Scott Ritter (17)

Ritter’s Rant 057: Insanity https://substack.com/@realscottritter/note/p-174859865?utm_source=notes-share-action&r=1vhv3f

Keith Kellogg says the US might provide Ukraine with Tomahawk cruise missiles. My response: Insanity

Hello and welcome to this edition of Ritter’s Rant. Today’s word of the day is insanity, or we can use a form of the word, insane. And this needs to be applied to anybody who honestly believes that Donald Trump is going to provide the Ukrainian government with Tomahawk cruise missiles. I mean, this is the big story right now.

The next time thought crosses my mind, I’ll be sure to let you know. Thanks.

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Boots on the Ground https://substack.com/@realscottritter/note/p-174884817?utm_source=notes-share-action&r=1vhv3f

For years Gerald Celente’s Peace & Freedom rally in Kingston, New York has been a summer fixture for Hudson Valley peace activists. Today its future is in doubt.

Gerald Celente addresses the audience at his Peace & Freedom Rally in Kingston, New York

The need today for a viable anti-war/pro-peace movement is as great as it has ever been. But the causes that once motivated millions to take to the streets no longer resonate with the younger generation, which is more attracted to the allure and immediacy of digital communications. But the harsh reality is this: just as one cannot win a shooting war through high-technology weapons alone, one cannot generate the kind of political change needed to end current wars and prevent new ones by relying upon social media. You need boots on the ground to win. And the anti-war/pro-peace movement isn’t mustering the numbers necessary to achieve victory.

This past weekend I travelled down to Kingston, New York, just as I had for three of the past four years, to participate in the Peace & Freedom Rally, hosted by Gerald Celente, the long-time editor of Trends Journal. The rally, located in the Stockade District of Kingston—the “crossroads of American history”—has been a summer standard for the past several decades, a gathering of like-minded persons who all shared a vision of making the world a better place to live in through the pursuit of peace and harmony.

When I first spoke at the rally, in the summer of 2022, there was a vibrant crowd that numbered in the hundreds. I missed out on the 2023 rally (I was travelling in Russia at the time) but made the 2024 rally the kicking off point for Operation DAWN, my campaign to inject arms control and the prevention of nuclear war as an issue of concern in the November 2024 Presidential election. Again, a crowd of more than 500 attended the rally.

The Author addressing the crowd in Kingston, September 28, 2024

Boots on the ground.

One thing all these rallies had in common was the fact that the attendees, and those they came to listen to, were mostly on the far side of 50, and oftentimes by a wide margin. Gerald and I spent some time talking about how we could attract a younger crowd this year, examining options regarding speakers and the possibility of busing in college students from New York City. For a variety of reasons, these plans did not pan out.

We gathered in Kingston this past Saturday, September 27, to promote those causes near and dear to our collective hearts. We had assembled an A-list lineup of speakers: Garland Nixon, Diane Sare, Dennis Kucinich, Joe Lauria, Ray McGovern, Roger Waters (by video), me and Gerald Celente. We talked about freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, the Constitution, citizenship, the state of politics in America today, nuclear weapons, nuclear war, arms control, and the need for a vibrant and active anti-war/pro-peace movement.

The crowd, which numbered just over 100 strong, was appreciative and supportive.

But you can’t occupy peace if you don’t occupy the ground.

Last year, the speakers were electrified by the energy of the crowd. We hung out afterwards, speaking to those attendees who lingered, and then amongst ourselves over dinner and drinks. We left Kingston empowered by the energy of the crowd, motivated to continue the struggle for peace.

Gerald Celente with his lineup of speakers, September 28, 2024

This year, the energy that empowered us in the past was not present. Speakers left soon after speaking, and there was little of the synergy between the crowd and speakers that defined the past gatherings. The speeches were great, delivered with passion and conviction, possessing content as moving and relevant as always. And the crowd was appreciative with their applause and cheers.

But there were fewer of them—much so.

They did not fully occupy the ground.

Last year, in Kingston, I kicked off Operation DAWN, my campaign to promote arms control, encourage disarmament, and prevent nuclear war. The importance of rallies like Kingston goes beyond spreading simple awareness of an issue, but also generating real and meaningful support, primarily financial. The money raised through the Kingston Peace & Freedom Rally helped sustain Operation DAWN throughout the fall, contributing to actions which helped prevent nuclear conflict.

This year I had hoped to follow suit and use the Kingston rally as a vehicle for raising money to promote Project 38, my documentary film about the danger of nuclear war, and the Poughkeepsie Peace Initiative, a campaign designed to keep the last remaining arms control treaty between Russia and the US—New START, which expires in February 2026—alive.

In the week leading up to the Kingston rally, I had brought together a group of experts on nuclear war, arms control, and Russia to strategize about how to keep arms control alive. This was an ambitious project, which had significant overhead attached. I invested resources that had been gathered through earlier donations into this gathering, and the product that was produced as a result gave all who attended confidence that the goals and objectives set for the gathering could be met.

I had looked to the Kingston rally as an opportunity to recharge the coffers going forward (the Poughkeepsie event had, for a variety of reasons—all legitimate—gone well over budget.) But the money raised through book sales and donations fell far short of expectations, perhaps a reflection of the fact that the crowd was about ¼ the size of last year.

During my presentation, I appealed to those who might be watching online (the event was streamed to several channels, including YouTube and X) to support independent journalists such as Gerald Celente and the speakers he had gathered in Kingston. I spoke of the dangers associated with digital suppression and noted that the thing that made independent journalists independent (the fact that they were not controlled and/or influenced by corporate funders) also made them vulnerable when it came to sustaining their work and their message. I asked the crowd to support those speakers and channels that they relied upon for their news and information.

I can’t speak on behalf of any others, but as of this writing, my donation page has been a flat line.

I know Gerald took a huge financial hit this year. The goal of the Peace & Freedom Rally was never to make Gerald rich, but to at least break even, and even better, generate money that could help promote future rallies.

Earlier this year, in June, Gerald was kind enough to grant me the use of his lovely Kingston facility to host the US-Russian Citizens Summit. The event was a great success, made even more so by the physical beauty of the stage upon which the American side of the equation was situated. As with any event of this nature, costs far exceeded income. The imbalance would have been even greater if it weren’t for the fact that Gerald provided his facility and many of the support costs free of charge.

I can’t speak on behalf of Gerald, but perhaps he, like me, was hopeful that some of the losses could be recovered through a well-attended Kingston rally.

By an anti-war/pro-peace movement willing and able to put boots on the ground.

Sadly, this was not the case. We needed a battalion, and we got a platoon.

Those who attended were, simply put, awesome.

Thank you very much for your support.

But it was, and is, not enough to allow this project to go on.

We may have witnessed the last Peace & Freedom Rally. An event like this requires a prodigious amount of work, and a significant amount of money, to pull off. Gerald has been doing this task selflessly for many (11!) years now. But like his audience, Gerald is no spring chicken. The years take a toll on us all, and I can say as someone who knows Gerald very well, as a friend and colleague, his batteries may be beyond the capacity to be recharged.

The 2025 iteration of the Peace and Freedom Rally produced enough high points to go into the books as a worthy event—Roger Waters premiered his new song, Samud, something that alone guarantees the rally a place in history. Any of the speeches made could be viewed in isolation by college-level civics and governmental classes for their moral and intellectual value.

Roger Waters premiers his new song, Samud, before the Kingston audience, September 27, 2025

We had a good day.

A good event.

But to prevail in this day and age of informational warfare, we needed a great event, and a great day.

We are in the midst of an ideological struggle the likes of which has not been experienced by this experiment in democracy we call America.

What makes this struggle even more acute is the fact that the consequences of failure on the part of the anti-war/pro-peace movement in the nuclear age is far more existential than any similar struggle in the past.

Humanity survived World War One.

Humanity survived World War Two.

Humanity will not survive World War Three.

Simply put, when it comes to the anti-war/pro-peace movement and nuclear war, failure is not an option.

And yet we are failing.

One of the goals of the Poughkeepsie Peace Initiative is how to get the message about the danger of nuclear weapons to resonate with generations of younger Americans who have never experienced the visceral fear of imminent nuclear war.

Last year, in large part because of the emotional and financial bounce we got from the Kingston rally, we were able to take the message of saying no to nuclear war to Washington, DC, and achieve a very positive outcome.

This year the bounce wasn’t there. The reality is we are anchored in debt that must be paid off before we can move on.

Boots on the ground equals money in the bank.

As for me, I will continue to press forward, limited only by time and resources.

As for Gerald, I can’t say.

The reality is Gerald will need to find a partner who is willing and able to commit the time and resources necessary to continuing his legacy of pursuing peace, justice and freedom.

The Kingston Peace & Freedom Rally was a marquee event held in an ideal location. It is not readily replaced, if in fact such a thing is possible.

Gerald’s Kingston venue, after the crowd went home

Gerald’s Kingston venue has the potential to continue being thus, but only if the anti-war/pro-peace movement can expand its demographics and resources in such a way that sustainability issues related to continuing this important work can be successfully addressed.

There is much work to be done in the cause of supporting peace and preventing war—especially nuclear war. Like all worthwhile causes, the struggle for peace in the nuclear age requires hard work and sacrifice on the part of those so engaged. It also requires resources, both in terms of time and money.

We have a year to see if we can shape events in a way to make continuing Gerald’s Peace & Freedom rally a possibility.

Time is not on our side.

Boots on the ground and money in the bank.

Let’s see if we can make both of these happen and, in doing so, keep the prospects of peace alive.

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Ritter’s Rant 058: The 21st Point https://substack.com/@realscottritter/note/p-174953024?utm_source=notes-share-action&r=1vhv3f

Trump has unveiled a 20-point peace plan for Gaza. But there’s a 21st point — it won’t work.

Hello and welcome to this episode of Ritter’s Rant. Today we’re going to be talking about the 21st point. I think by now everybody is familiar with Donald Trump’s 20 point plan for peace in Gaza and by extension all of the Middle East because peace will break out once this peace plan is successfully implemented.

This is a bad deal. And that’s why the 21st point is not just to say no, but hell no. Anyways, that’s my rant. Next time a thought crosses my mind, I’ll be sure to let you know.

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THE GREAT CON: U.S. Risks Nuclear War with Russia While Trump Claims to Want Peace – Scott Ritter, by @RachBlevins

https://substack.com/@realscottritter/note/p-174952691?utm_source=notes-share-action&r=1vhv3f

Rachel Blevins and Scott Ritter

Hello and welcome to this episode of Ritter’s Rant. Today we’re going to be talking about the 21st point. I think by now everybody is familiar with Donald Trump’s 20 point plan for peace in Gaza and by extension all of the Middle East because peace will break out once this peace plan is successfully implemented.

This is a bad deal. And that’s why the 21st point is not just to say no, but hell no. Anyways, that’s my rant. Next time a thought crosses my mind, I’ll be sure to let you know.

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The Peace Explorer https://substack.com/@realscottritter/note/p-175013298?utm_source=notes-share-action&r=1vhv3f

Civil diplomacy is a reserve of big politics

In 2013, Anatoly Kazakevich founded the Baikal-Alaska project in the Siberian city of Irkutsk, Russia. The project is dedicated to the study and development of historical ties between Siberia and Alaska.

In 2017-2019, Anatoly headed up an expedition to sail a catamaran from Lake Baikal to Alaska. Anatoly sailed across Baikal lake, the Lena River, the Okhotsk and Bering Seas to Alaska, eventually reaching his final destination in the city of Sitka, Alaska. In total Anatoly and his team traveled some 15,400 kilometers, a journey dedicated to bringing Americans and Russians closer together.

Anatoly made a documentary movie, and published a book which tells the story of the remarkable expedition. He and his team have built a themed Baikal-Alaska hotel in Irtkusk where visitors can live in rooms inspired by the expedition and the history and geography of Siberia and Alaska.

Next year, this intrepid explorer for peace will be heading up a new expedition designed to bring the Russian and American people closer together. In July 2026, Anatoly’s Baikal-Alaska will undertake a new expedition which will transverse key stops along the route used in the Second World War. To date, the response has been overwhelming: over 100 participants, including pilots, owners of sea plane, bloggers, and filmmakers—have joined the mission—a mission of peace.

Organized by the Peace Explorer himself—Anatoly Kazakevich.

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Ritter’s Rant 059: Censorship https://substack.com/@realscottritter/note/p-175222832?utm_source=notes-share-action&r=1vhv3f

YouTube took down my last rant. Israel was behind it. YouTube is un-American.

Hello and welcome to this episode of Ritter’s Rant. Today we’re going to talk about censorship. And let me just put you on notice that this might be the last Ritter’s Rant there will ever be. You see, a couple days ago I did a Ritter’s Rant where I called it the 21st point.

And YouTube has become nothing other than an extension of Israel’s long arm to try and control how you think about complicated issues like war, peace, and Hamas. That’s been my rant. Next time a thought crosses my mind, I’ll be sure to let you know. Thanks.

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The Russia House at Fifty https://substack.com/@realscottritter/note/p-175343031?utm_source=notes-share-action&r=1vhv3f

We have come a long way since we started back in February. And we have a long way to go.

On February 1, 2025, the administrator of my Telegram channel, Alexandra Madornaya, and I embarked on a grand experiment, the goal of which was to capture the Russian voice and bring it to an American audience. The product of this experiment—The Russia House with Scott Ritter—has reached the 50-episode benchmark. This provides me with a chance to reflect on how we got here, and where we are going.

The Russia House with Scott Ritter wasn’t the first time I had immersed myself in such a project—I had previously collaborated with the Russian media company Solovyev Live to produce The Scott Ritter Show, which was initially aired on a dedicated YouTube channel until the Ukrainian government, acting through the US Embassy, put pressure of YouTube to de-platform the program. I continued with the project, however, broadcasting my interviews with prominent Russian personalities, until September 2024, when the US Government enacted new sanctions against Russia which would have potentially criminalized any further collaborative work with Solovyov Live and other targeted Russian media outlets (including RT and Sputnik, for whom I contributed articles and video-based analysis.)

One of the last episodes of The Scott Ritter Show before being shut down by the Biden administration

The Scott Ritter Show was moderately successful, gaining a large Russian following, and, prior to being de-platformed by YouTube, had attracted tens of thousands of American subscribers. The purpose of the program—to bring the Russian voice to an American audience—was being fulfilled. When the US Government seized my passport in June 2024, preventing me from travelling to Russia to participate in the Saint Petersburg International Economic Forum and conducting a 40-day tour of Russia where I was scheduled to conduct town hall-style meetings in 16 different cities, the need for The Scott Ritter Show was even more manifest.

And then the Biden administration killed it through sanctions.

In a nation defined by the concept of a free press, nothing screams hypocrisy more than sanctioning a free press. Now, there will be some who will claim that the concept of a free press wasn’t intended to provide a platform for so-called foreign propaganda, a label used by the CIA and American media outlets jealous over the attention Russian media outlets like RT get amongst an American audience.

But the concept of a free press, like free speech, is not something the US government gets to define for the American people. Freedom of speech and freedom of the press is an inalienable right that we the people of the United States of America reserve for ourselves, a right protected by the First Amendment of our Constitution. I the battleground of ideas that is a free press, the side that seeks to censor and silence is the side possessing the weaker argument. No one should fear a debate, dialogue or discussion about strongly held beliefs. And yet when confronting Russophobia in the United States today, it is the Russophobes who seek to suppress any voice that tries to paint Russia and Russians in a realistic light.

The Scott Ritter Show, like all my work trying to expose the American public to the Russian reality, was targeted by the Biden administration as a threat to American national security. My efforts to inform the American public about the danger of worsening US-Russian relations, and to encourage Americans to use their vote in the 2024 US Presidential election to pick candidates that would eschew nuclear war by promoting peace over war with Russia, was deemed to be “interference in the US election process.”

Elections matter.

And encouraging American citizens to vote their conscious, and to empower that vote with knowledge and information, is the ultimate expression of citizenship.

And this was criminalized by the Biden administration and the Russophobes that dominate the unelected establishment elites that dominate government, academia and the mainstream media.

The very people who fear an informed debate, dialogue and discussion about Russian reality.

The Biden administration’s candidate for President, Kamala Harris, lost the 2024 US Presidential election to Donald Trump. And, regardless of what else one thinks about who Donald Trump is or what he has done, one of the first actions of President Trump upon being sworn in was to sign a series of executive orders promoting free speech and ending the weaponization of law enforcement and intelligence to target Americans who exercised their free speech rights to speak out against government policies they disagreed with.

I decided to test this new policy direction, and The Russia House with Scott Ritter was the result.

During my collaboration with Solovyov Live, I had the benefit of working with partners who were extremely well connected to the Russian government and establishment, and the guest list reflected this reality. For The Russia House with Scott Ritter, Alexandra and I were on our own. Here, Alexandra showcased both her intelligence and resourcefulness in identifying quality guests (her standard was that they must be acknowledged experts in their respective fields) and attracting them to the show.

Alexandra Madornaya (center) with the Author (left) and Apti Alaudinov (right)

The results speak for themselves—in the first months of The Russia House with Scott Ritter, I was able to have conversations with political figures such as Maria Zakharova, the spokesperson for the Russian Foreign Ministry, Apti Aloudinov, the famous military commander of the Akhmat Special Forces, and a host of noted academics, journalists, and specialists on a wide variety of topics covering the entire spectrum of the Russian reality today.

Given the realities of sanctions (despite his executive orders about free speech, President Trump has not moved on ending the legal restrictions against working with Russian media or engaging in financial transactions with Russians working in Russia), Alexandra and I decided that our best business model going forward was to set up a Telegram Channel which she would own and administer, and to publish The Russia House with Scott Ritter on this channel, charging a modest subscription fee to help cover the costs of editing and interpretation (costs which run to several hundreds of dollars per episode.)

Like any new endeavor, The Russia House with Scott Ritter had to go through the difficult experience of trying to build an audience capable of sustaining the effort and costs associated with the project. Here Alexandra and I struggled—the number of subscriptions necessary to break even on expenses proved to be a difficult objective to achieve. After a few months of watching Alexandra deplete her personal bank account to keep The Russia House with Scott Ritter afloat, we decided we either had to give up on the project, which neither of us wanted to do, or find a different business model.

We opted to expand The Russia House with Scott Ritter to my Substack page as a subscription service. I would hold money sufficient to offset the cost of producing the podcast aside until which time circumstances permitted me to legally transfer funds to Alexandra.

Even with the additional exposure on Substack and X, The Russia House with Scott Ritter only experienced modest growth. The guests continued to be of the highest quality, and the topics covered provided graduate-level exposure to the reality of Russia.

The problem facing The Russia House with Scott Ritter is the same problem that confronts anyone who seeks to promulgate concepts intended to better relations between the United States and Russia—endemic Russophobia. There is a limited audience of open-minded people willing to take the time to seriously watch and absorb the information that is being disseminated through the podcast that Alexandra and I produce. Growing an audience requires more than simply applying the tools associated with conventional marketing. For The Russia House with Scott Ritter to succeed, the marketing strategy employed needs to more resemble the strategies used to fight a pandemic—to accurately identify the disease in question, to expose its vulnerabilities to interdiction, to develop an adequate vaccine, and then to distribute the vaccine in an efficient manner.

The disease has a name—Russophobia. The problem with this disease, however, is that the diagnosis requires a level of self-awareness that is difficult to achieve, especially when the targeted audience is constantly inundated with data and information designed to sustain the disease. The root cause of the disease is ignorance, but this ignorance doesn’t manifest itself until too late in the life cycle of the disease, when the policies that politicians and the establishment elites produce from the foundation of popular support predicated upon the fear of Russia generated by unconstrained Russophobia manifest themselves in conflicts that have the potential of ending humanity.

To defeat Russophobia, those infected must first become aware of the infection and recognize the need for the vaccine of knowledge and information that programs like The Russia House with Scott Ritter make available. This, of course, dictates a different strategy than one used to increase understanding of the Russian reality. This new strategy focusses on making those infected by the disease of Russophobia aware of the consequences of the policies that they have unquestioningly enabled to be implemented and encourage them to begin questioning the justification for these policies. In doing so, there will be a demand for new sources of information that challenge the body of data that these people had previously drawn upon.

And one of the new sources of information that will be available with be The Russia House with Scott Ritter.

Nothing happens in a vacuum, however.

Especially if one wants to take on the powers that be that have built the physical and intellectual infrastructures that promulgate Russophobia today.

In July of this year, more than a year after the Biden administration seized my passport, it was unceremoniously returned.

I immediately made the decision that my first trip using this passport was to complete the journey the Biden administration stopped back in June 2024—to go to Russia.

But not as a tourist.

My goal was to take The Russia House with Scott Ritter to Russia and kick-start the creation of a viable antidote to the disease of Russophobia.

The Author interviews Mamuka Pipia, the owner of the Genatsvale Restaurant and the International Secretary of the Solidarity for Peace Party, Republc of Georgia, and a member of the National Unity Club

This kind of work does not happen by itself. I reached out to the National Unity Club, an organization linked to the National Unity Club, a political body that links Russia with Belarus, with whom I had interacted with previously by participating in on-line conferences about improving US-Russian relations. They had invited me to a conference in June that I was unable to attend due to not having a passport. I asked if they had anything scheduled for August, to which they answered they would make something happen if I were able to come to Russia.

What the National Unity Club and I agreed to was to showcase The Russia House with Scott Ritter by conducting a series of interviews of prominent Russian personalities which would then be jointly disseminated by the National Unity Club in Russia, and by Alexandra and I on Telegram, Substack and X.

While I paid for the costs associated with my trip (airfare, hotel food), the National Unity Club made the technical arrangements associated with producing the interviews—studio space (we both used a fireside venue in the lovely Genatsvale Restaurant on Arbat Street, and a more traditional studio setting at the headquarters building of the TASS News Agency, both in downtown Moscow), cameras and sound technicians, and simultaneous interpretation—were provided by the National Unity Club, who also arranged the interviews.

I had asked Alexandra to attend every phase of the various processes associated with the conduct of these interviews for the purpose of observing and taking notes, all with an eye on eventually conducting such an endeavor on our own.

The result speaks for itself—The Russia House with Scott Ritter published 17 interviews that were conducted over the course of five days work. Almst immediately, the difference between conducting an interview online, which was the norm for interviews done from my home “studio” in New York, and speaking face to face, became apparent. A face-to-face interview is a more intimate in nature, and the emotions generated by the resulting conversation result in a far more human experience than otherwise could be had. If the purpose of The Russia House with Scott Ritter was to capture the Russian reality, the one-on-one in person interviews conducted together with the National Unity Club captured the Russian soul.

As successful as the experience with the National Unity Club was, the reality is that for The Russia House with Scott Ritter to succeed in its goal of becoming a viable antidote for Russophobia in the United States, it had to be seen as a stand-alone entity, capable of operating independently of any Russian group or organization.

This is why I asked Alexandra to observe and take notes during the August events.

Based upon the success of the August interviews, I decided that I would bring The Russia House with Scott Ritter back to Russia in November. But this time it would be a completely in-house operation, with Alexandra producing the entire effort.

The November trip will not simply replicate the August experience. Yes, we will be conducting several one-on-one interviews with an extremely impressive lineup of prominent politicians, experts, and academics. But the goal is to take The Russia House with Scott Ritter to the next level.

I recently published a book here in the United States, Highway to Hell: The Armageddon Chronicles, 2015-2024 (published by Clarity Press). In August, Alexandra put me in contact with Konstantin Antipin, the editor at the Konzeptual Publishing House in Moscow. Based upon this meeting, an agreement has been reached between Clarity Press and Konzeptual to publish Highway to Hell in the Russian language.

Russian language book cover for Highway to Hell

I will be using the publication of the Russian language edition of Highway to Hell as a springboard for my November trip, and Alexandra has organized a book launch event at an impressive Moscow venue which will be filmed and disseminated as part of The Russia House with Scott Ritter.

One of the goals and objectives of the November trip is to bring awareness to the danger of nuclear war and the need for arms control. While I have been pushing this message here in the United States, the November trip offers the possibility of using Russia as a sounding board to help amplify this message to an American audience—it is one thing to hear an American say certain things, but another altogether to hear it from a Russian voice.

In this context, I will be working to interview Russians knowledgeable in US-Russian relations, nuclear weapons, and arms control.

I will also be looking to expand the conversation beyond the normal one-on-one interview by engaging in townhall-style interactions with students and faculty of prominent Russian universities, as well as the Russian public during book events scheduled during my visit.

There are other projects planned which still need to manifest themselves, but one thing is for certain—the November visit to Russia will be unlike anything I have ever undertaken in my previous visits, both in terms of ambition and self-reliance.

The ambition will play itself out as circumstances permit—I am, after all, a guest in Russia, and my goals and objectives may not always coincide with those of my Russian hosts. But nothing happens in a vacuum—one must make every effort, and hope that things fall into place.

Hope, of course, is helped along by intense preparation and hard work, and one can be rest assured that both Alexandra and I are doing everything possible to ensure that, when it comes to the November trip, hope becomes reality.

The Russian reality.

Which will be shared to the world via The Russia House with Scott Ritter.

One of the decisions that must be made regarding the distribution of the The Russia House with Scott Ritter is how best to get the product to as broad an audience as possible. This means that, when it comes to the November trip, none of the interviews and meetings conducted will be put behind a pay wall.

This represents a gamble on my part—the expenses associated with doing everything in-house are considerable, and there is always a temptation to try and recoup the expenses through a paywall.

But the goal here isn’t to generate income, but to create and disseminate an informational vaccine to the disease of Russophobia.

And this is where I am asking for support in the form of donations.

There are many who cannot pay for content.

And there are many who are not able to donate.

I understand the economic reality of the present condition here in the United States.

What I promise is that while in Russia I will do everything possible to capture not only the Russian reality, but the Russian soul, with a high-quality product that will be distributed to our audience in a timely manner.

I promise to responsibly engage with relevant Russian officials and experts on issues pertaining to the defeat of Russophobia here in the United States, and on matter relevant to addressing the problems that prevent the bettering of US-Russian relations.

And if you believe in this project, and are able to support it, all I ask is that you donate what you can.

Every dollar helps.

And none will go to waste.

As I write in my book, Highway to Hell, “This isn’t a drill. This isn’t an academic exercise. This is the real world. This is life or death…the question is, what are we going to do about it?”

Alexandra and I are doing our part.

And I am confident you will do yours.

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Ritter’s Rant 060: Outrage https://open.substack.com/pub/scottritter/p/ritters-rant-060-outrage?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

The US Congress is outraged that the Biden administration turned the FBI on them. Where was this outrage when Biden unleashed the FBI on innocent Americans?

Hello and welcome to this episode of Ritter’s Rant. Today’s word of the day is outrage. I mean, that’s what we’re seeing right now from members of Congress, members of the United States Senate and other Republicans who have just woken up to the fact that the Biden administration weaponized the Department of Justice, weaponized the FBI.

Bring RT back to the United States as a competitor. Make Americans see the standard that’s set and strive to do better. Anyways, that’s my rant. The outrage over the interference of the FBI. The outrage over ongoing suppression of free speech and a free press. When will this outrage turn into action? I’m waiting.

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Reflection on an event like no other https://open.substack.com/pub/scottritte

RT’s 20th Anniversary Gala wasn’t just a celebration of truth. It was an incubator of intellectual reflection on the world we live in

The Bolshoi Theater lit up in RT’s colors

I’m sitting in Vnukova airport waiting to board the flight that begins my journey home from what has been the most mind-blowing five days imaginable.

When I accepted RT’s invitation to attend their 20th anniversary gala, I accepted because I respect the organization and its people, and believed they were owed that courtesy.

But I had the roles reversed—RT extended me every courtesy in facilitating what was a magical event populated by the most internationally diverse collection of leading intellectuals and subject matter experts ever gathered in one place.

For anyone who ever thought of RT as an up and coming organization, think again—the RT I experienced this weekend was a fully matured, confident and competent international news organization whose time had obviously come.

Maligned and sanctioned by the collective West—including my country, the United States, RT has emerged from the maelstrom of controversy and chaos stronger than ever, its message of fact-based truth resonating among a global audience, including a not-so-insignificant group inside the very nations who sought to isolate RT to begin with.

The Gala was a masterpiece in every way, highlighting RT’s global reach and attention to detail. Walking the reception hall, one could not help but be impressed by the quality and quantity of global leaders in their respective fields. It was like being amongst the extended family you never knew you had, and I was humbled to be counted in their presence.

Any doubt of RT’s reach and importance was immediately erased when the evening’s keynote speaker took to the stage. Russian President Vladimir Putin is one of the world’s busiest men, and the present situations confronting him demand more of his time than any other in recent memory. And yet there he was, side by side with the resilient and radiant Editor in Chief of RT, Margarita Simonyan, declaring to all present the critical importance of telling the truth in an age where lies and distortions have become common currency among international news organizations. President Putin made it clear to all: the complicated situations that have emerged on the global scene demand the attention of a news organization whose ethos is grounded in integrity and fidelity to telling the truth—nothing less.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and RT Editor in Chief Magarita Simonyan address the Gala attendees

And RT, President Putin announced to all present, was such an organization.

The Bolshoi Theater played host to RT’s 20th Gala, and RT could not have picked a better venue. The facility exuded not just class, but class infused with the Russian soul. This was driven home by a wonderful performance of the ballet “The Queen of Spades”, based upon Alexander Pushkin’s novella of the same name. The perfection of the Bolshoi Theater’s performance was the perfect punctuation for what was, in every way, a perfect evening celebrating 20 years of operation by a media company that has set the standard of professionalism and ethics when it comes to international journalism.

The Bolshoi dancers perform the “Queen of Spades”

I would be remiss if I didn’t add the following comment: the quality of RT’s international guest list generated its own magic in the lead-up to and aftermath of the Gala. The countless conversations that transpired over coffee in the hotel lounge, or a meal in one of Moscow’s many world-class restaurants, generated ideas which, if followed up on, will have a global impact in their own right.

RT isn’t just a world-class news organization.

It is a global incubator of the kind of intellectual innovation that can only be achieved when like minded people, grounded in similar values, come together in a common cause.

So congratulations, RT, on 20 years of excellence.

Here’s to 20 more.

oooooo

The Scud Hunters: Chapter Four https://substack.com/@realscottritt

The Missile Guy

Patriot missiles engage Iraqi Al Hussein missiles over Riyadh, January 26, 1991 (Photo by AP/John Gaps III)

The Battle of Riyadh

Israel had been hit hard by SCUDs for two straight days. Our turn came on January 20, when a total of eight SCUDs were launched against targets in Saudi Arabia, including four toward Riyadh. This feat was accomplished only by the tenacity and audacity of the men of the Al Hussein Force. Following the second strike against Israel, on the morning of January 19, General Ayoubi ordered that all launchers designated to participate in the planned attack on Saudi Arabia should return immediately to the filling and arming site at Ramadi, where they would be loaded with a combat ready missile before proceeding south.

This was a very tricky operation, as it involved dispatching fully loaded missile launchers down a major highway during daylight hours in the middle of a war where enemy aircraft were actively searching for this very activity. The launchers, with sufficient intervals, proceeded from one hide location to the next, which they would not depart until the ‘all clear’ signal had been given by air defense, which monitored the skies above for hostile aircraft. In this way, both Unit 224 and Unit 223 were able to be in position to fire a total of six missiles at targets in Saudi Arabia on the night of 20/21 January.

For the attack on Riyadh, General Ayoubi had allocated six launchers from Unit 224, operating in the vicinity of the southern Iraqi town of Safwan. At 9 pm on January 20 two of these were able to launch their missiles; one of these was the 10^th battery. As soon as they finished, several of the Unit 224 MAZ-543 batteries, including the 10^th, immediately headed back north to Baghdad, and then Ramadi, where they were reloaded with missiles to continue their attacks against Israel.

I was in my quarters in Eskan village when the air alarm went off, warning of the incoming missiles. Like everyone else in the apartment complex, I donned my MOPP (Mission Oriented Protective Posture) gear, which consisted of a gas mask, charcoal-lined overgarments, rubber gloves and over-boots. Not satisfied with sheltering in place, as required by our standing orders, I made my way to the roof of the apartment to see the action taking place outside; I justified this insubordination by labeling my actions as a “necessary intelligence gathering function.”

Within seconds of my arrival, I was able to make out the orange glow of a SCUD burning off its residual fuel as it completed the final leg of its ballistic trajectory. I was startled by a Patriot battery which fired its missiles from a position close by. The S-shaped trajectory taken by the Patriot PAC-2 missile as it adjusted to the trajectory of the SCUD missile projected by its acquisition radar had it fly dangerously close to the ground, passing right over my head before climbing into the sky toward the SCUD.

I could see at least three explosions in the sky as the Patriot missiles appeared to intercept the SCUD, followed moments later by a larger explosion on the horizon as the SCUD warhead impacted the earth. This experience was repeated a second time when another SCUD streaked across the night sky, prompting a second salvo of Patriot missiles, more airborne explosions, and another large detonation on the ground. These missiles both struck Riyadh; an impact outside an office building produced a 10-foot-deep crater and knocked down a portion of that structure, injuring a dozen people. One of the Patriot missiles launched to intercept these SCUDs, however, ended up hitting the ground in Riyadh as well; it is not known if the crater was caused by a SCUD or a Patriot.[1]

In the aftermath of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, in August 1990, General Schwarzkopf requested that a Patriot air defense capability be among the first US forces to be deployed into Saudi Arabia. The 11^th Air Defense Artillery (ADA) Brigade, commanded by Colonel Joseph Garett III, was tasked with providing a Patriot battalion. At the time, the only interceptor missiles available to the 11^th ADA were what the Army called “Patriot Advanced Capability, Phase 1”, or PAC-1, variants. The PAC-1 was a modification of the original Patriot surface-to-air missile, a 1970’s-era missile designed to shoot down waves of Soviet aircraft in any large-scale European conflict.

Patriot was originally deployed to the 32^nd Air Defense Command, subordinated to US Army, Europe. Faced with a capable Soviet tactical ballistic missile threat, the US Army modified the original Patriot tracking system, along with the interceptor missile’s fusing and warhead, for the purpose of achieving a so-called “warhead kill”—using the explosive power of the Patriot to knock an incoming missile off course, and thereby preventing it from hitting its intended target. Initial tests of the PAC-1 interceptor were conducted in 1986, and by 1988 the PAC-1 interceptor was deemed operational.

As the Soviets improved the performance of their tactical ballistic missiles, so, too, did the US Army seek to keep pace by developing improvements to the PAC-1 system. By August 1990 the Army was finalizing preparations to test a new missile interceptor, the PAC-2, which incorporated new software, fusing, and warhead components designed to generate a “hard kill” capability.

The operational history of the Patriot missiles did not get off to an auspicious start. Around 4 am on January 18, while Israel was being pummeled by Iraqi missiles, First Lieutenant Charles McMurtrey and Sergeant Joe Oblinger, both assigned to Alpha Battery, 2^nd Battalion, 7^th Air Defense Artillery Regiment, 11^th Air Defense Brigade, responsible for defending the US Air Base at Dharan, Saudi Arabia, were standing duty, scanning the radar screens for any sign of a hostile attack, when suddenly their green-lit electronic display indicated that a single missile was inbound.

“I knew right away what it was,” McMurtrey recalled afterwards. “There’s no way you can confuse it.”

The battery commander, Captain Jim Spangler, alerted the battalion command post, which activated a siren, followed by an announcement: “Condition Red, Condition Red, don your gas masks!”

In the firing battery command van, the operators stood by as the Patriot system, operating in automatic mode. At 4.28 am, the battery fired two PAC-2 missiles, which arched upwards in the early morning sky, maneuvered twice, before exploding. “I was standing outside my tent about three kilometers away”, Lieutenant Colonel Leeroy Neel, the battalion commander, recalled. “I saw the explosion, but it didn’t register immediately. Then I thought, “my God, that’s one of mine.’”

The lack of any battle damage reports did not faze Neel. “A chemical team takes care of that,” he noted. “My people just find them and shoot them down.”[2]

For Neel, Spangler, McMurtrey, Oblinger, and the rest of the personnel of Alpha Battery, the Patriot missile had just completed its combat initiation with flying colors.

Later that evening, it was Bravo Battery’s turn. Once again, the tactical control officer on duty informed the battery commander, Captain Joe DeAntona, that his radar was tracking an incoming SCUD. As with Alpha Battery, the Patriot system operated by Bravo Battery was on automatic mode. DeAntona gave the order to engage, and almost immediately two PAC-2 Patriot missiles were fired into the night sky. Shortly afterwards, the system reported that the target had been destroyed.

“It was high-fives and loud clapping,” DeAntona recalled. “It was like a game-winning shot, it was like scoring the winning touchdown pass on the last play. It felt like victory.”[3]

DeAntona’s troops, however, were not celebrating victory, but rather a glitch in the Patriot system that had resulted in the launching of PAC-2 interceptor missiles against phantom targets. The celebrated first “successful engagement by an Air Defense system ever in combat history” was, literally, nothing more than a ghost in the machine, the product of what the Army later called “significant frequency overload” caused by the powerful electronic signals generated by the radars and jammers of systems such as the E-3 Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) and EF-111 Raven which resulted in the Patriot radar generating false tracks which the system, when in full automatic mode, then responded to as if they were real.[4]

Over the course of the next few days, Iraq sustained its barrage of missiles, hitting Israel and targets throughout the Arabian Peninsula on a near daily basis. Aircraft which were tasked with striking non-SCUD targets in Iraq were diverted to join in an expanding counter-SCUD mission that was proving to be vexing from a BDA standpoint.

“These attacks,” General Khaled Bin Sultan, the Saudi Commander of Joint Forces, recalled afterwards, “prompted us to think of retaliation.”[5] Saudi Arabia had in its possession a force of between 36 and 60 Chinese-made DF-3A medium range missiles which had been purchased in great secrecy in 1986, and which limited operational capability in 1989. The Saudi decision to procure these missiles was founded in the missile war being waged at the time by Iraq and Iran. The best way to deter any regional power from firing missiles at Saudi Arabian cities, the Saudi leadership believed, was to have its own missiles available for immediate and devastating retaliation. The Saudi operation to acquire and field the DF-3A was known as the East Wind.

With a range of 1,646 miles (2,650 km) and a payload of around two tons, the DF-3A was the most potent missile in the region at the time, except for Israel’s nuclear-tipped Jericho 2. During the planning for the opening night of Desert Storm, the DF-3A had been incorporated into the initial attack, with a dozen or so missiles to be fired at Iraqi SCUD-related targets. However, the Saudi’s balked at the last second, concerned over the optics of having an ostensible defensive weapon of retaliation employed offensively in a pre-emptive strike.

The Iraqi missile attacks, however, changed everything. General Khaled Bin Sultan ordered the commander of the Saudi Missile Forces, Brigadier General Ibrahim al-Dakhil, to prepare several missiles for launching against several key Iraqi cities to deter future attacks. The missiles were made ready save for the loading of the volatile liquid fuel; once a missile was loaded with the highly corrosive fuel and oxidizer, the missile either had to be fired immediately or else taken out of service for repair.

Once the missiles were ready, General Khaled Bin Sultan notified the Saudi leadership and awaited the orders to fire. These orders never came. The Saudi ruler, King Fahd, had decided that the DF-3A was a weapon of last resort and, as such, would not be used to retaliate against further Iraqi missile attacks. One of the factors that weighed in on this decision was the fact that the DF-3A was, if anything, even less accurate than the Iraqi Al Hussein missiles, and by launching two tons of high explosives against Iraqi cities, Saudi Arabia would be guilty of the same charges of indiscrimination and hazarding of civilian life and property as were being levied against Iraq.[6]

A few days after the initial SCUD attack on Riyadh, on January 23, a team of missile experts from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) flew into Riyadh to conduct a technical analysis of the missile debris that had been recovered from the initial attacks. In my role as the SCUD BDA officer, I was invited to participate in the final debriefing session. I knew several of the DIA team from my time as an INF inspector, and the debriefing quickly took on the air of a reunion. Other analysts included two from the US Army’s Missile and Space Intelligence Center in Huntsville, Alabama named Curtis Gentry and Gail Shephard, who were to become close colleagues of mine in the years to come.

The SCUD missile had been produced by the Votkinsk Factory at its downtown facility, Plant 235, a fact I mentioned in passing. Some of the CENTCOM officers present were surprised to hear about my experience as an INF inspector, and my service at the Votkinsk Portal Monitoring Facility. I even mentioned that I had met some of the Soviet workers responsible for building the SCUD. There were a lot of assumptions being made as we discussed the technical features of the Iraqi missile, with some of the CENTCOM contingent wrongly concluding that I had inspected SCUD missiles at Votkinsk, instead of SS-25’s. This error would prove consequential in the days to come.

The briefing turned out to be quite informative. The Iraqi version of the Soviet SCUD, which they called the Al-Hussein, was basically an elongated missile made by cutting up two SCUD missiles to make larger fuel and oxidizer tanks, before rewelding the pieces back together. The warhead had been reduced in size from 985 to 500 kilograms (2,170 to 1,100 pounds) of high explosive, a factor which, when combined with a longer burn time brought on by the increased fuel, extended the range of the missile from to approximately 650 kilometers, or 400 miles.

US troops examine the pieces of an Al Hussein missile that had been launched against Riyadh on January 20, 1991 (Photo by the Department of Defense)

While the official CENTCOM position was that all incoming Iraqi SCUDs had been successfully intercepted by the Patriot PAC-3 missiles, the debris told another story—the elongated Iraqi missile was subjected to greater amounts of structural stress produced by the higher speeds achieved through the longer engine burn time and distance of travel. As a result, the airframe tended to breakup in the final phase of the flight into three sections comprising the engine compartment, the fuel tanks, and the warhead and guidance sections. The larger of these three was the section comprising the fuel tanks, and it was on this piece that the patriot missile would aim, leaving the warhead section to spiral to the earth unmolested.

The fact of the matter was that the Patriot missile was not preventing the modified SCUD warhead from reaching its target, which explained the large crater in downtown Riyadh that no official would admit was produced by a SCUD lest they undermine the Patriot missile success narrative that had been constructed.

I came back from the DIA technical debriefing convinced more than ever that the Iraqis were winning the missile war. Not only were they launching missiles with impunity, but by happenstance the structural deficiencies inherent in their modified Al-Hussein missiles served to create de facto decoy objects that facilitated their warheads penetrating the Patriot missile shield. Only the massive inaccuracy of the missile, with a circular error of probability of up to nine kilometers (5.6 miles), prevented greater casualties.

This was war, and although the BDA cell was organized to work in rotating shifts, I never returned to my quarters directly after being relieved. I would instead pour over intelligence reports, trying to find something that could help turn the tide in our favor against Iraq. This included going over to the Combat Camera office, where I had requested the airmen working there to assemble a videotape containing all the days reported SCUD kills for my review. I would then spend hours examining these images, looking for anything that would sustain the claimed result. In every instance, I was compelled to dismiss the reported kill as unfounded, even though every fiber in my being wanted a different result.

I was responsible for producing a daily tally of confirmed SCUD battle damage, a list that had taken on enormous political importance with Israel demanding to be allowed to send its Air Force into western Iraq to do what the US Air Force had so far been unable to accomplish—kill Iraqi SCUDs. It was not as if the boys in blue were not trying; another document which had taken on political importance was the daily diary of counter-SCUD activity, detailing each mission flown in the counter-SCUD effort.

Kill Saddam

My war took an interesting turn during the evening of January 24 when Lieutenant General Calvin Waller, the Deputy Commander of CENTCOM, burst into the BDA cell, proclaiming loudly, “Where’s that Russian missile expert?”

Everyone in the room looked toward me, and I stood up. “I guess that would be me, Sir.”

Waller did not mince words. “Come with me. I have a job for you.”

We took the elevator from the basement to an upper floor in the MoDA headquarters building. “You’re going to be meeting with Prince Turki Bin Faisal al Saud, the director of al-Mukhabarat al-A’amah (the Saudi General Intelligence Directorate).”

Prince Turki was the eighth and youngest son of King Faisal and had been the head of intelligence since 1979. “This is a big deal. The Saudi’s are genuinely concerned about the missile threat posed by Iraq. Right now, we are not doing a particularly good job at stopping the SCUDs from hitting Saudi Arabia. We need to be doing something positive. The prince has an agent inside Iraq and has informed us that he has some intelligence about Iraq’s missile program. This is the first time the prince has shared this kind of intelligence with us. I think it’s a test of our ability to respond to intelligence of this sort.”

General Waller paused and looked at me. “Don’t fuck this up.”

The General and I were ushered into a dimly lit room lavishly outfitted with fine furniture, including a sofa that we were directed to sit in by a man dressed in elegant white Arab garb, inclusive of khafiya. Soon after we were seated, another man entered the room—Prince Turki, similarly clad as his attendant, with the addition of a black bisht, or robe, made from finely woven wool trimmed in gold embroidery. General Waller and I stood as the prince made his entrance, sitting only after he had taken his seat in a chair opposite us.

Lieutenant General Cal Waller, the Deputy Commander of CENTCOM (top), and Prince Turki Bin Faisal al Saud (bottom) (Top photo by the Department of Defense; bottom photo by Saudi Government)

This was my first experience with Arab nobility and the art of the drawn-out conversation. I was accustomed to getting straight to business, but clearly this was not the Saudi way. I sat in silence as General Waller and Prince Turki engaged in polite conversation, only nodding my head when the General introduced me as the “the missile guy”. Rich aromatic Arabic coffee was served, along with dates. I sipped my coffee only after the Prince and General Waller sipped theirs, and similarly took a single date only when each of my seniors had done the same.

After what seemed an interminable wait, we finally got down to business. Prince Turki raised his hand, and a Saudi officer entered the room. The prince introduced him as an intelligence officer who ran several human sources inside Iraq. According to the Saudi intelligence officer (who spoke Arabic, with Prince Turki translating), recently an Iraqi source had submitted a report about preparations being made to use a new kind of missile against Saudi Arabia. This missile was believed to use solid fuel, and had a longer range, greater payload, and more accuracy than the extended SCUDs that had been used by Iraq thus far in the war. The missiles had been prepared in a hardened bunker. The source noticed that the floor of the structure where the missiles had been worked on was covered in a granular white powder.

The Saudi government was concerned about the possibility of this missile being used against Saudi Arabia and was hoping that CENTCOM would be able to provide some insight into what kind of missile the Iraqi source was speaking about.

I asked the prince if I could have a day to prepare an assessment. He said yes, and General Waller and I were escorted from the room. On the way back down to the basement Waller was silent. When the elevator door opened on the CENTCOM workspaces, he turned to me. “Let me know when you have something for the prince,” he said, before leaving me for the sanctum of the Combat Operations Center. There was no fanfare, no pep talk—nothing.

I went to the Current Intelligence Center (CIC), where I started digging through intelligence reports. I found one dated back a few years which claimed the Iraqis had received some SS-12 medium-range missiles—another Votkinsk product—from the Soviets in the mid-to late-1980’s. I also found a report prepared by DAT-6, the office in the Defense Intelligence Agency responsible for attaché operations in the Middle East/North Africa, which investigated this very report, concluding that such a transfer had not occurred.

The SS-12 was one of the missile systems banned under the terms of the INF Treaty. I recalled that in February 1990 the US had learned that several SS-23 short-range missiles—which like the SS-12 had been banned by the treaty—had been transferred to East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria before the treaty went into force, and subsequently not declared by the Soviet Union. I wondered if it were possible that the Soviets, in similar fashion, had transferred some SS-12 missiles to Iraq, and just not told anyone.

The SS-12 used the same MAZ-543 TEL as the SCUD, which would make such a limited transfer even more difficult to detect. CENTCOM had little intelligence on the SS-12 beyond that one report, which was several years old, and the DAT-6 investigation, which was dated December 1990. I could submit a request through channels to speak with the report’s author to get clarification, but that would take days—time I did not have. Instead, I decided to reach back into my recent past for answers.

I placed a secure call to operations room of the On-Site Inspection Agency (OSIA, the Department of Defense agency responsible for implementing the provisions of the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces, or INF, treaty), identified myself by name, and asked if I could speak to someone familiar with the SS-12 missile system. Within a few minutes I was talking with Lieutenant Colonel Tom Brock, one of the Inspection Team Leaders. I filled him in on the nature of my request and asked him if there was any possibility that some SS-12 missiles could have been transferred to Iraq by the Soviets before the INF Treaty was signed. Tom asked me to give him a couple of hours to run this question down. When I called Tom back, he informed me that he had discretely reached out to the Soviets and asked my question and had been assured that no SS-12 missiles had been transferred to Iraq, or any other non-Soviet entity. All SS-12 missiles were scheduled to be destroyed under the INF Treaty.

I next turned to other potential sources of solid fuel missiles that the Iraqis could be using. Intelligence reports spoke of an Argentinian missile, the Condor II, that had been developed in conjunction with the Egyptians as the Badr-2000, who subsequently sold the designs and technology to the Iraqis under the same name. The Iraqis had constructed a modern facility southwest of Baghdad known as Taj al-Marik where the Badr-2000 was to be produced. All indications were that this effort had not reached fruition by the time the war had started. It was unlikely that the Badr-2000 was the missile which the Saudi intelligence source was referring to.

I could come up with no other plausible scenario where the Iraqis could have either acquired an operational intermediate-range solid fuel ballistic missile, or manufactured one indigenously, with or without outside held. I checked the BDA data base and found that Taj al-Marik had already been struck several times and was considered to have been either destroyed or neutralized (indeed, the air strike on Taj al-Marik, consisting of a score of Tomahawk cruise missiles, nearly succeeded in killing the Deputy Director of MIC, Amer al-Sa’adi, who was, like Amer Rashid at Taji, conducting a tour of the facility to ascertain how much damage had been done a a result of coalition attacks.)

Based upon this assessment, I was satisfied that Iraq did not have a solid fuel missile capable of threatening Saudi Arabia. I wrote a two-page memorandum for General Waller detailing my reasoning, which I delivered to him personally the next morning.

That evening I was summoned back to the Combat Operations Center, where I found General Waller waiting for me, holding my report in his hand. “The prince will see us now,” he said.

The meeting unfolded in precisely the same manner as the prior evening. Once the coffee had been drunk and the dates eaten, General Waller handed my report to Prince Turki, who received it and put it down on the table without looking at it. “I would like to hear from your expert in person,” the prince said.

I briefed him on the contents, as well as my conclusion—the intelligence was wrong, and there was no threat to the Kingdom from a new Iraqi solid fuel missile. The prince translated my words to the Saudi agent handler, who listened without any expression or reaction. Prince Turki thanked me for my work, and once again General Waller and I departed for our basement offices. The General was visibly relaxed—clearly the meeting had gone well from his point of view. As for me, I was glad to have been of service.

General Waller called on me one more time, in the afternoon of January 27. “The prince wants to see you,” he said. “Apparently you impressed him.”

In a scene that was a repeat of the first two, Prince Turki, accompanied by a Saudi agent handler, briefed General Waller and I on sensitive human intelligence from a Saudi spy operating inside Iraq. “Saddam Hussein is planning on visiting Basra on January 30 to meet with his commanders. He will arrive sometime on the 29^th and will be staying in the home of a prominent local citizen.” Prince Turki went on to provide a description of the building and its surrounding environs, which I wrote down.

The prince stopped speaking, and I looked over to where General Waller sat. “Your job,” General Waller said, “is to locate the building in question and turn it over to the Air Force for targeting.”

Prince Turki thanked us before departing, leaving General Waller and I alone in the room. “We’re going to kill Saddam?” I asked. “Isn’t that assassination?”

General Waller gave me a hard stare. “It’s a leadership target,” he said, his voice firm. “We are at war. Saddam is going to be planning operations designed to kill Americans. This is our chance to stop him.”

As far as I was concerned, I had just been given a lawful order.[7]

I turned to the professionals at the Joint Imagery Production Complex (the Desert Gypsy) for help. The JIPC conducted first-phase analysis of national, theater and tactical imagery from a variety of sources. “First-phase analysis” is defined by doctrine as “the rapid exploitation of newly acquired imagery and reporting of imagery-derived information within a specified time from receipt of imagery” and satisfies “priority requirements of immediate need.” General Waller had made it clear to me that killing Saddam was a “priority requirement”, and the resources of the JIPC were put at my disposal.

The JIPC was set up in a cluster of tents and shelters located in Riyadh International Airport. I took a shuttle to the airport, where I was greeted by an Army Colonel, the JIPC commander, who had been alerted to my arrival. After I laid out the gist of my problem, he turned me over to a female airman whom he said was his top photographic interpreter. Given the time constraints involved, the plan was for the airman to do a survey of existing satellite imagery, trying to isolate possible candidates, before tasking satellites to take current imagery. The fact that we had been given the ability to task a national resource was a big deal—due to limited satellite availability, the JIPC was limited to only 50 frames of digital satellite imagery per day. We were in the middle of a war, where the competition for satellite tasking was tremendous. It became clear to me that killing Saddam was a high priority task.

I left the airman to do her job. She would call me at my desk when she had identified candidate locations.

The phone call came the next evening. Time was short—I needed to get some target grids over to General Waller soon if he was going to be able to get them into the Air Tasking Order for the night of 29/30 January. The airman had done a remarkable job turning my verbal description into actual targets on the ground. She had identified six potential candidate locations, three of which she deemed to be a close fit.

That evening the airman and I were in the middle of studying the imagery—taken earlier that day—through specialized devices that produced a 3-D image. Just before 9 pm, the air raid alarm went off, signaling an inbound SCUD. While we did not know it at the time, the 19^th battery, operating near Safwan, had fired a single Al Hussein towards Riyadh.

The airman laughed. “I guess Saddam heard about us,” she said, “and is trying to get us before we get him!”

The Colonel stuck his head into our workspace. “Mandatory evacuation to the air raid shelter”, he said. “Masks on.”

“I’m running out of time, Sir,” I said. Experience showed that anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour could pass between the sounding of an alarm and the all-clear signal. I still needed to decide on which targets to pass to General Waller. “I’m staying.”

He did not argue. “It’s your funeral.” But when the airman (to her credit) also volunteered to remain behind to help me, the Colonel drew the line. “You work for me. He doesn’t,” the Colonel told her. “Get going.”

In the background I could hear Patriot missiles firing, followed by the explosion of the SCUD warhead impacting the ground. “You missed, you Bastard”, I muttered, knowing well I was not the target and, moreover, if I had been, the poor accuracy of the Al Hussein all but guaranteed my survival.

This did not mean the missile was harmless; Newton’s universal theory of gravity— “what goes up must come down”—meant that the SCUD warhead was going to land somewhere. On this night that “somewhere” was a populated area of Riyadh, doing considerable damage. The fact that it was obviously not a chemical munition helped speed up the all-clear signal, and soon the airman was back at her workstation. By then I had narrowed it down to three targets, which I had prioritized in terms of probability. I asked the airman for her opinion, and after carefully examining each image, she agreed.

I had my targets.

I returned to the MoDA building, and reported to the Combat Operations Center, where General Waller sat, running the war. I was escorted in, and walked up to the General, handing him an envelope with a single sheet of paper on which were typed the grid coordinates of each target.

“Are you sure about these?” he asked.

“As sure as I can be based upon the information provided,” I responded. “These are the top three locations in the Basra area that fit the description provided by Prince Turki.”

General Waller thanked me, and I was ushered out.

I learned later that two of the targets were bombed by F-111F aircraft on the day Saddam was supposed to be travelling. The reports, however, turned out to be false — Saddam never travelled to Basra. The buildings hit were most likely civilian homes. I do not know what, if anything, became of the occupants of the two buildings that were struck, but I do know they were deemed to be occupied at the time they were designated as targets, and 2,000-pound bombs are not known for their soft touch.

The Black Hole

By January 23 it was obvious to everyone that the United States, despite all its many assurances to the contrary, did not have a solution to the Iraqi SCUD problem. The pressure inside Israel was building for retaliation. The domestic political tension was furthered by some inopportune comments made by General Schwarzkopf to BBC radio about the threat posed by the Iraqi missiles. “Saying that SCUDs are a danger to a nation is like saying that lightning is a danger to a nation,” Schwarzkopf noted. “I frankly would be more afraid of standing out in a lightning storm in southern Georgia than I would standing out in the streets of Riyadh when the SCUDs are coming down. If it’s going to hit you it’s going to hit you, but the percentages are so much less.”[8]

It was left to others to do damage control. Major General Armstrong had to assuage the leadership of the Israeli Defense Force (IDF), who emphasized the hair-trigger nature of their retaliatory force, and the fact that they were under increasing criticism from their own citizens for not pulling it. In private, however, these same IDF officials—especially those from the Israeli Air Force—admitted that they did not have a better solution to finding and killing the Iraqi mobile SCUDs than what was currently being done by the American-led coalition forces. The issue, however, was not one of military practicalities, but rather domestic political reality—the IDF plan would be implemented if the political pressure continued to mount, and this pressure increased with each SCUD attack from Iraq.

What the IDF leadership needed from Major General Armstrong was detailed information which highlighted the US actions in western Iraq so that they might forestall any rash action by their own political leadership. In particular, the IDF requested advance knowledge of what targets were being struck, assurance that there was an active counter-SCUD presence over western Iraq, and timely battle damage assessments. All of this would considerably aid the IDF in placating Israeli political concerns that everything was being done that could be to stop the Iraqi SCUD attacks. Major General Armstrong passed on the Israeli request to Central Command headquarters in Riyadh.

While Major General Armstrong was meeting with the IDF in Tel Aviv, the battle damage analysts at CENTCOM J-2 were beginning to come to grips with the scope of the failure of the US-coalition air strikes against the Iraqi mobile SCUDs. As the lead SCUD battle damage assessment analyst, I played a major role in this effort. In a blunt assessment, I highlighted the fact that while nearly 40% of the air strike missions flown by US-coalition aircraft between 20-23 January had been targeted against the mobile SCUD threat (in both western and southern Iraq), the actual damage inflicted was, to be blunt, negligible. The pilots flying these missions had reported over 60 mobile SCUD launchers destroyed by 23 January; CENTCOM pre-war estimates credited Iraq with only 26 mobile launchers, and DIA’s estimate—historically inflated—listed Iraq as having 36 mobile launchers.)

According to the pilots, we had killed twice as many mobile launchers as we believed the Iraqis could possess. And yet the SCUD attacks continued. The bottom line was that, despite the considerable amount of effort being placed on locating and destroying the Iraqi SCUD force in western Iraq, on the eve of an urgent Israeli request for information and data needed to prevent the conflict from spreading, the United States had very little of substance to report. CENTCOM’s quick little 48-hour campaign to rapidly destroy Iraqi SCUD missiles deployed against Israel had failed, and now the United States was being called to task.

The CENTCOM response was to turn to the Air Force—Lieutenant General Horner and his strike planner, Brigadier General Glosson—for a solution. The irony in this choice was thick, as it was this pair which was primarily responsible for the predicament the United States now found itself in. Moreover, nothing in the events of the past days suggested that either of the Generals had undergone a transformation concerning their strategy for coping with the mobile SCUD threat.

Brigadier General Glosson’s strike planning cell (the so-called Black Hole), were deeply involved in charting the progress of their Air Tasking Order (ATO), which many in the cell felt to be beyond reproach and thus unalterable. In the opinion of these planners, the ATO was designed for the purpose of liberating Kuwait, not defeating a mobile SCUD threat. The fact that the introduction of Israeli combat forces into the war because of the Black Hole’s failure to find a solution to the SCUD problem would lead to the disintegration of the coalition and the failure of the entire campaign was, to these planners, a political problem, not a military one.

One of the major reasons the Black Hole took the stance they did was that they were tasked with implementing a strategic air campaign designed to defeat the nation of Iraq, not orchestrate a tactical battle against mobile missiles. The processes involved in putting together and executing this strategic campaign were as complex as they were time consuming. The normal mission planning cycle involved in putting bombs on target was a three-day process. Using a target list produced well in advance, the Black Hole planners produced what was known as the master attack plan (MAP) on day one. Here the various targets to be attacked in a 24-hour period would be presented, in order of priority.

On day two, the Guidance, Apportionment, and Targeting Division (GAT) would transform the MAP into the actual air tasking order (ATO) by identifying a specific aircraft and bomb type for every point on the ground designated to be attacked. The ATO would be entered into what was known as the computer-aided force management system, or CAFMS, an interactive computer-based platform used to relay information and facilitate text-based discussion between users. This was how the strike packages were disseminated to the operational squadrons. If the mission planners at the squadron level had any questions or concerns, they would use the CAFMS to communicate with the Black Hole for clarification. If everything checked out, the actual bombing missions would be flown on day three.

The strategic air campaign was designed to unfold over the course of weeks, with a synergism produced by a specific sequencing of targets over time. It was a living, breathing reality, a finely tuned system dedicated to implementing the plan as it existed, and not shooting from the hip. There was an ability to make small adjustments as targets of opportunity came up—my targeting of Saddam Hussein based upon Saudi human intelligence serves as a case in point. But as far as the Black Hole was concerned, the ATO had already accounted for the Iraqi SCUD problem with its 48-hour plan of attack. It was time to get on with fighting—and winning—the rest of the war.

Lieutenant Colonel David Deptula (right) briefs General Schwarzkopf and Brigadier General Buster Glosson on the air campaign in the Black Hole (Photo by David Deptula)

According to the initial estimates prepared by the Black Hole, the sortie rate (with one sortie representing the launching and recovery of a single aircraft) for phase one of the strategic air campaign was supposed to have levelled out at approximately 100 sorties per day by day seven of the campaign (D+7). The sortie rate had instead soared to over 1,200 sorties per day, with a significant portion of these (some 40%) being flown in support of the unplanned counter-SCUD effort. The Black Hole rightfully believed that the tempo of the ATO was being put at risk, and with it the timing for the entire Theater Campaign Plan—in short, if things kept going the way they were, the ground attack to defeat the Iraqi army and liberate Kuwait would have to be delayed.

The Black Hole believed that a balance needed to be struck between achieving the main objective of the Theater Campaign Plan (the liberation of Kuwait) and the appeasement of Israeli political concerns. The thought of reapportioning valuable air assets based upon political issues rankled the planners, especially their leader, Buster Glosson. The counter-SCUD effort had already denied the Black Hole planner the precision strike capability of the F-15E Strike Eagles of the 335th (Chiefs) and 336th (Rockets) Tactical Fighter Squadrons and threatened the sustainability of the overall air campaign by throwing off logistical and maintenance time schedules. If this trend continued, the Black Hole believed, it could cripple the overall US Air Force war effort. From the perspective of the Black Hole, the Theater Campaign was not to be disrupted any further, Israeli concerns be damned.

Logistics

While Desert Storm officially began on the night of 16/17 January, Unit 224 had been on a war footing since March 1990, and the wear and tear of near-continuous operations had taken its toll on the ageing vehicles, especially the MAZ-543 launchers, which were built back in 1974, and had already been through eight years of combat service in the Iran-Iraq War. On the first night of operations against Israel, one launcher—the 5th battery—broke down and was unable to launch, while another—the 1st battery—successfully launched its missile, but then was taken out of service for repairs. The 5th battery was able to participate in the second night’s attack, but then broke down again. Both the 1^st and 5^th batteries were pulled out of service for repairs and were not able to make the move to the south, and as such missed out on the opening salvo of Al Hussein missiles fired into Saudi Arabia.

Problems continued to plague the mobile launchers of Unit 224. While both the 2nd and 7th batteries were able to participate in the opening attack on Saudi Arabia, they, too, suffered malfunctions that required them to be withdrawn back to Baghdad for repairs, even as the 1st and 5th batteries were brought back up online.

That any of the worn-out launchers remained operational at all was only through the hard work and heroic efforts of the men of the Unit 224 Technical Battalion who, along with the missile technicians of the First Maintenance Unit, made sure that maintenance and repairs were conducted on both the launchers and their payloads throughout the conflict. To accomplish this, workshops were set up at various hide sites along the route taken by the launchers when transiting between fronts, where maintenance crews would inspect the vehicles and their missiles when they pulled in to take cover from hostile aircraft and reconnaissance assets.

All of this required careful coordination, as the maintenance teams needed to be in place prior to the launchers beginning their movements. Complicating matters further was that no maintenance/hide site could be used more than once, out of concern that the movements might have been detected by coalition intelligence platforms and the location designated for attack. This meant that the maintenance crews had to be continuously searching for hide sites that were both effective in terms of concealment and convenient in terms of access for the launchers.

The shift south after the second night of attacks on Israel created a pause in operations that General Ayoubi sought to minimize by sending the 4th and the 10th batteries back out west following their missile attack on Riyadh on the night of January 20.

The four Al Nida launchers of Unit 223 were established in the south, and as such able to maintain a modicum of pressure on the coalition’s forces operating out of Saudi Arabia. General Ayoubi then turned his attention to conducting a massed missile attack against Israel on January 25. To do this, however, he needed to move all of Unit 224’s MAZ-543 launchers back to western Iraq. He had two launchers—the 4th and the 10th—already operating in the area. Two others—the 2nd and 7th—were still undergoing repairs in Baghdad. This meant that Unit 224 would need to displace the six remaining launchers from where they were operating in the south of Iraq back north, through Baghdad, and from there to Ramadi and points west.

In addition to the MAZ-543 launcher, each battery had its own compliment of support vehicles which accompanied the launcher, including decontamination, reconnaissance, survey, and fuel and supply trucks. These would accompany the MAZ 543 in a loose convoy, with the result being that General Ayoubi’s order to displace Unit 224 put not six, but rather closer to forty, vehicles on the road. This was in addition to the scores of vehicles operated by the Technical Battalion and First Maintenance Unit, which were also on the move, setting up maintenance and refurbishment sites along the route.

Any time one puts more than 100 vehicles in motion at approximately the same time, headed in the same direction, there is the risk of this activity being detected by enemy reconnaissance, which would invite destruction from anyone of the hundreds of aircraft that were scouring Iraq, looking for precisely that opportunity. The key to survival for Unit 224 was to find a way to stagger the movement of these vehicles, and blend them into the natural pattern of activity, to make detection and interdiction as difficult as possible.

The launchers and their support vehicles represented half of the equation involved in launching a missile—the other half was the missile itself. During the Iran-Iraq War, and in the period between the end of that conflict and the Kuwait crisis, the Al Hussein missiles (and, prior to modification, the basic SCUD missile) were stored in warehouses at the Unit 224 base in Taji. The missiles were stored empty in the same so-called triple carriers they had been shipped in from the Soviet Union, so named because they held three missiles (two at the base, one on top). The guidance and control devices (gyroscopes and accelerometers) and warheads with fuses were shipped separately in their own special cannisters, as was the fuel “norm” for each missile, delivered in special made storage containers designed to be connected to fueling vehicles, which would pump the fuel from the container into the missile.

Under Soviet doctrine, a SCUD missile would be prepared for launch (fueled and armed, with gyroscopes programed and mounted) at the launch site. This would entail the launcher, together with a truck-mounted crane towing a missile mounted on a trailer, arriving at the designated launch site, joined by a fuel pump vehicle and additional vehicles carrying the fuel containers, and another vehicle carrying the warhead and fuse. At this point members of the missile technical battery would program the guidance and control devices for the missile. The gyroscopes of the missile guidance section were made ready for operational use by the missile technical battery through use of a special piece of calibration equipment mounted on the back of a ZIL-131 truck.

This equipment was critical to the success of the Al-Hussein launch, as the missile would not perform properly if the gyroscopes were not calibrated prior to the launch, thus permitting the missile to track where it was during its ballistic trajectory. There would also be a decontamination vehicle in case the nitric acid-based oxidizer leaked, and a water tanker. Preparation for launching a missile could take upwards of forty minutes to an hour, during which time the launcher and its crew were vulnerable to attack.

General Ayoubi had changed all of this. He dispersed the empty Al Hussein missiles, still mounted in their triple carriers, to various locations around Baghdad, as well as interim hide sites between Baghdad and the Ramadi missile support site operated by Unit 224, and a similar site near Amarah, in the south, operated by Unit 223. Likewise, the fuel and oxidizer containers were hidden among groves of date palms to prevent their detection, to be collected as needed.

A fully fueled Al Hussein missile, with warhead and gyroscopes installed, being lifted from its specialized trailer before being mounted on a mobile launcher (Photo by the Author)

At Ramadi and Amarah, the First Maintenance Unit divided the available fueling, warhead mounting and guidance support vehicles. Whenever General Ayoubi ordered an attack to take place, he would instruct the First Maintenance Unit to prepare the number of missiles necessary for the attack, along with additional missiles if there was expected to be an immediate follow-on attack the next day. While the launchers of Unit 224 and Unit 223 were making their way either to Ramadi or Amarah, the missiles they would use were being prepared—filled with fuel and oxidizer, warheads mounted, and guidance components programed and installed.

Each launcher was assigned a missile configured to be launched from a specific location toward a designated target. In this way, when a launcher arrived at either the Ramadi or Amarah support sites, they simply pulled up alongside their assigned missile, which was already loaded onto a missile trailer, and waited while the missile was lifted from its trailer and mounted on the launcher. This was the secret of how the Iraqis were able to reduce the time spent at a launch site to less than five minutes, and why the coalition was having so much difficulty interdicting them.

As efficient as this arrangement was in terms of reducing the exposure of the Al Hussein Force to attack at the launch site, however, it also translated into inefficiencies in operation. On several occasions, missiles would fail to launch due to fuel leaks brought on by the strain placed on the missile airframe incurred while being driven from the missile support site to the launch site. To help alleviate this problem, General Ayoubi instructed the Technical Battalion to periodically raise each launch arm to 45 degrees during their stops at the hide site/maintenance sites in route to the launch site, inspecting the missiles for leaks which, if detected, would be repaired by a crew from the First Maintenance Unit.

This was a delicate ballet which had to be carefully managed by the staff officers of the Al Hussein Missile force, ensuring not only that sufficient missiles, fuel and other support resources were available to both Ramadi and Amarah to meet the launch schedule, but also that the various component elements were themselves continuously moved from hide site to hide site to avoid detection. On top of this, the First Maintenance Unit and Unit 224, working in cooperation with the Project 144 engineers and technicians, continued to work at the bombed-out Taji missile support facility to repair missiles that had been taken out of service, as well as complete the assembly of new missiles, which would be inspected and certified for operational use.

And, always in the background, was the special weapons unit, which maintained ten fully configured and fueled missiles tipped with warheads containing botulinum toxin, as well as a dozen warheads filled with Sarin nerve agent that could be mounted on a regular Al Hussein Missile if needed. These weapons were stored in various locations northwest of Baghdad, near Nibae, and would be used against predesignated targets inside Israel only on the specific orders of Saddam Hussein or, in the alternative, if all communication was lost between the Al Hussein Force and the Iraqi High Command, in which case General Ayoubi was to assume the worst and execute the attack using the special warheads.

As careful as the Al Hussein Force was in implementing the vehicle movement plan and accompanying concealment activities, the underlying reality was that Iraq was a nation at war, fighting against an opponent possessing the world’s most advanced combat capabilities. Moreover, at any given time a significant percentage of these capabilities were singularly focused on destroying the Al Hussein Force; the Technical Battalion and First Maintenance Unit were repeatedly forced to move their operations within the Taji facility as the buildings they were using were systematically bombed.

The individual batteries likewise felt the pain of war. On January 22, while operating in the vicinity of Al Qurna, in the south, a group of vehicles belonging to the 3rd battery was struck by a bomb, causing one vehicle to overturn and catch fire. On January 24, the 8th battery suffered a similar fate while operating near Wadi Amij when an aerial bomb destroyed a water tanker, wounding three soldiers. And on January 25, a chemical reconnaissance vehicle belonging to Unit 224 struck a new type of weapon—an air delivered BLU-91/B “Gator” mine designed to impede traffic—which destroyed the vehicle and wounded four soldiers.

Despite the risks and difficulties, after implementing the mass displacement of six launchers, together with accompanying support vehicles, from the southern front to western Iraq, preparing a dozen Al Hussein missiles for operation, and avoiding destruction at the hands of the coalition air forces, Unit 224 was, on the evening of January 25, prepared to carry out the mass attack on Israel envisioned by General Ayuobi.

A New Plan

The consecutive mass launches of Al-Hussein missiles against Israel placed the delicate balance of relations between Washington and Tel Aviv at risk, threatening to snap the slender thread of restraint which held at bay the vengeance of the Israeli Defense Force. The recent arrival in Israel of Patriot ABM batteries manned by US soldiers had done much to alleviate the passions within the IDF which favored immediate retaliation on the part of Israel. However, the continued attacks by Iraqi Al Hussein missiles on Israeli targets forced the CENTCOM staff to reassess its SCUD threat elimination plan, the inadequacy of the current effort finally being acknowledged by even the most stubborn adherents of the old “48-hour termination” plan.

Israel, disappointed by US intelligence sharing efforts, demanded that it be permitted to fly an Israeli RF-15 phot-reconnaissance aircraft over western Iraq to support coalition targeting efforts as well as assuage Israeli concerns over battle damage assessment and target acquisition. Once again, the Israeli request was denied by the Secretary of Defense, Dick Cheney.

While Israeli officials raged in internal debate as to Israel’s eventual course of action vis-a-vis Iraq, CENTCOM frantically searched for a new strategy to cope with the suddenly resurgent Iraqi threat. In a coordinated effort between the CENTCOM Combat Assessment Cell and Current Intelligence Center, the CENTCOM Joint Operations Center, along with the Air Force component Intelligence Staff, a joint plan of action to eliminate the Iraqi SCUD threat was drafted and quickly brought to General Schwarzkopf’s attention for immediate implementation.

The plan sought to fulfill the campaign objectives regarding the Iraqi SCUD force as set down in the Desert Storm operations plan, which were to destroy Iraq’s fixed ballistic missile launch capability and SCUD-related maintenance and repair facilities as the primary objective, and to deny locations to which SCUD launchers may deploy as the secondary. The plan acknowledged that the limited knowledge of the Iraqi SCUD force and its operations had forced the coalition into a reactive vice proactive effort to eliminate the SCUD threat. The reason for this shortcoming was the unpredictability posed by the Iraqi mobile launchers and the lack of understanding on the part of the coalition concerning their employment.

The new joint SCUD elimination plan was broken into two distinct phases: Phase One sought to identify and fill the information gaps that were now evident in the CENTCOM comprehension of Iraqi SCUD operations, while Phase Two would destroy, disrupt, and/or deny Iraq the capability to continue SCUD operations through the exploitation of Iraqi vulnerabilities identified through the filling of information gaps.

Phase One proposed to use of special forces to reconnoiter possible Iraqi SCUD areas of operations to determine mobile SCUD unit locations and operational procedures. Operations during this phase were to be limited to reconnaissance and reporting only, reserving the use of force for follow on operations (the rationale for this course of action being that initial reconnaissance findings would likely lead to the discovery of even more important targets.)

Phase Two operations were themselves broken down into distinct operational periods. First, every SCUD launch site identified in Phase One would be attacked to both destroy fixed and mobile launchers and to deny these sites for future use. Attacks were to be conducted randomly throughout the hours of darkness, and against randomly selected targets, to disrupt and diminish Iraqi operational effectiveness.

Next, coalition aircraft would attack and destroy known and suspected SCUD support facilities, concentrating upon hardened aircraft bunkers located at airfields in known or suspected SCUD areas of operations. Other suspected support facilities and hide locations would be attacked as they were discovered.

Rapid reaction forces, comprised of dedicated attack aircraft and special forces teams, would be placed on alert to respond within 10 minutes to any targets generated by the special reconnaissance activities by other special forces, or tasking received by either national or theater level intelligence of possible SCUD activity.

The combined attack aircraft/special forces capability would then be used to conduct search and destroy operations attacking known targets, as well as scouring the area around Highway 10, other local highways, and the region around H-2 airfield. Other special forces teams would continue to locate additional targets, which would then be attacked using large-scale special operations, Ranger, and/or airborne forces.

This plan was designed to reduce and eventually eliminate the Iraqi SCUD threat against Israel and Saudi Arabia. While it would have undoubtedly had a greater impact on Iraqi SCUD operations had it been conceived prior to the start of Operation Desert Storm and implemented immediately upon day one of hostilities, even at this late stage in the war such a plan, aggressively implemented, would have made an impact.

The new SCUD elimination plan, however, was a victim of its own ambition. By signing off on the plan, General Schwarzkopf would be admitting the failure of Brigadier General Buster Glosson’s Black Hole, and ultimately the failure of Lieutenant General Chuck Horner’s strategic air campaign, to counter the single greatest threat facing the coalition at that time—Iraq’s SCUD missile force. Schwarzkopf could not see fit to commit to such a declaration. Instead of rejecting it outright, however, he killed it by doing nothing. The SCUD elimination plan, so carefully crafted by his own staff, was placed in limbo.

This is the last chapter of The Scud Hunters which will be published for all subscribers.

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[1] George N. Lewis, Steve Fetter, and Lisbeth Gronlund, “Casualties and Damage from SCUD attacks in the 1991 Gulf War”, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, March 1993, p.47.

[2] Guy Gugliotta, “Battle-New Patriot Missile Soars to Stardom”, The Washington Post, January 19, 1991.

[3] Jeff Crawley, “Fort Sill Remembers First Patriot Missile Intercept”, Fort Sill Tribune, January 22, 2016.

[4] “Scud Buster”, Missile Defense Advisory Alliance, February 26, 2021; Cody M. Davis, Interview with Colonel (retired) Joe DeAntona, Missile Defense Advisory Alliance, March 3, 2021. The events of January 18 were not unique to Alpha and Bravo batteries; all in all, some 24 Patriot PAC-2 missiles were fired at 60 false targets generated from the considerable electromagnetic energy generated from other coalition forces, which penetrated the Patriot radar from its back, causing the Patriot radar software to process them as actual radar “hits”, or detection events. These accidental launches occurred during the first week of the conflict. The problem was resolved by January 23 by installing makeshift shrouds on the back of the Patriot radar, software modifications which filtered out false signals, and the reversion to manual mode, putting the operator back into the loop when it came to authorizing the actual launch of an interceptor missile. See Joeseph Lovece, “Electronic noise from US gear prompted errant Patriots”, Defense Week, September 28, 1992, p. 13, and Alexander Simon, “The Patriot missile: Performance in the Gulf War reviewed”, Center for Defense Information, July 15, 1996.

[5] General Khaled Bin Sultan, Desert Warrior, p. 252.

[6] General Khaled Bin Sultan, Desert Warrior, p. 352.

[7] This mission was not unique during Desert Storm—eventually some 260 distinct missions were flown which directly targeted Saddam Hussein. The intelligence-driven aspect of some of these missions was captured in William Smallwood’s book, Strike Eagle, where he describes a mission very similar in nature to mine—the targeting of a bunker near the city of Basra on January 23 (see Smallwood, pp. 154-157.) Smallwood also describes efforts to target specially modified Winnebago recreational vehicles which were being used by Saddam as mobile command posts (Smallwood, pp. 157-159.)

[8] Dan Balz and Rick Atkinson, “Powell Vows to Isolate Iraqi Army and ‘Kill It’”, The Washington Post, January 24, 1991.

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