The “Scud Alert” warning also initiated actions in the air defense cell. First, the Army troops would inform their Patriot batteries; civil defense agencies would also be notified, so they could warn civilians to take cover. Then the AWACS display would light up, showing the approximate launch point, missile flight path, and probable impact zone. This information would be relayed automatically throughout the command-and-control network, so F-15 or F-16 pilots could be vectored toward the mobile launchers. At the affected Patriot batteries, systems would be checked to make sure they were ready for computer-initiated firing.
Since to the DSP’s sensors B-52 strikes initially looked very much like a Scud launch, there was a quick check with the AWACS display to discover if the Scud attack was genuine. Once that was determined, Horner would watch CNN for a real-time live report.
Though most Scuds did little damage, there were still bad moments. One that fell in Israel caused a large number of injuries, another destroyed the school attended by General Behery’s children, and another fell in the street outside RSAF headquarters (it was immediately attacked by souvenir hunters). A piece of molten metal from this Scud (or from the Patriot that intercepted it) burned a hole through the roof of the RAF administration building and dropped sizzling onto a desk where a pair of Brits were having a late-night cup of tea. Finally, and tragically, in the waning moments of the war, during a period when the Patriot battery defending the city was off-line, a Scud slammed into a warehouse in Dhahran where U.S. Army transportation troops were sleeping. Over twenty-five troops were killed and nearly a hundred injured—the largest numbers of allied casualties from a single Gulf War event. In fact, Scuds killed more U.S. troops than were killed in any single engagement during the eight months of war on the sea, six weeks of war in the air, and four days of war on the ground (a total of about seventy-five soldiers were killed by the Iraqis, and another seventy-five were killed by blue-on-blue).
The failure to stop the Scud threat was Chuck Horner’s greatest Gulf War failure, the one area where airpower could not secure and maintain the military initiative.
COLLATERAL DAMAGE
A major and largely unsung obsession shared by Chuck Horner, his planners, the Coalition pilots, and the President of the United States, was to prevent needless civilian casualties—collateral damage, in the military euphemism. Military targets and military personnel were fair game, but ordinary Iraqis were not responsible for the criminal acts of their rulers. They had a right to live in safety, as far as humanly possible.
Chuck Horner will never forget George Bush’s anguish in August at Camp David as he contemplated the deaths that would follow the decisions he’d been forced to make—an anguish, Horner is convinced, that was the right response to the actions he was taking. Horner himself has felt similar pain many times. The needless death of civilians had to be avoided.
On the whole, Coalition airmen successfully followed this course. On two occasions, they failed:
The first, simply, was a tragic mistake. During an RAF strike on a bridge, the guidance system of a laser-guided bomb failed, and the bomb fell into a nearby marketplace, killing or injuring several Iraqi civilians. Since the target was legitimate, and reasonable measures had been taken during an attack on a legitimate target, no blame could be attached to this tragedy.
The second was more complicated—the attack on the Al-Firdus command-and-control bunker.
In the planning for the offensive air campaign, a master target list had been created. The list included thirty-three targets designated as command-and-control centers, though what exactly they commanded and controlled was not totally clear. Number thirty on the list was the Al-Firdus bunker in Baghdad, which was initially scheduled to be struck on day three of the war, a day when many targets were scheduled to be hit. (Day-three targets tended to be the leftovers, after the really important targets were struck on the first two and a half days). In the event, Al-Firdus and the other thirty-two bunkers slipped in priority, as the demands of Scud-hunting, more time-sensitive targets, and weather were met.
Still, in the eyes of the Black Hole planners, Al-Firdus remained a legitimate target of some importance to Saddam’s war machine. It was definitely constructed to house military command and control, and it was camouflaged, barb-wired, and guarded (though in truth, hardly anything in Iraq was not camouflaged, barb-wired, and guarded). What Black Hole planners did not know was that hundreds of Iraqi civilians were using the bunker as an air raid shelter.
At last, after nearly four weeks of war, Al-Firdus made it to the top of the list. Planners proposed it for the night of 13-14 February; it was approved as legitimate by the lawyer in the plans shop who watched over the legal aspects of target selection (he could and did veto targets), and then it was approved by Schwarzkopf in the evening briefing.
Chuck Horner reflects:
In retrospect, I should have asked harder questions. For one, if we could wait almost a month to strike this bunker, what made it so important now? For another, how was the bunker actually being used to command Iraqi military forces? Since the real reason we were attacking the bunker was almost certainly the availability of F-117 sorties (we’ve got lots to spend; if we don’t use them, they’re wasted), I doubt that anyone could have given me a good answer to those questions. In the absence of a satisfactory answer, I could have erased that target from the list, and hundreds of Iraqi lives could have been saved and a terrible tragedy avoided. But all of that is hindsight. The reality is F-117s hit the Al-Firdus bunker, and we killed several hundred people.
However, the questions I failed to ask aren’t the only questions that need asking here. For instance, why use the bunker as an air raid shelter? To the Black Hole planners and the F-117 pilots flying the missions, it is inconceivable that any Iraqi in Baghdad would want to be anywhere but in his own home during air attacks. American bombs did not hit family homes. Pilots were painstakingly careful to bomb only militarily significant targets. Their bombing was accurate.
Of course, it wasn’t only American bombs that were falling out of the sky; thousands of artillery shells and hundreds of surface-to-air missiles were thrown up each night. All of that lethal stuff had to fall back to earth. In that case, maybe it made sense to seek shelter.
And yet, other questions remain.
When the other bunkers were struck, no civilian casualties were reported. Why did Al-Firdus and not the other thirty-two bunkers contain civilians? Did the local commander, in a goodwill gesture, invite locals into his bunker? Or did he suck up to his friends and superiors by offering them shelter not available to the average Iraqi? Who knows . . . except maybe Saddam?
There is one certainty in war: you will always face uncertainty. The enemy does his best to hide the answers to any questions you might ask of him. He tries to tell you that he possesses nothing of value. If Saddam had announced that the Al-Firdus bunker was an air raid shelter, and not a command-and-control center, if he had painted a red crescent or red cross on the roof, would we have believed him? We would probably have asked more questions, but it’s likely that the bunker would still have been hit (though if we had known the truth, that target would not have appeared in the Air Tasking Order).
The bottom line in war is you are always operating with half the story.
My first knowledge of the tragedy came from CNN, with pictures of bodies being carried from the smoking shelter. In a way, I was glad we had to endure those terrible scenes. Too often, we look on war as a game or a noble adventure. Certainly war can pursue noble objectives—stopping the murder, rape, and torture in Kuwait being a prime example. Certainly men and women undergoing the most stressful battlefield conditions rise to unheard-of selflessness. But war is still, when you get to the bottom line, killing, maiming, and wanton destruction—humans at their lowest, trying to impose their will on others. War may be necessary, but it must always be detested.
During the 1700 changeover briefing, I told the troops in the TACC: “Nobody needs to fe
el bad about the bunker incident in Baghdad, but we all should feel bad about the loss of life, anybody’s life, because every life is precious. It doesn’t matter whether it’s an Iraqi soldier or a kid in a bunker in Baghdad, we should feel bad about the loss of one of God’s creatures. On the other hand, from a professional standpoint, we have nothing to be ashamed of. The mission was planned and executed flawlessly. The intelligence was as good as there is available. As for the people who don’t understand that war is groping in the dark trying to do dastardly things so the war will be over with, well, I don’t have much time for them. You would sure think modern, educated people would understand that truth, but many choose not to, so to hell with them. We’ll have a lot of ‘weak willies’ to worry about now. They worry about whether they’ll get up in the morning, so to hell with them. You just continue what you’re doing, because what you’re doing is right and you’re doing it very well. We’ve got to get Kuwait back to the Kuwaitis.”
Maybe if I’d had more time to think about it, I wouldn’t have made such a hard-assed speech; but I was worried that people would be overconcerned about the political cost of civilian casualties and try to shut down the air campaign. I was not wrong to worry.
Targeting in the Baghdad area all but stopped, and General Schwarzkopf began to anguish over every target we nominated, denying approval of most of them. Okay, this change was not in fact hard to accept. Most of the known high-value targets had already been destroyed or heavily damaged, and by then our main thrust had turned to destroying tanks, artillery, and lines of communication in the KTO. But a notion sticks in my throat that someone above the CINC had issued guidance based on fear of public opinion polls. This is not a fact, it’s a suspicion, and yes, civilian policy-makers must guide the warriors; but it sends trembles through me. War is political. So be it.
We eventually went back to Baghdad.
The lesson must be that war is not antiseptic, that innocent lives will be lost, that commanders in arms will kill one another. It is important that leaders at all levels do their utmost to minimize death and suffering. It must be an obsession with the commanders and planners, and of everyone who has a finger on the trigger. On the other hand, survival on the battlefield and success in war require decisive action in an ill-defined environment while using the most lethal weapons ever devised. That’s the rub. When the laser-guided bomb slips its release hooks, someone is going to die.
Let the deaths of American, Saudi, and British troops, let the deaths of Iraqi civilians, remind each of us that war is a hateful thing.
10
Lost and Found
IN combat operations, aircraft will be shot down; and in any air operation, equipment can fail. When an aircraft is shot down or its engine fails behind enemy lines, surviving crew are perilously exposed—and the people they’ve just bombed are hardly in a welcoming mood. This means, simply, that these crews expect a chance to come home before anyone can give them the welcome “they deserve.” That chance for rescue is a fundamental covenant between combat aircrews and their commanders. Aircrews’ confidence in that covenant is a function of the actual numbers rescued.
In Desert Storm, the numbers rescued, as compared with the numbers downed, was very low: Eighteen men and one woman became prisoners of war as a result of aircraft shoot-downs. Seven combat search-and-rescue (CSAR) missions were launched, resulting in three saves. That’s one saved for every six lost. Not an inspiring record.
It is therefore no surprise that the confidence of aircrews in the fundamental covenant was not high.
To discover the reason for the scarcity of CSAR missions in Desert Storm, one has to go back a few years.
In military doctrine, the rescue of soldiers, sailors, and airmen was originally a service responsibility—that is, the Air Force was responsible for organizing, equipping, and training the forces needed to pick up pilots who were shot down. For years, the Air Force did just that—its Air Rescue Service trained Pararescue Jumpers (PJs), enlisted men ready to parachute into enemy territory, perform emergency medical treatment on downed pilots, and fight off the enemy while the rescued airman was being winched up to a helicopter overhead. During Vietnam, PJs became the most decorated heroes of the war. Pilots admired no one more highly.
In 1983, the Air Rescue Units were transferred en masse to the newly created Special Operations Forces Command. Since the air movement of Special Operations soldiers to and from behind enemy lines is the same function as combat search-and-rescue, this change made great sense. There is one important difference, however, between SOF operations and air rescue. In SOF operations, there is some control over timing. This difference had serious consequences.
Meanwhile, the assets the Air Force had acquired to take people to and from behind enemy lines were placed under SOF command (or CINCSOF—before Goldwater-Nichols, air rescue forces had been assigned to Military Airlift Command). Among these were various helicopters and the HC-130 command-and-control aircraft. This version of the Hercules transport provided a platform for an on-scene director to orchestrate the rescue. Vietnam-era MH-53 Jolly Green Giant helicopters were now called PAVE LOW IIIs, and equipped with devices that permitted low-altitude flight at night. Later, a newer and smaller rescue helicopter was introduced for the SOF, the MH-60G Pave Hawk; it was also equipped for flying at treetop level at night. Though PJs were disappearing, new enlisted crews, called “Special Tactics Personnel,” were being trained to ride the SOF-penetrating helicopters. STPs performed the same functions as Vietnam-era PJs, and trained just as hard.
The monkey wrench in the works was the change in command lines that accompanied the 1983 changeover. The new SOF airmen now worked for an Army colonel whose primary focus was on glamorous missions behind enemy lines. He wanted his “air force” available to support his missions behind enemy lines and not tied up chasing after downed aircrews.
Some basic presuppositions made matters even worse: In their own private view, special forces fight alone, in isolation from other land, sea, air, and space forces. Therefore, for the most part SOF airmen trained for terrain-hugging night flights, which was considered the safest way to enter enemy airspace. In consequence, they felt they were ill-trained to conduct air rescue operations in daylight.
During the Gulf War, as it turned out, SOF airmen operating in Kuwait and southeastern Iraq61 owed their survival in enemy airspace, not to their night training, but to the grounding of Iraqi fighters by Coalition airpower and to the vastness of the desert, which was so large and inhospitable that Iraqi air defense forces could not cover all of it. And when Iraqi ground forces did locate Special Operations units, these units as often as not had to be picked up and returned to safety during daylight hours—SOF bias notwithstanding.
Meanwhile, reflecting post-Goldwater-Nichols realities, the CENTCOM air force was not the USAF; it was the USAF plus sizable numbers of aircraft from the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps, plus thousands of aircraft from other nations operating under the command of the Joint/Combined Force Air Component Commander, Chuck Horner. In other words, the individual service responsibility to conduct search-and-rescue had grown to include a great deal more than the U.S. Air Force. To handle this new situation, General Schwarzkopf set up a unique combat search-and-rescue organization. While retaining command of CSAR plans and operations in his own staff, the CINC placed his subordinate commander, Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Joe Stillwell, and his rescue cell in Horner’s Tactical Air Control Center. The TACC would likely be the first to learn when an aircraft was shot down and if the aircrew was alive; in the TACC, the CSAR cell could maintain contact with rescue forces in Iraq using the AWACS aircraft to relay commands or information; and the TACC controlled the air-to-air, air-to-ground, and Wild Weasel defense suppression forces needed to protect CSAR forces during a rescue. Finally, pilots orbiting overhead could best determine if a helicopter could survive local enemy defenses and make their pickup.
These sensible command-and-control procedures did not sit well
with Colonel Jessie Johnson, the Special Operations commander. To Johnson, it appeared that the CSAR commander worked for Horner (a situation Johnson did not like). Stillwell did not work for Horner. He worked for Schwarzkopf.
For obvious reasons, Schwarzkopf tasked rescues in northern Iraq to the air forces operating out of Incirlik, Turkey.
The mission of combat search-and-rescue in central and southern Iraq and Kuwait went to Jessie Johnson. Colonel Johnson’s MH-53 and MH-60 helicopters were based at King Fahd Air Base in eastern Saudi Arabia, where all SOF aircraft were based. When possible, however, they were placed on alert at forward operating locations at airfields along the Iraqi border, such as those near King Khalid Military City, and the towns of Rafha, Ar’ar, and Al Jouf, where A-10s were also operating in their Scud-hunting mission in the western Iraqi desert.
Unfortunately, for reasons already stated, the air rescue mission was never a top special forces priority. Thus, while the CSAR missions were directed and controlled by the joint recovery coordination cell in the TACC, the SOCCENT commander retained final mission approval and refused to okay a CSAF launch until a survivor could be confirmed on the ground. Yet, as always, the SOF airmen of the Air Force Special Operations command were eager and ready to rescue downed airmen anytime anywhere.62
The opportunity came early to test this system. On January 21, 1991, a Navy F-14 pilot, Lieutenant Devon Jones, was picked up in a daring rescue.
Jones’s F-14, call sign Slate 46, was flying over western Iraq looking for Iraqi fighters to shoot down, when an Iraqi SAM slammed into the jet and forced him to eject. Jones came down in the desert, which proved to be blessedly empty of Iraqis. He immediately took out his survival knife and hacked a hole in the hard ground big enough to crouch in. Then he hunkered down on top of his parachute and pulled a scraggly bush over his head. Since he knew the shoot-down had been reported to the AWACS, all he had to do was wait for rescue or capture, whichever came first.