1991: The Iraqi Air Force stays

MacCaulay

Banned
I was reading up for The Soviet Invasion of Iran, and there was a small paragraph in an Air Forces Monthly from '99 about the flight of the Iraqi Air Force to Iran in 1991 to escape the Coalition air forces during Desert Storm.

The article gave the numbers of aircraft that went to Iran from Iraq as: "24 Mirage F1s, 22 Su-24s, 40 Su-22s, 4 Su-17/20s, 7 Su-25s, four MiG-29s, seven MiG-23Ls, four MiG-23BNs and one MiG-23UB".

That's over one hundred aircraft flown to Iran. They only ended up folding the Fulcrums and Fencers into their arsenal because of training and logistical reasons.

But what if the IrAF had made the decision to take these aircraft and attempt to down enemy aircraft in the hopes of racking up POWs to end the war early?
 
In fact in OTL it seems that the IRAF get an air combat kill

"- The 29Jul91 "Inside the Navy" (Tom Breen) said that Industry, Navy,

and Congressional sources agree that Spiecher was downed by an Iraqi

MiG-25 Foxbat using an AA-6 ACRID Missile. Weaknesses in the ALR-

67 RHAW System with the F/A-18 might have been a factor in not

being aware of the MiG-25.

... 16Sep92, story surfaced again in the news media out of a New York Times article written by Mark Crispin Miller (a professor of media studies at Johns Hopkins University) where a "senior Navy Intelligence Officer, Capt Carlos Johnson, said "we were pretty sure at the beginning" that the F-18 flown by Speicher was downed by an Iraqi MiG-25 Foxbat. Furthermore, Commander Mike Anderson, and USN pilot in the area of the downed F-18, said that permission was not granted by AWACS for his flight to attack the Foxbat that was under surveillance prior to Speicher being hit. This might have something to do with Horner's insistance that the F-15's be the only air-to-air players and all other aircraft refrain from seeking out any Iraqi aircraft.

- Rick Atkinson, in his book "Crusade: The Untold Story of the Persian Gulf War" (pg 47), mentions that Speicher was downed by a MiG-25 that slipped through the AWACS gap. The MiG-25 was speculated to have seen the flash of the HARM fired by Speicher (Rick notes that Speicher was in an F-14, no!) and then closed to kill him with a missile which presumes he had a visual on him and used an IR missile."

from http://www.sci.fi/~fta/Day-1.htm
 
The IRAF has some limits as to how it can employ the fighters. Firstly, unless there are dogfights occuring over Iranian territory, Iran isnt exactly in a position to pock up downed pilots as PoWs. But basically Iran cant allow itself to intervene in the war too much. The amount of international support for the coalition was rather impressive, and probably enough to make a punitive counterattack against the Iranians if they acted up too much. And Iran had relativly little vested in Iraq, and the revelation that they are backing the Iraqis isnt going to play very well at home or abroad.

In short, Iran is going to have to be very circumspect in how it employs the Iraqi air force.
 
Instead of losing his entire air force to Iran, which was never going to return them no matter what the outcome of the war, Saddam loses them in combat. I would expect, just because s**t happens, that they might get a couple of coalition a/c. Also, if they got smart they could use some for ground attack against coalition concentrations in Saudi before the invasion at very low level and perhaps coordinate with SCUD attacks. In any case expending them in combat will produce some results (as opposed to sending them away which loses them for no results), and if they get lucky and shoot down some a/c or get a lucky ground attack on some coalition grouping (remember the SCUD that hit a barracks) you can get coalition POWS/casualties, maybe destroy some equipment which adds up to a propaganda plus even if it has little or no effect on the military balance.

Sending his AF to Iran ranks as one of the stupidest ideas ever. Saddam would have been smarter to send it to Syria where he could hope to get some or all of it back if he stays in power. Numerous convoys of "something" went to Syria, speculate yourself what was in them: Gold, art treasures, basics for WMD labs??
 

MacCaulay

Banned
The IRAF has some limits as to how it can employ the fighters. Firstly, unless there are dogfights occuring over Iranian territory, Iran isnt exactly in a position to pock up downed pilots as PoWs. But basically Iran cant allow itself to intervene in the war too much. The amount of international support for the coalition was rather impressive, and probably enough to make a punitive counterattack against the Iranians if they acted up too much. And Iran had relativly little vested in Iraq, and the revelation that they are backing the Iraqis isnt going to play very well at home or abroad.

In short, Iran is going to have to be very circumspect in how it employs the Iraqi air force.

IrAF is the Iraqi Air Force. IIRAF is the Islamic Iranian Republic Air Force. I'm pitching that Iraq just doesn't fly the aircraft to Iran, and uses them to mount an air offensive.
 
Last edited:
IrAF is the Iraqi Air Force. IIRAF is the Islamic Iranian Republic of Iran. I'm pitching that Iraq just doesn't fly the aircraft to Iran, and uses them to mount an air offensive.

My bad. I interpreted your post as asking if the Iranians allowed/coerced the Iraqi planes which fled there to fly combat missions against the coalition.

In this case, the Iraqis may put up a stronger resistence to the coalition, but i dont think that it would make that much of a difference overall. The portion of the air force that stayed behind wasnt particularly impressive, and the fact that Saddam thought that sending the planes to Iran (despite the war with them 3 years before being the main reason he was in Kuwait) doesnt argue well for the effectivness of the rest.
 
If the IrAF stays and fights, it dies, simple as that. They had some very good drivers in the Mirage F-1 and MiG-25 communities (the Fulcrum drivers had some people with Mirage experience, or so the folks on ACIG.org say), but MiG-21s and -23s were generally dogs in the air-to-air arena. For air-to-ground, the Su-24s were not combat-ready (only one crew qualified), but the anti-ship Mirages, along with the Su-22s and -25s, had strikes drawn up for CAS, going for carriers (a short road to suicide), and strikes on Dhahran, al Jubyal, Khafji, and other targets on the Saudi coast. Check the book The Mother of All Battles from Naval Institute Press; it has more on what the IrAF had planned, but couldn't carry out due to overwhelming air superiority on the Coalition side. If the IrAF does come up, more planes wind up smashed wrecks on the desert floor, and perhaps a couple of Eagle or Tomcat drivers wind up aces.
 

MacCaulay

Banned
If the IrAF stays and fights, it dies, simple as that. They had some very good drivers in the Mirage F-1 and MiG-25 communities (the Fulcrum drivers had some people with Mirage experience, or so the folks on ACIG.org say), but MiG-21s and -23s were generally dogs in the air-to-air arena. For air-to-ground, the Su-24s were not combat-ready (only one crew qualified), but the anti-ship Mirages, along with the Su-22s and -25s, had strikes drawn up for CAS, going for carriers (a short road to suicide), and strikes on Dhahran, al Jubyal, Khafji, and other targets on the Saudi coast. Check the book The Mother of All Battles from Naval Institute Press; it has more on what the IrAF had planned, but couldn't carry out due to overwhelming air superiority on the Coalition side. If the IrAF does come up, more planes wind up smashed wrecks on the desert floor, and perhaps a couple of Eagle or Tomcat drivers wind up aces.

Well, the anti-ship and ground stuff is what I was thinking.

I'm not pitching this with the idea of saying "hey guys if 20 mig fulcrums come up then will the usaf go boom and surrender?", I'm pitching this because the addition of that many airframes and additional experienced pilots with warplans behind them would mean the Coalition would actually have to shoot it's way not only through some hard AAA, it'd have to do some hard air-to-air fighting.
Is the end in doubt? No. But they might deal differently if the IrAF has more capabilities for a air-to-ground mission or two, or anti-ship strikes.
 
The RSAF double kill on 24 Jan 91 was the only IrAF air strike attempted: it's been widely felt that it was either an attempt to go after ships with Exocet-armed Mirages, or was a strike on Dhaharan. IrAF records captured in 2003 told the story: it was an attempt on the tanker terminal at Ras Tamurah, north of Dhahran. Three Mirages tried the strike, one turned back due to mechanical, two continued on, and an RSAF F-15 driver splashed both. If they'd turned just to the east, they would've ate AIM-54s, as two F-14s were going through final prelaunch checks before firing....
 
You could even have had Tornado F-1s or Harriers, US or British, scoring kills. Hell if one got close enough to an A-10, and the sky was full of 'em, it would have been cut in half.
 
The additional Iraqi planes might do some damage, but they were very dependent on ground-control radars to fight, radars that were destroyed early on. They had a "ghetto AWACs" (it looked like an airliner with a giant radar dish stapled on top), but I don't know how long that lasted either.

I don't think the Iraqi Air Force continuing to fight is going to have a major effect on the war, unless they get REALLY lucky and set off some kind of insane chain reaction explosion at an oil port (the Ras Tanura thing).

Hmm...I remember there was an American ship badly damaged by an Iraqi mine. Was the timing right for the Iraqis, assuming their air force stayed in being, to attack it?

Them finishing off a wounded American ship might be within their capabilities, even if they'll probably die in the process.
 
You could even have had Tornado F-1s or Harriers, US or British, scoring kills. Hell if one got close enough to an A-10, and the sky was full of 'em, it would have been cut in half.

Are A-10s capable of air-to-air combat?

I wouldn't want to be in front of that heavy gun that shoots uranium shells, but I don't know how maneuverable they are. They're designed to be flying tank-killers, IIRC.

(Something they are exceedingly good at)
 
Here's an idea:

At some point prior to the 100 hour ground campaign, the Iraqis sent a small force to seize the Saudi border city of Khalfji. They managed to do this, but follow-up waves were annihilated from the air.

If the Iraqi Air Force was still in being at this point and went out on some kind of death ride, they might be able to sufficiently interfere with coalition air attacks to enable the Iraqis to reinforce Khalfji, making the retaking of the city a gigantic pain in the behind.

In OTL, Khalfji had no effect on the enormous coalition army massing in the west for the "Hail Mary" attack on the entrenched Iraqis from the rear. In TTL, a much larger Iraqi army dug into Khalfji could be threatening enough that additional forces could be detailed to deal with it.

The Iraqis are still going to lose, but we could generate some interesting butterflies from that--larger numbers of Saudi and Qatari casualties (it was them who played a big role in retaking Khaljfi in OTL) could have political knock-on effects down the line, as might larger numbers of non-Arab troops.
 
The IRAF probably could have caused some more losses directly or indirectly:

"LOSSES: v 1 x F-15E from the 335th TFS Strike Eagle was downed in Western Iraq
- 4th TFW from Seymour Johnson AFB, became 10th US Combat Loss
- Corvette Flight #1 Col Scott #3 Col Eberly/Griffith
#2 xxxxx #4 xxxx
- Col David W. Eberly (43), pilot, from Brazil, IND, DO of the 4th TFW
- Maj Thomas E. Griffith (34), WSO from Sparta, New Jersey
- both men evaded for two days working towards the Syrian border
- returned on 11Mar91 with the first POW's
- originally fragged as a 24 ship package against ammunition depots in the
Euphrates Valley, but changed after Presidential order was received to go after
the SCUD launchers and missiles (on the 19th Washington time)
- Intell had located a comples of missile bunkers and assembly areas in Western
Iraq at Al Qaim, which was also surrounded by many SAM sites
- a SCUD missile "barrage" was thought to be scheduled against Israel tonight
- 12 x F-15E's from the 335th TFS would hit at 22:00pm followed by 12 more
aircraft from the 336th TFS using cluster bombs and gator mines
- the required TOT's and Aim-Points came by fax as the crews manned aircraft
- the Mission Commander was Col R.E. "Scottie" Scott who had flown two
nights ago when Don Holland and Tom Koritz were lost
- Weather made refueling difficult above Ar Ar, and 2 x F-4G Wild Weasel
support aircraft from Shiek Isa had not received the TOT change, although
2 x EF-111's did arrive on station SE of Al Qaim.
- An Iraqi MiG-25 flight vectored on the EF-111A's and fired one missile at the
lead Raven and two missiles at the Wingman. The Raven's broke away from the
missiles & aborted the CAP, returning to Taif, thus leaving the Eagles exposed.
- Scott led six jets northeast toward Al Qaim highway ("AAA Alley") and Eberly
took his formation southweat, both to attack from different directions and they
were intent at bombing from 20,000 ft after the 1st loss was at low altitude.
- Point to ponder, critics point out that Col Eberly should not have been flying
combat missions because of his indepth knowledge of the "plan". The fact that
no real sophisticated interrogation occurred, although it was brutal, could it
mean that the Soviets/East Germans were really "hands off" on this war.
- 30 miles from the target area SAM activity began, at 10 miles SA-2's and 3's
were launched at Eberly as the first flight bombed at 580 kts.
- Eberly debriefed that saw an orange fireball on the right, stationary &
tracking, and pulled 60° to the right, reversed and went into a dive attack. He
never saw the missile that hit him & the Beagle lurched up and departed. They
ejected at more than 500 kts.
- Rumor out of USAFE was that Eberly's aircraft was engaged at low altitude by
an SA-2 that made a classical pitch over at the F-15E. The SA-2 missile
passed over and behind the F-15E before it detonated, then as the WSO was
calling to Eberly that things looked good, Eberley punched them both out. After
the ejection Eberly did not grab his survival gear so during the E&E portion
his WSO had to feed and nurse him. The post-war debrief discounted this
entirely, Eberly joined with Griffith after ejection and they worked as a team,
serving with honor once captured. It will make an interesting book."


Indirectly the MIG-25 caused a lost (Source:http://www.sci.fi/~fta/Day-4.htm)


By the way: is interesting also see that some B-52 were damaged by the iraquis by SAM or AAA (http://128.121.102.226/aaloss.html)
 

MacCaulay

Banned
Here's an idea:

At some point prior to the 100 hour ground campaign, the Iraqis sent a small force to seize the Saudi border city of Khalfji. They managed to do this, but follow-up waves were annihilated from the air.

If the Iraqi Air Force was still in being at this point and went out on some kind of death ride, they might be able to sufficiently interfere with coalition air attacks to enable the Iraqis to reinforce Khalfji, making the retaking of the city a gigantic pain in the behind.

In OTL, Khalfji had no effect on the enormous coalition army massing in the west for the "Hail Mary" attack on the entrenched Iraqis from the rear. In TTL, a much larger Iraqi army dug into Khalfji could be threatening enough that additional forces could be detailed to deal with it.

The Iraqis are still going to lose, but we could generate some interesting butterflies from that--larger numbers of Saudi and Qatari casualties (it was them who played a big role in retaking Khaljfi in OTL) could have political knock-on effects down the line, as might larger numbers of non-Arab troops.

That's a very interesting idea. The Fulcrums themselves were probably the main weapons that would be able to be used in this sense, but it seems the IrAF had enough that they at least could've made some effort. The Saudi air force did have battle experience (some Mirage F1s and such), but against an aircraft like the Fulcrum? That'd be tough.
And if the Iraqis decided to forward deploy their Mirages behind the lines and just go for broke trying to hit whatever came up, then the Coalition air force might have to bomb Kuwaiti air fields just to take out the IrAF and abort what they see as an imminent Iraqi invasion.

The big thing here is that we're assuming they're able to stay in the air, mostly because these extra airframes let the IrAF take attrition damage. Not a lot, but probably more than the USAF has been used to dealing with in it's prior engagment with Panama.
If anything, this seems like it would be closer in style to the air war over Yugoslavia, where we had air superiority and were able to keep control but nevertheless had to deal with the constant threat of fighters threatening our CAP.
Now, this flies in the face of our strategy for that war: in Every Man A Tiger, CENTCOM Air Component commander General Chuck Horner says that Schwarzkopf's orders to them were to "kick them in the teeth. Then kick them some more until they stop moving."
But Iraq's still a big place, and even with this giant exodus that's a lot of aircraft for us to keep track of. We can't keep on top of an airforce that big like we did in 2003.

I mean...the Iraqis sent 2 Mirage F1s into Saudi Arabia early in the war to try and find ground units to attack, but they were brought down by a Saudi F-15. What if they'd sent, say...10? That's not a few aircraft from a beaten air force. That's a freaking air raid. And the F1 is not a bad aircraft. The South African Air Force who used them and the Cubans and Angolans who were shot down by them will tell you.
10 Mirage F1s managing to find any one of the 4 Corps in the desert could've really messed up our day.

And no: I'm not saying "the iraqis wouldve sent the planes in and we lose the war", but it's still a hiccup in the already labourious buildup that was Desert Shield. It took us six months to do that.

The IRAF probably could have caused some more losses directly or indirectly:

That's cool stuff...I never read that. And it's an interesting thing to point out. The skies would definitely be much more crowded, and when airspace is crowded mistakes get made.
 
More crowded airspace means the increased likelihood of blue-on-blue or red-on-red incidents. Case in point: 17 Jan 91: two F-15s are tracking two MiG-29s and getting in position to kill them, when the wingman suddenly overtook and passed the leader, who then shot him down, and the leader thus flew through the debris clould, and ate some of the debris, and crashed. Since neither F-15 was in position yet to take a shot, they weren't credited with the lead MiG-29.

If the Iraqis want more POWs, they have to do one of two things, if not both: 1) More effective air defense-meaning more MiGs and Mirages in the air, to force strike birds down low, into the low-altitude SAM/AAA envelope. 2) More aggressive action on the ground a la Khafji. The Iraqis were disappointed in Khafji (although all the after-action reports were glowing with praise for Saddam as he planned the attack, and Khafji was used as a model in Iraqi staff training from 1992 onwards), mainly because the only POWs they took were nine Saudi border guards and two U.S. Army truck drivers who'd gotten lost and wound up in Khafji. One of the truckers was female, but the Iraqis failed to exploit the propaganda possiblities of Specialist Melissa Rathbun-Nealy's capture, probably due to Iraqi TV having been bombed off the air. Had the war gone further than it did, there was the possiblity of exploiting Major Rhonda Cornum's capture a la the NVN (showing her in a hospital receiving medical treatment for her two broken arms and a bullet wound to her left shoulder), but the Iraqis were not as skilled in exploiting POWs as the NVN were.
 

CalBear

Moderator
Donor
Monthly Donor
Points regarding potential air strikes

1. The Patriot (MM-104) is a SAM system. That was lost in the whole SCUD thing, but PAC-2 was fully capable of killing an aircraft @ ~100 miles 98 times out of 100, with second missile hit probability on the same target driving the success number close to unity. The SM missiles on the American Warships in the Gulf were equally effective against aircraft sized targets. Both systems could accept targeting feeds from AWACS aircraft.

2. The longest range weapon in the Iraqi Air Force's bag of tricks was the Exocet (38 mile range) That means a potential attacker would have to evade the outer CAP, the SAM belt, the inner CAP and a second SAM belt just to reach firing range. The layman's term for this action against a CBG at Condition One is "snowball in hell".

3. The air was positively swarming with exceptionally trained Coalition pilots, virtually all of whom would have happily traded 20 years of their life span to make a kill, flying superbly maintained aircraft that were quite literally the leading edge of technology. The Iraqi pilots, conversely, had very low flight hours and were flying old Western and Soviet designs that only a madman or suicide would take into combat against the Coalition. (It is important to note that the MiG 25 that potted a Hornet did so as part of an engagement that had the Bug pilot evading multiple SAM at the same time the MiG fired. This doesn't change the facts, but context is needed in the discussion).

4. Like their Soviet instructors, Iraqi fighter pilots were almost totally reliant on ground controllers. Individual initiative was NOT encouraged. Any time an Iraqi Radar radiated it ate a HARM or ALARM missile, generally followed by cluster bombs. Unremarkably, few Iraqi radar sites were in operation by day 3 of the air war; this was especially true for ground controller sets. Coalition pilots, besides have been trained to take the initiative whenever possible, also had multiple AWACS available for C&C, vectoring to targets, even for direction to the closest available tanker. This sort of situation isn't quite like clubbing baby seals, but it is close enough for government work.

BTW: The A-10 did carry AIM-9 AAM in the Gulf War. 'Hog pilots were flying the most maneuverable aircraft in the air on most days (slow as hell, yes, but they could turn on a dime and leave you $.09 change). Any Iraqi pilot foolish enough to close on an A-10 would have found out why even male African lions won't attack a Warthog by choice.
 
Top