Chapter 4. Key Accomplishments

    1.  During the third week of the major combat phase, General Moseley asked rhetorically on this point: “Did we get 30 days of [prior air] preparation like in the first desert war? No. But I don’t think we needed 30 days of preparation. . . . While we didn’t have 30 days of preparation, we’ve certainly had more preparation pre-hostilities than perhaps some people realize” (“Coalition Forces Air Component Command Briefing”).

    2.  These statistics were drawn from Moseley, Operation Iraqi Freedom—by the Numbers; Maj. Gen. Daniel J. Darnell, USAF, “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” undated briefing charts; and Nichols, “Operation Iraqi Freedom: CFACC/CAOC/NALE,” undated briefing charts.

    3.  An experienced A-10 pilot and combat commander offered the insightful observation that “in most cases, the A-10 gun is considered a precision munition. Given that an average burst in combat is around 50 rounds and that our A-10s shot 311,597 rounds in all, I would suggest that the Air Force actually did in the neighborhood of another 6,230 precision attacks (311,597 total rounds divided by 50 per burst), or, perhaps more correctly, at least 5,000-plus, a number that is not insignificant, since only two other precision munitions, the GBU-12 LGB and GBU-31 JDAM, exceeded that number” (comments by Colonel Neuenswander, March 6, 2007).

    4.  Knights, Cradle of Conflict, 327. A Los Angeles Times survey of records from 27 hospitals in Baghdad and outlying areas indicated that at least 1,700 Iraqi civilians were killed and more than 8,000 were injured in the Baghdad area alone during the campaign and in the initial weeks thereafter. The greatest obstacle impeding the establishment of a more accurate count was the problem of distinguishing between Iraqi soldiers and civilians. Many soldiers continued to man their positions as the campaign unfolded, but dressed in civilian clothing and without ID tags. Laura King, “Baghdad’s Death Toll Assessed,” Los Angeles Times, May 18, 2003.

    5.  Knights, Cradle of Conflict, 14–15.

    6.  Willis, “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” 19.

    7.  Ibid., 11.

    8.  Ibid., 40.

    9.  Another F-16 pilot added: “When you’re dropping JDAM, we call it ‘O-6 bombing,’ because even the colonels can hit the target” (Davies and Dildy, F-16 Fighting Falcon Units of Operation Iraqi Freedom, 44, 88).

  10.  Hampton Stephens, “Wind-Corrected Anti-armor Weapon Used for First Time in Iraq,” Inside the Air Force, April 4, 2003, 9.

  11.  Stephen Trimble, “Air Force’s AMC Tallies Massive Airlift Effort for OIF,” Aerospace Daily, May 29, 2003.

  12.  See Martin Streetly, “Airborne Surveillance Assets Hit the Spot in Iraq,” Jane’s Intelligence Review, July 2003, 34–37.

  13.  Trimble, “Air Force’s AMC Tallies Massive Airlift Effort for OIF.”

  14.  Cynthia Di Pasquale, “Russian Planes Expand U.S. Airlift Capability Strained during OIF, OEF,” Inside the Air Force, April 2, 2004, 9.

  15.  Trimble, “Air Force’s AMC Tallies Massive Airlift Effort for OIF.”

  16.  Lessons of Iraq, vol. 2, Ev 50.

  17.  Ibid., Ev 59. An RAF logistics officer at Strike Command headquarters similarly proposed that slack in logistical support is essential not merely as insurance but also as a potential force multiplier by virtue of the overinsurance that it provides. He added, in a thoughtful cautionary note, that “just in time” logistics can all too often end up meaning “just too late.”

  18.  Rowan Scarborough, “Myers Says ‘Annihilation’ of Iraqi Army Wasn’t Goal,” Washington Times, June 30, 2003.

  19.  Thom Shanker, “Assessment of Iraq War Will Emphasize Joint Operations,” Washington Post, May 1, 2003.

  20.  Ibid. JFCOM’s commander, Adm. Edmund Giambastiani, added in this regard that General Franks “doesn’t care where he gets capability to go kill a target, to accomplish a mission, or take an objective. So whether we do it with air power, artillery, naval gunfire, naval aircraft—it doesn’t make a difference. He just cares about taking care of a target.”

  21.  Capt. David A. Rogers, USN, “From the President: The Health of Your Tailhook Association,” The Hook, fall 2003, 4. In January and February 2003, with CENTCOM’s complete cooperation and support, JFCOM established a joint “lessons-learned” team of subject matter experts to observe, assess, and document joint combat operations while they were still under way. JFCOM subsequently deployed more than thirty of its team members to CENTCOM’s area of responsibility just before the campaign’s start. Admiral Giambastiani later remarked, “We were there before operations started and followed the entire campaign in real time. We had complete access to all commanders and their staffs for all operations at all levels. General Franks set the tone and welcomed this team with open arms.” In a synopsis of the team’s initial findings seven months later, Giambastiani offered as the effort’s ultimate key judgment that “our traditional military planning and perhaps our entire approach to warfare have shifted . . . away from employing service-centric forces that must be deconflicted on the battlefield to achieve victories of attrition to a well trained, integrated joint force that can enter the battlespace quickly and conduct decisive operations with both operational and strategic effects” (statement by Adm. Edmund P. Giambastiani Jr., commander, U.S. Joint Forces Command, before the House Armed Services Committee, U.S. House of Representatives, Washington, D.C., October 2, 2003).

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

  23.  Feiler, “Iraqi Campaign Lessons Show Shift to ‘Overmatching Power’ Doctrine,” 1, 12–13.

  24.  For a thorough account of that experience, see Lambeth, Air Power against Terror, 163–231.

  25.  Elaine M. Grossman, “General: War-Tested Air-Land Coordination Cell Has Staying Power,” Inside the Air Force, March 12, 2004, 13–14.

  26.  Elizabeth Rees, “Standup of 484th AEW Proved Vital to Army, Air Force Ops Integration,” Inside the Air Force, September 5, 2003, 3.

  27.  The primary ASOC supporting V Corps remained collocated at the latter’s principal command post in Kuwait. A tactical ASOC advanced with the V Corps tactical command post and allowed for a long-range communications relay from the main ASOC. The E-2, E-3, and E-8 aerial and ground surveillance aircraft also fulfilled as-needed communications relay functions, but there was no command and control aircraft that was dedicated exclusively to support ASOC employment.

  28.  Maj. Alexander L. Koven, USAF, “Improvements in Joint Forces: How Missteps during Operation Anaconda Readied USCENTCOM for Operation Iraqi Freedom,” research report, Air University, Air Command and Staff College, Maxwell AFB, Ala., April 2005, 20–21, emphasis added. The author was a command and control duty officer in the CAOC’s time-sensitive targeting cell during the major combat phase of Iraqi Freedom.

  29.  Earlier in January 2003, during CENTCOM’s final precampaign workups, V Corps planners had met with their CENTAF counterparts at Shaw AFB to discuss the ASOC’s concept of operations for urban CAS. Out of that exchange emerged the foundation for the ultimate arrangements for conducting that mission that were finalized in March 2003. Conversations with Colonel Erlenbusch, Major Roberson, and other CENTAF staff, January 29, 2007.

  30.  In this important distinction, “operational control” entails “organizing and employing forces, sustaining them, and assigning [them] general tasks,” whereas “tactical control” is “the specific direction and control of forces, especially in combat” (Reynolds, Basrah, Baghdad, and Beyond, 10).

  31.  The first priority of Marine Corps aviation is to support Marines on the ground. Accordingly, the Marines look at their combat air assets first and foremost as integral components of their combined arms team, or MAGTF.

  32.  Stout, Hammer from Above, 16–17.

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

  34.  Ibid.

  35.  Although the V Corps shaping effort was called “Corps CAS” and was conducted inside the FSCL using Type III CAS procedures, that effort really represented air interdiction, which does not require the terminal attack control that the V Corps commander nonetheless demanded for the battlespace that he controlled (see Chapter 5).

  36.  Stout, Hammer from Above, xiv–xv.

  37.  Ibid., 14.

  38.  “Air Support Operations Center (ASOC) Employment,” briefing presented at the Air Force Doctrine Summit IV sponsored by the Air Force Doctrine Center, Maxwell AFB, Ala., November 17, 2003.

  39.  Fontenot, Degen, and Tohn, On Point, 428.

  40.  Ibid.

  41.  Third Infantry Division (Mechanized) After Action Report: Operation Iraqi Freedom (Fort Stewart, Ga.: U.S. Army 3rd Infantry Division, 2003), 29. The concurrent after-action assessment of 3rd ID’s Division Artillery called the conduct of CAS both a “winner” in Iraqi Freedom and a welcome testament that the Air Force had finally become “rededicated to CAS.” See Fires in the Close Fight: OIF Lessons Learned (Fort Stewart, Ga.: 3rd Infantry Division DIVARTY [Division Artillery], November 2003).

  42.  Ibid., 137.

  43.  Ibid., 138.

  44.  Holmes, U.S. Navy Hornet Units of Operation Iraqi Freedom, pt. 2, 68–69.

  45.  Expanding on this, the commanding officer of VFA-15, Cdr. Andy Lewis, recalled that “communication with the FAC was usually via our KY-58 secure radio, which is akin to talking with your head in a trash can” (ibid., 70).

  46.  “Coalition Forces Air Component Command Briefing.”

  47.  Ibid.

  48.  Koven, “Improvements in Joint Fires,” 25.

  49.  Krepinevich, Operation Iraqi Freedom: A First-Blush Assessment, 20–21.

  50.  Charles E. Kirkpatrick, Joint Fires as They Were Meant to Be: V Corps and the 4th Air Support Operations Group during Operation Iraqi Freedom, Land Warfare Papers no. 48 (Arlington, Va.: Association of the U.S. Army, Institute of Land Warfare, October 2004), 1.

  51.  Third Infantry Division (Mechanized) After Action Report, 86, 137.

  52.  John Liang, “JFCOM Commander Outlines ‘Good’ and ‘Ugly’ in Iraq Lessons Learned,” Inside the Pentagon, March 25, 2004, 15.

  53.  Knights, Cradle of Conflict, 285. By one report, PowerPoint briefings consumed as much as 80 percent of the bandwidth used during the major combat phase of Iraqi Freedom.

  54.  The assessment added that the resultant common operating picture “worked only within the CFLCC zone. Other forces operating on the ground in other components’ areas of operations were not included in the CFLCC picture and had to devise their own workarounds” (Joint Lessons Learned, 55).

  55.  Ripley, “Closing the Gap,” 26.

  56.  Tony Capaccio, “U.S. Commanders Wore General Dynamics Transmitters,” Bloomberg.com, April 30, 2003. After the campaign ended, the Air Force considered ways to improve the Blue Force Tracker system to ensure that pilots could talk ground forces onto targets and to enable life-or-death decisions involving, for example, the presence of friendly forces. “That could be deadly if we are being spoofed or if the display is not proper,” General Leaf noted. “Or it could be a reverse decision . . . to employ weapons based on the absence of Blue Force Tracking” (Elaine M. Grossman, “Air Force May Expand Significantly on Army Battlefield Tracking System,” Inside the Pentagon, November 6, 2003, 3).

  57.  Franks with McConnell, American Soldier, 447.

  58.  For a concise synopsis of the main technical and performance features of these aircraft, see Carlo Kopp, “Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance in Operation Iraqi Freedom,” Defence Today magazine, June 2004, 1–6.

  59.  “Global Hawk Feats in Iraq Could Lead to ISR Fleet Lessons,” Inside the Pentagon, May 29, 2003, 8.

  60.  Loren B. Thompson, “ISR Lessons of Iraq,” briefing prepared for the Defense News ISR Integration Conference, Washington, D.C., November 18, 2003.

  61.  Ibid.

  62.  The only reason why the Air Force’s F-22 Raptor fifth-generation air dominance fighter, the most data-linked combat aircraft in the world by far, was not used in the offensive and defensive counterair roles and for precision ground attack missions in which stealth would have been required for survival in Iraq’s most challenging threat envelopes was that the aircraft was not yet ready for combat employment when the campaign began. It only achieved initial operational capability two years later with the 1st Fighter Wing at Langley AFB, Virginia.

  63.  Davies, F-15C/E Eagle Units of Operation Iraqi Freedom, 21.

  64.  They also pointed up some clear limitations on the use of electro-optical and infrared targeting pods for positive target identification. Most pods of that sort used during Iraqi Freedom required that their aircraft operate at altitudes between 5,000 and 10,000 feet in order to provide sufficient resolution to enable such identification. That operating limitation highlighted a major unsatisfied need for combat aircraft to be able to identify positively such tactical-sized targets as tanks and other armored vehicles while maintaining sufficient standoff to survive in a medium and high surface-to-air threat environment.

  65.  Lorenzo Cortes, “Air Force Offered Improved Networking Capabilities during OIF,” Defense Daily, June 4, 2003, 5.

  66.  Ibid., 46.

  67.  Capt. David C. Hardesty, USN, “Fix Net Centric for the Operators,” Proceedings, September 2003, 69.

  68.  Sandra I. Irwin, “Iraqi Freedom Tests Naval Aviation’s Flexibility,” The Hook, summer 2003, 65.

  69.  Knights, Cradle of Conflict, 286–287.

  70.  Gordon and Trainor, Cobra II, 352.

  71.  John Gordon IV and Bruce Pirnie, “‘Everybody Wanted Tanks’: Heavy Forces in Operation Iraqi Freedom,” Joint Force Quarterly, 4th quarter, 2005, 86, 89.

  72.  In particular, as an Air Force space officer who served on the ACCE staff with Major General Leaf recalled four years later, “there was a big problem getting enough satellite communications so that all the mission reports could get through in a timely fashion. This created major difficulties for making timely assessments of targets to attack for the next [ATO] cycle, especially as the ground forces approached to contact. We were able to work additional communications, but the problem was never completely resolved before we departed” (comments on an earlier draft by Lt. Col. Chris Crawford, USAF, National Security Fellows Program, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass., March 4, 2007).

  73.  John T. Bennett, “Smaller Bombs among Needs Revealed In Iraq, Navy Officers Say,” Inside the Pentagon, August 7, 2003, 4.

  74.  Joris Janssen Lok, “Communication Weaknesses Endanger Allied Integration in U.S.-Led Air Campaigns,” Jane’s International Defence Review, March 2004, 4.

  75.  For a thorough assessment of this important development in U.S. joint force interoperability, see Lambeth, Combat Pair.

  76.  For a full discussion of the earlier complications in the relationship between CENTCOM and its air component principals in the CAOC that had necessitated General Moseley’s intervention, see Lambeth, Air Power against Terror, 295–311.

  77.  There were, however, numerous instances within a given ATO cycle in which targets on the joint target list (JTL) that had been approved by General Moseley for inclusion on the JIPTL were subsequently moved by CENTCOM to either the restricted target list (RTL) or the no-strike target list (NSTL). The head of the CAOC’s combat plans division later recalled in this regard, “We had a problem with CENTCOM moving targets onto and off of the JTL to the RTL and the NSTL inside the ATO cycle. That required a manual scrub of the ATO to ensure that we were not hitting targets on restricted and no-strike lists. The MAAP cycle, accordingly, had to run for twenty-four hours rather than the normal twelve to fourteen hours due to the rapid pace of land component movement and the need to continually adjust each ATO right up to its moment of execution” (comments on an earlier draft by Col. Douglas Erlenbusch, USAF, CENTAF director of operations, February 4, 2007). Throughout the three weeks of major combat, CENTCOM updated the JTL, RTL, and NSTL every twelve hours. That meant that there were three changes to those three lists between the approval of the JIPTL and the execution of each ATO. On several occasions aircraft in the midst of conducting scheduled attacks had those attacks aborted at the last minute because their target had been moved from the JTL to the RTL. In a few instances targets were struck after they had been moved to the RTL. As CAOC planners later recounted, neither the MAAP toolkit nor TBMCS had the ability to take an updated RTL and NSTL and reconcile them against an already approved JIPTL. Fortunately, none of these residual limitations on the CAOC’s freedom of action turned out to have been serious complicating factors affecting the conduct of the air war to the latter’s detriment.

  78.  Kometer, Command in Air War, 140, 169.

  79.  Amy Butler, “Moseley: Time-Sensitive Targeting Improved from Afghanistan to Iraq,” Inside the Air Force, June 20, 2003, 1.

  80.  A “time-sensitive target” is any target identified within an ATO cycle that is deemed to be of such importance to the combined force commander that it must be struck as soon as possible with any available asset, regardless of that asset’s prior tasking. During Operation Iraqi Freedom, CENTCOM determined which target sets would be designated time-sensitive. A “dynamic target” is any target identified within an ATO cycle that is deemed of sufficient importance to all components that it should be struck within the ATO with any assets available. During Iraqi Freedom, those targets were determined by the chief of the guidance, apportionment, and targeting (GAT) cell in the CAOC.

  81.  Butler, “Moseley: Time-Sensitive Targeting Improved from Afghanistan to Iraq,” 10. The highly disciplined rules of engagement of Southern Watch that had generated the “Mother may I?” attitude among allied strike pilots persisted well into the first week of the Iraqi Freedom campaign. Such initial hesitancy did not inhibit those Air Force A-10 pilots who were working in support of I MEF ground operations, because they had never played a part in Southern Watch. Conversation with Major General Darnell, August 2, 2006.

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

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

  84.  Maj. Gen. Daniel J. Darnell, e-mail communication to the author, January 11, 2006.

  85.  Keith J. Costa, “Draft JFCOM ‘Lessons Learned’ Study Examines Early Iraq War Moves,” Inside the Pentagon, March 18, 2004, 1, 12–13.

  86.  Conversation with Gen. Charles F. Wald, USAF (Ret.), Washington, D.C., August 1, 2006.

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

  88.  The entire “process” narrative that follows below was informed by conversations with Colonel Erlenbusch, Major Roberson, and other CENTAF staff, January 29, 2007.

  89.  Lt. Col. David C. Hathaway, USAF, “Operational Assessment during Operation Iraqi Freedom—Assessment or Assumption?” research report, Air War College, Maxwell AFB, Ala., May 25, 2005, 5–6.

  90.  The mechanism that had been established within the land component for providing CAS to Army ground forces was the Air Force’s TACS, which in turn was closely aligned with the counterpart Army air-ground system (AGS). Within that arrangement, the air component’s ground command and control elements were the ASOC, collocated with V Corps at its rear headquarters, and the ASOC’s subordinate tactical air control party (TACP) staffed by air liaison officers (ALOs) and joint terminal attack controllers (JTACs) assigned directly to and in direct support of forward fighting elements at the division level and below. The primary mission of TACPs from corps level down to brigade level was to advise their supported ground commanders on the capabilities and limitations of air power and to help those commanders in planning, requesting, and coordinating CAS. The TACP also provided the principal means for the terminal control of CAS in support of friendly ground troops. The CAOC served as the senior element of the TACS and thus as the direct overseer of both the ASOC and the latter’s TACPs. The TACPs processed and executed both preplanned and immediate CAS requests, although the majority of those requests were for immediate CAS. Only about 6 percent of those immediate air support requests entailed direct troops-in-contact situations, unless one considers such broader categories as “troops taking mortar or artillery fire.” I am grateful to my RAND colleague Jody Jacobs for helping me to better understand this process and its complex inner workings.

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

  92.  Ibid.

  93.  E-mail message to the author from Col. Douglas Erlenbusch, USAF, former CENTAF director of operations, then serving as commander of Air Force ROTC Detachment 40, Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, Calif., April 21, 2009. With respect to concerns over the timeliness of the AOD, Colonel Erlenbusch added, “The strategy division also tried to flex with the speed of operations by publishing multiple AODs for a single ATO (for example, ‘Change 1, Change 2,’ and so on). This was a bit cumbersome for the planners to get their hands around and to merge into the ATO cycle, but it at least provided some up-to-date guidance. Target sets that were proposed by CENTCOM and then inserted into the ATO outside the cycle also made it necessary for us to have qualified MAAP staff available around the clock.”

  94.  Mark Hewish, “Out of CAOCs Comes Order,” Jane’s International Defence Review, May 2003, 23–24.

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

  96.  Kerry Gildea, “Air Force Says TBMCS Played Critical Role in Air War Execution,” Defense Daily, May 6, 2003, 1–2.

  97.  Comments by Colonel Erlenbusch, February 4, 2007.

  98.  The combat air forces and military airlift forces use different systems to plan and conduct their respective missions. The combat air forces use TBMCS, and the airlift community uses C2IPS (for command and control information processing system). An interface between C2IPS and TBMCS was developed to integrate airlift mission data in the daily ATO, but it was cumbersome and unreliable. Conversations with Colonel Erlenbusch, Major Roberson, and other CENTAF staff, January 29, 2007.

  99.  Ibid.

100.  Ibid.

101.  As yet another example of the assorted minor frictions the CAOC staff encountered from time to time, the air component’s target development team was located in a separate and extra-secure ISR division building, whereas the key combat plans cells were located in the CAOC proper. This physical separation of the two groups often complicated communications and the synchronization of target information. Numerous occasions arose when ISR division target development team members were processing target candidates to be nominated for the ATO, only to learn later that combat plans staffers had already nominated those targets for previous ATOs, making for a needless duplication of effort. Ibid.

102.  Ibid.

103.  Ibid.

104.  Ibid.

105.  Lessons for the Future, 27.

106.  Conversation with Air Chief Marshal Burridge, October 27, 2004.

107.  Amy Butler, “Iraq War Underscores Need for Improved and Standardized AOCs,” Inside the Air Force, May 16, 2003, 3.

108.  Carpenter, “Rapid, Deliberate, Disciplined, Proportional, and Precise,” 20–21.

109.  Ibid.

110.  Murphy and Miller, “The Team That Picks the Targets.”

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

112.  Paul Dolson, “Expeditionary Airborne Battlefield Command and Control,” Joint Force Quarterly, 4th quarter, 2005, 68–75.

113.  Crews of AWACS and JSTARS aircraft operating in an ABCCC capacity were sometimes so overtasked that they could not receive and forward higher-priority assignments to available strike aircraft in the target’s vicinity. In at least two instances, B-1B missions took on 140,000 pounds of fuel from tankers and still ran out of fuel while awaiting CAOC tasking from airborne AWACS or JSTARS aircraft whose crews were preoccupied with ABCCC tasking. Conversations with Colonel Erlenbusch, Major Roberson, and other CENTAF staff, January 29, 2007.

114.  Quoted in Maj. Joseph G. Matthews, USA, “The E-8 Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System Support to Counterinsurgency Operations,” research report, Air University, Air Command and Staff College, Maxwell AFB, Ala., April 11, 2006, vii.

115.  Dolson, “Expeditionary Airborne Battlefield Command and Control.”

116.  Matthews, “The E-8 Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System Support to Counterinsurgency Operations,” 22.

117.  Ripley, “Closing the Gap,” 27. The Marine Corps employed its palletized direct air support center (DASC) in a KC-130 tanker aircraft to overcome such problems in I MEF’s sector.

118.  Butler, “Iraq War Underscores Need for Improved and Standardized AOCs,” 3.

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

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

121.  Ibid.

122.  Comments by Colonel Neuenswander, March 6, 2007. The former commander of the 4th Fighter Wing, one of the two Air Force F-15E Strike Eagle wings that took part in the air war, aptly noted four years later: “One of the great weaknesses of all the post–Iraqi Freedom literature [on the air contribution] is that it generally does not capture the ‘color’ of combat operations at the wing level. It only focuses on the CAOC and higher. Although the CAOC in this instance indeed represented the supreme evolution to date of air and space power command and control, there was still a lot going on in the trenches” (comments by Major General Rosborg, March 16, 2007).

123.  Thompson, “ISR Lessons of Iraq.”

124.  Jeremy Feiler, “CSIS Report: U.S. Victory in Iraq Showed ‘Flexibility’ of U.S. Planning,” Inside the Pentagon, May 1, 2003, 19.

125.  Lorenzo Cortes, “Coalition Forces Have Fired 15,000 Guided Munitions during Iraqi Freedom,” Defense Daily, April 11, 2003, 7. See also Carpenter, “Rapid, Deliberate, Disciplined, Proportional, and Precise,” 22. This assured navigation accuracy was crucial for the effective delivery of more than 5,600 satellite-aided JDAMs that relied on GPS signals for achieving pinpoint accuracy. As the campaign unfolded, space operators in the CAOC provided daily assessments of the GPS constellation’s predicted geometry and accuracy. During the three-day shamal, coalition aircraft destroyed entire divisions of the Iraqi Republican Guard using GPS-aided munitions against targeted positions that had been detected and geolocated by space-based synthetic aperture radar.

126.  Gen. Lance W. Lord, USAF, commander, Air Force Space Command, address to the 2005 Air Force Defense Strategy and Transformation Seminar Series sponsored by DFI International, Washington, D.C., March 9, 2005.

127.  Kerry Gildea, “Next-Generation Imaging Satellite Team Formed with News of Bush Policy Shift,” Defense Daily, May 14, 2003, 7.

128.  James Hackett, “Tracking Targets from Space,” Washington Times, July 8, 2003.

129.  Carpenter, “Rapid, Deliberate, Disciplined, Proportional, and Precise,” 22.

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

131.  Elizabeth Rees, “USAF Moves Space Forces Director Back into Iraq Air Ops Center,” Inside the Air Force, June 4, 2004, 4.

132.  One notable downside of space support to combat operations had to do with repeated shortfalls in satellite communications capacity. “With demand already high due to operations in Afghanistan, CENTCOM struggled to find enough UHF [ultra-high frequency] tactical satellite channels and was just able to address the critical operational needs for [the campaign]. To complicate matters [was] the fact that many [satellite communications] systems did not support mobile communications at the data rates needed” (Joint Lessons Learned, 31).

133.  William B. Scott and Craig Covault, “High Ground over Iraq,” Aviation Week and Space Technology, June 9, 2003, 44, as cited in Kometer, Command in Air War, 170.

134.  Jeremy Feiler, “Pentagon Officials Examine UAV ‘Lessons Learned’ in Iraq,” Inside the Pentagon, December 11, 2003, 15.

135.  Willis, “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” 22.

136.  Cook, “Shock and Awe?” 21.

137.  Eric Schmitt, “In the Skies over Iraq, Silent Observers Become Futuristic Weapons,” New York Times, April 18, 2003. Operating out of a base in the United Arab Emirates, the RQ-4 flew combat support missions every day of the war, in the process imaging some two hundred to three hundred sites of interest to CENTCOM during sorties that lasted up to twenty-six hours.

138.  “Unmanned Systems: UAV Shows Effectiveness as a Targeting Platform,” Flight International, April 22–28, 2003, 9.

139.  The ground stations required to support such UAV operations include nearly thirty interconnected trailers that require seventeen C-5 sorties to be deployed forward. For that reason, it makes more sense to leave those facilities at their home bases in the United States whenever possible. Technical panel presentation, 2003 Tailhook Association annual symposium, Reno, Nev., September 20, 2003; Jeremy Feiler, “Officials: UAV Lessons among Most Vital Gleaned in Iraq War,” Inside the Pentagon, July 17, 2003, 1, 10.

140.  Rowan Scarborough, “Hovering Spy Plane Helps Rout Iraqis,” Washington Times, April 3, 2003.

141.  Richard J. Newman, “The Joystick War,” U.S. News and World Report, May 19, 2003.

142.  Lorenzo Cortes, “Operation Iraqi Freedom Required Unique Wartime Use of E-8C Joint STARS,” Defense Daily, June 11, 2003, 5.

143.  Amy Butler, “JSTARS Faced ‘Learning Curve’ for CAOC Officials Unfamiliar with System,” Inside the Air Force, May 30, 2003, 9.

144.  Cortes, “Operation Iraqi Freedom Required Unique Wartime Use of E-8C Joint STARS,” 5.

145.  William M. Arkin, “Fliers Rose to Occasion: In Iraq, a Pause Refreshed Ground Troops and Let Planes Inflict Major Damage,” Los Angeles Times, June 1, 2003.

146.  Richard J. Dunn III, Price T. Bingham, and Charles A. Fowler, Ground Moving Target Indicator Radar and the Transformation of U.S. Warfighting (Arlington, Va.: Northrop Grumman Analysis Center, February 2004), 25.

147.  Butler, “JSTARS Faced ‘Learning Curve’ for CAOC Officials Unfamiliar with System,” 8.

148.  “Coalition Forces Air Component Command Briefing.”

149.  Adam J. Hebert, “Building Battlespace Awareness,” Air Force Magazine, October 2003, 66–67.

150.  U.S. commanders experienced difficulty keeping track of Iraqi force positions once the Iraqis began dispersing to avoid allied air strikes. Costa, “Draft JFCOM ‘Lessons Learned’ Study Examines Early Iraq War Moves,” 1, 12–13.

151.  Dunn, Bingham, and Fowler, Ground Moving Target Indicator Radar and the Transformation of U.S. Warfighting, 16–17.

152.  Ibid., 19.

153.  Andrew Koch, “Information War Played Major Role in Iraq,” Jane’s Defence Weekly, July 23, 2003, 5.

154.  CENTCOM’s SOF teams also used money freely as a part of the psychological warfare campaign. As one senior planner put it: “How much does a cruise missile cost? Between one and two and a half million dollars. Well, a bribe . . . achieves the aim, but it’s bloodless and there’s zero collateral damage” (Vago Muradian, “Payoffs Aided U.S. War Plan,” Defense News, May 19, 2003, 1).

155.  Koch, “Information War Played Major Role in Iraq,” 5.

156.  Elaine Grossman, “Coalition Drops ‘Capitulation Leaflets’ over Iraqi Troops,” Inside the Pentagon, March 20, 2003, 16.

157.  Elaine Grossman, “Land, Air Commands Struggled on Iraq Leaflet Timing, Coordination,” Inside the Pentagon, June 26, 2003, 4–6. A member of General Leaf’s staff recalled that “when we arrived, there was no organized method within the land component organization to nominate types of leaflets against specific targets. Two things happened before the war to fix that. First, there was a memorandum of agreement that established the types of information that would be provided to the CAOC. We even developed a form that was used. . . . Second, the information operations working group under the land component commander began to play a bigger role in shaping the various messages, timing, targeted groups, and so on. I watched this overall process closely for General Leaf, and most of the major problems were fixed by the time the war started” (comments by Lieutenant Colonel Crawford, March 4, 2007).

158.  Elaine Grossman, “Evolving Threats May Offer Air Force ‘Unlearned Lessons’ in Iraq,” Inside the Pentagon, July 17, 2003, 17.

159.  Andrew Koch, “Information Warfare Tools Rolled Out in Iraq,” Jane’s Defence Weekly, August 6, 2003, 7.

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

161.  Koch, “Information War Played Major Role in Iraq,” 5.

162.  Holmes, U.S. Navy Hornet Units of Operation Iraqi Freedom, pt. 2, 24.

163.  Hunter Keeter, “Cartwright: Threat Location, Prediction Capability Should Be Priorities,” Defense Daily, April 30, 2003, 4.

164.  Willis, “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” 19.

165.  Lorenzo Cortes, “Air Force Integrated Litening Pods for Block 40 and Block 50 F-16s before OIF,” Defense Daily, June 20, 2003, 5. The more capable Sniper targeting pod was not used during the campaign because qualification testing on it had not been completed.

166.  “WCMD-Equipped Sensor Fuzed Weapons Dropped on Iraqi Vehicle Column,” Defense Daily, April 3, 2003, 1; Kopp, “Iraqi Freedom—the Hammer and Anvil,” 26.

167.  Holmes, U.S. Navy Hornet Units of Operation Iraqi Freedom, pt. 2, 32.

168.  Michael Sirak, “U.S. Air Force Reveals New Strike Munition,” Jane’s Defence Weekly, May 14, 2003.

169.  “USAF Offers Details of Weapon Tailored for Iraq War,” Aerospace Daily, May 5, 2003.

170.  Gordon and Trainor, Cobra II, 432.

171.  Ibid., 432–433.

172.  Hinote, “More Than Bombing Saddam,” vi.

173.  Ibid., 116.

174.  Ibid., 165.

175.  Kitfield, “Attack Always,” 1292–1296.

176.  Krepinevich, Operation Iraqi Freedom: A First-Blush Assessment, 8.

177.  Woods and others, Iraqi Perspectives Project, x. For a subsequent RAND report that exploited much of the same source material and arrived at roughly the same conclusions, see also Stephen T. Hosmer, Why the Iraqi Resistance to the Coalition Invasion Was So Weak (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corporation, MG-544-AF, 2007).

178.  Woods and others, Iraqi Perspectives Project, 27–28.

179.  Hinote, “More Than Bombing Saddam,” 12.

180.  Ibid.

181.  Woods and others, Iraqi Perspectives Project, 125.

182.  Ibid., 125.

183.  Ibid., 126.

184.  Ibid., 147.

185.  Ibid., 128.

186.  Ibid., 128.

187.  Biddle and others, Toppling Saddam, 7.

188.  Ibid., 24.

189.  Krepinevich, Operation Iraqi Freedom: A First-Blush Assessment, 10.

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

191.  Kopp, “Iraqi Freedom—the Hammer and Anvil,” 30. On this point, the above-noted assessment implied that the coalition’s defeat of Iraq’s ground forces was essentially due to “the M1 tank’s ability to fire on the move, hit targets on the first shot at ranges of multiple kilometers, and penetrate both sand berms and T-72 frontal armor at the same distances,” disregarding CENTAF’s relentless kill-box interdiction attacks independent of ground action that accounted for the vast majority of Iraqi tanks destroyed during the campaign (Biddle and others, Toppling Saddam, 30). A less unabashedly parochial treatment of that capability concurred that “the combination of protection and firepower on the American M1A1 [Abrams main battle tank] played a critical role in ensuring that Iraqi forces could not brings tanks to bear at ranges that allowed them to be effective.” The latter study added, however, that “questions arise . . . about what would have happened if Iraq had large numbers of more modern antitank guided weapons like the Russian-designed Kornet” (Cordesman, “The ‘Instant Lessons’ of the Iraq War,” 13). Notably, Hezbollah’s well-disciplined militia units used such weapons against the Israel Defense Forces in southern Lebanon during the thirty-four-day war there in 2006, with significant costs to Israel’s Merkava main battle tank.

192.  Krepinevich, Operation Iraqi Freedom: A First-Blush Assessment, 14.

193.  Gen. Richard Myers, USAF, Department of Defense briefing, Washington, D.C., April 7, 2003.

194.  Krepinevich, Operation Iraqi Freedom: A First-Blush Assessment, 21.

195.  Benjamin S. Lambeth, The Transformation of American Air Power (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2000), 320–321, emphasis in the original.

196.  Jody Jacobs, David E. Johnson, Katherine Comanor, Lewis Jamison, Leland Joe, and David Vaughn, Enhancing Fires and Maneuver through Greater Air-Ground Joint Interdependence (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corporation, MG-793-AF, 2009), 6.

197.  Johnson, Learning Large Lessons, 115, 140.

198.  Jacobs and others, Enhancing Fires and Maneuver through Greater Air-Ground Joint Interdependence, 6.

Chapter 5. Problems Encountered

    1.  James R. Schlesinger and others, Final Report of the Independent Panel to Review DoD Detention Operations (Washington, D.C.: Department of Defense, 2004).

    2.  Thomas E. Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (New York: Penguin Press, 2006), 116.

    3.  Powell further remarked that he had counseled the president beforehand at a private dinner in August 2002, well before the war was initiated: “My caution was that you need to understand that the difficult bit will come afterwards—the military piece will be easy. This place [Iraq] will crack like a crystal goblet, and it’ll be a problem to pick up the bits” (Charles Moore, “Colin Powell: ‘I’m Very Sore,’” London Daily Telegraph, February 26, 2005).

    4.  “Top Navy Aviation Officials Predict Few Major Lessons from Iraq,” Inside the Pentagon, May 22, 2003, 10.

    5.  Ibid.

    6.  Grossman, “Evolving Threats May Offer Air Force ‘Unlearned Lessons’ in Iraq,” 1. The twofold intent of that symposium, whose participants included many key players in the planning and execution of air and space operations during the three-week campaign, was, first, to produce an exhaustive overview report aimed at providing a solid foundation for improving CENTAF’s ability to plan and execute major air operations in a future joint and combined setting, and, second, to document the essential facts of the three-week air war to facilitate subsequent efforts to develop and apply tactical lessons learned; update platform-specific tactics, techniques, and procedures; and improve joint and service doctrine. Working groups at the symposium explored such specific subjects as strategy; target development; guidance, apportionment, and targeting; the master air attack plan; ATO production; command and control arrangements; SPINs development; combat operations; time-sensitive targeting; counter-Scud operations; ISR; combat assessments; the tactical air control system; space operations; information operations; KI/CAS; defensive counterair; SEAD and DEAD operations; tanker issues; and combat search and rescue. Although the final report is not available to the general public, the present book has been informed throughout by extensive inputs from numerous CENTAF personnel, from General Moseley on down, who took part in the symposium and in the many events that it addressed.

    7.  Elaine M. Grossman, “Giambastiani Flags Battle Damage, Friendly Fire ‘Lessons Learned,’” Inside the Pentagon, March 11, 2004, 3.

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

    9.  Another issue lies in recognizing the difference between operations that went well because allied forces were good at them and those that succeeded because the Iraqis were weak or inept; the latter should counsel caution not to be excessively complacent as we look ahead. I wish to thank my RAND colleague Karl Mueller for bringing this important point to my attention.

  10.  Tim Ripley, “Iraq Friendly Fire Was Worse Than Reported,” Jane’s Defence Weekly, July 16, 2003, 3.

  11.  The PAC-3, which, unlike the PAC-2, can reach higher and is a hit-to-kill weapon, saw its first operational use in Iraqi Freedom.

  12.  Bradley Graham, “Radar Probed in Patriot Incidents,” Washington Post, May 8, 2003. In a campaign history published by General Bromberg’s organization five months after the major combat phase ended, the 32nd AAMDC spoke frankly of “cluttered cyberspace” in the area of operations around Karbala where the F/A-18 was downed by one of the unit’s Patriot batteries: “Patriot and field artillery FireFinder acquisition radars radiated on the area. Helicopter and fixed-wing aircraft moved throughout the area . . . employing various radio and radar systems and filling cyberspace along other portions of the electromagnetic spectrum. Overhead, JSTARS and AWACS aircraft added to the clutter carrying multiple emitters on board. Simultaneously, EA-6B electronic warfare aircraft conducted jamming and support missions for various air packages. In the midst of this electronic clutter, an F-18 was mistakenly engaged and destroyed by Patriot missiles. . . . While not the proximate cause, . . . it is possible that [this] electronic clutter contributed to [the F/A-18’s inadvertent downing],” suggesting that “deliberate examination must be made of the operational impact of cluttered cyberspace and [that] joint approaches to cyberspace management must be undertaken” (“Operation Iraqi Freedom: Theater Air and Missile Defense History” [Fort Bliss, Tex.: 32nd Army Air and Missile Defense Command, September 2003], 94).

  13.  Michael Smith, “U.S. ‘Clears’ Crew Who Shot Down Tornado,” London Daily Telegram, July 16, 2003.

  14.  Ibid.

  15.  Theodore A. Postol,” An Informed Guess about Why Patriot Fired upon Friendly Aircraft and Saw Numerous False Missile Targets during Operation Iraqi Freedom,” briefing charts, Security Studies Program, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, April 20, 2004. Lending strong credence to this independent analysis, the Army briefing that it addressed candidly conceded that there was “no voice link between [the Patriot] battalion headquarters and higher authority [with respect to identification and engagement]; that there was a “different air picture at different levels of command”; that there were “varying degrees of standards [across the Patriot force]”; that Patriot operators focused “solely on TBMs [and] did not work identification of unknown aircraft on [their] scope”; and that those operators “lost situational awareness of air tracks,” indicating a clear need to “train [for] scope awareness [regarding] all air platforms” (emphasis added). “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” briefing charts, 32nd Army Air and Missile Defense Command, Fort Bliss, Tex., September 2003, 54, 56–57.

  16.  Robert Riggs, “Blue on Blue: How Did an Army Patriot Battery Shoot Down a Navy F-18?” CBS 11 News (Dallas/Fort Worth, Tex.), February 4, 2004, at http//:www.globalsecurity.org/news/2004/040505-patriot-shootdown.htm

  17.  Givens, “‘Let Slip the Dogs of War,’” 25.

  18.  Davies, F-15C/E Eagle Units of Operation Iraqi Freedom, 45.

  19.  Report of the Defense Science Board Task Force on Patriot System Performance: Report Summary (Washington, D.C.: Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics, January 2005), 1.

  20.  Ibid., 2.

  21.  Ibid., 3.

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

  23.  “Army Announces Patriot Missile System’s Performance in Operation Iraqi Freedom,” U.S. Army News Release, December 10, 2004.

  24.  Reynolds, Bashar, Baghdad, and Beyond, 78.

  25.  Lt. Gen. T. Michael Moseley, USAF, “USCENTAF Friendly Fire Investigation Board: A-10—USMC Friendly Fire Incident (near An Nasiriyah, Iraq, 23 March 2003),” memorandum for commander, U.S. Central Command, Shaw AFB, S.C., May 23, 2003.

  26.  Executive summary attached to Gen. John P. Abizaid, USA, “Investigation of Suspected Friendly Fire Incident near An Nasiriyah, Iraq, 23 March 2003,” memorandum for commanders, USCENTAF, USARCENT, USNAVCENT, USMARCENT, SOCCENT, and Joint Forces Command, U.S. Central Command, MacDill AFB, Fla., March 6, 2004.

  27.  Ibid.

  28.  Ibid.

  29.  Peter Pae, “‘Friendly Fire’ Still a Problem,” Los Angeles Times, May 16, 2003.

  30.  Rod Andrew, U.S. Marines in Battle, An Nasiriyah, 23 March–2 April 2003 (Washington, D.C.: Headquarters U.S. Marine Corps, 2009), 20. Type III CAS does not require the FAC to have visual contact with either the designated target or the supporting aircraft.

  31.  Pae, “‘Friendly Fire’ Still a Problem.”

  32.  Stout, Hammer from Above, 270.

  33.  Operation Telic: United Kingdom Military Operations in Iraq, 25.

  34.  Third Infantry Division (Mechanized) After Action Report: Operation Iraqi Freedom, 141.

  35.  Ripley, “Iraq Friendly Fire Was Worse Than Reported,” 3. Many of the fratricide incidents were ground-to-ground in nature, despite the land component’s extensive use of CENTCOM’s Blue Force Tracker capability.

  36.  Lessons of Iraq, vol. 1, 108.

  37.  Quoted in Gardner, “Operation Iraqi Freedom: Coalition Operations,” 93.

  38.  Fontenot, Degen, and Tohn, On Point, 110.

  39.  Atkinson, In the Company of Soldiers, 148.

  40.  Ibid.

  41.  Ibid., 151.

  42.  Robert Hewson, “Apache Operations over Karbala,” Jane’s Intelligence Review, July 2003, 27. Not long after the Apache went down, CENTAF geolocated it with overhead imagery and destroyed it with four well-placed 2,000-pound LGBs. Conversation with Major General Darnell, August 2, 2006.

  43.  Neil Baumgardner, “V Corps Commander: Army ‘Altered Use’ of Apaches following Failed Attack,” Defense Daily, May 8, 2003, 3.

  44.  Rowan Scarborough, “General Tells How Cell Phone Foiled U.S. Attack in Iraq,” Washington Times, May 8, 2003; Atkinson, In the Company of Soldiers, 148–154.

  45.  Neil Baumgardner, “101st Airborne Division Packaged Apaches, ATACMS during OIF,” Defense Daily, May 14, 2003, 2.

  46.  Fontenot, Degen, and Tohn, On Point, 192.

  47.  Ibid., 193.

  48.  “Army to Reevaluate Apache Tactics,” Air Force Magazine, October 2003, 15.

  49.  Scarborough, “General Tells How Cell Phone Foiled U.S. Attack in Iraq.”

  50.  Fontenot, Degen, and Tohn, On Point, 160.

  51.  Ibid., 179.

  52.  Ibid., 192. The 3rd ID’s after-action assessment likewise observed candidly that current Army attack helicopter doctrine “is still oriented on deep attack operations [which are] not the best use for the division attack helicopter battalion. The heavy division attack helicopter battalion is best employed in conducting shaping operations between the division coordinated fire line (CFL) and the division forward boundary (DFB).” The assessment recommended “readdressing attack aviation doctrine to discuss the employment of the attack helicopter battalion in the heavy division to support shaping operations as opposed to deep attack operations” (Third Infantry Division (Mechanized) After Action Report: Operation Iraqi Freedom, 36–37).

  53.  Richard J. Newman, “Ambush at Najaf,” Air Force Magazine, October 2003, 60.

  54.  Johnson, Learning Large Lessons, 129–131.

  55.  Knights, Cradle of Conflict, 295.

  56.  Rebecca Grant, “Saddam’s Elite in the Meat Grinder,” Air Force Magazine, September 2003, 43.

  57.  General Merrill A. McPeak, USAF, Presentation to the Commission on Roles and Missions of the Armed Forces (Washington, D.C.: Headquarters United States Air Force, September 14, 1994), 35.

  58.  Maj. John M. Fawcett Jr., USAF, “Which Way to the FEBA (and FSCL, FLOT, Troops in Contact, Etc.)?” USAF Weapons Review, fall 1992, 26 (emphasis added).

  59.  Knights, Cradle of Conflict, 297.

  60.  Regarding the nature of these responsibilities, a postcampaign report issued by the USAF Air Ground Operations School described the ASOC as “the principal air control agency of the theater air control system responsible for the direction and control of air operations directly supporting the ground combat element. It processes and coordinates requests for immediate air support and coordinates air missions requiring integration with other supporting arms and ground forces. It normally collocates with the Army tactical headquarters senior fire support coordination center within the ground combat element.” The ASOC “manages [CAS] assets within the ground force AOR, processes CAS requests and controls the flow of CAS aircraft, deconflicts airspace control measures and aircraft, assigns aircraft to [TACP] terminal attack controllers, and manages the joint air request net (JARN) and the tactical air direction net (TAD).” Its subordinate TACPs attached to deployed Army troop formations “advise ground forces on aircraft employment and capabilities, coordinate and control aerospace operations, participate in battle planning, request air assets to support ground force requirements, and direct air strikes against enemy targets in close proximity to friendly forces” (Curt Neal, “JAGO [Joint Air Ground Office of Air Combat Command] ASOC Tiger Team: ASOC/TACP Reorganization to Support UEx [Unit of Employment ‘X’],” briefing slides, USAF Air Ground Operations School, Nellis AFB, Nev., 2005). This report summarizes key findings of a conference convened by ACC’s JAGO at the USAF Air Ground Operations School at Nellis AFB on January 25–27, 2005, aimed at developing a “new ASOC construct” with the goal of providing “the most air power on target with the least amount of [command and control].”

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

  62.  Ibid.

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

  64.  Most of the requests from V Corps for both preplanned and immediate CAS were fulfilled by allied strike aircraft that were either pushed to or pulled from the airborne CAS stack nearest to the requesting ground unit. CAS stacks were typically maintained at altitudes between 10,000 and 20,000 feet. Because of the total air dominance enjoyed by the coalition, these CAS stacks were able to operate very close to the land battle and were accordingly moved forward as the ground offensive advanced northward, such that they were able essentially to provide almost constant overhead coverage. As a rule, the ASOC supporting V Corps typically had at least four available aircraft in the CAS stack for immediate on-call response to air support requests. CENTAF planners later recalled that the synergistic combination of numerous forward-positioned orbiting CAS stacks and the more than ample supply of appropriately armed aircraft populating those stacks were major reasons not only for the effectiveness but also for the responsiveness of the CAS that the CAOC provided V Corps throughout the campaign. Conversations with Colonel Erlenbusch, Major Roberson, and other CENTAF staff, January 29, 2007.

  65.  The Afghan and Iraq air war experiences showcased the ability of today’s air assets to exhaust even a substantial fixed target list in a very short time. In contrast, the inherently more difficult challenges of conducting the mobile target attacks that often distinguish counterland operations inevitably lead to weapons bring-back by strike aircraft. CENTAF planners concluded in this respect that “future mission planners should be prepared for this” and, “when it occurs, not react emotionally but rather view it as a predictable occurrence. In this manner, CAOC operators and aircrews can ‘stick with the plan’ instead of creating more confusion by ‘trying to make something happen’” (conversations with Colonel Erlenbusch, Major Roberson, and other CENTAF staff, January 29, 2007).

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

  67.  Comments by Lieutenant Colonel Hunerwadel, May 23, 2007.

  68.  Comments by Colonel Neuenswander, October 26, 2010.

  69.  A knowledgeable former U.S. Army officer affirmed that the coalition’s war plan “emphasized nonlinear ground operations,” the result of which was “a battlefield with no clear front and rear areas” (Krepinevich, Operation Iraqi Freedom: A First-Blush Assessment, 14).

  70.  Maj. Kenneth A. Smith, USAF, “Joint Transformation of Aerial Interdiction by Enhancing Kill-Box Operations,” research report, Air Command and Staff College, Air University, Maxwell AFB, Ala., April 2006, 22.

  71.  Joint Chiefs of Staff, Doctrine for Joint Operations, Joint Publication 3-0 (Washington, D.C.: Department of Defense, September 10, 2001), III-44.

  72.  Joint Chiefs of Staff, Joint Fire Support, Joint Publication 3-09 (Washington, D.C.: Department of Defense, November 13, 2006), A-4.

  73.  Secretary of the Air Force, Counterland Operations, Air Force Doctrine Document 2–1.3 (Maxwell AFB, Ala.: Air Force Doctrine Center, September 11, 2006), 69.

  74.  Kometer, Command in Air War, 175.

  75.  Ibid.

  76.  Ibid., 206, citing Lt. Gen. William S. Wallace, USA, “Joint Fires in OIF: What Worked for the V (U.S.) Corps,” briefing slides, U.S. Army Combined Arms Center, Fort Leavenworth, Kans., no date. “The problem with this claim,” the assessment citing it added, “is that there was no good way to keep track of the damage done by KI” (ibid.).

  77.  Patrecia Slayden Hollis, “Trained, Adaptable, Flexible Forces = Victory in Iraq,” interview with Lt. Gen. W. Scott Wallace, Field Artillery, September–October 2003, 5–9.

  78.  Wallace, “Joint Fires in OIF.”

  79.  Ibid.

  80.  Comments on an earlier draft by Col. Gregory Fontenot, USA (Ret.), October 25, 2010.

  81.  Lt. Col. Michael B. McGee Jr., USAF, “Air-Ground Operations during Operation Iraqi Freedom: Successes, Failures, and Lessons of Air Force and Army Integration,” research report, Air War College, Maxwell AFB, Ala., February 25, 2005, 55-56. Among the 660 missions that did not drop ordnance, 126 of their aircrews could not find the target, 177 could not positively identify the target, 188 were unable to drop because of weather considerations, 130 had to depart the area because of low fuel, and 39 were noneffective for assorted other reasons.

  82.  Lt. Gen. William S. Wallace, USA, “Joint Effects in OIF [Operation Iraqi Freedom]: A V Corps Perspective,” briefing slides, U.S. Army Combined Arms Center, Fort Leavenworth, Kans., no date, slide 21.

  83.  Further testifying to his satisfaction, General Wallace quoted Lt. Col. J. R. Sanderson, the commander of Task Force 2-69 in the fight for Objective Titans north of Baghdad: “The F-15s and F-16s were good. The A-10s were absolutely fantastic. It is my favorite airplane. I love those people. If I had enough coins, I would send one to every A-10 driver in the Air Force just to tell them how much I appreciate them, because when those guys come down and they start those strafing runs, it is flat awesome. It is just flat awesome” (ibid.).

  84.  Stout, Hammer from Above, 114.

  85.  Comments on an earlier draft by Col. Scott Walker, USAF, Air Force Studies and Analysis Agency (AF/A9L), Washington, D.C., February 16, 2007.

  86.  Carpenter, “Rapid, Deliberate, Disciplined, Proportional, and Precise,” 14; Grant, “Saddam’s Elite in the Meat Grinder,” 43.

  87.  Ibid.

  88.  Lessons of Iraq, vol. 1, 60.

  89.  Jacobs and others, Enhancing Fires and Maneuver through Greater Air-Ground Joint Interdependence, 10. This experience highlighted for General Moseley the need for air component commanders to insist on more—and more realistic—air-ground integration in routine peacetime large-force joint training as well as more realistic joint force training. For decades, the joint Air Warrior training program has placed artificial constraints on air power so that the Army captain can see the tank-on-tank battle from the opening round of a training engagement, resulting in a misleading and negative impression of air power’s true effectiveness. If properly employed in actual joint and combined warfare, allied air power would never allow that tank-on-tank battle to occur. I am indebted to Lt. Col. Mark Cline for bringing this important point to my attention.

  90.  Kometer, Command in Air War, 143–144.

  91.  Third Infantry Division (Mechanized) After Action Report: Operation Iraqi Freedom, 108–109.

  92.  Knights, Cradle of Conflict, 303. In the MAGTF construct, the BCL was the main measure of fire support control, roughly analogous to the FSCL in Army–Air Force practice, but the BCL was extended only to the maximum range of the MAGTF’s organic artillery. Every kill box inside the BCL was closed to air attack unless expressly declared otherwise by prior arrangement. Kill boxes on the far side of the BCL but still inside the FSCL, however, were open to the MAGTF’s organic fixed- and rotary-wing strike assets unless declared otherwise.

  93.  McGee, “Air-Ground Operations during Operation Iraqi Freedom,” 2, 4, 7. This outspokenly argumentative yet also scrupulously professional assessment is the most comprehensive account available of the ASOC’s perspective with respect to the relative merits of ASOC-controlled “corps shaping” versus CAOC-controlled KI/CAS in V Corps’ area of operations. Although many CAOC principals would emphatically disagree, the lead author of the best study to date of U.S. Army operations during the campaign commented that “McGee has it pretty close to right,” bearing strong testimony to the abiding axiom of organizational life that where you stand depends on where you sit (comments by Colonel Fontenot, October 22, 2010).

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

  95.  Third Infantry Division (Mechanized) After Action Report: Operation Iraqi Freedom, 108.

  96.  Ibid.

  97.  “Lapses in Coordinating Missile Launches in Iraq Pinned on V Corps,” Inside the Pentagon, June 19, 2003, 1.

  98.  Comments on an earlier draft by Col. Richard Turner, USAF, commander, 479th Flying Training Group, Moody AFB, Georgia, April 24, 2007.

  99.  Ripley, “Closing the Gap,” 25–26.

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

101.  Quoted in “Air Support Operations Center (ASOC) Employment.”

102.  Ibid.

103.  Bill Kaczor, “Air Force Chief Says Military Must Cooperate,” Miami Herald, October 22, 2003.

104.  This was decidedly not the case, however, when it came to joint and combined air component and SOF training for the impending counter-Scud effort in Iraq’s western desert. On the contrary, the air and land components of the counter-Scud team, allied as well as American, enjoyed ample opportunities to work together in realistic large-force training exercises in the Nellis range complex in 2002 and early 2003 aimed at developing, validating, and refining tactics, techniques, and procedures for nonlinear CAS and SOF support. Conversations with Colonel Erlenbusch, Major Roberson, and other CENTAF staff, January 29, 2007.

105.  Joint Lessons Learned, 22.

106.  Conversation with Air Vice-Marshal Andy White, RAF, October 28, 2004; comments on an earlier draft by Air Chief Marshal Sir Brian Burridge, RAF.

107.  Lessons for the Future, 9.

108.  Ibid., 29.

109.  In the view of a former CAOC planner, since the ASOC is really an extension of the CAOC, this ultimately represents a problem that demands the attention of both the air and land component commanders. CAS is inherently inefficient because it is impossible to predict what kind of support will be needed and when and where it will be needed. When one adds to that the fact that none of the players (other than perhaps the Marines) had done CAS operations on such a large and sustained scale, the air and land components arguably need to address this problem from the top down. Comments by Lieutenant Colonel Cline, January 11, 2008.

110.  Lessons of Iraq, vol. 1, 61. Reflecting further on this point, the same former CAOC planner remarked: “I’m not so sure we were great at CAS [even] in 1989 when I started flying F-16s. But I will say that after Desert Storm, there seemed to be a move away from CAS in a lot of F-16 wings as LANTIRN came on board and as many F-16s transitioned to SEAD. In addition, the F-15E was viewed almost as a ‘strategic’ asset that was too good for CAS because of its precision strike capability. (Ironically, they were the only aircraft that could not employ JDAMs at the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom.) Also, the focus of exercises like Red Flag tended to be more ‘strategic attack’ strike-package-oriented, since that was what occurred in Desert Storm. Air Warrior became the only major CAS training and [as noted above] was actually negative training for Air Force aircrews and ground maneuver commanders. Finally, we failed to evolve our joint doctrine to keep up with technology. After the initial stages of Operation Enduring Freedom, we tried to catch up rapidly in January 2002 as we rewrote [joint manual] 3-09.3 to come up with Types I, II, and III CAS. . . . [T]oo many still think of CAS as the air marshal described” (comments by Lieutenant Colonel Cline, January 11, 2008).

111.  Lessons of Iraq, vol. 2, Ev 62.

112.  Lessons of Iraq: Government Response to the Committee’s Third Report of Session, 2003–2004 (London: House of Commons, Defence Committee, HC 635, June 8, 2004), 7; and “UK Multiplying Close Air Support Capability,” Jane’s International Defence Review, October 1, 2005. By the same token, members of the Australian national contingent noted similar shortfalls within their own force contingent, as a result of which notable improvements were subsequently made in JTAC training and standardization in air-land integration within the ADF. Comments by Group Captain Keir, July 2, 2009.

113.  Hathaway, “Operational Assessment during Operation Iraqi Freedom,” 12.

114.  Ibid., 2.

115.  “Task Force Enduring Look Lessons Learned,” briefing, as quoted in Kometer, Command in Air War, 177.

116.  Kometer, Command in Air War, 177.

117.  Johnson, Learning Large Lessons, 126.

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

119.  Commanding General, 1st Marine Division, “Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF): Lessons Learned,” MEF-FRAGO 279–03, May 29, 2003, quoted in Johnson, Learning Large Lessons, 196.

120.  Hathaway, “Operational Assessment during Operation Iraqi Freedom,” 15–16.

121.  Ibid., 18.

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

123.  Simpson, “Air Power Lessons from Operation Iraqi Freedom.”

124.  The same could be said for equally accurate inertially aided munitions. An F-16 pilot recalled that on arriving in their assigned area of operations, he and his wingman received immediate tasking to drop CBU-103s on a SAM site south of Baghdad: “There was an undercast, but the CBU-103 is fairly accurate and has its own inertial guidance system. When I released the bombs, I watched them fall toward the white clouds below. The dark green contrast against the sunlit clouds was a picture that is hard to describe, but as they fell, I knew that they were going to hit their assigned targets, which would soon cease to exist” (Davies and Dildy, F-16 Fighting Falcon Units of Operation Iraqi Freedom, 31).

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

126.  Ibid.

127.  The lack of adequate situation awareness that ensued from the CAOC’s inability to track accurately the status of potential targets throughout the three-week campaign proved highly detrimental to the target development process. CAOC staffers noted that “the JIPTL tracker was responsible for reporting which targets on each JIPTL were actually struck. Unfortunately, this process failed to account for the many strikes performed against targets that were not on the JIPTL for any given ATO day. CAOC leadership accordingly identified a requirement for tracking the history of every target aim point in existence for Iraq, to include (1) what JIPTL, if any, the aim point had been placed on; (2) if the aim point had been MAAPed; (3) if the aim point was struck; and (4) if it was struck, what were the results of that strike” (ibid.).

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

129.  Hathaway, “Operational Assessment during Operation Iraqi Freedom,” 20. Colonel Hathaway further observed that “improvements in air and space technology have greatly enhanced our ability to find, fix, and target. Consequently, we have greater demands to assess the resulting effects. This, in turn, requires a greater demand on the same technology used to find, fix, and target. It is a self-perpetuating cycle that the CAOC must balance to ensure that execution does not get blindly in front of assessment” (p. 21).

130.  Elaine M. Grossman, “JFCOM Draft Report Finds U.S. Forces Reverted to Attrition in Iraq,” Inside the Air Force, March 26, 2004, 14–15. Another after-action inquiry that bears mention here was the CENTAF-led analysis done by the combined weapons effectiveness assessment team (CWEAT) that sent nearly one hundred experts in targeting, weapons, engineering, and intelligence throughout Iraq, starting on June 8, 2003, to more than five hundred weapon impact points targeted by the CAOC to assess the performance of air component weapons. The team consisted of civilian and military members from all branches of the U.S. armed services, U.S. Department of Defense agencies, the Royal Navy, the British Army, and the RAAF. As this investigation entered its second week, the CENTAF team chief, Col. Tom Entwhistle, said that its “ultimate goal . . . [was] to learn [from the campaign experience] so that in the future we can operate with increased precision” (“Team Assessing OIF Air Component Effectiveness,” Camp As Sayliyah, Qatar: AFPN [Air Force Print News] news story, June 13, 2003).

131.  Elaine Grossman, “Battle Damage Assessment Process Found Unwieldy in Iraq Combat,” Inside the Pentagon, June 19, 2003, 10.

132.  Ibid., 11.

133.  Simpson, “Air Power Lessons from Operation Iraqi Freedom.”

134.  Anne Barnard, “Death Lurks in Unspent U.S. ‘Bomblets,’” Boston Globe, May 1, 2003.

135.  A former senior CAOC planner noted emphatically that “we as a CAOC staff did not help the BDA effort. . . . Even against non-KI/CAS targets, we were hard-pressed to accurately track what munitions went against what set of coordinates. If we could not give the raw data to CENTCOM, we were not helping the assessment efforts” (comments by Lieutenant Colonel Cline, January 11, 2008).

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

137.  Holmes, U.S. Navy Hornet Units of Operation Iraqi Freedom, pt. 2, 36.

138.  Carpenter, “Rapid, Deliberate, Disciplined, Proportional, and Precise,” 18.

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

140.  Remarks at a flag panel presentation during the Tailhook Association’s 2003 annual symposium, Reno, Nev., September 20, 2003.

141.  David A. Fulghum, “Tanker Puzzle: Aggressive Tactics, Shrinking Tanker Force Challenge Both Planners and Aircrews,” Aviation Week and Space Technology, April 14, 2003, 23–26.

142.  Ibid.

143.  Carpenter, “Rapid, Deliberate, Disciplined, Proportional, and Precise,” 18.

144.  Lorenzo Cortes, “Seizure of Tallil Base Improved A-10’s Effectiveness in Iraqi Freedom, Commander Says,” Defense Daily, April 18, 2003, 8.

145.  General Moseley personally flew on one of those early tanker sorties inside Iraqi airspace to demonstrate his confidence in their tactical soundness from an aircrew safety point of view.

146.  So-called flex-deck operations, a more frenetically paced activity than normal cyclic operations involving waves of launches and recoveries at carefully selected intervals, typically have at least one of the carrier’s two bow catapults firing continually while the two waist catapults in the landing area are kept clear to accommodate a steady stream of recovering aircraft.

147.  Cdr. James Paulsen, USN, “Naval Aviation Delivered in Iraq,” Proceedings, June 2003, 35.

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

149.  On this point, the commander of one F-15E wing that participated in the war recalled: “We did some creative things to ensure that our jets had significant loiter time and the ability to penetrate deep into Iraq, given the loss of Incirlik. For example, we dumped gas all the way up the Persian Gulf to be light enough to land at Al Jaber with a full load of nine GBU-12s, hot-pitted at Al Jaber, then went deep and long. Our guys did the Al Jaber hot-pits twice and sometimes three times before returning to Al Udeid. The average Strike Eagle mission was six to nine hours during the surge period. We also flew the jets [more than twice a day each] the entire time—unprecedented” (comments by Major General Rosborg, March 16, 2007).

150.  Conversations with Colonel Erlenbusch, Major Roberson, and other CENTAF staff, January 29, 2007. The doctrine referred to here presumes that intratheater tankers are inherent parts of a global aerial refueling mobility scheme that requires direct control by the CAOC’s air mobility division (AMD), which is also subordinated to the Air Force’s Air Mobility Command. Yet as CAOC planners later noted, “in reality, once major combat operations commence, virtually 100 percent of all intratheater tankers, which are operationally controlled by the air component commander, are used for direct combat support missions within CENTCOM’s area of responsibility. These missions do not require any special global AMD coordination. Current doctrinal guidance usurps planning control of combat assets from the CAOC, negatively affecting the air component commander’s ability to perform his missions” (ibid.).

151.  Ibid.

152.  Gardner, “Operation Iraqi Freedom: Coalition Operations,” 95.

153.  SIPRNet “is a classified Defense Department network that is functionally equivalent to the civilian World Wide Web.” In the ten years prior to Iraqi Freedom it had become “ubiquitous, with units at every echelon having access to a secure network where classified plans, discussions, and information could be shared free.” Obviating the need to mail classified data or to talk over a secure telephone, it made for “a quantum leap in efficiency and effectiveness. In addition to desktop access to the latest plans and intelligence information, the secure e-mail and chat rooms fostered crosstalk at all levels. Planners and home stations could follow current operations and conduct parallel planning to anticipate requirements” (Fontenot, Degen, and Tohn, On Point, 11).

154.  Ibid., 95.

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

156.  This point was driven home emphatically during a conversation with Air Commodore Chris Nickols, RAF, commander, Air Warfare Center, RAF Waddington, UK, October 29, 2004. Air Commodore Nickols served as one of CENTAF’s three rotating CAOC directors during Operation Iraqi Freedom and was uniquely well placed to appreciate the real-time opportunity costs of the NOFORN caveat in intracoalition relations during an ongoing multilateral campaign.

157.  Lessons of Iraq, vol. 2, Ev 44.

158.  Ibid.

159.  For further discussion of that earlier dual-ATO arrangement and the strain that it placed on the cohesion and ease of execution of the joint and combined air operation, see Lambeth, NATO’s Air War for Kosovo, 188–189.

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

161.  Review of Operational-Level Interoperability between the Military Forces of Australia and the United States of America (Camp H. M. Smith, Hawaii: U.S. Pacific Command; and Canberra, Australia: Department of Defence, October 2004), 15, 17. The other two identified categories entailed issues relating to security cooperation arrangements and the management of the relationship and separate issues of a more technical nature involving capability development and force transformation.

162.  Official interview with Group Captain Henman, April 9, 2007.

163.  Official interview with Wing Commander Keir, February 19, 2007.

164.  Review of Operational-Level Interoperability between the Military Forces of Australia and the United States of America, 15.

165.  Official interview with Group Captain Halupka, May 14, 2008.

166.  Review of Operational-Level Interoperability between the Military Forces of Australia and the United States of America, 27.

167.  Ibid., 48–51.

168.  Ibid.

Chapter 6. Toward a New Era of Warfare

    1.  Susan Page, “War May Realign World and Define a Presidency,” USA Today, March 17, 2003.

    2.  Ibid. The intellectual foundation for such a change was laid down in the administration’s new national security strategy released in September 2002, which stated the logic of a strategy of preemption: “We must be prepared to stop rogue states and their terrorist clients before they are able to threaten or use weapons of mass destruction against the United States and our allies and friends” (ibid.).

    3.  Carla Anne Robbins, “U.S. Nears War in Embrace of Strategy of Preemption,” Wall Street Journal, March 18, 2003.

    4.  Woodward, Plan of Attack, 428. Box-cutters were the weapon of choice for the September 11 terrorist hijackers.

    5.  Peter Spiegel, “Thinking ahead with the Pentagon’s Planners,” London Financial Times, April 16, 2003.

    6.  Fontenot, Degen, and Tohn, On Point, xvi.

    7.  Ibid., 249–250.

    8.  Cordesman, “The ‘Instant Lessons’ of the Iraq War,” 5.

    9.  Fontenot, Degen, and Tohn, On Point, 102.

  10.  Vernon Loeb, “Sniping at the ‘Plan’ Strikes Some Nerves,” Washington Post, April 2, 2003.

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

  12.  Conversations with Colonel Erlenbusch, Major Roberson, and other CENTAF staff, January 29, 2007. A CENTAF planner who served in key CAOC positions in both Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom stressed the indispensable role played by General Moseley in setting the right tone at all levels in building those close trust relationships, noting emphatically how “his attitude pervaded our staff as we worked with our lower-level component counterparts” (comments by Lieutenant Colonel Cline, January 11, 2008).

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

  14.  Conversation with General Moseley, August 2, 2006. Indeed, as General Moseley went on to observe, Enduring Freedom was a “microcosm” of the subsequent joint and combined campaign against Iraq when it came to such crucial functions as the buildup of forces, the establishment of air superiority, the extensive use of GPS- and inertially aided munitions, cruise missile operations, and the introduction and support of SOF teams and conventional ground forces. A senior CENTAF planner pointed out that “many of the successes enjoyed during [Iraqi Freedom] were a direct result of the ‘smart’ application of the successes [achieved earlier in Afghanistan] and the determination not to repeat the mistakes” (conversations with Colonel Erlenbusch, Major Roberson, and other CENTAF staff, January 29, 2007).

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

  16.  Ibid.

  17.  Koven, “Improvements in Joint Forces,” 8. As an example of the sort of joint counterland training that is arguably required to exercise and validate new concepts of operations, CENTAF planners pointed to the notable success of the counter-Scud concept of operations that was repeatedly tested and ultimately validated in the Nellis range complex by joint and combined forces before being actually executed in Iraq’s western desert. Conversations with Colonel Erlenbusch, Major Roberson, and other CENTAF staff, January 29, 2007.

  18.  Simpson, “Air Power Lessons from Operation Iraqi Freedom.”

  19.  Lessons for the Future, 9.

  20.  Simpson, “Air Power Lessons from Operation Iraqi Freedom.”

  21.  Ibid.

  22.  Ibid.

  23.  Knights, Cradle of Conflict, 304.

  24.  DeLong, Inside CentCom, 129.

  25.  Michael Knights, “Iraqi Freedom Displays the Transformation of U.S. Air Power,” Jane’s Intelligence Review, May 2003, 19.

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

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

  28.  Ibid., 2.

  29.  Lessons of Iraq, vol. 2, Ev 60.

  30.  Woods and others, Iraqi Perspectives Project, passim.

  31.  Dunn, Bingham, and Fowler, Ground Moving Target Indicator Radar and the Transformation of U.S. Warfighting, 5.

  32.  Carpenter, “Rapid, Deliberate, Disciplined, Proportional, and Precise,” 2.

  33.  Fick, One Bullet Away, 289.

  34.  Comments by Lieutenant Colonel Hunerwadel, May 23, 2007.

  35.  Thomas E. Ricks, “What Counted: People, Plan, Inept Enemy,” Washington Post, April 10, 2003.

  36.  Woodward, Plan of Attack, 118. Despite his avowed emphasis on “jointness,” however, Franks clearly brought a pronounced land-centric bias to his war planning, routinely characterizing allied ground forces as “supported [emphasis added] by overwhelming air power” and portraying the overall concept of operations as one in which slow-reacting Iraqi ground formations would be fixed and ultimately destroyed by the combined effects of artillery, air “support,” and attack helicopters (Franks with McConnell, American Soldier, 415).

  37.  Fontenot, Degen, and Tohn, On Point, xv, xvii. The landmark Goldwater-Nichols Defense Reorganization Act of 1986, among other things, reduced the uniformed services from fighting forces in and of themselves to being simply force providers to joint force combatant commanders who reported directly to the secretary of defense and who, at least in theory, were expected to plan and conduct military operations in their respective regional areas of responsibility around the world in a manifestly integrated and joint way. For a good overview of the origins, nature, and intent of this game-changing legislation regarding the way in which the United States has conducted its defense enterprise ever since, see Vincent Davis, “Organization and Management,” in American Defense Annual, 1987–1988, ed. Joseph Kruzel (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1987).

  38.  Cordesman, “The ‘Instant Lessons’ of the Iraq War,” 23.

  39.  Quoted in Amy Svitak, “Force of the Future,” Army Times, November 25, 2002.

  40.  Cordesman, “The ‘Instant Lessons’ of the Iraq War,” 8.

  41.  Murray and Scales, The Iraq War, 163.

  42.  DeLong, Inside CentCom, 110.

  43.  Carpenter, “Rapid, Deliberate, Disciplined, Proportional, and Precise,” 1.

  44.  Stephen Trimble, “Cebrowski: Iraq War Offers Clues for Transformation Agenda,” Aerospace Daily, April 23, 2003.

  45.  Hunter Keeter, “Cebrowski: Iraq Shows Network-Centric Warfare Implementation,” Defense Daily, April 23, 2003, 4.

  46.  Knights, “Iraqi Freedom Displays the Transformation of U.S. Air Power,” 16.

  47.  Elaine M. Grossman, “Key Generals: Response to ‘Fedayeen’ a Vital Milestone in Iraq War,” Inside the Pentagon, May 8, 2003, 14.

  48.  Ripley, “Closing the Gap,” 27.

  49.  Vernon Loeb, “Pentagon Credits Success in Iraq War to Joint Operations,” Washington Post, October 3, 2003.

  50.  Thom Shanker, “Pentagon Criticizes High Rate of Allied Deaths by Allied Fire,” New York Times, October 3, 2003. A substantially larger allied ground presence from the outset almost certainly would have been the preferred alternative for either heading off or better containing the postcampaign insurgency, sectarian violence, and rampant civil disorder that persisted in Iraq for nearly six years after Hussein’s regime was driven from power.

  51.  Statement of Brig. Gen. Marc Rogers, USAF, director for joint requirements and integration, U.S. Joint Forces Command, before the House Armed Services Committee, Subcommittee on Terrorism and Unconventional Threats, House of Representatives, 108th Congress, Washington, D.C., October 21, 2003.

  52.  Scarborough, “Myers Says ‘Annihilation’ of Iraqi Army Wasn’t Goal.”

  53.  Jeremy Feiler, “Speed, Unpredictability Led to Victory in Iraq, Defense Officials Say,” Inside the Pentagon, March 4, 2004, 1, 14.

  54.  Conversation with then Wing Commander Stuart Atha, RAF, Ministry of Defence, London, October 27, 2004.

  55.  Davies and Dildy, F-16 Fighting Falcon Units of Operation Iraqi Freedom, 68–69.

  56.  Carpenter, “Rapid, Deliberate, Disciplined, Proportional, and Precise,” 1.

  57.  Robert A. Pape, “The True Worth of Air Power,” Foreign Affairs, March–April 2004, 127.

  58.  Murray and Scales, The Iraq War, 114.

  59.  Interview with Lt. Gen. David D. McKiernan, USA, U.S. Army Center of Military History, Washington, D.C., June 30, 2003, cited in Reynolds, Basrah, Baghdad, and Beyond, 12.

  60.  Elaine M. Grossman, “A-10 Aircraft Took Heavy Fire while Performing Unusual Mission,” Inside the Air Force, April 11, 2003, 10.

  61.  John M. Broder, “General Franks Makes First Visit to Troops in the Battle Zone,” New York Times, April 8, 2003. The “pot” mentioned by Franks referred to a reporter’s earlier allusion to the Ba’athist regime as a large clay pot against which allied forces were constantly tapping in different ways and at different times.

  62.  Vince Crawley, “Less Is More,” Army Times, April 21, 2003.

  63.  Jeremy Feiler, “Goldwater-Nichols Changes Key to U.S. Success in Iraq, Pace Says,” Inside the Pentagon, September 25, 2003, 2.

  64.  Interview with Vice Adm. Timothy J. Keating, USN, “This Was a Different War,” Proceedings, June 2003, 30.

  65.  Joint Lessons Learned, 14, 21.

  66.  For amplification on this point, see Lambeth, Combat Pair.

  67.  Johnson, Learning Large Lessons, 195, 197.

  68.  Ibid., 199–200, 206–207. Writing a year later, the USAF’s Lt. Gen. David Deptula similarly observed that as the American defense establishment has evolved since the end of the Cold War, “Goldwater-Nichols has created unintended consequences. It has resulted in a focus on military integration, but failing to develop a corresponding focus on incorporating all the elements of national power has delayed us from achieving true integration of all the pillars of national security. It has also led to an unsophisticated interpretation of jointness that drives some to seek homogeneity among the services, while others use ‘jointness’ as an excuse to participate in every mission. This has led some services to seek self-sufficiency rather than synergy—and to the degree that they have been allowed to do so has actually resulted in divergence from the tenets of Goldwater-Nichols by some as they replicate other services’ core competencies” (“Toward Restructuring National Security,” Strategic Studies Quarterly, winter 2007, 16).

  69.  Comments by Colonel Fontenot, October 13, 2010. Colonel Fontenot hastened to add that “despite that, the [fact remains] that the V Corps troops truly appreciated the role that fixed-wing air played. CAS played a decisive role in more than one fight.”

  70.  Whether it also was a lesson “learned” and duly assimilated remains to be determined, given the continued inefficiencies in air-land interaction that predominated in the nation’s subsequent counterinsurgency operations in Iraq through 2010 and that persist to this day in CENTCOM’s continuing counterinsurgency effort against the Taliban in Afghanistan.

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

  72.  Knights, “Iraqi Freedom Displays the Transformation of U.S. Air Power,” 19.

  73.  Commenting on the bottom-line meaning of the above, a Russian defense analyst, Yevgeny Pashentsev, said immediately after the campaign ended: “The Americans have rewritten the textbook, and every country had better take note.” Likewise, a former Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces general and later head of the Russian military’s official research organization, Vladimir Dvorkin, remarked that “the gap between our capabilities and those of the Americans has been revealed, and it is vast” (quoted in Fred Weir, “Iraqi Defeat Jolts Russian Military,” Christian Science Monitor, April 16, 2003).

  74.  Comments by Colonel Fontenot, October 22, 2010.

  75.  Among the many books that have been written on the American postcampaign experience in Iraq since April 2003, particularly notable are Fouad Ajami, The Foreigner’s Gift: The Americans, the Arabs, and the Iraqis in Iraq (New York: Free Press, 2006); Ali A. Allawi, The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing the Peace (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007); Nora Bensahel et al., After Saddam: Prewar Planning and the Occupation of Iraq (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corporation, MG-642-A, 2008); Larry Diamond, Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq (New York: Times Books, 2005); James Dobbins et al., Occupying Iraq: A History of the Coalition Provisional Authority (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corporation, MG-847-CC, 2009); Michael R. Gordon and Bernard E. Trainor, The Endgame: The Inside Story of the Struggle for Iraq from George W. Bush to Barack Obama (New York: Random House, 2012); Peter R. Mansoor, Baghdad at Sunrise: A Brigade Commander’s War in Iraq (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008); Thomas E. Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (New York: Penguin Press, 2006); Thomas E. Ricks, The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006–2008 (New York: Penguin Press, 2009); Linda Robinson, Tell Me How This Ends: General David Petraeus and the Search for a Way out of Iraq (New York: Public Affairs, 2008); Bing West, The Strongest Tribe: War, Politics, and the Endgame in Iraq (New York: Random House, 2008); Bob Woodward, State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006); and Bob Woodward, The War Within: A Secret White House History, 2006–2008 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2008). For the personal recollections of the Bush administration’s proconsul to Iraq, who headed the Coalition Provisional Authority and oversaw the badly flawed allied occupation of Iraq from May 2003 to June 2004, see L. Paul Bremer III, My Year in Iraq: The Struggle to Build a Future of Hope (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006).

  76.  Melvin R. Laird, “Iraq: Learning the Lessons of Vietnam,” Foreign Affairs, November–December 2005, 22.

  77.  James Dobbins, “Iraq: Winning the Unwinnable War,” Foreign Affairs, January–February 2005, 16. CENTCOM’s target priorities for the opening days of the campaign may have been partly culpable for this ensuing downside consequence of the allied invasion, if only indirectly. A knowledgeable commentator later suggested in this regard: “Unfortunately, leadership attack may have contributed to the difficulty in establishing a lasting peace after the major combat operations ended. . . . [The approach chosen] enabled an overall strategy using a relatively small invasion force. This force was sufficient for the drive to Baghdad, but it proved insufficient for establishing security after the regime’s collapse. . . . [That said], the chaos that engulfed Iraq in the opening days of coalition rule was not an indictment of leadership attack, but rather a consequence of incorrect assumptions made by coalition leaders about the nature of postwar Iraq” (Hinote, “More Than Bombing Saddam,” 168, 175).

  78.  Grossman, “Evolving Threats May Offer Air Force ‘Unlearned Lessons’ in Iraq,” 16.

  79.  For perhaps the most thorough survey of the many individuals both in and out of government who urged the Bush administration to anticipate and duly hedge against the likely needs of postcampaign stabilization, see Bensahel et al., After Saddam.

  80.  Atkinson, In the Company of Soldiers, 187.

  81.  “Prepared Testimony by U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld to the Senate Armed Services Committee,” U.S. Senate, Washington, D.C., July 9, 2003.

  82.  This theme was first developed in depth more than four decades ago in the widely acclaimed study by the late Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1968).

  83.  Thomas L. Friedman, “If I Had One Wish,” New York Times, October 4, 2006.

  84.  Ricks, Fiasco, 127–128.

  85.  Eliot Cohen, “No Way to Win a War,” Wall Street Journal, December 7, 2006.

  86.  Frederick W. Kagan, Finding the Target: The Transformation of American Military Policy (New York: Encounter Books, 2006), 358–359, 369–370. The 3rd ID’s after-action assessment of its campaign experience candidly noted that the division “did not have a dedicated plan to transition quickly from combat operations to SASO [stability and support operations]. . . . As the division transitioned to SASO, it did not have sufficient forces or effective rules of engagement (ROE) to control civilian looting and rioting throughout the city.” The assessment concluded regarding this point that “we must be ready for rapid success. Follow-on SASO plans must be developed in advance and the necessary resources readily available for commitment,” with arrangements in place “to conduct SASO concurrently with combat operations or immediately after the completion of combat operations” (Third Infantry Division [Mechanized] After Action Report: Operation Iraqi Freedom, 13, 18).

  87.  Krepinevich, Operation Iraqi Freedom: A First-Blush Assessment, 7–8.

  88.  Ibid., 11.

  89.  This characterization of fourth-generation warfare was put forward by Vice Adm. David Nichols, USN, deputy commander of U.S. Central Command, during a flag presentation at the 2004 annual symposium of the Tailhook Association, Reno, Nev., September 11, 2004.

  90.  Col. Thomas X. Hammes, USMC (Ret.), The Sling and the Stone: On War in the 21st Century (St. Paul, Minn.: Zenith Press, 2006), 2.

  91.  Stout, Hammer from Above, 378.

  92.  Colin S. Gray, The Air Power Advantage in Future Warfare: The Need for Strategy (Maxwell AFB, Ala.: Air Power Research Institute, Air University, 2007), 15, 18, 20.