A November 1991 interview with:
Phil "Ruhldog" Ruhlman



Reproduced with permission
Courtesy of Lou Drendel

From "Viper F-16" by Lou Drendel
Squadron Signal Publications
Copyright 1992 - ISBN 0-89747-281-0





My squadron, the 614th TFS from Torrejon AB, Spain, deployed to the Gulf in 29 August 1990. We were the first US military force to ever visit Qatar, and we arrived in Doha with twenty-four F-16's after a seven hour flight from Spain. We were joined by three KC-10s, which had carried all of our stuff, and the base itself was pretty bare. There were a couple of hangars for the Emir's airplanes and the twelve Mirage F.1's of his Air Force. They had their own support facilities, but they didn't have the capacity to support us, so consequently we built a bare base from scratch. We put up 100 tents, a kitchen, chapel, a rec center, a full communications net, full security police force, two tanks, armored personnel carriers, and built a bomb dump with the capability to build up weapons. We had deployed carrying six AIM-9 missiles per jet because we didn't know what to expect in the way of an air-to-air threat. Most of the bombs were aboard ships being transported from the States. Our first couple of nights there we stayed in the Sheraton, which we all liked a lot! But General Horner said "No way…we are not going to have an incident like Beirut He was referring to the Marine barracks terrorist attack, and the security situation was something to be concerned about, so we moved back to the International Airport. We got an officer's building with twenty-four rooms and that is where the pilots stayed during the war.

The initial war fighting mentality centered around low altitude ingress, pop-up attacks, and low altitude egress. However, the density and spread of the Iraqi Army did not allow for a defined FEBA/FLOT (Forward Edge of Battle Area / Forward Line of Troops). Basically, they were everywhere… all over Kuwait and Basra. Flat sandy terrain provided no cover for low altitude ingress, but it did make for easy target acquisition.

The first units deployed to the Gulf began practicing high altitude dive bomb attacks. Assumptions were that the Wild Weasels would suppress SAM's and high altitude would decrease AAA effectiveness. AAA ranged from small arms, to 23mm, 57mm, 85mm, and 105mm. That required ingress at 20,000 feet or better. Our pre-war (Desert Shield) training involved extensive large package employment (16-20 F-16s) with sequential attacks from 45 degree dives. Typical release altitudes ranged from 17,000 to 8,000 feet. The F-16 is small, gray and cool (Cool refers to infrared signature.) It was practically invisible above 15,000 feet, on a clear, bright, sunny day. High altitude gave us better air-to-air radar coverage and fuel consumption and higher MACH numbers could be used on ingress.

Politically there might have been some uncertainty about what was going to happen if Saddam did not vacate Kuwait, but we were prepared to fight from the first days of Desert Shield. Desert Storm was still in a 'concept stage' until just prior to January 1991. I thought we would be back in Spain by October, but then shuttle diplomacy began and we realized that we were going to be there for Thanksgiving and Christmas…and we began to hope that we would be adopted by some American oil families in-country. We did expect terrorist attacks on Christmas and when that didn't happen, I fully expected Saddam to back down prior to the 15 January deadline. Of course, he didn't and on the afternoon of 16 January, General Schwartzkopf sent his execute message down to the units.

Desert Shield was the best training exercise we ever had. We were essentially deployed for seven months on the most massive Red Flag exercise you can imagine and we were ready to go to war. We had huge strike packages, which included F-16s, F-15s, Weasels, and tankers, Tornados, Jaguars… The French Air Force was there with their Mirage 2000 and played enemy air for us…and we were stationed on a base with twelve Mirage F.1s from the Qatar Emiri Air Force. We fought one versus one basic fighter maneuvers (BFM), two versus two air combat tactics (ACT)…everything with those guys. We knew everything about the F.1 before going into the war. In the process, we trained them better than they could have ever hoped to be trained. In our first engagements, we "shot them down" rather easily, but they learned from the experiences and they got a lot better before the war started.

My wingman during the war was a brand-new Second Lieutenant, Michael "Timmy" Sewell, who had joined the unit in August, right out of pilot training. He was the best wingman I ever had…just because the training environment during Desert Shield was the best we had ever experienced.

The Canadians showed up just before the war started with their eighteen CF-18's to augment the air defense force in the Gulf, followed by the French AF with more Mirage F.1's. So there we were, on this international airport, which probably never saw more than two DC-10's a day in peacetime, with all of these fighter squadrons which were flying practice missions every day. We did learn to work together. When the war started, we flew bombing missions and the CF-18's flew CAP over the Gulf. F-16's conducted daylight raids on Baghdad on 19 January 1991. We were later primarily used on second echelon reinforced targets - bridges, bunkers, airfields, factories, ammo dumps, communications, etc. The F-16 was also used for first echelon targets in Kuwait, including artillery, SAM and SCUD sites. General Horner described the F-16 as "The Workhorse" of the war…it did the baseline bombing, hauling the iron, day after day.

Going in, we knew that the only way to defeat an enemy was to keep their air force from flying, and we went right for the throat at the beginning. Even though they knew what was coming, we hit them so hard and so fast on Day One that it was mass confusion for them from that day forward. During that first week, Iraq was lit up like Christmas…the Iraqis had everything on, and the Wild Weasels were expending their HARM's quickly. Our Radar Homing and Warning (RHAW) gear was really lit up, but it was pretty evident that they really didn't understand what a RHAW was. After about a week, they figured it out and would not turn the radars on. We did not carry HARM's, but some of the F-16's out of Turkey did and they were the first to fire HARM's in combat. We depended on the F-4G Wild Weasels, but once the Iraqis turned off their radars, they didn't have to escort us to the targets. Then the Weasels became 'watchdogs,' simply patrolling around the target areas, daring the enemy to turn on a radar.

On the first morning I was deputy lead of a seventy ship package (including our sixteen F-16's) against suspected SCUD launch sites. My squadron commander, LtCol Bruce 'Orville' Wright, was the overall package commander. This was my most exciting mission of the war. We had been assigned to hit several airfields in Kuwait. Our sixteen ship flight was part of seventy multi-national aircraft going to this target area. We were each carrying two Mk 84 2000 pound bombs. As we crossed the fence, five of the sixteen were below the minimum fuel that we had agreed on for going to the target. The weather was bad, with cloud tops at 10,000 feet. Orville turned the five around and sent them home, but eleven of us pressed on. (Eight jets split to a second pre-planned target, while we pressed on to the first targets with only the three remaining F-16's.) I was number two, and just as we got to the target, there was a black hole in the cloud deck and the target was right in the middle of it! The squadron commander rolled in and I rolled in right after him from 16,000 feet. We screamed down the chute, aiming for a SCUD missile storage area. There were missiles going everywhere. They were shooting SAM's with and without radar guidance. The adrenaline was really pumping! I pickled, and came off with nine G's! My 500 knots was converted to 400 knots and my RHAW lit up with a SA-2 at my dead six. I heard AWACS call, "SA-2 Active, western Kuwait!" I thought, "No kidding, he's on me!" I punched chaff, jinked right…and it went away…came back to egress heading…he's on me again…no kidding! My airspeed is down to 350 knots and I'm thinking, "This is it, he's got me!" As you get slower the tracking solution is easier for the missile and I really had a solid spike, right at my dead six. I've got twenty miles to go to the border, but the SA-2 is closing at supersonic speed and I am convinced that the war is over for me. It was time to punch the tanks off. There is a little plastic cover over the jettison button so that you don't accidentally punch them off. The crew chief had glazed it over with white glue to make it look pretty. I bruised my finger, but the adrenaline rush got that button punched. The tanks came off the airplane, it was clean, and I started to accelerate. Right then, I heard a Weasel guy call "Magnum two." The SA-2 is gone…just like that, and I am outta there!

I called him up right after I landed and asked if he had taken out the SA-2. He said "Yeah, I got it just as you were egressing. The HARM came right off the rail, and instead of doing its usual climb to acquire the target, it went straight for the SA-2 site!" I still owe that guy a case of Scotch. I learned my lesson from that. I never came off another target with less than 450 knots.

Early in the war, 60 F-16's, along with EF-111's and F-4G's went 'downtown.' Our squadron had sixteen jets at the tail end of this group, and we were tasked with bombing strategic targets in Baghdad. All this garbage about us hitting civilian targets was just that. That stuff you saw on CNN, where they took their cameras to these different bunkers to show that there was nothing military in there…we talked to Qataris that had been there before the war and they told us "Don't you believe it…there is military stuff in there!"

My squadron lost two airplanes on that one Baghdad mission. Aviation Week claimed that only the F-117 flew over Baghdad, but that just wasn't true. There were scores of F-16's which went downtown, including my squadron, with went downtown on that third afternoon…in broad daylight. The anti-aircraft fire was described to me as incredible and the SAM's were not just fired under radar control…they were also optically guided. I saw one video tape (shot through the F-16's HUD) which showed the pilot, Maj. Emmett "E.T." Tullia, evading twelve different SAM's! As he evades them, he is forced lower and lower into what appears to be to be mist in the video is actually clouds and clouds of AAA!

Capt. Mike "Cujo" Roberts and Maj. Jeff "Tico" Tice got shot down on that mission. Mike took a direct hit and punched out under heavy negative G. When I saw the film later, I thought he was a goner, but he landed right next to a gun pit and was captured immediately. Jeff Tice took a round in the tank and lost oil pressure. He made it about halfway back to Saudi before he had to punch out. He was picked up by some Bedouins who traded him to the Iraqis. We were told not to carry any pictures, money, credit cards, gold…anything they might be able to use against you if you were captured. Well, that was baloney. I carried gold bracelets, gold chains, pictures of my wife…whatever I thought would help me make a deal, as well as for luck. Tico thought the pictures of his family that he carried saved his life, because it humanized him in the eyes of his captors. Guys flew with a lot of interesting things…mostly for luck, but also to barter for their lives with. They commonly described it as their "magic."

Studies had been done on the weather to determine just when to launch Desert Storm. It was decided mid-January was the time when the least chance of bad weather existed…so naturally, we had the worst weather in fourteen years on day one!!! The numbers predicted were a twelve percent chance of less than 6,000 foot ceilings over the target area, but it was actually less than 6,000 feet thirty-eight percent of the time for the first two weeks of the war. So there we were, up at 25,000 feet, with clouds under us…and there is no way you are going to go down and fly under a 6,000 foot overcast, silhouetted against the clouds for all those AAA gunners. The weather got a lot better during the middle two weeks of the war, and that is when we began to "attrit" the enemy.

Once the war settled into its attrition phase, the missions went something like this: We would take off with a flight of four to eight aircraft, loaded with two Mk. 84 2,000 pound bombs or CBU's. After dropping off the tanker, we would contact a fast FAC, who would be flying a LANTRIN-equipped F-16. He would divide his area into "kill boxes," east and west. We called then "Killer FAC's" and their call sign was "Pointer", which was appropriate since our call signs were all dogs. Initially they were diseases, but we later changed them to dogs. We used "Fang, Wolf, Cujo, Tico, Snoopy, Setter, Collie, Pug, Lassie, Boxer, Doberman, Rabid, Hound, Beagle, Bulldog, Huskie, Pitbull, and Mutt." We would be about 150 miles out when we contacted the FAC, and we would ask him to describe the targets, which might be a row of tanks, or a logistics site, giving us the coordinated in the clear. He would ask us for our time on target and we could tell him to the second by punching the coordinates into out inertial navigation system (INS). The FAC's were like traffic cops, because we had waves and waves of flights coming into the Basra area, where the Republican Guard were holed up. There were twenty tanker tracks, and the F-16's used five or six of them to feed fighters into this area.

The FAC would ask us what time we expected to get there, and we would, for example, tell him, "15 minutes" then he would ask another flight… if that guy said "10 minutes" he got first shot at the target. It was really easy to manage, because you had a bunch of fighter pilots up there keeping track of each other. It was very common to be working a target and have another four ship of F-16's working a target five miles away. The important thing was to see the target. We had come a long way to hit it and we wanted to take the time to positively identify the target… and see if there was anything else. We were at 20,000 feet, but Pointer knew the area cold, and he could pick out the targets pretty easily. At night the infrared capability in the pods even allowed them to pick out the "hot" tank from a group of tanks on the ground. (The enemy often holed up in one tank to conserve fuel and the heat signature would tell you which one it was.) Obviously, those became priority targets for the night bombers.

We would come across the fence (border) very high (30,000 feet), almost supersonic, then drop down to 20,000 feet when we got into the target area. There would be a couple of F-4G Wild Weasels hanging around, "smoking a Lucky," just waiting to see if any radars came up…and none did. See the Iraqis got so terrified of the Weasels that they would not turn their radars on. Coming across the fence, they might hit you with one strobe, just to try to pick out your altitude. But that was like trying to find someone in a dark room by turning on a flashlight for one second. You might get lucky, but then they are going to move and you are going to lose them again. So we came across at 30,000 feet, conscious of the SAM threat and always wary of a possible SAM firing. Our confidence was always very high in the Weasels, but we didn't get too cocky. The SA-6 was very deadly and it held our attention constantly. Still we were high and out of the AAA. Once in the target area we would descend to 20,000 feet. That made it easier to search for targets. AAA would come up, but it was optically guided and easy to avoid. Since the Weasels intimidated them, SAM's had very little chance of shooting us down. Our biggest threat was being seen by AAA gunners.

There were several tactics used. My favorite was to come into the target area with sections in five mile trail. The leader looks the target over… what is it? Do they see us? Are they shooting at us? He briefs the following sections and by the time the second section arrives in the target area, the leaders bombs are going off, making it easier for the trailers to pick out the target. When the environment was really permissive, we would take our time and make sure of our hits with multiple passes. At the beginning of the war, when they were still firing a lot of missiles, it was one pass and get out of there!

Our initial combat loads were two wing tanks, an ECM pod, on the centerline (ALQ-131), and four AIM-9's (later reduced to two on the wingtips only). The gun was fully loaded with 510 rounds of 20mm HEI, although we never strafed. We carried a variety of bombs. Early in the war, we carried two Mk. 84 low drag bombs with FMU-139 fuses, or two CBU-87 with FZU-39 fuses, or two CBU-89 with FZU-39 fuses. Later in the war, we carried four CBU-87's or four CBU-58's, or four Rockeye, or six Mk. 82 low drag, or four Mk. 82 high drag (BSU-49's). The FMU-139 fuse malfunctioned early in the war, causing the early detonation of a Mk. 84 in flight. The 614th TFS lost one F-16 over Kuwait when the FMU-139 fused the bomb at release, almost blowing the wing off the jet. The pilot ejected and was picked up in the water by the Navy.

The older CBU's (58 and Rockeyes) were used extensively during the February Campaign. CBU-87's and 89's were saved until the Republican Guards pulled up stakes and bugged out of Kuwait. The CBU-58's and Rockeye were difficult to deliver from high altitude. The CBU-87 was a dream. F-16's also dropped a lot of leaflet bombs. We hated the stuff! It was dropped level with a timer fuse. F-16's would carry two of the bombs, called "whales" under each wing. Sometimes, in a four ship, three jets would carry bombs and one would carry leaflets. Initially chaff / flare loads were 60 chaff / 30 flare for the 87 year group F-16's. Later on, 90 chaff / 15 flare was used. F-16A's (and those with only two canisters) carried 30 chaff / 15 flare. Chaff was VITAL! (Authors note: Chaff consists of strips of foil which is ejected in "clouds" from canisters to provide a false target to radar guided SAM's. Flares are just that… and they provide a false target for heat-seeking SAM's.) F-16's from the New York Air Guard employed the GPU-5 30mm gun pod but were not fond of it, since it was not as good as the internal 30mm gun in the A-10. Many Block 40/42 Lantrin jets employed IR Mavericks.

In spite of the fact that we attacked them around the clock for nearly six weeks, there were still plenty of targets when the war ended. We should not have given them six months to build their defenses. You can build some really impressive logistical storage sites in that amount of time…and even to the south, there were artillery positions everywhere! The sand was just pockmarked with them. The trouble is, when you are rolling in from 15,000 feet, you are saying "Is that really an artillery site, or just a bunch of junk?" So if you got secondary explosions, you were happy, if not…well, you just didn't know, and there was no Ranger down there saying "Nice hit." I flew forty missions. On ten of them I got good secondary explosions. Ten were against strategic targets like powerplants or buildings, ten were over the weather, using radar to drop the bombs, and on the other ten, I just didn't know if I was bombing a "real" target, or one that had been abandoned. Some of the missions were very satisfying. One day we bombed the telephone exchange that provided all the communications from the Iraqi General Staff down to Kuwait. Right after we landed, we turned on CNN and, sure enough, they were reporting that all communications with Kuwait had been lost!

On another mission, I was leading a flight of four against a bunker complex. I rolled in, dropped one Mk. 84, pulled off and looked back just in time to see four trucks pull out onto the highway. I called my wingmen off the bunkers and told them to go for the trucks. Now rolling in from 20,000 feet the enemy is never going to see you… they just don't know that you are there until the bombs go off. We were going to drop from 10,000 feet. The F-16 system is extremely accurate, but you still have 10,000 feet of winds to worry about, and we had discovered that a lot of the bombs were dropping short. One of the capabilities of the system is that it allows you to program changes and we were told to 'drop long,' and we started getting good hits. So here we were, rolling in on a line of moving trucks and dropping from 10,000 feet. My bomb hit a couple of feet to the right of the lead truck, completely destroying it. The F-16 system is reasonably accurate from high altitude, as the normal CEP for the system is less than 75 feet. Now if you have a tank buried up to the turret in sand, hitting ten feet away is not going to kill it, and that is why the F-15E's and F-111's used LGB's to kill the tanks (all Lantrin F-16's now have LGB capability.)

A lot of our success in this war had to do with our attitude going in. We were told from day one, "No target is worth your ass." Point blank. "If it doesn't look right…go home. You have a twenty million dollar airplane there…and there is no target in Iraq worth you not coming home to Momma." The attitude was do it right, do it smart, if it ain't right, go home. In the Vietnam War, the targets were picked by Johnson from the White House. In this war, you had a Capt in a "Killer FAC" picking the targets. His only instructions were, "Don't bomb civilian targets and don't bomb churches or mosques." …and he would say "Ok, that makes sense. I'm a college graduate… I can figure that out."

We did other innovative things too. On the fourth day of the war, the Iraqis had figured out what a HARM was, and were beginning to shut down their radars whenever the Weasels were around. Trouble was, sometimes there weren't enough Weasels to cover all the bombers going to Basra. The Weasel callsigns were beers… "Coors," "Pabst," "Miller," etc. As we crossed the fence that day, I was leading an eight ship flight and we still didn't have our Weasels. I told my number five guy, Capt Evan "Mai Tai" Mai, to act like a Weasel if they didn't show by the time we got to the target area…use all their terminology, call signs…right in the clear, on a channel that we knew the Iraqis monitored. We were getting some RHAW indications and the Weasels had called up to say that they were going to be twenty minutes late. As we got to the target we were lit up by a SA-6 site. Mai Tai called, "Fang, Coors, Magnum 6!" And the site turned off their radar immediately. (Magnum was the code word for the firing of a HARM missile, 6 indicated a SA-6 site.) Now I'll admit my heart was in my mouth, because just two days previously, I had lost two buddies over Baghdad to these missiles.

As time went on though, the Weasels and the threat of the HARM really shut down the SAM's and all we had to worry about was AAA. That was just like the old WWII movies. You would go driving into the target area and you would see these puffs of smoke. Some at 11,000 feet, some at 15,000 feet some at 18,000 feet…all different colors. They never saw us, they were just firing at the sound, so we simply avoided the flak traps and attacked from different directions. And the key was to stay fast…come off the target with at least 450 knots of airspeed, using a 3 or 4 G pull. If you did get lit up by a SAM radar, move the airplane with a 2 G pull so you didn't degrade your airspeed.

When I flew with our wing commander, Col. Jerry Nelson, who had flown combat in Vietnam, he was always supersonic going home, and even when he was on my wing he would "pimp" me to keep the speed up. Since we hit the tanker just before going in, we came off the target pretty fat on gas and with a clean airplane it wasn't unusual to egress at 1.2 Mach. We would stay below the contrail level and when we hit the Gulf we would slow down and climb. It was really pretty funny…all these contrails starting right at the border and heading south!

No F-16's got any kills during the war, and that was a source of a lot of frustration. AWACS had the big picture and they would call any bandits in the air by referencing an agreed upon location ("Bullseye"). The location would be given a codename so the call might be "Two F.1's, 20 miles south of pizza." Well, there were a lot of F-16 guys who were dying for a kill, and a call like that might draw a crowd. I was terrified of fratricide. During most of the war there were no F-15's over Kuwait, so we were on our own as far as providing CAP, and if the chance had arisen to get a MiG during the attack phase, we would have jettisoned the bombs and gone right for the kill. We did have some missiles fired accidentally. You are trained to go air-to-air mode as you come of a target, which means flipping the thumb switch to "Dogfight". If you are pumping adrenaline and hold down the bomb pickle button as you switch to dogfight, there is the remote possibility that a missile will come off the rail. After the war, we were tasked with Combat Air Patrols, and we were allowed to shoot down anything but helicopters. We intercepted a lot of helicopters, but you couldn't do anything but watch them. We did escort Saudi F-5's, Alpha Jets, and some friendly Mirage F.1's into Kuwait. You had to be real careful doing that, because the Iraqis had F.1's too, and their radar signature was distinctive. On one of these missions, I had a Navy F-14 roll in on us and go by me 200 feet away. I guess they were frustrated too…they only got two kills during the war. During the war, the 614th TFS flew 1,300 sorties and dropped 1,837 tons of bombs. The cooperation among our allies was outstanding. The Arab Coalition members felt that they were punishing an errant member of the family, and they really did their part. I was especially impressed with the professionalism of the Qatar Emiri Air Force (F.1's and Alpha Jets) with whom we flew several combined air strikes into Kuwait.

Philip M. Ruhlman Brigadier General Philip M. Ruhlman is the Chief of Staff, Joint Warfare Centre, Supreme Allied Command Transformation, Stavanger, Norway. Brigadier General Ruhlman graduated from the United States Air Force Academy in 1980 and earned his pilot wings in 1981. His first assignment was as a jump-qualified Battalion Air Liaison Officer and Forward Air Controller flying the O-2A. He then transitioned to the F-16 and has since flown every version assigned to the United States Air Force. He flew 43 F-16 combat missions over Iraq and Kuwait during Operation DESERT STORM, and has served as a wing weapons officer, instructor pilot, and Chief of Standardization and Evaluation. His staff assignments include positions at joint element, major command, direct reporting unit, and headquarters air staff levels. He has commanded a fighter squadron, fighter operations group, and the largest operational F-16 fighter wing in the United States Air Force.

Lou "Cool" Drendel Lou Drendel is a world-renowned aviation artist and one of America's foremost aviation authors. His paintings have appeared in the Chicago Tribune, Time-Life Publications, Berkely Books, The Journal of the American Aviation Historical Society, EAA Warbirds Magazine, and in the 50+ books he has authored on military aviation for Squadron/Signal Publications and for ARCO Publishers. His art can be seen at http://www.aviation-art.net. Lou is a founding member of the Lima Lima Flight Team. He has flown both leadership positions on the team. (Team Lead and Solo Lead.) He has logged over 3,800 hours in the T-34 Mentor and is the former President of the national T-34 Association. He is a Life Member of EAA and a former director of the EAA Warbirds of America. His continuing “Flyers Series” of paintings for American Flyers website celebrates famous aviators and famous aircraft. Lou and wife Carol are residents of Venice, Florida. cool@limalima.com

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