America, theel story of Operation Desert Storm is told through the perspective of several air commanders. Storm is a 37 minute Defense Department report detailing the strategy and Technology Used in what was seen as a precision war. This is the road to basra. Med thisi army jam road and others as Coalition Forces moved into kuwait. Known as the highway of death. Example of allied air. Ower the coalition used overwhelming airpower to defeat a brutal dictator. In this program, the air commanders of desert storm talk about how they fought the war focusing on the u. S. Air forces role. August 7, 1990, president bush responding to the iraqi invasion of kuwait orders American Forces to deploy. U. S. Central command air forces. Ad to move 7000 miles quickly within days, five air force squadrons and two u. S. Carriers arrived in the gulf. The u. S. Commander Lieutenant General chuck corner recalls the deployment. Initially we had to get people here rapidly because of a threat of iraqi invasion. We brought over those things that you need to defend such as s. 6s and a10 weeks, thefive Coalition Air force outnumbered the iraqi air force. When it became apparent that we were successful, we then pledged to poor south with more aircraft primarily such as the b52s f10 and f 16s. Created four air divisions. Bomberd the tankers and aircraft. Glenn prophet commanded the air soision and general to know general tanoso handle each air division. We could provide the command and control we needed to execute the war. As we began to get more operating locations, we moved anchors into locations at the united arab emirates. The coalition would eventually have close to 3000 planes. Planesighter and attack patrolled the desert, providing cover for the Largest Military airlift in history. Airlift, the hidden part of airpower. Fastest way to get enough men and material to defend the desert kingdom. The Brigadier General commanded the Coalition Airlift forces. The the deployment planes hauled as much as they could, as fast as they could. Clear that was Desert Shield would surpass by far the number of strategic airlifts we had ever had by far. To places like riyadh, baharain. In the early goings, it was walltowall planes. Planes would be holding until a plane took off. December, wend actually went into a second peak. We went into the same thing, hauling the maximum use of strategic forces. The allies began planning a military offensive to liberate kuwait. General swarts goff was commander and chief of the allied forces. He called for an intense air campaign to clear the way. Fundamental for any campaign is to seize control of the air. Experts helped make the most Successful Air campaign in history. Our mission was to expel that army from kuwait. All, we knew that we needed to operate in iraqi airspace. To do that, we would have to take apart and disrupt its ability to stop us coming in. We would have to disintegrate the defense set up. General was the director of campaign plans before the war, and committed fighter and attack aircraft during the war. The targeted strategy from the start was to take down his ability to command and control his military. Concernedviously most about taking it down. The coalition have to become saddams integrated defenses. Commandedier general the Electronic Warfare forces during the war. The basic design there is set envelopet the have an you fly into. In order to avoid that, you go in low. If you cana up avoid aaa and in and avoid the sam thats the way it is put together. It can be formidable. The it is made up of, systems it sells, the acquisition the system itself, the acquisition radar, and what i call the nervous system, the control system. The one like you had in baghdad, the secular Operation Center spread out interest intercept Operation Centers. That is what the system does. It controls where they will be sent against the contain the fighters and bombers and which airplanes will be engaged in sam missles. Perhaps as many as 17,000 surfacetoair missiles, on the order of 10,000 antiaircraft artillery pieces. Modern radar latched together with hightech equipment. An integrated system and our objective was to tear it down. Take away the nervous system, the control. And start shooting down the pieces of it one by one. The Desert Storm Air campaign would have four phases. Gain air superiority, destroy capability,ategic his longrange missiles, and disrupt his command and control. Phase two would be short. The plan on taking one day to suppress mobile air defenses in the kuwaiti theater of operations. Three, allied airpower would continue to hit the targets from phase one, but they would shift their attack to the iraqi field army. It would contain over half a million men, 3000 tanks and artillery pieces. One of the Main Missions given by generals watch coif general schwarzkopf was containing the battlefield. We had to have chemical delivery systems, artillery, army. An important target would be saddams crack troops. He was depending on them to trifecta Coalition Ground forces. One of the centers of gravity is to destroy the Republican Guard and the military support for Saddam Hussein. Planners believed it would take about three weeks. The fourth and final campaign was to support the allied Ground Troops. It woulders estimated be launched 30 days after the campaign began. We have no choice but to drive saddam from kuwait by force. We will not fail. Air attacks are underway against military targets in iran. The coalition waited 48 hours after the deadline expired. 0300 thats when operation Desert Shield became Operation Desert Storm. Over 600 planes were launched from bases throughout the arabian peninsula. From even as far as the united states. To give you some idea of the order of magnitude within the hours, over 300 tankers stories alone to support the strike package. There had never been any launch as big in the history of the air force. Attack r opening Electronic Warfare tactics and classical elements of mass and surprise. We had been here since often. Day an awacevery sitting up here. He knew that was up there. That is what we wanted him to see, right up to the minute that the bombs started falling. Just beyond the radar warning capabilities of the iraqi radars, our attack aircraft were forming up in orbit with tankers so they could top off their fuel at the last moment. Although they numbered less than 3 of coalition fighters, the f117 struck almost one third of the targets on the first day. These stealth fighters led to the attack, penetrating the s unseen. Plane first one was a coming out of a ship. Hour, 26inus one minutes, they launched a tomahawk missile. Over 50 cruise missiles were launched that night. The second thing that aturred was taking down minutes,inus 21 helicopters took out two iraqi reporting sites on the borders. The first actual bomb to fall fell on iraq. Stealth penetrators then hit around the area. Target was the principal Telephone Communication facility dubbed the at t building. What we refer to is the central come node in the whole country. If you remember when he was reporting, he went blank at h our plus four seconds. Took outf117s targets in the southern part of. He country the buildings were taken down, his ability to communicate was taken down, and the city went black. Having opened up the gateways, our other strike packages rushed through and we hit very hard. All of the strategic targets, air defenses, and so forth. Our goal was to put them into shock and destroy their ability to defend their homeland. We were able to do that by having massive attacks across a spectrum of targets, primarily command and control. Down the central centralg centers, or we senterating centers, in hundreds of highspeed missiles. They home and on enemy radar in missions and destroy those sites. Went after the chers and scud laung the storage areas associated with that. They stuck out some of the power grids, hit the industrial sites and the airfield. The gr1s were heavy in striking airfields, as were the b52s. Air modes in air to were there from the start making sre the tankers and awac airplanes were protected. The iraqis never recovered from that first punch. At sunup, we brought in the f16s and the f18s. It was almost your he to how precisell most erie how the plan unfolded. There were absolutely no glitches. That was a tribute to the people who worked so hard and long at making sure the details were worked out. We dhe numerous times that esk blew the first 24 hours to make sure there were no glitches. It was a good plan and very thorough. We is a lot of airplanes and assets. We used a lot of airplanes and assets. We seized control of the air in the initial moments of the air campaign and as a result made all the rest of it much easier and more efficient. The first bomb dropped and 18 hours later, the longest continuous weather front in iraq in three years moved in. We thought nothing but whether for eight Straight Days nothing but the weather for eight Straight Days. We intended to take out all of the nuclear biological, and chemical storage. The weather really hampered us. That was our number one concern. That he would go to the facilities and start moving it around. The coalition was still able to destroy many nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons sites and cripple his ability to research these weapons. He was never able to use these weapons against the allies during the war. The thing that slow them down the most was the weather. Inordinateivert an amount of assets to deal with that problem. Although they destroyed many permanent scud launchers, they did not destroy saddams mobile launchers. Saddam was still able to send missiles toward saudi arabia. There were a lot of problems in terms of psychological impact on saudi arabia and israel. It became important that we locate these time sensitive targets. We wound up using 24 airplanes continuously and we supplemented those airplanes with strikes. It averaged out we were using almost 100 airplanes per day. We use the f16s and the f15es. We used a variety of intelligence sources and a command and control network to put the airplanes over the target at the right time. The Coalition New that the mobile targets had to come out of hiding. These launch areas were called scud boxes. During the day, a 10s flew along the roadways. F16 by night, f16es the newrn iraq, experimental joint stars aircraft directed several strikes against scuds. They were able to locate mobile launchers with radar that tracks movement on the ground. Many mobile launchers were destroyed. Day 11, we were at day 4. 5 in the war. When you subtract the scuds, in the first 11 days we had only accomplished three days worth of what we had intended to accomplish. Werelthough the scuds never fully suppressed, error text really reduce their ability from five per day to three per week. Although they struggled with the weather and the scuds, they had little difficulty with the iraqi air force. They were no match for coalition islets pilots. More was decimated emotionally and psychologically than physically. Every time they took off, they got shut down. They could not come close to intercepts. That had to be demoralizing. Since they could not survive in the air, the iraqis began hiding their aircraft and shelters. Keep it in, bigtime secondary. The allies began to concentrate their attacks on these shelters by day seven. Bombs penetrated and destroyed over 300 of them. The one thing that this war has done, without a doubt, it has changed the precision. When we dropped 30,000 bombs to take a target in world war ii, we dropped one in a rack. In iraq. Only 7 of the tonnage dropped on iraq and kuwait was precision tonnage. Some estimate that these bombs destroyed 80 of strategic targets during the war. With the combination of stealth and precision in the were ableability, we to attack discreetly. We did not carpet bomb downtown baghdad. We took special care to make sure we only attacked military targets. The crews were informed to bring home the ordinance. With precision munitions, the coalition could avoid civilian heiresses. We went after security facilities, the baath party headquarter facilities. Those were the areas where the most barbaric acts and decisions supporting those were made, and executed, and controlled from. It was critical to be able to take that element out of that society. It was also critical to let the populists see that that segment was as vulnerable as anyone else. Electronic war like no other in history. They would go in there very close and jam those acquisition radars. Anytime we set up packages, we had jammers put his eyes out at that spot. F4gs sitting back. To suppress it. Because of that, the fear of their ability to put arms on them and kill them, they were very reluctant to have their radar up for any length of time. That means if your radar is not up it is up for a very short period of time and being jammed you cannot break out of a target. It takes time to work through jamming. Because they were afraid of the harm, they would not leave the radar online enough, so consequently they could not get good pk sam shots at us. They started firing missiles. Thats like shooting a rifle. It goes where it is aimed. That is why they had zero effectiveness. Another danger for the allies was antiaircraft fire. Sitesyou have as many gun as you have up there to defend, you cannot take them all out. Task. A monumental they have to render them ineffective and you do that with tactics. So use medium and High Altitude to overcome the aaa. Accommodation of us been all to suppress, not using the fighters effectively, from the beginning we had air superiority. That accounts for the good loss rates. Good for us. We did not lose many airplanes. Days you know, by the 10 point we had lost about 22 airplanes. I think it speaks for itself. Phase three did not come after phase one and two as planned. It happened at the same time. We had more than enough airpower on the scene to do the phase one job at the beginning and we simply diverted it to begin on phase three. From day one on, but Iraqi Ground Forces were not under heavy air attack. The lics precision weapons to take down iraqi that allies used precision weapons to targets. Iraqi we dropped precision bombs. We put seven bridges in the water on the first night. Iraqi engineers built on tune bridges to replace the pontoon bridges to replace the destroyed once. The allies returned and took them out as well. Armyesupply of the iraqi slowed from 20,000 tons or day to 2000 tons. There are large strategic targets such as power plants, petroleum supplies, and military targets. Most important missing mission was to hit the Republican Guard. Early on we were providing three b52s every hour and a half. Or a target that had to do with softening up it the b52 struck regardless of the type of whether there was. Secondly, we struck all day and all night, without warning, without their ability to effectively mask mass a counter air offensive. Puttingery effective at firepower on their equipment, troop locations, artillery, tanks and could do nothing about it. Behind the bombs that fell and the planes and deliver them were commonly known as awacs. They choreographed the strike packages on targets, bridges and the iraqi army. Onecoalition averaged bombing per minute. The focus became destroying the equipment as opposed to destroying troops. Our initial intelligence of the forces in the field were poor. Towere sending aircraft out destroy armor units and when they arrived at the location where they were thought to be, they were not there. The flight leader would have a difficult time getting a valid target for his flight. We put f16s over the battlefield and their job was to control a 20 by 20 mile box and find the targets in their and as we said the attack stories in, he was able to point out where the attacks were and we could make the attacks much more efficient. Allied bombing was relentless. Days, withast 11 precision weapons, we destroyed in excess of 1000 tanks. In excess of 300 artillery pieces. General horner gave this assessment of the air war. We had some tough times. It was far worse than forecast and it was only because we were doing so well in the counter air campaign that we were able to up to 50 he schedule some days with regard to the weather. More importantly, we demonstrated we are able to dig out the forces in the field. Luckd particularly good with our systems at night and the f117s. There bombing accuracy is absolutely phenomenal. Work being done by a10s is f16, and beginning to pay off. It has to be difficult to be an iraqi soldier day after day and end were anendure the poundings. S. They said it aircraft they field feared the most were the a10s because they never missed. It was a very unnerving. Ituation to experience fortifications, his flank in iraq was weak and exposed. He had air lifters position thousands of troops and equipment from mass side massive allied thrusts through iraq. One of our biggest jobs we had over here was to move major elements of the 18th airborne starting the day after the bombing started. For the first 14 days we had a 130 scheduled every 10 minutes 24 hours a day. That ability to move the vast amount of people and a lot of the vehicles that quickly in my mind, Saddam Hussein never caught on until much later in the ground war that there was anybody up there. The b52s in the f117s teamed up as they made their final preparations. We put massive b52 strikes in. The bomb through those areas so they would be clear paths that went to the breach area so when the troops went through, there would be a pathway cleared of minds and the wire would be cut. The precision guided bombs enter the battlefield, took out the feed points of the entire system he had developed that he was counting on to fill trenches and set them afire to make it more difficult. It was time for the Ground Troops