'The place is covered with Bedouins,' Massey said. 'You meet a Bedouin and you've got a fifty percent chance he is going to turn you in.'
Though some of his own troops were on foot, Massey also made it clear that the patrols needed to be mounted. Without vehicles they were easy prey.
It was an important lesson.
Even before they left the States, Downing and his planners realized the critical mission wasn't to destroy Scuds; it was to stop Scud missiles from shooting into Israel. That realization meant they didn't have to find the missiles themselves; any of the facilities necessary for launching them would do just as well.
'When you focus on that as a mission, a whole bunch of other things open up to you,' Downing explains. 'All of a sudden, you start after things like the logistic system, the fuel system, the communications systems, people, barracks, roads. I mean, it's not just the missiles.
'A target list that was very, very small and very, very vague became an enormous target list that let us be very, very smart.'
Field-level troops and commanders formulated the specific tactics, not the generals. Downing and Stiner saw their jobs as primarily answering the question 'How do we support this?'
'The guys who arc going to do the mission plan it,' said Downing. 'Generals don't plan it.'
The Special Forces Scud missions began February 7, when sixteen SOF troopers and two vehicles were helicoptered into Iraq by MI I-53J Pave Low and CH-47 Chinook helos. They were supported by armed Blackhawk helicopters, called defensive armed penetrators, as well as regular Air Force and Navy airplanes, including F-15Es, F-18s, and A-10As. A week after the operation began, the original anti-Scud forces were augmented with additional special missions units, a reinforced Ranger company, and additional special operations helicopters.
About fifteen anti-Scud SOF missions were undertaken during the course of the war. More would surely have been launched if the war had not ended. The mission lengths and sizes varied; at one point, at least four different American SOF units were looking for Scuds inside Iraq.
The insertions were made by helicopters, whose movements were coordinated with large packages of bombers heading across the border to attack Iraqi installations. Personal, up-front leadership was exercised by commanders at every level, a trademark of special operations. 'Doug' and 'Rich' personally flew the lead on every critical air insertion; 'Eldon,' 'Ike,' and 'John,' and their troop commanders and sergeant majors, led every ground patrol. The Ranger raid against a command-and-control node near the Jordanian border was led by 'Kurt,' the Ranger company commander. While the Iraqi defenders concentrated on the high-flying bombers, the helicopters zipped undetected across the open desert at sand-dune level.
While specific procedures varied according to the situation, in general, the ground units would hide during the day, while reconnaissance and attacks took place at night. Fighter-bombers and attack planes detailed to Scud-hunting would be vectored to their targets by the SOF teams. The Strike Eagles worked mostly at night, the A-1 OAs mostly during the day.
One of the keys to the Scud operations were special all-terrain vehicles and humvees, which could be carried inside special operations helicopters. Machine guns, grenade launchers, and antitank missiles gave the vehicles considerable firepower. Besides the driver and up to ten passengers, gunners could sit on elevated swivel-seats at the rear.
Transporting the vehicles and combat teams across sometimes two hundred miles of hostile territory presented a problem, however. The fuel required for the long-range missions also weighed the helos down. All that weight meant they couldn't hover: They had to literally land on the fly. Twenty-knot rolling touchdowns on a smooth landing surface arc one thing — and they are quite another in sand dunes at night. The uneven terrain — not to mention rocks — could easily destroy the fuel-laden helos.
As soon as the operations began, the special operators realized that their aerial and satellite intelligence photos — used by the Air Force for their earlier attacks — in many cases missed the desert roads the Scud transports were actually using. And even when the targets were pointed out, hitting individual missile launchers from 15,000 feet and above was a difficult proposition.
Back behind the lines, Downing met with Buster Glosson to discuss the possibility of using CBU minefields on the newly discovered Scud routes and rear staging areas. Glosson liked the idea. So Downing asked him to come along to discuss the plan with Schwarzkopf, who still insisted on signing off on every covert mission. The CINC tended to trust the Air Force general more than he did SOF officers. After hearing the plan, the always skeptical Schwarzkopf turned to Glosson, who of course gave it his thumbs-up. The boss was convinced.
'Once we figured out what the logistics flow was, we went in and put these minefields in,' said Downing. 'And they were devastating.'
Cooperation between SOF and Air Force units was very high, and probably saved the lives of a number of operators behind the lines. On at least two occasions, Air Force F-15Es intervened when Iraqis attacked the special operations teams. In one case, a Strike Eagle pilot switched on his landing lights and plunged toward a patrol of nine armored vehicles, scattering them so a SOF helo could rescue a four-man SOF contingent. In another, an Eagle weapons officer used a smart bomb as an antiaircraft weapon, wiping out an Iraqi helicopter.
As part of the SOF Scud campaign, Blackhawk helicopters conducted armed reconnaissance missions, flying their specially equipped MII-60s at night with the aid of night-vision goggles. On their first night out, they nailed a Scud.
When they reported this to Downing, he was skeptical. Downing was a Vietnam veteran with two tours as a junior infantry officer; he knew better than to trust the first reports back from the field.
'Yeah, right,' he told them. 'Let's see the videos.'
Like most U.S. military aircraft, the sophisticated helicopters included equipment that recorded attacks. His men dutifully brought the tape in, and set it unseen in the viewer. Downing frowned through the fast forward with obvious disbelief.
Then the pilot slowed the tape just as a Scud missile came into focus on the screen. A few puffs appeared; an Iraqi soldier ran past the camera.
'Holy shit!' said Downing, as the Scud exploded.
He grabbed the phone and called General Schwarzkopf. 'They got some Scud missiles,' he told the general when he came on the line.
'Yeah, right.'
'No, we really did.'
'Okay, that's good,' said Schwarzkopf, hanging up, still clearly unconvinced.
Downing turned to his staff. 'Get me an airplane,' he said. The general grabbed 'Dave,' one of the warrant officers who had flown the mission. Three and a half hours later, the two men walked into General Schwarzkopf's war room in Riyadh.
'What are you doing here?' demanded Schwarzkopf.
'Sir, I want to talk to you about these Scud missiles,' Downing told him.
'Yeah, right.'
'We've got a video I'd like to show you,' said Downing.
Glosson was standing nearby. 'I'd like to see it,' said the Air Force general, who was himself taking a lot of the heat for the Scud launches.
Sweeney set up the video. Schwarzkopf hunched over the monitor — then began dancing like a kid as the screen lit up with flames.
'Holy shit! That's a Scud missile. Hey, where'd you get this?' he asked Downing. 'Can we transmit this back to the States?'
For Downing, it was a particularly sweet moment. Several years before, Schwarzkopf had cornered him in a Pentagon hallway, and lambasted him for pushing a proposal to outfit Special Operations helicopters with rockets, miniguns, and cannons. The helicopters Schwarzkopf had scorned had just scored a big kill.
Downing didn't bother mentioning it.
Iraqi Scud launches peaked on January 21, when fourteen were fired; ten were launched on January 25 and another six on January 26. By then, the missiles had become a priority for the Air Force. The British SAS, and then American Special Forces units, took up the operation soon afterward. Firings dropped off precipitously during the
