IRAQ'S GOAL: BRING DOWN A U.S. PLANE
By Tom Hundley
It is a strangely impersonal war, and the U.S. military pilots who have been quietly fighting it for the past 10 years want to keep it that way.
Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, on the other hand, would like to make it a bit more personal. He would like to shoot down one of these American pilots, put his face on television and parade him through the streets of Baghdad.
That would be a very sweet moment for the Iraqi dictator. So sweet that he has offered a $14,000 bounty to any soldier who succeeds in bringing down a U.S. plane.
Last autumn, while most of official Washington was preoccupied with the presidential election, allied military advisers in Turkey were deeply troubled by what they saw as a U.S. policy that seemed to be playing into Iraq's hands.
"This is a disaster waiting to happen," fumed one who spoke on condition of anonymity. "One of these days Saddam is going to get lucky. He's going to shoot down one of our guys. Then what do we do? Is this country prepared to go to war over it?"
Top U.S. and British officials say joint strikes on Iraqi air defense systems on Feb. 16 have lengthened the odds against the Iraqis shooting down one of their planes. The same official who spoke so critically of the policy in November agreed that the attacks on radar installations on the outskirts of Baghdad were a significant step in the right direction.
But no one denies that the risk is still there, nor do they deny that the political price for a downed aircraft would be enormous.
"Certainly, the thought goes through your mind every time you go up: What if there's a system malfunction and you have to bail out over Iraq?" said an Air Force captain who patrols the no-fly zone over northern Iraq from this airbase in southern Turkey.
Media access to the base at Incirlik is restricted, and military officials insisted that the names of pilots not be published. Those in charge are understandably edgy. Iraqi ground forces have fired more surface-to-air missiles at allied warplanes during the past month than they had in the previous year.
"Every single day that I've flown, I've been shot at or seen others shot at," the Air Force captain said.
He is 27, a graduate of the Air Force Academy and F-15s. He spoke with the laconic detachment and cool self-assurance typical of those who fly the world's most lethal warplanes.
He said the Iraqis have been putting up an "interesting" combination of surface-to-air missiles, rockets and anti-aircraft artillery.
"I wouldn't say there has been anything like a close call. We're looking out the window at the right time; we're avoiding the trouble areas; we're taking evasive action when necessary," the pilot said.
The United States and Britain, joined by France and Turkey, established the no-fly zone in northern Iraq--now dubbed Operation Northern Watch--to protect Iraqi Kurds from retaliation after the Kurds rebelled against the Baghdad regime at the end of the Persian Gulf war. That was nearly 10 years ago, in April 1991.
A southern no-fly zone--Operation Southern Watch--was established 16 months later to prevent the Iraqis from threatening the Kuwaiti border and to protect Iraq's Shiite minority, which also rebelled against Baghdad. Flight operations for Operation Southern Watch are carried out from Saudi Arabia and from U.S. carriers in the Persian Gulf.
The French, eager to renew business ties with Baghdad, stopped participating in Operation Northern Watch in 1996 and withdrew from OSW in 1998.
Turkish participation in Operation Northern Watch is limited. The Turks allow the U.S. and Britain to base their planes at Incirlik, but Turkish politicians have a habit of threatening to end the cooperation whenever they are peeved by some aspect of American policy.
The rules of engagement in the skies over Iraq are simple. Allied planes don't shoot at Iraqi targets unless the Iraqis engage them first. If the Iraqis engage either with radar or direct fire, the allies reserve the right to shoot back at anything that represents a threat.
A patrol over Iraqi skies is anything but routine. It is a carefully choreographed event that involves a "package" of up to 30 aircraft and many hours of meticulous planning.
F-15s are used to maintain air superiority in the unlikely event that the Iraqis would send up their own warplanes to challenge the allies. Smaller, more maneuverable F-16s are used to take out radar, missile sites and anti-aircraft positions that threaten allied planes. The F-15s and F-16s are accompanied by radar jammers and reconnaissance planes such as the EA-6B Prowler.
Just outside the no-fly zone, in Turkish airspace, lumbering tankers are positioned to refuel the combat aircraft while the AWACS radar planes keep track of all the players in what amounts to a three-dimensional game of cat-and-mouse.
Search and recovery aircraft are on standby in case an allied plane goes down.
"These aren't just strolls in the park," said a 40-year-old Navy commander who pilots an EA-6B Prowler.
"The Iraqis have a very integrated and robust air defense system. And when we go up there, they are definitely looking for us," said the pilot, who is on his fifth tour in this theater since 1992.
Military experts and Western diplomats say Iraq has greatly improved its air defenses during the past three years, making up for technological shortcomings with creative innovations.
"They are devoting tremendous energy to their goal of knocking down one of our planes. They keep coming up with evermore devilish techniques," a senior Western diplomat said. One such technique seen recently by American pilots attempts to lure them into the range of conventional ground artillery that can suddenly fill the sky with "three football fields worth of lead," the diplomat said.
Far more threatening to the lives of American pilots, however, was the fiber optic network Chinese technicians were installing to link various elements of the Iraqi air defense network. It was this technology--a blatant violation of UN sanctions on China's part--that was the target of the Feb. 16 air strikes.
Despite Hussein's stepped-up efforts to shoot them down, American fliers remain supremely confident in their ability to thwart him.
"There's an oddball chance that he could do it, but basically in 10 years we haven't lost a single coalition aircraft," the F-15 pilot said. "I think it shows we're doing it right."
What concerns the pilots is the random technical glitch that would force them to bail out over Iraq. No matter how many fallbacks and failsafes are built into the equipment, no matter how many times the system is checked and rechecked, things go wrong.
Things went seriously wrong on April 14, 1994, when U.S. warplanes misidentified and shot down two U.S. helicopters over northern Iraq, killing all 26 onboard.
If a pilot does go down, he would stand a much better chance of being safely recovered in northern Iraq, where about half the territory is controlled by Kurds friendly to the U.S., than in southern Iraq, a much larger area entirely controlled by the Iraqi military.
But no matter where a pilot goes down, the military's policy is the same. "We go in and get him," said a former command official.
The world got a glimpse of the military's remarkable capabilities in this respect in 1995, when Air Force pilot Scott O'Grady was rescued after six days on the ground in hostile Bosnian Serb territory.
With the Bush administration reformulating and rebuilding its Iraq policy, a key question is whether the risks of maintaining the no-fly zones are worth the benefits.
"Ask yourself about the alternatives," said a Western diplomat who travels regularly to northern Iraq. "Saddam would have retaken this territory, and he would have used chemical weapons to do it. Ask yourself, is it worth it to protect 4 million people against chemical weapons attacks?"
The Iraqi Kurds, well supplied with light arms, undoubtedly are better able to defend themselves under an allied air umbrella. The same cannot be said for the unarmed Shiites in southern Iraq who are constantly menaced by Iraqi troops in spite of the American planes.
Pilots, as a rule, do not delve deeply into such policy questions, at least not publicly. They are, however, happy to tell you that the risks they take are part of their jobs.
"I'm a professional military aviator; I'm not a big policy guy," the Navy pilot said. "We've got a very specific and well-defined mission here. This is what we train for, and I get a great deal of satisfaction out of doing it."
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