Gulf War Air Power Survey
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- Figure 12 USAF Women Deployed and Total Force
- Women performed many functions during the Gulf War. Here, female chaplain holds services.
- Air Force Casualty Services
- Table 11 DOD Casualty Figures
- Non-Hostile Dead USA
- Total 145 470 21 234
- Air Force Personnel Nondeployable Rates
- Table 12 Deployablity Problems Associated With Inadequate Dependent Care Plans
- Military Couples w/Dependents (
- Figure 13 Active Air Force Nondeployables By Type 10 Family Support Activities
- Air Force Civilian Personnel and Contractor Support
- 7 Media and Public Affairs
- Part I
- Media Coverage and the Public
- What the Public Wanted to Know
- Now that the U.S. has taken military action against Iraq, do you think that the number of Americans killed and injured will be . . .
Stop-Loss The President extended to the Services authority to suspend provisions of the law relating to promotions, retirements, and separations. This authority is known as Stop-Loss. As in the call-ups, the President delegated this authority to the Secretary of Defense, who in turn delegated it to the Service secretaries on 27 August 1990.1023 Stop-Loss was limited to members of the armed forces who: • were or were about to be involved in operations in or around the Arabian Peninsula, • were or were about to be involved in direct support of Persian Gulf operations, • possessed critical skills associated with Gulf operations, • possessed skills in short supply. On 17 September 1990, the Secretary of the Air Force implemented a limited Stop-Loss for individuals with separation or retirement dates between 2 October and 31 December 1990.1024 This affected approximately 1,500 Air Force personnel whose separation or retirement date was adjusted to 1 January 1991. In the months following September, the Air Force revised the Stop-Loss list, adjusting both the scope and period, so that airmen could not leave the Air Force indefinitely because of the uncertainty created by the Gulf Crisis. The revised list would have affected nearly 11,500 members. In January 1991, 75 officer and 63 enlisted specialties were on the list.1025 People in these career areas made up approximately 44 percent of the Air Force. However, only about 2.4 percent were potentially prevented from leaving the Air Force.1026 Guidance from the Air Force Chief of Staff and Deputy Chief of Staff for Personnel, however, “minimized” the impact of Stop-Loss on its members.1027 While the Army initially applied Stop-Loss to all its personnel, then later relaxed its policy, the Air Force began by limiting it to specific units or specialties identified by the commands. A limited Stop-Loss had never been exercised. While this approach proved to keep only those people needed to support the war, it also proved that the Personnel Data System was not as flexible as the personnel policies it was intended to support. During the war, the Air Force Military Personnel Center studied the varying degrees of Stop-Loss implementation.1028 They determined that while it would have appeared more appropriate to expand Stop-Loss throughout the Air Force, the discriminate approach with modifications as needed met the immediate warfighting needs and minimized the effect on Air Force people. Additionally, the expansion of Stop-Loss would have been inconsistent with several ongoing and planned force reduction programs.1029 Role of Women (U) More than 40,000 U.S. Service women deployed to the theater of operations.1030 As of March 1991, the Army had sent 30,094; Navy, 4,685; Marine Corps, 1,225; and Air Force, 4,095 women to the Persian Gulf. That equates to about 7 percent of all the deployed forces.1031 Percentages of Air Force women in the total force with those deployed to the Persian Gulf War is illustrated in Figure12. Figure 12 USAF Women Deployed and Total Force 8
Women performed many functions during the Gulf War. Here, female chaplain holds services. 11
9 In the very early stages of the deployment, there was some hesitation in deploying some functional areas and women on the first departing aircraft. It was associated with determining what the Saudi position would be regarding U.S. Service women deployed to Saudi Arabia. This concern was soon dismissed, however, and commanders as well as functional areas deployed personnel without regard to gender. Air Force Casualty Services This function, controlled and administered by the Directorate of Casualty Matters at Randolph AFB, Texas, served as the single focal point for Air Force casualties during the Persian Gulf War. The twenty-four-hour-a-day Casualty Operations Center included receiving all reports of casualties, coordinating notifications, and directing assistance to the next of kin. Casualty reporting by Personnel Support teams, however, was sometimes hindered by deployed commanders, directors of operations, and the medical community. Casualty message traffic would sometimes be overclassified or critical identification information would not be immediately released to the Personnel Support team for reporting to the Casualty Center.1032 This generally occurred, with concern over security, and was often unavoidable. Air Force Casualty Matters developed an automated casualty reporting system that provided a capability to produce cumulative casualty statistics generated daily and provided to the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Air Force Contingency Support Staff, Air Force Military Personnel Center, Air Staff, and SAF Public Affairs. Guidance concerning the public release of casualty information from OSD, Public Affairs was lacking.1033 The Air Force was the only Service to develop an automated capability to report casualty information. The CENTAF-Forward personnel staff served as a vital link to the deployed personnel community working with CENTAF-Rear to ensure that casualty information was appropriately declassified and released to the Personnel Support teams. Additionally, they coordinated casualty issues with field hospitals and the other Services. Operation Yellow Ribbon Upon cessation of hostilities, releasing prisoners of war and reuniting family members became the universal concern. The Defense Department had not faced such an undertaking since the release of POWs from the Vietnam War. During the Persian Gulf War, however, all U.S. POWs were returned and there were no people missing in action. The coordinating agency for repatriation became the task of the Air Force Deputy Chief of Staff for Plans and Operations on 1 March 1991, three days before release of the first POW. The Air Force Operation Yellow Ribbon After Action Report, issued on 16 May 1991, recommended that the Air Force be appointed as the executive agent for organizing and beginning formal POW/MIA repatriation planning for future contingencies.1034 During the Gulf War itself, the United States suffered few casualties, as indicated in the figures released by the Defense Department shown in Table 11. Table 11 DOD Casualty Figures
Source: Washington Hq Services, Directorate for Information Operations and Reports and JCS/J-1. *Female casualties are included in Service counts. KIA: Killed in action; WIA: wounded in action; POW: prisoner of war. Air Force Personnel Nondeployable Rates To assess the efficacy of the reserve program, in September 1990 and February 1991 the Air Force conducted a survey of the dependent care program. The results in Table 12 indicate the number of reported nondeployables relating specifically to dependent care problems.1035 Table 12 Deployablity Problems Associated With Inadequate Dependent Care Plans
Guard and reserve nondeployability rates were partially masked, since they were not mobilized by entire units, and commanders selected volunteers that were most fit to deploy. In that regard, there were no reportable nondeployables. The active-duty forces deployed in much the same manner as the reserves, and their commanders also could choose from a large pool of qualified personnel. However, there were numbers of active-duty personnel coded nondeployable in the Personnel Data System. Since the active-duty Personnel Data System can only indicate who was deployed, there is no basis to determine who was asked and did not deploy. Since the numbers of nondeployables is a snapshot in time, a person coded nondeployable in the morning could be deployable in the afternoon. For an accurate picture of the active Air Force nondeployables during the Persian Gulf War, three snapshots in time were taken at the end of September and December 1990 and March 1991 with the results averaged. They revealed a total of 466,752 deployables and 81,925 nondeployables.1036 Of the nondeployables, 68,452 were changing permanent duty station. (Personnel are coded nondeployable until they have at least 60 days at their new duty station.) These codes are routinely waived by commanders making them deployable. Figure 13 shows 13,528 active personnel coded nondeployable (excluding the 68,452 personnel coded for permanent duty station moves). Comparing male and female rates in all categories shows that 1.8 percent of the total male population was coded nondeployable, and 6.4 of the females. Figure 13 Active Air Force Nondeployables By Type 10
At the outset of Operation Desert Shield, 107 family support centers provided a wide range of programs to address family needs1037 as the on-base focal point. During the deployment, the centers augmented their ongoing programs in financial management, information and referral, and volunteer assistance to meet the increasing needs of the community. After the initial deployment, support centers also implemented new programs to assist family members. In January 1991, Air Force Family Matters conducted a survey of center directors to assess the early response to families and found a significant increase in the use of Family Support Centers by Guard and Reserve families.1038 The survey pointed out that the family support network transcended family support centers in that they provided emotional, educational, informational, and social supportbut especially “peace of mind” for family members and military alike. While the effect of family worries or distractions on combat operations may not be directly measurable, such factors certainly contribute to morale and affect job performance. During combat operations, the need for services and support increased as families faced ongoing media updates on the events of the war. In the category of “support during family separation,” for example, contacts multiplied from an average of 3,000 per quarter prior to Operation Desert Shield to more than 75,000 during the period associated with the war.1039 Air Force Civilian Personnel and Contractor Support Air Force civilian employees and independent contractors became an integral part of the total force during the Persian Gulf War, even though they were not technically in the armed forces. They worked along side their military counterparts and suffered the same unpleasantries. More than 200 Air Force civilian employees served in Southwest Asia during Operations Desert Shield/Desert Storm.1040 In addition, approximately 6,000 Air Force civilian employees were called to active duty as part of the Reserves or National Guard, which represents 1.4 percent of the total DOD reservists activated during the Persian Gulf War. “Tech Reps” were also used by the Services to provide technical assistance on many weapon systems deployed to the Persian Gulf War. They were both civil service and independent contractors, often retired military and always highly trained by the manufacturers in the maintenance of various aircraft and other high-tech systems. They offered years of experience and corporate knowledge during the war.1041 At the 388th Tactical Fighter Wing Provisional, for example the Air Force Engineering and Technical Service Reps fixed as many as seventy items a month for F-16s that would have normally been sent back to Hill Air Force Base, Utah for repair. They also developed a method to cool aircraft canopies for protection from the extreme desert heat while parked on the ramp. Given the nickname “Old Guys” by Lt. Col. Bob Gilloth, assistant deputy commander for maintenance, these civilians played a vital role in the completion of the 388th wartime mission.1042 The Tactical Air Command provided the largest number of civilian employees deployed, and the single largest group (forty-one) came from TAC's Air Force Engineering and Technical Services. They provided technical advice and support for the F-15, F-16, F-111, RF-4, F-4 G/E, A-10, AWACS, Compass Call, ground TACCS, Combat Communications, and the Corps Automated Maintenance System. Seventy-nine defense contractor representatives from Grumman, Martin Marietta, Chicago Aerial, Northrop, McDonnell Douglas, and Hughes Aircraft also deployed to the theater of operations.1043 They provided essential wartime technical support to a myriad of systems including radar systems, navigation target pods, RF-4C cameras, and electronic warfare systems, to name a few. One very successful air-to-ground mission was a direct result of a Grumman Corporation contractor. Aboard one of the surveillance aircraft, the Tech Rep picked out a cluster of forty Iraqi armored vehicles on the ground, resulting in the destruction of twenty-nine by U.S. aircraft.1044 Air Force civilian employees also provided support for logistical, civil engineering, intelligence, procurement, personnel systems, and mortuary affairs. Prior to the invasion, 123 Air Force civil service employees were already assigned to permanent duty stations in Southwest Asia. A departure of nonessentials reduced that number to 87. Another 66 deployed to the theater of operations during Desert Shield from Air Force Logistics, Military Airlift, Systems, Strategic Air, and Special Operations Commands, and U.S. Air Forces in Europe. They performed a myriad of functions in battle damage repair, fuels quality assurance, telecommunications, and others. Akin to their military counterparts, accountability of deployed civilians was also a problem.1045 Currently, the Manpower and Personnel Module of the Contingency, Operation, Mobility Planning and Execution System does not interface with the civilian personnel data system; hence, procedures to account for civilian or contractor employees deployed in support of a contingency did not exist. Furthermore, policies and procedures on issuing identification cards, uniforms, chemical defense gear, and passports for contractor personnel must be included in base mobility plans. While not a show stopper, the lack of firm guidance created minor problems.1046 7 Media and Public Affairs Operations Desert Shield/Desert Storm demonstrated that press coverage is an unavoidable yet important part of military operations. Experience again proved that while the press could be managed more or less successfully, it could not be ignored, and it could not be controlled. More specific to the air campaign, the military also learned new aspects of public relations. For example, the inaccessibility of American air bases in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Shield hampered the creation of a comfortable working relationship between the press and the United States Air Force. Also, many Air Force commanders were skittish about talking to the press, having witnessed the dismissal of Air Force Chief of Staff, General Michael Dugan for indiscretion. During Operation Desert Storm, a number of factors contributed to distribution of press coverage of the air war: journalists' lack of understanding of air operations, restricted access by reporters to air crews, bases, and aircraft, and the misleading nature of television footage covering precision-guided weapons. This chapter examines two important and interrelated aspects of coverage of the air war: what the press covered and how the military, particularly the Air Force, organized to manage that coverage. To that end, the two parts of this chapter address the different public affairs aspects of the campaign. The first is a qualitative examination of press coverage of the war, with particular emphasis on the air campaign and its impact on public support for the war effort and on decisionmakers, and the second elaborates on the public information mechanism that was put in place by the military for handling press coverage, with specific interest in the manner that military public affairs organizations handled the air war story, followed by conclusions. Part I The Media in the Gulf War This chapter focuses on central issues related to media coverage of the Gulf War, especially the air campaign. It is important to make clear at the outset what this chapter is not. It is not a chronological or thematic explication of the full range of broadcast and print coverage of the entire war or the air war, nor is it an after-action report on how DOD, Air Force, or other Service public affairs personnel handled the media during the war. It is not a blow-by-blow, who-did-what-to-whom account of military-media relations. Rather, this essay selects a small number of important issues related to media coverage of military operations and attempts to illuminate them in the context of the Gulf War air campaign, while looking towards future conflicts. The issues discussed were selected because they not only played a significant role during the Gulf War air campaign, but are likely to reappear. Thus this chapter has one eye on the past and one on the future. It should be noted that extensive literature on the press/media and the Gulf War has developed and is likely to continue to build during the next several years. At least three types of books have appeared so far: anthologies, insider accounts, and interpretative analyses. The most comprehensive of the anthologies is The Media and the Gulf War: The Press and Democracy in Wartime, edited by Hedrick Smith.1047 The insider accounts were written by working journalists or someone working within a major news organization. An example of the former is Hotel Warriors: Covering the Gulf War by John J. Fialka of the Wall Street Journal 1048; an example of the latter is How CNN Fought the War: A View From the Inside by Major General Perry M. Smith, USAF (ret).1049 The interpretative analyses were sometimes written with an ideological bent, sometimes without. Three examples are War and the Media: Propaganda and Persuasion in the Gulf War by Philip M. Taylor1050; Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War by John R. MacArthur1051; and The Persian Gulf TV War by Douglas Kellner.1052 Many of the important issues that emerge from a study of broadcast and print media during wartime fall into two clustersmedia coverage and the public, and media coverage and the policymakers. These clusters overlap, to be sure, but they are analytically distinct. Media Coverage and the Public Here, there are two issues of special significancefirst, how the public learns from the media what it most wants to know, i.e., how the war is going, and second, how press coverage of civilian casualties affects public support for the war. It would also be useful, after exploring those two issues, to examine briefly overall public support for the Gulf War. What the Public Wanted to Know Once military operations are underway, the first and most basic question most citizens probably ask is, “how is the war going?” The problem in answering this straightforward question is that there are few if any handy, public, widely accepted measures of progress, or lack thereof, in a war or any other military operation. Not since Korea has a single, simple line on a map provided reasonable indication of progress. It is certain, however, that almost everything the public learns about an ongoing military operation is learned from the media, especially television. (The importance of television as the principal source of news for most members of the public is difficult to exaggerate; for example, a Gallup poll conducted in the first days of the Gulf War found that eighty-nine percent described television as their “main source of information about the war,” eight percent radio, and two percent newspapers).1053 Almost as certain is the tendency of government officials, reporters, editors, producers (the counterpart in broadcast news to editors in the print media), and citizens to search for simple measures of progress. In an age of instant information usually conveyed in abbreviated, almost short-hand form, the search for a “measure of merit” may pose problems not just for the journalist and the professional analyst but also for the average citizen, newspaper-reader, and television-viewer. One of these measures used frequently during the early days of the Gulf War was aircraft losses. Newspapers and television news programs provided coverage of daily and cumulative losses, allied and enemy. These were simple numbers, and there were only a few of them to track. While not providing as comprehensive a measure of progress as the forward-line-of-troops in Korea, the aircraft loss figures could provide a simple, easily understandable, albeit partial measure of progress in the war. For government and military public affairs offices, it was an easy, obvious, and useful task to publish these figures on a regular basisif for no other reason than that it was an easy, obvious, and useful question for reporters to ask at news briefings! But these same numbers also posed a potentially difficult problem for those managing the politics and public affairs dimensions of the war. In a campaign such as the Gulf War, in which one side was flying hundreds of aircraft in thousands of sorties every day, and the other was essentially hunkering down, the former could easily find itself losing more planes than the latter. This could be a political problem for the former if such results, when released, were to lead its public to conclude that it was losing, or at least not doing very well, or doing well at too high a cost. In fact such a problem never materialized during the air war, in part because comparative aircraft losses were not prominent in the coverage, in part because other aspects of the war (especially the Scud problem) came to dominate the news in the first days of combat, and in part because allied losses were so small. First, aircraft loss figures, while included in most coverage in the early days of the war, were not portrayed as prominently as they might have been, and they were not used as a simple, single measure of progress. The Washington Post and The New York Timestwo of the most influential daily newspapers in the country, which are read by most members of Congress, senior government officials, and journalists in Washingtonprovided extensive and intensive coverage of the Gulf War. A close examination of their coverage in the early days of the air campaign indicates that aircraft losses were not a prominent feature in their1054 reporting, and further that other numbers (such as comparative troop strength, numbers of aircraft in theater, sorties flown, prisoners of war, Scuds launched and destroyed) were given at least as much prominence. A review of the relevant transcripts of network evening news stories during this same period reveals similar treatment of comparative aircraft loss figures by ABC, CBS, and NBC: they were reported, but were not prominent in the coverage. Thus, aircraft loss figures appear to have been no more dominant in early coverage of the war than many othersincluding daily and cumulative numbers of sorties, and percentages of “successful” sortiesleaving the public without a single, simple measure of progress. A second factor reducing the visibility and salience of the comparative loss figures was that even in the early days of the air campaign, there were bigger war fish for the media to fry, including allied pilots taken prisoner by Iraq and the “video-game” footage of allied precision-guided munitions destroying Iraqi targets. By far, however, the most important development diverting press attention from aircraft losses was the sudden, very early, and (to many) surprise appearance of the Scud missile threat, which quickly took center stage. Indeed, on the front page of the Post's second-day-of-the-war edition (18 January), the six-column, two-line headline was “Iraq Retaliates With Missile Attacks Against Israeli Cities, Saudi Air Base.”1055 Four separate articles that day, including the two leading stories on page one, focused on the Scud attacks, and the allied, Israeli, and other responses to them. The next day's paper reflected the same emphasisanother six-column, two-line, page-one headline (“More Iraqi Scud Missiles Hit Israel, Increasing Chances of Retaliation”),1056 and nine separate Scud-related stories, including the top three on the front page, one of which added another element of drama to the Scud story“U.S. Hunt for Missile Launchers Like `Needle in Haystack' Search.”1057 (U) On television, the Scud story was even more dramatic, with extensive and frequent footage of damaged areas in Israel and Saudi Arabia, civilian casualties, gas-mask drills, even live reports on imminent and actual attacks, including colorful, gripping footage (which later became quite controversial)1058 of the (alleged) interception of Scuds by U.S. Patriot missiles. For all the media, both for editors and producers, and for readers and viewers, drama always plays better than mere data. This is especially true for television, which is, above all, a visual medium. “Write to the pictures,” is a television news byword.1059 A perverse Gresham's Law is at work: Good pictures always drive out dull data. In the words of the Daily Telegraph, “Television is a marvelous medium of impression, a hopeless medium of analysis . . . .”1060 Of course, the Iraqi Scud attacks were more than human drama. Given the severe internal pressures on the Israeli government to retaliate, and the likely effects that Israeli entry into the war might have had on the cohesion of the Gulf War Coalition, serious and volatile geopolitical factors were at work. How effective the Scud attacks would be, whether they would continue, who would retaliate and howall would have considerably more to do with perceptions of the war's progress than would comparative aircraft losses. A third factor that mitigated the potential impact of comparative aircraft loss data was the (surprisingly to many) small scale of the allied, especially U.S., losses. For months prior to the war, the press and Congress had been publicly airing casualty estimates by well-known military analysts, and the numbers were sobering. In December Time reported that “analyst Edward Luttwak figures that, under the most favorable circumstances . . . the U.S. would suffer `several thousand killed in action.' Trevor N. Dupuy, a retired Army colonel, has worked out methods of predicting casualties that have proved startlingly accurate . . . . For a war with Iraq, he calculates 1,200 to 3,000 dead, 7,000 to 16,000 woundedin the first 10 days.”1061 The public also came to share these predictions: Even as late in the crisis as January 10-11, Gallup found that 62 percent of the public thought that U.S. casualties would number in the thousands, and only 28 percent thought they would number less than 1,000. But after the war began, and even in its first few days, public predictions of the numbers of casualties dropped significantly; they rose somewhat in early February, then dropped again towards the end of the war, as shown in Table 13. As late as the day after the war began, some publicly circulated official or quasi-official estimates of possible losses were considerably higher than those which in fact soon occurred. On 17 January, the Post reported: “Total U.S. losses in the air war are uncertain. The House Armed Services Committee estimated the number at ten planes or more a day; Air Force officials believe losses to be lower.”1062 Table 131063 Now that the U.S. has taken military action against Iraq, do you think that the number of Americans killed and injured will be . . . Directory: sgp -> library sgp -> Sgp country Programme Strategy for op6 sgp -> Itu-d study groups sgp -> Internship with Congressional Campaign Exploratory Committee — Only 4 spots left! sgp -> Using Well Logs in the Petroleum Industry sgp -> Telecommunication development bureau itu-d study groups Download 5.55 Mb. Share with your friends:
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