Gulf War lessons, learned or not
A rainbow breaks over an American M1/A1 Abrams tank during exercises last month near the Iraqi border in Kuwait. The realities of war are seldom this pretty.
NEW YORK, Jan. 6 — The Gulf War is remembered as a walkover by many Americans — a late 20th-century blitzkrieg. In reality, the U.S. military had a legion of troubles in the 1990-91 conflict, many of which caused unnecessary deaths to allied troops and Iraqi civilians alike. Other tragedies were averted merely by luck or Iraqi incompetence. What new tactics, technologies and procedures are in place today to ensure that some of the worst mistakes of the first Gulf War will not be repeated in a second Iraq war?
THE GULF WAR of popular
memory bears little resemblance to the one fought by the United States and its
allies against Iraq, then touted as “the fourth-largest army in the world.” By
the end of the war, media-savvy U.S. military spokesmen were deriding the Iraqi
forces as “the second-largest army in Iraq.”
In 1993, John Keegan, the world’s pre-eminent military historian, called
the war “a triumph of incisive planning and almost faultless execution.” Colin
Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the first war and now secretary
of state, concluded in his 1995 biography that even though Saddam Hussein
remained in power, “the remaining Iraqi army is hardly a force with a will to
fight to the death.”
Quick conclusions now look time-worn.
The larger, strategic
questions now seem self-evident:
Did the United States tilt too far toward Saddam’s Iraq during the Cold War?
Should the United States have pressed on to Baghdad in 1991?
Would U.S. troops still be in Saudi Arabia today — the main issue animating al-Qaida
— if Washington had supported the anti-Saddam uprisings by Iraqi Kurds and
Shiites that followed the war?
AFTER ACTION REPORTS
These are questions for politicians and academics, not soldiers. But the
Gulf War spawned in each branch of the U.S. military a serious round of
soul-searching about mistakes that had cost lives - its own and those of Iraqi
non-combatants. Friendly fire claimed 24 percent of all Americans killed in
action, and more British troops fell to U.S. weapons than to Iraqi ones. Entire
airwings became dependent on amphetamines, the “go pills” doled out to keep
pilots alert on long missions. Two huge Navy warships were nearly sunk by Iraqi
mines, exposing the fleet’s inadequate mine countermeasures. Disputes over the
effectiveness of attacks on Iraqi divisions bedeviled air war commanders.
Tragic errors in target selection and bombs that simply missed their
intended targets caused civilian deaths that briefly threatened the coalition.
And miscalculations about the effects of vaccines, the vindictiveness of Iraq’s
occupying forces and the Iraqi Republican Guard’s determination to survive also
had serious consequences: Gulf War Syndrome, the world’s largest ever oil spill
and a failure to defang Saddam’s army when the chance arose.
FAUX PAS AND FIXES
In interviews with
a range of officers and military analysts, MSNBC.com asked a simple question:
What were the biggest tactical mistakes and lessons of the Gulf War, and what
has been done to fix them?
“FRIENDLY FIRE:” As dire as the statistics sound — 35 of the 146
Americans killed in action were killed by their own comrades — military officers
regard the figure as relatively low. “You have to put the number of friendly
casualties in context,” says Jack Jacobs, a retired Army colonel who received
the Medal of Honor during the Vietnam War. “Anything larger than zero is a lot.
But with so few casualties overall, the friendly fire number seems large. The
reality is, it is a lot lower than it would have been for a similar operation in
Vietnam or World War II.”
Still, the military — at least in part because of the incidents involving
American forces killing British troops — grappled with ways of further reducing
the number during the 1990s. One clear advantage today, according to Bill
Martel, a professor at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I., is that American
forces now have Global Positioning Satellite devices — GPS for short — which
should make their locations more “knowable” to their comrades.
Retired Air Force Maj. Gen. Perry Smith notes that a “battlefield
coordination detachment” has been added to the Combined Air Operations Center
that would call the shots in any new Iraq air war.
No one pretends these systems are flawless. During the Afghan campaign,
for instance, a special forces soldier gave his own GPS coordinates rather than
the coordinates of the target to a B-52 crew, with tragic results. In another
instance, Canadian troops were killed in an incident still under investigation.
“I don’t think there’s any technological silver bullet that will make
friendly fire events go away,” Martel says. “How do you employ tens if not
hundreds of thousands of people in combat and eliminate human error? You can’t.
How can you prevent someone from entering the wrong GPS coordinates? You can’t.”
But at least GPS will give U.S. forces some improvement. For the British,
who expect to send up to 30,000 troops to the Gulf, there has been little done,
according to Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Larpent, who commanded a unit that lost 9
men to American fire in the last war.
“Why is it that our soldiers again will have nothing better to protect
them than some very rudimentary system that we used without success back then?”
he asked in a letter Sunday to a British newspaper.
THE ‘AL-FIRDOS’ BUNKER:
On Feb. 13, 1991, two Stealth fighters received orders to hit a hardened
shelter in Baghdad that U.S. intelligence had identified as a “command and
control bunker.” The Air Force’s desire to hit sites related to Saddam’s ability
to wage war had led intelligence officers to suggest this target several times —
and each time it had been rejected for lack of evidence that it was, in fact, a
military target. The bunker strike was approved after an Iraqi CIA asset
confirmed it was a key military bunker. In fact, while debate still rages over
the Iraqi military’s use of the bunker, the two bombs dropped through its
reinforced roof incinerated more than 200 civilians (the Iraqis claimed the
number was far higher).
The growing percentage of “precision” munitions in the U.S. military
arsenal may diminish the number of civilians killed by missed targets. Andy
Krepinevich, a military analyst at the Center Strategic and Budgetary Priorities
in Washington, notes that only 7 percent of bombs dropped in the Gulf War were
“smart” bombs. “About 35 percent were precision munitions in Kosovo, and that
climbed to about 60 percent last year in Afghanistan,” he says. “The figure may
be close to 80 percent if an Iraq war happens.”
Still, the “targeting error” problem — the one that chose Al Firdos for
destruction — has haunted the Air Force ever since. In Kosovo, a Stealth bomber
dropped a bomb on the Chinese Embassy after the CIA and DIA failed to coordinate
data on what was in the building. A Red Cross headquarters in Kabul and a
wedding party in northern Afghanistan suffered similar fates.
“I think there have been strides made in the relationship between
intelligence agencies and battlefield commanders,” says Gen. Perry Smith. “But
you’re going to have an occasionally goof like that because of human error or a
lack of real close coordination between agencies. In a 30-day war of the kind
being discussed, there will be at least one. That’s just the way it is.”
SCUD HUNTING: The effort to detect and destroy mobile Scud
missiles, in retrospect, received too little attention, according to Smith.
“Schwartzkopf was not a big special forces fan. We had them but didn’t use them
that widely,” the general says. “We learned a lesson; we learned we could not do
this from the air.”
In fact, Schwartzkopf authorized the British SAS to begin hunting Scuds
two days before the ground war began. He later agreed to allow the U.S. Delta
Force to join them. Not one Scud launcher was destroyed.
“Now, after Afghanistan, we have a large number of special forces, better
equipped and with better sensors. Reconnaissance drones, too, will play a role,
lingering over areas and swooping down.”
So-called UCAVS - Unmanned Combat Air Vehicles like the Hellfire
missile-firing Predator — also makes it more likely that “real-time”
intelligence can be harvested. “They may not be able to knock out a Scud
launcher,” the general says, “but they can keep it busy while the F-16s are on
the way.”
ANTI-MISSILE DEFENSE:
When Scuds were launched, “day of” accounts told a breathless tale of triumph,
all built around the idea that Patriot missiles based in Israel and Saudi Arabia
had killed most, if not all, incoming Scuds.
“After the war, we examined those claims, and as it turned out, they
killed a few or possibly even no Scuds completely,” Smith says. Late in the war,
that reality became painfully clear when a single Scud slammed into a crowded
U.S. barracks in Dharan, Saudi Arabia, killing 28, mostly U.S. Air National
Guard troops.
Since then, there have been two major developments. One is a
new-generation Patriot PAC-3, designed to hit oncoming warheads, rather than
merely destroying the missile and leaving the warhead to follow its own altered
but still deadly trajectory.
The second is a joint U.S.-Israeli program that developed a whole new
system: the Arrow anti-missile system. Israel now fields a dozen batteries of
these missiles, which, unlike the last-ditch Patriots, are designed to intercept
Scuds in their launch mode, far away from targeted cities. “We should now be
able to shoot down somewhere in the neighborhood of two-thirds of oncoming
missiles,” Smith predicts. “Of course, it only takes a single missile with a
chemical warhead to change the geopolitics. But this is a huge advance over
where we were 12 years ago.”
MEDICAL ISSUES: Beyond the obvious dangers of a battlefield, the
military found itself criticized harshly after the Gulf War on two fronts:
inadequately preparing troops for exposure to dangerous chemicals — including
biological and chemical weapons — and overusing amphetamine “Go Pills” used by
pilots to stay alert on long missions.
Lawyer, Air Force doc
disagree on amphetamine’s effect January 3, 2003 — The lawyer for a U.S. Air Force pilot who mistakenly bombed Canadian troops, killing 4, says the pilot’s judgment was impaired by Air Force-issued amphetamines used to ward off fatigue. A USAF medical doctor disagrees. |
During the war, Washington Post reporter Rick Atkinson
reported in his book, “Crusade,” pilots of the 53rd Tactical Air Squadron based
at Al Kharj, Saudi Arabia, became psychologically addicted to the pills. The
pace was so ferocious, Atkinson reports, that an effort by the squadron’s
commander to ban the pills had to be abandoned. In
Afghanistan, two pilots involved in a friendly fire incident involving Canadian
troops recently claimed their judgment was impaired by “go pills” they were
required to take, a charge the Air Force denies. Perry, the retired Air Force
general and a former fighter pilot himself, says the long distances needed to
reach the battlefield in Afghanistan may be partly to blame. “That should not be
a major issue in Iraq,” he says.
More serious is the Gulf War Syndrome issue. Soon after the war, U.S. and
British troops began complaining of debilitating symptoms. There still is no
scientific agreement on what causes the illnesses, which range from joint pains
to memory loss to partial paralysis. Some blame the bio-warfare vaccinations
administered before the war. Others wonder whether destroying stocks of Iraqi
chemical or biological agents might have done it, or even exposure to the oil
fires that raged. Whatever the cause, reports from the GAO and the Institute of
Medicine and a variety of other sources blame the Defense Department for not
taking the issue seriously, for attempting to deny the existence of the issue
and ultimately for failing to safeguard troops.
Given the uncertain root of the problem, experts say, there is no
certainty that a second rash of such illnesses can be avoided. However, the
military’s stock of protective chem-bio suits, and its ability to detect such
agents, is vastly improved.
MINE WARFARE: Few now remember, but during operations intended to
trick Iraq into believing that U.S. Marines would land in Kuwait, two major Navy
vessels - the Aegis cruiser U.S.S. Princeton and the amphibious assault ship
U.S.S. Tripoli - very nearly were sunk by Iraqi mines. Since that incident,
according to CBSA’s Krepinevich, mine warfare officers have tried without
success to get a major modernization of the World War II-vintage minesweeping
fleet.
“This is one place where progress is almost nil,” he says. “This is not a
glamorous use of funds, obviously, and it is a problem that hasn’t been
addressed.”
The sinking of a cruiser or one of the aircraft carrier-sized amphibious
assault ships would not have changed the course of the war but might well have
changed the public’s perspective of it.
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