McNair Paper Number 52, Chapter 5, Notes, October 1996
1. Thomas A. Keaney, discussion of a partial draft of this essay, 10 July 1995.
2. The Gulf War Air Power Survey was commissioned on 22 August 1991 by then Secretary of the Air Force Donald B. Rice "to review all aspects of air warfare in the Persian Gulf" (Thomas A. Keaney and Eliot A. Cohen, Gulf War Air Power Survey: Summary Report (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1993), ix and xi). The survey was directed by Dr. Eliot Cohen of Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies. The author was task-force chief for operations and effects.
3. Gulf War Air Power Survey, "Missions" database, ATO [Air Tasking Order] Day 3, entries for the 48th Tactical Fighter Wing. Coalition air planners were able to devote some five months to scripting the first two days of the air campaign in meticulous detail. The third day of the war was the first planned "in real time" and rightly came to be known as "the ATO day from hell."
4. Keaney and Cohen, Gulf War Air Power Survey: Summary Report, 16.
5. While minimum "medium-altitude" release altitudes for individual aircraft varied considerably prior to the beginning of the ground campaign on 24 February, release altitudes in the vicinity of 14,000-17,000 feet were not unheard of during Desert Storm for F-16 pilots dropping unguided bombs using 45-601 dive angles. For these release parameters, the slant range to the aim point at bomb release is around 20,000 feet, and the combined system error could be 120 feet "even if the pilot did everything right and the [continuously computed-impact-point bombing] system worked perfectly" (Richard J. Blanchfield, et al., Part I: Weapons Tactics, and Training in Gulf War Air Power Survey, vol. IV, Weapons, Tactics, and Training and Space Operations (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1993), 86). Because pilots seldom perform perfectly under actual combat conditions, one suspects that miss distances of 200 feet or more were not uncommon for visual dive bombing from medium altitude, particularly early in the campaign.
6. To be stressed is that Coalition air commanders explicitly lifted the restrictions on bombing altitudes initiated after the third day of Desert Storm on the first day of the ground offensive. The message dispatched by Brigadier General Buster Glosson to the ten fighter wings under his command at 1900 local on 24 February 1991 authorized flight leads to determine release altitudes and weapon parameters "consistent with the risks to American and Allied troops" (Message, RESTRICTN.LFT, 241600Z Feb. 1991).
7. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, trans. Peter Paret and Michael Howard (princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), 120.
8. Barry D. Watts and Thomas A. Keaney, Part II: Effects and Effectiveness in Gulf War Air Power Survey, vol. II, Operations and Effects and Effectiveness (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1993), 388-389.
9. Major General Buster C. Glosson, Gulf War Air Power Survey interview, 14 April 1992.
10. Haywood S. Hansell, Jr., The Air Plan That Defeated Hitler (Atlanta, Georgia: Higgins-McArthur/Longino and Porter, 1972), 121.
11. The anticipated fielding in quantity of precision weapons like the Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) in the first decade of the twenty-first century may, at last, begin to ameliorate the frictional impediment that adverse weather in the target area has long posed for bombing operations by fixed-wing aircraft. Of course, this conjecture assumes that the Global Positioning System (GPS) data necessary for reasonable accuracy with the initial JDAM weapons cannot be denied or degraded by enemy countermeasures, especially around high-value targets. Thus, this example also illustrates the inherent limits of purely technological solutions to friction at the tactical level.
12. Watts and Keaney, Part II: Effects and Effectiveness, vol. II, 111.
14. Major Lewis D. Hill, Doris Cook, and Aron Pinker, Part I: A Statistical Compendium in Gulf War Air Power Survey, vol. V, A Statistical Compendium and Chronology (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1993), 241; Department of Defense, Conduct of the Persian Gulf War: Pursuant to Title V of the Persian Gulf Conflict Supplemental Authorization and Personnel Benefits Act of 1991 (Public Law 102-25) (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, April 1992), 152. The actual figure for Iraqi "shooter" sorties is ~ 430. However, it is likely that the Iraqis flew some sorties that were not observed by Coalition forces or intelligence.
15. Gulf War Air Power Survey, CHC-10, "(S) Fact Paper: Iraqi Hardened Aircraft Bunker Vulnerabilities," 24 January 1991. Within 3 days of the first LGB attacks on hardened Iraqi aircraft shelters, Iraqi combat aircraft began fleeing to Iran (Watts and Keaney, Part II: Effects and Effectiveness, vol. II, 129).
16. Watts and Keaney, Part II: Effects and Effectiveness, vol. II, 234, and Williamson Murray, Part I: Operations in Gulf War Air Power Survey, vol. II, Operations and Effects and Effectiveness (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1993), 70 and 92-94.
17. Norman Cigar, "Iraq's Strategic Mindset and the Gulf War: Blueprint for Defeat," The Journal of Strategic Studies (March 1992): 3-5, 14-16, and 18-20; also, Watts and Keaney, Part II: Effects and Effectiveness, vol. II, 126-127 and 234.
18. Watts and Keaney, Part II: Effects and Effectiveness, vol. II, pp. 239-240. The Tactical Air Control Center log indicated that the diversion of strike aircraft in response to JSTARS detection of what were later identified as elements of the Iraqi 3rd Armored and 5th Mechanized divisions was underway by 2200 hours Riyadh time on 30 January 1991.
19. George Bush, "Address to the Nation Announcing the Deployment of United States Armed Forces to Saudi Arabia," 8 August 1990, in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: George Bush, 1990 (in two books), vol. 2, book II, July 1 to December 31, 1990 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1991), 1108.
20. Conduct of the Persian Gulf War, 95.
21. Watts and Keaney, Part II: Effects and Effectiveness, vol. II, 79. The other two primary centers of gravity were (1) the forces of the Republican Guard and (2) Iraqi leadership together with national-level means of command and control (USCINCCENT OPORD 91-001 for Operation Desert Storm, paragraphs 1D, 3A, and 3B).
22. Prior to Desert Storm, Coalition intelligence believed that the Iraqis were some years, if not a decade or more, away from fielding a nuclear weapon. In the wake of intrusive, on-site inspections carried out by International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors operating under the auspices of the United Nations (UN) Security Council after Desert Storm, a very different assessment emerged: "At the time of the Gulf War Iraq was probably only 18 to 24 months away from its first crude nuclear device and no more than three to four years away from advanced, deliverable weapons" [David A. Kay, "Denial and Deception Practices of WMD Proliferators: Iraq and Beyond," The Washington Quarterly (Winter 1995): 85]. Kay was chief inspector on three of the early UN nuclear weapons inspections in post-Gulf War Iraq.
23. Postwar IAEA inspections eventually uncovered some 39 nuclear facilities at 19 different geographic locations in Iraq (United Nations Security Council, "Report on the Seventh IAEA On-Site Inspection in Iraq under Security Council Resolution 687 (1991): 11-22 October 1991," Report S/23215, 14 November 1991, 8 and 63; Michael Eisenstadt, Like a Phoenix from the Ashes? The Future of Iraqi Military Power (Washington, DC: Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 1993), 92-93. By contrast, as of 27/28 February 1991, U.S. intelligence was holding only eight nuclear targets, of five were believed destroyed, two damaged, and one still operational (J-2/JCS Daily BDA Assessment: Operation Desert Storm, GWAPS NA 353, briefing slides for 27/28 January 1991).
24. Jed C. Snyder, "The Road to Osiraq: Baghdad's Quest for the Bomb," Middle East Journal (Autumn 1983): 567-568 and 576-578.
26. Eight Israeli F-16s put fourteen 2000-pound Mk-84s into Osirak's dome; the two other bombs dropped destroyed an adjacent building. Dan McKinnon, Bullseye One Reactor (Shrewsbury, England: Airlife Publishing, 1987), 172 and 178-179.
27. Watts and Keaney, Part II: Effects and Effectiveness, vol. II, 314.
28. Rolf Ekeus, United Nations Security Council, Report S/23165, 25 October 1991, "Annex: Report by the Executive Chairman of the Special Commission established by the Secretary-General pursuant to paragraph 9(b)(i) of Security Council resolution 687 (1991)," 4.
29. Kay, "Denial and Deception Practices of WMD Proliferators: Iraq and Beyond," 87-98.
30. David Kay, letter to Barry D. Watts, 20 October 1992, GWAPS, NA-375.
31. Like the frictional impediment of adverse weather, failure to understand the functionality of a target system has antecedents at least as far back as World War II. In the case of the Anglo-American Combined Bomber Offensive (CBO) against Germany, the most telling example is the "coal/transport nexus" that both distributed the lifeblood of German war production, coal for power, and provided the division of labor that enabled the war economy to adapt to specific bombing attacks [Alfred C. Mierzejewski, The Collapse of German War Economy, 1944-1945: Allied Air Power and the German National Railway (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 178-179]. The CBO's fundamental goals were to "accomplish the destruction and dislocation of the German military, industrial and economic system and the undermining of the morale of the German people to a point where their capacity for armed resistance is fatally weakened" (U.S. Eighth Air Force, "The Combined Bomber Offensive from the U.K.," 12 April 1943, U.S. National Archives, RG 218, CCS 381, Box 594, 2). The collapse of German war production was in fact achieved by January 1945 because of the collapse of the country's transportation [Ernest W. Williams and Elbridge L. Shaw, The Effects of Strategic Bombing on German Transportation (Washington, DC: U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, Transportation Division, January 1947), vol. 200 (European War), 89-91]. However, at the very point in the war that this long-sought goal was achieved, General H. H. "Hap" Arnold was lamenting to this chief bomber commander in Europe, General Carl Spaatz, that with all the tremendous striking power at Spaatz's disposal we should be getting "much better and much more decisive results than we are getting now" [John E. Fagg, "The Climax of Strategic Operations," in Wesley F. Craven and James L. Cate, eds., The Army Air Forces in World War II, Vol. 3, Europe; ARGUMENT TO V-E Day, January 1944 to May 1945 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1951), 716].
32. Revealing insofar as general friction's persistence is concerned, General H. Norman Schwarzkopf appears to have still believed some time after the war ended that the Iraqi nuclear program had been destroyed during Desert Storm. See General H. Norman Schwarzkopf with Peter Petre, The Autobiography: It Doesn't Take a Hero (New York: Linda Grey/Bantam Books, 1992), 499. The author can also personally testify that the head intelligence officer for U.S. Air Forces Central Command during the war adamantly subscribed to this same conviction in March 1992.
33. Michael R. Gordon and General Bernard E. Trainor, The Generals' War: The Inside Story of the Conflict in the Gulf (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1995), 304, 371, and 376.
34. Brigadier General Robert H. Scales, Jr., Certain Victory: The United States Army in the Gulf War (Washington, DC: Office of the Chief of Staff, U.S. Army, 1993), 216-223.
35. Richard M. Swain, "Lucky War": Third Army in Desert Storm (Fort Leavenworth, KS: U.S. Army Command and General Staff College Press, 1994), 230: also see Schwarzkopf with Petre, 453-454.
36. Gordon and Trainor, 379; Swain, 236-237.
37. Swain, 238. Swain argues that as early as 25 February the use of imprecise language by VII Corps and Third Army in communicating their intentions to Schwarzkopf's headquarters in Riyadh began to open a gap in perception between the theater commander and his subordinate field commanders (ibid., 247).
38. Lieutenant General John H. Cushman, "Desert Storm's End Game," Proceedings (October 1993): 76.
39. As of 1 March 1991, some 840 tanks (at least 365 of which were Republican Guard T-72s), 1,412 other armored vehicles (mostly armored personnel carriers), and 279 pieces of artillery of various types were still in the hands of surviving Iraqi forces and outside of Coalition control (Central Intelligence Agency, Office of Imagery Analysis, AOperation Desert Storm: " Snapshot of the Battlefield," IA 93-10022, September 1993). Of the totals cited, at least 39 tanks and 52 other armored vehicles belonging to the Republican Guard's Hammurabi Division were destroyed in the early morning hours of 2 March 1991 by the American 24th (Mechanized) Infantry Division as the Iraqis attempted to reach the Hawr al Hammar causeway and escape northward (ibid.).
40. By around midnight (Riyadh time) on the night of February 25/26, Joint STARS was showing heavy traffic moving north from Kuwait City toward Al Basrah; at 0135 hours Riyadh time on February 26th (1735 hours on 25 February in Washington, DC), Baghdad radio announced an Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait; and, by morning on the 26th, coalition intelligence in the theater was reporting a mass exodus led by the Iraqi III Corps in the east (Swain, 250; also, review of JSTARS tapes for the night of 25/26 February 1991 conducted at the Pentagon in April 1995).
41. CIA, "Operation Desert Storm," IA 93-10022.
42. In a controversial article, Jim Burton was the first to criticize Generals Franks and Schwarzkopf for preferring a synchronized phalanx attacking head-on into the Republican Guard units in the rear of the Kuwaiti theater rather than encirclement and annihilation [Colonel James G. Burton, "Pushing Them Out the Back Door," Proceedings (June 19930: 37-42]. In later issues of Proceedings, Burton's criticism elicited heated responses, particularly from U.S. Army participants in Desert Storm who sought to defend their service's performance. Burton's 21 June 1995 briefing, "Desert Storm: A Different Look," provides an in-depth examination of the publicly available evidence bearing on this controversy. Burton's conclusion from his 1995 analysis is, once again, that the U.S. Army "did not know how to conduct a deep thrust to the enemy's rear."
43. As early as 1926, German army maneuvers stressed the tactical innovation of having units advance boldly ahead without "maintaining a continuous front" or "regard for troops on their flanks" James S. Corum, The Roots of Blitzkrieg: Hans von Seeckt and German Military Reform (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 1992), 185]. During World War II, Balck and "P" Wood proved themselves to be among the most skilled practitioners of this approach to mobile, armored warfare [BDM Corporation, "Generals Balck and von Mellenthin on Tactics: Implications for NATO Military Doctrine," BDM/W-81-399-TR, 1 July 1981, 26, 31-32, and 39; and Hanson W. Baldwin, Tiger Jack (Fort Collins, Colorado: Old Army Press, 1979), 39-46 and 61-69]. By contrast, Third Army in Desert Storm emphasized the use of phase lines and Global Positioning System receivers to maintain the geographic alignment of the flanks of adjacent units as they rotated, like the spoke of a "Great Wheel," from a northward-to eastward-facing phalanx (Scales, 252-254; Conduct of the Persian Gulf War, 287).
44. Schwarzkopf with Petre, 384 and 499.
45. Between 3 and 9 October 1994, the Iraqis massed as many as 70,000 troops, including two Republican Guard divisions and over 1,000 tanks, on Kuwait's northern border [David A. Flugham, "Iraq Invasion Threat Reassessed by Military," Aviation Week and Space Technology, 14 November 1994, 18-19. Lt. Gen. John H. Cushman, "Back to the Gulf," Proceedings (December 1994): 35]. Over the next 10 days, various force elements and some 14,000 American personnel, including marines and elements of the U.S. Army's 24th Mechanized Infantry Division, were rushed to the Gulf.
46. These difficulties measuring the frictional imbalance between opposing sides recall Andy Marshall's concerns about the measurement of military power. As he wrote in the mid-1960s: The "conceptual problems in constructing an adequate or useful measure of military power have not yet been faced. Defining an adequate measure looks hard, and making estimates in real situations looks even harder" (A. W. Marshall, "Problems of Estimating Military Power," RAND P-3417, August 1966, 9).
47. For classic accounts of Allied friction in May 1940, see Major General J. F. C. Fuller, The Conduct of War, 1789-1961 (Minerva Press, 1968), 255-261; and, Antoine de Saint ExupJry, trans. Lewis GalantiPre, Flight to Arras (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1942), 56. For insight into German friction during this campaign, especially during the crucial crossings of the Meuse River, see Robert Allan Doughty, The Breaking Point: Sedan and the Fall of France, 1940 (Archon Books, 1990), 131-165, 323-324, and 329-332.
48. Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War, vol. II, Their Finest Hour (Boston: Bantam Books, 1949), 100.
49. The author is indebted to Alan Beyerchen for the ensuing discussion of differences in "decision-cycle times" and possibility space as rough indicators of the relative balance of friction between opposing sides. As he rightly pointed out in May 1996, my contention in this section that the gross magnitude of the frictional imbalance between opponents did not appear to be very different in 1991 from what it had been in May 1940 can only be defended if such indices can be found and, at a minimum, qualitatively described.
52. As a campaign unfolds, the attractive options tend to contract for both adversaries. For instance, on the first day of the Germans' May 1940 offensive, the options of going either to Paris or to the Channel coast were both open. By the time the panzer units in Army Group Center began wheeling toward the Channel on 15 May, though, the option of going to Paris was far less attractive from a German perspective due to the way the campaign had unfolded than it had been 5 days earlier.
53. Phase or "state" space is a way of visualizing the behavior of a dynamical system. Its coordinates are the "degrees of freedom of the system's motion" (James P. Crutchfield, J. Doyne Farmer, Norman H. Packard, and Robert S. Shaw, "Chaos," Scientific American, December 1986, 49). In the case of a simple pendulum, for example, the relevant phase space only requires two coordinates: the pendulum's velocity over time, and its position or displacement left or right of center. Once initially set in motion, a frictionless pendulum describes a circle in phase space, whereas one subjected to friction follows an orbit that spirals to a point.
54. Alan Beyerchen, e-mail message to Barry Watts, 31 May 1996, 6:23PM.
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