Marines and the Air Tasking Order

You feel like you’re just barely hanging in there, coming straight down. It seems like straight down. You pickle off your bombs and then pull off. . . . You’re at 550 knots at 60 degrees nose down so the pull off is really just: “Ugh, how low am I going to go on this bottom out!?” Of course that’s when you start worrying about getting back up above 10,000 feet and getting the flares off on the climb out so they don’t catch you with a cheap shot on the way out.

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Iraq’s broadest response to the air campaign was to “hunker down” and simply outlast the onslaught, preserving what it could for after the campaign rather than attempting to defeat Coalition air power. On 21 January, Saddam ordered his air defenses to “maintain the weapons and equipment and to cut down on the use of ammunition.” Saddam had determined that “the enemy is planning to shorten the battle, which we planned to prolong, the opposite of their expectation. Therefore, according to our calculations, the most important requirements of the long war are to conserve everything.”

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In Kuwait, the common Iraqi soldier was unsure what to believe. Aside from the border artillery units and the air defense sites, there had been relatively few strikes on Iraqi targets in Kuwait proper. There were rumors about the Coalition’s air attacks but few facts, and rumor ran rampant in a military that treated official news as suspect. One young Iraqi soldier serving in the III Corps kept a diary that was found abandoned after the war. His entry for the fourth day of the campaign illustrates the uncertainty the bombing of Iraq was producing in the soldiers in Kuwait:

One says they have destroyed Baghdad and demolished it and another says there is no water, electricity or telephone lines. Some of them turn the world black in your eyes. Others come to pacify you saying nothing has happened there—they have only bombed the military installations. Others say they have bombed the civilian buildings. You don’t know who to believe and who is lying. All news [reports] are hallucinations. They are all lying. The truth is lost.

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The missions were increasingly familiar and that familiarity was also a danger. Colonel Jones described how he warned his Harrier pilots to stay focused and avoid flying too aggressively as the air war continued: “There’re no bad guys in the wire. There’s no reason to be pressing the attack. There’s no reason to get down and expose you or your aircraft to damage.” He added that “this part of the war really was mechanical and it was basically go in high and find the target, take it out, go home, come back and do it again.”

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A more direct warning of the dangers of routine came in the form of two friendly fire incidents. On 23 January, an Air Force A-10 strafed Marines at Observation Post 6; luckily there were no casualties. On 24 January, a convoy of 1st Force Reconnaissance Company driving near Observation Post 2 on the Saudi-Kuwaiti border was repeatedly strafed by an Air Force A-10. Two vehicles were damaged, and a Marine and a sailor were wounded. General Walter Boomer responded to this incident—the first involving casualties—by shifting the fire support coordination line several thousand meters farther into Kuwait and placing Marine liaison officers with the Air Force’s A-10 squadrons.

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Also on 24January, the only known Iraqi offensive air sorties of the war occurred when a pair of Iraqi Dassault Mirage F-1s attacked the Saudi oil terminal of Ras Tanura. They were targeted by Marine MIM-23 medium-range surface-to-air missiles but were both shot down by a Saudi Arabian F-15C’s AIM-9 Sidewinder air-to-air missiles.

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Multiple strikes were launched by Marine aircraft against the Iraqi III Corps’ headquarters. Captain Stout flew in one on 24 January that left the place “in a shambles.” On 25 January, Marine aircraft destroyed the Ahmadi ammunition storage facility; the resulting smoke pillar rose to 30,000 feet. A later strike against III Corps headquarters was postponed after the Iraqis began pumping oil into the Persian Gulf. The strike was diverted to destroying the pumps at the refinery in an attempt to slow the flow of the oil.

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As part of Saddam’s plan to try and preserve his forces and endure the air assault, on 26 January he ordered the Iraqi Air Force to start fleeing to Iran, where the aircraft might sit out the war unharmed by Coalition attacks. Many Iraqi aircraft made the dash over the coming weeks, but neither aircraft nor crews returned to Iraq after the war in significant numbers.

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Under the pressure of combat, the differences between Air Force and Marine Corps air doctrine began to strain the agreement reached in September. As noted in chapter 4, the Air Force used its control of the air tasking order to control targeting

Reprinted from Edward J. Marolda and Robert J. Schneller Jr., Shield and Sword: The United States Navy and the Persian Gulf War (Washington, DC: Naval Historical Center, Department of the Navy, 1998), p. 239

“Kill boxes” allowed the Coalition aircraft to hunt in predesignated regions in search of targets of opportunity.

priorities, thus attempting to control the use of all air power in the region. The Air Force saw no problems with this approach and felt the Marine worries were groundless. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Deptula explained this way: “Their [the Marines’] concern is so dogmatic that we want to take their air away from them, and that’s not true. . . . If they get into a major ground battle, or a ground battle period, we’re not going to hold that air away from them. That’s the way they act, and that’s why they kept their AV-8s, which is fine. We had enough F-16s to compensate.”

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Despite the Air Force’s confidence, there were problems during the Gulf War in targeting priorities; the Air Force invariably gave a higher priority to targets inside Iraq itself, or to air defense targets. And those sorties that were not aimed at Air Force priority targets were distributed to the Army corps as well as to General Boomer’s Marines. This led to targets that directly targeted Marine priorities getting postponed or denied. For example, General Boomer’s staff tried multiple times to get the headquarters of the Iraqi III Corps on the “JFACC”* targeting list, but it never made passed muster as a “strategic” target. Instead, the Marines targeted it with the sorties withheld from the joint forces air component commander by the September agreement. Because the first three days were dominated by JFACC sorties (aside from Harrier close air support missions for Marines under fire), the Iraqi corps headquarters was not targeted for days.

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Another issue lay with the daily air tasking order itself, which was several hundred pages long each day. It overwhelmed the communication facilities of the Marine (and Navy) units that needed it, di-

*

JFACC (pronounced “Jay-Fack”) is short for “Joint Forces Air Component Commander.” It was used as slang in the Marine headquarters to designate targets and sorties that were generated by Air Force Gen Horner’s staff, rather than those generated by the Marine staff.