Desert Shield – Desert Storm 20th Anniversary of the Gulf War

58 Pages·2011·17.575 MB·English

by  Chuck Oldham

THE 20TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE GULF WAR
D S
ESERT HIELD
D S
ESERT TOR M
EDITOR’S FOREWORD
On Jan. 15, 1991, the United Nations ultimatum ordering Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait ran out. For
months, a coalition of nations had been staging a military buildup, preparing to launch an attack to take
back Kuwait. Now the coalition was ready.
By 2:30 a.m. on Jan. 17, airstrikes were hitting Baghdad. Operation Desert Storm had begun.
It was a watershed conflict.
To the surprise of many, the major conflict of the 20th century’s last decade was not between the Soviets
and the Americans, nor the Arabs and Israelis, but rather saw a worldwide coalition arrayed against an
Arab country that had invaded a smaller Arab neighbor.
The conflict was a showcase for technologies like precision munitions, stealth, night vision and other
sensors, C4ISR assets, and UAVs. Once considered the dominant military power in the region, Iraq was
totally outclassed and comprehensively defeated by these technologies and the tactics that leveraged
them. The result was that more American casualties were sustained in training than in the war itself.
According to some accounts, the overmatch of these Cold War-bred technologies against Iraq’s Soviet
tactics and equipment helped convince the Soviet leadership that the Cold War was essentially lost,
bringing on the collapse of the Soviet Union.
But overwhelming victories tend to provide more lessons to future opponents than the victors, and the
result was that during Operation Iraqi Freedom, a short, sharp conventional conflict developed into a
different kind of warfare, with the United States and its coalition partners facing an enemy with AK-47s,
RPGs, and IEDs in a long, difficult insurgency.
An even larger and more difficult insurgency continues today in Afghanistan, and the tactics of
unconventional warfare employed by that insurgency speak to the success of Operation Desert Storm 20
years ago: Knowing that a traditional confrontation against today’s coalition would be doomed, terrorist
organizations have resorted to a shadowy sort of battle, one in which – by design – they make themselves
hard to pin down and defeat. That the conflicts of today reflect the lessons learned from Operation Desert
Storm should in no way devalue the achievement of two decades ago, when a western and pan-Arab
coalition came together to confront and force the headlong retreat of Iraqi forces from Kuwait.
FOREWORD
Contents
Desert Shield/Desert Storm: The 20th Anniversary of The Gulf War
Foreword ...................................................................................................................................................3
The Air War
The Air War
Air Power in Operation Desert Shield/Desert Storm .....................................................................................4
By Robert F. Dorr
The Air War: Lessons Learned .....................................................................................................................12
By Robert F. Dorr
The Land War
The Land War
In Desert Storm .............................................................................................................................................16
by Scott R. Gourley
Some Lessons Learned From the Land War ................................................................................................24
By Norman Friedman
The Naval War
Naval Forces in the Gulf War ........................................................................................................................30
By Norman Friedman
Naval Lessons of the Gulf War .....................................................................................................................38
By Norman Friedman
Features
Republican Guard Nemesis
Feint and Deception Doomed Iraqi Units .....................................................................................................44
By Clarence A. Robinson, Jr.
Emerging From the Shadows
Getting Stealth into the Gulf War ..................................................................................................................48
By John D. Gresham
The Battle of 73 Easting
And the Road to the Synthetic Battlefield....................................................................................................54
By John D. Gresham
DESERT SHIELD II DESERT STORM 3
THE AIR WAR
THE AIR WAR

AIR POWER DURING OPERATION DESERT SHIELD AND DESERT STORM
By Robert F. Dorr
On the night of January 17-18, 1991, a veritable tack from the north. He saw city lights, neon signs, the
tidal wave came plunging down on Iraq and on snake-like Tigris River winding through the city. Sixty
Iraqi forces in Kuwait as 300 strike aircraft from SAM sites and 3000 antiaircraft guns encircled Baghdad
the Western coalition swarmed down on stra- on this night. Almost all of them were shooting now.
tegic targets. Maj. Gregory A. Feest, flying an F-117 Night- Only later would Leatherman learn that, panicked, they
hawk, dropped the first bomb of the war on a interceptor were shooting “blind” and not at him. At exactly 3:00
operations center in Baghdad, wreaking havoc in Saddam a.m., the F-117 in front of Leatherman’s hit the AT&T
Hussein’s air defense system. But even before the stealth Building with a GBU-27 bomb. On Leatherman’s scope,
fighters, Iraqi air sites near the border were challenged by the target abruptly glowed, hotter than adjacent office
helicopters. towers and the nearby, tulip-shaped Iraqi Martyrs Monu-
Task Force Normandy was made up of MH-53J Pave Lows ment. Leatherman pickled one minute later, splitting the
from the Air Force’s 20th Helicopter Squadron and AH-64 crosshairs on his display and blowing out the upper four
Apaches from the Army’s 101st Division, Fort Campbell, floors of the building. Leatherman peeled away to the
Kentucky. The plan was to attack each of two radar sites west, for the safety of the desert, and turned for home,
at a pivotal location known in American parlance as Ob- switching on heavy metal music from Def Leppard on his
jective Oklahoma with two Pave Lows and four Apaches. Walkman. Behind him, Capt. Marcel Kerdavid swooped
The Pave Lows used terrain-following radar and GPS down through a sky alive with fire and pickled a GBU-
(global positioning system) to guide the Apaches over the 27 through the Al Khark communications tower, to blow
border and to a pre-planned firing point. Close to the tar- the 370-foot spire apart at its mid-point. “My biggest
gets, the Pave Lows slowed and dropped fluorescent light fear was that I would survive,” remembered Major Mike
sticks onto the desert. The Army helicopters used those Mahar, pilot of an F-117 in the second wave assaulting
points of light to set their own navigation systems, then Baghdad. ‘They’re all dead,’ I told myself. ‘All the guys
draw to within visual range, the Pave Lows moved back who went in ahead of me have been shot down. If I live
and opened fire with 30mm cannons and Hellfire missiles. through tonight, I’ll be the only F-117 pilot who survived.
The result was a devastating blow to key Iraqi defense Everybody will ask why’”
positions, 22 minutes before the 3:00 a.m. H-hour. “Twenty minutes away from Saddam Hussein’s presi-
dential retreat at Abu Ghurayb, I saw what looked like red-
orange explosions from bombs filling the landscape ahead.
STEALTH ATTACK
But we didn’t have any aircraft up there. I know, now, I was
By then, the 12-plane first wave of F-117s was al- looking at muzzle flashes from antiaircraft guns.” The sky
ready 50 miles beyond Oklahoma. These F-117s reached around Mahar seemed to be full of fire. Flak detonated
Baghdad while Saddam’s radars were still up and run- above and below him, buffeting the F-117. “No one had
ning and without being detected. Maj. Jerry Leather- ever seen such a nocturnal display of pyrotechnics,” he re-
man was in one of the F-117s. Leatherman’s job, like members. “With no spatial reference, it was impossible to
that of another F-117 pilot ahead of him, was to bomb tell how far some of it was from my airplane. But it seemed
the Baghdad International Telephone Exchange, known very close.”
to the F-117 pilots as the AT&T building because its real In fact, none of Mahar’s wingmen were dead, wounded,
Arabic name was unwieldy. Leatherman followed the or even scratched. As it would turn out, the F-117’s first-
night eastward at 480 knots. He skirted the capital to at- generation, radar-evading stealth properties enabled it
4 DESERT SHIELD II DESERT STORM
STOPPING SMOKING PROGRAMS
Bitburg based F-15 Eagles flew straight to Saudi Arabia fully armed
for war.
to fly 1,271 combat sorties in the 42-day Persian Gulf war missiles, some of which came from the aging battleship
without a single loss. From the beginning of the war until USS Missouri (BB-63), carrier-based warplanes from no
its end, the F-117 ruled the skies over Baghdad. fewer than five carrier battle groups flanking the Arabian
Shortly before 3:00 a.m., an E-3 Sentry AWACS spotted peninsula on both sides, and long-range bombers.
MiG-29s flying low about 50 miles inside the Iraqi border. During Operation Desert Storm, B-52G Stratofortresses
Four F-15C Eagles from the 33rd Tactical Fighter Wing, Eg- served in provisional bomb wings and mounted combat
lin Air Force Base, Fla., slipped across the border to inter- missions from Diego Garcia; Jeddah, Saudi Arabia; Mo-
cept. One of the Iraqi MiGs responded by gaining a radar ron, Spain, and Fairford, England. B-52Gs flew 1,624
lock-on on Capt. John B. “J. B.” Kelk’s Eagle. With alarms missions, dropped over 72,000 weapons, and delivered over
sounding and visual warnings jarring him, Kelk fired a mis- 25,700 tons of munitions on area targets in the KTO (Ku-
sile and scored the war’s first aerial victory at 3:10 a.m. wait Theater of Operations) and on airfields, industrial tar-
near Mudaysis in southern Iraq. gets, troop concentrations and storage areas in Iraq. Per-
sian Gulf war B-52Gs had a mission capable rate of over 81
percent, or 2 percent higher than the peacetime rate. B-
AIR ACTION
52Gs dropped 29 percent of all U.S. bombs and 38 percent
It was the beginning of an air-to-air combat saga that of all Air Force bombs during the war.
would be unprecedented in the history books. A Navy FA-18 It was revealed a year after the Gulf War that seven B-
Hornet lost that first night may have been the only Ameri- 52Gs fired 35 AGM-86C conventional air launched cruise
can aircraft lost in air-to-air action (to an Iraqi MiG-25). missiles (CALCMs) against eight targets in northern Iraq,
In contrast, the coalition shot down 44 Iraqi warplanes, including hydroelectric and geothermal power plants near
some of them attempting to flee to asylum inside Iraq’s re- Mosul, and the telephone exchange in Basara. The classi-
cent former enemy, Iran. A total of 37 were brought down fied code name for the program was Senior Surprise, al-
by Air Force F-15Cs, all but one of them in Kelk’s fighter though the crews called them “Secret Squirrels.”
wing, and the Eagles sustained no losses. While an airlift Seven aircraft from the 596th Bombardment Squadron,
of unprecedented size continued to bring supplies and 2nd Bombardment Wing flew the longest combat mission
arms to the bases built up by the coalition, Operation Des- in history that first night of the Persian Gulf conflict. The
ert Storm unleashed new strikes by sea-launched cruse round-trip mission from Barksdale Air Force Base, La.,
DESERT SHIELD II DESERT STORM 5
An Iconic
Symbol of Freedom
THE STATUE OF LIBERTY
A LIVING SYMBOL OF FREEDOM FOR 125 YEARS
A Special Publication coming Fall 2011 will offer a unique look at this national treasure, an iconic
symbol of freedom to millions worldwide. It will chronicle the history of Lady Liberty, from her arrival
in America as a gift from France, through her hard fought and uncertain final completion, to her
renovation and status today as a world famous symbol of democracy and freedom. The publication will
tell the story of the historical and remarkable efforts of the Foundation to raise funds for the restoration
and preservation of the statue and Ellis Island, and also include many more unique features on Lady
Liberty. Included will be commentary from the leadership of the National Park Service, the Statue of
Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation, and other notable friends of the Statue.
If you are interested in advertising in The Statue of Liberty: A Living Symbol of Freedom for 125 Years
call Ken Meyer today at 813-639-1900
Above: On their way into the theater, Navy Tomcats brushed up on dissimilar air combat train-
ing with Royal Air Force Phantoms. Right: The old B-52s played a large part in the conflict,
firing cruise missiles and unloading almost a third of all bombs in the war.
lasted over 34 hours and launched 35 AGM-86C CALCMs
against eight targets near Mosul, in northern Iraq. A fur-
ther four missiles on four different aircraft had problems
and were not launched. Launched during a ten-minute pe-
riod from about 100 miles south of the Iraqi-Saudi border
near the town of Ar Ar, they struck power stations near
Mosel and communications facilities (including one near
Basara), some of which were beyond the reach of manned
aircraft prior to the start of missions from Turkey. The mis-
siles’ use of the global positioning system aided their flight
over the often featureless Iraqi terrain enabling 31 of them
to hit their targets. The engine on one missile failed to start
after launch, two probably missed their targets, and one
was never accounted for (and was possibly shot down),
yielding an 85-to 91-percent success rate. Speculation
about why so many aircraft were used to launch so few
missiles centers on the theory that the abort of a single air-
craft would have less impact if it had fewer missiles. Fur-
ther, the mission used up most of the available AGM-86Cs.
ONGOING CAMPAIGN
Once the fighting was underway, it became apparent
that there would be no ground war immediately. But in the
DESERT SHIELD II DESERT STORM 7
STOPPING SMOKING PROGRAMS
8 DESERT SHIELD II DESERT STORM
STOPPING SMOKING PROGRAMS
Above: F-16C Fighting Falcon fighter aircraft are refueled by KC-135
Stratotanker aircraft. Left: The Marines brought their own organic
air power with them, in the shape of Harriers flying from amphibious
warfare ships and ashore, as well as F/A-18s and A-6E Intruders, flying
18,000 sorties during the air campaign.
MAC’s Gen. H. T. Johnson cobbled together an air bridge
that hauled people and equipment on exhausting, 38-hour
missions (the round-trip from a U.S. base, to a European
air, the attackers employed tricks they had learned playing location, followed by the round-trip “downrange” to the
the high-end game in the final years of the Cold War. A Saudi deserts). Johnson threw nearly all of his 265 C-141B
decade after the Goldwater-Nichols Law forced American Starlifters and 85 C-5 Galaxys into the effort and activated
service branches to cooperate, Desert Storm became the elements of the CRAF (Civil Reserve Air Fleet). The size of
first joint war. There were glitches (because of incompat- the effort was stupefying: C-141B or C-5 landed at Dhahran
ible information networks, each Navy carrier had to send every seven minutes, around the clock. The tonnage of the
an airplane to Riyadh to pick up the Air Tasking Order each 1948 Berlin airlift was exceeded in the first 22 days. 220,000
day), but jointness was a “force multiplier” that made ev- troops and their equipment were moved by October.
ery bomb and missile deadlier. A typical airlift job was, for example, to haul equipment
The new technologies, including radar-evading stealth for the 2nd Marine Division at Camp Pendleton, Calif. A
and miniaturized precision targeting, were icing on this crew would fly the first leg – for example, from Pendleton
cake. It would be impossible to understand the success of to Torrejon. There, another crew in a revolving pool would
Desert Storm without grasping the Desert Shield buildup pick up both the mission and the aircraft, and continue
– and especially the Desert Shield airlift that came first. downrange. Routine problems which might delay a depar-
When Saddam swept over Kuwait, the United States had ture – cleaning an aircraft, for instance – had to be set
no forces in the region. Six months later, 525,000 Ameri- aside in the all-compelling effort to keep the aircraft mov-
cans were in the Gulf. Their numbers included the equiv- ing, constantly moving. The eastbound stage, they called
alent of nine infantry and armor divisions and a Marine it, evoking memories of stagecoaches which, moving in
division plus a brigade. They had 1,300 main battle tanks, the opposite direction, had opened up the American West.
seven carrier battle groups, a dozen fighter wings, and a Downrange, there was no place to rest, so the crew would
supply line for arms and ammunition that stretched half- have to bring their C-141B or C-5 back to Torrejon before
way around the world. they could sleep.
The airlift mounted by U.S. Air Force’s Military Air- There were triumphs and there were horror stories. One
lift Command (now MAC) carried people, weapons, and C-5 Galaxy pilot struggled with ground personnel who tried
equipment of all five U.S. service branches from 120 loca- to load too much cargo, command posts confused about
tions to the deserts of the Middle East. Together with the his destination, and a 3-hour quest for an empty bed at the
sealift that followed, it made possible the most spectacu- end of a 30-hour work day. Another spent a day of equal
lar buildup of military force in history. length hauling supplies from Torrejon downrange, then re-
DESERT SHIELD II DESERT STORM 9
THE AIR WAR
Air Force C-141 aircraft, plus C-130s, C-5s, and KC-10s, carried over a half
million passengers and as many tons of cargo.
turning, while struggling with a nose wheel that wouldn’t Lt. Gen. (later Gen.) Charles “Chuck” Horner, who
come down (until lowered manually), and a pilot’s altim- commanded the air campaign from a Riyadh headquar-
eter on the blink. Shortcuts had to be taken in maintaining ters called the Black Hole, had had six months to ex-
aircraft, and especially in cleaning them – one C-141 was ploit the well-established airfield infrastructure in the
needed so badly, it was pulled out of the paint shop and region and to build up a force which comprised nearly
flown to Saudi Arabia in natural metal, colorless – to keep a thousand aircraft. All of this paid off as the fighting
troops and materiel moving. began but, even then, not everything went perfectly.
Strategic airlifters (C-141Bs and C-5s, plus C-130E/Hs As January faded into February, still with no ground
and KC-10As when self-deploying) flew 20,500 missions, war underway, Horner and his aerial armada were seri-
carried 534,000 passengers, and hauled ously distracted by a hunt for Iraqi Scud missile launch
542,000 tons of cargo. Airlifters moved 4.65 billion ton- sites. “The great Scud hunt,” as it turned out, had little
miles, as compared with 697.5 million during the 65-week impact and Iraq continued to launch small numbers
Berlin airlift. To those who participated, there was anoth- of the ballistic missiles, with conventional warheads,
er way to say what they had done – a bumper sticker, worth with impunity.
saving for the grandchildren, worn by some as a badge of Britain’s Royal Air Force learned that using runway-de-
honor: I FLEW THE EASTBOUND STAGE. nial weapons-developed in a NATO-Warsaw Pact contest
Saddam Hussein, with the world’s fourth largest land – was a good way to get shot down.
army, with Scud ballistic missiles, with nascent chemi- RAF Tornado squadrons had to keep constantly revising
cal and biological weapons, ultimately was not up to the their tactics as they attempted to do their part in keeping
test of confronting a mature American volunteer force Saddam’s air defense quiet. Typical was the loss of a Tor-
supported by Coalition forces. The lapse of six months be- nado to a surface-to-air missile on February 14. Flight Lt.
tween Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait on August 2, 1990 and Rupert Clark was reacting to the hit when a second SAM
the start of the war in January had enabled Gen. H. Nor- went off nearby. It was catastrophic – instant loss of both
man Schwarzkopf, the U.S. field commander, to assemble engines, as well as trashing of the entire cockpit and flight
a massive air and ground armada which included half a instruments. Clark ejected and was captured. His naviga-
million American troops. tor, Flight Lt. Steven Hicks, was killed.
10 DESERT SHIELD II DESERT STORM