Anniston Star March 12, 2011
ANALYSIS: A no-fly-zone veteran's advice for those who may patrol Libya
By Tim Lockette
Dear military aviator,
If someone has forwarded you this story — your worried aunt, your brother who wishes you well — then you’re probably on your way to the new no-fly zone.
Maybe you’re on an aircraft carrier in the Gulf of Sidra, preparing to fly over Libya, or maybe you’re setting up shop at an airbase across the Mediterranean. But if you’re getting this message, if it has gone viral, then NATO or the United Nations has probably approved a no-fly zone, and you’ve been invited to go enforce it.
I hope you don’t mind a little advice from somebody who has been there, and done that. Like thousands of people who served in the Air Force in the 1990s, I’m a veteran of no-fly operations — if “veteran” is the right word for someone involved in this peculiar form of aerial sitzkrieg. As an enlisted crew member on a KC-135R tanker (which, as you know, is a flying gas station), I spent several months pumping gas to F4s and F15s over northern Iraq in Operation Provide Comfort and over the desert south of Iraq in Operation Southern Watch.
That’s two no-fly zones — out of only three in American history (the other being Operation Deny Flight, which took place over the Balkans. Remember the Balkans?). Precious little has been written about this relatively new military strategy, and since no one seems to agree on what no-fly operations are for, I’m as good an expert as any.
It may seem odd for me to be offering you advice. After all, you’re probably just coming off a deployment to a war zone, or maybe two, and I haven’t even seen combat.
But you’re entering my world now — a weird ghost zone between war and peace. A mission both boring and deadly — and deadly, sometimes, because it’s boring.
So here’s my advice:
Bring your Playstation. You’ll need entertainment, because you’re going to be there for a long time.
I know you’re hoping for a quick victory. When I asked defense analyst John Pike for an estimate of how long a no-fly operation would take the United States, he was happy to describe the most optimistic view of a potential conflict.
“This thing could be brief and glorious,” said Pike, director of the much-quoted think tank GlobalSecurity.org. “We could get the Enterprise into the Gulf of Sidra … blow up a few helicopters over Tripoli and see (Moammar) Gadhafi out within days.”
“Brief and glorious” was what I expected on my first trip to Turkey and Saudi Arabia. Back then, you made a point of knowing where your chemical warfare gear was. Saddam Hussein was on his last leg, and at any moment, the missiles might start flying in a final battle royale.
Of course, it didn’t happen. No-fly patrols kept Saddam from dropping bombs on his own people, and they even created a de facto independent state in the Kurdish areas of Iraq — but they didn’t tip the scales decisively against Saddam. In the northern zone, two Kurdish factions eventually descended into civil war, and one of them wound up accepting assistance from Saddam. In the southern zone, the Iraqi government managed to suppress rebellions even with U.S. jets circling overhead. The no-fly zones would go on for 12 years.
So, you’ll need something to do while you wait for the dictator to fall. As former Air Force Gen. Merrill McPeak recently told The New York Times, a no-fly zone doesn’t have to be a 24/7 operation to deter flights. In “hot” periods — yes, there was fighting — we could be quite busy. But we’d sometimes go for days at a stretch without a flight.
In Riyadh, between flights, I plugged away at a 700-plus-page, unpublishable fantasy novel. My crew hosted a Tecmo Bowl video-game tournament, participated in a roller-blade-equipped “desert hockey” league, and completed at least one of the Zelda games. Some all-male crews would buy stacks of women’s magazines from the BX, cutting out images of women that hadn’t been blacked out by the Saudi censors. Their lovingly assembled collages, on poster board, hung proudly throughout their quarters.
Chances are, you’ll have time for some arts and crafts, as well. Pike, the defense analyst, says the “brief and glorious” scenario is only the rosiest option. On the other end of the spectrum is a decade-long commitment in which U.S. jets circle over a grinding civil war.
“Like many countries in the Arab world, the nation of Libya is artificial,” he said. “It has traditionally been divided into two city-states — Tripolitania and Cyrenaica — and the current conflict falls along the same lines.”
Even the shortest no-fly effort, Operation Deny Flight over the Balkans, lasted two years.
There’s no telling how much your no-fly time will cost the taxpayers. But to heck with the taxpayers. They’re the ones who sent you here.
Paper valor is better than real valor. If you covet honor, you can really clean up in a no-fly operation. In my day, every flight that entered Iraqi airspace was considered “combat” or “combat support,” which meant you could log tons of combat time without firing a shot in anger. Even in an unarmed aircraft like the KC-135, crews could collect a chest full of medals.
Of course, if you really did get shot at, good luck getting anyone to believe it. Skirmishes happened all the time in the no-fly zones — fighters getting “lit up” by Iraqi missile sights, bombing those sites and flying off unscathed — but the incidents rarely made the front page. If all goes well, six months after you deploy to Libya, most Americans will forget you’re there. So don’t be a hero.
There’s only one no-fly war hero in all of history: Capt. Scott O’Grady, whose experiences in the Balkans inspired the movie “Behind Enemy Lines.” Of course, O’Grady got shot down, which has its drawbacks. Most people who are shot down don’t live to see their stories highly fictionalized on the big screen.
The enemy is us. You’re just as likely to get shot down by your own people. In April 1994, Operation Provide Comfort saw its only combat losses when American F-15s shot down two U.S. Blackhawk helicopters over Iraq, killing 26 American, Turkish and Kurdish troops.
Airmen who’d been in the zones were appalled and saddened. But we weren’t all that surprised. Every time we arrived in Turkey to patrol the northern zone, the briefings mentioned the potential for fratricide. This is the biggest peacetime air operation since the Berlin Airlift, the briefers would say. There are lots of Americans up there, armed to the teeth and eager to get an air-to-air kill — and few airborne enemy challengers. Do that long enough, and somebody’s going to get hurt.
Pike agrees.
“Over time, in any military operation, fratricide is inevitable,” he said. He noted that even pilots who flew in Iraq and Afghanistan have spent their time attacking ground targets, which could lead to too much eagerness to get an air-to-air kill — the achievement most pilots dream of.
When fratricide happens in your no-fly zone, expect the good people of America to look away. They won’t be able to understand how Americans can kill other Americans, or how our troops can die as a result of a mistake. Especially in a conflict they forgot was even going on.
But, hey, to heck with the good people of America. They’re the ones who sent you here.
You can’t win. But then, you can’t lose. One of the big problems with no-fly zones, Pike notes, is that no one knows the conditions of victory. How do you know you’ve “won?” When can you declare success and go home?
“Once you turn this thing on, it’s hard to turn off,” Pike said. “Once you stop, you’ve admitted defeat.”
Years after you leave the zone, you’ll still be wondering if you did any good. You’ll swell with pride when you hear of a village that was able to establish self-rule because of American protection. And you’ll feel a certain shame when you hear of people who were killed on the ground while the United States circled overhead.
Needed or not, no-fly zones are emotionally unsatisfying for both flyers and the public. There isn’t the clear narrative we’re accustomed to seeing in the war movies. Operation Deny Flight ended with the signing of the Dayton Peace Accords, which sounds like a success. The Iraqi zones, of course, didn’t end until the U.S. invasion in 2003. In other words, things escalated.
Pike says escalation, and the spread of conflict, are real risks in your no-fly zone, as well. Now that you’re patrolling Libya, you can bet protesters in other countries will begin calling for a no-fly zone, too.
“Where is the bright line that determines when you declare a no-fly zone and when you don’t?” Pike asked.
That’s a problem that will probably cause a lot of sleepless nights for the policy makers.
But, hey.
They’re the ones who sent you here.
© Copyright 2011, Anniston Star
