A New War’s Fog
DANA PITTARD
August 2014
On the day we kicked off the first strikes of the campaign, everyone was ecstatic to finally be killing ISIS. But we would quickly be humbled by—and somberly reminded of—the potential pitfalls in strike cell operations and the huge responsibility that came with each and every authorization to strike.
We received an alarming spotter report from one of our F-16 fighter pilots as he patrolled the skies of northern Iraq. He described a very large ISIS force of at least 500 fighters rapidly moving from the west toward Erbil.
Our newly initiated Embassy Strike Cell went on full alert, but I knew extreme caution was required. In the war against ISIS, conducting airstrikes was more complicated than we were used to. We couldn’t use our best resources for identifying targets and directing strikes—JTACs embedded with ground troops on the battlefield. Our JTACs were in the strike cell and they had the difficult job of overcoming language, cultural, and technical obstacles to communicate with our Iraqi and Kurdish partners on the ground and control strikes onto the right targets while themselves far removed.
When we received our pilot’s report, we kicked into high gear. Our targeting team recommended we attack the suspected ISIS force with everything we had. I called Lieutenant General Terry, who gave me the authority to strike pending CENTCOM approval. I called General Austin at CENTCOM to apprise him of the situation. He gave me authorization to strike once we confirmed the target as ISIS. Still, we both thought it would be prudent to get a second set of eyes on the ISIS fighters before engaging.
I requested a Predator drone be pushed to the area. I was all for pulling the trigger, but a nagging thought made me hold up: we’d been tracking ISIS forces for seventy-two hours straight since getting authorization to protect Erbil, and then this tantalizing target just appeared out of nowhere.
How did they get so far east of the Abisellan Line without detection?
Wouldn’t we have seen them earlier?
It was hard to believe that the huge ISIS force had gotten so far without being spotted up to that point, but our drone coverage in northern Iraq was limited due to a shortage of drones throughout the CENTCOM Middle East theater of operations. We knew we had some surveillance gaps that left us unable to monitor all road networks and approaches to Erbil. Still, I wanted a good look at the force before I ordered a strike, and the only way to do that was with a Predator drone.
Our fighter pilots were often great resources for identifying friend from foe. Yet even with those eyes it was tough for them to distinguish ISIS fighters from other troops or groups of refugees and civilians. You had to understand how they moved, what sort of equipment and weaponry they carried, and ideally you had to have communication with partner forces on the ground to gain ground intelligence. I respected our Air Force pilots, but it was difficult for them to discern one group of fighters from another. Despite all the training they received, their observations of ground troops were affected by high speeds and altitude.
I asked the JTACs to pull up the video feed of the Predator drone we’d tasked to the target area so we could take a closer look, but it was another thirty minutes before it could be overhead. Our eager F-16 pilot was itching to strike. He requested authorization to engage the large force. The pilot was trigger happy, for sure—but I was in charge of making that call, and my JTAC would be the one to deliver the message.
Every set of eyes in the strike cell was on me awaiting the decision. The operations center was hot and humid. We were already tense and sweating. The easy and popular decision would have been to grant the request and call out the dogs of war, but my gut told me to hold off. I’d had experiences in the past with battlefield pilot reports that were not totally accurate. On the other hand, I’d been one of the strongest voices against our extremely limited rules of engagement up to that point, so I hoped my gut wasn’t working against me.
I had received the go-ahead from my superiors, and on the surface it seemed to be a chance to use our vast firepower on a despicable enemy that we’d observed slaughtering civilians without qualms. Still, as much as I wanted to order the pilot to drop his bombs, I directed our JTACs to hold off.
“I need a drone on the scene. I gotta make this call knowing full well those are ISIS fighters,” I told everyone.
A collective groan emerged. We were all fighting fatigue and stress. We’d been so frustrated from the time we’d hit the ground in Baghdad, and we all wanted to take down ISIS whenever we got the chance. The suspected ISIS force was still an hour out from Erbil, though. If I could get the drone overhead within thirty minutes, we could determine the situation definitively with plenty of time.
“We’ll still have time to act once we’ve confirmed this is ISIS,” I said.
I called Lieutenant General Terry in Kuwait and ran my decision by him. He supported me, and that helped, yet I still felt like the least popular guy in the command center. It took exactly twenty-seven minutes for the Predator drone to reach the target area—but it seemed like twenty-seven hours.
The Predator drone’s video feed finally came up on our screen. One of my young staff officers blurted out, “See, they’re ISIS fighters moving east…what an awesome target!”
It didn’t look so awesome to me, though. The image was obscured due to cloud cover. I asked our JTACs to deliver guidance to the drone pilot—more than 7,000 miles away at an Air Force base in the Nevada desert.
“Tell him to move the Predator closer to the target area so we can see it more clearly.”
The Predator moved in and I directed our JTACs to have it zero in on the vehicles and fighters who had stopped along the route. Slowly, an image came into focus, revealing sand-colored vehicles and uniformed men, some wearing scarves over their heads. Some soldiers were directing traffic and others appeared to be aiding what looked like refugees walking along the road. Some of the soldiers were pointing their weapons west, away from Erbil and in the direction of ISIS forces.
I stared at the video feed for five or six minutes, trying to make sense of what I was seeing. In the meantime, I could feel all the eyes in the operations center on me. I had to go with what my own eyes were telling me.
This was not an ISIS fighting force.
They were most probably Kurdish Peshmerga fighters. It was a force of more than 500 friendlies! I realized my gut had tapped into my experiences working with the Kurdish Peshmerga and traveling throughout Erbil in the past. Only a few other people in the operations center had similar experiences. Most had been deployed to either the Baghdad area or Al Anbar Province in western Iraq. They hadn’t served in the northern Iraqi provinces of Ninewa or Erbil where they might have worked with the Kurdish Peshmerga. I was then one of only a few American military officers in Iraq at that time who’d been in every province and interacted in-depth with the Kurdish Peshmerga, Iraqi Army, Iraqi Police, Border Guards, Shia Militias, and other Iraqi Security Forces.
When I pointed out everything I observed based on my experience, most in the room agreed with my assessment. I told the JTACs to stand-down the F-16s. Still, one staff officer adamantly protested, insisting it was an ISIS force. Before I could respond to the young officer, Colonel Abisellan took him for a “walk” (probably a wise move).
We sent a message to the Kurdish military leadership and promptly received confirmation that the forces were Kurdish troops and not ISIS. When that word came down, the operations center went silent. A sigh of relief went up—and it wasn’t just from me.
The old saying “it’s lonely at the top” is often quite true, but I did receive a few thumbs-up, several smiles of congratulations, and one handshake. I thanked them all and went back to my small office and shut the door. I allowed myself a smile and a few deep breaths to release the stress.
No one had to point out that if I had authorized the airstrike it would have been the largest fratricide of a U.S. ally since the war on terror began back in 2001. My name would have gone down in infamy.
Whew.
I gladly took the scattered “attaboys” instead.