Storm On The Horizon Khafji-the Battle That Changed The Course Of The Gulf War

The Persian Gulf Theater, Winter 1991 I calculated that it is only by a counterstrike that one can disrupt the enemy's preparation for a new offensive. To force the enemy to take the offensive earlier than at the time which he had set is more advantageous for us than to sit and wait until he is fully prepared. Soviet General Vassili I. Chuikov, remarks regarding the Soviet offensive at Stalingrad, October 1942. Early on the morning of January 17, 1991, the multinational Coalition arrayed against Saddam Hussein kicked off an air campaign the likes of which the world had never seen. Capitalizing on nearly two decades of unprecedented American techno-military advancement, the execution of such a wide-reaching surgical campaign signaled a revolution in warfare. Conceived by a top secret U.S. Air Force planning cell known as Checkmate and its iconoclastic leader, Colonel John Warden, this air assault made use of a ground-breaking new class of weapons technologies developed in the years after the Vietnam War. Unlike the comparatively crude carpet-bombing campaigns of World War II and Vietnam, this operation, portentously named Instant Thunder, was designed to systematically demolish Saddam's leadership structure without leveling Iraq's cities along with it. What made Instant Thunder unique, however, was not just the technology it exploited but the extreme discretion with which it was prosecuted: Rather than try to methodically kill off every arm of the vast Iraqi war machine, Instant Thunder zeroed in on the Iraqi central nervous system: its electrical grid, its telecommunications networks, its radar installations, its command-and-control nodes, leaving Saddam's vaunted armored divisions to die on the vine. Taken as a whole, Warden's audacious plan seemed as much an argument to prove the supremacy of airpower as it was an attempt to force Saddam out of Kuwait. Handpicked to fire the opening salvos of this new war was a four-ship flight of Apache helicopter gunships from the Army's 101st Airborne. Piercing Iraqi airspace just after 2:00 a.m., they unleashed a volley of Hellfire missiles into a key battery of Iraqi radar dishes poised on the Saudi border, opening the door to flights of electronic jamming aircraft and Stealth fighters. Wave upon wave of American aircraft soon thundered over Baghdad, unleashing their deadly cargo, in some cases near waiting television cameras. And as CNN floated these images around the world, the war began to take on the queer character that has since become fixed in the public imagination, that of spectral bridges, buildings, and tanks being silently obliterated as if by magic on a million television screens, of antiaircraft fire arcing gracefully into the Iraqi sky. Thus the illusion of virtual war was born. After a week of round-the-clock bombing, Saddam was nearly blind, deaf, and dumb as his telecommunications and command networks were decimated. Nevertheless, Saddam was far from defeated, and the air campaign, while strikingly effective, left plenty to be desired as far as ground commanders were concerned. The practical problem with this new war was that it was focused so intently upon the fat targets in central Iraq that it left much of the Iraqi army dispersed throughout Kuwait totally unmolested. Ten days into the landmark campaign, at which point American Stealth fighters were essentially operating at will over Baghdad, the Iraqi tanks and howitzers across the berm from the Marines were practically untouched. As Colonel Manfred A. Rietsch, a Marine air group com- mander noted, "We weren't able to concentrate on the areas that affected our Marines. There were certain areas where there was a lot of enemy activity that appeared to be untouched by the JFACC [U.S. Air Force headquarters in Saudi ArabiMorris, David is the author of 'Storm On The Horizon Khafji-the Battle That Changed The Course Of The Gulf War', published 2005 under ISBN 9780345481535 and ISBN 0345481534.