“When you focus on that as a mission, a whole bunch of other things open up to you,” Downing explains. “All of a sudden, you start after things like the logistic system, the fuel system, the communications systems, people, barracks, roads. I mean, it’s not just the missiles.
“A target list that was very, very small and very, very vague became an enormous target list that let us be very, very smart.”
Field-level troops and commanders formulated the specific tactics, not the generals. Downing and Stiner saw their jobs as primarily answering the question “How do we support this?”
“The guys who arc going to do the mission plan it,” said Downing. “Generals don’t plan it.”
The Special Forces Scud missions began February 7, when sixteen SOF troopers and two vehicles were helicoptered into Iraq by MI I-53J Pave Low and CH-47 Chinook helos. They were supported by armed Blackhawk helicopters, called defensive armed penetrators, as well as regular Air Force and Navy airplanes, including F-15Es, F-18s, and A-10As. A week after the operation began, the original anti-Scud forces were augmented with additional special missions units, a reinforced Ranger company, and additional special operations helicopters.
About fifteen anti-Scud SOF missions were undertaken during the course of the war. More would surely have been launched if the war had not ended. The mission lengths and sizes varied; at one point, at least four different American SOF units were looking for Scuds inside Iraq.
The insertions were made by helicopters, whose movements were coordinated with large packages of bombers heading across the border to attack Iraqi installations. Personal, up-front leadership was exercised by commanders at every level, a trademark of special operations. “Doug” and “Rich” personally flew the lead on every critical air insertion; “Eldon,” “Ike,” and “John,” and their troop commanders and sergeant majors, led every ground patrol. The Ranger raid against a command-and-control node near the Jordanian border was led by “Kurt,” the Ranger company commander. While the Iraqi defenders concentrated on the high-flying bombers, the helicopters zipped undetected across the open desert at sand-dune level.
While specific procedures varied according to the situation, in general, the ground units would hide during the day, while reconnaissance and attacks took place at night. Fighter-bombers and attack planes detailed to Scud-hunting would be vectored to their targets by the SOF teams. The Strike Eagles worked mostly at night, the A-1 OAs mostly during the day.
One of the keys to the Scud operations were special all-terrain vehicles and humvees, which could be carried inside special operations helicopters. Machine guns, grenade launchers, and antitank missiles gave the vehicles considerable firepower. Besides the driver and up to ten passengers, gunners could sit on elevated swivel-seats at the rear.
Transporting the vehicles and combat teams across sometimes two hundred miles of hostile territory presented a problem, however. The fuel required for the long-range missions also weighed the helos down. All that weight meant they couldn’t hover: They had to literally land on the fly. Twenty-knot rolling touchdowns on a smooth landing surface arc one thing—and they are quite another in sand dunes at night. The uneven terrain—not to mention rocks—could easily destroy the fuel-laden helos.
As soon as the operations began, the special operators realized that their aerial and satellite intelligence photos—used by the Air Force for their earlier attacks—in many cases missed the desert roads the Scud transports were actually using. And even when the targets were pointed out, hitting individual missile launchers from 15,000 feet and above was a difficult proposition.
Back behind the lines, Downing met with Buster Glosson to discuss the possibility of using CBU minefields on the newly discovered Scud routes and rear staging areas. Glosson liked the idea. So Downing asked him to come along to discuss the plan with Schwarzkopf, who still insisted on signing off on every covert mission. The CINC tended to trust the Air Force general more than he did SOF officers. After hearing the plan, the always skeptical Schwarzkopf turned to Glosson, who of course gave it his thumbs-up. The boss was convinced.
“Once we figured out what the logistics flow was, we went in and put these minefields in,” said Downing. “And they were devastating.”
Cooperation between SOF and Air Force units was very high, and probably saved the lives of a number of operators behind the lines. On at least two occasions, Air Force F-15Es intervened when Iraqis attacked the special operations teams. In one case, a Strike Eagle pilot switched on his landing lights and plunged toward a patrol of nine armored vehicles, scattering them so a SOF helo could rescue a four-man SOF contingent. In another, an Eagle weapons officer used a smart bomb as an antiaircraft weapon, wiping out an Iraqi helicopter.
As part of the SOF Scud campaign, Blackhawk helicopters conducted armed reconnaissance missions, flying their specially equipped MII-60s at night with the aid of night-vision goggles. On their first night out, they nailed a Scud.
When they reported this to Downing, he was skeptical. Downing was a Vietnam veteran with two tours as a junior infantry officer; he knew better than to trust the first reports back from the field.
“Yeah, right,” he told them. “Let’s see the videos.”
Like most U.S. military aircraft, the sophisticated helicopters included equipment that recorded attacks. His men dutifully brought the tape in, and set it unseen in the viewer. Downing frowned through the fast forward with obvious disbelief.
Then the pilot slowed the tape just as a Scud missile came into focus on the screen. A few puffs appeared; an Iraqi soldier ran past the camera.
“Holy shit!” said Downing, as the Scud exploded.
He grabbed the phone and called General Schwarzkopf. “They got some Scud missiles,” he told the general when he came on the line.
“Yeah, right.”
“No, we really did.”
“Okay, that’s good,” said Schwarzkopf, hanging up, still clearly unconvinced.
Downing turned to his staff. “Get me an airplane,” he said. The general grabbed “Dave,” one of the warrant officers who had flown the mission. Three and a half hours later, the two men walked into General Schwarzkopf’s war room in Riyadh.
“What are you doing here?” demanded Schwarzkopf.
“Sir, I want to talk to you about these Scud missiles,” Downing told him.
“Yeah, right.”
“We’ve got a video I’d like to show you,” said Downing.
Glosson was standing nearby. “I’d like to see it,” said the Air Force general, who was himself taking a lot of the heat for the Scud launches.
Sweeney set up the video. Schwarzkopf hunched over the monitor—then began dancing like a kid as the screen lit up with flames.
“Holy shit! That’s a Scud missile. Hey, where’d you get this?” he asked Downing. “Can we transmit this back to the States?”
For Downing, it was a particularly sweet moment. Several years before, Schwarzkopf had cornered him in a Pentagon hallway, and lambasted him for pushing a proposal to outfit Special Operations helicopters with rockets, miniguns, and cannons. The helicopters Schwarzkopf had scorned had just scored a big kill.
Downing didn’t bother mentioning it.
IRAQI Scud launches peaked on January 21, when fourteen were fired; ten were launched on January 25 and another six on January 26. By then, the missiles had become a priority for the Air Force. The British SAS, and then American Special Forces units, took up the operation soon afterward. Firings dropped off precipitously during the second, third, and fourth weeks of the war, dwindling off to nothing by war’s end.
U.S. and British efforts to stop them had had an effect, but the Iraqis were clever and resourceful, and going after the missiles was something like trying to figure out a shell game.
The Scud campaign didn’t achieve its intended aim of breaking up the allied coalition—but it did tie up considerable American resources. And though Scuds were tactically negligible, they could hurt, and
hurt bad. An attack on Dhahran in late February, for example, killed twenty-eight U.S. soldiers and injured ninety-seven others.
Assessments after the war concluded that attacks on the missiles by fixed-wing aircraft were only very marginally effective. Most searches and attacks from the air took place at night (to protect the aircraft), but at night, even when an attacking aircraft flew directly on top of a missile site, the limits of airborne sensors and the vagaries of weapons made the site hard to hit. The ability of the Iraqis to modify the missiles and their tactics added further problems.
It might have made a difference if SOF had made a concerted effort against the Scuds from the beginning of the war, but that is speculation. The Iraqis were operating a small number of highly mobile launchers across a vast area.
The Scud campaign was probably the most successful Iraqi effort of the war.
GOING DEEP
As the Allied Command prepared for the ground war, Special Forces units prepared special reconnaissance (SR) missions to coincide with the attack. These were classic SF operations, providing mission commanders with information about enemy movements and capabilities.
And in at least one case, enemy dirt.
Two teams went into Iraq in the area through which Lieutenant General Fred Franks, the VII Corps commander, intended to sweep, testing soil conditions and analyzing the terrain in order to determine whether the desert soil would be able to support tanks and other heavy vehicles.
Inserted by Pave Lows, the teams included engineers who tested the soil with penetrometers. They also used still and video cameras to give commanders a visual record of what they’d be facing once they crossed into Iraq.
The overall thrust of the allied plan depended on a wide maneuver, or “left hook”—the famous “Hail Mary” that sent American troops racing north into Iraq before turning back east in the direction of Kuwait. While the strike would hit the Iraqis on their flank, the maneuvering American troops would themselves be vulnerable on their flanks. Real-time intelligence on the ground beyond the flanks was critical for both the XVIII Airborne Corps and VII Corps, the two allied groups charged with the forming the hook.
The XVIII Airborne Corps, which included the American 101st and 82nd Airborne Divisions, started farther west and would charge to the Euphrates before turning cast. The VII Corps would head roughly toward Al Busayyah and then swing right for Kuwait.
SF teams were assigned to each Corps to provide intelligence. Team members spent roughly a month prior to their jump-off occupied with training and developing techniques for the mission. The general game plan for each team was similar. They’d be inserted by helicopter at night, then hand-dig large holes, called “hide sites,” where they would stay during the day. The missions usually broke down to six or eight men, split into two hide sites. The two elements might locate several miles from each other, or they might be close together, depending on the particular circumstances. (There were at least six teams.) The teams were equipped with a variety of communications gear and armed with MP-5 submachine guns, grenade launchers, a variety of other light weapons, and a variety of communications gear.
The sites themselves, in areas as much as 165 miles inside enemy territory, were to be located near highways the Iraqis were expected to use to move troops, and the plan called for the SF teams to observe and radio back information day and night. Teams spotting armored concentrations and Scud missiles were to call in immediately: otherwise they would call at regular intervals. Generally the plans called for the units to stay in place until “picked up” by approaching ground troops.
The SF SR teams were sent out on the evening of February 23.
It turned out that many were plagued by bad luck—and far worse, lousy intelligence. Information provided to the teams indicated that most of the areas into which they were to be dropped were sparsely populated; several teams found this wasn’t the case. Additional snafus, including delays that upset mission timing, caused severe complications.
Two of the SR missions supporting the VII Corps remained undetected and provided important intelligence until they were joined by elements of the I st Cavalry Division on February 27. A third team had to be exfiltrated early because of the presence of Iraqi forces.
But things proved to be much more difficult in the XVIII Airborne area, where three missions ran into problems.
On one, the operators discovered their target site was a Bedouin camp. As they scouted for another site in their helicopter, they came under attack from antiaircraft artillery and SAMs and had to abort the mission.
SR 008B, a three-man team drawn from 5th SFG A-Detachment 523 and led by Master Sergeant Jeffrey Sims, was infiltrated by Blackhawk to a location near Qawam am Hamzal, where they would monitor vehicles for the XVIII Airborne Corps. Though the approach of the helicopters set local dogs barking, Sims and his men, Sergeant First Class Ronald Torbett and Staff Sergeant Roy Tabron, ignored them, and moved quickly to their hide site four kilometers away. Each man packed about 175 pounds; besides food, ammunition, weapons, communication gear, and equipment to construct their hide site, the Green Berets carried ten quarts of water apiece. Though they were armed with a variety of weapons, their ammunition stocks were relatively light. Their job was to stay out of sight, not shoot people.
The next morning, Bedouins appeared in the field where the Green Berets were hidden. The team lay low, hoping they might somehow be overlooked. No such luck: Around midday a little girl and her father stuck their heads into the rear exit hole of the hide site. The shocked Iraqis quickly backed away. As a pair of team members moved to grab them. they saw about twenty other Bedouins nearby. Loath to harm the civilians, the three SF operators grabbed their essential gear and moved down the drainage ditch.
The Bedouins closed in, perhaps believing they might earn the reward the Iraqi government had posted for captured pilots. Several began firing small arms. The SF team called in air support and asked to be extracted.
A long firefight followed. At one point, an F-16 pilot had to back the Iraqis off by dropping a thousand-pound bomb and CBUs. But such measures proved temporary; the team was trapped in the relatively open terrain. Buildings near the highway provided Iraqis a vantage to pin them down, while others tried to flank them. Despite efforts to conserve their ammunition, their small stock quickly dwindled.
About an hour and a half after the firefight began, another F-16 managed to hold off the attackers with another bomb strike, then circled above while a Special Forces Blackhawk rushed in to try a broad daylight rescue. Enemy troops were now closing in. Disregarding his flight plan, Warrant Officer “James” blew right over an Iraqi division, leaving the startled Iraqis un-shouldering their rifles.
On the ground, Sims and his men grimly thought about the grenades they’d clipped to their belts as last-resort weapons. The grenades were meant for themselves.
Suddenly, Sims heard a helicopter approaching. “He was screaming down the road, going around 140 knots, on one side of the power line, six feet off the deck,” Sims remembers. The team popped a small white flare to mark their position. The helicopter pitched its nose up, swung around in a circle, and then slapped down nearly on top of them.
Team member Sergeant First Class Ronald Torbett’s mouth dropped. He thought the helicopter had been hit by the fusillade of rifle fire from the Iraqis—not an unreasonable assumption, given the hail of bullets from the enemy troops nearby. But he was wrong. The difficult maneuver had been controlled, a piece of master aircraft driving between power lines and Iraqi gunfire. As the helo’s door gunner laid down suppressing fire, the three Green Berets jumped inside. The Iraqis continued to rake the helicopter; miraculously, no one inside was seriously hurt, and the pilot managed to repeat his aerobatics, dodging bullets and power lines to get away. Flying at top speed no more than twenty feet off the ground, the Blackhawk barreled back toward coalition lines.
It made it home safely, but was so badly damaged it didn’t fly again during the war.
&n
bsp; DECEPTION ON KUWAIT BEACHES
Even though the main allied ground attack came from the west, General Schwarzkopf’s plan included a direct attack on southern Kuwait, a mission tasked to the Marine Corps 1st and 2nd Divisions, along with Kuwaiti and Arab units. This attack would tie down Iraqis as the “hook” was launched; it would also aim to eventually capture Japer airfield, Kuwait International Airport, and Kuwait City, all strategically and symbolically important.
One option that was also seriously considered was a Marine amphibious landing on Kuwait.
However, reconnaissance of the beaches during the fall and winter months by SEALs, as well as by Marine and Navy units, made it clear that an amphibious landing would be bloody, and result in the destruction of a considerable amount of Kuwait’s infrastructure. Reluetantly, the Marines settled on a land assault from the south, itself no picnic. To make it work, the Iraqis had to be convinced the Marines were coming from the sea.
Special Forces SEALs played an important role in the deception. Lieutenant General Walter E. Boomer, the Marine Corps CENTCOM commander, asked Navy Special Warfare Task Group commander Captain Ray Smith to develop a plan to help divert Iraqi armor in the Kuwait area. Boomer wanted to draw the Iraqis tanks and guns away from his own units and tie them down near the coast. The general suggested a diversionary landing operation; the SEAL leader quickly accepted.
After the air war began, the SEALs began looking for a beach where they could stage their mock invasion. Fifteen reconnaissance missions were undertaken in the area between the Saudi border and Ra’s al Qulay’ah on the Kuwaiti coast. Pave Lows supported some of these missions, inserting the SEALs on “soft duck” operations; the others were made from patrol boats. On at least one occasion, the Iraqis fired at the Special Forces troops, but no casualties were sustained. But neither could the SEALs find the right kind of beach.