28 years ago this week, a terrorist truck bomb detonated adjacent to an eight-story barracks at Khobar Towers, a military compound just outside of Dhahran. The barracks housed airmen from fighter and rescue squadrons along with support teams, all deployed to patrol No Fly Zones over southern Iraq.
The Khobar bomb was the largest terrorist weapon ever directed at American forces, with a blast force equivalent to 20,000 pounds of TNT — four times the power of the truck bomb used in Oklahoma City. Windows were shattered two miles away. The rumble of the blast could be felt much further than that.
Because of the manner of its construction, the barracks did not collapse. But it was badly mangled, the blast shattering glass, crumpling metal, and shearing off the entire face of the building.
19 US Air Force airmen were killed.
They were:
Captain Christopher Adams
Captain Leland Haun
Master Sergeant Michael G. Heiser
Master Sergeant Kendall K. Kitson
Technical Sergeant Daniel B. Cafourek
Technical Sergeant Patrick P. Fennig
Technical Sergeant Thanh V. Nguyen
Staff Sergeant Ronald King
Staff Sergeant Kevin Johnson
Sergeant Millard D. Campbell
Senior Airman Earl F. Cartrette Jr.
Senior Airman Jeremy A. Taylor
Airman 1st Class Christopher Lester
Airman 1st Class Brent E. Marthaler
Airman 1st Class Brian W. McVeigh
Airman 1st Class Peter W. Morgera
Airman 1st Class Joseph E. Rimkus
Airman 1st Class Justin Wood
Airman 1st Class Joshua E. Woody
Alongside the fallen, 498 from many coalition nationalities were wounded. Every building in the compound was either destroyed or damaged beyond repair.
Coalition forces would immediately abandon Khobar for more isolated locations which could be better hardened, thus instigating a since well-worn pattern of disassociation with foreign hosts as a security trade-off.
In the wake of the incident, there was a realization that as horrific as the attack was, it could have been much worse.
One reason it wasn’t: Staff Sergeant Alfredo R. Guerrero of Modesto, California.
Guerrero, a Security Forces airman, happened to be on the roof of the barracks when the truck pulled into position. He noticed details that sent a shiver up his spine, including the presence of a chase vehicle and suspicious behavior by the men in both vehicles.
His reaction was instant, decisive, and no less than gallant. Squeezing off a quick radio call to alert the wider base, Staff Sergeant Guerrero ran immediately into the building from the rooftop entrance and began coursing up and down the hallways on the top floor, beating on doors to roust residents and get them to evacuate. He then worked his way down rapidly, making it a couple more levels before the bomb detonated. After the explosion, he continued to evacuate wounded, rendering First Aid and CPR to several victims.
His actions saved dozens of lives. Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Ronald Fogelman later decorated Guerrero with the Airman’s Medal, which is given for heroism while not engaged in combat with an armed enemy.
Someone should probably dust off Guerrero’s nomination file and rethink the level of recognition he received. Because something we learned is that even if we didn’t know it yet, we were at war.
We also learned that our old ways of deploying wouldn’t work anymore. In a world where anti-terrorism was the focus, bases would need greater standoff distances, robust security resources, and the eyes and ears of every airman as sensors.
The USAF revolutionized Force Protection, training every individual to a higher standard. The improvement in base protection would be strategically pivotal just a few years later.
Many airman learned the principles of Force Protection from Guerrero himself, who committed to teaching others what he’d learned at such a high cost to his team. He continued to instruct for the rest of his career and into his retirement.
Something else we learned is that success in deployed environments requires a high level of cooperation with the host nation. Military leaders can’t always secure cooperation without the integrated support of others from the interagency environment. That too would prove an invaluable lesson in the years to come.
There were also some things we didn’t learn.
Like the fact that hanging out on foreign soil for extended periods of time can have unintended strategic consequences. Khobar was an unheeded warning that our presence in the Middle East, in particular on Saudi soil, was helping fuel a terrorist movement of growing coherence and purpose.
Our presence supplied a lazy but piercing extremist narrative about Western threats to Islam. Wealthy donors eager to encourage a broader jihad fattened the coffers of Al Qaeda, which leveraged our extended presence as a bottomless well of propaganda.
The recruitment and legitimacy we unwittingly facilitated would come to haunt us. Khobar was part of an accelerating and intensifying campaign which could have, but didn’t, change our behavior. Al Qaeda’s subsequent bombings of embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and its attack of the USS Cole continued a pattern of warnings insufficiently heeded. The cataclysm which followed in 2001 continues to shape our reality ever since, in countless and costly ways.
Am I suggesting we needed to fold up and retreat from the Middle East after Khobar? Absolutely not. That would have been a strange way to acknowledge the investment of our nation and sacrifice of our fallen in the pursuit of a peaceful and stable region.
But the fact it took the events of September, 2001 to shift our strategy and sensor array to terrorism is an undeniable strategic failure. A check written by the fallen airmen of Khobar which our nation failed to cash.
We as a nation also didn’t learn from the mistaken and cynical act of carrying domestic politics past the water’s edge.
In the aftermath of Khobar, there was an understandable push to comprehend what happened. That constructive curiosity would metastasize into flagrant scapegoating, ringing in a new era of hyper-politicized foreign policy.
The Air Force conducted two separate legal investigations into it its own actions, finding that commanders had done all they could given the intelligence they had. A separate inquiry commissioned by the Senate and conducted by retired Gen. Wayne Downing came to the opposite conclusion, finding that intelligence had been ample and commanders should have done more to harden their operations.
Both investigations were wrong in different ways.
The Air Force had erred in placing a soft target in a basically indefensible urban area. It had been a complicated decision influenced by logistical and operational factors as well as host nation constraints. In hindsight, adequate security at the location wasn’t possible as the terror threat intensified, and the basing decision should have been revisited as new intelligence indicating a rising threat level became known.
But the Downing report had also made a huge factual mistake when it singled out Brig. Gen. Terryl Schwalier, the wing commander at Khobar, for failing to protect the outpost. It got the bomb forensics wrong, concluding the bomb had been around 5,000 pounds. It was actually at least four times as powerful, making it twice the size of the bomb used in the Marine Corps Barracks attack in Beirut in 1983. The Khobar bomb was 80 times the size of any previous weapon detected by intelligence sources in Saudi Arabia.
Everything about the Khobar attack pointed toward new levels of terrorist capability and intent. Before the attack, there would have been no basis in intelligence or logic for Schwalier to insist on expanded standoff distances, layered perimeters, or the other measures suggested in the Downing report. Had he requested the resources to harden Khobar to the level suggested by hindsight, they’d likely have been denied.
Schwalier had in fact implemented more than a 130 security improvements at Khobar in the previous year, including 36 of 39 recommendations from a recent vulnerability assessment. He met with his team to discuss security constantly. It was on his mind and his agenda.
None of that prevented the Clinton Administration from resting 100% of the blame for Khobar on his shoulders. Secretary of Defense William Cohen, going against the recommendations of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. John Shalikashvili, denied Schwalier’s promotion to Major General, which had already been confirmed and scheduled.
Schwalier’s career ended instantly, the heartbreak of losing 19 of his airmen compounded by the absence of opportunity to continue serving in their honor. He had been one of the best of his generation, mentored and heavily influenced by none other than Robin Olds, one of the Air Force’s most legendary and revered combat leaders. But ultimately, Schwalier became a human symbol for leaders getting caught in political crossfire.
In the years after, it became accepted and eventually normalized for mid-level military officers to be publicly sacrificed over geopolitical failures created by politicians themselves. And as the pattern entrenched, fewer strong leaders aspired to senior command.
Which brings us to one more thing we should have learned from Khobar but didn’t.
Schwalier wasn’t the only Air Force general to retire over the incident. The service’s Chief of Staff, Gen. Fogelman, requested early retirement just before Schwalier’s declined second star was publicly announced.
Cohen’s decision was something of a last straw for a principled leader who couldn’t stomach being a part of what he saw as a brazenly improper action.
Quoted in a report years later, Fogelman reflected on his decision:
“You really do have to get up and look at yourself in the mirror every day and ask, ‘Do I feel honorable and clean? … I just could not begin to imagine facing the Air Force after Secretary Cohen made the decision to cancel General Schwalier’s promotion.”
But there’s a bigger backstory to Fogelman’s decision, which he had been mulling over for at least a year before pulling the trigger. He had been at odds with the Clinton Administration, with Congress, and at times with his joint chiefs counterparts on a range of issues from modernization to budgeting, from acquisition to personnel decisions. He abhorred the compromised shorthand of political bargaining, and considered it the wrong process for resourcing defense.
Fogelman had also clashed publicly with the Air Force Secretary over the disciplining of 1Lt. Kelly Flinn, a B-52 pilot whose investigation over allegations of sexual impropriety had become a national story which reflected poorly on the service.
By the time the Khobar mess played out, Fogelman was politically isolated, losing battle after battle, and no longer considered himself an effective representative of the Air Force.
What the Air Force should have taken from that situation was the importance of developing general officers with the capacity to build relationships with political personalities across agency boundaries and partisan dividing lines. The capacity to remain politically integrated is particularly key in a Chief of Staff, whose influence or lack thereof can make or break the service’s strategic solvency.
That lesson did not stick. In the years since, we’ve had another Chief of Staff fired after becoming politically isolated, and another serially roasted in public by legislators for being totally out of step with political and legislative intent.
Air Force influence in political circles has waned continually. The service is 18% smaller than in 1986. While the cost of aircraft and technology has spiraled, budgets haven’t kept up, leaving the service perpetually insolvent and thus unable to craft long-term plans on a dependable resource base. Acquisition programs have been scaled back. Authority to prosecute serious crimes has been reduced, resulting from of a broad loss of confidence in the objectivity and fairness of the chain of command.
And in this time, the service has changed basically nothing about how it locates, develops, and prepares key talent for the unique challenge of leading at the highest levels of politics and strategy.
Scandal doesn’t help either, and the reality of two retired 4-stars and an active duty 2-star being disciplined for sex crimes against subordinates makes it fair to wonder about the promotion formula.
While stature has improved recently with the emergence of a few truly gifted and capable senior leaders, the Air Force track record suggests insufficient hunger to learn from strategically consequential events.
And yet, underneath all the noise and politics, Khobar can’t help but exemplify the timeless tradition of American service and selflessness. The willingness of stout and courageous young people to spend their lives, and sometimes give their lives, protecting the rest of us.
For me, the overriding lesson of Khobar is the one we continue to observe but never really internalize. Which is that if you love soldiers, you can’t love war.
What war does to all of us, it does to them first. It bankrupts materially, corrodes morally, dehumanizes, traumatizes, and kills.
Sometimes it kills slowly. The demons of war chase participants into early graves.
But other times it kills without warning, delay, or mercy. As it did on June 25th, 1996.
Written for the 19 fallen airmen of Khobar towers.
TC is a retired American airman and independent writer.