Smoke Defense Ready but Not Needed in Gulf

Every Army division that went into combat in the Persian Gulf War had the ability to use smoke, one of the most ancient tools of warfare, as a battlefield obscurant.

However, the brevity of the ground war and the dust, sand and smoke of battle made human-made obscurants largely unnecessary.

But a month before the war, an Army battalion made a Saudi Arabian air base vanish beneath a layer of fluffy white fog. The experiment persuaded Air Force brass to add the technique to their defenses.

“Operational concept-wise, it worked,” said Maj. Ed Presson, assistant director for camouflage, concealment and deception at Florida’s Eglin Air Force Base.

Presson and others discussed the role of obscurants in the Gulf because much of the information has been declassified.

There’s nothing new about smoke as a defense. It cloaked some battles in the Peloponnesian War in the 5th Century B.C., and the Soviets used it extensively in World War II. In the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the Israelis used smoke to conceal their tanks from antitank missiles.

Utah’s Dugway Proving Ground, a sprawling installation in the remote Western desert, was designated as one of the Army’s smoke and obscurant test sites in 1976.

Scientists test generators that produce visible and infrared obscurants, smoke grenades launched from combat vehicles and rockets with phosphorus warheads that disperse a blinding smoke.

At Dugway, the focus is on technical testing--determining the properties of smoke and munitions designed to protect ground troops. Some operational testing is done when troops engage in war games on the post’s 841,000 acres.

“As a countermeasure to various types of weapons systems, smoke and obscurants are viable and relatively inexpensive,” smoke group leader Dennis Bodrero said.

Much of the Army’s emphasis had been on the smoke and obscurant capabilities of the military of the former Soviet Union, which used the tactic more than 1,000 times in World War II.

The Air Force already was equipped with aircraft decoys, false runways, camouflage netting and similar concealment techniques. Aircraft long have jettisoned metallic chaff to fool a radar-guided missile.

But for two years before Operation Desert Shield began in 1990, the Air Force had been developing and testing a smoke-generation system designed to cover a large fixed facility like an air base.

The Gulf War, and King Faud Air Base south of Dhahran, offered compelling reasons to demonstrate for the first time in a combat zone the effectiveness of a smoke defense against attacking aircraft homing in visually, Presson said.

“We had this big area, a big base, and the smoke system makes a smart way of doing things against the Iraqi threat,” Presson said. “The Air Force had never done this before, unlike the Army. Some commanders had never seen smoke covering runways.”

Presson contacted Army Lt. Col. Darryl Kilgore, a smoke expert now with III Corps at Ft. Hood, Tex., who brought three dozen smoke generators mounted on humvees.

The exercise began early on a mid-December morning. High above, a reconnaissance plane warned of an impending raid as a dozen A-10 jets with a list of targets began the mock attack.

The generators spewed clouds of fog oil that enveloped the six-square-mile base.

“If you were in a helicopter looking down on it, it would be very much like being in an airplane and looking down at the clouds. . . . It looked like white fluffy cotton balls,” Kilgore said.

The attackers failed to find their targets and the experiment was declared a success, said Presson, who went back to Eglin, crated up the Air Force’s prototype system and had it “in the field and ready to go” in Saudi Arabia by Jan. 1, 1991.

“Fortunately, we never did get attacked,” he said. “We did some activation, but we never did totally cover ourselves up.

“But based on being able to deliver the system to the field, and have it operational during the entire conflict, Tactical Air Command made the decision to put it into production.”