When we were then shown the follow-on plan, which outlined how quickly the Army and Marines were going to move when the first bombs fell, we thought that the whole situation on the ground and in the air was going to get pretty bad.” Another F-15E crewmember added: “We jokingly started to call it ‘shock and awwww-sh*t!’ when it looked like the ground troops were spread too thin and got bogged down in An Nasiriyah and the like.”¹⁴⁶

Still concerned that Iraq might launch Scud missiles against Israel, General Moseley persuaded his land component counterparts to make an exception to CENTCOM’s general rule against key infrastructure target attacks so that he could target a dozen bridges in western Iraq that might enable Hussein’s forces to move hidden Scuds from their storage facilities to launch areas. Although CAOC staffers knew that dropping these bridges might impede postcampaign food relief into Iraq from Jordan, they regarded the Scud risk as a more pressing priority. Accordingly, the coalition target coordination board, headed by CENTCOM’s director of operations, General Renuart, acceded to Moseley’s bid to attack the twelve requested bridges, ten of which were ultimately either destroyed or damaged from the air, leaving more than one hundred more in the area untouched. The bridges were all in the vicinity of previously known or suspected Scud launch areas in desolate locations, and all spanned smaller streams or dry washes in unpopulated parts of western Iraq. Encountering resistance from his political-military assistant, who sought to have the board’s approval for the attacks reversed, General McKiernan replied that he trusted General Moseley’s judgment on the issue.147

The widespread use of the term “shock and awe” by the media was badly misleading, in that it implied a visual spectacle that was never an intended part of the air attack plan. Air Chief Marshal Burridge dismissed the term as “a sound bite which got rather regenerated in Washington” that fundamentally missed what the air war was about and “was not very helpful elsewhere, frankly.”¹⁴⁸ On the contrary, the initial goal of allied air strikes was to degrade IADS facilities around Baghdad, Basra, and Mosul and to destroy key command and control nodes.¹⁴⁹ Limited air strikes were also conducted against Iraqi artillery and surface-to-surface missile positions in southern Iraq.¹⁵⁰ Less than a week before the campaign started, Anthony Cordesman had presciently suggested that eleventh-hour news reporting was tending “to exaggerate the [likely] impact of the precision bombing plan in the first two nights.” He even more presciently predicted that “events will increasingly dictate targeting from Day One on.”¹⁵¹ Indeed, by D+1 on March 20, Navy SEALs had seized the offshore gas and oil platforms and main oil tanker loading platform at Al Faw; by early the following morning, the Jalibah and Tallil airfields had been captured and the regular Iraqi army’s 51st Mechanized Division had surrendered; and by the end of D+3 on March 22, the Rumaila oilfields and Umm Qasr in the Al Faw Peninsula had been secured.¹⁵² Also on March 22, some seventy TLAMs were launched against bases of the Ansar Al Islam, an insurgent group that was thought to have ties with Al Qaeda.¹⁵³

Regarding the opening-night spectacle, Knights observed that “the [Bush] administration and the military had played it safe, and the result was underwhelming to friend and foe alike. There would be no major collateral damage incidents directly attributable to the air campaign—a notable first for the post–Cold War U.S. military—nor would there be an appreciable effect on the enemy war effort.”154 The damage was extensive all the same, however, and it must have seemed overwhelming to those Iraqis who were on the receiving end of the bombs. President Bush later aptly characterized the opening round of A-hour attacks that began on the night of March 21 as “one of the most precise air raids in history.”¹⁵⁵

Air-Land Warfare Unfolds

After several days of preplanned attacks against government buildings and other fixed targets, allied air strikes shifted, as planned, to concentrate on Iraqi fielded forces, including the six Republican Guard divisions that were deployed in and around Baghdad. The principal focus of the initial air effort against Iraqi ground forces was on the command and control, armor, and artillery assets of the units positioned between Kuwait and Baghdad and on the Republican Guard divisions that were positioned to defend Baghdad. Coalition air attacks against the southernmost enemy ground formations were directed against, in order of priority, the Iraqi 3rd Corps, 51st Mechanized Division, 11th ID, and 6th Armored Division.¹⁵⁶

Allied air attacks also now focused increasingly on “tank plinking” in designated kill boxes. This mission presented a major targeting challenge to allied aircrews because the Iraqis, having learned from the Serb experience four years earlier in Operation Allied Force, did not array the tanks of the Republican Guard divisions in battle formation, but instead dispersed them under trees and in the farming villages of the Euphrates River Valley.¹⁵⁷ Duly qualified allied fighter aircrews often performed as airborne forward air controllers (FAC-As) while searching for targets of opportunity during strike coordination and reconnaissance (SCAR) missions so they could direct other fighters and bombers to find and attack them.¹⁵⁸ This function complemented the work done by JTACs and SOF teams in locating Iraqi units and laser-designating them for airborne strikers. The mandatory altitude floor of ten thousand feet in the vicinity of Baghdad that General Moseley had imposed on allied aircrews made it hard for fighter pilots and their backseaters to discern targets, even with the aid of their infrared and electro-optical targeting pods, when JTACs on the ground tried to talk their eyes onto those targets.

Some FAC-As were initially underutilized in the air war. For example, in certain instances involving I MEF ground operations, F-14 pilots and radar intercept officers who were certified to perform FAC-A functions were held back in CAS stacks while fighters flown by more trusted Marine aviators were pushed forward to work directly with Marine JTACs on the ground. Once FAC-As were finally allowed to work in close concert with ground-based JTACs, particularly during night hours, they substantially reduced the required time between aircraft check-in and bombs on target. When they were not operating directly with JTACs, FAC-As were often best used to conduct reconnaissance in closed kill boxes inside the FSCL. FAC-As and SCAR aircrews operating in concert with division- and brigade-level JTACs were often able to locate and engage previously undiscovered enemy force concentrations.159

CAOC staffers later characterized the use of SCAR operations in this manner as “the most effective method for maximizing combat effects within open kill boxes.”¹⁶⁰ General Moseley used a few dedicated SCAR assets to find and identify moving targets and then either to attack them or to direct other aircraft to attack them. CAOC planners recalled that “SCAR jets typically took off with ATO-assigned kill boxes as their initial work areas, but they could be easily retasked as the battlefield situation might require. Their inherent flexibility further enhanced kill-box interdiction in Iraq.”¹⁶¹

The air component’s sorties dedicated to supporting the land component were intended to undermine or eliminate Iraqi ground force resistance and thereby enable General McKiernan to maneuver his forces with no need to pause in response to enemy actions. General Moseley colorfully explained this intent before the start of combat operations: “I don’t want [General McKiernan] to have to stop unless he decides to pull into the local 7-11 for a chili cheese dog and a cherry limeade.”¹⁶² Toward that end, using as a starting point the “push-CAS” kill-box approach that was first employed during Desert Storm and further refined during Enduring Freedom, the CAOC developed sophisticated and flexible KI/CAS procedures that provided a better means of identifying and promptly attacking Iraqi targets on the battlefield.¹⁶³ Each kill box in a larger common grid reference system overlaid on the battlefield was a thirty-minute by thirty-minute block of terrain, which translated into an area thirty nautical miles long and slightly less in width depending on latitude.¹⁶⁴ Such blocks were further divided into nine “keypads” that allowed for additional target-area deconfliction, plus the ability to concentrate more strike sorties within a given block of airspace over the combat zone. Each row of kill boxes was assigned a numerical designator, such as 84, and each specific kill box was assigned a two-letter designator, such as AW. Then each individual key was given a number (see figure 2.1).¹⁶⁵

The CAOC and the staff of its subordinate air support operations center (ASOC) assigned to support V Corps planned to use the kill-box system to ensure dedicated command and control procedures and a constant presence of FAC-As and JTACs within the battlespace. Controllers would assign allied pilots to specific kill boxes, both inside and beyond the FSCL, that were opened and closed for finite windows of time as might be required to ensure proper deconfliction of aircraft and artillery and to minimize the chances of friendly fire incidents. V Corps and I MEF were to control the kill boxes within the FSCL, and the CAOC would control those beyond it. The land component commander could open kill boxes within the FSCL to strike aircraft and close them at appropriate times to preclude any possibility of fratricidal fire from allied aircraft. In practice, however, the Army commander initially refused to open kill boxes inside the FSCL or to allow FAC-As to control kill boxes inside the FSCL in accordance with the KI/CAS plan (see figure 2.2), resulting in frustration for the air component and a resultant systemic inefficiency in the actual execution of the CAOC’s KI/CAS plan. Only after the “strategic pause” (see below) was the KI/CAS plan executed as it had been initially envisioned.¹⁶⁶

FIGURE 2.1 Common Grid Reference System

Source: Special Warfare

The kill-box arrangement was the result of a command and control construct that first saw widespread use during Operation Desert Storm. Subsequent improvements had made it a very effective measure for controlling battlefield interdiction and CAS sorties. General McKiernan or his designated subordinate could close entire kill boxes or merely portions of a keypad, either permanently or temporarily, to allow friendly ground operations in that particular piece of battlespace. A former Marine Corps fighter pilot explained that “airborne FACs [forward air controllers] could direct supporting aircraft to proceed to a given key on the keypad and await further instructions, or could use the system to help describe a target: ‘A pair of T-72s just north of the road intersection in the northwest corner of 84AW-9.’”167 Another informed account of this mission added: “The correct term for these dual-role sorties was KI/CAS, which inevitably became known as ‘kick-ass.’”¹⁶⁸

As the land component advanced relentlessly on Baghdad, kill boxes were opened and closed, on a minute-by-minute basis at times, “as ground troops neared them, artillery fired through them, or attack helicopters needed to service targets.”169 General McKiernan applied an atypically deep FSCL at the start of the ground offensive to prevent allied ground forces from overrunning the FSCL during their rapid advance, outstripping their supporting joint fires, and running the risk of sustaining Blue-on-Blue attacks by allied aircraft. This deep FSCL often worked at cross-purposes with the best interests of the land component, however, because it prevented the conduct of often urgently needed interdiction and CAS by allied fixed-wing air power (see Chapter 5 for a more detailed discussion).

FIGURE 2.2 Kill-Box Status Change Request Format

Source: Special Warfare

In northern Iraq, the American and coalition teams assigned to JSOTF (Joint Special Operations Task Force) North were mainly charged with keeping the Republican Guard divisions positioned in that region from falling back toward Baghdad and impeding allied combat operations in the south. Air component support for those northern SOF units was severely limited until Turkey granted the coalition the use of its airfields and airspace. To make matters worse, JSOTF North had been assigned a lower priority than the SOF operations in Iraq’s western desert and the main conventional ground force that served the land component working south of Baghdad. The CAOC found it impossible to provide a continuous air presence over northern Iraq by aircraft operating from bases south of Iraq because of the substantial distances involved. Accordingly, JSOTF North did not receive preplanned air support until Turkey finally granted overflight permission for Navy and Marine Corps strike fighters operating from the two carriers on station in the eastern Mediterranean. That Turkish approval came on March 24, five days into the war, and the first Navy sorties began flowing into northern Iraq two days later, on March 26. Eventually, CAS support was essentially constant.¹⁷⁰

Ground forces ignored the importance of fixed-wing air support at their peril. In an attempt to use Army air power in direct support of the land offensive, for example, the commander of V Corps, Lt. Gen. William Wallace, elected late in the afternoon of March 23 to launch thirty-one AH-64 Apache attack helicopters in a deep assault against forward elements of the Republican Guard’s Medina Division near An Najaf without prior preparation of the battlespace by the air component’s fixed-wing assets. During the course of that operation, which an assessment of the Army’s campaign performance later characterized frankly as “unsuccessful,” nearly all of the Apaches were badly damaged by Iraqi AAA and other heavy-weapons fire, and one was forced down and its two-man crew captured.¹⁷¹ An early account of this endeavor attributed the near-disaster to “hasty preparation, inadequate intelligence, a forewarned enemy, and an unfortunate selection of attack routes.”172 There was considerably more to the story, however, than that incomplete characterization suggested (see Chapter 5 for a more detailed discussion).

A more effective air power performance associated with the fighting near An Najaf occurred when orbiting UAVs and an E-8 JSTARS detected a formation of Iraqi T-72 tanks and other vehicles moving into position to attack U.S. forces. A well-aimed barrage of JDAMs delivered by fixed-wing aircraft destroyed some thirty of the armored vehicles and broke up the formation before it could get under way.¹⁷³ At this point in the land offensive, the forward line of allied troops had moved so far northward into Iraq that single-cycle carrier operations from the North Arabian Gulf (see below) could no longer reach the fight without refueling, prompting the Navy to press a number of tanker-configured F/A-18E/F Super Hornets into an organic tanking role. Concurrently, CENTAF moved two tanker tracks into Iraqi airspace, declared the captured Jalibah airfield operational for allied forces, and began kill-box operations in the land component’s battlespace as approved transit of Turkish airspace by allied tankers and strike fighters finally began to ramp up.¹⁷⁴ “Throughout it all,” the most thorough reconstruction of the Army’s performance in the campaign noted, CENTCOM’s air component “continued to degrade the regime’s ability to command and control its forces and provided exceptional CAS to the coalition ground forces in contact. Coalition air forces roamed the skies over Iraq at will, providing CAS, interdicting enemy forces, and striking strategic targets across all of Iraq. Coalition ground forces maneuvered with impunity, knowing that the coalition determined what flew. Coalition air attacks were responsive, accurate, and precise.”¹⁷⁵

The forces of nature came to the forefront on March 24 when a massive sandstorm, or shamal (derived from the Arabic word for “north”), slowed the northward pace of allied ground units, which had advanced beyond An Najaf and had begun to encounter increased resistance. It was not, as General Renuart remarked at the time, “a terribly comfortable day on the battlefield.”¹⁷⁶ The sudden storm was triggered by the passage of a strong, synoptically driven cold front through CENTCOM’s area of operations. Such storms, which typically last three to five days, are common in Southwest Asia during the winter, spring, and summer months and represent the most hazardous weather condition associated with the region. They can stir up tremendous amounts of dust as they sweep across the Arabian Peninsula, Iraq, and Kuwait, often resulting in surface winds of greater than fifty knots and producing ten- to thirteen-foot sea swells throughout the North Arabian Gulf. The strongest storms can reduce visibilities to zero within hours, as occurred in this case.

Fortunately, CENTAF’s weather experts predicted this shamal some five days before its onset, after a pass by a NOAA-17 polar orbiting satellite showed indications of surface winds activating the dust-source regions in northern Saudi Arabia. The commander of the 28th Operational Weather Squadron, the main Air Force entity responsible for Middle East weather forecasting, later remarked, “It’s one thing to say there’s going to be a big storm, but another thing to say where and when [and if] it’s going to be sand or a thunderstorm and where there’ll be cloud cover and rain. We hit this one pretty darn well.”177 That forecast gave mission planners in the CAOC ample time to front-load ATOs scheduled for execution during the sandstorm’s estimated course with an extra allotment of sorties, as well as to make appropriate changes to previously planned weapons loads in favor of GPS-aided munitions over LGBs, which were more likely to be adversely affected by the sandstorm. By March 24, with the predicted storm rapidly approaching, CAOC weaponeers began calling for JDAM-only loadouts in an effort to minimize the anticipated effects of the upcoming storm on overall mission effectiveness.¹⁷⁸

The sandstorm effectively grounded Army and Marine Corps attack helicopters, rendering fixed-wing aircraft the only platforms that could deliver needed direct and indirect fire support to allied ground troops who were sometimes surrounded by enemy troops in close proximity. One unit of the U.S. Army’s 3rd ID was trapped for two days on the enemy side of the Euphrates River, surrounded by Iraqi forces who were equally blinded by the storm. The Air Force JTAC attached to the unit called in hundreds of JDAM strikes all around the unit, killing Iraqi troops on all sides.

A postcampaign assessment from the Army’s perspective praised the air component’s contribution to the joint and combined battle:

           Although hampered by severe sandstorms, coalition aircraft continued to attack air defense, command and control, and intelligence facilities in the Baghdad area. Coalition aircraft continued to achieve high sortie rates despite the weather. The focus of strike missions began to shift to the Republican Guard divisions in the vicinity of Baghdad. Control of the air allowed the employment of slow-moving intelligence-gathering aircraft such as the E-8C . . . and the RC-135 Rivet Joint. . . . The majority of the effort was against discrete targets designed to achieve specific effects against the regime, to interdict enemy movement, or in close support of ground forces. Even during the sandstorm, surveillance aircraft continued to provide data that enabled the coalition to target Iraqi units over an area of several hundred square miles during weather the Iraqis thought would shield them from air attack. . . . Coalition air forces operated against strategic, operational, and tactical targets, demonstrating both the efficacy and flexibility of air power.179

Lieutenant Colonel Carlton, again leading a two-ship element of F-16CJs, launched from Prince Sultan Air Base into the teeth of the storm. Having been told that there were no suitable alternate landing fields in the entire theater, Carlton and his wingman headed for a tanker. “We made our way to the tanker, passing through a thunderstorm. . . . When we got to the tanker tracks, there should have been about 25 to choose from, but there were only three or four that had made it out there in the weather. I found my tanker on the radar and then broke out of the weather about two miles in trail. As we got our gas, I looked north and there was a wall of cloud as far as the eye could see from west to east, going up to 36,000 feet.”¹⁸⁰ At that point Carlton heard a request for help over Guard channel: “Anybody with JDAM contact me on this frequency.” The request for emergency air support had come from the U.S. Army’s 3rd Squadron 7th Cavalry (3-7 Cav), which was hunkered down just south of An Najaf waiting out the shamal. Carlton described the reported situation on the ground: “The Iraqi Fedayeen are starting to suicide-bomb them with cars and are shooting at them. They’ve got a couple of ground FACs with them, and they can’t see more than 10 to 15 meters at best, and there are no [other remaining] air-to-ground guys nearby to help them out because they’ve gone.”¹⁸¹ While Carlton and his wingman made their way toward An Najaf as fast as they could without using full afterburner, the Air Force JTAC (call sign Vance 47) supporting the embattled Army unit directed his TACP team to determine the perimeter of the friendly troops on the ground.

“We got there and start talking to Vance 47,” Carlton said, “and we worked out our coordination to drop. One of my WCMDs failed, and I didn’t drop it because the problem was with the guidance system, but the other one went straight through the weather and hit the target. . . . The feedback from the ground was very direct. They [the TACP operators supporting the Army unit] immediately came up on the radio and told us that they were no longer being shot at.”¹⁸²

Although the combination of the sandstorm and the concurrent (and completely unexpected) harassment efforts by the Ba’ath regime’s paramilitary Fedayeen Saddam brought the allied ground advance to a temporary halt, neither of those fleeting impediments materially affected the tempo or intensity of allied air operations.183 A series of smaller-unit allied ground attacks and feints allowed very effective air strikes against Iraqi ground forces. However, CENTCOM’s initial hope of persuading large elements of the Iraqi armed forces to surrender at the outset rather than fight proved ill founded. The morale of Iraq’s combatants appeared better than anticipated, and paramilitary forces of the Fedayeen Saddam and Special Security Organization fought tenaciously.¹⁸⁴

Fedayeen Saddam documents seized and exploited by JFCOM after the regime collapsed on April 9 explained the tenacity of these typically dismounted, exposed, and lightly armed paramilitary combatants. The documents declared that the organization’s main mission was to protect Iraq “from any threats inside and outside.” In 1998 the organization’s secretariat had promulgated “regulations for an execution order against the commanders of the various Fedayeen” should they fail in that duty: any section commander would be executed if his section was defeated, any platoon commander would be executed if two of his sections were defeated, any company commander would be executed if two of his platoons were defeated, any regiment commander would be executed if two of his companies were defeated, and any area commander would be executed if his governate was defeated. JFCOM’s subsequent assessment remarked, “No wonder that the Fedayeen Saddam often proved the most fanatical fighters among the various Iraqi forces during Operation Iraqi Freedom,” even though they were “totally unprepared for the kind of war they were asked to fight, dying by the thousands.”¹⁸⁵

The defending Iraqi ground units had been positioned and dispersed to allow for the greatest possible survival against air attack. Once directly threatened by the advancing allied forces, however, they were forced to move into more concentrated defensive positions, thereby rendering themselves more vulnerable to attack from the air.¹⁸⁶ As columns of Republican Guard vehicles attempted to move under what their commanders wrongly presumed would be the protective cover of the shamal, allied air strikes disabled a convoy of several hundred vehicles that were believed to be ferrying troops of the Medina Division toward forward elements of the 3rd ID encamped near Karbala, about fifty miles south of Baghdad. Air Force and Navy aircrews mainly used satellite-aided JDAMs for these attacks because LGBs, while still usable, did not perform quite as well in reduced-visibility weather conditions.¹⁸⁷ Although the JDAMs were unusable against moving vehicles, they were precisely what was needed when delivered through the weather against fixed targets with known coordinates. Recalling this experience, General Leaf later spoke of “our pause that wasn’t a pause,” since the air component never slackened its high tempo of operations throughout the shamal. General Moseley also later noted that 650–700 strike sorties had been directed against the Republican Guard over the three-day course of the shamal. Both he and General McKiernan agreed that allied air attacks against fixed leadership targets should be matched by concurrent attacks against the Medina and Hammurabi Divisions of the Republican Guard, which were expected to present the greatest threat to advancing allied ground forces.188

A CAOC planner said that when the shamal made classic CAS unworkable, “we went straight to the battlefield coordination detachment [the Army representatives in the CAOC] and said, ‘Give us all the targets you want to hit in the next few days,’ and they handed over 3,000 [target aim points]. They were the coordinates of every known revetment, every defensive area, every ammo storage dump. We didn’t have any imagery to validate them by, so we just grabbed the Global Hawk [UAV] liaison community and sent them all 3,000 DMPIs [desired mean points of impact]. We said ‘image these.’ This broke all the rules regarding tasking of ISR, but it worked.”¹⁸⁹ Other synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging for what CAOC planners called the “smackdown” effort against Iraqi ground forces included JSTARS, U-2s, and various satellites on orbit, as the single Global Hawk dedicated to the campaign remained airborne for twenty-six-hour sorties every other day, imaging 200 to 300 objects of interest to CAOC targeteers per sortie. With the coalition’s ground advance virtually at a halt and the location of all friendly forces well known and confirmed via Blue Force Tracker, mission planners did not require fine-grained situation awareness.¹⁹⁰ “All they needed to know,” Knights wrote, “was whether a revetment or a tactical assembly area was empty or full. Anything that resembled a threat was going to get bombed.”¹⁹¹ As the battle for Baghdad took shape, what Knights called “a synergistic combination of ground- and air-combat power . . . shared the battlespace as never before.”¹⁹²

Although CENTCOM’s most senior commanders insisted that there was never a real “pause” during the shamal, because heavy air attacks continued, the commander of I MEF’s 1st Marine Division, Maj. Gen. James Mattis, stressed that his Marines had been told to hold their offensive toward Baghdad just as they were becoming vulnerable to an Iraqi counterattack. “I didn’t want the pause,” Mattis said. “Nothing was holding us up. The toughest order I had to give [throughout] the whole campaign was to call back the assault units when the pause happened.” Mattis added that Lieutenant General Conway, the commander of I MEF, and Maj. Gen. Buford Blount, the commander of the Army 3rd ID, had shared his desire to continue pressing the ground advance.¹⁹³

General Leaf, the head of the ACCE at General McKiernan’s headquarters, insisted that

           the pace of the defeat of the Iraqi armed forces . . . accelerated—it didn’t slow. That didn’t mean that the pace of advance didn’t slow. But in that environment, the pace of destruction of Iraqi fielded forces accelerated. They were moving to contact, they moved to contact, they got killed. It was that simple. . . . If you can find an Iraqi field commander who says he thinks he got a break for a couple of days, I’d like to meet that guy. . . . An example of this supposed pause, one troop from 3-7 Cav was surrounded at night in a dust storm. . . . At the end of the engagement, the Iraqi force and a reinforcing element were destroyed with, I think, about 150 prisoners from the reinforcing element that surrendered before ever making contact because of a B-52 strike. And the particular troop, Charlie 3-7 Cav, suffered zero wounded, zero killed. That’s when everybody thought things were grinding to a halt. As I said, the Iraqis were being ground up.194

TSgt. Michael Keehan, an Air Force JTAC assigned to a team of controllers from the 15th Expeditionary Air Support Operations Squadron, offered a riveting recollection of how things looked from the ground as the Army’s 7th Cavalry Regiment was moving toward Baghdad during the battle of As Samawah, just as the three-day shamal had begun to develop. The regiment was crossing the Euphrates River at about 2230, well after nightfall.

           Both sides of the road were taking fire. I had two A-10s overhead and used my IR [infrared] pointer to get their eyes on the target east of us. They strafed the entire area with 30 mm, which illuminated the area with brilliant white light. Enemy activity ceased to exist. Then I worked the west side of the road with eight 500-lb bombs and white phosphorous rockets. We were about 700 meters away when the bombs hit, and everyone felt the shock waves in their bodies. I think that last strike, so near the convoy, brought us new-found respect. I think the Army hadn’t any idea of what we do. This display of sheer brute power was proof.¹⁹⁵

At about 0100 or 0200, after crossing the river, Keehan’s unit ran into another ambush—the third within eight hours.

           I had called the ASOC and told them of our situation and to keep sending us aircraft. I had two A-10s overhead in a matter of minutes with a full load of eight 500-lb bombs, full guns and rockets—standard load. The enemy positions hit us from both sides of the road [with] small arms and mortars. Most of the left-flank enemy positions were neutralized by Bradley [armored fighting vehicle] fire, so I concentrated CAS on the right side of the road near a long line of palm trees that lined the adjacent river. . . . I had the aircraft first strafe the area along the riverbank, making sure they had the right area that I was illuminating with my IR pointer. . . . The winds were picking up off to the northwest, the first telltale sign of a sandstorm brewing. . . . We were down to 50 feet or less of visibility. We still had to take the bridge near An Najaf, the bridge across the Euphrates River. We would be the first unit to cross it, the first unit right of the river.196

As they neared the bridge, “Staff Sergeant Schrop [Michael Shropshire] took over the controlling, as he was closer to the bridge and could better coordinate the friendly posture as we laid down steel close to their positions. . . . We both worked all night over maps and tons of coordinates. I believe by this time we were in almost catatonic states of mind. How long had we been up now? Who knows? That night, Staff Sergeant Shropshire controlled more missions, and we made sure no friendlies were harmed. That was the main thing.”¹⁹⁷ During that engagement Sergeant Keehan called in a dozen 2,000-pound JDAMs, another dozen 1,000-pound JDAMs, 2 500-pound JDAMs, and 1,200 rounds of 30-mm A-10 cannon fire. He also got 4 personal kills with his .50-caliber machine gun and M4 carbine. The repeated CAS attacks that he and Sergeant Shropshire called in destroyed some 30 Iraqi tanks and killed more than 100 enemy troops. In the midst of these events, a feint by other elements of the 3rd ID forced the opposing Iraqi Medina Division to begin repositioning its forces in an effort to block the American advance between the Tigris and Euphrates. After an E-8 JSTARS detected the ensuing movement of enemy armor and artillery on transporter trucks with its SAR and GMTI radars through the dust storm, CENTAF’s now-alerted air component began, in General Wallace’s words, “whacking the hell out of the Medina [Division].”¹⁹⁸

During the combined-arms battle at Objective Montgomery, closer to Baghdad, the shamal hit Sergeant Keehan’s unit with full force.

           The sandstorm was just an eerie catalyst of what was to come our way. Since the first three ambushes thus far this night, there was worse to come. I remembered a jumbled quote from Abe Lincoln that goes something like “thank God the future only comes one day at a time.” We were living hour to hour, kilometer to kilometer, and battle to battle. There was not a moment when I had time to think more than five minutes into the future, and that was more than likely terrain study up the road or looking off into the distant brush and rooftops for enemy soldiers. We were going into a populated area. That meant more places to hide, more ambushes, snipers, suicide-car bombers, and just plain fanatics. . . . I was the focal point for coordination and execution of CAS sorties. Thus far, I had controlled all the missions for 3-7 Cav’s defense. . . . The daylight had turned into an almost indescribable orange hue. This was something none of us had ever experienced, something you might read in a Ray Bradbury book or see in a sci-fi movie. Visibility was 50 feet at best with heavy winds, everything was orange, and there were enemy soldiers out there set up to kill us as we drove through their city. The OK Corral on Mars. . . . Huge explosions rocked off our left flanks, we had no idea what they were or how close. But it was close enough for me. . . .

                The weather continued to be horrible that night, and to top it off, it started to rain mud. No kidding, mud. . . . When the ASOC was looking for an area weather update, rather than a normal weather code for certain patterns, I had to say, “it’s raining mud, over.” There is no existing weather code for that, and I told them I was not kidding. . . . Any TACP, now or retired, will read this and think the possibility of doing CAS, given the circumstances we were in, would say it was close to impossible. Well, that night we did just that. . . . I would receive timely reports via JSTARS on military vehicles moving into our zones, so I was more than happy to be there and to help plan this mission. . . . I also had a lot of [intelligence] on enemy forces coming south into our northern and eastern flanks. They were coming at us from all directions, it seemed. . . . Without the courageous efforts of Staff Sergeant Shropshire, [Senior Airman Jonathan] Hardee, and myself using CAS in that area that night, I have no doubt in my mind that American lives would have been lost. . . .

                It was [now] around midnight, and it was still raining mud. I had been tasked with Pinup flight, a B-1 bomber fully loaded with 28 2,000-lb GPS-guided bombs. I had permission to attack the enemy T-72s that were pushing down the highway. . . . I mapped out several coordinates along the highway to create a stick length for a string of bombs that was three kilometers in length. . . . I tasked Pinup to release half of their bomb load on the stick length prescribed. . . . I cleared them hot and heard the radio call back—“Advance 51, this is Pinup, one minute to impact.” . . . JSTARS confirmed that [enemy forces] had pooled in a low area just south of the city. . . . I retargeted [the B-1] and they made two more bomb runs, eight released, then the final six. By now, the ASOC let us have free rein of the [radio] net, thanks to them.199

The next mission took Keehan’s unit through the Karbala Gap and northward to secure the western flanks.

           I received two F-14s with four LGBs aboard, and I targeted two more T-72s hiding in the canal zone just seven kilometers from us. We devised a great plan using artillery, CAS, and tanks to engage the enemy. A picture-perfect combined-arms battle. . . . The lead tanks stopped two kilometers short of the enemy positions. . . . I had Kiki flight of A-10s with their standard load of eight 500-lb bombs and full guns. They released their loads on the target area, and as soon as they were off and Winchester [out of bombs and ammunition], I had another flight of RAF [Tornado] GR4s with four GBU-16s. We bombed the same area, as they were hiding in the palm groves, well-camouflaged. I could not get accurate BDA [battle damage assessment], as the entire area was dust and smoke. . . . I was still controlling F/A-18s. They dropped another 18 500-lb bombs as we retreated back out of artillery range. . . . Once back in the safe zone, I continued to call in CAS throughout the night, requesting aircraft with FLIR [forward-looking infrared sensors] to pick out the target by the heat source. I had another flight of F/A-18s that picked out ten tanks on the south side of the canal, warm and running. They dropped LGBs on them, shack [bull’s-eye] again. I continued to work as many as four flights [four-plane formations of aircraft] in my airspace, each of us talking and confirming new targets and old ones. Cappy flight of two more F/A-18s acquired two more tanks and destroyed them as well. On their heels, I had two more RAF Tornados that also destroyed an additional two tanks trying to hide under bridge passes.

The results of this last action were twenty-five confirmed enemy tank kills, ten confirmed technical vehicles, some six hundred to one thousand enemy troops killed, numerous artillery pieces taken out, and an “unknown amount of enemy vehicles vaporized.”200

The Army subsequently awarded Keehan and Shropshire the Silver Star for their exceptional gallantry under fire, making them two of the seven Air Force JTACs who earned that high accolade for similar acts of heroism during the course of campaign.²⁰¹ Sergeant Keehan’s citation noted that his unit encountered heavy resistance in the defended city of As Samawah. While riding in a soft-skinned vehicle, he began receiving heavy fire and promptly called in CAS as artillery shells began exploding two hundred meters all around his position. Keehan directed air support against enemy positions along the riverbank and roads, which destroyed those forces with bombing and strafing runs, often within six hundred meters of friendly positions. Days later, his unit again faced a waiting enemy. After seizing the bridge at Sbu Sakhayr, the unit drove through a gauntlet of small-arms fire.

“In what was to be the decisive battle of the war,” the citation continued, “enemy . . . forces surrounded his unit in the midst of the sandstorm.” As the only available communications link for his unit, and “surrounded at night and blinded by sand and raining mud, [Keehan] orchestrated an almost impossible air support mission [against] approaching enemy armored formations.” As his unit continued along on the main axis into Baghdad and was again met by heavy fire, “Sergeant Keehan continued to call in CAS under heavy direct and indirect fire from T-72 tanks and artillery. The CAS attacks destroyed the enemy forces without the loss of a single American life.”²⁰² The citation for Shropshire, who also coordinated CAS operations during those battles, outlined a similar story of exceptional bravery:

           While securing a key Euphrates River bridge crossing, his unit was surrounded by enemy . . . forces and began receiving heavy small arms and RPG [rocket-propelled grenade] fire. Under a hail of gunfire in the midst of the sandstorm, he coordinated CAS while continually switching from his radio handset to his rifle, killing three enemy soldiers at close range. After receiving E-8 JSTARS cueing, and with complete disregard for his own safety, he left the APC [armored personnel carrier] during the sandstorm to confirm enemy armor locations and then directed a strike by 10 JDAMS that destroyed 10 T-72 tanks and the dismounted enemy forces who were about to overrun his unit’s position. He hastily repaired his bullet-ridden satellite antenna and quickly coordinated another air strike, destroying additional approaching enemy armor.203

Although General Mattis was plainly unhappy about having to halt the advance of his 1st Marine Division, General McKiernan had ordered the pause so that the land component could consolidate its gains and secure its lines of communication.²⁰⁴ “If nothing else,” a former Marine Corps fighter pilot observed,

           the pause was a great opportunity to methodically shape the battlefield rather than trying to keep up with the lightning-quick pace the ground forces had set in their race to Baghdad. . . . Coalition aircraft kept up around-the-clock attacks all throughout the pause and until the fall of Baghdad. Saddam’s divisions were smote from above—almost literally out of existence. In the process, they demonstrated the breakthrough capability of an air component that was now able to destroy the military effectiveness of an enemy ground force in conditions that rendered that force not only incapable of maneuver but even of defending itself. There were no massive armor-on-armor battles or earthshaking artillery exchanges because none of the Iraqi armies survived [the constant pounding from the air].²⁰⁵

Military-affairs commentator Max Boot noted that this constant pounding “took place out of sight of the international news media, and so the devastating effectiveness of these strikes did not become clear until later.”²⁰⁶

When the shamal abated and the allied ground advance resumed, the rate of allied air attacks increased commensurately to meet the renewed need for kill-box interdiction and CAS.²⁰⁷ More than half of the attacks (480 out of 800 on one day) were directed against Republican Guard units.²⁰⁸ By this time Iraqi ground force commanders had concluded, erroneously, that the only time they could successfully move and survive was at night. One commentator observed that “this made for good, clean hunting for the coalition aircrews. It was good hunting because it was the time the enemy chose to leave his hiding places. It was clean hunting because there was very little civilian traffic late at night.”²⁰⁹

Capt. Russ Penniman, a Navy fighter pilot who was serving as co-director of the CAOC’s combat plans division, observed that the video images televised back in the United States that presumed to portray the bombing of Baghdad gave no hint of the actual scope and magnitude of the ongoing attacks: “You have no idea of the vastness of that attack. Looking out of the window of a hotel [in which network video crews were positioned] is like looking through a soda straw.”210 Prior to the ground advance into Baghdad, these allied air strikes had crushed two of the six Republican Guard divisions and severely damaged two others, thereby clearing the way for the advance. Republican Guard lines were being shredded from the air, and the enemy was completely unable to hit back with any significant strength. Secretary Rumsfeld said: “They’re being attacked from the air, they’re pressured from the ground, and in good time they won’t be there.”²¹¹

Other Air Applications

On March 26 a fifteen-plane formation of Air Force C-17 intertheater airlifters departed Aviano Air Base, Italy, on a mission to air-drop elements of the Army’s 173rd Airborne Brigade into Bashur airfield north of Tikrit, the final move toward completing the opening of CENTCOM’s northern front in Iraq. The unopposed combat airdrop of 954 paratroopers and their equipment was the largest since the combat drop into Panama in 1989 during the hunt for dictator Manuel Noriega. It also was the first-ever combat airdrop of paratroopers by a C-17. The first five aircraft unloaded heavy equipment, and the remaining ten dropped paratroopers. The most authoritative reconstruction of U.S. Army operations in the campaign described this evolution: “The C-17s entered Iraqi airspace at 30,000 feet but descended to 1,000 feet for the actual jump. To reduce exposure to Iraqi air defenses, the aircraft literally dove down, with the paratroopers momentarily experiencing negative g-forces. . . . Colonel William Mayville, commanding the 173rd, followed the heavy drop as the first paratrooper out the door at 2010. 953 soldiers followed in 58 seconds.”²¹² Over the next four nights, C-17s delivered the full brigade into Bashur, landing in no-light conditions. In all, the operation entailed more than 60 C-17 sorties that carried more than 2,000 troops, 3,000 short tons of cargo, and more than 400 vehicles.²¹³

Allied air strikes intensified toward the end of March, broadening their focus to include telephone exchanges, television and radio transmitters, and government media offices.²¹⁴ Baghdad television was continuing to pump out a stream of propaganda portraying the Ba’ath regime as holding firmly against the allied offensive, thereby encouraging Iraqi fighters by suggesting that the regime’s command and control network was still intact and functioning—and, more to the point, that defending Iraqi forces were not doomed to defeat. President Bush, Secretary Rumsfeld, and General Franks began leaning hard on CENTCOM’s planners to come up with an effective way of terminating the broadcasts.

Up to that point in the campaign, high-level concerns about the need to avoid collateral damage and an associated desire to preserve Iraqi infrastructure for postwar reconstruction had allowed Iraqi television to remain on the air. The head of targeting intelligence on the Joint Staff recalled:

           The main factor restraining us was the collateral damage issue—most of these places were downtown and not surrounded by walled compounds like the other regime targets were. After the first few strikes, they stayed on the air, and frustration was growing. This guy [Iraq’s minister of information, Mohammed Said Al-Sahhaf, dubbed “Comical Ali” by some in the Western media] was still talking, and all the low-collateral-damage targets had been hit. What we needed to do, in a network-attack situation like this, was to attack all the nodes simultaneously instead of piecemeal. . . . There were three options—direct attack on the stations, taking out the power, and attacks on their transmission capabilities—the broadcasting antennae.215

The antennae were chosen as the most attractive targets, and MQ-1 Predator UAVs armed with Hellfire missiles eliminated the antennae on the roof of the Ministry of Information without causing other damage. TLAMs armed with submunitions were used to scrape aerials and satellite dishes off the roofs of other buildings, and one Predator used a Hellfire to disable the transmission dish of the Arabic-language Al Jazeera network in Baghdad to prevent the station from transmitting propaganda that worked to the regime’s advantage. That particular strike kept the offending station off the air for only about six hours, however, because Al Jazeera had redundant broadcast systems.²¹⁶

Viewed in hindsight, the failed decapitation attempt against Hussein and his two sons on March 19 initially appeared actually to stiffen the regime’s resolve because the men were able to transmit an uninterrupted flow of propaganda through television and radio outlets that had been placed on CENTCOM’s no-strike list. Only when administration leaders finally agreed to have the offending transmission facilities taken off the air did the coalition’s effort to capture Iraqi “hearts and minds” begin to show signs of promise—aided in considerable part by a two-pronged psychological operations stratagem involving propaganda leaflets and the direct piping of counter-regime radio broadcasts into Iraq. This psychological-warfare effort entailed the dropping of more than 40 million leaflets containing 81 separate messages both before and during the major combat phase of Iraqi Freedom. In addition, EC-130 Commando Solo aircraft transmitted more than 300 hours of radio and television messages to Iraq’s leadership, fielded forces, and rank and file. ²¹⁷

As the battle for Baghdad drew closer, the Republican Guard positioned their tanks under cover and in traditional revetments around the city. Coalition strike aircraft, including heavy bombers, struck the tanks with consistently lethal effect. Moving vehicles were engaged by LGBs or strafed by A-10s with 30-mm cannon fire. An F-15E weapons systems officer (WSO) explained how to bomb moving targets with LGBs:

           Hitting a moving target with a 500-lb GBU-12 was not dissimilar in theory to clay-pigeon shooting with a shotgun. The WSO would gauge the relative motion and direction of the vehicle and then point his laser a set distance ahead of it. By generating this lead, the bomb would be released with enough energy to strike the target as it continued to travel. With the bomb in flight, the laser would be fired some eight to ten seconds before impact and the weapon would guide onto the laser spot. If the WSO had been too generous with the lead, he could massage the laser spot back toward the vehicle, causing the LGB to sharpen its trajectory. Conversely, the bomb could be dragged further by adding lead to the vehicle. With the TIMPACT [time to impact] counter in the jet counting down, the WSO could gradually bring the laser spot onto the vehicle itself. With any luck, the bomb would score a direct hit.218

CENTAF’s strike aircraft also attacked enemy tanks, artillery batteries, AAA emplacements, and Republican Guard barracks that were arrayed around the outskirts of Baghdad.²¹⁹ The intent was to bomb those units into submission before they could be pulled back into the city, with the specific goal of drawing down their combat capability by at least 50 percent.²²⁰ At the height of this nonstop air offensive, some 150 allied aircraft were continuously in orbits over Iraq, waiting to conduct on-call attacks against targeted Republican Guard units. The complete intimidation of Iraq’s air defenses countrywide had by that time emboldened General Moseley to operate his JSTARS aircraft deep within enemy airspace in a continuous search for both fixed and mobile Republican Guard vehicles with their SAR and GMTI radars.²²¹ It was a remarkably complex force employment choreography.

The Bush administration continued to place heavy emphasis on avoiding collateral damage, so planners at CENTCOM accordingly turned to the latest computer models and software in pursuit of measures to minimize it. Allied aircrews, intelligence analysts, lawyers, and public affairs officers were pulled into collateral damage mitigation teams to respond to specific incidents and false allegations. Every preplanned target underwent a rigorous review, which included assessment of the likely blast propagation for a given munition and matching of the bomb’s size, fusing, and angle of impact, and the time of day of the attack—all with a view toward minimizing noncombatant casualties. A senior official observed, however, that “ultimately, if it’s a high enough value target, you accept a higher risk of casualties.”222

Every effort was made as well to avoid the destruction of infrastructure that would be essential to postwar reconstruction. For example, CENTAF’s air operations planners sought to negate the capability and effectiveness of Iraq’s IADS without destroying the electrical power–generation sources that sustained it. “There are other ways of taking down the integrated air defenses rather than just pulling the plug on the electricity,” the maritime component commander, Vice Admiral Keating, noted. “You can disable the radars by striking them. You can take down the facility itself by putting a bomb in the roof. Or you can disable the means of communicating the information drawn by the radars and observers to higher headquarters.”²²³ Iraq’s communications system was a particularly difficult target because it consisted of extensive backup networks connected by mobile dishes and deeply buried fiber-optic lines.²²⁴ The Iraqi military computer net was so commingled with the civilian computer network that attacking it likewise presented a risk of collateral damage.²²⁵

Fighter Losses to Friendly Fire

Three particularly disturbing incidents of surface-to-air fratricide against allied aircraft (the second barely averted) occurred during the three-week campaign. The first took place on March 23 when an Army Patriot PAC-3 SAM crew accidentally shot down an RAF Tornado GR4 (call sign Yahoo 76), killing its two crewmembers, as the aircraft was returning to its base in Kuwait after a strike mission near Baghdad. Early speculation attributed the incident to either a failure of the Tornado crew to identify their aircraft properly to allied acquisition and tracking radar controllers or a failure of the Patriot battery operators to interpret correctly the Tornado’s IFF signal.²²⁶ The Patriot system is designed to classify a target based on its speed, trajectory, altitude, and IFF response, as well as its character as a fixed- or rotary-wing aircraft, antiradiation missile, or ballistic missile.²²⁷ By one unofficial account, Army air defense logs showed that the offending battery manually fired a single missile at the aircraft after the battery’s radar symbology indicated an incoming antiradiation missile 9 miles downrange at 18,300 feet with an airspeed of 511 knots, an improbably slow speed for an antiradiation missile.228 Whatever the case, the aircraft, having just initiated its descent and not yet having established radio contact with air traffic controllers in Kuwait, was plainly misidentified as something other than a friendly fighter, and the Patriot battery fired in self-defense.²²⁹ A subsequent British military investigation determined that the Tornado’s IFF system had not been working properly.²³⁰

A second Blue-on-Blue surface-to-air incident occurred south of An Najaf nearly twenty-four hours later when another Patriot battery locked onto an Air Force F-16CJ with its fire control radar.²³¹ Remarkably, the F-16CJ’s HARM targeting system was not programmed to recognize and identify the Patriot’s radar signature, and the aircraft’s radar warning receiver displayed it as an “unknown” threat. The F-16 pilot responded accordingly by firing a HARM into the Patriot’s radar dish, effectively disabling it. Fortunately, no one was hurt in this incident.²³² After this near miss, another F-16 pilot remarked unapologetically: “We had no idea where the Patriots were, and those guys were locking us up on a regular basis. No one was hurt when the Patriot was hit, thank God, but from our perspective they’re now down one radar. That’s one radar they can’t target us with any more.”²³³ Regardless of that angry remark, the Army’s Patriots in-theater were an indispensable—and frequently utilized—defense against a very real Iraqi theater ballistic missile (TBM) arsenal that threatened exposed troops marshaled in Kuwait as the allied land offensive was in its final stages of preparing to push northward.

Nevertheless, many allied pilots believed that the Patriot posed a greater threat to them than did any SAM in Iraq’s inventory. Among the main problems associated with the Patriot batteries was their failure to remain linked into the overall air picture as they moved forward along with the ground forces’ advance. An Air Force analyst noted that “in many cases they would set up and go operational before linking back into the air picture—or even notify the CAOC of their new location. This is why the Viper [F-16 ] drivers and others ‘never knew where the Patriots were.’ It also contributed to fratricide potential, in that disconnected but operating Patriots could not use the common air picture to help identify radar targets as friendlies.”²³⁴

The third Blue-on-Blue surface-to-air incident involved a Navy F/A-18C from the carrier Kitty Hawk that was downed by a Patriot over southern Iraq on April 2 while conducting a strike mission over Karbala. The pilot was killed. Both he and his wingman, who observed the entire evolution, had taken evasive action to avoid the incoming SAM.²³⁵ The Navy leadership was understandably distressed that the Patriot battery had failed to distinguish the F/A-18 from a faster-moving enemy missile, and that it was even scanning for aircraft targets at all, considering that the Iraqi air force had not generated a single sortie since the invasion began.

The three Patriot-related incidents prompted the former director of the Defense Department’s operational testing and evaluation, Philip Coyle, to ask pointedly why the Army’s SAM batteries had been paying attention to fixed-wing aircraft in the first place: “We ruled the skies in Iraq, so almost by definition any aircraft up there was either ours or British.”236 After an initial inquiry by CENTCOM, General Moseley insisted that the Patriot crews stop using the automatic target engagement mode. “Although it might take a little longer for a Patriot battery to get a defensive shot off in manual mode,” Moseley’s chief strategist later noted, “that risk was clearly better than the alternative of continuing to take friendly losses, all the more so since we had attained unquestioned air supremacy over all of Iraq except the immediate Baghdad area.”²³⁷

The third instance of friendly fire described above begot another when two Air Force F-15Es were vectored to search for the F/A-18’s crash site and look for signs that the pilot had survived the attack. The F-15E crews were not informed that the F/A-18 had likely been lost to a Blue-on-Blue engagement. Consequently, when they saw flashes on the ground near the estimated impact point, they evidently concluded that they had been targeted by the same Iraqi SAM battery that had shot down the F/A-18. They attempted to establish contact with V Corps, which was coordinating air operations behind the FSCL in that area. That failing, they contacted the nearest E-3 AWACS, whose controller for the area cleared an attack on the suspected SAM site after gaining approval from the CAOC. In fact, the source of the flashes was a V Corps artillery battery, which the F-15Es targeted and attacked with GBU-12 LGBs. That error, which resulted in three Army soldiers killed and six wounded, was later attributed in part to the CAOC’s decision not to inform the F-15E aircrews that they were responding to a suspected fratricidal surface-to-air incident.²³⁸

The director of the Missile Defense Agency, Lt. Gen. Ronald Kadish, later told a Senate investigating committee that these Blue-on-Blue incidents could have resulted from both mechanical and human errors. A subsequent report indicated that the downed Tornado GR4 had failed to reenter Kuwait through one of the air corridors that had been cleared for that purpose. “You have to remember that this is a very complicated business,” General Moseley said of that incident. “So when things like this happen, you do step back and begin to investigate the process, the procedures, the tactics, and the techniques, and you begin to look and see if we have hardware issues or people issues.”²³⁹

Whatever the explanation, the Patriot quickly became the main concern of coalition aircrews operating over and in the vicinity of U.S. Army troop positions in Iraq. To ensure that Army operators manning Patriot batteries could clearly identify CENTAF’s aircraft, the CAOC advised pilots to use not only their encrypted Mode 4 military IFF transponders but their civilian Mode 2 systems as well. Although the latter measure made them less likely to be inadvertently targeted by Patriot operators, it also provided Iraq’s SAM operators with an added means of tracking their movements.240

With regard to the Patriot incidents discussed above, an experienced F-16 pilot later said: “I think that the responsibility for the weapon’s use falls squarely with the Army. The whole thing about losing a British jet and a Hornet to the Patriot is the ROE that goes into it. When is the Army allowed to put the system into automatic mode? When can they pull the trigger? If the ROE is stringent, then you don’t have a problem, but if it’s too free or loose, then you open the door up for decisions to be made that have tragic consequences.”²⁴¹

Another Air Force pilot fingered the absence of adequate communications standards between the Army and Air Force as one explanation for the F-16CJ’s HARM self-defense shot against the Patriot site:

           The Army was not coordinating with us to tell us where they were, who they were, and what was going on. In my opinion, we didn’t have a good enough picture of what the Army had. And it’s not just what’s located on the ground—it’s what emitters do they have, what radars and what electrons are they throwing out into the air? Our airplane is mechanized to sense all of these things and adapt accordingly. We have to know what both the good guys and the bad guys are throwing out electronically so that we can distinguish between them. If we don’t know, we can’t program the software to do that.²⁴²

This pilot almost surely was alluding to the fact that the F-16CJ was not programmed to recognize the signature of the friendly Patriot’s radar, thus forcing the aircraft’s radar warning receiver to display the offending Patriot radar as an “unknown” SAM (see Chapter 5 for more on friendly fire).

From SEAD to DEAD

The intense Iraqi IADS activity that planners had expected in response to the allies’ opening-night air operations never occurred. On the contrary, Iraqi acquisition and tracking radars did not emit even once over the course of nearly a month of virtually nonstop air attacks, and allied aircraft encountered no radar-guided SAM or AAA fire from Iraq’s air defenses. The initial allied SEAD effort concentrated on enemy sector operations centers, early-warning radars, and associated communications nodes. Subsequent attacks went after SAM radars and launchers. Iraq’s radar-guided SAMs were not initially struck on a massive scale because they were hard to locate; the Iraqis repositioned them every eight to twelve hours and withheld radar emissions. That tactic increased the survivability of Iraq’s SAMs even as it all but negated their operational effectiveness.243 The SAM and AAA fire that did occur was invariably unguided, although these barrages came increasingly closer to the targeted aircraft, sometimes within a mile or less. Nevertheless, this sporadic fire, most of which occurred after allied bombs had already hit their targets, had thus far failed to down a single coalition aircraft. This was no doubt due in part to the four thousand sorties flown over the nearly nine months of Operation Southern Focus.²⁴⁴ The CAOC had put considerable effort into piecemeal attacks against Iraqi SAMs and radars, as well as toward breaking open fiber-optic vaults to complicate enemy command and control arrangements.²⁴⁵

F-16CJ pilots nevertheless earned their flight pay on these often harrowing forays into Iraq’s still heavily defended airspace. Capt. Gene Sherer had a hair-raising experience on one such foray.

           I was SEAD mission commander, call-sign Vouch 61, and we were flying in the Super MEZ in the southwest corner of Baghdad. We were a four-ship supporting a B-1B, with some EA-6B Prowlers doing some jamming and some F-16CGs, F/A-18s and F-14s bombing targets. . . . We had one vul [period of vulnerability] time that was supposed to be 25 minutes. . . . Flying on station, the next thing I know, [my wingman] calls for a break turn. In the break, I look and see a missile go straight past him, and I think, “Oh, sh*t!” We started to get a heartbeat going, and we’re using the [electronic jamming] pod trying to do our stuff. Well, I ended up seeing another three missiles unguided, and at least two more that guide [optically] on me and my wingman, who was a mile and a half to the east in line-abreast formation. All of it was unguided, but I later saw on my HARM tape that an SA-3 came on line. I didn’t see it at the time because we had AAA all over the place and my wingman was defensively maneuvering. It was squirrelly [and] the most incredible thing I’ve done. We all shot HARMs that day except [one member of the four-ship flight]. We were in the MEZ for 45 to 50 minutes.²⁴⁶

“After the first three days,” General Moseley noted as the three-week campaign was reaching endgame,

           we switched from a suppression campaign to a destruction campaign, and we’ve been literally hunting them down one by one and killing multiples of them every day. We use our F-16CJs and the F/A-18s with the munitions they carry, and our Rivet Joint and the Global Hawk and the F-15E . . . and we have a . . . specific mission to go hunt them down and kill them. Kill the antennas, kill the launchers, kill the support vans, the comm vans, break up their command and control, and force them to move. And as they’re moving, they’re not setting up and plugging in and getting their systems up. And every time they move one of those things, they have a tendency to break something on them, and by forcing them up and by individually hunting them down and keeping them on the run, you begin to be able to control the airspace. That’s exactly how we’ve been able to transition from the starting condition of air superiority now to air supremacy.247

SEAD escort and on-call SEAD operations were highly successful in that Iraqi SAM operators were simply not emitting with their radars. As one Air Force pilot later summarized it concisely, “Iraqi radar was a no-show.”²⁴⁸ Virtually all of the observed AAA fire and SAM launches were unguided. Accordingly, CAOC planners decided to take a more a proactive approach toward dealing with Iraq’s IADS. Major Roberson explained:

           The strategy that the Iraqis elected to follow meant that they did not come up and actively engage our aircraft, which presented a big challenge for us. So long as the threat is emitting, we have the sensor suite to detect it across a large frequency range, but because they chose not to emit and overtly target our aircraft, it made it very challenging to locate those threats. One can argue that because they chose to do that, that was suppression in and of itself. The very presence of the CJ meant that we [had] achieved SEAD. But that wasn’t enough. We still had to execute an air campaign, so we needed to go to downtown into Baghdad and downtown into Tikrit with LGBs and JDAM and hit some very important targets, and we had to get close to do that.²⁴⁹

In this move from SEAD to the actual physical destruction of enemy air defenses (DEAD, pronounced “deed”) on the campaign’s third day, Air Force F-16CJ pilots went after Iraqi SAM and AAA sites with mixed munitions loads that included the satellite-aided GBU-31 JDAM and the CBU-103 WCMD, as well as the infrared-imaging AGM-65 Maverick air-to-ground missile, giving them both SEAD and DEAD capability. Navy and Marine Corps EA-6Bs provided vital electronic jamming support. This transition was not part of any coordinated shift to a preplanned DEAD campaign. It occurred because the situation no longer required each CJ to carry two HARMs per aircraft. The resultant hard-target capability added much greater mission flexibility to CENTAF’s SEAD assets.

A more comprehensive and coordinated DEAD effort began six days later, on D+9. As allied ground forces pushed ever closer to Baghdad and Iraq’s IADS remained silent, CAOC planners realized that a determined DEAD effort would be required. The majority of Iraq’s SAM inventory remained intact and operationally usable. Accordingly, a concentrated effort began on March 28 to draw down Iraq’s SAM capability in the Baghdad area. The U-2 and the Global Hawk were enlisted to find and geolocate SAM targets. The DEAD strike force consisted mainly of Air Force F-16CJs armed with GBU-31s, CBU-103s, and Maverick missiles, and Navy and Marine Corps F/A-18Cs carrying joint standoff weapons (JSOWs). These aircraft, supported by EA-6B Prowlers and further augmented by B-2s, maintained around-the-clock DEAD CAPs over Baghdad. Lt. Col. Scott Manning, a CJ pilot with the 20th Fighter Wing, recalled, “DEAD wasn’t so much a coordinated mission against specific objectives, but more a case of ‘if you find it and you can get permission to strike it, then go ahead and kill it.’”250 The move from SEAD to DEAD entailed “a scary decision” for General Moseley, but, he explained, “we needed to kill those SAMs.”²⁵¹ In the end, the DEAD effort succeeded in considerable part because effective ISR platforms were used directly in a focused operation that commanded both an abundance of appropriately loaded attack assets and the required command and control backup to link the sensors to the shooters.

The Counterair Effort

The Iraqi air force did not launch even one fighter sortie during the allied campaign. Nor, in a welcome surprise, did Iraq launch any cruise missiles at allied naval forces. Nevertheless, allied offensive counterair missions continued throughout the war because the Iraqi air force had been generating as many as 150 sorties a day before the war started on March 19. That earlier flight activity had occasioned legitimate concern in the CAOC that enemy aircraft might deliver biological or chemical weapons with little or no warning in suicide attacks against allied forces. Enemy airfields were heavily targeted to prevent Iraqi fighters from taking off on such missions.

General Moseley assured General Franks during the final countdown to war: “I will make it my life’s work that the Iraqi air force will not fly.”252 Toward that end, he instructed Lieutenant Colonel Hathaway to deny the enemy even a remote chance of getting an aircraft airborne by marking target aim points on every runway and other flyable surface on and immediately adjacent to all of the active Iraqi fighter airfields and cratering them during the first night, as well as locating and destroying all identifiable squadron buildings, fuel storage facilities, and command and control sites. Should any evidence be detected of attempted enemy runway repair efforts, those airfields were to be promptly reattacked as a top priority. Because civilian airliners were the only long-range aircraft at Hussein’s disposal, General Moseley ordered their destruction as a hedge against their use as suicide weapons. (Evidently anticipating this, the Iraqis removed the engine nacelles from their airliners before the campaign’s start, providing observable confirmation of their inability to fly. That had the effect of getting them removed from the CAOC’s target list at the last minute.)²⁵³

The initial attacks against Iraq’s fighter airfields focused on runways and aircraft parked in the open, with the first bombs fused to detonate about fifteen minutes after the initial time-on-target for the A-hour strategic strikes throughout the country. Follow-up attacks were visited on all airfields on which the Iraqis made attempts to repair runway damage. Not only did the Iraqi air force make no attempt to fly during the war, many fighter aircraft were actually moved away from their bases and buried. One intelligence report indicated that Saddam Hussein did not trust his air force and had ordered pilots to remain on the ground.²⁵⁴ Subsequent allied interviews with senior Iraqi leaders who had surrendered or were captured after the campaign amply validated this assessment. Interviews with dozens of Iraqi military and political leaders as well as literally hundreds of thousands of captured Iraqi documents indicated that Hussein had so little confidence in the combat capability of his air force that he elected to husband what remained of it as a hedge against possible future needs. The commander of Iraq’s air force and air defense force admitted to coalition interrogators that Hussein had decided two months before the start of the war that the air force would not participate.²⁵⁵ Instead, Hussein decided to move the combat aircraft away from their bases and conceal them from coalition ISR assets so he might later dig them out and return them to service—yet another testament to his refusal to believe that allied ground forces would ever reach the Iraqi heartland. Once it became clear that Iraq’s fighter pilots would not be a factor in the war, sorties originally dedicated to offensive counterair missions were re-roled to support advancing allied ground forces.256

Nonkinetic Operations

As the air attacks continued, CENTCOM employed propaganda leaflets, radio broadcasts, and loudspeakers in an effort to induce enemy troops to surrender, spreading the message that were they to refuse, the Al Nida Division would suffer the same fate as did the Baghdad Division.²⁵⁷ Major Roberson, a CAOC planner who helped orchestrate the air component’s contribution to CENTCOM’s psychological warfare effort, recalled one circumstance in which a leaflet mission appeared to have been particularly effective. The land component’s planners wanted to neutralize the Iraqi 34th Armor Brigade on one flank of V Corps’ advance and accordingly targeted it for leaflet deliveries. “Two consecutive days of leaflets told them, ‘Hey! Your time’s coming. Capitulate and lay down your arms, because if you don’t, then we’re going to attack you.’ Since we had that capability and [also] air superiority, that’s what happened. After the [initial bombing] attack, we came back and dropped more leaflets that said, ‘We told you we’d do it. So, any of you guys who are left, go home!’”²⁵⁸ The targeted Iraqi armor brigade never showed up on the battlefield.²⁵⁹

CENTAF distributed more than 40 million leaflets between October 2002 and the end of the three-week campaign. They included warnings against employing WMD, conducting air operations, backing the Ba’ath Party, destroying oil fields, and mining Iraqi waterways. They also provided frequencies for coalition radio broadcasts urging civilian noninterference with allied operations and, toward the campaign’s end, providing instructions on how Iraqi military units should surrender or desert. Radio broadcasts from EC-130E/J Commando Solo aircraft and radio network intrusions conducted by EA-6B Prowlers and EC-130H Compass Call aircraft transmitted similar instructions.²⁶⁰

The Compass Call aircraft were called on to play an especially important part in helping allied SOF teams gain control of important parts of the Iraqi infrastructure during the opening days of Iraqi Freedom, including a number of Iraqi airfields and a group of key oil installations on the Al Faw Peninsula. It was thought at the time—incorrectly, as it turned out—that Iraqi troops stationed at the oil rigs were awaiting orders to detonate explosives at some of the installations and that the ability of the EC-130H to block orders from Iraqi commanders had been instrumental in preventing that calamity. The aircraft likewise supported the SOF seizures of the important H-2 and H-3 airfields in Iraq’s western desert, and EC-130s were on station during two successful prisoner-of-war rescue operations. Indeed, SOF commanders commonly regarded the EC-130 as a “go/no-go” asset.261

Although much effort went into preparing for and implementing psychological warfare operations, however, there is no substantial evidence attesting to their overall impact on the course and outcome of the three-week campaign, even though there were indeed isolated cases that suggested the achievement of a clear desired battlefield effect.²⁶²

Key Air Component Achievements

As allied ground forces advanced northward toward Baghdad, a recurrent media refrain suggested that CENTCOM was using air strikes to “soften up” the Iraqi ground troops positioned in and around the city, after which the land component would send in “raiding parties of armored units, special forces, and light infantry to finish off their targets.”²⁶³ To that suggestion, General Moseley was finally moved to comment tersely: “Our sensors show that the preponderance of the Republican Guard divisions that were outside of Baghdad are now dead. We’ve laid on these people. I find it interesting when folks say we’re ‘softening them up.’ We’re not softening them up. We’re killing them.”²⁶⁴ An Australian analyst writing as the major combat phase of Iraqi Freedom was nearing its end noted that “the coalition air fleet has, to date, accounted for most of the heavy damage to the Iraqi land force. Often the ground force only mops up remnants left after sustained battlefield air strikes.” This writer went on to portray the plains of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers south of Baghdad as “an enormous kill zone for an ongoing aerial turkey shoot unseen since 1991.”²⁶⁵

Throughout the three-week campaign, the majority of the air component’s strike assets were expressly apportioned to support the land component, with CAS being the single most numerous mission type flown by all combat aircraft, including B-52s.²⁶⁶ One account aptly summarized the impact of the air offensive on Iraq’s ground forces: “The much-vaunted Republican Guard did not put up any coordinated resistance along the Karbala–Al Kut line after a week of pounding from the air. Most of the Republican Guard units in frontline areas had been debilitated by desertions, and when the 3rd Infantry and 1st Marine Divisions advanced, they found many positions abandoned, along with hundreds of tanks and armored vehicles. When the 3rd ID arrived in the vicinity of Baghdad’s main airport, it met only sporadic counterattacks from Special Republican Guard units.”²⁶⁷

Air assets operated by the SOF component also played a significant, and at times heroic, role in facilitating SOF operations throughout the three-week campaign. An especially notable instance of valorous air support unfolded shortly after midnight on April 2 during a covert raid by American SOF units on the Thar Thar Palace near Baghdad, a known residence of Hussein and his two sons. The raid yielded no regime leaders, but it netted a trove of documents of considerable intelligence value.268 Three Air Force Special Operations Command MC-130E Combat Talon pilots who took part in that raid, Lt. Col. Kenneth Ray, Maj. Bruce Taylor, and Maj. James Winsmann, were subsequently awarded the Silver Star for their actions during the operation. Their aircraft had been tasked to provide low-altitude in-flight refueling during both ingress and egress for a formation of SOF helicopters that were infiltrating a Navy SEAL team, Army Special Forces troopers, and a CIA unit into the palace. As the MC-130s neared their assigned target area with their lights out and with their pilots wearing NVGs, they and their accompanying ten-ship package of helicopters triggered a hail of heavy enemy surface-to-air fire. Iraqi SAMs engaged them three times during their initial ingress refueling evolution. The MC-130 pilots executed prompt and aggressive defensive countermaneuvers, taking their aircraft down to less than 100 feet above ground level in one instance while dispensing defensive countermeasures against enemy surface-to-air fire. They successfully negated the enemy threat, with one MC-130 avoiding a missile hit by less than 50 feet. The aircraft then pressed to a second aerial refueling point that still lay within the enemy’s surface-to-air threat envelope. The MC-130s conducted 6 in-flight refuelings and transferred more than 30,000 pounds of fuel to 10 fuel-critical helicopters deep inside enemy-controlled territory at night and in blowing dust, accomplishing their mission with no losses.²⁶⁹

Air support for the 1st Marine Division was provided by the F/A-18 Hornets, AV-8B Harriers, and AH-1W Cobra attack helicopters of the 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing (MAW) in conformance with the well-honed Marine Air-Ground Task Force (MAGTF, pronounced “mag-taf”) concept of operations. General Moseley gave the wing considerable latitude to underwrite the immediate and often rapidly changing needs of the engaged Marine ground commander. A subsequent report explained this informal contract:

           As [Gen. Charles] Horner had done in Desert Storm, Moseley conceded that they would use their aircraft primarily to shape the battlefield in their area. In fall of 2002, he had prepared for this by convening a conference with top Marine generals to work out the [command and control] of Marine air power. Without any formal written agreements, the generals worked out an arrangement that allowed the Marine air commander to tell the air component how many sorties [I MEF] needed. The planners in the CAOC then allocated these sorties, arranged all the support for them, and sent that information back out in the ATO. To make this plan work, Moseley insisted the Marines provide some of their best officers to serve as liaison officers, one of whom became the CAS planner for the entire theater. It was another example of working out relationships prior to the conflict to make the electronic collaboration run more smoothly during the conflict.270

The official Marine Corps after-action assessment of I MEF’s contribution to the campaign noted that “the agreement among the generals was to ‘nest’ Marine command and control under [the] CFACC [combined force air component commander, pronounced “see-fack”]. There would be a Marine ATO within the CFACC ATO; the primary mission for Marine air would be to support the MEF scheme of maneuver; excess sorties would be made available to the CFACC—and there would be provisions for the reverse to occur as well.”²⁷¹ The 3rd MAW’s commander, Maj. Gen. James F. “Tamer” Amos, “found General Moseley to be a commander who readily understood the utility of the MAW as a part of the MAGTF while asserting his own rights to the airspace over the battlefield.”²⁷² In the ensuing scheme of Marine air employment, the Cobras were typically used to suppress and draw down the Iraqi troops that were most directly arrayed against advancing Marine formations while the Hornets and Harriers worked farther north of the line of friendly advance in preemptive kill-box interdiction of enemy ground force movements.

Three variants of CAS performed in joint and combined combat are recognized. The most permissive of these is Type III CAS. Once a pilot is sure of the enemy’s position and the positions of all nearby friendly forces, he can be cleared by a JTAC to engage a validated target with no further approval needed. Type II CAS occurs when either visual acquisition of the attacking aircraft by a JTAC on the ground or visual acquisition of the target by the attacking pilot before weapon release is not possible. Type I CAS, the most exacting, requires the JTAC or FAC-A to visually acquire and positively identify both the attacking aircraft and the target being attacked. JTACs may use either Type I or Type II CAS with the approval of the fire support coordination center. Type III CAS is used only when there is a low to nonexistent danger of fratricide, in which case the appropriate ground commander can authorize unrestricted weapon release.²⁷³

To facilitate the closest possible integration of Marine Corps air and ground assets, the 3rd MAW assigned selected pilots not only to the company level to serve as JTACs, but also to each battalion of the 1st Marine Division as an extra support measure to ensure that the unit’s CAS needs would be properly met.274 By the time the Marines rolled into Numaniyah, well into their northward convergence on Baghdad, what had been expected to be a hard-fought showdown with a brigade from the Republican Guard’s Baghdad Division had yielded only sporadic small arms fire that was quickly and effectively suppressed. By all indications, the previous week of aerial and artillery bombardment had driven the enemy unit’s personnel from their positions.²⁷⁵ Once the Marines finally contacted the remaining remnants of the Baghdad Division, allied intelligence estimated that the division retained only 6,000 of its 11,000 troops and less than 25 percent of its artillery. Many enemy troops simply deserted their positions.²⁷⁶

Similarly, when the Army’s 3rd ID came into contact with the remnants of the Republican Guard forces on the outskirts of Baghdad, only about a dozen enemy tanks came out to fight. They were quickly destroyed in one of the few direct tank-on-tank engagements of the entire war.²⁷⁷ CENTCOM estimated that even before they had been engaged frontally by allied ground forces, the Republican Guard units fielded around Baghdad had already lost more than 1,000 of Iraq’s total inventory of 2,500 tanks to air attacks.²⁷⁸ Of the more than 8,000 munitions that had been dropped since March 19, as many as 3,000 were expended in the last 3 days of March, mostly against Republican Guard units south of Baghdad.²⁷⁹ The Medina Division received particularly intense strikes, as a result of which it and the Baghdad Division were estimated to have been drawn down by 50 percent before allied ground forces moved to contact. The Hammurabi and Nebuchadnezzar Divisions that were trying to reinforce those two had also been pummeled and were lacking leadership at higher levels.²⁸⁰ “After a week of sustained aerial bombardment of the opposing Medina and Baghdad Divisions,” one analyst wrote, “the [coalition’s] ‘Panzers’ rolled through the remnants with little resistance.”²⁸¹

The exact amount of Iraqi ground force equipment destroyed by these air strikes may never be known, but the strikes handily achieved CENTCOM’s desired effect of preventing the Republican Guard divisions from mounting a cohesive defense of Baghdad. When allied ground units finally moved within range of enemy ground forces on D+12, they encountered only what one observer called “small determined pockets of Iraqi regime loyalists.”²⁸² By April 2 the Medina Division was officially deemed by CENTCOM to be “combat-ineffective.”²⁸³

General Jumper’s precampaign concern that the Iraqis might try to jam the GPS signals on which allied JDAMs and navigational systems depended proved unfounded, although American ground troops raiding a targeted residence in Al Qaim discovered a stash of Russian-made GPS jammers with an address label on the shipping container showing that it had been delivered to the Iraqi embassy in Moscow in January 2003.284 Allied forces experienced ineffectual enemy attempts at GPS jamming, but no jamming of communications. Ironically, allied strike aircraft destroyed enemy GPS jammers with GPS-aided JDAMs.²⁸⁵ That fact bore out a comment made by General Leaf two months before the war started when he was still the director of operational requirements on the Air Staff: “If a potential adversary . . . is betting their future on GPS jamming, it’s going to be a serious miscalculation. I’m very confident of our ability to operate effectively in that environment.”²⁸⁶ His prediction was validated during the first week of the air war when the Joint Staff’s vice director for operations, Major General McChrystal, declared: “We have been aware for some time of the possibility of GPS jammers being fielded, and what we’ve found is through testing and through actual practice now, that they are not having a negative effect on the air campaign at this point.”²⁸⁷ In fact, GPS jammers had essentially no effect on the air component’s munitions delivery operations. Under Secretary of the Air Force Peter Teets acknowledged, however, that GPS was indeed susceptible to jamming attempts and noted that the Air Force was taking appropriate steps “to make it much more jam-resistant on the satellite side, on the control-element side, and on the user-equipment side.”²⁸⁸

In effect, the nonstop precision aerial bombardment from the night of March 21 onward so resoundingly paved the way for allied ground forces that the entrance of the latter into Baghdad was a virtual fait accompli. The allied air contribution to the major combat phase of Iraqi Freedom reconfirmed a lesson from Afghanistan that air power can effectively substitute for artillery if fully exploited toward that end. After just a week of allied bombing, Iraq’s ground troops were so disorganized and disoriented that they were unable or unwilling to fall back to a secondary line of defense; instead, they simply walked away. Much of the impact of the bombing was psychological rather than physical; the destruction of a mere ten or so enemy vehicles, for example, might have the secondary effect of convincing several hundred Iraqi troops to give up the fight and go home. Those troops who remained in place were so heavily outmatched that they were put to rout even before they could see their approaching American opponents.

In the end, thanks in substantial part to the enabling contributions of CENTCOM’s air component, advancing allied ground forces covered a distance through defended enemy territory equal to that from the Mexican border to San Francisco within less than three weeks.289 Moreover, the worst-case fear of an Iraqi military retreat en masse into Baghdad and the urban fighting and widespread collateral damage to civilian structures that inevitably would have accompanied it were never realized. Using its previously developed urban CAS plan in which most buildings inside Baghdad had their own individual designation, the CAOC succeeded in precisely directing those munitions that were delivered into the city in a way that minimized unintended damage to civilian infrastructure.²⁹⁰ A last-ditch Iraqi attempt to torch oil trenches in the Baghdad area with the goal of obscuring prospective targets with heavy smoke did little but foul the air for the civilian population and create video images for attempted propaganda exploitation. The SAR sensors of the E-8 JSTARS could image targets right through the smoke, and satellite-aided munitions could guide themselves completely unhindered to their assigned aim points. An analyst remarked with respect to this vain Iraqi attempt that while the obscuration “might impair some optical reconnaissance tools, it was largely irrelevant in slowing the bombardment.”²⁹¹

To a considerable degree, directives handed down by Saddam Hussein were responsible for the thorough drubbing Iraqi ground forces sustained in the allied combined-arms offensive. The Republican Guard had been fielded primarily in a peacetime watchdog role to block any attempted mutiny by regular Iraqi army units and to ensure that the latters’ commanders stayed in line. Yet, Hussein did not allow his Republican Guard units to deploy in strength in central Baghdad. Instead, he chose to defend the city by positioning the Hammurabi Division to the southwest, the Al Nida Division to the southeast, and the Nebuchadnezzar Division spread out in positions to the north and southwest.²⁹²

In fact, the integrity of Iraq’s command and control network failed so badly under the weight of the allied air offensive that at one point an Iraqi two-star general drove directly into an American military checkpoint, unaware that allied forces were even in his vicinity.²⁹³ As late as April 5, when U.S. troops were knocking on Baghdad’s front door and the regime was just four days from collapse, an Iraqi colonel who had been taken into custody that morning said that his commanders had told him that American forces were still a hundred miles away.²⁹⁴ In the immediate aftermath of the war, CENTCOM remained unsure how many Iraqi armored vehicles had been destroyed, but the number was clearly in the high hundreds, if not more. General McPeak remarked that the asymmetric application of precision long-range air power against an enemy whose only strength lay in short-range ground power left the Republican Guard with only two options: they could “either hunker down outside Baghdad and die slowly or maneuver and die quickly.”²⁹⁵

A widely acclaimed account of the allied invasion of Iraq concluded that “declining morale and an abiding fear of U.S. air power had clearly taken their toll on what was supposed to be one of the premier Republican Guard divisions.”296 Intelligence gathered by U.S. occupation forces after the regime fell plainly attested that

           the Al Nida [division] was nowhere near full strength when [American Marines] smashed into it. The commander of the unit later told his interrogators that the leaflets dropped on his troops telling them to depart the area or be bombed by U.S. warplanes had had a tremendous effect. The soldiers became demoralized when they realized that allied aircraft could fly over their positions with virtual impunity and that the leaflets could just as easily have been bombs. Originally a division of 13,000 soldiers and 500 vehicles, it had been reduced to 2,000 troops and 50 vehicles of all sorts by the time the Marines closed on the Iraqi capital. . . . Like the Medina Division, the Al Nida was just a shell of itself when it was attacked by U.S. troops.²⁹⁷

This account tellingly concluded, “The Iraqis’ fear of U.S. air power was as crippling as the air strikes themselves. . . . In the final days, it was impossible to tell from the air which Iraqi tanks were operational and which had been abandoned, so Moseley instructed his aircrews to ‘keep killing it all.’”²⁹⁸ The CAOC even used inert cement-filled GBU-12 500-pound LGBs (redesignated BDU-50s) during the urban CAS endgame of Iraqi Freedom, essentially “bombing with concrete” to disable Iraqi tanks and other armored vehicles through the munition’s kinetic-energy effect alone rather than risk inflicting collateral damage on surrounding buildings and killing noncombatants.²⁹⁹

Carrier-Based Operations

Like all of the allied air assets that took part in the three-week campaign, the five carrier air wings that were committed to Iraqi Freedom operated around the clock, with Theodore Roosevelt taking the night shift in the eastern Mediterranean and Constellation taking the night shift in the North Arabian Gulf.³⁰⁰ The average flight operations day was sixteen hours during the first twenty-three days of the war, after which it ramped down to thirteen to fourteen hours.³⁰¹ Each air wing averaged fifty to sixty sorties a day, perhaps an unimpressive number until one considers that all were staggered multicycle missions lasting six or more hours and often entailing four or more in-flight refuelings. Carrier flight decks were manned twenty-four hours a day for long stretches because strike aircraft and tankers frequently recovered later than planned as a result of repeated requests for on-call CAS. Sea-based strike aircraft were airborne twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. As had been the case in Operation Enduring Freedom, alert strike packages were also launched every day as previously undiscovered targets of interest were identified. Also as in Enduring Freedom, carrier-based aircraft relied heavily on land-based U.S. Air Force and RAF tankers. That access allowed mission lengths to be extended from one to three or more launch-and-recovery cycles, which in turn eased carrier deck loading and increased the flexibility of the air wings.

These references to aircraft launch-and-recovery cycles speak to a fundamental aspect of carrier air operations that warrants further explanation. Every minute a carrier is headed into the wind during ongoing flight operations, it is committed to a predictable course that opponents can detect and track. Fleet tactics thus dictate that launches and recoveries take place as rapidly as possible while allowing for the routine problems that inevitably arise in the course of such operations, such as a temporarily fouled deck and occasional bolters.302 Cyclic operations offer the best way to deal with these requirements.

In such operations, a 1+0 cycle is one that lasts an hour from an aircraft’s launch to its recovery. A 1+15 cycle lasts an hour and fifteen minutes. In the instance of a notional 1+15 cycle, while one wave of aircraft is being launched, the preceding wave that was launched an hour and fifteen minutes earlier will be holding overhead, its pilots watching their constantly dwindling fuel levels and, as may be required, refueling in flight from recovery tankers near the carrier as they await the signal to extend their tailhooks and commence their approach to the carrier in sequence. Twenty to thirty aircraft can be kept airborne at any given time using such an approach to operations, while the extra space thus freed up on the flight deck can be exploited for respotting aircraft to prepare for the next launch. During these gaps in flight operations, aircraft can also be moved back and forth to the hangar bay as may be required by the flight schedule or maintenance needs.³⁰³

A continuous cycle of launches followed by immediate recovery of the preceding wave of aircraft reduces the time the carrier needs to remain on a predictable course into the wind. It also gives the flight deck crews sufficient time to ready the deck for the next cycle. A Nimitz-class carrier’s two bow catapults and two waist catapults can launch twenty aircraft in approximately ten minutes. In ideal conditions, the carrier can recover twenty aircraft on its angled deck in as little as fifteen minutes. A total of twenty-five minutes on a predictable course is ideal for a twenty-aircraft cycle and is generally achieved when the embarked air wing and the carrier’s crew work harmoniously together.

Within the span of a single deck cycle, whatever its duration, an air wing’s aircraft are launched, recovered, dearmed, spotted, repaired, exchanged with hangar-deck aircraft, serviced, fueled, reconfigured with ordnance, and made ready for the next cycle. Managing the flight deck and respotting aircraft during such an intense operations flow involves an exquisitely complex choreography in which the manipulation of assets and proper timing are crucial. After the last cycle during a day of flight operations has been concluded, as many as forty aircraft may be parked on the flight deck, each carefully spotted to take up the least amount of deck space while allowing a clear path to at least one of the carrier’s catapults for the next cycle’s initial launch. Aircraft parked on the flight deck are often only inches apart, with their landing gear sometimes perilously close to the flight deck’s edge. The carrier’s air department monitors all this activity from flight deck control, where a tabletop representation of the flight deck indicates each aircraft’s location on the deck and is updated whenever aircraft are respotted. Any disruption of this complex and carefully managed choreography can foul the landing area and force aircraft on final approach to be waved off, consuming more fuel as a result and, at worst, creating gridlock.

During the three weeks of major combat in Iraqi Freedom, E-2C Hawkeye early-warning and battle management aircraft played an indispensable role in getting carrier-based strikers to the right kill boxes. They frequently served as communications links between the carriers, the CAOC, and ground tactical commanders. EA-6B Prowlers also played a pivotal part in the air war. The availability of support jamming was an ironclad go/no-go criterion for all strike missions, including those that involved B-2 and F-117 stealth aircraft. Throughout the three-week campaign, the Navy continued its practice of assigning four EA-6Bs to each embarked squadron. With five air wings participating, along with additional land-based Prowlers, mission planners in the air wings and the CAOC were satisfied that sufficient support jammers were available.304

U.S. Naval Reserve squadrons also played an important part in carrier-based strike operations, as perhaps best represented by VFA (Navy Fighter-Attack Squadron)-201, home-stationed at Joint Reserve Base Fort Worth, Texas. That unit was administratively attached to CVW-8 embarked in Theodore Roosevelt, making it the first Naval Reserve squadron to deploy for combat since the Korean War. The squadron had only recently converted to the F/A-18+ and joined the air wing during the final phases of the latter’s predeployment workups at NAS Fallon. It offered a uniformly high experience level and integrated well with the wing’s active-duty squadrons. Unlike a normal fleet squadron, which typically features a younger and less seasoned aircrew complement, VFA-201’s pilots averaged 35 years of age, 350 arrested carrier landings, and 2,700 flight hours. Moreover, fourteen of the eighteen were graduates of Navy Fighter Weapons School (Topgun). The executive officer of VFA-15, the fleet squadron that mentored the pilots as they joined CVW-8 for this precedent-setting deployment for a reserve unit, recalled: “The biggest problem they faced was the fact that they had operated almost exclusively as adversary pilots [in the air-to-air training role] for so long. This meant that they did not routinely practice ‘Blue air,’ or offensive [strike] mission tactics. However, being very high-time Hornet pilots, they quickly ironed out these tactical wrinkles.”305

Adequate stocks of LGBs and JDAMs allowed the deployed air wings to play a significant role in seeking out and attacking enemy theater ballistic missile launchers. The two wings operating out of the eastern Mediterranean focused on suppressing Scud launches into Israel from Iraq’s western desert. The three Gulf-based wings concentrated on potential missile launches from southern Iraq against Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and other neighboring Gulf states. Each carrier possessed about forty magazines for munitions storage, with row after row of GBU-12 and GBU-16 LGBs stacked up for use. Ten or so crewmembers needed roughly ten to twelve minutes to build up a bomb ready for use.³⁰⁶ Because the CAOC could not always guarantee targets that could be positively identified and attacked without an unacceptable risk of collateral damage, Navy strike fighters sometimes recovered with unexpended ordnance. A maximum of two thousand pounds of allowable bring-back ordnance was eventually dictated for most carrier-based fighters by the circumstances of the ground advance.³⁰⁷

Carrier aircraft losses were almost nil. In one such case, an S-3B tanker veered off the flight deck of Constellation and into the water following a suspected runaway throttle or brake failure. The two crewmembers ejected safely and were promptly recovered. Also, an F-14 went down over Iraq due to a mechanical failure involving the aircraft’s fuel system.³⁰⁸ The pilot and radar intercept officer likewise ejected safely and were recovered shortly thereafter. A Marine AV-8B Harrier crashed during a night mission from the assault ship Nassau. The pilot ejected and was recovered from the North Arabian Gulf.³⁰⁹

The sandstorm that essentially halted the allied ground advance for three days also affected carrier operations in the North Arabian Gulf. At times, the shamal generated sustained winds of twenty-five knots gusting to fifty and visibility that was often less than three hundred feet. Desert dust penetrated aircraft inlets and orifices, caused damage to canopies and engines, and occasioned some harrowing aircraft recoveries. Carrier landings into whiteouts occurred more than a few times, with cockpit sensor display videotapes showing eye-watering arrested landings that were performed flawlessly in visibilities of less than half a mile. Landing signal officers would talk each aircraft down the centerline of the carrier’s recovery area, sometimes with the aircraft becoming visible only seconds before it trapped.

Throughout the shamal, air wing tanker squadrons flew twice their normal number of sorties to refuel fighters that were orbiting above the carrier and waiting for openings through which they could penetrate and trap.310 Tankers transferred fuel to strike fighters and to EA-6Bs, typically in heavy turbulence and at altitudes as high as 30,000 feet, where in-flight refueling evolutions would not normally take place. Six launch and recovery cycles on the three carriers in the North Arabian Gulf had to be canceled because of persistent airborne grit, lightning, and wind shear. Despite these challenging conditions, the Navy did not dramatically reduce its overall sortie rate during the sandstorm, and the coalition continued to fly as many as two thousand ATO sorties daily. CVW-5 launched one hundred strike sorties a day and also conducted organic tanking, with its eight S-3B tankers flying thirty or more refueling sorties a day.

The F/A-18E Super Hornet had entered squadron service only nine months before the start of Iraqi Freedom with VFA-115 of CVW-14 embarked in Abraham Lincoln. In November 2002, shortly after its maiden deployment, the F/A-18E saw its first exposure to combat in Operation Southern Watch, dropping GPS-aided JDAMs on targets in southern Iraq. This combat first for the aircraft also marked the first successful operational use of the GBU-35, a 1,000-pound JDAM variant that the Navy prefers over the original 2,000-pound version because it is a lighter load to bring back to the carrier in the event the munition is not dropped during the sortie. (The Boeing Company had delivered an initial batch of 434 of the weapons to the Navy the previous March.)³¹¹

At the start of Iraqi Freedom, VFA-115 had been averaging about fifteen maintenance man-hours per flight hour with the F/A-18E, as compared with twenty for the older F/A-18C and sixty for the F-14. The electronic technical publications (about 80 percent of the required documentation) supplied to the squadron and the F/A-18E’s ability to upload technical updates added to the ease of maintenance, as did the fact that the aircraft were the newest in the Navy’s inventory, some having come straight to the squadron off the production line. Initially, the F/A-18E was assigned missions in Iraqi Freedom that did not utilize its increased endurance or greater load-carrying capability. That practice was later changed as pilots gained more combat experience with the aircraft. The Super Hornet’s increased payload capability over that of the earlier F/A-18C meant the same number of targets (or more) could be attacked while exposing fewer aircraft to danger.

During VFA-115’s initial workups, the F/A-18E had been used extensively as a mission tanker to refuel combat-configured Super Hornets and other air wing aircraft. In Iraqi Freedom, one F/A-18E out of the squadron’s dozen was fully dedicated to tanking, although the wing’s S-3Bs retained the recovery tanking role. Because the Super Hornet, unlike the S-3B, has a self-protection capability with its AIM-9M and AIM-120 air-to-air missiles and an electronic warfare suite for protection against surface-to-air threats, it can accompany strikers into enemy airspace in its tanker role and can escort damaged aircraft back to friendly airspace. The aircraft also was equipped with the ALQ-165 advanced self-protection jammer and the ALE-50 towed decoy—the first pairing of such a decoy with a Navy aircraft. In all, Super Hornet tankers transferred more than 3.5 million pounds of fuel to receiver aircraft.

On March 31 an embarked squadron of 12 F/A-18F two-seat Super Hornets arrived in-theater in CVW-11 on board Nimitz, the first carrier to deploy with the new aircraft, en route to the North Arabian Gulf to relieve Abraham Lincoln. Two E-models from VFA-14 and two F-models from VFA-41 were flown four thousand miles from Nimitz in the Strait of Malacca to Abraham Lincoln to augment CVW-14 and to give the two-seat F model an early first exposure to combat. The addition of those extra four Super Hornets gave CVW-14 a more flexible mix of strike and tanker capability as well as additional FAC-A support. (Nimitz herself was expected to arrive on station in the Gulf in early April.) As with VFA-115 embarked in Abraham Lincoln, the Super Hornets in Nimitz had deployed without all of their equipment, most notably the shared reconnaissance pod, fully tested. Although the pod, called SHARP, had no data-link capability and was equipped only with a medium-altitude sensor package, it performed adequately. (Data-link capability and a high-altitude digital camera were to be added later.)

The F/A-18F was the first Navy aircraft to be equipped with the advanced technology forward-looking infrared (ATFLIR) pod, which by the start of Iraqi Freedom was in full-rate production.312 Problems with the initial ATFLIR pods in Abraham Lincoln were overcome with the successor generation of pods provided to another F/A-18E squadron and to the first F/A-18F squadron embarked in Nimitz. Four Super Hornets in the deployed F/A-18E/F squadrons were configured for use primarily as tankers. As the campaign unfolded, some in the F/A-18E/F community pressed for an early integration of the extended-range standoff land attack missile (SLAM-ER), as well as a 500-pound LGB and eventually the 500-pound JDAM. At the time, the smallest precision weapon the aircraft could carry was a 1,000-pound LGB, which was too large for some CAS mission requirements.313 The aircraft also lacked a long-range standoff weapon as it awaited provision of the U.S. Air Force–developed joint air-to-surface standoff missile (JASSM).

Even with the recent introduction of the Super Hornet into fleet service, the F-14 remained a viable platform because it offered greater range than the Super Hornet and its LANTIRN targeting pod was available in greater numbers than the F/A-18E’s new ATFLIR pod. Tactics and operating procedures for the F-14 focused on hunting down mobile targets. Because friendly ground forces did not have the technical wherewithal to generate mensurated target coordinates, the F-14’s full-capability tactical air reconnaissance pod system (TARPS) and fighter tactical imagery (FTI) suite enabled real-time imagery transfers whereby SOF teams on the ground could cue F-14s to locate and attack moving targets with LGBs.³¹⁴ The F-14’s sensor and targeting systems were also being provided to the F/A-18F, whose aircrews could thus acquire, view, send, and receive electro-optical imagery in near-real time, along with text messages that might be sent either as attachments or as stand-alone transmissions. Receivers of such transmissions could include other aircraft as well as land combatants ranging from senior commanders to SOF teams in the field using laptop computers as downlinks.³¹⁵ Spare parts for the F-14Ds turned out to be the parent air wing’s single greatest challenge, although it was never so acute as to prevent the wing from meeting its goal of having seven of its ten F-14Ds operational at all times.³¹⁶

Combat operations conducted by the two Mediterranean-based carrier air wings differed markedly from those flown by the three air wings that operated in the congested waters of the North Arabian Gulf. The former had initially been tasked with supporting the planned invasion by U.S. Army ground forces from Turkey. After the Turkish government ruled out that option, the Mediterranean-based air wings were re-roled to support the allied SOF teams operating in northern Iraq and the western desert. When the war began, however, the Turkish government was also denying its airspace to allied strike operations against Iraq, a measure that threatened to keep the two air wings in Carrier Task Force 60 out of the fight altogether as the three carriers in the North Arabian Gulf made their contribution to the war effort from the south. Fortunately for CENTCOM, that changed on March 20 when Saudi Arabia relented under U.S. diplomatic pressure and granted transit approval for allied combat aircraft to pass through its previously restricted airspace. The commanding officer of VFA-105, embarked in Harry S. Truman, recalled his relief: “We had a way in! The new route was going to be long. From a position just off the Nile Delta, CVW-3 aircraft flew down the Sinai Peninsula, around the southern tip of Israel and Jordan and worked their way across the Saudi desert to refuel from Air Force tankers just short of the Iraqi border. Once topped off, F/A-18s and F-14s, supported by EA-6Bs, would strike at targets located west and northwest of Baghdad.”317

As the campaign entered its third and final week, that sea-based capability allowed General Moseley to report that “the Navy is carrying a large, large load up there [in northern Iraq] operating out of the eastern Mediterranean and flying across Turkey. . . . With two aircraft carriers in the eastern Med and with our tankers, we’re able to provide near-continuous pressure.”³¹⁸ More to the point, those sea-based strike fighters, along with Air Force B-52s operating out of RAF Fairford in the United Kingdom, made some things possible in northern Iraq that could not have been accomplished otherwise. Because of range-payload limitations and tanker-related operating restrictions, the CAOC could not range land-based U.S. Air Force and RAF strike fighters, even the exceptionally long-legged RAF Tornado GR4s based in Qatar and Kuwait, very far north of Baghdad. Moreover, during the three-day shamal, Navy strike fighters from the carrier operating areas in the eastern Mediterranean and the North Arabian Gulf were the only allied fighters that could play in the air effort against Republican Guard and other Iraqi ground forces, because Al Udeid and Al Jaber Air Bases in Qatar and Kuwait were both completely weathered in. The senior CAOC director recalled that Navy aircrews were “absolute heroes” during that critical time window, saving a lot of Army lives when a convoy of Iraqi vehicles began heading south toward their positions. More than one aircraft returned to its carrier with severe hail damage and even radomes ripped off as a result of the storm.³¹⁹

Cdr. Andy Lewis, the commanding officer of VFA-15 in CVW-8 on board Theodore Roosevelt, implemented a pilot management plan that proved to be a perceptible force multiplier: “One thing that we did in our squadron that I think paid big dividends when [Iraqi Freedom] started was to create a tactical organization, or, in other words, assign permanent lead-wingman combinations. We took the most experienced pilots and paired them with the least experienced. After that, pilots were assigned by tactical pairs as strike sorties were given to the squadron. As a result, my young guys were never without guidance either before or during the war, and this allowed even the most junior ‘nugget’ to fly strikes starting from Day One regardless of their overall experience.”³²⁰

The five carrier air wings that took part in the campaign were better integrated into the ATO process than ever before, with each wing having representatives in the CAOC where the daily ATO was assembled to ensure that the wings were assigned appropriate missions. Lessons learned during Enduring Freedom carried over into the now much-improved joint force planning for Iraqi Freedom, with CENTAF staffers at all levels coordinating seamlessly with their counterparts in the maritime component and with at least one Navy Fighter Weapons School graduate eventually embedded full time in the CENTAF planning staff.

The Navy’s carrier air wings also had ready access to software that automatically searched the complex ATO for Navy-specific sections, eliminating the need for air wing mission planners and aircrews to sort through the entire immense document. Closer cooperation in recent years between their weapons schools yielded still further dividends in improved joint Air Force–Navy interoperability. By all accounts, the Navy and the Air Force worked together unprecedentedly well in integrating their respective air operations. Almost all strike packages were joint operations, with Air Force F-16CJs and Navy EA-6B Prowlers routinely embedded together to enable the most robust possible defense suppression capability.321

Of the 41,404 combat and combat support sorties flown during the three weeks of major combat in Iraqi Freedom, Navy and Marine Corps aircraft flying from carriers and large-deck amphibious ships flew nearly 14,000. Of those, 5,568 were fighter sorties, 2,058 were tanker sorties, 442 were E-2C sorties, and 357 were ISR sorties. Of the roughly 5,300 bombs dropped by Navy and Marine Corps strike aircraft, fewer than 230 were unguided. More than 75 percent of the precision weapons delivered by Navy strike aircraft were JDAMs. In addition, Navy F/A-18Cs flew 24 of the 158 propaganda leaflet delivery missions. Most of the Navy’s fighter sorties were dedicated to providing CAS.³²² Fully mission-capable (FMC) rates for carrier-based aircraft throughout the campaign were significantly higher than the normal peacetime rates for deployed air wings. The FMC rate was 89 percent for the F-14A, 98 percent for the F-14B, 78 percent for the F-14D, 80 percent for the F/A-18A, 87 percent for the F/A-18C, 90 percent for the F/A-18E, 91 percent for the F/A-18F, 80 percent for the EA-6B, 89 percent for the S-3B, and 79 percent for the E-2C.³²³

The End of the Ba’athist Regime

By April 4, 85 percent of the allied air effort was concentrated on drawing down the Medina, Hammurabi, and Baghdad Divisions of the Republican Guard that were defending the approaches to Baghdad. Army intelligence reported that day that allied air attacks had degraded the Hammurabi Division to 44 percent of its assessed full-up effectiveness and the Medina Division to 18 percent.324 That same day saw the first deployment of allied fixed-wing combat aircraft into Iraq when Air Force A-10s began operating out of the Iraqi air force’s Tallil airfield after Marine Corps and RAF Harriers had established a forward arming and refueling point one hundred miles inside Iraq. That forward move eliminated some of the burden on the coalition’s heavily taxed tanker force.

General Moseley reported during a press conference on April 5 that Iraq’s military airfields “for the most part, are not flyable. This morning we had only a handful of landing surfaces that could be used, and as we go through the day we will crater those again, as we do every day to attempt to minimize the opportunity to fly. . . . That does not mean that he [Saddam Hussein] won’t be able to get an airplane airborne somewhere, . . . [but if] he does get something airborne, it will not have a strategic dislocating impact on us.” As to why the Iraqi air force had remained out of the fight throughout the campaign, General Moseley replied: “I believe that he has not flown because in their mind they’ve made calculation that they will not survive.”³²⁵

On April 6 Major General McChrystal reported: “Coalition air forces have established air supremacy over the entire country, which means the enemy is incapable of effective interference with coalition air operations.”³²⁶ Iraq’s air defenses had not yet been completely neutralized, however. Lt. Col. Raymond Strasburger was leading an element of A-10s that same day in support of Advance 33, an Air Force JTAC team attached to the Army’s Task Force 2/69 Armor, when he observed enemy tanks and armored fighting vehicles engaging the force’s lead company from the east end of a bridge spanning the Tigris River. In an ensuing sequence of events for which he was awarded the Silver Star, Lieutenant Colonel Strasburger led his element through heavy AAA fire despite severely reduced visibility and conducted an initial reconnaissance run against the target.

           Relinquishing the element of surprise to Iraqi AAA gunners, he used the same attack heading to protect friendly forces and repeatedly attacked a battalion-sized enemy armor element that was dug in on the east side of the bridge. For 33 minutes, he continued with his wingman to press the attack in the face of heavy AAA fire, demobilizing three T-72 tanks, six APCs, and multiple utility vehicles that were within striking distance of the friendly ground force. His effort ultimately allowed TF 2/69 Armor to press their northward attack with minimal combat losses, linking up with adjoining coalition forces and completing the 360-degree encirclement of Baghdad.327

On April 7 General Moseley reported that the CAOC was running out of worthwhile targets.³²⁸ That same day, however, allied intelligence sensors reportedly intercepted a telephone conversation that suggested that Saddam Hussein and his two sons were in downtown Baghdad’s Al Mansoor district. A signals intelligence cut from the intercepted cell phone exchange provided exact GPS coordinates for the location. The crew of a B-1 bomber orbiting nearby was given mensurated target coordinates by the CAOC and dropped two deep-penetrating and two delay-fused GBU-31 2,000-pound JDAMs on the target within twelve minutes after the CAOC had received the raw target coordinates from an E-3 AWACS.³²⁹ The entire sequence between the identification of the target and the attack reportedly took less than an hour.³³⁰ Once again, Hussein was not at the site, but the attack nevertheless confirmed that CENTCOM was continuing to exert every effort to hunt him down and kill him.

On April 8, thanks mainly to the unrelenting precision air attacks throughout the preceding three weeks, CENTCOM intelligence reported that only 19 of the roughly 850 tanks of the Republican Guard divisions defending Baghdad at the beginning of the campaign remained intact, and that only 40 of the Iraqis’ 550 artillery pieces were still serviceable.³³¹ In effect, the Republican Guard had lost nearly all of its tanks and artillery to allied air attacks. When the 3rd ID was ordered to send its 2nd Brigade on a raid into central Baghdad to capture the presidential district, the brigade penetrated to its objective opposed only by dismounted paramilitary harassment. Iraqi resistance was highly fragmented and confused, and seemed unable to organize.³³² The most thorough review of the U.S. Army’s contribution to the three-week campaign noted that the advancing armored task force’s encounter with exclusively dismounted resistance “would become de rigueur all the way to Baghdad. . . . The enemy used innocent men, women, and children as human shields. Iraqi forces also used trucks, taxis, and ambulances to transport fighters onto the battlefield. . . . This pattern of operation became routine as the war wore on.”³³³

A former Marine Corps F/A-18 pilot later wrote that “the Iraqi army was notable during the campaign for the incredible fact that it never really showed up. . . . American air power vaporized a great number of Iraqi formations before they could even start toward the fighting, while some enemy units just chose not to do battle and never left their garrisons.”³³⁴ This observer went on to note that the continuous air strikes well in front of advancing coalition ground forces were “an undeniable factor, indeed, perhaps the most important factor, in the success of the ground effort. . . . Quite simply put, the Iraqis were never able to mass in units large enough to slow the American advance. This fact was sometimes lost on ground commanders whose awareness of the battlefield was often no more than what they could see from the road.”335 RAND analyst David Johnson echoed this assessment in noting that “the importance of ‘shaping’ the battlefield with air power, enabled through high levels of operational situational awareness, was that it created a tactical condition whereby coalition ground forces never faced large Iraqi formations ‘eyeball-to-eyeball.’”³³⁶ On the contrary, the ground component mainly confronted fanatically tenacious but disorganized and suicidal dismounted Iraqi paramilitary fighters in repeated skirmishes in which “after the AK-47 [rifle], the RPG was the most ubiquitous weapon of the war.”³³⁷

After allied ground forces had enveloped Baghdad, the CAOC began shifting its kinetic effort toward Tikrit and Mosul farther north. Already, B-52s and Navy strike fighters had been conducting armed overwatch operations in that area in support of JSOTF North. On April 9, A-10s and RAF Harrier GR7s were folded into that effort to increase the pressure on enemy units in the area and accelerate their surrender. Saddam Hussein’s regime finally collapsed that same day. The U.S. troops that drove through the streets of Baghdad encountered only scattered resistance as thousands of residents poured into the streets to celebrate the regime’s defeat. By this time, U.S. and British forces were in control of at least two-thirds of the country and all of its main centers south of Baghdad. Hussein, his family, his ministers, and other key members of the ruling Revolutionary Command Council still remained at large.³³⁸ The noose on most of those holdouts, however, tightened relentlessly.³³⁹

By mid-April, allied combat and combat support sorties were down to about seven hundred a day, only a third of the peak rate that had been sustained through the previous three weeks. The Kitty Hawk and Constellation carrier battle groups and their embarked air wings were sent home from the North Arabian Gulf on the war’s twenty-seventh day, leaving one carrier remaining in the Gulf and two in the eastern Mediterranean within range of Iraq should CENTCOM need their services. By D+31 the Navy’s carrier presence in the region had ramped down to a single battle group headed by Nimitz with CVW-11 on board.³⁴⁰ The Air Force’s four B-2s on Diego Garcia and forward-deployed F-117s at Al Udeid also returned to their home bases in the United States. At that point the U.S. Defense Department’s public affairs chief, Victoria Clarke, declared that “the [Hussein] regime is at its end, and its leaders are either dead, surrendered, or on the run.”341 President Bush later added an important qualifying note: “Our victory in Iraq is certain, but it is not complete.” He emphasized that a final allied victory over Iraq would not be declared until General Franks had determined that all allied military objectives had been obtained.³⁴²

In the end, it was the combination of allied air power as an effective shaper of events and the speed of the ground advance that got allied forces to Baghdad before the enemy could mount a viable defense, a process greatly aided by the ineptitude of the Iraqi armed forces. As a senior military official put it, “we executed faster than they could react.” The Iraqi troops that were rushed to the field found themselves on a killing ground for allied air power, in what CENTCOM staffers called “reinforcing failure.”³⁴³ Vice President Cheney quoted historian Victor Davis Hansen in assessing the coalition’s unexpectedly rapid success: “By any fair standard of even the most dazzling charges in military history, . . . the present race to Baghdad is unprecedented in its speed and daring and in the lightness of its casualties.”³⁴⁴

Although the “shock and awe” blitz the media anticipated against enemy urban targets never materialized, the CAOC nonetheless succeeded in hitting what its planners had wanted to hit in Baghdad during the first night of the air war. It also excelled uniformly in providing a measured and steady concentration of allied air power against the Republican Guard. Col. Michael Longoria, the commander of the Air Force’s 484th Air Expeditionary Wing, described the effects of the air war on the coalition’s ground effort: “It’s just awesome the number of tanks, APCs, tracked vehicles and enemy positions that were attacked. . . . I don’t know if we are going to understand how significant this effort was until we do more analysis. But when you can destroy over three divisions worth of heavy armor in a period of about a week and reduce each of these Iraqi divisions down to even 15, 20 percent of their strength, it’s going to have an effect.”³⁴⁵ The coalition lost only twenty manned aircraft in achieving this effect, including six helicopters and one A-10 that were downed by enemy fire.

A report in the British press suggested that an F-15E that went down on April 7 during the war’s last days may have been hit by a Stinger missile that had been abandoned by British special forces during their retreat from an ambush, but CENTCOM immediately discounted that suggestion as pure hearsay with no evidentiary basis whatever. A senior British Special Boat Service source likewise greeted the dubious report with skepticism, saying: “You would rather leave a man behind than equipment like that.”³⁴⁶ The aircraft had been bombing enemy positions near the northern town of Tikrit. The pilot, Capt. Eric Das, and his weapons systems officer, Maj. William Watkins, did not attempt to eject and were killed. A closer inquiry ruled out radar-guided SAMs or AAA, and the cause of the loss was never determined.347

As for the joint and combined campaign’s bottom-line results at the strategic level, the Republican Guard and Special Republican Guard had been crushed, Iraqi mines and coastal cruise missiles had been neutralized, the southern and northern oil fields had been secured, and the Iraqi air force had been grounded. The three-week campaign brought a decisive end to Operations Northern Watch and Southern Watch. The former ran for 4,365 days (just 2 weeks short of 12 years) and generated 106,170 armed overwatch and combat support sorties out of Turkey; the latter lasted 3,857 days (10.5 years) and generated almost 3 time as many sorties—285,681—out of bases in Saudi Arabia and from carrier air wings operating in the North Arabian Gulf.³⁴⁸ In planning the campaign, General Franks had mitigated strategic-level risk by accepting risk at the operational level, and that operational-level risk had been mitigated by audacity, speed of movement, combined arms lethality, and tactical-level acumen, with more than a little help from Iraq’s military incompetence. In all, the twenty-one-day experience showed that overwhelming force is not just about numbers and that jointness can be a true force multiplier when pursued and applied with commitment and conviction by all players from the most senior echelons on down.³⁴⁹

To be sure, the campaign’s planning and conduct had its share of critics on the American domestic front who complained for a time that the ground offensive, with only one Army division and one MEF attacking from the south with unprotected flanks on both sides, represented a needlessly risky gamble by the Bush administration and by CENTCOM.³⁵⁰ Those critics, however, failed to recognize the effectiveness of the transformed allied air capability against fielded enemy ground forces that had evolved since the first Persian Gulf War in 1991. Gen. Charles Horner, the air component commander during Desert Storm, explained that improvements in air-delivered precision target attack had “made it possible [in Iraqi Freedom] to destroy a very large number of Iraqi ground forces in a short period of time. Moreover, the attacks were made from medium or higher altitudes, which eliminated exposure to short-range air defenses. And, from these altitudes, Iraqi soldiers had little or no warning time to disperse and take cover.” Horner added: “Iraqi units were being targeted with precision air attacks before they could pose a threat to advancing U.S. land forces or were within range of the cameras of embedded news media.”³⁵¹ He further noted the psychological effects of constant exposure to such attacks, which are almost never taken into account in the archaic attrition warfare models that continue to be used in official war games.³⁵²

Maj. Gen. Robert Scales, the lead author of the Army’s after-action account of Desert Storm and no air power enthusiast, succinctly summed up this newly emergent fact of modern military life when he remarked that “the American way of war substitutes firepower for manpower. We expose as few troops as possible to close contact with the enemy. We do that by killing as many enemy as we can with precision weapons.”353 Air Chief Marshal Burridge echoed that assessment during his postcampaign testimony before the British House of Commons: “Von Clausewitz always told us that if you are going to invade somebody’s country, go at three to one. . . . We did it the other way around, but von Clausewitz did not have the understanding of air power. Air power was decisive in the maneuver battle.”³⁵⁴

Critical to allied air power’s decisiveness in the campaign’s ground maneuver battle was its remarkable effectiveness against Iraqi armored forces. After the campaign ended, an assessment by the U.S. Department of Defense determined that all but two dozen Republican Guard tanks had been either destroyed or abandoned. There was no indication, however, that many crewmembers had been killed inside them. A group of Time magazine reporters who later visited a number of the most notable land battlefields discovered that most Iraqi soldiers had survived by staying away from their tanks as the latter were being destroyed with unerring precision by allied air power. Those troops simply fled as allied ground forces moved northward. This may help explain why those Iraqi units defending Baghdad put up virtually no resistance to CENTCOM’s prompt capture of the city. The Baghdad, Medina, Nebuchadnezzar, and Hammurabi Divisions of the Republican Guard had been deployed in two defensive arcs south of the capital, an outer arc about one hundred miles long and an inner arc spanning some thirty miles from Yusifiyah to Suwayrah. All of these troop positions had reportedly been undermanned. Each division had a strength of about 10,000 troops on paper, but the Department of Defense later estimated that the Iraqi troops who had been positioned against attacking allied forces actually numbered only between 16,000 and 24,000 in all. For the most part, those troop positions were attacked by allied air forces, with JSTARS, Predator, and Global Hawk geolocating enemy tanks and allied strike aircraft then being called in to engage and destroy them.³⁵⁵

In telling testimony to the accuracy of those attacks, five Iraqi tanks in an open marketplace in Mahmudiyah were struck from the air while they were sequestered in alleyways so cramped that the turrets of the tanks could not be turned. Some storefront windows just a few feet away from the tanks were blown out, but no harm was done otherwise to the surrounding buildings. Iraqi troops sometimes parked tanks and other vehicles beneath overpasses to prevent detection from above, only to have them destroyed or disabled by LGBs that entered from the side and left the bridges overhead intact. More than a few tanks that were hidden under trees were also destroyed because the Iraqi unit commanders and soldiers who placed them there failed to realize that the palm fronds offered no sanctuary from modern thermal imaging technology.356

In yet another testament to the consistent precision of allied air attacks, the battlefields south of Baghdad featured few of the sorts of craters that carpet-bombing attacks would have produced. Instead, combat effects assessors found blown-out Iraqi tanks and other vehicle hulks standing alone in ones and twos, most having been destroyed from the air before advancing U.S. ground forces arrived within weapons range. A Republican Guard colonel on the Iraqi General Staff later told his allied interrogators that “the . . . divisions were essentially destroyed by air strikes when they were still about 30 miles from their destination. . . . The Iraqi will to fight was broken outside Baghdad.” This colonel added: “Defeat was in large part due to our inability to move troops and equipment because of the devastating U.S. air power.” Similarly, a Republican Guard captain said of his recollections of the shamal experience: “It was night and in the middle of a severe sandstorm. The troops and vehicles were hidden under trees. The soldiers thought they were safe, but two enormous bombs and a load of cluster munitions found their targets. Some soldiers left their positions and ran away. When the big bombs hit their targets, the vehicles just melted away.”³⁵⁷

Allied psychological warfare operations in the form of leaflets dropped on Iraqi positions and e-mail messages sent directly to Iraqi commanders may have helped considerably in eliminating the Iraqis’ will to fight. Iraqi military survivors who subsequently spoke with Time reporters were anything but belligerent. The survival of so many Iraqi troops did not concern U.S. commanders, because their intent was not to kill large numbers of Iraqis but to break down their resistance. As further evidence that little significant ground combat took place, earthwork bunkers, trenches, and sandbagged enemy gun emplacements facing southward showed few traces of the shell casings, cartridges, and scorch marks that are the normal residue of ground warfare.³⁵⁸

Iraqi soldiers interrogated both during and after the campaign freely admitted that their morale had quickly collapsed when their armored vehicles began exploding all around them in the midst of the blinding three-day sandstorm (see Chapter 4 for more on the views of Iraqi commanders). In those circumstances Iraqi troops simply had no place to hide. As CENTCOM’s deputy commander, Lieutenant General DeLong, pointed out, “after fourteen days of bombing, Baghdad’s Republican Guard troops were down to minimum capacity, numerous key leadership targets were taken out, and Iraqi military communications were in disarray.”359 Offering his own perspective on this achievement in subsequent testimony to a defense committee of the British Parliament, Air Chief Marshal Burridge similarly remarked: “I suspect that we disrupted his command and control very early on, and I think they simply lost the ability to mount any sort of coherent defense. They were also surprised by the speed of advance, particularly from the Karbala gap up to Baghdad airport. . . . I think they were incapable of responding.”³⁶⁰

Overall, CENTCOM achieved tactical surprise at the outset and, with the singular exception of the unsuccessful Apache deep-attack attempt on March 24, retained its offensive momentum throughout the major combat phase of Iraqi Freedom. Iraqi forces were never able to mount a coherent counter to the allied offensive. Saddam Hussein never stopped believing that an attack would come through the north from Turkey and Jordan. As a result, he kept eleven Iraqi army divisions tied down there as insurance against a second front, which was never a possibility after Turkey refused to grant CENTCOM the use of its territory. In the end, noted one assessment, “rather than the Grozny-like carnage and destruction predicted—and feared, Baghdad fell and the regime fell after only three days of hard [localized] fighting. . . . With soldiers and Marines able to move at will throughout the city, the regime evaporated.”³⁶¹

Postcampaign interrogations of Iraqi political and military leaders revealed that right up to the start of the campaign, Hussein believed that the United States would not invade Iraq because timely French and Russian intervention would prevent it. He also was said to have believed that in the event the United States did invade, it would quickly yield to international pressure to halt the war; that no coalition forces would ever reach Baghdad; and that the Bush administration would be content to settle for an outcome that fell short of regime change.³⁶²

Looking back over the campaign experience, the deputy air component commander, Admiral Nichols, remarked, “We were much more successful than even the most optimistic among us had predicted. We moved farther and faster than projected, and our combined arms fires set new standards for persistence, volume, and lethality, day and night in all-weather conditions. The Iraqi military tried but could not react to the tempo we set on the battlefield. By the time they made a decision to do something, we had foreclosed that option.”³⁶³ An assessment of the U.S. Army’s contribution to the campaign aptly noted that “the essential lesson of these urban fights was that integrating combined arms, heavy and light forces, armored raids, and a liberal application of precision air power applied in each case. . . . Coalition airmen delivered responsive and highly accurate close air support, turning the tide of battle in ground tactical engagements on more than one occasion in the final assault on Baghdad.”364 CENTCOM’s leaders would not know until the Ba’athist regime had been toppled and its former principals could be interrogated, however, that Hussein had been mainly concerned with the threat from within and accordingly had configured and fielded his forces to address that concern above all else.³⁶⁵