gulf war ii: air and space power led the way

Gulf War IIAir and Space Power

Led the Way

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Front cover: A member of the USAF’s CombinedWeapons Effectiveness Assessment Teamestablishes the impact point of a precision guidedbomb through the dome of a key Iraqi regimebuilding. USAF photo by MSgt. Carla Kippes.

An Air ForceAssociation

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Gulf War IIAir and Space Power

Led the Way

he Global War on Terrorism thatbegan the morning of Sept. 11, 2001,seemed almost fated to lead to a secondmajor war between the United Statesand Iraq. And it is now clear that the AirForce also was destined to play theleading role in creating the strategicconditions for victory in that war,executed by a total of 466,985 US andallied forces1 in Spring 2003.

In the early morning of March 20,2003 (local Baghdad time), two F-117Stealth fighters launched out on adaring mission to bomb a specificbuilding thought to be a SaddamHussein hide-out.2 Just three weekslater, US Marines pushed into down-town Baghdad and helped a crowd ofIraqis topple a statue of Saddam Hus-sein.3 The Iraqi capital belonged to USforces, and Saddam and his sons werenowhere to be seen.

The defeat of Saddam’s regime was adramatic advance in the Global War onTerrorism. It was also a new kind ofvictory, one that showed how airpowercould alter the conditions for jointforce operations.

Plans for Gulf War II—officiallynamed Operation Iraqi Freedom, orOIF—started to coalesce in early 2002.Yet up until the night of March 20, thewhole shape of the impending war wasdebated and discussed around theworld.

For a year, the war was the subject of“a great deal of intense planning and agreat deal of what-iffing by all of us”said Gen. Tommy R. Franks, CommanderUS Central Command (CENTCOM).4

Few guessed that the war would throwout the window a number of tried-and-true concepts about campaign shapingand phasing.

OIF was lauded for being extremely“joint,” with conventional ground forcesplaying a role more prominent than hadbeen seen in years. Indeed, the war’sdaily progress tended to be measuredon the ground. How far had the 3rdInfantry penetrated into Iraq? When didthe Marines cross the Diyala River ineastern Baghdad? Newly “embedded” TVcrews produced riveting footage of

American soldiers and marines takingfire and shooting back. By contrast,coverage of the air war was rare.

Even so, this was an airpower war.Pre-war planning fine-tuned air andground coordination mechanisms fromthe tactical to the operational level, allto produce the optimum level of jointfirepower. Modern airpower made itpossible to:

Decimate Iraq’s air defenses andcommunications sites before the wareven started.

Re-shuffle, at the last minute, theorder of opening attacks.

Wipe out much of the RepublicanGuard before US ground forces evenmade contact.

Sustain the joint campaign despitefierce sandstorms and unexpected Iraqiresistance.

Wage distinct and simultaneousfights in the south, north and west ofIraq.

Create a strategic environment inwhich all of the strengths of US jointforces and coalition partners could beput to combined use against Iraqiforces.

Credit goes to the joint and coalitionforce for a stunning success. However, itwas the recent developments in air-power—led by the United States AirForce—that put in place the entireframework for victory.

The War Before the WarFor the Air Force, the preparations for

OIF spanned more than a decade.Airmen from USAF, other US services,and coalition partners spent 12 yearspatrolling Iraqi airspace to enforce twoUN-backed no-fly zones. In theseefforts—known as Operation NorthernWatch and Operation Southern Watch—patrols often were routine, but overtime, a generation of airmen gainedfirst-hand experience of flying andfighting in “the sandbox.” Many aircrewmembers such as USAF F-15C pilotCapt. Samantha Weeks got their firsttaste of combat conditions whilepolicing the no-fly zones. Weeks de-scribed a day when she and her flight

T1. USCENTAF, Operation IraqiFreedom: By the Numbers, April 30,2003.

2. Adam J. Hebert, “The BaghdadStrikes,” Air Force Magazine, July2003.

3. Patrick E. Tyler, “US Forces TakeControl of Baghdad,” New YorkTimes, April 10, 2003.

4. Gen. Tommy R. Franks,CENTCOM commander, newsbriefing, March 22, 2003.

2

lead spotted an Iraqi jet that appearedto be in violation of the northern no-flyzone. “We got to commit out on thatIraqi plane,” said Weeks, “and that wasawesome because you’re going to dothe job you trained for every singleday.”5

Then, in 1999, the mostly quiet airwar began to heat up. UN inspectionteams had since the end of Gulf War Ibeen working in Iraq to uncoverforbidden weapons of mass destruction.As Security Council members such asFrance and Russia lost interest infurther enforcement of the UN sanc-tions, Saddam Hussein grew bolder. Inlate 1998, he expelled UN weaponsinspectors from Iraq altogether. TheClinton Administration responded inDecember 1998 with Operation DesertFox, a four-day airpower retaliationexercise that targeted sites suspected ofcontaining Weapons of Mass Destruc-tion (WMD), Republican Guard facili-ties, and air defense systems.

After that, the shooting never reallystopped. The Iraqis became moreaggressive, “painting” coalition aircraftwith anti-aircraft sensors and firing onnumerous occasions. The coalition firedback with carefully-placed precisionattacks on Iraqi air defense systems. Thetotal number of retaliatory strikesincreased in 1999 and, over time, beganto take a significant toll on Saddam’s airdefenses.

In the year leading up to the March20, 2003, start of the war, Washingtonredoubled its efforts. CENTCOM de-clared that Saddam’s forces had fired atcoalition aircraft “nearly 500 times” in

the year 2002, sparking about 90retaliation missions.6 Nov. 21, 2002,provided a typical example. Coalitionaircraft bombed Iraqi air defensecommunication facilities near Al Kutand Basra. Back at the Pentagon, RearAdm. David Gove, a Joint Staff spokes-man, said American pilots in the no-flyzone “are essentially flying combatmissions.”7 He went on to say, “Anyopportunity that they have to under-stand the capabilities and the layout ofIraqi air defense weapons systems isuseful for their own experience base,and there has been degradation of theintegrated air defense system in Iraq.”

Air Force Lt. Gen. Michael Moseley,the Combined Forces Air ComponentCommander (a.k.a., “air boss”), latertold reporters that, long before theofficial start of the war, US air com-manders took full advantage of theopportunities opened up by Iraq’sdefiant stance. The air component hadin fact been executing a comprehen-sive plan, known as “Southern Focus,” todisrupt Iraq’s military command andcontrol system. One key target wasIraq’s network of fiber-optic cable,through which it hoped to be able totransmit messages and maintain com-mand and control of its forces in somefuture showdown with the UnitedStates. Moseley said that between June2002 and March 20, 2003, CENTCOMairpower put 606 bombs on 391carefully selected targets.8

The impact was already apparentwhen, on March 19, 2003, Col. GaryCrowder of Air Combat Commandappeared at a formal Pentagon briefing,

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Commander. Gen. TommyFranks (right), com-mander, US CentralCommand, meets Brig.Gen. Rick Rosborg,commander of the 379thAir Expeditionary Wing, ata forward base. The wargenerated “a great deal ofwhat-iffing by all of us”said Franks.

5. Capt. Samantha A. Weeksinterview, September 2002.

6. John A. Tirpak, “Legacy of theAir Blockades,” Air Force Magazine,February 2003.

7. Rear Adm. David Gove, JCSspokesman, DOD news briefing,Nov. 20, 2002.

8. Michael Gordon, “US Air Raids in’02 Prepared for War in Iraq,” NewYork Times, July 20, 2003.

where he estimated that Saddam had bythat date effectively ceded “about two-thirds of his airspace” to coalitionforces. “We are starting off in a signifi-cantly better position as a consequenceof the northern and southern no-flyzones, which will enable operationsthat might not otherwise have beenable to commence,” Crowder added.9

Crowder’s remarks may have surprisedsome, but not anyone who had beenpaying attention. Several weeks into thewar, Gen. John P. Jumper, Air Force Chiefof Staff, made public the fact thatcoalition aircraft between June 2002and March 20, 2003, carried out “about4,000 sorties” against the integrated airdefense system in Iraq and againstsurface-to-air missiles and commandand control. “By the time we got toMarch,” Jumper added, “we think thatthey were pretty much out of busi-ness.”10

The Case Against IraqThese combat operations in the no-

fly zones reflected a Bush Administra-tion conclusion, made with 9/11 inmind, that Iraq was a mortal danger thatcould not truly be contained as long asSaddam Hussein remained in power.Four years with no United Nationsinspections made it impossible to knowwhat Saddam had done with his weap-ons programs.

Vice President Dick Cheney summa-rized part of the case against Iraq in aspeech to veterans in August 2002.11

Said Cheney: “Nothing in the last dozenyears has stopped him—not his agree-ments; not the discoveries of theinspectors; not the revelations bydefectors; not criticism or ostracism bythe international community; and notfour days of bombing by the US in 1998.What he wants is time, and more time,to husband his resources, to invest inhis ongoing chemical and biologicalweapons programs, and to gain posses-sion of nuclear arms.”

Just as worrisome was the sympathybetween Saddam’s regime and al Qaeda.It was Osama bin Laden himself whofirst made the connection in 1998,

when he cited the no-fly zones overIraq in his fatwa calling for the killingof Americans.

Regime change in Iraq was an essen-tial part of the post-9/11 securitystrategy. Still, it felt unfamiliar toAmericans. The bottom line was that,because Saddam’s Iraq was or couldwell become a “safe harbor” for terror-ists, then he simply would have to go—and soon.

“Congress must act now to pass aresolution which will hold SaddamHussein to account for a decade ofdefiance,” Bush urged in late September2002.12 The bipartisan resolution was alitmus test of the support for war, ifnecessary. “Countering Iraq’s threat isalso a central commitment in the waron terror,” Bush said in an appearancewith Congressional leaders on Oct. 2.13

“We know Saddam Hussein haslongstanding and ongoing ties tointernational terrorists.”

Bush asked Congress to pass asupportive resolution, and it compliedon Oct. 11, 2002. Although manymembers expressed misgivings, Con-gress overwhelmingly authorized theuse of military force against Iraq “as hedetermines to be necessary and appro-priate” to defend the US and enforceUN resolutions.

For all intents and purposes, US pilotsin the no-fly zones were at war eventhen. In November 2002, USAF Gen.Richard B. Myers, Chairman of the JointChiefs of Staff, declared, “Every missionthat our pilots go on is considered acombat mission.”14

For Americans, this was not a familiarway to wage war. The nation greatlypreferred to have an undeniable casusbelli, which would shield it from worldcriticism. Gulf War II, however, had tostart without an admiring gallerycheering it on.

On Nov. 8, 2002, the UN SecurityCouncil passed Resolution 1441. Itoffered Iraq “a final opportunity tocomply with its disarmament obliga-tions.” The resolution called for unre-stricted access for weapons inspectors.It also warned that any “false state-

9. Col. Gary Crowder, Chief,Strategy, Concepts, and Doctrine,Air Combat Command, DOD newsbriefing, March 19, 2003.

10. Gen. John P. Jumper, remarksto National Space Symposium,April 10, 2003.

11. Vice President Dick Cheney,remarks to the Veterans of ForeignWars 103rd National Convention,Aug. 26, 2002.

12. President George W. Bush,remarks at Cabinet photoopportunity, Sept. 24, 2002, WhiteHouse transcript.

13. President Bush, Rose Gardenremarks on Iraq Resolution, Oct. 2,2002, White House transcript.

14. Gen. Richard B. Myers,Chairman of the Joint Chiefs ofStaff, in “Iraq Remains a Threat toNo-fly Zone Pilots, Aircrews,”American Forces Press Service,Nov. 4, 2002.

4

ments” or other non-compliance wouldput Iraq in material breach not just of1441, but of the long series of bindingUN resolutions dating back to April1991—all of which were designed toprod Iraq into authentic disarmament.Those same resolutions formed thelegal basis for the no-fly zones and gavethe coalition a broad foundation formilitary action against Iraq.

“The world has now come togetherto say that the outlaw regime in Iraqwill not be permitted to build orpossess chemical, biological or nuclearweapons,” Bush said.15

Inspectors returned to Iraq in Decem-ber, but things went sour immediately.On Feb. 5, 2003, Secretary of State ColinPowell reported, “Iraq never had anyintention of complying with [theSecurity Council’s] mandate.” Powellcited evidence for Iraqi possession ofweapons of mass destruction andreferred to Iraq’s proven record ofwillingness to attack its neighbors andto use chemical weapons on its ownpeople.16

However, ambivalence about preven-tive war was strong. Even the Gulf War ICommander, retired Army Gen. H.Norman Schwarzkopf, said, “Before Ican just stand up and say, ‘Beyond ashadow of a doubt, we need to invadeIraq,’ I guess I would like to have betterinformation.”17 Many Americans felt thesame kind of unease. The supply ofpolitical support was limited.

On March 7, about two weeks beforethe war, UN inspectors published a 173-page report listing 29 areas where Iraqhad not provided sufficient information

to inspectors and claiming that Iraqcould retain weapons such as the nervegas agent VX.18

On March 17, 2003, President Bushmade a national television appearanceto issue this ultimatum. “SaddamHussein and his sons must leave Iraqwithin 48 hours.” He added, “Theirrefusal to do so will result in militaryconflict, commenced at a time of ourchoosing.”19

Across the Atlantic, America’sstaunchest ally British Prime MinisterTony Blair faced a confidence vote onMarch 18. Blair spoke before Parliamentof his commitment to Resolution 1441as the legal basis for action in Iraq.Saddam had been “for years” in materialbreach of UN resolutions and in hislack of compliance had squandered thislast opportunity. He said there wasstrong evidence that Iraq held weaponsof mass destruction. The world hadwaited long enough, Blair said. Inactionnow would cost dearly—well beyondthe confrontation with Iraq. “Whatwould any tyrannical regime possessingWMD think, viewing the history of theworld’s diplomatic dance with Sad-dam?” Blair asked.20 “That our capacityto pass firm resolutions is only matchedby our feebleness in implementingthem.” One day, he warned, regimes“will mistake our innate revulsionagainst war for permanent incapacity.”

Launching Operation Iraqi Freedomwas the only way forward.

A New Kind of PlanEarly in the war, Franks said of it,

“This will be a campaign unlike any in

5

SAM Trap. July 2001photo shows a truck-mounted Iraqi SAMtracking a coalitionaircraft. US aircraftrelentlessly attackedIraq’s air defensesystem in the yearbefore March 20, 2003.

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15. President Bush, Rose Gardenremarks, Nov. 8, 2002, White Housetranscript.

16. Secretary of State Colin Powell,“Iraq: Denial and Deception,” speechto UN Security Council, Feb. 5,2003.

17. Thomas E. Ricks, “DesertCaution,” Washington Post, Jan. 28,2003.

18. 12th Quarterly Report of theExecutive Chairman of the UnitedNations Monitoring, Verification, andInspection Commission, Feb. 28,2003.

19. President Bush, address to thenation, March 17, 2003, WhiteHouse transcript.

20. British Prime Minister Tony Blair,text of speech, The Guardian, March18, 2003.

history.”21 He was speaking the unvar-nished truth. The war was differentbecause the core of US military strategyhad undergone a seismic shift.

Until the very end of the 20thcentury, US military strategy still owedmuch to 19th century concepts, thoughmodified to take account of the emer-gence of airpower. Forces set condi-tions for dominant maneuver and thenclosed in to defeat the enemy. In the20th century, airpower became adecisive force and control of the airwas a prerequisite for everything else.An opening air campaign knocked outenemy air defenses, beat up enemyforces on the ground, and grantedfreedom of maneuver and increasedfirepower to armies on the ground.

The unfolding of this sequence mighttake months or years (as it did in WorldWar II) or mere weeks (as in the GulfWar of 1991), but one had to observethe sequence to win at acceptable cost.

The planners of OIF had far widerchoices—principally because the aircomponent already had created astrategic environment in which theorder of attack mattered less than itonce did. Sequential air and groundoperations were not the only choices in2003.

Signs suggesting such a strategic shift

had been visible for a few years. InOperation Allied Force in 1999, therewas no formal land component involve-ment at all, and no allied soldiersmarched into Kosovo until the capitula-tion of the Milosevic regime. The war inAfghanistan—Operation EnduringFreedom—also departed from thescript. It soon turned out to be aproving ground for the use of dominantairpower teamed with a few hundredspecial operations forces to maneuverirregular Afghan forces on to seizemajor cities.

These two wars dethroned the old“maneuver-and-fires” dogma, suddenlyremoving it from the core of the jointcampaign design. No longer wouldwarfare have to fit a sequential mold.Maneuver-and-fires still would governsome important types of land forceengagements, but it would no longer bethe dominating spirit of American warplanning. Kosovo and Afghanistan alsobroke up old notions of “supported-supporting” relationships among theservice components and opened theway for new concepts of how thecomponents worked together.

With air dominance over Iraq alreadyin hand, it was possible to attacksimultaneously, at different locations,and aim for multiple objectives at the

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Air Boss. USAF Lt. Gen.Michael Moseley,Combined Forces AirComponentcommander—the “airboss.” From the start,the coalition enjoyed airdominance, a fact thatset the terms for theshape and pace of thewar.

21. Franks, CENTCOM newsbriefing, March 22, 2003.

900

800

700

600

500

400

300

200

100

0

Fighter Bomber SOF ISR C2 Airlift Tanker Other Total

USAF 293 51 131 60 22 111 182 13 863

Navy 232 0 0 29 20 5 52 70 408

USMC 130 0 0 0 0 0 22 220 372

Army* 0 0 0 18 0 0 0 2 20

Allies 80 0 14 11 4 10 12 7 138

same time. This campaign wasn’t goingto look anything like a command andstaff college study-book.

The shift in warfare was just whatwas needed to handle a campaign thathad to do everything from suppressingScud missile launches and protectingIraq’s economic infrastructure tohunting down Saddam and pushingground forces off on a fast campaign.Air dominance set up the strategicconditions for shaping and phasingelements of the campaign.

The new realities were only tooevident in multiple debates about whenand how to begin the air campaign—“ADay”—and ground campaign—“G Day.”

A key player in these debates was AirForce Maj. Gen. Daniel P. Leaf. Gulf WarII air boss Moseley selected Leaf to behis personal representative to Army Lt.Gen. David McKiernan, the CombinedForces Land Component Commander(a.k.a., “land boss”). Leaf was in aunique position to observe interplay of

personal institutional factors in warplanning. “There were all kinds ofdiscussions of timing,” he said, “andthere were questions as to whetherthere’d be 14 days between A-Day andG-Day, and then six days, or three days,or no days.”22

As it turned out, there was no needto delay the land campaign; the US hadalready conducted an undeclared airwar. As retired Gen. Merrill A. McPeak, aformer USAF Chief of Staff, declared ina June 5 Washington Post commentary:“It’s incorrect to say that, unlike DesertStorm 12 years before, there was noindependent air campaign in advanceof the jump off of our ground forcesfrom Kuwait.”23 As it turned out, air-power had already done its work, andthe ground war would commence halfa day before all-out air operationsresumed.

Similarly, there was no need to waitto insert special operations forces onthe ground. Reports of clandestine

Total Coalition Aircraft

863

408372

138

20

USAF

Navy

USMC

Num

ber

of A

ircr

aft

*Does not include helicopters.

Army*

Allies

The air armada in theGulf comprised 1,801combat and supportaircraft.

22. Maj. Gen. Daniel P. Leafinterview, June 27, 2003.

23. Gen. Merrill A. McPeak, USAF(Ret.), “Leave the Flying to Us,”Washington Post, June 5, 2003.

(Charts in this study are based onUS Central Command’s “OperationIraqi Freedom—By the Numbers.”)

7

teams already in place in Iraq hadcirculated for months. By mid-March,teams were in place at key locations,ready to help direct coalition attackswhen the time came.

Franks could afford to bide his timeand wait to open the war exactly as hewished. Whether air or land or specialforces fired the first shots did notmatter much in these altered strategicconditions. This new twist to warfareconfounded most of the “wartime-edition” pundits and surprised not afew individuals with significant militarycredentials, too.

Months of planning and map-tablerehearsals acquainted commanderswith every variation of how the cam-paign might unfold. Instead of followinga single, rigid plan, commanders reliedon the knowledge gained from testingdifferent options to make quick deci-sions based on how Iraqi forces reacted.The number one priority for Franks wasto get to Baghdad—and, with its over-whelming force, the coalition had manytactical options about how exactly tomake that happen. “Joint warfareunfolded differently than we expected,but, because of the extensive planningand speed and agility represented, thechange in the execution plan didn’tmatter,” said Vice Adm. Tim Keating, theCombined Forces Maritime ComponentCommander.24

OIF started in its own way withinitial shaping actions just as Bush’s 48-hour deadline expired early on March20, local Baghdad time. According toMyers, these “early battlefield prepara-

tions” included air strikes on radars inwestern Iraq and near Basra in southernIraq. Air attacks also neutralized artilleryin the Al Faw peninsula northeast ofKuwait. Next, “coalition forces beganinserting Special Operations Forcesthroughout western and southern Iraqto conduct reconnaissance operationsand take down visual observation postson the southern Iraqi border” Myerssaid.25

CENTCOM saw evidence that theIraqis were trying to mount an opera-tion to destroy their own oilfields.Franks believed the coalition could “getthe oil fields” before the Iraqis torchedthem. “We saw an opportunity toachieve one of our operational objec-tives,” said Franks, “which was toprevent the destruction of a big chunkof the Iraqi people’s future wealth.”26

“Let’s Go”The real shocker, though was Franks’

last-minute decision to go for Saddam’sjugular—literally.

On the afternoon of March 19, CIADirector George Tenet took a scintillat-ing piece of intelligence to the WhiteHouse.27 There, he told the Presidentthat a highly placed source had passedthe word that Saddam for several hourswould be at a residence in the south-eastern area of Baghdad. The buildingwas a “compound” at which Iraqileaders were known to congregate.Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rums-feld described the target this way: “Wehad what I would characterize as verygood intelligence that it was a senior

8

Black Jet. The first F-117to strike the Baghdadbunker returns to basejust after sunrise onMarch 20. Franks wentfor Saddam’s jugular,ensuring the war did notfollow a script.

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24. Vice Adm. Timothy Keating,CFMCC, “This Was a Different War,”US Naval Institute Proceedingsinterview, June 2003.

25. Myers, DOD news briefing,March 21, 2003.


27. John Diamond, Dave Moniz, andJack Kelly, “Urgency to Take OutSaddam Leads to Shift in USStrategy,” USA Today, March 21,2003.

Prince Sultan AB

● Shaikh Isa AB

Incirlik AB

● Thumrait AB

● Masirah AB

● Seeb Airport

● Tehran

●

Saudi Arabia

Iraq

Turkey

Iran

Afghanistan

Yemen

Oman

Syria

UAE

Qatar

Pakistan

Iraqi leadership compound.”28 Saddamwas elusive in the extreme. Throughoutthe 1991 Gulf War, coalition forcesworked hard to pinpoint his location,but always found themselves to beseveral hours behind their quarry.

The Iraqi strongman was known toemploy body doubles, decoy cars, andvarious other methods to keep hiswhereabouts secret and his foes offbalance.

The intelligence Tenet brought to theWhite House was perhaps the best theAmericans had ever obtained. Thequestion: Could the building be at-tacked in time?

Only USAF’s stealthy F-117 had thechance to survive Baghdad’s air de-fenses and strike in time. The “Black Jet,”however, could only sortie at nightwhen the darkness cloaked its “visual

9

al Udeid AB●

Bahrain

Kuwait

● Riyadh

● Baghdad

Damascus ● Tikrit

● Mosul● Kirkuk● Bashur Airfield

●

●

Tigris River

EuphratesRiver

Jordan

Arabian Sea

Mediterranean Sea

Red Sea

Persian Gulf

signature” from enemy gunners. InBaghdad, it was already nighttime, withdawn only a few hours away, so speedwas critical.

Mission planners responsible for the12 F-117s at Al Udeid, Qatar, picked Lt.Col. David F. Toomey III and Maj. Mark J.Hoehn to fly the mission.29 The squad-ron was on a war-time footing and hadtwo F-117s in pristine condition—thatis, low-observable maintenance com-plete to combat standards—and set togo. The problem was weather overBaghdad. Low clouds would interferewith the F-117’s infra-red targeting forthe laser guided bombs, which was thesystem used to such great effect in the1991 Gulf War and subsequent cam-paigns. Fortunately, the F-117s had anew weapon. The EGBU-27 had anEnhanced Paveway III seeker that

Ankara●

Amman●

Gulf of Oman

28. Defense Secretary Donald H.Rumsfeld, DOD news briefing,March 20, 2003.

29. Hebert, “The Baghdad Strikes,”Air Force Magazine, July 2003; andLorenzo Cortes, “Air Force F-117sOpen Coalition Air Strikes withEGBU-27s,” Defense Daily, March21, 2003.

Fighter Bomber SOF Total

USAF 293 51 131 475

Navy 232 0 0 232

USMC 130 0 0 130

Army* 0 0 0 0

Allies 80 0 14 94

ISR C2 Airlift Tanker Other Total

USAF 60 22 111 182 13 388

Navy 29 20 5 52 70 176

USMC 0 0 0 22 220 242

Army 18 0 0 0 2 20

Allies 11 4 10 12 7 44

permitted the weapon to track to itstarget using GPS coordinates.30 No onehad ever dropped an EGBU-27 incombat, but the F-117 pilots werewilling to give it a try.

So was Bush. “Let’s go,” said thePresident to his aides. Bush had thusgiven the go-ahead for a war-openingstrike just after 3 a.m., local Baghdadtime.31

Toomey and Hoehn took off at 3:38a.m. (Baghdad time) and began the two-hour flight to Saddam’s capital. At 5:34a.m. (Baghdad time) came the multiplethunderclaps of four 2,000-poundbombs exploding at the target site.32

Within a few minutes, 40 TomahawkLand-Attack Missiles, launched from theUSS Cowpens and other warships at sea,hit other downtown Baghdad targets,notably the intelligence service head-quarters and a key Republican Guardinstallation.33 “A minute passed beforethe air raid siren began to wail,” wrote

Anthony Shadid, a Washington Postreporter in Baghdad that morning. “Forthe next hour, long pauses were inter-rupted by tracer bullets racing acrossthe sky, and more anti-aircraft rounds.”34

For the F-117 pilots, it was a danger-ous mission. Dawn already was breakingas they reached their target, and thustheir egress would have to be flown indaylight. But the strike paid off. Frankssaid later that the attacks were coordi-nated “about as close ... as I have everseen ... and, as you know, I have workeda great many of them in Afghanistan.”35

Rumsfeld told reporters in Washington,“There’s no question but that the strikeon that leadership headquarters wassuccessful. We have photographs ofwhat took place. The question is, whatwas in there?”36 Even though theymissed Saddam this time, the attack putthe regime on notice that no place wassafe. And the sudden strike had widerbenefits. The initial F-117 and TLAM

10

Combat Aircraft

USAF(51.0%)

USMC (14.0%)

Allies (10.1%)

Navy(24.9%)

*Does not include helicopters.

Support Aircraft

USAF(44.6%)

Navy(20.2%)

USMC(27.8%)

Allies (5.1%)Army (2.3%)

30. Hebert, Air Force Magazine,July 2003.

31. Dan Balz, “US Urges Iraqi ArmyLoyalists to Give Up,” WashingtonPost, March 21, 2003.

32. Anthony Shadid, “ExplosionsRip through the Quiet of Morning,”Washington Post Foreign Service,March 20, 2003.

33. Shadid, Washington Post,March 20, 2003.

34. Shadid, Washington Post,March 20, 2003.


36. Rumsfeld, DOD news briefing,March 21, 2003.

The Air Force provided51 percent of thecombat aircraft and allof the heavy bombers.Most of the tanker,airlift, and ISR aircraftcame from USAF units.The Air National Guardand Air Force ReserveCommand accounted formore than 300 aircraft.

strikes, said Leaf, “changed the timing”for the whole operation. “Against allodds,” he noted, “we had tactical sur-prise because of [the US decision tostrike] that target of opportunity.”37

Goals of OIFFull-scale ground operations started

24 hours later. The 1st US MarineExpeditionary Force entered the Iraqicity of Umm Qasar on the Faw Penin-sula, and then moved in to secure Iraq’ssouthern oilfields. American SpecialOperations Forces seized an airfield inWestern Iraq. Navy SEALS took over twoIraqi oil terminals in the Persian Gulf.Then, in the early morning hours ofMarch 21, 2003 (local time), the USArmy’s 3rd Mechanized Infantry Divi-sion charged out of Kuwait into south-ern Iraq, hell-bent for Baghdad.38

11

● al Jaber AB

Iraq

● al Salem AB

Kuwait

● Baghdad

● Tikrit

● Mosul

● Kirkuk

● Bashur Airfield

Tigris River

Euphrates River

Saudi Arabia

Iran

Syria

Jordan● H 3

● H 2

● Kuwait City

●

Tallil Airfield ●

Nasiriyah

●Basra

Umm Qasr

al Faw

●●

Najaf ●

Karbala ●

The campaign goals demandedsimultaneous actions by differentcomponents at different places as thewar began. Rumsfeld laid out thespecific objectives:39

Put a decisive end to Saddam’sregime.

Eliminate Iraq’s WMD, deliverysystems, and production centers.

Kill, capture, or drive out terroristsin Iraq.

Collect intelligence to help breakup terrorist networks.

Collect information about WMDefforts in other nations.

Bring humanitarian relief suppliesto Iraqis.

Secure Iraq’s oil fields.Install a democracy.

“We did not choose this war,” Rums-feld said.40 “Saddam Hussein was given a

●al Kut

EuphratesRiver

Turkey

37. Leaf interview, June 27, 2003.




choice by the international community:Give up your weapons of mass murder,or lose power. He chose unwisely, andnow he will lose both.” Out in the Gulf,where the preparation was over andthe action beginning, Franks instructedsubordinate commanders to make it“fast and final.” Moseley said, “That wasthe mark on the wall for his command-ers.”41

Strategic AirpowerCENTCOM based its planning on a

collection of “Days”—“S-Day” for themoment that Special Operations Forceswould begin their work; “A-Day” for thestart of the air campaign; “G-Day” forthe formal opening of the groundinvasion.

As it turned out, A-Day began one halfday after the start of G-Day. In the final,nighttime hours of March 21, localBaghdad time, coalition bombers,fighters, and cruise-missile-firingwarships unleashed precision attackson numerous fixed, strategic targetsthroughout Iraq. Soon, Rumsfeldannounced that A-Day had arrived, andhe predicted instant success against theIraqi leaders.42

“Their ability to see what is happen-ing on the battlefield, to communicatewith their forces, and to control their

country, is slipping away,” Rumsfeldproclaimed.43 A-Day was the product ofmuch deliberate planning plus a dash oflast-minute improvisation (for example,the sudden scrapping of some targets insouthern Iraq because coalition forceshad already taken control there).

Moseley said, “Even during the timethat we were at the peak of [war inAfghanistan], we began to thinkthrough what might be possible if wewere asked to conduct this campaign.”44

He then pointed out the major differ-ence between Gulf War I and Gulf WarII: “Did we get 30 days of [battlefield]preparation, like in the first desert war?No, but I don’t think we needed 30 daysof preparation.”45 (The pure “air war”actually lasted 38 days.)

The opening strikes proved Moseleyright. “Several hundred military targetswill be hit over the coming hours,” JCSChairman Myers noted to reporters,and, indeed, Iraq felt the sting of morethan 700 strike sorties and more than500 cruise missile attacks.46 This“massive air campaign” as Myers calledit, differed from others that came beforeit. First, it was more precise than anyother. From B-2 bombers with 16 JointDirect Attack Munitions to F-15Efighters with laser-guided bombs, thecampaign was heavy on precision

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Heavy Hammers. A B-1Bbomber (top) takes offwhile a B-52H preparesto follow. USAF’s heavybombers delivered ahuge amount of tonnage.The strategic campaignwas not an independentevent but rather wasused to advance the jointcampaign.

12

41. Bradley Graham and VernonLoeb, “An Air War Of Might,Coordination And Risks,”Washington Post, April 27, 2003.



44. Lt. Gen. T. Michael Moseley,CFACC, DOD news briefing, April 5,2003.

45. Moseley, DOD news briefing,April 5, 2003.


attack. “Our air forces continue to strikeregime command and control andmilitary formations virtually all over thecountry,” Franks said on March 24.47

This strategic air campaign, however,generated expectations different fromthose of 1991. A different philosophywas apparent right from the start.Critical parts of the infrastructure hit inGulf War I were not targeted in thesame way in 2003. Electricity in Bagh-dad stayed on virtually throughout thewar, and this was no accident. Keatingnoted that you don’t necessarily have topull the plug on Iraq’s electrical grid inorder to take down the integrated airdefense system. “There are other ways,”said Keating.48

The strategic air campaign grew out ofthe broad joint campaign objectivesarticulated by Rumsfeld and under-scored by Franks. It was not crafted tooverturn Saddam’s regime in a singlenight or to send political messages.Planners made no move to lace togetherclever patterns of air strikes in order tobreak the “will” of the people or deflatethe regime by destroying all the “strate-gic” targets that it held most dear.

Indeed, American military leaders byand large refrained from joining thebizarre claims of the “shock and awe”crowd who were so prominent in themedia. Rumsfeld, for one, warned that“it’s a stretch” to think that such scaretactics could work against the murder-ous regime in Iraq. As for Moseley, hehad this to say: “The term ‘Shock andAwe’ has never been a term that I’veused. I’m not sure where that camefrom.”49

In sum, the strategic campaign wasnot an independent event but ratherwas used to advance the joint cam-paign. In Gulf War I, target categorieswere carved up by type and function—electrical power, oil, leadership, and soforth. In 2003, the CFACC’s strategy-to-task mission comprised 11 objectivesand used them to allocate air strikesand build master attack plans. Themission area “UW” (unconventionalwarfare) was to support the needs ofCombined Forces Special OperationsCommand Commander. Two othermission areas were focused on sup-pressing and neutralizing WMD deliverysystems and infrastructure. Half of theair capability was allocated to a singlecategory of counter-land support to theland component commander,McKiernan.50

Thus, the “strategic” portions of theair campaign actually crossed the seamsof various mission areas. Strikes such asthose on communication nodes orairfields may have looked like classic20th century targeteering, just ex-ecuted with more precision andefficiency. In reality, the interweavingof air component objectives in the dailyefforts made the “strategic” campaignsimply one piece of the air-war mosaic.

The coalition’s 2003 strategic aircampaign differed from the 1991version in two other significant ways:its extreme caution about collateraldamage and its innovative targeting oftime-sensitive and dynamic targets.

Collateral DamageJust as aircrews planned ingress and

13

Teamwork. Tankers—suchas this KC-135—were thebackbone of the airoperation, which wasunprecedentedly “joint”and “combined.” Picturedhere are fighters from USAF(F-15E, F-16CJ, F-117), theRAF (GR-4 Tornado), andRAAF (F/A-18 Hornet).Navy and Marine aircraftplayed key roles.

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47. Franks, CENTCOM news briefing,March 24, 2003.

48. Michael R. Gordon, “WarPlanners Would Save Enough ofIraqi Army to Rebuild It,”International Herald Tribune, March11, 2003.


50. USCENTAF, Operation IraqiFreedom: By the Numbers, April 30,2003.

egress routes, initial points, releasepoints, and defensive measures for eachtarget, air component planners assessedeach potential target in CENTCOM’sdatabase for ways to hold collateraldamage to a minimum. “My objective isto create as little collateral damageeffect as I have to,” said Moseley.51

The Iraqis made this goal especiallytough to achieve. They routinely parkedfighters or air defense systems next tocivilian schools and parks, daringcoalition forces to attack. According toRumsfeld, officials of the ruling BaathParty had established 123 of its officeswithin schools around the nation.52

Faced with such tactics, coalitionplanners needed a sophisticatedprocess for managing or avoidingcollateral damage in Iraq. Hence, it wasno surprise that air strikes in Baghdadwere also subjected to rigorous analysisand evaluation at the CAOC.

“Collateral damage is really ... twoseparate pieces,” explained a CENTCOMbriefer a few weeks before the war. Onepiece focused on damage to infrastruc-ture. The other centered on unintendedcasualties among noncombatants.53 Toprevent both, US planners ran everyfixed target through a vetting processto evaluate the prospect of collateraldamage. USAF MSgt. Douglas Frickey,who served in the CAOC throughoutthe war, said, “We use several types ofhigh-tech electronic and computerprogram models, based on mathemati-cal theories, to help us with the collat-eral damage estimation process.”54

In planning an attack on a militarytarget, planners could vary the aim

points, the attack azimuth, or the timeof day for the attack, all to spare livesand property. No one believed theprocess would be perfect every time,but advance evaluation could put logicinto it, the planners thought. By thetime OIF started, Baghdad had beenexamined and evaluated, and the aircomponent had built a database ofcollateral damage metrics for potentialtargets. This was no mean feat, giventhat the CAOC database ultimately grewto more than 25,000 desired meanpoints of impact, or “DMPIs,” for alltypes of targets.55 Still, coalition forceswere moving so quickly, Frickey said,“we were providing collateral damageestimation information around theclock.”56

The net effect was a degree ofcontrol and precision which far ex-ceeded anything seen in previous wars.Early in the conflict, Rumsfeld grewannoyed with a reporter who wascomparing the attacks to those carriedout in World War II. “There is no com-parison,” he shot back. “The targetingcapabilities and the care that goes intotargeting to see that the precise targetsare struck and that other targets are notstruck is as impressive as anythinganyone could see.”57

Careful analysis paid off. “I think youhave seen time and time again militarytargets fall while the civilian infrastruc-ture remains in place,” Franks said aweek into the campaign. “And it’s thesame with civilian lives.”58 Moseley, inpostwar interviews, said that he andother air commanders were obliged toobtain Rumsfeld’s personal approval to

Nerve Center. It wasalways busy in USAF’sCombined AirOperations Center,located at Prince SultanAB, Saudi Arabia.Coalition plannersneeded a sophisticatedprocess not only forcoordinating strikes butalso for managing oravoiding collateraldamage.

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52. Rumsfeld, DOD news briefing,April 11, 2003.

53. DOD background news briefingon targeting, March 5, 2003.

54. Douglas H. Stutz, “Inside theCAOC: Saving Lives with CollateralDamage Estimation,” CFACC PublicAffairs, Report 7, 2003.

55. USCENTAF, By the Numbers.

56. Stutz, Report 7, 2003.



undertake any air strike that couldlikely result in the deaths of 30 or moreIraqi civilians. Proposals to strike suchtargets came up more than 50 timesduring the war; in all cases, Rumsfeldgave his military leaders authority toproceed.59 Some air-delivered munitionsdid malfunction or go long and misstargets. However, the coalition’s abilityto adjust its attacks to minimize collat-eral damage was nothing short ofremarkable. Where the war was un-popular, there were outcries about thebrutality of “bombing Baghdad,” but, asthe war progressed, the strategic aircampaign produced little to supportcomplaints.

Time-Sensitive TargetsThe Air Force and other elements of

the air component worked equally hardto improve the coalition’s ability toattack time-sensitive targets. Newadversary tactics—such as selective useof SAM radars as practiced by Serbia’sforces in the 1999 Kosovo War—put apremium on tracking elusive andfleeting targets. The Global War onTerrorism made these pop-up targets amajor element of any air campaign.Rarely would ground forces be inposition to chase terrorists spotted bysome Intelligence-Surveillance-Recon-naissance (ISR) platform or seize aWMD site. Control over these importanttargets rested mainly with airpower.

CENTCOM also ironed out its ownmeans for vetting targets. Approvaldelays and lack of understanding ofrules of engagement (ROE) had causedimmense problems in Kosovo and evenin the Afghanistan war. Before combatbegan, one CENTCOM officer (an A-10pilot) said the control structure foroperations in Iraq was very flat, de-signed to push decision authority downquite far in order to match combattempo. “I don’t believe you’ll see thekind of challenges that military com-manders in Kosovo faced,” he said. “Ithink the President, Secretary [ofDefense], and General Franks have avery good agreement [that] only thosekey targets have to be elevated” and for,

other targets, “we allow the battlefieldcommanders to make those decisions”with pre-established rules.60

For OIF, the air component narrowedand thus clarified its definitions. Time-sensitive targets (TSTs) included Iraqileadership, terrorists, and WMD. Therewas another category called “dynamictargets,” defined as those that were“highly mobile and otherwise impor-tant” but not included in any of thethree TST categories. The optimumtechnique for striking both types wasto divert airborne strike aircraft in realtime.

Striking TSTs were tough. The taskdevoured intelligence. Fortunately, theair component had an armada of ISRassets. ISR platforms flew about 1,700sorties during Gulf War II.61 Volume,concentration, and overlap producedmore situation awareness and detaileddata than was the case for any other airwar in history. The Air Force ISR aircraftin the region included eight E-8 JointSTARS aircraft, nine RC-135 Rivet Jointaircraft, 15 high-flying U-2 spyplanes,and a Global Hawk. The Navy providedmore than 30 P-3s. Meanwhile, 19 AirForce E-3 AWACS, 20 Navy E-2 AEWaircraft, and the E-8s fanned out in acommand and control network. Morethan 50 satellites in space supportedthe air component for communications,navigation, and surveillance.62 Apartfrom these dedicated C4ISR platforms,many bombers, fighters, and gunshipscarried specialized target acquisitioncapabilities that made contributions tothe overall ISR picture.

The ISR assets searched for targetsfor both the air and land componentcommanders and immediately fed backimages for bomb damage assessment(BDA). Every day, said Moseley on April5, “we’ve had Predators over the top ofBaghdad, looking for surface-to-airmissile radars, looking for missilelaunchers that he’s got up in the parksand some of the athletic areas, andlooking over some of the leadershiptargets that we struck to help usdetermine whether we have to restrikeit or whether we can leave it alone.”63

15

59. Bradley Graham, “US MovedEarly for Air Supremacy,”Washington Post, July 20, 2003.

60. DOD background news briefingon targeting, March 5, 2003.

61. Robert S. Dudney, “The GulfWar II Air Campaign, by theNumbers,” Air Force Magazine, July2003.

62. USCENTAF, By the Numbers,April 30, 2003.


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Clear View. USAF pilotsput the finishingtouches on an E-8 JointSTARS aircraft. ISRaircraft such as the E-8gave commanders andoperators anunparalleled view of thebattle space, whichcombat forces used togreat advantage.

It all added up to the ability to stareat targets and track enemy activity.Ultimately, the air component wouldprosecute 156 true TSTs and another686 dynamic targets.64

Coalition ComponentsAs the shared use of ISR assets

suggested, the air and land componentshad a whole new type of partnership inOIF. Perhaps this was the biggesttransformation of all—and it did notcome easily. Understanding the nutsand bolts of this new partnership wasessential to understanding the conductof OIF.

Misunderstanding between air andground commanders had been a majorsore spot in Gulf War I. Sparks flew overthe alleged inflexibility of the AirTasking Order (ATO) process and thetally of Iraqi tanks, armored vehicles,and artillery pieces destroyed byairpower. During the four-day groundoperation in February 1991, the Army’sextension of the fire support coordina-tion line gave fleeing Republican Guardforces 17 critical hours of protectionfrom concentrated air strikes.65

Ten years later, the problems ofcoordination were still there. They randeep in the doctrines and philosophiesof how to win America’s wars. It tookthe sobering effect of enemy firepowerto uncover them—and barely in time.

The setting was Operation EnduringFreedom, the 2001-02 war againstterrorist infestations in Afghanistan.Initially, there was no land componentin theater for OEF; American SpecialOperations Forces teamed up with on-

call airpower and friendly Afghan forcesto dominate the battle space and takeback Afghanistan from the Taliban.When the land component was in placeand ready to commence operations inmid-November 2001, commandersfound that land forces had little experi-ence in dealing with the unique opera-tional requirements, battlespace controlmeasures, and politically-sensitive rulesof engagement for airpower forces inthe theater.

The confusion showed up mostdramatically in Operation Anaconda, amajor ground operation staged in thewilds of Afghanistan in March 2002.From the start, the forces of OperationAnaconda ran into fierce resistancewhen they went after al Qaeda terror-ists holed up in the Shah-e-Kot Valley.After a rough start, though, persistentairpower and smart tactical decisionsby engaged Army forces got the opera-tion back on track and the Shah-e-KotValley was cleared of al Qaeda forces intwo weeks.66

Although the troops performedimpressively, observant senior com-manders, particularly within the AirForce, were shaken by the unnecessar-ily close call. After-action analysis madeclear that the land component hadmissed many opportunities to coordi-nate with the air component prior toexecution.67

Better component coordination forthe much bigger fight ahead in Iraq hadto start with advance planning. Thecomponents had to build strongerworking relationships and establishsome shared understanding of what

16

64. USCENTAF, By the Numbers,April 30, 2003.

65. Rebecca Grant, “The GreatEscape,” Air Force Magazine, March2003.

66. Rebecca Grant, “The Airpowerof Anaconda,” Air Force Magazine,”September 2002.

67. Rebecca Grant, “The ClashAbout CAS,” Air Force Magazine,January 2003.

airpower could and could not do forthe land component and other ele-ments of the joint force. As planning forIraq accelerated, Moseley hand-pickedsenior colonels and dispatched them toother key headquarters, such as that ofKeating’s Combined Forces MaritimeComponent in Bahrain. Moseley sent aone-star general to be his personalrepresentative at CENTCOM’s forwardheadquarters, as well as sending Leaf towork in the McKiernan’s headquarters.“I provided an airman’s perspective,with the understanding of the CFACCpriorities and intent, directly to thecommander and his staff, withouthaving to go through a phone call, aVTC, or an e-mail,” Leaf said.68

Moving AheadNow the components would need to

call on those relationships as the two-pronged land offensive drove deeplyinto Iraq. By March 21, lead elements ofthe 7th Cavalry Regiment of the 3rdInfantry Division, were 100 miles intoIraq.69 That advance matched that of thelongest ground maneuver in Gulf War II,but the force did it in one fourth thetime. Behind the spearhead, the 101stAirborne Division crossed into Iraq,while special operations forces engagedto the north and west.

On this two-pronged attack restedthe main hopes for the campaign. Thestrategic design for defeating Iraq’sarmed forces took into account thedisposition of those forces.

In 1991, Iraq’s forces were mostlyclustered on the border with SaudiArabia. Coalition forces had to destroytanks and knock out artillery withairpower before its land componentforces could punch through the lines.In 2003, however, Iraq’s forces werescattered throughout the California-sized country. In southern Iraq, onecould find an armored division atSamawah, an infantry division 75 milesaway near Nasirayah, and a mechanizeddivision just north of Basra, nearly 100miles further east. Two more infantrydivisions and an armored divisionwaited in the rear, 50 to 75 milesdeeper inside Iraq.70

These regular Iraqi divisions weretoo widely dispersed to be mutuallysupporting. Certainly, they mightmanage to stage a few pitched battles,but, to counter the coalition, they’dhave to form up somewhere on theroute of advance and counterattack in abig way. Isolating and destroying theIraqi forces piece by piece would stripthem of the power to maneuver aslarge formations.

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Armor. Pre-waraccounts credited theRepublican Guard withhaving 900 top-of-theline tanks, plus oldersystems such as thisSoviet T-55 destroyednear An NumaniyahBridge. Coalitionairpower and land forcesshredded Iraqi armorwhenever encountered.


69. Association of the US Army,“Operation Iraqi Freedom Timeline,”June 2003.

70. Washington Post graphic, “Iraq:Setting the Stage for War,” March 2,2003.

Land forces moved out. British andAmerican Marines worked to quellresistance around Basra in the south. Atthe same time, the Army V Corps struckout towards Baghdad, staying to thewest of the Euphrates River. On theright, the Marine Corps’ 1st MEF set itsown course for the capital, stayingroughly parallel to the V Corps advance.At Nasiriyah, they met their first seriousresistance. Marines of the 1st MEF werenow swinging in from the east to linkup with V Corps’ advance. Regular Iraqiarmy units seemed to vanish as thecoalition advanced. Low numbers ofIraqi prisoners indicated that theregular army units were avoiding thefight. In Kuwait in 1991, they weretrapped by coalition forces and had tosurrender. This time, regular Iraqi forces“have just melted away,” reportedCENTCOM’s Deputy Commander, ArmyLt. Gen. John Abizaid.71

At Nasiriyah, surprisingly strongresistance came from Iraqi irregularswithin the city. These forces couldn’tmass to defend the position, but theycould take a toll on coalition troops.One group offered a white flag ofsurrender, and then opened up withartillery fire. Twelve Marines were killedin Nasiriyah on the fourth day of thewar. Special Republican Guard forceshad “infiltrated forward” to conductthese types of raids, Abizaid said.72 Mostof the resistance appeared to becoming from Saddam’s special securityorganization and the Saddam Fedayeen.

At land component headquarters,Leaf sensed that “significant pieces” ofthe two southern-based Republican

Guard divisions—the Baghdad and theMedina—were engaged at Nasiriyah.73

The V Corps Commander, Lt. Gen.William Wallace, later spoke of hissurprise at the Iraqi tactics. “He [theenemy] was willing to attack out ofthose towns toward our formations,when my expectation was that theywould be defending those towns andnot be as aggressive,” said Wallace.74

Baghdad was still 250 miles away. Itwas there that coalition land forcesexpected to encounter the main bodyof the Republican Guard divisions.

The Republican GuardIf any Iraqi forces could pull off a

strong counterattack, it seemed likely tobe the Republican Guard divisions,Iraq’s best forces. The Republican Guardhad been the elite of the Iraqi militarysince they helped turn the tide of theIran–Iraq war in 1988. Two years later,Republican Guard forces spearheadedthe Aug. 2, 1990 invasion of Kuwait. Inthat war, the Hammurabi andNebuchadnezzar divisions attackedKuwait from the north. The Medinadivision struck from the west. AfterKuwait fell, regular Iraqi army divisionsstocked with conscript troops movedforward to the Saudi border, while theRepublican Guard forces pulled back toconsolidate a strategic line of defensealong Iraq’s southern border withKuwait.

The 1991 Gulf war proved that theRepublican Guard were trained toinitiate defensive maneuvers and put upa fight. As coalition ground forcesattacked, brigade-size forces of the

SOF. The air componentteamed with SpecialOperations Forces andhighly trainedcontrollers to pinpointtargets for attack. Here,a USAF MH-53M PaveLow IV of the 21stSpecial OperationsSquadron pulls a hardleft on a mission overIraq.

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71. Lt. Gen. John Abizaid,CENTCOM Deputy Commander,news briefing, March 23, 2003.

72. Abizaid, CENTCOM newsbriefing, March 23.


74. Lt. Gen. William Wallace, VCorps Commander, DOD newsbriefing, May 7, 2003.

Republican Guard were soundly de-feated in encounters such as the Battleof Medina Ridge. However, these short,sharp engagements also served asdelaying actions to screen the retreat ofa good chunk of the main body. Much ofthe Medina and Hammurabi made itback to Iraq, along with other Guarddivisions.75 Throughout the 1990s,Saddam used the Republican Guard toput down uprisings and protect his rule.

A decade later, the Republican Guarddivisions had not recovered theirformer prowess, but they remained asubstantial military force. A 1998 reportby US military analyst AnthonyCordesman credited the RepublicanGuard with having as many as 600Soviet-made T-72 tanks and 300 Soviet-made T-62s, for a total of about 900 top-of-the line tanks.76 Other Soviet-exportequipment such as T-55 tanks remainedon Iraq’s table of equipment, too. Airstrikes in Operation Desert Fox inDecember 1998 targeted some Republi-can Guard caches of equipment andmay have killed some of its personnel.However, there was no question thatRepublican Guard forces remainedcohesive and comparatively well-equipped.

“They didn’t have the forces they hadbefore,” said Air Force Col. CharlesWestenhoff, chief of USAF’s Checkmateoperational assessment office, “but still,in early 2003, the Republican Guardsthemselves had more than twice asmany tanks as coalition forces andprobably about twice as many artillerypieces ... in the theater.”77

Now, the Republican Guard divisionswere moving from garrison to positionsoutside Baghdad. They deployed toseveral different locations. Intelligencein early March 2003 showed onedivision in the north, near Mosul, andanother division near Kirkuk. Two moredivisions were deployed to the north ofBaghdad with a fifth division positionedto the southwest, between Karbala andHilla. The sixth division was southeastof Baghdad.

Land component forces thought thatthey most likely would not encounter

the main defensive lines of the Republi-can Guard until they were near theoutskirts of Baghdad. However, coali-tion airmen began their confrontationwith Republican Guard long before thattime. “The targeting priority for airattack in direct support of the landcomponent was the Republican Guard,”Leaf said.78 As Abizaid noted, “It wasfocused initially on the Medina division.Suffice it to say, we are applyingsignificant pressure on them from theair as our ground troops continue toclose with them.”79

A Rough PatchJust as the coalition was ramping up

its attacks on Republican Guard forces,the coordination of the land and aircomponents hit a rough patch. OnMarch 23-24, lead elements of V Corpspressed on toward the city of Najaf,approximately 100 miles northwest ofNasiriyah and some 100 miles duesouth of Baghdad. The V Corps Com-mander, Wallace, opted to send AH-64Apache attack helicopters against theRepublican Guard. For the Apaches toattack, the land component had tomove the fire support coordination line(FSCL) forward in that sector to coverRepublican Guard forces positionedabout 50 miles from Baghdad. (TheFSCL is a line of demarcation inside ofwhich air forces could not drop weap-ons except under tightest constraints,but the Army could use its own fire-power.) “As the rate of initial advanceof the V Corps elements was great,” Leafsaid, “they recommended, and the JTCB[Joint Targeting Coordination Board]approved, a fairly long placement of theFSCL” in V Corps’ sector.80

The ground forces got their wish, andthe Apaches went on the attack. Unfor-tunately, they ran into heavy fire fromthe Republican Guard and others in thearea. An Iraqi general in Najaf placed acell-phone call to warn his forces thatthe Apaches were on their way. “As ourattack aviation approached the attackpositions, they came under intenseenemy fire,” Wallace later said. Thedefenders shot down one Apache (its

19

75. Rebecca Grant, “The GreatEscape,” Air Force Magazine, March2003.

76. Anthony Cordesman, “KeyTargets in Iraq,” CSIS Paper,February 1998.

77. Col. Charles Westenhoff, Chiefof USAF’s Checkmate operationalassessment office, interview, May29, 2003.


79. Abizaid, CENTCOM newsbriefing, March 23, 2003.


crew members were rescued) anddamaged another 30 or so. Wallacesummed up, “The attack of the 11thAviation on the Medina Division did notmeet the objectives that I had set forthat attack.”81 The Apaches were sothoroughly ventilated that they had tobreak off and return to base withoutreally attacking the Guard units.82

Indeed, the Apache unit afterward wasnot considered battle-worthy. Thesignificance of this, according to aWashington Post report, was that “theArmy’s premier deep-attack weaponappeared to be neutered.”83

What foiled the Apache attack wasonly too apparent. As degraded as its airdefenses were, Iraq still had plenty ofanti-aircraft artillery, short-range SAMs,and troops ready to fire wildly butcontinuously into the air. Coalitionairmen reported that, by the end of thewar, they had faced more than 1,400AAA attacks and 1,600 SAM attacks, plusconstant automatic weapon fire.84 It wasa lethal environment for the slow, low-flying Apaches, moving far ahead ofinfantry columns instead of operating ontheir flanks, as is customary.

Leaf said of the attack: “We—theentire coalition team—had not hit ourstride in achieving the command andcontrol required to operate in volumeeffectively inside the fire supportcoordination line.”85

He went on to say that, from anairmen’s perspective, “the most signifi-cant thing” about the setting of the FSCLwas the command and control burden itplaced on the coalition. With friendlyforces—the Apaches—ranging far out in

front of the land forces, the strikes offixed-wing aircraft had to be regulatedby forward air controllers.86 If, say, an E-8Joint STARS aircraft spotted a column ofenemy vehicles inside the FSCL, it couldnot just pass along the coordinates tothe fast movers overhead. The FAC hadto get to the scene and control theengagement, all of which took precioustime. And the process is even morecumbersome at night.

Thus, the use of the attack helicop-ters reduced the volume of heavy airstrikes on the targets arrayed in front ofthe coalition divisions. That decision,Leaf concluded, “cost us basically a fullnight of fixed target strikes inside theFSCL.” He added, “We worked throughthat.”87 The V Corps leadership becamesomewhat more realistic about settingthe FSCL. Also, the air and land compo-nents got better at using the “killboxes”to launch attacks on enemy forces onboth sides of the line.88

The SandstormOne day after the abortive Apache

operation, a heavy sandstorm rolledinto the area, blinding all but the mostsophisticated and advanced radarsensors. This forced the coalition to relyon a few key airborne sensors and anumber of satellites to keep track of theRepublican Guard and enable friendlyforces to press on with the attack. ByMarch 25, the sandstorm was howlingacross Iraq. Maj. Gen. Victor E. RenuartJr., CENTCOM’s director of operations,summed up the situation: “It’s a little bitugly out there today.”89

Blowing sand did not hamper the

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Sandstorm. When aheavy sandstorm hit,key airborne and space-based sensors keptworking, and fightersand bombers were notaffected. Moseley, farfrom waiting out thestorm, ordered adramatic escalation inair attacks on theRepublican Guard.

81. Wallace, DOD news briefing,May 7, 2003.

82. Rowan Scarborough, “GeneralTells How Cell Phone Foiled USAttack in Iraq,” Washington Times,May 8, 2003.

83. Rick Atkinson, et al, “ConfusedStart, Swift Conclusion,”Washington Post, April 13, 2003.






89. Maj. Gen. Victor E. Renuart Jr.,CENTCOM director of operations,news briefing, March 25, 2003.

fighters and bombers airborne overIraq. However, the particulate matter ofsand and dust—just like clouds andfog—degraded infrared sensors such asthose used to direct laser-guidedbombs. It also played havoc withoptical and infrared reconnaissance.Fortunately, the sandstorms had noeffect on synthetic aperture radar,which could “see” right through theenveloping muck. The E-8 Joint STARSand high-flying Global Hawk autono-mous UAV kept a close watch on theRepublican Guard forces. So did radar-imaging satellites in space.

After the onset of the sandstorm, landcomponent forces were forced to waitfor a week before they could resumetheir advance. This period became thedecisive point of the war, and it was thehour for airpower. Renuart noted that,“while we may not have helicopterpressure or ground pressure at aparticular point on the battlefield,”coalition air forces and special opera-tions forces kept up the pressure.90 Thatweek saw the deadly combination ofaerospace sensors and aerospacestriking power come close to obliterat-ing Saddam’s premier ground forces.

Far from waiting out the sandstorm,Moseley ordered a dramatic escalationin attacks on Iraq’s fielded forces.“We’re killing the Republican Guard,”Moseley reportedly told other CAOCofficers at the close of his morningbriefing, “But I want you to kill themfaster.”91

Coalition planners were receiving avirtually uninterrupted stream of datafrom Joint STARS and Global Hawksystems and from advanced satellites.They quickly saw that the large Repub-lican Guard divisions were not fixed inplace. Rather, small units moved aroundpiecemeal, and elements of the Bagh-dad, Hammurabi, Nebuchadnezzar, andMedina divisions were flowing southtoward the battle line. According toLeaf, the maneuver appeared to bebased on a principle of “just kind of aflow south.” In Leaf’s opinion, theRepublican Guard had little control atthe strategic or operational levels. Iraqi

planning came down to telling smallunits, “If you are defending Baghdad,you head south.”92

All along, though, the air componenthad the Republican Guard forces intheir gun sights, and the Iraqis werewalking right into a meat grinder. “Ifthe Iraqis moved in a coherent forma-tion, they were immediately detectedand targeted,” said Air Force Maj. JonPrindle, a senior Joint STARS director.93

“Most of them got destroyed,” he added.Air Force Chief of Staff Jumper recalled,“We were watching these guys ...coming out of Baghdad, trying toreinforce the Medina Division, and theB-1s and the B-52s were up therepounding the heck out of them.”94

According to Leaf, Republican Guardunits near Najaf evidently believed thatthe sandstorm somehow shielded themfrom detection, and, instead of dispers-ing, they concentrated their forces. Itwas a bad move; the Guard crammed somany T-72 tanks into a small area thatfour precision-guided bombs destroyed30 of them at a blow, Leaf said.95

Elsewhere, the encounters wereconsiderably closer. Southeast of Najaf,coalition soldiers tangled with Iraqiforces making a flank attack. Oneheavily engaged US Army unit had itsforces stretched out in a thin line, saidLeaf, and the weather was terrible. Thefighting became so close, said Leaf, thatIraqi soldiers were hit by ricochetsfrom their own rocket-propelledgrenades.96 US troops were dismount-ing to take up enemy AK-47 assaultrif les so they could shoot back atnearby attackers.97 The Iraqis damagedseveral coalition vehicles.98

Airpower roared into this close fight.Air Force SSgt. Mike Shropshire, anenlisted terminal attack controller(ETAC) moving with the 7th Cavalry,called for help. Soon, a B-1B dropped aload of JDAMs on the Iraqis. Later, JointSTARS sensors picked up indicationsthat an Iraqi column was moving downthe road to reinforce Iraqi units atNajaf. This time, an orbiting B-52 gotthe call and unleashed JDAMs, clusterbombs, and Mk 117 bombs on the

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90. Renuart, CENTCOM newsbriefing, March 25, 2003.



93. Graham and Loeb, April 27,2003.

94. Jumper, “Leveraging LessonsLearned with Tactical Operations,”remarks to National Security Forum,Maxwell AFB, Ala., May 27, 2003.




98. Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks,CENTCOM deputy chief ofoperations, news briefing, March 26,2003.

Iraqis. A contingent of 150 Iraqi soldiershit by the B-52 swiftly surrendered, saidLeaf.99

The event was recounted byCENTCOM’s deputy chief of operations,Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks, at a pressbriefing in Qatar. “That attack wasseriously repulsed with significantdamage to the attacking Iraqi forces,”Brooks said.100

MobilityA truly strategic use of airpower came

from mobility forces. Active, Guard andReserve airmen joined forces to supporta rapid global set-up for the campaignand keep it functioning.

Once again, early preparations paidoff. Airlift put “people and supplies inplace so the president could act whenhe wanted to, without going through amobilization effort,” said Roche.101 Withthe Coalition members shifting right upuntil the last moment, it was up to theAir Force’s mobility troops to movecargo, weapons, and personnel tosustain the fight. “You just do yourmission,” said C-130 pilot Maj. DanKeneflick of the Minnesota Air NationalGuard’s 133rd Airlift Wing.102 “Yourealize you’re a very small piece in avery huge puzzle.”

In purely numerical terms, airmobility dominated the campaign. “We

hauled and we hauled good,” saidRoche.103 Tankers and airlifters ac-counted for 56 percent of the AirForce’s 24,196 sorties f lown fromMarch 19 through April 18, 2003.104 Alltold, the Air Force f lew 7,413 airliftsorties for Operation Iraqi Freedom.That included globe-spanning airliftmissions controlled by the Tanker andAirlift Control Center at Scott AFB, Ill.,plus in-theater missions, f lown mainlyby C-130s. When the need arose, the332nd Air Expeditionary Wing even setup a “Red Tail Express” by leasingtrucks to drive supplies to newlyopened expeditionary airfields. Coali-tion ally Australia also contributed 263airlift sorties during OIF.

One of the most remarkable feats wasthe quick funneling of airlifters intonewly captured airfields. At Bashur, innorthern Iraq, members of the 86thContingency Response Group fromRamstein AB, Germany, parachuted inwith the Army airborne troops whotook the field on March 26. Theirmission: get the airfield up and runningas soon as possible. “There was no otherway to get Air Force boots and eyes onthe ground to assess the situation andprepare to receive aircraft, said Maj.Erik Rundquist, security forces com-mander for the group.105 Soon, “heavies”were landing day and night—and

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Air Mobility Sorties

Tanker Airlift Total Percent

USAF 6,193 7,413 13,606 81.3%

Navy 2,058 0 2,058 12.3%

USMC 454 0 454 2.7%

Army 0 0 0 0

Allies 359 263 622 3.7%

Total 9,064 7,676 16,740

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100. Brooks, CENTCOM newsbriefing, March 26, 2003.

101. MSgt Chuck Roberts, “C-130Crews Keep the Supplies Coming,”Air Force News Service, April 16,2003.

102. MSgt Chuck Roberts, “C-130Crews Keep the Supplies Coming,”AFNS, April 16, 2003.

103. Air Force Secretary James G.Roche, interview.


105. Louis A. Arana-Barradas,“Bashur or Bust,” Airman Magazine,July 2003.

keeping engines running during unload-ing in case they had to make a quickgetaway.

Keeping the airlifters, ISR aircraft, andstrike aircraft airborne were the tank-ers. “Not a single bomb gets dropped,not a single air-to-air engagementhappens, or missile is fired unlesstankers make it happen,” said Col. CathyClothier, 401st Air ExpeditionaryOperations Group commander.106

US Air Force tankers racked up 6,193sorties during the main phase ofOperation Iraqi Freedom. The pace ofoperations kept tanker crews busy. KC-135 pilot Capt. Richard Peterson at the321st Air Expeditionary Wing describedOIF as a nonstop series of “fly, crewrest, and time to go again.”107

SpaceSpace forces enhanced every aspect

of OIF. While the 1991 Gulf war wasrightly heralded as the first “space” war,the next 12 years saw explosive growthin the ability to make the most of theadvantages provided by USAF spacesystems. “We are so dominant in spacethat I pity a country that would comeup against us,” said Maj. Gen. Franklin J.Blaisdell, USAF’s Director of SpaceOperations and Integration, a few daysbefore the war began.108

Space and air forces were moreclosely integrated than ever before,with CFACC Moseley also designatedthe space coordination authority. Thatput him in charge of a substantialchunk of space assets during thecampaign. Moseley’s “quiver” for air andspace included “in excess of 50 satel-

lites” that “have been just unbelievablycapable.” Defense Support Programsatellites monitored infrared flashes toprovide early warning of Iraqi missileattacks. Communications, weather andnavigation were also space-basedfunctions. Communications satellites“played a big role enabling jointcommunications and the transfer oftargeting information to air, land andsea forces,” said Blaisdell after thewar.109

GPS satellites formed the web ofprecision that enabled 5,500 GPS-guided JDAMs to find and hit theirtargets.

On the ground, the availability of GPShelped increase the speed of responseand accuracy for close air support.Space forces supported “conventionalsurface forces, the naval forces, specialoperations forces” as well as air forces,Moseley attested.110

Naval AviationIn Operation Iraqi Freedom, Navy

and Marine aviators once again played amajor role. Their contributions werenotable first for the way sea-basedairpower blended seamlessly with land-based airpower and, second, becauseboth the Navy and Marines flexed newoperational concepts that enhancedtheir effectiveness in the joint force.

For the Navy, concentration was thekey. Five aircraft carriers contributedtheir striking power in the form of F/A-18s, new F/A-18E/Fs, and F-14s. On topof this, the air wings provided E-2sentries, EA-6B jammers, versatile S-3s,and multi-purpose helicopters. Land-

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Heavy Lift. USAF C-17squeue up and await theirloads. The Air Force’sfleet of strategic andtactical airlifters playeda key role in the buildupfor Gulf War II, and alsokept it on track withswift and reliableresupply of groundforces.

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106. MSgt. Chuck Roberts,“Operation Iraqi Freedom,” AirmanMagazine, May 2003.

107. MSgt. Chuck Roberts,“Operation Iraqi Freedom,” AirmanMagazine, May 2003.

108. Robert S. Dudney, “SpacePower in the Gulf,” Air ForceMagazine, June 2003.

109. SSgt. A.J. Bosker, “Space isultimate high ground,” Air ForceNews Service, May 27, 2003.


Coalition aircraftdropped on Iraq a totalof 29,199 bombs,rockets, and missiles ofall varieties.

Gulf War II featuredheavy use of guidedweapons, or thosedirected to the target bylaser beams, satellitesignal, or TV imagematching. Two-thirds ofthe expendedmunitions—19,948—were of the precisiontype.

based P-3s with highly sophisticatedsensors joined in the ISR coterie. “Allfive carrier groups sustained a veryhigh tempo of operations without asingle day off for maintenance from the20 days leading up to the war and the25 days of the war—about a 45-daystretch at a high tempo,” said Keating.111

Moseley also brokered a deal to haveall Marine aviation—from lift to fight-ers—on the ATO and thus under CFACCcontrol for the first time. The CAOCthen pumped Marine air, along withother assets, out to Marine units forclose air support. Marine Corps fight-ers—many serving in squadrons embed-ded in Navy carrier air wings—ulti-mately flew 3,794 sorties while Navyfighters logged 5,568 sorties.112

As with Afghanistan, the Navy andMarine fighters fit right in. All carriedlaser-guided bombs and JDAM, so thatall joint aircraft in the CAS stack or ondeep interdiction missions deliveredthe same effect. Strike pilots fromCarrier Air Wing 8, embarked on theUSS Theodore Roosevelt, joined in thewave of attacks on Iraqi ground forcesin late March. “Lots of our targets wereartillery and (other sites) to impedeIraqi ground force progress,” said Cmdr.Sean Clark, an F/A-18C pilot with VFA-201. “We have a lot more ground forcesto support with our strikes.”113

Network of AirpowerEvery weapon of the air component

rained down upon the Iraqis. Moseleyexplained that coalition air crews werefighting several different battles simul-

taneously. In the south, the air compo-nent was staging a precision onslaughtto debilitate the Republican Guard andsupport V Corp and 1st MEF. In thewest, air crews conducted an intenseScud hunt and strategic attacks againstvital targets of many varieties. In thenorth, the air component carried outstrikes in support of SOF units and latera small contingent of conventionalforces, which arrived by airdrop. Eachfight was intimately related to the largercampaign, said the air boss, but eachhad its own distinctive character.

Compared to earlier American airoperations, Gulf War II had to be—andwas—far more sophisticated, its forcesheavily networked and focused.

The most obvious characteristic ofthe war was the tremendous precisionof coalition targeting and attack. Itmarked a dramatic advance over GulfWar I a dozen years earlier. One witnessto the change was Keating, command-ing the Navy’s carrier-based strikingforces in the Gulf. He recalled, “I wasflying off the USS Saratoga in the RedSea for the first Gulf War in 1991, andevery piece of ordnance I delivered was... a ‘dumb’ bomb.”114 In 2003, 68percent of the attacks—Air Force, Navy,Marine, allied—used precision guidedmunitions, according to CENTCOM.115

Such weapons were available anywhereacross the battlespace.

Plenty of aircraft were in place. Inpublic, many skittish Gulf states choseto keep quiet about their willingness toprovide the coalition access to bases.However, when time came for action,

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Munitions Expended

Guided 19,948Unguided 9,251Total 29,199

Unguided (32%)

Guided (68%)

111. Keating, “This Was a DifferentWar,” US Naval InstituteProceedings interview, June 2003.


113. Chief Journalist AaronStrickland, “TR Planes PoundNorthern Iraq,” Navy Newsstand,April 1, 2003.

114. Keating, DOD news briefing,April 12, 2003.


permission was granted by Qatar,Kuwait, Bahrain, the United ArabEmirates, and other states in the region.The Air Force opened up a total of 36new, bare-bones “expeditionary bases”in the area.116 With such good access,US Air Force fighters, bombers, andattack aircraft dropped about twothirds of total munition tonnage in theair war.117

No one is claiming that this air warachieved perfection. In fact, a problemarose in a predictable area: allocation oftanker assets. Early in the campaign,Turkey denied the coalition the use ofits air bases, including for aerial refuel-ing operations. This led to a shortage oftanker coverage for some strike pack-ages. This was seen most clearly in USSixth Fleet’s naval air operations in theMediterranean. Several flights of Navystrikes had to break off in the middle ofmissions, turn back, jettison bombs, andgo back to their carriers. Predictably,Navy complaints quickly hit the press.Keating, however, greeted the problemwith equanimity. “It didn’t affect theoverall campaign,” he said. Indeed, hewent on, the air component could“move gas around tactically and opera-tionally, ... and then make some accom-modations in the air tasking order.”118

The tankers were the backbone of theoperation, and Moseley soon pushedthem further north, into orbits insideIraq, to move the fuel closer to thestrikers.

The air component needed every bitof this new efficiency to prosecute thewar. Iraqi forces had always beenscattered, but now they were more

fanned-out than ever. Heavy Iraqi forcesmoved their tanks and fighting vehiclesand artillery away from the Army’savenues of approach, noted Maj. Gen.David H. Petraeus, the commander ofthe 101st Airborne Division.119 Thisdispersal made it hard to find concen-trations of artillery and armor.

And yet they were found, withregularity and with devastating effect.Take, for example, the case of an attackon a Republican Guard surface-to-surface missile unit north of Bagh-dad.120 The unit was hiding under athick canopy of trees, late at night, anda sandstorm was blowing. In short, thesoldiers thought they were safe. That iswhen they were hit by two massivebombs and a load of cluster munitions,an attack that killed six troops andchewed up much of the unit’s equip-ment. After the war, the WashingtonPost’s William Branigin heard some ofthe gory details from Capt. OmarKhalidi, 28, an Iraqi officer. “We weresurprised when [the US pilots] discov-ered this place,” recalled Khalidi. “[Theattack] affected the morale of thesoldiers, because they were hiding andthought nobody could find them. Somesoldiers left their positions and ranaway. When the big bombs hit theirtarget, some of the vehicles just melted,and the effect of the cluster bombs waseven greater, because they covered alarger area.”121

Responsive ISR combined with rapidre-targeting made coalition air strikesmuch more effective than wouldotherwise have been the case. GlobalHawk and other platforms were used to

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Unmanned. Theintelligence “take” fromUAVs such as Predatorand Global Hawk wasmonitored byintelligence experts andothers at US bases.Here, a crew at Tallil AB,Iraq, moves a Predatorinto position.

116. Jumper, remarks to NationalSecurity Forum, May 27, 2003.

117. Tamar A. Mehuron, “The ChartPage: Gulf War II Air Campaign,” AirForce Magazine, May 2003.

118. Keating, DOD news briefing,April 12, 2003.

119. Maj. Gen. David H. Petraeus,Commander, 101st AirborneDivision, DOD news briefing, May13, 2003.

120. William Branigin, “A Brief,Bitter War for Iraq’s MilitaryOfficers,” Washington Post, April 27,2003.

121. Branigin, “A Brief, Bitter Warfor Iraq’s Military Officers,”Washington Post, April 27, 2003.

re-check specific target aim points priorto a strike. For example, Global Hawkroamed over areas where missionplanners believed the UAV would spotmajor concentrations of RepublicanGuard forces. Global Hawk then fedeither wide-area or smaller “spot”images to analysts at Beale AFB, Calif.,for rapid processing. Experts (residentin the Nevada Air National Guard)quickly interpreted the data andinstantly sent it forward to the in-theater CAOC via e-mail or picturetransfer. At the CAOC, Global Hawkliaison officers such as Maj. Bill Cahillpassed the information on to theoperations floor where it was for-warded to airborne strike aircraft.122

Whenever ISR platforms reeled in hotintelligence, strike aircraft could attacknew targets. Most fighters and bombersin OIF had some type of data link. Thespecific technologies varied.

Link 16—the Joint Tactical Informa-tion Display System (JTIDS)—was thegold standard. The Navy had incorpo-rated its own links in its strike fighters.Bombers had platform-unique systems.Air National Guard aircraft equippedlinks also could take on real-time data.“Smart” tankers had a communicationspackage that allowed them to pass ontime-critical information to strike

aircraft taking on fuel. The effect ofdatalinks was enormous.

Lt. Gen. Ronald E. Keys, USAF deputychief of staff for air and space opera-tions, reported that they created aseries of “neighborhood networks.”123 Itwasn’t a perfect, integrated network, hesaid, but it was a step forward incommunication and it changed thetactics of air warfare. Near-impossibletasks such as Scud-hunting got a com-plete overhaul and became workable.Jumper noted, “You’d be surprised howmany people think that the way youfind Scuds is to send lots of airplanesout there and look.” The better way, hecontended, was to “get your sensorsthat can find moving things, identifythem quickly, and have your shootersset up so that they can respond quicklyonce identification is made.”124

Networked sensors cued each other.A Joint STARS aircraft track of movingvehicles might be passed to GlobalHawk for imagery collection. In turn,Global Hawk’s high-altitude and widearea surveillance equipment mightidentify an area of interest, then cueoperators to move Predator in for tight-focus video.

At the heart of the network lay theCAOC. It was “fed” its data throughmassive T-1 lines. A T-1 line is a high-

Space. Space poweracted as a critical forcemultiplier for coalitionforces. Here, SrA.Neyibe Ramos, 2ndSpace OperationsSquadron, runs througha checklist of GPSsatellite operationswhile on duty atSchriever AFB, Colo.

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122. Maj. Bill Cahill, USAF GlobalHawk liaison officer, interview,May 30, 2003.

123. Lt. Gen. Ronald E. Keys,USAF Deputy Chief of Staff for Airand Space Operations, interview,July 7, 2003.

124. Amy Butler, “Datalinks aSolid Weapon Against Scuds,Friendly Fire, Jumper Says,”Inside the Air Force, April 11,2003.

capacity, fiber-optic cable capable ofcarrying more than 1.5 billion bits ofdata per second.125 The CAOC waslinked to the outside world throughmore than 100 of these enormous datapipes. They provided the channelsneeded to effect fast and reliable flowof text messages and digitized informa-tion. Commanders therefore had aconstant, real-time picture of aircraftlocations, which allowed them toredirect strikers and support aircraft asneeded. The information architecturealso made it possible to handle thedigital “take” from ISR platforms orstrike aircraft and pursue new targets innear-real time.

None of this would have matteredunless the people manning the CAOCknew what to do with fresh informa-tion. The Air Force pulled off a combatculture change that took joint andcoalition air war to a new level ofpower and competence. This changeregistered on the CAOC floor—not inthe wizardry of the computer consolesbut rather in the skill of the warriorsassigned there.

The new style of combat stemmedfrom the Air Force’s deliberate effortover recent years to squeeze muchmore capability from the existingtechnologies by changing how opera-tions and intelligence specialistsinteract in combat operations. In fouryears—between the end of OperationAllied Force in 1999 the start of OIF in2003, airmen learned to handle larger

numbers of time-sensitive and dynamictargets. The biggest change could beseen in the way that CAOC officersapproached the task. What had oncebeen a slow and methodical processcrackled with the urgency.

“ISR ... was just a microcosm of thischange that was going on, big-picture,within the Air Force in how we targetstuff,” said Cahill, the Global Hawkliaison officer. He called it part of “arevolution of how you employ air-power.”126

The impact of this CAOC culturechange was felt most powerfully bymembers of the Republican Guard. Onone occasion, Global Hawk imageryreconfirmed the locations of Medinadivision targets. The CAOC then di-rected a B-2 that was already airborneto switch some of its JDAM targets tonew strike coordinates. Having done so,it released its weapons, which wereguided home by signals emanating fromthe Global Positioning System satelliteconstellation. The practice of spreadingup-to-the-minute ISR data to strikersalso played a big role in Suppression ofEnemy Air Defenses (SEAD) opera-tions—particularly as the air war cameto focus on killing Iraq’s integrated airdefense system around Tikrit, Saddam’shome town and center of his politicalsupport.

Multiple FightsThe combination of precision, data

links, and continuously-available ISR

27Strike Sorties

USAF (45%)

USMC (18%)

Navy (27%)

Allies (10%) Fighter Bomber Total Percent

USAF 8,828 505 9,333 45.0%

Navy 5,568 0 5,568 26.9%

USMC 3,794 0 3,794 18.3%

Army 0 0 0 0

Allies 2,038 0 2,038 9.8%

Total 20,228 505 20,733

125. “How Does a T-1 Line Work?,”www.howstuffworks.com.

126. Cahill, interview, May 30, 2003.

updates made airpower more respon-sive than it ever had been. That was thecase whether the task was hitting aleadership target or putting bombswhere a ground controller neededthem.

It also allowed Moseley to phasedifferent types of operations withineach separate fight. The “south fight”being conducted by the V Corps and 1stMEF, the air boss said, followed a courseof “strategic attack, to interdiction, toclose air support, to re-supply.”127 The“north fight” unfolded after March 26,when a flight of 15 Air Force C-17transports air-dropped 1,000 membersof the Army’s 173rd Airborne Brigadeinto northern Iraq to capture and openan airfield near Bashur. The “west fight”in the huge desert expanse of westernIraq had been underway since Night 1.

Western Iraq was particular sensitive,because it was the arena for possibleScud missile launches. In Gulf War I,Iraq’s forces had used the western sitesto mount Scud attacks on Israel andSaudi Arabia. Iraq had “hide sites” forScud missiles, said one military official.At certain military facilities, one couldsee lines painted on roadways andother surfaces to simplify the alignmentof a missile transporter for launch.128

Before the start of the war, Frankshimself had said, “We do know thatmore than two dozen Scud missilelaunchers remain unaccounted forsince the days of the Gulf war.”129

In coalition planning, the task ofpreventing Scud attacks was given tothe air component and special opera-tions forces. These forces got to work

right away. “If you control the majorinstallations and major lines of commu-nication, you basically control westernIraq,” said an officer.130 Only a few daysafter war commenced, he was able tostate, “We’ve extended that control overa significant portion of Iraq.”

For this “western fight,” the aircomponent teamed with SOF forcesmuch as it had in Afghanistan in 2001.Special Operations Forces from the US,Britain, and Australia again employedtactics honed in Afghanistan, wherehighly trained air controllers travelingwith SOF forces pinpointed locationsfor air strikes. These same combinedteams were at work in Iraq, activelyhunting for weapons of mass destruc-tion and ballistic missile systems. In the“north fight,” SOF members assistedKurdish Peshmerga forces.

Readily available airpower was agreat asset for the SOF teams. However,making all of this work properly tookan unprecedented level of coordinationwith the special operations component.Blue force tracking was a difficultproblem. Though trained to infiltrate insecret and operate independently, thecoalition SOF forces and CIA elementsnonetheless had to be part of the aircomponent’s battlespace picture.

American forces shook hands overseveral unusual arrangements thathelped to cement cooperation. Forexample, coalition air planners agreedto put a certain number of aircraft moreor less “on call” for use by SOF. Thehighly specialized Task Force 20, doingits clandestine work around Baghdad,actually nominated some 1,800 targets

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Hercules. At a forwarddeployed base, SrA. DanBriscoe, a member of atactical airlift controlelement, marshals a C-130into a parking space. AirForce tactical airlifterswere in heavy use,supplying fast-movingforces across Iraq.

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128. Elaine Grossman, “CoalitionControl over Western Iraq may havebeen news to regime,” Inside theArmy, March 31, 2003.


130. Grossman, Inside the Army,March 31, 2003.

for strikes.131 The provision of dedicatedairpower for SOF assets was a new buthighly effective feature of the opera-tion. As a result of this arrangement andothers like it, SOF in high-threat areashad unusual ability to summon air-power on demand—for strikes or forrescue. When an isolated reconnais-sance patrol got trapped behind enemylines early in the fighting, USAF MH-53“Jollys” pulled them out unscathed.132

Air Force Col. James Dobbins of the392nd Air Expeditionary Group said aircommanders “stacked the recon ele-ments like cordwood to get themout.”133

Building BlocksDay after day, coalition aircraft flew

hundreds of sorties against RepublicanGuard targets. This was having animpact, but it was not easy to measure.Assessing the effect got harder andharder as the attacks mixed, mangled,and pulverized these Guard formations.

Before the start of the war, each ofthe Guard divisions had received acombat-strength rating of at least 80percent, with some divisions pegged at90 percent.134 As coalition aircraftstruck tanks, artillery, and other ve-hicles, the losses in equipment began tomount. How much this had diminishedthe Iraqi combat capability was thecrucial question as the land compo-nent—still engaged with pockets ofRepublican Guard around An Najaf—gotready to move forward on April 1.

CENTCOM briefers routinely showedgun camera video of blown-up Iraqitanks. The number of tank kills was aprime building block for measuringprogress first in each killbox and then,in larger areas on the land component’sroute of advance. As Franks said onMarch 30, “I pay very close attention to... the amount of force in aggregate inany particular piece of geographyinside Iraq.”135

The land component “wanted toensure that specific units that were keyto the Iraqi forces were properlyprioritized [to be hit with heavy airstrikes] and then were renderedineffective or at least reduced in theireffectiveness,” Leaf explained.136 “Thatwas pretty difficult to do in the fog andspeed of war” and given the hodge-podge character of the Iraqi forces.Analysts struggled to match reports ofair strike damage with the equipmentof specific Republican Guard units.

To help the land component gainperspective, Leaf monitored missionreports from returning aircrews. As themission reports filtered in 12 to 24hours after a day’s strikes, Leaf and hisstaff would put together a Falcon Viewthree-dimensional terrain map markingthe locations of the most recent bombhits. Leaf conceded that “it wasn’t full-blown BDA,” but the information wasuseful in meetings with McKiernan andhis top staff members. As he put it:“When they’d say ‘Well what are youguys doing?’ I could say ‘This is where

Strikes by Category

KI/CAS

Regime

Counterair

WMD

Fixed Targets

(78.4%)

(9.0%)

(7.2%)(4.2%) (1.2%)

KI/CAS 15,592

Regime 1,799

Counterair 1,441

WMD 832

Fixed targets 234

Total 19,898


132. Col. James Dobbins, 392nd AirExpeditionary Group Commander,DOD news briefing from TallilForward Air Base, April 17, 2003.

133. Dobbins, DOD news briefingfrom Tallil, April 17, 2003.

134. Westenhoff, interview, June26, 2003.


136. Leaf, interview, June 27, 2003.

The air componentdevoted anoverwhelming amountof its effort—some 78percent—to support ofground forces. Thesewere called “kill boxinterdiction/close airsupport,” or KI/CASmissions.

29

we’ve attacked targets, these are thekinds, these are the weapons we’veused in those attacks, and when avail-able, here are some of the commentsfrom crews brought in from themisreps.’ ”137 Leaf’s quick-turn opera-tional picture helped give the landcomponent an overview of where airstrikes were doing the most damage toIraqi forces.

Under the weight of the attacks,Republican Guard units were ceasing toexist or trying to stay alive by movingin mostly random ways. Brooks, theCENTCOM briefer, said on March 28,“What we see in many formations ofthe Republican Guard is some effort totry to reposition internally within theirdefenses.”138 He added that such maneu-vers looked more like “survival tactics”than organized changes in defensiveposture. “Right after the sandstormended,” said one senior military officer,“we started getting indications thatthey were getting pounded.”139

The arrival of March 30 foundcoalition ground forces about 60 milesfrom Baghdad. Franks rejected thenotion that his forces were now in aclassic “operational pause,” catchingtheir breath before renewing theassault. True, the lead elements of theland component were taking on newsupplies and consolidating their grip oncities they’d encircled, but the jointcampaign as a whole was not on“pause.” As Franks explained it, thefighting forces passed the ball so that“sometimes air, sometimes ground,sometimes special forces, sometimes acombination of two of the above,sometimes all three” were engaged.140

Marine Lt. Gen. James Conway, thecommander of the 1st MEF, agreed withthis description of the situation. He wasleading a supporting attack, convergingon Baghdad by moving on the capitalfrom the southeast and staying on theright of V Corps. There were times inwhich Conway held his forces in place,but it did not mean a cessation ofcombat. “While we were stationary, wewere, in fact, attacking with our air,” hesaid, “taking maximum advantage of

intelligence, surveillance, and recon-naissance capabilities to determinewhat the enemy was that we faced.”141

Jumper said simply, “I’d like to ask thecommander of the Medina Divisionwhen he thought the pause was.”142

To BaghdadFor the Saddam regime, Tuesday, April

1, marked the beginning of the end. Airstrikes again targeted the presumedlocations of the Republican Guarddivisions and other units in the path ofthe coalition’s advance. JCS ChairmanMyers said the purpose of the attackswas not only to clear a path for theground forces but also to prevent theIraqi forces from fleeing into Baghdad,where digging them out could causeimmense damage and bloodshed.143

From the beginning, CENTCOM hadmade it clear that it was in no mood forget bogged down in a siege of thecapital.144 Plans called for a swift takingof Baghdad.

Late on the night of April 1, coalitionland forces began their final, two-pronged attack toward Baghdad. The3rd Infantry troops engaged the Medinaand Nebuchadnezzar divisions enrouteand, on April 2, they bypassed Karbalaand continued north. On the right, the1st MEF moved out from Kut towardBaghdad. Marines blew through theBaghdad Division and, after a briefdelay caused by destruction of a bridge,crossed the Tigris River. “The Baghdaddivision has been destroyed,” an-nounced Renuart.145

The coalition’s prisoner count totaledonly about 4,500.146 Where had the self-styled defenders of Baghdad gone? Allsigns pointed to significant destructionof forces—and to mass desertions.Advancing land forces found “a tremen-dous amount of destroyed equipmentand a significant number of enemycasualties as they moved towardBaghdad,” Leaf noted.147 However, theyalso found areas where there was agreat deal more abandoned equipmentthan there were casualties.

After a week of air attacks, Leafreported, “it became pretty clear to



139. Rick Atkinson, Peter Baker, andThomas E. Ricks, “Confused Start,Swift Conclusion,” WashingtonPost, April 13, 2003.


141. Lt. Gen. James Conway,Commander, 1st MEF, DOD newsbriefing from Iraq, May 30, 2003.


143. Myers, DOD news briefing,April 1, 2003.


145. Renuart, CENTCOM newsbriefing, April 2, 2003.



30

them there wasn’t much future insticking with your T-72.”148

Iraq’s defense simply crumbled.According to Brooks, CENTCOMofficers knew Iraqi forces planned “togradually pull back into Baghdad withforces and lines of force that we wouldencounter over time.”149 Some Republi-can Guard units had managed to carryout one phase of the plan by movingsouth, but now, their ability to mountorganized resistance fell apart. Leafsaid: “It appears to me that the aircomponent made that movement to thetime and place of Iraqi choosingimpossible, and so the engagementcame on our terms.”150

The much-anticipated tank battlebetween American armor and theRepublican Guard simply never hap-pened. “In some cases,” Brooks said, “webypassed those forces. In other caseswe prevented their withdrawal. Inother cases we destroyed them as theytried to reposition.”151 Leaf also notedthat airpower alone did not do all ofthe damage. “Clearly,” he maintained,“there were times when the combinedeffect ... of the land component and theair component was absolutely devastat-ing.”152

Nonetheless, the battlefield effect ofairpower was only too apparent. AsMoseley said on April 5, “As far as largefighting formations, we haven’t seen anyof that lately, because we’ve beenattacking steady for about six or sevendays now.”153 The land component sawthe same thing. Leaf noted: “Theyweren’t meeting organized unit-levelresistance. They were hitting pockets.”154

Urban CAS UnveiledWith the climactic phase of the

battle at hand, the coalition’s aircomponent implemented in Baghdad anew concept of operations for urbanclose air support.

In some ways, urban CAS relied onproven techniques. Moseley declaredthat CAS was a challenge “whether it’sin the desert or whether it’s in a city,because you’re dealing with deliveringweapons in the close proximity of








In heaviest use werethe laser guided bomb,Joint Direct AttackMunition, and Mk 82iron bomb. These threetypes accounted for 71percent of all munitionsexpended. The rest wasdivided among 16 othertypes.

LGB, JDAM, Mk 82 (71%)

All Other (29%)

Most Popular Munitions

LGB 8,618 29.51%

GPS–JDAM 6,542 22.40%

Mk 82 5,504 18.85%

Mk 83 1,692 5.79%

M117 1,625 5.57%

Maverick 918 3.14%

GPS–WCMD 908 3.11%

TLAM 802 2.75%

Allied guided 679 2.33%

Hellfire 562 1.92%

HARM 408 1.40%

JSOW 253 0.87%

CBU-99 182 0.62%

CALCM 153 0.52%

Allied unguided 124 0.42%

CBU-87 118 0.40%

GPS–LGB 98 0.34%

Other guided 7 0.025%

Mk 84 6 0.021%

Total 29,199

Munitions Use By Type

31

friendly troops.”155 US exercises inrecent years underlined what hadalready been shown in other experi-ences such as the Russian disaster inGrozny, capital of the rebellious prov-ince of Chechnya. It was there thaturban combat could bring devastatingcasualties and demoralization. The USsoldiers and Marines probing thedefenses of Baghdad were bettertrained for urban fighting than anyoneever had been. That, plus innovativegear such as body armor and enhancedISR, gave them a significant edge overtheir opponents. However, close airsupport would be an insurance policyagainst the day when some troopswould fall into a trap.

Moseley explained how it would allwork.156 There “will be a 24-hourpresence of forward air controllers,both on the ground and in the air, plusa 24-hour presence of a mix of aircraftand ordnance,” he said. Munitionsoptions—from guns to Mavericks to500-pound laser-guided bombs—wouldpermit operators to select just the rightweapon for the situation.

Moseley’s urban CAS plan had beenin the works for more than a year. Itwas in part the handiwork of a Marinemajor at the CAOC. For the first timeever, all Marine airpower was placedunder control of someone other thanMarine commanders—in this case,Moseley. There was no holding back ofassets for exclusive Marine Air/GroundTask Force use, as happened in DesertStorm. Marine aviators were acknowl-edged experts in close air support, andthat experience helped the CAOC do its

work. The result, Moseley said, was “awonderful, effective plan” in which theair component would provide airborneFACs over the Baghdad, around theclock, and would also provide multiplesets of fighters, with multiple munitionsoptions, “stacked up” over the city 24hours a day, ready to respond on amoment’s notice.157

With the luxury of uncontested airsuperiority, the coalition placed strikesorties in pre-designated orbits so thatCAS could be delivered, on demand, inany sector of Baghdad. Planners haddiagrammed and catalogued every cityblock in Baghdad, creating a commonreference system so that calls for airsupport could be processed in quicktime. Moseley then kept “a mix ofassets” from the Air Force, MarineCorps, Navy, Royal Air Force, and RoyalAustralian Air Force over top of thebattle area. He didn’t mind that strikeaircraft had to bring home bombs thatweren’t needed in a particular sortie.“Now that appears wasteful, but that’sokay,” Moseley asserted. “What we’relooking for here is combat effective-ness, not necessarily combat effi-ciency.”158

When the coalition opened up newforward bases at Talil and elsewhere inIraq, the intensity of the air attacksratcheted up once more. A-10s flyingfrom Tallil could say aloft for an addi-tional hour per sortie, said Dobbins.159

Flying CAS sorties was no cakewalk.Air Force Capt. Kim Campbell, an A-10pilot, came back to base in a Warthog sothoroughly shot up that its hydraulicsystems had ceased functioning.160 Maj.

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Warthog. A-10 attackaircraft had a field dayagainst Iraqi forces,pulverizing enemyarmor and suppressingground mobility.Sometimes, the enemyscored, and some toughWarthogs returned tobase thoroughly shot upbut still ticking.





159. Dobbins, DOD news briefingfrom Tallil Forward Air Base, April17, 2003.

160. SSgt. Jason Haag, “PilotBrings Battle-Damaged A-10 HomeSafely,” ACC News Service, April 16,2003.

32

Jim Ewald, another A-10 driver, was notso lucky. During an April 8 sortie overBaghdad, his aircraft was struck by aSAM. “I could see a reddish glow on mycockpit instruments [caused by] thefire behind me,” Ewald said.161 Hemanhandled the Warthog away fromBaghdad and ejected. US soldiers sawEwald eject and rushed to find him.Hiding in a dry canal moments after hehit the ground, Ewald heard a youthfulvoice call to him: “Hey, pilot dude.Come out. We’re Americans.”

In Baghdad itself, the Iraqis set ablazesome 50 oil trenches, hoping to createenough smoke to obscure the aerialview of the city. However, it was aforlorn effort. Without the RepublicanGuard forces to hold up or even slowthe coalition advance, Baghdad wasopen and vulnerable.

On Thursday, April 3, elements of the3rd Infantry moved beyond Karbala towithin 30 miles of Baghdad. The rightpincer of the 1st MEF was about 60miles south of city. It was just a matterof time before Iraq fell. Army Maj. Gen.Stanley A. McChrystal, the Joint Staff’svice director for operations, said at aDOD news briefing that the RepublicanGuard were “no longer credibleforces.”162 On April 4, soldiers startedprobing the environs of Saddam Inter-

national Airpower in Baghdad. Meetingonly light resistance, they movedforward and seized it. By Sunday, April6, it had become a center of C-130transport operations.163

In between those two days came amemorable event. On April 5, justbefore 9 a.m. (Baghdad time), elementsof the 3rd Infantry made a “thunderrun” into the center of Baghdad itself.The show of force resulted in at least1,000 Iraqi military casualties164 anddemonstrated beyond doubt thatBaghdad was done for. The idea for theraid came from work done before thewar on how to conduct urban combatwith armored formations. That, Wallacesaid, had “planted the seed for the ideaof heavy armor in an urban raid-typeconfiguration.”165 Earlier battles aroundNajaf had shown US planners theimportance of using urban raids tothwart the Iraqi penchant for mountingunexpected attacks out of urban areas.

Two days after the thunder run, the1st MEF was making its way throughthe eastern outskirts of Baghdad and VCorps was in position to close thepincer. Tanks moved out early thatmorning and were soon entering adowntown presidential palace.

The night of April 7 brought anotherremarkable airstrike. Lt. Col. Fred Swan,

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Precision. Weaponsloaders equip a B-1Bbomber with a dozen2,000-pound JointDirect Attack Munitionsand 1,000-pound“bunker buster”munitions. Two-thirds ofall expended munitionswere of the guidedvariety.

161. Jim Garamone, “Pilot DescribesBaghdad Crash,” American ForcesPress Service, July 17, 2003.

162. Maj. Gen. Stanley A.McChrystal, JCS Vice Director ofOperations, DOD news briefing, April3, 2003.

163. Association of the UnitedStates Army, Operation IraqiFreedom Chronology, May 2003.

164. Patrick E. Tyler, “US TanksMake Quick Strike Into Baghdad,”New York Times, April 6, 2003.

165. Wallace, DOD news briefing,May 7, 2003.

33

a B-1B crew member, was at his weaponsystems station aft of the cockpit whenthe crew got the call to strike a specificdowntown building. CENTCOM intelli-gence had “credible information” on a“regime leadership meeting” takingplace.166 The B-1 was orbiting withweapons available. It was just comingoff a tanker in western Iraq and settinga course for another target area whenthe aircraft received the coordinates fora new “priority leadership target” inBaghdad. “You get kind of an adrenalinerush,” Swan said. The B-1 headed for thetarget, which was in the Mansourneighborhood of Baghdad. With SAM-killing F-16CJs patrolling nearby andEA-6B Prowlers along to jam air de-fenses, the bomber moved in. The crewcross-checked the coordinates with theairborne controller three times. Twelveminutes after they got the call, the B-1dropped two hard-target penetratorJDAMs and two other JDAMs—eachwith fuses set for a 25-millisecond burst

delay—that would follow the initialbombs and plunge deep into the sub-structure of the building. The buildingwas destroyed, but it appears thatSaddam left it only minutes before thestrike. For the B-1 crew, the mission wasnot over; it flew on to strike 17 moretargets before landing again.167

Joint Staff spokesman McChrystalrevealed that a mere 45 minutes hadelapsed between receipt of the intelli-gence and the blast of the bombs.168

Only Saddam’s twitchy instinctssaved him from the B-1 strike, a body-guard later claimed. Saddam did indeedmake a stop at the Mansour districtsafe-house but left by the back dooralmost immediately. “Ten minutes afterthey went out the door, it was bombed,”the bodyguard told the Times of Lon-don.169

Baghdad FallsThe land component’s task was to

destroy all pockets of resistance within

Air Force aircraft turnedin nearly 60 percent ofthe coalition’s 41,404sorties. USAF notablydominated the strike andmobility categories ofsorties. Data does notinclude SpecialOperations Forces, Armyhelicopter, and coalitionsovereignty flights.

Total Air Sorties

Fighter Bomber Tanker Airlift C2 ISR Rescue Other Total

USAF 8,828 505 6,193 7,413 432 452 191 182 24,196

Navy 5,568 0 2,058 0 442 357 0 520 8,945

USMC 3,794 0 454 0 75 305 0 320 4,948

Army 0 0 0 0 0 269 0 0 269

Allies 2,038 0 359 263 112 273 0 1 3,046

Total 20,228 505 9,064 7,676 1,061 1,656 191 1,023 41,404

Army (0.6%)Allies (7.4%)

USAF(58.4%)

Navy (21.6%)

USMC (12.0%)

166. Brooks, CENTCOM newsbriefing, April 8, 2003.

167. Lt. Col. Fred Swan, B-1Bweapon systems officer, and Capt.Chris Wachter, B-1B pilot, DODnews briefing, April 8, 2003.

168. McChrystal, DOD newsbriefing, April 8, 2003.

169. Catherine Philip, “Secrets ofSaddam’s Family at War,” LondonTimes, July 25, 2003.

34

the city and link up V Corps and the 1stMEF for occupation duty. The twopincers inexorably closed. First, Armysoldiers pushed into the center ofBaghdad from the west. Next, Marinesmoved in from the east. At the sametime, other soldiers and marines brokeoff and moved along the outskirts ofBaghdad to capture major road intersec-tions and encircle the city by closingup escape routes to the north. On April8, Army soldiers fought off a counterat-tack on the bridges. Marines crossedthe Diyala river and headed for the eastbank of the Tigris. On April 9, the twocoalition ground forces linked up. Agroup of Marines with an M-88 tankrecovery vehicle, in what is now aworld-famous event, helped joyousIraqis pull down a giant statue ofSaddam Hussein. The end of the notori-ous regime was a done deal.

Major combat was over, but thefighting continued. On that very day,April 9, Marine FACs called for close airsupport in a particular firefight. Severalaircraft armed with bombs werestacked in the queue but the controllerwanted strafing on the Iraqis. Maj. ScottCuel, an A-10 pilot from the MichiganAir National Guard, got the call and “putabout 600 rounds into them.”170 The“north fight” continued, too. Ten regular

army divisions and perhaps a brigade ofRepublican Guard forces were stillbelieved to be in the northern area.171

However, there was no need to launcha new land offensive. SOF forces werequelling resistance around Kirkuk. “Wehave been targeting them aggressively,both from the air and then with theSpecial Operations Forces, for the lastdays,” said McChrystal, “and we judgetheir capability to have droppedsignificantly, both from casualties andalso from people just simply leavingthe battlefield.”172 Myers said thoseforces had been “subjected to bombingby airpower and will continue to bedealt with in that way for some time.”173

For all that, Iraq had been conquered.The job took just three weeks. Moseley,declining to claim credit, said only, “Thereason we were able to push ahead tothe center of Baghdad is because theland component commander has beenable to shape that [battle] along withinterdiction and close air support, andwith incredibly brave US Army and USMarine Corps troops, who have beenable to capitalize on the effect thatwe’ve had on the Republican Guardand the fielded forces.”174

One could agree with Moseley andstill state that the whole design of thecampaign—with its geographically

170. Jim Garamone, “AirGuardsmen Detail Iraqi FreedomClose Air Support,” American ForcesPress Service, July 16, 2003.



173. Myers, DOD news briefing,April 9, 2003.


Eagle. AIC WilliamGilmer, a crew chief,gives a “go-ahead”signal to an F-15E.Coalition fighter aircrews worked beforeand during the war toestablish and hold cleardominance of the skiesover Iraq and destroyIraq’s integrated airdefense system.

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separated fights and swift execution—owed its existence to airpower. The aircomponent set the strategic conditionsfor the simultaneous operations takingplace across Iraq, from SOF actions tothe main effort of the V Corps-1st MEFdrive on Baghdad. Airpower made itpossible to wage simultaneous attacks.It kept the joint campaign on theoffensive during needed pauses forlogistics support or unexpected onesdue to weather. It protected those samesupply lines by making it all but impos-sible for the Iraqis to mass their forces.The air component drained the Republi-can Guard of its combat effectivenessand set up favorable conditions for thefinal assault on Baghdad. Throughoutthe campaign, meticulous and always-available close air support backed upsoldiers and marines who faced fierceIraqi counterattacks on the ground.

Air dominance made possible a wholenew chapter of the American way ofwar.

Jumper said, “It’s this ... dominancethat allows us ... to get into the placewe’re trying to go to, to kick down thedoor or be a part of kicking down thedoor, and allows us to operate at thetimes and places of our choosing. Wesaw a little bit of this when, for the firsttime, ... our ground forces maneuveredpast large enemy formations withoutfirst destroying them, allowing airpowerin all of its forms to protect [their]flanks.”175

Air Force Secretary Roche, also sawthe broad effects of the war. “TheAmerican way of war,” he said, “has

undergone a remarkable evolution interms of how we command and controlwarfare, with respect to the speed andrange with which we can deliverdecisive effects, and with respect to theglobal information dominance thatenables our nation to see first, under-stand first, and act first.”176

On May 1, 2003, President Bushdeclared an end to OIF’s major combatoperations, telling America’s armedforces: “Because of you, the tyrant hasfallen, and Iraq is free.”177

AftermathTerminating Saddam’s dictatorship

and decades of Baath Party misrulecertainly did not solve all of Iraq’sproblems. Far from it. Danger andviolence continued.

Baath loyalists and irregular forcescarried out a disorganized but danger-ous series of attacks on individual UStroops who were attempting to keepthe peace and provide security during aperiod of occupation. In June and July,new reports of American deaths be-came a daily occurrence. The quickvictory did not dispel all doubts aboutthe need for a war in Iraq or quietconcerns about the future course of theGlobal War on Terrorism. Coalitionforces, meanwhile, continued theunglamorous but vital task of roundingup senior Baath officials who were stillat large and conducting searches forunexpectedly elusive caches of WMD.The post-war effort got a big boost onJuly 21 when coalition ground and airforces found, cornered, and killed

The Edge. On the eve ofthe formal outbreak ofwar, Lt. Col. Matt Meloyprepares for a mission.The combination ofadvanced air and spacesystems and highlytrained airmen gave thecoalition its decisiveadvantage and a strongframework for victory.


176. Roche, “The Future is Now...,”remarks at the Command ChiefMaster Sergeant Conference,Gunter Annex, Maxwell AFB, Ala.,April 25, 2003

177. President Bush, remarks fromthe USS Abraham Lincoln, May 1,2003, White House transcript.

36

Saddam’s two sons—Uday and Qusay.178

The very public demise of the psycho-pathic Hussein Brothers had a majoreffect on a public still fearful of Sad-dam and the thugs who had beenrunning the country for decades.

The coalition had met its goals anddone so with unparalleled skill. Thecoalition operated upwards of 1,800aircraft in the theater. The US lost onlytwo to enemy fire: an A-10 over Bagh-dad and an F-15E fighter near Tikrit.Both F-15E crew members died—theonly combat deaths among airmen.179

Equally striking is the fact that not asingle Iraqi warplane took to the air tocontest the coalition fighters. For some,this was a mystery, but not for Moseley.He believed members of the Iraqi AirForce, mauled a dozen years ago by AirForce fighters, made a simple calcula-tion of cost and possible benefit. “Wehit him pretty hard up front,” Moseleytold Pentagon reports on April 5. “Ibelieve that he has not flown because... they’ve made a calculation that theywill not survive.”180

Central to the campaign’s successwas the effort to keep the componentsin synch, not only at the tactical levelbut also at the operational level.“Having commanders think in a moreintegrated way about how they employthe force—that’s been our goal,” Myerssaid.181 Several factors made it possible.Improved situation awareness gavecommanders a real-time view of air, seaand land forces. Recent negativeexperiences such as that of OperationAnaconda in Afghanistan instilled inArmy and Air Force officers alike a newresolve to better coordinate theirservice efforts. Strong relationshipsamong the component commanders seta powerful example.

There can be no denying, though,that the combined arms team flour-ished in an environment created byairpower before the first tank rolledinto Iraq. Air dominance allowedCENTCOM to maintain tactical surpriseuntil the last moment and to start theground operations early when the oilfields were threatened. Air dominance

178. Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez,Commander JTF-7, DOD newsbriefing on Uday and QusayHussein, July 22, 2003.



181. William Matthews, “Triumph ofJointness,” Defense News, April 14,2003.

182. Rumsfeld, DOD news briefing,April 11, 2003.

made it possible for CENTCOM to driveV Corps and 1st MEF northward at topspeed, bypassing towns in the process.And, most importantly, air attacksdecimated the Republican Guard.

Three weeks elapsed between thatfirst dawn strike of the F-117s and thefall of the statue of Saddam. During thatperiod, there unfolded a major MiddleEast conflict offering incontrovertibleproof of this proposition: Modernairpower has permanently re-definedand re-shaped warfare. The power of airand space forces, clearing the way forlean and well-trained ground forces,achieved victory against a larger (ifdispirited) adversary in record time andwith startlingly few casualties on eitherside. It severed the regime’s commandand control, unraveled its air defenses,destroyed many of its most importantand elusive targets, and absolutelyobliterated its premier ground force.

Operation Iraqi Freedom will standout as a military success story for theUnited States Air Force and a triumphof joint and coalition operations. Wherethe Global War on Terrorism goes nextcannot be foreseen. The United Statesand the rest of the world has entered anew security era in which globalthreats and global partnerships willchange rapidly. Yet the impact of thewar will be great. As Rumsfeld said,“You’ve got to be reminded ofChurchill’s quote: ... ‘This is not theend, it is not even the beginning of theend, but it’s perhaps the end of thebeginning.’”182 ■

37

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