My Share of the Task(32)

                On January 18, the situation changed when Iraq launched eight Scud missiles against Israel, the first of forty-two eventually fired in an attempt to provoke the Israelis. Although when fired at such extreme range, the Scud missiles were inaccurate and limited in payload, Israeli counterstrikes were expected, and that reaction threatened to fracture the Allied Coalition. Preventing Israeli action became a priority.

                In late January, I deployed with the first element of a task force directed to augment ongoing efforts by Coalition aircraft to locate and destroy Iraq’s mobile Scud-launch vehicles in the expanse of Iraq’s western Anbar Province.

                Our concept of operations was to project small ground elements into Anbar, north of where British special forces had already begun to insert small teams. Omnipresent Coalition airpower would support the teams, as would special operations helicopters, which would insert, resupply, and exfiltrate the operators.

                To focus our effort, we attempted to view the Iraqi Scud capability as a system. That system included personnel, truck-mounted launchers, missiles, rocket fuel, essential meteorological data, and launch approval, which would clearly require real-time communications. We analyzed the possible launch sites, the hide sites, the best times to operate, and what would trigger a decision to fire.

                The approach was correct, but our intelligence simply couldn’t generate enough clarity on Iraqi Scud operations to support an effective campaign to cripple the system. As a result, our efforts relied on thoughtful guesswork by intelligence teams and risky operations by forces on the ground. We were largely dependent on luck. It was a position I never wanted to be in again.

                I was a staff officer at our base in Saudi Arabia, just south of the Iraq border, so for me the war was less excitement than simple hard work and a chance to learn. At one point in the conduct of an operation, a troop of about twenty Army special operators deep inside Iraq got into a firefight with Iraqi forces. The troop was able to break contact with the Iraqis and move a distance away, but danger remained. With a wounded operator, they requested extraction—a natural decision based on the assumption that the Iraqis now knew their location, and would likely send more forces to pursue them.

                The troop’s squadron commander, a veteran of high-risk reconnaissance operations in South Vietnam and Cambodia, came to our task force commander, then–Major General Wayne Downing, and recommended extracting the troop. Downing asked some relevant questions and then disapproved the request. The troop would remain on the ground. Downing’s decision surprised me, but his calculus was courageous and instructive. He knew that if Iraqi forces cornered and destroyed the troop, he would bear responsibility. And that responsibility would weigh more heavily than if he had been on the ground sharing their risk, which wasn’t possible. However, he also knew that if the troop was extracted, CENTCOM’s perception would be that we were easily run off the battlefield; that perception would endanger the viability of our mission and our task force’s freedom to operate. We’d be marginalized and unable to accomplish our strategic mission of preventing Israeli intervention.

                Downing judged that U.S. airpower could protect the troop, but as nothing in war was guaranteed, he had to shoulder the risk. The troop remained on the ground in Iraq and was able to avoid being trapped by Iraqi forces.

                As we teamed up with British special forces, I found myself paired for planning with an unconventional Scot, Lieutenant Colonel Graeme Lamb of the British Special Air Service. We quickly became close. I remember little about his appearance except that he was a bit disheveled and wore no socks, so that his white ankles showed between his combat boots and the drawstring of his pant cuffs. Senior to me and with more worldly experience, Graeme was more extroverted and self-confident in that environment than I was. While I often found myself consumed by the details of planning operations, Graeme was constantly thinking and talking about the wider strategy of the war—and he forced me to think.

                At one point, when some aspects of operations were frustrating me, I came back to my desk to find a small yellow Post-it note stuck to my notebook with a single, appropriate phrase from Kipling’s famous poem: “If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you . . .”