In the beginning, Central Command planners had a hard time putting a psychological-warfare plan together. Though this was historically the responsibility of the Army component, in recent times (such as during the operations in Panama and Grenada), the primary responsibility has gone specifically to Special Operations forces. When the Gulf crisis broke, Central Command, lacking expertise to plan a PSYOPS campaign, requested help from the Commander in Chief Special Operations Command (collocated with CENTCOM, as it happened, at MacDill AFB).
The plan that resulted was useful in identifying targets for PSYOPS efforts, but was an overly “Ameri- centric” view of influencing Arabs. Next, in Riyadh, Schwarzkopf asked John Yeosock to prepare a comprehensive (and less
Meanwhile, Khaled bin Sultan became interested in the efforts to prepare leaflets and radio and television broadcasts, and to exploit enemy deserters. With his help, the message was made more subtle and complex. Where the American aim had been intimidation, he wanted to emphasize cooperation. In his view, Iraqi soldiers would respond positively to messages like “We know you didn’t want to invade Kuwait, and we, your brothers, will right this wrong. Please don’t oppose us. Join us instead.”
In essence, the enemy was hit with two different messages: The Schwarzkopf tough message showed a B- 52 saying, “Desert Storm is coming to your area. Flee immediately.” The Khaled message showed Coalition soldiers sitting around a campfire, eating roast lamb, drinking tea, and saying, “Come and join us; we are your friends. This leaflet will be your ticket to safety.” Both had an impact.
The PSYOPS message was primarily delivered by air. During Desert Shield, Volant Solo aircraft and selected ground radio stations beamed the Voice of America service in Arabic. These broadcasts continued throughout the bombing campaign and the ground war. After the war began, C-130s, B-52s, and F-16s dropped leaflets on the Iraqi Army. Schwarzkopf personally devised a plan whereby air-dropped leaflets would inform a targeted Iraqi division that they were going to be bombed by B-52s the next day. And so it would happen; the next day hundreds of 500- pound bombs would rain on the division. Afterward, more leaflets would be dropped, advising the Iraqis to flee, as more strikes were planned for their area. And the next day, the unit would be hit again.
Debriefings of Iraqi POWs indicated that this operation significantly affected the troops’ morale and was an important factor in their decision to surrender or desert.
? Because psychological warfare is more art than science, it is very difficult to judge the effectiveness of a PSYOPS campaign.
It is clear that no one in the target audience was missed. Nearly thirty million leaflets were dropped in the KTO, and the world saw Iraqi soldiers surrendering by the thousands, clutching the white leaflets that guaranteed their safe treatment. Radio broadcasts probably also had an effect, as a third of the POWs stated in their debriefings that these affected their decision to surrender.
Nevertheless, a study of PSYOPS after the war concluded that it was not so much the leaflets and the broadcasts as the incessant aerial attacks, the unrelenting presence of Coalition aircraft over the battlefield day and night, that changed people from fighters to quitters. Airpower sent a message to Iraqi soldiers that they had no refuge from attack from above. The noise of jet engines throughout the night, the inability to travel safely, the devastating and sudden attack from an unseen B-52 or F-111 laser-guided bomb drove them into a helpless, hopeless state. The leaflet offered hope of survival. The brutal, unrelenting air campaign made the message on the leaflet count.
However we explain it, nearly 80,000 out of an estimated 200,000 Iraqis in the KTO surrendered, and most of the remaining 120,000 took to their heels when Coalition tanks appeared on the scene.
? During February, desertion became the number one problem for the Iraqi generals. In some Iraqi divisions, hundreds — even thousands — of troops simply went home. After the Battle of Khafji, the IIId Corps lost at least a further 10 percent of its troops to desertions, and the rate of desertion was accelerating as air continued to pound them. There were even desertions in the pampered, privileged Republican Guard.
Not only were the trigger-pullers walking off the battlefield, but other vital functions were suffering. The logistical resupply of the army was not adequate, and there were shortages of food and water. Essential maintenance was being ignored, and as a result, many of the vehicles, radars, heavy guns, and other machines of war were inoperable or impaired. The lack of maintenance on their fleet of vehicles, combined with air attacks on everything that moved, had reduced the Iraqi logistics teams to using Kuwaiti garbage trucks to carry supplies to their troops dug in on the desert. The trends for Iraq were all bad.
As February wore on, Joint STARS picked up more and more movement at night. Convoys of up to fifty vehicles were trying to evade the ever-present aircraft overhead. Though the darkness of night gave them some shielding, their best ally turned out to be the waves of drizzly weather that passed through the KTO every few days. Unfortunately for the Iraqis, the F-16 pilots developed attack options with the moving target indicator displays on their radar, and took away the Iraqi weather advantage.
At that point, the national community (the intelligence people who didn’t deploy to the war) estimated that the Iraqis could no longer meet the logistic requirements that ground combat would impose. While they were believed to have plenty of ammunition, they would run out of food and fuel.
To the Iraqi generals in Kuwait, withdrawal doubtless seemed the best course; but it was too late for that, unless they could find a way to get the aircraft off their backs.
Schwarzkopf ’s dilemma remained “When do we cross the border? When do we start losing Coalition ground forces to save Kuwait?” To which Chuck Horner added, “When can we get this over with and stop the loss of Coalition airmen’s lives, losses that started on January 17? Too often, these deaths were overlooked by the media and others whose eyes saw only ground combat, as if that were the only game in town.”
MISSION CREEP
As the war went on, the effectiveness of the Iraqi Air Force continued to decline, even as Iraqi aircraft played no part in the defense of the homeland, after their futile attempts during the first few days of the war. The aircraft lost were invariably parked in shelters or fleeing to Iran, and the losses did not always come from Coalition guns and missiles. On February 7, twelve Iraqi jets made a run for Iran. Three of these were shot down by F-15s, and six crashed in Iran, either because they were unable to land safely or because they ran out of fuel. The fear factor must have been very high among Iraqi pilots.
To offset the failure of their most effective air defense systems, fighter aircraft and radar-guided surface- to-air missiles, the Iraqis bolstered defenses in the KTO with short-range, optically aimed heat-seeking surface-to- air missiles, such as the SA-16 or some variant of this Russian-built weapon.
The increased battlefield defenses proved especially dangerous to USAF A-10s. The Warthogs were descendants of World War II P-47 Jugs, as well as the Vietnam-era Thuds that Chuck Horner had flown. They were tough, heavily armored (for aircraft), and very survivable, but slow; and they were used primarily for attacks against enemy armor in close support of friendly ground troops. For that purpose they packed quite a large punch, primarily a 30 mm Gatling gun in the nose, one round from which could destroy a tank over a mile away (the Warthog was designed around this gun, which is as big as a Volkswagen, when you include the ammunition drum). It also carried the IR Maverick missile, as well as regular bombs.
The Warthogs were especially vulnerable to short-range SAMs, because they took such a long time to zoom back to the safety of medium altitude after a bombing, strafing, or missile-diving attack.
The good news was that intelligence estimates placed only about two hundred of these missiles in Iraqi hands. Thus, one strategy Horner considered — and instantly discarded — was to deliberately expose his aircraft, in order to “run them out of bullets.”
