Every Man a Tiger: The Gulf War Air Campaign

That lack of understanding changed after the war, when we were able to learn the truth about conditions inside Iraq from discussions with ordinary Iraqi citizens and captured military personnel. After the war we were able to document the horrific acts committed by the Iraqi secret services against the people of Kuwait. After the war we were able to witness from afar the brutal subjugation of the Kurds, the Marsh Arabs, and other Iraqi people who had attempted to rise up against the dictator in rebellions that we had tacitly encouraged by our defeat of Saddam’s military forces. As we watched Iraqi Army helicopters savage their own citizens, the part we had played, our unwillingness — or inability — to intervene to halt these tragedies, left a bitter taste in our mouths. What could we do? What should we have done?

Such complexities — and the many other complexities of postconflict Iraq in 1991 and 2003—show that while our military is amazingly capable of ever-increasingly efficient and successful conduct of warfare, both our own nation and the coalitions of nations of which we have been part remain much less capable of resolving the effects that result from our use of military force, regardless of our strategies and goals.

Meanwhile, the mission we were sent to launch on January 17, 1991, was to liberate occupied Kuwait, and that is what we did. At the end of February 1991, we had driven the Iraqi Army out of Kuwait City, and shown the vaunted Iraqi Republican Guard to be inept and impotent. Our military had done what was asked of us and had done it in a manner of which we were proud. We had been in the desert for three-quarters of a year — the soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines of the Coalition were tired of the killing and were eager to go home. Unfortunately our desires may have caused the next generation of soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines to spend a much longer period of time in the vast deserts of the Middle East. But then in 1991, who foresaw September 11, 2001?

THE NEW THREATS

The attacks on New York’s twin towers and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., changed the United States, her people, and their leaders.

Before the events of 2001 we had weathered a host of attacks carried out by Al-Qaeda and the agents of Saddam Hussein. These events involved a number of actors and may or may not have been related, yet all were aimed at the United States. The bombings by Al-Qaeda agents of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania caused large numbers of civilian casualties. An Al-Qaeda attack in Yemen nearly sank a U.S. Navy ship, the Cole, and caused the deaths of several of our service men and women. Earlier, agents of Saddam had attempted to assassinate former President George Bush in Kuwait. Later, Iraq expelled the United Nations Weapons of Mass Destruction inspectors and then was caught building surface-to-surface missiles that failed to comply with the agreements that ended Gulf War I.

While these events drew condemnation from many nations, America was seen as big, strong, and resilient, and so reactions out in the world were less vocal than if a smaller, more helpless country had been exposed to actions and attacks such as these. And even in the United States, though our citizens were seriously concerned about these events, they were not outraged enough to be moved toward significant action.

That does not mean that we did nothing. We did retaliate with cruise missiles fired against Al-Qaeda facilities in Afghanistan. We punished Saddam’s misdeeds with air attacks (which seriously damaged his W.M.D. capabilities). We brought our concerns to the UN and other international forums (though such diplomatic efforts were often stifled by other nations, for reasons of their own). Yet none of those actions could be called significant, much less decisive.

It was the stunning visual displays of two Boeing 767 aircraft slicing into the twin towers in New York City, and the smoke and debris of those mighty buildings crashing to the ground, that changed things. It was also the sight of smoke and flames rising around the Pentagon, while our F-16 jet fighters roared overhead looking for the enemy who had just completed his mission, that changed things. It was the recordings of the voices of Americans on an airliner over Pennsylvania that changed things — calling their loved ones on cell phones to tell them of their decision to overpower their hijackers, dying in the effort, and saving the lives of the terrorist target where their aircraft would have been turned into a guided bomb.

The nation was energized on September 11, 2001. It was a shocked nation that quickly became united in grim determination that we had not seen since December 7, 1941.

At that time this was a nation whose military was in the midst of significant reforms, which in some ways made it superbly ready to face the challenges thrown at it by this new war, “a war on terror.” But there was still a long way to go to reshape a military organized, trained, and equipped to fight the Soviet Union into the force needed to counter those who now threatened our national security and the security of our allies around the world.

RAPID DOMINANCE

In January of 1991, Desert Storm unveiled military capabilities that the general public had not previously appreciated. Precision-guided bombs, aircraft that could see moving targets in the air and on the ground, and infrared sights that allowed both pilots in the air and soldiers on the ground to target the enemy in the dead of night all became popular fare on evening television during that dramatic month. Modern warfare had evolved in ways that many considered revolutionary. In the years between Desert Storm and our later wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, military leaders searched for concepts that might explain what was revolutionary in Desert Storm and what was needed and possible in future wars.

In 2001 incoming Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld used the word “transformation” to describe his plans to adapt new ways of operating our military forces, based on exploiting new capabilities and combining these systems with legacy systems, while fighting as a joint land, sea, air, and space team.

Another concept phrase that has been used to describe future warfare is “Rapid Dominance.” The Rapid Dominance approach to defeating the enemy relies heavily on achieving effects against an enemy’s vital systems and institutions — sometimes instead of, sometimes in addition to, destroying his military might. Effects-based operations may include destroying an adversary’s military force, but they may also choose more radical means to influence the enemy to conform to our desired outcome.

In Kosovo, for example, our goal was to remove Serbian forces conducting ethnic cleansing. After fifty-five days of air strikes against Serbian armor had failed to deter the Serbs, NATO forces changed to an effects-based operations strategy that attacked the Serbian leaders’ economic power base. Within three weeks the Serbian forces surrendered Kosovo to the United Nations peacekeepers. The Serbs left the province undefeated in battle, yet NATO had achieved its desired outcome.

? In order to be effective, Rapid Dominance requires four major elements:

First: Effects-based operations require that their implementers have thorough knowledge of their enemy and of themselves. This goes well beyond the traditional counting of ships, planes, and troops. It requires that the strategists have awareness of what makes the enemy tick — its leadership, populace, economy, and so on. It requires that planners understand how to influence both the enemy leadership and the general populace, and then how to judge the effects of the measures taken to achieve that influence. It requires that new strategies be undertaken as the enemy moves toward the end state desired and also what unintended consequences may result from the military force applied to achieve those goals. Lastly, war impacts both sides. An understanding of how the conflict will affect your own side is needed to avoid undesirable effects to you, even while achieving success over an enemy.

In Vietnam, the enemy was defeated on the battlefield, but the war was lost because of the effects visited on the American public by inept strategies and shoddy execution of military force.

In Operation Iraqi Freedom, we had excellent knowledge of how to defeat the Iraqi forces, but we lacked understanding of the best postconflict strategy. We were aware, for example, that the Iraqi Army was often indifferent, even hostile, to Saddam Hussein’s leadership — and if given alternatives, would not fight. Yet instead of taking this reality into account and acting on it, Coalition forces followed traditional procedures after Iraqi soldiers surrendered. They disarmed them, vetted them for possible war crimes, and then returned them to their homes, if