Storm Over Iraq: Air Power and the Gulf War by Richard Hallion

Author:Richard Hallion [Hallion, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9781588345196
Publisher: Smithsonian
Published: 2015-05-26T07:00:00+00:00

What made it decisive was what the strategic air campaign managed to accomplish. One can comprehend what strategic air power achieved in the Gulf war by looking at five separate categories of effort: attacks on command and control, power generation, refined fuel and lubricants production, the transportation infrastructure, and the Iraqi air force.

First, the strategic air campaign struck forty-five key targets in the Baghdad area with F-117A—dropped precision-guided bombs or cruise missiles, which left the Hussein regime confused, and ignorant of what was happening above them. Yet the strategic air campaign did this without “carpet-bombing” Baghdad or inflicting massive civilian casualties as, say, the bomber raids on Berlin that forced Hitler underground had caused during the Second World War. Indeed, as was reported by one physician who visited Iraq after the war, the strategic air campaign hit with “neurosurgical precision.”45 The war revealed an interesting synergy between airlift and strike operations. Because of the leverage precision weapons offer, and the ease with which they are moved (the total precision munitions tonnage used in the war would have required only 450 C—141 airlift sorties to deliver) the airlifter in effect becomes the “first stage” of a “two-stage bomber.” It carries the munitions around the globe and deposits them on an airfield. Then the munitions, in football terms, are “lateraled” to a strike airplane that carries the bomb over the “goal line.” (The most telling example of this came late in the war, when two 4,700-pound GBU-28s arrived in the Gulf via a C-141, and, less than five hours later, were loaded on F-111Fs to go after a specially hardened command bunker; their bomb casings were still warm from the molten bomb mix poured in them back at Eglin AFB just hours before.)46

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