Every Man a Tiger: The Gulf War Air Campaign

  Meanwhile, Khaled bin Sultan became interested in the efforts to prepare leaflets and radio and television broadcasts, and to exploit enemy deserters. With his help, the message was made more subtle and complex. Where the American aim had been intimidation, he wanted to emphasize cooperation. In his view, Iraqi soldiers would respond positively to messages like “We know you didn’t want to invade Kuwait, and we, your brothers, will right this wrong. Please don’t oppose us. Join us instead.”

  In essence, the enemy was hit with two different messages: The Schwarzkopf tough message showed a B-52 saying, “Desert Storm is coming to your area. Flee immediately.” The Khaled message showed Coalition soldiers sitting around a campfire, eating roast lamb, drinking tea, and saying, “Come and join us; we are your friends. This leaflet will be your ticket to safety.” Both had an impact.

  The PSYOPS message was primarily delivered by air. During Desert Shield, Volant Solo aircraft and selected ground radio stations beamed the Voice of America service in Arabic. These broadcasts continued throughout the bombing campaign and the ground war. After the war began, C-130s, B-52s, and F-16s dropped leaflets on the Iraqi Army. Schwarzkopf personally devised a plan whereby air-dropped leaflets would inform a targeted Iraqi division that they were going to be bombed by B-52s the next day. And so it would happen; the next day hundreds of 500-pound bombs would rain on the division. Afterward, more leaflets would be dropped, advising the Iraqis to flee, as more strikes were planned for their area. And the next day, the unit would be hit again.

  Debriefings of Iraqi POWs indicated that this operation significantly affected the troops’ morale and was an important factor in their decision to surrender or desert.

  ★ Because psychological warfare is more art than science, it is very difficult to judge the effectiveness of a PSYOPS campaign.

  It is clear that no one in the target audience was missed. Nearly thirty million leaflets were dropped in the KTO, and the world saw Iraqi soldiers surrendering by the thousands, clutching the white leaflets that guaranteed their safe treatment. Radio broadcasts probably also had an effect, as a third of the POWs stated in their debriefings that these affected their decision to surrender.

  Nevertheless, a study of PSYOPS after the war concluded that it was not so much the leaflets and the broadcasts as the incessant aerial attacks, the unrelenting presence of Coalition aircraft over the battlefield day and night, that changed people from fighters to quitters. Airpower sent a message to Iraqi soldiers that they had no refuge from attack from above. The noise of jet engines throughout the night, the inability to travel safely, the devastating and sudden attack from an unseen B-52 or F-111 laser-guided bomb drove them into a helpless, hopeless state. The leaflet offered hope of survival. The brutal, unrelenting air campaign made the message on the leaflet count.

  However we explain it, nearly 80,000 out of an estimated 200,000 Iraqis in the KTO surrendered, and most of the remaining 120,000 took to their heels when Coalition tanks appeared on the scene.

  ★ During February, desertion became the number one problem for the Iraqi generals. In some Iraqi divisions, hundreds—even thousands—of troops simply went home. After the Battle of Khafji, the IIId Corps lost at least a further 10 percent of its troops to desertions, and the rate of desertion was accelerating as air continued to pound them. There were even desertions in the pampered, privileged Republican Guard.

  Not only were the trigger-pullers walking off the battlefield, but other vital functions were suffering. The logistical resupply of the army was not adequate, and there were shortages of food and water. Essential maintenance was being ignored, and as a result, many of the vehicles, radars, heavy guns, and other machines of war were inoperable or impaired. The lack of maintenance on their fleet of vehicles, combined with air attacks on everything that moved, had reduced the Iraqi logistics teams to using Kuwaiti garbage trucks to carry supplies to their troops dug in on the desert. The trends for Iraq were all bad.

  As February wore on, Joint STARS picked up more and more movement at night. Convoys of up to fifty vehicles were trying to evade the ever-present aircraft overhead. Though the darkness of night gave them some shielding, their best ally turned out to be the waves of drizzly weather that passed through the KTO every few days. Unfortunately for the Iraqis, the F-16 pilots developed attack options with the moving target indicator displays on their radar, and took away the Iraqi weather advantage.

  At that point, the national community (the intelligence people who didn’t deploy to the war) estimated that the Iraqis could no longer meet the logistic requirements that ground combat would impose. While they were believed to have plenty of ammunition, they would run out of food and fuel.

  To the Iraqi generals in Kuwait, withdrawal doubtless seemed the best course; but it was too late for that, unless they could find a way to get the aircraft off their backs.

  Schwarzkopf ’s dilemma remained “When do we cross the border? When do we start losing Coalition ground forces to save Kuwait?” To which Chuck Horner added, “When can we get this over with and stop the loss of Coalition airmen’s lives, losses that started on January 17? Too often, these deaths were overlooked by the media and others whose eyes saw only ground combat, as if that were the only game in town.”

  MISSION CREEP

  As the war went on, the effectiveness of the Iraqi Air Force continued to decline, even as Iraqi aircraft played no part in the defense of the homeland, after their futile attempts during the first few days of the war. The aircraft lost were invariably parked in shelters or fleeing to Iran, and the losses did not always come from Coalition guns and missiles. On February 7, twelve Iraqi jets made a run for Iran. Three of these were shot down by F-15s, and six crashed in Iran, either because they were unable to land safely or because they ran out of fuel. The fear factor must have been very high among Iraqi pilots.

  To offset the failure of their most effective air defense systems, fighter aircraft and radar-guided surface-to-air missiles, the Iraqis bolstered defenses in the KTO with short-range, optically aimed heat-seeking surface-to-air missiles, such as the SA-16 or some variant of this Russian-built weapon.

  The increased battlefield defenses proved especially dangerous to USAF A-10s. The Warthogs were descendants of World War II P-47 Jugs, as well as the Vietnam-era Thuds that Chuck Horner had flown. They were tough, heavily armored (for aircraft), and very survivable, but slow; and they were used primarily for attacks against enemy armor in close support of friendly ground troops. For that purpose they packed quite a large punch, primarily a 30 mm Gatling gun in the nose, one round from which could destroy a tank over a mile away (the Warthog was designed around this gun, which is as big as a Volkswagen, when you include the ammunition drum). It also carried the IR Maverick missile, as well as regular bombs.

  The Warthogs were especially vulnerable to short-range SAMs, because they took such a long time to zoom back to the safety of medium altitude after a bombing, strafing, or missile-diving attack.

  The good news was that intelligence estimates placed only about two hundred of these missiles in Iraqi hands. Thus, one strategy Horner considered—and instantly discarded—was to deliberately expose his aircraft, in order to “run them out of bullets.” Not a smart idea, he told himself. There have to be other ways to defeat heat-seekers.

  ★ At the start of the war, the A-10s were used in the role for which they were designed, attacking enemy armor in close proximity to friendly forces. Warthog pilots described the first day of the war as a “turkey shoot.” Because Sandy Sharpe and Dave Sawyer, the A-10 wing commanders, kept their aircraft above 10,000 feet, they were able to inflict great violence on front-line Iraqi divisions without unnecessarily exposing the aircraft to enemy defenses (though two aircraft were hit by small-arms fire, the damage was negligible).

  The picture got complicated after the opening days of the war, when bad weather over the KTO gave the Iraqis time to dig in deeper.

  By the time the weather cleared, later
in January, the Iraqis had gone to ground and the impact on them of the high-flying A-10s was far less devastating than before. Consequently, on the thirty-first of January, it was decided that the Warthogs could initiate their attacks from 4,000 to 7,000 feet. In that way, the pilots would be closer to their targets and could more easily spot the dug-in and camouflaged tanks, APCs, and artillery pieces. It also put the aircraft closer to the Iraqis, so they could more accurately aim their guns and heat-seeking missiles.

  Despite the increased risk, the A-10s were getting the job done very well, and this encouraged their commanders to task them against other targets, such as SAM sites, fixed structures, and logistical storage areas. The commanders in the TACC, and even at the wing, did not realize that they were all in the process of “mission creep.” As a result, they were putting this aircraft and their pilots in needless jeopardy.

  For a time, everything went along just fine. The lower altitude allowed the A-10 pilots to find their targets more easily than before, and the tank kills rose. Meanwhile, the defensive threat seemed pretty much unchanged, as the pilots followed the daily directives Sandy Sharpe and Dave Sawyer gave them both verbally and in the pilots’ “Read File.” Then came A-10 successes hunting Scuds in Iraq and as a “Wart Weasel,” and mission creep went into high gear.

  Soon, TACC commanders were sending A-10s against targets deep in the KTO, and the command element aboard the ABCCC EC-130 began to divert the A-10s deeper and deeper into Kuwait and Iraq.

  Though the A-10 pilots questioned this ever-increasing tasking of the A-10 deeper into harm’s way, headquarters ignored their fears (though the two wing commanders did manage to work with the Black Hole and choke off the truly insane mission creep jobs, such as a proposal to bomb an SA-2 storage site near Basra).

  Now that A-10s were flying deep behind the lines, battle damage to the aircraft began to mount, and some serious hits were tearing off major portions of the aircraft structure. The pilots were attacking the Tawalkana and Medina divisions of the Republican Guard at 4,000 feet above the ground and sixty to seventy miles north of the border and safety. On the fifteenth of February, the Republican Guard stopped taking it lying down and launched eight SAMs, which knocked down two aircraft and extensively damaged Dave Sawyer’s jet.

  Sawyer climbed out over the hostile desert at a sizzling 200 knots, with thousands of holes in his engines and tail, and the top of his right empennage blown off. Just as he crossed the last Iraqis, some fifteen miles north of the border and safety, he looked down to see a flight of faster F-16s working over a huddled third-string Iraqi infantry division that Saddam had staked out to absorb our ground offensive’s first blow. A lonely moment. Also an angry one. Somebody had badly screwed up priorities.

  We had a problem. Our most effective tank killer was being shot up at an alarming rate. In fact, before February 15, we had lost only one A-10 (on February 2 to an IR SAM), while suffering a little over twenty-five other aircraft shot down. Still, before February 15, the large number of battle-damaged A-10s was wearing on my mind. Thirty or forty had been hit, yet had survived and limped home for repairs—a tribute to their rugged design and safety features. But a lot of hits was a lot of hits. Too many hits.

  On the fifteenth, when I walked into the TACC, I learned that two A-10s were down and three damaged, with one of these losing much of its tail. The airplanes were too valuable in a variety of roles, from Scud-hunting to close air support, to have them grounded by battle damage. There was a strong possibility that the Iraqis would run me out of airplanes before they ran out of SAMs.

  With a heavy heart, I told the battle staff we were going to pull the A-10s back and use them only against the Iraqi divisions near the border. The Republican Guard and other armored divisions being held in reserve would now be off-limits to the A-10s, until later in the war, when the Iraqis had run out of heat-seeking missiles. Though I was worried that my decision would sting the egos of the Warthog drivers (a fate they sure didn’t deserve, since they were excelling at everything they’d been tasked to do), I just couldn’t stand by and watch them take hits and now losses.

  But Dave Sawyer wrote me the next day, the sixteenth, and (without really meaning to) relieved my worries. “Your guidance to limit A-10s to southern areas is appropriate and timely,” he wrote. (That’s military for “Thank you, boss. We were being given more than our share of pain and suffering.”) He went on to relate the specific procedures he and Sandy Sharpe had worked out:

  “We have prohibited daytime strafe for the present, except in true close air support, search and rescue, or troops in contact situations. With the OA-10 forward air control spotters, flight leads using binoculars, or a high (relative) speed recce pass in the 4-7,000 foot range, we should be able to determine worthwhile armor targets, then stand off and kill them with Mavericks. We’ll save the gun (and our aircraft) for the ground offensive. The OA-10s and our two night A-10 squadrons have yet to receive battle damage. There’s safety in altitude and darkness. When the ground war starts, we’ ll strafe up a storm and get in as close as we need to to get the job done. No A-10 pilot should ever have to buy a drink at any Army bar in the future. Until G day, request you task A-10s only in air interdiction kill boxes you’ve now limited us to. If you need us to go to deeper AI targets, we plan to impose a 10,000-foot above-the-ground minimum altitude there, and employ only free-fall ordnance and Mavericks. We’ll promptly exit any AI area in which we get an IR or radar SAM launch.”

  It wasn’t a case of the A-10s failing to do the job, it was rather a matter of building on the strengths of our overall force. We would use the strengths of the F-16s, with their speed and automated bombing systems, to attack the heavily defended divisions deep in the KTO, while the more capable close-in capabilities of the A-10’s 30mm cannon would be reserved for the more heavily dug-in, but more lightly defended, Iraqis just across the Saudi border.

  Later—after the results of the war were compiled—the superior survivability of the Warthogs was amply demonstrated. Of the U.S. aircraft tasked to carry the mail against the Iraqi Army, only the F-16s and USMC F/A-18s exceeded the A-10s in fewest losses per 1,000 sorties.

  There is a story about a young fighter pilot who walks into a saloon in some faraway place and sits down at a table with a tough old veteran, deep in thought and drink.

  “What is the secret to life and success in flying fighters?” the youngster asks the old hero.

  And the steely-eyed, well-worn fighter pilot sings out, “More whiskey, more women, and faster airplanes.”

  Well, in this war the Warthogs had a lot of success, but they sure didn’t have much whiskey, women, or a fast airplane; they did it with brains and courage.

  APPROACHING G DAY

  Since the Schwarzkopf plan for the ground offensive involved a massive, surprise flanking attack (which was to be anchored by a direct assault into Kuwait), the ground forces slated for the flanking attack had to secretly relocate to assembly areas west of their original positions. The secrecy was crucial to the plan, and the CINC had been adamant about maintaining it. As we have already seen, he had refused to let the Army start its movements until the air war started, lest the Iraqi Air Force discover his preparation for the “end run” of their defenses.

  For Gary Luck’s XVIIIth Airborne Corps, this directive proved to be a big problem, for they had the farthest to go—over 400 miles, with nearly 15,000 troops and their equipment—at the same time that Fred Franks’s VIIth Corps was making its own way west over the same, two-lane Tapline Road. Despite the obstacles, Luck and his two heavy division commanders, Major Generals McCaffery and Peay, worked out how to make this difficult movement.

  Luck had one serious advantage over Franks’s heavily armored corps, in that his own corps was more easily transported by air. In fact, the 82d Airborne and to some extent the 101st Air Assault division were designed for air transport.

  Enter the USAF’s General Ed Tenoso and his fleet of C-130s.

  Up until
the move west, the C-130s’ main task had been in high-priority cargo-moving—supporting all the Coalition forces (though with emphasis on United States forces). Where they went and what they moved was decided by Major General Dane Starling, Schwarzkopf’s J-4, or logistician.

  Early in Desert Shield, Bill Rider, the CENTAF logistician, and his director of transportation, Bob Edminsten, had set up a C-130 airline in the theater. The C-130s flew regular, scheduled passenger flights, called Star routes, and cargo flights, called Camel routes. Starling determined what had priority on these flights, and Tenoso’s airlifters put that in the Air Tasking Order.

  This “airline” was already a vast operation before the move west, but the effort associated with that move was simply staggering (and largely unsung), with a big C-130 landing every five to ten minutes, every hour of the day, every day of the week, for two weeks after the start of the war on the seventeenth of January, hauling the vast army to faraway places like Rafhah, hundreds of miles up the Tapline Road—a nose-to-tail stream of C-130s.

  ★ As the armies completed their moves to the west, and the forces south of Kuwait came up on line, weather became the enemy.

  Chuck Horner now takes up the story:

  ★ As February wound down, General Schwarzkopf was under great pressure from Washington to initiate the ground attack before the Iraqi Army was able to negotiate a surrender that would allow them to leave Kuwait with their remaining tanks and guns. The date Schwarzkopf selected for G day was the twenty-fourth of February.