28 to 31 January

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

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 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.

Total Strikes in Kuwait, 1/17/91 to 2/1/91

Data culled from A Statistical Compendium and Chronology—Gulf War Air Power Survey, vol. 5 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1993), pp. 466–467 This chart shows the number of strikes by Coalition aircraft carried out each day against Iraqi forces in Kill Boxes AF6, AG6, AH6, AF5, AG5, AH5, AG4, and AH4. These kill boxes contained the Iraqi forces most likely to engage Marine ground forces. A strike is defined as a weapon employed by a single aircraft against a target. Aircraft often made multiple strikes on each sortie.

The end of the initial phase of the air campaign and 3d Marine Aircraft Wing’s decision to increasingly opt out of the air tasking order process resulted in an increase in missions into Kuwait from 24 January onward, with a sharp spike occurring on 31 January when Coalition aircraft caught a large convoy of Iraqi forces north of al-Khafji. Nonetheless, it would be fair to say that that Iraqi forces in Kuwait, in particular the III Corps and IV Corps, who were defending the area through which the Marines would be advancing, had not yet suffered a prolonged, broad, intensive air bombardment.

At the 28 January daily staff briefing, General Boomer expressed his frustration with the air campaign in Kuwait proper:

I don’t know how to address this very well because if you don’t feel it in your bones, it’s very hard for me to get the point across. But we are in a full-court press now for everything to be working, all of our assets to be utilized, and you can’t accept any bull s–––t reasons for why this can’t happen. . . . Time is getting short. Every sunlit day that we have we must take maximum advantage of it. Every asset must be up. I am concerned that we don’t have enough sorties today. . . . Our planning and our system should be such that their every pilot should fly today. . . . If they are not, it’s our fault; it’s our fault, pure and simple. That monkey’s on our back, guys, and the backs of the other staffs; the wing staff and the division staff. None of you are going through that wire; none of you are going through that breach system. I sense that if you were, then you wouldn’t be accepting some of these “nos.”

47

That is not to say that Coalition air power was not impacting those Iraqi units, however. It is true that the Iraqi entrenchments and decoys had been somewhat effective in minimizing damage, and very few of the Iraqi armored vehicles had been damaged or destroyed in the attacks. But vehicle readi-

Marine Corps Art Collection

Fly Over by Col H. Avery Chenoweth

ness was now a major issue for the Iraqis, mostly because the increase in Coalition flights from 24 January onward combined with the steady presence of Coalition aircraft over Kuwait kept the Iraqis hiding in their bunkers rather than performing needed maintenance. Iraqi supply vehicles were no longer able to move, so ammunition, food, and water were also beginning to become issues for the Iraqis. Iraqi commanders attributed this to the Coalition aircraft “flying continuously over our forces [just] beyond 75mm antiaircraft artillery range” rather than just “dropping bombs and leaving.” General Salah Aboud ascribed these difficulties to the destruction of his corps’ air defense command headquarters.

48

The Iraqis responded by employing innovative supply solutions such as slaughtering local cattle for food or collecting camels as an alternative method of supply transport. Vehicle maintenance, never an Iraqi strong suit, was shifted to the hours of darkness. Nevertheless, little could be done for the unit most heavily targeted during January, the III Corps’ artillery, which was “experiencing trouble with some of [its] artillery pieces due to [over]use or because [it] had been bombed.”49

One measure of the success of the campaign in Kuwait is that after the war, Iraqi War College studies focused heavily on defeating or avoiding air attacks. Burning oil fires, deception, decoys, and dispersal were all techniques that were tried in Kuwait and that the Iraqis would later perfect in the decade of tense peace following the war.

50

The success of the air campaign was also apparent on a more individual level. After the first week of bombing,the aforementioned anonymous Iraqi soldier made the following entry in his diary: “I haven’t slept a wink and I don’t know anything about my family. No news about them for seventeen days. I don’t know if they are safe and I don’t know about my brother Hussain who is in the Alexandria Institute or about my brother Abbas who is in the Air Force Supply and Transportation Unit. I pray to God that they may be safe.”

51

Despite the Scud distraction and the focus on strategic rather than operational targets, the air cam-

paign had an obvious and significant impact on Iraqi forces inside Kuwait. It isolated units from the national command authority; degraded troop morale; and made even simple movements difficult, often requiring days of detailed planning for routine operations. With its diplomatic options exhausted, and enduring the effects of an air campaign much longer than anticipated, Iraq began planning a large spoiling attack centered on the Saudi town of alKhafji on 29 January 1991. Now known as the Battle of al-Khafji, it was the first major ground combat action of the Gulf War.