Worst of all, after battling the weather, dodging enemy AAA fire, and straining to find their targets, attacking aircrews were often sent to the wrong place. Because target coordinates were derived from overhead photography that was hours and days old by the time it was received in Riyadh, all too often planes were sent out to kill tanks and artillery in locations the enemy had long since left. Though there were several efforts to speed the information flow, none of these really worked.

The solution, as we’ve already seen, was Killer Scouts—F-16s orbiting thirty-by-thirty-mile sectors of the battlefield and searching for dug-in tanks and artillery. When they found them, they’d direct the oncoming streams of fighter-bombers to their targets.

★ A second addition to tank- and artillery-killing efficiency occurred in late January. By then, control of the air had been assured and the fixed targets in Iraq had been (for the most part) hit, thus allowing more and more F-111F and F-15E64 sorties to be tasked against Iraqi Army targets. The tank-plinking tactics developed in the Night Camel exercises were now put to the test in the real world. The results were remarkable. On February 11, aircrews claimed 96 armored vehicles—tanks, APCs, and artillery; 22 of these were killed by “plinkers.” On the twelfth, film showed 155 killed; of these 93 were plinked by laser-guided 500-pound bombs. On the fourteenth, 214 were killed, and of these, 129 were “plinked.” The totals grew daily (except for those days when bad weather shrouded the battlefield).

Dollar for dollar, this was the way to kill tanks. If a single F-111F carried eight 500-pound laser-guided bombs at $3,000 each, then for less than $50,000 (which included most of the other costs of a sortie) eight tanks could be destroyed. In the U.S. Army, each tank costs in the neighborhood of $1,000,000. The Russian tanks used by the Iraqi Army cost about half that. So less than $50,000 worth of air offense killed over one hundred times as much ground offense.

COUNTERPUNCH

Not much has been said in favor of Saddam Hussein as a strategist, yet in fact his original strategy for the Gulf War was simple yet brilliant—at least on the face of it. The Iraqi dictator had paid close attention to the lessons of Vietnam. If the United States can lose a war once, he reasoned, they can lose a war twice, and he nominated Iraq for the honor of inflicting that loss. “What led to the defeat?” he asked himself. Casualties on the battlefield produced discontent on the home front. Battlefield carnage translated into television images that so horrified the folks back home that the President of the United States was driven from office, and the Americans left the field of battle undefeated, yet beaten.