Every Man a Tiger: The Gulf War Air Campaign

keeping their cool and evading capture. And it takes commanders who are hard-hearted enough to leave a downed airman to the mercies of the enemy when it is likely that more men and women will be killed or captured.

In Desert Storm, there was a failure to fully coordinate these aspects of the CSAR mission. While there were at times brilliant rescues, the aircrews were far from confident in the system. The next Chuck Horner to fight an air war had better pay close attention to the way he (or she) organizes and controls the employment of his or her combat search-and-rescue efforts.

11 Punch and Counterpunch

At this point, the focus began to shift from pure air superiority, but it is important to repeat this fundamental: airpower is not discrete, it flows. While it is useful to talk about the discrete elements of airpower (such as gaining control of the air, battlefield interdiction, or preparing the battlefield — that is, limiting the enemy’s ability to harm friendly forces), such talk has limits. One element does not stop and another one start. There may be greater or lesser intensity directed toward one or the other of them, but during any slice of time, all will be working.

In Desert Storm, once air superiority was assured, greater attention was given to battlefield interdiction and to preparing the battlefield — but all the while, air superiority was never ignored.

? Battlefield interdiction — isolating the battlefield — is a classic role of airpower, and was a natural goal for General Schwarzkopf to set for Chuck Horner.

In the case of Desert Storm, battlefield interdiction meant preventing the resupply of Iraqi forces in occupied Kuwait and southern Iraq. If the enemy was denied access to resupplies of food, water, gasoline, ammunition, and medical supplies, in time he would be rendered helpless. The length of time this form of interdiction warfare took to become effective was the big question.

Answering it depended on the answers to many other questions. How well is the enemy supplied when combat begins? What is the tempo of combat and the demands that tempo will make on his store of supplies? How effective is aerial interdiction on resupply throughput? And so on. During the war in Vietnam, efforts to isolate the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese regular army in South Vietnam failed, both because of the inefficient use of airpower and because of the crude, yet determined, supply system of North Vietnamese forces.

That failure was not repeated in the Gulf conflict.

In order to attain classic battlefield interdiction, General Schwarzkopf expected Chuck Horner to bomb the bridges on the roads and railroads running from Baghdad to Basra and on to Kuwait City. Trucks and military convoys (and indeed any likely vehicles) were to be targeted by fighter-bombers patrolling the desert south of the Iraqi capital. Iraqi aircraft would not be allowed to fly; and whenever they attempted to, they would be discovered by AWACS radar and immediately attacked by Coalition fighter pilots.

However, because of the limitations of classic battlefield interdiction, American planners began to look at new — and potentially quicker — ways to isolate the battlefield. They came to ask: “Can we paralyze the enemy by isolating his fielded forces from their sources of information and from their command and control?” In other words, “Can we practice information warfare against the Iraqi army of occupation?”

In the Iraqi dictatorship, with its fears, suspicions, and terrors, independence of thought or action is instantly uprooted and punished. A military commander who shows independence, no matter how successful, becomes a threat to Saddam Hussein and his few close advisers. Success itself is a threat, since it encourages independence and popularity. Thus, battle plans are scripted with the oversight and approval of Saddam, and deviation from the script is not allowed.

This raised a question in the minds of the air planners: “What if we can isolate the Iraqi ground forces from their supreme leader in Baghdad? Would they become paralyzed? Would the deployed forces in the field freeze in place, awaiting capture, rather than maneuver about the battlefield and oppose Coalition liberation forces?”

Because modern military command and control is accomplished primarily via electronic media — telephones, radios, and computer networks, connected by satellite, microwave nets, telephone lines, and high-data-rate fiber- optic cables — Horner’s planners targeted the connecting links. Thus, Coalition bombers attacked telephone exchange buildings, satellite ground stations, bridges carrying fiber-optic and wire bundles, and cables buried in the desert. Even had there been ASAT missiles available, individual satellites would not have been targeted, since both sides in the conflict used the same satellites.

To stop the radio and television broadcasts that connected Saddam with his army and his people, transmission towers were bombed, but this effort was only partially successful. The problem was in stopping low- powered radio broadcasts emanating from more or less primitive stations scattered throughout the countryside.

Interestingly, the Iraqis themselves put very tight limits on their own radio transmissions, in the apparent belief that the Americans would either listen in on them or target the radio emitter locations. Though this successfully denied intelligence to the Coalition, it also put a chokehold on command and control of their deployed forces.

A telling consequence of the information war (as reported after the war by Iraqi POWs) proved to be the inability of Iraqi headquarters in Baghdad to provide intelligence to the Iraqi Army leadership in the field about Coalition ground force deployments and maneuvers.

It is hard to tell whether this incapacity was a Coalition success or an Iraqi failure… A similar answer, it turns out, has to be given to the larger question: How successful was the air campaign in denying Iraqi command and control of their forces? There’s just no way to know for sure.

For starters, no one has any idea how much Saddam even conferred with his generals, yet he was certainly able to convey to his Third Corps commander enough command information to initiate the invasion of Saudi Arabia in late January 1991 (the Battle of Khafji). Even so, the Coalition information and command-and-control advantage (thanks in large measure to the targeting of airpower by the Joint STARS aircraft) allowed a single brigade under the command of Khaled Bin Sultan to rout three Iraqi divisions.

The Iraqi failure at Al-Khafji raises larger questions for Chuck Horner:

Did we really want Saddam isolated from the battle? Given his lack of military experience, poor judgment, and micromanaging leadership style, perhaps we should have facilitated his presence on the battlefield in every way possible. Of course, that’s not the American way. We like to see others the way we look at ourselves, so cutting Saddam off from his forces in the field seemed the proper thing to do.

But this was not our worst mistake. That mistake was never asking ourselves “So what?” That is, we had no very good ideas about what to do after we’ d succeeded in cutting Saddam off from his forces in the field. Therefore, we continued to plan and conduct a ground campaign that did not fully exploit the success we’d achieved in denying the enemy the capacity to command his forces.

Thus, our fear of Iraqi reconnaissance aircraft caused us to delay moving the U.S. corps into their jump-off positions for the ground war until after the air war began. This caution proved unnecessary, and ignoring it could have speeded up our attack and made the war more efficient. Far more telling, however: when the battle for Al-Khafji made it apparent how thoroughly airpower could destroy Iraqi forces in the attack, why didn’t the Coalition leaders alter their ground campaign plans? And, for that matter, why didn’t the Iraqis alter their strategy after their ground forces proved to be helpless in the face of the aerial onslaught?

Though I cannot answer for the Coalition leadership, the Iraqis in February did in fact alter their strategy: they sought to end the war, offering to withdraw from Kuwait and renounce their claims to sovereignty there. (Their offer, of course, proved to be too little and too late.)

Meanwhile, the campaign to prevent the resupply of logistics to the battlefield proved to be very effective. The Iraqi Army had serious problems providing units in the field with sufficient food and water. On