Allies in Air Power

A History of Multinational Air Operations

Steven Paget

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780813180328
• eBook ISBN: 9780813180342
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

In the past century, multinational military operations have become the norm; but while contributions from different nations provide many benefits—from expanded capability to political credibility—they also present a number of challenges. Issues such as command and control, communications, equipment standardization, intelligence, logistics, planning, tactics, and training all require consideration. Cultural factors present challenges as well, particularly when language barriers are involved.

In Allies in Air Power, experts from around the world survey these operations from the birth of aviation to the present day. Chapters cover conflicts including World War I, multiple theaters of World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Gulf War, Kosovo, the Iraq War, and various United Nations peacekeeping missions. Contributors also analyze the role of organizations such as the UN, NATO, and so-called "coalitions of the willing" in laying the groundwork for multinational air operations.

While multinational military action has become commonplace, there have been few detailed studies of air power cooperation over a prolonged period or across multiple conflicts. The case studies in this volume not only assess the effectiveness of multinational operations over time, but also provide vital insights into how they may be improved in the future.

Coalition Air Power in the Gulf War, 1991

Richard P. Hallion

Less than three months after the end of the Gulf War of 1991, the noted air power analyst Air Vice Marshal R. A. “Tony” Mason, Royal Air Force (RAF), judged it “the apotheosis of twentieth-century air power.”¹ In thirty-nine days of round-the-clock strategic, operational, and tactical air and cruise-missile attacks, followed by a four-day air-and-artillery-supported armored mechanized assault, a coalition mandated by the United Nations (UN) liberated Kuwait and, striking deep into Iraq itself, occupied 28,500 square miles (73,815 square kilometers) of territory, taking more than 87,000 prisoners. In a furious welter of explosive and cacophonous destruction, it broke the world’s sixth-largest air force and reduced the world’s fourth-largest army to merely the fourth-largest army inside Iraq.² The outcome confounded prewar prognosticators, shattered conventional wisdom about air campaigns and cross-border maneuver warfare, led to widespread reform of military doctrine and forces, and triggered a still unresolved debate about whether it constituted a transformational “Revolution in Military Affairs” or simply a single uniquely situational (and thus anomalous) event.³

Though video of high-tech F-117 “stealth” fighters, Patriot missiles, Apache gunships, and “smart” bombs dominated the media, the outcome represented the collective achievement of coalition partners that planned and fought together to liberate Kuwait from Saddam Hussein. A brief summation of what they brought—and the costs they bore in both material and human terms—offers ample measure of that contribution. Excluding the United States, coalition members

• furnished all bases, airfields, camps, operating locations, and ports;

• furnished more than 90 percent of fuel used in Desert Shield/Storm;

• furnished a third of all troops and other military personnel;

• furnished a quarter of all fixed-wing aircraft (including almost a third of all fighter/attack aircraft and almost a third of all airlifters);

• furnished nearly half of all naval vessels;

• furnished more than a third of all armored and mechanized vehicles;

• offset in cash or in kind nearly 90 percent of US incremental crisis and war costs;

• suffered a quarter of all aircraft losses from Iraqi fire;

• suffered more than a third of all combat deaths from Iraqi fire;

• suffered more than half of all combat wounded from Iraqi fire.

Quite clearly, then, coalition members more than pulled their weight in influencing the war’s outcome.

FROM CRISIS ONSET THROUGH DESERT SHIELD

Saudi Arabia’s King Fahd and other Persian Gulf leaders saw Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in the early hours of 2 August 1990 as a perfidious, dishonorable, and ungrateful act of betrayal—not merely of Kuwait and the Gulf Cooperation Council but also of the Arab–Islamic world as a whole. European and American leaders were likewise shocked and angered, with Britain’s prime minister Margaret Thatcher and France’s president François Mitterrand reacting most strongly.

On 7 August, US Central Command initiated force deployment Operation Plan 1002-90, marking the beginning of Operation Desert Shield, and Prime Minister Thatcher ordered the RAF to send strike aircraft to the Gulf, marking the beginnings of Operation Granby, the British effort in the Gulf War. The first American aircraft—twenty-three F-15Cs for Saudi air defense—arrived at Dhahran on 8 August, and the first British aircraft—twenty-four Tornado F.3 air defense fighters and twelve Jaguar GR.1A strike fighters—arrived in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, and Thumrait, Oman, respectively, on 11 August (Tornado GR.1s were held back until 27 August, while Whitehall mandarins debated deploying offensive or defensive systems).⁴ President Mitterrand ordered French forces to the Gulf, as did Canada and Australia. Morocco, Syria, and Egypt also pledged troops, the first non–Gulf Cooperation Council Arab states to do so.⁵ Even so, by mid-August diplomatic strictures were complicating and even delaying force deployment. The magnitude of the crisis and the unity of regional partners and allies helped greatly, however, with Austria, Bahrain, Egypt, Greece, India, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Switzerland, Thailand, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), joined subsequently by several eastern European nations, streamlining approval procedures or granting outright blanket authorization. Though some hindrances remained, the subsequent deployment generally went smoothly.⁶ Bedding down incoming forces raised numerous issues, but most were resolved reasonably quickly. Furnishing air base security posed one challenge but was resolved through cooperation between arriving forces and host-nation personnel. To compensate for the shortage of foreign personnel that could be assigned to base-protection duties and to furnish needed counterintelligence expertise, Saudi Arabia and the various Gulf states assigned their own security forces—who were intimately familiar with local threats, something incoming foreign personnel were generally not—to work with American and other coalition forces.⁷

Coalition participation and contributions were crucial to combat success, from initial force deployments in August 1990 through the seven-week air-sea-land war itself. In addition to the United States, Saudi Arabia, and Great Britain, thirty-four other coalition nations and five more contributed soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines, special forces, medical personnel, ships, aircraft, tanks, artillery, mechanized vehicles, and other forms of aid or relieved the military burdens of other nations that made such contributions by deploying their own forces to critical regions (such as Belgian, Dutch, German, and Italian fighter deployments to Turkey). Forces fell under either the Saudi-led Joint Force Command (led by His Royal Highness General Khaled bin Sultan, Royal Saudi Air Defence Force) or US Central Command (CENTCOM, led by General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, US Army).

The coalition’s first task was securing the safety of Saudi Arabia. Recognizing the urgency of assistance, Khaled and other senior officials drew up five requirements that coalition partners had to meet. They must

• be capable of high mobility and a speedy response;

• have a deterrent capability, even before reaching the kingdom;

• be able to protect supply lines to the kingdom, especially maritime routes;

• be strong enough to defend the kingdom and confront any possible attack;

• be able to contemplate quickly launching an offensive to free Kuwait.

“The inescapable conclusion,” Khaled wrote after the war, “was that only the forces of the United States could meet these conditions.”⁸ But even the United States would require coalition assistance. There were also concerns related to Saudi autonomy and its uniquely Islamic culture—in particular the relationship among Saudi Arabia, the United States, and incoming coalition partners—as well as to the role of Saudi and American/coalition military commanders. On 9 August, King Fahd appointed Khaled as Joint Force commander, a coalition military leader equivalent to America’s Schwarzkopf. Although Khaled recognized it was “inevitable that the command structure of the air campaign should reflect American supremacy,” he “wanted to be sure that [he] knew 100-percent of what was going on.”⁹ Saudi leaders rigorously guarded their prerogatives of state power and freedom of action, insisting that any proposed military action be reviewed and approved first by the Saudi government and that once the crisis passed, the coalition members quickly remove their forces from the country.

“If the truth be told, the task we faced during the crisis was not winning the war against Saddam,” Khaled wrote after the war. “In my view the greatest challenge we faced—and our failure was what Saddam was counting on—was to make sure that the members of the coalition worked together without friction or dispute.”¹⁰ “To their credit,” British ambassador to Saudi Arabia Sir Alan Munro wrote, “both commanders [Khaled and Schwarzkopf] kept their sentiments towards each other within bounds.”¹¹

Upon first meeting Khaled, Schwarzkopf sensed unease beneath the pleasantries. “[Lieutenant General Charles “Chuck”] Horner [US Air Force (USAF)] and [Lieutenant General John] Yeosock [US Army] had guessed he [Khaled] was worried that with my higher rank and broad experience as a commander I’d try to bulldoze him or order him around,” Schwarzkopf recalled. “I had no such intention, and, as Khaled recognized this in the days that followed, we became true friends and effective colleagues.”¹² As a young cadet, Khaled had graduated from officer training at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst and then during his career had attended and graduated from the US Army’s Command and General Staff College, the USAF’s Air War College, and the US Navy’s (USN) Naval Postgraduate School, experiences that gave him broad familiarity with both the British and American military services and systems. Thus, both by inclination and by background he was desirous of helping. Schwarzkopf recognized that Khaled, as a senior military officer and a member of t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: Multinational Air Power: The Context
• Building Partnership Capacity: US Air Power in the First World War
• Partners in Name Only: The Royal Air Force and Armée de l’Air during the Battle of France, 1940
• Creating an Anglo-American Air Component: The Western Desert Experience, 1940–1942
• The Royal New Zealand Air Force and American Supply in the South Pacific during the Second World War
• From Ally to Auxiliary: The Royal Hungarian Air Force and the Luftwaffe in the Second World War
• The Korean War: United Nations Carrier Operations, 1950–1953
• Magpies and Eagles: Number 2 Squadron, Royal Australian Air Force, and the Experience of Coalition Warfare in Vietnam
• Coalition Air Power in the Gulf War, 1991
• Operation Allied Force as a Catalyst for Change: Toward Intensified Multinational Cooperation
• Operation Iraqi Freedom: The Allied Contribution
• United Nations Peace Operations: Precedents and Progress in the Four Facets of Air Power
• Multinational Air Power: The Outlook
• List of Contributors
• Index