The Air War verted other message traffic, and clogged the system. It was drawn up by General Horner’s staff, which was dominated by Air Force officers (calling into question the so-called joint nature of his command), and it followed Air Force doctrine. Each day’s tasking was planned days in advance, and Marines and sailors both felt the system would be unresponsive to the fast-paced changes the air campaign would require. The Navy was unhappy with the way the Air Force dominated the process, with Vice Admiral Stanley Arthur, General Boomer’s Navy counterpart, remarking after the war that “we’ve had many examples of . . . fleeting moments of opportunity, without being able to get back to them. We had an enemy that crumbled on us this time, but if we had an enemy that was very tough and a lot smarter, we can’t let those little windows of opportunity ever disappear.”40 In an interview from March 1991, Colonel Rietsch expressed the views of many Marines on the air tasking order: We were able to do our job in spite of the ATO [air tasking order] process and that’s really true. From the Air Force point of view this thing will probably come out as a big success—the ATO—because they are going to say “yes it worked.” Well, my answer: it worked— we did our job in spite of it. It was not flexible, [and] most days we got the ATO after the ATO day had already started. I mean we were launching airplanes before we got the ATO.41 The 3d Marine Aircraft Wing responded to the air tasking order’s flaws by “opting out.” The Marines stuffed the order with planned sorties, then cancelled or diverted them as needed on the day in question. This gave General Moore the flexibility he needed to respond to General Boomer’s priorities in preparing the Kuwaiti battlefield for the liberation.42
28 to 31 January On 28 January, 3d Marine Aircraft Wing lost its second aircraft when Captain Michael C. Berryman’s Harrier was shot down by an infrared surface-to-air missile. Flying with Marine Attack Squadron 311, Berryman was leading his section as they were diverted to an Iraqi rocket battery when he was hit. He ejected safely but was captured by the Iraqis, joining Acree and Hunter as the third Marine aviator captured in the war. Like them, he would be tortured and mistreated by the Iraqis. Unlike Acree and Hunter, the Iraqis did not publicly acknowledge Berryman was their prisoner until after the war. He
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was originally listed as missing in action and was presumed killed.43 Also on 28 January, Marine F/A-18s of Marine Aircraft Group 11 participated in a strike at a rocket fuel factory near Baghdad, the deepest penetration into Iraq by Marine aircraft during the Gulf War. The factory was heavily damaged, and none of the Hornets were damaged on the mission.44 Marines continued to hunt for III Corps headquarters, which they believed had been split between a permanent and a mobile headquarters. On 29 January, General Boomer was informed that an Iraqi prisoner of war claimed the headquarters was located at a racetrack. Marine intelligence officers in the 1st Surveillance, Reconnaissance, and Intelligence Group combined this and other collected information with reports from the Kuwaiti resistance, and they determined that the site of the headquarters was on a former military base in southern Kuwait and that a meeting for Iraqi officers was scheduled there for the evening of 31 January.45 The resulting air strike illustrates the way the Marines worked around the strictures of the air tasking order. Two A-6Es from Marine Aircraft Group 11 were taken from a cancelled JFACC mission and directed to strike the small building identified. They hit it with two laser-guided GBU-10 2,000-pound bombs, demolishing the target. The Marines believed they had killed General Salah Aboud Mahmoud, the III Corps commander, but this was not the case.* It is difficult to determine what exactly this strike hit; Iraqi sources do not describe any direct attacks on General Salah Aboud, but he did later say, concerning his headquarters in this period, that it “consisted of a small shelter and of a building that belonged to Kuwait’s Army. . . . It was badly damaged because the enemy had started attacking it daily. . . . There were many big impact craters from the bombs dropped at the entrance of the shelter. For the entrance, we had to provide signs from these roads to our entrance to avoid any unexploded ordnance.”46 As January came to a close, the 3d Marine Aircraft Wing had done considerable damage to the Iraqi military, but most of the damage had been done to strategic targets. Inside Kuwait itself there had been relatively few strikes, as the following chart indicates. *
It is strongly suggested on pages 51–52 in Col Charles Quilter II’s monograph U.S. Marines in the Persian Gulf, 1990–1991: With the I Marine Expeditionary Force in Desert Shield and Desert Storm that Gen Salah Aboud died in this strike. This is incorrect; the general was later present at the Safwan cease-fire talks and spoke often to the Iraqi War College in the mid-1990s.
