Skills of Coalition Fliers Give Air Campaign a Lift : Military: Americans get most of the publicity, but other pilots are busy proving their mettle.

As the sun climbed over Kuwait in the early hours of last Thursday, Cmdr. Youssef could see a dull glint to the northeast, near the horizon. It was Kuwait city, catching the morning light. For the first time in more than five months, he was seeing home.

For the Kuwaiti pilots who flew their A-4 Skyhawks toward Kuwait city that morning, the dawning of war has brought both the joy of once again flying over Kuwait and a new kind of pain: part of their mission would be to destroy their own airfields.

“There is a lot of emotion going on, especially that first day,” said Youssef, who, like most Kuwaiti military officers, asked that his last name be withheld. “When we have to drop bombs on our own fields, we feel frustrated. But we have to take the dirt out of it, anyway. It’s a cancer. We need to take it out.”

Kuwait’s tiny air force, equipped with the 20 A-4s that pilots managed to rush out of the country in the face of the Iraqi invasion, has flown an average of 24 combat sorties a day. It is part of a coalition of forces from Britain, France, Canada, Italy and Saudi Arabia whose exploits have not been widely documented on international television but who nonetheless make up a significant part of the multinational campaign to liberate Kuwait.

The Saudi air force, flying to war for the first time in its history, is dispatching its pilots on nearly twice as many sorties as individual American fliers, making up what Saudi military officials estimate is 20% of the total missions flown in Operation Desert Storm.

British pilots, equipped with their country’s state-of-the-art JSP-233 airfield destruction bombs, have launched attacks on at least 40 airfields in Iraq and Kuwait with what British officials say is “a good deal of success.” They have also suffered the greatest losses, comparatively: five planes downed in nearly 300 sorties, largely attributable, military officials say, to the uniqueness of their mission. The pilots must fly low over enemy runways to deliver the asphalt-eating JSP-233.

French pilots, prohibited by their government from entering Iraqi airspace, have been directing a hail of bombs at ammunition dumps, some petroleum facilities and fuel storage sites inside Kuwait--largely with their Jaguar aircraft. The French F-1 Mirages, twins of the Iraqi Mirages, so far have been substantially grounded in the campaign.

Canadian pilots have been flying a variety of combat patrols, air support and reconnaissance runs throughout the theater, as have the Italians, with two squadrons of British-made Tornadoes based in Abu Dhabi.

American forces clearly have dominated the air campaign so far. But U.S. officials have worked hard to point up the role of the coalition partners in the operation.

“There are real political as well as military reasons why you want to involve as many coalition partners as possible in the operation: to show that it’s a true coalition, to show it’s not solely an Anglo-American effort, that it does have the support of all its members,” said Paul Stares, an expert on military command and control at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

Added another military analyst: “There is a political need to ensure that not all the body bags that come back are American . . . that when the dust settles, this is not just a U.S. effort.”

Illustrating the complex international web of deployment in the air war so far, Gen. Charles Horner, commander of U.S. air forces in the Persian Gulf, said a typical recent mission included an American F-15 escorting a Saudi bomber into Iraq while a U.S. Navy aircraft accompanied the mission to jam enemy radar in the vicinity.

“The Saudi aircraft put four craters on the runway and, I’ll tell you right now, we couldn’t have taken a pickup truck and put those bombs and laid them out there any more accurately,” Horner said. “So we have very, very good cooperation and integration of our forces.”

Saudi pilots, untested in battle except for an occasional defensive sortie during Iraq’s eight-year war with Iran, have pushed their planes into the sky night and day since the beginning of the operation, flying an average of 2 1/2 to 3 missions a day for each pilot, compared to 1 or 1 1/2 for American fliers.

The Saudis’ aerial contribution is the second-largest in the coalition and, because of the billions of dollars the desert kingdom has spent on defense in recent years, among the best equipped. The Saudis see the campaign in many ways as their proving ground after months of grumbling in the kingdom about the need for calling in foreign forces to protect the kingdom despite all the billions spent.

“Remember, the Americans didn’t come until the 8th of August,” said a military official, who asked not to be identified. “We were here defending the country from the first day. We could resist Saddam (Hussein, the Iraqi president), we could fight Saddam. But that would inflict a lot of damage on the kingdom.”

“I am a prince,” said Abdullah ibn Khalid al Saud, “but first I am a Saudi soldier and a Saudi pilot, and I am here to defend my country, my people and my friends. . . . We are all very proud.”

“We know we are fighting for something we believe in,” said another Saudi Tornado pilot, who refused to give his name. “We are not occupying other countries, we are obeying the orders for peace, and that is it. I believe in what I’m doing, so I hope to do my job accurately.”

A senior Saudi military official said Saudi Arabia’s pilots have “proven ourselves” in the days since battle began, although the air force remains stubbornly convinced it could have protected the kingdom in the days when Iraq’s forces were massing by the thousands along the Saudi-Kuwait border.

“We would have lost a lot of lives, a lot of aircraft, infrastructure, equipment--but we would have defended the country one way or the other,” he said.

Kuwaiti pilots have been used to fly missions deep into Kuwait, some against their own airfields, where aiming is critical and their familiarity with the terrain unequaled.

In addition to taking on the perilous job of runway-busting, the British and their Tornado GR-1As, equipped with modern sensors, have proved adept at reconnaissance missions during the past several days of bad weather over Iraq. British pilots have pinpointed seven of Iraq’s elusive mobile Scud missile launchers.

Earlier this week, two British Tornado fighters raced to the rescue of a formation of American A-10 tank-busting planes that were being chased by enemy aircraft along the Saudi-Kuwait border.

“As soon as our boys appeared on the scene, it had the desired effect,” said Wing Cmdr. Sandy Davis, deputy commander of the Royal Air Force’s fighter and bomber squadrons in Eastern Saudi Arabia. “The Iraqis came off their tails and made a run for it. They know that we’re not knights of the air. We play dirty.”

While American forces have tended to respond tensely to the many chemical weapons alerts called since the beginning of the operation, the British fighters have responded with typical English aplomb. One day this week, most of a British fighter squadron sat around the ready room in gas masks and chemical protection gear, giggling audibly through their respirators at an episode of “Monty Python’s Flying Circus.”

Times staff writer Alan Miller in Washington contributed to this report.