success.
? Like a fool, I stayed in the TACC, fascinated by the unfolding events, and neglecting sleep. I had admonished all the others to rest so they could hold up under the long haul, but neglected to follow my own orders. I was operating on caffeine and adrenaline, the “breakfast of champions” for a fighter pilot.
Meanwhile, the F-117s and F-111s were tearing Iraqi command and control to pieces. The strikes against key airfields and munitions production facilities were going as planned. The B-52s, A-10s, F-16s, Jaguars, FA-18s, and AV-8s were hard at work on the Iraqi Army deployed in the desert.
When we bombed the Iraqi Army with B-52s, we were primarily using them for effect. And they had quite an effect. One POW was asked which aircraft he feared the most, and he said, “The B-52.” He was then asked to describe the experience. To which he replied, “I was never bombed by a B-52; but I visited a friend who had been, and I saw and heard what it was like, and so I feared the B-52 more than anything else.”
After the war, another Iraqi was asked why he had surrendered so quickly. “It was the bombs,” he said, pointing to pictures of B-52s and A-10s. “It was the bombs.”
Little did he realize that he had most likely survived because we had targeted those aircraft to minimize Iraqi deaths. We did that because it was the right thing to do, and because we wanted to exploit the already low morale of the Iraqi soldier in his unholy occupation of a Muslim neighbor. If I had wanted to kill Iraqi soldiers, we could have loaded the B-52 “buffs” with wall-to-wall antipersonnel munitions; and, today, unexploded submunitions (ready to detonate if disturbed) would probably have left Kuwait and southern Iraq uninhabitable.
What we dropped were regular bombs. They made a lot of noise and tore up the desert for miles; and if one hit a bunker, the folks inside died. That couldn’t be called an accident, but if by some miracle we had hit no Iraqi soldiers, and they had all surrendered without fighting, I would not have been unhappy.
? Before the middle of February, I actually paid little attention to the specifics of the war. I listened to all the BDA bullshit, but only to the extent that it told me what else needed to be done. I was trying not to rest on our laurels. Or, as Bill Creech told us, “Don’t read your own press clippings.” What was important was what was coming next. So I paid attention to what we had done only when it helped me with that. Each day we learned more about the Iraqis, and the thoughts about what that new information meant were my most important thoughts.
You don’t really know about war until you engage in it against a specific enemy in a specific environment. Sure, you can make general assumptions that will in all likelihood hold up when the shooting starts, but you have to be careful about relying on these. It’s like preparing for a boxing match. You study previously demonstrated tendencies, strengths, and weaknesses, but when the bout starts, that has only a limited value. Now you are concerned with your opponent’s punches and openings. Strategies change because of many factors, such as fatigue or injury, that can only be known during the fight.
CONTROL OF THE AIR
Air superiority is not a precise concept. And the process of gaining it is no less fuzzy. What do you mean by air superiority, and how do you know when you’ve got it? There is no handy chart that lets you plot the x- and y-axis and find where the two lines cross.
What I wanted was to operate freely over Iraq and not lose too many aircraft. Okay, what does that mean? What is too many? I don’t know exactly, but I guess I will know if it is too many. Later in the war, too many A-10s targeted against the Republican Guards were getting shot up. Because they were suffering too many casualties, I ordered them to other targets. Were there any specific numbers involved in this decision? No. It was a gut call.
Free operation over Iraq raises other issues. For starters, not every aircraft could be expected to go everywhere. Or if it could go everywhere, it might not do that all the time. The F-117s could go anywhere, but when the Iraqi Air Force was flying, they could only go at night. (Again, we wanted to fly the F-117s in conditions where they wouldn’t be seen.) The A-10s, on the other hand, were never sent to Baghdad, even after we controlled the air.
In other words, control of the air is a complex issue, filled with variables.
To take the question a step further, I considered that I had air superiority when I could do what I wanted to within the strengths and limitations of my force, and when I could hold the Iraqi targets at risk while employing all my air assets as appropriate. That meant, for example, that my strike aircraft did not have to jettison their payload due to Iraqi defenses such as fighter interceptors.
I knew we would have aircraft losses throughout the war, but I wanted those losses to be the lowest possible until the ground war started. Then I expected the aircraft doing close air support would be taking greater risks, flying lower to identify the target or to get under the smoke and weather in order to support our engaged coalition ground forces.
An air commander manages loss rates. If you have time, and the target is not urgent (either in time or in priority), then you back off from great risk (on those occasions, for example, when the weather will make it difficult to visually acquire SAM missiles and outmaneuver them). On the other hand, if the situation is dire — if, say, a ground unit is being overrun — then you order the force into greater danger. At Khafji, we lost an AC-130 that stayed too long over the battlefield. Day came, and the sky grew light enough for an Iraqi shoulder-fired SAM gunner to visually acquire him and shoot his missile. Our pilot was not reckless. He elected to err on the unsafe side because there were lots of high-priority targets for him to shoot. It was a bad judgment, but that’s how airmen think and evaluate risk. If the target had been more ordinary and he had been facing the same risk, he’d have gone somewhere else and hit an easier target.
Because I absolutely had to knock out the Iraqi air defense command and control, I risked sending all the F-117s to Baghdad (I didn’t realize then how good Stealth was). However, if I had the same appreciation of Stealth that I had during the opening moments of the war, and the target was the Baath Party headquarters, I would not have sent the F-117s. That target wasn’t worth the gamble.
To me, the goals of the air superiority campaign were threefold:
(1) To render the Iraqi fighters inoperable. We would blind them by cutting off their command and control, terrorize them by shooting down anything that flew, and make life difficult by bombing airfields and radar sites.
(2) To render the radar-guided surface-to-air missiles impotent. We would attack command and control and use support jamming EA-6Bs and EF-111s, in order to force each piece of the system into autonomous operations (in that way they had to radiate with their own radars to find a target, making them more vulnerable to HARM attacks). We would terrorize the operators to induce them not to use their radars. We would kill them on a priority basis, using Wild Weasels and USN HARM-equipped aircraft. We would self-protect by using ECM pods, and by flying in VFR conditions, so aircraft could see the radar-guided SAMs and outmaneuver them.
(3) To render guns and shoulder-fired IR SAMs useless. We would fly at medium altitude; keep the time at low altitude (such as at the bottom of a dive bomb pass) at a minimum; and — the age-old lesson we always relearn in combat — we would not make multiple passes on the same target.
From the start, General Schwarzkopf was always asking when we would have air superiority, but I would never tell him. I knew we would be able to do anything we wanted to from the start, yet I also knew the Iraqis would contest control of the air as long as Saddam could fire his pistol toward the sky (as he often did in newsreels). The CINC wanted some magic number. I knew there was no such thing. I knew the answer lay in Chuck Horner’s gut, and it was determined by my gut feelings about the losses and efficiency of the operation.
That is why my first stop every day was at the search-and-rescue cell to talk over losses. How did they happen and what was the status of the crews? That stop had many purposes: one, to keep reminding me that war is about death and killing and that our guys were dying, just as the enemy was; two, to keep the faith with the aircrews (we were honor bound to do our best to rescue them if they got shot down); three, to learn what was working and what was failing so that I could crank that information into my targeting, rules, advice, and strategy.
So when did we get air superiority?
We had it before the war began, because we had the means to get it — equipment, intelligence, training,
