on the battlefield of Al-Khafji.”
? In fact, even after all my hopeful words, I don’t think Khaled fully trusted me; and later he called Brigadier General Ahmed Sudairy to demand air from him. However, Sudairy could tell him only what I had already said, that hundreds of sorties were being sent to the battle (again, we did not know how much air was used to intercept the Iraqi advance and how much was being used by the DASC for CAS in Khafji and in the desert).
Meanwhile, as the sun went down on the evening of the thirtieth, Battles One, Two, and Three began seriously heating up. Not to fear, we had a pair of golden arrows in our quiver — Joint STARS and AC-130 gunships.
Joint STARS could look hundreds of miles into enemy territory and detect and identify individual vehicles — that is, it could distinguish cars, trucks, APCs, and tanks. J-STARS was a
On the other hand, the AC-130 gunship system had been around since Vietnam. Though it was old, it was still deadly: its night-vision sights made it a fearsome nighttime threat, and its side-firing 105 mm howitzer could pump out three to five shots a minute. In Grenada, AC-130 gunships had picked off the Cuban snipers hiding around the airfield and allowed the first elements of the XVIIIth Corps to advance from what had been a death trap. On the night of the thirtieth, this same aircraft was killing every Iraqi vehicle they saw venturing on the coastal highway into Saudi Arabia.
If I’d been the Iraqi commander that night, one question would have kept coming up: “How do they know?”
Every time Iraqi vehicles began to march south, A-10s, FA-18Bs, or even the odd Pave TAC F-111 or F-15E would show up, and all hell would break loose. Every time I tried to move my force to the battles in Saudi Arabia, the commander must have been thinking, my troops come under attack, and then abandon their tanks and APCs on the sand. Would it never cease?
The onslaught from the air that night
But it didn’t all go our way.
Early on the morning of the thirty-first, the AWACS controller called the AC-130 pummeling the coast highway: “Dawn approaching, you’d better go home.” (In daylight, the enemy could spot the lumbering aircraft and shoot it down with a heat-seeking missile.)
“I can’t go right now,” the pilot answered, “I have too many targets left on the road.” It was his last transmission. Thirty seconds later, the AC-130 disappeared from the AWACS radar screen; the plane had crashed into the sea, killing all fourteen crewmen aboard. In the predawn light, an Iraqi soldier had fired a heat-seeking antiaircraft missile into the AC-130’s port engine. This was our single biggest loss of airmen during the entire war.
? By midday of the thirty-first, the battles for Khafji were over. The remaining Iraqis in the desert and in town were stranded. Saudi and Qatari forces had attacked and performed flawlessly with grit and determination, and Khaled had proved he could lead under fire (I think even he had had doubts about this prior to the battle). The results to the bean counters must have been wonderful — hundreds of pieces of armor destroyed in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, and almost five hundred Iraqi prisoners taken (a clue that we needed to prepare for an onslaught of POWs).
This victory did not come free. Approximately fifty Islamic soldiers from the Saudi Northern Area corps were killed or wounded.
The most important outcome of the battle is that the Iraqis were now left without options to take the initiative offensively. Specifically, Battle Four was never fought. The Iraqis could no longer muster forces to attack the Egyptians and Syrians in the Northern Area command.
What had the Iraqis hoped to gain by the Al-Khafji incursion? Did they expect to draw the Coalition ground forces into an attack before the Iraqi forces were further decimated by our airpower? It didn’t happen. Did they expect to inflict casualties on the Coalition forces, take prisoners, and make headlines in the United States? It didn’t happen. Did they want to show the Arabian and other Islamic forces up as soft, ill-trained, or even cowardly? It didn’t happen. Was Khafji part of a larger scheme, the first phase of an overall plan to go on the initiative against other Coalition forces? It never happened. Those Iraqi hopes and plans died on the way to battle under a twenty- four-hour nonstop pounding from above.
Colonel Dave Schulte, the BCE commander in the TACC, summed up the lessons learned from Khafji (my comments follow, in parentheses):
1. The Iraqis couldn’t mass forces due to Blue Air; therefore they must mass air defenses first. (They tried, but we would not permit it.)
2. Iraqi battlefield intelligence was poor because they failed to predict our response. (That is why controlling air and space is so important. Imagine the consequences if the Iraqis had known about Walt Boomer’s exposed logistic bases. Imagine the impact if they had been able to bring artillery to bear on the Tapline Road.)
3. The Iraqis had good command and control of their forces. This was evident during execution of the attack and retreat. (Okay. But we would do our best to destroy that command control before our ground attack started.)
4. The Iraqis fought well. (And yet they were already surrendering in large numbers, disillusioned, ashamed, tired of war, worn out from constant air attack. Their motivation to surrender was to increase as the bombardment continued.)
The Iraqi IIId Corps commander summed it up another way. When he saw what was happening to his forces in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, he called Saddam and asked for permission to break off the attack on Al-Khafji and begin a withdrawal.
“No, continue the attack,” Saddam replied. “I want you to make this the mother of all battles!”
To which the IIId Corps Commander replied, “Sir, the mother is killing her children,” and hung up. He then ordered his remaining forces to withdraw.
And this is what I said at the January 31 1700 meeting in the TACC:
