Archie to SAM: A Short Operational History of Ground-Based Air ...

GROUND-BASED AIR DEFENSE SINCE 1990
those in eastern Europe “from the air standpoint, we looked at
about as tough a threat as you are going to find anywhere.” 7
These air- and ground-based defenses were highly centralized.
The key to the system was a computerized control system called
KARI (Iraq spelled backwards in French in honor of its developers
and installers). It consisted of 1970s technology that became
operational in 1987. KARI was oriented against a threat
from the west (Israel) and the east (Iran) consisting of a number
of radars and more than two dozen operations centers. Built
to handle attacks of 20 to 40 aircraft, KARI showed the capability
of handling up to 120 tracks at one time during the Iran-
Iraq War. It was highly automated and “user friendly,” demanding
little of lower-level operators. In fact, it was designed to be
operated by personnel with the equivalent of a sixth grade education.
KARI was both extensive and redundant, covering all of
Iraq and, after the August invasion, Kuwait as well. 8
As with their other systems, the Iraqis had a great number and
variety of radars, about 500 located at 100 sites. American intelligence
considered six Chinese (Nanjing) low-frequency radars
the most dangerous, as they were least susceptible to jamming
and, in theory, could detect the stealth aircraft. 9
Thus, the Iraqis fielded a potent air force and air defenses.
However, they faced the strongest, largest, and most modern
air force in the world, bolstered by allies. Clearly, the coalition
had air power superiority across the board in terms of numbers,
aircraft quality, communications, and doctrine. Coalition
airmen had other major advantages as well.
The coalition airmen greatly benefited from the maturation
of two recent technologies that tilted the balance in favor of the
offensive: stealth and precision-guided munitions (PGM) (fig. 91).
Stealth greatly reduced the ability of radar to detect aircraft
and, combined with carefully planned flight routing, made night
and bad weather attacks essentially invisible. Thus, radar, which
had been the air defender’s chief asset from the early 1940s,
was nullified, leaving the defenders dependent on blind luck
and eyeballs for detection of attacks and guidance of guns and
missiles. (Infrared homing was somewhat lessened but not to
the same degree as radar.) The impact of this technology was
enhanced by the development of PGMs. PGMs permitted almost
219