border and headed west. Two F-15Cs call tally and are cleared to fire by AWACS, since there is no friendly traffic fragged for that area.
Reavy is skeptical, because the Iraqis have pretty much shown good sense about where and when they fly. Thinking it is probably a Special Ops mission, he calls the Special Ops liaison and tells him to get his ass into the TACC (Special Ops had a little private room of their own just outside the TACC).
When the guy comes out, he says the helicopters are not his, and they can die as far as he cares.
Mike Reavy still thinks something is wrong here and tells the major to get his ass back into his secret room to check.
He comes out minutes later, pale as a ghost. They
Fifty seconds later, the same young lady in the same very loud but controlled voice announces, “Disregard the Scud alert. False alarm.” (The DSP IR satellites had seen the intense heat across the earth made by a string of bombs and duly reported it to the ground station in Colorado. However, when the watts per steradian did not match the Scud profile loaded into the computer, the event was reported as an “anomaly,” which is space-geek talk for “hell if I know.”)
In between events, I read my mail, lots of it, and I love it all — from Mary Jo, from friends, from people I’ve never met and probably never will. It is a lifesaver for all of us and a great source of energy.
? It is now 0200 in the morning, and Tom is fully in charge. Things have quieted down, and I am very, very tired. I’ve already fallen asleep twice in my chair, but this is not an uncommon sight when things are slowing down and you have someone next to you who can fill in if needed. It’s not like guard duty.
It’s time to haul my tail upstairs, put on the pistola and bulletproof vest, and head back out through the wall, talking calmly to all the guard posts en route. I do not want to get killed in this war.
The apartment is dark, but I don’t bother to turn on the lights or hang up my uniform. I just place it over the chair and crash into the bed. Fortunately, there will be a clean bed and fresh underwear, thanks to the house boy, Chris from Sri Lanka. He is never there when I come and go, but he always picks up after me and keeps the laundry clean and ready.
I will change fatigues in the morning, so I’ll get up a little earlier than usual. But then, since John is not sleeping here tonight, at least the phone won’t be ringing. I am asleep in seconds.
13
The Ten Percent War
In February 1991, during the waning moments of the war, a debate went on in the White House about choosing a moment to cease hostilities. As Colin Powell reports in his autobiography, the debate ended when John Sununu suggested 0500 on February 28. That way the “war” would have lasted a hundred hours and could be plausibly named “The Hundred-Hour War.” And so it came about. It was a brilliant idea. The name had PR pizzazz.
There was only one problem: the war did not last one hundred hours. The duration of the war — from mid- January to the end of February — was closer to a thousand hours. Sununu and the others in the White House were thinking of the ground war, of course — an easy misconception, but maddening to Coalition airmen, who bore such a large part of the burden of winning this war. To them, the ground effort was not a Hundred-Hour War, it was a Ten Percent War.
This is not to say that the ground war was a waste or unnecessary — far from it — and as January turned into February, and February wore on, Coalition air devoted an ever-greater portion of their effort to preparing for it. The ground invasion of Kuwait was to come soon, everyone knew, but when? When was G day?
The decision to start the ground war was based on the answers to three questions:
1. Were the Iraqis beaten down enough to allow Coalition ground forces to attack with a minimum of casualties?
2. Would the weather be favorable enough to allow air support?
3. Were Coalition troops trained and logistically ready, and at their assigned starting-out locations?
We’ll look at the answers to these questions over the course of this chapter.
BEATING DOWN THE IRAQIS
The answer to question one depended on three factors. First: battlefield preparation. How successful was Coalition airpower in reducing Iraqi armor and artillery? Second: The choice of which Iraqi units to hit, how hard, and when. (These two issues were related, but they were kept separate at CENTCOM and CENTAF, because of the understandable interest of Coalition ground units in the condition of the Iraqi units they themselves would be facing.) Third: PSYOPS. How successful were Coalition psychological-warfare efforts in undermining the morale of Iraqi ground forces? An army that has no taste to fight is an army that is beaten — even if they are equipped with state-of-the-art equipment in pristine shape.
? Though air attacks had hurt Iraqi forces in the KTO before the beginning of February, the Iraqis were still a reasonably effective fighting force. February ruined them. The following summary is based on a Chris Christon report from February 10, 1991.
In his view, initial attacks — primarily directed against the air defense system, Scud sites, infrastructure, leadership, and weapons research, development, and production facilities — had had no major impact on the Iraqi Army. Commanders and their staffs had proved very flexible in handling the difficulties that Coalition air attacks had imposed on their operations. For example, when air attacks cut telephone lines, the Iraqis used message carriers on motorcycles. When air disrupted their command-and-control networks (as part of the destruction of the centralized air defense system), the Iraqis developed work-arounds; and their command-and-control network remained effective, secure, and capable of supporting major military operations.
On the front lines, they had adjusted their routines around the timing of air attacks, and for the first part of the war, the Iraqi Army found sanctuary at night. They were able to do this because the most capable Coalition systems for night attack — F-117s, F-111s, and LANTIRN-equipped F-15Es and F-16s — were tied up chasing Scuds or hitting fixed targets outside the KTO, which left the job of hitting the Iraqi Army at night mostly to A-10s, A-6s, and B-52s hitting area targets.
All this changed in February, when most of the air effort was devoted to shaping the battlefield. For example, of the 986 bombing sorties scheduled for February 11, 933 of them were tasked to that mission. And here is how shaping-the-battlefield sorties were allocated by corps during the period from February 10 through February 12:
By mid-February, the total air campaign was well under way. Now the sorties against front-line forces were flying night and day. Now attacks on the Iraqi transportation system were starting to have effect, and enemy reports of food and water shortages began to filter into the intelligence system. Now the war was almost as boring as an airline schedule — except that it wasn’t passengers that were being delivered.
What gave interest to this sea of monotony were the Scuds at night, combat losses, and the weather, which was a constant problem, as waves of low pressure swept down across Baghdad toward Basra.
