Notes

Introduction

    1.  Those two operations were initiated to protect Shiite populations in the south of Iraq and the Kurdish peoples in the north by prohibiting, among other things, Iraqi fixed-wing aircraft operations south of the 32nd parallel (and, after 1996, the 33rd) and north of the 36th parallel. Southern Watch operations were conducted mainly from bases in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait; Northern Watch sorties flew mainly out of Incirlik Air Base in Turkey. The two combined operations denied the Iraqi air force the use of two-thirds of Iraq’s airspace. From their inception in 1991 until the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom twelve years later, American and British (and, until December 1998, French) forces flew more than 200,000 armed overwatch and combat support sorties to police the two no-fly zones.

    2.  The term “joint” refers to the cooperative involvement of two or more U.S. armed services in a combat, peacekeeping, or humanitarian operation. “Joint and combined” refers to both multiservice U.S. and allied participation in such operations.

    3.  For a fuller development of this point, see Richard N. Haass, War of Necessity, War of Choice: A Memoir of Two Iraq Wars (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2009), especially 233–278.

    4.  A wide-ranging exploration of the many strategy and policy issues raised by this new thrust of American security planning in the wake of the September 11 attacks may be found in Karl P. Mueller and others, Striking First: Preemptive and Preventive Attack in U.S. National Security Policy (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corporation, MG-403-AF, 2006).

    5.  George W. Bush, Decision Points (New York: Crown Publishers, 2010), 229.

    6.  Bob Woodward, Plan of Attack (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004), 120.

    7.  Todd S. Purdum, A Time of Our Choosing: America’s War in Iraq (New York: Times Books, 2003), 4.

    8.  For the U.S. figures, see “U.S. Casualties in Iraq,” at http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/iraq_casualties.htm. The number of Iraqi civilian fatalities due directly to combat and insurgency-related operations is highly disputed. One of the more reliable sources, the Iraq Body Count Project, an independent UK/U.S. group, put the number at around 111,000 in mid-August 2011. See Iraq Body Count Project, at http://www.iraqbodycount.org.

    9.  Andrew Flibbert, “The Road to Baghdad: Ideas and Intellectuals in Explanations of the Iraq War,” Security Studies, April–June 2006, 317.

  10.  See Charles Duelfer and others, Comprehensive Report of the Special Adviser to the DCI on Iraq’s WMD (Washington, D.C.: Iraq Survey Group for the Central Intelligence Agency, September 30, 2004). Both President Bush and his closest White House counselor during the planning and conduct of the campaign have been frank in acknowledging their collective error in this regard. In his memoirs Bush freely admitted that “the reality was that I had sent American troops into combat based in large part on intelligence that proved false. That was a massive blow to our credibility—my credibility—that would shake the confidence of the American people” (Bush, Decision Points, 262). Bush’s most senior political adviser, Karl Rove, later conceded in his own memoirs: “I am under no illusions—the failure to find stockpiles of WMD did great damage to the administration’s credibility” (Karl Rove, Courage and Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight [New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010], 342).

  11.  The respected British newsweekly The Economist reported in late October 2011 that “the verdict of Americans at large is bleaker. . . . Even among those who fought in Iraq or Afghanistan, . . . only 44 percent now think the war was worth fighting, according to recent polling by the Pew Research Center; and an even smaller proportion of the general public, 36 percent, agrees with the veterans” (“No Satisfaction, No Resignation,” The Economist, October 29, 2011, 42).

  12.  I am grateful to my colleague Nora Bensahel for urging me to highlight this important qualification to the otherwise impressive success story of the three-week major combat phase of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

  13.  Michael R. Gordon and Bernard E. Trainor, Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq (New York: Pantheon Books, 2006), xxxi. The ground-centric emphasis of this otherwise superb account is telegraphed by its title, which was the code name adopted for the land component of Operation Iraqi Freedom, referring to the offensive launched by Lt. Gen. Omar Bradley’s First Army eight weeks after the D-day landings during the Normandy campaign of World War II.

  14.  Stephen Biddle and others, Toppling Saddam: Iraq and American Military Transformation (Carlisle, Pa.: Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, April 2004), 1. See also Stephen Biddle, “Speed Kills? Reassessing the Role of Speed, Precision, and Situation Awareness in the Fall of Saddam,” Journal of Strategic Studies, February 2007.

  15.  Col. Gregory Fontenot, USA (Ret.); Lt. Col. E. J. Degen, USA; and Lt. Col. David Tohn, USA, On Point: The United States Army in Operation Iraqi Freedom (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 2005), 178. This impressive study is unswervingly joint-minded in its appreciative treatment of the air component’s contribution to CENTCOM’s campaign to topple Hussein and should be mandatory reading for all those interested in understanding what the air war was supporting on the ground throughout the three weeks of major combat. With regard to the early transition in focus of the air offensive from independent strategic operations to direct support of the land advance, Colonel Fontenot later recalled that “to me, the best thing about [General] Moseley [the campaign’s air commander] was that he was able to anticipate when to shift effort and did so very well” (comments on an earlier draft by Col. Gregory Fontenot, USA [Ret.], October 22, 2010).

  16.  Iraqi Freedom also offered a base of experience from which to identify lessons that were not duly heeded by Washington and CENTCOM, suggesting areas that continue to need remedial work.

  17.  Gen. Tommy Franks, USA (Ret.), with Malcolm McConnell, American Soldier (New York: Regan Books, 2004), 411–412.

  18.  See, among numerous others, Jon Lee Anderson, The Fall of Baghdad (New York: Penguin Press, 2004); Rick Atkinson, In the Company of Soldiers: A Chronicle of Combat (New York: Henry Holt, 2004); John Koopman, McCoy’s Marines: Darkside to Baghdad (St. Paul, Minn.: Zenith Press, 2004); Tim Pritchard, Ambush Alley: The Most Extraordinary Battle of the Iraq War (New York: Random House, 2005); Bing West and Maj. Gen. Ray L. Smith, USMC (Ret.), The March Up: Taking Baghdad with the United States Marines (New York: Bantam Dell, 2003); Evan Wright, Generation Kill: Devil Dogs, Iceman, Captain America, and the New Face of American War (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2004); Karl Zinnmeister, Boots on the Ground: A Month with the 82nd Airborne in the Battle for Iraq (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2003); and David Zucchino, Thunder Run: The Armored Strike to Capture Baghdad (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2004). Of those books that have appeared on the war more broadly defined, Thomas Donnelly, Operation Iraqi Freedom: A Strategic Assessment (Washington, D.C.: AEI Press, July 2004), and John Keegan, The Iraq War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), do not address air operations at all; and Purdum, A Time of Our Choosing, and Williamson Murray and Maj. Gen. Robert H. Scales Jr., USA (Ret.), The Iraq War: A Military History (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), do so only cursorily. Franks’ memoir, American Soldier, likewise discusses allied air operations only briefly and superficially. A more detailed treatment of the air war is offered in Walter Boyne, Operation Iraqi Freedom: What Went Right, What Went Wrong, and Why (New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 2003). By far the most richly informed account of allied air and space operations thus far is Michael Knights, Cradle of Conflict: Iraq and the Birth of the Modern U.S. Military (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 2005), 235–327. At a more general policy and strategy level, see also Keith L. Shimko, The Iraq Wars and America’s Military Revolution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 142–172.

  19.  I am grateful to my RAND colleague Karl Mueller for drawing my attention to this important point.

  20.  Amy Butler, “Lack of Embedded Reporters a Hurdle for Air Force Media Ops,” Inside the Air Force, April 4, 2003, 5–6.

  21.  Joint Lessons Learned: Operation Iraqi Freedom Major Combat Operations, coordinating draft, U.S. Joint Forces Command, Norfolk, Va., March 1, 2004, 33.

  22.  Anthony H. Cordesman, “The ‘Instant Lessons’ of the Iraq War: Main Report,” third working draft, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington, D.C., April 14, 2003, 8.

  23.  Murray and Scales, The Iraq War, 73.

Chapter 1. The Road to War

    1.  Murray and Scales, The Iraq War, 13.

    2.  Bush and his national security adviser stated succinctly in their joint memoirs published seven years later: “Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land” (George Bush and Brent Scowcroft, A World Transformed [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998], 489).

    3.  Donald Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown: A Memoir (New York: Sentinel, 2011), 415.

    4.  Quoted in Charles Krauthammer, “What Ever Happened to the Powell Doctrine?” Washington Post, April 20, 2001. An informed assessment of Hussein’s risk calculus eight years after Operation Desert Storm ended suggested that the Iraqi dictator’s ultimate decision to withdraw his occupying forces from Kuwait “stemmed from his fear of losing both the war and his entire army. . . . The destruction of the Iraqi army would have stripped Baghdad of its ability to defend itself. . . . It also would have meant the destruction of the Republican Guard. . . . Finally, such a crushing defeat would have been such a humiliation that he would have had to expect an immediate challenge from within his power base” (Daniel Byman, Kenneth Pollack, and Matthew Waxman, “Coercing Saddam Hussein: Lessons from the Past,” Survival, autumn 1998, 134).

    5.  Bush, Decision Points, 228; Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown, 418.

    6.  This prolonged pattern of behavior on Hussein’s part is chronicled in detail in Kenneth M. Pollack, The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq (New York: Random House, 2002), 55–108.

    7.  Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown, 414.

    8.  Purdum, A Time of Our Choosing, 20.

    9.  Woodward, Plan of Attack, 25.

  10.  Ibid.

  11.  Ibid., 1.

  12.  Ibid., 34.

  13.  Michael R. Gordon, “Pointing Finger, Bush Broadens His ‘Doctrine,’” New York Times, January 30, 2002.

  14.  Charles Krauthammer, “Redefining the War,” Washington Post, February 1, 2002.

  15.  Woodward, Plan of Attack, 108–109.

  16.  Ibid., 116.

  17.  Ibid., 119–120.

  18.  Mike Allen and Karen De Young, “Bush: U.S. Will Strike First at Enemies,” Washington Post, June 2, 2002. In fact, according to one of CENTAF’s key air operations planners, the first steps toward developing a concept of operations for the air war were taken in early February 2002 when, “upon returning from Tampa to Shaw, under General Moseley’s direction, CENTAF planners put together the first draft of a three-day MAAP using a force structure that General Moseley had passed to Shaw from the CAOC in Saudi Arabia. This three-day MAAP would be continuously refined over the next 13 months, but it formed the foundation of the air campaign” (comments on an earlier draft by Lt. Col. Mark Cline, USAF, January 11, 2008; Cline headed the MAAP cell in the CAOC during the final preparations for and execution of the major combat phase of Operation Iraqi Freedom).

  19.  Allen and De Young, “Bush: U.S. Will Strike First at Enemies.” Secretary Rumsfeld chose to characterize the emergent Bush doctrine of preemption as “anticipatory self-defense” (Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown, 423).

  20.  Woodward, Plan of Attack, 112.

  21.  Ibid., 169.

  22.  Ibid., 161.

  23.  Karen De Young, “Bush Cites Urgent Iraqi Threat,” Washington Post, October 8, 2002.

  24.  Alison Mitchell and Carl Hulse, “Senate, in 77–23 Vote, Passes Iraq Resolution,” New York Times, October 11, 2002.

  25.  “Mr. Bush’s UN Mandate,” Wall Street Journal, November 11, 2002.

  26.  “The State of the Union Message,” New York Times, January 29, 2003.

  27.  For amplification on this assertion in an unclassified extract of the estimate in question, see Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Programs (Washington, D.C.: Director of Central Intelligence, October 2002), 1.

  28.  Woodward, Plan of Attack, 23.

  29.  Ibid., 2.

  30.  Ibid., 9.

  31.  Ibid., 34.

  32.  Ibid., 71.

  33.  Evan Thomas and Martha Brant, “The Education of Tommy Franks,” Time, May 19, 2003.

  34.  Franks with McConnell, American Soldier, 315, 331.

  35.  Woodward, Plan of Attack, 8.

  36.  Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown, 427.

  37.  Gordon and Trainor, Cobra II, 28.

  38.  Franks with McConnell, American Soldier, 337.

  39.  Ibid., 334.

  40.  Ibid., 335.

  41.  Woodward, Plan of Attack, 60–61.

  42.  Before becoming CENTCOM’s director of operations, Renuart commanded Joint Task Force Southwest Asia, which enforced the southern no-fly zone over Iraq through Operation Southern Watch.

  43.  Thomas and Brant, “The Education of Tommy Franks.”

  44.  Franks with McConnell, American Soldier, 361.

  45.  Vice Adm. David C. Nichols, USN, “Operation Iraqi Freedom: CFACC/CAOC/NALE [Naval Air Liaison Element],” briefing by the then deputy combined force air component commander, Operation Iraqi Freedom, no date given.

  46.  Woodward, Plan of Attack, 96.

  47.  Col. Mason Carpenter, USAF, “Rapid, Deliberate, Disciplined, Proportional, and Precise: Operation Iraqi Freedom Air and Space Operations—Initial Assessment,” unpublished paper, 3–4. Colonel Carpenter headed the CAOC’s strategy division during the three-week major combat phase of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

  48.  Lt. Gen. T. Michael Moseley, USAF, “Operation Iraqi Freedom: Initial CFACC Roll-up,” briefing given at a CENTAF-sponsored symposium to assess and document allied air operations during the three weeks of major combat in Operation Iraqi Freedom, Nellis AFB, Nev., July 18, 2003.

  49.  Amy Butler, “Data Links a Solid Weapon against Scuds, Friendly Fire, Jumper Says,” Inside the Air Force, April 11, 2003, 1. As General Moseley later put it, “no Scuds” was the rule for the western desert (conversation with Gen. T. Michael Moseley, USAF, chief of staff, Headquarters U.S. Air Force, Washington, D.C., August 2, 2006).

  50.  The National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq that had been provided to Congress by the CIA in October 2002 indicated that Iraq possessed as many as several dozen Scud missiles with ranges of 400 to 550 miles. Yet in the years since Desert Storm, U.S. reconnaissance efforts had not succeeded in capturing a single image of an Iraqi Scud. Gordon and Trainor, Cobra II, 335–336.

  51.  Woodward, Plan of Attack, 98–99.

  52.  Ibid., 110.

  53.  Conversation with General Moseley, August 2, 2006.

  54.  With respect to his burglar reference, Franks later explained that it meant that “you didn’t roll over and go back to sleep when there was an intruder downstairs with a gun” (Franks with McConnell, American Soldier, 383).

  55.  Woodward, Plan of Attack, 113–114.

  56.  Franks with McConnell, American Soldier, 383.

  57.  Gordon and Trainor, Cobra II, 44–45.

  58.  Franks with McConnell, American Soldier, 352.

  59.  For a concise synopsis of effects-based targeting that was published more than a decade ago, see Col. David A. Deptula, USAF, Firing for Effect: Change in the Nature of Warfare (Arlington, Va.: Aerospace Education Foundation, 1995; updated in 2001 under the new title Effects-Based Operations).

  60.  In addition, CENTAF staffers worked closely with the 32nd Air Operations Group, a similar planning entity attached to CENTAF’s counterpart, U.S. Air Forces in Europe (USAFE) headquartered at Ramstein, in building a working relationship with that organization’s staff that would endure throughout the major combat phase of Iraqi Freedom. Conversations with Col. Douglas Erlenbusch, USAF, CENTAF director of operations; Maj. Anthony Roberson, USAF, chief of the CENTAF commander’s action group; and other CENTAF staff during a visit to CENTAF headquarters, Shaw AFB, S.C., January 29, 2007.

  61.  Woodward, Plan of Attack, 114.

  62.  Nichols, “Operation Iraqi Freedom: CFACC/CAOC/NALE.”

  63.  Ibid.

  64.  Conversations with Colonel Erlenbusch, Major Roberson, and other CENTAF staff, January 29, 2007.

  65.  Ibid.

  66.  The White Plan covered a duration of between seventy-two hours and seven days, sufficient time for the 509th Bomb Wing to get its B-2 stealth bombers into the fight. The Red Plan, also known as Running Start, covered seven days. A CENTAF planner recalled that CENTAF “developed three different Blue Plans and three different White Plans, with one focused on Iraq’s air forces, one on the Republican Guard, and one on suspected facilities associated with WMD production” (comments by Lieutenant Colonel Cline, January 11, 2008).

  67.  Comments on an earlier draft by Lt. Col. David Hathaway, USAF, February 19, 2007.

  68.  Conversations with Colonel Erlenbusch, Major Roberson, and other CENTAF staff, January 29, 2007.

  69.  Woodward, Plan of Attack, 126.

  70.  Gordon and Trainor, Cobra II, 51.

  71.  Purdum, A Time of Our Choosing, 97–98.

  72.  Ibid., 102.

  73.  Woodward, Plan of Attack, 124–125.

  74.  Ibid., 146.

  75.  Franks with McConnell, American Soldier, 352. Another unplanned-for contingency, which Franks had taken to calling “catastrophic success,” was the outside chance that Iraqi resistance would crumble both quickly and unexpectedly (ibid., 392). That possibility raised the obvious question of what CENTCOM should do next.

  76.  A similar arrangement between the Air Force and the Navy involving the sharing of satellite-aided JDAMs had been brokered earlier during Operation Enduring Freedom by the Air Force chief of staff at the time, Gen. John Jumper, and the chief of naval operations, Adm. Vern Clark. Conversations with Colonel Erlenbusch, Major Roberson, and other CENTAF staff, January 29, 2007.

  77.  Earlier in June, General Moseley had approached Air Combat Command for help in developing new concepts of operations for the counter-Scud mission. The team of experts that Air Combat Command supplied in response to his request became an integral part of the broader CENTAF planning process.

  78.  Conversations with Colonel Erlenbusch, Major Roberson, and other CENTAF staff, January 29, 2007.

  79.  Woodward, Plan of Attack, 154–155.

  80.  Elaine M. Grossman, “Coalition Will Calibrate Force to Limit Casualties in Baghdad Attacks,” Inside the Air Force, April 4, 2003, 4.

  81.  Lessons of Iraq: Third Report of Session 2003–04, vol. 2 (London: House of Commons, Defence Committee, HC 57-II, March 16, 2004), Ev 51 (hereinafter cited as Lessons of Iraq, vol. 2).

  82.  Woodward, Plan of Attack, 157–159.

  83.  Ibid., 207.

  84.  Conversations with Colonel Erlenbusch, Major Roberson, and other CENTAF staff, January 29, 2007.

  85.  Thomas E. Ricks, “War Plan for Iraq Is Ready, Say Officials,” Washington Post, November 10, 2002.

  86.  Tom Squitieri and Dave Moniz, “U.S. War Plans: Blast Away Saddam’s Support,” USA Today, November 11, 2002.

  87.  Woodward, Plan of Attack, 327.

  88.  In military parlance, a Red Team is a group of skilled military professionals convened to detect and assess identifiable weaknesses in a plan’s or unit’s capability and readiness for combat.

  89.  CENTAF staffers also met about this time with their counterpart planners at CENTCOM headquarters to clarify the emerging war plan’s various operational objectives and anticipated “supported” and “supporting” command relationships to ensure synchronization across the involved warfighting components. Conversations with Colonel Erlenbusch, Major Roberson, and other CENTAF staff, January 29, 2007.

  90.  Comments on an earlier draft by Col. Matt Neuenswander, USAF (Ret.), October 22, 2010.

  91.  Comments by Lieutenant Colonel Cline, January 11, 2008.

  92.  Carpenter, “Rapid, Deliberate, Disciplined, Proportional, and Precise,” 9.

  93.  Tim Ripley, “Planning for Iraqi Freedom,” Jane’s Intelligence Review, July 2003, 10.

  94.  Comments by Lieutenant Colonel Cline, January 11, 2008.

  95.  Conversations with Colonel Erlenbusch, Major Roberson, and other CENTAF staff, January 29, 2007.

  96.  Comments by Lieutenant Colonel Cline, January 11, 2008.

  97.  Michael R. Gordon, “The U.S. Battle Plan: Make Friends and War,” New York Times, March 11, 2003.

  98.  Carpenter, “Rapid, Deliberate, Disciplined, Proportional, and Precise,” 5.

  99.  Comments by Lieutenant Colonel Hathaway, February 19, 2007.

100.  Nichols, “Operation Iraqi Freedom: CFACC/CAOC/NALE.”

101.  Mark Thompson, “Opening with a Bang,” Time, March 17, 2003.

102.  Gordon and Trainor, Cobra II, 35. For the work in question, see Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade, Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance (Washington, D.C.: National Defense University Press, December 1996). “Shock and awe” was never used, let alone promoted, by CENTCOM’s air component. It was entirely a construct that emanated from and was popularized by the Office of the Secretary of Defense with a view toward shaping the tone and focus of Secretary Rumsfeld’s desired battle plan for Operation Iraqi Freedom and reflecting his personal determination to see the plan embody less “massive build-up and overwhelming force” and more “light, lean, speed, and agility.” Colonel Hathaway later recalled that the construct did affect the evolution of OPLAN 1003V as CENTCOM moved toward a more operationally risky simultaneous execution of major air and land operations, but “none of the planners actually expected the visually awe-inspiring orgy of air-delivered fire and destruction that the press had begun to envision. My goal was to build a plan that would deliver a blow to the Ba’athist regime on Day One and never allow it to recover or regroup. To this extent, we did have ‘shock and awe’” (comments by Lieutenant Colonel Hathaway, February 19, 2007).

103.  Woodward, Plan of Attack, 311. In his memoirs President Bush freely acknowledged that “later, many of the assertions in Colin’s speech would prove inaccurate. But at the time, his words reflected the considered judgment of intelligence agencies at home and around the world” (Bush, Decision Points, 245).

104.  Woodward, Plan of Attack, 150.

105.  Ibid., 233.

106.  CENTAF staffers strongly preferred the long-established time-phased force and deployment data (TPFDD, pronounced “tip-fid”) procedures rather than the multiple individual ad hoc deployment orders that Secretary Rumsfeld insisted on. CENTAF planners did, however, press for an early flow of forces in order to meet the growing demands that CENTCOM’s emerging war plan was placing on the air component. These mission support needs included forces for strategic attack, counterair, SOF support, and now earlier-than-anticipated support to the land component. Conversations with Colonel Erlenbusch, Major Roberson, and other CENTAF staff, January 29, 2007. Army planners were likewise unhappy with Rumsfeld’s insistence on piecemeal deployment orders in lieu of the time-tested TPFDD approach. A postcampaign assessment from the Army’s perspective candidly noted that deviating from the detailed TPFDD “had unintended consequences as logistics units fell farther back in the force flow. This affected not only Army units but also those from sister services that depended on Army supporters. . . . As the campaign progressed, the force flow never caught up with the operational requirements; the approach ultimately failed to provide either the flexibility or responsiveness anticipated” (Fontenot, Degen, and Tohn, On Point, 74).

107.  Scott C. Truver, “The U.S. Navy in Review,” Proceedings, May 2003, 94.

108.  Vice Adm. Timothy J. Keating, USN, “Naval Aviation Key to Iraqi Freedom Victory,” The Hook, winter 2003, 4.

109.  Kerry Gildea, “Ammunition Stocks Ready for War, Navy, Marine Corps Leaders Report,” Defense Daily, February 27, 2003, 4.

110.  Hampton Stephens, “Deployments Force Cancellation of January Red Flag,” Inside the Air Force, January 17, 2003, 5.

111.  Hampton Stephens, “USAF Cancels Second Red Flag in a Row, Citing Lack of Available Assets,” Inside the Air Force, March 14, 2003, 2.

112.  Hampton Stephens, “At Rhein-Main, Activity Increases as U.S. Prepares for Iraq War,” Inside the Air Force, February 28, 2003, 4–5.

113.  Gen. John W. Handy, USAF, Operation Iraqi Freedom—Air Mobility by the Numbers (Scott AFB, Ill.: Headquarters Air Mobility Command, October 1, 2003), 3.

114.  Ibid., 5.

115.  Ibid., 18.

116.  Gordon and Trainor, Cobra II, 48.

117.  Franks with McConnell, American Soldier, 342. These “spikes” in force deployment and use were directly connected to Operation Southern Focus, CENTCOM’s concurrent expanded use of reactive air attacks in response to Iraqi provocations against coalition aircraft operating in the southern no-fly zone (see Chapter 2). Lieutenant Colonel Hathaway later explained, “We didn’t want to trip them [the Iraqis] into any action that would trigger the start of major hostilities until we were ready. During the final weeks before the actual execution of OPLAN 1003V, General Franks directed that we terminate the ‘spikes’ to ensure that we wouldn’t inadvertently do anything that might force a premature execution of the plan, as well as to allow the President’s last-chance diplomatic effort to play out unimpeded” (comments, February 19, 2007).

118.  Not only was General Leaf an experienced fighter pilot, he also was intimately familiar with U.S. Army operations, having been an honor graduate of the Army’s Command and General Staff Officer Course and a graduate of the Army’s pre-command course. Fontenot, Degen, and Tohn, On Point, 31.

119.  For detailed discussion, see Benjamin S. Lambeth, Air Power against Terror: America’s Conduct of Operation Enduring Freedom (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corporation, MG-166–1-CENTAF, 2005), 163–231.

120.  Col. Matthew D. Neuenswander, USAF, “JCAS in Operation Anaconda—It’s Not All Bad News,” Field Artillery, May–June 2003, 2.

121.  General Moseley created the first ACCE organization in May 2002, shortly after Anaconda. It was established with the SOF community’s Combined Joint Task Force (CJTF) 180 in Afghanistan to provide senior air-component representation to other fighting elements of CENTCOM, much as those elements provided representation to the CAOC. This was a new idea that paid off impressively in improved intercomponent operations. The arrangement became the template for the ACCE that was subsequently established with the land component for Operation Iraqi Freedom. CENTAF staffers later called the concept “new doctrinal territory” and an initiative that “paid huge dividends by improving communications and staff relationships” (conversations with Colonel Erlenbusch, Major Roberson, and other CENTAF staff, January 29, 2007).

122.  Amy Butler, “As A-10 Shines in Iraq War, Officials Look to JSF [Joint Strike Fighter] for Future CAS Role,” Inside the Air Force, May 23, 2003, 13.

123.  Elaine M. Grossman, “Iraq War Could Feature Unprecedented Air-Land Collaboration,” Inside the Pentagon, February 13, 2003, 1, 16–18. The fact that an ACCE was needed at all for Iraqi Freedom reflects the widespread geographical distribution of CENTCOM’s subordinate warfighting components, requiring a ponderous CAOC that, in the case of Afghanistan, had been located thousands of miles to the rear of the fight. There was no ACCE arrangement in Operation Desert Storm because joint theater headquarters were all collocated in Saudi Arabia. In the case of current counterinsurgency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, with the air component commander and the CAOC both far removed from the center of action, one has begun to hear increasingly compelling arguments that what is really needed is not just an ACCE, but even more a pushing of some CAOC tactical-level functions down to the Air Force air support operations centers in Baghdad and Kabul that are collocated with U.S. ground commanders to ensure that the air component’s potential contributions are fully engaged in the joint fight. For an insightful recent commentary along these lines, see Lt. Col. Jeffrey Hukill, USAF (Ret.), and Daniel R. Mortensen, “Developing Flexible Command and Control of Air Power,” Air and Space Power Journal, spring 2011, 53–63.

124.  This willingness bore out an observation later put forward in the U.S. Marine Corps’ official postmortem on I MEF’s role in the campaign that General McKiernan “was not afraid of new ideas and wanted to find the best organization for the fight—as opposed to doing things the way they always had been done.” The same account also noted that McKiernan “had what Newsweek was to call ‘a temperament as . . . even as the desert,’ which also made it easy for him to work with other services” (Col. Nicholas E. Reynolds, USMC [Ret.], Basrah, Baghdad, and Beyond: The U.S. Marine Corps in the Second Iraq War [Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 2005], 13). Before the campaign kicked off, General McKiernan made it a special point to stress that “there will never be a Third Army fight. We will always be in a combined [and] joint contest” (interview by Maj. John Aarson with Lt. Gen. David McKiernan, November 17, 2002, as quoted in Fontenot, Degen, and Tohn, On Point, 31).

125.  Comments by Lieutenant Colonel Cline, January 11, 2008.

126.  Robert Wall, “Rescue Enhancements: U.S. Air Force Helicopters Employ Longer-Range Guns and New Threat-Avoidance Technology,” Aviation Week and Space Technology, June 16, 2003, 168.

127.  Franks with McConnell, American Soldier, 398.

128.  General Moseley played a major role in negotiating many of these forward basing arrangements. The senior Australian air planner in the CAOC later remembered “Moseley complaining at one stage that he was dispatched again to the Middle East to talk to the minister of defense in Saudi or wherever and saying, ‘I’m supposed to be planning the air war. Why the heck am I doing all this?’ But the reality was that Moseley had a very good working relationship with all the defense organizations in the area, had a very good network. He was well known to a lot of the politicians, the ministers of defense and the governments in that area, and he became the front man. Without his efforts, the State Department would have had a lot of problems” (official interview with Group Captain Otto Halupka, RAAF, Operation Falconer Air Planner, May 14, 2008, provided to the author by the RAAF Air Power Development Centre, Canberra, Australia).

129.  By the account of one key planner, CENTAF’s logistics personnel were heroic in working munitions issues, getting the munitions into the theater, and setting up all the bases. British and Australian logisticians were also fully engaged in this planning activity at Shaw AFB. “I don’t know who said it,” he added, “but it’s true—amateurs do strategy, professionals do logistics” (comments by Lieutenant Colonel Cline, January 11, 2008). See Kristin F. Lynch, John G. Drew, Robert S. Tripp, and Charles Robert Roll Jr., Supporting Air and Space Expeditionary Forces: Lessons from Operation Iraqi Freedom (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corporation, MG-193-AF, 2005).

130.  Esther Schrader and Richard Boudreaux, “U.S. Seeks Overflights in Turkey,” Los Angeles Times, March 12, 2003.

131.  Ibid.

132.  Elaine Grossman, “U.S. Air Force Spent Millions on Turkish Bases Unused in Iraq War,” Inside the Pentagon, August 14, 2003, 1, 12–13.

133.  Franks with McConnell, American Soldier, 428.

134.  Woodward, Plan of Attack, 330–331.

135.  Robert Burns, “U.S. Gulf Force Nears 300,000 as Commander, Bush Consult,” Philadelphia Inquirer, March 5, 2003.

136.  Nimitz, with her embarked air wing and crew, had sustained a record-setting nine-and-a-half-month deployment more than two decades before in 1979 and 1980 when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan and the Iranian hostage crisis first kicked off.

137.  Eric Schmitt, “Pentagon Ready to Strike Iraq within Days if Bush Gives the Word, Officials Say,” New York Times, March 6, 2003.

138.  David E. Sanger with Warren Hoge, “U.S. May Abandon UN Vote on Iraq, Powell Testifies,” New York Times, March 14, 2003.

139.  Reynolds, Basrah, Baghdad, and Beyond, 50.

140.  Jay A. Stout, Hammer from Above: Marine Air Combat over Iraq (New York: Presidio Press, 2009), 27–28.

141.  Lt. Gen. T. Michael Moseley, USAF, Operation Iraqi Freedom—by the Numbers (Shaw AFB, S.C.: Headquarters U.S. Central Command Air Forces, Assessment and Analysis Division, April 30, 2003), 6–10.

142.  Christopher Cooper and Greg Jaffe, “U.S. Use of Saudi Air Base Shows Kingdom’s Quiet Commitment,” Wall Street Journal, March 12, 2003.

143.  David Lynch and John Diamond, “U.S., British Forces Are ‘Ready Today’ for Invasion,” USA Today, March 17, 2003.

144.  Moseley, “Operation Iraqi Freedom: Initial CFACC Roll-up.”

145.  Ibid.

146.  Elaine M. Grossman, “U.S. Forces to Take Close Battlefield Approach into Baghdad Fight,” Inside the Pentagon, March 20, 2003, 2–3.

147.  Ripley, “Planning for Iraqi Freedom,” 9.

148.  Conversations with Colonel Erlenbusch, Major Roberson, and other CENTAF staff, January 29, 2007.

149.  Hunter Keeter, “Next Internal Look to Spotlight Deployable Command and Control,” Defense Daily, October 31, 2002, 6.

150.  “XC4I” stands for experimental command, control, communications, computers, and intelligence.

151.  Hunter Keeter, “Exercise Internal Look to Evaluate Joint Task Force Command Capability,” Defense Daily, December 5, 2002, 4.

152.  Gordon and Trainor, Cobra II, 89.

153.  Woodward, Plan of Attack, 237.

154.  Franks with McConnell, American Soldier, 414.

155.  Jeremy Feiler, “Iraqi Campaign Lessons Show Shift to ‘Overmatching Power’ Doctrine,” Inside the Pentagon, October 9, 2003, 13.

156.  One might add here, as a fourth consideration, the important fact that allied air superiority had already been established over Iraq’s northern and southern no-fly zones. Comments by Lieutenant Colonel Cline, January 11, 2008.

157.  Lessons of Iraq: Third Report of Session 2003–04, vol. 1 (London: House of Commons, Defence Committee, HC 57-I/II/III, March 16, 2004), 35 (hereinafter cited as Lessons of Iraq, vol. 1).

158.  Comments by Lieutenant Colonel Hathaway, February 19, 2007.

159.  Woodward, Plan of Attack, 257.

160.  Conversations with Colonel Erlenbusch, Major Roberson, and other CENTAF staff, January 29, 2007.

161.  Woodward, Plan of Attack, 264–265.

162.  Conversations with Colonel Erlenbusch, Major Roberson, and other CENTAF staff, January 29, 2007.

163.  Ibid.

164.  Ibid. U.S. air-launched cruise missiles delivered by B-52s were mainly used during the first days of the air war against preplanned targets but also were employed as an alert response capability and in reactive targeting.

165.  Ibid.

166.  Ibid.

167.  Ibid.

168.  Eric Schmitt and Elisabeth Bumiller, “Top General Sees Plan to Shock Iraq into Surrender,” New York Times, March 5, 2003.

169.  Woodward, Plan of Attack, 217–218.

170.  Franks with McConnell, American Soldier, 440.

171.  Woodward, Plan of Attack, 365.

172.  Dana Milbank and Mike Allen, “President Tells Hussein to Leave Iraq within 48 Hours or Face Invasion,” Washington Post, March 18, 2003.

173.  Richard W. Stevenson, “As Diplomatic Effort Ends, President Vows to Act,” New York Times, March 18, 2003.

174.  Woodward, Plan of Attack, 335.

175.  Ibid., 352.

176.  Betsy Pisik, “Human Shields Take a Powder,” Washington Times, March 5, 2003.

177.  Tom Bowman, “U.S. Aims to Curtail Civilian Casualties,” Baltimore Sun, March 5, 2003.

178.  Rowan Scarborough, “Bush Convenes War Cabinet,” Washington Times, March 6, 2003.

179.  Elaine M. Grossman, “Decision to Hasten Ground Attack into Iraq Presented New Risks,” Inside the Pentagon, March 18, 2004, 1, 14–17.

180.  Comments by Lieutenant Colonel Hathaway, February 19, 2007.

181.  Ibid.

182.  Ibid.

183.  Prior to Operation Desert Storm, Iraq was Turkey’s second-largest trading partner, with $3 billion in exchange each year. See Jeremy Feiler, “Turkey Could Move Forces into Northern Iraq to Thwart Refugee Crisis,” Inside the Pentagon, March 13, 2003, 11–12.

184.  Thom Shanker and Eric Schmitt, “Rumsfeld Seeks Consensus through Jousting,” New York Times, March 19, 2003; and Eric Schmitt with Dexter Filkins, “Erdogan to Form New Turkish Government as U.S. Presses for Use of Military Bases,” New York Times, March 12, 2003.

185.  Rowan Scarborough, “Lightning Air Strikes, Then March to Baghdad,” Washington Times, March 18, 2003.

186.  Greg Jaffe, “U.S. Rushes to Upgrade Base for Attack Aircraft,” Wall Street Journal, March 14, 2003.

187.  Peter Baker, “Marine Predicts Brief Bombing, Then Land Assault,” Washington Post, March 17, 2003.

188.  Thomas E. Ricks, “Myers Depicts War on Two Fronts,” Washington Post, March 5, 2003.

189.  Squadron Leader Sophy Gardner, RAF, “Operation Iraqi Freedom: Coalition Operations,” Air and Space Power Journal, winter 2004, 88. At the outset, CENTAF had not anticipated this prospective complication. Eventually, it enlisted the help of two airmen from the Air Force Doctrine Center at Maxwell AFB, Ala., to assist in working through the associated command and control issues. Comments by Lieutenant Colonel Cline, January 11, 2008.

190.  B-1Bs carrying twenty-four JDAMs were used extensively in the counter-Scud effort in the western desert. CAOC planners understood that if those munitions were not required to support that mission during any given aircraft time on station, the B-1s would undertake dynamic or time-sensitive targeting elsewhere in the war zone.

191.  Franks with McConnell, American Soldier, 434.

192.  In a sidebar comment titled “Sometimes Even a Nonlethal Attack Can Be Lethal,” Lt. Col. Carl Ayers, commander of the Army’s 9th PSYOP (Psychological Operations) Battalion, described the unusual death of an Iraqi border guard in the western desert: “The cause of death was a box of leaflets that fell out of a [C-130] Combat Talon aircraft when the static line broke. The box impacted on the Iraqi guard’s head, and 9th PSYOP Battalion may have achieved the first enemy KIA [killed in action] of Operation Iraqi Freedom” (Fontenot, Degen, and Tohn, On Point, 108).

193.  Comments by Lieutenant Colonel Hathaway, February 19, 2007.

194.  There is no evidence that any Air Force leader at any time in the planning for Iraqi Freedom insisted on the Air Force being the first in “for matters of pride,” as was later alleged by CENTCOM’s deputy commander in his memoirs. See Lt. Gen. Michael DeLong, USMC (Ret.), Inside CentCom: The Unvarnished Truth about the Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 2004), 86.

195.  Franks with McConnell, American Soldier, 439.

196.  Steve Davies and Doug Dildy, F-16 Fighting Falcon Units of Operation Iraqi Freedom, Osprey Combat Aircraft No. 61 (Oxford, England: Osprey Publishing, 2006), 16. The rules of engagement for Iraqi Freedom were substantially simplified compared with those that had prevailed throughout Operations Northern Watch and Southern Watch. During those operations, aircrews were prohibited from attacking a target unless it could be confirmed to lie within fifty feet of the geographic coordinates that had been provided for the target by the CAOC. Once Iraqi Freedom was under way, any target inside a kill box assigned to be attacked could be struck so long as positive identification could be made and collateral damage estimates were satisfactorily met, and there were no friendly ground forces in the area. Conversations with Colonel Erlenbusch, Major Roberson, and other CENTAF staff, January 29, 2007.

197.  The SPINs document itself was divided into eight sections: commander’s guidance, flight planning, communications and data links, airspace, rules of engagement, operations, personnel recovery, and air defense. CENTAF staffers continually updated and refined this document as the air operations plan evolved. For the sake of continuity, General Moseley determined that the format of the daily SPINs for the war against Iraq would be essentially the same as the earlier SPINs documents for Operations Northern Watch, Southern Watch, and Enduring Freedom. During the actual campaign, the daily document averaged more than 350 pages in length and contained a variety of matrices, graphs, diagrams, and illustrations. Conversations with Colonel Erlenbusch, Major Roberson, and other CENTAF staff, January 29, 2007.

Chapter 2. CENTCOM’s Air Offensive

    1.  Franks with McConnell, American Soldier, 348–349.

    2.  Nichols, “Operation Iraqi Freedom: CFACC/CAOC/NALE.”

    3.  Lessons of Iraq: Third Report of Session 2003–04, vol. 3 (London: House of Commons, Defence Committee, HC 57-III, March 16, 2004), Ev 414 (hereinafter cited as Lessons of Iraq, vol. 3).

    4.  Woodward, Plan of Attack, 102.

    5.  A sortie is one mission flown by one aircraft.

    6.  Conversation with General Moseley, August 2, 2006.

    7.  Actually, as early as November 2001, on assuming command at CENTAF, General Moseley had already begun to refocus no-fly zone operations over southern Iraq expressly toward what he called “increased air defense threat mitigation” (Moseley, “Operation Iraqi Freedom: Initial CFACC Roll-up”).

    8.  Steve Davies, F-15C/E Eagle Units of Operation Iraqi Freedom, Osprey Combat Aircraft No. 47 (Oxford, England: Osprey Publishing, 2004), 19.

    9.  Woodward, Plan of Attack, 10–11.

  10.  Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown, 418–419.

  11.  Woodward, Plan of Attack, 14.

  12.  Knights, Cradle of Conflict, 258.

  13.  Ibid., 235.

  14.  Comments by Lieutenant Colonel Hathaway, February 19, 2007.

  15.  Carlo Kopp, “Iraqi Freedom—the Hammer and Anvil,” Australian Aviation, May 2003, 26.

  16.  For further details, see Knights, Cradle of Conflict, 236–238.

  17.  Thomas Ricks and Alan Sipress, “Cuts Urged in Patrols over Iraq,” Washington Post, May 9, 2001, quoted in Knights, Cradle of Conflict, 239.

  18.  The CAOC later determined that the E-2C pilot had reacted to self-defense flares fired from a flight of fighters that was conducting a flare check above him. The reported missile shot was never validated, and Iraq’s IADS did not have SA-3s positioned that far south at the time the alleged incident was reported. Comments by Colonel Neuenswander, March 6, 2007.

  19.  Knights, Cradle of Conflict, 256–257.

  20.  Quoted in ibid., 257.

  21.  Ibid., 257.

  22.  Ibid., 258.

  23.  Neil Tweedie and Michael Smith, “Britain ‘To Play Full Role in Iraq Invasion,’” London Daily Telegraph, March 13, 2003.

  24.  Lt. Col. Rob Givens, USAF, “‘Let Slip the Dogs of War’: Leadership in the Air War over Iraq,” student term paper, National War College, Washington, D.C., 2005, 11.

  25.  Franks with McConnell, American Soldier, 388.

  26.  Davies and Dildy, F-16 Fighting Falcon Units of Operation Iraqi Freedom, 55.

  27.  Knights, Cradle of Conflict, 241–242.

  28.  This escalated effort in no way entailed a purposeful misuse by CENTCOM of its no-fly-zone mandate from the UN. The CAOC always worked within the established Southern Watch rules of engagement, the subtle difference being that rather than being constrained to respond only against the specific system that had threatened a coalition aircraft, allied aircrews were now authorized to respond against related targets, so long as such targets were expressly associated with the Iraqi IADS and command and control networks. E-mail communication to the author by Air Chief Marshal Sir Glenn Torpy, chief of the air staff, RAF, March 17, 2007. General Moseley later explained that Southern Focus operations “never expanded attacks beyond what [were] necessary, proportional, and authorized . . . in self-defense” (quoted in SSgt Jason L. Haag, USAF, “OIF Veterans Discuss Lessons,” Air Force Print News, USAF Air Warfare Center Public Affairs, Nellis AFB, Nev., July 31, 2003).

  29.  Knights, Cradle of Conflict, 258–259.

  30.  Carpenter, “Rapid, Deliberate, Disciplined, Proportional, and Precise,” 4.

  31.  The targets that were attacked included Ababil 100, FROG 7, and other missile launchers.

  32.  Knights, Cradle of Conflict, 263.

  33.  Ibid., 259.

  34.  Davies and Dildy, F-16 Fighting Falcon Units of Operation Iraqi Freedom, 13.

  35.  Ibid., 14. There also was a significant concurrent nontraditional ISR effort over western Iraq involving F-16C+s of the Alabama Air National Guard (ANG) (F-16C+ is an unofficial designation given to ANG aircraft equipped with the AN/AAQ-28 Litening II target pod). In addition to gathering intelligence on possible Iraqi Scud-related activities, this effort contributed to clearing the way for SOF team operations on the ground once the campaign began in earnest.

  36.  Robert Wall, “Time Runs Short: Final War Preparations Continue Even as Controversy Keeps a Start Date Uncertain,” Aviation Week and Space Technology, March 17, 2003, 28. The E-8 uses advanced synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and ground moving-target indicator (GMTI) radar to find and monitor fixed and moving vehicles and other objects on the ground. It allows commanders and mission planners to detect, locate, classify, track, and target hostile ground movements irrespective of weather or smoke obscuration.

  37.  Karen DeYoung and Colum Lynch, “Three Countries Vow to Block U.S. on Iraq,” Washington Post, March 6, 2003.

  38.  Mike Allen and Bradley Graham, “Franks Briefs Bush on War Plans, Says Military Is Ready,” Washington Post, March 6, 2003. See also “U.S., Britain Double Daily Flights over Southern Iraq,” Baltimore Sun, March 6, 2003.

  39.  Davies and Dildy, F-16 Fighting Falcon Units of Operation Iraqi Freedom, 16.

  40.  Michael R. Gordon with John F. Burns, “Iraq’s Air Defense Is Concentrated around Baghdad,” New York Times, March 17, 2003.

  41.  Tom Squitieri, “What Could Go Wrong in War,” USA Today, March 13, 2003. For more on Serb tactics, see Benjamin S. Lambeth, NATO’s Air War for Kosovo: A Strategic and Operational Assessment (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corporation, MR-1365-AF, 2001), 102–120.

  42.  David A. Fulghum, “Frustrations and Backlogs,” Aviation Week and Space Technology, March 10, 2003, 33.

  43.  Carpenter, “Rapid, Deliberate, Disciplined, Proportional, and Precise,” 24.

  44.  Jim Krane, “Pilotless Warriors Soar to Success,” CBS News, April 25, 2003.

  45.  Conversation with General Moseley, August 2, 2006.

  46.  “Moseley Details ‘The War before the War,’” Air Force Magazine, October 2003, 14.

  47.  Carpenter, “Rapid, Deliberate, Disciplined, Proportional, and Precise,” 11.

  48.  Moseley, “Operation Iraqi Freedom: Initial CFACC Roll-up.”

  49.  Elaine Grossman, “Critics Decry 2002 Air Attacks on Iraq That Predated Key U.S., UN Votes,” Inside the Pentagon, July 24, 2003, 19–20.

  50.  Suzann Chapman, “The ‘War’ before the War,” Air Force Magazine, February 2004, 53.

  51.  Merrill A. McPeak, “Leave the Flying to Us,” Washington Post, June 5, 2003.

  52.  Linda Robinson, “The Men in the Shadows,” U.S. News and World Report, May 19, 2003.

  53.  Comments by Lieutenant Colonel Cline, January 11, 2008.

  54.  Woodward, Plan of Attack, 108–109.

  55.  Ibid., 301.

  56.  Ibid., 304.

  57.  Ibid., 42.

  58.  As a further hedge against that eventuality, CENTCOM had sent a small team to Israel headed by Maj. Gen. Charles Simpson, director of air and space operations at USAFE headquarters, and Peter Flory, the principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, to help ensure Israel’s noninvolvement by providing daily campaign progress briefings to the Israeli military leadership.

  59.  Carpenter, “Rapid, Deliberate, Disciplined, Proportional, and Precise,” 9.

  60.  Col. Robert B. Green, USAR, “Joint Fires Support, the Joint Fires Element and the CGRS [Common Grid Reference System]: Keys to Success for CJSOTF West,” Special Warfare, April 2005, 12.

  61.  Jack Kelly, “Covert Troops Fight Shadow War Off-Camera,” USA Today, April 7, 2003.

  62.  Andrew F. Krepinevich, Operation Iraqi Freedom: A First-Blush Assessment (Washington, D.C.: Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, 2003), 18.

  63.  The GBU-31 JDAM’s 2,000-lb Mk 84 bomb core contains 945 pounds of tritonal, which consists of solid TNT laced with aluminum for stability. The bomb’s 14-inch-wide steel casing expands to almost twice its normal size before the steel shears, at which point 1,000 pounds of white-hot steel fragments fly out at 6,000 feet per second with an initial overpressure of several thousand pounds per square inch and a fireball 8,500 °F. The bomb can produce a 20-foot crater and throw off as much as 10,000 pounds of dirt and rocks at supersonic speed. David Wood, “New Workhorse of U.S. Military: A Bomb with Devastating Effects,” Newhouse.com, March 13, 2003.

  64.  Nick Cook, “Shock and Awe?” Jane’s Defence Weekly, April 2, 2003, 21.

  65.  Lorenzo Cortes, “B-1 Crews Moved Quickly with JDAM Loads during Iraqi Freedom, Pilot Says,” Defense Daily, April 22, 2003, 1.

  66.  Carpenter, “Rapid, Deliberate, Disciplined, Proportional, and Precise,” 10.

  67.  Vago Muradian, “Allied Special Forces Took Western Iraq,” Defense News, May 19, 2003, 1.

  68.  General Moseley later conceded his personal doubt at that time that Saddam Hussein still maintained a viable Scud launch capability in Iraq’s western desert. Yet because of the clear precedent of Desert Storm in 1991, when Iraq fired eighty-eight Scuds into Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain from western-desert launch sites, the possibility had to be taken seriously. Accordingly, using known Desert Storm launch information as a starting point, CENTAF conducted a massive precampaign ISR effort to map out and subsequently plan and rehearse attacks against every potential Scud hide site and key transportation node while minimizing to the fullest extent possible unnecessary damage to Iraqi infrastructure. The joint air and SOF attacks that were ultimately executed in the western desert against the assessed Scud threat included the immediate seizure of the H-1 and H-3 airfields and precision air attacks against some eighty plausible Scud transportation nodes, including thirteen or fourteen bridges to prevent the crossing of any possible Scud transporters and launch vehicles. Conversation with General Moseley, August 2, 2006.

  69.  Ibid.

  70.  Tony Holmes, U.S. Navy Hornet Units of Operation Iraqi Freedom, pt. 2, Osprey Combat Aircraft No. 58 (Oxford, England: Osprey Publishing, 2005), 46.

  71.  The FSCL is a procedural device for controlling and managing standoff fire support to ground combat operations that is established by the land component commander and adjusted by him as deemed necessary, but at intervals of no less than twelve hours.

  72.  Holmes, U.S. Navy Hornet Units of Operation Iraqi Freedom, pt. 2, 59.

  73.  Carpenter, “Rapid, Deliberate, Disciplined, Proportional, and Precise,” 15–16.

  74.  The senior CAOC director during the three-week campaign recalled that allied SOF teams operating in northern Iraq confronted a large contingent of Iraqi conventional and paramilitary forces and later provided “overwhelming” feedback to the air component in enabling them to neutralize those superior numbers of enemy forces in short order. He added that the SOF land warfare community now “gets” air power and its potential for contributing to joint operations. Conversation with Maj. Gen. Daniel J. Darnell, USAF, director of legislative liaison, Headquarters U.S. Air Force, Washington, D.C., August 2, 2006.

  75.  Barton Gellman and Dana Priest, “CIA Had Fix on Hussein,” Washington Post, March 20, 2003.

  76.  Franks with McConnell, American Soldier, 378–379.

  77.  Maj. S. Clinton Hinote, USAF, “More than Bombing Saddam: Attacking the Leadership in Operation Iraqi Freedom,” master’s thesis, School of Advanced Air and Space Studies, Air University, Maxwell AFB, Ala., June 2006, 114.

  78.  Ibid., 188.

  79.  Ibid., 136–137.

  80.  Gordon and Trainor, Cobra II, 177. Hussein’s personal secretary, Abd Hamid, was apprehended after the regime’s collapse and told U.S. interrogators that Hussein had not been to Dora Farms since 1995 and was nowhere near the site on the night of the attack (ibid.).

  81.  Davies, F-15C/E Eagle Units of Operation Iraqi Freedom, 40.

  82.  All of the TLAMs fired were Block IIIC variants, which featured not only the inertial navigation system and terrain contour–matching and digital scene-matching area-correlation systems of earlier versions, but also a GPS receiver that made the missile much easier to update with target information, increasing its accuracy. Only one failed on launch. With the addition of GPS and other guidance system improvements, the Navy had shortened the length of time required to detect, classify, and attack targets with TLAMs from days to hours. Hunter Keeter, “Navy Fire Control, Targeting Capability Improvements Shorten Strike Timeline,” Defense Daily, March 21, 2003, 7. On the night of this first decapitation attempt, the reported position accuracy of GPS was 2.2 meters, thanks to careful system refinement by Air Force Space Command. The average reported GPS accuracy for targeting between March 19 and April 18 was 3.08 meters, with a 95 percent confidence level. William B. Scott, “‘Sweetening’ GPS: Squadron Boosted GPS Accuracy ‘Window’ to Support Iraq Air Campaign,” Aviation Week and Space Technology, June 9, 2003, 49. Of the more than five hundred TLAMs that were fired during the three-week campaign, there were reportedly only six or seven failures—duds that either never left the launch tube or else fell into the sea before getting successfully airborne. Cordesman, “The ‘Instant Lessons’ of the Iraq War,” 27.

  83.  Lorenzo Cortes, “Air Force F-117s Open Coalition Air Strikes with EGBU-27s,” Defense Daily, March 21, 2003, 1.

  84.  Purdum, A Time of Our Choosing, 110.

  85.  Davies and Dildy, F-16 Fighting Falcon Units of Operation Iraqi Freedom, 25.

  86.  Ibid., 25–26.

  87.  Purdum, A Time of Our Choosing, 111.

  88.  Franks with McConnell, American Soldier, 459.

  89.  John Liang, “Myers: Saddam Hussein Is a Legitimate Target,” Inside the Air Force, March 21, 2003, 15.

  90.  Five days after the abortive attack, the CIA officer who was running the Rockstars operation personally visited the Dora Farms complex and found no sign that a bunker had been there. Likewise, a U.S. Army colonel in charge of inspecting targeted sites in Baghdad reported that giant holes had been created but “no underground facilities, no bodies” were found. See “No Bunker Found under Bomb Site,” New York Times, May 29, 2003.

  91.  The Army’s theater air and missile defense (TAMD) was fielded to protect not only coalition forces in CENTCOM’s area of operations but also the nearby friendly countries of Kuwait, Turkey, Qatar, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and Israel. Improvements to the Patriot advanced capabilities version 2 (PAC 2) that was deployed to the region included software upgrades and hardware changes that enabled better target acquisition and tracking, with the PAC 3 version putatively offering even greater capability and reliability. Fontenot, Degen, and Tohn, On Point, 65.

  92.  Franks with McConnell, American Soldier, 65.

  93.  Elaine M. Grossman, “First Attacks on Coalition Were Iraqi Missiles Aimed at Kuwait,” Inside the Air Force, March 21, 2003, 1, 13–14.

  94.  Lorenzo Cortes, “Patriots Intercept Eight Iraqi Ballistic Missiles, Involved in Two Friendly Fire Incidents,” Defense Daily, March 28, 2003, 3.

  95.  Franks with McConnell, American Soldier, 468.

  96.  Walter Pincus, Bob Woodward, and Dana Priest, “Hussein’s Fate Still Uncertain,” Washington Post, March 21, 2003.

  97.  Fontenot, Degen, and Tohn, On Point, 88, 99.

  98.  Gordon and Trainor, Cobra II, 331–332.

  99.  “Flexibility: Rumsfeld Tactical Signature Writ Large,” London Daily Telegraph, March 21, 2003.

100.  Thomas E. Ricks, “Calibrated War Makes Comeback,” Washington Post, March 21, 2003.

101.  Darren Lake, “How Different It All Is from the Last Gulf War,” Jane’s Defence Weekly, March 26, 2003, 3.

102.  Comments by Lieutenant Colonel Hathaway, February 19, 2007.

103.  Nichols, “Operation Iraqi Freedom: CFACC/CAOC/NALE.”

104.  Knights, Cradle of Conflict, 265.

105.  Bradley Graham and Vernon Loeb, “An Air War of Might, Coordination, and Risks,” Washington Post, April 27, 2003.

106.  Capt. Mark I. Fox, USN, “Air Wing of Destiny,” Foundation (published by the Naval Aviation Museum Foundation), fall 2004, 75, 77.

107.  Lorenzo Cortes, “B-2 Drops Pair of 4,700-Pound GBU-37 GAMs [GPS-Aided Munitions] on Iraqi Communications Tower,” Defense Daily, March 31, 2003, 5.

108.  Carpenter, “Rapid, Deliberate, Disciplined, Proportional, and Precise,” 6.

109.  As for actual SAMs themselves, those would be struck by TLAMs only if the CAOC had a confirmed location for them. Had an Iraqi SAM operator activated his radar long enough to detect a target and fire and guide a SAM, he would have been instantly attacked by a HARM or an ALARM [RAF air-launched antiradiation missile.] Comments by Lieutenant Colonel Cline, January 11, 2008.

110.  Davies, F-15C/E Eagle Units of Operation Iraqi Freedom, 48.

111.  Davies and Dildy, F-16 Fighting Falcon Units of Operation Iraqi Freedom, 28.

112.  Comments by Lieutenant Colonel Cline, January 11, 2008.

113.  Conversations with Colonel Erlenbusch, Major Roberson, and other CENTAF staff, January 29, 2007.

114.  Hampton Stephens, “B-1 Bomber Being Used in a Variety of Missions during Iraq War,” Inside the Air Force, March 28, 2003, 1, 8–9.

115.  A well-informed account explained: “Taking the standard Block 50D/52D F-16C and upgrading it to perform the SEAD role involved the addition of two main pieces of mission-specific equipment. The most obvious of these is the addition of the AN/ASQ-213 HTS—the HARM targeting system. HTS is a small pod carried on the right side of the [aircraft’s air] intake cheek that is used to find, classify, range, and display threat-emitter systems to the pilot. In doing so, it allows the pilot to cue the . . . HARM to specific threat systems. Supplementing the HTS is the AN/ALR-56M advanced radar warning receiver, AN/ALQ-131(V)14 electronic countermeasures pod, and the addition of under wing-mounted chaff dispensers to complement those already mounted on the lower rear fuselage adjacent to the horizontal stabilizers. The second key component . . . is the avionics launcher interface computer (ALICS), which resides in the . . . HARM launcher pylon and acts as the conduit between the HTS, the central computer, and the missile itself. Pronounced ‘A-licks’, the ALICS is essential for successful handoff of radar threats from the jet to the HARM” (Davies and Dildy, F-16 Fighting Falcon Units of Operation Iraqi Freedom, 7–8).

116.  Ibid., 27. The HARM’s most effective operating mode against SAM threats is its “range-known” mode, in which the missile has accurate azimuth and ranging information against potential enemy IADS targets. “This is the mode that offers the best probability of kill, and known emitter locations can be programmed into the missile’s seeker head prior to flight, or passed dynamically via the ALICS during flight as the HTS sniffs the air for electrons. However, for much of Operation Iraqi Freedom, HARMs were launched using the preemptive mode, which allows the AGM-88 to be fired toward suspected or known sites in an arcing trajectory that maximizes the weapon’s time of flight. In this mode, the missile seeker activates as it heads toward earth and then waits to see if its assigned target [begins to emit].” The F-16CJ’s ability to react so swiftly to pop-up SAM threats is due almost entirely to intelligent software programming and the integration of hands-on-throttle-and-stick switchology in the cockpit. A pilot explained: “The jet’s smart enough that if we see something in the HTS pod, all we do is put our cursors over the threat and get a pretty accurate idea of its position, which will be good enough to launch a missile at it. At that point, we designate the target and let the HARM go” (ibid., 48).

117.  Ibid., 42.

118.  Lieutenant Colonel Hathaway explained that “the problem was that the SAM operators in the Super MEZ refused to turn their radars on. We didn’t know whether it was out of their fear of the coalition’s SEAD assets or . . . reflective of a determination to preserve their capabilities for a later ambush of coalition nonstealth aircraft. To support the land component’s imminent movement into the Baghdad area, we needed to get nonstealthy aircraft into the Super MEZ as quickly as possible so we could gain air supremacy and prepare the battlespace on the ground. After three days of not being able to draw down Iraq’s densest concentration of SAM radars with HARMs, we switched to a DEAD [destruction of enemy air defenses] campaign to track down and physically destroy the SAM sites” (comments by Lieutenant Colonel Hathaway, February 19, 2007).

119.  Comments by Lieutenant Colonel Cline, January 11, 2008.

120.  Knights, Cradle of Conflict, 18.

121.  Elizabeth Rees, “363rd AEW [Air Expeditionary Wing] Weighs In on Ops Tempo, Force Strain, Enemy Air Defenses in War,” Inside the Air Force, March 28, 2003, 9. The SEAD campaign was also rendered relatively manageable because the Iraqi IADS in the Super MEZ surrounding Baghdad and Tikrit, while dense, was also both known and antiquated, consisting of such threat systems as SA-2s, SA-3s, SA-6s, and some Rolands that CENTAF’s aircrews had faced many times before. It did not include any advanced SAM systems like the SA-10 or SA-20. Lorenzo Cortes, “Leaf: Iraq Air Defenses Were Dense, Antiquated in OIF; Stealth Needed in Future,” Defense Daily, June 9, 2003, 6.

122.  Fox, “Air Wing of Destiny,” 78.

123.  Davies and Dildy, F-16 Fighting Falcon Units of Operation Iraqi Freedom, 40–41.

124.  Elizabeth Rees, “Old Predators Used as Decoys to Provoke Iraqi Air Defenses,” Inside the Air Force, April 11, 2003, 7.

125.  An Australian analyst pointed to “perhaps the most bizarre happening in this phase of the air campaign,” namely, “the repeated gathering of Baghdadis on the opposite bank of the Tigris River—watching the mesmerizing sound and light show through the night” while standing mere hundreds of meters away from where allied munitions were detonating (Kopp, “Iraqi Freedom—the Hammer and Anvil,” 32).

126.  Knights, Cradle of Conflict, 18.

127.  Philip P. Pan, “Turkey Lets U.S. Use Airspace,” Washington Post, March 21, 2003.

128.  Philip P. Pan, “Turkish Leader Makes Request on Airspace,” Washington Post, March 20, 2003. See also Richard Boudreaux, “Two Errant Missiles Fall in Turkey,” Los Angeles Times, March 24, 2003.

129.  Although the 3rd ID would eventually take in some 2,600 enemy prisoners of war, there was never any massive capitulation of entire units as occurred during Operation Desert Storm. Fontenot, Degen, and Tohn, On Point, 109.

130.  Carpenter, “Rapid, Deliberate, Disciplined, Proportional, and Precise,” 12.

131.  Lessons of Iraq, vol. 2, Ev 204.

132.  Quoted in Murray and Scales, The Iraq War, 88.

133.  Michael R. Gordon, “The Goal Is Baghdad, but at What Cost?” New York Times, March 25, 2003. A CENTAF planner later noted that another reason for this last-minute removal of multiple targets from the initial strike list was General McKiernan’s determination to avoid potential fratricide as his troops continued their high-speed advance north toward Baghdad. “Regrettably,” said this planner, “a lot of those targets were the local security offices in towns in southern Iraq” (comments by Lieutenant Colonel Cline, January 11, 2008).

134.  Nichols, “Operation Iraqi Freedom: CFACC/CAOC/NALE.”

135.  Knights, Cradle of Conflict, 279.

136.  Ibid., 275.

137.  Ibid.

138.  Ibid., 274.

139.  Ibid.

140.  Ibid., 273.

141.  Ibid., 275.

142.  Comments by Lieutenant Colonel Hathaway, February 19, 2007.

143.  Knights, Cradle of Conflict, 275–276. Another senior CAOC planner later recalled, “this was disappointing, because every town from Mosul to Basra had a Directorate of General Security, Iraqi Intelligence Service, and Special Security Organization building or prison and torture chamber, and we wanted . . . to kill the bad guys inside as a symbol to the people who lived in those towns that the security forces were no longer in control” (comments by Lieutenant Colonel Cline, January 11, 2008).

144.  Conversation with General Moseley, August 2, 2006.

145.  Knights, Cradle of Conflict, 276. On the other hand, a senior CAOC planner later pointed out, “I don’t think I would have wanted to be the one sitting in Kuwait waiting to uncoil as Iraqi artillery and FROG rockets started raining down” (comments by Lieutenant Colonel Cline, January 11, 2008).

146.  Davies, F-15C/E Eagle Units of Operation Iraqi Freedom, 44.

147.  Elaine Grossman, “Air Chief Won Ability to Hit Iraqi Bridges to Prevent Scud Launch,” Inside the Pentagon, June 12, 2003, 1, 10–11.

148.  Lessons from Iraq, vol. 2, Ev 48.

149.  On this point, during his briefing to media representatives as the campaign entered its last week, General Moseley commented: “The term ‘shock and awe’ has never been a term I’ve used. . . . We withheld some targets based on the initiation conditions and based on where the surface forces were. But that [was the] right thing to do anyway” (“Coalition Forces Air Component Command Briefing,” Washington, D.C.: Department of Defense, April 5, 2003).

150.  Greg Jaffe, “Plan Is to Cut Off Top Officers while Allies Strike Air Defenses,” Wall Street Journal, March 20, 2003.

151.  Anthony H. Cordesman, “Understanding the New ‘Effects-Based’ Air War in Iraq,” Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington, D.C., March 15, 2003, 3.

152.  Nichols, “Operation Iraqi Freedom: CFACC/CAOC/NALE.”

153.  Ripley, “Planning for Iraqi Freedom,” 11.

154.  Knights, Cradle of Conflict, 278.

155.  Bush, Decision Points, 255.

156.  Carpenter, “Rapid, Deliberate, Disciplined, Proportional, and Precise,” 13.

157.  Thomas E. Ricks, “Unfolding Battle Will Determine Length of War,” Washington Post, March 25, 2003.

158.  As the focus of the air war shifted from attacking preplanned fixed targets to supporting coalition ground units on the move, the air component’s target development planners unexpectedly found themselves obliged to create “bomber boxes.” Their initial attempt to create such bomber holding areas, according to CENTAF staff, “failed to meet operator requirements.” Ultimately, the B-52 liaison element in the CAOC provided three essential requirements for a bomber operating box: the geographic coordinates of the box’s center, the length and width of the box measured in feet, and the magnetic heading (in degrees) of the bomber box’s major axis. Conversations with Colonel Erlenbusch, Major Roberson, and other CENTAF staff, January 29, 2007.

159.  Ibid.

160.  Ibid.

161.  Ibid. In March 2003 the SCAR mission was not a formally recognized Air Force combat mission. CAOC planners adopted it from the Navy and Marine Corps for kill-box interdiction because of the mission’s assessed value. The same planners strongly recommended afterward that the Air Force formally include the mission in its operating repertoire and continue to perform it in any future engagements in which it might provide value to the land component.

162.  Carpenter, “Rapid, Deliberate, Disciplined, Proportional, and Precise,” 25.

163.  The “push-CAS” arrangement entailed maintaining an even flow of interdiction sorties into the Kuwaiti theater of operations around the clock, with a proviso that any of those sorties could be diverted as necessary to service CAS requests made by the Army’s corps commanders. Its point was to assure the corps commanders that they had on-call CAS should it ever be needed without tying up coalition aircraft.

164.  As used in this context, a minute is a unit of angular measure equal to one-sixtieth of a degree.

165.  For a detailed explanation, see Green, “Joint Fires Support, the Joint Fires Element and the CGRS,” 15–17. A later effort was initiated in the joint arena to develop and implement a “global area reference system” (GARS) that would align all regional combatant commanders using the same methodology to enable standardization of software and training for warfighters who might end up fighting in any of several theaters around the world. Now in joint use, GARS is essentially the same as CGRS but provides a single, globally referenced set of boxes, quadrants, and keypads.

166.  Comments by Colonel Neuenswander, March 6, 2007.

167.  Stout, Hammer from Above, 270.

168.  Davies, F-15C/E Eagle Units of Operation Iraqi Freedom, 44.

169.  Tim Ripley, “Closing the Gap,” Jane’s Defence Weekly, July 2, 2003, 26.

170.  Conversations with Colonel Erlenbusch, Major Roberson, and other CENTAF staff, January 29, 2007.

171.  Fontenot, Degen, and Tohn, On Point, 89.

172.  Murray and Scales, The Iraq War, 109.

173.  Ibid., 172.

174.  Conversations with Colonel Erlenbusch, Major Roberson, and other CENTAF staff, January 29, 2007.

175.  Fontenot, Degen, and Tohn, On Point, 90.

176.  Rajiv Chandrasekaran and Peter Baker, “Sandstorm Delays Army’s Advance; Units Set to Hit Guard near Capital,” Washington Post, March 26, 2003.

177.  Quoted in Capt. John W. Anderson, USAF, “An Analysis of a Dust Storm Impacting Operation Iraqi Freedom, 25–27 March 2003,” master’s thesis, U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, Calif., December 2004, 2.

178.  Throughout the buildup for and subsequent execution of OPLAN 1003V, the CAOC received twice-daily briefings on current and anticipated future weather conditions in CENTCOM’s area of responsibility. Five-day forecasts kept ATO planners informed of prospective future conditions at major bases and in key target areas. During the three-week major combat phase of Iraqi Freedom, more than 75 percent of the daily ATOs were adversely affected by weather, with 20 percent suffering from “major” weather effects and more than 6 percent of their scheduled sorties having been either canceled or declared noneffective. Ibid., 84.

179.  Fontenot, Degen, and Tohn, On Point, 142.

180.  Davies and Dildy, F-16 Fighting Falcon Units of Operation Iraqi Freedom, 33.

181.  Ibid.

182.  Ibid.

183.  For a graphic account of these harassment operations written by a Marine reconnaissance platoon commander whose unit was caught in the midst of them for several days, see Nathaniel Fick, One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2005), 205–290.

184.  Andrew Koch, “Did Washington Underestimate Iraqi Resolve?” Jane’s Defence Weekly, April 2, 2003, 2.

185.  Kevin M. Woods, with Michael R. Pease, Mark E. Stout, Williamson Murray, and James G. Lacey, Iraqi Perspectives Project: A View of Operation Iraqi Freedom from Saddam’s Senior Leadership (Norfolk, Va.: Joint Center for Operational Analysis, U.S. Joint Forces Command, March 2006), 55. A summary of the main findings of this landmark assessment may be found in Kevin Woods, James Lacey, and Williamson Murray, “Saddam’s Delusions: The View from Inside,” Foreign Affairs, May–June 2006. Saddam Hussein established the Fedayeen in October 1994 in response to the Shiite and Kurdish uprisings of March 1991 that immediately followed Operation Desert Storm.

186.  Carpenter, “Rapid, Deliberate, Disciplined, Proportional, and Precise,” 13.

187.  Peter Baker and Rajiv Chandrasekaran, “Republican Guard Units Move South from Baghdad, Hit by U.S. Forces,” Washington Post, March 27, 2003.

188.  Elaine M. Grossman, “Key Generals: Response to ‘Fedayeen’ a Vital Milestone in Iraq War,” Inside the Pentagon, May 8, 2003, 1.

189.  Quoted in Knights, Cradle of Conflict, 304.

190.  See Chapter 4 for more on the Blue Force Tracker system. The system also reduced fratricide because an allied tank equipped with it could be identified at a distance. Fontenot, Degen, and Tohn, On Point, 63.

191.  Knights, Cradle of Conflict, 305.

192.  Ibid., 314.

193.  Elaine M. Grossman, “Marine General: Iraq War Pause ‘Could Not Have Come at Worse Time,’” Inside the Pentagon, October 2, 2003, 1.

194.  Lorenzo Cortes, “Leaf Says Severe Weather Accelerated Iraqi Forces’ Defeat,” Defense Daily, June 5, 2003, 1.

195.  TSgt. Michael Keehan, USAF, “15th EASOS [Expeditionary Air Support Operations Squadron] Operation Iraqi Freedom TACP Stories,” briefing by TACP team assigned to the 3rd Squadron, 7th Cavalry, 3rd Infantry Division, no date given, provided to the author by Col. Matt Neuenswander, head of the Air Force element, U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

196.  Ibid.

197.  Ibid.

198.  James Kitfield, “Attack Always,” National Journal, April 26, 2003, 1292–1296.

199.  Keehan, “15th EASOS Operation Iraqi Freedom TACP Stories.”

200.  Ibid.

201.  The others were, respectively, SSgt. Thomas Case, SSgt. Travis Crosby, SSgt. Joshua Swartz, TSgt. Eric Brandenberg, and TSgt. Jason Quesenberry.

202.  “Citation to Accompany the Award of the Silver Star Medal to Michael L. Keehan III,” document provided to the author by AFCENT/A9, Shaw AFB, S.C., April 17, 2009.

203.  “Citation to Accompany the Award of the Silver Star Medal to Michael S. Shropshire,” document provided to the author by AFCENT/A9, Shaw AFB, S.C., April 17, 2009.

204.  An assessment of the land offensive noted that “the sandstorm actually improved the coalition’s logistical situation, as it slowed the fast-moving spearheads enough to allow resupply convoys to reach them and replenish food and ammunition that had dwindled during the long, rapid advance. When the sandstorm lifted on March 27, the advance thus continued afresh with no meaningful long-term effect from the delay” (Biddle and others, Toppling Saddam, 18).

205.  Stout, Hammer from Above, 209.

206.  Max Boot, War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History, 1500 to Today (New York: Gotham Books, 2006), 395. Of such air support, however, Col. William Grimsley, commander of the 3rd ID’s 1st Brigade, later noted that there is a “host of Marine Corps, Navy, Air Force, and Royal Air Force pilots I would love to meet some day” (Fontenot, Degen, and Tohn, On Point, 167).

207.  Although the three-day sandstorm did not materially hinder the air component’s contribution to the campaign effort, between March 25 and March 27, 817 scheduled ATO sorties were either canceled or declared noneffective due to the weather. See Anderson, “An Analysis of a Dust Storm Impacting Operation Iraqi Freedom,” 88, 50.

208.  Dave Moniz and John Diamond, “Attack on Guard May Be Days Away,” USA Today, March 31, 2003.

209.  Stout, Hammer from Above, 260.

210.  Kim Murphy and Alan C. Miller, “The Team That Picks the Targets,” Los Angeles Times, March 25, 2003.

211.  Rajiv Chandrasekaran and Peter Baker, “As Marines Resume Advance, Army Fights Baghdad Defenders,” Washington Post, April 2, 2003.

212.  Fontenot, Degen, and Tohn, On Point, 227.

213.  Handy, Operation Iraqi Freedom—Air Mobility by the Numbers, 11.

214.  Anthony Shadid, “In Shift, War Targets Communications Facilities,” Washington Post, April 1, 2003.

215.  Quoted in Knights, Cradle of Conflict, 322. “Comical Ali” was a play on the epithet “Chemical Ali,” which referred to Ali Hassan Abd Al Majid Al Tikriti, the former Iraqi minister of defense, interior minister, and chief of the intelligence service who gained notoriety during the 1980s and 1990s for the role he played in Saddam Hussein’s campaigns against domestic opposition forces. Dubbed “Chemical Ali” by Iraqi Kurds for his use of chemical weapons against them (in one instance killing more than five thousand civilians), Al Majid was captured by allied forces after the three-week campaign in 2003 and was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death in 2007 for crimes committed during the Al Anfal campaign against Kurdish resistance forces in the 1980s.

216.  Conversation with Major General Darnell, August 6, 2006. General Moseley’s chief of strategy later amplified: “While the primary target was indeed the ministry of information, intelligence reporting told us that many Western journalists were being held there as ‘guests.’ In the end, we decided to go against the antennas on the roof as the best way to achieve the desired effect” (comments by Lieutenant Colonel Hathaway, February 19, 2007).

217.  Hinote, “More Than Bombing Saddam,” 152. See also Kim Burger, Nick Cook, Andrew Koch, and Michael Sirak, “What Went Right?” Jane’s Defence Weekly, April 30, 2003, 21.

218.  Davies, F-15C/E Eagle Units of Operation Iraqi Freedom, 65.

219.  Rajiv Chandrasekaran and Peter Baker, “Baghdad Hit Hard from Air as Ground Forces Regroup,” Washington Post, March 28, 2003.

220.  Evan Thomas and John Barry, “A Plan Under Attack,” Time, April 7, 2003.

221.  Murray and Scales, The Iraq War, 165.

222.  Eric Schmitt, “Rumsfeld Says Important Targets Have Been Avoided,” New York Times, March 24, 2003.

223.  Michael R. Gordon, “Allied Plan Would Encourage Iraqis Not to Fight,” New York Times, March 11, 2003.

224.  Although triple-redundant, the communications nodes were in principle easy to target. The difficulty stemmed from the fact that destroying the main switches in Baghdad entailed high collateral damage potential. In addition, there were the uncertainties that attended damaging something that the coalition intended to rebuild later and destroying an enemy equity that could provide intelligence value if left intact. Comments by Lieutenant Colonel Cline, January 11, 2008.

225.  Bradley Graham, “U.S. Air Attacks Turn More Aggressive,” Washington Post, April 2, 2003.

226.  David J. Lynch, “Marines Prevail in ‘Toughest Day’ of Combat,” USA Today, March 24, 2003. See also Vernon Loeb, “Patriot Downs RAF Fighter,” Washington Post, March 24, 2003.

227.  “Patriot Under Fire for Second Error,” Flight International, April 8–14, 2003, 10.

228.  Atkinson, In the Company of Soldiers, 133.

229.  Col. Darrel D. Whitcomb, USAFR (Ret.), “Rescue Operations in the Second Gulf War,” Air and Space Power Journal, spring 2005, 97.

230.  Gordon and Trainor, Cobra II, 354.

231.  Ibid.

232.  Jonathan Weisman, “Patriot Missiles Seemingly Falter for Second Time,” Washington Post, March 26, 2003. It was not correct, as Rick Atkinson reported regarding this incident, that a HARM had been “mistakenly” fired by a “confused F/A-18 pilot” (In the Company of Soldiers, 154).

233.  Davies and Dildy, F-16 Fighting Falcon Units of Operation Iraqi Freedom, 52.

234.  Comments on an earlier draft by Lt. Col. John Hunerwadel, USAF (Ret.), Air Force Doctrine Center, Maxwell AFB, Ala., May 23, 2007. In Israeli military practice, anything that flies (short of artillery and surface-to-surface rockets), from fixed-wing and rotary-wing combat and combat support aircraft to such surface-to-air weapons as Patriots, Hawks, and even AAA, is owned and operated by the Israeli Air Force, in part precisely to prevent such possibilities for fratricide.

235.  Patrick E. Tyler, “Attack from Two Sides Shatters the Iraqi Republican Guard,” New York Times, April 3, 2003; and Bradley Graham, “Patriot System Likely Downed U.S. Jet,” Washington Post, April 4, 2003.

236.  Or, he might have added, Australian, as the RAAF contributed fourteen F/A-18s to the overall campaign effort. Charles Piller, “Vaunted Patriot Missile Has a ‘Friendly Fire’ Failing,” Los Angeles Times, April 21, 2003.

237.  Comments by Lieutenant Colonel Hathaway, February 19, 2007.

238.  Gordon and Trainor, Cobra II, 354–355.

239.  Thom Shanker, “Risk of Being Killed by Own Side Increases,” New York Times, April 8, 2003. There also were a number of fratricidal air-to-ground engagements, including one involving an Air Force A-10 that was providing CAS to Marines approaching An Nasiriyah. The A-10 strafed the wrong side of a bridge on which friendly and enemy vehicles were commingled and shot up a Marine amphibious assault vehicle, killing six Marines (see Chapter 5). Murray and Scales, The Iraq War, 122.

240.  Davies and Dildy, F-16 Fighting Falcon Units of Operation Iraqi Freedom, 50.

241.  Ibid., 51.

242.  Ibid.

243.  Carpenter, “Rapid, Deliberate, Disciplined, Proportional, and Precise,” 11.

244.  ATO M followed the previous day’s ATO L, which was the last ATO executed in the context of Operation Southern Watch before the start of OPLAN 1003V and major combat operations.

245.  David A. Fulghum, “New Bag of Tricks: As Stealth Aircraft and Northern Watch Units Head Home, Details of the Coalition’s Use of Air Power Are Revealed,” Aviation Week and Space Technology, April 21, 2003, 22.

246.  Davies and Dildy, F-16 Fighting Falcon Units of Operation Iraqi Freedom, 29.

247.  “Coalition Forces Air Component Command Briefing.”

248.  David A. Fulghum, “Fast Forward,” Aviation Week and Space Technology, April 28, 2003, 34–35.

249.  Davies and Dildy, F-16 Fighting Falcon Units of Operation Iraqi Freedom, 30.

250.  Ibid., 31.

251.  Conversation with General Moseley, August 2, 2006.

252.  Ibid.

253.  Ibid.

254.  Carpenter, “Rapid, Deliberate, Disciplined, Proportional, and Precise,” 11.

255.  Woods, Lacey, and Murray, “Saddam’s Delusions,” 5.

256.  On the failure of the Iraqi air force to fly, Air Marshal Torpy later noted: “They had obviously been watching the way we had been operating in the no-fly zones for 12 years, so they had good knowledge of our capability and they inevitably also knew what we had brought into the theater as well” (Lessons of Iraq, vol. 1, 96).

257.  Rajiv Chandrasekaran and Peter Baker, “U.S. Takes Battle to Baghdad Airport,” Washington Post, April 4, 2003.

258.  Davies and Dildy, F-16 Fighting Falcon Units of Operation Iraqi Freedom, 60.

259.  Major Roberson later remarked that although delivering leaflets was not initially accepted in the squadrons as a legitimate “combat mission,” the pilots eventually came to understand that “it was one of those necessary evils, in that the psyops part of Operation Iraqi Freedom was as important as the . . . kinetic effects of the war. You don’t get any feedback when you [dispense the leaflets], but I think everybody in the squadron accepted the fact that it was something that needed to be done” (ibid., 59).

260.  Carpenter, “Rapid, Deliberate, Disciplined, Proportional, and Precise,” 23.

261.  Hampton Stephens, “Compass Call Was Key to Special Operations in Iraq, Afghanistan,” Inside the Air Force, April 2, 2004, 1, 4.

262.  I am grateful to Col. Gregory Fontenot, USA (Ret.), for bringing this important consideration to my attention.

263.  Paul Richter, “Risky Fight for Baghdad Nears,” Los Angeles Times, March 24, 2003.

264.  “Coalition Forces Air Component Command Briefing.”

265.  Kopp, “Iraqi Freedom—the Hammer and Anvil,” 29.

266.  Butler, “As A-10 Shines in Iraq War, Officials Look to JSF for Future CAS Role,” 1.

267.  Ripley, “Planning for Iraqi Freedom,” 11.

268.  Cordesman, “The ‘Instant Lessons’ of the Iraq War: Main Report,” 40.

269.  This composite portrait of events was assembled from the citations accompanying the award of the Silver Star to Kenneth E. Ray, Bruce R. Taylor, and James Winsmann, provided to the author by AFCENT/A9, Shaw AFB, S.C., April 17, 2009. In addition to the eleven Silver Stars awarded to Air Force airmen, the majority of them JTACs, fifty-eight Distinguished Flying Crosses with special citations for heroism were also awarded to Air Force airmen for similar acts during the same period. Information provided to the author by AFCENT/A9, Shaw AFB, S.C., April 17, 2009.

270.  Lt. Col. Michael W. Kometer, USAF, Command in Air War: Centralized versus Decentralized Control of Combat Air Power (Maxwell AFB, Ala.: Air University Press, June 2007), 142. An earlier version of this study was submitted as the author’s doctoral dissertation in security studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

271.  Reynolds, Basrah, Baghdad, and Beyond, 24.

272.  Ibid., 23. The above-noted after-action assessment added: “Amos’s personal style was, by Marine Corps standards, laid back; he was unusually approachable and looked for the common-sense solution as opposed to asserting his status or rank. That said, he was nothing if not results-oriented” (ibid., 49).

273.  Gordon and Trainor, Cobra II, 534. The core issue has to do with the extent of situational awareness on the part of the CAS controller in differing circumstances. In Type I CAS (the most exacting variant), the JTAC or FAC-A must have visual contact with both the target and the attacking aircraft. Type II requires visual contact with either the aircraft or the target. Type III does not require visual contact with either, but the JTAC or FAC-A must be in communication with the attacking pilot and approve the release of weapons. All of the attendees at the warfighter conference convened by General Moseley at Nellis AFB in August 2002 during CENTCOM’s initial planning workups agreed that draft Joint Publication 3-09.3 for joint CAS offered a serviceable basis on which to ground the emerging KI/CAS concept. They specifically pulled from the draft publication the new types of specified joint CAS control (Types I, II, and III), as well as its definition of a JTAC. The challenge proved to be getting all component players to implement the three types consistently. Conversations with Colonel Erlenbusch, Major Roberson, and other CENTAF staff, January 29, 2007.

274.  Murray and Scales, The Iraq War, 11.

275.  Jonathan Finer, “For Marines, a Fight with a Foe That Never Arrived,” Washington Post, April 4, 2003.

276.  Rajiv Chandrasekaran and Peter Baker, “Baghdad-Bound Forces Pass Outer Defenses,” Washington Post, April 3, 2003.

277.  Evan Thomas and Martha Brandt, “The Secret War,” Time, April 21, 2003.

278.  Michael R. Gordon, “Tightening a Noose,” New York Times, April 4, 2003.

279.  Rajiv Chandrasekaran and Alan Sipress, “Army Has First Close Fighting with Republican Guard Units,” Washington Post, April 1, 2003.

280.  Patrick E. Tyler, “Two U.S. Columns Are Advancing on Baghdad,” New York Times, April 1, 2003.

281.  Kopp, “Iraqi Freedom—the Hammer and Anvil,” 30.

282.  Carpenter, “Rapid, Deliberate, Disciplined, Proportional, and Precise,” 14.

283.  Michael R. Gordon, “Battle for Baghdad Begins in Area Surrounding Iraqi Capital,” New York Times, April 2, 2003.

284.  Ibid., 120.

285.  Michael Sirak, “Interview with James Roche: Secretary of the U.S. Air Force,” Jane’s Defence Weekly, May 14, 2003.

286.  Maj. Gen. Franklin Blaisdell, the Air Force’s director of space operations, similarly said that “any enemy that would depend on GPS jammers for their livelihood is in grave trouble” (quoted in “Iraq Is Expected to Try Jamming U.S. Signals,” Baltimore Sun, March 13, 2003).

287.  “DoD Says Russian Sale of GPS Jammers to Iraq Not Affecting Air Campaign,” Inside the Pentagon, March 27, 2003, 19.

288.  “CENTCOM, Pentagon Confirm Destruction of GPS Jamming Equipment,” Defense Daily, March 26, 2003, 1. The Air Force announced plans in early 2003 to allocate $40 million toward countering the effects of potential jamming of GPS-aided air-delivered munitions. Elaine M. Grossman, “Air Force Aims to Redirect $40 Million in FY03 to Counter GPS Jamming,” Inside the Pentagon, January 30, 2003, 1, 14.

289.  Murray and Scales, The Iraq War, 115.

290.  Carpenter, “Rapid, Deliberate, Disciplined, Proportional, and Precise,” 14.

291.  Kopp, “Iraqi Freedom—the Hammer and Anvil,” 32.

292.  Sean Boyne, “Iraqi Tactics Attempted to Employ Guerilla Forces,” Jane’s Intelligence Review, July 2003, 16–17.

293.  Mark Mazetti and Richard J. Newman, “The Seeds of Victory,” U.S. News and World Report, April 21, 2003.

294.  Purdum, A Time of Our Choosing, 3.

295.  Merrill A. McPeak, “Shock and Pause,” New York Times, April 2, 2003.

296.  Gordon and Trainor, Cobra II, 360.

297.  Ibid., 373.

298.  Ibid., 412, 426.

299.  This technique was first employed on a trial basis during the late 1990s by the commander of Operation Northern Watch, then Brig. Gen. David Deptula. It offered an effective measure for mitigating collateral damage, although the technique required a steep weapon impact angle in order to prevent the munition from ricocheting off hard surfaces, with unpredictable consequences.

300.  For a more detailed discussion of the carrier air contribution to the three weeks of major combat in Iraqi Freedom, see Benjamin S. Lambeth, American Carrier Air Power at the Dawn of a New Century (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corporation, MG-404-NAVY, 2005), 39–58.

301.  Nichols, “Operation Iraqi Freedom: CFACC/CAOC/NALE.”

302.  A “bolter” is an unplanned touch-and-go landing on the carrier deck that occurs when the aircraft’s tailhook fails to engage an arresting cable.

303.  This discussion has been informed by the description of carrier cyclic operations contained in Peter Hunt, Angles of Attack: An A-6 Intruder Pilot’s War (New York: Ballantine Books, 2002), 53–55.

304.  Robert Wall, “E-War Ramps Up: EA-6B Prowler to Resume Traditional Radar-Jamming Role if Iraqi Conflict Escalates,” Aviation Week and Space Technology, March 17, 2003, 49.

305.  Holmes, U.S. Navy Hornet Units of Operation Iraqi Freedom, pt. 2, 17.

306.  Lyndsey Layton, “Building Bombs aboard the Abraham Lincoln,” Washington Post, March 14, 2003.

307.  “Bring-back” capability refers to the total weight of ordnance that a Navy or Marine Corps combat aircraft can recover with. It depends on the carrier’s landing weight limitations and other operating factors. Munitions in excess of the bring-back weight must be jettisoned before the aircraft can land.

308.  Whitcomb, “Rescue Operations in the Second Gulf War,” 97.

309.  Patrick E. Tyler, “Iraq Is Planning Protracted War,” New York Times, April 2, 2003.

310.  Carol J. Williams, “Navy Does Battle with Sandstorms on the Sea,” Los Angeles Times, March 27, 2003.

311.  “Defense Watch,” Defense Daily, November 12, 2002, 1. GBU-35 was the initial Navy designation for its 1,000-pound JDAM based on its Mk 83 general-purpose bomb. The Navy has since adopted the same GBU-32 designation used by the Air Force.

312.  Carol J. Williams, “Super Hornet Creates a Buzz in the Gulf,” Los Angeles Times, April 1, 2003.

313.  Robert Wall, “Super Hornets at Sea: U.S. Navy’s New F/A-18Es Are Showing Surprising Reliability and Added Endurance,” Aviation Week and Space Technology, March 17, 2003, 46–47.

314.  Lt. Cdr. Richard K. Harrison, USN, “TacAir Trumps UAVs in Iraq,” Proceedings, November 2003, 58–59.

315.  Michael J. Gething, Mark Hewish, and Joris Janssen Lok, “New Pods Aid Air Reconnaissance,” Jane’s International Defence Review, October 2003, 59.

316.  Robert Wall, “Weather or Not: The F-14D Strike Fighter Can Now Drop Precision Weapons Even on Cloud-Shrouded Targets,” Aviation Week and Space Technology, March 17, 2003, 48.

317.  Holmes, U.S. Navy Hornet Units of Operation Iraqi Freedom, pt. 2, 17.

318.  “Coalition Forces Air Component Command Briefing.”

319.  Conversation with Major General Darnell, August 2, 2006.

320.  Holmes, U.S. Navy Hornet Units of Operation Iraqi Freedom, 14.

321.  Sandra I. Irwin, “Naval Aviators Experience Success in Iraq, but Worry about the Future,” The Hook, fall 2003, 69. For a fuller discussion of the development of this close working relationship since the 1991 Persian Gulf War, see Benjamin S. Lambeth, Combat Pair: The Evolution of Air Force–Navy Integration in Strike Warfare (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corporation, MG-655-AF, 2007); Benjamin S. Lambeth, “Air Force–Navy Integration in Strike Warfare: A Role Model for Seamless Joint-Service Operations,” Naval War College Review, winter 2008; and Benjamin S. Lambeth, “Aerial Partners in Arms,” Joint Force Quarterly, second quarter, 2008.

322.  Vice Adm. Michael Malone, USN, “They Made a Difference,” The Hook, summer 2003, 26.

323.  Moseley, Operation Iraqi Freedom—by the Numbers, 10.

324.  Murray and Scales, The Iraq War, 174.

325.  “Coalition Forces Air Component Command Briefing.”

326.  John M. Broder, “Allies Fan Out in Iraq—Resistance Outside City Is Light,” New York Times, April 9, 2003.

327.  “Citation to Accompany the Award of the Silver Star Medal to Raymond T. Strasburger,” document provided to the author by AFCENT/A9, Shaw AFB, S.C., April 17, 2009. In yet another indication that allied control of the air over Iraq was still not absolute, an Air Force A-10 was shot down two days later near the Baghdad International Airport, evidently by an optically guided Roland SAM. The pilot ejected safely and was recovered. John F. Burns, “Key Section of City Is Taken in a Street-by-Street Fight,” New York Times, April 9, 2003.

328.  Carla Anne Robbins, Greg Jaffe, and Dan Morse, “U.S. Aims at Psychological Front, Hoping Show of Force Ends War,” Wall Street Journal, April 7, 2003.

329.  Michael Knights, “USA Learns Lessons in Time-Critical Targeting,” Jane’s Intelligence Review, July 2003, 33. The GBU-31 penetrates ten to twenty feet below the surface of its target before being detonated, with the depth depending on the type of material the weapon must go through.

330.  “Baghdad Raid Takes 12 Minutes from Targeting to Attack,” Flight International, April 15–21, 2003, 8. See also “Speed Kills,” Inside the Pentagon, April 10, 2003, 13.

331.  Murray and Scales, The Iraq War, 176.

332.  Giles Ebbutt, “UK Command and Control during Iraqi Freedom,” Jane’s Intelligence Review, July 2003, 42.

333.  Fontenot, Degen, and Tohn, On Point, 118, 130.

334.  Stout, Hammer from Above, 200.

335.  Ibid., 269.

336.  David E. Johnson, Learning Large Lessons: The Evolving Roles of Ground Power and Air Power in the Post–Cold War Era (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corporation, MG-405-AF, 2006), 115.

337.  Fontenot, Degen, and Tohn, On Point, 214.

338.  Anthony Shadid, “Hussein’s Baghdad Falls,” Washington Post, April 10, 2003.

339.  On July 22, 2003, Hussein’s two sons Uday and Qusay were killed when a detachment of troops from the 101st Airborne Division and a joint SOF and CIA team raided a house where their presence had been detected; see Kevin Sullivan and Rajiv Chandrasekaran, “Hussein’s Two Sons Killed in Firefight with U.S. Troops,” Washington Post, July 22, 2003. Saddam Hussein himself was finally captured by U.S. forces on December 13, 2003, in a farmhouse near Tikrit. He was subsequently tried and executed by the elected Iraqi government that replaced him.

340.  Nichols, “Operation Iraqi Freedom: CFACC/CAOC/NALE.”

341.  Rowan Scarborough, “White House: ‘We’ve Won,’” Washington Times, April 15, 2003.

342.  David E. Sanger and Thom Shanker, “Bush Says Regime in Iraq Is No More: Victory ‘Certain,’” New York Times, April 16, 2003.

343.  Michael R. Gordon, “American Forces Adapted to Friend and Foe,” New York Times, April 10, 2003.

344.  Greg Jaffe, “Rumsfeld’s Vindication Promises a Change in Tactics, Deployment,” Wall Street Journal, April 10, 2003.

345.  Stephen J. Hedges, “Air War Credited in Baghdad’s Fall,” Chicago Tribune, April 22, 2003.

346.  Neil Tweedie, “U.S. Fighter ‘Shot Down with Missile Left by SBS,’” London Daily Telegraph, June 6, 2003.

347.  Once the major fighting was over, the commander of the wing to which the F-15E had been assigned took a recovery team to the crash site. He reported: “After I briefed General Moseley on what I found there, he declared the jet and crew combat losses—end of story” (comments on an earlier draft by Maj. Gen. Eric Rosborg, USAF, March 19, 2007).

348.  Moseley, “Operation Iraqi Freedom: Initial CFACC Roll-up.”

349.  Nichols, “Operation Iraqi Freedom: CFACC/CAOC/NALE.”

350.  General Myers, the JCS chairman, dismissed that criticism as “bogus,” adding that it came from people who “either weren’t there, don’t know, or they’re working another agenda” (Jonathan Weisman, “Rumsfeld and Myers Defend War Plan,” Washington Post, April 2, 2003). A far more compelling criticism would have faulted the Bush administration and its subordinate Rumsfeld Pentagon for having entered into a regime-change campaign with a ground force grossly insufficient to consolidate the military victory with postcampaign stabilization and restoration of public order. See Chapter 6.

351.  Gen. Charles A. Horner, USAF (Ret.), “Operation Iraqi Freedom and the Transformation of War,” Aviation Week and Space Technology, May 5, 2003, 66.

352.  Former Air Force chief of staff Gen. Ronald Fogleman, in criticizing a common American war-gaming practice that persists to this day, complained in a memorandum to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1996 that “these legacy models are most relevant when considering . . . an employment strategy of attrition and annihilation. Models assessing force-on-force engagements, based on force ratios and territory gained or lost, lack the capability to fully and accurately portray the significant effects of operations . . . directly attacking the enemy’s strategic and tactical centers of gravity.” A standard campaign model still widely used by the Department of Defense and Joint Staff, called TACWAR (for “tactical warfare”), for example, does not model anything approaching the application of air power to achieve decisive functional effects as was demonstrated in both Desert Storm and Iraqi Freedom. For further discussion of this important point, see Lt. Col. Steve McNamara, USAF, “Assessing Air Power’s Importance: Will the QDR [Quadrennial Defense Review] Debate Falter for Lack of Proper Analytic Tools?” Armed Forces Journal International, March 1997, 37.

353.  Dennis Cauchon, “Why U.S. Casualties Were Low,” USA Today, April 21, 2003.

354.  Lessons of Iraq, vol. 1, 37.

355.  Terry McCarthy, “What Ever Happened to the Republican Guard?” Time, May 12, 2003, 38.

356.  Ibid.

357.  Quoted in Lt. Col. Mark Simpson, USAF, “Air Power Lessons from Operation Iraqi Freedom,” Headquarters Air Combat Command, ACC/XPSX, Langley AFB, Va., November 25, 2003.

358.  McCarthy, “What Ever Happened to the Republican Guard?”

359.  DeLong, Inside CentCom, 114.

360.  Lessons from Iraq, vol. 2, Ev 50.

361.  Fontenot, Degen, and Tohn, On Point, 374.

362.  Ibid.

363.  Rear Adm. David C. Nichols Jr., USN, “Reflections on Iraqi Freedom,” The Hook, fall 2003, 3.

364.  Fontenot, Degen, and Tohn, On Point, 273, 329.

365.  Gordon and Trainor, Cobra II, 56.

Chapter 3. The Allies’ Contribution

    1.  For official commentary on the United Kingdom’s contribution to Operation Desert Storm, which the British code-named Operation Granby, see Michael Mates, Preliminary Lessons of Operation Granby: House of Commons Papers 1990–91 (London: Stationery Office Books, 1991); and Nicholas Bonsor, Implementation of Lessons Learned from Operation Granby: House of Commons Papers 1993–94 (London: Stationery Office Books, 1994).

    2.  For more on that contribution by the United Kingdom, see Lambeth, Air Power against Terror, 116–119. See also Nora Bensahel, The Counterterror Coalition: Cooperation with Europe, NATO, and the European Union (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corporation, MR-1746-AF, 2003), 55–63.

    3.  As but one indicator that British involvement in the prospective war against Iraq was anything but assured at that point, RAF aircraft were proscribed from taking part in some elements of Operation Southern Focus. Conversation with senior staff officers at RAF Strike Command, RAF High Wycombe, UK, October 28, 2004.

    4.  Keegan, The Iraq War, 125.

    5.  As the United Kingdom’s forward deployment for the campaign began, that effort enjoyed only 32 percent public support—about the same level that prevailed in 1956 when British forces deployed for the Suez campaign. That support rose to 85 percent by the time combat operations commenced, then dropped to 50 percent before the campaign had ended and to a considerably lower level thereafter. Air Chief Marshal Sir Brian Burridge, RAF, “Iraq 2003—Air Power Pointers for the Future,” Royal Air Force Air Power Review, autumn 2004, 7–8.

    6.  Operations in Iraq: First Reflections (London: Ministry of Defence, July 2003), 3, hereinafter cited as First Reflections.

    7.  Operation Telic: United Kingdom Military Operations in Iraq (London: Report by the Comptroller and Auditor General, HC 60 Session 2003–2004, December 11, 2003), 1.

    8.  Ibid., 1.

    9.  Ministry of Defence: Operation Telic—United Kingdom Military Operations in Iraq (London: House of Commons, Committee of Public Accounts, 39th Report of Session 2003–04, July 21, 2004), 3–4.

  10.  David Willis, “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” International Air Power Review, summer 2003, 16–18.

  11.  Information provided by Group Captain Richard Keir, RAAF, director, RAAF Air Power Development Centre, Canberra, Australia, July 2, 2009.

  12.  In connection with Operation Slipper, the Australian government dispatched an Australian national commander to Kuwait in October 2001. It also concurrently deployed a SOF task group to Afghanistan, four F/A-18 Hornet fighters for the local air defense of Diego Garcia, two Boeing 707 tankers to support allied air operations against the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan operating out of Manas, Kyrgyzstan, and in early 2003 sent two P-3 Orion maritime patrol aircraft to the Persian Gulf region.

  13.  Press interview with Senator the Honorable Robert Hill, Minister for Defence, RAAF Base Richmond, New South Wales, Australia, February 7, 2003.

  14.  The first RAAF officer, Wing Commander Otto Halupka, joined CENTAF’s initial planning deliberations at Shaw AFB, S.C., as early as August 2002 after having deployed shortly before for initial in-briefs at CENTCOM’s headquarters at MacDill AFB with the designated Australian national commander, Army Brigadier Maurie McNarn, and the designated Australian air contingent commander, Group Captain Geoff Brown. Official interview with Group Captain Geoff Brown, RAAF, Operation Falconer air component commander, April 9, 2008, provided to the author by the RAAF Air Power Development Centre, Canberra, Australia.

  15.  Tony Holmes, “RAAF Hornets at War,” Australian Aviation, January–February 2006, 38.

  16.  Australia’s National Security: A Defence Update 2003 (Canberra, Australia: Department of Defence, 2003), 15.

  17.  The Honorable John Howard, address to the House of Representatives, Parliament House, Canberra, Australia, March 18, 2003.

  18.  Lessons of Iraq, vol. 1, 33.

  19.  The MoD assigned a three-star RAF representative, then Air Marshal Jock Stirrup, to CENTCOM headquarters in Florida at the start of Operation Enduring Freedom. Stirrup was later replaced by a two-star successor as the Afghan air war ramped down, but the position was again upgraded to a three-star billet for Operation Iraqi Freedom with the assignment of Air Marshal Burridge as national contingent commander.

  20.  Conversation with Air Chief Marshal Sir Brian Burridge, RAF, commander-in-chief, RAF Strike Command, on board a 32 Squadron HS 125 en route from RAF Northolt to RAF Lossiemouth, UK, October 27, 2004.

  21.  At the time, Air Vice-Marshal Torpy was serving as the air officer commanding of No. 1 Group within RAF Strike Command, who oversaw all RAF strike fighter operations.

  22.  Lessons of Iraq, vol. 2, Ev 42.

  23.  Lessons of Iraq, vol. 1, 52.

  24.  Ibid., 53.

  25.  Lessons of Iraq, vol. 2, Ev 42.

  26.  Ibid., Ev 44.

  27.  Ibid., Ev 43.

  28.  Claire Bannon, Media Liaison Officer, “Op Bastille/Falconer Timeline,” Canberra, Australia, Government of Australia, no date.

  29.  The War in Iraq: ADF Operations in the Middle East in 2003 (Canberra, Australia: Department of Defence, 2004), 13.

  30.  Lessons of Iraq, vol. 1, 32.

  31.  Lessons of Iraq, vol. 2, Ev 198.

  32.  Operations In Iraq: Lessons for the Future (London: Ministry of Defence, December 2003), 6–7, hereinafter cited as Lessons for the Future.

  33.  Lessons of Iraq, vol. 3, Ev 416.

  34.  First Reflections, 4.

  35.  Conversation with senior staff officers at Headquarters Strike Command, October 28, 2004.

  36.  “RAF Contribution to Operation Iraqi Freedom,” briefing given to the author by 23 Squadron, RAF Waddington, UK, October 29, 2004.

  37.  Lessons of Iraq, vol. 2, Ev 44.

  38.  The War in Iraq: ADF Operations in the Middle East in 2003, 8.

  39.  The Honorable John Howard, Address to the Committee for Economic Development of Australia, Canberra, Australia, November 20, 2002.

  40.  Darwin and ANZAC, along with the RAAF’s AP-3s, were already deployed in CENTCOM’s AOR in support of Operation Slipper, the ADF’s contribution to Operation Enduring Freedom against the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan.

  41.  Once regional air defense was no longer a serious concern, the F3s were pulled out to free up more ramp space for other aircraft. Although ramp space was at a premium throughout the campaign, sufficient strike aircraft were always present to satisfy the commitments levied on the British contingent by the daily ATO. Conversation with Air Vice-Marshal Andy White, RAF, air officer commanding, No. 3 Group, Headquarters RAF Strike Command, RAF High Wycombe, UK, October 28, 2004.

  42.  First Reflections, 43–48.

  43.  Ark Royal carried Royal Navy Sea King and RAF Chinook helicopters.

  44.  First Reflections, 43–48.

  45.  Conversation with Air Vice-Marshal White, October 28, 2004.

  46.  Holmes, “RAAF Hornets at War,” 38.

  47.  A fourth F/A-18 squadron, and the first to have been stood up at Williamtown in 1986 after the RAAF acquired the Hornet to replace its aging Mirage fighters, is 2 Operational Conversion Unit, the RAAF’s transition squadron that consists mainly of dual-control F/A-18B trainer versions of the aircraft.

  48.  Official interview with Group Captain Bill Henman, RAAF, Operation Falconer commander of the air combat wing, April 9, 2007, provided to the author by the RAAF Air Power Development Centre, Canberra, Australia.

  49.  Ibid.

  50.  Conversation with Air Marshal Glenn Torpy, RAF, commander, Permanent Joint Headquarters, Northwood, London, UK, October 26, 2004.

  51.  Lessons of Iraq, vol. 2, Ev 52.

  52.  Lessons of Iraq, vol. 1, 59.

  53.  Ibid.

  54.  Torpy further volunteered that experience from previous operations had demonstrated the need for delegated targeting responsibility in order to maintain a sufficiently high tempo during Operation Telic. He also noted that the British defence minister, Geoffrey Hoon, fully understood those needs and was pivotal in securing the needed streamlining of the approval process. Conversation with Air Marshal Torpy, October 26, 2004.

  55.  Gardner, “Operation Iraqi Freedom: Coalition Operations,” 94.

  56.  Lessons of Iraq, vol. 1, 59.

  57.  Lessons for the Future, 27.

  58.  “Op Bastille/Falconer Timeline.”

  59.  On this point, ADF legal officers vetted targets “in concert with RAAF intelligence personnel to produce what was called a ‘legal target appreciation’ for each target to be hit by RAAF aircraft. Also, each target was briefed to Group Captain Brown for his approval. This was done in parallel with the U.S. process, not sequentially, so as to not hold up the CAOC process. Anything outside Group Captain Brown’s approval level was either not accepted as a target or, if there was time, referred back to Australia for a decision. If there was an issue with a target, we were always able to pull it from the U.S. allocation to us and have it replaced with something more suitable. For this level of involvement, we relied heavily on RAAF planners within the GAT [guidance, apportionment, and targeting] and MAAP cells” (comments on an earlier draft by Group Captain Richard Keir, RAAF, chief of intelligence and targeting for the RAAF under Group Captain Brown, director, RAAF Air Power Development Centre, Canberra, Australia, July 2, 2009).

  60.  Official interview with Group Captain Brown, April 9, 2008. Later, Group Captain Brown recalled that one of his most memorable moments in the CAOC occurred when General Moseley invited him to join him, alongside General Franks and RAF Air Vice-Marshal Torpy, in a video teleconference with President Bush, a former Texas Air National Guard F-102 pilot, who said to Franks: “Well, lucky you’re surrounded by three fighter pilots to keep you under control there, Tommy!” (Ibid.).

  61.  Official interview with Wing Commander Melvin Hupfeld, RAAF, Operation Falconer commanding officer, No. 75 Squadron, September 16, 2003, provided to the author by the RAAF Air Power Development Centre, Canberra, Australia.

  62.  A parachute recovered by Iraqis that they claimed was that of a downed coalition airman was actually an ALARM parachute under which the missile descends slowly as it searches for its target. Conversations with senior staff officers at Headquarters Strike Command, October 28, 2004.

  63.  Operation Telic: United Kingdom Military Operations in Iraq, 7.

  64.  First Reflections, 14.

  65.  Lessons of Iraq, vol. 2, Ev 200.

  66.  “Storm Shadow Appears ahead of Official Entry into Service Date,” Flight International, April 1–7, 2003, 6.

  67.  First Reflections, 23. The munition includes an initial penetrator charge followed by the main explosive charge in order to breach reinforced structures. Neil Baumgardner, “RAF Spokesman: Enhanced Paveway ‘Outstanding’ in Operation Iraqi Freedom,” Defense Daily, April 2, 2003, 7–8.

  68.  The loss of the use of Turkish bases for conducting combat operations into Iraq created a major ripple effect as the RAF’s Tornado GR4 Storm Shadow shooters were forced to strike critical hard targets in northern Iraq that had originally been scheduled to be attacked by F-15Es configured with GBU-28 5,000-pound bunker busters. The GR4 was able to range farther north into Iraq than was the F-15E from the latter’s southern base at Al Jaber, Kuwait. Conversations with Colonel Erlenbusch, Major Roberson, and other CENTAF staff, January 29, 2007.

  69.  Flight Lieutenant Andy Wright, RAF, “GR4 Reconnaissance: Operation Telic,” RAF 2004, Ministry of Defence, Directorate of Corporate Communication (RAF), Ministry of Defence, London, 2004, 24–25. Just before the start of combat operations the RAF modified some of its Tornado F3 counterair fighters to carry ALARM missiles for use in defense suppression but determined that the modification was not sufficiently robust to warrant introducing it into combat. Air Chief Marshal Sir John Day, RAF, “Air Power and Combat Operations—the Recent War in Iraq,” RUSI Journal, June 2003, 35.

  70.  Comments by Lieutenant Colonel Cline, January 11, 2008.

  71.  “RAF Contribution to Operation Iraqi Freedom.”

  72.  Flight Lieutenant Roz Rushmere, RAF, “E-3D Sentry: Operation Telic,” RAF 2004, Ministry of Defence, Directorate of Corporate Communication (RAF), London, 2004, 20–22.

  73.  Squadron Leader Hugh Davis, “VC-10 Tanker: Operation Telic,” RAF 2004, Ministry of Defence, Directorate of Corporate Communication (RAF), London, 2004, 44, 49.

  74.  Conversation with then Wing Commander Stuart Atha, RAF, Ministry of Defence, Whitehall, London, October 26, 2004.

  75.  Operation Telic—United Kingdom Military Operations in Iraq, 8.

  76.  Lessons of Iraq, vol. 2, Ev 47.

  77.  Gardner, “Operation Iraqi Freedom: Coalition Operations,” 98.

  78.  Ibid., 47. This niche expertise in tactical reconnaissance was valuable because the U.S. Air Force had withdrawn its dedicated RF-4C tactical reconnaissance aircraft from service after the conclusion of Operation Desert Storm in 1991. The use of a reconnaissance pod on the Harrier GR7 and the RAPTOR system on the Tornado GR4A represented the culmination of a process for upgrading the RAF’s tactical reconnaissance capability that began in 1991 with the acquisition of six early-generation improved low-level reconnaissance pods to supplement the original pods carried by the RAF’s single dedicated Jaguar reconnaissance unit, 41Squadron, based at RAF Coltishall. Gething, Hewish, and Lok, “New Pods Aid Air Reconnaissance,” 52.

  79.  Gardner, “Operation Iraqi Freedom: Coalition Operations,” 92.

  80.  Lessons of Iraq, vol. 1, 62.

  81.  Conversation with Air Marshal Torpy, October 26, 2004.

  82.  Holmes, “RAAF Hornets at War,” 39. Nevertheless, as the commanding officer of 75 Squadron later recounted, the RAAF’s deployed Hornet pilots did get some useful in-theater acclimation short of participating in Southern Focus operations before the campaign formally kicked off: “We did some missions where we flew up the North Arabian Gulf along the administrative route that would take us into the Iraqi theater. We flew up over Kuwait as well and did some training over there. While they were massing the army forces in Kuwait, we used that for our own training benefit to look at what a tank would look like on the ground, how we could see it on the radar or our other sensors, and so we experienced the communications process, the operation and coordination with our command and control agencies. We did all that and practiced that prior to actually deploying across the line, so we became quite familiar with what was there. We just hadn’t experienced going across the border into a combat area” (official interview with Wing Commander Hupfeld, September 16, 2003).

  83.  Comments on an earlier draft by Air Vice-Marshal Geoff Brown, RAAF, deputy chief of air force, RAAF, July 2, 2009.

  84.  Holmes, “RAAF Hornets at War,” 40.

  85.  Official interview with Wing Commander Hupfeld, September 16, 2003.

  86.  In his later recollection of this precedent-setting event for the Australian defense establishment, the RAAF’s chief targeting adviser to CENTCOM characterized the final decision-making process: “The target was an Iraqi leadership target. . . . It just so happened that at the particular time that the target was detected and went through the approval chain, our aircraft were the closest ones to it. So after a quick national validation, I remember standing next to Geoff Brown with the lawyer in the CAOC, and I can’t remember the exact words, but it was really: ‘Are you happy, are you happy, are you happy’ sort of thing, and we sort of said: ‘Yep, it all appears good to us, your decision now, Boss.’ So he said, ‘Do it’” (official interview with Wing Commander Keir, February 19, 2007, provided to the author by the RAAF Air Power Development Centre, Canberra, Australia).

  87.  Air Marshal A. G. Houston, RAAF, “Message from Chief of Air Force: Operation Falconer,” Canberra, Australia, March 24, 2003.

  88.  Air Commodore Geoff Brown, RAAF, “Iraq: Operations Bastille and Falconer—2003,” in Air Expeditionary Operations from World War II until Today, ed. Commander Keith Brent, RAAF (Canberra: Proceedings of the 2008 RAAF History Conference, April 1, 2008).

  89.  Ibid.

  90.  The War in Iraq: ADF Operations in the Middle East in 2003, 26–28.

  91.  Brown, “Iraq: Operations Bastille and Falconer—2003.”

  92.  The War in Iraq: ADF Operations in the Middle East in 2003, 29.

  93.  “Op Bastille/Falconer Timeline.”

  94.  Air Marshal A. G. Houston, RAAF, “Message from Chief of Air Force: Operation Falconer,” Canberra, Australia, April 4, 2003.

  95.  “Operation Falconer Honors List,” Canberra, Department of Defence, November 28, 2003.

  96.  Brown, “Iraq: Operations Bastille and Falconer—2003.”

  97.  The RAAF also is acquiring the AGM-158 JASSM and twenty-four F/A-18F Super Hornets to replace its aging F-111Cs and has taken on four C-17s and will acquire five KC-30B tankers and six Wedgetail AWACS aircraft. The RAAF’s capability in the second decade of the twenty-first century will be significantly greater than that of the 2003 force. Comments by Group Captain Keir, July 2, 2009.

  98.  Ibid.

  99.  Holmes, “RAAF Hornets at War,” 39.

100.  Ibid., 42.

101.  First Reflections, 19.

102.  Lessons of Iraq, vol. 2, Ev 43.

103.  Lessons of Iraq, vol. 1, 32.

104.  Group Captain Chris Finn, RAF, “Air Aspects of Operation Iraqi Freedom,” Royal Air Force Air Power Review, winter 2003, 19.

105.  On this point, Air Chief Marshal Burridge stressed the criticality of joint air-ground training being conducted “end to end” in such a manner that it “exercises the entire kill chain” (conversation with Air Chief Marshal Burridge, October 27, 2004).

106.  Conversation with General Moseley, August 2, 2006.

107.  Conversations with Colonel Erlenbusch, Major Roberson, and other CENTAF staff, January 29, 2007.

108.  Conversation with Air Chief Marshal Sir Glenn Torpy, RAF, chief of the air staff, London, UK, May 19, 2009.