arkin, william m. - gulf war - secret history vol.3

The Gulf War: Secret History Week 21 through Week 30

by William M. Arkin

Week 1 through Week 10

Week 11 through Week 20

Week 21 through Week 30 (below)

Bio of William M. Arkin

Week Twenty-one: Preparation of the Battlefield

On Dec. 20, Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Colin Powell, and Under Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, sat down with military commanders in Saudi Arabia for the final war council of Desert Shield. The Jan. 15 United Nations deadline loomed less than a month away, with an immediate air war expected to kick-off an offensive to eject Iraq from Kuwait. This placed Gen. Chuck Horner, the air commander, front and center. A fifteen minute briefing as part of a one-hour presentation swelled to more than three hours as every aspect of air operations was probed. The assumption of a successful air war was integral to planning for the ground campaign. Gen. Schwarzkopf directed that airpower was to reduce Iraqi ground units by at least 50 percent, while attriting Iraqi artillery in those areas where breaching operations were anticipated by 90 percent. How it would be done and how long it would take was one of the main issues to be resolved on Dec. 20. Though the leaders could all agree by the end of the day, when war came, the lack of real integration of air and ground would haunt the Gulf War, significantly influencing an inconclusive outcome. What is more, distrust and lack of understanding between ground and air commanders that was evident in 1990 would persist through the Yugoslav war of 1999 and until today.

Confusing and Terrorizing

Phase III's original conception was neither smart nor tidy. The U.S. Eyes-Only war plan specified that the air campaign should "inflict maximum enemy casualties" in preparing for ground operations. Bridge busting, the Top Secret plan stated, was to "form a kill zone north of Kuwait." Gen Schwarzkopf directed that the air forces should "...open the window for

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initiating ground offensive operations by confusing and terrorizing Iraqi forces in the KTO [Kuwait Theater of Operations] and shifting combat force ratios in favor of friendly forces." Schwarzkopf may not have known much about airpower, but he knew what he liked. He had a particular respect for the B-52 -- his 25 year-old Vietnam memories were dominated by the impact that heavy bomber attacks made in the jungle -- and he told Horner that he wanted them to pulverize the Republican Guard. His request coincided with Air Force doctrine du jour of a single force with no distinction between "strategic" and "tactical" (that is, the old nuclear connotations), so planners were only too happy to treat the cumbersome bombers like they were agile fighters. No one ever really thought that the B-52 would match smart bombers in accuracy, but in attacks on troop concentrations, the psychological impact of 114,000 pounds of explosives dropped by a typical cell of three bombers was legion. This was an amount of ordnance about equal to what an entire fighter squadron could deliver at one time. The B-52 "has got a mystique about it," said Maj. General John L. Borling, deputy chief of operations at Strategic Air Command. "Because of its destructive power it has an ethos, a sense of awesomeness."

Plinking

Of course, B-52s were not the only aircraft allocated to pound Iraqi forces. From first light on Jan. 17, Air Force A-10's and F-16's would undertake Phase III attacks, while Marine AV-8B's and F/A-18's, and Kuwaiti A-4KUs would bomb Iraqi positions near the border. By the second day, large-scale battlefield attacks would begin, including French and British Jaguars. Then there were F-15E and F-111F precision-guided shooters, aircraft that could "tank plink," that is, employ precision-guided weapons from medium altitude to kill individual tanks. Schwarzkopf wanted to destroy Iraqi morale with B-52s, but he also thought that the best way to do this would be to annihilate one of the Republican Guard divisions. He wanted the focus to be on killing tanks, particularly T-72 tanks. It didn't matter that "tank" plinking missions against buried vehicles, in poor weather, and in the presence of formidable battlefield air defenses hardly focused the plinking effort solely on tanks. Ironically, the term "tank plinking" was taken by many ground commanders as evidence that the Air Force was institutionally ignoring the equipment they worried about most -- artillery guns.

BDA

On Jan. 14, just three days before the start of the air war, the Army set up a small bomb damage assessment (BDA) cell to track attrition of Iraqi ground forces. Schwarzkopf demanded that specific statistical data on tanks, armored personnel carriers, and artillery guns be tracked for every division. Army and Marine Corps analysts were given responsibility to



determine the condition of Iraqi formations in their sectors. The rationale, said Brig. Gen. John F. Stewart, the Army's senior intelligence officer on the ground, was that "if the ground campaign's initiation was to be determined by a point when air attacks had reduced Iraqi armor and artillery by 50 percent, then [ground commanders] should make that determination since [they were] to conduct the main attack." Immediately, however, it was clear that Army intelligence was not up to the task. The Army BDA cell was not only ill-prepared, it was manned by only six specialists on each shift around the clock. A second problem was the weather. During the first 10 days of the air war, cloud cover severely impeded high quality imagery. Because the returns were so scanty, the photographic record quickly lagged behind the unceasing attacks. As Stewart explained, BDA would be easy if every time an air mission struck a target it was followed immediately by some imaging system. Then we could match a target struck with photographs taken, count the tanks, armored personnel carriers or artillery destroyed, and sum up all such reports. It does not happen that way. Bad weather, enemy air defense, competition for imagery elsewhere and myriad other factors absolutely preclude that you ever follow a strike mission with imagery. In fact, imagery taken on targets struck usually lagged by days, not hours. Without overhead imagery, Army analysts established an alternate formula for estimating BDA. They took three sources of information -- satellite or U-2 imagery, A-10 pilot mission reports, and aircraft "gun camera" videotapes from the plinkers -- and established counting rules for each. High resolution satellite or U-2 photos, when available, were obviously the best source of information, but even there, plinking created problems because unless a tank or armored vehicle was completely destroyed by a secondary explosion, a hit was often difficult to see. Schwarzkopf complained that intelligence had created such strict BDA reporting criteria, that "vehicles must be on their back like a dead cockroach before J-2 [intelligence] would assess a kill."

50 Percent

Soon enough the BDA process would cause severe discord between the services as disagreements mounted over the results of Phase III air attacks. The air operators, as was their habit, believed that they were having enormous effect on the ground. They thought that Army counters were "discounting" their reports too much, while Army counters felt that the Air Force was avoiding going after what they, the Army, wanted to be attacked. And, while Horner's intelligence analysts and planners believed that Army BDA was far too stingy in crediting air attacks, the CIA and DIA in Washington concluded that the Army command was being too liberal. Was the notion of a successful air war of attrition intrinsically unpalatable to the ground commanders? Certainly Schwarzkopf and the Army generals fancied their campaign plan a brilliant war of maneuver. They had little to gain from too successful "preparation" of the



battlefield. Army pretension was that it, and not the Air Force, would deliver the "powerful blow" described in 1980's air-land battle doctrine. Such an attack assumed air support, either "close" support of ground skirmishes, or deeper interdiction of forces beyond the reach of the Army. But it was the Army that was the main element, a concept at odds with any airpower-only potential. However audacious the "left hook" plan was, Army commanders all agreed nonetheless that Iraqi forces had to be attrited to allow combat with minimum coalition casualties. Fifty percent attrition became religion even though many had forgotten its origins. It had been used as the rule of thumb in the pre-war Internal Look command post exercise against Iraq. Did it matter that over the next five months, coalition forces would grow to the equivalent of more than five corps-size formations, and the main thrust of the ground war plan would shift to an envelopment rather than an up the middle attack? It did not 50 percent never changed. When Gen. Horner briefed the leadership on Dec. 20, battlefield preparation for a ground attack (Phase III) was projected to last eight days. Computer simulations concluded that the ground war could begin between days 16 and 21 of bombing, and that the overall battle would be over in about 30 days. Horner told Cheney that in his best judgment it would take up to six week to "prepare the battlefield," a figure that proved substantially accurate once the shooting started. Disagreement or not, Phase III of the Desert Storm air war plan - "preparation" of the battlefield - says it all about the schizophrenic nature of the Gulf War. Air forces were called upon to destroy ground forces to a degree never before expected in warfare. Yet in the eyes of the main decision-makers, air war was still only prelude to the real war, which was the ground war.

Week Twenty-two: The Second Front

On Dec. 21, 1990, the finishing touches were put on the preliminary operations order for Combined Joint Task Force Proven Force, a second front against Iraq. The idea of bombing Iraq from Turkey had first been raised by Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf on Aug. 10, just eight days after the Iraqi invasion. Schwarzkopf told Air Force targeting expert Col. John Warden he wanted him to look at Iraq's northern neighbor as a potential staging base for attacks into Iraq. Gen. Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Warden the next day that he doubted that the NATO member could be included in any war. It was a misreading by Powell that led to the last-minute scramble, though the always unpredictable Turks may have wanted to keep their cooperation with the coalition under wraps anyhow until after the shooting started.



Two Commands

Incirlik air base, located about 10 miles from Adana in south-central Turkey, was host to American forces, even nuclear weapons, for decades prior to the Iraqi invasion. Over the years as more and more "control" of Incirlik and other bases was ceded to the host government, the permanent American air presence had diminished. But there were always planes present, flying in from Spain or the United Kingdom for the superb training opportunities. On Aug. 2, when Iraq invaded Kuwait, the 20th Tactical Fighter Wing from RAF Upper Heyford was participating in a routine deployment to Incirlik. Practically oblivious to the activity to the south, the wing was doing its part to maintain a forward presence on NATO's southern flank against the Soviet Union. The reason for this was that Turkey and points north belonged to the U.S. European Command, headquartered in Stuttgart, Germany, and not to Gen. Schwarzkopf's Central Command, which was responsible for Iraq. Still, 14 F-111F Aardvark fighter-bombers were quietly told to remain in Turkey. F-16s joined on Aug. 10, and plans were developed to activate the 7440th Wing (Provisional), to host and control the growing and diverse aerial force on the ground. The initial plan discussed in September was to fly a couple of days worth of airborne electronic combat operations from Incirlik to complicate Iraqi air defenses and divert attention and resources. Ankara was briefed, precipitating one of the most difficult and under-reported political and military hassles of the entire war. Months of negotiations and prodding was needed to secure approval from the Turkish General Staff for offensive operations, and both the Turkish Defense Minister and the Chief of the General Staff resigned over the dispute.

Operation Proven Force

On Dec. 23, EUCOM commander Gen. John Galvin authorized the establishment of Joint Task Force (JTF) Proven Force, " ... to deter conflict and provide combat capability in event of hostilities" from Turkey. The initial task force was activated at Ramstein Airbase in Germany: the Turkish General Staff would only approve deployment of a small advanced team to Incirlik. The first contingent of personnel for the headquarters of the JTF arrived on Jan. 16, just the day before the shooting started. Proven Force was a "composite" operation not unlike an naval aircraft carrier air wing. It included F-15s for air cover; F-16s for day strike; F-111Fs for night strike; electronic warfare EF-111s, EC-130s and F-4Gs "Wild Weasel" SAM killers; KC-135s for aerial refueling; RF-4s for reconnaissance; and E-3B AWACs for airborne surveillance and command and control. Galvin and Schwarzkopf agreed that CENTCOM would exercise tactical control and provide targeting requirements and tactical direction to the



Incirlik aircraft. Because the composite wing required so little outside help to fly its "packages," and because its relative geographical isolation near northern Iraq allowed its aircraft to operate semi-autonomously, the two commands agreed that tasking would not be detailed. CENTCOM headquarters in Riyadh would provide the target objectives in northern Iraq -- say "destroy chemical weapons production facilities at Mosul" -- and Proven Force planners would determine the force size and weapons. The area of northern Iraq north of Taji, just outside Baghdad, was essentially given over to Proven Force, even though the targets more readily accessible to forces based in Saudi Arabia. Proven Force did have one enormous handicap, nevertheless: None of the aircraft assigned to Incirlik could fire laser-guided bombs.

Unproven without Smart Weapons

On Jan. 17, four days after a visit by Secretary of State James Baker, Turkish Prime Minister Yildirim Akbulut told reporters following an emergency meeting at the Presidential Palace in Ankara that parliamentary permission would be sought for military operations. Though the Ankara government had quietly set for the second front, Akbulut still needed parliamentary cover. "If the need arises, the United States can use the bases" to launch attacks against Iraq, he assured. Parliament promptly empowered the government to use the forces on Turkish soil "at the time and in the manner the government deems appropriate to carry out UN Security Council resolutions." The U.S. Ambassador in Turkey received formal approval from the Turkish Foreign Ministry for the "temporary" deployment of 48 addition fighters to Incirlik, bringing the total to 96. Within hours, the additional aircraft arrived. It was, nevertheless, not to be. Turkish Foreign Minister Kurtcebe Alptemocin announced that his nation would not participate in an attack against Iraq, and flights for the night of Jan. 17 were suspended. Sorties were again canceled on the evening going into Jan. 18 while Turkish officials re-examined what they had just signed up to support. Proven Force aircraft would fly their first missions on the night of Jan. 18-19. The strikes from Turkey initially concentrated on air defenses and airfields, though there were significant suspect chemical, biological, and nuclear facilities, electric power plants and oil refineries in the north. The hardened Iraqi air defense network presented Proven Force with a formidable obstacle, one that had to be overcome before attacks on strategic targets could begin. Though F-4G Wild Weasels from Incirlik could attack radars with anti-radiation missiles, the absence of laser-guided bombs required the Black Hole targeting planners in the Pentagon to assign F-117A stealth fighters based near Yemen to attack key nodes in the north. As Operation Desert Storm progressed, Proven Force would fly 50 to 60 strikes a day in three waves (two in daylight, one at night).



The better-equipped aircraft based in the south were more successful in attacks against point targets, but as Scud missile hunting, attacks on Iraqi forces in the Kuwaiti theater, and other unplanned contingencies diverted planes focused on Baghdad and the Iraqi core, Proven Force aircraft would venture as far south as Baghdad. But more often than not, as the war unfolded, the Black Hole experts would find the northern interlopers more of nuisance than a help.

Week Twenty-three: The 4th Largest Army in the World

Four thousand, two hundred and eighty tanks, 2,880 armored vehicles, 3,100 artillery guns and rocket launchers. The Iraqi military's overwhelming characteristic in the Kuwait theater of operations (KTO) was its abundance of combat hardware. A November 1990 U.S. Army intelligence report labeled the Iraqi tank force "a large, modern and capable component of their army ... " As war approached in January 1991, intelligence analysts concluded that Iraqi forces in the KTO were organized in 35 divisions, composed of 42 armored and mechanized, and 83 infantry and commando brigades manned at 546,700 personnel. It was indeed the "fourth largest Army in the world," and Central Command's leaders were planning for a tough and deadly ground war following from the assumption that even at 50 percent attrition, with chemical weapons and the advantage of massive defenses, the "combat hardened" Iraqi soldiers would exact a terrible price in surrendering Kuwait. But what did all the numbers really mean? In the immediate aftermath of the Kuwait invasion, hastily published studies of Iraqi forces were simplistic in their analysis and contradictory in their conclusions. Now, after five months of U.S. and allied troop buildup there were thousands of analysts in theater, in the United States and Europe, counting tanks, characterizing Iraqi units and hunting targets. There also were signs that the numbers didn't add up, but any contrarian intelligence assessments played little role in modifying CENTCOM's plans for war.

Show Us Your Stuff

The Iraqi test firing of a Scud missile on Dec. 2, the first launch since the Iraqi invasion, portended all that was right and wrong with Iraq's strategy, and U.S. intelligence's ability to glean Iraqi intentions. At 730 a.m, three missiles were fired from Al Amarah New Airfield, located halfway between Baghdad and Basra in southern Iraq. U.S. intelligence had identified potential mobile missile launch sites at



the sprawling airfield -- it had been used during the Iran-Iraq war for just such a purpose -- but with all of the eyes and ears watching, U.S. intelligence never detected the preparations for the test beforehand. And once the missiles were launched, U.S. intelligence could not collect enough information to precisely locate the launchers for potential destruction. The flight paths of the missiles were away from U.S. and coalition forces, and they fell in western Iraq, west-northwest of the Wadi Amij area. The Army's XVIII Airborne Corps reacted by instituting Mission-Oriented Protective Posture (MOPP)-0, putting its troops in protective chemical gear. A coalition air defense and air-to-ground attack exercise nicknamed Sandy Beach, scheduled to take place in Qatar, was canceled as aircraft were "generated" in a mass "load-out" exercise preparing for a potential surprise attack. Dec. 2, 1990 also proved to be a relatively high intensity daylight flying day for the Iraqi Air Force. U.S. Air Force intelligence counted 209 sorties flown by Iraqi planes, including one mission by a rarely seen Iraqi airborne early warning aircraft which passed into Jordanian airspace during its mission, evidently looking for Israeli and coalition signals that might be activated in response to the Scud missile test.

Missile Early Warning

What the Iraqis were up to, Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf's command couldn't say. The missile test, nevertheless, proved a welcome opportunity to test U.S. missile satellite early warning, as well as to collect useful intelligence. The U.S. Space Command reported to Washington "that the ballistic missile launch warning system reacted nominally to the Scud launches," and Central Command (CENTCOM) pointed out that the launches "offered us an opportunity to evaluate and fine tune our missile warning procedures from the top down." Iraq thus provided a convenient look at Scud missile procedures in its pre-war tests, sending missile analysts scrambling to gauge the Iraqi force. By the time additional Scud missile tests were held on Dec. 26 and Dec. 28, Space Command analysts reported that Iraq was giving considerable effort to hiding its missiles and mobile launchers in the countryside. The units were moving mainly at night for launches near sunset or sunrise. Analysts believed that the Scuds were being hidden in airfield buildings or in camouflaged, earth-covered trenches. Scuds would definitely by a part of the Iraqi defense, as would be the Iraqi air force. On Dec. 12, Saddam's air warriors flew 213 sorties, their highest level since the invasion. Aircraft and supplies were being dispersed to alternate airfields, and as for the enormous Iraqi ground force, it continued to dig in as Army and Marine Corps intelligence struggled to figure out the threat.



The Order of Battle

Contrary to the popular view that the intelligence eye is all-seeing, it had taken all of five months for data on Iraqi forces and targets to be compiled, and even then, there continued to be gaps, disagreements, and false suggestions in Iraqi capabilities and numbers. One problem was that analysts had to start their compilation of Iraqi "order of battle" from scratch. When CENTCOM intelligence analysts traveled to Washington in May 1990 to obtain all available information on Iraqi forces to prepare for new contingency plans and the June wargames that preceded the actual Iraqi invasion, they were told then that it would be three to five years before a solid database on Iraq could be redeveloped. Without the texture that comes with the experience of analysis over time, all the analysts had were raw numbers. At the time of the Kuwait invasion, Iraqi ground forces overall included 5,800 tanks, 5,100 armored vehicles, 5,000 support vehicles, and 8,000 guns, rockets, and mortars. As Iraqi forces moved into Kuwait, Baghdad wasted no time in mining the terrain on a huge scale, employing anti-tank and anti-personnel mines by the millions. Saddam was estimated to have an inventory of 10 million state-of-the-art mines from around the world; the DIA believed that four million had been used against Iran in the eight-year war. Elaborate obstacle systems were built consisting of minefields, antitank ditches, explosive obstacles, barbed wire, and oil-filled fire trenches, all covered by interlocking fields of fire. Shore-based defenses against an amphibious assault included hedgehogs, stakes, booby-traps, waterline minefields and concertina wire, reinforced by artillery and Silkworm anti-ship missiles.

The Inept Giant

There was little resonance for U.S. intelligence analysts to harbor any doubts or suspicions about the true strength of the new Iraqi demon and the fourth-largest army in the world. But there was mounting evidence that the Iraqi giant was far from invincible. Iraq's performance in the Kuwait invasion was seen in retrospect as largely inept, and despite many popular renditions of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war that credited Iraq with mighty military accomplishments, now that intelligence analysts were looking closer, they saw many weaknesses. Iraq devoted a far higher proportion and higher quantity of manpower and other resources to the war than Iran, spent far greater sums on military modernization, exceeding Iranian defense spending by as much as 30 percent. The percentage of the population committed to the armed forces was five times that of Iran. During the decisive battles at the end, Iraqi forces sometimes outnumbered Iranian regulars by a margin of 20 to one. On the one hand, coalition intelligence analysts had to contend with



tracking and describing the strengths and weaknesses of 17 different models of Iraqi tanks of Soviet, Romanian, Chinese, French, and North Korean manufacture, as well as captured-Iranian and Kuwaiti models (from the United States and Britain). Armored vehicles included 38 different Soviet, Chinese, Czech, Hungarian, Yugoslav, Brazilian, Egyptian, French, Spanish, Italian, U.S. and British models. But on the other, some analysts argued that the vast arsenals of war materiel collected by Saddam could not be effectively used. Large stockpiles served to undermine military effectiveness as the training, maintenance, and tactical skill of conscripted and dragooned soldiers rarely matched the raw capability of the equipment on hand. It was all a logistical nightmare, conducting maintenance and resupply on such a varied force. And in other equipment categories, the numbers just didn't add up. Though Iraqi artillery was one of the most feared elements of its ground force, and statisticians counted an increase in southern artillery battalions from 90 to 136 in just one month, the guns were also mostly towed artillery tubes, making them more vulnerable to air attacks and counter-battery fire than self-propelled howitzers. Meanwhile, U.S. intelligence was being swamped by the raw material. At first, Army analysts tried to plot each element of Iraq's forces and defensive barriers. But the intelligence organizations quickly recognized that they could not keep up with the workload created by tracking everything on the other side of the Saudi border. Weeks went by while satellites and U-2's concentrated on specific priorities. When imagery was finally collected just prior to the air war in mid-January, the Iraqi masters of fortification looked more like amateur do-it-yourselfers. Analysts in Washington had written about deadly triangular strong points, but the imagery showed mostly linear defenses, anything but uniform. Some defensive belts were layered with trenches, wire and covering fire, but others were haphazard and not well defined. Mines were inexpertly laid and tended. The "seams" between Iraqi units were apparent. Saddam's ground forces were deployed mostly near roads, particularly along the avenues of north-south approach into Kuwait, and along the Iraqi pipeline road in southern Iraq. The truth was that Iraq's post-invasion mobilization had brought in hundreds of thousands of untrained or little-trained conscripts. The soldiers were mainly drawn from urban and rural backgrounds. Few had any experiences in the desert, and now that's where they were stuck. One of the best jokes from the Gulf War asserts that Iraq's problem was that it followed Soviet doctrine to a tee in preparing for Operation Desert Storm. The Soviet strategy had three points One, mobilize huge forces. Two, draw the enemy deep into your own territory. And three, wait for winter.



Week Twenty-four: The Air Boss

One day amidst the fighting of Operation Desert Storm, an aide hurried up to Lt. Gen. Charles A. ("Chuck") Horner as he was eating breakfast. The aide excitedly handed over the latest hot piece of intelligence from Washington. Without missing a beat, the story goes, the boss of the allied air campaign took his fork and brushed the fax off the table onto the floor without reading it. An ogre, the guy who made the brilliant air planner Col. John Warden a non-person in the Persian Gulf War. That's what Horner's detractors say. Some would call Horner an irascible fool in above his head. Yet he managed to superbly sustain and encourage a gaggle of great minds and even greater egos fighting the air war by ignoring blinding faxes when he could, relying instead on his intuition, which told him to let a thousand flowers bloom in an enterprise - war -- which he believed could neither be run according to anyone's schedule or plan, nor be won by any silver bullet. "We didn't have a clue about what airpower could do, " Horner said in a recent interview reflecting on his thoughts about Operation Desert Storm ten years later. Horner is sober in his recollections and dismissive of airpower boosters. "They muddy the waters so bad," he said of those pushing this or that lesson from the Gulf War. "We don't learn the right lessons," Horner said. Fans and detractors alike say that Horner's gruffness and tendency towards prompt dismissal was and is a technique to allow decisions without having to make an explanation. Yet despite this well-worn routine with subordinates, Horner maintained perhaps the best relations of any service commander with Central Command commander-in-chief Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, whose volcanic temper made Horner seem a neighborly anthill by comparison. In all the post-war glories about whose brilliant contribution was most to credit for winning the war, Horner's contribution is often overlooked.

The Five-Sided Menace

For those who know him, it wouldn't be surprising to know that Chuck Horner still reserves his fiercest criticism for "Washington" and the Pentagon. The idea of Washington telling him what to do, of producing a theory of warfare from afar, or of imposing arbitrary constraints on the conduct of war a la Kosovo, still raises the hackles of the now retired four-star general. "When you are involved in war," Horner said, "you've unleashed some pretty terrible things." It is a horror that itself should make people reluctant to enter into it in the first place, he believes. "To me, if you're so worried about collateral damage, then your reason for justifying war is probably not real," Horner added. But he pointed out that it was the Pentagon, and not necessarily the civilian leaders of the Bush administration, that generated the "no losses" creed. As for civilian collateral damage, Horner said, "It is obviously something



you should avoid." Yet for every incident, he has a simple and straightforward explanation. "At Nasiriyah, the bomb misguided and hit a marketplace," he said of a deadly Feb. 4, 1991 incident. When the Amiriyah shelter was bombed in Baghdad 10 days later, killing some 400 civilians, "I felt horrible about it," he said. In any event, when the head of Iraqi military intelligence defected to the west in 1994-1995, he said the bunker was one of his command's facilities, Horner added. "In terms of decisions made on the next day's targets, I had no problems." Even friendly deaths, Horner took in stride. Horner was well-known in his belief that "no target" in Iraq was worth a pilot's life. "I'm not for losing people," he said, but "when the ground war started, our guys were told to get in there [and support the ground troops], even if you are going to get shot down." Loss, Horner say, "is a part of war, no matter how hard you try." "In reality," he added, "people die, even if it's just not on our side." At various points during Operation Desert Storm, because of unintentional incidents causing civilian deaths, Washington imposed constraints on air attacks. Horner dismissed any bellyaching that these constraints shifted the outcome of the war "If there were a reason to hit something, I would have fought for it." But the commander of the finest air war ever fought expressed a curious disregard for the individual targets themselves, again relying on an intuitive feel for the accumulating weight of attacks on the enemy as a whole.

Finding the Right Targets

Horner said he still hates the word "strategic," equating it with Cold War connotations of nuclear warfare. "We experimented with it," he says laconically of the efforts to kill Saddam Hussein and destroy the Iraqi leadership. "We just weren't smart enough to know what targets to attack," he concluded. In contrast, the U.S.-led coalition went after the Iraqi air defense system "because we understand air defenses," Horner explained. On leadership targeting, Horner said, his feeling was that the targeting teams had produced a range of targets that was "interesting" and "worth a shot." "Hell, I didn't have any better ideas," Horner said. But the notion of embarrassing Saddam Hussein by selective air strikes was probably wrong-headed and not based on any firm evidence, he said. "We locked in on the early targets, Iraqi Intelligence Service and Ba'ath Party headquarters, because they were targets we knew," Horner said, "And those things might have been the wrong things to hit." Part of the problem, Horner explained, is that over and over professional intelligence analysts have gotten punished so severely for being wrong that they never stick their necks out. "I wish the CIA guys had come by and said, there's more to life than that. We need psychologists. I think we can affect [the Iraqi] leadership. You have to know how to push them, the sequence and timing, the correct stimulus. Each day requires a new



programming." Horner decries that for all the talk of "effects based operations," the Air Force still goes by the old rules. "We still fight our war games using attrition models as a measure of merit," he said. "Future warfare is going to require a much finer integration of intelligence and operations," Horner said. "We need JWAC on steroids," he says referring to the super-secret Joint Warfare Analysis Center in Dahlgren, Va., a targeting organization that grew out of the successful experience of mapping and nullifying Iraq's air defense grid.

Blind Man's Bluff

Horner treated every critical probe, every question about the 1991 conduct with the same evasive pragmatism. We did the best we could, we worked with the information we had, we made mistakes that in hindsight might have change some things, but not the basic outcome. It seems an unsatisfying decade-after look back. "The enemy's not going to tell us what to do," Horner persisted. "It's blind man's bluff." As for the endgame, he remains discomforted by the now ten-year old U.S. military presence in the Persian Gulf region and the never-ending no fly zone missions, but dismisses fighting for total victory as the 1991 alternative. "We never intended to fight in the cities, it just wasn't worth it," Horner said. "Our people were already getting killed needlessly [in southern Iraq], mostly from friendly fire and American unexploded ordnance," he added. Horner said that political leaders muddied the outcome more because of their insistence on making Saddam Hussein into a Hitler, than in any constraint it imposed. "When he doesn't go away, we lost," Horner said. He thinks the Bush administration should have brought all American forces home after the coalition defeated Saddam Hussein on the battlefield and ejected his army from Kuwait. "We should have said, 'Okay Saudis, he's your brother, it's your problem now.' Instead "We have the fleet, we have airfields, we have pre-positioned equipment," Horner said. By staying, the United States has played into the hands of idealists, Muslim fundamentalists and others "who didn't want to have us there in the first place." It isn't Horner's style to read the postwar literature, nor does he spend much energy dealing with, or correcting, what other people have said a war that he lived through. In ten years I've known Horner, he remains unchanged in his position War is hell, and those who pretend otherwise are a menace. But in this undeniable, yet simple rule, there is still a lot of room for maneuver, error, and change.

Who are Horner's heroes?

Like any good general, he is quick to credit the troops who fought the war. Intellectual heroes? He admires those who worked their tails off



with no egos and far from the limelight in getting the job done The logisticians, Schwarzkopf's intelligence chief Brig. Gen. Jack Leide, his roommate and Army commander, Lt. Gen. John Yeosock, and the systems guys who did the analysis of the air defense system. Horner saved one final blast for the drumbeat of media reporting in 1990 that the U.S. arsenal in the Persian Gulf -- developed over the previous decade by President Ronald Reagan -- would fail to do the job. "All the stuff about weapons, the airplanes, it ain't going to work," Horner said. "God damn it, it worked. Reagan threw all that money at the military and we grew giant corn, hey that's America."

Week Twenty-five: Opening Night

In the pre-dawn darkness at 635 a.m. Jan. 16, 1991, seven B-52 bombers took off from Barksdale Air Force Base, La., on the longest bombing mission in airpower's 80-year history. Flying a great circle route toward Spain, the bombers refueled in the air before funneling through the Straits of Gibraltar into the Mediterranean Sea. For veteran pilots, "shooting the straits" had become common practice after the United States lost the right to overfly either country. Permission for the B-52s to fly through Turkish airspace was still pending. In the topsy-turvy new world order, permission had been obtained for the first time since World War II to overfly former Warsaw Pact adversaries Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Romania with military aircraft while traditional European partners, including members of NATO like Turkey, kept their airspace off-limits until the last minute. Now, with top secret conventionally armed cruise missiles intended for the most precise attacks on Iraq telecommunications and electrical targets, the B-52s still could not evade the reputation linking them with the image of nuclear mushroom clouds. Or worse Branded in the public mind was their role in the Vietnam War carpet-bombing missions, the very antithesis of the new smart-war portrait that was about to unveil in Operation Desert Storm. Opening night in the most televised and awaited war in history had this anomaly Once-covert airplanes like the F-117A Stealth fighter became commonplace media fixtures, yet a historic 35-hour B-52 mission was conducted in total secrecy.

A New Era of Warfare

"Huge tracers, red staccato-like fire, the sound of thunderous explosions. It's obvious an attack is underway." Before the first bombs ever landed, Desert Storm began live on television. Gary Shepard of ABC-TV reported from the Rashid Hotel in Baghdad at 639 p.m. EST. CNN soon joined on the air "The anti-aircraft



fire began 20 minutes ago," veteran war correspondent Peter Arnett reported. "There were loud explosions, obviously bombing .... " In Washington, another half hour passed before White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater formally announced the outbreak of the war. President Bush, who was watching in the situation room, had approved this "war by appointment" to begin at precisely 3 a.m. Baghdad time, 7 p.m. in Washington. "Commitment to hostilities" had actually occurred at approximately H-hour minus 90 minutes when U.S. Navy warships and a submarine in the Red Sea and Persian Gulf launched four dozen Tomahawk sea-launched cruise missiles. They were scheduled to land in Iraq at six minutes after H-hour. The first strike came with a daring U.S. Army helicopter gunship raid on two remote radar sites in the Iraqi desert at precisely the moment ABC went on the air. Destruction of the sites would open up a flight corridor for F-15E Strike Eagles to penetrate deep into western Iraq to attack Scud missile launchers aimed at Israel. Still, it was virtually impossible that word could have been passed from the border to anti-aircraft crews on top of Baghdad buildings in the same minute. Though all eyes were focused on Baghdad, at H-hour minus nine (251 a.m. local time), the first bomb of the air war was dropped by an F-117A Stealth fighter on the Nukhayb intercept operations center, 65 miles southwest of the Iraqi capital. Two Nighthawks, each carrying their maximum load of two laser-guided bombs, were directed to hit the southwest command post, knocking another "hole" in Iraq's air defense screen for the main attacking force. Nine minutes later, five F-117s converged on the highest-priority targets in downtown Baghdad the Rashid Street communications tower in the old city (labeled the "ATT building" by war planners and the media), the international telephone exchange across the river (known to targeters as Al Karkh) and Iraqi air force headquarters at the downtown Muthenna airport. Each was a central hub in the communications network for the air defense system. This was indeed a new era of warfare Despite all the attention heaped on Stealth, in the first wave more cruise missiles were directed at Baghdad targets than were Stealth fighters. Though the Tomahawks' reliability and accuracy were questioned, even by many in the Navy, their use did not put pilots' lives at risk. Eight missiles were targeted on Saddam's New President Palace along the Tigris river, six on Ba'ath Party headquarters to its south. Electrical power plants were attacked with special variants of the Tomahawk that dispensed a spider-like web of filaments to cause them to short-circuit. It was yet another top secret program conceived by war planners fascinated with the possibility of "nonlethal warfare." The special warheads would disable electrical distribution without destroying generating capacity, minimizing the long-term effect on the civilian population. Saddam's highly advanced national electric grid, one of the finest in the Third World, would prove an optimum bulls-eye to test the new capability. "I think it would be fair to say," Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney



announced at the Pentagon three hours later, "that the initial reaction from the Iraqis is such that I'm generally of the opinion that we achieved a fairly high degree of tactical surprise." Yet amid the fog of war, some suspected that Iraqi gunners sprang to action as if on cue, recipients of a mysterious tip-off from one of America's coalition partners. It wasn't the last time U.S. leaders and television watchers alike would be confounded. Baghdad had its own schedule, and its own strategy. That night, Jan. 17, 1991, was certainly the most memorable single night of modern warfare. The harmless Baghdad fireworks display came to symbolize American omnipotence and Iraqi defeat. In five months, a coalition air armada had grown to almost 2,000 fighters and bombers, the largest and greatest diversity of aircraft collected together since World War II. The choreography to attack Iraq had been written and rewritten. "We flew in one day as many sorties as [Saddam] faced in eight years of war with Iran," Lt. Gen. Charles ("Chuck") Horner would later say.

The choreography first and foremost concentrated on disrupting Iraq's air defense and command and control systems to minimize coalition losses. Other "strategic" attacks followed from Washington and Air Force priorities The former concentrated on neutralization of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, the latter on Iraqi "leadership." Attacks on Iraqi forces in Kuwait and southern Iraq also began simultaneously, as did attacks on sources of supply and transportation. By the time the night was over, 680 aircraft had entered Iraqi and Kuwaiti airspace, 530 from the U.S. Air Force, 90 from the Navy and Marine Corps, 24 RAF aircraft and 12 each from France, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Yet for every airplane scheduled to drop a bomb or fire a missile on the first night, two others did not. Virtually unnoticed against the backdrop of attacking planes was the vast force of electronic combat assets that are a prerequisite of modern warfare. Moments before H-hour, jammers began saturating Iraqi radar screens and communications channels, creating "a wall of electrons." Confusing, blinding and destroying air defenses fell to these workhorses 160 jammers and fighters, each with a variety of specialties, took part on opening night. Three EF-111 Ravens (nicknamed "Spardvarks") and 12 F-4G "Wild Weasels" joined the initial surge of Stealth fighters across the border. To further sow confusion, decoy drones were shot ahead of the main attacking force.

Unacknowledged Events

The rest, as they say, is history. But on this 10th anniversary of the Persian Gulf War, it is sad how little of true Desert Storm history is acknowledged. Though Stealth's public reputation was forged by soon-to-be-famous videotapes showing the "results," on the first night eight of 34 missions were aborted. In the first wave over Baghdad, Stealth pilots successfully



struck two of three targets, twice missing the air defense communications terminal at the Muthanna headquarters. Overall, F-117s scored 13 hits and eight misses in the first wave. When the electronic take-down kicked in over Baghdad, a wall of anti-aircraft artillery fire coincided with the arrival of the second F-117 wave. Of seven designated Baghdad targets, only two were successfully struck. The skies were so lethal that four of the seven missions resulted in no releases Pilots returned to base with bombs still in their bays. Throughout Iraq, suspected chemical and biological weapons bunkers in Diwaniyah, Nasiriyah, Salman Pak, Karbala and Qabbatiyah, as well as Ash Shuaybah in Kuwait, were hit in only three of 12 attempts. Sixteen of 30 F-117 Stealth pilots would receive medals for their first-night performances. One pilot received a Distinguished Flying Cross for a "direct hit" on the reactor at the Baghdad Nuclear Research Facility at Tuwaitha, even though the site was not targeted until Jan. 18, and all four attempts against the facility on that night were unsuccessful (there were three no-releases and one miss, according to the unit's own record). Another Stealth pilot would get a DFC for destruction of an underground bunker at Taji. Yet the bunker actually proved too strong for the new I-2000 penetrating bomb, necessitating emergency development of a 5,000-pound earth penetrator that would be delivered by F-111F aircraft on the last day of the war. Stealth's true opening-night record is 28 of 60 laser-guided bombs hitting their aimpoints. For all the vivid reporting of mayhem from the Iraqi capital, only 10 2000-pound bombs landed in the entire city on opening night. Of eight designated targets for the B-52-launched cruise missiles, two were missed completely and civilian "collateral damage" occurred at three others. Four of the 39 missiles carried for the Jan. 17 mission failed to launch, and of the remaining 35, no more than 28 hit their aimpoints. Across the street from the Basra main post office, at least one missile hit a five-story apartment building, destroying the structure. The Amarah telephone exchange, located in the Yarmouk neighborhood at the foot of the city iron bridge, was destroyed, but four nearby homes and a Ba'ath party social club were damaged. In Diwaniyah, 11 civilians were killed and 49 were wounded when cruise missiles struck buildings adjacent to the downtown telecommunications center. The Diwaniyah strike would be the worst case of collateral damage on opening night, but since the targets for the B-52 cruise missiles have never been officially revealed, the results never blemished the anniversary unveiling.

Tomahawk Performance

Despite low expectations, the Navy's Tomahawk performed better than either the Air Force's missile or the Stealth fighter. The Center for Naval Analysis (CNA) estimated that more than 80 percent of the missiles in the first salvo arrived at their targets. In the second salvo, right after daylight, nine of 10 missiles were assessed as having hit the Ministry of



Defense, located in the 12th Century Abbasid palace at the edge of the old city. But Tomahawk appeared to cause at least two cases of collateral damage on Jan. 17. Across the Tigris River from the Ministry, the Baghdad National Museum was damaged by an errant missile. CNA analysts would eventually estimate that 81 percent of Tomahawk missiles arrived at their aimpoints. But it is a tentative conclusion even 10 years later. Because many targets were also struck by aircraft, and satellite photography was not always promptly available after Tomahawk attacks to determine specific damage caused by missiles, analysts could not always distinguish between damage caused by a single missile, multiple missiles or aircraft. In all, 376 combat medals would be doled out to pilots and air crew for first-night missions 145 DFCs and nine Silver Stars to the Air Force; 164 air medals, 57 DFCs and one Silver Star for Navy crew. Some of the citations read like tabloid headlines. One B-52 pilot received a DFC for an attack on a southern airfields, leading to the "overwhelming destruction of all target objectives" and denying "the Iraqi fighter resources any dispersal capability for the duration of the conflict." Another's DFC cites "a supremely successful strike ... despite fanatical defense of the target area." Yet not one of the airfields hit by B-52s on opening night were disabled, and most were hit another half dozen times or more. By far, a single Stealth bomb in the second wave on Jan. 17 had the biggest impact. It became the object of the first publicly unveiled videotape when Gen. Horner stepped up to the podium in Riyadh on Jan. 18 to show a bomb hitting the roof of the 13-story Iraqi air force headquarters building. The image would come to symbolize smart war F-117s could hit "targets as small as a one-yard-wide vent shaft," the media reported. The Air Force gushed that an F-117 pilot on opening night "cruised over Iraqi air force headquarters, dropping a smart bomb down its elevator shaft and blowing out the bottom of the building." The impression was left that single bombs could disable entire targets because of new accuracy. Never reported was that 41 more Stealth missions would target Iraqi air force headquarters and Muthenna airfield, 16 against the same building after Horner displayed his suggestive videotape. And never internalized in post-war air warfare triumphalism was the growing reality that weapons were increasingly smarter than either intelligence analysts or targeters. Air warfare lives by television and dies by television. Though another air war would be fought over Kosovo nine years later, there would be collective amnesia about certain and unavoidable civilian collateral damage, and incredulity expressed that the NATO priority was minimizing friendly AND enemy losses. People would forget, if they ever knew, that bad weather also played a major role in the Gulf War timetable. Everyone seemed glad to collectively forget that Washington "micro-managed" targeting when it needed to, making decisions that in 1999 would seem oddly familiar calling off the entire Baghdad bombing campaign after a successful but



deadly strike on the Amiriyah shelter on Feb. 14 that killed several hundred civilians; or stopping the use of Tomahawk missiles after one appeared on CNN and another hit a house in the capital, restricting attacks on urban bridges.

'Dumb' Bombs Still Fall

Because smart war continues to fit with the Nintendo video game image created in the first moments of Operation Desert Storm, attention naturally is diverted from the always larger, more powerful and destructive "dumb bombing" force that made up the preponderance of both Operations Desert Storm and Allied Force. Out of the limelight, hundreds of bombers, attack jets and fighters unloaded tens of thousands of tons of bombs on Iraq, and just as they did in 1999 over Kosovo. At Nukhayb, the first Stealth target, two aircraft initially dropped bombs on the command center, and Stealth returned two more times to re-bomb. Four bombs to destroy a target is, of course, a phenomenal advance in the history of airpower, but Nukhayb, like virtually every target, was "fragged" to be hit multiple times, often regardless of elliptical bomb damage evidence, scheduled before satellite photography would become available to indicate initial damage. Given that smart weapons tended to operate at 70-80 percent success rates, that pilots always exaggerate their accomplishments and that Iraq experienced the worst weather in 15 years, the precaution proved particularly prescient. There is nothing particularly devious about ensuring that a target is "hit" by attacking it two or three times in a row with smart bombers. There is nothing sinister about admitting that target selection and efforts at minimizing collateral damage are best efforts and not applied science. Yet 10 years later, the suggestion of the perfect war and the self-serving history of instant "paralysis" masks the unchanging difficulty and deadliness of the enterprise of war.

Week Twenty-six: Early Euphoria

United States Ambassador to Israel William Brown, sporting the striped tie of the Strategic Air Command, couldn't contain himself the night Operation Desert Storm began. "My son is a B-52 pilot, and so I'm also proud in a personal sense, as the father of an American serviceman," he beamed on Israeli television. President Bush, his hair still damp from the shower, poked his head into the White House press room early the next morning: "Things are going pretty well," he told a group of groggy reporters, thumbs up. Perhaps more sober in demeanor but no less swept away, Sen. Sam Nunn, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee and an early



opponent of military action, confidently told the CBS-TV morning news that the United States had "accomplished" its two main strategic goals, knocking out the Scud missiles that could reach Israel and gaining control of the air. Half of Iraq's warplanes had been destroyed, French Armed Forces Chief of Staff Maurice Schmitt said. Iraqi soldiers had suffered high casualties; doctors in Kuwait had told the exiled Kuwait minister of state for cabinet affairs that hospitals were filled with "hundreds" of soldiers. Republican Guard troops had been "decimated," CNN's Wolf Blitzer reported from the Pentagon. The afternoon of Jan. 17, Bush playfully joshed with Marlin Fitzwater, feigning anger that the White House spokesman had suggested in public that Iraq "surrender." The White House clarified that the United States did not demand that Iraq literally surrender, but gone were any first-day jitters, momentarily forgotten were public admonishments about the coming battle and potential casualties. Later, members of Congress rose to cheer Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Colin Powell and Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney when they arrived at the Capitol to review the evening rushes. "I have to hand it to them," said diehard dove Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa, after hearing their briefing. War is hell, and there are no shortage of professional military men who stress the chaos of combat and the fog of war. But on the first day of Operation Desert Storm, while the official line was to caution the media and the public against "euphoria," officials and reporters alike could barely contain their jubilation.

The Weather Worsens

Commanders in Riyadh knew that everything would not be perfection in the air war, but already by the evening of Jan. 17, they could see it as well. The weather was one of the biggest challenges. As morning broke after opening night, northern and southeastern Iraq were covered by partly cloudy to mostly cloudy skies. It was the beginning of a long bout of cloud cover, continuing to Jan. 28, that had not been predicted. There was as much as a 300 percent increase in precipitation over normal rates. Weather had an immediate effect on the air war. Laser designators did not work as well in low cloud cover and in rainy or foggy conditions. The last F-117 strikes of day one barely achieved 50 percent hits, and a number of other targets were "no drops," because of weather interference. On the night of Jan. 18, the weather was so bad around Baghdad that no F-117's dropped on their primary targets, and few alternative targets could be hit either. Sorties all over were being changed due to weather problems; day five saw the most weather-related cancellations and changes of the war, with approximately 400 sorties scrapped. In the first ten days of Operation Desert Storm, weather affected more than half of planned F-117 strikes on three days, one-third on two days, and about one-quarter on three other days. By the end of January, Brig.



Gen. Buster Glosson said, weather had the campaign "absolutely beat down." By the end of the war, half of all scheduled strike sorties were diverted or canceled due to weather.

Building the ATO

When weather was not interfering with the choreography, the basic dance itself stumbled until it found a rhythm. Air tasking orders (ATOs) had been prepared for the first two days of Desert Storm, but thereafter, it had to be newly constructed by hand, telling airplanes when and where to go, what call signs to use, where to refuel, and what to bomb. As the ATO was being prepared for Jan. 19, the process of constructing an air plan during hostilities proved far more complex than the Air Force had anticipated. At the last minute, Maj. Gen. John A. Corder, the Air Force director of operations, threw up his hands and ordered planners to turn over what they had, and only partially completed ATO's were sent to the wings. A sizable portion of the planned strike packages were canceled because aerial tankers or support aircraft such as jammers and escorts were not in the right place. Day four say the most cancellations of the war: It took nearly six days for planners and units to fully coordinate a timely ATO. Even once the process was smoothed out, the ATO proved cumbersome and inflexible. To compensate plans were quickly developed to use a system of "kill boxes" over Iraqi forces to guide operations, and strip- and airborne-alert aircraft were established for quick-reaction missions.

Bomb Damage Assessment

Planning operations 48 hours in advance, of course, required good intelligence. On the morning of Jan. 17, the process of scouring over 3,500 daily pilot mission reports, reconnaissance photos and eavesdropping tidbits began. Given precision-guided weapons and specific aimpoints, Glosson's Black Hole planners in Riyadh desired BDA on the same day. But other than electronic reporting of signals from surface-to-air missile (SAM) and radar sites, most intelligence producers could not keep up with the pace of the war, even regardless of the worsening weather. Other than mission reports, "gun" tapes from aircraft thus became the standard for quick reporting on strike successes, another unanticipated adjustment. The videotapes were indispensable to determine if a weapon had hit its aimpoint, but thereafter, satellite or U-2 photography would have to be depended on to determine what happened after impact. Imagery analysts were faced with a new problem. Laser-guided bombs often produced little exterior damage beyond a hole where the bomb penetrated a hardened structure. Photos taken from straight overhead could easily miss a bomb hole caused by a weapon with a shallow-angle flight path. Similarly, if the photo was taken from the side of the target, an entrance hole on the far side might be invisible to the interpreter altogether.



A Minimum Altitude

On Jan. 18, the Pentagon announced that some 2,000 sorties would be flown daily during the initial phase of the war. Twenty-four hour pressure would be maintained, with night missions making it more difficult for the Iraqis to use the cover of darkness to repair damage and replenish supplies. Four hundred aircraft strikes (called waves) would be common, with four-hour turnaround times possible for attack planes. Certainly the most successful element of the initial strikes was the neutralization of Iraq's air defense system and radar-guided surface-to-air missiles (SAMs). The end result was a virtual sanctuary for aircraft above 10,000 feet, a sanctuary that came none too soon. Low-level attacks had been the standard practice of pilots for decades of Cold War preparation. Low and fast was the way to evade the enemy's SAM screen, and aircraft were designed to optimize such tactics, with training exercises geared towards preparing for the difficult maneuvers. Low flying planes, however, were still vulnerable to more primitive technology -- anti-aircraft artillery (AAA) and infrared guided missiles -- and even though the losses from low-level flight in the first three nights never approached pre-war predictions, euphoria made the results too much to bear: Two B-52s sustained damage while flying at less than 400 feet, aircraft from the carriers USS Midway and USS Saratoga ran into a wall of AAA and short-range missiles while attacking Shaibah and H-3 airfields, one plane hit and another shot down, four French Jaguars were damaged in Kuwait, F-111F and F-15E low-level strikes were unsuccessful, with many pilots aborting attacks because of AAA. But the worst was two RAF Tornados shot down in low-level attacks on southern airfields. Only four planes were downed, but it soon became clear to military leaders that no undue risks should be taken in bombing Iraq that would endanger pilots' lives. Lt. General Charles A. ("Chuck") Horner decided to move attackers to altitudes that would evade most AAA and short-range SAMs. Bombing from higher altitude would safeguard pilots and aircrew, but it would also create a number of penalties. Operating from altitudes much higher than any pilots had previously trained, and with weapons (particularly cluster bombs) that were designed for low altitude release, accuracy significantly declined. Not only was there a far greater dispersion pattern for weapons, but pilots were now outside the range needed to make sighting corrections. Crews also had a greater problem in assessing damage. The decision to bomb from medium altitude also multiplied the impact of the weather, for a target visible at 1,000 feet could escape observation at 10,000.

The Scuds Fly

"What about the Scuds in western Iraq?" a reporter asked Powell at the first Pentagon news conference of the war, barely two-and-a-half hours into the fighting. "Have you got any reading on that? Those are fairly



high priority targets aren't they?" "Yes," Powell dead-panned, "they [the missiles] are fairly high priority targets." Laughter filled the briefing room. But almost exactly 24 hours after the first allied bombs landed in Iraq, Iraqi missiles landed in Israel. The first missile, launched from near the western town of Rutbah at one minute to two Israel time (5:59 p.m. EST), landed in the Mediterranean Sea, not far offshore. Six minutes later, another missile was launched; two minutes later came three more; eleven minutes later another; a minute later another; and eight minutes later, the last of eight missiles. Pandemonium broke out in Israel and Washington. Euphoria was gone.

Week Twenty-seven: The Battle for Hearts and Minds

Hamid Mukhif, manager of the Iraqi telephone exchange in Diwaniyah, a small southern governorate on the Euphrates river, was on his way to work on the morning of Jan. 17, 1991, when his building was bombed. Hamid marveled at the ability of "three missiles" to pick their way through the downtown and hit his two-story building. And though the attack wasn't without "collateral damage," he knew exactly what the intended target was and its military significance. Eleven civilians were killed and 49 injured on Jan. 17 in the Diwaniyah attack when an air-launched cruise missile missed the exchange by 300 feet and slammed into an eight-story apartment building. It was the worse case of collateral damage on the opening night of the Persian Gulf War. On Feb. 2, CNN aired extensive footage of the damage in Diwaniyah. By then, the public debate over Iraqi civilian casualties had escalated far out of proportion to the actual record on the ground. The U.S.-led allied coalition was taking unprecedented measures to focus on the Iraqi regime and not the people, yet more was not known than known about the bombing campaign and the conditions inside Iraq, and an intense "psychological" tug of war began. Iraq never managed to send the war veering out of control with its Scud attacks on Israel and Saudi Arabia. And its early propaganda about U.S. soldier conduct was clumsy and had little effect. But when it came to the embedded images of bombings' past, Baghdad scored big, portraying itself as victim of indiscriminate bombing. Some would later lay the blame at CNN's doorstep for willfully acting as the conduit for Iraqi propaganda, but public anxieties over casualties - friendly and enemy - ran much deeper.

Sending Signals

The first command, control, and communications targets on the Instant Thunder targeting list was not a military link, but the Baghdad



headquarters of Iraqi State Television. The bulls-eye of Col. John Warden's initial briefing was the "Hussein regime," the objective to "rupture Hussein's link to people and military," the Top Secret August 1990 briefing said. Destruction of radio and television transmitters, the theory went, would stop Saddam from communicating with the Iraqi people, and halt propaganda against Arab neighbors and military forces in Saudi Arabia. A "strategic" psychological operations (PSYOPS) plan was formulated within weeks of the Iraqi invasion to gain Arab support for U.S. actions. But it was a campaign that never fully took shape, killed by protracted disputes in Washington over who should be responsible for its implementation, and victim of a number of overlapping covert efforts undertaken by the CIA and friendly governments. What was left for air war planners was to let bombs do the talking. Thirty-six different transmitters and installations of the State Radio and Television establishment become high priority targets, and telephone exchanges like Diwaniyah went to the top of the list. Brig. Gen. Buster Glosson, head of the Black Hole targeting staff in Riyadh, thought that destruction of communications would "put every household in an autonomous mode and make them feel they were isolated. I didn't want them to listen to radio stations and know what was happening. I wanted to play with their psyche." Bombed repeatedly in the opening week, the communications networks proved more redundant and more able to be reconstituted than the targeters anticipated. And no matter how successful U.S. aircraft were at bombing radio and television, Baghdad managed to conduct an increasingly successful campaign to focus world attention of civilian deaths and what it claimed was excess damage. It was an operation for which its own radio and TV were secondary tools.

The Body Count

"I have absolutely no idea what the Iraqi casualties are," Central Command commander Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf said at his Jan. 18 press briefing. "I tell you, if I have anything to say about it, we're never going to get into the body count business." Schwarzkopf's intent, harkening back to the way enemy casualty estimates were used in Vietnam to "prove" tactical success, made sense, but U.S. spokesmen became so adamant against estimating the human toll and the briefers offered such a glowing assessment of bombing accuracy, many in the news media and public grew ever more skeptical. When the first night's euphoria was not turned into instant victory, somehow the coalition was forced onto the defensive. Bomb damage assessments "are not like election returns," Pentagon spokesman Pete Williams later pleaded with reporters, "you don't just go out and do this and then the computer kicks it out the next day." He and other briefers stressed that the CNN images from Iraq clearly demonstrated how discriminate the bombing was. At the end of the first week, in response to frustrations about the lack of



officials details coming forth, Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Colin Powell again appeared before the media. Powell reiterated explanations of the measures to limit collateral damage, and denied any bombing of religious or cultural site. The briefing sated some appetites, but that evening, CNN reported an attack on a "Baby Milk" factory, Iraq's first foray into effective propaganda. After days of referring to CNN as "proof" of their care, Washington quickly condemned CNN as purveyor of Iraqi "disinformation." The Baby Milk controversy delighted the Iraqis, and CNN's Peter Arnett was taken to the village of Dour, where he reported that 24 civilians were killed in an "earthquake" of an attack. Saddam Hussein was even made available to Arnett on Jan. 27, where he promised "blood ... lots of blood ... let not the fickle politicians deceive you ... by dividing the battle into air and land parts - war is war." The Iraqi messages was clear Hidden Iraqi deaths today would turn into coalition deaths tomorrow. As January came to a close, reports began emerging from Iraq of attacks on civilian traffic during Scud "hunting" on the Baghdad-Amman highway. The U.N. Secretary-General, speaking up for the first time, condemned the air strikes. President Bush felt compelled to assure in his State of the Union address that "Iraq's capacity to sustain war is being destroyed ... We do not seek the destruction of Iraq, its culture or its people."

The Media's Fault?

Tens of thousands of allied sorties had been flown, and CNN had aired fewer than a dozen cases of civilian damage. Yet each new story impacted with greater and greater forces. "You've heard us say, and I think we're under some obligation to add every time," Pete Williams said, "that we ... try to go after only military targets. Do we miss sometimes? Yes, of course they do." Anxiety was building about the seeming growing human toll; Iraq decided to let more journalists into the country, increasing their propaganda lifeline. Iraq announced on Feb. 1 that a number of mosques and churches had been damaged, The damage in Diwaniyah was shown on the second, and on Feb. 5, an eyewitness reported "a hellish nightmare of fires and smoke" from the southern city of Basra, with bombing "leveling some entire city blocks ... bomb craters the size of football fields and untold number of casualties." "We never said there would be no collateral damage," said an exasperated Lt. Gen. Thomas Kelly from the Pentagon, "war is a dirty business ...." From Riyadh, spokesman Brig. Gen. Richard Neal said "I will be quite frank and honest with you, that there is going to be collateral damage because of the proximity of these targets close to, abutting civilian sites." The unintended message was clear the claimed deaths and damage were indeed real. After three weeks, Iraq wasn't claiming even 500 civilian deaths, yet with the attention focused on the issue, one might have thought a massive



bombing of civilians like the World War II Dresden raid had occurred. Washington again blamed the media Saddam "has a very extensive PR efforts and it's disturbing to find ... that somebody is buying it," White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater said in his Feb. 11 briefing.

An Information Vacuum

Was Iraq winning the propaganda war or was the United States losing it? Videotapes of perfect attacks continued to be trotted out, but meanwhile the U.S. military was unable to convey an accurate and convincing picture. Given that the public largely perceived that the intelligence system was omniscient and would know which bombs hit and which did not, the media images suggested that the Pentagon was covering things up. Surprising to those riveted on minimizing U.S. and coalition deaths was public attention focused on the Iraqi toll. By the time the "Amiriyah" shelter was attacked on Feb. 13, the propaganda battle was in full bloom. Four hundred plus civilians died in that attack; it was an error that would change the entire tenor of the rest of the strategic air campaign, cutting off Baghdad strikes and miring military and civilian leaders in a defensive stance. Here was the worst single incident of civilian carnage in the war, but that very fact - that the deaths at Amiriyah more or less equaled all Iraqi deaths in the air war to that point - never was fully understood as a demonstration how successful air warriors had been at limiting collateral damage. After all, look what two well-aimed bombs could do to civilians if that truly was the intent. With slowly unraveling international support, and public opinion shifting against a ground war, the Amiriyah spin was never so matter-of-fact. Neither Iraqi propaganda nor the news media was wholly responsible for the hearts and minds debate. Perhaps another explanation is in the very nature of air war -- lacking animation, high-tech to the point of emotional emptiness. Military spokesmen could daily enumerate the score -- number of sorties flown and weapons expended, percentage of destruction in target groups -- but the rendering lacked any visual authenticity. In the face of "Nintendo" imagery that showed flawless performance, Peter Arnett even had a hard time convincing his CNN producers in Atlanta that the few cases of civilian damage he was shown weren't staged. Arnett became the devil incarnate to many in Washington despite the fact that he always offered on-air cautions to the effect that the damage appeared sparse compared to other wars he had reported from. His observations, and the Pentagon's assurances, never competed with an image of war that people had in their head. In the overall scheme of things, the 11 killed in Diwaniyah constituted a phenomenal historical advancement in precision strikes from the air. But anxiety on the part of the Bush administration and the military leadership over public opinion overshadowed the physical realities. That



the few deadly incidents of the Gulf War -- the Baghdad-Amman highway, the Baby Milk factory, the Amiriyah shelter, the "highway of death" -- became more well known than any battles, is commentary on the disorientation sparked by this new mode of war.

Week Twenty-eight: To Kill an Army

"It may sound funny, but I think sometimes the fear of missing the target and having to show our tape to everybody else was greater than the fear of getting shot down." The F-111F crewman was describing his laser-designation pod that was able to record each mission, a system that on Feb. 6, 1991, went to work in a new and unexpected task, one that few pilots had ever trained for killing tanks. As the "Phase III" bombing in the Kuwaiti theater accelerated, Saddam Hussein's army literally dug itself into the earth, bulldozing 10-foot high scrapes into which tanks and armored vehicles were driven and covered with sandbags for camouflage and protection. The flaw in the plan was that the vehicles left a distinctive infrared "signature." Aircrew discovered that they could pick out the armored vehicles at night with their infrared sensors, particularly in the early evening hours, since the metal collected heat like a sunning reptile. "Bug hunting," air crews called the missions, though when they heard that Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, the Army theater commander, did not like the term "tank plinking," his disapproval insured that the term would become enshrined in Air Force lingo. This was the Air Force operating autonomously, with no spotters on the ground and no advancing coalition force. It was a military revolution air warriors using smart weapons to kill individual vehicles on the ground. But it was never good enough for the Army, and attacks on the Iraqi army opened up an enormous inter-service sore that festers to this day.

Pounding a Tethered Goat

No matter how many innovations the Air Force introduced, attrition was slow going, and imagery analysts and Army auditors were not able to accurately gauge destruction unless they observed a "catastrophic" kill. It was soon realized that the tank plinkers could deliver "reported and recorded destructions" with their videotaped attacks, and once they accelerated their involvement in Phase III, the number of kills went up sharply. For almost a month, the world was focused on the efforts of individual bombs hitting Iraqi buildings and bunkers in strategic attacks. The hits not only suggested success, but they were measurable in a way that the mass of dumb bomb attacks weren't. The air masters were equally



mesmerized. It didn't take long before even the Phase III directors - the "KTO cell" in the Black Hole - adopted the bias of their strategic brethren, elevating tank-plinking attacks to a senior varsity and relegating all other aircraft to a junior varsity category. The task of mass bombing a field army never sat well with the new pretensions of the smart bombers -- "pounding a tethered goat" as Lt. Gen. Chuck Horner, the CENTCOM air boss, called it. Pilots readily admitted that behind the bravado, tank plinking wasn't only focused on tanks. "I'm sure we bombed our share of empty revetments and our share of revetments with trucks or decoys in them," one F-15E pilot said. "Were we effective? I think so, by virtue of the fact that I could go in with eight bombs and a wingman with eight bombs, and we could completely work over an encampment of tanks. Also, I've go to think that besides taking out their equipment, it had to have been extremely demoralizing to those guys to be under attack for half an hour … especially when it is three o-clock in the morning and all you can hear in between explosions -- with us at 20,000 feet -- is just a little [jet engine] whine." Schwarzkopf, Reagan-like in his simplicity, seemed to fully appreciate the psychological and unquantifiable impact of day-in day-out bombing regardless of whether it was with smart bombs or dumb. Smart missions produced BDA results that could be kept track of in an increasingly cacophonous air battle. But more than ten times as many attack sorties with dumb weapons were being flown over the Kuwaiti theater. Target The Republican Guard No matter what BDA suggested, Schwarzkopf would nightly switch allocations and increase efforts against the Republican Guard and other Iraqi heavy units that he thought demanded greater emphasis. Horner and his deputy, Brig. Gen. Buster Glosson, would privately meet with Schwarzkopf each evening, and he would choose this or that Iraqi division as worthy of being bombed the next day. "Why are you hitting them?" he would yell at Horner and Glosson, studying the map of units earmarked for attack. "I want them," he would shout, pointing to a division symbol on the map. Emphasis on the Republican Guard was undeniable -- the three kill boxes containing the three heavy divisions absorbed almost 60 percent of the entire bombing effort. Even with the Iraqi incursion of Saudi Arabia at Khafji unfolding, and the diversion of a B-52 strike and two fighter packages to support U.S. Marines, Horner told his staff on the night of Jan. 29 not to lose their focus "When we have the Republican Guard in the bag, then we'll turn our attention to the ground forces in Kuwait," he said. Meanwhile, Army commanders believed that the Air Force was crazily racking up a high score while ignoring forces directly to their front that they perceived required more effort to minimize U.S. casualties in breaching Iraqi defenses. Regardless of what the Army commanders thought though, Schwarzkopf had in his mind both a timetable and a sequence for air attacks prior to the ground war. As part of his deception effort to hide the "left hook" main ground attack



and suggest a coastal invasion, Schwarzkopf kept a certain level of concentration on border defenses in Kuwait (particularly those opposite Arab force sectors), putting off attacks on forces in the path of the Army and the Marine heavy units until he felt it was time. Marine Corps breach sites across Iraqi minefields in southern Kuwait, for instance, could only be hit one more time than surrounding areas, less the bombing emphasis give away where U.S. forces would penetrate. Some of these decisions made sense, but on some level, one could make the argument that Schwarzkopf knew nothing of airpower, did not have a good grasp of the overall air war's effects, and Horner and Glosson were just happy to hide behind the mercurial commander-in-chief in carrying out a difficult enough job without having to respond to the sniping from the Army. Some capricious decisions didn't make sense. Schwarzkopf, for instance, told Glosson not to pound front-line artillery opposite the U.S. VII Corps until three or four days before the ground war, fearing that earlier destruction would allow its replacement. The Air Force's subsequent "ignoring" of the Army's emphasis on artillery drove ground commanders crazy. But did Schwarzkopf's order make any sense at all in mid-February, given the complete immobility of the Iraqi Army and the ongoing campaign against Iraqi transportation? Schwarzkopf never particularly communicated his thinking about all this to his Army and Marine Corps component commanders, and when they complained, a variety of schemes and special targeting "boards" were set up to assuage their concerns. In the end though, Horner and Glosson would follow Schwarzkopf's orders to hit the Republican Guard, support the weaker Arab forces, and maintain the "deception." Many in the Air Force in 1991, and many today, think airpower is unsuited to attack mobile ground forces. It is a mission that hardly has a following or powerful internal constituency like strategic attack or aerial dogfighting. As would be seen in Yugoslavia eight years later, the expectation is that airpower should be able to kill tanks and other vehicles, even stop "ethnic cleansing" on the ground, certainly a more difficult task than bombing a largely immobile defensive army. In the Gulf War, the Air Force came up with many innovative tactics to carry out their assigned goal, but the reluctance not to "do windows" stood in the way then and now of fully developing the means both to attack ground forces and assess the results. Schwarzkopf never helped. When the final showdown came prior to the ground war, and Army commanders demanded additional varsity sorties allocated to their fronts. Schwarzkopf just laughed, backing up neither Horner nor the Army, and still never explaining his thinking. "Guys," he said, "it's all mine, and I will put it where it needs to be put."

Week Twenty-nine: The Gate is Where?



"The gates are closed," Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf announced, "There is no way out ...." At 9 p.m. (1 p.m. Washington time) on Feb. 27, 1991, an hour after the British military spokesman announced that Her Majesty's forces had completed their mission and the Saudi spokesman likewise stated that joint forces had ended the six-month occupation of Kuwait, the commander of Operation Desert Storm appeared before the news media in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia to announce that it was all over. "I can't recall any time in the annals of military history when this number of forces have moved over this distance to put themselves in a position to be able to attack," he said. "If I used words like brilliant" he continued, in describing the Marines, "it would really be an under-description of the absolutely superb job that they did in breaching the so-called impenetrable barrier." The operation would be studied for years to come, he said. Regarding the main assault of the Army's VII and XVIII Airborne Corps against the Iraqi Republican Guard, Schwarzkopf described "a solid wall" of advancing coalition units. Three thousand of 4,000 Iraqi tanks are "confirmed destroyed," he said. "As a matter of fact," he interjected, "that number is low because you can add 700 to that as a result of the battle that's going on right now with the Republican Guard." But in retrospect, it is clear that Schwarzkopf didn't have a clue as to what was actually happening on the battlefield. Operation Desert Storm had indeed ended as abruptly as it began. But the gate was not closed; Norman Schwarzkopf didn't even know where the gate was.

Push Them to the Sea

Schwarzkopf was bragging in public but behind the scenes, he was livid with the VII Corps and its commander, Lt. Gen. Frederick Franks. Franks' priorities were to conduct coordinated and deliberate advance with his heavy divisions, and to sustain low casualties. At the macro level, one would think that Schwarzkopf would be content with the assurance that the Kuwaiti theater had been sealed off due to attacks on Iraqi transportation targets, and that Schwarzkopf's coveted "kill zone" was being created by the air warriors. In Schwarzkopf's mind, the battle geography was set. All Franks had to do was shut the back door against the Guard's escape, lest they flee "over" the Euphrates river, he thought. On the afternoon of Feb. 26, after hearing that Schwarzkopf was apoplectic over the "slow" pace of the VII Corps advance, Franks called Schwarzkopf for the first time in the ground war to explain his advance and positions on the battlefield: He had ordered his men to attack and destroy the five heavy Republican Guard and Jihad Corps divisions the next day, without pause, fully committed to his plan to do so with the U.S. heavy divisions together on line. Schwarzkopf said little of his disappointment in the phone call, merely encouraging Franks on, urging him to attack into the night. "Turn east,"



he said, "go after 'em." Turn east? That Schwarzkopf could see destruction of the Republican Guard divisions as occurring if the VII Corps faced east is a terrible blunder. Sitting 800 kilometers south in Riyadh, Schwarzkopf was confident that his armored legion -- if only Franks would do the job right -- could slam into the Iraqi Republican Guard, its back to the Persian Gulf. The problem was that Schwarzkopf's plan always had U.S. forces turning too sharply to the east, meeting the bulk of Saddam's armor and Republican Guard with a glancing blow along its southern flank rather than head on. Iraqi forces never retreated east in the direction of the sea. They had always kept Basra, Iraq's most important southern city, to their northeast, at their backs. Schwarzkopf's geographic confusion compounded even further. In his "gates are closed" press briefing, he would place U.S. XVIII Airborne Corps units "into the Tigris and Euphrates valley" when in fact foot soldiers never stepped out of the desert. A deep helicopter attack had been undertaken into the Euphrates marshlands all the way to the Tigris River, but ground units never even got to the Euphrates. The XVIII Airborne Corps reported to Riyadh that Highway 8 had been closed; Schwarzkopf's confused geography concluded that the Republican Guards were sitting without any exit. Schwarzkopf claimed in the press briefing that Highway 8 from Basra to Nasiriyah skirting south of the Euphrates river "was the only avenue of egress left," ignoring completely the main avenue of Iraqi retreat into Basra itself and then north on the Basra-Baghdad main highway through the marshes at Al Qurnah.

Where's Waldo?

Schwarzkopf might be confident that the gates were closed, but commanders and staff officers alike throughout the theater weren't exactly sure where all of their forces were. The problem was that rapidly-moving ground units had not been able to provide precise grid locations. Lead scout units in both U.S. corps were so far in front of their main trace that reports of their position gave the false impression that more territory was under U.S. control than actually was. For instance, the 1st squadron, 1st Cavalry Regiment screening the 1st Armored division, ranged so far in front of the division body by dusk on Feb. 26 -- 50 kilometers in front -- that Apache attack helicopters had to be called out to help the unit disengage from a premature fight with the Iraqi main body. The squadron was hit with Iraqi cluster bomb artillery, wounding 23 soldiers, destroying five wheeled and three armored vehicles. At 2 a.m. Riyadh time, four hours after the "gates are closed" briefing ended, Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Colin Powell called Schwarzkopf to inform him that the official time for a ceasefire was set for eight a.m. local time the next mornning, Feb. 28. Schwarzkopf's deputy



commander, Lt. Gen. Calvin Waller, who was in the room during the final telephone call, firmly disagreed given his understanding of where Franks was in his assault. "You go argue with them," Schwarzkopf snapped to his deputy. As Schwarzkopf and Powell discussed the termination of combat, the tilted ending to the east was pursued with a vengeance. Central Command (CENTCOM) intelligence reported to Washington that "a north-south [Iraqi] defensive line exists approximately 30 km. [17 miles] west of Al Basra," further suggesting that an eastward attack made sense. But the bulk of the VII Corps was directed 50 kilometers further south, towards the Iraqi town of Safwan, not northeast into the Rumaylah oil fields. North of the VII Corps, McCaffrey's 24th Infantry Division of the XVIII Corps prepared for a northeastern assault into the Rumaylah oilfields to the outskirts of Basra beginning at 5 a.m. Overnight, the division's nine and a third artillery battalions as well as division attack helicopters, pumped fire to the east. CENTCOM maps indicated that all of the 24th's objective had been secured. It wouldn't be the first time that staff officers confused deep air and artillery attacks with seizure by ground troops, pushing their pins in the wrong places. With continued poor weather, oil fires and smoke impeding reconnaissance, and the natural fog of war, more was unknown than known. Locations of U.S. units, let alone the identity and quantity of Iraqi forces withdrawn into the safety of Basra became increasingly muddled. CENTCOM intelligence reported on Feb. 27 that some Iraqi elements had already made their way through Basra and even crossed the Euphrates river to the north of Al Qurnah. At the same time Schwarzkopf stepped to the podium on Feb. 27, CENTCOM reported the latest summary to Washington:

A total of 27 Iraqi divisions (three armor, two mechanized, and 22 infantry) and one armored brigade had been defeated to such extent that the majority of their combat equipment was destroyed or captured. Every Iraqi division except for two infantry divisions in coastal Iraq east of Basra, the 51st Mechanized in Kuwait's northeast corner, and the Republican Guard Hammurabi division, was listed as combat ineffective. It didn't matter that the Republican Guard infantry and special operations divisions, with the exception of one brigade of the Adnan division, were unlocated. Nor that the 6th Armored division, previously in central Kuwait, was largely missing, or that the 17th Armored division in northern Kuwait was thought to have withdrawn to Basra. CENTCOM reported in its final SITREP for the 27th that the Republican Guard units were "encircled ... They have few options other than surrender or destruction."

The Discussion is Closed

The war was going extremely well, but the briefings were going even better. When Bush had met with his top advisers on Wednesday morning, Feb. 26, everyone was so relieved of initial reports from the theater, they



could hardly focus on the tough work to be done after the fighting. The Marines were on the doorstep of Kuwait City, Powell said; he spoke for the first time of the still unnamed highway of death, and of the great carnage being inflicted on retreating forces along the roads out of Kuwait. Schwarzkopf and Powell stayed constantly in touch over the secure phone. On the morning of Feb. 27, The Washington Post carried a pool report from Randall Richard of The Providence Journal detailing a frenzied air pursuit of Iraqi troops. Reporting from the aircraft carrier USS Ranger in the Gulf, Richard wrote that the north-south roadway from Kuwait City "was so jammed with tanks and other armored vehicles that Iraqi troops and vehicles were being diverted along a second, coastal route." Soldiers were described as "sitting ducks" -- "It was just a question of getting back and forth to the carrier to get more bombs to continue to attack." Though the Post included the details of the attacks in its page one wrap-up of events, Richard's story itself was deemed routine enough by editors to be placed on page 28. In some former time, the news might have been an oddly encouraging. Now, however, it cut through political corridors with all of the ferocity of Scud missile attacks on Israel or the Amiriyah shelter bombing in Baghdad. Coverage in The New York Times was less vivid than the Post's on Feb. 27, but it ran an editorial "Beyond Fury, Cool Calculation," favoring a quick end to the fighting. After all, Schwarzkopf suggested nothing less.

Hesitation to a Kill

Bush's inner circle congregated to watch Schwarzkopf's televised briefing. No one was really arguing to continue the war, but Schwarzkopf in essence short-circuited any discussion. If he was confident that the objectives had been achieved, those present felt, it made sense to end the war sooner rather than later. An abysmal overestimation of Iraq's fighting condition further influenced this muddled outcome. The truth about Saddam's battered forces always had held its own danger. Tentative public support for the necessity of a culminating ground war depended upon a balancing act -- a consensus not only of Iraqi intransigence but of a still threatening foe. It was a thin line on which to hang: A worst case was crucial in terms of mobilization, while the lack of passion to fight for Kuwait demanded human cost be kept at an absolute minimum. To be heralded equally with the spectacular air prologue, ground war had to be not only meritorious but bloodless. Bloodless on the Iraqi side as well as for the allied coalition, political and military leaders agreed. At 9 p.m. EST (5 a.m. in Iraq on Feb. 28), President Bush addressed the nation, declaring that "Kuwait is liberated" and "Iraq's Army is defeated." At midnight (8 a.m. local time), he said, "exactly 100 hours since grounds operations commenced and six weeks since the start of Operation Desert Storm, all U.S. and coalition forces will suspend further



offensive combat operations."

Week Thirty: The Bitter End

There is a story about two young Marine sergeants given the task, on the second day of the ground war, of driving a flatbed tractor-trailer truck loaded with 200 captured Iraqis from Kuwait back to the prisoner-holding area in Saudi Arabia. Just the two of them, driver and security guard, with 200 of the "enemy." It's a long drive, and when they get to the collection point, off in the distance one of the sergeants sees a general officer, and he runs up to him and says, "Sir, could you come here, please, I want you to see something." And the general responds, "You know, soldier, I have seen things all day." "No, you have to see this," the Marine sergeant insists. So the general comes around the side of the truck, and there are 200 frightened faces peering down at him. And the sergeant looks up at the truck and sings, "Old MacDonald had a farm..." And they all respond-every single one of them-"E-I-E-I-O." What can you say about a war that ended with 90,000 prisoners? Today, Iraqi soldiers are used as props for the armed services and defense contractors to congratulate themselves ("They surrendered to a remotely-piloted vehicle!"), but in February 1991, a terrible fight was anticipated against a capable foe. Such was the weight of battle that there never was a clear plan for what to do at the end.

The Dust Settles, the Fog Thickens

With the end of the Gulf War, President Bush's popularity skyrocketed to 91 percent; public support for the military reached a 15-year high mark at the ceasefire. Postwar euphoria matched that of the opening night. "We got to practice on a third-stringer," one soldier from the 1st Armored Division boasted, reflecting the anti-climatic mood of many in the field, forgetting any fear or pity that existed just hours earlier. "We were the New York Giants scrimmaging the jay-vees from some high school called the Iraqi 26th Division," said another. "Just a big POW capture," The New York Times quoted an Army soldier as saying. "Basically it was a lot like the United States declaring war on Rhode Island," another told The Washington Post. If every war has its climax, there is also a hangover. Despite military supremacy and splendid briefings, it soon became clear that a gaggle of Iraqi forces survived in the so-called Basra "pocket" between the ceasefire line and the southern city, and recriminations soon emerged about the "highway of death" and conditions inside Iraq.



Given the defeat of the Iraqi soldiers, Army men at least were expressing sentimental nonsense. "The president...stopped the war at exactly the right time, because we were on the verge of a massacre at that point," said Lt. Gen. Tom Kelly, director of operations for the Joint Chiefs in 1991. Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf appeared in an interview with David Frost with the same new-found modesty. "We knew we had them," he said, recounting a conversation with Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Colin Powell the day before the ceasefire. "We had closed the back door. The bridges across the Tigris and Euphrates were out... It was literally about to become the Battle of Cannae, a battle of annihilation." Schwarzkopf was determined not to be another disgraced commander blamed for letting a beaten opponent get away. After months of telling his forces to pulverize Saddam's best, all of a sudden he was humble. "The Republican Guard was a militarily ineffective force, and we had inflicted great damage upon them and they had been routed.... I mean it's a question of...how do you define the word 'destroy'?. .. We probably would have inflicted a lot more damage" had the war continued, Schwarzkopf said.

Schwarzkopf's 'Bomb'

And then he delivered the atom bomb. He had "recommended" to Powell that hostilities continue longer, he said. The White House wasted no time contradicting the victorious commander-National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft was already "livid" about the news that the roads out of Basra had never been closed. President Bush was surprised when reporters asked him about Schwarzkopf's mea culpa. "All I know is there was total agreement in terms of when this war should end," he responded. Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney issued a statement saying that Schwarzkopf had made no such recommendation to continue. After a rare telephone call from the true commander-in-chief-it was only the third or fourth time Bush and Schwarzkopf had spoken since August 1990-Schwarzkopf publicly apologized. The military again employed false modesty to cover the embarrassment, offering that the objectives had been achieved. "Our objectives were to kick the Iraqi army out of Kuwait," Powell said bluntly. "They're gone." Decrying Monday-morning quarterbacking, the chairman gave assurances that he had no reason to think his initial recommendation was incorrect. "We had achieved our military mission, we had achieved the political objective we had been assigned, and it was time to stop the killing.… "

The Quagmire

The alternative, Schwarzkopf and Powell have argued ever since, was to take Baghdad, a task they labeled a Vietnam-sized mistake.



"Should we have gone on and marched into Baghdad because we could have been there in two days?" Schwarzkopf asked rhetorically while giving a speech in October 1991. "The answer is absolutely not." Powell agreed at the one-year anniversary "It was not our intention to go to Baghdad. And had we done that, we would have gotten ourselves into the biggest quagmire you can imagine trying to sort out 2,000 years of Mesopotamian history." It is a false dichotomy of the end of the Gulf War on two points. First, it merely perpetuates the botched geography <hyperlink>, ignoring the military's failure to "cut off" Saddam's Army in the south by either severing transportation links or ground envelopment. When the White House inner circle consented to the cessation of hostilities, they did so with the belief that the exits from the Kuwaiti theater were indeed closed. Several of the president's aides thought-as did Schwarzkopf himself-that sufficient ground had been taken that withdrawing Iraqis would indeed have to pass through some allied checkpoint. Cheney had been told on Feb. 27 by the Joint Staff that the Republican Guard divisions were cut off from further retreat. Second, a Baghdad option was never seriously considered, war-gamed or even discussed. Nevertheless, when Operation Desert Storm ended, coalition forces were on the verge of maneuvers that could in essence have achieved similar goals, splitting off the southern third of the country and robbing the center of contact with its Army and the south. Had coalition forces truly trapped the Iraqi Army from withdrawing north to Baghdad, not only would there have been enormous postwar leverage to bargain for a swift political and disarmament outcome, but the Republican Guard would not have been available to suppress the rebellions which quickly broke out in the Shi'a south and Kurdish north. Defeat and occupation would not be just some Vietnam quagmire when, indeed, the Iraqi military would have been trapped, and further decimated, had Desert Storm gone on. And so the surprisingly easy Gulf War came and went. Things didn't go as wrong as predicted by most The costs to the American public weren't bank-breaking, the environment survived, chemical weapons weren't used, no terrorist attacks occurred, Israel was not dragged in, there were not tens of thousands of allied body bags. Those who stated that the value of airpower was exaggerated and that the war would drag on Vietnam-style were proven wrong. High-tech weapons worked, and the U.S. military performed. The international community still had to untangle the issues of the Middle East and the international repercussions of a war and its aftermath-most notably Israeli security and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. All the while, the media seemed to spill as much ink on its own trials and tribulations during the war as it did on the events themselves.

The Realpolitik Alternative

"Saddam Hussein should not be permitted to get away scot-free, without



being held accountable for his actions," Cheney said at the Pentagon the day before the ground war began. Yet geopolitical interests, as Bush and Scowcroft saw them, conspired against this sensible outcome. At the White House, there was absolute conviction that Iraq not be "dismembered" into Shi'a, Sunni and Kurdish states, with the aftereffects threatening U.S. client states Turkey and Saudi Arabia, so a butcher in Baghdad was the acceptable realpolitik alternative. Surprisingly quickly, a rigorous disarmament program was put together; in the waning days of Operation Desert Storm, bumbling U.S. intelligence began to realize that Saddam Hussein's weapons-of-mass-destruction program was far more significant than anyone believed before the war. It is Iraq's refusal to comply with the rules set down in April 1991 that is behind the continued American military presence today, including no-fly zones in the north and south, a no-drive zone in the south, a low-level war of attrition against Iraq's air defenses and four separate bombing campaigns over the years. Given that the Gulf War was the demarcation between the Cold War and post-Cold War eras, it shouldn't be surprising that the outcome was seen in geo-strategists' heads as requiring an arms control regime. Ten years later, though, Iraqis still like America, and the typical Iraqi male who served in Saddam's army during Operation Desert Storm has a respect bordering on awe for the U.S. military. They've seen what American technology and skill produced. The Gulf War is probably as close as we will ever come to a full-scale war that is at the same time filled with humanity. Iraqi soldiers were killed and injured by the thousands, to be sure, but the way in which military force was used, for all the mistakes, criticism and miscues, paved the way for restoration of peaceful relations. This is quite in contrast with the attitude of those who served in the Yugoslav military during Operation Allied Force in 1999. When I was in Yugoslavia in August 1999 after the war, it struck me that the attitude and feeling of conscripts was one of contempt and deep-seated hatred for America, a feeling that emanated not only from a sense of historic Serbian victimization but also from a belief that NATO and the United States did not have the guts to engage the Yugoslav military on an honorable field of battle. Obviously, there is dementia in the fantasy that the Yugoslav Army could have emerged victorious. Yet I can't help but think that airpower provokes this kind of emotion, even if unintentional. And the hesitant and incompetent use of force breeds future antagonism.



arkin, william m. - gulf war - secret history vol.3

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