crucial.
North of the border but short of Baghdad were two powerful Iraqi radar bases, whose dishes commanded all the skies from the Gulf in the east to the western desert.
The helicopters had been chosen, despite their slow speed compared with supersonic jet fighters, for two reasons. Skimming the desert, they could pass under the radar and approach the bases unseen; further, the commanders wanted human-eyeball confirmation that the bases were really wrecked, and from close range. Only the choppers could give that. It would cost a lot of lives if those radars were left functioning.
The Apaches did all that was asked. They had still not been noticed when they opened fire. All their crew had night-vision helmets, which look as if they have short binoculars sticking out the front. They give the pilot complete night vision, so that in utter darkness to the naked eye he can see everything as if it were illuminated by a brilliant moon.
First they shattered the electrical generators that powered the radars, then the communications facilities from which their presence could be reported to missile sites farther inland; finally, they blew away the radar dishes.
In less than two minutes they had loosed twenty-seven Hellfire laser-guided missiles, a hundred 70-mm. rockets, and four thousand rounds of heavy-duty cannon fire. Both radar sites were left smoldering ruins.
The mission opened a huge hole in the air defense system of Iraq, and through this hole poured the remainder of the night’s attack.
Those who saw General Chuck Horner’s air-war plan later suggested it was probably one of the most brilliant ever devised. It contained a surgical, step-by-step precision and enough flexibility to cope with any contingency that required a variation.
Stage one was quite clear in its objectives and led on to the other three stages. It was to destroy all Iraq’s air defense systems and convert the Allies’ air superiority, with which they started, into air supremacy. For the other three stages to succeed within the self-imposed thirty-five-day time limit, Allied aircraft had to have the absolute run of Iraqi air space without hindrance.
In suppressing the air defense of Iraq, the key was radar. In modern warfare, radar is the single most important and most used tool, despite the brilliance of all the others in the armory.
Radar detects incoming warplanes; radar guides your own fighters to intercept; radar guides the antiaircraft missiles; and radar aims the guns.
Destroying the radar makes the enemy blind, like a heavyweight boxer in the ring with no eyes. He may be big and powerful still, he may pack a fearsome punch, but his enemy can move around the sightless Samson, jabbing and slashing at the helpless giant until the foregone conclusion is reached.
With the great hole punched in the forward radar cover of Iraq, the Tornados and Eagles, the F-111 Aardvarks and F-4G Wild Weasels powered through the gap, going for the radar sites farther inland,
heading for the missile bases guided by those radars, aiming for the command centers where the Iraqi generals sat, and blowing away the communications posts through which the generals were trying to talk to their outlying units.
From the battleships
The Wild Weasel is a version of the Phantom, but specializing in radar-destruction. It carries HARMs, High- speed Anti-Radiation Missiles.
When a radar dish lights up or “illuminates,” it emits electromagnetic waves, including infrared. It can’t help it. The HARM’s job is to find those waves with its sensors and go straight to the heart of the radar before exploding.
Perhaps strangest of all the warplanes slipping northward through the sky that night was the F-117A, known as the Stealth fighter. All black, created in such a shape that its multiple angles reflect most of the radar waves directed at it and absorb the rest into its own body, the Stealth fighter refuses to bounce hostile radar waves back to the receiver and thereby betray its existence to the enemy.
Thus invisible, the American F-117As that night simply slid unnoticed through Iraqi radar screens to drop their two-thousand-pound laser-guided bombs precisely onto thirty-four targets associated with the national air defense system. Thirteen of those targets were in and around Baghdad.
When the bombs landed, the Iraqis fired blindly upward but could see nothing and missed. In Arabic, the Stealths were called
They came from the secret base of Khamis Mushait deep in the south of Saudi Arabia, where they had been transferred from their equally secret home at Tonopah, Nevada. While less fortunate American airmen had to live in tents, Khamis Mushait had been built miles from anywhere but with hardened aircraft shelters and air-conditioned accommodation, which was why the prized Stealths had been put there.
Because they flew so far, theirs were among the longest missions of the war, up to six hours from takeoff to landing, and all under strain.
They threaded their way undetected through some of the most intense air defense systems in the world— those of Baghdad—and not one was ever touched, on that or any other night.
When they had done what they came to do, they slipped away again, cruising like stingrays in a calm sea, and went back to Khamis Mushait.
The most dangerous job of the night went to the British Tornados.
Their task then, and for the next week until it was discontinued, was
“airfield denial,” using their big, heavy JP-233 runway-busting bombs.
Their problem was twofold. The Iraqis had built their military airfields to be absolutely vast. Tallil was four times the size of Heathrow, with sixteen runways and taxi tracks that could be used for takeoff and landing as well. It was simply impossible to destroy it all.
The second problem was one of height and speed. The JP-233s had to be launched from a Tornado in stabilized straight and level flight.
Even after bomb launch, the Tornados had no choice but to overfly the target. Even if the radars were knocked out, the gunners weren’t;
antiaircraft artillery, known as triple-A, came up at them in rolling waves as they approached, so that one pilot described those missions as “flying through tubes of molten steel.”
The Americans had abandoned tests on the JP-233 bomb, judging it to be a pilot-killer. They were right. But the RAF crews pressed on, losing planes and crews until they were called off and given other duties.
The bomb-droppers were not the only planes aloft that night. Behind them and with them flew an extraordinary array of backup services.
Air superiority fighters flew cover on and over the strike bombers. The Iraqi ground controllers’ instructions to their own pilots—the few who managed to take off that night—were jammed by the American Air Force Ravens and the Navy equivalent Prowlers. Iraqi pilots aloft got no verbal instructions and no radar guidance. Most, wisely, went straight back home.
Circling south of the border were sixty tankers: American KC-135s and KC-10s, U.S. Navy KA-6Ds, and British Victors and VC-10s.
Their job was to receive the warplanes coming up from Saudi Arabia, refuel them for the mission, then meet them on the way back to give them more fuel to get home. This may sound routine, but actually doing it in pitch darkness was described by one flier as “trying to shove spaghetti up a wildcat’s backside.”
And out over the Gulf, where they had been for five months, the U.S.
Navy’s E-2 Hawkeyes and the USAF’s E-3 Sentry AWACS circled around and around, their radars picking up every friendly and every enemy aircraft in the sky, warning, advising, guiding, and watching.
By dawn, Iraq’s radars had mostly been crushed, her missile bases blinded, and her main command centers ruined. It would take four more days and nights to complete the job, but air supremacy was already in sight. Later
