The Three Battles of Wanat Read online

  Seventeen other raids were conducted in and around Baghdad soon after Zarqawi’s death. The shooters found suicide vests, passports, Iraqi army uniforms, and license plates hidden under floorboards. Another twenty-five Iraqis were issued blue jumpsuits and led to the interrogation rooms. Task Force 145’s primary focus shifted to Zarqawi’s successor, Abu Ayyub al-Masri. The insurgents’ bombings continued. The fight went on.

  As for Abu Raja and Abu Haydr, they were processed and shipped out. “Probably to Camp Cropper,” said one of the gators, referring to a detention facility near Baghdad International Airport.

  Mary and Lenny felt that Abu Haydr deserved a reward of some kind, but they were reminded that he had been an important mid-level figure in the deadly insurgency, a man who had on his hands, at least indirectly, the blood of many civilians and American soldiers. The idea of a reward was quickly dropped.

  And what of Doc’s pledge to Abu Haydr?

  “Doc promised him an important role in the future of Iraq,” said one gator. “And, by God, Abu Haydr got it. He was the man who led us to Zarqawi.”

  The Last Ace

  Atlantic, March 2009

  The Doorstep of Oblivion

  Over Cesar Rodriguez’s desk hangs a macabre souvenir of his decades as a fighter pilot. It is a large framed picture, a panoramic cockpit view of open sky and desert. A small F-15 Eagle is visible in the distance; but larger and more immediate, filling the center of the shot, staring right at the viewer, is an incoming missile.

  It is a startling picture, memorializing a moment of air-to-air combat from January 19, 1991, over Iraq. Air-to-air combat has become exceedingly rare. Even when it happens, modern fighter pilots are rarely close enough to actually see the person they are shooting at. This image recalls a kill registered during the Gulf war by Rodriguez, who goes by Rico; and his wingman, Craig Underhill, known as Mole.

  A special-operations team combed the Iraqi MiG’s crash site, and this was one of the items salvaged, the last millisecond of incoming data from the doomed Iraqi pilot’s head-up display, or HUD. It was the final splash of light on his retinas, probably arriving too late for his brain to process before being vaporized with the rest of his corporeal frame. Pilots like Rodriguez don’t romanticize such exploits. These are strictly matter-of-fact men from a world where war is work, and life and death hang on a rapidly and precisely calibrated reality, an attitude captured by the flat caption mounted on the frame: “This is an AIM-7 air-to-air missile shot from an F-15 Eagle detonating on an Iraqi MiG-29 fulcrum during Operation Desert Storm.”

  A snapshot from the doorstep of oblivion, the photo is a reminder that the game of single combat played by Rico and Mole, and by fighter pilots ever since World War I, is the ultimate one. It may have come to resemble a video game, but it is one with no reset button, no next level. It is played for keeps.

  When Rodriguez retired from the air force two years ago, as a colonel, his three air-to-air kills (two over Iraq in 1991 and one over Kosovo) were the most of any American fighter pilot on active duty. That number may seem paltry alongside the twenty-six enemy planes downed by Eddie Rickenbacker in World War I, or the forty notched by Richard Bong in World War II, or the thirty-four by Francis Gabreski in World War II and Korea. Rodriguez’s total was two shy of the threshold number for the honorific ace, yet his three made him the closest thing to an ace in the modern U.S. Air Force.

  This says more, of course, about the nature of American airpower than it does about the skills of our pilots. It’s hard to call what happens in the sky over a battlefield today “single combat.” More than ever, an air war is a group effort involving skilled professionals and technological marvels, from the ground to Earth orbit. But within the world of military aviation there remains a hierarchy of cool, and fighter jocks still own the highest rung. The word ace denotes singularity, the number one, he who stands alone at the top. Its mystique still attracts ambitious young aviators, even if nowadays the greatest danger most of them face is simply flying the aircraft at supersonic speed.

  American pilots haven’t shot down many enemy jets in modern times because few nations have dared rise to the challenge of trying to fight them. The F-15, the backbone of America’s airpower for more than a quarter century, may just be the most successful weapon in history. It is certainly the most successful fighter jet. In combat, its kill ratio over more than thirty years is 107 to zero. Zero. In three decades of flying, no F-15—not even any F-15 flown by an air force other than America’s—has ever been shot down by an enemy plane. Rival fighters rarely test those odds. Many of Saddam Hussein’s MiGs fled into Iran when the United States attacked during the Gulf war. Of those who did fight the F-15, like the unfortunate pilot whose cockpit view is framed on Rodriguez’s wall, every last one was shot down. The lesson was remembered. When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, Saddam didn’t just ground his air force; he buried it.

  That complete dominance is eroding. Some foreign-built fighters can now match or best the F-15 in aerial combat, and given the changing nature of the threats our country is facing and the dizzying costs of maintaining our advantage, America is choosing to give up some of the edge we’ve long enjoyed, rather than pay the price to preserve it. The next great fighter, the F-22 Raptor, is every bit as much a marvel today as the F-15 was twenty-five years ago, and if we produced the F-22 in sufficient numbers we could move the goalposts out of reach again. But we are building fewer than a third of the number needed to replace the older fighters in service. After losing hope of upgrading the whole F-15 fleet, the air force requested 381 F-22s, the minimum number that independent analysts said it needs to retain its current edge. Congress is buying 183, and has authorized the manufacture of parts for twenty more at the front end of the production line, enough to at least keep it working until President Obama decides whether or not to continue building F-22s. Like so many presidential choices, it’s Scylla and Charybdis: a decision to save money and not build more would deliver a severe blow to a sprawling and vital U.S. industry at a time when the nation is mired in recession. And once the production line for the F-22 begins to shut down, restarting it, even in reaction to a new threat, will not be easy or cheap. Each plane consists of about a thousand parts, manufactured in forty-four states, and because of the elaborate network of highly specialized subcontractors needed to fashion its unique airframe and avionics, assembling one F-22 can take as long as three years. Modern aerial wars are usually over in days, if not hours. Once those 183 to 203 new Raptors are built, they will have to do. Our end of the fight will still be borne primarily by the current fleet of aged F-15s.

  When Obama unveiled his national security team in December, he remarked that he intended “to maintain the strongest military on the planet.” That goal will continue to require the biggest bill in the world, but the portion that bought aerial dominance for so long may have become too dear. (The team’s lone holdover from the Bush administration, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, has not been an advocate for the F-22.) If Obama opts to shut down production on the aircraft, it will certainly be a defensible decision. After all, our impressive arsenals did not stop one of the most damaging attacks in our history seven years ago, mounted by men armed with box cutters. There are various ways of computing the cost of a fighter, from “unit flyaway cost,” which is the price tag as the plane rolls off the line, to “program acquisition unit cost,” which adds in the cost of the research, development, and testing. The former for the F-22 is about $178 million, and the latter about $350 million. Either way, the F-22 is the most expensive fighter ever built.

  But even reasonable decisions can have harsh consequences. Without a full complement of Raptors, America’s aging fighters are more vulnerable, and hence more likely to be challenged. Complaints from the air force tend to be dismissed as the laments of spoiled fighter jocks denied the newest, hottest toy. But the picture on Rodriguez’s wall reminds us of the stakes for the men and women in the cockpit. Countries such as Russia,
China, Iran, and North Korea will be more likely to take on the U.S. Air Force if their pilots stand a fighting chance. This could well mean more air battles, more old-style aces—and more downed American pilots. Not only aviators will feel the impact. Owning the sky is the first prerequisite of the way we fight wars today. Air supremacy is what enables us to send an elaborate fleet of machinery caterwauling over a targeted nation, such as Afghanistan or Iraq: the orchestrating AWACS (Airborne Warning and Control System, the flying surveillance-and-command center); precision bombers; attack planes, helicopters, and drones; ground support; rescue choppers; and the great flying tankers that keep them all fueled. This aerial juggernaut enables modern ground-fighting tactics that rely on the rapid movement of relatively small units, because lightly armed, fast-moving forces can quickly summon devastating air support if they encounter a heavy threat. Wounded soldiers can count on speedy evacuation and sophisticated emergency medical care. Accomplishing all this with anything like the efficiency American forces have enjoyed since the Vietnam war depends on owning the sky, which means having air-to-air hunter-killers that can shoot down enemy planes and destroy surface-to-air missile (SAM) sites before the rest of the fleet takes to the sky. Superior fighters are the linchpin of our modern war tactics. Having owned the high ground for so long, we tend to forget that it is not a birthright. Unless the twenty-first century is the first in human history to somehow transcend geopolitical strife, our military will face severe tests in the coming years. The United States will be expected to take the lead in any showdown against a sophisticated air force. So it is worth examining the nature of air-to-air combat today, and the possible consequences of not building a full fleet of F-22s. At the center of this question is that most romantic of modern warriors, the ace.

  Going Acro

  The skills that make a fighter pilot great have, like aircraft, evolved. Japan’s celebrated World War II ace, Saburo Sakai, who shot down more than sixty planes in aerial combat, described in his memoir—Samurai!—the extensive acrobatic training he and his fellow recruits received in pilot school to improve their strength and balance even before they flew. They worked on reducing their reaction time and perfecting their hand-eye coordination by swiping flies out of the air. Balance, coordination, reaction time, a feel for the airplane, gunnery, the ability to calmly perform complex aerobatic maneuvers while under fire, a talent for thinking and acting quickly even while upside down or tumbling or out of control—these were all vitally important. But the paramount skill, Sakai recalled, was something the recruits had at the start: exceptional vision.

  All of the young pilots had been selected for their perfect eyesight, but even more important was how broadly they could see, how wide a horizon they commanded, and how quickly they could focus on even the faintest off-center visual cue. They competed to locate stars in daylight. Sakai wrote:

  Gradually, and with much more practice, we became quite adept at our star-hunting. Then we went further. When we had sighted and fixed the position of a particular star, we jerked our eyes away ninety degrees, and snapped back again to see if we could locate the star immediately. Of such things are fighter pilots made.

  I personally cannot too highly commend this particular activity, inane as it may seem to those un familiar with the split-second, life-or-death movements of aerial warfare. I know that during my 200 air engagements with enemy planes, except for two minor errors I was never caught in a surprise attack….

  Surprise attack—seeing the enemy before he sees you—is still the killing edge; that is why Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the fighter pilot and author, described dogfighting as less combat than “murder.” Getting the jump on an enemy, hitting him before he sees you, is the best-case scenario, or the worst, depending on where you sit. As the air war over Japan became one-sided, in 1945, Sakai’s eyes kept him alive; only two other pilots in his unit survived.

  Today, of course, electronic systems extend a fighter’s vision well beyond the range of the most acute eyeball. Aerial combat is no longer a matter of fixing your sights on a dodging enemy. Most of the maneuvering in air-to-air combat today takes place beyond visual range, or BVR. The modern fighter pilot flies strapped into the center of a moving electronic cocoon. His speeding jet emits a field of photons that can find, identify, and target an enemy long before he will ever see it. At the same time, his electromagnetic aura defends him by thwarting the enemy’s radar. American pilots strive to find and shoot down enemy aircraft from outside what they call the “weapons engagement zone,” or WEZ, which means safely beyond range of the enemy’s missiles. Traveling faster than sound, the fighter pilot is part of a network that can spot an enemy over the horizon, sometimes before the enemy even leaves the ground; that can attack multiple targets simultaneously; and that in an emergency can react to an incoming threat before the pilot is even aware of it. Today’s jet is a machine so powerful, so smart, and so fast that the fighter jock’s biggest challenge is to safely fly and land it.

  Combat in this arena has become virtual in every way except in its consequences. Tactics in a world of dueling electrons can be best understood in the abstract. Pilots speak of the need to extend their “timeline.”

  “When cavemen fought they had their fists, first of all,” F-15 pilot Colonel Terrence “Skins” Fornof explained to me last year in Alaska. “Then someone came up with the sling, which meant he could attack before his enemy could get close enough to take a swing. The history of warfare technology has all boiled down to increasing the distance between you and your enemy’s fist. Distance means time, and you gain the advantage by extending that timeline. Our goal is the same as it ever was: to kill the enemy before he even has a chance to employ his weapon. War is not fair. You don’t want him to even get close enough to fight.”

  The best flier in the world stands little chance against a superior aircraft, but that doesn’t mean just anyone can be a good fighter pilot. The skills required today are related to those of the early aces, but different. Perhaps the best way to explain is to take a closer look at Rodriguez. A lifelong military man, he is of average height with a bullish torso, a round face, brown eyes, and thinning gray hair. The house in Tucson where the picture hangs has been his home for two years—longer than any other place he has ever lived. He exudes brisk, straightforward confidence, without pretense or misgiving. Asked to name his single most important flying skill, the modern equivalent of Sakai’s peripheral vision, Rodriguez struggles for an answer. It is something harder to grasp. It boils down to a talent for processing multiple information streams simultaneously.

  “A World War II pilot would look at all of the things going on in the cockpit today, and his first reaction would be, ‘You guys have too many things going on here at once.’ You know, it is sensory overload,” he said when we talked at his home. “When you put one of those old pilots in a modern simulator, he can fly the airplane. The airplane is as easy to fly today as it was back then, maybe actually easier, because now it has aerodynamic features that make it more forgiving from the standpoint of taking off and landing. But the old pilot will very quickly say, ‘I can’t keep up with all the sensors that are buzzing into my brain right now.’ And every sensor that talks to you has a different frequency, a different tone, a different format, and with some of them you are only picking up audio, with others it’s a visual, with some a combination of the two.”

  Rodriguez began pilot training in 1981, after graduating from the Citadel. He knew going in that, of the class of seventy pilot trainees, only about five would qualify to fly fighters. Most would graduate and play vital roles in the great air-war machine, but only the cream would win coveted fighter seats. The first wave of washouts came during simple maneuvers on the training jets. According to Rodriguez, “You start maneuvering and they’d get violently airsick. That was the biggest cut.”

  In the group that reached the next level, the academic workload sorted out the players who were most intense from the wannabes. Rodriguez was used to the clois
tered atmosphere and grinding academic pace of a military school, so he excelled in that area, too. Those who excelled with him faced a new test: going acro.

  “Suddenly acro was not just a cool thing you’d watch at the air show anymore,” Rodriguez says. “You were acro. You were part of it and you had to be able to think on your back, on your head, at zero g and then at high g’s, depending on the maneuver.” Avoiding “gravity-induced loss of consciousness,” G-LOC, during aggressive acrobatics is a physical struggle. As the force of gravity intensifies, blood drains rapidly from the brain unless the pilot fights back. The pressurized suit helps, tightening on the extremities and lower body, but the pilot learns to flex his legs, buttocks, and stomach muscles and to control his breath. He emerges from such maneuvers wrung out and drenched with sweat.

  It is a literal gut check. Rodriguez was lucky. He had the constitution for it. The only time he ever got airsick was one morning when the flying conditions looked unpromising and, assuming that his flight would be scrapped, he “proceeded to power down on two big, huge breakfast burritos.” Then he had to fly after all.

  “I was told we were going to go up and actually do some advanced handling, which was a fairly physically challenging event because it was putting the airplane to the extreme aerodynamic limits … falling down and getting into spins and stuff like that, so it was one of those things where I go, ‘OK, stand by one.’ I reached down and grabbed my barf bag, filled it up, put it back in my G suit, and said, ‘OK, let’s keep going.’”

  Complex exercises required rapid mental calculations: if you entered a loop ten knots slower than anticipated, that meant your airspeed would be too slow to complete the entire maneuver, so you would have to make an adjustment, quite literally, on the fly.