'60 Minutes': How tech helped win Sadr City battle Video
'60 Minutes': How tech helped win Sadr City battle Video Transcript
>> One of the reasons violence in Iraq has subsided so dramatically was a significant battle that US forces won in Sauder City just five months ago. Sauder City, part of Baghdad, is home to 2,000,000 Shiite and turf of the fiercely anti-American Cleric Mugtada al-Sadr. For years insurgents in Iraq have been stymieing US troops with home-made low-tech weapons like car bombs and improvised roadside explosives. But in the battle of Sauder City, as we learned in a high-level debriefing with the US Commander in Iraq, the Americans overpowered the Shiite militias with high-tech, the most advanced, sophisticated, whiz-bang hardware and software on earth. Electronics, lasers, high-resolution cameras that can literally cut through the fog of war. When we were in Iraq to interview the new Commanding General Ray Odierno we went with him as he surveyed the former battle field, through neighborhoods now pacified and into a market returning to life. At his side was the brigade commander who led the battle here, Colonel John Hort.
>> John: This is some of the hideous fighting that we have experienced in our 2 months in Sauder City.
>> Right where we're standing.
>> John: Right where we're standing.
>> Standing there or any place in Sauder City could not have been done just 5 months ago. This was off limits to Americans. For years the fiery Cleric Mugtada al-Sadr and his Shiite militia controlled the streets. Last March they began using the neighborhood as a launching pad to lob rockets into the nearby Green Zone, the seat of the Iraqi government and site of the US Embassy.
>> Not just 1 or 2 but we're talking 20 to 30 rocket attacks coming out of Sauder City.
>> Colonel Hort gave General Odierno his first briefing on the battle and we were invited to sit in. It's rare that reporters can video tape sessions like this one. We were asked to turn our cameras off only once and were allowed to broadcast only a few slides that were later declassified for us, like this one.
>> And you can kind of see, kind of some of the locations they were coming out of, we've got all of Sauder City against the Green Zone.
>> The US Military had wanted to mount an attack but Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Al Maliki balked for a year because the militias are Shiites like him and that made a decision to fight them politically risky. You waited for him.
>> It was his decision.
>> To give you -- his decision to give you the go ahead.
>> Right, I think what he finally realized were that the militias that had safe havens in Sauder City were really trying to destabilize the government of Iraq, and he realized that it would add instability to his own government.
>> Once Maliki gave the go ahead a US striker battalion went in, but they confronted a steady stream of militia reinforcements.
>> Everyday it was 20, 30, 40 new guys that were comin' out to fight.
>> So Hort and his men had to do something to keep them out. They decided to build a wall, a barrier straight across Sauder City. It would also create a buffer zone wide enough to prevent the militia rockets from reaching the Green Zone. To build the wall Colonel Hort's Charlie Company began putting up massive T-shaped concrete slabs. Fighting erupted almost immediately as sniper fire came in from every direction. [gunshots] Charlie Company retaliated with massive tank fire.
>> We fired 800 tank rounds in this fight. We haven't fired that many tank rounds since the start of the war.
>> Colonel Hort said the building of the so called T-Wall became a magnet for every bad guy in Sauder City. This was one of the most intense engagements in the entire war, yet even as the battle raged, the wall went up.
>> It was literally concrete barrier by concrete barrier, ya know, we just wasn't goin' out there and puttin' up some barriers, I mean, it was a fight every inch of the way in.
>> Put 'em up under fire?
>> Our guys would climb the ladders to unhook the crane chains from the wall unarmed while people are firing at 'em, so it was high [inaudible].
>> Lieutenant Colonel Brian EIfler's team laid down cover fire while some soldiers wide opened and exposed unhooked the chains from the crane. On days when the shooting was particularly fierce they were able to put up only 8 slabs.
>> Every type of weapon system the enemy had they tried to use against us up at the wall, I mean, it was step by step by step and fighting literally every hour of the day.
>> They called in sniper teams from the elite Nave Seals and air support, F18 Fighter Jets and Apache helicopters that protected the flanks. But here's what really made the difference an arsenal of advanced high-flying technology, UAV's, unmanned aerial vehicles with highly improved camera systems so sensitive they can see the enemy, even at night, through clouds and gun smoke from high up. They can spot someone smoking or a weapon on someone's side, and they have sensors so advanced they can hear enemy radio transmissions and pinpoint their location.
>> In 2003 we didn't have all the systems that are now available, we had some, but we didn't have all the UAV's.
>> In the battle for Sauder City they used two different UAV's, one was the Shadow Drone, depicted here on one of Colonel Hort's slides, 20 or 30 seconds after a militia team fired a rocket. The Shadow locked on them, shadowed them, watched them move, and set up for their next shot. Then an armed UAV, The Predator, was activated. These are actual pictures of the battle on the streets of Sauder City, as you can see, a group of militia fighters rush to a car that had just been hit by a US Hellfire Missile, they remove a mortar tube from the trunk and load it into a second car, which they drive through the streets to an open field. At that point The Predator locks its sight onto the vehicle and fires off another missile. According to the Army, this killed two fighters inside the car and destroyed the mortar tube; war by remote control. This is how Charlie Company hunted down the militia rocket teams and whittled down their numbers.
>> Ya know, they went from 20 to 30 men groups down to 5, 4 and in some cases only 1 or 2. The Predator and the Shadow were just phenomenal in their abilities to see the enemy particularly after he shot a rocket.
>> We have learned from other sources that Colonel Hort's ground troops were supported by a secret special ops unit called Taskforce 17. Using their own Predators along with Iraqi undercover operatives and eavesdropping it was able to take out some of the militia leaders who were based north of the wall hiding among the civilian population. With the help of the Drones and their high-powered cameras Army commanders were able to see or map the entire theater of operations and figure out the enemies tactics and patterns with so called persistent surveillance.
>> And in some cases we would wait 4, 6 even 10 hours to do the engagement because we didn't want to kill [inaudible] we wanted to go after the whole group of, ya know, the company, the chain of command as you want to call it that where they would actually pick up the rail, drive in their vehicle, go to another location, and do an after action review on what they did.
>> In other words, after a long skirmish, all the individual militia rocket teams would rendezvous in a large group with their leaders. In this video you can see how Colonel Hort's men would be tracking as the militia fighters went to a set location for a battle assessment and their new assignments.
>> So, once they got to that site, that's when we would do the engagement, sometimes that took 6, 8, 10 hours to wait and that's what Predator allowed us to do; it truly preyed on the enemy.
>> Can I ask, did they have no idea? How far away?
>> The Predator's about, well flies about 10,000 feet.
>> It's a UAV.
>> The noise.
>> It's so high up they can't --
>> You can't hear it?
>> Sometimes they can but it's pretty hard, it's very difficult.
>> They can't hear anything. This was the first time UAV's were used this way at the brigade level allowing soldiers on the ground to manage and synchronize the information themselves, they call it find, fix, and finish.
>> All of this was pushed down to the brigade commander and used in this fight. We primarily focused north against the rocket teams.
>> Colonel Hort and his men were able to watch in real time as the enemy planted over 300 armor piercing roadside bombs or IED's, and so they made the decision early in the battle to use tanks and Bradleys fortified with thick reactive tiles. They were so effective said Colonel Hort that even while they actually struck 120 IED's, the crews were all protected.
>> It went from literally 60 attacks down to 3 or 4 attacks, and that was --
>> In a day, a week --
>> 60 attacks a day.
>> So the battle of Sauder City was won with a combination of high-tech and no-tech, lasers and electronic eyes in the sky and cement. Over the course of the fighting that lasted 8 weeks, the number of US troops grew from 700 to 2,000 up against roughly 4,000. An estimated 700 of the militia fighters were killed, 6 Americans died. Near the end in May, Colonel Hort says as many as 40 of the militia leaders fled and a cease fire was negotiated.
>> Ya know, it's my opinion at the brigade level that the cease fire was declared because they really didn't have a whole lot left to throw at us.
>> By the end of the battle the T-Wall was finally finished.
>> That's 4,000 meters so close to 2 miles in terms of where the wall started and finished, that's just the exact width of Sauder City.
>> It seals off about a quarter of Sauder City and it's been beautified with local artists painting murals of peaceful happy scenes that have to be approved by the US Army. To get from one side of the wall to the other, the locals have to go through entry points. Check-points, they have to be checked to go back and forth.
>> Yeah, you -- that's right, but it's easy, it's usually just showing of an ID but it is a check-point. And, again, that's to limit freedom of movement of the insurgents for the most part.
>> Merchants and traders are back in business here. This is a wholesale market in Sauder City where trucks deliver fresh produce from the countryside everyday now. The militias used to shake down the vendors, that's over, but still the local businessmen are not happy about the wall. Tell me about the T-Wall. ^M00:11:41 [ Speaking in a foreign language ] ^M00:11:48
>> They feel that they're cut off from the other side, which is affecting their businesses.
>> And you can tell 'em, when we're able to get more security forces over time we will take the T-Walls down.
>> Yet, local citizens are providing intelligence, solid tips that have led to the capture of weapons caches, IED caches, but General Odierno says the situation is fragile.
>> General Odierno: You eliminate the safe haven and now we can start to build but it takes time, I mean, that's the issue, it just takes time.
>> Many of the fighters who've survived, the General told us, fled to Iran and Syria to try and regenerate. The idea he says is to create a neighborhood that doesn't want them back. ^M00:12:31 [ Sound effect ] ^M00:12:36 [ Silence ]
One of the reasons violence in Iraq has subsided so dramatically was a significant battle that U.S. forces won in Sadr City just five months ago. Lesley Stahl looks at how technology helped win Sadr City.
