As they neared the target, Mohammed got a perfect placement of the crosshairs on the runway that was their target.
Meanwhile, Sultan had grown concerned that the terrain-following autopilot might give a fly-up command because of all the debris being thrown up in front of them. He toggled off the automatic flight system and began to hand-fly the aircraft, easing it down to below 100 feet.
His preplanned attack had him flying across the runway, so bombing errors would be canceled out by the long string of bomblets carried in the JP-233 dispenser. However, since the other Tornadoes tasked to cut the runway would not be coming, he made an instant decision to fly down the runway to ensure it was rendered inoperable for its entire length. Even though this change in plan would expose their aircraft to the maximum gauntlet of enemy fire, he knew he had to do what he had to do.
Slamming his jet around in the night at hundreds of miles per hour, only tens of feet above the ground, he lined up on the long runway now located somewhere in the holocaust of bullets and rockets shooting into the sky. He pressed down with his right thumb on the red button on top of the stick, and the fire-control computer initiated the process that would dispense the runway-cratering bomb over the target.
The jet flashed into the bright streaks from the bullets and rockets meant to kill them, and Sultan spent his longest six seconds, flying down the Iraqi runway.
Then they were streaking back into the darkness and Sultan was about to sigh with relief, when he heard a loud thump, and the aircraft made a shudder. He froze, certain they had been hit by the antiaircraft fire. He nervously checked his dials and lights to see where the problem was. Are we on fire? Are we streaming precious fuel? Is this the end just when I’ve cheated death?
He shouted to Mohammed on the interphone, “We’ve been hit!”
“No, no,” Mohammed answered with his usual cool, “that’s just the empty weapons dispenser.” The dispenser automatically jettisoned when all the bombs were gone. Then he implored his fearless leader, “Please turn back, or else we are going to Baghdad!”
Filled with relief, the pilot pulled his aircraft around to a southerly heading and climbed away from the place of terror and death toward home.
As they crossed the border into the safety of the Kingdom, Sultan and Mohammed were filled with pride—and with gratitude that they hadn’t screwed up. A month earlier, Sultan had gotten into trouble for doing an aileron roll during a night flight. But now as they crossed the border, he made a series of celebratory rolls to the right and then to the left. They were both alive!
At home in the shelter, the crew debriefed to a wildly enthusiastic ground crew. They had successfully brought off a lot of firsts for their young air force.
The next day, I reported the success of their mission success on worldwide news. Their attack had been so precise, I said, that you couldn’t have placed their munitions more accurately if you had driven them out to the runway in a pickup truck.
Meanwhile, after the laughter and crying, General Turki sent Sultan and Mohammed home and told them to take the next day off, which they did; but these combat veterans quickly discovered that in war you don’t relax, except through exhaustion. After they returned to the flying schedule, they flew thirty missions.
Let me add that after his first experience of low-level ground fire, Sultan demanded that they stop flying low-altitude bomb runs, and Turki backed him up. This paid off, for the only Saudi Tornado lost in the war ran out of fuel trying to land in fog at the King Khalid Military City forward operating base (where there was no approach control capable of handling such emergencies).
Some jobs require heroes. Someone has to set the records for others to follow. The hero is afraid, sure: afraid of enemy fire, afraid of being killed, but most of all afraid of screwing up and letting his mates down, afraid of failure. In spite of their fear, Captain Sultan and Lieutenant Mohammed fought the people like me at headquarters who failed to give them adequate warning, fought the weather that dark and stormy night, fought the disruptions that left them the sole aircraft to attack the target, and fought the Iraqis, who had not yet learned to fear and respect our Coalition airpower. They fought and won.
Thank God for heroes.
BUILDING COALITIONS
The key ingredients to forming and maintaining a military coalition are common purpose, political leadership, and military forces that can work together.
The common purpose removes the tendency to define national interests, as in, “What’s in this for me?”
The coalition that fought in the Gulf had one common purpose, to liberate occupied Kuwait. Sure, there were other national interests at stake. For the Europeans, it was access to affordable oil. To the Arabs, it was national survival. Nevertheless, the overarching purpose, the one used to goad the United Nations into action, was to stop the rape, murder, and robbery of one nation by another.
It’s easy enough to say that we need to have a common purpose. The trick is to understand and articulate it. Or, as General George Marshall said, “The hardest thing to do is define the political objectives of war. Once that is done, a lieutenant can lay out an appropriate military strategy.”
★ The political leadership President Bush provided the Desert Storm Coalition was critical to its success. Because he listened to and consulted with the political leaders of the Coalition nations, they were confident that their views and concerns were being considered as the Americans formulated policy and actions. The outgrowth of this trust at the top was trust at the military levels below. And so as the military leaders met, there were no hidden agendas. Certainly there are already enough honest differences between air, land, sea, and space approaches to war; suspicions of national agendas could only have made it far more difficult to plan and execute military operations.
For our part, we among the military worked hard to respect the rights of other sovereign nations. Where a nation had concerns and sensitivities, we modified our rules of engagement, our proposed operations, or our tactics to accommodate them.
We also worked hard to develop interpersonal relationships with our Coalition partners. This was not easy, as rank, egos, and the size of each nation’s military contribution could cause divisiveness.
For airmen, fortunately, rank had little importance, and all spoke the common language of aviation, English. But egos were inevitably a problem, especially for United States personnel who have been taught to swagger from the first day of pilot training and have been brought up in a nation that has little experience of international tact. The size of a nation’s contribution could also have led military leaders to conclude that one nation had more combat expertise than another. Yet superior equipment and more personnel did not automatically translate to wisdom. All had to listen to the others, and where there was honest difference of opinion, it had to be resolved by hard-fought, respectful, but honest debate.
Here the United States military was at a disadvantage, as we are so certain of ourselves. Since we are usually the biggest player, without meaning to, we tend to intimidate our partners. Sure, the others want Americans to lead, but they resent it that we act as though we are in charge.
★ Being in a coalition means doing business the hard way. It takes time and patience. Ego has to be set aside, as the lives of men and women hang in the balance. You won’t have all the answers, and mistakes will be made. But if you build a relationship of trust and openness, respect and acceptance, then you can work through the difficult times.
The immediate success of the Gulf War was the liberation of Kuwait. Perhaps the more enduring success was the working together of the Coalition nations.
In the future, the United States will face many national security challenges that will require military operations ranging from humanitarian aid to war. We already see the United States in a NATO-led coalition doing housekeeping (technically termed “out-of-area operations”) in the former Yugoslavia. It is likely that similar combined military operations will be the pattern for the f
uture—ad hoc coalitions that provide room for many nations to be united in a common cause, with the United States providing leadership but not necessarily in charge.
We were lucky in the Gulf. We had a history of working with the Gulf nations and our NATO partners. But how will we prepare for the future?
Coalition operations are not easy. Command arrangements can be difficult. So can communications (radio equipment is often incompatible, even when the language is common). Intelligence must be shared (the United States often classifies for “U.S. eyes only” even the most obvious details about an enemy). Yet the last remaining superpower needs international partners. We not only gain valuable insights from our compatriots about what needs to be done and how to do it, but we are inhibited from making stupid mistakes. Our combined efforts gain legitimacy because they come from many nations, not just one. Therefore, we need to prepare in peacetime to undertake combined operations during a crisis.
This has begun to happen. Already, United States military forces train with the men and women of other nations. Blue Flag exercises at Hurlburt Field bring together the Gulf War nations to plan and execute air operations, should they be needed in that part of the world. As our focus turns from the Cold War to a more complex new world of ethnic violence, proliferating weapons of mass destruction, and peacekeeping operations, U.S. forces in Europe work with new partners from Poland, the Czech Republic, Ukraine, and Russia.
Annually, our airmen, sailors, soldiers, and marines deploy to Korea, the Middle East, and Africa to train alongside our friends around the world, and our sale of American equipment to other nations ensures we will be capable of operating side by side.
The only question that remains is this: Will our future political leadership have the wisdom and training to form a coalition like the magnificent team that fought in the Gulf? Or will we repeat the mistakes of Vietnam?
16
Beyond Iraqi Freedom
A little over a decade after Operation Desert Storm (1991), when Coalition forces liberated Kuwait following the 1990 Iraqi invasion, General Tommy Franks and his air boss Lieutenant General Michael (Buzz) Mosley, initiated Operation Iraqi Freedom; this time to liberate the Iraqi people from the rule of fear imposed by Saddam Hussein. This action, often referred to as Gulf War II, was undertaken for a number of reasons and envisaged a number of goals.
The immediate causes for the new war included a firm belief that Saddam had reinitiated his efforts to produce—or at least acquire—Weapons of Mass Destruction: Defecting Iraqi scientists had outlined his efforts to create mobile laboratories capable of growing spores for anthrax. There was evidence that he was acquiring equipment needed to produce weapons-grade radioactive materials. Large amounts of his pre-1991 war poison gas stockpile had not been accounted for by the United Nations inspection teams. And during the years following 1991, the Iraqi dictator had cunningly thwarted the efforts of the UN weapons inspection teams, sent to Iraq in accordance with the agreements that ended the Desert Storm conflict.
The longer-term causes go back to Desert Storm itself and its aftermath.
We can start with the widespread opinion, which grew up after Desert Storm, that we had halted the operation short of its necessary goal, the removal of Saddam Hussein and his criminal cronies . . . a view stated publicly by former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and other world leaders. Given the terrorist atrocities of 2001 and later, they may well have been right.
But history has twenty-twenty hindsight.
At the end of February 1991, we had achieved our stated goal in Desert Storm, the liberation of occupied Kuwait. Though the total liberation of Iraq was always an obvious option, we rejected that option in our military councils. There we had discussed the difficulty we would incur fighting an Iraqi enemy defending his home as opposed to one who was pillaging and raping a fellow Arab nation. We were also concerned about adding the severe problems of administering aid to a large and complex country like Iraq to the already daunting problems of assisting current refugees and those ravaged by war in Kuwait.
It must also be understood that the liberation of Kuwait was achieved by a coalition of military forces, not by a single force under a single, unified command. In 1991 ours was a “coalition of the willing,” who were united in the goal of liberating Kuwait, but far less unified in the approach to handling the source of the problem, Saddam’s Iraq. Many of our Coalition allies—most notably our Arab allies, who played a major role in the conflict and were eager to help overturn the occupation of Arab Kuwait—would have had reservations about taking the ground war to Baghdad. Most did not want to be seen as aggressors against an equally Arab Iraq, while some would have objected to a large non-Arab, non-Islamic occupation force in Iraq, with its many historic shrines and Muslim holy places. Some also viewed an evil Saddam more acceptable than a weak Iraq that could not prevent the political/ military force of Iran from encroaching on the borders of the Gulf Arab states. Some members of the Coalition may even have abhorred the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, yet had strong commercial ties to the leadership in Baghdad and wanted a tamed Saddam to remain in power. These were issues for the political, not the military, leadership to sort out.
If our failing in Desert Storm was stopping too soon—and I don’t know that to be the case—the failing came about in part because we did not understand our enemy: Saddam Hussein. Those of us who grew up in the United States, England, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates all came from diverse cultures, but none of us had experienced or understood life under the rule of Saddam and his Baath party colleagues.
That lack of understanding changed after the war, when we were able to learn the truth about conditions inside Iraq from discussions with ordinary Iraqi citizens and captured military personnel. After the war we were able to document the horrific acts committed by the Iraqi secret services against the people of Kuwait. After the war we were able to witness from afar the brutal subjugation of the Kurds, the Marsh Arabs, and other Iraqi people who had attempted to rise up against the dictator in rebellions that we had tacitly encouraged by our defeat of Saddam’s military forces. As we watched Iraqi Army helicopters savage their own citizens, the part we had played, our unwillingness—or inability—to intervene to halt these tragedies, left a bitter taste in our mouths. What could we do? What should we have done?
Such complexities—and the many other complexities of postconflict Iraq in 1991 and 2003—show that while our military is amazingly capable of ever-increasingly efficient and successful conduct of warfare, both our own nation and the coalitions of nations of which we have been part remain much less capable of resolving the effects that result from our use of military force, regardless of our strategies and goals.
Meanwhile, the mission we were sent to launch on January 17, 1991, was to liberate occupied Kuwait, and that is what we did. At the end of February 1991, we had driven the Iraqi Army out of Kuwait City, and shown the vaunted Iraqi Republican Guard to be inept and impotent. Our military had done what was asked of us and had done it in a manner of which we were proud. We had been in the desert for three-quarters of a year—the soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines of the Coalition were tired of the killing and were eager to go home. Unfortunately our desires may have caused the next generation of soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines to spend a much longer period of time in the vast deserts of the Middle East. But then in 1991, who foresaw September 11, 2001?
THE NEW THREATS
The attacks on New York’s twin towers and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., changed the United States, her people, and their leaders.
Before the events of 2001 we had weathered a host of attacks carried out by Al-Qaeda and the agents of Saddam Hussein. These events involved a number of actors and may or may not have been related, yet all were aimed at the United States. The bombings by Al-Qaeda agents of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania caused large numbers of civilian casualties. An Al-Qaeda attack in Yemen nearly sank a U.S. Navy ship, the Cole, and caused
the deaths of several of our service men and women. Earlier, agents of Saddam had attempted to assassinate former President George Bush in Kuwait. Later, Iraq expelled the United Nations Weapons of Mass Destruction inspectors and then was caught building surface-to-surface missiles that failed to comply with the agreements that ended Gulf War I.
While these events drew condemnation from many nations, America was seen as big, strong, and resilient, and so reactions out in the world were less vocal than if a smaller, more helpless country had been exposed to actions and attacks such as these. And even in the United States, though our citizens were seriously concerned about these events, they were not outraged enough to be moved toward significant action.
That does not mean that we did nothing. We did retaliate with cruise missiles fired against Al-Qaeda facilities in Afghanistan. We punished Saddam’s misdeeds with air attacks (which seriously damaged his W.M.D. capabilities). We brought our concerns to the UN and other international forums (though such diplomatic efforts were often stifled by other nations, for reasons of their own). Yet none of those actions could be called significant, much less decisive.
It was the stunning visual displays of two Boeing 767 aircraft slicing into the twin towers in New York City, and the smoke and debris of those mighty buildings crashing to the ground, that changed things. It was also the sight of smoke and flames rising around the Pentagon, while our F-16 jet fighters roared overhead looking for the enemy who had just completed his mission, that changed things. It was the recordings of the voices of Americans on an airliner over Pennsylvania that changed things—calling their loved ones on cell phones to tell them of their decision to overpower their hijackers, dying in the effort, and saving the lives of the terrorist target where their aircraft would have been turned into a guided bomb.