Airpower Doctrine: Tactics, Technique, and Procedures (TTPs)

Prepared for United States Central Command Air Forces

Approved for public release; distribution unlimited


Map of Afghanistan

CHAPTER EIGHT


Operation Enduring Freedom was the first major war of the 21st cen- tury. It also was a defining moment for the still-nascent presidency of George W. Bush. Its outcome in bringing down the Taliban and de- stroying al Qaeda’s terrorist infrastructure in Afghanistan validated the president’s decision to avoid leaping into a precipitous response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, even though the initial inclination, as Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld noted early on, had been to lash out reflexively.1 Instead, the Bush administration laid the groundwork for retaliation systematically and carefully, exercising in the process what The Economist called “considerable amounts of skill, subtlety, leadership, and, above all, intelligence” both in building a coalition and in planning and conducting the campaign.2 In so do- ing, it surprised both its critics and, most likely, the terrorists as well, the latter of whom were, for the first time, put on the defensive and thrust into a reactive mode. The simultaneous initiation of strike and humanitarian relief operations helped contribute to a popular Afghan view of the United States as a liberator rather than an invader. It also helped prevent the emergence of a significant Afghan insurgent resis- tance to the U.S. military presence.



1 Anne Scott Tyson, “Why U.S. Is Moving So Deliberately,” Christian Science Monitor, Oc- tober 4, 2001.

2 “Closing In,” The Economist, September 29, 2001, p. 11.

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Planning for Enduring Freedom began as an exercise in coer- cion, with a view toward persuading the Taliban to turn over Osama bin Laden and his chief al Qaeda deputies. Soon thereafter, however, it became an exercise in brute-force regime takedown and active pur- suit of Taliban and al Qaeda fanatics to the bitter end as it became clear that the Taliban leaders would remain unyielding in this regard. As the war commenced on October 7, 2001, President Bush urged CENTCOM to “take high risks and push the envelope in prosecut- ing this campaign.”3 Although the war got off to a slow start due to weather-driven delays in inserting U.S. SOF teams into Afghanistan, the Taliban crumbled so rapidly in the end that the air offensive did not have discernible phases once its collaborative work with those teams began in earnest. Foreign affairs commentator Fareed Zakaria flatly concluded from the experience that “American air power today is an amazing weapon of war.”4

After the initial bombing ended and the interim Karzai govern- ment had been installed, it became clear to many that the war had indeed been another air power success story, as were Operations De- sert Storm, Deliberate Force, and Allied Force before it. Many lessons from the earlier Allied Force experience were duly honored and in- corporated, particularly the synergistic effect of using friendly ground forces for shaping enemy troop movement and cueing allied air power. By the end of Operation Anaconda in mid-March 2002, En- during Freedom had become the longest-running combat operation the United States had been involved in since Vietnam. Thanks to its persistence, however, according to one reflective account, the terror- ists had finally become “the hunted, not the hunters.”5

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3 Wald, “Operation Enduring Freedom: The CFACC Viewpoint.”

4 Fareed Zakaria, “Face the Facts: Bombing Works,” Newsweek, December 3, 2001.

5 “Six Months On,” The Economist, March 9, 2002, p. 11.

Innovations in Force Employment

In addition to its overarching role as the first military move in the global war on terror, Operation Enduring Freedom was also a battle laboratory for testing, in a live combat setting, some of the most sig- nificant air power developments to have appeared in more than two decades. Among other things, the war saw the first use of an un- manned ISR platform, the MQ-1 Predator, as a precision-attack weapon. It also represented the first major occasion in which “other government agencies,” notably the CIA, were directly integrated into air combat operations. Its dominant features were persistence of pres- sure on the enemy and rapidity of execution, thanks to the improved data fusion enabled by new technologies, a better-managed CAOC, more help from space, and smarter concepts of operations. Much of the persistent pressure stemmed from the widespread availability of precision weapons. During Allied Force, only the B-2 was configured to drop JDAMs. In Enduring Freedom, nearly every U.S. strike plat- form was equipped with that capability.

Many tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) were impro- vised in the heat of battle by allied combatants, who were often the first to identify needed improvements in such areas as communica- tions, organizational arrangements, and ways of using force. Perhaps the most notable innovation was the much-improved integration of precision air power with friendly ground forces, in this case heavy bombers and fighters armed with JDAMs and LGBs and allied SOF teams aided by Air Force terminal attack controllers. Particularly in the case of Operation Anaconda, it was this combination of air assets in all services and highly qualified combat controllers and ETACs on the ground that saved the day for CJTF Mountain despite the latter’s ill-planned start of the operation.

The success of this combination was due not so much to the technologies employed as to the way they were fused together into a novel concept of operations. The war’s first air component com- mander, Air Force Lieutenant General Charles Wald, later recalled that the rapid progress of the Northern Alliance in early November 2001 had been enabled by the targeting support provided by just

“three or four [SOF] guys on the ground.”6 In the end, little more than 300 U.S. SOF combatants proved pivotal in bringing down the Taliban by allowing allied air power to deliver to its fullest potential. The measured and discriminate use of force that was a signature fea- ture of Enduring Freedom emanated from what Secretary of the Navy Gordon England called “targeting truth,” namely, knowing that a desired target is “an authorized target, a target that you can go hit,” as well as understanding “the collateral [damage] consequences of those targets . . . and then, of course, the validity of the bomb damage assessment.”7

Attempts at effects-based operations depended heavily on accu- rate and real-time target information. The major breakthroughs here were not in aircraft or munitions but rather in the realm of ISR fu- sion enabled by linking the inputs of Predator, the RC-135, the U-2, the E-8, and other sensors around the clock. The result was far better than that two years earlier during Operation Allied Force. Greater communications connectivity and more available bandwidth enabled constant surveillance of enemy activity and contributed significantly to shortening the kill chain. Predator and, even more, Global Hawk offered a major improvement in this regard in that they could loiter over the battlefield continuously for long periods without the high absenteeism rate of satellites. They also did not represent a national asset like a satellite and hence bore no requirement for the air com- ponent commander to request tasking.8

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6 Ricks, “Bull’s-Eye War: Pinpoint Bombing Shifts Role of GI Joe.”

7 “Precision Weapons, Networks Trump Navy’s Need for New Ships, England Says,” Aero- space Daily, October 17, 2002.

8 A second Global Hawk crashed on July 10, 2002, into friendly territory in Pakistan on a routine mission while supporting CENTCOM’s mopping-up operations in Afghanistan. That loss left Air Combat Command with only one of five developmental aircraft remaining from the original demonstration effort. Earlier in June, Northrop Grumman announced that Global Hawk had passed the 1,000-hour flight milestone while supporting Enduring Free- dom. Amy Butler, “Flight Testing Halts After OEF Claims Second Global Hawk in Crash,” Inside the Air Force, July 12, 2002, p. 1, and “U.S. Grounds Spy Plane,” Washington Post, July 13, 2002.

With respect to this persistent ISR, Secretary of the Air Force Roche said: “I think we’re almost there.”9 The capability was so effec- tive in part because a UAV can now remain on station for a long time, enabling the elusive goal of near-instantaneous attack by find- ing a target, matching it with a weapon, releasing the weapon, and observing the resultant effects. Through such highly leveraged use, UAVs were a major part of the Enduring Freedom success story, demonstrating in the process a clear need for more of such capability. Compared to orbital assets, they provided longer dwell time, more rapid revisit rates, and the ability to be tasked to a specific need far more quickly.

In addition, a new concept of offensive air employment against enemy ground forces was successfully tested in Enduring Freedom. Although often mistakenly equated with close air support (CAS), it was, in fact, something fundamentally new by way of air power appli- cation that entailed direct air attacks against fielded enemy forces who were not in direct contact with friendly troops.10 That novel use of air power needs to be further thought through and codified in joint- service doctrine and TTPs so that it can become more fully institu- tionalized and integrated into the four services’ force-employment repertoires. Better doctrine and concepts of operations are also needed for using fused air power and friendly SOF teams in conjunc- tion with indigenous forces like the Afghan anti-Taliban groups. Be- yond that, a need was shown for doctrinal improvements aimed at accommodating operational relationships with other government agencies, notably the CIA. Still other operational innovations that helped account for Enduring Freedom’s success included a reduction in the GPS signal error by 50 percent and a demonstration of CENTAF’s CAOC as the world’s most powerful command center,

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9 Frank Tiboni, “Instantaneous Attack Capability Near for U.S.,” Defense News, January 7–13, 2002, p. 1.

10 For more on this new approach to the use of air power in land warfare, see Major General David A. Deptula, USAF, Colonel Gary Crowder, USAF, and Major George L. Stamper, USAF, “Direct Attack: Enhancing Counterland Doctrine and Joint Air-Ground Operations, Air and Space Power Journal, Winter 2003, pp. 5–12.

enabling the full integration of space operations into mission plan- ning and an unprecedented rapidity of execution.

Overall, the most salient features of the Afghan air war by way of innovations in force employment included:

1 A new synergy between SOF spotters and air power

2 Sensor-to-shooter technical links reduced to minutes

3 A continuous ISR umbrella permitting on-call day and night, all-weather precision JDAM capability that enabled lethality on demand throughout the theater

4 Multisensor ISR directly available to the warfighting component

5 A near-seamless integration of space, mobility, and information in the CAOC

6 A high-bandwidth capability in the CAOC that provided sig- nificantly improved situation awareness and theaterwide connec- tivity

7 A near-real-time capability in the CAOC, offered by Predator, for aiding targeteers in deriving mensurated coordinates in min- utes in support of fused precision time-sensitive targeting11

8 Better integration than ever before of service component contri- butions in the CAOC

9 Integrated real-time, loitering hunter-killer operations.12

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Predator provided the CAOC with target coordinates through its video display, but those coordinates were not accurate enough in and of themselves to enable the precision dropping of a JDAM. Targeteers either in the CAOC or at CENTCOM provided the actually mensu- rated coordinates using the RAINDROP point mensuration based on the National Imagery and Mapping Agency’s Digital Point Precision Data Base (DPPDB), a three-dimensional display of most of the world from which GPS-quality coordinates and elevation can be de- rived for GPS-aided bombs. (Comments on an earlier draft by Major Charles Hogan, USAF, December 22, 2003.)

These points were all drawn from Major General David A. Deptula, USAF, “Operation Enduring Freedom—Highlights, Challenges, and Potential Implications: Some Observations from the First 60 Days,” unpublished briefing charts. General Deptula was the CAOC direc- tor for Operation Enduring Freedom from September 23 to November 23, 2002.

Persistent Problems in Need of Attention

Notwithstanding the innovations outlined above, Operation Endur- ing Freedom also embodied some more controversial features. As noted in Chapter 7, those developments included a pronounced ten- dency toward not only centralized planning but also centralized exe- cution of force employment. That, in turn, led to an implementation of the rules of engagement in often ad hoc and dysfunctional ways, thanks to the war’s domination both at CENTCOM and in Wash- ington by leaders strongly inclined toward detailed oversight and un- willing either to trust their subordinates or, if they were not trustwor- thy, to replace them. The more controversial aspects referred to here also included some revealed shortcomings in ISR capability, overly convoluted command arrangements with respect to special operations forces, and a less-than-ideal relationship between the combatant commander and the air component commander from a structural viewpoint, irrespective of the personalities involved. Each of these shortcomings offered useful grist for the defense community’s “les- sons learned” mill. In some combination, they may have contributed to the unnecessary escape of some top Taliban and al Qaeda leaders.

As for collateral damage avoidance, it is now an entrenched fact of life that as American air power has become ever more accurate, le- thal, and effective, it also has come under ever more intense public attention, scrutiny, and questioning, even as it has, at the same time, heightened not only the nation’s political imperatives but also a legal need to be more discriminate in the use of force. Moreover, as con- cern for avoiding enemy noncombatant casualties has steadily risen in recent years, it has spawned an increasingly stringent rules-of- engagement regime aimed at minimizing the incidence of collateral damage. During Desert Storm, the rules of engagement were certainly a factor in inhibiting air operations on occasion, as was the natural inclination of leaders and planners to avoid causing collateral damage whenever possible even when the rules were not so constraining. The rules of engagement were more restrictive in Allied Force, however, and they were unprecedentedly restrictive in the case of Enduring Freedom. Indeed, the determination by CENTCOM to avoid collat-

eral damage irrespective of that effort’s effect on mission accom- plishment was so prepossessing that CENTAF, to its credit, created a special collateral damage reaction cell in the CAOC to look into alle- gations of civilian fatalities and other unintended damage by exam- ining target data, pilot reports, and aerial reconnaissance photogra- phy. This was a salutary development that needs to be formally incorporated into doctrine and practice. One useful lesson taught by both Enduring Freedom and Allied Force was the compelling need for an institutionalized ability in the CAOC to gather information quickly and determine causes when things go wrong, as they inevita- bly will from time to time, not only for collateral damage situations, but even more so when friendly fire incidents demand quick, honest, and convincing explanations.

In reviewing several scores of such allegations, that CAOC reac- tion cell confirmed but a handful of weapon malfunctions or DMPI placement errors that actually caused unintended casualties.13 A later report based on an Associated Press review of hospital records, inter- views, and visits of bombed sites indicated that the civilian death toll in Afghanistan was less than that registered two years earlier in Serbia and Kosovo during Operatison Allied Force, the latter of which was on the order of 500 to 600.14 Shortly after the campaign ended, an American organization called Global Exchange sent a field team into Afghanistan to assess reported collateral damage incidents, after which it compiled a list indicating that 812 civilians had been killed by errant attacks. One explanation offered by the group was that U.S. SOF teams relied excessively on faulty information provided by Af- ghan opposition groups. In response to that report, Secretary of the Air Force Roche admitted that mistakes had been made, singling out in particular the failed battery in an Air Force combat controller’s GPS receiver that resulted in the controller’s own position being bombed and Hamid Karzai almost getting killed. The Afghan provi-

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Barry Bearak, “Uncertain Toll in the Fog of War: Civilian Deaths in Afghanistan,” New York Times, February 10, 2002.

Laura King, “Civilian Toll in Afghan War Likely Lower,” Philadelphia Inquirer, February 12, 2002.

sional government eventually estimated that fewer than 500 Afghan civilians had been killed by errant bombs.15

Some airmen maintained that the collateral damage constraints in Enduring Freedom that emanated from CENTCOM or above se- verely hindered effective combat operations. For example, those con- straints may have contributed to the escape of Mullah Omar on the first night, a possibility that has not been confirmed beyond doubt. But without question, the heightened aversion to the potential costs of unintended consequences that pervaded the chain of command from the White House on down allowed numerous other similarly lucrative but fleeting opportunities to kill enemy leaders to slip away. There was abundant good reason for that CENTCOM aversion to collateral damage in principle, however, and such cases of missed chances were fortunately exceptions to the rule. On this important point, the air commander during Operation Desert Storm, General Horner, rightly noted that in Enduring Freedom, “collateral damage concerns [indeed] became more important than mission success. But then, in part, mission success depended on avoiding collateral dam- age.”16 In general, as Australian air power historian Alan Stephens has pointed out, “the need to balance operational opportunities against international political sensibilities seems to have been reasonably well managed . . . certainly better managed than was the case during Allied Force.”17

Some critics charged that even while the war was under way, General Franks had been overly influenced by his JAG, who was said to have repeatedly held forth with a thumbs-down opinion on CAOC target nominations, even though the proposed targets were clearly military in nature. It was she, for example, who reportedly recommended against approving the CAOC’s requested attack on a convoy thought to contain Omar the first night out of concern that

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Dexter Filkins, “Flaws in U.S. Air War Left Hundreds of Civilians Dead,” New York Times, July 21, 2002.

Comments on an earlier draft by General Horner, January 8, 2004.

Alan Stephens, “Afghanistan and the Australian Way of War,” unpublished paper, p. 6.

the convoy might involve a trick to sucker in a strike against com- mingled civilians. In fairness to the approval process, however, she was only doing her job in questioning the legal basis for the requested attack. Enforcement of rules of engagement is not the JAG’s respon- sibility. The rules-of-engagement issue is quintessentially an opera- tional issue. Pentagon spokesman Rear Admiral Craig Quigley was on solid ground in reminding the critics that CENTCOM’s JAG “was never in a position to ‘stop’ any attack (nor is any JAG anywhere). That is the prerogative of Franks and other operational commanders alone.”18 The commander’s responsibility is to determine how much risk he is prepared to take. The military lawyer’s job, in turn, is to bend every effort to keep the commander from becoming a war criminal as a result of his actions. It is up to commanders, in turn, to use their JAGs proactively and not allow them to veto force- employment options by defaulting to their opinions to the exclusion of all other considerations.19

Notably, most of the inadvertent civilian fatalities in Enduring Freedom occurred after Tora Bora and Zhawar Kili and the end of the war against the Taliban in mid-December 2001. As the effort metamorphosed into a counterinsurgency operation, it demanded an ever more exacting imposition of appropriate rules to avoid collateral damage to avert even an occasional undisciplined or trigger-happy force-employment event. Of the highly publicized incident in which hostile fire emanating from a site close to where an Afghan wedding party was under way drew a lethal response from an AC-130 orbiting