SINCE EARLY 2004, UNDER THE SPONSORSHIP OF U.S. AIR FORCES CENTRAL (AFCENT), I have pursued an in-depth assessment of the American and allied air contribution to the three weeks of major combat in Operation Iraqi Freedom that ended the rule of Saddam Hussein. This research followed an earlier AFCENT-sponsored study to assess the war against Al Qaeda and its Taliban hosts in Afghanistan between early October 2001 and late March 2002 in response to the terrorist attacks against the United States on September 11, 2001. That earlier effort is reported in Benjamin S. Lambeth, Air Power against Terror: America’s Conduct of Operation Enduring Freedom.1 The present book offers a similar treatment of the shorter but more intense air war that occurred over Iraq a year later when American air assets, aided substantially by the contributions of the British Royal Air Force (RAF) and the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF), played a pivotal role in securing the immediate campaign objectives of U.S. Central Command. This book aims to fill a persistent gap in the literature on Operation Iraqi Freedom by telling that story as fully and credibly as the available evidence will allow.
1 Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corporation, MG-166-1-CENTAF, 2005. The abbreviation CENTAF (for U.S. Central Command Air Forces) was changed to AFCENT (for U.S. Air Forces Central) on March 1, 2009, after the U.S. Air Force leadership redesignated some of the Air Force’s numbered air forces as formal warfighting headquarters. I use the abbreviation CENTAF throughout this book because it was CENTAF that planned and fought the three-week Iraqi Freedom air war in 2003.