At that moment, the bomb hit, the fireball of the secondary explosion rolled over the SAS man, and the loudest “JESUS CHRIST!” ever transmitted on the airways interrupted what had been a cool, professional conversation. Fortunately, he was not injured, and the tape delivered more than a good laugh to the commanders in Riyadh. For Horner, it showed they were making progress in an otherwise frustrating job. For Schwarzkopf, this evidence of success took off some of the heat from Washington to start a ground war in the west.
SAS operations in Iraq sometimes ran into difficulties. On one occasion, a three-man SAS team was captured by Iraqis. Two of the team managed to escape, while the third was beat up and tortured. Of the two who got away, however, only one trekked to safety in Syria; the other died of exposure (it was fiercely cold in Iraq). Later, from the man who reached Syria, the TACC planners learned the location of the torture site. That night, a pair of 2,000-pound bombs were dropped through its roof.
? Some weeks after the SAS first went out to hunt Scuds, Major General Wayne Downing’s U.S. Special Operations force began to share those duties. This operation caused surprising friction with Horner’s TACC team. The problem, in Horner’s view, was their go-it-alone attitude and their emphasis on secrecy and rank:
Another group of troopers who were vital to the war on Scuds got no medals and very little appreciation — the men and women of Space Command.
Throughout the Cold War, U.S. deterrence strategy had relied on detecting an attack on the United States in sufficient time to launch retaliatory strikes. A cornerstone of this strategy was the Defense Support Program (DSP) satellites, huge cylinder-shaped objects in geosynchronous orbits. Each DSP had an infrared telescope that kept track of hot spots on earth. If the hot spot started moving across the earth’s surface, the satellite reported the event to the command center in Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado Springs. There, the men and women of the U.S. Space Command would evaluate the event to see if it was a threat to North America. Though the DSP had not been built to fight theater war, and was sensitive only to the high-intensity rocket plumes made by ICBMs, the wizards of space altered the computers in August 1990 to sort out the DSP data more finely. The Iraqi test firings in December proved this would work.
Of almost equal importance for Horner’s people was knowledge of launch site locations.
In the Cold War, once you knew an attack was coming from Russia, you had about all the information you needed, and this was about all DSPs would tell you. DSPs were not designed to project the accuracy required to attack a launch site with iron bombs. This was a serious deficiency that could never be totally overcome. Nevertheless, the contractor, TRW, and the military wizards of space had vastly improved the design by the time the guns started to shoot, and the DSP was able to give some rough idea of launch points.
These modifications helped, but DSP’s greatest contribution to the war was to provide warnings of attack, so civil defense agencies could be alerted.
Those in the TACC can never forget those chilling words, “Scud Alert!” In the early days of the war, the words ignited near panic; until the Patriots proved their worth, almost everyone donned chemical-biological protection gear and headed for a deep underground bunker.
The “Scud Alert” warning also initiated actions in the air defense cell. First, the Army troops would inform their Patriot batteries; civil defense agencies would also be notified, so they could warn civilians to take cover. Then the AWACS display would light up, showing the approximate launch point, missile flight path, and probable impact zone. This information would be relayed automatically throughout the command-and-control network, so F-15 or F- 16 pilots could be vectored toward the mobile launchers. At the affected Patriot batteries, systems would be checked to make sure they were ready for computer-initiated firing.
Since to the DSP’s sensors B-52 strikes initially looked very much like a Scud launch, there was a quick check with the AWACS display to discover if the Scud attack was genuine. Once that was determined, Horner would watch CNN for a real-time live report.
Though most Scuds did little damage, there were still bad moments. One that fell in Israel caused a large number of injuries, another destroyed the school attended by General Behery’s children, and another fell in the street outside RSAF headquarters (it was immediately attacked by souvenir hunters). A piece of molten metal from this Scud (or from the Patriot that intercepted it) burned a hole through the roof of the RAF administration building and dropped sizzling onto a desk where a pair of Brits were having a late-night cup of tea. Finally, and tragically, in the waning moments of the war, during a period when the Patriot battery defending the city was off-line, a Scud slammed into a warehouse in Dhahran where U.S. Army transportation troops were sleeping. Over twenty-five troops were killed and nearly a hundred injured — the largest numbers of allied casualties from a single Gulf War event. In fact, Scuds killed more U.S. troops than were killed in any single engagement during the eight months of war on the sea, six weeks of war in the air, and four days of war on the ground (a total of about seventy-five soldiers were killed by the Iraqis, and another seventy-five were killed by blue-on-blue).
The failure to stop the Scud threat was Chuck Horner’s greatest Gulf War failure, the one area where airpower could not secure and maintain the military initiative.
COLLATERAL DAMAGE
A major and largely unsung obsession shared by Chuck Horner, his planners, the Coalition pilots, and the President of the United States, was to prevent needless civilian casualties — collateral damage, in the military euphemism. Military targets and military personnel were fair game, but ordinary Iraqis were not responsible for the criminal acts of their rulers. They had a right to live in safety, as far as humanly possible.
Chuck Horner will never forget George Bush’s anguish in August at Camp David as he contemplated the deaths that would follow the decisions he’d been forced to make — an anguish, Horner is convinced, that was the right response to the actions he was taking. Horner himself has felt similar pain many times. The needless death of civilians had to be avoided.
On the whole, Coalition airmen successfully followed this course. On two occasions, they failed:
The first, simply, was a tragic mistake. During an RAF strike on a bridge, the guidance system of a laser- guided bomb failed, and the bomb fell into a nearby marketplace, killing or injuring several Iraqi civilians. Since the target was legitimate, and reasonable measures had been taken during an attack on a legitimate target, no blame could be attached to this tragedy.
The second was more complicated — the attack on the Al-Firdus command-and-control bunker.
In the planning for the offensive air campaign, a master target list had been created. The list included thirty-three targets designated as command-and-control centers, though what exactly they commanded and controlled was not totally clear. Number thirty on the list was the Al-Firdus bunker in Baghdad, which was initially scheduled to be struck on day three of the war, a day when many targets were scheduled to be hit. (Day-three targets tended to be the leftovers, after the really important targets were struck on the first two and a half days). In the event, Al-Firdus and the other thirty-two bunkers slipped in priority, as the demands of Scud-hunting, more time-sensitive targets, and weather were met.
Still, in the eyes of the Black Hole planners, Al-Firdus remained a legitimate target of some importance to
