20 December 2020

Editor’s Note: This popped up as I was trying to organize a compendium of official travel to some odd places- Delhi, Zagreb, Rangoon, Pyongyang among others. It was weird and fun. But I found some other stuff that stopped me in my tracks. This is one of them.We talked about th end of the Cold War yesterday. Despite what I might have thought, it wasn’t the end of that sort of thing. Welcome to….

– Vic

29 May 2001

The Air Campaign

It was Memorial Day last weekend, and the flag that flew on the staff in front of my house had flown on the roof of the Capitol on Kuwait Day, 1991, the deadline President Bush set for Saddam to take his legions home. It is a little faded, since I flew it for the duration of the Gulf War, and on all the patriotic holidays since. It is still serviceable. Sometimes I look at the flag and think of Al Amiraya, a place we called the Al Firdos District Command and Control Bunker. Thinking about the bunker and what they stacked in front of it after the strike still makes me a little queasy, and I’m not the only one.

CNN showed it. The bodies of the families of the Baathist leadership of Iraq, who were hiding in the safest place they could think of.

It was a weird time. Thinking back on it I am still astonished by how strange it was. The Berlin Wall had fallen when I was on cruise in the Mediterranean with Carrier air Wing SIX the year before. I had executed orders to report to the Defense Intelligence Agency in September, a couple weeks after Saddam had gone into Kuwait. My old boss Mike McConnell had been nominated and accepted as the Joint Staff Intelligence Officer. They called it the “JS” in those days, a digraph that meant “Joint Staff Support.” Now they call it “J-2” for Joint Staff Intelligence Division, an equal among the Joint Chiefs Staff codes. But it is still DIA people, living in the mezzanine basement of the Pentagon.

We were all Soviet specialists, of one stripe or another. That went with the baggage of being Cold Warriors. Of course, the struggle against the Godless Commies was played out in a variety of places around the dusty world, and we all worked the crisis de jour as it came along. But the constant was the Soviet problem, Soviet weapons and soviet ships and soviet airplanes. I need you to understand just how intrinsic the Soviets were to how we perceived everything.

I was in a video-teleconference early in the DESERT SHIELD phase of the crisis and heard how they came up with the number of Iraqis in the Kuwait Theater of Operations-0 the KTO. The Admiral asked the question: “How many Iraqis are there?”

The answer came from a grizzled old analyst more familiar with the Fulda Gap in Germany where the Communist hoards would flood into Western Europe in the Gotterdammerung of the final conflict between East and Wrest. He didn’t know much about the people who live on the Euphrates River, but he did know Russians. “Well,” he said slowly. “That is hard to say. But if they follow the Russian Table of Organization, there are around a half-million.” The number hung in the air, and the qualification was lost. We didn’t have a clue as to how faithful the Iraqis were to the Soviet model. But a half a million was a number we could remember.

That number in turn was briefed to the Press, and there it was. A DoD number- sacrosanct, unchangeable. I had some experience with DoD numbers since I created them regularly. I was the mine-warfare analyst during the weeks when that area was hot. We counted a few dozen mines based on reports from the Theater and fed the information to Pete Williams the Press Secretary. That was henceforth the number of mines. Navy would call me up and challenge the number, confident that their analysis was superior. They were probably right. I told them that there was an infinite supply of wrong numbers, but that there was only one number that had been told to CNN and the Washington Post. And by God, that was the number.

The other key to the puzzle of the Gulf War was that most of the people who were engaged in the nuts-and-bolts of the war had never seen one close up. I was a pretty good example. I had been in the Navy thirteen years. I had made deployments in the Med, and lived in the Western Pacific. We helped plan the response to the Iranian hostage crisis, and even hosted the HH-53 helicopters on our ship that later came to their sad ends in Iran.

We had all gone nose-to-nose with the Russians everywhere the empires intersected. But we had never gone over the edge into the chaos of combat. Our grownups- Powell and General Kelly, the joint Staff Operations Officer, and Admiral McConnell had been to the Show, but they had gone as junior officers and spent the rest of their careers internalizing it. So there were some lessons-learned that were going to be very painful to learn. We were about to fly a couple hundred-thousand air sorties and turn loose several heavy armored divisions.

The first lesson to learn was: how do you know how well you are doing? When is it time for the next phase of the battle to begin?

The air campaign was run by Lieutenant General Chuck Horner, the Central Command Air Forces Component Commander, and devised by Brigadier General Buster Glossen. He did it during the DESERT SHIELD build-up. The General was assisted by kids who worked in a storage area in the basement of the Royal Saudi Air Force Headquarters. The residents called it “the Black Hole” and pretty soon everyone else did, too. The people who built the plan included pilots, attorneys, targeteers, logisticians and intelligence weenies like me.

First, they restated the mission, as they understood it, which was to eject Iraqi forces from Kuwait. Then they set about building a plan that would permit Coalition Ground Forces to breach the sand berms and minefields the Iraqis had thrown up. Say what you want about the Iraqis, but they were superb combat engineers, absolutely world class. Then we would kick the Republican Guard’s asses. General Powell said it a lot more eloquently, but that was what it was about.

The Air Campaign plan sliced and diced Iraq and turned it from a nation into twelve target sets. The categories were: leadership; command, control, and communications (C3) facilities and operations; air defense systems; military depots and storage locations; nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons and their associated production facilities; airfields; railroads and bridges; Scud missiles; oil refineries; electrical production; naval ports; and the Republican Guard.

Obviously, you had to knock down the air defense before you could do anything else. With air supremacy, all other things came. Hitting the “C3I” and “Leadership” targets meant they would be confused and not able to talk. Turning the lights out on them was going to add to their befuddlement. When in doubt, I always say, make them go to their back-up power and see how prepared they are. It was all synergistic, a simple linear process, working down the rest of the target lists in priority order until you got to the elite Republican Guard Divisions. And then, as General Powell explained, we would cut their heads off.

Before the war started, we had control of the intelligence collection systems and we had questions from all sides, from the policy makers to the forces forward in the desert. Now the policy was set, and the policy was war. Accordingly, the system operated exactly as it is programmed to do. According to doctrine, control of the intelligence collection systems in a shooting war shifts from the Intelligence Community to the Department of Defense. This had never happened before. Now General Scwartzkopf’s staff owned the collection assets to help him fight the war. Intelligence was coming from the guys who flew the missions, pilot debriefings, and that stream ended abruptly at General Schwartzkopf’s Headquarters. Norm was determined not to fall into the Vietnam syndrome in which President Johnson was on hands and knees picking out targets on the Oval Office floor. He was not going to let his war be directed from Washington. Accordingly, the Pentagon was out of the loop and clueless on a lot of the execution of the Air Tasking Order, or ATO.

The ATO is a creature of the United States Air Force. Culturally, it is the backbone of everything they do. It is a seventy-two hour plan in which every mission is integrated: strike birds, tankers, electronic warfare, transports. The whole ball of wax. When you are flying 1,400 missions a day, this is a list of unbelievable complexity. And in the Air Force view, once published, the ATO is graven in stone and no alternation is possible. Once you are in the ATO, it is going to happen or somebody is going to know why.

Getting on the ATO is a process called “fragging.” It is not the same as rolling a grenade into some eager-beaver officer’s tent. It is getting into the plan. And the plan was issued from the Black Hole in Riyadh. So for those outside the Theater, where General Schwartzkopf was God, the whole war may just as well have been a Black Hole, a tabula rasa in a computer a world away.

On February 17th the first strikes went in, and CNN reported it live. It was spectacular. The artillery fire and rockets over Baghdad were unbelievable. Minutes into the raid the lights went out and they stayed out. The next morning the Secretary and the Chairman were itchy for an assessment. There wasn’t one. There were some pictures, but inconclusive. The weapon we had used to turn out the lights did not have an effect that we could detect from space, except for the obvious one, and the analysts in the Intelligence Community were not cleared for what it was. So how could they assess its effectiveness? The analysis was being produced of the first wave of strikes did not seem to agree with what was on TV. because the BDA team that the system had put in place was collectively fired since they apparently couldn’t answer the Secretary’s central question: “So, how are we doing?”

The Admiral had assembled a team of target professionals from the Air Force, on the assumption that they were best prepared to backwards-engineer the strikes and assess the amount of damage we had inflicted on the Iraqis. He ensured there was a mechanism to provide them with the highest-quality satellite images of the targets in a special large format, big as a desktop. They had all the tools to make the Leadership comfortable with how the war was being conducted. It didn’t pan out that way. What the targeteers couldn’t provide the Chairman or the Secretary was the critical “So what?” factor. They had the pretty blown-up satellite pictures of the blown-up buildings. They could answer with some certainty what weapon had caused the damage. What they could not do was put it in context.

“What does it mean?” asked the Secretary.

“Why did we hit that target?” demanded the Chairman.

“Dunno, Sir. But look, this hole in the dome clearly was caused by a 2,000LB Guided Bomb Utility….and look at this next cool picture, Sir….” They were not prepared to answer questions about context or what it all meant. They were not all-source intelligence analysts and they were not what the Leadership wanted. General Powell put Mike McConnell on the spot. He wanted answers, and he was not going to rest until he had them.

I got a call at home on Saturday after the usual twelve hours. I was informed that I had an opportunity to excel. I was the new Senior Bomb Damage Assessment analyst to the leadership. They hoped I would have something interesting to say on Monday.

So, I found myself in a little room off the main floor of the National Military Command Center at 0200 Monday morning, preparing for the eight o’clock brief to the leadership of the Department of Defense and the Joint Chiefs Staff. Let me orient you. We are on the third floor of the Pentagon, inboard of the “C”-Ring. The chairman’s Office is on the second floor, ground level at the River Entrance. The Secretary is right above on the third floor. Walk out of those offices on the outer side of the “E”-Ring with the spectacular views of the capital. Move inward a ring and you leave the sunlight and enter a gray world of dim it light. Behind the guard posts are the big operations and intelligence centers. The National Military Command Center is there, and so is the Alert Center of the intelligence staff. They are adjacent, but not open to each other because of the sensitivity of the information contained in the Alert Center. That is where the Hot Line to Moscow is located, among other things. The lights are dim there and a hundred analysts huddle over their flickering terminals. Two floors below hundreds more analysts from every section of DIA have been brought to the Pentagon to grind out support products. It is running on caffeine and nicotine, and you can still smoke inside the Building.

Keep peeling the onion. Off to the side of the Alert Center watch floor is a little alcove. It is where the first Iraqi Working Group was established when the system began to realize things were getting tense on the Kuwaiti Border. After the invasion, the working group began to burgeon. Soon it spilled out, morphing into a Working Group, and then it finally just ate everything in its path and it was the Department of Defense Joint Intelligence Center. We all worked there, a thousand in the Pentagon and another thirteen hundred at the Defense Intelligence Analysis Center at Bolling Air force Base.

They gave the alcove to our fledgling Bomb Damage Assessment Team, and we ripped down the wall to where the Crisis Action Team of the Joint Staff sat. We were not afraid of the intelligence leaking out. Instead we were eager for the operations staff to come in and share their views on what some of the pictures taken from space meant. People could just wander in and out. There was a lot of interest, naturally, so I was not uncommon to practice the morning brief to fifteen or twenty generals or Admirals before you gave it to the Chairman.

My favorite regular was General Al Grey, Commandant of the Marine Corps. He usually showed up around 0500- we would have a pretty good idea of what we were going to show and what target category we were going to feature. The Commandant was a burly fireplug of a man with bristling cropped white hair. He made a point of wearing his camouflage fatigues in the spit n’ polish Joint Staff, four shiny stars on the each collar. He carried a huge field canteen cup, also in camouflage, full of coffee. He was genuinely interested, and totally unencumbered by an entourage of horse-holders. He just wanted to know how the war was going for his Marines.

There was an even more holy place in the warren of offices and watch floors. It was around the corner from us, past a duty Colonel who guarded the door. We called it the “E-S-C” for reasons that escape me now. It is the real nerve center of the Pentagon, much more sensitive than the big briefing theaters elsewhere in the building. These meetings were by-invitation only. In addition to the Secretary and the Chairman there was a select few. Gruff old General Kelly was right down front where I had my easel for the giant blown-up photos. He became the media darling in the afternoon press conferences along with Mike McConnell. Mike did not enjoy the exposure, and as quickly as he could delegated the responsibility to Dave Herrington, a Navy Captain who was a born showman. Press Secretary Pete Williams was there, of course, because Mr. Cheney insisted on it. So was Richard Haver, Special Assistant for Intelligence, and young David Addington, alter ego for Mr. Cheney. Filling out the table were the Lieutenant Generals in charge of Logistics and Communications and Plans. But it was a small group and we all knew who the primary customers were.

The Secretary’s briefing was formatted in two parts. First, an operations guy would stand up and brief the ATO. They would talk about the number of sorties planned and which targets were going to get hit. And include items of interest; new weapons or tactics which were about to be demonstrated to an appreciative Iraq. My first brief was Late in the war we got pretty interested in Bunker busting for a couple reasons. I’ll tell you about one of them a minute.

We did other briefing later in the day, the most important one to the Operations Deputies of the Military Services. But that was a piece of cake compared to briefing Powell and Cheney.

One time, early on, we got a stony reception to a critical piece of intelligence we had acquired. I asked Admiral McConnell about it later, asking him why the meeting had gone the way it had.

“It’s because you are talking to two men who both consider themselves the next President of the United States,” said Mike. “Once I cracked that code I was fine here.”

The last event of the day was the Press Conference that was held in the Correspondent’s corridor near Pete William’s office. I sometimes went with the Admiral to the Press Conferences, and once sat next to him next to the dais. I looked out a sea of lights and brilliant colors. The correspondents were dressed in dazzling hues to attract attention and get called in the question time. The Admiral made a comment to me that made me nearly collapse in laughter. I’ll tell you sometime.

Copyright 2020 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com