<text id=00he2300><title>End Of Cold War And Persian Gulf: Introduction</title>
<history>US Air Force: Events History</history>
<article><hdr>End Of Cold War And Persian Gulf: Introduction</hdr><body>
<p>The US Air Force created a new Air Force Intelligence Command on 1 October 1991. This brought together 'all source' intelligence, split up among several commands, whether from a satellite photo or an air attaché's eavesdropping. Two years earlier, an Air Force analyst in the Pentagon noticed an odd intelligence report and flagged it for his boss: Hungarians were selling barbed wire as tourist keepsakes.
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<p>Eastern Europe collapsed. Growing dissidence in East Germany and relaxed borders elsewhere flooded the West with refugees. A secure border between East and West had kept the Warsaw Pact together. The landmark event which changed it was Hungary's 1989 decision to dismantle its barbed wire fortifications and to merely monitor, not enforce, its frontiers. Like falling dominos, Germany, Poland and Czechoslovakia followed. The Berlin Wall, too, was broken into fragments of memorabilia. Germany was reunified, and the Soviet Union began to fracture.
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<p>In 1988, the US and Soviet Union held the first exchange visits between each other's military officers. The press was treated to the unthinkable: Moscow's Marshal S. F. Akhromeyev climbing into a B-1B bomber for a guided tour on a visit to Ellsworth AFB, North Dakota. Within a year, US officials were in the USSR getting the cook's tour of the Tupolev Tu-160 bomber.
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<p>George Bush's Defense Secretary Dick Cheney took a hard look at aircraft programmes and whittled them down. Cheney cancelled the Bell V-22 Osprey tilt-wing aircraft, which the Air Force wanted for special operations, but Congress breathed new life into it. Cheney cut the number of B-2 bombers wanted by the service from 132 to 75, and the number of Douglas C-17 transports from 210 to 120. He cancelled a controversial Navy warplane, the General Dynamics A-12 Avenger 2. He informed Air Force leaders that the Reagan-Bush goal of 40 combat wings—never attained, but still officially the goal—was deader than the Dodo.
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<p>It was widely understood that Cheney was reducing the armed forces (personnel cuts went with the programme reductions) because the Soviet threat was decreasing. In fact, the changes might have been necessary anyway because the US was strangling in debt. To achieve the build-up of the 1980s, the nation had quadrupled its National Debt and was now devoting 23 per cent of annual gross domestic product merely toward servicing—not repaying—the debt. It was joked that things were so bad the Pentagon would have to be reduced to four sides.
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<p>Fighter pilots had long since wrested control of the Air Force from 'bomber generals', but they were left with an enormous ICBM and bomber force just when the Soviet Union began to unravel. One of the bombers was the B-52. In the 1990s, it was the longest-serving aircraft in the history of warfare, yet many had relatively few flying hours. It had always been SAC policy to husband its equipment in ultra-miserly fashion.
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<p>When Saddam Hussein's Iraqi army swept over Kuwait on 2 August 1990, the United States had no armed forces in the region. Six months later, 425,000 Americans were in the Gulf. It was the most spectacular build-up of military force in history. Tabbed for rapid deployment was the 1st Tactical Fighter Wing at Langley AFB, Virginia under Colonel John M. 'Boomer' McBroom, where instructions arrived 'to lean forward and green up'. McBroom's F-15C Eagles launched within 18 hours of receiving the Desert Shield execute order.
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<p>The 17-hour solo crossing in an F-15C required six air refuelings. The F-15C cockpit had been designed for pilot comfort but only so much could be done. The pilot was lashed to his seat by two Koch fastener buckles at his chest and two more at his hips; by seat belt, oxygen cord and interphone line, by the round tube from the air blower for his G-suit. All this time, a helmet is bearing down over his head, a visor hangs in front of his eyes and an oxygen mask is slapped fast across his face, chaffing and itching. The 48 F-15Cs were the first Desert Shield forces to land in Saudi Arabia. At the time, there was a real fear they might have to shoot their way in.
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<p>General Norman Schwarzkopf moved US Central Command's headquarters from Florida to Saudi Arabia. On the heels of Langley F-15Cs, other fast jets began the long deployment: F-117As from Tonopah, Nevada; F-15E Strike Eagles from Seymour Johnson, North Carolina; F-16 Fighting Falcons from Shaw Field in South Carolina. B-52 bombers were positioned on the island of Diego Garcia.
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<p>In Riyadh, Schwarzkopf's deputy, Lieutenant General Charles ('Chuck') Horner became the coalition's supreme air commander. Horner threw together offices in an underground maze which became known as the 'Black Hole' and put officers to work, orchestrating the arrival of new forces and scoping out ways to survive while the build-up gained momentum.
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<p>US Air Force leaders cobbled together an air bridge to move people and equipment around the world. It was the biggest such effort ever, in which a C-5 or C-141 landed at Dhahran every seven minutes, around the clock; the tonnage of the 1948 Berlin Airlift was exceeded in the first 22 days and doubled a week later, with 200,000 troops and much of their equipment moved to the Saudi sands by October. The crews of giant transport aircraft, many of them reservists who flew on a voluntary basis before being called to active duty on August 29, kept their aerial supply line moving around the clock.
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<p>General H. T. Johnson, chief of Military Airlift Command, threw nearly all of his 265 C-141B StarLifters and 85 C-5 Galaxys into the massive effort to move people and weapons to the Persian Gulf. Maintenance people began coaxing extra capabilities out of the aircraft. Crews staged out of such familiar European bases as Torrejon, Zaragosa, Rhein-Main and Ramstein. At Torrejon on the outskirts of Madrid, where transport crews rested after the eight-hour haul from the American East Coast and before the nine-hour trip to Saudi Arabia, the transient quarters were so full that men and women slept in hallways and bathrooms. The flight line was so packed with C-141s and C-5s that a pilot had to be given a map to find his plane.
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<p>A typical airlift job might be to haul equipment for the 82nd Airborne from Fort Bragg. A crew would be assigned to fly the first leg, e.g. to Torrejon. There, another crew in a revolving pool would pick up mission and aircraft, and continue 'downrange'. It was known as the eastbound stage, evoking memories of the stagecoaches which opened up the American West. Downrange, there was no place to stop for rest, so the crew would have to bring their C-141 or C-5 back to Torrejon before they could sleep.
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<p>It was a time of enormous tension. On some crews, nerves were frayed and tempers flared, nor was the job as simple as moving people and things from Point A to Point B. To quote Johnson, "You don't just fly a lot of airplanes to different places, ask people to fill them up, and take off again to carry them overseas." Plans had to be made on how to move a unit and how to meet priorities. There were few veterans still on active duty who remembered the Nickel Grass airlift of two decades before. To those who participated in the C-5 and C-141 missions which went on around the clock, which tested people and equipment beyond any limits previously imagined, it would forever be like a badge of honor to say later that—as a bumper sticker proclaimed—I FLEW THE EASTBOUND STAGE.
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<p>The use of air power to build up the force and draw a line in the sand would have been futile, of course, without tankers operated by Strategic Air Command and reserve crews. KC-135 Stratotankers and KC-10 Extenders flew up to 300 missions per day at the peak of the build-up. No large-scale military operation had ever been carried out at such distances before and, although air refueling had become routine, the number of tankers and the ability to use all of them, all the time, had never been stretched in such a way.
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<p>By 17 October, two and one-half months after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, Defense Secretary Cheney announced that 200,000 Americans were in the Persian Gulf. The equivalent of seven fighter wings was now arrayed on the desert, including a second squadron of F-15E Strike Eagles.
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<p>The otherwise flawless airlift was marred by the August crash of a C-5A Galaxy at Rhein-Main, killing 13 and blamed, finally, not on crew exhaustion but on a faulty engine thrust reverser. An F-15E Strike Eagle, an RF-4C Phantom and an F-111F 'Aardvark' were lost in September and October.
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<p>By late October, Schwarzkopf told his leaders that an 'enhanced option' would have to be exercised to double the size of forces in the Desert Shield build-up. This meant an increase of 200,000 troops, raising the total to 425,000.
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<p>On 17 January 1991, the coalition launched Operation Desert Storm when waves of aircraft came down on Iraq in a veritable tidal wave. Some 160 tankers at multiple refueling tracks 'topped off' warplanes before they entered Iraqi air space. AWACS kept track of friendly forces and scrutinised movement in Iraqi territory. On the first night of the air war, 668 aircraft attacked Iraq, 530 of them (79 per cent) from the US Air Force.
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<p>A daring raid by US Army Apaches, supported by Air Force MH-53J Pave Low special operations helicopters, unleashed Hellfire missiles to take down a segment of Iraq's air defense radars at a pivotal location known to Americans as Objective Oklahoma, opening a passageway for coalition warplanes to attack without being detected en route. By then, the 12-plane first wave of F-117s was already 50 miles (80.5 km) beyond Oklahoma. The first wave of F-117s reached Baghdad while Saddam's radars were still up and running and without being detected. The 'black' investment in stealth technology had proven itself.
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<p>In one F-117 over Baghdad, a pilot carefully kept the crosshairs of his laser designator on a telecommunications center known to Americans as the 'AT & T Building'. The weapons bay snapped open and the aircraft's 'trapeze' ordnance pylon disgorged a 2,000-lb (907-kg) LGB (laser-guided bomb) which sank into its laser 'basket' and plunged unerringly towards a little spot of laser light on the top of the center. In Riyadh, General Horner and his 'Black Hole' staff were waiting for CNN, broadcasting via telephone from Baghdad, to go off the air. When correspondents' voices were replaced with static, coalition leaders knew they had begun dismantling Iraq's infrastructure.
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<p>The longest combat missions in history were flown by B-52 Stratofortresses which took off from Barksdale AFB, Louisiana, refueled repeatedly, and delivered air-launched cruise missiles, hastily converted from nuclear to conventional ordnance, to Iraqi targets.
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<p>F-4G 'Advanced Wild Weasels', F-15Es, F-16Cs, F-111Fs and A-10s began systematically tearing down Iraq's infrastructure and military, despite the worst weather in 14 years. Conditions during much of the long air campaign approximated a rainy European summer, not the kind of blue-skies conditions usually associated with desert warfare. While the world observed in 'real time' as the war was broadcast 'live' around the globe, General Horner directed an air campaign designed to ease the eventual assault by coalition ground forces.
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<p>Iraq's short-range ballistic missile, the 'Scud', posed one of the air campaign's most serious challenges and symbolizes the kind of threat for which the Air Force would have to be prepared in the future, given the proliferation of mobile ballistic missile systems around the world. 'Scud' launchers proved difficult to detect and, even after air power resources were diverted from other duties to stalk them, were never really suppressed.
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<p>The air war was a combination of low and high technology: F-117As used stealth to rule the skies over Baghdad, but the F-15E Strike Eagle without its laser-bomb technology proved highly effective dropping old-fashioned bombs. Iraq's defense radars were often shut down to deceive the 'black boxes' aboard RC-135 reconnaissance aircraft, or jammed and disrupted by EF-111As. There were half a dozen other weapons which were now long in the tooth, among them the A-10 'Warthog' tank-killer which employed ancient technology, and worked.
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<p>Overall, the coalition air campaign accumulated a total of 109,876 sorties over the 43-day war, an average of 2,555 sorties per day. Of these, over 27,000 targeted 'Scuds', air fields, air defenses, electrical power, biological and chemical weapons, headquarters, intelligence assets, communications, the Iraqi army and oil refining. KC-135 and KC-10 tankers flew 15,434 sorties, refueling warplanes from all service branches and proving once again the importance of their mission.
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<p>The strategic air campaign struck 45 key military targets in the Baghdad area, with the result that the Hussein regime was driven underground. The campaign shut down the Iraqi electrical power grid. Fuel and lubricants, the lifeblood of any military machine, were targeted and repeatedly attacked.
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<p>As for the Iraqi air force, it was taken down by the F-15 Eagle, with a little help from other aircraft. The USAF had five F-15C air-to-air and two F-15E strike squadrons in its Desert Storm forces. F-15Cs escorted other warplanes and fought most air-to-air engagements. One fighter squadron, the 58th, accounted for 17 of the war's 39 air-to-air victories, many of them Iraqi aircraft which were shot down not fighting, but fleeing.
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<p>A Mirage F1 kill scored by the 1st TFW's Captain Steven Tate was credited as the first aerial victory of the war. A later review confirmed that three others came earlier: Credit for the first kill of the war finally went to Captain Jon Kelk, who shot down a MiG-29 on 17 January. No F-15C/D Eagle air-to-air fighters were lost. Two F-15E Strike Eagles were shot down during the fighting with one crew killed, the other taken prisoner. The Strike Eagle scored one aerial kill, never acknowledged officially, of an Iraqi helicopter (apparently a Hughes 500) which it destroyed in an air-to-air engagement using a bomb.
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<p>The anti-armor campaign received little attention, but the USAF worked hard to kill Iraqi tanks, using weapons which had not been employed before. The Pave Tack-equipped F-111F with the laser-guided bomb was particularly successful. F-111Fs cruised over Iraqi lines, using the swiveling FLIR pod to sweep-search back and forth across the ground, a technique they had refined before the war. Twilight and night attacks proved particularly devastating, for the differential cooling rate of metal vehicles and equipment against a desert background produced a heat pulse well above the ambient infra-red background. The F-111F designated a tank with its laser and dropped a 500-lb (227-kg) GBU-12 bomb. F-111Fs scored up to 150 armor kills per night. Another ordnance item used to good effect (mostly by the A-10) was the AGM-65G infra-red imaging Maverick missile.
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<p>The Air Force's 249-large F-16 Fighting Falcon force generated more sorties (13,500) than any other strike aircraft in the Gulf War, covering an array of targets ranging from 'Scuds' to production facilities through battlefield emplacements and dug-in armor and artillery. The F-16 flew primarily as a 'dumb' bomb-dropper. Killer scouts—F-16s configured as controllers and target markers—marked targets and directed attack aircraft hitting targets within individual 15 x 15-mile (24 x 24-km) 'kill boxes.'
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<p>Although Air Force chief of staff General Michael J. Dugan had been fired by Cheney for predicting the air campaign in revealing detail, his successor General Merrill A. McPeak came to the chief's job with perhaps more power than any occupant of the slot since LeMay. The situation in the Gulf had been ideal for a land-based air arm: US forces had arrived to find well-prepared airfields and support facilities immediately on hand for their use, and had been given six months to build up for the conflict. Not surprisingly, McPeak argued that the results showed land-based air power to be more important than the Navy's carrier battle groups. The USAF defeated many enemies over the year but had never been able to prevail over its arch nemesis, the Navy. In Desert Storm, it came close. More importantly, McPeak had a mandate to bring about sweeping changes in the organization and structure of the Air Force, using the theme 'Global Reach, Global Power' as shorthand for a largely US-based expeditionary force which would be prepared, in the future, for more brushfire wars now that the Cold War had petered out. The Air Staff embarked on its plans for the remainder of the century, doing what American officers have always done—preparing for the last war.
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<p>McPeak penned some of the Air Force's own assessment of its victory in the Gulf. "The Gulf War illustrated that the precision of modern air attack has revolutionized warfare. Air Force strike aircraft dropping smart conventional munitions inflicted levels of destruction upon Iraq's command, control and communications network that, a few years [earlier], were thought possible only with nuclear weapons. In direct attacks aimed at the Iraqi air force, bunkers designed to withstand nuclear blast overpressures were easily penetrated and destroyed by laser-guided hardened penetrating bombs. Tanks and armored vehicles succumbed to laser-guided bombs, striking with unerring and frightening precision, time after time. Bomb accuracy, once measured in circular error probable distances in the thousands of feet, is now down to less than 10 ft."
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<p>More than a few members of the United States Air Force felt they deserved credit not merely for defeating Iraq, but for defeating world Communism. Strategic Air Command, in particular, claimed this distinction, before McPeak put it out of commission in June 1992. In the lean, post-Desert Storm era, the Air Force dropped to about 15 combat wings, its smallest size since the late 1930s. It was a new era, and new challenges lay ahead.
