2RHPZ
06-10-2004, 04:56 PM
COALITION SCUD-HUNTING IN IRAQ, 1991
THE STRATEGIC ENVIRONMENT
In late January 1991, Gulf War coalition leaders faced a major challenge they
had not anticipated at the beginning of the air campaign against Iraq. Saddam
Hussein had succeeded in deploying Scud missiles aboard mobile launchers, and on
January 18 he had initiated a series of attacks on Israel, Saudi Arabia, and
Bahrain. In strictly military terms, these low-accuracy, low-reliability weapons
had little utility as counterforce weapons. In a broader strategic sense,
however, the Scuds posed a major threat. Through his missile attacks, the Iraqi
leader hoped to shatter the fragile coalition created by the United States to
roll back Saddam Hussein?s August 1990 invasion. In attacking Israel, the Iraqi
leader also was bolstering his credentials in the Arab world as the "Zionist
entity´s" most effective and dedicated adversary.
The Scud attacks on Israel, it was feared, would provoke an Israeli military
response that would make it difficult for Arab states to remain a part of the
anti-Iraq coalition. As a matter of national policy, Israel was committed to
responding militarily to attacks on its territory. During the first week of the
attacks, 26 missiles were launched against Israel, and although they caused
relatively little destruction, they created a great deal of psychological unease
among the population and sparked widespread public demands for retaliation. An
Israeli response,
in all likelihood, would entail air strikes against Iraq, which would require
overflying Jordan, Saudi Arabia, or Syria. Leaders of the coalition feared that
the Arab members of the anti-Iraq force, including Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and
Syria, would then withdraw, thereby undercutting a crucial political and
diplomatic component of the war to drive Saddam Hussein?s forces from Kuwait.2
The Scud attacks on Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, while not as politically delicate
as those on Israel, nonetheless caused serious concern among coalition leaders,
who feared that they were intended to provoke the coalition into a premature
offensive.
The United States had taken a number of steps to persuade Israel not to enter
the conflict and fracture the coalition. These measures included the transfer of
two U.S. Army Patriot air defense batteries to Israel and a sustained air
campaign to destroy the remaining Scuds before they could be launched. However,
the Scuds proved to be extremely elusive targets; in the face of growing Israeli
determination to conduct its own Scud-hunting operations in Iraq, the United
States and its coalition partners considered new and more dramatic approaches to
the strategic challenge posed by Saddam Hussein?s ballistic missiles.
THE IRAQI SCUD THREAT
At the time of its invasion of Kuwait, Iraq had two versions of the Scud missile
in its inventory, the al-Hussein (also known as the al-Hosseih), with a range of
600?650 kilometers, and the al-Abbas (also called the al-Hijarah), which had a
750?900 kilometer range. Both were Iraqi modifications of the Soviet R-17
ballistic missile known as the SS-IC Scud B in North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (NATO) par-lance.4 Iraqi modifications, such as the reduction of
payload weight and a faster burn-rate for the missile?s fuel, which reduced its
inflight weight, were ingenious but resulted in a weapon that was less accurate and
less reliable than the original Soviet model.5 As a result, the Iraqi Scuds were
useful only as a terror weapon, as demonstrated during the 1980?1988 Iran-Iraq
War, when Baghdad launched a total of 203 Scuds against targets in Iran. The
attacks generated extensive panic in Iran?largely out of fear that the missiles
were loaded with chemical weapons?but they caused relatively little destruction.6
While militarily ineffective, the Scud launches created an important legacy. The
Iran-Iraq war developed within Saddam Hussein?s military a dedicated cadre of
experienced missile crews who had a demonstrated ability to fire missiles
against civilian targets.
At the time of the Persian Gulf War, the Iraqis had two means of launching the
Scuds: fixed launchers and mobile transporter-erec-tor-launchers (TELs).
According to intelligence estimates used by
U.S. military planners at the beginning of the air war against Iraq,Saddam
Hussein?s forces had 28 fixed launchers at five missile complexes in western
Iraq, as well as a number of training launchers in other parts of the country.8
More important from the point of view of the subsequent Scud hunt were the
mobile TELs employed by the Iraqis. These vehicles came in two forms: the
Soviet-made, eight-wheeled MAZ-543, and the Al Waleed, a modified civilian Saab-
Scania tractor-trailer.In addition, a large number of vehicles, including fuel
trucks and missile supply vehicles disguised as civilian buses,
supported the mobile launchers.
The Iraqi military went to great lengths to ensure that their country?s
adversaries were unable to determine the precise number or location of the
mobile TELs. High-fidelity decoys, some of East German origin, were widely
employed. Iraqi missile crew tactics and procedures, such as the extensive use
of gullies, wadis, culverts, and highway underpasses, were designed to thwart
aerial reconnaissance.11 Iraqi crews were able to operate from positions that
coalition military leaders had not expected, such as hardened shelters at air
bases and built-up areas. In addition, the Iraqis prepared protective, hidden
holding pens for the TELs along highways in western Iraq.12 Unknown to coalition
planners, the Iraqis, drawing on their experience in the war against Iran, had
shortened the Scud launch process in an effort to prevent post-launch detection.
Soviet R-17 crews typically took as long as 90 minutes to set up and fire their
missiles, but the Iraqis had managed to reduce the preparation and launch time
to under half an hour.13 The Iraqis were also careful to avoid emitting telltale
telemetry that could help an adversary locate the missile before it was
launched.
As a result of these deceptions, the United States and its coalition partners
were never able to get a complete picture of the missile and TEL inventory or
its location. By the time the war began, U.S. intelligence analysts had a good
understanding of the fixed Scud sites and their supporting infrastructure, such
as missile manufacturing plants and storage facilities. But U.S. analysts
remained uncertain about the locations of the mobile launchers, which the Iraqis
had dispersed before the start of the air campaign. The exact number of TELs was
also unclear. Estimates at the beginning of the war placed the figure at 36,
although a post-war Pentagon study concluded that this number was probably too
low.14 In the words of one senior Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) official,
there was ?no accurate accounting of numbers of mobile launchers or where they were
based [or] hiding.
AIR OPERATIONS AGAINST SCUDS
Coalition military planners had been well aware of the potential threat posed by
Iraq?s ballistic missiles. In mid-January 1990, during the opening days of the
Gulf War, a large number of sorties were directed at the fixed Scud launch sites
and at the manufacturing facilities that supported the missiles. But contrary to
coalition expectations, the Iraqis chose to rely exclusively on mobile
launchers. Further, the fixed sites hit on the night of January 16?17 were in
fact decoys intended to divert coalition attention away from the Scud TELs that
had already been dispersed to hidden locations.16
Poor weather conditions and Iraqi deception techniques made it extremely
difficult for coalition forces to detect and attack the dispersed TELs before
they launched their missiles. Instead, air commanders focused on destroying the
vehicles after they had launched their Scuds. Toward this end, the coalition
mounted combat air controls over so-called ?kill boxes? where TELs were
suspected.17 The kill boxes were located in two areas?western Iraq near the
Jordanian border, where the Scuds were fired at Israel, and southern Iraq, where
they were aimed at Saudi Arabia.18 Air commanders hoped that keeping aircraft on
station over the kill boxes would allow F-15E and F-16L strike aircraft to hit
the TELs after they had launched their weapons but before they had time to flee
to safety. 19 However, sensors aboard orbiting coalition aircraft, including
LANTIRN (Low Altitude Navigation and Targeting Infrared System for Night) and a
synthetic aperture radar, were unable to identify and acquire the TELs, whose
infrared and radar signatures were virtually indistinguishable from trucks and other
electromagnetic ?clutter? in the Iraqi desert and were relatively easy to mask.20
The maddeningly elusive nature of the Iraqi targets is illustrated dramatically
by the fact that on the 42 occasions during the war when orbiting strikers
visually sighted mobile TELs, in only eight instances were they able to acquire
the targets sufficiently well to release ordnance.21
MISSIONS OF SPECIAL OPERATIONS FORCES
It became increasingly apparent to the coalition?s senior military commanders
that finding and destroying the elusive mobile TELs demanded a new approach. The
use of conventional ground troops to hunt for Scuds had been rejected by JCS
Chairman General Colin Powell and General Norman Schwarzkopf, the commander of
U.S. Central Command. More recently, however, Israel had threatened to take
matters into its own hands and mount its own air and ground operations in
western Iraq. Washington refused to approve such operations, but the Israeli
proposal prompted U.S. Secretary of Defense **** Cheney to consider employing
special operations forces (SOF) to hunt for Scuds.22 British Special Forces, he
discovered, had been operating in western Iraq since January 20. Some of the
coalition?s senior military commanders, including Schwarzkopf, had long been
skeptical about the value of special operations, and was unenthusiastic about
using SOF for cross-border operations in Iraq. In Schwarzkopf?s judgment,
western Iraq, an area of roughly 29,000 square miles, was simply too large for a
ground force to search. As he explained at a January 20 press conference,
?there?s not much point putting people on the ground to try and find nine, maybe
ten trucks.? Nevertheless, Cheney approved a plan to send U.S. SOF personnel
across the Saudi Arabian border to hunt for Scud launch-ers.
On February 7, the first U.S. SOF teams began searching for mobile TELs in
western Iraq. American and British Special Forces?the Special Air Service
(SAS)?divided the responsibility for searching the region. U.S. personnel
operated in a several thousand square-mile area northwest of the main Baghdad to
Amman route up to the Syrian border. Known as ?Scud Boulevard,? the area
included Al Qaim, where it was suspected that the Iraqis were using phosphate
mines as hiding places for mobile TELs. The SAS squadrons were also assigned a
several thousand square-mile hunting ground, nicknamed ?Scud Alley,? that
stretched from an area around the H-2 airfield south of Highway 10 to the Saudi
border. American and British areas of operation are depicted in Figure 3.1.
Open sources contain relatively little operational information about
U.S. SOF activities in western Iraq. Some basic elements have emerged, however.
Operating at night, Air Force MH-53J Pave Low and Army MH-47E helicopters would
ferry SOF ground teams and their specially equipped four-wheel-drive vehicles
from bases in Saudi Arabia to Iraq. The SOF personnel would patrol during the
night and hide during the day. When targets were discovered, Air Force Combat
Control teams accompanying the ground forces would communicate over secure
radios to Airborne Warning and Control
Figure 3.1 Coalition SOF Areas of Operation
System (AWACS) aircraft, which would in turn communicate with orbiting F-15E and
A-10 aircraft loaded with cluster munitions and 1000-lb bombs.28
Given Britain?s traditional penchant for official secrecy, it is ironic that far
more information is available about SAS activities in western Iraq. Since the
end of the Persian Gulf War, memoirs by former members of the SAS, as well as
senior military commanders, have revealed many of the details surrounding
Special Forces missions against Iraq?s mobile TELs. Because British and American
special operations forces were striving to achieve similar objectives in similar
terrain, it is probably safe to use British sources for insights into coalition
special operations in general. Having said that, however, it is important for us
to recognize that significant differences existed. American units generally had
superior equipment and better intelligence about their targets. In addition,
U.S. SOF were much more numerous, which allowed their commanders to rotate them
out after their missions, which typically lasted a week or ten days. Relatively
fewer British forces, combined with an organizational ethos that stressed long-term
insertions, meant that SAS missions tended to be far longer.
Like their American counterparts, eight-man SAS teams were flown in Chinook
helicopters into Iraq under the cover of darkness from forward operating bases
in Saudi Arabia. Most patrols went in with modified Land Rovers known as
?pinkies.? However, as noted by Lt. General Sir Peter de la Billi?re, the senior
British commander, SAS patrol members have a tradition of great operational
autonomy, and at least two teams chose to patrol on foot. Upon landing at the
target area, one of those teams, after quickly surveying the flat terrain,
concluded that it would be impossible to hide adequately, and insisted on being
helicoptered out. Most of the second team, which patrolled on foot for several
days, was ultimately captured by the Iraqis.
During the day, SAS personnel would hide in carefully camouflaged ?lying up
positions? in wadis, gullies, or other spots where detection by Iraqi troops
would be difficult. The desert, ostensibly empty, was in fact populated with
Bedouin goat herders and their families, who were scattered throughout the Scud
alley operational area. The risk of compromise by the tribesmen was a major
concern for the SAS before and during their missions. Although some troopers
favored killing any Bedouins they encountered, a ?hearts and minds? approach
prevailed.31 At night, aboard the pinkies, patrol members would search the
desert for mobile TELs. Whereas American teams on the ground were given daily
intelligence updates about potential targets, SAS teams had only the most
general indication of where a Scud launcher might be found. Their primary source
of intelligence was their own eyesight. In the words of one SAS staff sergeant,
Scuds were usually launched at night and gave a huge signature, a great big ball
of light. You could see the fireball at the base of the motor from thirty miles
away across flat open desert, and that gave us an indication of where to look.
The launcher would be moved immediately after firing, but if you looked at the
layout of the roads and interpreted it intelligently you could generally pick up
where the launcher was going to be.
However, navigation across the desert proved to be a major challenge. Fog,
sandstorms, and cold made it extremely difficult for even a force as well
trained and experienced as the SAS to cover much ground. The flat, featureless
terrain, with no reference points, also created significant obstacles to the
effective use of maps, and because of cloud cover, there was little or no ambient
light in the desert at night, making night-vision devices relatively useless. From
open sources, it is difficult to determine precisely how much ground a vehicle could
cover in any given evening.
However, a former SAS member describes his horror one morning
upon discovering how little his patrol had traveled during the previous night.
One of his fellow SAS members urged the patrol to cover at least 80 kilometers
the following evening, suggesting that the distance they had traveled the night
before had been considerably less.
When targets were discovered, SAS team members would call in USAF strike
aircraft using TACBE radio distress beacons. At first there were no established
procedures for calling in air strikes, and the SAS teams had to use the
emergency ?guard? radio frequency to talk to the pilots.38 In an effort to
improve command and control, communications procedures were established, and SAS
liaison officers eventually were assigned to the U.S./coalition Tactical
Aircraft Control Center (TACC) in Riyadh, the nerve center of the air cam-paign.39
After the SAS teams found a target, their messages were relayed to the TACC,
which would transmit the information to orbiting AWACS aircraft. The AWACS, in
turn, would communicate with strike aircraft on combat air control?typically, A-10s
during the day and F-15Es at night. Despite these improved command and control
measures, however, the time between target identification by the ground teams
and the delivery of ordnance by the strike aircraft was 50 minutes or more,
roughly on par with the U.S. experience during operations along the Ho Chi Minh
Trail.
Like their MACVSOG predecessors, SAS personnel did more than find targets and
call in air strikes. They were multipurpose forces, capable of taking direct
action, conducting BDA on targets previously hit by coalition aircraft, and
capturing Iraqi prisoners. Teams destroyed fiber-optic
links that carried targeting data for the Scud missile crews, and used plastic
explosives to blow up microwave relay towers and communications bunkers.44
Frustrated with the relatively long delays involved in calling in air strikes,
SAS troopers also attacked Iraqi vehicles and other targets directly, usually at
night. Using thermal imagers, the teams employed shoulder-fired Milan missiles
to engage Iraqi mobile TELs. As the Iraqis began moving Scud-related equipment
in 10- to 20-vehicle convoys as a defensive measure, SAS teams mounted ambushes
using bar mines and bulk explosives.
ASSESSING THE EFFECTIVENESS OF THE SCUD HUNT
In the immediate aftermath of the war, British and American political and
military leaders announced that coalition operations had effectively neutralized
the Scud threat. Senior U.S. SOF officers claimed that U.S. teams operating in
western Iraq were responsible for the destruction of as many as a dozen mobile
TELs. A year after the war?s end, however, Pentagon officials began expressing
public doubt about the number of Scud TELs actually eliminated by coalition
forces. In the words of Pete Williams, the assistant secretary of defense for
public affairs, there was ?no accurate count of how many mobile launchers had
been destroyed.? The Pentagon?s postwar study on Gulf air operations, the Gulf
War Air Power Survey, concluded that sensor limitations on coalition aircraft,
combined with highly effective Iraqi tactics, resulted in relatively few mobile
launcher kills. According to the report, a few [TELs] may have been destroyed, but
nowhere near the numbers reported during the war . . . .
[T]here is no indisputable proof that Scud mobile launchers?as opposed to high-
fidelity decoys, trucks, or other objects with
Scud-like signatures?were destroyed by fixed-wing aircraft.
The postwar UN Special Commission (UNSCOM) established to eliminate Saddam
Hussein?s weapons of mass destruction discovered substantial evidence that the
coalition had destroyed far fewer missiles and mobile TELs than had originally
been claimed. Despite the coalition?s Scud-hunting campaign, Saddam Hussein,
according to UNSCOM, retained a significant postwar capability of 62 complete Al
Hussein missiles, 12 MAZ 543 TELs, and seven Al-Nidal and Al-Waleed mobile
launchers.
In the face of such skepticism about earlier claims of effectiveness, defenders
of the special operations against the Scud threat put forward a new argument.
Instead of focusing on the question of how many Scuds or mobile TELs had been
killed, supporters now stressed the deterrent effect of coalition operations. As
de la Billi?re explained during a television interview after the war, the
counter-Scud missions
really denied the Iraqi Scuds the capability of deploying sufficiently close to
Israel to launch their weapons effectively . . . . I?m quite confident that
[absent such operations] the Scuds would have gone on operating despite the
massive air superiority that we possessed.
The combination of special operations and air strikes, according to this view,
created pressure on mobile TEL crews, forcing them to continuously seek new
launch sites and slowing their rate of fire.
To be sure, launch rates did decline over the life of the Scud-hunting campaign.
During the course of the war, Iraq fired a total of 88 extended-range Scuds
against targets in Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain. A total of 33 launches
took place during the opening week of Desert Storm, a daily rate of 4.7
launches. During the remaining 36 days of the conflict, the Iraqis fired 55
missiles, bringing the daily launch rate down to 1.5. As impressive as this
lower rate sounds, however, it must be considered in context. While it is true
that Scud firings dropped during the third and fourth week, they began to increase
during the final week of the conflict. Iraq, according to a March 1990 DIA
assessment, had the ability even in the last days of the war to ?initiate
firings from new launch areas and to retarget . . . from urban to military and
high-value targets.
What this suggests is that after initially being hindered by coalition anti-Scud
activities, the Iraqis managed to adapt to the pressure created by these
operations. (By the same token, however, it seems fair to conclude that had
the war continued, allied SOF also might have learned to adapt to and overcome
some of Iraqi?s countermeasures.) The pattern of Iraqi launches over time also
calls into question the operational effectiveness of the Scud-hunting missions.
Coalition SOF searched for mobile TELs in western Iraq, the region from which
Scuds were fired at Israel. However, the presence of large numbers of Iraqi
troops kept SOF teams out of the southernmost part of Iraq, the area from which
Scuds were launched at Saudi Arabia. After the first week of the war, the Iraqi
launch rate for missiles directed at Israel was roughly the same as the rate for
those fired at the Arab states.
In other words, the Iraqis fired their missiles at the same rate
regardless of whether SOF were operating in the launch area. Thus, on the
tactical and operational level, it would appear that the special operations in
western Iraq did not achieve their objective of eliminating, or seriously
reducing, the Scud threat. The Iraqis? use of decoys and other deception
techniques, the quick-fire ?shoot and scoot? capabilities of the Scud crews,57
and sensor and other technical shortfalls, plus the vast amount of terrain
special operations personnel were expected to cover, combined to frustrate and
undermine the coalition?s Scud-hunting mission.
On the strategic level, however, the coalition SOF can claim much more success.
The British and American teams were sent in response to a grave challenge to the
continued Arab participation in the coalition formed to respond to Iraq?s
aggression against Kuwait. In the judgment of the Bush administration in
Washington and the Conservative government in London, continued Scud attacks
were likely to bring Israel into the war, which would cause the Arab members to
defect from the coalition. Such an outcome, in the view of Washington and
London, would cause major strategic and political problems for the coalition,
and would seriously degrade its ability to prosecute the war against Saddam
Hussein.
To assuage Israel, coalition leaders pledged to send its best trained, most
experienced, and most elite ground forces to hunt for the Scuds in western Iraq.
The fact that Washington and London made this SOF commitment, and employed the
coalition?s most advanced reconnaissance and strike aircraft, including the F-15E,
appears to have convinced Tel Aviv that an Israeli military response against
Saddam Hussein was unnecessary. The coalition held, and the way was paved for the
liberation of Kuwait. Thus, while not reaching their tactical or operational
objectives?beyond perhaps the goals of harassing Iraqi TEL crews?SOF
were useful in achieving higher strategic objectives that ultimately served to
drive Saddam Hussein from Kuwait.
THE STRATEGIC ENVIRONMENT
In late January 1991, Gulf War coalition leaders faced a major challenge they
had not anticipated at the beginning of the air campaign against Iraq. Saddam
Hussein had succeeded in deploying Scud missiles aboard mobile launchers, and on
January 18 he had initiated a series of attacks on Israel, Saudi Arabia, and
Bahrain. In strictly military terms, these low-accuracy, low-reliability weapons
had little utility as counterforce weapons. In a broader strategic sense,
however, the Scuds posed a major threat. Through his missile attacks, the Iraqi
leader hoped to shatter the fragile coalition created by the United States to
roll back Saddam Hussein?s August 1990 invasion. In attacking Israel, the Iraqi
leader also was bolstering his credentials in the Arab world as the "Zionist
entity´s" most effective and dedicated adversary.
The Scud attacks on Israel, it was feared, would provoke an Israeli military
response that would make it difficult for Arab states to remain a part of the
anti-Iraq coalition. As a matter of national policy, Israel was committed to
responding militarily to attacks on its territory. During the first week of the
attacks, 26 missiles were launched against Israel, and although they caused
relatively little destruction, they created a great deal of psychological unease
among the population and sparked widespread public demands for retaliation. An
Israeli response,
in all likelihood, would entail air strikes against Iraq, which would require
overflying Jordan, Saudi Arabia, or Syria. Leaders of the coalition feared that
the Arab members of the anti-Iraq force, including Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and
Syria, would then withdraw, thereby undercutting a crucial political and
diplomatic component of the war to drive Saddam Hussein?s forces from Kuwait.2
The Scud attacks on Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, while not as politically delicate
as those on Israel, nonetheless caused serious concern among coalition leaders,
who feared that they were intended to provoke the coalition into a premature
offensive.
The United States had taken a number of steps to persuade Israel not to enter
the conflict and fracture the coalition. These measures included the transfer of
two U.S. Army Patriot air defense batteries to Israel and a sustained air
campaign to destroy the remaining Scuds before they could be launched. However,
the Scuds proved to be extremely elusive targets; in the face of growing Israeli
determination to conduct its own Scud-hunting operations in Iraq, the United
States and its coalition partners considered new and more dramatic approaches to
the strategic challenge posed by Saddam Hussein?s ballistic missiles.
THE IRAQI SCUD THREAT
At the time of its invasion of Kuwait, Iraq had two versions of the Scud missile
in its inventory, the al-Hussein (also known as the al-Hosseih), with a range of
600?650 kilometers, and the al-Abbas (also called the al-Hijarah), which had a
750?900 kilometer range. Both were Iraqi modifications of the Soviet R-17
ballistic missile known as the SS-IC Scud B in North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (NATO) par-lance.4 Iraqi modifications, such as the reduction of
payload weight and a faster burn-rate for the missile?s fuel, which reduced its
inflight weight, were ingenious but resulted in a weapon that was less accurate and
less reliable than the original Soviet model.5 As a result, the Iraqi Scuds were
useful only as a terror weapon, as demonstrated during the 1980?1988 Iran-Iraq
War, when Baghdad launched a total of 203 Scuds against targets in Iran. The
attacks generated extensive panic in Iran?largely out of fear that the missiles
were loaded with chemical weapons?but they caused relatively little destruction.6
While militarily ineffective, the Scud launches created an important legacy. The
Iran-Iraq war developed within Saddam Hussein?s military a dedicated cadre of
experienced missile crews who had a demonstrated ability to fire missiles
against civilian targets.
At the time of the Persian Gulf War, the Iraqis had two means of launching the
Scuds: fixed launchers and mobile transporter-erec-tor-launchers (TELs).
According to intelligence estimates used by
U.S. military planners at the beginning of the air war against Iraq,Saddam
Hussein?s forces had 28 fixed launchers at five missile complexes in western
Iraq, as well as a number of training launchers in other parts of the country.8
More important from the point of view of the subsequent Scud hunt were the
mobile TELs employed by the Iraqis. These vehicles came in two forms: the
Soviet-made, eight-wheeled MAZ-543, and the Al Waleed, a modified civilian Saab-
Scania tractor-trailer.In addition, a large number of vehicles, including fuel
trucks and missile supply vehicles disguised as civilian buses,
supported the mobile launchers.
The Iraqi military went to great lengths to ensure that their country?s
adversaries were unable to determine the precise number or location of the
mobile TELs. High-fidelity decoys, some of East German origin, were widely
employed. Iraqi missile crew tactics and procedures, such as the extensive use
of gullies, wadis, culverts, and highway underpasses, were designed to thwart
aerial reconnaissance.11 Iraqi crews were able to operate from positions that
coalition military leaders had not expected, such as hardened shelters at air
bases and built-up areas. In addition, the Iraqis prepared protective, hidden
holding pens for the TELs along highways in western Iraq.12 Unknown to coalition
planners, the Iraqis, drawing on their experience in the war against Iran, had
shortened the Scud launch process in an effort to prevent post-launch detection.
Soviet R-17 crews typically took as long as 90 minutes to set up and fire their
missiles, but the Iraqis had managed to reduce the preparation and launch time
to under half an hour.13 The Iraqis were also careful to avoid emitting telltale
telemetry that could help an adversary locate the missile before it was
launched.
As a result of these deceptions, the United States and its coalition partners
were never able to get a complete picture of the missile and TEL inventory or
its location. By the time the war began, U.S. intelligence analysts had a good
understanding of the fixed Scud sites and their supporting infrastructure, such
as missile manufacturing plants and storage facilities. But U.S. analysts
remained uncertain about the locations of the mobile launchers, which the Iraqis
had dispersed before the start of the air campaign. The exact number of TELs was
also unclear. Estimates at the beginning of the war placed the figure at 36,
although a post-war Pentagon study concluded that this number was probably too
low.14 In the words of one senior Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) official,
there was ?no accurate accounting of numbers of mobile launchers or where they were
based [or] hiding.
AIR OPERATIONS AGAINST SCUDS
Coalition military planners had been well aware of the potential threat posed by
Iraq?s ballistic missiles. In mid-January 1990, during the opening days of the
Gulf War, a large number of sorties were directed at the fixed Scud launch sites
and at the manufacturing facilities that supported the missiles. But contrary to
coalition expectations, the Iraqis chose to rely exclusively on mobile
launchers. Further, the fixed sites hit on the night of January 16?17 were in
fact decoys intended to divert coalition attention away from the Scud TELs that
had already been dispersed to hidden locations.16
Poor weather conditions and Iraqi deception techniques made it extremely
difficult for coalition forces to detect and attack the dispersed TELs before
they launched their missiles. Instead, air commanders focused on destroying the
vehicles after they had launched their Scuds. Toward this end, the coalition
mounted combat air controls over so-called ?kill boxes? where TELs were
suspected.17 The kill boxes were located in two areas?western Iraq near the
Jordanian border, where the Scuds were fired at Israel, and southern Iraq, where
they were aimed at Saudi Arabia.18 Air commanders hoped that keeping aircraft on
station over the kill boxes would allow F-15E and F-16L strike aircraft to hit
the TELs after they had launched their weapons but before they had time to flee
to safety. 19 However, sensors aboard orbiting coalition aircraft, including
LANTIRN (Low Altitude Navigation and Targeting Infrared System for Night) and a
synthetic aperture radar, were unable to identify and acquire the TELs, whose
infrared and radar signatures were virtually indistinguishable from trucks and other
electromagnetic ?clutter? in the Iraqi desert and were relatively easy to mask.20
The maddeningly elusive nature of the Iraqi targets is illustrated dramatically
by the fact that on the 42 occasions during the war when orbiting strikers
visually sighted mobile TELs, in only eight instances were they able to acquire
the targets sufficiently well to release ordnance.21
MISSIONS OF SPECIAL OPERATIONS FORCES
It became increasingly apparent to the coalition?s senior military commanders
that finding and destroying the elusive mobile TELs demanded a new approach. The
use of conventional ground troops to hunt for Scuds had been rejected by JCS
Chairman General Colin Powell and General Norman Schwarzkopf, the commander of
U.S. Central Command. More recently, however, Israel had threatened to take
matters into its own hands and mount its own air and ground operations in
western Iraq. Washington refused to approve such operations, but the Israeli
proposal prompted U.S. Secretary of Defense **** Cheney to consider employing
special operations forces (SOF) to hunt for Scuds.22 British Special Forces, he
discovered, had been operating in western Iraq since January 20. Some of the
coalition?s senior military commanders, including Schwarzkopf, had long been
skeptical about the value of special operations, and was unenthusiastic about
using SOF for cross-border operations in Iraq. In Schwarzkopf?s judgment,
western Iraq, an area of roughly 29,000 square miles, was simply too large for a
ground force to search. As he explained at a January 20 press conference,
?there?s not much point putting people on the ground to try and find nine, maybe
ten trucks.? Nevertheless, Cheney approved a plan to send U.S. SOF personnel
across the Saudi Arabian border to hunt for Scud launch-ers.
On February 7, the first U.S. SOF teams began searching for mobile TELs in
western Iraq. American and British Special Forces?the Special Air Service
(SAS)?divided the responsibility for searching the region. U.S. personnel
operated in a several thousand square-mile area northwest of the main Baghdad to
Amman route up to the Syrian border. Known as ?Scud Boulevard,? the area
included Al Qaim, where it was suspected that the Iraqis were using phosphate
mines as hiding places for mobile TELs. The SAS squadrons were also assigned a
several thousand square-mile hunting ground, nicknamed ?Scud Alley,? that
stretched from an area around the H-2 airfield south of Highway 10 to the Saudi
border. American and British areas of operation are depicted in Figure 3.1.
Open sources contain relatively little operational information about
U.S. SOF activities in western Iraq. Some basic elements have emerged, however.
Operating at night, Air Force MH-53J Pave Low and Army MH-47E helicopters would
ferry SOF ground teams and their specially equipped four-wheel-drive vehicles
from bases in Saudi Arabia to Iraq. The SOF personnel would patrol during the
night and hide during the day. When targets were discovered, Air Force Combat
Control teams accompanying the ground forces would communicate over secure
radios to Airborne Warning and Control
Figure 3.1 Coalition SOF Areas of Operation
System (AWACS) aircraft, which would in turn communicate with orbiting F-15E and
A-10 aircraft loaded with cluster munitions and 1000-lb bombs.28
Given Britain?s traditional penchant for official secrecy, it is ironic that far
more information is available about SAS activities in western Iraq. Since the
end of the Persian Gulf War, memoirs by former members of the SAS, as well as
senior military commanders, have revealed many of the details surrounding
Special Forces missions against Iraq?s mobile TELs. Because British and American
special operations forces were striving to achieve similar objectives in similar
terrain, it is probably safe to use British sources for insights into coalition
special operations in general. Having said that, however, it is important for us
to recognize that significant differences existed. American units generally had
superior equipment and better intelligence about their targets. In addition,
U.S. SOF were much more numerous, which allowed their commanders to rotate them
out after their missions, which typically lasted a week or ten days. Relatively
fewer British forces, combined with an organizational ethos that stressed long-term
insertions, meant that SAS missions tended to be far longer.
Like their American counterparts, eight-man SAS teams were flown in Chinook
helicopters into Iraq under the cover of darkness from forward operating bases
in Saudi Arabia. Most patrols went in with modified Land Rovers known as
?pinkies.? However, as noted by Lt. General Sir Peter de la Billi?re, the senior
British commander, SAS patrol members have a tradition of great operational
autonomy, and at least two teams chose to patrol on foot. Upon landing at the
target area, one of those teams, after quickly surveying the flat terrain,
concluded that it would be impossible to hide adequately, and insisted on being
helicoptered out. Most of the second team, which patrolled on foot for several
days, was ultimately captured by the Iraqis.
During the day, SAS personnel would hide in carefully camouflaged ?lying up
positions? in wadis, gullies, or other spots where detection by Iraqi troops
would be difficult. The desert, ostensibly empty, was in fact populated with
Bedouin goat herders and their families, who were scattered throughout the Scud
alley operational area. The risk of compromise by the tribesmen was a major
concern for the SAS before and during their missions. Although some troopers
favored killing any Bedouins they encountered, a ?hearts and minds? approach
prevailed.31 At night, aboard the pinkies, patrol members would search the
desert for mobile TELs. Whereas American teams on the ground were given daily
intelligence updates about potential targets, SAS teams had only the most
general indication of where a Scud launcher might be found. Their primary source
of intelligence was their own eyesight. In the words of one SAS staff sergeant,
Scuds were usually launched at night and gave a huge signature, a great big ball
of light. You could see the fireball at the base of the motor from thirty miles
away across flat open desert, and that gave us an indication of where to look.
The launcher would be moved immediately after firing, but if you looked at the
layout of the roads and interpreted it intelligently you could generally pick up
where the launcher was going to be.
However, navigation across the desert proved to be a major challenge. Fog,
sandstorms, and cold made it extremely difficult for even a force as well
trained and experienced as the SAS to cover much ground. The flat, featureless
terrain, with no reference points, also created significant obstacles to the
effective use of maps, and because of cloud cover, there was little or no ambient
light in the desert at night, making night-vision devices relatively useless. From
open sources, it is difficult to determine precisely how much ground a vehicle could
cover in any given evening.
However, a former SAS member describes his horror one morning
upon discovering how little his patrol had traveled during the previous night.
One of his fellow SAS members urged the patrol to cover at least 80 kilometers
the following evening, suggesting that the distance they had traveled the night
before had been considerably less.
When targets were discovered, SAS team members would call in USAF strike
aircraft using TACBE radio distress beacons. At first there were no established
procedures for calling in air strikes, and the SAS teams had to use the
emergency ?guard? radio frequency to talk to the pilots.38 In an effort to
improve command and control, communications procedures were established, and SAS
liaison officers eventually were assigned to the U.S./coalition Tactical
Aircraft Control Center (TACC) in Riyadh, the nerve center of the air cam-paign.39
After the SAS teams found a target, their messages were relayed to the TACC,
which would transmit the information to orbiting AWACS aircraft. The AWACS, in
turn, would communicate with strike aircraft on combat air control?typically, A-10s
during the day and F-15Es at night. Despite these improved command and control
measures, however, the time between target identification by the ground teams
and the delivery of ordnance by the strike aircraft was 50 minutes or more,
roughly on par with the U.S. experience during operations along the Ho Chi Minh
Trail.
Like their MACVSOG predecessors, SAS personnel did more than find targets and
call in air strikes. They were multipurpose forces, capable of taking direct
action, conducting BDA on targets previously hit by coalition aircraft, and
capturing Iraqi prisoners. Teams destroyed fiber-optic
links that carried targeting data for the Scud missile crews, and used plastic
explosives to blow up microwave relay towers and communications bunkers.44
Frustrated with the relatively long delays involved in calling in air strikes,
SAS troopers also attacked Iraqi vehicles and other targets directly, usually at
night. Using thermal imagers, the teams employed shoulder-fired Milan missiles
to engage Iraqi mobile TELs. As the Iraqis began moving Scud-related equipment
in 10- to 20-vehicle convoys as a defensive measure, SAS teams mounted ambushes
using bar mines and bulk explosives.
ASSESSING THE EFFECTIVENESS OF THE SCUD HUNT
In the immediate aftermath of the war, British and American political and
military leaders announced that coalition operations had effectively neutralized
the Scud threat. Senior U.S. SOF officers claimed that U.S. teams operating in
western Iraq were responsible for the destruction of as many as a dozen mobile
TELs. A year after the war?s end, however, Pentagon officials began expressing
public doubt about the number of Scud TELs actually eliminated by coalition
forces. In the words of Pete Williams, the assistant secretary of defense for
public affairs, there was ?no accurate count of how many mobile launchers had
been destroyed.? The Pentagon?s postwar study on Gulf air operations, the Gulf
War Air Power Survey, concluded that sensor limitations on coalition aircraft,
combined with highly effective Iraqi tactics, resulted in relatively few mobile
launcher kills. According to the report, a few [TELs] may have been destroyed, but
nowhere near the numbers reported during the war . . . .
[T]here is no indisputable proof that Scud mobile launchers?as opposed to high-
fidelity decoys, trucks, or other objects with
Scud-like signatures?were destroyed by fixed-wing aircraft.
The postwar UN Special Commission (UNSCOM) established to eliminate Saddam
Hussein?s weapons of mass destruction discovered substantial evidence that the
coalition had destroyed far fewer missiles and mobile TELs than had originally
been claimed. Despite the coalition?s Scud-hunting campaign, Saddam Hussein,
according to UNSCOM, retained a significant postwar capability of 62 complete Al
Hussein missiles, 12 MAZ 543 TELs, and seven Al-Nidal and Al-Waleed mobile
launchers.
In the face of such skepticism about earlier claims of effectiveness, defenders
of the special operations against the Scud threat put forward a new argument.
Instead of focusing on the question of how many Scuds or mobile TELs had been
killed, supporters now stressed the deterrent effect of coalition operations. As
de la Billi?re explained during a television interview after the war, the
counter-Scud missions
really denied the Iraqi Scuds the capability of deploying sufficiently close to
Israel to launch their weapons effectively . . . . I?m quite confident that
[absent such operations] the Scuds would have gone on operating despite the
massive air superiority that we possessed.
The combination of special operations and air strikes, according to this view,
created pressure on mobile TEL crews, forcing them to continuously seek new
launch sites and slowing their rate of fire.
To be sure, launch rates did decline over the life of the Scud-hunting campaign.
During the course of the war, Iraq fired a total of 88 extended-range Scuds
against targets in Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain. A total of 33 launches
took place during the opening week of Desert Storm, a daily rate of 4.7
launches. During the remaining 36 days of the conflict, the Iraqis fired 55
missiles, bringing the daily launch rate down to 1.5. As impressive as this
lower rate sounds, however, it must be considered in context. While it is true
that Scud firings dropped during the third and fourth week, they began to increase
during the final week of the conflict. Iraq, according to a March 1990 DIA
assessment, had the ability even in the last days of the war to ?initiate
firings from new launch areas and to retarget . . . from urban to military and
high-value targets.
What this suggests is that after initially being hindered by coalition anti-Scud
activities, the Iraqis managed to adapt to the pressure created by these
operations. (By the same token, however, it seems fair to conclude that had
the war continued, allied SOF also might have learned to adapt to and overcome
some of Iraqi?s countermeasures.) The pattern of Iraqi launches over time also
calls into question the operational effectiveness of the Scud-hunting missions.
Coalition SOF searched for mobile TELs in western Iraq, the region from which
Scuds were fired at Israel. However, the presence of large numbers of Iraqi
troops kept SOF teams out of the southernmost part of Iraq, the area from which
Scuds were launched at Saudi Arabia. After the first week of the war, the Iraqi
launch rate for missiles directed at Israel was roughly the same as the rate for
those fired at the Arab states.
In other words, the Iraqis fired their missiles at the same rate
regardless of whether SOF were operating in the launch area. Thus, on the
tactical and operational level, it would appear that the special operations in
western Iraq did not achieve their objective of eliminating, or seriously
reducing, the Scud threat. The Iraqis? use of decoys and other deception
techniques, the quick-fire ?shoot and scoot? capabilities of the Scud crews,57
and sensor and other technical shortfalls, plus the vast amount of terrain
special operations personnel were expected to cover, combined to frustrate and
undermine the coalition?s Scud-hunting mission.
On the strategic level, however, the coalition SOF can claim much more success.
The British and American teams were sent in response to a grave challenge to the
continued Arab participation in the coalition formed to respond to Iraq?s
aggression against Kuwait. In the judgment of the Bush administration in
Washington and the Conservative government in London, continued Scud attacks
were likely to bring Israel into the war, which would cause the Arab members to
defect from the coalition. Such an outcome, in the view of Washington and
London, would cause major strategic and political problems for the coalition,
and would seriously degrade its ability to prosecute the war against Saddam
Hussein.
To assuage Israel, coalition leaders pledged to send its best trained, most
experienced, and most elite ground forces to hunt for the Scuds in western Iraq.
The fact that Washington and London made this SOF commitment, and employed the
coalition?s most advanced reconnaissance and strike aircraft, including the F-15E,
appears to have convinced Tel Aviv that an Israeli military response against
Saddam Hussein was unnecessary. The coalition held, and the way was paved for the
liberation of Kuwait. Thus, while not reaching their tactical or operational
objectives?beyond perhaps the goals of harassing Iraqi TEL crews?SOF
were useful in achieving higher strategic objectives that ultimately served to
drive Saddam Hussein from Kuwait.