Posted on 05/13/2003 8:48:17 AM PDT by Stand Watch Listen
On the opening night of Operation Iraqi Freedom, Lt. Cmdr. Curtis Goodnight stood on the bridge of the USS Bunker Hill, a Navy cruiser with a hull full of Tomahawk missiles, and nervously rocked from foot to foot as if just getting his sea legs. Occasionally, the ship's No. 2 officer glanced over the shoulders of junior naval officers as they studied green and orange radar screens that blinked with the ship's location in the upper reaches of the Persian Gulf. Mostly, though, he just listened to the radio traffic crackling over the intercom from a windowless command center directly below the bridge--waiting for orders that would start the war."They've haven't served us our targets yet," Goodnight said as the hour slipped past 4 a.m., nearly two hours after the ship's captain told his more than 300-person crew to prepare for missile launches. Normally, the crew can launch Tomahawks within an hour of a strike's being called. Profanities about delays could be heard over the intercom; Goodnight went from rocking to pacing. Only a handful of the ship's officers knew it at the time, but the delays resulted from battle plans' being scrapped and redrawn based on near-real-time intelligence coming from Baghdad. The Central Intelligence Agency believed it had Saddam Hussein in its sights. The Bunker Hill's missiles were being redirected to the Iraqi president's suspected hideout.
Finally, at 5:15 a.m., amid an explosion of flames and smoke, two missiles emerged from the ship's rear, shaking the 9,500-ton vessel and lighting up the ocean with the bright blue color of a welder's torch. The missiles paused overhead for three seconds, almost appearing to have petered out, before their navigation systems kicked in with a loud pop. The upright rockets then flattened out as they shot across the sea, trailing flaming debris. Within 10 seconds, the Tomahawks were out of sight. In short order, two more missiles streaked away into the early-morning sky.
The war had begun.
At first glance, this was a rerun of the 1991 U.S. war against Iraq. In Operation Desert Storm, the Bunker Hill also launched the Navy's first strikes from the sea. But the differences end there. Retired Rear Adm. Thomas Marfiak, who captained the Bunker Hill during the 1991 Gulf War, says it would have taken weeks to redraw battle plans back then. "We just did not have the technology; we could not have responded so quickly," he says.
The Pentagon's opening gambit of the war illustrates just how far the Navy has come during the past decade. In the 1991 Gulf War, the Navy played a secondary role to Air Force and ground forces because of limited and slower communications systems, poor joint planning, and technological shortfalls in both its fighter planes and bombs. Twelve years later, the Navy says it has addressed those shortcomings. As a result, it played a greater role in this war and has created a model for fighting in future joint operations.
By at least two measures, the Navy's role in Iraq has been larger this time than it was in 1991. As of mid-April (when two of the five aircraft carriers in the region began heading home as Baghdad fell), the Navy had flown about half of the campaign's 15,000 air-strike sorties. In 1991, by comparison, it flew less than a quarter of all strike missions. Additionally, the Navy has fired more than 800 Tomahawk missiles, more than double the nearly 300 fired in the 1991 war. "The Navy has done a lot more this time," says Ronald O'Rourke, a naval analyst for the Congressional Research Service.
Navy Capt. Mark Fox, commander of the air wing based on the USS Constellation aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf during Operation Iraqi Freedom, says that better and faster coordination among the services is a key difference between today and 1991. In the first war, an airplane carrying a computer disk with the day's air missions would make daily runs to all the aircraft carriers in the region. Nowadays, Fox just checks his e-mail for the air plan. "Today, we are far better at having electronic means [of communicating] as opposed to carrier-pigeon-type airplanes flying and helicopters delivering the tasking orders," says Fox. "It's hard to remember that in 1991 we had no e-mail."
Quicker joint communication leads to better targeting information, Fox adds. During the recent war, e-mail and the more-advanced instant-messaging system moved information almost seamlessly from the Combined Air Operations Center at Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia to carriers in the Gulf and to command-and-control aircraft coordinating strike packages. During Operation Iraqi Freedom, it was not uncommon for aircraft to change their targets in mid-mission, based on real-time information flowing up from ground forces.
In the cramped operations center aboard the Constellation, Marine Corps pilot Lt. Col. J.R. Woods had no shortage of tools for monitoring and coordinating the air campaign. On his computer screen, he monitored e-mail and five real-time instant-message chat rooms that linked him to other ships in the battle group, to other carriers in the region, and to the air operations center. On the wall, there's a satellite phone that was used for the most urgent, mission-specific requests. "The biggest change [in communications] in the past five years has been the ability to chat," Woods says.
But perhaps the greatest advance has come from improvements in the bombs that pilots drop during missions. Although no final study of battle damage in the war is yet available, "The evolution of precision air-strike technology greatly improved coalition capabilities," says Anthony Cordesman, a defense analyst for the Center for Strategic and International Studies, in a recent report titled The "Instant Lessons" of the Iraq War. About three-quarters of the ordnance dropped by Navy pilots in Iraqi Freedom was guided by either lasers or the Global Positioning System, compared with less than 10 percent in Operation Desert Storm, Navy officials say.
Navy Capt. Craig Geron, deputy commander of the Constellation air wing during Iraqi Freedom, says that precision weapons have greatly lessened the number of air missions that have to be flown, because a single aircraft loaded with bombs and missiles can now take out multiple targets. In earlier conflicts, several aircraft armed with less-accurate bombs were used to take out one target, he says.
The Joint Direct Attack Munition, a "dumb" 1,000- or 2,000-pound gravity bomb outfitted with a strap-on GPS kit, was the weapon of choice during the war because of its accuracy and because it could be dropped in any kind of weather, including through clouds. "With GPS, I don't even have to look out the cockpit," says Geron, noting that the targeting process he goes through is fairly simple. Before a mission, he preprograms a data card that contains the longitude and latitude coordinates for a target. He then plugs that card into his cockpit dashboard; when a display screen tells him he's within range of the target, he hits a button to release a JDAM, and the bomb guides itself to the target. The weapon's accuracy rate topped more than 90 percent in Iraq, and thousands of such bombs were dropped, says Navy Capt. Bob Wiert, the service's program manager for JDAM.
Precision-guided weapons also allowed Navy and Air Force fliers to provide more close-air support to ground troops than in the 1991 Persian Gulf War. In particular, the bombs permitted fixed-wing aircraft to fly more missions in urban areas, because military targets could be hit with less risk of causing collateral damage to nonmilitary sites or killing civilians. Still, the Air Force flew most of the close-air support missions, something that Navy and Marine pilots privately grumble about because they train extensively in such missions.
The evolution of aircraft technology has allowed naval aviators to expand their role. During the 1991 war, the Navy could outfit only A-6 aircraft with precision-guided weapons, and it had only 12 of these planes on each aircraft carrier. Now, aircraft upgrades allow most of the 70-plus planes on an aircraft carrier, including F-14 Tomcats and F-18 Hornets, to roar off the deck with the smart munitions hanging from their bomb racks. And for the first time, a Navy S-3B Viking, a submarine-hunting aircraft now used primarily for aerial refueling, fired a laser-guided missile in combat, destroying targets near Basra.
One problem Navy pilots faced in the 1991 Gulf War remains: a shortage of fuel caused by having too few refueling airplanes. "For a fighter pilot, there's never enough gas. They can always use more," said Vice Adm. Timothy Keating, the commander of naval forces in the Persian Gulf, at a press briefing last month. The General Accounting Office estimated in 2000 that the armed services were about 20 percent short of the number of aerial tankers they needed. In the Iraq war, U.S. air refuelers had flown more than 7,500 sorties by mid-April and had delivered more than 46 million gallons of fuel.
In some cases, particularly for aircraft flying off carriers in the Mediterranean Sea, strike missions early in the campaign had to be aborted because the planes simply did not have enough fuel to reach their targets in Iraq. Originally, pilots had expected to rely on tanker planes based in Turkey, but restrictions on basing U.S. forces there scuttled that option. One temporary fix for the Navy was to take ordnance off some F-18 Super Hornets, add fuel, and send them up as "buddy" tankers to other F-18s that were going in for the strikes.
Concerns were also raised about the Navy's Tomahawk cruise missiles, which cost $1 million apiece. Unlike those used in the first Gulf War, the latest version of the missile uses GPS, but it is a "fire-and-forget" weapon, which means its course cannot be corrected if the missile goes awry. During Iraqi Freedom, wayward missiles landed in Turkey and Saudi Arabia, and one even misfired near its launcher--the destroyer John S. McCain in the Persian Gulf--nearly hitting the deck before turning end over end into the sea. Keating told reporters that the Tomahawks' failure rate--those missiles that failed to hit their targets--was less than 10 percent. A new version of the Tomahawk is due out next year that will allow in-flight changes.
Countermine operations received a mixed review as well, because it took sailors several days to clear Iraq's only deepwater port in Umm Qasr for humanitarian ships. Mine experts, however, say that the work is painstakingly slow: All underwater objects that resemble a mine must be treated like one until proved otherwise, and then detonated or secured. "Even if we find 999 mines and a ship hits one, we didn't do our job," says Lt. Cmdr. John McKelvy, a countermine officer in the Persian Gulf during the war. Mine experts call the waters around Umm Qasr particularly challenging, because strong currents limited the time Navy divers could be in the water.
Back on the Bunker Hill on the first night of the war, Goodnight stretched his long, lanky frame over the side of a narrow catwalk along the ship's bridge and seemed to breath a sigh of relief as each of the 13 Tomahawks soared into the sky. On a lower deck, enlisted crewmembers cheered and snapped keepsake photos with disposable cameras purchased from the ship's store. Goodnight shouted the "all clear" after successful launches of the missiles. "Happy trails," he said. The same could be said for the Navy's role in the second war with Iraq.
George Cahlink, an associate editor of Government Executive magazine, was embedded on several ships during the war.
He got to the new plans after deleting 20 spam messages and 15 viruses ("Lengthen your penis", "Viagra sampler", "Of Our Service", etc.).
This represents a huge revolution in warfare. There's still a need for close air support, certainly, but what this says is that we basically have the ability to take out stationary targets at will.
What it also says is that if we ever fight an equal, we'd damned well better be prepared to gain and keep air superiority. I don't know if we've got the equipment and pilots to do that right now.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.