US Space Forces, a Key Wartime Advantage

“ The satellites have been just unbelievably capable,” declared USAF Lt. Gen. T. Michael Moseley, head of the coalition air forces for Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Moseley was briefing reorters April 5 when he cited the contributions of USAF’s space forces. He said all the satellites in his “quiver,” not just the Global Positioning System satellites, have been supporting “conventional surface forces, the naval forces, Special Ops Forces, and the air forces themselves.”

In addition to directing air operations over Iraq, Moseley also served as the space coordinating authority for the operation. Helping him in that role were some 1,000 men and women from Air Force Space Command who deployed to Southwest Asia.

Those “tip of the spear” space forces were aided by the majority of space personnel operating from their home stations, Gen. Lance W. Lord, AFSPC commander, said April 8. He described the space force contribution as an “asymmetric advantage.”

“ We don’t just have more satellites than the enemy or faster communications,” said Lord. “And we aren’t the only ones with access to the global navigation and timing capabilities provided by GPS; the Iraqi forces could use them, too. The advantage we provide is more than numbers, it’s more than simply the individual capabilities any one system provides.”

Space forces are enabling the US to expand the capabilities of older systems, explained Lord, citing development of the Enhanced GBU-27 laser guided bomb, used for the first time in Gulf War II, as one example.

He also noted that those who thought the advent of GPS jamming systems would deny US space superiority were “sorely mistaken,” as was demonstrated when “B-1B Lancers and F-117 Nighthawks bombed those six GPS jammers ... with GPS–guided munitions.”
In detailing space contributions to the war in Iraq, USAF officials said AFSPC personnel:

Conducted more than 1,500 GPS satellite uploads to provide enhanced GPS accuracy to within less than 13 feet for precision guided munitions.

Provided warning on about 70 percent of the Iraqi missile launches.
Supported several combat search and rescue operations.

Provided critical reachback for space planning and execution via the air and space operations center at Vandenberg AFB, Calif.

Conducted more than 5,000 satellite contacts from eight worldwide satellite control network sites.

Provided high-bandwidth, protected, robust communications through communications satellites.

Provided real-time battlespace characterization for battle damage assessment.

Rumsfeld on Precision Airpower

On March 21, not long after the start of Gulf War II’s air campaign, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld met with Pentagon reporters. One purpose of the session was to set the record straight with respect to modern airpower.

“ Just before coming down, after the air campaign began in earnest, ... I saw some of the images on television, and I heard various commentators expansively comparing what’s taking place in Iraq today to some of the more famous bombing campaigns of World War II.

“ There is no comparison.

“ The weapons that are being used today have a degree of precision that no one ever dreamt of in a prior conflict. They didn’t exist.

“ And it’s not a handful of weapons. It’s the overwhelming majority of the weapons that have that precision.

“ The targeting capabilities—and the care that goes into targeting, to see that the precise targets are struck and that other targets are not struck—is as impressive as anything anyone could see.

“ The care that goes into it, the humanity that goes into it—to see that military targets are destroyed, to be sure, but that it’s done in a way and in a manner and in a direction and with a weapon that is appropriate to that very particularized target.

“ I think that the comparison [with World War II bombing campaigns] is unfortunate and inaccurate. And I think that will be found to be the case when ground truth is achieved.”

The Return and Fall of Peter Arnett

The first surprise was that Peter Arnett was back on network television, broadcasting for NBC from his old home stand in Baghdad.

Arnett had been dumped by CNN after his 1998 report, “Valley of Death,” was exposed as bogus. It claimed that in 1970, US forces used nerve gas, killed 15 or 20 defectors, and wiped out a Laotian village of 100 people, including women and children.

He tried to put the blame on his producer, April Oliver, saying he had only read a script and was being “trashed on a daily basis by the right wing news media,” but CNN exercised the exit clause in his contract anyway.

It was not Arnett’s first misadventure in military reporting. In 1965, working for the Associated Press, he picked up and repeated a false allegation by Radio Hanoi that the US Army used poison gas in Vietnam. Reporting from Baghdad for CNN in 1991, he broadcast and later defended Saddam Hussein’s claim that the United States had bombed a “baby milk plant,” which turned out to be a biological weapons factory.

As the current war with Iraq approached, Arnett was sent to Iraq by the National Geographic Explorer series, telecast on MSNBC. He subsequently signed up to work for NBC itself. According to ABC radio in Australia, “When Peter Arnett arrived in Baghdad this year, he was treated like a celebrity by Arab and Iraqi media.”

When correspondents from other American news organizations, including CNN, were expelled, Arnett was allowed to stay. “The Iraqis have thrown the CNN crew out of Baghdad and I’m still here,” he gloated in an interview with TV Guide. “Any satisfaction in that? Ha, ha, ha, ha.” The Iraqis, he said, “see me as a fellow warrior.”

On March 30, state-controlled Iraqi television broadcast an interview with their fellow warrior, who began with glowing words for the cooperation of the Ministry of Information, “which has allowed me and many other reporters to cover 12 whole years since the Gulf War with a degree of freedom which we appreciate.”

With little prompting, he said, “It is clear that within the United States there is a growing challenge to President Bush about the conduct of the war and also opposition to the war. So our reports about civilian casualties here, about the resistance of the Iraqi forces, are going back to the United States. It helps those who oppose the war.”

“ Clearly the American war planners misjudged the determination of the Iraqi forces,” he said, adding that “The first war plan has failed because of Iraqi resistance. Now they are trying to write another war plan.”

Arnett was wrong on several points—for example, support for Bush in the United States was rising, not falling—and, at best, he was speculating on others, such as a change in the war plan.

More important, Arnett had told Iraqi rulers what they wanted to hear, praised them to the Iraqi television audience, and gave them encouragement to continue the fight. Some, such as John Podhoretz in the New York Post, speculated on whether this amounted to “aid and comfort” to the enemy.

Initially, NBC spokeswoman Alison Gollust leapt to Arnett’s defense, saying, “His impromptu interview with Iraqi TV was done as a professional courtesy. ... His remarks were analytical in nature and were not intended to be anything more.”

Flooded with “thousands” of e-mails and telephone calls, NBC rethought its position and fired Arnett in the middle of the night March 31. National Geographic fired him, too.

“ When you give an interview to a guy in an Army uniform who works for a dictator whose government we’re at war with, it raises some real questions about your judgment,” said NBC News President Neal Shapiro.

Arnett was apologetic, sort of, on NBC’s “Today” show. “I want to apologize to the American people for clearly making a misjudgment,” he said. “I created a firestorm in the United States, and for that, I am truly sorry.”

He was hired almost immediately by the stridently antiwar Daily Mirror, which bills itself as “Britain’s brightest tabloid newspaper.” In his first day on the new job, Arnett wrote that “I report the truth of what is happening in Baghdad and will not apologize for it. I am still in shock and awe at being fired. ... The right wing media and politicians are looking for an opportunity to be critical of reporters who are here. I made the misjudgment which gave them the opportunity to do so.”

How Arnett felt about having his stories in the Daily Mirror—along with such front-page screamers as “Is Liz Queen of the Whingers?” (about actress Elizabeth Hurley; “whinging” is Britishese for whining)—was not said.

— John T. Correll

War Plan Critics Blasted

Gen. Richard B. Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, took a verbal swipe at some Pentagon critics on April 1. He struck out at those military officers—currently serving and retired—who had been critical of the Central Command war plan.

Less than two weeks into Operation Iraqi Freedom, critics had raised a chorus of objections to the battle plan, calling the operation a failure. They declared that the air campaign did not produce “shock and awe” and said the ground campaign was ineffective because it lacked sufficient size and heavy armor to protect long supply lines and punch through Iraqi forces.

Some critics claimed that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld forced Gen. Tommy R. Franks, commander of Central Command, to make do with less equipment than was needed to properly run the war. Additional heavy equipment was still flowing toward the Persian Gulf when hostilities began and would not be in place for more than a month.
Myers said the campaign began when it made sense.

“ How do you protect tactical surprise when you have 250,000 troops surrounding Iraq?” the chairman asked. Surprise, he said, was achieved by “starting the ground war first, [the] air war second.”

The war plan accomplished a string of complicated objectives, Myers observed.

Iraq’s southern oil fields were secured. No Scud missiles were fired against Israel or Jordan. Humanitarian relief supplies flowed into the Iraqi port of Umm Qasr.

Achieving these objectives was possible because US forces “went in very early, even before the ground war, to secure those places,” Myers said.

Battling the Friendly Fire Problem

By any measure, the frequency of American fratricide—when a unit mistakenly attacks a friendly military unit—has been lower in Gulf War II than in previous wars. Several incidents, however, served as reminders that blue-on-blue friendly fire is still a vexing problem.

The coalition has flown huge numbers of sorties, dropped thousands of precision guided and unguided bombs, fired hundreds of missiles, and unleashed massive barrages of tank, helicopter, and artillery fire, the overwhelming majority without incident. However, over the first two weeks of the war, the Army’s Patriot missile defense systems engaged coalition aircraft on several occasions and caused some fatalities.

On March 22, a Patriot interceptor destroyed a Royal Air Force Tornado, killing its two crew members. The Patriot system had mistaken the aircraft for an incoming missile. Senior defense officials said shortly after the incident that electronic systems used to identify friendly aircraft had failed somehow.

On March 25, another Patriot system locked onto a USAF F-16, which detected the radar lock and promptly destroyed the system’s radar dish with a High-speed Anti-Radiation Missile. No casualties resulted from this incident.

Finally, the Patriot system was blamed for downing a Navy F/A-18C fighter on April 2. The Hornet was over central Iraq when it was shot down. More than a week later, the pilot had not been recovered.

Another case of potential friendly fire occurred on April 3, when an Air Force F-15E fighter may have mistakenly bombed a convoy of US Special Operations Forces and Kurdish allies. Three Americans, one Kurdish soldier, and possibly one civilian reportedly were killed in the incident. At least five US personnel and several Kurds may have been wounded. Another incident of coalition aircraft bombing coalition forces may have occurred on April 6.

Coalition forces also experienced at least one incident in which a coalition tank fired on another coalition tank.

In the 1991 Gulf War, 35 of the 148 US battle deaths (24 percent) were the result of fratricide. The April 7 Washington Post reported that, in Gulf War II, 13 of 71 US fatalities (18 percent) stemmed from friendly fire.

All of these incidents in Gulf War II are under investigation.

Tankers and Lifters Ridden Hard

In the first 16 days of Operation Iraqi Freedom, USAF airlifters and tankers carried out more than 8,000 sorties—more than half of all the Air Force’s total wartime sorties.

The total included more than 3,000 refueling sorties (two-thirds of all coalition tanker missions) and 5,000 airlift sorties (all of the coalition lift missions).

A senior Pentagon official said USAF crews through April 3 had flown about 3,500 intertheater lift missions, most of them with the C-17 aircraft. C-130 crews had performed another 1,400 lift missions within the Iraqi theater.

The crews of KC-135 and KC-10 tankers, meanwhile, had delivered 32.1 million gallons of fuel to various aircraft from different US services and different nations. They had been flying virtually around the clock.

In the first 21 days of the war, more than 200 USAF active duty, Guard, and Reserve tankers operating from 15 locations had flown more than 4,700 sorties.

The high demand for mobility forces—aerial refuelers and airlifters alike—had some calling for a re-evaluation of currently declared USAF airlift requirements.

Mobility Requirements Study 2005, completed in 2001, increased the Air Force’s lift requirement from 49.7 million ton-miles per day to 54.5 MTM/D. The service’s actual capability has been short of this requirement from the beginning, and the requirement itself may no longer be valid.

At a March hearing, USAF Chief of Staff Gen. John P. Jumper told a House panel that “it will be worth our while” to re-evaluate the lift requirement. He said, “That number was established with a completely different set of assumptions.”

Gen. John W. Handy, the commander of Transportation Command and Air Mobility Command, told National Defense Magazine that the war on terrorism has made the MRS-05 findings obsolete. Further, he said, existing lift assets would not be able to accommodate the demands of two major crises simultaneously.

Antiwar Movement’s “Million Mogadishus” Man

Columbia University professor Nicholas De Genova gained instant fame and infamy March 26 when he declared, “The only true heroes are those who find ways to defeat the US military” in the war in Iraq.

As the professor told it, he would be happy to see US military forces suffer “a million Mogadishus,” a reference to the horrific October 1993 battle in which 18 US Army Rangers lost their lives to street thugs in the capital of Somalia.

The professor’s comments, emitted at an antiwar “teach-in” on Columbia’s New York campus, were immediately condemned, even by organizers of the protest.

“ He and the press have hijacked this teach-in, and I’m very, very angry about it,” said political science professor Jean Cohen, an organizer. The Columbia Daily Spectator reported that Cohen called De Genova’s comments “not innocent ... This was a planned undermining of this teach-in.” Another protest organizer, history professor Eric Foner, said, “If I had known what he was going to say, I would have been reluctant to have him speak.”

De Genova, an assistant professor of anthropology and Latina/o studies, responded to the criticism in a March 27 letter to the Spectator. He accused the paper of quoting him “in a remarkably decontextualized and inflammatory manner.”

Then, he promptly reaffirmed the opinions.

“ Imperialism and white supremacy” have been hallmarks of US nationalism, De Genova wrote.

Further, said he, “The disproportionate majority of US troops come from racially subordinated and working-class backgrounds and are in the military largely as a consequence of a treacherous lack of prospects for a decent life.”

His implication was that today’s soldiers entered the military service because they couldn’t do anything better with their lives. However, a recent study conducted by his own institution—Columbia University—said just the opposite. The study measured recruit status in four ways—family socioeconomic status, verbal and quantitative skills, educational achievement, and work orientation. It stated flatly that today’s recruits “do not come from the more-marginal groups on any of four dimensions.”

Undeterred by such inconvenient facts, De Genova plunged ahead, claiming that the US troops have a choice: They can serve their nation, or they can “refuse to fight and contribute toward the defeat of the US war machine.”

According to De Genova, a million Mogadishus—and the accompanying deaths of the same racially subordinated and working class people he purports to support—would serve a greater good. The professor wrote that “Vietnam was a stunning defeat for US imperialism; as such, it was also a victory for the cause of human self-determination.”

The Rescue of POW Lynch

A joint service special operations team on April 1 rescued Army Pfc. Jessica D. Lynch from the Iraqi hospital where she was being held prisoner.

According to Central Command, Army Rangers, Navy SEALs, Air Force combat controllers, and Marines participated in the rescue operation. “It was a classic joint operation done by some of our nation’s finest warriors,” said Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks, CENTCOM deputy chief of operations, at a press briefing in Qatar.

Lynch, with the Army’s 507th Ordnance Maintenance Company out of Ft. Bliss, Tex., was captured March 23 when her convoy took a wrong turn near Nasiriyah, Iraq. The convoy was ambushed by Iraqi paramilitary forces.

Several Americans were killed in the attack, and others were taken prisoner and subsequently shown on Iraqi television. Lynch was not among those POWs interrogated on Iraqi TV and was initially listed as missing by the Pentagon.

According to a DOD release, an Iraqi lawyer came across Lynch while visiting his wife in the hospital and observed an Iraqi colonel slapping the severely injured 19-year-old—first with his palm then backhandedly.

The lawyer, identified only as “Mohammad,” decided to seek out US forces and walked six miles to a Marine position to inform them of the captured soldier.

Mohammad returned to the hospital to perform reconnaissance and eventually provided Marines with the information critical to Lynch’s rescue, including the room in which she was being held.

Brooks said the US rescue force also found 11 bodies at the hospital. Two were in the morgue and nine others were buried in a nearby graveyard. Members of the rescue force could find no shovels, so dug with their hands to recover the bodies for return to the US. DOD identified eight of the bodies as US soldiers.

Buzz Words

The man who ran the Gulf War II air war was Air Force Lt. Gen. T. Michael Moseley, the Combined Forces Air Component Commander. The air boss, known to all as “Buzz,” spoke to the press for about 90 minutes on April 5. Excerpts:

• Iraqi forces: “Our sensors show that the preponderance of the Republican Guard divisions that were outside of Baghdad are now dead. ... I find it interesting when folks say we’re softening them up. We’re not softening them up. We’re killing them.”
• Iraqi aircraft: “I believe that [Iraq’s Air Force] has not flown because ... they’ve made a calculation that they will not survive. Now time will tell. We’ll have to find an Air Force senior officer that’s still alive out there one of these days and ask him that question.”
• Joint airpower: “I’m not sure I care how we kill [an enemy] tank. ... I’d just say we’ve just killed a hell of a lot of them and we’re going to keep moving them until they quit moving them.”
• Critics of the war plan: “I’m amused by the way that they critique it, but at the end, it’s a whole lot like listening to a cow pee on a flat rock. It just doesn’t matter.”
• Shock and awe: “The term ‘shock and awe’ has never been a term that I’ve used. I’m not sure where that came from.”
• Fast movers: “In the south, we’ve had such a rapid movement of the surface forces that we’ve progressed straight from some strategic attack targets and interdiction targets to close air support.”
• Fate of Saddam: “I don’t know whether he’s still alive, but I suspect his quality of life is not as good as it was two weeks ago.”
• The 21,000-pound “Mother of All Bombs”: “I haven’t seen this MOAB. I saw it on the television.”
• Experience level: “There are not too many captains and majors and lieutenant colonels out there in the Air Force and in the flying Navy who haven’t been in combat or haven’t been in this theater multiple times.”
• Efforts to jam GPS signals: “We’ve killed every GPS jammer that’s come up—with a GPS weapon. So that hasn’t worked out very well for them.”