From one point of view, battlefield interdiction is an accessory to battlefield preparation. Putting a wall between an enemy and his sources of sustenance and information obviously seriously restricts his ability to inflict harm on friendly ground forces. Though a number of other elements also fall under the overall rubric of preparing the battlefield, only one of these truly mattered to General Schwarzkopf: “Kill the tanks and artillery.” His reasons for this were simple, and doctrinally correct: tanks and artillery were the Iraqis’ likely means to inflict harm on friendly ground forces.

It was for this reason that plans called for half of the enemy tanks and artillery pieces to be destroyed by airpower before Coalition soldiers and marines crossed into Kuwait and Iraq. From the opening moments of the war, the Air Tasking Order called for strikes against the Iraqi Army in the KTO.

In the west, in front of VIIth Corps, the killing effort was more or less equally divided between tanks and artillery, with perhaps a slight tilt in the direction of the modern T-72 tanks of the Republican Guard. In the east, on the other hand, Walt Boomer wanted emphasis placed on Iraqi artillery. Once the ground war started, he believed he could handle the tanks he would be facing (which were for the most part obsolete), but the artillery would cause problems, especially when he was passing his force through the extensive minefields that lay ahead of him.

Despite the priority of this mission in the mind of the CINC, killing Iraqi tanks and artillery got off to a slow start. In the early moments of the war, when most aircraft were directed to gaining control of the air, only a few sorties were available for tasking against KTO-based targets, and bad weather made it difficult for KTO-bound pilots to find Iraqi tanks and artillery without unnecessarily exposing their aircraft to enemy AAA and shoulder-fired SAMS. Worse, pilots had difficulty hitting their targets when they found them, since they were not used to initiating attacks at 10,000 feet or above. At those altitudes, strong winds often made a pilot’s roll-in unpredictable; it was a struggle to place his aircraft at the right position and speed for the weapons release.

Combat was proving a far cry from the shine-your-ass gunnery meets we had held in the United States, where the pilots were not being shot at, where they had been briefed on the winds affecting their bombing passes, where they were flying on familiar training ranges against familiar targets, and where they could press their attacks so close to the target that there was little opportunity for a bent fin or maladjusted release rack to make a bomb errant. In the meets, you expected the bombs to go inside the open turrets of the tanks; in Iraq you could hardly see where the tanks might be on the desert floor below.