To which Lt. General Behery added “and Iraqis,” as the meeting broke up.
? Tom Clancy resumes the story.
BRIDGES
After the battle of Khafji, an even greater emphasis was put on efforts to isolate the battlefield by shutting down the transportation system. Iraq had an excellent road system, with more than 50,000 military trucks and nearly 200,000 commercial vehicles capable of hauling supplies to the army of occupation in the KTO. Since it would clearly take a very long time to shut down transportation by attacking individual vehicles (there were simply too many of them), Horner and his planners had to try something else. They’d hit the roads and bridges.
Fortunately for Coalition planners, the major road and railroad lines paralleled the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers south of the Iraqi capital, and major road and rail bridges could be found at key cities along each route. For example, five major roads and the railroad to Basra all converged and crossed various waterways at the town of An Nasiriyah in southern Iraq.
The problem for planners was that finding suitable roads to target grew harder as one got closer to the KTO. Since craters could be rapidly repaired or bypassed on roads south and west of Basra, bombing them had little effect. As a result, planners placed most of the targeting effort on crossings over waterways and rivers. In essence, it became a bridge-busting campaign.
Where possible, laser-guided bombs were used to drop individual concrete spans over major highways — and the films from these attacks gave Schwarzkopf some of his best television one-liners: “Now you are going to see the luckiest man alive,” he intoned as a vehicle barely cleared a targeted bridge microseconds ahead of the spectacular blast of a laser-guided bomb.
Early in January, the CENTAF intelligence staff had identified 579 highway, 155 railroad, and 17 inland waterway targets. Since laser-guided bombs made “one bomb one target” practical, it was estimated that fewer than 1,000 bombs, or about 200 to 300 sorties, would be needed to accomplish the mission.
In the event, “one bomb one target” wasn’t far off the mark. And so the single-track rail line between Baghdad and Basra was cut by destroying bridges at As Samawah, Saquash, and Basra. These bridges were not repaired during the war, and no goods moved by rail.
But no one had considered the Iraqis’ ingenuity in repairing or bypassing damaged road bridges. (They seemed to have on hand an inexhaustible supply of pontoon bridges.) As a result, nearly 5,000 weapons and 1,000 sorties were needed to close down the Iraqi vehicle-transportation system.
Yet even before the Iraqi make-dos began to frustrate Chuck Horner’s planners and airmen, Coalition mistakes limited bridge-busting success. F-111Fs, Tornadoes, and F-15Es would easily place a single 2,000-pound LGB on a bridge span, yet the next day photography showed traffic moving over the bridge.
The problem: bomb fuses had been set to allow the bomb a chance to penetrate fixed structures before exploding. Though this was fine for a hangar or a hardened bunker, it meant that bombs were punching round holes in the roadway and exploding under the span — and scarcely denting the overall bridge structure. The fix was to reduce the delay on the bomb fuse, which let the weapon explode on impact with the road surface.
Next came the pontoon bridges. A bridge span would be dropped, and the next day the Iraqis would float a pontoon bridge across the waterway. A sortie launched against the new pontoon bridge would destroy or scatter tens of pontoon boats and splinter the roadway they supported, and within hours new pontoons were in place and the crossing was back in business. In some marshy or low-water areas, the Iraqis simply used bulldozers to push dirt into the waterway and bypass busted bridges. When Horner bombed the dirt, they bulldozed more dirt.
Finally tiring of all this, Coalition planners set up “bridge patrols.” F-16s by day and F-111s and F-15Es at night would fly visual reconnaissance missions along specified river segments, destroying any bridges, bridging materials, or ferryboats that they found.
Shutting down the Iraqi lines of communication turned into a full-time job, but the Coalition air forces got the job done.
? Once the bridges and ferries had been severed, Coalition aircraft were tasked to attack the vehicles in the resulting jam-up at the closed crossings. This mission initially yielded good results, but in time the Iraqis gave up trying to resupply their army from Baghdad and tried to sneak supplies over the desert from Basra; or else supplies were shifted as best they could manage among units in the KTO. Neither did them any good. During the day, A-10s, F-18s, AV-8s, Jaguars, and F-16s were on the lookout for any movement on the desert, while at night, A-10s with IR Maverick missiles were on watch. And always there was Joint STARS. One Iraqi truck unit reported that out of eighty vehicles, only ten remained after the war; and prisoners told stories of men who refused resupply missions. Air not only choked off supplies into the KTO, it allowed only a trickle of supplies to units deployed throughout the desert.
The measure of interdiction effectiveness is the effect on throughput measured in metric tons per day (T/D). Chris Christon’s intelligence section estimated prewar Iraqi throughput for rail, highway, and boat at more than 200,000 T/D. By the first week in February, this had been cut in half. At the end of the war, throughput was estimated to be 20,000 tons per day.
To really understand what this means, one needs to ask what the Iraqi Army of occupation actually needed to sustain itself. That answer depends: if they were on the attack (as they were during the battle of Khafji) or fighting (as they were during the Coalition invasion of the last few days of the war), then they needed substantial quantities of supplies. But if they were simply sitting in the desert doing very little more than moving tanks and artillery around (as they were doing for the five weeks before the ground attack), they needed considerably less. Coalition intelligence estimated that when Iraqi forces in the KTO were engaged in battle, they required a minimum of 45,000 to 50,000 tons per day of supplies, while sustaining the Iraqi Army when it was not fighting required 10,000 to 20,000 tons per day.
In other words, by the time the ground war began in late February, the Iraqi resupply system could barely meet the subsistence needs of its army — food, water, and medical supplies.
Air interdiction not only prevented the Iraqis from meeting the needs of their army, it limited their ability to take advantage of the significant amounts of supplies they had deployed to the field before the war began.
For instance, the air attacks forced the Iraqis to disperse ammunition storage areas throughout the desert. In that way, a single bomb would destroy only a small part of the ammunition stored at an artillery position, but the gunners had to travel long distances to obtain shells. And travel in the desert under the ever-present umbrella of Coalition aircraft was hazardous to the health.
Supply shortages took other tolls. For example, low-priority infantry units had very little to eat, with some receiving food supplies no more than once every three or four days. When the war came, several units surrendered because they were hungry.
Perhaps most tellingly, when the Iraqi generals were ordered to travel from Basra to Safwan for the cease- fire talks (a distance of thirty miles), they requested permission to make the trip by helicopter, because the road was impassable.
