20th aniversary gulf war

DESERT SHIELDDESERT STORM

T H E 2 0 T H A N N I V E R S A R Y O F T H E G U L F WA R

EDITORS FOREWORD

On Jan. 15, 1991, the United Nations ultimatum ordering Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait ran out. For

months, a coalition of nations had been staging a military buildup, preparing to launch an attack to take

back Kuwait. Now the coalition was ready.

By 2:30 a.m. on Jan. 17, airstrikes were hitting Baghdad. Operation Desert Storm had begun.

It was a watershed conflict.

To the surprise of many, the major conflict of the 20th centurys last decade was not between the Soviets

and the Americans, nor the Arabs and Israelis, but rather saw a worldwide coalition arrayed against an

Arab country that had invaded a smaller Arab neighbor.

The conflict was a showcase for technologies like precision munitions, stealth, night vision and other

sensors, C4ISR assets, and UAVs. Once considered the dominant military power in the region, Iraq was

totally outclassed and comprehensively defeated by these technologies and the tactics that leveraged

them. The result was that more American casualties were sustained in training than in the war itself.

According to some accounts, the overmatch of these Cold War-bred technologies against Iraqs Soviet

tactics and equipment helped convince the Soviet leadership that the Cold War was essentially lost,

bringing on the collapse of the Soviet Union.

But overwhelming victories tend to provide more lessons to future opponents than the victors, and the

result was that during Operation Iraqi Freedom, a short, sharp conventional conflict developed into a

different kind of warfare, with the United States and its coalition partners facing an enemy with AK-47s,

RPGs, and IEDs in a long, difficult insurgency.

An even larger and more difficult insurgency continues today in Afghanistan, and the tactics of

unconventional warfare employed by that insurgency speak to the success of Operation Desert Storm 20

years ago: Knowing that a traditional confrontation against todays coalition would be doomed, terrorist

organizations have resorted to a shadowy sort of battle, one in which by design they make themselves

hard to pin down and defeat. That the conflicts of today reflect the lessons learned from Operation Desert

Storm should in no way devalue the achievement of two decades ago, when a western and pan-Arab

coalition came together to confront and force the headlong retreat of Iraqi forces from Kuwait.

DESERT SHIELD II DESERT STORM 3

FOREWORD

Foreword ................................................................................................................................................... 3

The Air WarThe Air War

Air Power in Operation Desert Shield/Desert Storm ..................................................................................... 4

By Robert F. Dorr

The Air War: Lessons Learned ..................................................................................................................... 12

By Robert F. Dorr

The Land WarThe Land War

In Desert Storm ............................................................................................................................................. 16

by Scott R. Gourley

Some Lessons Learned From the Land War ................................................................................................ 24

By Norman Friedman

The Naval WarNaval Forces in the Gulf War ........................................................................................................................ 30

By Norman Friedman

Naval Lessons of the Gulf War ..................................................................................................................... 38

By Norman Friedman

FeaturesRepublican Guard Nemesis

Feint and Deception Doomed Iraqi Units ..................................................................................................... 44

By Clarence A. Robinson, Jr.

Emerging From the Shadows

Getting Stealth into the Gulf War .................................................................................................................. 48

By John D. Gresham

The Battle of 73 Easting

And the Road to the Synthetic Battlefield.................................................................................................... 54

By John D. Gresham

ContentsDesert Shield/Desert Storm: The 20th Anniversary of The Gulf War

THE AIR WAR

4 DESERT SHIELD II DESERT STORM

THE AIR WAR AIR POWER DURING OPERATION DESERT SHIELD AND DESERT STORMBy Robert F. Dorr

On the night of January 17-18, 1991, a veritable tidal wave came plunging down on Iraq and on Iraqi forces in Kuwait as 300 strike aircraft from the Western coalition swarmed down on stra-

tegic targets. Maj. Gregory A. Feest, flying an F-117 Night-hawk, dropped the first bomb of the war on a interceptor operations center in Baghdad, wreaking havoc in Saddam Husseins air defense system. But even before the stealth fighters, Iraqi air sites near the border were challenged by helicopters.

Task Force Normandy was made up of MH-53J Pave Lows from the Air Forces 20th Helicopter Squadron and AH-64 Apaches from the Armys 101st Division, Fort Campbell, Kentucky. The plan was to attack each of two radar sites at a pivotal location known in American parlance as Ob-jective Oklahoma with two Pave Lows and four Apaches. The Pave Lows used terrain-following radar and GPS (global positioning system) to guide the Apaches over the border and to a pre-planned firing point. Close to the tar-gets, the Pave Lows slowed and dropped fluorescent light sticks onto the desert. The Army helicopters used those points of light to set their own navigation systems, then draw to within visual range, the Pave Lows moved back and opened fire with 30mm cannons and Hellfire missiles. The result was a devastating blow to key Iraqi defense positions, 22 minutes before the 3:00 a.m. H-hour.

STEALTH ATTACK

By then, the 12-plane first wave of F-117s was al-ready 50 miles beyond Oklahoma. These F-117s reached Baghdad while Saddams radars were still up and run-ning and without being detected. Maj. Jerry Leather-man was in one of the F-117s. Leathermans job, like that of another F-117 pilot ahead of him, was to bomb the Baghdad International Telephone Exchange, known to the F-117 pilots as the AT&T building because its real Arabic name was unwieldy. Leatherman followed the night eastward at 480 knots. He skirted the capital to at-

tack from the north. He saw city lights, neon signs, the snake-like Tigris River winding through the city. Sixty SAM sites and 3000 antiaircraft guns encircled Baghdad on this night. Almost all of them were shooting now. Only later would Leatherman learn that, panicked, they were shooting blind and not at him. At exactly 3:00 a.m., the F-117 in front of Leathermans hit the AT&T Building with a GBU-27 bomb. On Leathermans scope, the target abruptly glowed, hotter than adjacent office towers and the nearby, tulip-shaped Iraqi Martyrs Monu-ment. Leatherman pickled one minute later, splitting the crosshairs on his display and blowing out the upper four floors of the building. Leatherman peeled away to the west, for the safety of the desert, and turned for home, switching on heavy metal music from Def Leppard on his Walkman. Behind him, Capt. Marcel Kerdavid swooped down through a sky alive with fire and pickled a GBU-27 through the Al Khark communications tower, to blow the 370-foot spire apart at its mid-point. My biggest fear was that I would survive, remembered Major Mike Mahar, pilot of an F-117 in the second wave assaulting Baghdad. Theyre all dead, I told myself. All the guys who went in ahead of me have been shot down. If I live through tonight, Ill be the only F-117 pilot who survived. Everybody will ask why

Twenty minutes away from Saddam Husseins presi-dential retreat at Abu Ghurayb, I saw what looked like red-orange explosions from bombs filling the landscape ahead. But we didnt have any aircraft up there. I know, now, I was looking at muzzle flashes from antiaircraft guns. The sky around Mahar seemed to be full of fire. Flak detonated above and below him, buffeting the F-117. No one had ever seen such a nocturnal display of pyrotechnics, he re-members. With no spatial reference, it was impossible to tell how far some of it was from my airplane. But it seemed very close.

In fact, none of Mahars wingmen were dead, wounded, or even scratched. As it would turn out, the F-117s first-generation, radar-evading stealth properties enabled it

STOPPING SMOKING PROGRAMS


to fly 1,271 combat sorties in the 42-day Persian Gulf war without a single loss. From the beginning of the war until its end, the F-117 ruled the skies over Baghdad.

Shortly before 3:00 a.m., an E-3 Sentry AWACS spotted MiG-29s flying low about 50 miles inside the Iraqi border. Four F-15C Eagles from the 33rd Tactical Fighter Wing, Eg-lin Air Force Base, Fla., slipped across the border to inter-cept. One of the Iraqi MiGs responded by gaining a radar lock-on on Capt. John B. J. B. Kelks Eagle. With alarms sounding and visual warnings jarring him, Kelk fired a mis-sile and scored the wars first aerial victory at 3:10 a.m. near Mudaysis in southern Iraq.

AIR ACTION

It was the beginning of an air-to-air combat saga that would be unprecedented in the history books. A Navy FA-18 Hornet lost that first night may have been the only Ameri-can aircraft lost in air-to-air action (to an Iraqi MiG-25).

In contrast, the coalition shot down 44 Iraqi warplanes, some of them attempting to flee to asylum inside Iraqs re-cent former enemy, Iran. A total of 37 were brought down by Air Force F-15Cs, all but one of them in Kelks fighter wing, and the Eagles sustained no losses. While an airlift of unprecedented size continued to bring supplies and arms to the bases built up by the coalition, Operation Des-ert Storm unleashed new strikes by sea-launched cruse

missiles, some of which came from the aging battleship USS Missouri (BB-63), carrier-based warplanes from no fewer than five carrier battle groups flanking the Arabian peninsula on both sides, and long-range bombers.

During Operation Desert Storm, B-52G Stratofortresses served in provisional bomb wings and mounted combat missions from Diego Garcia; Jeddah, Saudi Arabia; Mo-ron, Spain, and Fairford, England. B-52Gs flew 1,624 missions, dropped over 72,000 weapons, and delivered over 25,700 tons of munitions on area targets in the KTO (Ku-wait Theater of Operations) and on airfields, industrial tar-gets, troop concentrations and storage areas in Iraq. Per-sian Gulf war B-52Gs had a mission capable rate of over 81 percent, or 2 percent higher than the peacetime rate. B-52Gs dropped 29 percent of all U.S. bombs and 38 percent of all Air Force bombs during the war.

It was revealed a year after the Gulf War that seven B-52Gs fired 35 AGM-86C conventional air launched cruise missiles (CALCMs) against eight targets in northern Iraq, including hydroelectric and geothermal power plants near Mosul, and the telephone exchange in Basara. The classi-fied code name for the program was Senior Surprise, al-though the crews called them Secret Squirrels.

Seven aircraft from the 596th Bombardment Squadron, 2nd Bombardment Wing flew the longest combat mission in history that first night of the Persian Gulf conflict. The round-trip mission from Barksdale Air Force Base, La.,

Bitburg based F-15 Eagles flew straight to Saudi Arabia fully armed for war.


lasted over 34 hours and launched 35 AGM-86C CALCMs against eight targets near Mosul, in northern Iraq. A fur-ther four missiles on four different aircraft had problems and were not launched. Launched during a ten-minute pe-riod from about 100 miles south of the Iraqi-Saudi border near the town of Ar Ar, they struck power stations near Mosel and communications facilities (including one near Basara), some of which were beyond the reach of manned aircraft prior to the start of missions from Turkey. The mis-siles use of the global positioning system aided their flight over the often featureless Iraqi terrain enabling 31 of them to hit their targets. The engine on one missile failed to start after launch, two probably missed their targets, and one was never accounted for (and was possibly shot down), yielding an 85-to 91-percent success rate. Speculation about why so many aircraft were used to launch so few missiles centers on the theory that the abort of a single air-craft would have less impact if it had fewer missiles. Fur-ther, the mission used up most of the available AGM-86Cs.

ONGOING CAMPAIGN

Once the fighting was underway, it became apparent that there would be no ground war immediately. But in the

Above: On their way into the theater, Navy Tomcats brushed up on dissimilar air combat train-ing with Royal Air Force Phantoms. Right: The old B-52s played a large part in the conflict, firing cruise missiles and unloading almost a third of all bombs in the war.



air, the attackers employed tricks they had learned playing the high-end game in the final years of the Cold War. A decade after the Goldwater-Nichols Law forced American service branches to cooperate, Desert Storm became the first joint war. There were glitches (because of incompat-ible information networks, each Navy carrier had to send an airplane to Riyadh to pick up the Air Tasking Order each day), but jointness was a force multiplier that made ev-ery bomb and missile deadlier.

The new technologies, including radar-evading stealth and miniaturized precision targeting, were icing on this cake. It would be impossible to understand the success of Desert Storm without grasping the Desert Shield buildup and especially the Desert Shield airlift that came first. When Saddam swept over Kuwait, the United States had no forces in the region. Six months later, 525,000 Ameri-cans were in the Gulf. Their numbers included the equiv-alent of nine infantry and armor divisions and a Marine division plus a brigade. They had 1,300 main battle tanks, seven carrier battle groups, a dozen fighter wings, and a supply line for arms and ammunition that stretched half-way around the world.

The airlift mounted by U.S. Air Forces Military Air-lift Command (now MAC) carried people, weapons, and equipment of all five U.S. service branches from 120 loca-tions to the deserts of the Middle East. Together with the sealift that followed, it made possible the most spectacu-lar buildup of military force in history.

MACs Gen. H. T. Johnson cobbled together an air bridge that hauled people and equipment on exhausting, 38-hour missions (the round-trip from a U.S. base, to a European location, followed by the round-trip downrange to the Saudi deserts). Johnson threw nearly all of his 265 C-141B Starlifters and 85 C-5 Galaxys into the effort and activated elements of the CRAF (Civil Reserve Air Fleet). The size of the effort was stupefying: C-141B or C-5 landed at Dhahran every seven minutes, around the clock. The tonnage of the 1948 Berlin airlift was exceeded in the first 22 days. 220,000 troops and their equipment were moved by October.

A typical airlift job was, for example, to haul equipment for the 2nd Marine Division at Camp Pendleton, Calif. A crew would fly the first leg for example, from Pendleton to Torrejon. There, another crew in a revolving pool would pick up both the mission and the aircraft, and continue downrange. Routine problems which might delay a depar-ture cleaning an aircraft, for instance had to be set aside in the all-compelling effort to keep the aircraft mov-ing, constantly moving. The eastbound stage, they called it, evoking memories of stagecoaches which, moving in the opposite direction, had opened up the American West. Downrange, there was no place to rest, so the crew would have to bring their C-141B or C-5 back to Torrejon before they could sleep.

There were triumphs and there were horror stories. One C-5 Galaxy pilot struggled with ground personnel who tried to load too much cargo, command posts confused about his destination, and a 3-hour quest for an empty bed at the end of a 30-hour work day. Another spent a day of equal length hauling supplies from Torrejon downrange, then re-

Above: F-16C Fighting Falcon fighter aircraft are refueled by KC-135 Stratotanker aircraft. Left: The Marines brought their own organic air power with them, in the shape of Harriers flying from amphibious warfare ships and ashore, as well as F/A-18s and A-6E Intruders, flying 18,000 sorties during the air campaign.


THE AIR WAR

turning, while struggling with a nose wheel that wouldnt come down (until lowered manually), and a pilots altim-eter on the blink. Shortcuts had to be taken in maintaining aircraft, and especially in cleaning them one C-141 was needed so badly, it was pulled out of the paint shop and flown to Saudi Arabia in natural metal, colorless to keep troops and materiel moving.

Strategic airlifters (C-141Bs and C-5s, plus C-130E/Hs and KC-10As when self-deploying) flew 20,500 missions, carried 534,000 passengers, and hauled

542,000 tons of cargo. Airlifters moved 4.65 billion ton-miles, as compared with 697.5 million during the 65-week Berlin airlift. To those who participated, there was anoth-er way to say what they had done a bumper sticker, worth saving for the grandchildren, worn by some as a badge of honor: I FLEW THE EASTBOUND STAGE.

Saddam Hussein, with the worlds fourth largest land army, with Scud ballistic missiles, with nascent chemi-cal and biological weapons, ultimately was not up to the test of confronting a mature American volunteer force supported by Coalition forces. The lapse of six months be-tween Saddams invasion of Kuwait on August 2, 1990 and the start of the war in January had enabled Gen. H. Nor-man Schwarzkopf, the U.S. field commander, to assemble a massive air and ground armada which included half a million American troops.

Lt. Gen. (later Gen.) Charles Chuck Horner, who commanded the air campaign from a Riyadh headquar-ters called the Black Hole, had had six months to ex-ploit the well-established airfield infrastructure in the region and to build up a force which comprised nearly a thousand aircraft. All of this paid off as the fighting began but, even then, not everything went perfectly. As January faded into February, still with no ground war underway, Horner and his aerial armada were seri-ously distracted by a hunt for Iraqi Scud missile launch sites. The great Scud hunt, as it turned out, had little impact and Iraq continued to launch small numbers of the ballistic missiles, with conventional warheads, with impunity.

Britains Royal Air Force learned that using runway-de-nial weapons-developed in a NATO-Warsaw Pact contest was a good way to get shot down.

RAF Tornado squadrons had to keep constantly revising their tactics as they attempted to do their part in keeping Saddams air defense quiet. Typical was the loss of a Tor-nado to a surface-to-air missile on February 14. Flight Lt. Rupert Clark was reacting to the hit when a second SAM went off nearby. It was catastrophic instant loss of both engines, as well as trashing of the entire cockpit and flight instruments. Clark ejected and was captured. His naviga-tor, Flight Lt. Steven Hicks, was killed.

Air Force C-141 aircraft, plus C-130s, C-5s, and KC-10s, carried over a half million passengers and as many tons of cargo.

THE AIR WAR

Prisoners of war in the Baghdad Biltmore found that Saddams troops had little regard for international stan-dards of behavior. All were beaten. Some were treated as propaganda tools. While dozens of friendlies were be-ing held prisoner, the coalition rounded up thousands of Iraqis, including some who surrendered to a remotely- pi-loted vehicle and others who were herded into captivity by Apache helicopters.

GROUND WAR

The ground war began at 4:00 a.m., February 24, when the 1st and 2nd Marine Divisions (in the east of Saudi Arabia, closer than other friendlies to Kuwait City) launched at-tacks through Iraqi border barriers of minefields, barbed wire, oil-filled trenches, and artillery fire. In a daring heli-copter assault, 2,000 men of the 101st Airborne Division seized As Salman airfield 50 miles inside Iraq. The next day, Army troops began maneuvering into the left hook that trapped large numbers of Iraqis between two major forces.

Gen. Colin Powell, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, had pointed to an Iraqi concentration during a

press conference. Im going to cut it off, he said, and then Im going to kill it. With the help of air power, he did.

The war ended on the last day of February with war-planes roving the highway of death between Kuwait City and Basra, picking off Iraqis at will. Among the statistics from the war: 184 Americans lost in combat. By declining to march on Baghdad, Washington and its allies created a legacy. A decade later, friendly warplanes are still patrol-ling the skies of Iraq.

A Royal Saudi Air Force F-15C takes of on a mission. Saudi aircraft comprised the largest contingent after the U.S.

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THE AIR WAR

In a basement room in the Pentagon, near the famous purple water fountain that has been a building landmark for Air Staff members for generations, an Air Force ma-jor is working on a study of forced entry.

To be honest, the major says, I dont know how much attention this is getting outside this building, out there in the real Air Force.

Forced entry is the services term for gaining access to airfields in a region that lacks a friendly host govern-ment. The term may refer to using political bargaining with the wavering leadership of a borderline nation. Or it may refer to launching a parachute assault to seize terrain. Either way, forced entry means securing the use of airfields where they arent readily available and

the term has fallen out of vogue since Operation Desert Storm.

Like air base operability, which refers to getting an air-field back into use after it has been bombed or dusted with chemicals, the concept is one that wasnt needed in the Persian Gulf war. There, a splendid infrastructure of air-fields was readily available for use by the western coalition throughout the Arabian peninsula and surrounding region. There, friendly airfields were never challenged or attacked.

The lessons learned during the Gulf conflict are at the core of American doctrine, tactics, and military plan-ning today, but the impact of that war is also a two-edged sword. The war taught Americans little or nothing about forced entry, airfield operability, fighting in a biological or

AIR POWER LESSONS FROM THE GULF WARBy Robert F. Dorr


chemical environment, and a dozen other disciplines that may be needed the next time Americans go to war. For-tunately, military thinkers are at work in these areas, but the mindset from the Gulf War may make their job more difficult. The United States may once again be preparing to fight the last war.

Fortunately, Operation Desert Storm taught many invalu-able lessons and these are being implemented today, often by the people who were there in the desert.

It is no accident that most of the lessons are positive. The high-tech, all-volunteer force that began deploying to the Middle East in 1990 about one-third larger than the U. S. military of today was probably the most formidable fight-ing force the world has ever known. In the decade since, times have changed, retention of skilled people has become a far more serious challenge, and the armed forces are in danger of becoming a hollow likeness of what they once were. But, to quote a U. S. Navy A-7E Corsair II pilot who fought in Desert Storm: The force we had assembled at that time was simply something that no smart adversary would want to mess with.

Much of it undoubtedly seems obvious now, but here are the key lessons:

1. Jointness is the way to fight. The term refers to cooperation among U. S. military service branches, and it has been evolving since the Goldwater-Nichols

Law of 1986, which tasked members of the service branches to work together, and imposed penalties for not doing so.2. Technology matters. Operation Desert Storm was a resounding vindication for the years of investment in radar-evading stealth technology, which enabled the F-117 Black Jet to reign supreme in the night skies over Baghdad. The desert war also proved the importance of dominating the electromagnetic spectrum, with everything from intelligence- gathering platforms like the U-2 aircraft to the F-4G Advanced Wild Weasel designed to engage and attack enemy missile sites.3. Airpower can prevail. It may be a bitter pill for some who fight on the ground or at sea, but while the Persian Gulf war proved that everyone is needed, it also validated the dominant role of air power in winning wars. In the war against Iraq, airpower had five weeks to pulverize the foe before troops moved in on the ground. In a war over Kosovo nine years later, airpower did the job without ground forces.4. The public matters. In an age of cable television (and, since the war, the Internet), the United States cannot go to war without public support. This means that future wars must take advantage of jointness, technology, and airpower to reduce casualties.

Opposite page: Since the Gulf War, the EA-6B has provided vital jamming support, but is an aging platorm. Above: Though F-16s CJs can fulfill part of its role, the retired F-4G Wild Weasel has not yet found a replacement.


THE AIR WAR

Operation Desert Storm showed that the public will accept sending its young men and women into battle, but only when it knows that casualties will be low.Although Operation Desert Storm was a model of joint-

ness, it also revealed cracks in the system. Navy carriers at sea did not have a compatible, secure system of communica-tion that would enable them to receive the daily Air Tasking Order from Riyadh: The order had to be picked up by a carri-er-based plane and physically carried to the ship. The Army and Marine Corps had serious problems of communication and interoperability, and the Air Force was not always on the mark in responding to the needs of ground troops.

Before Saddam Hussein became a household name in America, it was commonplace for some in the Pentagon to pooh-pooh the importance of technology. Oh, high-tech was important, all right, but in a military long enamored of bean-counting, numbers were more important in the view of many. Operation Desert Storm struck away all doubt that technology can prevail over numbers.

In some cases, however, lessons were learned and then ignored. There has been no follow-up aircraft with an im-proved version of the F-117s stealth capabilities. The Air Force has retired its EF-111A Raven and F-4G Advanced Wild Weasel electronic warfare aircraft prematurely, in the view of many and has not replaced them in kind. To-days EA-6B Prowler and missile-equipped F-16CJ Fighting Falcon, which have some of the capabilities of the retired aircraft, are in some ways less capable than the planes they replaced. The Prowler is too slow to keep up with strike air-craft proceeding to a target and, while the Prowlers elec-tronic systems are being updated, it is essentially a package of outdated technology.

During the Persian Gulf war, some warplanes reached their targets navigating via the global positioning system, which relies on satellites in orbit. Since the war, GPS has become vital to every aspect of military operations. Yet to-day, the military is being criticized for being slow to inte-grate air and space technologies, and those who appreciate the importance of space-based systems are crying out for a more autonomous space force. A commission headed by now-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld reported in Janu-ary 2001 that the United States was doing a poor job of han-dling its space assets, and urged greater independence for the militarys space command.

The difficulties in capitalizing on new technologies are il-lustrated by the Marine Corps problems with the MV-22B Osprey, the tilt-rotor aircraft it wants to use to haul troops from vessels at sea to landing zones deep inland, bypassing treacherous amphibious beach landings. After more than a decade of tests and 4,000 flight hours, the Osprey appears to have vindicated tilt-rotor technology, but the program has suffered two fatal crashes, and has been undermined by a record-keeping scandal within the Corps. Overlooked amid this fuss is the likelihood that tilt-rotor technology works, and the simple truth that any technological revolution ex-acts a price.

As for the plain truth about airpower, it remains difficult for some in the Pentagon to swallow, even if the truth has been evolving since Brig. Gen. William Mitchell demonstrat-ed the superiority of the bomber over the battleship in 1921. When properly used, together with the boon of technology (and that includes precision-guided weapons), airpower wins wars. The Gulf War required a contribution from ev-eryone, and the sailor aboard a destroyer or the infantry-man charging into battle was needed but by the time the ground fight began, the issue had been decided.

The need for greater integration of air and space assets is well understood but is proceeding too slowly. The need for a 21st-century version of the F-117, as well as a modern power projection platform to replace the ancient B-52 Stratofortress bomber, is also well understood but not proceeding at all. If airpower is to retain its prevalent role, newer and better systems need to be fielded sooner than current plans call for.

As for the role of the public in armed conflict, like it or not the U. S. armed forces must contend today with a populace weaned on instant information. The public today is not prepared to accept high casualties. That reality has shaped American intervention since the Gulf War, includ-ing the fighting over Kosovo, which was done entirely by air and resulted in not a single friendly killed or wounded in action.

But the next war could be different. The next war may re-quire forced entry or air base operability. The next war may not give us a Saddam Hussein, who generously allowed the western coalition six months to build up, exploiting a vast network of airfields that were available from day one. We may not have airfields next time, says the major near the purple water fountain and he is right.

The learning of lessons must always be a selective pro-cess. We cannot assume that our next conflict will resemble the Persian Gulf War in any way. We can, however, gain from the positive lessons of that war so long as we stay focused, also, on other threats and other eventualities loom-ing out there in an uncertain world.

Ten years after Desert Storm, the old B-52 soldiers on as a power projection platform.


THE LAND WAR

The land forces components of Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm were spun into initial ac-tion within hours of Saddam Husseins invasion of Kuwait on August 2, 1990. Serving as the bed-

rock for a coalition force structure that would fight the first major military campaign of the post-Cold War era, the U.S. land force component transitioned from an urgent defen-sive response to an overwhelming offensive juggernaut in less than six months.

TAKING THE DEFENSIVE

Some of the U.S. success in rapidly responding to the cri-sis in what would become the Kuwait Theater of Operations (KTO) stemmed from a revised U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) regional defense concept outline plan and a series of CENTCOM Internal Look exercises that had been conducted during the month prior to Iraqs invasion. Based in part on this planning foundation, then-U.S. Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney and CENTCOM Commander-in-Chief (CINCCENT) General Norman Schwarzkopf were immedi-ately dispatched to Saudi Arabia where they met with King Fahd on August 6. By this time, Iraq had placed six divisions on the ground in Kuwait where they possessed the option of continuing their attack south into Saudi Arabia.

The August 6 meeting resulted in an invitation for U.S. forces to assist in the defense of Saudi Arabia with CENT-COM deployments beginning the next day. Among the first forces to arrive on August 8 were two squadrons of U.S. Air Force air superiority fighters and elements of the U.S. Armys 82nd Airborne Division, Division Ready Brigade. The arrivals took place on the same day that Saddam Hussein announced Kuwaits annexation by Iraq.

Based on an August 10 vote by the Arab League, the first coalition forces, a contingent of troops from Egypt, arrived in Saudi Arabia on August 11. U.S. land forces also contin-ued to arrive over the next few days and weeks with the first

elements of a 16,800-man Marine Air Ground Task Force ar-riving on August 14.

The size and capabilities of these expanding forces fo-cused the initial strategy identified by CENTCOM planners on the deterrence of further Iraqi aggression and the defense of Saudi Arabia and other friendly regional states. However, with the failure of U.N. sanctions and the steady increase of coalition force strength, coalition strategists began to focus on the possibility of the offensive air, land, and sea operations that would be necessary to eject Iraq from Kuwait.

This would eventually evolve to focus on several key the-ater military objectives. As identified in Operations Order 91-001, these objectives included the attack of Iraqi politi-cal-military leadership and command and control; gaining and maintaining air superiority; severing Iraqi supply lines; destroying known chemical, biological, and nuclear pro-duction, storage, and delivery capabilities; destroying Iraqi Republican Guard Forces in the KTO; and the liberation of Kuwait City.

While some of these key objectives called for an aerial solution, others mandated the use of the expanding array of coalition land force units and equipment.

EQUIPMENT TECHNOLOGIES

As the most important test of American arms in a quarter of a century, Desert Storm coincided with the dawn of a new technological era on the battlefield.

At one end of the technology spectrum, Operations Des-ert Shield and Desert Storm saw the final combat participa-tion by the Iowa-cass battleships USS Wisconsin and USS Missouri. The ships were seen by many as floating Cold War icons, with World War II ending on the same wooden decks that were now being used to deliver lethal ordnance onto Iraqi positions in occupied Kuwait.

On the other hand, the new era was characterized by the broad introduction of combat technologies that included

THE LAND WARby Scott R. Gourley


Global Positioning Systems, precision guided munitions, enhanced survivability measures, and stealth technologies. Land force applications of the emerging battlefield technol-ogies ranged from the M1A1 Abrams main battle tank to the AH-64A Apache helicopter.

The Apaches, for example, made their first mark prior to the start of official land force offensive actions.

In the early hours of January 17, 1991, two groups of Apache helicopters flew north over hostile lines. Guided in part by a U.S. Air Force special operations MH-53J Pave Low helicopter, the Apaches took firing positions in front of two Iraqi air defense radar-warning complexes.

At 0238, the first shot of Operation Desert Storm was fired from the Hellfire missile launcher on the first Apache. Over the next few minutes, the two groups of Army attack helicopters opened a 40 kilometer-wide cor-ridor in air defense warning capabilities and signaled the

Above: An M1A1 Abrams lays a smoke screen. The Abrams ruled the battlefield. Right: U.S. Marines man an M-19 grenade launcher equipped with a night vision sight. The American ability to fight at night was a major advantage.



start of the wars air bombardment campaign a 40 day aerial assault frequently described in near Biblical pro-portions.

The Abrams main battle tank also saw significant at-tention in the months, weeks, and days prior to the start of the ground campaign. With the original arrival of defensive forces from the 82nd Airborne Division supported by the questionable firepower provided by obsolete M551 Sheridan armored reconnaissance vehicles from the divisions 3-73 Armored Battalion (since disbanded), coalition planners were anxious to begin supplementing those armored assets with the modern Abrams tanks.

However, many of the deploying U.S. land forces were equipped with the basic M1 with 105mm main gun. To guarantee battlefield overmatch against Iraqs top-of-the-line T-72M1 tanks, coalition planners focused on the need to field the M1A1 with 120mm main gun and on-board chemi-cal defense capabilities. Their concern led to the upgrade and fielding of more than 1,000 120mm Abrams tanks prior to the start of the land war.

Other new ground force weapons also participated early in the aerial attack phase of Desert Storm as on January 18, when a Multiple Launch Rocket System (MLRS) firing unit

Top: Dispersed trucks of the 364th Supply Company. Logisticians were among the unsung heroes of Desert Storm. Above: Helicopters, like the Marine CH-46 shown, proved themselves invaluable in many battlefield roles. Opposite page: Above: A Chapparal SAM vehicle. Coalition ground forces were prepared for an air threat that never materialized.


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from the U.S. Armys 1-27 Field Artillery launched historys first long range precision tactical missile strike against an Iraqi SA-2 surface-to-air missile (SAM) site located 30 kilo-meters inside Kuwait.

The countdown to G-day (official start of ground op-erations) also saw other field artillery units join in the fray through the conduct of numerous counterbattery raids by both cannon and rocket ground weapon systems. As they would continue to do throughout the conflict, coalition plan-ners used the application of combat firepower to shape the battlefield to present the optimum combat environment for U.S. forces and their allies.

These firepower raids conducted by coalition land force were also supplemented by a range of additional opera-tions performed by special operations forces (SOF). Spe-cial operations ranged from feints and actions designed to deceive the enemy regarding the true nature of coalition war plans to combat raids to destroy and deny Iraqi use of a particular asset. Among SOF elements conducting these missions were members of the Armys 1st Battalion/75th Ranger Regiment, who deployed to Saudi Arabia on Febru-

ary 12, 1991 and subsequently conducted raids and provided a quick reaction force in support of coalition forces.

STAGED FOR ACTION

While the raids and attacks conducted prior to G-day forced early activation of ground force prisoner of war op-erations (the U.S. Marine Corps, for example, reportedly began accepting enemy prisoners of war into their lines as early as January 17), the pre-G-day air campaign phase also provided planners with a last chance to organize and posi-tion land force elements for the long-awaited ground cam-paign. Moreover, some land forces used this period to begin the movement of the more than 65,000 combat and support vehicles required for the violent eft hook envelopment that would be key to the coalition land victory.

After months of gathering, training, and waiting, the co-alition ground force staging process had crafted a battle-field arrayed with five major formation groupings.

The western-most grouping on ODS battle maps was based around the XVIII Airborne Corps and included the



82nd Airborne Division, 101st Airborne (Air Assault) Divi-sion, 24th Mechanized Division, 6th French Armored Divi-sion, and both 12th and 18th Aviation Brigades.

To their right, the U.S. VIII Corps grouping included the 1st Infantry Division, 1st Armored Division, 3rd Armored Divi-sion, 1st Cavalry Division, (Initially used as theater reserve, 1st Cavalry Division conducted a critical G-day feint into a huge dry ravine between Iraq and Kuwait where Iraqi de-fenders mistakenly expected the main attack to occur, 1st British Armored Division, 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment, and the 11th Aviation Brigade.)

The center battlefield grouping was crafted around Joint Forces Command North (JFC-N) and included the 3rd Egyptian Mechanized Division, the 4th Egyptian Armored Division, the 9th Syrian Armored Division, an Egyptian Ranger Regiment, a Syrian Commando Regiment, the Royal Saudi Land Forces (RSLF) 20th Mechanized Brigade, the 4th RSLF Armored Brigade, and the Kuwaiti Shaheed and Al-Tahrir Brigades.

To the right of JFC-N was a grouping created around the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force (1 MEF), which included the 1st Marine Division, 2nd Marine Division, and the attached 1st Brigade, known as Tiger Brigade, from the U.S. Armys 2nd Armored Division.

Joint Forces Command-East (JFC-E) made up the right flank of the coalition ground campaign. Units assigned to this grouping were broken into three separate task force for-mations: Task Force Omar included the RSLF 10th Infantry Brigade along with Motorized Infantry Battalions from both the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Oman; Task Force Oth-man included the RSLF 8th Mechanized Infantry Brigade, the Kuwaiti Al-Fatah Brigade, and an Infantry Company from Bahrain; Task Force Abu Bakr included the Saudi Ara-bian National Guard 2nd Motorized Infantry Brigade along with a Mechanized Battalion provided by Qatar.

OFFENSIVE ACTIONS

With G-day officially beginning on February 24, 1991, the ground campaign represented the combined efforts of land, air, and sea elements to cut Iraqi lines of communications in southeastern Iraq, to liberate Kuwait, and to destroy units of the Iraqi leaders elite Republican Guard located in the KTO. The operational concept involved a massive coordi-nated attack along parallel routes into Kuwait and Iraq with an enormous left flanking attack through the Iraqi desert that not only avoided prepared enemy strong points but also trapped large elements of the Iraqi Army, presenting them with the options of surrender or annihilation.

As noted above, coalition forces involved in the left hook envelopment operation had actually been moving 24 hours a day for more than three weeks prior to G-day. The movement process saw the westernmost grouping, led by the XVIIIth Airborne Corps, move approximately 250 miles. To their right, VIII Corps units moved more than 150 miles. All in all, the movement of personnel and equipment during

this period reportedly exceeded that moved by General Pat-tons Third Army during World War IIs Battle of the Bulge.

By necessity, the movement of combat and combat support systems had to be accompanied by the massive relocation of logistic support assets. Although successfully performed by the 22nd Support Command, the enormous relocation pro-cess helped to highlight a number of logistics hardware defi-ciencies for coalition planners (see following story).

G-DAY

G-day actions got their violent start at 0400 local time on February 24 when 1 MEFs 1st Marine Division breached two belts of obstacles and continued their attack toward the airfield at Al-Jaber. Less than two hours later, the 2nd Ma-rine Division repeated the breaching and attack process on 1st Divisions left flank. The Armys Tiger Brigade, equipped with the highly lethal M1A1 Abrams main battle tank, sup-ported the M60A1-equipped Marines through the destruc-tion of Iraqs armored reserves located behind the obstacle barriers.

Furthest to the right, JFC-E began moving at 0800 on G-day, quickly securing initial objectives and continuing movement to the north supported in part by 16 inch naval gunfire delivered by a U.S. battleship operating in the Per-sian Gulf.

XVIII Corps G-day movement began with a massive he-licopter air assault by the 101st Airborne (Air Assault) Di-vision. The assault was accompanied by ground movement of the 6th French Light Armored Division (supported by the U.S. 82nd Airborne Division), the 24th Infantry Division, and the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment. Following its massive ground movement, VIII Corps elements crossed the line of departure, slashing multiple lanes through Iraqi obstacle belts and continuing their northward attack.

In the center, elements of JFC-N attacked and encoun-tered Iraqi fire trenches, securing initial objectives and establishing blocking positions to thwart any potential Iraqi armor counterattacks.

February 25 saw continuing coalition attacks on all fronts. To the west of the coalition front, XVIIIth Airborne Corps units continued their supporting attacks to isolate Iraqi forces.

To that corps right, VIIIth Corps 2nd ACR, along with the U.S. 1st and 3rd Armored Divisions, continued to expand their attacks north. Meanwhile, the 1st British Armored Di-vision attacked and destroyed Iraqs 12th Armored Division.

In the center, JFC-Ns Egyptian Corps expanded their bridgehead, capturing quantities of Iraqi troops and equip-ment in the process.

1 MEF elements continued the attacks they had started on the 24th. 1st Marine Division consolidated on the newly-seized Al-Jaber airfield and penetrated to within an esti-mated 10 miles of Kuwait City while 2nd Marine Division elements continued their attacks with resulting capture or destruction of nearly 200 enemy tanks.


THE LAND WAR

M551 Sheridans would have been badly outgunned had the Iraqis continued into Saudi Arabia.


THE LAND WAR

Above: Follow on forces of the Army, Marines, and coalition gradually built up to a massive force. Below: U.S. Marines roll into Kuwait City airport.

THE LAND WAR

Although continuing its successful attacks northward, JFC-E movement began to slow somewhat on the 25th due to huge numbers of surrendering Iraqis who swamped the prisoner of war processing system.

By the early hours of February 26, retreating Iraqi forces composed of elements of the Kuwait occupation force as well as Iraqs III Corps were caught in a gridlock of looted greed stretching along the main highway back to Iraq. Pun-ishing aerial attacks turned the congestion into a massive kill zone.

XVIII Corps 24th Mechanized Infantry Division complet-ed a 200-mile desert crossing to reach the Euphrates River Valley. Together with the penetration of VII Corps units deep into Iraq, the combat actions anchored the coalition left flank and completed the encirclement of Iraqi forces in Ku-wait and southern Iraq.

JFC-N continued seizing its objectives before elements turned east to seize the Al-Salem airfield.

1 MEFs 1st Marine Division seized Kuwait International Airport while 2nd Marine Division secured transportation nodes to the west and northwest of Kuwait City. To the east, JFC-E was positioned to lead the liberation drive into Ku-wait City itself.

By the end of the land wars second day, coalition ground forces had captured an estimated 30,000 enemy prison-ers of war and destroyed or neutralized 26 out of Iraqs 42 ground divisions.

Continuing the advances that began on the night of Feb-ruary 26 that included attacks against three Republican Guard Mechanized Divisions the Hammurabi, the Medi-na, and the Tawakalna VII Corps elements attacked Iraqs northern flank on February 27 to hold those encircled forces in position.

Meanwhile, JFC-E took position in the southern part of Kuwait City while JFC-N prepared to enter the city from the west.

It was against this background of continuing coalition success that Desert Storm offensive operations were ceased on February 28, just 100 hours after the official start of the ground campaign.

Any discussion of the 1991 war in the Persian Gulf must include one final note. While the land war component of Des-ert Storm may have looked effortless to some, it did come at a price in American lives. Casualties may have been light, but they did occur and the sacrifices of those soldiers and their families must never be forgotten.

Aftermath. The muzzle of a destroyed Iraqi tanks cannon frames oil well fires lit by the retreating Iraqi forces.



SOME LESSONS LEARNED FROM THE LAND WAR

In terms of lessons learned, the land war operations as-sociated with Operations Desert Shield/Desert Storm represent one of the most thoroughly studied military actions in history.

At the strategic level, ODS marked the first major inter-national conflict of the post-Cold War era. As such, posi-tive lessons stemmed in no small part from the enormous changes that were taking place in Eastern Europe and the collapsing Soviet Union. The changes allowed the develop-ment of a new American strategy, one focused more on re-gional threats than bi-polar global conflicts.

The initial pursuit of that new strategy focused on devel-opment of a powerful coalition force that extended its ties far beyond regional borders. The unmistakable success of the coalition process has led to changes in strategic think-ing around the world. In fact, one of the latest examples of that new philosophy can be found in a growing 21st century interest in creating regional response forces in Europe and elsewhere.

More recent conflicts in Somalia, Bosnia, and Kosovo have only served to reinforce that regional and coalition fo-cus. In fact, regional conflicts are now considered so likely by senior U.S. military planners that the U.S. Army has cre-ated entirely new Brigade Combat Team forces and is pre-paring to equip those elements with new medium weight classes of combat vehicle systems.

At the tactical level, many of these critical lessons were actually recorded and reported at the start of land combat operations.

A case in point can be found in a newsletter dated Au-gust 1990 (No. 90-7). The Special Edition newsletter was prepared and released by the Center for Army Lessons Learned (CALL), U.S. Army Combined Arms Training Activ-ity (CATA), Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Titled Winning in

the Desert, the document was being printed for distribu-tion within days of Iraqs invasion of Kuwait.

The first publication was based on the concept that the principles and fundamentals of combat do not change in the desert.

By necessity, the first lessons learned product tended to focus on broad generalities from You cant drink too much water to Dont play with snakes but served to pave the way for the extensive harvesting of lessons that would continue for months and years.

Within a month, for example, CALL had released Winning in the Desert II (Number 90-8, Special Edition, September 1990), which began to supplement many of the operation-al and regional generalities with specifics on The Iraqi Threat and including vehicle bumper markings for some Republican Guard elements.

The immediacy of lesson assessment continued through-out both Desert Shield and Desert Storm. Moreover, the rapid dissemination of these lessons took on added impor-tance for the Army and all armed service participants as the cessation of hostilities happened to coincide with final-ization of the FY92 defense budget by defense and Congres-sional representatives.

This budgetary consideration was highlighted by Army representatives in a March 13, 1991 document titled Army Weapons Systems-Performance in Southwest Asia. Citing as its purpose the relaying of initial, emerging feedback on the performance of key Army systems in Southwest Asia, the authors of the six-page paper go on to acknowledge that As the Army and Congress work together to finalize the fiscal year 1992 budget, and future budgets, it is important to consider how well our systems actually performed in the most realistic, comprehensive operational test conducted to date Operation Desert Storm.

THE LAND WAR

by Scott R. Gourley


It is the immediacy of the report gathering that provides this initial post-war offering with such a wealth of valu-able lessons regarding critical land warfare and land war-fare support systems like the Abrams tank, Bradley fight-ing vehicle, multiple launch rocket system, Hellfire missile system, army tactical missile system, Copperhead artillery projectile, Patriot missile system, helicopter aircraft surviv-ability equipment (ASE), AH-64 Apache, UH-60 Blackhawk, CH-47 Chinook, OH-58D Kiowa Warrior, and the Joint Sur-veillance and Target Attack Radar System (JSTARS).

The Abrams tank, for example, was praised in the emerg-ing Congressional feedback for its reliability, survivability, and lethality.

In terms of reliability, the report points to operational readiness rates that exceeded the Armys 90 percent stan-dard for both VII Corps and XVIII Airborne Corps after 100 hours of offensive operations. Especially noteworthy was a night move by the 3rd Armored Division covering 200 kilo-meters (120 miles). None of the more than 3,000 tanks in the division broke down.

Emerging survivability lessons from the heavily armored M1A1s focused on the findings that Seven separate M1A1 crews reported being hit by T72 tank rounds. These M1A1s sustained no damage, attesting to the effectiveness of our heavy armor.

Above: M1A1 Abrams battle tanks test their guns before taking part in an exercise. Right: The threat of chemical and biological warfare was taken very seriously throughout the campaign.


On the flip side, however, the T72s served as unwilling teachers for combat lessons focused on lethality and bat-tlefield performance.

Other crews reported that the M1A1 thermal sight al-lowed them to acquire Iraqi T72s through the smoke from oil well fires and other obscurants, the report reads. The T72s did not have the same advantage. This situation gave the Abrams a significant edge in survivability, engagement range and night maneuver. Additionally, tank crews report that the M829A1 tank round was extremely effective against the T72.

The value of thermal sights was reinforced by emerging comments regarding the performance of the Bradley Fight-ing Vehicle: [Bradley] crews reported that the infrared sights were very effective, even during sand storms. Other crews reported that the 25mm Bushmaster cannon was more lethal than they expected...

With the identification and quantification of additional combat lessons, the Army developed a post-war upgrade to a large portion of the Bradley Fighting Vehicle Fleet. Known

High mobility trucks were vital in supplying fast-moving forces.


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as the ODS Upgrade Package, the field retrofit program addressed six specific vehicle modifications identified dur-ing the lessons learned process. The upgrade, first fielded in FY96, includes an eyesafe laser rangefinder (which is also incorporated in the M2A3 [Improved Bradley Acquisi-tion System] (IBAS), a combat identification system, GPS/POSNAV, drivers vision enhancer, missile countermeasure device, and restowage of onboard equipment.

In concluding the short congressional summary, the Army authors noted that [O]ur systems performed well in combat. These reports are not only gratifying, but they also validate Army research, development and acquisition pro-grams over the past years. This is not to say that everything performed perfectly or that we are entirely satisfied with what we have. In fact, the operation showed that in some areas there is much room for improvement. For example, we noted needs for improvement in: Identification friend or foe (IFF) to reduce casualties inflicted from friendly fire; Heavy equipment transport; Night vision for aviators in feature-less terrain; Helicopter communications during nap-of-the-earth flight; Anti-jam capability for tactical satellite com-munications; [and] Improving the lethality of light forces.

Many of these preliminary combat lessons were highlight-ed again four months later when then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney delivered his Interim Report to Congress. Delivered in mid-July 1991, Conduct of the Persian Gulf War notes that: ...During the war, we learned a lot of spe-cific lessons about systems that work and some that need work, about command relations, and about areas of warfare where we need improvement. We found we did not have

enough Heavy Equipment Transporters or off-road mobility for logistics support vehicles. Helicopters and other equip-ment were maintained only with extra care in the harsh desert environment... We were ill-prepared at the start for defense against biological weapons, even though Saddam possessed them. And tragically, despite our best efforts, there were here, as in any war, civilian casualties and losses to fire from friendly forces. These and many other specific accomplishments, shortcomings and lessons are discussed in greater depth in the body of this report...

The issue of heavy equipment transporters (HET) repre-sents one of the greatest equipment shortfalls highlighted by Desert Storm / Desert Shield. Specifically, U.S. plan-ners had to tap an amazing array of coalition sources to assemble the requisite number of heavy equipment tractor and trailer systems needed to support combat operations.

As of February 4, 1991, the cornerstone of the Desert Storm heavy transport fleet consisted of 456 M911 tractors with a like number of M747 trailers. However, since this total fell far short of the required total, the Army was forced to resort to a variety of sources to satisfy the shortfall. For example, 48 additional transport tractors were purchased from Mack Truck. These tractors were used to pull 24 Kalyn trailers and 24 Landoll trailers. To this, Italy added 60 Iveco/Fiat heavy equipment transport and trailer systems with a large number of Tatra vehicles also added to the fleet from both Czechoslovakian and (East) German sources. Another 134 tractor and trailer combinations were leased from mul-tiple sources while the remaining tractor and trailer com-binations required to satisfy the 1,295 vehicle total were provided by host nation support and other coalition forces.

Yet in spite of the effort that went into assembling this international transport armada, few if any of the vehicles as-sembled in the HETS model mix met the 70 ton requirement mandated by the M1 series main battle tank. Fortunately, this particular lesson learned was translated to a mate-riel solution when the Army began fielding its new HETS, composed of the M1070 tractor and M1000 trailer, starting in 1993.

Along with a need to haul heavy armor forward over large desert expanses, Secretary Cheneys report introduction al-ludes to the fact that Desert Shield/Desert Storm pointed out weaknesses in the U.S. land logistics support fleet. The good news is that the highlighting of these weaknesses was partly attributable to the performance of several new ve-hicle systems that showed what off-road mobility could and should be.

The U.S. took a mixed fleet of 5-tons to the Persian Gulf, with newer systems like the M939A2 spotlighting the mobil-ity and performance limitations of their aged cousins. Post-war years have seen even greater advances in this portion of the U.S. tactical wheeled vehicle fleet as both 2-1/2-ton and 5-ton members of the Family of Medium Tactical Vehi-cles (FMTV) have entered operational use.

Desert Shield/Desert Storm operations by the (then) new-ly-fielded Heavy Expanded Mobility Tactical Truck (HEMTT)

A civilian worker spraying the finishing touches of desert camouflage on the Abrams. The importance of civilian contractors efforts should not be underestimated.


also received rave reviews for mobility performances in off-road areas throughout the KTO. However, the off-road excellence also helped to exacerbate mobility restrictions in a U.S. fleet of line haul tractors and trailers that were originally designed and procured for an on-highway opera-tional profile.

Post-war years have seen further quantum improvements in the battlefield logistics arena with the fielding of the Ar-mys Palletized Load System (PLS).

Likewise, the tragedy of friendly fire casualties continues to be addressed through evolving programs like the vehicle-based Battlefield Combat Identification System (BCIS) and Combat Identification for the Dismounted Soldier (CIDDS).

Another capabilities shortfall surfacing in the DoD report involved a lack of U.S. defense capabilities against biologi-cal weapons. A clear example of a rapid post-conflict ma-teriel solution to this deficiency can be seen in the devel-opment and fielding of the M31 series Biological Integrated Detection System (BIDS). Although U.S. forces reportedly received rushed fielding of limited biological detection ca-pabilities during the conflict, it was not until fielding of the multi-component BIDS that the U.S. military could truly claim to possess the worlds first capability for monitoring, sampling, detecting, and presumptively identifying battle-field biological warfare (BW) agents.

As a post-conflict development program, BIDS was de-veloped by the U.S. military with participation by several agencies including the U.S. Armys Chemical and Biological Defense Command at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland. For the most part the basic system features off-the-shelf

technology of a type found in many microbiology or re-search laboratories. The subsystems were integrated in an S-788/G lightweight multipurpose shelter and carried on the rear of an M1097 series High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle (HMMWV).

By the middle of 1994, the Army had identified and con-verted a motorized smoke unit to begin training as its first BIDS-equipped biological defense company.

Along with biological defense needs, ODS also present-ed the Army with a mandate to accelerate their fielding of a previously-planned Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical Reconnaissance System (NBCRS). The M93 was the six-wheeled lightly armored vehicle serving as a rolling labora-tory that samples and analyzes air, water, and ground sam-ples for signs of weapons of mass destruction.

The original U.S. Army XM93 NBCRS design was based on the Thyssen Henschel TPz1 Fox NBC Armored Vehicle first fielded with the (West) German Army in the mid-1980s. In March 1990, a team from General Dynamics Land Sys-tems Division (GDLS) and Thyssen Henschel received the U.S. contract for the Fox System Improvement Program (SIP). Among other things, the contract called for the pro-duction and support of 48 interim configuration Fox vehicles to be completed by October 1993.

However, less than six months after that contract award and three years short of the scheduled vehicle deliveries, U.S. Army elements were tasked for Operation Desert Shield without a viable NBCRS capability. In response to the obvious shortfall, 60 Americanized NBCRS systems were gifted by Germany to the U.S. Armed Forces.

The Americanized vehicles were modified in Germany to include an integrated U.S. communications and weapon system, smoke grenade launchers, engineering and other changes. The completed vehicles were then delivered to Ri-yadh, Saudi Arabia, while U.S. Army troops trained to per-form NBCRS functions at the German Army NBC School in Sonthofen, Germany.

Although performing well in ODS, the 60 American-ized Fox vehicles did not satisfy the Armys February 1991 NBCRS Required Operational Capability (ROC) require-ments. As a result, in addition to working in concert with Thyssen Henschel to produce the 48 basic vehicles desig-nated as limited production urgent fielding, GDLS also produced 10 vehicles modified to meet ROC requirements. Those vehicles, designated XM93E1, entered operation-al testing in the spring of 1994. An additional five basic systems which the Army had purchased under an earlier foreign materiel evaluation program brought the U.S. Fox fleet total to 123 vehicles.

Based on the results of the post-war operational testing in 1994, the U.S. Army type classified the XM93E1 as the M93A1 on June 26, 1995, and approved existing Fox systems for upgrade and fielding.

Secretary Cheneys July 1991 DoD report to Congress also addressed several lessons learned as a result of ground operations by U.S. Marine Corps elements. Although ac-

THE LAND WAR

Early arrivals: A 101st Airborne company deploys to Saudi Arabia.

THE LAND WAR

knowledging in the introduction that We were not nearly good enough at clearing land and sea mines, especially shallow water mines, and that This might have imposed significant additional costs had large scale amphibious op-erations been required, the report praised the versatility of Marine Corps land systems including the Light Armored Vehicle.

At the same time that the DoD assessment was being de-livered to Congress, Marine Corps service representatives were releasing their own equipment assessments stem-ming from lessons learned during the ground war experi-ences of 1 Marine Expeditionary Force (MEF).

In one example, the Marine Corps Research Center (MCRC), Quantico, Virginia, released a July 1991 assessment of Armor/Antiarmor Operations in Southwest Asia (MCRC Research Paper #92-0002). Prepared by MCRCs Battle As-sessment Teams (BAT) armor/antiarmor team, the analysis focused on the armor/antiarmor and mechanized aspects of MEF operations during Desert Shield and Desert Storm.

According to the reports writers, The effort focused on interviewing any member of the MEF, regardless of military occupational specialty or service component, who fired an antiarmor weapon (Dragon, TOW, rocket, 25mm gun, tank main gun or assault amphibious vehicle (AAV) weapon sta-tion) during either Desert Shield or Desert Storm. It was considered to be just as relevant to collect data from indi-viduals who may have missed the target, or experienced an erratic or malfunctioning weapon, as it was to collect expe-riences from gunners or crews who claimed to have hit the target.

Like the Army, the Marine Corps assessment team quick-ly identified the M1A1 Abrams as the greatest tank on the battlefield. Moreover, the Marine Corps assessment was based on a unique comparison factor since armored units of the MEFs Ground Combat Element (GCE) were primarily equipped with M60A1 tanks and only received a battalion of M1A1s during the final stages of Operation Desert Shield. Supported by additional M1A1 observations drawn from Ti-ger Brigade (a brigade of the U.S. Armys 2nd Armored Divi-sion attached to I MEF), the assessment team concluded, The M1A1 was undoubtedly the best tank on the battlefield. Marine and Army (Tiger Brigade) gunners successfully en-gaged targets at 3,000+ meters and recorded first round hits while shooting on the move. Although the Abrams clearly had a number of advantages in the KTO over every model of Iraqi tank, and for that matter the M60A1, it was the vehi-cles thermal sight and laser-range finder that provided the crew the capability to dominate the battlefield.

USMC combat experience with the M60A1 also surfaced a number of disadvantageous lessons, ranging from its lack of thermal sight to a shortage of reactive armor.

In terms of tank lethality, the assessment team members noted that In the case of main gun effectiveness both the M1A1 (120mm) and M60A1 (105mm) were effective against any model Iraqi MBT, from any aspect, with both sabot and high explosive ammunition. The only comment wor-

thy of note in this regard was that sabot rounds typically passed completely through the vehicle without causing an instantaneous catastrophic explosion. Crews reported a delay of from 1 4 minutes before the target exploded and burned. Crews were more impressed and confident with the immediate destruction associated with high explosive (HE) rounds and frequently switched accordingly. Engage-ments took place at an average range of 1,200 meters for the M60A1, and this without a thermal sight. The M1A1 had significantly longer average ranges, but the team collected insufficient data to provide a statistically valid average. In-terviews with M1A1 crews generally placed engagements somewhat beyond 2,000 meters and almost always through the thermal sight.

The 25mm cannon, which had drawn positive comments in the preliminary Army report to Congress, also surfaced among U.S. Marine Corps lessons drawn from experience with their Light Armored Infantry battalions: The 25mm chain gun proved effective in every engagement against Iraqi armored fighting vehicles, personnel carriers, etc. Short bursts of from 3-7 HE rounds were sufficient to cause immediate burning and catastrophic destruction of the vehicle. The 25mm ammunition in use by the GCC was not able to penetrate Iraqi tanks. [Army] Tiger Brigade crews reported that penetration and destruction of T-55/69 MBTs was commonplace with the identical 25mm gun mounted on the Bradley fighting vehicle. The difference in effec-tiveness is in the depleted uranium (DU) ordnance fired by Army crews...

Many similarities between Army and Marine Corps ground war lessons continued through reported experienc-es with Anti-Tank Guided Missiles (ATGMs), Friendly Fire fratricide and NBC defense.

Then-Secretary Cheney identified five general lessons taken from the war in his July 1991 report to Congress. They included the importance of decisive presidential leadership, a revolutionary new generation of high technology weap-ons, a high quality military, the need for sound planning in an uncertain world, and the fact that It takes a long time to build the high-quality forces and systems that gave us success.

But, regardless of the any overarching strategic or tac-tical hardware issues and programs that might have been defined or refined as a result of ODS experiences, perhaps the single greatest lesson learned during the war involved the importance of the individual.

The U.S. Marine Corps assessment is clearly on the mark in the opening of its Summary / Recommendations section: Americans, and the American military especially, tend to be enamored with technology and seek hardware solutions to every problem. It is where we put our money and most of our effort. What really worked in SWA [Southwest Asia] was the people, and if we continue to invest in this aspect of the force, and not fall victim to an over reliance on technol-ogy and a knee jerk search for the technological solution, we will be better off in the long run.



NAVAL FORCES IN THE GULF WAR

Most observers think of the Gulf War as a land and air campaign; surely the naval aspect was secondary. In fact it was primary: With-out the seapower, the war could not have been

fought at all. For the United States, seapower is, above all, about access to the world beyond our shores. In an age of air transportation, it is too easy to forget that most heavy goods still travel by sea, because that is by far the easiest way to move them. It still only pays to move very valuable lightweight cargo such as people by air. It would, for ex-ample, be unimaginable to try to move an air base, with its airplanes and its resources, along a highway or through the air. Yet an aircraft carrier is exactly that, a moving air base.

It is also extremely important to note that a U.S. warship is U.S. territory, generally not subject to any other coun-trys authority in the way that a base on foreign soil is. Given such mobile territory, the U.S. government can de-cide what it wants to do in a crisis situation, without having to gain local support. In many cases a foreign government wants our support but risks domestic or local opposition if it requests it. By moving ships into place we can solve that governments problem.

Finally, seaborne mobility still exceeds land mobility. A seaborne force can threaten an enemy with a wide variety of attacks, and those ashore may find it very difficult to build up defenses at each threatened place. Conversely, once de-fenses have been erected ashore, they are difficult to with-draw and reposition. In a larger sense, the sea is both po-tential barrier and potential highway. The force facing Iraq had long sea flanks in both the Gulf and the Red Sea, both of which it could use and both of which the Iraqis could use as venues of attack.

THE NAVAL WAR

By Norman Friedman


Overall, U.S. seapower guarantees access to war zones overseas and tries to deny such access to an enemy. U.S. naval forces demonstrated all of these virtues during the Gulf War.

First came access, which meant much more than simply moving a mountain of materiel to the Gulf. When Saddam invaded Kuwait, he warned the other regional governments, such as that of Saudi Arabia, that to accept U.S. aid would be to oppose Arab unity. At least in theory, Saudi Arabia was quite vulnerable to such arguments. The legitimacy of

the Saudi government is tied to its role as guardian of the most sacred sites in Islam. To allow hundreds of thousands of disbelievers into the country might well be construed as treasonable. Indeed, Saudi extremists such as Osama bin Laden have made exactly that argument since the Gulf War. There was, then, a very real question as to whether the Saudis would ask for U.S. assistance, even though they felt quite threatened by Saddams army just across the border in Kuwait.

The guided-missile cruiser USS Mississippi at sunset during Desert Storm.


THE NAVAL WAR

Naval forces solved this problem. When U.S. carriers moved into the Gulf, they offered a degree of protection to Saudi Arabia, whether or not the Saudis had asked for it. They removed any veto Saddam may have imagined that he could exercise. The Saudis quickly asked that U.S. forces be deployed into their territory. Even then, for some months the carriers and accompanying missile-armed surface ships provided both much of the air de-fense of Saudi Arabia as well as the main striking force against a renewed Iraqi thrust. The carriers aircraft were soon outnumbered by those flown directly into Saudi Arabia, but the latter arrived without their ground radars and command and control, or the spares and munitions

and maintenance equipment which were needed to make them truly effective. That heavy material came mainly by sea. Thus, without the carriers, it would have taken sev-eral months to erect an adequate integrated air defense. Without spare parts, the land-based aircraft could not have mounted more than a very few sorties per airplane. The carriers offered instant capability because they pro-vided not only the airplanes but also everything the air-planes needed; that is why it matters that heavy objects (like ships) can move easily when they are supported by the sea. Without the naval presence in the Gulf, it would have been easy for Iraqi aircraft to have blocked the build-up through the ports of the Gulf. Seapower covered the build-up in Saudi Arabia.

Much the same could be said for U.S. Marines onboard ships in the Gulf. Like the carriers, these amphibious units offered instant, albeit limited, combat capability. Unlike the carrier-based aircraft, they had little further significance, since Marines were soon flown into Saudi Arabia, to match up with materiel from prepositioning ships. For about a de-cade the U.S. Marines had maintained a Maritime Prepo-sitioning Squadron at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, against just such an emergency: a land attack somewhere in Southwest Asia. The prepositioning ships carried equip-ment sufficient to arm a Marine brigade for 30 days of com-bat. The troops themselves flew in by air. The only other U.S. quick-reaction force was the pair of Army airborne divisions, whose role was to seize and hold airfields to be used by troops flying in. This time they held the airfields into which the Marines, and later many more army troops, flew.

Left: Crewmembers in protective masks during a nuclear-biological-chemical drill. Right: A pack of VF-74 and VF-103 Tomcats aboard USS Saratoga. Tomcat pilots were often frustrated by Iraqi pilots who fled after detecting the F-14s radar emissions.


THE NAVAL WAR

Thus the Marines equipped from the sea provided much of the initial defense of Saudi Arabia against any renewed Iraqi thrust.

At the same time, U.S. and coalition seapower denied Saddam access to the resources he needed to maintain his own forces. The United Nations imposed an embargo, which was enforced by an international force of frigates in the Arabian Sea. They blocked arms shipments. Until that moment, Saddam had spent very little on spare parts; famously, he followed a policy of maintenance by Federal Express. Like all embargoes, this one could not be leak-proof, but it was effective. Blocking Saddams spares had important wartime consequences. For example, on the first night of the war, coalition aircraft and missiles destroyed the Iraqi air defense centers. After that, the coalition ner-vously awaited their reconstruction which never came. It was precluded by the lack of spares due to the embargo. One irony of the embargo was that the ship-tracking system which made it possible had been developed for the very dif-ferent Cold War purpose of tracking the Soviet fleet. It had only completed its tests in June 1990, on the eve of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.

The embargo had another important virtue. It allowed the growing coalition to do something about Saddam Hussein before it had sufficient forces in place to eject him from Ku-wait. Saddam invaded Kuwait in August 1990; the war did not begin for another six months. Had the coalition done nothing at all during that interval, it would have been un-der enormous pressure never to fight, to be content with negotiation which would have left Saddam in posession of some or all of his prize. By providing a means of pressuring Saddam, the embargo gave the developing coalition time to

Above: Underway replenishment of the USS Ranger and the French destroyer Latouche-Treville. Above right: Ships of Task Force 155 during Operation Desert Storm, including the carriers Saratoga, America, and John F. Kennedy. Below: The Australian guided-missile destroyer HMAS Brisbane. Note the radar absorbent material draped over the ships rails.


THE NAVAL WAR

build forces and the consensus for military action. Too, the embargo was a kind of halfway house, a test of whether international pressure actually could eject Saddam from Kuwait. Its lesson was that force was needed. Without the embargo, the military assault would have been widely de-nounced as excessive.

Once the holding force was in position, a buildup began. About 90 percent of the mountain of materiel came by sea, because it is still much easier to move heavy weights that way rather than by air. Shipping was unopposed, but not because Saddam lacked friends along the routes the ships took. In particular, Libyan dictator Muammar Qa-daffi backed Saddam and he had six old Soviet-built sub-marines. In the past, Qadaffi had sometimes been quite belligerant. U.S. naval forces had attacked his navy when he had proclaimed parts of the Mediterranean his territo-rial waters. He had ordered a Scud ballistic missile fired at a NATO navigational (Loran) station in Sicily. Most ominously, in 1984 a Libyan roro merchant ship had laid a string of mines in the Red Sea, specifically to embar-rass the Saudi government by attacking pilgrims en route to Mecca in Saudi Arabia. U.S. naval forces, particularly submarines, were assigned to watch the Libyans to ensure free passage of the Mediterranean for shipping en route to Saudi ports.

It helped enormously that Egypt, through whose Suez Canal the ships had to pass en route to the Gulf, was a coalition partner. Egypt borders on Libya, and Qadaffi had often denounced the Egyptians friendship with the United States. It is probably not too much to say that the Egyp-tians relied partly on deployable U.S. seapower, particularly carriers, to help them in the event that Qaddafi made any

Above: VA-72 Corsairs and VA-75 A-6E Intruders off the USS John F. Kennedy are refueled by an Air Force tanker en route to targets in Iraq and Kuwait. Right: USS Missouri. Desert Storm was the swan song of the old battleships. Below: U.S. and coalition warships in Manama, Bahrain just after Desert Storm. The command ship USS Blue Ridge is at right, with the frigates USS Hawes and what appears to be HMS Boxer astern of her at left.

move. The long history of U.S. seapower in the Mediterra-nean helped ensure that, when the route through that sea was crucial, it was available. The alternative, to route ships around Africa, would have required much longer voyages. Since ships would have taken much longer to get to the Gulf area, many more would have been needed to deliver mate-rial at the same rate. Shipping was quite tight in any case, and the added strain might have been unsupportable. Some NATO navies, such as the Germans, deployed mine counter-measures craft to the Mediterranean end of the Suez Canal to deal with a possible (and plausible) Libyan mine threat to the canal.

Ships deliver their material to ports. Modern merchant ships carry their goods in containers, which are unloaded by massive special facilities at pierside. In all of the Gulf area, only three modern ports were available: Al-Jubayl and Ad-Dammam in Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain. Had the Iraqis managed to shut them down, the buildup would have stalled. The Navy did have means of unloading mod-ern merchant ships without port facilities, but that would have been extremely slow. The campaigning season in the Gulf was short. Without the ports, it would probably have been impossible to build up fast enough to mount the ground war during the few available months early in 1991. Nothing could have been done until the fall. Given such a delay, the coalition might well have collapsed. Although the Iraqis lacked the naval force to attack the shipping pouring materiel through these ports, they did, at least po-tentially, have the ability to knock out the ports. No other target would have offered anything with as much leverage. The potential threat to the ports came from Saddams air power and from any special forces he might possess. The carriers, the missile ships in the Gulf, and then the ground-based fighters in Saudi Arabia, countered Iraqi air power. Naval harbor defense units mounted patrols to ensure that the Iraqis did not mount midget submarine or special-forc-es attacks on the ports. U.S. Coast Guard harbor security units were also used. The Gulf powers naval forces also patrolled against hostile small craft or suspicious-looking commercial ships.

Saudi Arabia, the base from which the coalition army (and its ground-based aircraft) attacked, is flanked by the Red Sea and the Gulf. Across the Gulf lay Iran, whose in-tentions were by no means clear. Iran had recently fought a long bloody war against Iraq, and thus might applaud Iraqi defeat. On the other hand, the Iranian government was clearly anti-Western; indeed, the Western powers had tilted in Iraqs favor during the Iran-Iraq War. Thus the Iranians might also applaud (or assist in) Western humiliation by Iraq. Both Iran and Iraq had (and have) ambitions to domi-nate the Gulf. It might be imagined that, from an Iranian point of view, the ideal outcome would have been to see the coalition smash Iraq, only to be humiliated and driven from the Gulf in its turn, prehaps after having been badly blood-ied in the fight against Iraq. Iran had a substantial air arm, and throughout the war it represented a potential threat.

For that matter, the Gulf was a potential avenue of ac-cess for Iraqi strike aircraft, which might try to avoid overflying the heavily defended frontier between Iraq and Saudi Arabia. Because the Iraqi air force did not choose to contest initial coalition air attacks, it was not destroyed in the air. Through much of the war, its aircraft sat in their protected hangarettes, an air force in being against which the coalition had to maintain considerable defenses. It might be suspected that the Iraqi air force was sitting out the war because it was not competent to challenge the coalition; but that was not certain. Actu-ally destroying the hangarettes ate up air efforts badly needed against more urgent targets.

The U.S. carrier force in the Gulf guarded against both forms of flanking air attack. Late in the war its mission seemed particularly urgent. Once the hangarettes came under air attack, many Iraqi aircraft suddenly fled to Iran. Saddam advertised the mass flight as an effort to save his air arm. If that were accepted, then the air arm could well be ordered to return to attack the coalition force. It now seems that the mass flight was just that, an attempt by in-dividual Iraqis to save themselves from the relentless bom-bardment, but that was by no means obvious at the time. Carrier-based fighters had to be deployed to deal with this potential threat.

The carriers role was not merely defensive. They con-tributed heavily to the massive air attacks carried out through the war: Overall, naval aircraft contributed about 23 percent of combat sorties, which was roughly their proportion of coalition combat aircraft. Carriers operat-ed from both Saudi flanks, the Red Sea and the Gulf. By so doing, they considerably complicated the task of Iraqi air defense, which otherwise might have concentrated on aircraft flying directly over the border from Saudi Arabia. Carrier aircraft also contributed some unique capabili-ties. The Navys EA-6B Prowler was the best jamming air-plane in the Gulf, so it often supported Air Force strikes. Similarly, the TARPS (tactical reconnaissance) pods available only to naval aircraft provided the Gulf com-manders with their best reconnaissance asset; it had no Air Force equivalent.

In addition to carrier strike aircraft, the Navy contribut-ed large numbers of Tomahawk missiles, in the first com-bat use of this weapon. Tomahawk became famous for its precision; some commentators claimed that it could even stop at traffic lights to turn up the appropriate streets towards its targets. In fact only Tomahawks and stealthy a

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