An Introduction
Countering
the V-1 & V-2
1990: The Iraqi
Scud Threat
Counter-Force in Desert Storm
Special Forces in Desert Storm
Post-1990 Developments
Implications for
the Future
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As a political initiative to keep Israel out of the war, the "Great Scud Hunt" was a success. It was only part of a major American exercise, however, to apply pressure on the Israeli Government. This also included: the deployment of American-manufactured Patriot batteries to Israel, manned by American and Israeli and, in the last days of the war, Dutch, personnel; unprecedented intelligence sharing; and generous additional military and economic aid. Because the deployment of the Dutch Patriots received little publicity, it is covered in a separate document. However, this deployment set an important precedent: for the first time, a multilateral missile defence system was deployed by the US and another NATO member, the Netherlands, and by a regional ally, Israel.
These measures succeeded. The Israelis did not retaliate against Iraq and the anti-Saddam Coalition remained intact, opening the way for the liberation of Kuwait. Beneath the political rhetoric, military analysts have taken a close interest in the actual results of the "Great Scud Hunt" to determine its effectiveness.
Conflicting Claims of Success
Immediately after the war, such senior Coalition political and military leaders as US President George Bush, British Prime Minister John Major, and Generals Schwarzkopf and de la Billiere, claimed the "Great Scud Hunt" had put Iraq's mobile Scuds out of action. Accounts by USAF pilots and British and US Special Forces' soldiers who took part in the "Great Scud Hunt" record numerous claims of the destruction of mobile Scuds, often in graphic detail. The Scud kill table at the end of this memorandum gives a complete list of these claims.
A year after the Gulf War, however, Pentagon spokesman Pete Williams admitted that there was "no accurate count of how many mobile launchers had been destroyed". It now seems clear that Coalition aircraft attacked and destroyed numerous decoys and non-Scud related vehicles. The problem was highlighted by an incident involving General Schwarzkopf when he claimed video footage showed Scud launchers being destroyed when it in fact was a group of fuel tanker trucks.
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An Introduction
Countering
the V-1 & V-2
1990: The Iraqi
Scud Threat
Counter-Force in Desert Storm
Special Forces in Desert Storm
Post-1990 Developments
Implications for
the Future
|
Williams added that the counter-Scud effort had reduced Iraq's ability to launch missile attacks by severely disrupting their operations. His comments appear to have been prompted by a series of reports from UNSCOM inspectors in Iraq which indicated that the Iraqis had a significant Scud capability remaining intact after the war. UNSCOM found 62 complete AI Hussein missiles, six MAZ 543 TELs and four other TELs, along with parts of 88 other missiles and nine TELs. The Iraqis were also suspected of hiding other missiles from the UN inspection teams.
One of the inspectors who visited western Iraq found no remains of the destroyed mobile Scuds at the sites claimed by Coalition intelligence. Of the 28 fixed launchers at the sites in western Iraq, only 14 had been destroyed. In southern Iraq, advancing Coalition troops found no abandoned Scuds, indicating the southern missile units were able to escape intact.
When UNSCOM inspectors visited Iraqi missile research, however, development and manufacturing facilities after the conflict they reported major damage to these sites, indicating that Coalition air attacks on large fixed targets were effective.
It is clear that the "Great Scud Hunt", while being a political success, had a mixed fortune on the operational level. The Coalition certainly made life very difficult for the Iraqi mobile Scud units: it was very dangerous to move around western Iraq by vehicle because of the threat of air attack and ambush by the Coalition special forces. But the Coalition had neither the technology to locate and destroy every mobile Scud nor the political will to drive the Scuds physically out of range of their targets by occupying western Iraq, as was the case in the KTO.
Lessons Learnt
Throughout the "Great Scud Hunt" Coalition command, control, communications and intelligence (C3I) systems proved inadequate for the three key tasks of speedily identifying, locating and tasking assets to attack mobile Scuds. Coalition strike aircraft equipped with precision guided weapons could inflict catastrophic damage on Scud launchers only if they could find them. But the problem was to locate and identify the Scud TELs in the 29,000 square miles of desert that was western Iraq; it was a classic case of trying to "find a needle in a haystack".
Initially, the Coalition was not fully prepared to deal with the mobile Scud threat. Before the war, Coalition military commanders from General Schwarzkopf downwards had not considered the problem important enough and little effort was put into preparing to counter the mobile Scud threat beyond putting some strike aircraft on ground alert. To avoid infringing Iraqi sovereignty, the Coalition refrained from infiltrating its special forces into Iraq to watch the mobile Scuds, so they had to rely on technical surveillance devices such as satellites and photographic reconnaissance aircraft. These proved effective for locating Scud fixed launch sites and Iraq's missile manufacturing infrastructure but were inefficient at detecting mobile Scud launchers parked in hardened aircraft shelters, underground car parks or factory complexes. At the start of Operation Desert Storm the Coalition had no accurate count of how many TELs the Iraqis possessed and no idea where they were.
Schwarzkopf rightly judged his main objective to be the destruction of the Iraqi army in Kuwait and his complex air campaign plan all but ignored the mobile Scud threat. The response to the Scuds had to be improvised once the missiles started to fall on Israel, even though their political threat was well-known to Coalition military commanders.
The Coalition air offensive was a highly centralised operation involving more than 1,000 sorties a day. The command, control, communications and intelligence (C31) system of the Coalition air forces worked on a 24 hour planning cycle which was unable to respond effectively or quickly enough to new intelligence on the location of mobile Scuds. Traditional methods of planning air strikes, based on sending out aerial reconnaissance aircraft to find targets and then pre-briefing bomber aircrews on their targets, did not work when dealing with the Iraqi mobile Scuds. The Iraqis could move their Scuds quicker than Coalition intelligence could track them. By the end of the war an improvised C3I system linking the SAS and Delta Force directly to the Coalition TACC was up and running. It was able to integrate air and ground forces to allow a degree of real-time gathering of intelligence in the Scud Boxes and enable a rapid response by strike aircraft to sightings of Scud launchers. The Scud Box system enabled aircraft permanently to be in the air ready to respond to information from special forces teams on the ground.
Surveillance Sensors
A number of other USAF reconnaissance systems deployed to Saudi Arabia could detect Scuds in real-time, such as the Northrop Grumman E-8 JSTARS radar ground surveillance aircraft and the Lockheed Martin TR-1 /U-2R with its electro-optical camera down link. The JSTARS used a radar system that could detect and, to a certain degree, identify types of vehicles for controllers in the air or in a ground station. The TR-1 / U2R systems were, in effect, long range television cameras which could then feed 'live' images to a ground station.
These systems were, however, not always available to operate over western Iraq and there were major problems in linking them into Coalition communication networks. Similar problems bedevilled the passing of intelligence information from American DSP missile tracking satellites to strike aircraft operating over western Iraq. The Iraqis also proved skilful opponents. They had a good idea of the capabilities of Coalition surveillance systems and were able cleverly to hide their Scud launchers.
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