The 37-year-old weapons-systems officer mans the computer in his F-15E Strike Eagle while the pilot steers. He runs his targets through a computer program nicknamed Bug Splat, which helps make his bombing so precise that he is dropping munitions in windows rather than on whole buildings. “I am the modern-day bombardier,” he says.
The air campaign doesn’t get a lot of coverage, but it deserves a lot of credit for the relatively easy push into Baghdad this week. “We weren’t softening [the Republican Guard] up, we were killing them” says Lt. Gen. Michael Moseley, who is running the air war from Prince Sultan Air Base in Al Kharj, Saudi Arabia. Neither the government of Saudi Arabia nor here in Qatar wants the region to know just how crucial the air bases on their territory have been to the war against Iraq. There are no reporters allowed either at Prince Sultan Air Base or at Al Udeid Air Base just outside Doha. But from my downtown Doha hotel, I hear the roar of jets around the clock. I can only say that Jaggers flies from “somewhere in the region.”
The night that the “shock and awe” air campaign started (a term Moseley says is a media creation), Jaggers was in one of the hundreds of planes that unleashed a mighty load on Baghdad. What does he remember most about that night? “The sheer volume of antiaircraft fire and surface-to-air missiles fire.” His plane had been targeted (beeps go off in the cockpit when the plane has been tagged by a laser) but never hit. The amount of antiaircraft artillery from the capital quieted down a lot after that first night. Still Jaggers says, “If you don’t go out there with fear, you’re either dumb or crazy.”
On his night runs, he wears night-vision goggles. Sometimes he can actually see the target, sometimes it’s just a blip on the computer screen in front of him. He has some 50 satellites helping guide his aim. The greenish screen makes everything look “just as it is at dusk or dawn,” Jaggers says. It looks like those old monochrome screens that give everything a green pallor, which the Strike Eagle backseaters call “green goo.”
His two-person F-15E allows for a lot of agility in the air. Just about every munition in the Air Froce inventory can be strapped to his aircraft. It typically carries up to nine bombs at the same time ranging from 500 to 2,000 pounds. His plane can go up to 30,000 feet or hover just above a city. It’s good for both “air to air” combat (shooting at other planes) as well as “air to ground” combat (dropping lots and lots of bombs). They’ve mostly been doing the latter. Coalition forces cratered a lot of the Iraqi airstrips; they were especially wary of chemical weapons being airdropped on troops. They’ve have found Iraqi aircraft hidden in cemeteries, buried underground, everywhere, it seems, but in the sky. “I haven’t seen a one,” Jaggers says.
The first week of the war, Jaggers always knew where his targets were when he left base. These days, it’s more likely that he’ll have a “target of opportunity” come up when he’s flying. Some days he’ll lie in wait up there in “air orbit” for someone on the ground to call in CAS (close air support) mission. When he gets word on his headset about coordinates of a possible target, he goes to work on the computer to complete a CDE, collateral damage estimate. Bug Splat helps him determine what kind of bomb to use, from how high to drop it, what kind of fuse it needs. But before he drops a bomb in an urban setting like Baghdad, he gets a PID, positive ID. “I physically see the target and check the surrounding area,” he says. “If it’s ever in doubt, bring the bomb home.”
The battle for Baghdad has posed new challenges for the air war. In urban settings, they prefer to use the laser-guided bombs, which are even more precise than GPS-guided munitions. The idea was to use the minimum possible munition for the maximum effect, given the increased risks of collateral damage and civilian deaths in an urban setting. No matter how high-tech war becomes, there is always room for error, human and mechanical. No rational person thinks that the air strike that hit the Al-Jazeera bureau in Baghdad on Tuesday was an intentional hit to silence the Arabic news channel. Some soldier called in a CAS on the two-story villa either because he was under fire or thought he was. But a reporter died in the attack.
Jaggers knows his rules of engagement: avoid civilian targets as much as humanly possible. Weapons systems video can be reviewed if there is ever any doubt about a strike. He has aborted strikes he thought too risky. “I see it as being chivalrous. We could do what we did in World War II and firebomb Dresden,” Jaggers says. But so much has changed since the days of the old-world bombardier.
