Every Man a Tiger: The Gulf War Air Campaign

the other hand, efforts to deny resupply of ammunition had little or no impact, as the defeated army surrendered before expending large amounts of ammunition. The joke was, “Come to Kuwait if you want to buy an AK-47. They are like new, shot once, and dropped once.” In this war, we stopped ammunition from reaching the soldiers, but they had all they needed. After enduring six weeks of aerial bombardment, their strongest motive was surrender, not dying for Saddam.

In other words, perhaps our information-warfare attacks proved far more effective than Coalition leaders realized. And perhaps the Iraqi Army failed to maneuver in the face of our ground onslaught because our campaign to deny them intelligence had a far greater impact than we comprehended at the time. Certainly, despite our apparent success with the more traditional means to isolate the battlefield, we need to study this new form of warfare in far more detail to determine which works best — the classical or the new method of interdiction… or both together.

Isolating the battlefield, as General Schwarzkopf conceived it, had one other — perhaps surprising — goal. Not only did he intend to prevent food, ammunition, water, communications, or reinforcements from reaching the enemy; he also intended to prevent the Iraqi Army occupying Kuwait from getting out. Or, in the words of Colin Powell, “We are going to cut off the head of the snake, and then we are going to kill it.”

On the whole, airpower succeeded in that aim… at least in the open country, where roads and bridges were exposed. Airpower so successfully dropped the bridges across the rivers of southern Iraq that, years after the war, it was difficult to travel by car to the countryside. Where airpower did not succeed was in preventing the Iraqis from hiding many of their tanks and armored personnel carriers in the cities of southern Iraq. The only way to hit these from the air would have exposed the populations of the cities to widespread aerial attacks, and the Americans and their Coalition partners were not willing to do that. Attacking the cities from the ground was, of course, another option, but few Coalition leaders were eager to take that step when their stated goal was to eject the Iraqis from Kuwait.

KILLING TANKS AND ARTILLERY

From one point of view, battlefield interdiction is an accessory to battlefield preparation. Putting a wall between an enemy and his sources of sustenance and information obviously seriously restricts his ability to inflict harm on friendly ground forces. Though a number of other elements also fall under the overall rubric of preparing the battlefield, only one of these truly mattered to General Schwarzkopf: “Kill the tanks and artillery.” His reasons for this were simple, and doctrinally correct: tanks and artillery were the Iraqis’ likely means to inflict harm on friendly ground forces.

It was for this reason that plans called for half of the enemy tanks and artillery pieces to be destroyed by airpower before Coalition soldiers and marines crossed into Kuwait and Iraq. From the opening moments of the war, the Air Tasking Order called for strikes against the Iraqi Army in the KTO.

In the west, in front of VIIth Corps, the killing effort was more or less equally divided between tanks and artillery, with perhaps a slight tilt in the direction of the modern T-72 tanks of the Republican Guard. In the east, on the other hand, Walt Boomer wanted emphasis placed on Iraqi artillery. Once the ground war started, he believed he could handle the tanks he would be facing (which were for the most part obsolete), but the artillery would cause problems, especially when he was passing his force through the extensive minefields that lay ahead of him.

Despite the priority of this mission in the mind of the CINC, killing Iraqi tanks and artillery got off to a slow start. In the early moments of the war, when most aircraft were directed to gaining control of the air, only a few sorties were available for tasking against KTO-based targets, and bad weather made it difficult for KTO-bound pilots to find Iraqi tanks and artillery without unnecessarily exposing their aircraft to enemy AAA and shoulder-fired SAMS. Worse, pilots had difficulty hitting their targets when they found them, since they were not used to initiating attacks at 10,000 feet or above. At those altitudes, strong winds often made a pilot’s roll-in unpredictable; it was a struggle to place his aircraft at the right position and speed for the weapons release.

Combat was proving a far cry from the shine-your-ass gunnery meets we had held in the United States, where the pilots were not being shot at, where they had been briefed on the winds affecting their bombing passes, where they were flying on familiar training ranges against familiar targets, and where they could press their attacks so close to the target that there was little opportunity for a bent fin or maladjusted release rack to make a bomb errant. In the meets, you expected the bombs to go inside the open turrets of the tanks; in Iraq you could hardly see where the tanks might be on the desert floor below.

Worst of all, after battling the weather, dodging enemy AAA fire, and straining to find their targets, attacking aircrews were often sent to the wrong place. Because target coordinates were derived from overhead photography that was hours and days old by the time it was received in Riyadh, all too often planes were sent out to kill tanks and artillery in locations the enemy had long since left. Though there were several efforts to speed the information flow, none of these really worked.

The solution, as we’ve already seen, was Killer Scouts — F-16s orbiting thirty-by-thirty-mile sectors of the battlefield and searching for dug-in tanks and artillery. When they found them, they’d direct the oncoming streams of fighter-bombers to their targets.

? A second addition to tank- and artillery-killing efficiency occurred in late January. By then, control of the air had been assured and the fixed targets in Iraq had been (for the most part) hit, thus allowing more and more F-111F and F-15E[64] sorties to be tasked against Iraqi Army targets. The tank-plinking tactics developed in the Night Camel exercises were now put to the test in the real world. The results were remarkable. On February 11, aircrews claimed 96 armored vehicles — tanks, APCs, and artillery; 22 of these were killed by “plinkers.” On the twelfth, film showed 155 killed; of these 93 were plinked by laser-guided 500- pound bombs. On the fourteenth, 214 were killed, and of these, 129 were “plinked.” The totals grew daily (except for those days when bad weather shrouded the battlefield).

Dollar for dollar, this was the way to kill tanks. If a single F-111F carried eight 500-pound laser-guided bombs at $3,000 each, then for less than $50,000 (which included most of the other costs of a sortie) eight tanks could be destroyed. In the U.S. Army, each tank costs in the neighborhood of $1,000,000. The Russian tanks used by the Iraqi Army cost about half that. So less than $50,000 worth of air offense killed over one hundred times as much ground offense.

COUNTERPUNCH

Not much has been said in favor of Saddam Hussein as a strategist, yet in fact his original strategy for the Gulf War was simple yet brilliant — at least on the face of it. The Iraqi dictator had paid close attention to the lessons of Vietnam. If the United States can lose a war once, he reasoned, they can lose a war twice, and he nominated Iraq for the honor of inflicting that loss. “What led to the defeat?” he asked himself. Casualties on the battlefield produced discontent on the home front. Battlefield carnage translated into television images that so horrified the folks back home that the President of the United States was driven from office, and the Americans left the field of battle undefeated, yet beaten.

With all that in mind, Saddam planned for enduring a short air campaign and a fierce land battle. His troops constructed formidable defensive positions, with minefields, fire trenches, and presurveyed fields of fire for his artillery. When the war came to Kuwait and southern Iraq, perhaps his poorly trained infantry divisions would die in staggering numbers; but in doing so, they would inflict thousands of casualties and deaths on the Americans. Once the Coalition forces had been weakened, they could then be defeated or brutalized by his heavy armor and Republican Guard divisions. And even if all these plans failed and he did not win on the battlefield, the television coverage of the bloodshed would ensure his victory in the streets of Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, and