Lessons of the Gulf War

As an ex-military officer who served 33 years in the Air Force, I was personally enthusiastic about the President’s trusting relationship with the US Joint Chiefs of Staff that enabled him to delegate enough authority so they could use their expertise in the proper way. And fortunately, the Joint Chiefs were able to take the same approach with the coalition commander, General Norman Schwarzkopf. General Colin Powell, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, who is a good friend, told me that although he talked to General Schwarzkopf twice a day, he left it up to him to make the right decisions at the right time. I believe it is absolutely critical that such tactical judgments be made at the scene of action. America learned the hard way in Vietnam what problems can be created when local military actions are determined by decision makers too removed from the field and too exclusively motivated by politics.

The total coalition forces roughly equaled the Iraqi forces in number (Table 1). The figure for Iraqi losses refers to the number of prisoners taken. Actual losses have never been determined though most experts believe they were very heavy.

The coalition was clearly outnumbered in tanks, but was even with the Iraqis in other elements of army capability. In aircraft, the coalition had a better than 2-to-1 advantage, with the bulk of allied airpower consisting of America’s 2,040 aircraft. The coalition flew 110,000 missions,an unprecedentedly large number for an air war of such short duration. It is important to note, however, that only 35,000 of these were strike sor ties. Hughes had some 55 different systems deployed in the Gulf – everything from radar and night vision equipment to information systems and missiles.

The War’s Big Surprises

US President Dwight Eisenhower, who served as Supreme Allied Commander in Europe during World War II, emphasised how astonishing wars always are for all participants. Certainly, the Gulf War produced its share of dramatic surprises. Perhaps the most striking had to do with casualties. No one imagined that a campaign of this size could be undertaken with so few people lost on the winning side. In fact, as this realisation about “minimal casualties” hit home during the course of the war, it caused the leaders of the coalition to rethink their concept of what risk levels they were willing to accept in conducting operations. And certainly, the discovery of how greatly casualties can be limited will lead to further substantial changes in battle tactics in many future engagements comparable to this one.

A second major surprise was the Scud missile phenomenon. It was astonishing that the Scuds could be so difficult to find and destroy. But it was even more astonishing that a Scud operation so impotent militarily could be so powerful politically. This operation had the immediate potential to fracture the Western coalition with Arab nations, but it also provided a graphic reminder of the additional strength political terrorism can gain from ballistic missiles of even limited range. I remember Israeli Defense Minister Rabin telling me on a number of occasions before this war that if a Middle-East nation ever demonstrated a capability to attack its neighbors with poison gas delivered by means of ballistic missiles, this new threat would change the balance of power in the region and perhaps in the entire world.

I believe this is very true, which is why I have constantly argued, both when I ran America’s Star Wars programme and subsequently, that it is critically important for all countries to have defenses against such assaults from ballistic missiles.

Logistics Operations

One big challenge for the US and many other countries was logistics – having to quickly move massive forces and their equipment to a distant field of operations. The US conveyed the initial forces by air. The large C-5A transport flew 834 early missions, and the smaller C-141 flew almost 1,700. Even with this military capability, the US had to call on its civil reserve fleet for 958 missions.

The coalition’s airlift operations worked well, partly because Saudi Arabia has a very extensive infrastructure and support operation to accommodate large and complex arrival activities. After landing great numbers of personnel and their equipment, these forces were quickly dispersed to shelters and then on toward the front lines.

Gearing up for Desert Storm also required a large amount of sea transportation, and in this area there were some problems with the US performance. America’s sealift capabilities have been neglected over the years. When the call came, the US was not as ready as it should have been. In some cases, after loading up and putting to sea, transport ships actually had to turn around and come back. Ultimately, the US had to fill the gaps in preparedness by leasing shipping from other countries. The part of sea transport operations that did work out well was the disembarkations in Saudi Arabia – again because of that nation’s ample infrastructure. In this case, the coalition was able to rely on the oil and repair facilities already in place for supertankers. Surely, the logistics challenge would have been much more difficult in one of the many nations where infrastructure is less well developed.

Intelligence Operations

Another challenge the coalition had to meet was gaining the upper hand in intelligence operations. And this, of course, was accomplished immediately and decisively. The coalition knew where the Iraqi forces were at all times, but Saddam did not know where coalition forces were. And if he had known, he could not have used the knowledge to make direct changes in his campaign, because the coalition wholly destroyed his command and control structures early in the war. He was completely out of touch with his people and, of course, the various components of his forces were equally cut off from one another. So bad was this problem that when the ground war to liberate Kuwait finally began the first many Iraqi tank commanders knew that hostilities had commenced was when their tanks began to explode, the victims of beyond visual range air and land based weaponry.

On the other hand the coalition had a lot of difficulty coming up with accurate assessments of what it was accomplishing with its bombing strikes. One reason was too much contradictory intelligence. Too often, it failed to adequately reconcile conflicting reports at the lower tactical levels where such information can best be evaluated. There were cases where an inability to rely on reports from pilots that certain targets had already been taken out led to wasting substantial resources on unnecessary air strikes.

Another thing interfering with efforts to assess bombing damage was a communications overload. The coalition had a tremendous number of datalinks, many of which of course reached back to the US and to other countries: nine satellites were essentially dedicated to Desert Storm, and the coalition leased a number of commercial channels and even put up temporary “light satellites” to help with the special circumstances.

But, war related activities boosted satellite communications volume at least five times over normal levels. Even with all the extra capability, the coalition was sometimes unable to keep communications flowing. What this meant for bomb damage assessment was that this intelligence effort often lagged current operations by as much as three days. Obviously, in such a fast moving campaign, this is a very significant shortcoming.

The Air War

As Air Force commander General Merrill McPeak has noted, the air portion of this war followed the four phases of a classic textbook operation.

In the first phase, the coalition moved to attain superiority in both air-to-air and air-to-ground activities. The second phase was aimed at knocking out the Iraqis’ surface-to-air system, which was Soviet supplied and often very advanced. Around Baghdad, for instance, the anti-aircraft environment this system generated was more threatening even than the US encountered in Vietnam in the Haiphong Harbor area. In the third phase of the air war, the coalition sought to damage the Iraqi ground forces. Here the main focus was on forces in Kuwait; but the coalition also targeted adjacent areas in Iraq to ensure that the enemy would not be able to resupply from these regions later. The fourth phase of the air war was aimed at giving support to the ground operation, once the final assault was underway.

The US Air Force ran preview simulations of many of its strikes. Based on these, it was predicted the coalition might lose something like 150 aircraft in the first phase of the war. Of course, it did not even come close to this. At the beginning of the war, loss rates were at 0. 15%, as compared with the 3 to 10% attrition that the USAF anticipated for this kind of battle. Later on, the loss rate quickly went down to an amazing 0. 04%, which is lower than the Air Force experiences in combat training operations. Another unexpected plus of the air campaign was that the Iraqi forces virtually abstained from engaging the coalition in air-to-air operations. Here they were following the Soviet doctrine that says, “Don’t use your air forces against the main strength of the enemy but conserve them for later use in more advantageous circumstances. ” As you know, part of this conservation involved sending 139 aircraft to Iran. I think the Iraqis counted on being able to get this equipment back for subsequent use in the war. They were wrong.

In the US Air Force, when analyzing past combat operations, we have often relied on a metric comparing aircraft loss on both sides that we call the “fighter-exchange ratio. ” We have used this metric for anticipating future combat losses and acquisition needs. However, in this war the fighter exchange ratio was simply meaningless. The coalition did lose 42 aircraft in the early phase of the war. But since there was no real air-to-air engagement, these losses were the result of ground accidents and other noncombat activities. The coalition was able to declare its achievement of air supremacy almost immediately, in just the second week of the war.

At the beginning of the war, the coalition made an extraordinary effort to destroy targets and maximize protection of its strike aircraft. In both of these endeavors, the role of the F-117A stealth aircraft was critical. In the first few days of the war, the F-117A was flown on 1,317 sorties without a single loss. And subsequently, these F-117s, which represented only 2. 5% of our total strike aircraft capability, were assigned and successfully attacked an incredible 31% of the total targets the coalition destroyed during the war.

The coalition relied on the stealth aircraft so heavily not only because it was so effective, but also because it helped limit casualties by reducing the requirement for accompanying aircraft during strikes. For example, if four F-117s were sent on two flights into the Baghdad area, total support for these sorties would be nothing more than two tanker planes for refueling. Obviously, the numbers would be vastly different if you could not count on the protection of stealth and had to put together a strike force with all the usual defensive and support capabilities. Then you would need many additional strike planes, combat air patrol planes to protect strike planes, intelligence and command and control plane to evaluate targets and direct the complex operations, and numerous tankers to support all of this. This would probably involve a total strike force of no fewer than 75 aircraft.

Dramatic comparisons like this are going to have an impact in military establishments around the globe. We can predict that many nations will now try to get stealth capability and that it will not be very difficult to obtain. Such a development will have important implications for nations like Sweden and Finland that are concerned with defense forces. Probably, in the near future, our air defense planning, communications and operations will all have to bechanged in ways enabling us to deal with the new reality of stealth aircraft.

Another technology that the coalition relied on early in the air war was the long range, high precision Tomahawk missile. First, though, additional reconnaissance was required to make sure there was enough targeting information to maximise the effectiveness of this missile. Then the coalition immediately started using Tomahawks against all known Iraqi chemical and nuclear facilities. Commanders felt it was important to destroy these strategic assets right away, before any diplomatic initiatives might be developed that would tie their hands.

The coalition also employed Tomahawks against long range targets in Baghdad. These missiles were so accurate that it proved possible to attack military targets in the city without disturbing civilian areas located next to them.

Such precision guided weapons were certainly the coalition’s strong suit in the air war. Alternative approaches were far less effective. For example, low level bombing attacks proved unnecessarily risky; the British quickly discovered this. In the first few days of the war, they attacked 40 different airfields with their Tornado fighters, bombing the runways both with cratering muni tions and delayed action mines. While many runways were destroyed, the cost was high. In 300 or so sorties, the British lost six Tornados to Iraqi anti-aircraft fire and, as a result, decided to discontinue these low level strikes.

This same disenchantment with the low level approach caused the US Air Force to move the F-16 fighter operation up to about 15,000 feet where they were immune to light AAA and man portable SAMs. However, as I can tell you from personal experience, no F-16 pilot has been trained to drop bombs from such an altitude. The result was that the F-16s dropped masses of bombs that were almost totally ineffective.

The weapons that did hit targets from these heights were the large, laser-guided bombs and infrared guided Maverick missiles. Many A-10 pilots, especially, preferred these heat sensitive missiles that equipped them to make nighttime strikes. In all, pilots used some 5,000 Mavericks in Desert Storm and achieved a remarkable success rate of about 85%.

Let us return for a minute to the comparison between such precision guided missiles and conventional bombs. During the war, coalition forces expended just 5,900 tons of the former, and some 85,000 tons of the latter, but the missiles were overwhelmingly effective, and the dumb bombs were really quite wasted (if we discount their purely psychological impact).

One of the most important lessons from the air war is that precision guided missiles really pay off. Certainly they are expensive, but not when you compare them with the costs incurred if you lose the aircraft and crew themselves.

An absolutely critical contributor was the AWACS (Airborne Warning and Control System) aircraft . Throughout most of the war, there were at least four AWACS planes flying on station at all times. The 45 crew members in each of these planes worked 12 hour shifts grappling with a major air traffic control problem. Relying on the AWACS’ situational displays, each controller was responsible for directing something like 25 aircraft. In some cases, controllers could relay data to pilots automatically using JTIDS, the Joint Tactical Information Distribution System. But in many other cases, it was necessary to rely primarily or exclusively on voice communication. Each AWACS controller had to operate four different voice channels and was often overloaded with the communications flow. All controllers experienced extreme difficulty directing the great numbers of aircraft assigned them.

Another workhorse intelligence aircraft was the TR-1, with its ASARS reconnaissance radar and supporting film systems. Images from the TR-1 were sent to special processing ground stations, then checked by the intelligence community, and finally used to assign targets to the appropriate pilots. Much of this assignment was done in “real time” -conveyed to pilots already in the air over a particular target. The TR-1 targeting was extremely accurate, as was proved in the air war again and again.

During the war, the coalition also had a chance to try out an experimental targeting system called “Joint Start” (Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System). This system, which consists of Hughes synthetic apertµre radars (SAR) mounted on both sides of a 707, is intended to be used primarily for moving target operations, for instance, when engaging a very active enemy army. At the beginning of the war, when the Iraqis were solidly dug in, Joint Start could not be used as effectively as late, when the Iraqis were in retreat.

Clearly, the biggest setback in this intelligence targeting area was in defending against the Scuds fired during the war and in trying to hunt down those in hiding.

The coalition’s theatre missile defense against these weapons actually went all the way back to the US. The satellite borne system the US has in place to warn it in case of a major Soviet strike did provide information about the Scud attacks. But unfortunately, this system could only tell when the missiles were being launched, not how many there were and where they were going. (Refer p. 32 Apr 91 AA).

Further, while the Patriot missile defense got very positive media coverage, it too was often less successful than military commanders would have liked. In an effort to get greater range out of the Scuds, the Iraqis extended the fuel tanks, and in doing so made improper welds that left the missiles vulnerable to break up when they came back down into the earth’s atmosphere. Thus, in some cases, the target acquired by the Patriot was not a single missile, but a large cloud of broken up missile parts. The defending missile could not distinguish the warhead from the rest of the debris and therefore could not score a genuine hit.

The coalition’s biggest difficulty with the Scuds, though, was in finding them in their hiding places. It mounted a massive air search that was not very successful, and that cut into efficiency drastically. In fact, during one period, about a third of all coalition air assets were tied up in the search for Scuds.

The coalition also deployed special ground forces in the search -8,000 from the US and substantial contingents from the UK and France as well. Many of these were working behind enemy lines looking for launchers. The hope was that, once launchers had been discovered, they could be “laser designated” as targets for our fighters. But this operation, too, fell disappointingly short of expectations.

One thing the Scud episode brings home vividly, I think, is that Saddam Hussein might have changed the whole outcome of this confrontation with Kuwait if he had possessed a real ballistic missile capability. All that Iraq or any other nation theoretically requires to elevate itself into a superpower is three such missiles: one to demonstrate capabilities, a second to aim at an enemy, and a third in hiding to discourage a preemptive strike. Suppose Saddam had waited a few years to move on Kuwait in order to achieve enough such capability so that he could threaten multiple NATO countries. Would President Bush still have been able to put together a consensus and a worldwide coalition to go after him? I think not.

Naval Operations

Let me now turn to naval operations. The US Navy, like the coalition air forces, was primarily engaged in an air campaign. Naval aircraft carried out almost 7,000 missions but were also forced to commit themselves to an unusually high proportion of purely defensive missions. Coalition commanders felt that they had to withhold many of these aircraft from the strike area and devote them to protecting carriers against surprise strikes, because losing a carrier would be politically disastrous. However, placing such a heavy emphasis on defense unquestionably sapped the Navy’s offensive horsepower.

Another problem was that US naval vessels had to deal with the handicap of being very distant from target areas by going to shallow water operations. It was a real act of courage to take a major carrier strike force directly into the Gulf. And, of course, the US Navy did not wholly escape the perils. One thing it learned is that it still does not have adequate ways of dealing with mines – weapons that cost almost nothing to employ, but are usually tremendously costly to have employed against you. The top line Aegis cruiser USS Princetown only sustained light damage, but the amphibious support helicopter carrier USS Tripoli was knocked out of the battle by a mine.

The Ground Assault

Let us move on now to consideration of the ground war. As many experts have noted, it was a brilliantly conducted operation. Taking a big gamble, General Schwarzkopf made a sudden change in his plan of attack, based on the fact that our tank forces were trained for mobility and fast strikes. Though he had his main strike forces arrayed just south of Kuwait, he decided at the last minute to move these hundreds of thousands of troops 500 kilometres to the west to make his major strike first north through central Iraq, then east into Kuwait.

The general set himself a prodigious task in logistics. For example, he was running 4,500 trucks constantly, 24 hours a day. These were going by checkpoints at the rate of up to 18 trucks per minute. Generally, the daunting ground traffic control challenge was met very well. The strike was so rapid as to create situations where fighting forces outdistanced their supplies. In some cases, helicopters leading the attack actually ran out of fuel and had no way to get new supplies. On the whole, however, this 100 hour ground strike, along with its support operations, was extraordinarily successful.

Schwarzkopf’s tactics also included the fake marine landing that has generated so much discussion. It is not surprising that US Marines should dislike being demoted to fictional status, but the general’s deception did succeed in tying up 10 Iraqi divisions in an area remote from the real scene of action. Besides, in any case, an amphibious assault may not have been a serious contender among options for the ground campaign, given the ever present danger of mines.

Probably the biggest problem of the ground war was the “friendly fire” casualties. There were too many cases in which confusion about targets led coalition troops to kill their own people. And these losses were highlighted in this war where the coalition suffered so few casualties from enemy fire. In response to these costly mistakes, some ad hoc steps were taken to create better identification methods, for instance putting phosphorus paint markings on troops. But clearly, better solutions are necessary. I believe that in the US, there will now be a con certed effort to develop reliable low cost identification systems for its ground forces.

On the success side of the ledger, in support of the whirlwind assault, many high tech systems turned in an outstanding performance. Large numbers of TOWs and other precision guided munitions were employed by ground troops very effectively. The coalition forces “owned the night,” thanks to the excellent infrared night vision systems in its tanks, Bradleys, Black Hawk and Apache helicopters and other fighting platforms.

Another key system was the Firefinder radar. The system enabled coalition forces to track and destroy Iraqi artillery so unerringly that before long, these guns were silenced by the mere threat of being tracked by Firefinder.

Also valuable for fire control and battle damage assessment were the significant numbers of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) relied on by coalition ground forces.

Successes and Challenges

After so full a survey of lessons learned, let me underscore five problem areas where the United States and its coalition partners need to improve their performance and five success areas where they demonstrated praiseworthy strengths that they must exploit and build on in future campaigns. The US and its coalition partners need to improve their airlift and especially sealift capabilities; they must ensureample communications links and must develop better procedures for intelligence evaluation; they need to devise technologies and battle strategies that will help them avoid “friendly fire” accidents; they need to find ways of providing sea and land forces with better protection against mines; and they need to make fast progress with the critical job of creating systems of defense against tactical ballistic missiles.

Among the many strengths revealed by the war were the admirable leadership capabilities of the coalition, both in diplomacy and military strategy; the amazing accuracy and revolutionary casualty reducing potential of precision guided missiles and bombs; the remarkableelusiveness, effectiveness and high cost saving potential of stealth aircraft; the sophisticated control capabilities that gave the coalition such an overwhelming advantage in the intelligence arena; and the impressive performance of. the Abrams tanks and Apache and Black Hawk helicopters and of the night vision equipment that enabled these key fighting systems to operate around the clock. □

James A Abrahamson, Executive Vice President for Corporate Development of Hughes Aircraft Company since 1989, was born in

1933. Earning degrees in aeronautical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Oklahoma, he joined the US Air Force in 1955 and later flew combat missions in South East Asia. A graduate of the Air Command and Staff College, he helped oversee satellite, spacecraft and missile programmes before serving for fiveyears as the first director of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) in the office of the Secretary of Defense and retiring with the rank of lieutenant general. A recipient of many US military decorations and three honorary doctorates in engineering, he has also been presented with royal orders by Belgium, the Netherlands and Norway.

This general overview of the Gulf War is being followed up with a more detailed three part feature in our Technology Explained series which will deal more specifically with the tactics and weapons that won the war so decisively. Don’t miss it!