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By Commander William J. Luti, U.S. Navy
One of the central aspects of Desert Storm aviation success has gone virtually unnoticed. In the budget-crunching now in Progress at the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill, electronic warfare—waged here by an EA-6B from the John F. Kennedy and Equipped with jamming transmitter pods— should garner more of the spotlight.
In February 1991, Soviet Colonel Mikhail Ponomarev wrote: "The use of radio-electronic combat is for the First time in the history of warfare being used in such a wide scale that it has seriously complicated the conduct of air defense.” The colonel was referring, of course, to the masterfully orchestrated joint electronic battle waged over the skies of Iraq by elements of U.S. Navy and Air Force electronic combat forces.
Because of its clandestine nature, the full story behind this extraordinary and sophisticated joint effort to dismantle Saddam Hussein’s air defense system has yet to be told. Now, as fiscal deficits force us to make painful decisions regarding the future size and mix of our combat forces, it remains imperative that this unseen, almost invisible portion of the air campaign not be relegated to the combat category of little-noticed nor long-remembered.
The history of warfare is replete with instances of decisive battles being waged and won with breakthroughs in tactics and technology. From the longbow at Agincourt, and to the tank in World War I, right on through to the use of radar in World War II, the adroit blending of tactics and technology has often proved decisive on the battlefield. In the Gulf War, however, allied forces took command of the skies over Iraq within hours of the opening salvos of Desert Storm and for the next 43 days pounded away at will at Iraq’s warmaking infrastructure.
This relentless aerial onslaught has strategists and pundits pondering the titillating possibility that a shift in the nature and conduct of modem warfare has taken place, elevating air power to the decisive factor in achieving military and political objectives. While the jury is still out on the Billy Mitchell, Giulio Douhet, “Boom” Trenchard, et al. school of strategic air power, little doubt remains that air power proved vital, if not quite decisive, in the defeat of Iraq and the liberation of Kuwait.
This of course begs the question of how the United States was able to achieve this stunning aerial supremacy against an air-defense system touted to be twice as sophisticated and lethal as the one found in eastern Europe at the height of the Cold War. Was it merely the overwhelming nature of the allied air campaign itself? Or was it a deficiency in Iraqi doctrine, equipment, morale, or even training? Was there an enabling factor—a silver bullet—that allowed the United States to beat down an air- defense system surrounding Baghdad that was seven times more lethal than the one encountered around Hanoi at the height of the Vietnam War?
The answer, quite simply, lies in the years of hard work and training that the U.S. Navy and Air Force have devoted to perfecting the war-fighting mission—of blinding enemy air defenses so strikers can get to the target. Just as overall command of the air is a precondition for taking and holding enemy territory, overall command of the electromagnetic environment is a precondition for taking and holding enemy airspace. The electronic battle waged over the skies of Iraq gives new meaning to the recently coined aphorism that he who controls the ether, controls the air.
Once the lethal combination of jamming, high-speed antiradiation missiles (HARMs), decoys. Tomahawk land attack missiles (TLAMs), and precision-guided weapons sufficiently suppressed Iraqi air defenses, allied aircraft were free to strike targets virtually at will throughout Iraq.
Iraqi aircraft were effectively grounded in their shelters by the elaborate U.S. joint electronic suppression of enemy air defense (SEAD) system. With Iraqi communications jammed, U.S. strike fighters had little coordinated opposition en route to their targets.
The Electronic Battle Plan
The allied electronic battle plan rested on the simple premise that the systematic destruction of Saddam’s eyes and ears was the one precondition necessary to implement the remaining phases of the air campaign. Once U.S. aircraft had damaged these sensors, Saddam faced the same perplexing problem Paul Newman encountered at the hands of Strother Martin in the legendary film Cool Hand Luke: failure to communicate. With the Hussein regime isolated and incapacitated, it would then be possible to gain and maintain air supremacy and permit air operations to destroy Iraqi nuclear, biological, and chemical warfare capability; eliminate Iraq’s offensive military capability; and finally decimate the Iraqi Army in Kuwait.
The key to seizing air supremacy lay in the skillful employment of both soft- and hard-kill weapons targeted against the Iraqi integrated air defense system (IADS). The system integrated Iraqi fighters, surface-to-air missiles (SAMs), and antiaircraft artillery (AAA), which were centrally controlled from a series of command facilities.1
The IADS was split into three components: the first was a Soviet-style, highly centralized national air defense hierarchy that controlled fighters and fixed SA-2 and SA-3 SAMs, designed primarily to protect key airfields. The second missile air defense system, operated by the Republican Guard, protected key strategic sites, such as nuclear, biological, and chemical warfare facilities. The third component was an air defense system deployed by the Iraqi Army, designed primarily for battlefield defense.2
Based on this design, the Coalition could attack the IADS in stages. Once the national system had been destroyed or rendered ineffective, strategic targets could then be attacked from medium to high altitudes with impunity. These attacks, however, would require a suppression of enemy air defenses (SEAD) package to defeat local point- defense missiles operated by the Republican Guard. The system deployed by the Iraqi Army would have to be systematically and repeatedly attacked because of its decentralized nature and its numerous and dispersed semi-
mobile missile batteries.3
According to Central Command Air Operations Director Major General John Corder, U.S. Air Force, the electronic battle plan hinged upon the simultaneous implementation of a three-pronged strategy to dismantle Iraq's IADS:
>■ The suppression of enemy air defenses through the use of jamming, HARM missiles, decoys, and precision-guided munitions
>• Command, control, and communication countermeasures (C3CM) implemented by EC-130 Compass Call jamming aircraft assigned to suppress Iraqi communications until the command-and-control facilities could be destroyed ^ The use of on-board self-protection defensive electronic countermeasures (DECM) equipment designed to defeat any surface-to-air missile that made it through the electron-laden atmosphere4
The skillful employment of this electronic troika would not only prove vital to the conduct of the air campaign, but also would prove to be a critical factor in keeping the Coalition aircraft loss rate incredibly low.
The Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses
At approximately 0300 (Persian Gulf Time) on 17 Jan- nary, the battle of the airwaves began. Crews in Navy and Marine EA-6B Prowlers and Air Force EF-111 Ravens turned on their master radiate switches and began jamming the enemy’s air defense radars. From behind this wall of electrons emerged wave after wave of Coalition strike aircraft and 100 Tomahawk cruise missiles, streaking toward their strategic targets. After destroying critical radar sites with laser-guided missiles fired from Army AH-64 and Marine AH-1W helicopters and radar-homing HARM missiles fired from a variety of Navy and Marine tactical aircraft and Air Force F-4G Wild Weasels, Coalition aircraft continued to pour into Iraq, pounding command-and-control centers and key air defense installations. After this initial breach in the national-level air defense radar system, the ziggurat-like air defense operations centers in hardened buildings were destroyed by laser-guided bombs dropped primarily by Air Force F-l 17s.5
Once we neutralized the national-level system, we attacked the Fixed air defense sites operated by the Republican Guard with radar-homing HARM missiles. According to a recently published Navy Department report, the
Navy and Marine Corps launched more than 80% of the HARM missiles that paved the way for the initial Coalition attack.6 As General Corder succinctly stated:
“We set about in a very deliberate manner to take that thing [IADS] apart as the first order of business, the price of admission ... we bombed all the operations centers, we jammed everything we could on the first day. We knew that jamming would be very effective early______ ”7
In addition to jamming, Coalition strike aircraft— most notably A-10s—attacked early-warning and ground- controlled intercept sites. EC-130 Compass Call aircraft jammed Iraqi command-and-control assets until precision- guided munitions could destroy these facilities. “To me,” General Corder concluded, “it was a classic SEAD campaign, not really a lot different from those we practice in a microcosm out at Nellis during Green Flag.”8
Navy Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses
The U.S. Navy’s contribution to the joint SEAD effort was clearly instrumental in the early achievement of air superiority. In the 1980s, the U.S. Air Force, planning and thinking in terms of large numbers of strike aircraft for attacking the Soviet IADS in Eastern Europe, developed separate F-4G and EF-111 strike-support aircraft for that mission. The U.S. Navy, on the other hand, relied more on multimission aircraft to conduct both the SEAD and strike missions. The Navy adopted this multimission approach partly because of its tactical need to breach a littoral seaward-pointing air defense network and follow through with power projection missions ashore. It was also a consequence, in part, of limited aircraft carrier deck space. The number of Navy SEAD-capable aircraft, therefore, was far greater than the small number of dedicated SEAD aircraft (such as the Wild Weasel) employed by the Air Force during Desert Storm. In retrospect, the
Navy’s pivotal decision to equip the EA-6B with the HARM missile served as a SEAD force multiplier, greatly increasing the Joint Forces Air Component Commander’s (JFACC) tactical flexibility. Conversely, the Air Force decision not to equip the EF-111 with HARM—when coupled with the relatively low number of SEAD-capable airframes—placed the SEAD ball squarely in the Navy’s court. In fact, more than 60% of the SEAD sorties were flown by carrier-based Navy and ground-based Marine aircraft throughout the war.
One little known, yet great success story of Desert Storm was the joint employment of the 27 Navy and 12 Marine EA-6B Prowlers. The Prowler’s mission was to blaze an electronic path all the way to the target area, jamming and shooting those radar installations that could bring weapons to bear on any of the 15 to 20 aircraft being escorted. The one-two punch combination of high-powered, pod-mounted smart jamming transmitters and the HARM missile rapidly became the centerpiece of the electronic SEAD effort to break the enemy’s kill chain. It involved a complex series of events, beginning with detection by long-range early warning radars; handoff to acquisition, ground-controlled intercept, and target tracking radars; and finally to the transmission of missile-guidance signals all required to shoot down a Coalition aircraft. By delaying, degrading, and confusing this chain of events, Navy and Marine EA- 6Bs were routinely able to escort strike aircraft deep into enemy territory and back out again, safely, time after time.
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Colin
To put this complex task from the Red Sea in perspective, imagine taking off from Washington, D.C., inflight refueling over Ohio, crossing the Iraqi border at Chicago, electronically fighting your way through and around SAM sites and enemy fighter bases, and arriving in the vicinity of Baghdad near Minneapolis. By the time the flight was back in Washington, up to 1,400 miles and five hours had elapsed. On most strikes, EA-6B jamming commenced at the Iraqi border and stopped when the last strike aircraft was safely out of Iraq.
Similarly, Persian Gulf carrier-based and Sheik Isa- based Marine Prowlers provided continuous battlefield suppression and jamming primarily against the Iraqi Army’s air defense system in the Kuwaiti theater of operations. Furthermore, U.S. Air Force, British, French, Italian, Saudi, Kuwaiti, Bahraini, and Qatari strikes into Iraq took advantage of this same wall of electrons. Appropriately, EA-6B availability became a “go” or “no-go” criterion for these missions. The extent of this portfolio
Powell’s doctrine of overwhelming force was alive and "'ell in the battle of the airwaves. On the first night alone, as many as 20 Prowlers were used in direct support of the attack on the national-level air defense system. Two, sometimes three. Red Sea carrier-based EA-6Bs beat back the local point-defense missiles operated by the Republican Guard on each subsequent strike against strategic targets. These missions ranged from the H2/3 complex in western Iraq to points north of Baghdad, and all the way to tarots near the Iranian border.
prompted one Prowler pilot to proclaim that he was an equal-opportunity jammer. Another, in a more reflective mood, commented that just as the nation had shed the Vietnam syndrome, the EA-6B community had finally shed the Rodney Dangerfield “no respect” syndrome. In addition, aircraft availability and jammer pod transmitter reliability were so good that a lack of rested aircrews became the only limiting factor in the employment of the weapon system.
At the outbreak of any international crisis, U.S. politi-
cal and military leaders—as if to gain immediate situational awareness—habitually ask for the precise locations of the Navy’s forward-deployed aircraft carriers. Based on the EA-6Bs' critical role in keeping Coalition aircraft losses low, U.S. policy makers will probably expand on the carrier-location question with the addendum, “Where are the Prowlers?”
Lessons Learned
“Uninterrupted and extensive use of electronic warfare was,” in the professional view of General Mal’tsev of the Soviet Air Defense Forces, “the deciding factor in reducing the effectiveness of Iraq’s air defenses...gaining supremacy of the frequency spectrum determined the success of gaining supremacy of the air.”9 One can also judge the effectiveness of the SEAD campaign by the remarkably low Coalition aircraft loss rate: about 40 out of 50,000 fixed-wing sorties were lost to direct enemy action. This translates to a loss rate below 0.9 per 1,000 sorties, a fig- , ure even more remarkable when compared to the Vietnam War loss rate of 2.7 per 1,000 sorties. The difference, as Norman Friedman correctly points out, was that the high- and medium-altitude SAM threat in Iraq was virtually eliminated by an effective and unrelenting SEAD cam- i paign; unlike in Vietnam, pilots simply did not have to face that threat.10
Perhaps General Malyukov of the Soviet Air Force summed it up best when he said:
“How was this [low loss rate] attained? First, by massive use of electronic warfare, especially airborne systems. Second, by wide use of air-to-surface anti-radiation missiles fired from beyond the range of Iraqi air defenses. Electronic warfare was essentially one- ' sided, guaranteeing multi-national supremacy. . .
These astute observations—espoused candidly by high- ranking officers charged with the seemingly sacrosanct task of defending the motherland’s airspace—lends an air of professional credibility to the rapidly emerging princi- 1 pie of modem electronic combat: he who controls the electromagnetic environment controls the air.
What conclusions, then, can we formulate from this one- v
sided battle of the airwaves? First, future adversaries will no doubt redouble their efforts to make it even more difficult for strikers to get to the targets. Fixed, aboveground command-and-control centers are passe: going mobile and/or digging deeper will certainly be the wave of the future. As The Great Scud Chase clearly demonstrated, killing a mobile target—even in the barren desert—is more of an operational art than a science. Therefore, finding and killing a mobile air defense operations center will require an airborne platform equipped with the sensors and weapons capable of performing this multimission role.
Waiting silently in the wings to pick up this future warfighting mission is the advanced capability (AdvCap) version of the EA-6B. Scheduled for production in fiscal year 1997, this version of the Prowler will be able to detect, process, automatically locate, and attack a mobile air defense center with HARM and jamming. As currently planned, however, AdvCap will not have the lethality needed for a hard firepower kill. Failure to take the relatively simple steps to increase the Prowler’s lethality would be letting this future threat literally walk away from us. Those visionaries who had the wisdom and foresight to equip the Prowler with the HARM missile in the mid- 1980s will no doubt be pushing with the same visionary zeal to equip the Prowler with a standoff land attack weapon in the mid-1990s.
Second, the Navy’s propitious, timely, and in-depth analysis of Iraq’s integrated air defense system—completed in the weeks prior to the invasion of Kuwait— proved invaluable to the planning and execution of the overall air campaign. As the Soviet threat continues to recede in the months and years ahead, U.S. armed forces will no doubt be restructured and warfighting doctrine reformulated to cope effectively with Third World power projection contingencies. If the overwhelming success of the joint SEAD campaign is an indicator, future applications of force in pursuit of political objectives will require the same type of in-depth, hard analytical look at the air defense systems of potential adversaries.
Third, the application of overwhelming electronic force, when dovetailed with an unrelenting hard-kill SEAD campaign, saves lives. In a democracy, public support for the role force plays in achieving political objectives is °ften linked directly to the cost the nation must bear in terms of the lives of its sons and daughters. If the balance between ends and means remains prudent, then the nation’s policy and strategy will gain public support and stand a good chance of success. If the cost exceeds the Sain, however, then a sort of insolvency foments deep domestic political divisions, thereby lessening the chance tor victory.
Let us not forget, either, that in addition to saving lives, eftective SEAD saves aircraft—aircraft that will remain Central to the air component commander’s ability to generate and sustain a high number of sorties over an extended period of time. Such a capability tends to saturate, 0verwhelm, and eventually wear down the best of air defense systems. As an Air Force study recently concluded, ln an extended campaign even small differences in per- s°rtie attrition rates may spell the difference between victory and defeat.12
Fourth, air superiority, if not quite decisive, proved vital to the defeat of Iraq and the liberation of Kuwait. The following perspective of a captured Iraqi division commander illustrates this point:
Interrogator: “Why did your men give up?”
Division Commander: “You know.”
Interrogator: “I don’t know. Why?”
Division Commander: “It was the airplanes . . ,”13 As instructive as this perspective may seem, let us not lose sight of the fact that an F-15E Strike Eagle cannot take and hold enemy territory.
An effective air campaign, with its concomitant SEAD component, can certainly prepare the battlefield, but it cannot win wars. Iraqi troops—badly demoralized—withstood a tremendous pounding, but they only surrendered when confronted directly by armed Coalition ground troops. The effective, overwhelming, and unlimited (short of nuclear weapons) employment of land, sea, and air forces—that is, combined arms—brought Saddam to his knees and achieved the limited political objective of restoring the legitimate government of Kuwait.
Perhaps Karl von Clausewitz’s insightful dictum regarding coercion can help place this final point in perspective: “If an enemy is to be coerced,” the Prussian theorist reasoned, “you must put him in a situation that is even more unpleasant than the sacrifice you call on him to make.” Through the brilliant application of combined arms principles, Saddam was placed precisely in just such an unpleasant situation.
'Norman Friedman. Desert Victory: The War For Kuwait (Annapolis, Maryland: Naval Institute Press, 1991). p. 148.
'-Ibid., p. 153.
’I bid.
4Hal Gershanoff, *‘EC In The Gulf War: An Exclusive JED Interview With The Director Of Air Operations For Desert Storm,” Journal Of Electronic Defense, May 1991, p. 44.
'Some analysts have argued that Saddam's air defense system was more vulnerable than it had to be. As Friedman points out, had Saddam gone to the trouble to bury his control centers (such as his own command center) only the heavy pene- trator bombs used at the end of the war could have destroyed them: “It is entirely possible, then, that ultimately Saddam lost his integrated air defense because he did not want air-control centers to be invulnerable to his own eounter-coup forces.” See Friedman. Desert Victory, pp. 157-159.
'’U.S. Department of the Navy, The United States Navy In Desert Shield And Desert Storm (Washington: 15 May 1991), p. 37.
7Gershanoff, p. 44.
’'Ibid.
gAs quoted by VADM Richard M. Dunleavy, VAQ 129 Change of Command address. NAS Whidbey Island, Washington. August 1991.
"’Friedman, p. 167.
Dunleavy address.
1 MAJGEN George B. Harrison. USAF. “The Electronics Of Attrition,” Air Force Magazine, Vol. 74. No. 1, (January, 1991), pp. 68-71.
'LTGEN Charles A. Homer, USAF, “Statement,” U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee On Armed Services. Reflections On Desert Storm: The Air Campaign, Testimony (Washington, U.S. Government Printing Office, 21 May 1991).
Commander Luti is the Executive Officer of VAQ-130. He flew 18 combat missions in an EA-6B Prowler over Iraq during Desert Storm, after which the Navy selected him to brief the Secretary of Defense and the Senate Armed Services Committee on the Navy’s electronic combat performance during the Gulf War. He holds a Ph.D Degree in International Relations from Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.