Every Man a Tiger: The Gulf War Air Campaign

Saturday, August 4th: it was time to fly to Camp David to brief President Bush and his chief advisers.

Well past midnight, Horner, Schwarzkopf, and the other Camp David pilgrims boarded a C-21 Learjet, the Air Force transport normally used by VIPs, for the flight to Andrews AFB. The trip was tense and uncomfortable. The seats were small and the jet was full, so legs cramped, necks and rear ends ached. Everyone was exhausted, on edge. Horner himself was anxious; the thought of briefing the President was unsettling… not because it frightened him, but because he wanted to get it right, and that made it difficult to relax.

The CINC eased his great bulk into the tiny seat and tried to sleep; he was so large, he seemed to take up the entire plane. Horner slipped into a backseat next to Admiral Grant Sharp, the CENTCOM J-5 (Director of Plans), and reviewed his slides.

Sharp, a tall, gentlemanly, naval surface officer with gray hair and glasses, was a quiet man who spoke in well-constructed, thought-out phrases. Though he was old Navy and loved the service (his father, also an admiral, had been the Commander in Chief, Pacific Forces), he seemed more academic than military, which put him at a disadvantage when dealing with the fiery and mercurial Schwarzkopf. Sharp liked order and thoughtful discourse and hated the CINC’s tirades, while Schwarzkopf never warmed to scholarly types.

After a 4:00 A.M. touchdown at Andrews, they were driven across town to Wainwright Hall, the Distinguished Visitors Quarters at Fort Meyer on the Virginia side of the Potomac, and a five-minute drive from the Pentagon. At Wainwright, Horner grabbed a twenty-minute nap and a shower, which took away some of the cobwebs and grunge of the previous day and night.

Despite the antipathy of the ejection-seat technicians in the Life Support shop to storing clothes where they didn’t belong, Horner habitually kept a shaving kit and blue, short-sleeve uniform tucked up in the canopy of his F-16. Pilots normally used an underwing baggage pod for carrying personal baggage, but the pod limited maneuvering to only three Gs; and since he’d set out Friday morning to fight F-15s, there was no way he was going to stand for that.

He took advantage of the kit and the uniform now and, looking as put together as circumstances allowed, everyone regrouped and got in the cars that were to take them to the helicopter pad on the south end of the Pentagon.

By the time they reached the pad, it was about 6:00 A.M. Shortly afterward, they were joined by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (and Horner’s old National War College classmate), General Colin Powell, who radiated the warmth and humor that make everyone acquainted with him think of him as a best friend. After the greetings, Powell drew General Schwarzkopf aside for some last-minute coaching, to head off the chance that Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney or President Bush might reach conclusions at the briefing that he didn’t approve.

In Chuck Horner’s view, Colin Powell was a decent, honorable, intelligent, and genuinely likable man with unquestionable integrity who was also a brilliant schemer, manipulator, and political operator… and he had one serious flaw: he was Army through and through. He had never been able to admit the ascendancy of airpower. In Powell’s mind, it all came down to a zero-sum game, expressed in a simple syllogism: if airpower was growing in importance, then land power must be decreasing. That was bad for the nation, however; consequently, he had to make sure that brakes were applied to the growth of airpower.

Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, wearing cowboy boots, walked up to the pad a couple of minutes after General Powell, and immediately introduced himself to Horner with a warm handshake and a smile. The Secretary of Defense was of medium height and build, balding, neat, friendly, and, Horner quickly learned, a good listener. Until this morning, the two had never met.

As for Cheney, this was just another general, not even a slim or handsome one, whose shy Iowa mumblings were not likely to inspire a powerful first impression. “What do you call the Secretary of Defense?” Horner kept asking himself. “Mister Secretary? Boss? Dick? Your Honor?” Yet, for his part, Horner liked what he saw: this man was smart, selfless, and straightforward.

Everyone soon piled into a fancy Marine helicopter for the trip to Camp David.

The low man on the totem pole has some advantages. For starters, he can observe; he doesn’t have to show off who he is. So Horner relaxed in the helicopter and watched Schwarzkopf and Powell do a power dance together, as they worked to establish their territory and power base, and made sure that they were recognized for their expertise in military matters and that, in the meeting to come, the Defense Secretary wouldn’t take off on his own. Though Cheney was in charge, the senior uniformed types (as always) did their best to keep the civilian leadership from making military decisions on their own.

Thus, Schwarzkopf ’s body language said to Powell, “You may be the Chairman, Colin, but the Middle East is my theater and I work for Secretary Cheney.” Thanks to Goldwater-Nichols, the CINC had a direct, unmediated working connection with the Secretary of Defense, making the Chairman hardly more than an adviser — though an extremely powerful and influential one. Powell’s body language, on the other hand, said to Schwarzkopf: “Norm, let me guide you through this political maze.” And to Cheney: “Dick, don’t reach any conclusions about using military force until I get a chance to convince you about what should be done. And for God’s sake, don’t go to Norm direct”… despite the chain of command. All the while, Horner wondered if his own body language said what he hoped it said: “Here’s the Joe Cool fighter pilot delighted to have such a beautiful day to fly up and see George, Dan, and the boys in the cabinet. Hope they’ll like Chuckie.”

CAMP DAVID

Camp David turned out to be comfortable, but not luxurious — it had earth-tone colors, a musty odor (like a mostly vacant summer cabin), government-issue hardwood tables, overstuffed brown vinyl sofas, and brass lamps. Since the windows were small and looked out onto the surrounding forest, and their light was only partially supplemented by lamps on end tables, it was dim inside.

Soon after their arrival, Horner and Schwarzkopf went into the conference room to check it out before they had to perform — to reconnoiter the battlefield. As Horner remembers it, the room was wood-paneled, with a neutral-colored office-style carpet on the floor. The meeting table could hold about twenty to thirty people around it, and there were chairs along the walls for straphangers (like him). An overhead slide projector sat on a small table near the right forward edge of the main table, and a portable screen was parked a few feet away in a corner of the room.

While the CINC stepped out to find a breath mint (their mouths being in full rebellion against the previous night’s coffee and stress), Horner was alone until the first attendee entered. He knew the face… it was remarkably youthful; the man looked to be about seventeen years old. True to his Iowa upbringing, Horner did as his mother taught, crossed the room, stuck out his hand, and said, “Hi, Dan, I’m Chuck,” to the Vice President of the United States, Dan Quayle.

Even as his good humor and graciousness took hold, Quayle, like Cheney, probably figured, I don’t know who this odd general is, but I wonder how he made it past sergeant. He shook Horner’s hand, smiled warmly, and said, “Good to meet you, General,” without adding, “Dumb shit,” for which Horner mentally thanked him before retreating to a chair along the wall. He was soon joined there by Admiral Grant Sharp, who sat next to him.

Meanwhile, the rest of the high-level invitees entered the room — Secretary of State Jim Baker; CIA Director Judge William Webster; White House Chief of Staff John Sununu; National Security Adviser General Brent Scowcroft; Dick Cheney and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, who sat immediately behind him; and a few others.

Last came President George Bush, chatting with Generals Powell and Schwarzkopf. Bush was dressed in slacks and a windbreaker, looking young and refreshed for a man who carried the burden of the nation. When the President appeared, Horner searched carefully for what detractors called his “wimp” factor — the limp, willowy New England boarding-school boy with high-toned, squeaky voice and goofy gestures. Nothing of that showed. To the contrary: the man Horner saw was a commander in chief, cordial, polite, but in charge. Not bad, Horner thought, thinking over his initial impressions of both Cheney and the President. If we have to go to war, the civilian leaders we’ll be working for can do the job. He also remembered that the President had himself been a fighter pilot in the Navy in World War II, and knew what it was like to get hit and shot down. He was not surprised when, later, the President approached the day’s deliberations with the visceral knowledge that comes from being shot at and hit.

As he passed through the room, Bush walked past Horner’s chair and graciously reached for his hand, and Horner managed with surprising clarity, “Good morning, Mr. President, I’m Chuck Horner.”

He added to himself, Hooray, I didn’t screw that one up.

Soon the President, Powell, and Schwarzkopf took seats at the table and the meeting began.

The first business was a brief run-through of the CIA’s estimate of the situation in Kuwait and the Persian Gulf region, which was given by Judge Webster. Since Schwarzkopf had better and more recent firsthand information, based on the telephone calls to his major trapped in the hotel across from the American Embassy in Kuwait City, he jumped in with it, clearly loving the fact that he could one-up the CIA.

Score one for the CINC, Horner thought to himself. But shit, is this a tennis match? The obvious maneuvering left him cold.

Schwarzkopf was then officially introduced. As he started his briefing, Horner said two quick prayers: first, for the CINC, that his message would be accurate, accepted, and lead to the right actions. Second, that he himself would not doze off after two F-16 flights the previous day and a night without sleep.

The first prayer was answered when Schwarzkopf proved to be as effective as Horner expected, as he used map outlines to show the possible axes of Iraqi attack — most likely down the coastal highway toward Dhahran — and the ways ground forces could be employed to stop it.

And it didn’t take God long to answer the second prayer. Horner was soon in front of the slide projector, walking his way though the air component briefing. Though he was nervous, years of briefing very difficult generals about his failure to keep jets from hitting the ground and killing their pilots made this one easy. First, he talked about the size of the force they’d need (as it turned out, this would be about 30 percent of the actual war power finally deployed or at their disposal).[24] Then he talked about how long it would take them to reach the Gulf and how soon they’d be ready to fight, if it came to that: about thirty-six hours to put the force in place, and another day to take the munitions out of prepositioning storage or off of ships on the way to the Gulf from Diego Garcia. Following that, he discussed the types of missions that would be flown against which targets, in the event the Iraqi Army came across the Saudi border (including types and amounts of munitions, sortie rates, levels of success expected, and possible losses). There would be, of course, direct attacks against the lead elements of the Iraqi armoredforce, but the strategy was to trade space for time, and therefore to attack the logistical support of the attackers — the fuel, ammo, food, and water supplies. As a result, while U.S. forces might seem to be losing in head-on engagements on the ground, the Iraqi Army would be starving itself to death, and at some point — a week or two? — their attack would grind to a halt and U.S. air would then attrit the remnants in the desert wastes of Saudi Arabia.

Following the briefing, questions were asked — the kind where the questioner already knows the answer but wants to let everyone else around the table see that he’s present and accounted for. For the most part, however, these questions were not relevant, or even intelligent. “How are you going to give close air support to the Arab allies?” Answer: “The same way we give close air support to anybody else.” To Horner, the procedure was more interesting than the questions themselves. First, Horner gave Powell and Schwarzkopf a chance to field the question, while they in turn waited for Cheney. Horner felt he looked a little dense standing up there, waiting ten or twenty seconds for the senior leaders to finish their waltz.

The silliest, most shallow queries mostly came from Chief of Staff John Sununu—What’s this idiot doing here? Horner asked himself — but later, while watching CNN, he saw that the same “dumb” questions were the ones the reporters were asking, and his respect for Sununu grew. Sununu had simply been doing his job.

Meanwhile, Horner could see that Colin Powell was growing nervous that Horner was making “too good” a case for airpower — he had always found Powell easy to read — but the Chairman had such control of the meeting that he never came right out and said it.

At the first break in the questions, Horner took the opportunity to return to his seat against the wall to watch the debate that followed, primarily between State and Defense, the real centers of gravity that morning. Between those two, there was considerable staking-out of positions and ill-concealed hostility:

All of this discussion was open, freewheeling, and acrimonious in ways that set Horner wondering. Such open conflicts would never occur in a military conference, in which everyone bows to the senior officer and to the position they feel the commander has in mind. Yet he liked it. He liked to see people looking at the problem from a variety of angles. In the military, he thought, it’s too easy for everyone to back what they think the commander wants. So if you guess wrong and the boss is stupid, you strike out on two counts. Horner called such things “school solutions”—like giving an answer in a classroom because you know the teacher endorses it.

During the discussion, the President scarcely spoke. He seemed detached, even lost in deeper contemplation, as the talk whirled around the table. It was clear that he wanted to hear what people had to say and didn’t want to cast his shadow over the examination of the issues.

When he finally began to speak, two overriding concerns emerged: first, how to use military force against the Iraqis while keeping down the loss of life, and second, how to bring in other nations to form a coalition against Iraq (and thus avoid the arrogance of Vietnam). Chuck Horner easily identified with both concerns. It would have been hard for anyone who’d fought in Vietnam not to.

When Bush began raising the loss-of-life issue, Horner could see in his face and body language that it wasn’t perception, or spin, or bad headlines he was worried about. It was about people bleeding and suffering. His personal anguish over the killing was unmistakably visible, and it wasn’t just a question of U.S. lives, but of everybody’s — U.S., Allied, and even Iraqi.

Horner — already in tune with those feelings — was pretty sure that Schwarzkopf felt the same way, but the others in the room seemed inclined to discuss the issues from a more distant standpoint — the way one would talk about putting out a new product, or taking out a line of credit. “What’s the impact on our stock? What are the chances of success in the marketplace? What’s the price of failure?” But the President saw that the discussion was about human life, and while he seemed willing to go down that road, he knew at a gut level the real price that would have to be paid.

The President’s second set of concerns increased Horner’s growing respect for him, for they represented a departure from the traditional American views of the world. Instead of marching in as the all-knowing Yanks, the President was saying: “We’re not alone in the world. We need help and advice. We all have a problem, and let’s see if we can all find a consensus about fixing it.” It made Chuck Horner want to stand up and cheer.

Next, Bush moved on to practicalities: “What are we going to do about the invasion of Kuwait and the threat to Saudi Arabia?”

Baker continued to take the line that the United States must move cautiously. Powell’s thinking was similar: “We have to protect our interests in the region, but let’s not get into water that’s over our heads.” Cheney was most hawklike, but never outspokenly aggressive. His position was in tension with Baker’s, but without acrimony.

To Horner, it all seemed like a lot of posturing with very little plain talk. It was what he called the “staff two-step.” Everyone danced around the fact that they didn’t have the slightest notion about a course of action. All the smart, articulate presidential advisers, unable to give a meaningful answer, seemed more concerned about avoiding the perception of being wrong than about working the problems.

Once that became clear to the President, which didn’t take long, he asked Baker to consult with other world leaders. Bush already knew what Margaret Thatcher, the tough-minded prime minister of England, advised — he had spoken with her earlier in the week in Aspen, Colorado. She was all for kicking the Iraqis out. He planned shortly to call the French president, François Mitterand, to find out his views. “But what about King Fahd?” he asked. “After all, he is the one most threatened at this point.” Here he struck a dry hole. The President’s advisers simply repeated the positions they’d been taking all morning.

Then he turned to Cheney. “Dick, I want you to fly to Jeddah and talk to King Fahd. Find out what he thinks should be done.”

And that was it. The room was cleared of outsiders, so the principals could carry on in private. To pass the time, Horner took a short tour of Camp David with Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. The two immediately warmed to each other. Wolfowitz was a power in the Pentagon, an insider with the Secretary of Defense and extremely smart, but a humble, thoughtful, approachable, good-humored man, who was just as interested in touring Camp David as Horner was. They were like a couple of starstruck tourists: “Gee, so this is the gym…” “Gee, here’s where they watch TV…”

About the time the tour finished, the meeting of the advisers broke up. Their errand done, Horner and the others in Schwarzkopf ’s party hopped into the helicopter back to the Pentagon, then out to Andrews AFB and aboard the C-21 back to MacDill AFB.

GOODBYES

By that time, it was late afternoon, and Schwarzkopf dismissed the visibly worn-out Horner at planeside, thinking that his air commander would fly back home to South Carolina. However, a trip home wasn’t possible that day, since he was out of what the Air Force calls “crew rest”: an unbreakable rule — outside of war — says a pilot must have twelve hours of rest before he can fly. So Horner checked on his F-16, which was ready to go as always, then caught a ride over to the Visiting Officers Quarters to get some sleep, planning to fly home first thing the next morning. He was in bed by 7:00 P.M.

The phone rang. It was the Shaw AFB command post.

“General Horner, General Schwarzkopf asks that you call him secure.”

He asked for the number, then realized he didn’t have a secure phone in the VOQ room. Since General Schwarzkopf ’s house was only two blocks away, just in back of the base officers’ club, he got up, dressed, and walked over. When he rang the bell, “BeBe” Bell, the CINC’s executive officer, answered the door.

The CINC was holding a minimum-size staff meeting in the living room, and his mouth gaped when Horner walked in, thinking Horner had reappeared at MacDill via some Star Trek transporter beam.

His message to Horner was brief. Tomorrow the CINC was going to Saudi Arabia for a couple of days, and he wanted these people with him: his Army ground component commander, and old Arab hand, Lieutenant General John Yeosock; his Air Force air component commander, Chuck Horner; and his planner, Admiral Grant Sharp. The flight was leaving from Andrews about noon.

“No problem.”

“Keep the trip confidential,” Schwarzkopf added. “And bring one other person.”

Horner excused himself, ran back to the VOQ, and called Shaw AFB to set up a C-21 to leave about 10:00 A.M., to get him to Andrews by 11:30. As usual, he didn’t tell his wife. He knew that if he did, she would have to keep the secret, which was very difficult for such an open, friendly person, so he decided to keep the burden away from her.

Besides, he said to himself with a laugh, she thinks I’m an insensitive lout anyway.

★ The next morning at dawn, Chuck Horner’s F-16C leapt off the ground and soared up just as the orange ball of the sun broke the horizon.

Joy!

No matter how troubled he was, no matter how fearful or anxious, flying put his mind right. He couldn’t take his troubles with him in the jet. There was no time for extra thoughts, no room for distractions as he slipped past the tumbling bright clouds and shielded his eyes from the sun, feeling the incredible union with the beautiful, sleek jet to which he was strapped.

Shaw AFB was asleep when he landed. After the transit alert crew chocked the Lady Ashley and put her covers on, he gave her a parting glance, not knowing then that he’d never fly Lady Ashley again.[25] He threw his flight helmet, parachute harness, and G suit in the trunk of his staff car and left.

The drive home took him around the base golf course, where hackers were already out on the front nine. He could understand their eagerness. It was a beautiful South Carolina morning, and the course was lovely. Will I really be leaving all of this? he asked himself. And leaving Mary Jo yet one more time? He thought of the demands pilots asked of their wives: “Take care of the home, raise our children, and face the emergencies alone, while we chase around the world. And always be ready for the visit — you know the one.”

Mary Jo knows what’s going on in Kuwait, he thought. She knows I’m likely to go if a war starts. But it’s still not fair to her.

When Mary Jo met Chuck at the door, the questions started, as they always did when they met after an absence. But Horner could give her no answers. He was returning from a chat with the President of the United States and was about to leave home for an undetermined amount of time in a strange and distant country, but he still couldn’t talk about it. She was still asking questions as they kissed hello. He told her he needed to pack some things, and she helped him pack enough underwear and clothes for a two-day trip. Nine months later, when he returned, the shorts were worn out. As he packed, he whistled and sang the way he always did when he was about to go off and slay dragons. Mary Jo always hated it when he packed, because she knew that she was going to be left behind.

★ When General Schwarzkopf told Horner he could take one person on the trip to Saudi, he probably expected him to bring his aide, Jim Hartinger, or his executive officer, Colonel George Gitchell. But Chuck Horner’s thought process was different. He said to himself, If you’re going to a war, and you can only take one person, who would you take?

The answer was obvious — his logistician. There are three kinds of staff people who are never heroes, but without whom a commander is dead in wartime: his intelligence, communications, and logistics chiefs. He can limp along in peacetime with less than capable people in those slots, but he’s dead if there is any weakness there when the shooting starts. There is great truth in the old adage that amateur warriors study tactics, and that professionals study logistics. So Horner called his own command’s logie, Colonel Bill Rider, and told him to pack his bags for the Middle East, and to be prepared for the deployment and beddown of some fighter squadrons in the CENTCOM area of responsibility.

“Yes, sir,” he answered, “I’ll meet you at the plane.”

★ The next morning, Chuck Horner woke up the way he had many times before, eager as a bird dog before a hunt.

His goodbye kiss with Mary Jo was as special as he could make it. She still didn’t know he was leaving for war, and he wasn’t sure himself; but he couldn’t get out of his head the times when he’d left for Vietnam. Each time they’d both had serious doubts about whether they would see each other again. When he’d gone as a “Wild Weasel,” the odds had been high that he’d be killed or captured, leaving her with two kids and rapidly receding support from her Air Force family.

This day, he knew, was another such moment of truth in their marriage.

A terrible moment, as always. “There’s no justice when you marry a military person,” he observes. “Words are useless. So you just embrace and kiss each other. The pilot’s anxious, nervous, and raring to go; and she’s jealous because of all that, yet she loves him anyway, just as he loves what he does. Tears are not permitted. He can’t cry because he’s never learned how, and she can’t because it hurts too much. Besides, there will be plenty of time later during the dreary loneliness she’ll endure. So it’s an ‘I Love You’ kiss, then he’s off to somewhere that he can’t even tell her, and she’s off to play the organ at the nine o’clock Protestant service. He climbs in the car with a prayer, ‘God give me time in Heaven to be a loving husband, because I sure as hell have been a shit to her on earth.’ ”

★ This is getting to be a habit, Horner thought when the C-21 disgorged him and Bill Rider at Andrews AFB.

Waiting in the distinguished visitor lounge was Lieutenant General John Yeosock, commander of the United States Third Army, which was the Central Command ground component, known as ARCENT. He, too, had the hunting dog look.

Yeosock was a soldier other soldiers referred to as “a piece of work.” He had an IQ of about 140 and a homely face; he was totally selfless and impossible not to like. His only vice was cigars, expensive ones that came in metal tubes. John and Betta Yeosock had been at the National War College with the Horners and the Powells, and they’d all remained friends afterward. Even today, Horner and Yeosock still call Colin Powell “Your Highness.”

Soon they went out to meet Schwarzkopf ’s assigned VC-135, a military version of a Boeing 707, from the 89th Airlift Wing. Then the three of them piled into a car and headed for the Pentagon. During the ride, Horner learned that confusion had already set in. Who was going to Saudi Arabia? What was the agenda? What authority did they have to negotiate agreements? They didn’t even know whose airplane they would take. As he listened to all this, Horner kept silent, but it seemed a little disorganized for a military operation.

Since it was Sunday morning, the Pentagon was almost empty. They went directly to Secretary Cheney’s office, where Powell was waiting. As usual, the Chairman charmed everyone, especially Yeosock and Horner, because of their time in school together. A ready laugh, a hug; the man knew no strangers.

Then the discussion started. At first, it was, “Cheney’s going. No, Powell’s going. No, Cheney’s going.”

Then, “We’re going to take Schwarzkopf ’s airplane. No, Cheney’s airplane.”

Why was there all the confusion and changes of mind, especially after Camp David, when the President clearly seemed to want Cheney to talk to King Fahd? Horner had no idea.

As the powerful flew in and out of the office and talked on the phone, Horner and Yeosock chatted, mostly about how confused and screwed up the powerful seemed. They both wondered what the Saudis would think about all this, especially considering that Americans often accused them of being slow to reach a decision. They’d probably get a laugh out of watching the Americans run around in circles.

Since smoking in government buildings was prohibited, Yeosock spent some time in the bathroom. You can reasonably assume it was thick with blue cigar smoke before he left.

Finally, the powerful came out of Cheney’s office and seemed to know what was going to happen: Cheney would lead, and they’d go on his airplane. Colin Powell wished all of them the best of luck and they were off.

The trip to Jeddah was long and uneventful. The jet was a standard Boeing 707 that had been reconfigured with a private, simulated-wood-paneled “office” for VIPs just behind the cockpit. It took up about a third of the cabin space, with a double door opening toward the aft two-thirds of the aircraft; an aisle along the side of the aircraft connected the aft cabin with the plane’s entrance behind the cockpit. The VIP office had large leather chairs, a sofa that opened up into a bed, a small desk, and a telephone hooked up to the communications panels forward in the cockpit area. This let the VIPs talk with anyone in the world on encrypted telephones with the highest levels of security. The lesser lights were seated behind the office in rows of large, comfortable, business class-type airliner seats. Aft of that was a small galley where a host of stewards heated frozen TV dinners (worse, if you can imagine, than standard airline meals).

During the flight, General Schwarzkopf frequently disappeared into Cheney’s stateroom, and these visits fascinated the ordinary mortals. From where Horner sat, he could see the CINC through the open double doors squatting down next to the Secretary’s easy chair, talking with great animation and intensity. Whatever they were talking about, the CINC chose not to reveal it, so Horner and Yeosock just chatted, read, and tried to get some rest.

JEDDAH

They landed in Jeddah at 4:00 P.M. on Monday, August 6, and a blast of hot air hit them the minute the aircraft door came open. It was a not totally unwelcome reminder to Horner that he was in a country that he loved and among people that he loved. He was looking forward to seeing and working with his friends again.

Chuck Horner relates how his association with the Arab world first began:

Though I’d met a good many Arabs before 1981, the first senior Arab Air Force officer I got friendly with was a tall, taciturn brigadier general named Ahmed Behery, who was then the base commander at Taif.[26] By 1990, Behery had become commander of the RSAF, the Saudi Air Force.

In 1981, Behery was escorting an energetic, fast-talking prince, whose name was Bandar bin Sultan (then a colonel in the Saudi Air Force and a pretty fair F-15 pilot, and more recently the Saudi ambassador to the United States and a major player in the Gulf War), on a visit to Nellis AFB. Major General Bob Kelly, the Fighter Weapons Center commander, held a garden party in their honor, and the wing commander of the tenant wing at Nellis, the 474th TFW, Colonel Chuck Horner and his wife Mary Jo, were invited. The generals and host wing commander clustered around Bandar, who is extremely charming, and so I felt it wise to converse with the equally tall and distinguished, but much quieter, commander from Taif. Mary Jo and I walked over to him and introduced ourselves.

Behery is extremely shy, but not because other people frighten him. He is just reluctant to meet and greet. We made small talk for a while, until Mary Jo, in her blunt Iowa manner, broke in with some gripes against Arab men that had long rankled her. A particular incident still burned: During the days I was the wing commander at Williams AFB, we used to go to the graduation dinners for the foreign military sales training classes in the F-5E. At one of these, Mary Jo tried to strike up a conversation with an Arab student, either Saudi or Jordanian. Mary Jo is so open and friendly, it’s hard for her to grasp how anyone can fail to respond to her overtures. So when this one did — he was off-puttingly distant, stiff, and unfriendly — she took that as a characteristic of the people. I suspect the man was more concerned that she was the wing commander’s wife than that he was talking to a woman without a veil. Nonetheless, she came away with the idea that Arab men patronize women.

When Mary Jo concluded, “So you see, General Behery, Arab men are stuck up and snooty when they talk to me, and that’s why I don’t like to talk to them,” he actually beamed with amusement. And his good humor remained as he explained to both of us why Arab men are somewhat aloof when dealing with Western women (they are not used to the aggressive behavior of strangers, especially women). Then, becoming quite serious, he gave us a nutshell lecture about the differences between the Arab and the Western view of women.

What he had to say was no surprise — the usual line that in his culture women are held in high esteem, much as they were in our South before the Civil War. For that reason, it is considered important to protect the sanctity of women, and ill-mannered for a man to talk directly to another man’s wife. That is the reason for the veils and flowing garments. They protect women, he told us, much as one protects honey from flies by placing a cloth over the bowl. And yet he didn’t stop there. The time he had spent in the United States had made him familiar enough with our culture to be aware that our women resented the kind of protection Arab men and women take for granted. He knew that what was protection for an Arab woman was suppression for an American. And he had no problems with that. In fact, Behery saw both cultures for what there were: both had good and bad elements. Good people in each culture who did the right thing for the right reasons would make each culture work, while bad people would screw things up, no matter where they were.

The conversation, which went on for hours, was a little revelation — not because he’d told us anything new, but because he was truthful, open, sensitive, and fair. I loved his honesty, insight, and understanding. Or as Bill Creech used to say, “You only get one chance to make a first impression.” In this case, the impression Behery made was decidedly favorable.

Break Break. It was now seven years later. I had been told I was going to replace Bill Kirk as Ninth Air Force commander, but it had not been announced. Bill Kirk was about to take our boss, Bob Russ, around the Middle East, so Bob could see how the TAC men and women were living and serving in those countries: Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Oman, and Pakistan. Since this would become my beat, Bob took me along. While I was in Saudi, I met Behery again, and was even more impressed when I saw him on his own turf.

Americans have a tendency to look down on other people (I’ve done that myself). But when we meet foreigners who exceed our rather low opinion of what they should be, we tend to go too far in the other direction and get overawed by them. Let me tell you, all the Arab leaders that I met, colonel and above, were very impressive, and not because I was overawed — Turki at Dhahran, Sudairy in Riyadh, Henadi at RSAF, on and on. These men are truly exceptional individuals, regardless of where they are from.

In my journeys around Saudi Arabia, I found a far different country from ours. It’s quiet, for one thing — a quiet that comes from the isolation; there aren’t many people there; so for a New Yorker it must be hell on earth, but for an Iowan it is natural. The food is strange but good. And I love the exotic customs and traditions, the extremely handsome architecture, the smells of spice. The weather is hot and dry, to be sure, but I can take that. You don’t miss our television; and besides, you get to hear prayer call now and then during the day, especially before sunup and at sunset. This is beautiful, even though you don’t understand the words. And finally, the tradition of the desert demands that hosts honor guests; there is nothing that competes with the welcome provided by an Arab host; he is delighted to honor his guest. Truly all that he has is at your disposal. Your home is his home.

Saudi Arabia is not my land or my home, but I have loved it more than I could love many of the places where I’ve visited or lived in my own country. A binding and genuine friendship with the Saudi land and people has grown steadily over the years and has touched me deeply.

After I took over Ninth Air Force, I made regular visits to the Middle East to visit my troops and see to their needs, to work issues associated with the prepositioned materials in the region, and to forge relationships with the leaders of the various nations’ air forces. Sometimes these negotiations were very difficult, yet they were always carried on with mutual respect. Each side knew the other was only trying to do the best for his country — certainly an honorable motive.

I sensed, too, that they held (and still hold) the USAF in high respect, and I made sure we did nothing to weaken that esteem. So when one of our people committed an unlawful act, I took quick action — not primarily to come down hard on whoever was responsible, but to make sure that the countries involved know that Americans respect their national sovereignty.

In time I began to read all I could about the region and came to appreciate the long and rich history that goes back well before Europeans were still clubbing supper and living in skin shelters. I studied Islam and discovered its similarities with Judaism and Christianity. There is a common heritage that is lost when the doctrinaire types feud over ideas that are human interpretations of what God is all about, not what God thinks he is all about. Most significantly, I discovered that Arabs respect Americans because we work hard, we honor our own religion (or at least most of us do), and because we have for the most part dealt with them honorably.

On numerous occasions in those years, I negotiated with the various nations in the region about cooperation in the event of a crisis there. And we were involved in a number of major operations, such as protection of the oil fields and refineries during the Iran-Iraq War and the tanker reflagging and escort of Kuwaiti tankers down the Arabian Gulf and through the Strait of Hormuz during the time when the Iranian Revolutionary Guard were attacking them. I also helped out where I could: I spoke in their war colleges, I attended joint and combined exercises in the region, and I visited their people in the United States… little things and big things, because it was my job and because it was the right thing to do.

I soon became sensitive to the way Arabs have been presented to the American people. Not well. It’s another zero-sum game. Because we’re pro-Israel (and I have no quarrel with that), we look down on the Arabs. When was the last time Chuck Norris fought a terrorist who wasn’t Asian or Arab? Ignorant terms like “Islamic fundamentalist terrorist” fill our newspapers — as though all Muslims were fundamentalists and terrorists. Sure, I have met Arabs I don’t like or trust. And there are as many dumb son-of-a-bitch Arabs as there are in any culture, but the Arab military officers I have worked with have earned my respect, and I hope they hold me in the same regard.

Trust takes time, but when you have it, you have a wonderful gift. I cannot tell you how binding the emotions are between me and my close Saudi and other Arab friends; it is genuine and deep.

★ Jeddah is located on the Red Sea about midway down the Saudi coast. It is a large city, the capital of the westernmost province of the kingdom, and the port of entry for pilgrims to the holy city of Mecca. The airport is vast, and during the hajj, millions of travelers pass through it from all over the world to travel to Mecca. It is a beautiful, majestic city, old and new, with blue sky, blue water, and blue hazy mountains to the east. Its mosques are lovely, quiet, and splendid. There are grand parks along the waterfront, palm trees, and old buildings built out of huge blocks of coral cut from the sea, their balconies decorated with delicate carved wooden screens. A giant water fountain shoots water high into the air. The same sailing ships Arab seamen have used for centuries fill the harbor.

Because of its long history as a port, codes aren’t enforced as strictly in Jeddah (or in Dhahran, on the Gulf) as in the interior. For example, foreign women are not harassed when their hair is uncovered as much as they are in Riyadh. And because of its proximity to the sea and to more moderate weather, the summer palace is located there — actually beside the sea, in a grove of date palms.

The American party descended the aircraft ramp past the Saudi honor guard and the ever-present television cameras with their satellite hookups. As always, CNN was there, which got a laugh from Horner. He couldn’t tell his wife where he was going, yet when she turned on the morning news, there’d be her husband in Jeddah walking down the steps behind Secretary Cheney.

Soon they were in the Saudi VOQ, which was inland about ten blocks from the palace. Like the palace, the VOQ was surrounded by date palms, which provided much-needed shade from the glaring sun and gave cool relief from the hot ride in from the airport. Hot gaua followed by hot sweet tea was offered. Chuck Horner was home.

The gaua service followed ancient Bedouin custom. In the past, the desert dweller would roast green coffee beans over a camel-dung fire, and then grind the roasted beans with cardamom seeds and brew a greenish, sweetish, heavily flavored coffee in a distinctive long-spouted brass pot. Since water is so scarce, the coffee is served in tiny cups without handles, small enough to hide in the palm of one’s hand. Maybe two tablespoons of coffee are drained with great flourish down the twelve-inch-long spout into a cup. This is offered first to the senior personage, then other cups are offered to each guest according to rank and status. He downs the boiling hot fluid in one or two gulps and holds the cup out again for seconds or to be collected. Normally, he takes only one or two cups, signaling the server that he’s had enough by tipping the cup slightly. After the coffee, the server will return with a silver tray filled with small mugs of steaming hot tea, sweetened with two or more lumps of sugar. The taste of the tea will vary from area to area, depending on the local custom. But invariably, it is flavored with spearmint.

No matter how long a man has traveled, no matter how mysterious or strange the desert nation may seem, this simple ceremony, repeated every time he meets his Arab host at the airport, in his home, or even in his office, becomes the familiar opening that lets him know he is a welcome and honored guest. He is truly home.

When you are hosted by the king, you never go hungry. Sodas, juice, and dates and nuts were available in the VOQ rooms; dinner was served about eight; and Horner could call room service at any hour for anything else he wanted.

Sometime toward midnight — for that’s when business in Saudi Arabia normally takes place — the U.S. delegation made the short trip over to King Fahd’s palace. During the day, just as in the West, a visitor meets with his Saudi counterpart and talks over whatever subject is on his agenda. After nightfall, when things have had a chance to cool off, he gets together late and drinks tea and juice, and sometimes has dinner. Then, around midnight, he gets down to serious business and decisions are reached.

The trip to the Palace of the Defender of the Two Holy Mosques was a first for Horner. He’d heard it was splendid, and he was eager to check it out.

It turned out to be every bit as lovely as its reputation — with the usual Arab features: curving arches; brown, tan, or reddish-brown adobe; earth tones that blended in with the color of the surrounding desert; brick stairs; flowered tiles; fountains; and a glorious profusion of roses. The Saudis are especially astute at creating serenity and comfort in the midst of the beautiful but harsh desert in which they live.

While Horner and John Yeosock waited in an outer room, General Schwarzkopf and Secretary Cheney met with the King, joined by Chas Freeman, the U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, and Major General Don Kaufman,[27] the top U.S. military officer residing in the kingdom.

During that session, King Fahd made one of the most courageous, farsighted decisions ever made by an Arab leader. The situation was clear. Iraq was in Kuwait, and much of the Kuwaiti population was in various Saudi Arabian hotels. The Iraqi army was on the border, and while it had not threatened to attack, no one could forget that Saddam had promised not to attack Kuwait either. All of this was a good argument to invite the help of the Americans and other friends.

On the other hand, asking in the Americans presented the Saudis with serious problems — not, as some people think, because the Saudis feared and rejected America and the West. That wasn’t true. The Saudis admired and respected the West. Inviting in the Americans was problematic because Saudi Arabia was the most deeply fundamental Islamic nation. To the Saudis, fundamental Islam required them to stay as close to the teaching of the Holy Prophet and the Holy Koran as possible, and this required them to reject the aspects of our culture that, in their view, were offensive to God, such as pornography, drunkenness, and the like. They had no wish to encourage the spread of these vices inside their country. Like it or not, many Arabs viewed the people of the United States (including the U.S. military) as drunken, pot-smoking skirt-chasers. The ghost of Vietnam haunting us again.

So here was the King of Saudi Arabia trying to work out what to do after an army of brother Arabs had successfully invaded a neighboring brother country. As he gazed upon that ghastly situation, he couldn’t help but ask himself, “Will my Arab brother attack me?” even as the ruler of the attacking country assured him that his armies meant no harm. So should he trust the good intentions of his admittedly treacherous brother, or should he invite a foreign legion of godless drunks and rapists to defend his people? It was one hell of a choice!

For a long time, the debate continued in Arabic between the King and his brothers, with Cheney, Schwarzkopf, Freeman, Wolfowitz, and a few other American representatives still in the room (since Freeman spoke Arabic, the main points of the debate were later reported to the others). On and on, with no clear answers. Then, at last, the King articulated very simply what he had probably had in mind ever since it had become clear that the United States was willing to offer military help… Horner wasn’t to know what that was, however, until after the meeting broke up.

As the American delegation left the Palace of the Defender of the Two Holy Mosques, everyone seemed unusually calm and peaceful. Cool breezes were blowing off the Red Sea, fountains sang in the courtyard. The only other sound was the chirp the tires made, like sneakers on marble, as the staff cars glided over the polished tile driveway. The delegation filed into the cars without speaking, everyone deep in thought, heavily troubled by what lay ahead.

Horner and Paul Wolfowitz climbed into the backseat of the car they were sharing. As they drove out the massive gates of the palace grounds, Horner quietly asked him how things had gone in the inner sanctum. “The King has asked us to come in and help,” he said, with some wonder in his voice. “He said I’ve seen this nation come too far to have it destroyed.”

It was as simple as that. Yet it meant that Chuck Horner was about to embark on nine of the most intense months of his life.

Back at the guest quarters, Secretary Cheney held a short staff meeting to discuss what needed to be done right away. Then everyone turned in for some well-needed rest.

Even though Horner was worried that the change in time zones and the adrenaline racing through his veins might make sleep impossible, for some reason he enjoyed one of the best nights of sleep he’d ever had. The decision had been made. Now all he had to do was execute his end of the operation.

The following morning the Americans met with the King’s younger brother, Prince Sultan, the Minister of Defense and Aviation, the Arab equivalent of Cheney. After everyone filed into the vast, luxurious reception room (there was a light scent of rose water in the air), Prince Sultan took a seat in the corner in a large upholstered chair, Cheney sat to his right, while Prince Bandar stood between them to translate. (By this time, Bandar was the Saudi Ambassador to the United States; smart and devastatingly charming, he was the equal to Colin Powell at political maneuvering.) Prince Sultan, Bandar’s father, was fluent enough in English to conduct the meeting in that language, but this was not the time for misunderstandings. Each word had to be carefully weighed before it was spoken; and then it was up to the former F-15 fighter pilot, Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdullah Aziz, to make sure everyone understood what each side was agreeing to. Meanwhile, various Saudi military and the rest of the U.S. delegation took other chairs. Except for Sultan, all the Saudi military chiefs were in Riyadh.

Those in the room were tense and uncertain. They were in the first moments of a singularly important marriage, and the bride and groom were not sure they could get along… though they were more than willing to try. John Yeosock’s and Chuck Horner’s long experience in that part of the world — only Ambassador Chas Freeman knew the Arabs better — made them probably the most relaxed Americans there. They were familiar enough with Arabic not to totally depend on the translator; and, more important, they could read the facial expressions and body language of the Arabs, which allowed them to understand the emotions behind much of what was going on.

This is what the two sides agreed to that morning: the Saudis would open their bases and ports to U.S. military forces, and pay for the lion’s share of the huge undertaking upon which both nations were embarking. The U.S. representatives promised that their forces would respect Saudi laws and culture, and would leave immediately when requested by their hosts. The United States had learned from Vietnam.

Once all this was settled, another question came up: who’d be in charge while the CINC returned to the States to start the great enterprise that would become Desert Shield? Someone had to be appointed as the United States’ forward commander, to stay in the capital in Riyadh to organize and run things as the units and supplies arrived in-country — and to be in command of U.S. forces, in the CINC’s absence, in the event of an Iraqi attack. After some discussion, General Schwarzkopf, sitting next to Secretary Cheney, pointed across the room to Lieutenant General Chuck Horner, USAF.

Two feelings hit Horner as he learned that for the next few weeks he was to be “CENTCOM Forward.” First the big head—“Gee, I’m going to be in charge!”—swiftly followed by the more chilling realization that what he was in charge of could become a tremendous, tragic disaster. He thanked God silently for the presence of John Yeosock, Grant Sharp, and Don Kaufman, who were sitting beside him in that grand but somber meeting hall. Another prayer, never far from his lips, also came. “Please, God, keep me from screwing things up.”

By midafternoon, Cheney and the others returning to Washington were at Jeddah’s international airport, delivering last-minute instructions to those who were to stay in Saudi Arabia. No one there guessed that in six short months, this huge complex, called Jeddah New, the primary entry point for Islamic pilgrims making the hajj to the two holy cities of Mecca and Medina, would be wall-to-wall with B-52 bombers and KC-135 tankers.

Meanwhile, over two dozen battle-hardened Iraqi divisions stood at the border. Horner had at his disposal exactly two armored-car companies of Saudi National Guards.

In the windy afternoon heat, amid the bustle of loading and goodbyes, Schwarzkopf and Horner stood on the airport ramp, at the foot of the stairs leading up to Cheney’s 707, and discussed what needed to be done.

Among the points they talked about was campaign planning. “Since your staff will be disrupted packing up and deploying,” Schwarzkopf said, “I’m going to ask the Joint Staff”—the planning staff of the JCS in the Pentagon—“to start work on a strategic air campaign plan.” (Later this became the USAF staff in the Pentagon.)

The phrase “strategic air campaign” rang like Easter bells in Chuck Horner’s head. The CINC was acting like a CINC and not like an Army general. Instead of talking about a ground campaign to repel an Iraqi invasion or to evict the Iraqis from Kuwait, he was talking strategic[28] air campaign.

What did that mean?

Most air campaign plans are put together at the behest of the Army, and the purpose of the Army is to defeat the enemy army. To an army person, air planning means using airpower to support his own operations. That is not the way an airman looks at it. To the airman, his job is to defeat the enemy—a job that may or may not include defeating an enemy army. Therefore, the Air Force code for use of airpower aimed at the heart of the enemy, and not at his ground forces, is strategic air campaign.

Back in April 1990, Horner had briefed Schwarzkopf about the need for a strategic air campaign plan in preparation for the planned July Internal Look exercise. The scenario there had been army-against-army, but Horner had wanted to show airpower as something beyond a ground support role, to expose his new boss to ways of thinking that would allow Horner to exercise airpower in a more productive and effective way. At the briefing, Horner had talked ballistic missile defense, close air support, how to work with Allied air forces, and how to use airpower “strategically.” Schwarzkopf had liked the briefing and, as always, was sensitive to expanding his concept of airpower to complement his already vast understanding of land power.

Thus, when Schwarzkopf started talking right from the start about the need for a strategic air campaign plan, he showed that he remembered that briefing back in April. More important, in Chuck Horner’s view, he showed that he had grown up — and away from — his Army roots.

For a moment, Horner was thrilled. How could he not be?

But then the sounds in his head changed from Easter bells to Klaxons, and the ghosts of Vietnam assaulted him. “Washington?… the Pentagon?… Shit!” As soon as it dawned on him that the CINC intended to have the plans made in Washington, Horner went ballistic and shouted, “Okay, but we ain’t picking the goddamn targets in Washington!”

Though his air component commander’s anger caught him off guard, Schwarzkopf smiled. “Look, Chuck,” he said, “you’re my air boss, with final veto authority over everything connected with air. Any air plans will be ‘presented’ to you. We’re going to plan and execute this war in the theater.” He, too, remembered Vietnam.

The Joint Staff has its virtues, Horner was thinking, as he heard these words. It’s even good at a few things. But it’s best at compromise between the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps. Any plan that is the product of compromise is bound to be mediocre. And any air plan that is built by anyone other than airmen is bound to be a disaster. Horner trusted that Schwarzkopf knew this in his guts and would ensure that any work started in Washington would be delivered to the fliers who had to execute it and succeed. He proved true to his word.

After the VIPs boarded their aircraft and headed home to America, Grant Sharp and Paul Wolfowitz left to tour the Gulf allies to consult, seek agreements, and secure support for the U.S. forces, while Ambassador Freeman, John Yeosock, his aide, Major Fong, Don Kaufman, Bill Rider, and Horner boarded a small, twin-engine C-12 prop plane operated by an outfit known as “GUTS Airline” (Greater USMTM[29] Transportation System — Kaufman’s guys). Flying in this fragile-looking aircraft didn’t bother Horner, but the Ambassador and Major Fong looked a little worried as they bounced into the hot desert air. Horner sat back in his seat as the noise from the props drowned out attempts at conversation, and tried to work out what he had to do.

Earlier, he had already started to unleash the flood of aerial reinforcements by notifying Bob Russ at TAC to get the 1st Tactical Fighter Wing F-15Cs headed east to supplement the Royal Saudi Air Force F-15s and Saudi AWACS who had been guarding the skies around the clock since the invasion.

The 1st Fighter Wing would be assigned the air-to-air missions, while the other wing, the 363d Fighter Wing, would be assigned primarily to do air-to-ground missions with their F-16C swing fighters. These were the two Ninth Air Force wings Horner had put on alert in July at the start of the crisis. For this, he had taken some heat from his bosses in the Air Force who were not in the CENTCOM chain of command. He also had the other Ninth Air Force units leaning forward.

Meanwhile, the Navy had a carrier task force headed for the Gulf, and Marines embarked on transports were also en route, as was Horner’s good friend, Lieutenant General Gary Luck, with the lead elements of the XVIII Airborne Corps, primarily the paratroopers of the 82d Airborne Division.[30]

He then ran over where they would unload the Army and Marine Corps, as well as where to beddown the forces. How do we house and feed them? he asked himself, with the memory of the Beirut barracks bombing, where hundreds of Marines had lost their lives, still fresh in his mind. While Saudi Arabia was the safest nation in the world, some there would still side with Saddam Hussein. What could they do to our forces as they deployed into the airfields and ports? he asked himself. And then as they moved to the bases and into the desert? No matter how good the Saudi or U.S. forces were that were tasked to provide security, a single well-placed bomb could wipe out the deploying CENTCOM staff. Riyadh hotels were also an inviting target, vulnerable to a well-trained Iraqi special forces team.

If the threat of air or terrorist attack, or just plain accident (as in the crash of a troop-filled aircraft) weren’t enough to give him pause, there were the growing numbers of Iraqi tanks and troops just over the border to the north. Consequently, the single most important question Horner had to ask himself in those dark days before his own forces were in place was What will we do if the Iraqis come across the border tonight? That particular night, any effective response would have been tough, since there wasn’t much standing between the Iraqis and Riyadh but the Saudi Air Force and hundreds of miles of desert. If they’d come toward Riyadh that night, Horner planned to drive to Jeddah and rent a boat. Each night thereafter, new and stronger forces were available to resist the invasion that never came.

Added to those questions were the more complex everyday problems of gaining the enthusiastic cooperation of all the host nations — not only Saudi Arabia but Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, and Egypt.

When one is doing business in the Middle East, the first requirement is patience. The American way is to focus on the heart of a problem, define a course of action, and implement the solution. In the Arab world, business is done more gently. Since personal relationships are all-important, business is conducted with a leisurely civility. A promise is given only after great deliberation, for once one’s word is given, it must be kept. The Arab way is to discuss, consider, and avoid mistakes made in haste. The Arab way is to take time to understand all aspects of a situation; they have a deep aversion to making mistakes that could cause hard feelings between individuals, tribes, or nations. So Horner knew that all he needed was a couple of years to discuss how to beddown the oncoming troops, how to organize command arrangements, and who should accomplish which tasks, where, and when, in order to make the deployment a success.

Time. Time was the real enemy. The desert summer of the Arabian Peninsula was a killer, and Iraqi intentions were unknown.

Sitting there in his aircraft seat, winging toward Riyadh, a hollow feeling came over him; fearful thoughts slithered through his brain. I can’t do it, he told himself. I’m not adequate. I won’t get it right. No one’s capable of meeting these challenges.

Until it came to him: I don’t have to succeed. John Yeosock, Bill Rider, and a host of others are here. I’m not alone. More important, none of us is alone. God’s always present. So I’ ll trust in God. Inshallah.

When they arrived at Riyadh Air Base, on the afternoon of Tuesday the seventh of August, Chuck Horner and the other Americans were greeted by Major General Harawi, the base commander and a friend of Horner’s since his initial visit to the Kingdom in 1987. In their three years working together, he and Harawi had learned to solve issues “offline” that might have gotten stuck in both countries’ bureaucracies if they’d been handled more formally. Meanwhile, Harawi spread the word that Horner could be trusted, which helped cement Horner’s already growing friendship with General Behery, the RSAF chief, and a close friend of Harawi’s. Among Arabs, friendship is everything.

The air base, now perched on the northeast corner of the city, had once served as the international airport, but modern hotels, apartment buildings, and shops spreading out of the old city center had crowded it, requiring the construction of a huge new facility, King Khalid International Airport, out in the desert well to the north.

General Harawi’s base housed the Saudi Air Force E-3 AWACS aircraft, a C-130 squadron, and the Air Force academy, with its collocated flight training school. For almost ten years it had also hosted the USAF ELF-1 AWACS aircraft and tankers that flew out of Riyadh twenty-four hours a day, and had provided early-warning radar coverage for the Saudi’s eastern province during the Iran-Iraq War and the oil tanker convoy operation in 1988 and 1989.

During those years, Harawi had cared for a TDY family of about 1,000 U.S. Air Force men and women. If any of them had a run-in with the police or the Mutawa, the religious police force, Harawi got them out of it and sent them back to the United States. Alternatively, if the hotel contractor tried to skimp on food or room services, Harawi paid him a call to remind him that the Saudi government was spending a great deal of money to make sure the USAF AWACS people were well taken care of during their stay in the kingdom. He had a major operation at Riyadh, and owing to its proximity to town, many VIPs used it, yet he looked after the American troops as if they were his own sons and daughters.[31]

Yeosock, Kaufman, Horner, and Harawi sat down in the elegant VIP reception lounge, with its cool, scented air, easeful light, splendid chandelier, and what seemed to be acres of blue-and-white Persian rug, while a tall, impassive Sudanese steward served gaua and sweet tea. In the coming months, the presidents and prime ministers, congressmen and parliamentarians who flocked to the Gulf to cheer and be seen with the troops of the coalition would all pass through this same impressive space. There they’d be served gaua and tea by the same impassive steward and be given the opportunity to make the transition from the rushed intensity of the West to the more measured pace of Saudi Arabia.

After a decent interval for small talk, Harawi probed Horner about events in occupied Kuwait and the other countries (many of them unfriendly) that bordered the Kingdom. What was happening in occupied Kuwait? Who’d gotten out and who’d gotten killed? What were the Iraqi forces doing? Would they attack or not attack? What was going to happen in Yemen and Sudan? On the adjacent seas? Like most Saudis, Harawi’s primary source of information was rumors; the entire Kingdom lived on rumor. Information there was on very close hold, which meant that accurate information was truly valuable, and having such information gave the possessor great power. Even a two-star general such as Harawi was not in the top-level information loop, which meant that he had access to more rumors than news.

News was particularly important, because, unlike Americans, who think of threats from far away, Saudis thought of threats from a tight, immediate circle — Iraq, Iran, Yemen, or even Sudan. Their sensitivity was very acute, their fears very immediate.

Practically, in his capacity as Saudi AWACS commander, Harawi needed an accurate assessment of Iraqi intentions. His AWACS aircraft were maintaining twenty-four-hour coverage over the northeast. His immediate problem was that the single E-3 they had airborne (out of the five they owned[32]) could cover only a small sector at any one time (approximately one-fourth of the border), and the border between Iraq and Saudi Arabia was very long. This left gaps in the low-level radar coverage. If the Iraqi air force came south anywhere but in the east, the RSAF would have to depend on ground-based radar to pick up the attack. Harawi was worried that the Iraqis would take advantage of this weakness and make an attack on the kingdom — and Riyadh Air Base was a prime target.

After Horner had filled him in as best he could, and assured him that enough E-3s were on the way to fill his gap, the two friends said their goodbyes; then Kaufman, Yeosock, and Horner packed into a waiting car for the trip to MODA (the Ministry of Defense and Aviation) and a meeting with the heads of the Saudi military forces and their chairman, General Muhammad al-Hamad. Hamad, the Kingdom’s only active-duty four-star general, was Colin Powell’s counterpart.

Horner had known the tough but amiable soldier for well over three years, and made sure to call on him first thing whenever he visited the Kingdom. Their previous encounters had always been friendly, yet challenging. He wondered how this one would turn out.

Unlike Horner’s counterparts, Behery and Harawi, who’d worked closely with him to solve practical, military cooperation problems, the job of the head of the Saudi military was to work the larger political-military picture. Specifically, he had to raise a modern military in a part of the world where there were real, immediate threats. For that, he needed U.S. help, though he was not always comfortable admitting it, or rather, he needed to be able to buy up-to-date American military equipment and training. Since the U.S. government had traditionally been acutely sensitive to the wishes of those who saw U.S. cooperation with Saudi Arabia as inimical to the best interests of Israel, the history of U.S.-Saudi military cooperation at Hamad’s level had not been rosy.

As a result, whenever Hamad and Horner met, Hamad would welcome the American three-star warmly in English, a language he spoke perfectly. Gaua and tea, and talk of family and friends, would follow. Then he would switch to Arabic, to make sure his words were accurate, and, through a translator, give Horner a savage tongue-lashing — usually because the Congress was not acting on a military case of vital interest to Saudi Arabia. After the chewing-out, the talks would resume in English, with the tough Arab soldier wearing a broad smile and a twinkle in his eye. He would then wish Horner well and send him on his way. The routine never varied. Though he was dead serious, it was not personal. It was role-playing.

Why did he take shots at Horner? Because he was the closest American just then; and in the American setup you never knew who could really get things done. Hamad didn’t know Horner from Adam in those prewar days, but he did know Horner outranked the two-star he had in his building who was the USMTM commander.

The car carrying the Americans passed through the air base’s main gate, beyond which was a traffic circle. In the center of the circle was a large fountain. At one time the water had flowed out of the lip of a huge gaua pot, with four smaller gaua pots on the sides, and it thus became known as Teapot Circle. In 1989, the Saudis had torn the gaua pots down and put in a tiered water fountain with spray shooting out of the top — but it was still called Teapot Circle.

After swinging around the circle, the car headed south down Airport Boulevard toward the old city. Along this major artery was a complex of buildings that housed the Saudi military headquarters. Two blocks from the base was the MODA officers’ club — rooms for guests, dining areas, athletic fields, and gyms for men and women. Although it was much larger than its American counterparts, it had all the features an American military officer might expect to find, save one. There was no bar.

Next to the MODA club was the United States Military Training Mission (USMTM) compound. This covered a city block, and was walled. Within the walls were offices, a club (also no bar), a soccer field, some small houses, and two high-rise apartment buildings where John Yeosock and Chuck Horner would room together for the next nine months. The job of USMTM was to administer the various foreign military sales contracts the United States had established with Saudi Arabia. There were Army, Navy, and Air Force sections, each with staffs ranging up to two hundred people, including those who instructed the Saudi military in the use of the equipment or in setting up the training programs they had purchased from the United States. For example, at the AWACS wing, there was a USAF cadre who lived in Saudi Arabia for a year or two and trained their Saudi counterparts in the operation and maintenance of the E-3 AWACS. The two-star commander of USMTM worked for the commander in chief of Central Command.

A few blocks down from the USMTM compound was the beautiful brown-and-blue marble headquarters of the Royal Saudi Air Force. Horner would make his office here after General Schwarzkopf arrived. Along the way were hotels and upscale shops, including a Holiday Inn just past Suicide Circle, the roundabout immediately south of the RSAF headquarters, and so called because to enter it was to take one’s life in one’s hands, and many old buildings in the process of being torn down. Farther down Airport Boulevard were the buildings that housed the Royal Saudi Land Forces (RSLF) and the Royal Saudi Naval Forces (RSNF). At last, the gleaming white MODA facility rose up on the right, about two and a half miles from the air base. It was a seven-story office building, with a high wall around it and a single square tower rising up in front. A much larger, three-winged building extended back from the street, and was backed by a five-tiered parking lot.

At about 3:00 P.M., the car carrying the American party turned in past the guards and into the parking garage in the rear. From there, they were escorted to General Hamad’s office, where Hamad and the Saudi chiefs of services — land, sea, air, and air defense — were waiting.

During the walk through the lovely, spacious MODA complex, Don Kaufman offered a few suggestions:

First: the MODA building would be a good place for CENTCOM Headquarters.

A terrific idea, it instantly flashed on Horner. In that way, CENTCOM could be collocated with the Saudi JCS equivalent… and in so doing they’d be going a long way toward avoiding some of the major mistakes of Vietnam, where — except for some showcase “combined headquarters” and “liaison groups”—the Americans had remained apart from the South Vietnamese. Horner wanted everyone acting as one team: all equals, no “big brother come to save your ass” act.

Second: there was a newly completed underground command center at MODA; Horner should ask General Hamad to let CENTCOM use it.

Third: Horner would be welcome to use USMTM staff ’s small suite of rooms at MODA for his advance headquarters.

All three sounded so right to Horner that he enlisted Kaufman on the spot as his chief of staff.[33]

A few moments later, they were shown into Hamad’s conference room. Since the start of the crisis, Hamad had been meeting daily with his service chiefs; the Americans were now to be part of such a meeting. Around the large table sat Horner’s closest Saudi friend, Lieutenant General Behery, head of the Royal Saudi Air Force. Next to him sat the Saudi land force commander, Lieutenant General Josuf Rashid, and the commander of the Saudi naval forces, Vice Admiral Talil Salem Al-Mofadhi. Also present was the head of MODA Plans and Operations, Major General Jousif Madani. And finally, to General Hamad’s left, was a man Horner didn’t yet know, Lieutenant General Khaled bin Sultan, who at the time was the commander of the Royal Saudi Air Defense Forces, and was soon to become the Saudi military commander and Schwarzkopf ’s coalition equal.

Khaled, another, older son of Prince Sultan, was a big man, well over six feet tall and weighing two hundred-plus pounds, with a black mustache and dark hair combed straight back. He’d attended Sandhurst, Great Britain’s West Point, and spoke English and French fluently.

Khaled (as Horner was to learn very shortly) was a forceful man — probably due to his Sandhurst training. Instead of the bobbing-and-weaving style of most Arabs — who were so polite you couldn’t tell what they were for or against — he was direct. With Khaled, you knew where you stood, which made it much easier to work with him than with most Arabs.

Everyone shook hands all around, and after some polite remarks, got down to business. Two or three people on the USMTM staff gave the group the same briefings Cheney had given the King, including intelligence photos. There wasn’t much new there: the Iraqis were in Kuwait, much of Kuwait was in Saudi Arabia, and there were scarcely any serious military forces to stop the twenty-seven Iraqi divisions then in Kuwait from swinging south. For now, however, these seemed to be digging in on the border. The implication was that they weren’t planning an immediate attack. On the other hand, a military person plans to counter capability and takes little solace in intent. The military has been fooled too often.

Horner then gave to the assembled Saudis a brief rundown of the visit to Jeddah — the reason for it, Bush’s instruction to find out the King’s needs and wishes, as well as some insight into what had taken place at the meeting with Sultan that morning and what was likely to happen during the next few weeks:

As a result of the King’s invitation to U.S. military forces, U.S. Marines from the 7th Marine Expeditionary Brigade would soon be arriving in Jubail; meanwhile, the 82d Airborne would be moving into Dhahran, followed by the 24th Mechanized Infantry Division and the 101st Air Assault Division. Fighter squadrons would be going to every major Saudi air base. The 1st TFW F-15Cs and 552d AWCW E-3 AWACS aircraft were already en route. The Kingdom was about to receive hundreds of thousands of Americans: an urgent response to the military threat, but also an unwanted disruption to a culture vastly different from that of the United States.

Most of these generals had attended U.S. higher military schools at Fort Leavenworth or Maxwell AFB, so they understood the enormity of this deployment. However, none of them there — including Chuck Horner — had ever experienced such a movement in real life. He was ready for mass confusion, and he was not surprised when it hit full force.

At that point, the number one Saudi concern reared up. General Hamad broached it as if he were reading a script.

“Chuck, you’re not going to deploy women, are you?”

It was more a plea than a question.

“General Hamad,” Horner answered, “you know our services are totally integrated, that women make up ten to twenty percent of the units, and that even if we decided to prevent women from coming to the Kingdom, we couldn’t do it because it would make our units combat-ineffective.”

Hamad knew all this, and Horner knew he knew. They had worked this issue for the past ten years, as women assigned to AWACS had deployed to Saudi Arabia.

“Well, Chuck,” General Hamad pleaded earnestly, “I know you are not going to let your women drive.”

Here he was also well aware that women assigned to AWACS drove when they were on duty, in uniform, if their job required it. Sure, there were occasions when women drove while off duty or not in a uniform, but Horner had never heard about it, and therefore, in the logic of the Saudis, it didn’t happen.

“General Hamad,” Horner spoke softly, “these women will be leaving their homes, and in many cases their children, to come to the aid of your nation. Some of them may very well shed their blood, give up their lives in the defense of the Kingdom. If their military duties require them to drive, then of course they will drive.”

For a time they were at an impasse, until the Land Force Commander, Josuf Rashid, came to the rescue. He asked some questions, his face stern but not angry. It was no time for warmth. There was too much to be done and too little time.

“Chuck, let me get this straight. You intend to deploy women as part of your forces?”

“Yes, sir,” Horner replied.

“These women may have military duties that require them to drive cars and trucks?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Will these women drive cars and trucks when off duty?”

Seeing where he was going, Horner replied immediately, “Of course not! Your laws and customs do not permit women to drive in the Kingdom, and we are sworn to obey your laws and respect your customs.”

“Will these women wear uniforms when on duty?” he continued, apparently satisfied.

“Of course they will.”

He smiled broadly. It was as if a curtain had parted. “General Hamad,” he said, “you don’t have a problem. Chuck is going to deploy women with the American units. They will respect our laws about driving. During the military duties, they may have to drive; but they will be in uniform, so they are not women, they are soldiers.”

Everyone nodded at this wisdom, and relief filled the room. The first crisis of the new alliance had been avoided.

On to the next crisis — this one instigated by Chuck Horner.

“General Hamad,” he said, “I think we should collocate our military headquarters.” He quickly added, “Could we look at your new command center in the basement as a place to set up the central combined headquarters?”

Discussing combined command arrangements this soon was very difficult for the Saudis to handle, but even more bothersome was the prospect of hundreds of American men and women in their new headquarters building. Both Horner and Hamad were on uncertain ground… except that Horner was charging ahead, while Hamad was wondering how much he could agree to.

At that moment, the meeting switched to what Americans had come to call “Channel Two.” When Arabs changed from English to Arabic, they were going to “Channel Two.” Since Horner and the other Americans already had some experience in the Kingdom and knew some elements of the language, most of them could understand the general drift of a Channel Two discussion. This one seemed to go back and forth over two questions: whether to combine headquarters and whether to let the Americans in the building, especially the secret Command Center.

General Hamad picked up the phone and made a call, probably, Horner guessed, to check with his boss, Prince Sultan. A few brief words in Arabic indicated that General Hamad could not get through to His Royal Highness. Back to English and those at the table.

“Chuck,” he said, “I don’t know about using the command center. You see, it’s brand new, and not all the phones and communication equipment are installed.”

In Saudi Arabia, you seldom get a direct no. It is considered impolite. Instead, you hear excellent reasons why it is not possible at this time to reach a decision.

Just then, the man Horner had never met, the head of the Royal Saudi Arabian Air Defense Forces, Lieutenant General Khaled, went to Channel Two and delivered an outburst in Arabic to General Hamad. Horner roughly translates it as something like this:

“Boss, this is bullshit. The Iraqis are on the border, and we’re fencing words about using one stupid command center. We need to get off our asses, and, with all due respect, sir, I’m going to see what can be done.”

He then threw his notepad onto the table and charged out of the conference-room door. The room grew quiet, and for a while everyone talked about more mundane matters. But everyone around the table, including Horner, was more than a little dumbfounded by the force of his departure. Saudi Arabia is a most polite society, and the Arabs are extremely deferential toward officers of senior rank. In a second, Khaled went from a three-star general to a prince. And it took some time for everyone else to note the title change. When he reappeared and sat down, he was a subordinate general once more, but the prince had obviously made a phone call to put the train back on the track.

Next, as if by magic, General Hamad’s phone rang. The conversation that followed took some time, and it was, at least on this end, very respectful. When Hamad hung up, he smiled and turned to Horner.

“Why don’t we adjourn and go down and look at the command center?” he said.

Within minutes, the group was headed down the elevator to the two-story underground complex Horner would soon set up for General Schwarzkopf and his staff. Though he had no way of knowing it then, he would visit this command center every night he was in Riyadh, for the next very long nine months.

★ It goes without saying that this meeting was important. It set the stage for Horner’s own relations with the Saudis as Commander before General Schwarzkopf ’s arrival and as CENTAF Commander; and of course it had a large effect on the dynamic of U.S.-Saudi relations throughout the Gulf crisis. Even though the themes touched on that afternoon were few — women soldiers and use of the MODA Command Center — the consequences were large.

These themes, in fact, by metonymy, spoke for much, much more. They were focal points for a thousand other themes — telephones, rental cars, hotel rooms, basing, training ranges, port facility access, ramp space, airspace, storage areas, sharing of ammunition, on and on. Not the least of these issues was what military people call status of forces[34] — something never explicitly discussed but always in the back of everyone’s minds. Fortunately, the USAF had been in the Kingdom for the past ten years, and the Air Force people had behaved themselves in an admirable manner. This trust built up over a decade made it possible for both parties to start the relationship without formal agreements, just the verbal agreements reached in Jeddah.

Nonetheless, there was real concern about all these Western troops barging into a deeply religious nation, a nation where customs changed very slowly and where no outside military force had been stationed since the overthrow of the Ottoman Empire. The women soldiers issue stood in for all that. It was, in reality, a status of forces agreement, and it said, “We will respect your laws, but you must understand that we are a force that recognizes a different role for women than your culture does.”

The ground was broken. At that first meeting, the Americans and the Saudis tackled the tough issues with prudence and sensitivity, and that — along with the forceful leadership of General Khaled bin Sultan — enabled all that followed. If Horner had gone into that meeting and asked for 5,000 international telephone lines, 50,000 rental cars, and food for 500,000 troops, the Saudis would have gone into shock. Moreover, he had no idea then what he actually needed, and no one then could have estimated the final size of the force that deployed to conduct the liberation of Kuwait.

The command center issue was slightly different. Horner and his American colleagues worked that as an entrée to establishing a combined headquarters. If he had asked the Saudis to establish a combined command, they would have rejected the idea. Instead, he’d asked if he could move his headquarters in where theirs was. This de facto established a combined headquarters, without the direct request to do so.

SHEPHERDING CHAOS

The next few days were frantic.

Major Fong, John Yeosock’s aide, moved Yeosock’s and Horner’s gear into the top floor of one of the buildings in the USMTM compound. Bill Rider, Horner’s logistics chief, moved into the Saudi Air Force Headquarters and began to set up the air headquarters with the support of his RSAF counterpart, Major General Henadi, a man of great intellect and energy.[35]

Nothing went smoothly, yet everyone made do, and somehow forced everything to work.

One small example: the club manager at the USMTM compound went from serving thirty lunches a day to serving three thousand, all in a matter of days. Everyone ate on paper plates and sat on the floor, but they survived.

Anyone walking into Horner’s cramped offices in MODA in those difficult days would have gazed on what looked like absolute confusion, but that wasn’t quite the reality. Confusion arises when you don’t know what you are doing, and they did. There was simply so much to do, however, that everyone was always busy.

Meanwhile, the difficulties of deploying thousands of troops with their equipment were immense, even while speed was vital — the intentions of the Iraqis on the northern side of the Saudi border were still unknown. There was no time for rest, and twenty-hour days became the norm, with naps whenever possible.

In the meantime, Schwarzkopf was directing the sequence of deployments from his headquarters in Tampa, Florida. The thousands of miles between the United States and the Middle East were quickly spanned by an air bridge of immense capacity. Back home, they called it “the Aluminum Bridge.” Around the clock, C-5 Galaxy and C-141 Starlifter aircraft were loading and taking off at bases all around the country. C-130 Hercules medium transports were beginning to head across the Atlantic, to distribute throughout Saudi Arabia, and the other countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council, all of the supplies and people that were being sent. The main hub was Riyadh, but the routes covered Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the UAE, Qatar, Oman, and Egypt. It was not unlike the Klong Courier in Thailand. One “line,” the Blue Ball Express, carried passengers, while the Red Ball Express carried cargo.

Despite everyone’s best efforts, the next few days were utter chaos. The units back in the States were loading the equipment and supplies that they believed would be the most important, but their reporting system could not tell the people on the receiving end what would be dumped on the airport ramp or dockside in the Middle East; and no one knew where to send it to unload. In other words, the strategic airlift delivered their shipments to the wrong bases, and God only knew where equipment and supplies might be found.

Thus, a C-141 might take off from Pope AFB with 82d Airborne Division equipment on pallets. It would land in Spain or Germany to be unloaded, then part of the shipment would be loaded on a C-5, which would land at Riyadh. Meanwhile, the 82d was in Dhahran, in the northeast. So now the troops there were looking for their gear — which was sitting in a mountain of containers on the base at Riyadh — and Transportation Command was listing it as being en route. Try that times ten thousand, and at a growing rate, and you get an idea of what was going on.

(The C-130s turned out to be invaluable in straightening out the strategic airlift mess. Bill Rider just had the loads dumped in theater, then, while people there straightened things out, he sent the big jets back for more.)

In addition, every day people would arrive with no idea of the location of their unit. Thousands of men and women would land, starved for sleep, half-frozen from the long airplane ride, only to emerge in the blistering hot desert, given bottles of water, and asked, “Who are you and where do you want to go?” Most did not have a clue (in which case, if you couldn’t find your unit, you found someone who could use you until things got sorted out).

The pain and suffering the troops endured during the early deployment was beyond belief. At some locations, there was triple bunking — three people sharing a single bed or cot in eight-hour shifts. Later, more people were added to the schedule by making room for sleeping under the bed. The Arab hosts in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman opened up their bases, schools, hangars, and homes to help out. Americans were being housed everywhere.

Yet there was caution. After the 1983 murder of 241 Marines in Beirut by a suicide bomber, hotels were seen as risky (especially by General Schwarzkopf, who had a mania against hotels, because of his fear of terrorists). Often a person would arrive late at night, get bused to a beautiful hotel, enjoy the luxury of a bath with a fine meal and television in an air-conditioned room, only to get dumped in the desert the next day. There were thousands of stories like this.

And there were many snafus — at customs checkpoints, for instance, where vital munitions convoys would be held up at a border by bureaucratic agents. Customs people in every country feel they work for nobody, and that everyone is a smuggler, but this is especially true in countries that forbid the drinking of alcohol and consider bra ads pornography. Better to be slow than to take any risks. A shipment of munitions? Those papers had better be in order.

Then there were the communications shortfalls. Americans are used to telephones and communications access. Now a soldier was deployed to a nation where he needed permission for an international telephone line. He landed and went to the nearest telephone, perhaps a few miles away, so he could call home. But he couldn’t get an operator who knew who he was and where he was trying to call. His frustration level was instantly sky-high… even as he recalled what they’d told him when he’d boarded the aircraft about being ready to fight the minute he hit the ground.

★ One of the first deploying USAF units was a support group from the 363d Tactical Fighter Wing at Shaw AFB, South Carolina, who had been on alert to deploy since the crisis had begun. After their F-16s had roared off into the night, the maintenance teams had been loaded onto C-141s en route to who knew where. Hours later — all spent in the hold of a cramped, freezing cargo plane — they landed at midnight somewhere in the Arabian Gulf.

As it happened, their F-16s were at Al Dhafra, and this C-14 had landed at the old military base in Abu Dhabi, about ten miles away, because the ramp at Al Dhafra was full and could not accept them. Nobody in the airplane knew that.

Peering out the aircraft’s door, the thirty men and women from the 363d found only a dark, empty parking ramp, with hellishly hot desert air blasting them in the face. In the distance, they could see the lights of a city.

They climbed down the boarding stairs, and somebody thrust bottled water at them. Not knowing what else to do, they stowed it somewhere, then turned their attention to unloading the equipment they carried on board — spare aircraft engines, toolboxes, weapons, and spare parts. Airpower, as the United States practices it, brings it all — enough for thirty days of fighting until the supply lifeline can be built.

Meanwhile, all around them were guys in white robes and scarves over their heads: pleasant guys, as it happened, who spoke excellent English, though not the drawling southern dialect these folks from South Carolina were used to.

Before long they learned that they’d landed in the Emirate of Abu Dhabi and were to be bused to Al Dhafra, the military air base near Abu Dhabi, the capital of the emirate with that name. They were quickly packed into a small but clean bus. Then they headed out on a multilane freeway into the desert night — away from the city! Unaccustomed to the 110˚F nighttime heat (it was even hotter during the day, and more humid), they began to drink the bottled water that had been thrust at them earlier, grateful for the relief.

The bus driver, a nice fellow, was from Ethiopia and spoke very little English. After a time, he turned off the highway and onto a dirt road that quickly became part of the vast desert. Up and down they bounced, over sand dunes and rock-strewn waste, until finally the bus came to a halt. “All out here,” the driver ordered. The miserable band, loaded down with duffel bags and personal weapons, straggled out of the bus and assembled somewhere in the hot desert nowhere. Then off went the bus.

At that point, the lieutenant in charge, a young man named Tom Barth, took charge. Charge of what? Charge of whom? Where? Going where? It was pitch black, and the questions from the others started coming. But no answers were apparent.

Soon wild desert dogs began to circle the group, attracted to the smell of food from a few MREs (Meals Ready to Eat — field rations of questionable taste) and leftover in-flight meals. The big question was who was most afraid of whom, but the people did a better job of bluffing, so the wild dogs kept their distance.

Later, from the direction of the city lights they could still see over the horizon, a white cloud started to form. Was it a gas attack from invading Iraqi forces?

Actually, no.

Though this hearty band didn’t know it, they were in fact hundreds of miles south of Kuwait, just a few miles from the UAE coast, and they were observing the sea fog roll in. But just to be on the safe side, the lieutenant had everyone check their gas masks. Though their full chemical protection suits were loaded on the cargo pallets on the ramp next to the aircraft, they all carried a gas mask for just the threat that now seemed to be confronting them.

The fog did not reach them, but in the distance a new terror appeared — the lights of an oncoming car, bouncing from dune to dune. Up drove a dark Mercedes with tinted windows. Terrorists? It stopped, and the electric window slid noiselessly down. Tom Barth, fully aware that it was his responsibility to keep this band alive, ordered security policemen in the group to be ready to shoot, but to aim for the legs, in case this visitor wasn’t really a terrorist. Gathering up all his courage, Barth stepped forward to the open window and peered in. There he found a swarthy man with a large black mustache and cold dark eyes, and wearing one of those white robes.

The driver looked at him. “Are you Lieutenant Barth?” he asked politely.

“Yes, I am. Why?” Barth answered, in his most manly manner, greatly relieved.

The driver brushed off his questions and handed Barth a cellular phone.

Composing himself, he spoke into it. “Hello, Lieutenant Barth.”

Rapidly, an American on the other end replied, “Tom, where the hell are you?”

Though Barth had no clue, he did his best to explain. Finally, it was decided. They would just stay put, and someone would come and get them in the morning. Without a word, the Arab (just somebody from the UAE who was told to find the lost Americans) retrieved the phone, closed the tinted window, and drove off into the night, never knowing how close he came to being kneecapped by a terrified American Air Force lieutenant.

The next few hours passed slowly. There were complaints about how fucked up things were — and questions about where the women could go to the bathroom, because not all the bottled water turned into sweat. But then daybreak came, and all of a sudden, up drove the bus and the hugely smiling driver that had left them there the night before. He took the hearty band to a huge air base farther out in the desert, where they would spend the next few days sleeping on a hangar floor and eating MREs until Bill Rider could send tents and field kitchens to them.

They had plenty to do, as the F-16s from Shaw AFB needed to be turned around for combat air patrols or put on alert with air-to-ground munitions.

Everywhere it was the same — chaos — with everyone pitching in to help each other survive, build housing, and somehow come up with all the necessary comforts that Americans normally take for granted.

In those early days, only the locals — such as the Ethiopian bus driver — seemed to know what they were doing, though their reasons often mystified the Americans. Faced with the end of a long day and a craving to go home, he’d simply dropped his passengers off in the desert where he knew they couldn’t get hurt or in trouble. When his duty day had ended — at midnight, in this case — he’d gone home to get a good night’s sleep, picked them up the next morning, and taken them to the air base as instructed. He really didn’t understand those strange Americans.

★ Most of the arriving troops came into Dhahran, a huge Saudi Air Force base on the eastern coast. Its commander, Brigadier General Turki bin Nassar, an RSAF F-15 fighter pilot, held a master’s degree in business administration from Troy State University, and was a graduate from the USAF Air University at Maxwell AFB. Prince Turki had hosted a small detachment of Chuck Horner’s people from CENTAF during ELF-1 and EARNEST WILL. Turki was also responsible for the air defense of Saudi Arabia’s vital eastern province, with its vast oil refineries, oil storage, and transshipment points. And then, in August 1990, he had a huge additional job dumped on him.

The 1st Tactical Fighter Wing, commanded by Colonel (later Major General) “Boomer” McBroom, arrived first. Even before all of the forty-eight F-15C fighters had arrived, they were moving to help out Turki’s force of RSAF F-15Cs and Tornado F-2 Air Defense Variant (ADV) fighters in patrolling the skies along the Iraqi and Kuwaiti borders.

Meanwhile, thousands of Army troops from the 82d Airborne Division’s alert brigade were also unloading at Dhahran. Turki’s men opened every facility they had in order to beddown and process the arriving troops as they streamed though the air base en route to their camps in the desert. British and French troops and aircraft also arrived, and Turki found them homes, too.

He and McBroom formed quite a team. Since Turki was the host base commander, for most practical purposes McBroom worked for him, and together they solved a thousand problems every day: where to construct munitions storage areas, how to divide up ramp space, and the like. Cross support of RSAF and USAF F-15s became a daily occurrence, including the sharing of parts. Frequently, one would see USAF and RSAF repair teams helping one another, even if it meant that the two sergeants repairing the jet were a bearded Saudi and a fresh-faced American woman.

Throughout the Kingdom, the emirates, and the other host nations of what was already becoming known as “the Coalition,” other examples of cooperation were going on — from generals and admirals, to sergeants and seamen. Day in, day out, trust, confidence, and cooperation grew as they all turned to defense of the Kingdom.

While all of this was happening, Major General Tom Olsen formed up the Air Force’s Tactical Air Control Center (TACC) in the RSAF headquarters. The TACC was a vital part of what was to happen in the next nine months; the USAF could not have functioned without it. From there each day, Brigadier General Ahmed Sudairy and Colonel Jim Crigger and their staffs published an Air Tasking Order (ATO) for the growing Coalition air force. The ATO is the key document for running air operations in a theater — the sheet music that the aerial orchestra must use in order to play together. It covers everything from fighter and transport flights, to surface-to-air engagement envelopes and artillery fire. Anything that flies through the air needs to be in the ATO if it is to be safe, both for itself and others. In those early days, the ATOs out of the TACC were designed to execute the air defense of the Kingdom and the emirates, and to place aircraft on alert to repel a potential Iraqi invasion.

LINE IN THE SAND

The defense of the Kingdom was the other main driver during the “beddown of troops” period of Desert Shield. Every day, U.S. capabilities to defend Saudi Arabia against Iraqi aggression grew, which meant that new plans for that defense needed to be formed on an almost hour-to-hour basis.

On one of their first nights in-country, Horner asked John Yeosock what he had that night to fight with if the Iraqis decided to attack into northern Saudi Arabia. Yeosock reached into his pocket, pulled out a penknife, and opened its two-inch blade. “That’s it,” he said.

He wasn’t far from wrong.

From the start, air defense was the first order of business. Fortunately, much of this defense was already in place, owing to some congressmen who had weathered criticism in order to support the sale of F-15s and E-3 AWACS to Saudi Arabia. These very aircraft now made possible the safe passage of the giant USAF transports vital to the rapid buildup of U.S. forces.

The first deploying forces were USAF F-15 fighters and E-3 AWACS aircraft, to flesh out the Saudis who had been flying combat air patrols since the beginning of the crisis. Next came the U.S. Navy aircraft carriers, USS Independence and USS Dwight D. Eisenhower, with their attendant battle groups. Then came the first USAF air-to-ground attack aircraft, F-16s from the 363d TFW at Shaw AFB in the States, and others from Europe. A-10 tank busters, known affectionately as “Warthogs,” arrived from England AFB, Louisiana, and Myrtle Beach AFB, South Carolina. All of this was designed to provide enough airpower to blunt an Iraqi thrust, and to devastate their supply lifelines. Horner told Schwarzkopf what air units he wanted in what order, though there were also units that had not been anticipated — such as the F-111s from Europe or the F-117s — since they were not apportioned to CENTAF in the war plans.

Shortly after this, U.S. Marines aboard an Amphibious Ready Group (ARG) arrived offshore, followed by the larger and more powerful 7th MEB (Marine Expeditionary Battalion) from Twenty-nine Palms in California. These units drew their equipment from a just-arrived squadron of prepositioned ships based in the Indian Ocean at Diego Garcia. With them came a Marine air wing of fighters, attack aircraft, tankers, and helicopters to support their efforts. Then 82d Airborne Division began to land in Dhahran.

All these forces deployed along the east coast, the high-speed avenue of attack, to protect the strategic assets there — the oil facilities and the desalinization plants, which supplied water to the interior as well as to the ports, towns, and airports in the eastern province. The forces were small and light, without much of the armored muscle that would be required to stop an Iraqi advance if it came.

The fundamental job during this time was to find places to put all the people and equipment as they arrived, and to do it as fast as possible.

The USAF units were bedded down by Bill Rider and the CENTAF staff, who set up shop in the RSAF headquarters, and were working the USAF beddown right from the start. At Horner’s direction, the F-15s and AWACS went side by side with their counterparts in the RSAF. The F-16s went to the UAE, because they had the range to cover Saudi Arabia, and this way they were based pretty much out of harm’s way from either ground, air, or missile attack. The A-10s went into Fahd Air Base, ten miles west of Dhahran, since they would be vital to stopping an Iraqi tank attack — though in all likelihood they would have had to fall back in the actual event of an Iraqi attack. The F-111s and U-2s went to Taif, near Mecca, and the F-117s went to Khamis Mushayt, south of Taif and about thirty miles north of the Yemen border.

Grant Sharp did most of the Navy work. Since he already had a standing command afloat in the Gulf, the initial actions were to expand that command. Air tasking for the carriers would come out of the RSAF headquarters, while surface actions would come out of Rear Admiral Bill Fogerty (until Vice Admiral Hank Mauz arrived to take over at NAVCENT).

John Yeosock was in charge of the land forces, with Lieutenant General Walt Boomer, the Marine commander, and Lieutenant General Gary Luck, the XVIIIth Airborne Corps commander, working together immediately under him.

The 82d Airborne Division was the first on the ground, but there was no way to move them around except in the limited vehicles they had brought with them and the trucks and rental cars that could be scrounged from civilians. Owing to their lack of mobility, not much else could be done with them except to move them out from Dhahran into the desert near the air base, though some elements moved up toward the Kuwait border in position to fight delaying actions.

Defenses were dreadfully thin.

In those days, just in case, John Yeosock and Chuck Horner always kept their staff cars filled with gas, with a case of water in the trunk, and in the glove compartment a map of the road to Jeddah — if all else failed, the last-ditch fallback.

Most of the direst predictions did not envision a retreat that far, instead projecting the loss of the east coast down to Qatar or the UAE borders. In that event, the plan was to take refuge in Bahrain by blowing the causeway to Dhahran, an island.

There would eventually be bright spots, like the arrival of the 24th Mechanized Infantry Division with its M1A1 heavy tanks and M ⅔ Bradley fighting vehicles, or the rapid movement of the French ground forces from the port of Yanbu on the Red Sea across Saudi Arabia to the eastern province. But those events were weeks ahead, at the end of August and early September. For most of August, things were really hairy.

In the event of an invasion, the plan was for the 82d Airborne to act as “speed bumps.” They’d move forward and blow the bridges through the sepkas and then fight until dislodged. Sepkas were swamplike low spots near the coast, where the salt water lay just under the desert crust, making them impassable for vehicles. The 82d would then melt into the desert, escape down the highway… or be captured or killed. They’d do this over and over.

If the Iraqis tried an attack down the Wadi al Batin, the Saudi forces in King Khalid Military City would place a large roadblock across it and try to halt the invaders. If they failed, not much lay between the Iraqis and Riyadh, except some very difficult terrain and airpower.

Such an attack remained unlikely, since the Iraqis’ best avenue of attack would have been to race down the coastal road in the east, then make a right turn at Dhahran and come east toward the capital. But again, distance worked against them: the farther they attacked, the closer they came to the U.S. air bases in Bahrain, Qatar, the UAE, and southwestern and western Saudi Arabia. Additionally, the Iraqis did not have the means to sweep the Arabian Gulf clear of the U.S. surface navy. Thus, the farther south they came, the more they exposed their flank to naval gunfire and air attack from the carriers. To cap it off, there was an aggressive disinformation campaign to inform the Iraqis of a planned U.S. amphibious landing in Kuwait City — the worst-kept secret since the story that D Day was going to take place at the Pas de Calais.

★ Of course, there were other problems, as well.

Working out corps boundaries between the USMC and the XVIIIth Airborne Corps, for instance, might seem easy enough — draw a few lines on a map; you stay on this side; you stay on that — but it wasn’t. The corps had to be placed carefully so that the enemy couldn’t take advantage of the terrain.

The basic situation was this: Khaled’s Arabs (the EAC — Eastern Area Command) were on the coast; the Army’s XVIIIth Corps was on the left; and the USMC was in between. The problem was that significant avenues of attack had to be properly covered, and could not be split between different units. For example, the north-south highway needed to be entirely in one corps area, if for no other reason than simplified traffic control, but since there were curves in the highway, the corps that owned it had considerable area to defend. To make matters more difficult, the sepkas caused chokepoints, and these chokepoints funneled the enemy back and forth from one corps area to another.

Since it was vital for Walt Boomer and Gary Luck to work out these issues together, from time to time Horner called on one or the other to make sure everything was going well. Though they didn’t always reach full agreement, they achieved reasonable cooperation.

There were also disagreements about the placement of EAC forces — two separate issues, really, though they were related.

First: Khaled insisted that if the Iraqis attacked, Arabs had to be the first casualties. Horner understood the significance of that position, and he did not disagree. That meant placing Khaled’s forces close to the border — too close, as it turned out. They were within Iraqi artillery range, which gave the Iraqis the opportunity to inflict easy casualties. In time, Khaled’s objections were overcome, and the EAC and the SANG (Saudi Arabian National Guard, a small, elite force whose normal function was to protect the two principal holy places, Mecca and Medina) pulled back from the border. (This jammed them into the USMC coming out of Jubail, but that problem was also solved.)

Second: Khaled had orders from the King not to give up Saudi land. This was all well and good, but unfortunately, in those early days, the Coalition did not have sufficient land forces to execute that strategy, and even if they had, they’d have incurred large numbers of casualties. Though Khaled was truly caught in the middle between Horner and his King, he played his cards adroitly: even as he cooperated with the mobile defense concept the Coalition was faced with implementing, he extracted promises that U.S. forces would do their best to join with their Saudi allies to contain an attack on Saudi Arabia.

KHALED

Working out corps boundaries wasn’t the only hurdle Walt Boomer and Gary Luck faced. More serious for both men was logistics — food, water, housing, latrines, and gunnery ranges. The last item became a problem when the Bedouins who had herds grazing in the parts of the desert that were to be given over for ranges declared that they didn’t want to vacate them. Prince Khaled had to fix that.

Then congestion in the port at Al Damman became a problem. John Yeosock’s port masters couldn’t find anyone in charge. They would go to one agency, only to be told that some other agency worked the problem, and when they went to that one, they were sent to another. No one was responsible, yet everyone could cause delays or raise obstacles.

After a visit from Horner and Yeosock, Khaled stepped in. He put one of his people in charge, with full responsibility, and that was that. Then, when it was clear that there were not enough trucks to carry the stuff off the piers, it was Khaled who found more trucks.

His Royal Highness, Khaled bin Sultan, got things done. Another instance came with the problem of where to put the tens of thousands of Americans pouring into the nation. They had to be housed in a place where they’d be both comfortable and safe — and where Saudi society could be protected from so many antithetical cultural and religious customs.

Khaled came up with the answer. Eskan Village, a huge housing complex on the southeast side of the city, became home to most of the U.S. forces stationed in or near Riyadh. It had been originally built as military housing, but then the base it had been designed to support was delayed, so this huge compound had been mothballed.

Horner and the CENTCOM J-4 (logistics chief), Major General Dane Starling, took a tour of Eskan Village to see if it would meet their needs. They found hundreds of villas, each with three bedrooms and three bathrooms. There were also high-rise apartments, schools, swimming pools, and recreational areas — a complete village just waiting for power and water to be hooked up. It was perfect.

Still, Khaled could not solve every problem. He could find housing for 30,000 people and open seaports, but when Chuck Horner asked him for a television and videocassette player for each villa at Eskan, he balked and grew evasive. Horner was amazed. It was such a simple request. Only a few thousand TVs and video players, so the troops could watch Armed Forces Television and play videotapes from home.

One day, over a cup of cappuccino in his office in the MODA building, Horner pressed the issue, and the reason for Khaled’s refusal came clear. His people didn’t know where to buy thousands of TVs and video playback units.

“If I can get them,” Horner asked, “will you pay for them?”

“No problem!”

So Dane Starling phoned in the order to some lucky electronics dealer in Atlanta, and in a few weeks, the troops had their TVs.

SHEPHERDING COMMANDERS

Probably the most difficult issue for Horner as “CENTCOM Forward” was the determining of command relationships. At that time, command relationships between United States forces were not always easily understood or conducted. No one doubted General Schwarzkopf ’s authority, as defined by Goldwater-Nichols, but several areas needed work.

For example, there were air component and naval component commanders in CENTCOM, but there was no separate and distinct land component commander, which raised a number of nagging questions.

On the ground, Lieutenant General John Yeosock commanded the U.S. Third Army, which was in those days composed of one corps, XVIIIth Airborne Corps, commanded by Lieutenant General Gary Luck (later Lieutenant General Fred Franks’s VIIth Corps would be added to Third Army). There was also a United States Marine Corps component, MARCENT, commanded by Lieutenant General Walt Boomer, with his 1st Marine Expeditionary Force (1st MEF). 1st MEF was initially composed of the 7th MEB, with their attached MAW and support elements, about 20,000 personnel; but eventually it grew to more than two divisions ashore, with over 90,000 Marines.

In the best of worlds, a ground component commander would have coordinated the various land forces, but for various political and practical reasons — primarily to keep the Army and Marine chauvinists in the Pentagon from going to war over the issue of which service was in charge, and to make sure that he himself was the focal point of the ground war, his area of expertise — General Schwarzkopf decided to retain the authority of land component commander for himself. The result was that when Schwarzkopf was wearing his CINC hat, he commanded the air, navy, and land components, but when he was wearing his land component hat, he was merely the equal of the air and navy commanders. So who was talking when? Things never got out of hand, but the situation was murky.

Meanwhile, Khaled and John Yeosock devised an organization between them to coordinate their efforts, one that would integrate the land forces of the host nations with the land forces of the non-host nations, principally those of the United States, France, and Great Britain. They named the organization C3IC — an acronym that meant nothing at all. The idea was to fuzz things up, to let the name mean all things to all people. A precise definition would have started debates about command and control between the nations. By keeping its nature amorphous, everyone was able to work together without the need for rigid guidelines telling who had to do what to whom.

C3IC was located in a large space with a two-story-high ceiling on the main floor of the MODA command bunker. It was there mainly because Horner and Khaled knew that General Schwarzkopf would eventually make his headquarters at MODA, and he was going to be the U.S. land component commander. John Yeosock brought a superb officer, Major General Paul Schwartz, to head the U.S. side of C3IC, while Khaled provided an equally talented Saudi Army general, Brigadier General Abab Al-Aziz al-Shaikh.

Also on the main floor was the CENTCOM J-2 intelligence shop, and the CENTCOM J-3 operations shop in the hall. Schwarzkopf’s command center, where evening meetings were held, was located in a small conference room near the command center. On the other side of the command center wall was a small amphitheater, where larger staff meetings were held until the air war started in January. Then all meetings migrated to the command center. On the floor above were offices manned by Saudi officers working with the Americans. There was also a main conference room with windows that looked down on the C3IC room.

★ As time went on, it did not prove practical to integrate every command, though C3IC remained. In the beginning, all commands were fully integrated; but over time, Third Army staff outgrew the Royal Saudi Land Forces headquarters, where the land commanders had originally set themselves up. So John Yeosock and the other land commanders found it more useful to maintain separate locations, and Yeosock moved Third Army headquarters to Eskan Village.

On the other hand, air planning and execution were fully integrated throughout the war. Integration is easier with air than ground. Once there’s an Air Tasking Order, then the individual wings retain command of the units: Americans work for an American wing commander, though on a Saudi or UAE base; and the flight leader of a Saudi flight is Saudi, even though the flight might be part of a larger package commanded by a British flight leader.

Major General Jousif Madani, RSLF, the J-3 for the MODA staff, was a quiet, thoughtful man, who was charged by Hamad to sit down with Horner and work out the command and control issues; and Horner spent considerable time with him. Horner’s problem was that he could go only so far without Schwarzkopf ’s approval. Though the CINC had empowered him during those days to do what he thought best, he didn’t want to handcuff Schwarzkopf with any arrangements the CINC would have to change later. So, for once, it was the Americans and not the Saudis who were moving glacially.

However, Horner and Madani reached a general agreement that Khaled and Schwarzkopf would serve on an equal footing, which would also place Hamad and Powell on the same level. This equality issue was of some concern to the Saudis, because it was important to them to make sure they were respected by the Americans.

All of this activity provided a framework for the buildup of forces that were beginning to flow into the region, but it in no way anticipated the eventual size of the Coalition force that would go to war some six months later. Time and events would severely strain these early arrangements, but for the time being, they had to do.

★ As air component commander, Horner had to solve a few other command relationship problems, as well.

According to Goldwater-Nichols, the various services still organized, trained, and equipped their forces, and they still watched over promotions, but U.S. forces did not “belong” operationally to them. Operationally, U.S. forces belong to the unified commander. Goldwater-Nichols further stated that the unified commander could organize his force any way he saw fit. In other words, neither service doctrine nor the service chiefs (nor even the Joint Chiefs of Staff) could make him use or organize his force in a way he did not want.

Meanwhile, service doctrine favored service commands — Central Command Air Forces, Army Central Command, Naval Forces Central Command, and Marine Central Command — while the unified CINCs tended to find functional command arrangements more to their liking — land, sea, air, and now space — since that allowed for better coordination and unity of effort. The passage of Goldwater-Nichols inevitably led to struggles between the CINCs and service doctrines and the service chiefs.

Like most CINCs, Norman Schwarzkopf favored functional command arrangements. Thus, all CENTCOM air was integrated under one commander, called JFACC (Joint Forces Air Component Commander). The CENTCOM JFACC was Chuck Horner. Though integrating functions made sense both philosophically and operationally, it wasn’t always easy in practice. The Goldwater-Nichols command structures had never in fact been tried in wartime.

According to Marine doctrine, Marine air was intended for close air support of Marine ground units; it was a substitute for the heavy artillery they didn’t normally carry with them. Marine doctrine or no, however, the air component commander in Desert Shield/Desert Storm was ferociously opposed to splitting airpower into separate duchies, and he fought to keep it from happening. Some accounts of the war tell a different story: that Horner and Boomer worked out a deal that gave Horner command of Marine air until it was directly needed for close air support of Marine ground units. These stories are not true.

What happened was that soon after Boomer arrived in-theater, he and Horner met in Riyadh, and Horner said: “Look, Walt, I don’t want your air. But, by God, we are not going to fragment airpower. So your planes are going to come under me, and you will get everything you need.”

To which Boomer said, “Okay by me.”

And that was that.

Meanwhile, Boomer’s air commander, Major General Royal Moore, who felt that a higher power than Goldwater-Nichols had ordained him to be in charge of the Marine air, tried everything possible to undermine the centralized tasking that placed Marine air under Horner. Before the war started, he tried to pull Marine air out of the Air Tasking Order, but he ran into the brick wall that was the air component commander. Later, during the war, he continued to play games, but in fact it didn’t bother Horner. Moore was generating sorties to hit the enemy, and that is all Horner wanted him to do. The bottom line was that Horner, not Moore, was in charge.

In Horner’s words, “If an Army unit had needed that air, I would have sent it to them and told Moore to piss up a rope. But it never came to that. In fact, just the opposite. Schwarzkopf shortchanged the Marines. Not on purpose. He was just fixated on the Republican Guard and the VIIth Corps attack against them. So when it became apparent by sortie count that Boomer’s and the EAC’s guys were not getting as much air as the VIIth Corps and that they had more enemy to attack, we shifted air over the eastern sector. This was the right thing to do, and it paid off, as evidenced by the collapse of the Iraqis in the face of the initial attacks in the east [before VIIth Corps took off].”

★ Like the Marines, the Navy was also protective of its own air.

Admiral Hank Mauz, who was NAVCENT when Rear Admiral Bill Fogerty took over, and then Vice Admiral Stan Arthur, was not an airman, so he was not aware of some of the issues that had burned in pilots’ souls ever since Vietnam, such as “Route Packages.” Air Force pilots had hated the practice of dividing up sections so that only Navy planes flew in one, and Air Force planes in another, but thinking it was a convenient way to keep his carrier admirals happy, Admiral Mauz suggested dividing Iraq up into sections, so the Air Force and the Navy could conduct their operations without getting in each other’s way.

He was more than a little surprised when Horner gave him a withering look and told him, “Hell no. I’ll retire before we try anything as stupid as that.”

Mauz got the message.

THE CNN EFFECT

An invasion of sorts did occur in Saudi Arabia in August of 1990: not the Iraqis, the reporters.

The phenomenon of twenty-four-hour news network programming — instant and live — has fundamentally changed the way military professionals conduct war. Chuck Horner calls this phenomenon the CNN Effect.

War is by definition bad news. People are killed; homes and workspaces destroyed; money thrown away in obscene amounts. And now the TV camera provided people back home with instant access to it all. Unlike print, the TV camera sees what it sees. It’s there. The tape can be edited, but, basically, the camera is not held hostage to the credibility and adroitness of the reporter’s use of language. Whether he liked it or not, the presence of TV on the battlefield, on both sides of the lines, had a profound impact on how the military did business.

Chuck Horner elaborates:

As soon as the folks at home see on TV part of a battle, part of a battle space, or even a major player walking down an aircraft boarding stairs in some faraway country (signaling major league interest in the place), there’s a serious impact. Folks worry. They’re relieved. They’re angry. They form opinions about how you are doing that job. They may agree with what you are trying to do but disagree with the way you are doing it. The effect of a military decision is not only felt on the battlefield, it is felt immediately back home. And the impact of that can find its way back to the battlefield within hours. In a democratic society, of course, the effects of well-done planning are immediately available, while the effects of poor execution or misguided adventures may take some time to discern.

When a military leader thinks through what he is doing and how he is doing it, part of that mental process damn well better include the impact of his choices back home and in the rest of the world. If not, he’s likely to be in for surprises on the battlefield.

The Saudis were aware of the CNN Effect from the start (they carefully watch over their press, screening it for offensive material). So when Secretary of Defense Cheney walked down the airplane stairs in Jeddah on the sixth of August, 1990, the press was there because the King wanted them there. Why? I suspect he wanted to tell the Iraqis to keep out of here, because the powerful United States had sent its Secretary of Defense to offer its help.

Did Grant figure into his campaign the impact of widespread instant communication of the battlefield to all the world? You bet he didn’t. But it sure happened to us in the Gulf War, and it was a driver in everything we did.

It affected the way we targeted (and I don’t regret any of this): We did our best to avoid civilian casualties. We planned attack headings to avoid civilian areas. We accounted for the failures of precision munitions to guide properly. We did not shred Iraqi soldiers by dropping cluster bombs from B-52s. We did not drop bombs when we could not positively identify the target. We did our best to advertise the evils the Iraqis were committing inside occupied Kuwait.

And we screwed things up badly a few times: by hitting a command facility that was also being used as an air raid shelter, by demonizing Saddam Hussein instead of the occupation of Kuwait, and by allowing the wreckage on the road out of Kuwait City to be perceived back home as the highway of death, when there was very little death — though lots of destruction. (I am also sure the U.S. Army doesn’t like people seeing what airpower can do to an army… to anyone’s army.)

Thank God Saddam screwed up his own TV ops worse, time and again. Remember the burning oil fields of Kuwait? Remember the hostages? Remember the English hostage boy who was brought in as a “guest” of the great leader? When the President of Iraq came close to pat his little friend on the head, the boy froze with fear. All in glorious color. Saddam, old buddy, get a kid actor to stand in and stage the scene so he greets you with a kiss and a smile.

We in the West are stuck with a free press. It’s not always easy for us in the military to deal with our press, yet the press is our ultimate blessing and our lasting glory. When we are wrong, we will (sooner rather than later) be shown as wrong. When we are right and our actions are good, that will also come out. Sure, we can try to manipulate the press, and the press can attempt to manipulate the truth; but in the end there is enough integrity in both the military and the media to make sure most of the truth gets out to the world. The old boys will try to tell you we lost Vietnam because the evening news showed American boys burning villages and shooting old people. Get a grip. We lost in Vietnam because we were wandering in the wilderness of goals, mission, and policy; and in the process we came to believe that burning villages and shooting old people was good. The CNN Effect means that God’s looking over your shoulder all the time, and I think it is a blessing. It is not pleasant, and you take hits, but in the end it brings out the best in mankind when he is out doing his worst, waging war.

Here is how Horner made his own peace with the television invasion of Saudi Arabia in the summer of 1990:

Boomer and Turki at Dhahran became the stars in the eastern part of the country. I got the job of talking to the press in Riyadh, a job I had very little preparation for. Sure, I’d done local interviews and TV spots as the commander of various stateside bases. But Christ, these were the big boys. How was I going to handle questions I couldn’t answer because the answers were classified? Worse, how was I going to handle questions I didn’t know the answer to, which would make me look like a dumbshit? (Sure, I’m a dumbshit, but I don’t want the whole world getting their jollies watching me prove it on TV.)

Well, I survived the first hits; and I learned a little.

As I gained experience, I learned to talk plain English to the press, to tell as much as I could of the truth, to try not to cover my own ass, and to hell with them if they didn’t like an answer. That approach seemed to make sense to them, and we learned to trust each other. Most of them did their best to report what I said as accurately as they could, and I did my best to give them what I knew. If I didn’t know, I would tell them so; usually they didn’t know either and were just fishing.

In time, I also learned how to listen to a question and figure out the questioner’s story line. So if I thought some reporter was headed down a blind alley, or had the wrong slant, I would tell him so. Often this generated more useful, and more honest, questions.

Soon after I was appointed CENTCOM Forward, a Department of Defense press pool was formed, with Carl Roschelle from CNN as the designated leader. Carl was great to work with. But I soon learned that the news business is one of the most competitive in the world. A “can you top this” race between individual reporters, networks, and papers broke out.

The folks in the business are all trying to make a living involving extreme pressures to gather information and meet deadlines. They all want their own organizations to succeed, and that means getting the best, most exciting, most insightful information into the world’s TV sets before any of their competitors do.

This form of combat was brought home to me when ABC’s Sam Donaldson and NBC’s Tom Brokaw showed up at my doorstep in Riyadh. Each wanted an interview for that evening’s news in the United States. They flipped a coin to see who would go first, and Brokaw won. Unfortunately, his crew’s equipment, camera, and lights hadn’t arrived on the airplane with him. But when I suggested we set up with Donaldson’s crew and let the NBC team use that camera, it got very quiet in the room, and it instantly became apparent that Donaldson would do his interview, and if Brokaw wanted to videotape, his guys would have to go out and beg a camera.

As it worked out, we found a Saudi Military Public Affairs camera, so both interviews were done in time to send a satellite feed back to the States.

Our military often fails to understand the dog-eat-dog nature of the news business, or that each form of media has different time lines and communications requirements back to editors or studios. As a result, we often fail to assist and facilitate the media in ways that would be useful for both of us. Thus, the always cynical media personalities often lash out against the military, rail against what they perceive as news management, and complain bitterly that they are being censored. Sure, media guys have a lingering fear of the military, another hangover from Vietnam. But in reality, the fault is a simple misunderstanding on the part of the military about how to best support the unique requirements of different media.

One of the toughest interviewers for me was Michael Gordon of The New York Times.[36] He came on with all the warmth of a cobra; his questions were well thought out, difficult to answer, and tough; he clearly thought I was hiding things from him — specifically, that our situation was much worse than I was letting on, and I was an idiot who really didn’t have a grip on what was happening. (He was partially right on the last point.) Yet after reading his stories, I came to a different conclusion about Gordon than his interviews led me to. Media people, I realized, just like the military, live or die on their integrity. If a reporter deliberately strays from the truth, he or she is dead meat among their peers and editorial masters. Even though I might not like the particular story line he was creating, for all his flaws, Michael Gordon reported my words accurately.

During this period, a lot was going on, to say the least. While much of this had to be kept from the Iraqi intelligence-gathering system, it was important to provide reporters with a wide and deep background understanding of the current situation, so their reports were accurate and made sense. That meant they would inevitably learn data that, if reported, could endanger American lives or success on the battlefield. At the same time, we in the military prefer that some stories don’t appear in the media — because they make us look stupid. Or we think we have to keep information secret that’s in fact widely known back home. Trying to keep all of that in balance makes working with reporters a delicate operation.

From Michael Gordon’s New York Times teammate, Eric Schmidt, I learned you can trust the media. Schmidt has a dogged investigative streak. He finds out more about what’s going on than anyone I’ve ever met. But if the information he finds is truly classified — in order to protect lives or success in battle — you can depend on him to withhold it. Snow jobs will not work on Schmidt, so if you’re stupid, expect to read all about it under his byline. But if it truly needs to be protected, you can trust him. The same holds for 95 percent of the media, to whom integrity is job one.

Fear of the media seems to go with the job description of soldier, sailor, or airman. Why? God only knows. When you think about it, if you can trust the press and the TV commentator to tell the truth, and I do, then it’s not the media we fear but the American people… a sad commentary on our military mind-set.

Sometimes you… we… all of us do asinine things. If you are doing something stupid, pursuing a poor policy, or wasting taxpayers’ dollars, and the press or television paints you in an embarrassing light, that is probably a good thing. In the long run, the exposure, no matter how painful, is good for the military and the nation. If, on the other hand, you are getting the job done skillfully, pursuing a noble cause, or managing a military operation with efficiency (how rare that is!), then you have much to gain from media exposure. The American people are quite capable of judging good and bad for themselves.

I guess the bottom line is we have little to fear if we trust the judgment of the folks who pay the bills.

ON AND ON

All the while, more units arrived daily, which meant that Horner and his staff would be neck deep sorting out additional difficulties, problems, and dilemmas, mostly about where to get more — more phones, more cars, more rooms, more food, more water, more everything.

Horner usually met with Khaled daily, often several times a day, mostly to work on logistical support to cover the beddown on incoming units. He also talked to Schwarzkopf two or three times a day. Since the CINC still felt strongly about not putting troops in hotels, these conversations were often strained. Unfortunately, there was simply nothing else to do. In those early days, until tent cities could be erected for the Army, or pre-positioned shelters for the Air Force, there was no other place to put people. Since the Navy and the embarked Marines slept on their ships, this was less of a problem for them.

Every night, Horner and his staff met with the Saudis to make sure everyone had the same intelligence view of the Iraqis and to sort out problems at the highest level. Then he and his people went over the day’s confusions and crises, after which they discussed how the various land, sea, and air forces were deployed and the amount of military power they could assemble if attacked.

About 10:00 P.M., the rumors would start. On at least three nights, there was reliable information that the Iraqis had attacked. Horner kept cool and waited out each report, looking for corroborating intelligence. It never came.

By 3:00 A.M., they’d have things pretty well nailed down for the night; and then it was off to bed for at least three hours of sleep.

Then the whole drill began again.

15 AUGUST 1990

This is the way a typical day went for Chuck Horner during his time as CENTCOM Forward, as he reconstructs it:

0520 I wake up at the sound of the first prayer call in the apartment I share with John Yeosock. It’s still dark outside. A few moments later, in the shower, I can smell the desert through the open bathroom window.

0535 I eat breakfast with John Yeosock, Grr, my aide, and Major Fong, Yeosock’s aide. I have a fried-egg sandwich and orange juice from a can. Even before Fong fixes John’s breakfast, John is already through his first cigar of the day. We drink coffee in the living room and watch the evening news from the United States via the Armed Forces Radio and Television Service Satellite over the Mediterranean. There are no commercials, but there are spot announcements about how great it is to serve in Europe and enjoy the local culture.

0600 I drive with Grr to the Ministry of Defense and Aviation five blocks south along Airport Boulevard.

0620 We enter the rear of MODA, pass through a guard checkpoint before entering the garage, and park on the fourth floor of the parking garage in a reserved spot just to the right of the rear entrance. I have a Saudi security badge with my picture on it and all sorts of Arabic writing and stamps that lets me go anywhere in the MODA building. A similar one does the same for RSAF Headquarters. I don’t have any badges for U.S. areas, though, since the only place I would not be in a Saudi facility would be on the USMTM compound, where we have set up a SCIF (Special Category Intelligence Facility) with a guarded entry point, and they all know what I look like.

0625 I enter Major General Don Kaufman’s suite of offices on the fourth floor of MODA, two halls down from Khaled’s office and four halls down from Hamad’s, which is in the front of the building. The night shift is still at work; the changeover to the day shift is at 0700. Meanwhile, the day shift (mostly USMTM NCOs who handle message traffic) is starting to come on duty (the message center is located on the USMTM compound where our apartment is located). Since Bill Rider has already moved to the RSAF headquarters, the only officers now in the suite are all U.S.: Kaufman, Yeosock, Grr, Fong, and me. John and I sit down in our separate offices to start through the read file — all the messages that came in that night, a stack of paper about two to five inches thick. I read them quickly, look at the top lines for who sent the message, who it was intended for (usually one or more addressees are listed), and the message subjects; and then I scan the message to take what I want from it. Many of the messages cover what is currently being airlifted from the States, but there is also much intelligence information about the Iraqi army in Kuwait. On those messages where I want action taken, I will write on the side of the message. Here’s an example:

On a message from the Joint Communications Support Element in Tampa that’s addressed to their detachment in Riyadh (busy trying to plug U.S. comms into the MODA bunker, so CENTCOM Headquarters could talk secure to Washington), I might put something like this: “J-6, Make sure we can integrate with the Saudi secure comm. net. H.” Though my note is addressed to the CENTCOM J-6, a major general USAF communicator, it actually goes to his rep in the MODA, only days in-country and still trying to figure out what’s going on and what he should do. The point of my note is to inform him that we are going to operate as a coalition and that if he creates a U.S.-only comm system, that is a nonstarter.

Later in the day, he appears in my office to rant and rave about how our systems are incompatible with the Saudis’ and so he can’t do what I asked; and even if he could, doing it would give foreign nationals access to our crypto gear… and on and on.

“If you can’t find a solution,” I tell him, “then the Saudis will talk over unprotected circuits to their forces, and the Iraqis will be the foreign nationals who will have access to our secrets. So please get out of my office and figure how to rig it so we can talk secure (encrypted) to the Saudis and they can talk to their own units secure.”

Dealing with messages will go on for an hour or so. But there will be interruptions when people stick their heads into the room to ask a question or to talk about some incident that occurred during the night they think I should be aware of (either because they want me to know they have things under control or because it will come up when Schwarzkopf calls or when I meet with the Saudis). I drink about four cups of coffee and eat some strange pastry from a local store. There is a cup to collect coffee and pastry money.

0900 John, Don, and I go down to a small conference room for the morning stand-up with the rest of the CENTCOM and component representatives. In some cases, these are dual-hatted. So, for example, Grant Sharp represents both the CENTCOM J-5 Plans and the naval component (currently a Navy two-star on the La Salle, which is tied up in Bahrain, but will soon be a Navy three-star now en route to Riyadh and about to move the two-star out of his bunk aboard the La Salle). Tom Olsen, the acting Commander of CENTAF (until the CINC returns to the theater and I can go back to my old job), represents CENTAF. John Yeosock represents ARCENT, while Don Kaufman acts as the temporary CENTCOM chief of staff (and takes notes and directs actions that come out of the meeting).

The meeting starts with an intelligence briefing, which updates the Iraqi deployment on the Saudi border, but may also include news items, such as events in Europe or the (not yet former) Soviet Union that relate to the crisis. There is a short weather briefing from the USAF briefer, who’s come down from the RSAF Headquarters with Tom Olsen. After these briefings, we go around the table and discuss matters that are of concern to all who are present, or that need to be resolved.

It might come up, for example, that Dhahran is overrun with incoming troops, that the army people do not have anywhere to stay and are already triple hot-bunking it: three eight-hour sleep shifts per day for two people per shift, one on the bed and one on the floor under the bed; you swap every other day, meaning that six people can sleep per day per cot. There is also much talk about fouled-up deliveries — people at one place and their equipment at another (especially a problem with the army units).

Later, John Yeosock goes over the ground defense for the day, and then Jim Crigger or Tom Olsen does the same for the air defense setup. This is followed by what-ifs regarding an attack by Iraq on Saudi Arabia, update plans for evacuation of civilians, where we would resist and with what, and so on. None of this is pretty early on; but it gets better every day as more planes and troops arrive.

We break as soon as possible, so everyone can get back to work. (Long staff meetings are bad. They should start on time and we get them over with as soon as possible. They should take no longer than an hour, and thirty-five to forty minutes is better.)

1000 I wander down the hall to Khaled’s office and have a cup of cappuccino with him. Among Arabs, you never jump into business, so at first we make small talk about unimportant things, such as how Americans are coping with the weather, or else he talks about Saudi history and old stories about the Kingdom. Eventually we get around to real issues, such as the new demands for support that the buildup of forces is making on the Saudi hosts. The buck stops with Khaled, and he listens carefully. I am careful not to make outlandish requests, and I tell him often that my need for a thousand telephone lines is not crazy, but in fact I will likely be coming back to him in a few days asking for a thousand more. This in a nation where the king has to approve installation of all international phone lines.

We also talk about conversations I might have had with Schwarzkopf the previous night.

Finally, if Khaled has any complaints, he brings them up and I make notes for Don Kaufman (sometimes Don accompanies me and makes the notes); we will take action on everything, no matter how small. We intend to be good guests, especially since the Saudis are bending over backward to be good hosts. Our meeting may last an hour.

1100 I take the elevator to the first floor on my way to the underground bunker. On my way, I pass the mosque. If I do this during prayer time, the mosque will be full of military personnel, their shoes lining the hall and spilling out into the atrium. I walk quietly behind the prostrate worshipers and watch the imam on the stage leading them in prayer. On Friday he will give a sermon; and at all times the prayers and the Friday sermon are piped throughout the building, so those who cannot leave their workplace can still pray. Only the guards around the various guard posts are not prostrate.

A separate elevator takes me down six stories into an underground two-story bunker. On the lowest floor, CENTCOM people are busy stringing comm wires, putting up maps and information boards on the walls, and working on plans. Grant Sharp already has set up an office and is working on a conference room for Schwarzkopf.

Often I’ ll climb the stairs up to the floor above and stop by Yousef Madinee’s office to discuss command and control. Madinee is a Saudi Army two-star (and well thought of because of his heroic service during a previous crisis when Egypt’s Nasser involved his Army in a nasty revolution in Yemen). Since I must leave the door open for Schwarzkopf to do what he wants when he arrives later in the month, it is hard for me to come to any real agreements with Madinee. This is frustrating for both of us, but we make progress simply because we are discussing command relationships.

After a while, I go back up to the USMTM suite.

1145 I catch up on messages that have come while I was out, and I may have a visitor.

A French delegation, for example, comes to call on the Saudi leadership. They stop first with, say, Prince Sultan. Sultan doesn’t see them but passes them to a deputy. Then they do see General Hamad, who listens to them closely and then dismisses them with warm handshakes and no information or decisions. Now frustrated, they stop by to see the American in charge, both as a courtesy call and because they are scared that they cannot get their forces into this war, and if they do they will come under U.S. command and control, which they don’t want. (Eventually it works out that French forces do come into the war, and under American command and control — but with allowances for French fears.) There is lots of cagey diplomatic talk, as they probe for concessions and try not to offer anything in return. As I listen, I resist the urge to stick in the needle about their NATO participation. That is, if they had been better allies in NATO, then we would not be having these “getting to know you” sessions in Riyadh. I play good guy without committing to anything but a warm welcome and assurances that their national sovereignty will be respected, and as a sovereign nation they will be equal partners… Of course, after the war they will want to be superior partners when it comes to selling military equipment to the Arab nations (to include Iraq).

This all takes twenty to forty-five minutes, after which we part amicably. But by then they’ll know that even though they would have preferred to come in as the big brother to the Saudis, they will have to work with the Americans if they want in the game. It is hard to be the big brother when the three-hundred-pound Yankee is around and you weigh 120 pounds.

Time for lunch.

1230 Grr and I jump in the car and head back to the USMTM compound to eat at the club. Before the crisis, it used to serve maybe thirty people at lunchtime and had a good menu at reasonable prices, hamburger and fries with a diet Coke being a good choice. Now it serves two thousand people with a buffet [chow] line set up in the entrance, and you eat chili or spaghetti or beef stew off a paper plate and get a paper cup of Kool-Aid. There are not enough tables, and I’ve made sure there are no longer reserved tables for the general officers, as was the case before the crisis. All are equal and first come first serve, so you either stand holding your food until someone leaves, or you find a place to sit on the floor or in the small movie theater where the USMTM families used to go for entertainment. People are considerate and eat fast, and they give up their seats ASAP.

Troops I run into at lunch ask me what is going on, and I pretend to know and give them the best update I can.

1300 I go to my apartment, take the elevator up to the fifth floor, and lie down for a twenty-minute power nap. After I wake up, I change into my flight suit from desert fatigues. Grr is waiting downstairs. We head out to Riyadh Air Base five blocks to the north along Airport Boulevard to go flying.

1345 We arrive at the jets, two F-16s parked together with the RSAF PC-9 trainer aircraft on the east ramp, about seven hundred yards from where our AWACS are parked. The jets are from Al Dhafra in the UAE; the crews come up to work a duty shift of a week in the TACC, and the pilots they replace will take the jets home after Grr and I get our flight in.

1400 Grr and I take off for Dhahran AB in the eastern province. We check in with AWACS (the normal thing to do), and they provide air traffic control services for us. Though we may fly a low-level navigation mission, we’ll probably do Dissimilar Air Combat Tactics against F-15Cs. The mission will have been planned by Grr while I was at work that morning. After about an hour in the air, we land at Dhahran. We taxi up to the ramp where the 1st Wing has their jets parked, where we are met by Colonel John McBroom, the wing commander, who may have been in the flight we fought coming in.

1515 After a short debriefing on the training flight, I get in a car with Boomer McBroom to go visit the troops.

First we’ll meet with the maintenance troops. We’ll listen to their needs and answer their questions. Most of the time, these are about when are we going to go after “ him” (Saddam). Morale is always high, and while working conditions are tough, they keep the jets in commission at very high rates. What the hell, they don’t have anything else to do. It’s amazing how much time families, drinking, and sex take from our day. When you are without, you are much more productive and do not get into nearly as much trouble. Yet all of this, too, has its limits.

1600 We have been out to the weapons-storage area, and then we visit the school where the USAF reserve nurses are being housed. This last includes walking through sleeping areas where several nurses are in various stages of undress. They seem unconcerned about that, but I am embarrassed; and I talk to them with averted eyes, wishing I had guts enough to glance at their bra-clad chests. It’s the shits when you have to be on public display and on your best behavior. Afterward, we stop by the mail room, since it is a hot spot, and I make sure they have all they need to move the huge amounts of mail out to the troops in a timely manner. Next, we stop by an RSAF Tornado squadron to meet with Brigadier General Turki, the base commander, and his wing commander, Brigadier General Mansour. We talk about their preparations for war and the ongoing Combat Air Patrols we are flying together in the air defense of the Kingdom role. After that, we pass through the integrated USAF and RSAF engine shop to see how our two maintenance forces are integrating and working together. Saudi NCOs and our men and women are working side by side there, but it seems to be working out… Even though some of our women are visibly female under their T-shirts, this seems to have pretty much the same effects on all the males, whether Islamic or south Georgian.

We will end up at one of the USAF squadrons and talk to Intel, pilots, etc., and answer questions, perhaps in a short pilots’ meeting. The pilots are worried about screwing up in combat and tired of flying from midnight till dawn in the “CAP FROM HELL” (so called because you do it late at night, you are tired and bored, but you have to stay alert).

1700 Grr and I climb in our jets. I lead this time, and we fly along the Iraqi border to check out the ground forces that have moved in and to check in with any of the attached Tactical Air Control parties that may be in place. Grr coordinated with these while I was touring with Boomer. Lead elements of the 82d Airborne are north of Dhahran, and we do some dry CAS with their Battalion ALO; but there is not much else in the desert. By the time we land at Riyadh and the crews going back to the UAE take the jets from us, it is starting to get dark. I am tired from flying and fall asleep in the car as we drive back to MODA.

1900 In MODA, I read stacks of messages and make the usual notes on the margins. Don Kaufman has a list of things that have come up, and we run through them. I call Schwarzkopf to give him an update and listen as he anguishes about the problems he is facing getting combat power over ahead of headquarters (since headquarters doesn’t fight the enemy). John Yeosock is also in the suite after an afternoon of visiting with arriving units (he gets around in a C-12 light aircraft or a helicopter); and we compare notes about what we will do if the Iraqis attack that night. As we talk, we eat some french fries and swarmas, which are Saudi sandwiches — pita bread with grilled slices of lamb and mayonnaise.

Later, I may have a visitor from one of the arriving coalition forces, and we chat about their plans — e.g.: what forces they are bringing, where they would like to beddown, what support they might need, and the command-and-control lash-up. I put them at ease about the logistics concerns and promise to help with any special needs. For example, the airmen all want to know how their squadrons will receive the Air Tasking Order, and I explain that we will either have them collocate with a CAFMS[37]-equipped U.S. squadron or I will get them a CAFMS terminal of their own. If the visitor is a high-ranking officer (which might be a major, if that is high ranking for that air force/ army/navy), then I will invite him to the evening meeting.

2100 John, Don, and I go downstairs to the MODA bunker for the evening meeting with our Saudi counterparts. General Hamad and I will cochair the meeting, but Khaled will also be important. That is to say, if anything is to be decided afterward, it will be done in private with Khaled. John and his counterpart, Yousef Rashid, Tom Olsen and Behery, Grant Sharp and Admiral Talil will all sit with one another. I am always diffident at this meeting, because I am simply filling in for Schwarzkopf and do not want to make any waves. Still, we need some structure for working together and addressing any problems that come up. We do not spend a lot of time working strategy, as I am not sure the American ground forces want to fight in an integrated manner with their Saudi counterparts, and besides, they are just getting unloaded from the ships and planes and don’t know how to find the bathrooms yet. All the same, we must have some interaction. (The air forces, we quickly find, are already well integrated after years of training together and because of our AWACS operations during the Iran-Iraq War.)

The meeting will start off with an intelligence update: One night the United States will supply the briefers, the next night the Saudis will brief. After about twenty minutes of briefing, other briefers describe ongoing operations — who is flying what CAPs where, the status of forces in terms of buildup, and where they are deploying in the desert. Hamad says little, and the individual Saudi chiefs are reluctant to talk too much in front of him, probably because they wish to keep their own prerogatives and enjoy working with their U.S. counterparts. Thus, the RSAF and USAF work well together, while the RSAF and RSLF, though friendly and polite, do not have a history of close cooperation.

2230 I’m back upstairs putting out fires. There’s a telephone call from a civilian contractor at one of the U.S. compounds asking if it is true that the Iraqis had launched an attack and that poison gas had been used. “It’s not true to my knowledge,” I tell him, “but I will check into it.” A quick check of headquarters (the TACC in the RSAF) shows that all is quiet as far as AWACS can tell. RSLF listening posts on the border have not reported anything unusual. I get back to the contractor and calm him down, or else I have Don do it if I am busy with something else.

Now callers begin stopping by the office. You can never forget that most serious business in the Arab world is done between 11:00 P.M. and 3:00 A.M. A couple of print newsmen spend fifteen to thirty minutes asking me questions. Since it’s too early in the deployment for a Public Affairs Officer to be in theater, I use my best judgment and depend on their honesty and willingness not to make me look like a fool. (I never really had a problem except with Jack Anderson, who was writing reports back in the States that gave the impression he was in Riyadh; he even “quoted” me. The man has no integrity.)

Midnight I am really getting tired and fall asleep reading messages. My eyes start burning and watering, so I put some ice cubes on them, which gives some relief. I still doze off from time to time.

Even this late, there is lots of activity, and the phones are ringing off the wall (it’s daytime at CENTCOM Rear in Tampa and in Washington). I avoid most of the calls, and John Yeosock and Don Kaufman do most of the talking to important people, while the small stuff is handled by Grr. I do talk to Schwarzkopf if he calls, but he seldom does this late. And I also may talk with USAF generals, but I usually refer them to Tom Olsen at RSAF rather than try to do both jobs. There will be plenty of time to command the air forces when Schwarzkopf comes, and for now the people need a commander for all the theater.

Later, John comes in, and we sit and talk. Others join in, and we go over what we can do if the attack comes at first light or anytime tomorrow. I may call Tom Olsen, Gary Luck, or Walt Boomer if I have something to say to them, but I usually don’t, as their forces are just getting settled in and mating up with their equipment on a very piecemeal basis. When I talk to them, I do a lot of listening as to what they think and are planning, and I give suggestions based on what John and I have discussed. But for the most part, John Yeosock is in charge of organizing whatever ground forces we can muster, and Tom Olsen has the air forces along with Ahmed Sudairy, the RSAF/DO, who is an incredibly brilliant and take-charge airman.

0300 Things seem to be settling down. The night shift people are slowing down and starting to sit around and talk over coffee. But they will still be organizing reports, answering questions, or directing activities (such as rerouting an incoming C-5 so it lands at Dhahran and not at Jeddah). By now I am pretty much useless, due to fatigue; and John and I reluctantly head for the sack.

On some days, like Friday (Islamic Sunday), we might sleep in till 8:00 A.M. On some nights, just as we crawl into bed, the phone will ring with someone from the States calling one or the other of us. The idiot, not realizing the time in Riyadh, is trying to get a problem solved or a question answered before he leaves the office. They usually start off with, “Did I bother you? By the way, what time is it where you are?” Both questions mark him as an idiot.

It was time to start formulating the Plan.

War is essentially chaos, and the line between control and sickening confusion is paper-thin. If one takes care, the violence applied can be focused with precision, yet even when care is taken, it can easily degenerate into wild and formless mayhem. Look at Bosnia, Cambodia, and Rwanda.

It is no surprise that commanders devote much of their best effort to reducing chaos. One of the major means to that end is the Plan.

Planning in the U.S. military starts with the national command authorities — the President, aided by his chief advisers — who articulate the political objectives and overall goals to be achieved by the use of military force. The ball is then passed to the CINC in whose Area of Responsibility the force is to be used, and he determines how to put together and marshal the forces available to him in order to bring them to bear on his nation’s adversaries with the maximum focus and effect (and thus with the minimum of disorder and chaos). It is then the responsibility of the various component commanders to construct a plan to achieve the CINC’s objectives — a campaign.

★ That all sounds simple enough, but the reality is more complicated. To begin with, it is easy to assume too much for the capabilities of military force. What can military force actually do? What is its capacity to achieve a goal? The answer is: not very much, and very little well. At best, a specific goal can be more or less precisely matched with a specific use of military force — evicting the Iraqi army from Kuwait, for instance. But no amount of force could bring democracy to Iraq.

It is equally easy to assume too much, or too little, for an air campaign. The doctrinaire advocates of airpower believe, as an article of faith, that destroying the “controlling centers” of an enemy nation will render the enemy impotent and helpless, no matter how powerful his forces in the field. The doctrinaire advocates of land power conceive of air only as flexible, longer-range artillery, really useful only against those same enemy forces in the field. The reality does not so much lie in between as it varies with the demands of each situation.

There is further debate among airpower intelligentsia about whether the attack should be aimed at destroying an enemy’s means (his military forces and the various facilities that allow him to make war) or his will (his determination to resist). The extremists on both sides hold that if you do one, then you don’t need to do the other. Both are wrong. Attacking an enemy’s will can pay big dividends, but it is hard to know exactly how to do it. Bombing cities into dust sometimes works, as does targeting his military capabilities, but both are costly and have many drawbacks; so the theorists can debate in their ivory towers until they run out of words.

Meanwhile, the men and women in the field have to select the best of both as they apply to their given situation, and sometimes they don’t get the mix right. This was one area, in fact, where airpower failed in the Gulf War.

In Desert Storm, Coalition air forces attempted to destroy the will of Iraq by bombing leadership targets in Baghdad, but these attacks failed miserably to degrade Iraq’s determination to resist. Why? Because Coalition air commanders did not know what constituted the sources and strength of Saddam’s will. As Chuck Horner is the first to admit, he had the means to destroy Saddam’s will but didn’t know how to do it.

In contrast, when the Coalition attacked the means of the Iraqi Army in the field, it also destroyed that army’s will. Thus, when Coalition land forces engaged forty-two Iraqi divisions, the result after four days was 88,000 Iraqi POWs and only 150 U.S. ground force deaths (half of which were accidentally inflicted by U.S. forces).

What went wrong? The first problem was with intelligence. U.S. intelligence operatives have not been trained to think in terms of the effects of military force on a given enemy. As a result, instead of risking judgments, they behave like accountants (with numbers, there is little risk). Intelligence operatives like to count enemy airplanes rather than determine the effect of killing an ace pilot.

The second problem was with the Plan. The Plan is not chiseled in stone. It is a script, and no performance ever goes according to script. After the first bomb drops, the enemy changes. Perhaps he is stronger than before, perhaps he is weaker. But changed. So the theorist is right at the opening moment of the war, and wrong ever after.

We’ll be discussing both problems in more depth later on.

WHAT IS AN AIR CAMPAIGN?

An air campaign is a series of military actions that employs air vehicles in order to achieve a political goal. It may be a phase in an overall campaign that also uses land, sea, and space vehicles, or it may be a phase that uses air vehicles primarily. (Air is the area above the surface of land or sea and below the vacuum of space. The edge of space is currently reckoned to be about 90,000 feet above mean sea level, but in the future it will probably rise to about 350,000 feet above MSL.) A commander has a wide range of missions, available to him as part of those actions — air superiority, air interdiction, air reconnaissance, airlift, and close air support.

In addition, an air campaign (in fact, any campaign) has to address a specific situation — in this case, the invasion south by Iraq into Kuwait and, potentially, Saudi Arabia.

Once the objectives and the actual situation have been determined, how does a commander build an air campaign?

He starts by using his available intelligence information to decide on an overall plan, which contains all the elements he thinks are needed. Then he examines the contributions airpower can make and decides how it will be used. This last is primarily a list of functions, such as: “I want to gain control of the air and keep the Iraqi Army from inflicting casualties on our ground forces.” This, in turn, leads to target selection, such as, for example: “I’ll want to bomb a particular Sector Air Defense Operations Center.” Or, “AWACS sees a MiG-23 flying south. We need to stop it.” Or, “We need to destroy tanks and artillery in order to keep our own losses on the ground low.” Once the targets have been determined (and the target list will always be changing), he aligns the targets with the attack forces he has available. He then overlays all the other support elements needed to get the job done — intelligence, command-and-control measures, refueling, search and rescue, AWACS, electronic countermeasures, Wild Weasels, communication codes — and lists them in the daily Air Tasking Order (called the Frag in Vietnam). This is the control document that tells virtually everything that flies what to do in the air, where to be, and when (including where not to be—“airspace deconfliction”).

We’ll discuss the ATO in depth in a little while. Before that, however, Horner had a much bigger task in front of him as he began to figure out his air campaign.

THE PLAN AND THE CINC

Plans are not made in the abstract. They are addressed to specific commanders, and though this is primarily to satisfy the commander’s expressed needs, it is also inevitably tailored to the commander’s personality. As the various plans that eventually grew into the actual plan of attack in Desert Storm were created and developed, Chuck Horner was sensitive to both the needs and to the personality of H. Norman Schwarzkopf.

He was aware, first of all, that Schwarzkopf was a landman, not an airman. As a result, from the beginning of their relationship in CENTCOM, he had tried to elevate the CINC’s sights into thinking about the importance of airpower to devastate the enemy in ways that were not directly connected to land warfare. He feared that Schwarzkopf would fall into the land-centric error that too many land officers made: thinking that war was only the battlefield meeting of two land armies. Those officers understood that you bombed the enemy homeland, government, and infrastructure, but they were never sure why or what relevance that had to real war, which to them meant surviving on a battlefield and destroying the enemy soldiers. Next to these, all else was of limited relevance.

Horner wanted the CINC to consider the use of airpower to achieve goals that were not about destroying the enemy army. And in fact, he succeeded.

As it turned out, Schwarzkopf wished to be the kind of CINC who approached warfare from a much broader perspective than is usually the case with land-centric thinkers. He wanted Goldwater-Nichols to work. The proof of it was in the way he created a theater leadership capable of blending the best of land, sea, air, space, and special operations activities and capabilities.

Horner didn’t know that yet, however. This is the way he saw him at the time.

First of all, Schwarzkopf was extremely intelligent. It never took him long to grasp what he was being told.

Like Bradley, he deeply loved ground troops. He cared passionately about their safety.

Like Patton, he believed in his own destiny. This meant that he feared history would not remember him as the heroic man of destiny he considered himself to be… or rather, that others would foul things up for him and prevent him from achieving his historic destiny.

Finally, his ego was enormous, yet he was enormously insecure.

His insecurity was the key to his famous rages. For instance, Schwarzkopf could never handle well being put on the spot; and when he was put on a spot, his tendency was to lash out and bully or to throw blame on someone else. For this reason, Horner learned never, never to put him on the spot. He never confronted him in public, but always in his office, when they were alone or with another person the CINC trusted. This not only protected the CINC from himself and his insecurities; but when the CINC was nervous and insecure, he sometimes made wrong decisions, which might require a lot of work to undo.

To have constructed any kind of war plan without taking consideration of these and other personality and character issues would have been far worse than unwise.

INTERNAL LOOK AND THE EVOLUTION OF THE PLAN

Norman Schwarzkopf took command of CENTCOM on November 23, 1989. Chuck Horner took the first major opportunity he could to talk to him about airpower.

This came during the preparations for the Internal Look exercise planned for July 1990 in which Country Orange invaded Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. In April 1990, Horner gave General Schwarzkopf a briefing that covered his planned use of airpower in Internal Look — a briefing that came to have important consequences for Desert Storm, both in the way air was actually used operationally and in the way it added to General Schwarzkopf’s understanding of airpower.

The briefing made a number of key points:

First, it showed the new CINC the deployment priorities for airpower in the Middle East region. The immediate need it foresaw was to build up air defenses (with fighters, AWACS aircraft, and SAMs), so that all the other component forces could deploy under a defensive umbrella covering Saudi airports and seaports. Next, attack and bomber aircraft would deploy to deter invasion, or (if an invasion occurred) to slow the invading forces until sufficient friendly ground forces could be put in place. Then came a whole basket of airpower capabilities most people did not appreciate: command-and-control aircraft to manage and facilitate air support of a ground battle, intelligence-collection aircraft, and vital support systems such as intertheater airlift. These were followed by discussions of mundane but essential issues such as how and where the air forces would be bedded down, supported logistically, and tied together with communications networks. Horner also described how his people would take over the air traffic control system and manage the airspace over the area of responsibility.

During all of this, the CINC listened closely and appeared to appreciate the important details.

Now came a discussion of actual operations. Here Horner described how they would manage intelligence assets and collection; air defense CAPs (Combat Air Patrols) and AWACS coverage; employment of Patriot missiles to defend against Scud attacks, and counter-air attacks on Iraqi airfields, radars, and SAM sites; as well as the overall command-and-control system networking them together. He covered interdiction of Country Orange (Iraqi) forces in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia (if those countries had been invaded), and cutting them off from resupply. He described how they would provide close air support (CAS) to ground forces, using the tactical air control system, and ways to provide that same support to potential Arab allies. And he covered possible nuclear, biological, and chemical (NBC) weapons targets.

Several elements from this Internal Look briefing remained months later in the plans eventually used in the air attacks on Iraq and its military. These included the first use of Patriot missiles in the ballistic defense mode; the integration of U.S. Marine air into CENTAF plans and operations; Push CAS; and perhaps most important, trust between the CINC and his air commander.

Patriots, it should be noted, were originally developed for the Army as air defense systems (they were, therefore, Army missiles). Later, a ballistic missile defense capability was added, and that was how Chuck Horner wanted to use them in the Gulf, as a defense against Iraqi Scuds, and not as air defense (other systems could handle that task better than adequately).

Some in the Army wanted to use Patriots as both air defense and ballistic defense, which would have located the Patriots in less than optimum sites for ballistic defense and would have involved procedures that would have jeopardized the interception of missiles. Horner, therefore, decided to take early action to ensure that the Patriots would be used in the most effective way.

What happened next is convoluted, but in its twists it shows some of the practical side of Goldwater-Nichols. It’s also a good place to offer a brief primer on the way the various commands interacted.

★ As previously discussed, a service — whether Army, Navy, Air Force, or Marine Corps — organized, trained, and equipped forces to conduct military operations, and these forces were apportioned to unified commanders, who could organize their forces for battle in any way they felt was appropriate.

One such way might be to use them as a functional command. For instance, all fixed-wing aircraft from both the Air Force and Navy were assigned to a joint force air component commander — which was Chuck Horner, who was also the CENTCOM Air Force service commander. This dual role wasn’t unusual. As service commander, he had provided the major portion of the forces, and so it was appropriate that he be JFACC. If the Navy had provided the bulk of them, its service commander, Stan Arthur, would have had the position.

Disputes between functional elements in Desert Shield/Desert Storm were ultimately resolved by the CINC. If, let’s say, a Marine air commander wanted to use F-16s to patrol a road instead of his Harriers, then the JFACC would arbitrate. If the former were not satisfied, he could always go to his service commander, who would go to the unified commander. So, in Desert Storm, Walt Boomer of the Marines could go to Schwarzkopf and complain. If the CINC found his arguments had merit, then he could ask the JFACC to justify or reconsider his decision, or he could override it entirely.

Disputes involving another Coalition partner were more complicated. If the United Arab Emirate Air Force representative at headquarters did not agree with the JFACC on the employment of his Mirage aircraft, then he could appeal to his Air Force commander, who was supposed to go to the UAE national authority, who would talk to the UAE ambassador in Washington, who would talk to the Secretary of Defense, who would talk to the President, who would talk to the Secretary of Defense, who would talk to Schwarzkopf. Since that was obviously clumsy and slow, the UAE commander more than likely went directly to Schwarzkopf and asked for help with Horner.

The relationship between the service and the functional commanders depended on the way the services’ men and equipment were being used by the functional commander. Though on first glance there might seem to be potential for dispute here, in fact there was rarely a problem, since the functional commander used members of that service to plan how that service’s force would be used.

The functional commander might also ask the service commander about the military readiness of the forces he was using. So, for example, Chuck Horner might say to Walt Boomer, “Hey, Walt, would you please ask the USMC to ship your deployed air wing more anti-radiation missiles?” Similar relationships developed among the air forces of the various Coalition nations. So, for example, even though the JFACC had ordered the U.S. and Coalition air forces to make their bombing runs at medium altitude, the RAF might still want to conduct their attacks at low level. “Okay, Bill,” Chuck Horner would say to Bill Wratten, the RAF commander, “since your munitions can only be delivered at low altitude, go ahead.” Adding to himself, I hope they don’t get their asses shot away in the process.

As for the relationship between the component commander and the unified headquarters, George Crist, a former CINC of CENTCOM, summed it up this way, “The role of the Unified command is to create the environment needed for the component commands to fight the war.” The Unified command creates the proper environment by defining the overall objectives, apportioning forces, ensuring that services or nations share people and material so everybody can fight, and by determining priorities for the employment of the various forces. The Unified command must serve as the connection between those who conduct the politics of war and those who do the fighting.

The problems that develop most often result when the Unified staff decide they’d rather run the war than devote themselves to the less exciting and prestigious job of creating a good working environment for the component commanders. Unfortunately for the staff, the component commanders have a direct link in the chain of command with the CINC. Commanders like commanders more than they like staff, for commanders are the ones who must lay it on the line, and who must be responsible for their decisions and actions. Staffs merely advise and coordinate. So when the truth is difficult to discern, or when the issue has two reasonable alternatives, the CINC will normally side with his subordinate commander rather than a subordinate staff member. He loves and treasures his staff, but he understands the role of command and the importance of trusting his subordinate commander (and showing that trust).

★ As the JFACC, Chuck Horner concludes, I had to live or die by the quality of my ATO planning and execution. And while I looked for assistance from any source, in the end I had to satisfy the other component commanders, and ultimately the CINC, if I was to keep my job. Yet I could disagree with any of these and survive if my work was unassailable in terms of common sense and support to the overall campaign plan. If I failed to do that, it really didn’t matter whether or not I pleased or angered any of the various staffs, components, or authorities with their agendas. I always listened, but always kept my own counsel and did what I thought was best. And in the end, I did what I was trained to do, command. The ATO was the expression of that command.

★ We return now to April 1990, and the question of the Patriot missiles. Before his briefing to Schwarzkopf, Horner stopped into Third Army Headquarters in Atlanta to give John Yeosock (the Third Army commander, and CENTCOM’s Army service commander, or ARCENT) a briefing of his own, since, as CENTCOM’s area air defense commander (AAADC), that was also one of the JFACC’s responsibilities.

Since Horner was the area air defense commander, the Patriots (by virtue of the declaration of air defenses states and the rules of engagement) came under his tactical control; but because the missiles were apportioned to ARCENT, either the Army or Horner could position them. Thus, in meeting with Yeosock, the two men simply needed to reach an understanding about how to use them. Placement would logically follow. If Horner, as ADC, could not guarantee the Army that they would not be attacked by the Iraqi Air Force, then he would have had a very hard time obtaining agreement about placement of the Patriots. On the other hand, if he and the Army agreed that the ballistic missiles posed a greater threat than air attacks, then there would be no problem deciding where to put them. And this was what happened: Yeosock, the service component commander, said to Horner, “Good idea, you got them.”

After Horner gave his briefing to the land component commander (Schwarzkopf), Schwarzkopf said the same thing, “Good idea, you got them.” Since the air component commander and the land component commander had agreed, there was no need to raise the issue with the CINC for resolution. Horner simply informed him (Schwarzkopf) at the same time that he was convincing the land component commander (Schwarzkopf).

Thus, the Patriots were to be used in their ballistic defense mode during Internal Look… and of course later during Desert Storm.

Another issue Horner anticipated and headed off was an attempt by the U.S. Marine Corps to carve out their own space (as ground forces tend to do with land space). Marines like to run their own show, so they bring radars and air controllers to the fight, and are fully capable of controlling the airspace above their portion of the battlefield. Nevertheless, the JFACC is the airspace coordination authority under the CINC, and for him to cede a block of airspace to the USMC component would not only be inappropriate (a functional commander giving responsibility to a service commander) but would not provide for optimum management of the theater airspace.

Though it was not an issue with Walter Boomer, a few Marine officers did have a hidden agenda during the Gulf War: some Marines do not like functional commands — especially when another service will be commanding Marine forces. Since they are in essence a land force, and since the U.S. Army usually provides the major portion of the land forces, the Marines almost always work for the Army, and they don’t like that. For that reason, they resist any efforts to strip off their forces — aircraft working for the JFACC, for instance.

And for that reason, in the part of the Internal Look briefing in which he discussed airspace management, Horner made clear to the CINC that U.S. efforts should be integrated with the in-place system of the host nation, and that all airspace should then be coordinated under JFACC, who knew how to do that better than anyone else, and who would not anger the host nation (which would have been the CINC’s problem, but Horner’s undoing).

Schwarzkopf agreed.

Though some Marines were not happy with this decision (as had been the case in every previous exercise), he had confidence in Horner, and little further came of this problem. (During Desert Shield/Desert Storm there were attempts by Marine officers to go their own way, but Walter Boomer set these people straight.)

Land forces require close air support.

But how much do they need? And when? Is air best used here and now, striking enemy tanks and artillery, or somewhere else — say, striking his fuel depots and tanker trucks? These questions aren’t always easy to answer, unless enemy tanks are about to overrun friendly positions.

As a young pilot, both in war and in countless exercises, Horner had watched airpower’s potential squandered by assigning it to support the Army. He was determined not to let that happen again.

Airmen and landmen see CAS from different perspectives.

The airman sees it as answering the question, “How do I keep from hurting my guys on the ground?” In other words, he sees CAS as a system to hit the enemy in close proximity to friendly ground forces. His worry is not so much about hitting the enemy as about not hitting his own troops on the ground.

Through the eyes of the soldier on the ground, however, “CAS is airpower attacking the enemy that is killing me.” He sees it as powerful artillery. Sure, there must be measures to keep it from killing his own people, but the real issue is, “How do I get those jets to hit what is bothering me?”

These twin issues have been traditionally handled by means of the tactical air control party (TACP) — which is usually composed of a forward air controller (historically a fighter pilot in a helmet, with a rifle) and a radio operator who also drives the Air Force vehicle containing their radios and fixes broken equipment (radios, Humvees, or tents). The role of these two is to be assigned to a battalion (at the brigade and corps level, FACs are called ALOs, air liaison officers). The Army uses the FAC/ALO teams to communicate what it wants airpower to do, by means of preplanned processes. For example, the FAC/ALO may transmit a tasking directly to the TACC/AOC: “We need to hit the enemy machine gun bunker at 0300 two days from now in conjunction with an attack planned for 0330.” That tasking would go into the ATO as a “preplanned CAS sortie,” and forces would be assigned against that task.

Since the Army rarely knows what kind of air support they will need within the ATO cycle (two days), they put their requests for CAS in terms of “I will need ten CAS sorties sometime between 0300 and 0600 hours two days from now.” And this is translated into “air or ground alert CAS sorties.” Sometimes an aircraft that was intended to strike another target is diverted to support the ground forces because of a dire situation or an opportunity to do greater damage to the enemy. This is called “CAS Divert.” There will also be a CAS CAP, if the fighters must come from a great distance or if the need for the air is expected to be sudden and dire.

“Push CAS” is a planned concept wherein the sorties are spaced so as to fly over the friendly ground forces throughout the twenty-four-hour period. Meanwhile, there is in place a command-and-control lash-up that can access any of these sorties if it is reasonable to do so.

There are several ways for the aircraft to be sent into a particular area: the pilot may have been tasked to go there before takeoff, or he may have been sent there by Joint STARS, AWACS, or, in the past, a system called Air Borne Command Control Communications (ABCCC[38]).

Once the aircraft arrives in the area of the FAC, the FAC tells the flight leader what needs to be attacked, where the friendly ground forces are located (including himself), and special information, such as enemy defenses in the area and perhaps a required attack heading, in which he amplifies target location data: “Look 100 meters to the north of the bombed-out schoolhouse at the crossroads east of the small hill in the bend in the river.” This information is called a nine-line report, for it consists of nine items that must be briefed by the FAC (even if some elements are not required).[39]

Airpower must be used to support land forces — this is an absolute — but only when appropriate. In Chuck Horner’s view, land forces have too often confused trust with ownership. Trust is the knowledge that they will get the support they need. Ownership is the conviction that they are guaranteed the support they believe they need.

Before Push CAS, the system used to provide CAS was both arcane and obsolete. In theory, the CINC apportioned a percentage of the air effort to the land commander, who would then parcel it out to the various subordinate commanders. They would then use this as an element of their planning for the fight that was to take place in the future. Unfortunately, the subordinates rarely needed what they asked for (having been trained to “ask for too much” in order to ensure they’d get something close to their actual needs). Likewise, land commanders have often been unwilling to turn back air they didn’t need (unless a friend in dire straits needed it more). Few land commanders willingly part from anything they own.

Not all land commanders fell into this school. Some belonged to what Chuck Horner calls the “trust school”: “If we need it, it will come to us. If we don’t need it, let it be used efficiently against our common enemy.”

In the April 1990 briefing, Horner convinced Schwarzkopf of that position. And Push CAS was its expression: “We’ll provide CAS where and when it’s needed.”

Chuck Horner takes up the story:

In this briefing, I had two advantages: First, John Yeosock agreed with the Push CAS concept; and second, the land component commander knew he was responsible for all land forces and would have no problems apportioning the air effort to where it was needed. If lots of CAS was needed, he, Schwarzkopf (the JFLCC), would be able to convince the CINC (Schwarzkopf) to give him what he needed.

I was also sure he was confident that his JFACC could work out for him how much airpower to place in the CAS role, because he, Schwarzkopf (the CINC), had no idea how to determine how much airpower should be apportioned to CAS and how much to other roles, such as, say, Air Superiority or Air Interdiction. If Horner got it wrong, he could have him shot and find someone else. That way, if anything went wrong, Horner would get the blame. If things went well, then the man Horner worked for would get the glory.

Other issues raised at that briefing let the CINC know that Horner was thinking about fighting Schwarzkopf ’s war in Horner’s part of the world and that he could have confidence that Horner was a team player working Schwarzkopf’s concerns. For this reason, Horner showed him how he planned to work with the host nations (by merging air defense forces, by providing CAS to Arabs who didn’t have tactical air control parties and didn’t speak English, and by operating the Civil Airspace Control during time of war), and how he was ready to provide his air forces with sufficient logistical support and to take care of his people (with food, shelter, beds, and water).

Trust between and among commanders is essential. And it has to be earned. Horner earned Schwarzkopf’s trust.

In Horner’s words:

The bottom line was that I was telling him, “I know you are in charge. I am not going to be an Air Force prick, but I know more about airpower than you ever will, and you need to trust me and let me do my thing, so you will be a hero.”

In air-to-air engagements, if you can “lead-turn” a jet flying directly toward you, and he fails to see what you are doing, you will have an advantage when you pass, in that you have already started to turn toward his tail. If he discerns you have started a lead turn, he can negate it by passing as close to your jet as possible. Then each of you has to make up the 180-degree offset in the ensuing maneuvers. If he doesn’t and you have similar-performing jets, then the one who lead-turns wins.

At the April 1990 briefing, I was lead-turning the issues that had been a problem in the past: failure of the Marines to fight jointly, ignorant attempts by the Army to own the air forces, and failure of land force-trained CINCs to understand how to fight airpower. The briefing was a great success for me, for Schwarzkopf, and eventually the country.

I had Schwarzkopf’s confidence, and I got that the old-fashioned way: I earned it. So when he would call me in the middle of the night in the TACC from his war room and say, “Chuck, I am looking at a Joint STARS picture, and I see thirty trucks at XYZ, can you get them?” I could reply, “I will certainly try, but if they are not there because the picture you have is too old, I will send the force to where it was originally scheduled to go.” And he would reply, “Okay.”

★ All the planning and the thousands of actions that go on in war depend on faith and trust. No single commander can know all that needs to be known, can be everywhere to make every decision that needs to be made, or can direct every action that is taken.

The briefing ended with a discussion of what Horner labeled for Schwarzkopf a “strategic air campaign plan” (much to his later regret). What he meant was “targets strategic to Iraq”—that is to say, high-value targets, such as oil production and electrical distribution facilities, that could be held hostage in case Iraq used mass-destruction weapons.

Again, he was talking in the context of the essentially defensive Internal Look Scenario. Thus, the strategic campaign Horner was proposing then was only peripherally related to the plan of attack that later was to emerge in August and September of 1990. Unfortunately, the word strategic carries great magic, especially for commanders, and that day the word worked its magic on General Schwarzkopf. Ever after, he called the plan of air attack against Iraq the “strategic” air campaign, when, in reality, it was an offensive air campaign, a means to achieve the political objectives of the President and the Coalition, should diplomatic efforts and the embargo on Iraq fail.

This confusion was to resurface in August on the tarmac in Jeddah when the CINC asserted his desire for a “strategic” air campaign… and yet again in the plan proposed by Colonel John Warden and his CHECKMATE team, about which there will be more to come.

THE D DAY ATO

Deterrence is effected by having a strong military force in place that is ready to fight and capable of winning.

We will probably never know why Saddam Hussein did not attack Saudi Arabia in August. He may well have had that intention, yet was deterred by the rapid buildup of airpower and the U.S. ability to conduct a sustained air campaign within hours of the initial deployment.

Meanwhile, though the military commanders on scene did not know Saddam’s intentions, they had to be ready to counter the very real threat posed by twenty-seven Iraqi divisions on the border.

If Saudi Arabia were to be attacked, the following strategy was foreseen:

• First of all — and most important — air defense would be maintained, so Iraq could not use its own air forces to devastate the cities, ports, and airports in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain.

• There would be direct attacks on the attacking elements of the invading force.

• However, the greater concentration of attacks would be on the logistics lifelines of the Iraqis as they fanned out across the desert.

• Finally, Chuck Horner also asked for attack options against “strategic” targets inside Iraq. In this case, “strategic” attack meant strikes against targets not directly related to Iraqi military forces in the field.

This strategy was translated into what became the “D Day Plan” or “D Day ATO.” This is a good place to discuss just what an ATO is.

Air is a task-organized force — that is, each airplane is tasked to go somewhere and do something that will benefit the overall effort to attain a campaign objective as part of the overall theater strategy to support national objectives. The air commander plans tasks and allocates forces to do those tasks, based on the characteristics of the force elements. So, for example, on January 25, 1991, from 1000 to 1030, the USAF tasked A-10s to patrol a particular road in Kuwait and kill vehicles, using its gun and Maverick missiles. The way this tasking was transmitted to the people who would have to execute it was by means of an Air Tasking Order. In Desert Shield/Desert Storm, the planning that went into the preparation of the ATO was centralized at the headquarters of the JFACC and was done by representatives of all the functional elements (A-10 pilots, F-16 pilots, AWACS pilots, etc.) and nations represented (the United Arab Emirates Air Force, the RAF, etc).

The ATO is a statement of marshaled resources that is based on the best available information and the best available guidance at the time it is prepared. Each day, the commander will have a new appreciation of what needs to be done. Perhaps the enduring objective he sought to achieve has also been modified by new realities (definitely the case for the side that is losing).

That is to say, when constructing the plan and its expression in the ATO, the commander can never forget that the situation is fluid, that chaos is always a close neighbor, and that terrific opportunities may arise in an instant. This is especially true in war, where aircraft move about in the battlespace in minutes or seconds, and information about new situations and alignments of forces arrive in real time and must be acted on instantly. Even though the commander must have principles to hang on to, as time passes, his objectives may become modified, and he will certainly gain more information about the reality of his situation.

To make all this more complicated: The ATO itself is like a moving train. If someone suddenly changes one element, he must consider the ripple effect on other elements. Sometimes the effect is minimal. For example, Tiger Flight is scheduled to hit target X at Y time, but new intelligence comes in that says target X has moved five kilometers north. No problem. The new target coordinates are inserted, the change is added, and the ATO is hardly affected. But suppose that Y time becomes two hours later. Then there’s a serious problem. The new time may well drastically affect the aircraft generation schedule at the base. It may well affect tanker availability. It may well affect airspace deconfliction. And it may well affect the intelligence-collection efforts associated with that strike. For these reasons, it is sometimes better to freeze the ATO early and make up for the changes in the chaos that reigns in the current operations efforts during the day of execution.

Thus, an ATO is the marshaling of available resources against a series of tasks as they are best known when the plan is created. But the day that plan is executed, there will be more information that may in fact require reordering of priorities and tasks.

That means that the old paradigm — ready, aim, fire — has changed. In modern war, you ready, fire, and then aim. The deployment and sustaining of the force, a service responsibility, is the ready; the launch of the force against a preconceived schedule is the fire; while the command and control associated with the operations is the aim. That is, one now often loads up his aircraft, puts them in the air, and then decides what target to hit, based on real-time intelligence.

The plan, again, is not a sacred document. A commander has to be prepared to change it on the fly, and he has to have machinery in place to transmit the changes instantly to the people affected by them. For this reason, during Desert Storm, ATOs were built two and a half days — no more than that — before they were put into operation (since this was the minimum time for necessary preparations). This made it hard for the planners who made ATOs, but it ensured that changes would be more easily and quickly accommodated.

Chuck Horner imposed this two-and-a-half-day limit because he didn’t want his forces to be constrained by planning that went on days or even weeks before the war started. He wanted planners to be forced to evaluate the first day’s efforts and results, and then to plan what to do on day three. To make things easier, he gave them a half-day start. Then, as the days proceeded, they needed to make plans completely from scratch, using what they’d learned as previous days unfolded. “Of course, they had target lists hidden in their pockets,” Horner adds. “I expected that. But I wanted to force them into thinking about where we were at a given time and then planning from that, instead of building an entire air campaign and then just modifying it here and there. Chaos reigns and Huns like me revel in it.”

Likewise — as we’ve pointed out before — the commander can’t allow himself (or herself) to be a slave to seemingly potent doctrinaire concepts such as “strategic,” “tactical,” or “operational.”

Chuck Horner takes up the thought:

I have often said in the past that “strategic,” “operational,” and “tactical” are confusing words. And if you try to link strategy, operations, and tactics with the first three, you have a real mess, where people are talking past one another. I can make a strategy of tactical operations using unique tactics in order to attain a series of tactical goals to achieve an operational-level objective, which turns out to be the strategic center of gravity. Take tank plinking. It was a strategy — to deny the enemy the use of his killing machines. It had tactical goals — to destroy one hundred to two hundred tanks a night. It had an operational-level objective — to deny the enemy the effective use of his ground forces against our invading army. It had unique tactics — medium-altitude air attacks using laser-guided bombs with infrared sensors. And it destroyed a strategic center of gravity — since Saddam’s goal was to win a victory or stalemate by inflicting casualties on our forces. You have to be specific when talking about war. But unfortunately many are lost in the heady sense of destiny and all that bullshit, so they use powerful-seeming words like “strategic” when they don’t really know what they are talking about.

★ The D Day ATO tasked the air forces assembled in Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf nations, as well as those aboard the Navy aircraft carriers in adjacent waters, where and when to strike attacking Iraqi forces. It was modest at first, but as more and more aircraft deployed into the AOR, and as more and more planners from the Coalition allies came aboard, the daily ATO (updated daily and stored on floppy disks ready for immediate execution) grew in size and complexity. Meanwhile, as strength on the ground grew with the arrival of more and stronger ground forces, the targeting emphasis changed to reflect new overall campaign strategies.

★ Three people watched over the development of the D Day Plan — Major General Tom Olsen (Chuck Horner’s deputy), Colonel Jim Crigger (Horner’s Director of Operations), and Lieutenant Colonel Sam Baptiste from the CENTAF operations staff.

It would be hard to imagine a more suitable deputy than the silver-haired, grandfatherly, commonsensical A-10 pilot Major General Tom Olsen: Olsen was loyal; thoughtful when Horner tended to be rash; non-egotistical (so he worked Horner’s agenda, not his); and he made decisions Horner could easily live with. Olsen, in Horner’s absence, was the senior commander who approved or disapproved the ATOs and other efforts.

Colonel Jim Crigger was more directly the driving force behind the setting up of the TACC and its processes to produce the ATOs. Crigger had been the last commander of the 474th TFW at Nellis (the wing was phased out in 1989) and then, when he didn’t make General because of the draw-down resulting from the end of the Cold War, he became available for the Director of Operations job at Ninth Air Force/CENTAF. Crigger was intensely quiet, modest, and self-effacing, yet exceptionally smart (both in intellect and common sense), very tough, and deeply compassionate. After Horner hired him, he very quickly established his credibility with the hard-nosed staff (no small challenge, as they were the world experts in building an ATO and fighting war in the Middle East, having been together for over six years). The staff loved working for him; he coaxed their best efforts without driving them. Not only was his work as DO first class (he asked for guidance only when he needed it), he kept his mouth shut, and let the actions of his staff take the credit — always putting his people in front of himself when laurels were handed out, while taking the shots personally when things went wrong. Instead of ranting and raving at mistakes, he quietly dealt with them (including his boss’s) in private with constructive criticism. It wasn’t just his staff work that was exceptional; he was the point of contact with the deployed wing commanders, the man on the staff who, because he had himself just left wing command, could understand both their comments about ATOs and their needs, but could be counted on for good advice. The result was excellent chemistry with his commander.

Sam Baptiste had been operations officer for a squadron deployed in Iceland when a pilot had been killed in a crash and the blame laid on him, thus effectively ending his Air Force career. Afterward, Horner arranged to have him assigned to Ninth Air Force. Despite the cloud he was under, few people had his knowledge of fighter operations and intelligence. In the early days of Desert Shield, Baptiste handled the operations staff that determined which units would do which tasks if the Iraqis attacked; and in general, he laid out the details (such as CAPs) for Crigger. Later in the war, he joined Army Lieutenant Colonel Bill Welch in the more important job of planning the Kuwait Theater of Operations (KTO) portion of the daily ATO.

On August 8, 1990, when Olsen and the elements of the CENTAF planning staff arrived in Riyadh, Horner turned over to him command of CENTAF while he himself was occupied as CENTCOM Forward. Olsen quickly set up a warm working relationship with the RSAF commander, Lieutenant General Ahmed Behery.

Almost immediately, Jim Crigger and his staff had joined with the RSAF operations staff, and were conducting the appointment and guidance meetings that initiate the ATO planning cycle. Shortly after this, they were publishing a daily ATO. At first, these only coordinated combined air defense sorties, though they quickly grew to cover all the combined and coalition operational and exercise flying in the AOR. (This system was in place by August 13.)

On August 10, longer-range planning was begun. And on August 12, as the acting CINC, Horner asked Olsen to build a preplanned ATO that would rapidly respond to an Iraqi attack on Saudi Arabia — the “D Day ATO.”

Though (thankfully) the D Day Plan was never put into effect, it served as a springboard to subsequent planning for an offensive air campaign — not, interestingly, because of the planning itself, but as a training device. Training became an issue when the planning staff was augmented with many new people who were familiar with combat, fighters, and bombers, but who had never built an ATO. Putting together the D Day ATO gave these people on-the-job experience in the reasoning processes and the integration that needs to be considered — such as airspace deconfliction, tanker tracks, command-and-control agencies, radio procedures, and code words.

Meanwhile, communication of the ATOs between the TACC and operational units was soon accomplished by means of the Computer-Aided Force Management System (CAFMS) — best understood as a combination of word processor and e-mail. In the CAFMS computers were preprogrammed forms (spreadsheets and text). When these were filled out by the planners they became the ATO. These forms were then accessed by the wings that had communication links with the TACC in Riyadh.

The CAFMS terminals were also used to execute the ATO. At each duty position in the TACC current operations room, the duty officers monitored and communicated with the bases via CAFMS. So, for example, takeoff times would be sent from the wings to the TACC, which meant that the TACC operators knew who was en route to the tankers or their targets and could divert them to other targets if they wished. The TACC would also receive flight abort information, which allowed them to divert other missions against those targets they really wanted to hit.

CAFMS had several limitations. For one thing, the Navy carriers were not equipped with the SHF antennas needed to receive it, which meant that floppy disks containing the next day’s ATO had to be flown out to the carriers each night. (The foreign air forces that did not have a CAFMS terminal went to the USAF unit collocated with them and picked up the ATO there.) There were also systemic limitations. For example, because it was limited to word processor and e-mail functions, CAFMS was not able to show the effects of upstream changes downstream. Thus, if the TACC operators wanted to change a strike, the computer was not able to show how this change would impact on tanker off-loads and other such data.

JOHN WARDEN AND CHECKMATE

As Tom Olsen, Jim Crigger, and their staffs were setting up the planning and operational machinery required in theater, General Schwarzkopf was making good on his undertaking to Chuck Horner in Jeddah on August 7 to ask the Joint Staff to start the planning process for a strategic air campaign.

Recall that Horner had several reservations about the CINC’s plan. He was, first of all, dead set against Washington making strike plans for the forces in-theater to execute (as in Vietnam). Schwarzkopf assured him that wouldn’t happen. Horner was also worried that the CINC, and by extension the planners in Washington, would misinterpret the aims latent in the term “strategic.”

On the other hand, on the ramp in Jeddah, Schwarzkopf raised the issue of a possible offensive air campaign should hostilities erupt immediately (either because of an Iraqi attack south or because the Coalition decided to initiate an attack north in the near future). He was thinking offense even while the immediate need was for defense. To Horner (as to any airman), such a campaign was mother’s milk. This kind of campaign, every airman knows, would require striking the enemy as a system, not necessarily at his deployed military forces, but at what have come to be known as a nation’s “centers of gravity” (a term from Clausewitz: “The point at which all energies should be directed”), such as its communications systems, power systems, oil refineries, industrial basis, centers of government, and in general, its means to sustain war.

When General Schwarzkopf returned home to MacDill AFB, he talked with Colin Powell, and later to the Vice Chief of the Air Force Staff, Lieutenant General Mike Loh, about development of an air campaign. Loh then called on a small planning cell, called CHECKMATE, to do the initial work. Formed in the late seventies to examine the strengths and weaknesses of U.S. and Soviet military forces and to create simulations, in 199 °CHECKMATE was headed by Colonel John Warden, a brilliant airpower theorist. While at the National Defense University, Warden had published what many considered a groundbreaking study of the subject, The Air Campaign: Planning for Combat, as well as several articles on the employment of air forces.[40]

Warden was the kind of airpower enthusiast who saw air strikes as the decisive influence on conflict, while other supporting arms, such as the Navy and ground forces, had become superfluous and obsolete. People have been preaching the virtues of airpower pretty much from the time of the Wright Brothers, and some of these sermons have had considerable impact. The problem for airpower enthusiasts was that hundreds of thousands of bombs had been dropped, but aircraft had yet to deliver the decisive blow in a war (leaving aside the atomic weapons dropped on Japan in 1945).

John Warden was different from earlier enthusiasts in that, for him, it was not the material shortcomings of airpower (i.e., aircraft and weapons) that had failed to deliver the decisive blow, but its ineffective organization and application. In other words, if the violence was applied quickly, precisely, and in the right places, the desired results would inevitably follow.

It is no surprise, then, that Warden embraced with enthusiasm the task of developing a plan to force Iraq out of Kuwait by using airpower to destroy Iraq’s centers of gravity as defined by his Five Rings theory. For him, this task was the culmination of his military experience and of his search for new truths about the decisive potential of aerial attack.

Warden and his team immediately turned to this planning effort with great zeal and initiative.

The plan that came out of CHECKMATE was essentially a series of proposed targets to be attacked over a total of six days[41] (after which, presumably, the Iraqi leadership would give up and the war would be over). Attacking these targets would punish the leadership of the Iraqi government until it was driven into them that continuation of their land grab in Kuwait was futile.

• According to the CHECKMATE plan, Iraqi power and communications grids, command-and-control bunkers and facilities, and infrastructure like transportation and bridges, would be attacked.

• The plan also aimed strikes at Iraq’s emerging capabilities to produce weapons of mass destruction (NBC) and their delivery systems, such as missiles — like Scuds — and aircraft.

• Significantly, the CHECKMATE plan took into account the importance of minimizing civilian casualties, primarily through the use of precision-guided munitions (PGMs). This campaign was to be nothing like the city-busting, population-punishing bombing of World War II (which was not only morally suspect but ineffective: it only made people fight harder).

• Key to making all this happen was to be the concerted effort (called SEAD — Suppression of Enemy Air Defense), in the earliest stages of the campaign, to wreck the Iraqi air defense system (called KARI–Iraq spelled backwards in French[42]), so that U.S. losses would be minimized and aircrews and planners would have the freedom to make most effective use of the new PGMs and delivery systems that had come into the Air Force inventory during the past decade.

• Finally, though there were some plans to attack the Iraqi military in the field (i.e., in Kuwait), these were relatively modest as compared with the rest of the effort… The CHECKMATE plan did, however, produce some unintended benefits in that direction. There is no doubt, for instance, that it influenced favorably the capabilities of the deployed forces; and because of it, the force that finally deployed was far more capable than the original force allocated to CENTCOM. For example, at Warden’s behest, the air staff deployed the laser and electro-optical-guided bomb-capable F-111Fs from the 48th TFW at Lakenheath (the F-111Fs were later used to great effect in tank plinking) rather than the apportioned F-111Ds from Cannon AFB (which weren’t so equipped). Though no one had any notion of the eventual success of tank plinking until the idea was evaluated in the Night Camel exercises in October and November, the F-111Fs were nevertheless much more valuable than the F-111Ds.

The CHECKMATE team worked hard on their plan, fine-tuning it with every computer model at their disposal. And through their excellent contacts at the various intelligence agencies around Washington, D.C., they were able to assemble a much larger and more refined target list than was initially in the field in Saudi Arabia (probably their most useful offering to Chuck Horner and his own planners). They also called in representatives of the other services to get their ideas and comments, all of which made valuable inputs to the plan. In particular, the U.S. Navy’s SPEAR team, which had done first-class analytical work in examining KARI as a system, made valuable contributions to the SEAD portion of the plan (around which so much else depended). The SPEAR work gave planners a road map as to where and when to stick the knife into KARI (eventually giving rise to what became known as Puba’s Party, which knocked out Iraq’s air defenses on the first night of the war).

By the time it was done, the CHECKMATE campaign plan, called INSTANT THUNDER (with reference to the failed, gradualist, Vietnam War ROLLING THUNDER air campaign), ran to over two hundred pages. Given the time constraints levied on the CHECKMATE team, it was a dazzling effort. Now it was time to deliver the product to the customer, and that meant briefing it to senior leaders.

Warden flew twice to MacDill AFB to brief INSTANT THUNDER to Schwarzkopf, and both briefings were well received by the CINC. Warden’s offensively oriented thinking (he liked to compare his plan, for Schwarzkopf’s benefit, to the Schlieffen Plan and to Inchon) fit exactly into General Schwarzkopf ’s need to define an offensive strategy to free Kuwait. It also provided for options to respond to any Iraqi atrocity perpetrated against Western hostages then held in Iraq, or trapped in Western embassies in Kuwait City.[43]

One aspect of the campaign plan did bother Schwarzkopf. He found not nearly enough emphasis on reducing Iraqi ground forces, particularly the heavy armored units of the Republican Guards. By way of advice, the CINC mentioned this lack to Warden. It was advice Warden would later regret not taking.

After Schwarzkopf, Warden briefed Colin Powell, who also voiced his support for the INSTANT THUNDER plan. Now it was time to brief the CENTAF staff and Chuck Horner.

On August 19, a CHECKMATE team arrived in Riyadh and initially briefed Tom Olsen and the CENTAF staff. The team was headed personally by Colonel Warden, and with him were three of his key lieutenant colonels: Dave Deptula, Bernard Harvey, and Ronnie Stanfill. (Horner had known Deptula at Tyndall AFB, Florida, and thought very highly of him, both as an officer and as a fighter pilot.)

At the time of Warden’s arrival, Chuck Horner needed a chief planner for the air campaign; and on paper, John Warden was the perfect man for the job, with every intellectual skill needed to craft a plan that could be executed by Horner’s air forces, and which would drive the Iraqi armed forces to the edge of disaster.

But all that changed as soon as the two men met. To put it mildly, they didn’t hit it off. The problem was in part personal (which could have been solved; Horner worked all the time with difficult personalities — including the man he eventually made his planning chief) and in part professional: they had irreconcilable views about constructing an offensive air campaign against Iraq.

Here is Horner’s recollection of their encounter:

John Warden’s briefing to Tom Olsen and the staff was well received, especially because of the outstanding targeting materials and attack options it contained. (I later learned this data came from Major General Jim Clapper, the head of Air Force Intelligence, whose people worked tirelessly in support of CHECKMATE.) After the briefing, Tom Olsen told me about the accomplishments of Warden and his team, and suggested that I hear the briefing as soon as possible. According to Tom, INSTANT THUNDER went well beyond anything produced by the intelligence teams that had so far passed through Riyadh peddling their wares.

Since I was anxious to hear what John Warden had to say, I made a spot for him on my next day’s schedule. And at 1300 on August 20, I arrived in the RSAF Headquarters small conference room, where the CENTAF staff chiefs and the CHECKMATE team had assembled.

The briefing, unfortunately, started off poorly, the problem being that Colonel Warden had built it for a different audience than those like me who have been studying the Persian Gulf theater for years and airpower for decades. He had prepared the briefing as a stand-alone presentation for people at the JCS and CINC level, who had no idea of how Iraq as a country, or airpower as a tool, worked. That meant there was a lot of boilerplate up front, to bring the audience up to speed and to lay the groundwork for his subsequent points. Patience is not my long suit, and I don’t like being talked down to, so I waved Warden off from this preparatory material and told him to get on with his main points.

Though he seemed a little shaken by my sharp words, he quickly turned to his target listing. And here John Warden had the real thing. No doubt about it. I could not fault him for the glittering listing of targets he laid out then. Not only did he have access to target materials we had never seen before, but he had a good understanding of target systems, such as the relationship of the communications networks and the KARI air defense system. Most of all, he had a way to rack and stack the targets so we could relate their importance to overall political objectives. It was a solid piece of work, and he and his team could rightfully take pride in it.

But then, after some discussion, I began asking questions, and the wheels started to come off.

Keep in mind that the event had two aims. The briefing itself was important. But I was also conducting a job interview. If John Warden handled himself well — as I had every reason to expect he would — he’ d become my planning chief.

So I had questions for him about the briefing and the CHECKMATE plan — more or less factual questions (but which would at the same time show me how well he thought and judged); and I also had questions aimed at discovering his thought processes. I wanted to know how his mind worked and how he solved problems. To this second end, I threw a number of questions at him that would give him the opportunity to reveal the depth of his knowledge.

For example, I asked him, “Do you think we direct too much effort toward gaining control of the air?” Now, there is no right or wrong answer to a question like that, but an answer would show his reasoning process in building his plan. However, instead of grabbing the opportunity to show how his mental machinery worked, he simply dropped something like, “No, it’s about right,” telling me that he either knew it all and did not want to share it with me, or else he didn’t have a clue about gaining control of the air and had just filled the “control of the air” bin with some sorties because he needed to fill the square.

His responses to the more factually directed questions were similar. He danced around them — either because he didn’t know the answers (easy to understand; there was more plan than any less-than-divine mind could easily comprehend), or else because he didn’t want me to be screwing around with his efforts. I suspect it was a little of both.

Thus, when I tossed at him a question dealing with my broad concerns about the emphasis on targets in the Baghdad metroplex, he dodged it. To explain: Any attack within an urban area carries with it the almost certain guarantee of damage to civilian property, and civilian casualties. But worse, because of its historical and cultural significance among Arabs, the devastation of the ancient city of Baghdad by Western airpower could engender a hatred for the West lasting well beyond the immediate postwar period. It would be an Arab grievance and incitement to revenge for centuries into the future.

But, as I recall, he had no real answer for this, except perhaps to repeat his confidence in PGMs. Well, okay, I thought. But what if PGMs don’t work as well as we hope? What then? At that point, Warden, as ever, got fuzzy. (In the event, PGMs performed superbly.)

The truth is, by letting go of a little bit of control over the briefing, he could have easily provided me with useful answers. The plan was the work of many people. If he didn’t know the answer to some question or other, it would have been simple enough to turn to the subordinate on the staff who handled such matters and ask him. He could have easily said to Dave Deptula, for instance, “Dave, you built the air control part of the plan. Can you tell General Horner its basis, your assumptions, any limitations you see, and any possible holes in it?” While doing that would have brought risks, if in fact his subordinates had done their work, it would have been a mark of confidence and trust for him to let them answer. And of course, he could have corrected them as he saw fit. As it was, he was either too proud or too dense to try that solution.

There were also a number of other issues where we disagreed.

First, Warden’s plan envisioned pulverizing Iraqi air bases and their command-and-control structure. Though that is good airpower doctrine, I didn’t feel that going that far was either necessary or productive. It seemed to me that if we could render the KARI air defense network ineffective, then we could put the rest of the bombing sorties to better use. If an existing system is no longer going to be used effectively against you, what’s the gain in destroying it?

Second, I had serious doubts about the way his plan allocated targets by area: some to the U.S. Navy, others to the U.S. Air Force. Though his reasons made some sense (he did it because of the physical constraints of the various aircraft types’ payload and range), he unfortunately ran up against the personal experience of those who’d been frustrated, as I had, by the Route Package system in Vietnam. Now here was an Air Force colonel creating a concept that would easily lead to Route Packages once more. That wasn’t about to happen on my beat.

But what I really choked on came next.

The six days of attacks, foreseen by INSTANT THUNDER, were to be directed primarily against vital targets throughout Iraq, and principally on targets in the Baghdad area. That meant, for the most part, that Iraqi forces deployed in Kuwait and on the Saudi border would not be hit.

Warden’s reasons for this emphasis were straightforward: Airpower properly applied against the Iraqi centers of gravity would cause that nation’s leaders to surrender and withdraw their forces from Kuwait. In his view, Iraqi land forces were actually a detriment, a drain, less a threat than a hungry mass that had to be fed and supplied. Therefore, once we had removed the core national strengths, the Iraqi Army would simply go home.

Though I admired Warden’s singleness of purpose and his love of what airpower could accomplish, he was not the air commander. I was. More pressingly important, I was the on-scene CINC, and had other matters to consider, the most serious of these being the Iraqi divisions still poised just north of the Saudi boarder in Kuwait. At that moment, we had very few land forces in place to stop them.

First, while Colonel Warden held that because of our devastating strength in the air, the Iraqi land forces could not succeed in a ground attack, I was not in such a position to hope for the best. I knew that if we started the INSTANT THUNDER operation with only weak forces on the ground, our bases in northern Saudi Arabia might very well be overrun by the Iraqi Army. That makes it very difficult to rearm and refuel aircraft.

Second, though Warden was certainly correct in his assertion that airpower would play the major role in any forthcoming conflict, I did not consider, as he did, that Iraqi ground forces — or our own ground forces, for that matter — were unimportant. But when I pressed him on these issues, the debate went further downhill.

Where I had expected intelligence (and Warden was certainly intelligent), I was getting a university academic teaching a 101 class. At every question I asked that dealt with the Iraqi ground forces, he would dismiss my concerns as unimportant. Even if he was right (which I greatly doubt), he would have been wise to forgo the temptation to treat me like a boob. The commander on the scene may well have been a boob, but he doesn’t like to be treated like one. Warden’s problem, I’ve come to realize, was partly due to personal arrogance. He doesn’t easily suffer those who disagree with him. But it was also due to his absolute conviction that the entire package he was presenting was perfect. To question it, much less to doubt it, much less to consider changing it, was for him unthinkable.

Still, because I was much impressed with the excellence of his overall effort, I kept my patience, a rare thing, and continued to ask questions. “Humor me, John, just for the sake of discussion, what if the Iraqi Army attacks?…” But each time, he seemed certain I was too stupid to grasp his central concept and gave me a patronizing “If you could only understand what I’m trying to tell you” answer.

Soon, as the discussions became increasingly disjointed, the room grew tense. One thing was clear: John Warden and I looked at the problem of air campaign planning differently. He viewed it as an almost Newtonian science, with the targeting list being an end unto itself, while for me, air warfare revolves around the ATO, logistics, joint service and allied agreements, and the million and one little things that he never had to worry about back in the Pentagon. For me, the campaign plan and the targeting list are just the starting point. They are the place where the real work on an air war begins.

The more he talked, the more I realized that the major flaw in his plan was more than the piece he had left off about the Iraqi Army. The major flaw was that he did not have an executable document. He had no idea of the processes used to integrate the air war and all that is involved. He says, “Hit this and that target.” Fine, but where is the tanker schedule and the airspace deconfliction plan? Where are the rules of engagement, code words, IFF [Identification Friend or Foe] procedures, Coalition forces, radar coverage and orbits, and on and on? He skimmed through the details for a few days’ effort, and ignored the problems he didn’t want to or couldn’t deal with. He saw war in terms of the SIOP: execute this plan and the enemy is defeated. Well, good. But what if he decides not to be defeated? What do we do then?

In the end, it took weeks to build the first offensive air campaign plan. Much of Warden’s work was in it, but it went far, far beyond his work.

Sadly, I realized that his brilliance as a thinker would not carry through working with the team in Riyadh. Though I would have liked to use his efforts and his team to build an offensive air campaign, John Warden was too much in love with his own thinking, and too prickly to handle the give-and-take — the communicating — that Riyadh required. I decided he was better off away from the Gulf theater. I did keep the lieutenant colonels he brought with him, to help form the nucleus of the planning cell that we would create.

John Warden went home, where he did continue to support us by sending forward a flow of valuable planning and targeting information. But as far as I was concerned, he was out of the war.

BUSTER GLOSSON AND THE BLACK HOLE

The forced departure of John Warden left Chuck Horner in a bind. He had to take the remains of the CHECKMATE effort, the Internal Look plans, and the discussions with the CINC, and meld these with the thousands of other details needed to build a campaign plan that fit into the CINC’s intentions and, later, his overall plan for the liberation of Kuwait. This included the mundane aspects of logistics, communications, and day-to-day priorities. But more than all that, Horner needed a living, breathing plan that could adapt to the chaos of war, and not a set-piece, preordained effort that would lock him into a battle plan that was based on how his people conceived the world.[44] He needed an air strategy that could unfold in an ever-changing struggle, reacting to the enemy, maintaining the initiative and flexibility that airpower — and only airpower — could provide in this conflict.

Who could he put in charge of the plan? He needed the job filled now—August 20. He looked over his options:

Jim Crigger could do the job, but he was tied up running day-to-day operations. These were enormous, and getting bigger by the minute, as more reinforcements flowed into the AOR. Tom Olsen could also do it, but CENTAF needed a commander, and Schwarzkopf was still days away from coming in-theater, meaning that Olsen had to continue as Horner’s stand-in for the time being. Brigadier General Larry “Puba” Henry had arrived the day before, on loan until October from General Bob Russ, who had sent him to provide planning expertise on electronic combat operations (Henry had been an electronic-warfare officer — EWO). Few nonpilots make general, and none get to command fighter wings. Henry had done both. He was that good, and that smart. He would have been perfect as planning chief, but Horner needed his full efforts on the electronic-warfare elements of the plan, and besides he was only there on loan. His continued presence wasn’t guaranteed. Brigadier General Pat Caruana was also a possibility (he’d been sent to work the bomber/tanker force), but Horner didn’t know him, so he was out.[45]

“I was in a fog about who to pick,” Horner recalls now. “Then, just like in cartoons when the lightbulb comes on over somebody’s head, it hit me. Buster Glosson!”

Brigadier General Buster Glosson was already in-theater. In June of 1990, he had been exiled (for reasons lost to Chuck Horner) to work for Rear Admiral Bill Fogerty (aboard the USS LaSalle docked in Manamah, Bahrain) as deputy commander, Joint Task Force Middle East (JTFME), a job given to the Air Force in recognition of the important role the AWACS radar aircraft and air refueling tankers played in Operation EARNEST WILL (escorting Kuwaiti oil tankers down the Arabian Gulf and through the Straits of Hormuz). When Horner had arrived in Riyadh, Glosson had flown up to brief him on the KC-135 tanker deployment to the United Arab Emirates during July of 1990, which had been the opening U.S. response to Saddam’s threats prior to the invasion of Kuwait. During the meeting, Buster had asked Horner to keep him in mind if he could be of any use.

“Yes,” Chuck Horner told himself on August 20. “Now I can use Buster.”

Buster Glosson was a South Carolina patrician — silver-haired, stocky, extremely intelligent, a smooth talker, quick to laugh… also complex, mercurial, and flamboyant. And very political; he was always working an agenda with great skill;[46] he was always intriguing; and he was extremely competitive, extremely combative, abrupt, a bulldog: for him, like Vince Lombardi, winning was the only thing. If you were not on his team, then you must be the enemy — an attitude that inevitably caused friction in the staff. In some quarters he was (and is) despised.

Because he was himself an innovative thinker and doer, and liked aggressive innovators around him, he was a good leader for people with thick skins and daring. But he inflicted deep distress on those with an accountant’s view of the world, or even on those seeking order and quiet.

Because he liked public praise, he was easy to motivate: praise him publicly and privately point out his shortcomings, and he would work harder than ever. And yet he was for the most part indifferent to what other people thought of him; he marched to his own drum.

Because he was usually decisive, he had to be reined in now and again, but for Chuck Horner, this was no sin. He would much rather have someone who took action, even if wrong, than someone who stood around waiting to be told what to do.

Chuck Horner had known Buster Glosson for years, and their relationship had sometimes been stormy, yet Glosson was obviously the one to head the planning effort. It wouldn’t be fun or pretty, but he would get results. He would form a team, and he would seek feedback from the troops who might have to execute the offensive air campaign that he would be tasked to draft.

Horner called him that night (the twentieth) and ordered him to Riyadh. He was in Horner’s office in the MODA building the next day.

Horner’s instructions to Glosson were simple: Take the CHECKMATE effort and build an executable air campaign. To begin with, he had to build a team. He could have the CHECKMATE group that remained in Riyadh, he could have Larry Henry, he could raid deployed wings and bring over anyone else he wanted from the States; but since Horner could not spare many from the small CENTAFF staff, he was on his own. Second, Horner wanted to keep the effort U.S.-only, until they had a handle on the details of who was going to be joining in the effort. At the same time, he wanted to open up the effort to the Coalition partners as soon as possible. Third, Glosson’s team needed to get their act together fast; the CINC would arrive in-theater within the week, and Horner didn’t yet know when he would need an air campaign plan. Fourth, his guidance to Glosson was to prepare an ATO for the first two and a half days of the war and then, starting at day three, to be ready to build a new ATO every day until the enemy was defeated. Finally, above all else, Glosson needed to keep very close hold on security. Horner had been led to understand this last point was paramount, not only from the standpoint of operations security, but also because all the Coalition nations were doing their best to persuade Saddam to leave Kuwait peacefully. It would not help negotiations if he found out that the United States intended to destroy him if he didn’t leave.

Glosson went straight to work. In his usual, brusque fashion, he commandeered everything in sight, including the small conference room adjacent to Tom Olsen’s office on the third floor of RSAF headquarters, as well as a number of CENTAF staff Horner had specifically told him not to touch. He also stole every high-quality person who showed up to augment Jim Crigger’s CENTAF staff. Glosson would grab them, take them into his conference room, and tell them they were going to win the war by themselves, and if they told anyone what they were doing, he would personally rip their lips off their faces. Glosson was such a difficult person to deal with, not everyone was eager to join him, yet once they did, they adored it. The team he forged was tight-knit, and it was an exciting place to work.

The secrecy of the work, plus the fact that Glosson’s people worked sixteen to eighteen hours a day, meant that a new person who came to Riyadh simply disappeared if he shanghaied them for his team. It was as if they had been sucked up by a black hole. And so Buster Glosson’s area came to be known as “The Black Hole.”

Late in August, after the D Day plan came to be more or less routine, Horner decided it was a good moment to mix some of the D Day experience and thinking into Glosson’s team (most of Glosson’s group were newcomers, while most of the D Day planners were Ninth Air Force staff who had been around a long time). Thus it was decided to beef up the “Black Hole” shop with a few of the D Day planners — a plan that was somewhat complicated by the secrecy associated with offensive operations: The D Day planners and the Black Hole planners could neither work together nor talk to each other.

One of the early D Day additions to the Black Hole group was Sam Baptiste. Though he was at first unwilling to work for Glosson (he liked working for Crigger — a preference many shared: Crigger led, Glosson drove), at Horner’s insistence, he came around and agreed to work for Glosson. Baptiste and Army Lieutenant Colonel Bill Welch, a member of Battlefield Coordination Element (BCE) team, became the key planners in building the Kuwait Theater target lists.[47]

Glosson and the Black Hole gang worked day and night, and as the hours grew longer, tempers grew shorter. Glosson didn’t have much patience with slow learners or foot-draggers. And when a few of the original CHECKMATE team proved unable to adapt their thinking, they had to return to the States. Others, like Dave Deptula, excelled; the harder it got, the more they flourished.

The biggest of their problems was the moving-train aspect of planning. As soon as they’d have some piece of it set up, another unit would arrive and have to be accommodated in the plan; and this, in turn, could change everything else. Or else someone would gain a new insight into a better way to conduct an attack or defeat a system, and that would turn the whole plan upside down. Or else they’d outline a course of action, only to get bogged down in a shortage of aerial refueling tracks or of appropriate types and numbers of munitions. Each day was more confusion than order and light, yet they steadily hard-worked their way through it.

★ On August 23, General Schwarzkopf arrived in Riyadh.

As soon as possible, Horner left him with all the diplomatic problems and organizational worries and hurried back to CENTAF, sharing an office in RSAF headquarters with Tom Olsen. Next door, the Black Hole gang was in full swing, with Buster Glosson constantly rushing in and out, trying out new ideas and sharing progress reports with Horner and Olsen. It was a heady time.

On August 26, Glosson emerged from the Black Hole to brief his offensive air campaign to Horner. This did not turn out to be one of Buster Glosson’s shining moments. Though the plan itself was splendid, the briefing was a disaster. And Horner made his disappointment loudly apparent. When a crestfallen Buster Glosson returned to the Black Hole, and the others there asked him how it went, he summarized Horner’s criticisms this way: “The briefing,” he told them with searing honesty, “was (1) ill-prepared, (2) poorly presented, and (3) violently received.” They needed to go back to work.

The issue for Horner was not about the quality of the plan. He already saw that was shaping up just fine. The issue was that once Horner had signed off on it, the briefing would go to General Schwarzkopf. And the CINC would not only have to understand the plan, he would also have to buy into it as his own; and then he would also have to be prepared to defend this plan before General Powell, Secretary Cheney, and the President. Since the CINC’s greatest fear was to lose his reputation, it was important to make sure that nothing happened that might embarrass him. That meant he had to comprehend what Horner and Glosson were telling him in sufficient detail that he was certain not to fail to answer any question Powell, Cheney, or Bush might ask him. And that meant Horner had to give him something he could comprehend (and alter if he so desired); but most of all, it had to be something that made him feel comfortable.

However, the briefing was so fuzzy, poorly organized, and broad that it was difficult for a listener to understand — especially if he was not an airman. It gave the impression that the Air Force didn’t have a strong focus on its battle aims; it showed no understanding of the sequential effects of its plan of attack. Instead, they just seemed to be running around blowing things up in a helter-skelter fashion.

Later, Horner and Glosson got together to work out what needed to be done. Here, as throughout the planning process, Buster Glosson did the basic planning brainwork, while Horner made the plan intelligible to other people — and especially to non-airmen. He coached, he was a cheerleader and a sounding board, but he tried to stay out of the details. He was quick with pats on the back when the planning showed promise and innovation, and a frowner and barb-tosser when it did not.

During their discussion, Horner hit on the idea to turn Schwarzkopf’s briefing into something like a movie that would tell the unfolding story of how they planned to use airpower. The “movie briefing” would work something like this:

First, they would talk about the weeks preceding the strike, when extra sorties would be flown every night, to get the Iraqis used to seeing activity. Likewise, in the days preceding the strike, tankers would begin to move forward with the fighter packages. And then in the opening scene of the “movie,” the jets would take off late at night in minimum moonlight, to reduce the chance an Iraqi fighter could find the F-117 contingent visually as they slipped across the border at altitude. The scene would unfold with the nonstealth aircraft flying beneath the coverage of the long-range Iraqi radar. Then Special Operations helicopters would lead in the Army Apaches, which struck the first blow when they fired Hellfire missiles against a pair of border radars. (This was actually a later change, made after Schwarzkopf realized that Special Operations was going to strike the first blow. Since Schwarzkopf was famously suspicious of Special Forces, it was decided that the U.S. Army Apaches would strike the first blow, all of which helped sell the plan.) The rest of the briefing-movie scenes would follow:

The F-117s would hit Baghdad and the communications centers. F-111s would hit the Sector Operations Centers for KARI. F-15Es would hit fixed Scud sites. F-18s/F-16s/A-10s/AV-8s would hit Iraqi Army units. A host of allied aircraft would also be doing their part: RAF Tornadoes would hit airfields; RAF Jaguars would hit the Iraqi Army; RSAF F-5s would hit airfields in the western parts of Iraq; Special Operations helicopters would be infiltrating to pick up downed airmen; there were tankers, AWACS, F-15 and Tornado ADV (Air Defense Variant) CAPs; there was Rivet Joint on the Voice Product Network (a secure, encrypted voice network that allowed the intelligence technicians on the Rivet Joint to relay vital information to the AWACS controller, who would then pass it on to the fighter in unclassified form). It was the full panoply of all that would unfold in the opening days of the war. And it would give a clear indication of what would continue. That is, the Iraqi Army would be so worn down that the land war to come would feature very few casualties.

To make all this work, Horner had Glosson build a series of plastic overlays with symbols showing where the various aircraft would be at various times, together with the targets they were planning to strike. Thus, the 0300 overlay showed F-117s near Baghdad, while the tankers with assorted fighters were well to the south, and the Rivet Joint and AWACS were in the orbits they usually occupied. Then the 0400 overlay showed explosion symbols on the targets being struck, together with the next wave of attackers. This overlay also showed the MiG CAPS over Iraq and not Saudi Arabia, as they had been all during Desert Shield. The movie unwound before the viewer not unlike a primitive jerky cartoon. Even so, anybody watching would get a sense of the timing, the enormity, the integration, and the sequence of attacks and how they related to taking down the air defenses, and hitting critical time-sensitive targets.

Owing to the CINC’s anxieties about the Republican Guard, one significant element was added by Schwarzkopf to the plan, and to the briefing. Provisions had to be made to attack the elite Iraqi force early and often. The problem for him was this: Colin Powell had decreed that success involved killing the Republican Guard, which for him was the Iraqis’ strategic military center of gravity. Thus, Schwarzkopf did not want the loss of the Republican Guard to take place on his watch, and so he feared that when the bombing started, the Republican Guard would pull up stakes and head for Baghdad, and he would be judged a failure. In order to ease the CINC’s ever-growing anxieties, a large part of the air campaign was given over to preventing the Republican Guards from leaving the battlefield. They were bombed heavily, with more B-52 sorties added later. (In fact, Horner always doubted that the Republican Guards would leave the field. First of all, it would have put them on the roads, where they would have been easy pickings. And second, if Saddam’s strategy remained as it appeared then — that is, to plunge Coalition forces into the defensive arrangements he had worked so hard to erect along the border — then it didn’t make sense to remove his strongest forces from the battle. In this, Horner later proved to be right.)

After Horner and Glosson worked through this “movie briefing,” Glosson went back into his office, and a few hours later he emerged with the plastic overlay briefing that was to be his until the war started in January (though updated and fine-tuned constantly). This briefing in its various evolutions was given many times to General Schwarzkopf (who liked it enough to instantly make it his own), to Colin Powell on his September 12 visit to Riyadh, and to the Secretary of Defense and the President in Washington, D.C., a month later.

One change Horner added to the early briefing was to have a chart made that showed the fight taking place in phases. By phases he meant that various objectives would be emphasized at various times — that is to say, the four phases did not actually indicate separate actions, one beginning as the last ended, but levels of focus. They offered a way to communicate airman talk to non-airmen, and they were basically simple, the first phase being to gain control of the air, and the last to prepare the battlefield and support the land attack.

So:

• PHASE I — STRATEGIC AIR CAMPAIGN. To gain control of the air and hit the Iraqi leadership, NBC, Scuds, and electric and oil infrastructure. The idea was to deny Saddam supplies but not necessarily to destroy his heavy industry. That is, power and fuel would be attacked, but in such a way that facilities could be reconstituted relatively easily after the war — e.g., grids would be hit instead of generators.

• PHASE II — AIR SUPERIORITY IN THE KTO. This idea came from General Schwarzkopf, who was thinking like an army general, in terms of land area and lines on maps. Even though this phase was redundant (gaining control of the air would happen simultaneously over Iraq and over Kuwait), Horner didn’t fight him on it. It gave him buy-in to the plan (as in, “I thought of that”), so why argue with him?

• PHASE III — PREPARATION OF THE BATTLEFIELD. This included isolating the battlefield, killing tanks and artillery, and destroying morale. It was at this point that Horner and Glosson introduced into the plan the important (and later well-known) goal of destroying 50 percent of Iraqi tanks, APCs (armored personnel carriers), and artillery.

According to Army doctrine, when a land unit’s effectiveness has been reduced to 50 percent or less, then it is no longer combat-useful. At the end of the planned air campaign, the Iraqi Army would be reduced by 50 percent. Hence, in essence, when the air effort was over, the war would be over, and little would remain to be done save collecting prisoners.

To understand this goal, it is important to remember that Norman Schwarzkopf genuinely loved his troops. Their safety and ultimate survival was one of his chief passions. Thus, any air plan that ignored the troops on the ground would be dead if presented to the CINC. It is also important to understand that Schwarzkopf did not insist on a ground campaign. On the contrary, he would have been delighted if the Iraqis had surrendered before his land forces went into battle. All the same, he knew there was a 95 percent chance of land war, and he wanted to make sure air operations were conducted to maximize the survival of the men and women of his land forces. Thus, the air plan talked about “preparation of the battlefield” and attriting “50 percent” of the Iraqi armor and artillery.

Why “preparation” instead of just bombing the Iraqis into the Stone Age? Because “preparation of the battlefield” has special doctrinal meaning to the U.S. Army. If a battlefield is well prepared, few U.S. soldiers have to die. Ergo, the more thoroughly the Air Force can prepare the battlefield, the happier Norman Schwarzkopf would be.

Airmen are too often perceived as fighting some war other than the land commanders’ war. This war would be different. It would be the CINC’s war. Though it would primarily be an air campaign, to sell that campaign, Horner had to get the approval of General Schwarzkopf the land commander, before he got it from General Schwarzkopf the CINC.

The CINC bought this idea, and even thought it was his. (By the by, if the Air Force actually achieved this goal, they would clearly demonstrate airpower’s decisive effect on the battlefield — perhaps for the first time. Did matters unfold that way? We shall see.)

• PHASE IV — THE GROUND WAR.

How long would the campaign take?

The truth was, no one knew, and so estimates changed and varied. When the air staff ran the original ATO through the computer, the estimate was about a week. This seemed ridiculously hopeful to Buster Glosson, and so the time grew to three weeks. By November, it was thought that the planned Phase I would be pretty well achieved in less than a week (five to six days); Phase II in two days; Phase III in two weeks; and Phase IV would take up to three weeks. Later still, in a December briefing, Horner told Secretary Cheney that the computer models showed the war lasting from one to three weeks, but that he himself thought it would last at least six weeks. (This guess actually proved substantially correct.)

As it turned out, Phase I took from ten minutes to three days, depending on how success is measured. Phase II happened during Phase I. Phase III took five-plus weeks. And Phase IV took four-plus days.

The numbers of days do not total. For example, the thirty-eight days of Phase III include strikes conducted during the three days of Phase I. The message is that the impact of airpower on the enemy was underestimated, and the ability of airpower to destroy a deployed enemy was overestimated. The airman is always too optimistic, while the landman is too pessimistic.

★ Finally, it would be useful to compare the changes that took place in the air campaign from John Warden’s INSTANT THUNDER, to the September iteration of Buster Glosson’s briefing, and then to the ATO when the war started. Here are some numbers:*

This chart (a counting of the targets to be struck in the first two and one-half days) illustrates that while the first effort by CHECKMATE was commendable, it was out of date shortly thereafter. The number of targets doubled between INSTANT THUNDER and mid-September. And then the 174 targets in September grew to 218 in October, to 262 in December, and to 476 by war’s start. And as the war itself unfolded, the number of targets grew to thousands

INSIDE THE BLACK HOLE

The Black Hole started out in the conference room adjacent to the Olsen/ Horner office on the third floor of the RSAF headquarters. In November, it was moved into the basement complex of that building. In that complex was also housed the TACC Current Operations Center, the computer room, the RSAF Command Post, and other offices. A long hall connected these; the TACC Current Ops occupied the far (or south) end of the hall, while the Black Hole was at the north end. The RSAF Current Operations Center was on the left, about halfway down the hall from the TACC to the Black Hole. On the right and across the hall from the RSAF Current Ops was the Computer Center, a large room (perhaps sixty feet by fifty feet) filled with computers. There were many CAFMS terminals, all fed by the single large computer that was used to pull the ATO together. Between the large computer and the CAFMS terminals was a laptop that translated the input from the large computer into data the CAFMS terminals could display and manipulate. At the end of the hall, and straight ahead, was a stairs that led down to the RSAF Peace Shield bunker (another hundred or so feet below ground). Though it was still under construction, it was used as an air raid shelter during the first few Scud strikes on Riyadh.

Just before these stairs, and a ninety-degree turn to the right, was the entrance to the Black Hole. Up until the war started in January, this door was closely guarded (what lay beyond being top secret). After the war started, the door was simply left open.

The conference room the Black Hole occupied was about thirty feet wide by fifty feet deep. Immediately inside the room and on the right there was a small administrative section. Straight ahead was a small office shared by Buster Glosson and his excellent deputy, Tony Tolin (who had recently given up command of the F-117 wing and was in line to be promoted to brigadier general). To the left was a room with maps on the wall and a bank of televisions. In this room, Dave Deptula led the group that worked the targets in and around Baghdad. (The televisions were supposed to display target information, but they never worked and weren’t used.)

Down a small hall (created by plywood sheets) and to the right was a small room occupied by the Scud targeting section. Inside, pictures of fixed Scud launch sites were pinned to the wall. Also on the wall were maps showing Scud storage areas, Scud support facilities, factories, and the plants where Scud fuel was manufactured.

Because the missiles were moved out before the war started, once the fixed sites and the storage and production facilities were hit, there was nothing more to do but allocate sorties to Scud-hunting (A-10s by day, and F-15Es and LANTIRN Pod-equipped F-16s at night). As a result, the Scud targeting section turned out to be only partially useful.

A side story: Scud fuel was stable for only a limited time, and once it became unstable, it couldn’t be used. The Black Hole planners therefore figured that if the fuel production factory was destroyed, the Iraqis would have to stop shooting Scuds roughly three to four weeks afterward. In due course, the factory was bombed in the opening days of the war; but it appears the Iraqis didn’t follow the technical data, because they fired Scuds for the next six weeks.

Across the hall was the KTO (Kuwait Theater of Operations) Room, also containing many maps. Here Sam Baptiste and Bill Welch put together the effort to hit the Iraqi Army.

Behind it was the room occupied by the Air Superiority section, headed by Glenn Profitt, where Wild Weasel schedules and EF-111/EA-6 support were planned and put into the ATO (Profitt had taken over from Lenny Henry in October). As it turned out, once the war started, air superiority was attained faster than expected. And so work in this section, as in the Scud section, soon became routine, and the team became quickly unemployed.

Lastly, there should have been an “interdiction section” (that is to say, an “isolating the battlefield” section). To Chuck Horner’s later regret, there wasn’t. The reason not deserves an explanation. Let’s let him give it:

In our doctrine, we assign air to attack targets. When these targets are associated with the enemy air defense, our missions are called counter air. When these targets are in close proximity to our friendly ground forces, our missions are called CAS. When these targets are associated with whatever supplies the war effort, our missions are called air interdiction (that is, using air to interdict fielded forces from their support, logistics, command and control, reinforcements, movement, letters home, etc.). Other doctrinal missions include air superiority and nuclear strike (there is not a doctrinal mission called “strategic attack”).

Now, what do we call bombing a secret police headquarters that supports the evil regime? It isn’t counter air. It isn’t CAS. It isn’t interdiction (although we have to file it under that mission area now). So what is it?

What we need is a category of effort that addresses missions that are designed to defeat an enemy through means other than attacking his military forces. That is, once we have gained control of the air and hit the various fixed targets, our main effort has to be to isolate the battlefield. In Vietnam we hit the North for two reasons: (a) to interdict supplies coming south; and (b) to punish the North Vietnamese into stopping their support of the insurgency in the south. This latter category (b) really needs a name. Some would call it strategic, but strategic technically means either attacking a nation’s vitals or nuclear operations. Take your pick. I like the term offensive airpower, as this indicates you are doing something over enemy territory that is neither air superiority, air interdiction, nor CAS.

★ The Plan, of course, is only a step toward the war. Once the planning process was under way, there remained the millions of necessary actions, operations, procedures, problems solved, and just plain acts of sweaty labor that translated the Plan into focused violence.

By the time General Schwarzkopf returned to Saudi Arabia on the twenty-third of August, the offensive air plan had been hammered into workable shape, and Chuck Horner had come to realize that the United States would almost certainly have to fight Iraq. Says Horner:

By then I had no doubts that at some point we would have to go on the offensive. It was just a question of when — sooner if the Iraqis launched an attack, later if we did. I hoped that my convictions were wrong and that perhaps diplomacy would work, but the fortifications rising in Kuwait made it very evident that diplomacy was going to fail. That would leave us with the job of throwing the Iraqis out of Kuwait. Though I was convinced this would mean hard work for us, I also felt the fight would go fast. As events unfolded, I was pretty much right.

One option open to Saddam that may have saved him from war (and, thank God, he was probably too proud or too stupid to take it) was for him to have pulled out of Kuwait City and simply remained in occupation of the oil fields in North Kuwait and the islands at the mouth of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. Doing that would have posed a terrible dilemma for us: To stay and not fight? To declare victory and go home? Or to fight, even though Saddam had given up the greater part of his spoils? If we went home, then Saddam could continue to threaten his neighbors with an intact army. If we stayed without fighting, we would not only risk looking like an army of occupation, but it was a hard land and climate for our troops. But then, would an offensive to eject Saddam be justified?

Saddam, it turned out, was a lucky adversary for us. He could have made life much harder for us than he did.

The actual military situation had changed very little during the CINC’s absence. There was as yet nothing much standing between Saddam Hussein’s divisions on the Kuwaiti border and the Saudi heartland. The relatively thin Islamic Peninsula Shield forces were centered in the west in King Khalid Military City,[48] while elements of the XVIIIth Airborne Corps and the U.S. Marines were just getting off the boats and airplanes at Dhahran.

The ground defense plan remained for small unit resistance along the coast road, if the Iraqis had attacked that way. And if they had attacked inland, where there were no roads, air would have stopped them. Since the early U.S. defensive force consisted primarily of elements of the 82d Airborne division, and the 82d has no armor (after they drop into battle, they walk), what effectively blocked Saddam from Riyadh was 82d Airborne “speed bumps.”

It would have been a repeat of Korea in 1950—that is, fight where possible, but pull back. Trade land for time. Sting the enemy at every opportunity, but keep U.S. and friendly losses to a minimum. And use air to sap the enemy’s strength until he had exhausted his force, and friendly forces could be built up for a counterattack.

All of this began to change when the 82d Airborne division began to be augmented by the armored punch of the 24th Mechanized Infantry division and their Abrams tanks. At that point, Saddam had a lot more than “speed bumps” to worry about if he moved south.

Meanwhile, Horner was eager to shed the hat he wore as CENTCOM Forward and get back to his real work as CENTAF commander. Working the essentially political job of looking out for General Schwarzkopf’s interests (making sure that when the CINC returned to Saudi Arabia, he could pick up where he would have been if he had not left Jeddah nearly three weeks earlier) was not a grievous burden for Horner; it was an honor that Schwarzkopf had entrusted him with the responsibility. But he was doing the CINC’s work and not his own, and he wanted to get on with his own work — planning for and employing airpower. He wanted to be with his own troops. And he wanted to get into the details he’d had to relinquish to Tom Olsen. Though Olsen had handled things in his usual exemplary way while he himself was occupied with the CINC’s business, Horner did not like being a spectator.

So there was no one happier than Chuck Horner when General Schwarzkopf’s plane touched down on August 23.

★ Meanwhile, after much blood, sweat, and tears, the Black Hole team had created a complete, executable plan — that is, a plan that could be translated into a series of Air Tasking Orders that munitions and maintenance troops could use to load and marshal the jets, and that the pilots and crews could use to navigate and bomb. It met the CINC’s guidance about political objectives, and it was a living document that would flex in response to changes in the coming battle.

Buster Glosson had been a difficult boss, yet that had had little impact on the morale of the people assigned to the Black Hole. They simply had had so much important work to do that they’d been too challenged and busy to be much bothered by him.

The toughest element in creating an ATO is its open-ended character: it can always be made better, but when one piece is moved, all the other pieces shift — some only a little, others a lot. Though a perfect ATO might exist in some dream (or textbook), it has never existed in fact; and each day the Black Hole crew worked on the offensive air campaign, they discovered things that needed to be done to make it better… and at first to make it executable.

In late August, the plan was little more than a briefing, covering the highlights that the ATO would in time cover in detail, but it was a briefing that carried much on its shoulders, for it was tasked with conveying the plans and intentions of Chuck Horner and his staff to those who had to approve them — Schwarzkopf, Cheney, and Bush. Later, the President would also bring approval of the United Nations and Congress along with him. Specifically, the briefing had to convey the mental images of thousands of airplanes in a nearly three-day-long ballet.

Why only three days? Even though Horner knew the air campaign might go on for several months, he was convinced that no plan would last more than a couple of days before events caused it to be taken apart and put back together, so he allowed Glosson and his team to lay out the first three daily ATOs and nothing else. The general planning went on, of course, but Horner did not want his people to lock into specifics beyond that time.

When the plan was presented to Schwarzkopf, he approved it with little change.

The only detail that bothered him was the use of Special Operations Forces (SOF) helicopters during the opening moments of the war to lead Task Force NORMANDY, a planned strike on Iraqi early-warning radars located on the border with Saudi Arabia. The issue came up during the third run-through of the briefing. As Chuck Horner tells the story:

The CINC’s concern, and that’s a polite term for an 8.0 outburst on the Richter Scale, was that the Special Forces were going to start their own little war up there. And when they got in trouble, as he feared they would (he had his own ghosts from Vietnam to deal with, remember), he would have to bail them out with regular Army troops. In response, Buster carefully pointed out that the MH-53 PAVE LOW helicopters of the SOFs had to lead the way because they were equipped with the new, accurate NAVISTAR global positioning satellite (GPS) navigation systems needed to find the radars. He further reported that the actual shooting would be done by regular Army AH-64A Apache attack helicopters of the 101st Air Assault division. He then added that the PAVE LOWs would also provide up-to-the-minute satellite communications, as well as provide a combat search and rescue (CSAR) capability, if it was needed.

This idea of Army helicopters striking the first blow of the war really appealed to the CINC and greatly worked in our favor. To wit, even though the F-117 Stealth fighters were approaching Baghdad, and the air- and sea-launched cruise missiles were on their way, the first actual ordnance on target in the war would be delivered by the regular forces of the U.S. Army. It’s sort of like locating your Navy base in South Carolina when Mendel Rivers was in Congress. Though you could build the base at just about any harbor, it sure was going to be a lot smoother if you put it in Charleston, South Carolina. In our case, while anyone could drop the first bomb to hit a target, it made sense to use the Apaches. And it sure made the briefing with the CINC go a lot smoother!

CENTAF COMMANDER

Here, meanwhile, are Chuck Horner’s reflections on the responsibilities he faced as he got back into the saddle:

I had several jobs, so I guess I didn’t have to worry about boredom.

Planning for the offensive while maintaining the defense was job one.

Related to that was job two, which was to make sure we were ready at all times to go to war.

Job three was to be the leader without giving the impression of wanting to be in charge.

In this regard, I had to be especially sensitive in my approach to the contingents from the other nations in the Coalition. They expected me to lead, yet it was important for me to respect their inputs and concerns. In other words, I had to create the trust that would make them want to come to me for ideas, help, and coordination. On the other hand, if I needed anything from them, I had to be very careful how I approached them. And when putting together my guidance to U.S. airmen of all services, I had to make sure it was sound, not only for the sake of my own people, but for the sake of the Coalition partners. If they could agree with it, then they would nod and say, “That sounds good to me.”

I worked very hard to create an environment of openness, respect, and trust. There were no secrets, no special friends; all of us were equal and important, regardless of service or nation.

This attitude sometimes rankled my people, but they soon caught on and operated in the same mode (except for the majors from the USAF and the USMC; they always kept a wary eye on one another).

Job four was to be the spiritual leader of the airmen, primarily of the USAF, but (in a more understated role) of units from the allies as well.

What do I mean? First of all, I visited each unit as often as possible to make sure they had what they needed (to the extent that I could get it for them). They needed a lot: In some places, the folks lived in tents. Others in the early days had abysmal food (some meat they got had hair and teeth). Others had trouble getting mail, intelligence products, or weapons. And from time to time there were small problems with the host nation that I was able to nip with a friendly word to the local commander.

A big part of doing this job was just being seen. This means a lot to the troops living in uncertainty (How long are we going to be here? When is the war going to start?) and in difficult conditions (where the temperature is 110 degrees Fahrenheit, and they live in tents, without cold beer, far away from home).

At the same time, the commanders knew when I was coming and that I would be asking about how the troops were being taken care of. Although they all knocked themselves out to take care of their own troops, it helped when they could go to the local host commander and say, “You know about those gym privileges you were going to give my women on Wednesday nights? Well, General Horner is coming tomorrow, and I know he is going to beat me up about that. So can you help me out?” And General Mohammed (not a real name), who had been avoiding the issue, since he did not want women in his gym on Wednesday nights because his own troops couldn’t use it then, would say something like, “Yes, I think it is a wise thing for the women to have use of the gym one night a week. But you must make sure that the doors are guarded and that no men are allowed to see them in their sports clothing.” (By men, he of course meant his own men, some of whom would have been offended at the sight and might have complained to the local religious police.) But his real message was more like, “Okay, you got me, because your request is reasonable and I am your host. And besides, I don’t want you to tell Horner that I am not helping you out, because he might go back to Behery and then I’d get chewed out.”

To sum up, my job in Riyadh was to serve the CINC and form the Coalition. My job as a commander was to care for the troops. And my job as the JFACC was to provide for vision and esprit de corps.

Just about everything I watched over was of course the responsibility of someone in the staff. For example, Bill Rider in logistics, Randy Witt in communications, and Randy Randolph, the surgeon, had specific responsibilities in areas such as fuel, munitions, spare parts for Rider; lines of communication, message traffic flow, equipment status for Witt; and public health, hospitals, and medical evacuation plans for Randolph. I didn’t know anything about these matters — all of which are pass/fail in war — but I knew enough to know when they had all the bases covered; and I could help them get what they needed when they were having problems with their counterparts back in the States.

Though rank is not that big a deal in the Air Force, and we are taught that getting the job done is more important, still, each of these deputies was a colonel, while their counterparts in the States were two- or three-star generals. Thus, there was friction now and then. The folks in Europe and the States busted their asses to help us, but sometimes they had a different appreciation for what we needed than we did. Sometimes, in honest differences of opinion, a general tends to think he is more right than the colonel way out there in Riyadh. Well, if I sided with my colonel, then the guy back in the States had no choice but to give in; for ours was the only show in town, and the Chief of Staff of the Air Force was not only my dear friend, but he sure didn’t want Schwarzkopf telling Powell that the Air Force was not supporting their troops in the field. Keep in mind that I did not throw my weight around, but I was well aware of the power I had, and I didn’t hesitate to indicate a willingness to use it when it was appropriate to do so. In the process I hurt a few feelings, but only those that needed to be hurt.

THE MIKE DUGAN FIASCO

General Mike Dugan became Chief of Staff of the Air Force in August 1990, taking over from General Larry Welch. The two men could not have been more different. Welch was shy, retiring, and shunned publicity, while Dugan was outgoing, flamboyant, and courted the press. He was also blazingly candid, and had a striking aptitude for putting his foot in his mouth.

In September, Dugan made a trip to Riyadh during the same week Colin Powell was in the Kingdom for update briefings (as Chief of Staff, Dugan’s relationship to CENTAF was at best indirect, and thus the reason for the visit was of tenuous validity). The Chairman arrived on the scene quietly, bringing with him only an aide. Dugan arrived with an entourage, including several press people. Both the trip and the entourage were probably innocuous in themselves, though General Powell no doubt noticed and disapproved. Later events would cast them in a somewhat more sinister light.

In fairness to General Dugan, we should point out that he felt General Welch’s inaccessibility had prevented the Air Force from gaining its fair share of press coverage. His own aim, therefore, was to build the Air Force’s credibility with the media. And he had courageously set out to present the USAF as it was — good, bad, and ugly. Looking later at the events of September, Chuck Horner is convinced that Dugan brought reporters along on his visit not for the sake of polishing his own ego, but to give the press an opportunity to see and highlight the men and women of the Air Force in the desert.

In preparation for the visit, Horner asked General Schwarzkopf if Buster Glosson could brief the air campaign to General Dugan. The answer was a surprising no, owing to the CINC’s deep concerns about security. This was not intended as a slight. Security was (and had to be) tight. So, for example, when Powell was briefed, Lieutenant General Tom Kelly, the J-3 of the joint staff, was left out. Because he was not cleared, he was not told about the plan. Schwarzkopf undoubtedly was also far from eager to have Washington brass second-guessing him or trying to run his war — certainly well-founded concerns.

Nevertheless, Horner insisted. “After all,” he told the CINC, “this is the Air Force leader and a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And it will mostly be Air Force people who execute this plan.”

And Schwarzkopf finally relented.

The briefing itself pleased Dugan. In fact, it would have been hard for him not to like it. The information held no surprises for an airman, and indicated that Horner, Glosson, and the Black Hole gang had developed a thoughtful, executable plan.

During the flight back to Washington, however, the affair began to turn messy. General Dugan (undoubtedly in an expansive mood following his successful visit) discussed with members of his press entourage what might happen if an air campaign were to be launched against Iraq. The remarks were generalized and broad. He simply described how any airman would have conducted war against Iraq at this time and place, information every airman knows as well as he knows his own skin. In the process of describing the upcoming battle, it was clear that the Army would play second string behind the Air Force’s lead (another act that was later given a somewhat sinister interpretation in some camps, though in the event it turned out to be correct).

Unfortunately, there is only one really good way to conduct an air campaign, which meant Dugan was guilty of giving away secrets. And there is no doubt that Dugan gave out information that had been outlined in specific detail in the air campaign plan briefing; and that he had made inferences and remarks which could have been taken as disrespectful to the Army, Navy, and Israel. There is also no doubt that keeping Saddam Hussein ignorant of U.S. war strategy made absolute sense; to do otherwise jeopardized the lives of pilots.

So in telling the airpower story, he gave away secrets, put down the Army, and was crucified for it. As the old children’s joke has it, “Open mouth, insert foot.”

On Sunday, September 16, the story broke in the Washington Post. An outraged Colin Powell called Schwarzkopf and Cheney. An outraged General Schwarzkopf called Chuck Horner, who shared his boss’s outrage. And the next day Secretary Cheney called Mike Dugan to fire him. He had paid for his foolishness by being relieved from duty.

The official reason for the public execution of General Dugan was his revelation of secrets, and it is true, he was guilty of that. However, a case can be made that his real crime was insensitivity to the role of the CINC. It was Norman Schwarzkopf’s responsibility, not Mike Dugan’s, to describe how the air campaign in the Gulf Theater would be conducted. Dugan failed to appreciate that. Even his trip to Saudi Arabia was of doubtful wisdom from the point of view of his command responsibility. Yes, he was Chief of Staff of the Air Force; but he was also out of the direct command loop of CENTCOM.

Chuck Horner says in summary:

I can tell you that while I love Mike Dugan as a close friend, I was hurt by his interview. First, even though both of us hate ego people (and granting that I am one myself), I felt he was on an ego trip. Second, I felt he had betrayed the trust I had put in him when I’d persuaded Schwarzkopf to let us brief him. But then, third, after I got my ruffled feathers back in place, I felt sorry for Dugan. I was surprised he didn’t act smarter. Why not? I believe he had been suckered in by his own enthusiasm and the euphoria and false expectations you get when you become a high muckety-muck, like the Chief of Staff of the Air Force, with everyone congratulating you and telling you how smart you are and how pretty. The line between self-confidence and inflated ego is very fine, and generals too easily slip over to the inflated side of the line. I know I’ve done that, and it is likely that Mike Dugan did this time, and paid for it.

BRIEFINGS IN WASHINGTON

Even as Buster Glosson and his Black Hole team were pounding out the air campaign, a select group of Army planners had been developing a ground campaign. The team, called the Jedi Knights, was led by Lieutenant Colonel Joe Purvis from the Army’s School of Advanced Military Studies at Fort Leavenworth. The Jedi Knights had developed a ground campaign plan that called for a single U.S. Army Corps, U.S. Marine Corps, British, and Islamic force attack into Kuwait.

Bear in mind that they were looking to attack an army twice the size of theirs — half a million men, including the elite Republican Guards, with their up-to-date Soviet armor and equipment — and that the Iraqis had been busily fortifying the Saudi-Kuwait border with artillery, mines, trenches, barbed wire, fire ditches (ditches that would be filled with oil and then ignited), and other obstacles to invasion.

By October 6, Purvis’s planners had developed several options. The most desirable of these involved an enveloping flank attack to the west of the Iraq-Kuwait border (which lay along the Wadi al Batin, the dry riverbed that slanted north and east from the southwest corner of Kuwait). However, there were initial problems with this choice (which, of course, was the plan that was eventually adopted): Primarily, it was thought that not enough forces were available to effect the envelopment, keep the pressure on Iraqi forces along the Saudi-Kuwait border, and maintain a sufficient reserve. Army doctrine requires certain force ratios — that is, friendly-to-enemy ratios; and the forces then available to CENTCOM didn’t satisfy these numbers. Secondarily, no one knew whether the desert west of Kuwait could support armor. How hard was the ground? No one knew for sure.

What options were then open to Schwarzkopf? None of his other choices was appealing. The best of them seemed to be to focus his attack into the western sector of Kuwait, drive north to the heights near Mutlaa Pass (west of Kuwait City), and hope that counterattacking Republican Guards could be taken out by air. And if that somehow didn’t go as planned?… Well, they’d improvise.

Predictably, Schwarzkopf was set against this. That he never liked attacking into the heart of Iraqi defenses was always clear to Chuck Horner; that he liked armor was also clear: the lightly armored XVIIIth Airborne Corps was never his favorite attacking force against armor. And in fact, he didn’t have far to look: he had the “Left Hook”—the envelopment west of the Wadi. For that, however, he would need another heavy corps. How was he going to get it? He would present what he had to President Bush, Secretary Cheney, and General Powell — with all of its limitations. When they saw how risky this was, they would realize he needed more, and they would give him the extra corps he required for the Left Hook.

In hindsight, we now know that the Army planners never sufficiently took into account the ultimate effect of the air campaign on the Iraqi Army, though in all fairness, no one — not even the most optimistic airpower advocate — anticipated how seriously air attacks would damage the Iraqi Army prior to the ground campaign. If this success had been taken into account, the Left Hook would have been executable with pre-VIIth Corps Coalition forces.

★ On October 9, Buster Glosson and a team from CENTCOM left for Washington to brief the air campaign to General Powell (on October 10) and to the President and his chief advisers (on October 11). Heading the team was Major General Bob Johnston, the CENTCOM chief of staff. The other Army briefer was Lieutenant Colonel Joe Purvis.

Before the briefers left Riyadh, Schwarzkopf made it forcefully clear to Johnston that he was not recommending any of the ground schemes Purvis was going to brief. His aim was to generate the question “What do you need to develop an acceptable ground campaign?” With the expected answer being “A heavy corps.”

En route to President Bush, the briefings went through the usual reviews, which agreed that while the air campaign was well constructed and credible, the focus of the land campaign on sending forces directly into the teeth of the Iraqi defenses appeared unimaginative. Of course, it was not a lack of imagination that had given birth to this unhappy situation, it was a lack of friendly forces.

The briefing to the President had mixed results. The air briefing delivered by Buster Glosson was generally accepted, though not without questions about the plan’s assumptions of success. It simply looked too good. It was hard to accept its claims.

It’s worth looking at what lay behind these doubts — an outdated mind-set that did not yet understand the full impact and capabilities of modern airpower. Let’s examine a pair of facts:

First, the reputation of airpower had been created long before by air campaigns whose success had at best been mixed — the P-40s at Kassarine Pass, the B-17s over Germany, the F-100s bombing the Vietnam jungle. If such actions were paradigms for all air campaigns, then President Bush and his advisers had good reason to throw hard questions at Buster Glosson. How could any human endeavor go as well as he promised?

Second, technology had outrun conventional perceptions. In the years after Vietnam, airpower had taken a technological leap comparable to the shift from cannonballs to rifled shells. Now there were laser-guided bombs on Stealth aircraft, A-10s with Maverick missiles, and 30mm cannon shooting up tanks and APCs in the desert. The air campaign would go that well.

In the event, despite attempts to poke holes in it, the air briefing stood up.

The Army briefing didn’t fare so happily. For reasons unknown to Chuck Horner, it was never made clear that General Schwarzkopf had intended all along to offer Joe Purvis’s plan as a straw man that would justify the extra corps the CINC wanted very badly. To the best of Horner’s knowledge, Schwarzkopf had told Colin Powell time and again, “This plan is not what I want, but I can’t do what needs to be done without another corps at the minimum.” So Joe Purvis, courageously, stood up and got pummeled (and by implication, Norman Schwarzkopf got pummeled with him). The Army plan was called unimaginative, timid, risky. There were jokes about it: “Hey, diddle diddle, right up the middle.” All the while, Joe Purvis stood up time and again and absorbed the hits that led people to come to the hard conclusion that more ground forces would be needed if offensive operations were to be initiated. Though he never got much credit for it, he turned out to be a key factor in the success of Desert Storm.

And in the end, General Schwarzkopf got his second corps.

TRAINING

As the plan of attack was being developed and briefed, the Coalition air armada was being deployed to the Gulf and trained to fight.

What did this take?

Deployability is a major part of the normal, necessary business of the U.S. Air Force. Units are graded according to their ability to deploy quickly, and are often tasked to deploy to an isolated area on their own base, from which they fly sorties at surge rates[49] to make sure they have brought the correct amount of spares and other equipment. Deployment to the Gulf was made additionally easy for the USAF because of pre-positioned stores and Coalition equipment at collocated bases.

The U.S. Navy and Marine Corps had different methods of achieving the same results. Primarily, the Navy and embarked Marine jets were already in deployed status when their carrier left the United States, while the Marines had spares kits (containing thirty days’ supply of line-replaceable units, such as radios or altimeters) just like the USAF.

Though NATO units practiced deployment, it was usually not to the same intensity as U.S. services. However, since they were closer to home, they could use C-130s to ferry spares or equipment rapidly. Some units arrived with nothing more than aircrews and aircraft, but these were collocated with U.S. units that used the same equipment. If they needed a part, they could borrow one until another one could be flown from home. Special ground-support equipment and maintenance personnel were also shared as required. “One Team, One Fight,” as the slogan has it. In this case, it was true.

★ Though the six-month span between the initial deployment and the start of the war certainly helped, air forces train the way they fight (and by assigning to the enemy their own capabilities, the U.S. Air Force makes peacetime training more difficult than any war they are likely to fight). Thus, when the Coalition units arrived in the Gulf, they already knew how to go to war. The next steps would bring everyone to the next level, where a large, diverse force would be integrated, even as new approaches and methods (such as the Night Camel exercise, which we will look at more closely) were tried and practiced.

The focus of the training, in other words, was directed toward harmony among the various units, using the ATO as a score. Each pilot played a different instrument: The F-15C was used air-to-air; the F-15E, F-16, Mirage, or F-18 was used air-to-ground; and the Wild Weasel, the Joint STARS, the Compass Call, and the AWACS had their parts to play. If the music was written to exploit each unique sound, and if the tempo was the same for all, then it all would come together.

Everyone there was already a competent musician on his own instrument. The planners knew how to write a playable score. Chuck Horner’s job — as builder of teams and teamwork — was to wave his baton to keep the beat and to cue in specific sections of the orchestra. As in an orchestra, the musicians knew if they were making beautiful music; they knew when they were playing as one, and they enjoyed the confidence that engendered.

To these ends, Jim Crigger’s and Ahmed Sudairy’s operations staffs planned and tasked units to exercise together, most of whom had never flown with each other. A practice strike on a target on a gunnery range in the UAE involved Saudi, Italian, British, U.S., and UAE aircraft, for example. Or one or more units from non-U.S. forces would act as red air and intercept U.S. attackers to give the MiG CAPs a workout. Or there would be launch rehearsals, during which several sorties would take off in quick succession. Additionally, everyone received training in large-scale tanker operations, during which sixteen fighters would take off, join up, fly to a group of tankers and refuel, and then drop off at the right place and time to form up with other aircraft so they could hit a target at a given time.

Such exercises accustomed everyone to using the ATO and other common procedures and documents; listening to a Saudi AWACS controller; using code words and radio discipline; and thinking about integrated packages of strike aircraft, CAP aircraft, and support aircraft (Wild Weasels, Rivet Joints, EF-111 jamming aircraft, and AWACS).

Such harmony was most difficult for the Islamic allies. Though the USAF and USN had experience working with Arab air forces (in Bright Star exercises; Red Flags; and as a function of the training detachments associated with foreign military sales programs), the Arab air forces, culturally reluctant to fail in public, rarely trained together (training always involves learning how to overcome mistakes). Though there was surely some nervousness among the Arab allies before they let their pilots fly in Crigger’s exercises, there was an immediate imperative — war around the corner — that made these much more important than the cultural fear of public mistakes.

★ A more worrisome problem was aircraft accidents. There were far too many of them, though in Chuck Horner’s view, no aircraft accident was ever necessary.

One involved an ANG RF-4C (a reconnaissance version of the Phantom jet) practicing low-level gun jinks — that is, flying at low level to avoid radar-guided SAMs while maneuvering so AAA guns could not track them. Another involved an F-111 flying at low level on a gunnery range at night. Both pilots flew too low and paid for the error with their lives. Later, a young pilot in a two-seat F-15E strike aircraft decided to “play” air-to-air against an RAF Jaguar, despite strict orders against making air intercepts (unless he was actually attacked). His job was to carry bombs. The problem was that F-15E pilots wanted to be F-15C pilots, for the F-15Cs had the air-to-air mission, the mission with all the glamour.

This young pilot took off on a single-ship training mission at maximum gross weight in his F-15E (it was equipped with conformal tanks, which made it much heavier than the F-15C). Before coming to the Gulf, he had had an exchange tour with an RAF unit in Scotland. As it happened, the two units were now based together, which allowed the young pilot to conduct an intercept with an RAF squadron buddy, who was also flying in the local area on a training mission — the RAF Jaguar fighter at 100 feet above the ground and the F-15E at 10,000 to 15,000 feet. Since the F-15E’s radar could easily see the Jaguar, the young USAF pilot and his WSO attempted a stern conversion. In that maneuver, the pilot flies head-on to the target, then rolls on his back and pulls down until he can roll out behind his target, trading altitude for airspeed and G force for turn radius.

He almost made the final turn to pull out a few feet above the ground, but his tail scraped the ground three hundred feet before the final impact scattered the F-15E into thousands of burning pieces. The bodies were found in the wreckage and the final maneuver was observed and reported by the RAF pilot.

Horner was very upset with the wing commander, Hal Hornberg,[50] because he had specifically told him no air-to-air. If he had found out that Hornberg had winked at the ban on air-to-air training, or that he was running a lax operation in which others were winking at these restrictions (which many thought unreasonable), then Horner was going to find another wing commander. To find out the truth, Horner brought in from the States one of the most honest men he knew, Colonel Bill Van Meter, and sent him to investigate. In due course, it was determined that the old relationship with the RAF squadron, and not the squadron and wing commanders, was to blame. Horner further believes that if Hornberg had himself found that this tragedy had resulted from his own inattention or lack of leadership, he would have asked to be fired.

The year before deploying for Desert Shield, one of Horner’s wing commanders actually did that after he had lost three aircraft (his wing had gotten infected before his arrival, and he had to reap the rewards of his predecessor’s failures). “Fire me, boss, and put me out of my misery,” he had said to Horner, whose answer was, “I’m too mad at you right now for these accidents, and so I am going to leave you in the job just so you bear the pain while you put a stop to this nonsense.” He fixed the wing and went on to be a two-star; he was always an excellent leader.

In October, Horner called all the wing commanders to Riyadh for a let-it-all-hang-out meeting. The topic was not flying safety, it was preserving the force, and it got results. There was no screaming and shouting. There was no blame. Those wing commanders who’d had accidents felt worse than anyone else could make them feel (“If they didn’t feel that way,” Horner observes, “they shouldn’t have been commanders”). The ones who had not had accidents knew that “there but for the grace of God go I.” So each man gave his views about what he was doing right and what he was doing wrong, and about whatever he had discovered that led to accidents.

Everyone bared their souls, as they would at a mission debriefing, but with even greater intensity, brainstormed the potential pitfalls, and shared anguish for the organizational failures that had caused the deaths in the desert.

The actual reason for most of the accidents was not hard to discern: the crews were training too hard, pushing their aircraft, pushing the rules, and flying tactics far too risky for the situation. When pilots deploy away from home, constraints are lessened. And when they deploy in anticipation of war, the lure to go beyond the limits seems justified. As a result they often exceed their own capabilities and create situations that saturate their capacity to cope; they put their aircraft in positions that defy the laws of physics and are unable to recover.

Most of those at the meeting agreed that everyone needed some time off. Many of the pilots had been in the desert for over sixty days, living in crowded quarters, often with painfully uncomfortable sleeping arrangements, working twelve to fifteen hours a day, seven days a week. The troops were tired.

As luck would have it, living conditions were already getting better. Some of the units were now taking a weekly day off. As more tents became available, the number assigned to each tent was decreased. Recreation facilities were being established. But greater efforts were taken to lessen the stress.

★ The October meeting in Riyadh marked an important turning point in the period leading up to the war: Though other accidents happened, the curve went down. The dangerous trend was over. More important, the meeting marked the moment of truth when all the commanders realized they were going into the war in an orderly fashion, and that pilots must fly more conservatively in wartime than in peacetime. In peacetime they practice against a threat — SAMs, MiGs, AAA — that is perfect and omnipresent, while in an actual war they fly against an enemy operator, pilot, or gunner who is scared, tired, and working with equipment that cannot be well maintained and operated twenty-four hours a day. Very few accidents occur in combat. In combat, pilots avoid undue risks and keep everything as simple as they can. If an enemy kills you, that’s a tough break, but no one wants to be killed by his own dumb mistake.

ROTATION POLICY

In the midst of the training and deployment, Horner had a serious disagreement with the generals and lieutenant generals in Washington over rotation policy. They wanted to rotate troops back to the States; he didn’t.

He could not forget Vietnam, with its one year or 100 missions over the North, a policy that had robbed the deployed force of its commitment to success. He was going to have nothing like that in the Gulf… or he would go down swinging.

There were phone calls from General Russ, seeking Horner’s views about such a policy. “Chuck,” he asked, “what do you think about this—120 days in the AOR, and then we rotate the individual but not the unit?”

Horner’s reply was close to an ultimatum: “Respectfully, General, there’s no way I’ll ever agree to a rotation policy.”

“See here, Chuck,” General Russ answered, disturbed by Horner’s attitude. “This isn’t a discussion of whether or not we are going to have a policy. It’s a given that we are. Rather, it is a chance for you to give us your views about what policy we should implement. We can’t keep those people in the desert forever.”

To which Horner replied, “General, I respect what you are trying to do and appreciate your concern, but I will never agree to a rotation policy. We have been sent over here to do a job. When we get the Iraqis out of Kuwait, then bring us home. We are here until victory.”

These were brave words… and maybe foolhardy ones, Horner told himself, and sometimes he didn’t think he could make them stick. Yet he felt that this was one of those issues he needed to get fired over if it went the wrong way.

Fortunately, General Schwarzkopf felt as he did (probably as a consequence of his own Vietnam experience, though Horner can’t say this for sure), and so Horner’s policy stood — even in the face of higher-ups in Washington.

After that, Horner had to convey this hard message to the troops.

I found, he says, that if I told them the truth, they understood: That in fact I didn’t know when we would go home, that I didn’t know when the war might start, but that in Vietnam we had a rotation policy which made it our goal not to win but to stay alive until we rotated, and that I wasn’t going to be caught in that trap again.

I also told them that I wanted to be home as much as they did, and while I had better living conditions than theirs, I understood their frustrations. “We came to do a job,” I went on to say, “and it’s a worthwhile job. So as far as I’m concerned, we all stay until that job gets done. Sorry, but none of us can go home until the Iraqis are out of Kuwait, and the murder, rape, and robbery stop. It is my decision to make, and that is the decision I have made. If I get fired, then the new guy can do whatever he wants, but for us today it is here until victory.”

Certainly, we let people with special circumstances go home, and we had to let some of the reserve forces rotate their people, because they were on active duty for only a limited time. As for everyone else, morale was sky-high; people understood the contract and they had a stake in the outcome. They were committed to it, so let’s get on with it. A far cry from Vietnam.

THE AGONY OF KUWAIT AND THE HOME FRONT

Every day, the commanders in Riyadh and their staffs received reports of the Kuwaitis trapped in their occupied country — firsthand accounts of brutal acts of murder, torture, rape, and looting. At their best, the Iraqis in Kuwait City were a gang of thugs, stripping cars and houses. At their worst, they were beasts, executing children in front of their parents, decapitating with power saws men suspected of being resistance fighters, gang-raping foreign women once employed as domestic servants in wealthy homes.

Meanwhile, there was governmental and U.N. uncertainty about how best to remove Iraq from Kuwait, including considerable talk of alternatives to fighting. Most Americans wanted to avoid war, while many in and out of government — highly respected people such as Senator Sam Nunn and General Colin Powell — were counting on diplomatic initiatives and the U.N. embargo imposed soon after the invasion of Kuwait.

Others felt that the United States should not rush into a war where thousands of Americans might be killed, simply to secure Kuwait’s oil — or as some op-ed wag put it: Would the United States have risked so much of its wealth and so many of its young warriors if the chief export of Kuwait had been broccoli? (President Bush famously disliked broccoli.)

The view in the Gulf was vastly different. Proximity to the suffering in Kuwait made war seem increasingly better than waiting for the always doubtful success of the embargo or other initiatives.

All the talk of delay, along with the confusion of aims among their leaders, disheartened the families of those who were deployed, and left them in a conceptual bind. Without the appreciation of events in the Gulf afforded by firsthand knowledge, they were reduced to whatever information was provided by the U.S. media — a perplexing variety of views about what should be done to end the crisis in the Gulf. The families at home saw at best a vague end in sight to the crisis — and what appeared to be an ever-longer separation from their loved ones.

Yet — as always with service families — they bore up under the stress of separation in always inventive and heartening ways.

The spouses, most often wives, began to call themselves “the left-behinds.” The support they gave and received was a lifesaver, not only for their overall morale but also for their success in coping with everyday problems.

The yards in Sumter, South Carolina, near Shaw AFB, never looked so good, as neighbors turned out to mow and edge the lawns of families whose husbands had deployed to the desert.

The “left-behinds” began to bond together. Meetings were held to squash rumors, find out who needed help, and provide communication for those families living in unusual isolation. The wives got together for social functions, for a chance to just plain bitch to one another, and to take pride in not having to endure their terrible loneliness and pain on their own.

The shared sacrifice helped ease the panic and tears that came stealing into them when they were alone at night, wondering not only “when” but more importantly “if ever again” they would see their mates. Those in the desert had knowledge (though always sketchy and imperfect); they were busy; they were involved in a great and noble act; while the “left-behinds” worked to make their faithful, lonely lives seem normal at a time of almost unbearable abnormality. They did it because it was expected of them, because they had no other choice, and because of their courage and selflessness. They were real heroes of Desert Shield and Desert Storm.

★ On October 24, Chuck Horner at long last answered what had been Mary Jo’s constant question: “When are you coming home?”

I don’t know when we are coming home, I wrote her — with added comments—but for sure it will be after we fight Iraq. So the question is when are we going to fight? The answer is pick one of the following:

1. After the ’90 election. (Generals always try to sound politically aware.)

2. After the U.S. Embassy in Kuwait runs out of food and water. (We had plans to rescue the trapped staff, if their lives appeared to be in danger.)

3. After another 100,000 troops arrive. (More than 200,000 additional troops actually came.)

4. Before Ramadan begins. (The Islamic period of fasting and holy days, due to start in March.)

5. Before next summer. (I didn’t think we could survive the heat one more time.)

6. After next summer. (My attempt at humor.)

7. After Iraq attacks us.

8. Before Saddam starts killing the hostages.

9. Whenever President Bush and the other leaders say so.

10. Whenever the U.N. says to do it.

As it turned out, number ten, U.N. approval, occurred in late November, when the Security Council ordered a January 15, 1991, deadline for an Iraqi pullout from Kuwait, and number nine came with the President’s approval of the air campaign briefing. This decision grew stronger with the November decision to deploy the VIIth Corps from Germany and to double our naval and air forces, and was cast in stone with the congressional approval of military action in January of 1991.

My advice to Mary Jo was simple: “Just listen to President Bush. He is telling you the truth, and he is telling you what we are going to do.”

As for me, I had inside information. I knew that unless Saddam Hussein made an uncharacteristic change in his strategy, we were going to fight. In November, talk of rotation policy died, to be replaced by a growing sense of urgency, a clearer perception of what lay ahead, and an increasing awareness that, sometime after the first of the year, we were going to war.

BUILDUP

The first signs of the end of uncertainty came quickly. In November, the President’s approval of the additional corps began to take visible effect when the heavy VIIth Corps began to deploy from Germany to Saudi Arabia. In Germany, VIIth Corps had defended the strategic Fulda Gap in the face of the now rapidly disintegrating Warsaw Pact; in the Gulf, their mission was to be the armored fist of Schwarzkopf’s flanking attack aimed at the armored divisions of the Republican Guard, now based near the northwest corner of Kuwait.

Early that month, General Schwarzkopf called a commander’s conference at the “Desert Inn,” a military dining facility at Dhahran Air Base, to outline his plan for those who were new to CENTCOM, Lieutenant General Fred Franks and his VIIth Corps commanders, who had just flown down from Germany for an initial look-around. The old CENTCOM hands, like Yeosock, Boomer, Luck, and Horner, were already familiar with what the CINC would be telling them. They’d come to the Dhahran conference essentially to meet and greet. Though they were more than happy to have VIIth Corps and its Abrams tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles, the old hands had their brown desert camos and suntans, and their close comradeship developed in the desert, and to them the new men looked just a little out of place and edgy in their pale skins and forest-green camouflage fatigues. The new people would fit in — that’s what they were all trained and paid for — but there would be many tough moments in the weeks ahead.

In his briefing, the CINC covered what air was going to do, what the USMC, the XVIIIth Airborne Corps, and the Islamic Corps were going to do, and what he expected VIIth Corps to do. The Marines and the Islamic forces would attack the heart of the Iraqi defenses in Kuwait. XVIIIth Corps and the French would move into Iraq in the west, where they would support the flank of the main, VIIth Corps attack. When XVIIIth Corps reached the Euphrates River, they’d turn east and join the attack against the Republican Guards.

The CINC’s final message was simple: Hit them hard. Hit them fast. Never let up. Never slow down. “We are going to move out fast,” he told his commanders. “If you have commanders who are going to worry about outrunning their logistic tails, or about having their flanks exposed, don’t bring them to this fight. This attack will slam into an army that has been greatly weakened from weeks of air attack; and I want you to start out running and keep running until we surround them and destroy them as a fighting force.”

★ The buildup that followed was spectacular. There had been nothing like it since the buildup in the south of England in the spring of 1944. In November alone, CENTAF’s force grew by close to 40 percent, and that was only the beginning. Here is a snapshot of what was going on:*

Much of the USN buildup was additional carriers.

The buildup posed many problems.

For Chuck Horner himself, the pace of his own planning grew ever more frantic. Each day he had to ask himself yet again: “What has changed? What new force can we accommodate? How can we support it? At what location? How will we introduce them into the existing ATO?”

At Horner’s level, planning meant anticipating potential problems, then working out in advance how to avoid them, or solve them if they could not be avoided. It was his job to foresee everything that might happen, then to bring about the good outcomes and to head off the bad ones.

While the staff were up to their necks working immediate issues, he looked beyond what they were wrestling with to anticipate the next issues they needed to address when they finished what they were doing.

In this he was mostly successful, he now believes, for the war brought few surprises, while a thousand prepared-for events didn’t happen. His two chief anticipatory lapses were the impact of Scuds on the Israelis and the Khafji invasion — significant errors, yet easy to miss.

★ Meanwhile, there were many countless practical and immediate buildup-related problems:

Command arrangements had to be both spread out and strengthened. On December 5, Horner decided that his span of control was too large. He therefore put the fighters under Buster Glosson (officially, he became the fighter division commander); the bombers and tankers under Pat Caruana; the electronic assets under Profitt; and the airlifters under Ed Tenoso.

The constant arrival of new intelligence led to changes in the offensive ATO. However, now that there were more strike and support forces, more targets could be hit, so the ATO grew larger and more complex.

The best use of the new Joint STARS had to be worked out (it arrived for the first time only a day before the war started).

New players such as VIIth Corps had to be accommodated.

The airlift west of XVIIIth and VIIth Corps had to be worked out, once ground movements had been finalized (during their move west to attack positions, the only land artery, the Tapline Road, was paved with trucks. The intratheater airlift created an airbridge that relieved some of that pressure).

More tent cities had to be built, to accommodate the increased numbers of personnel.

There had to be ample munitions at each base. The plan was to have a sixty-day supply on hand; but when the new aircraft arrived, it went down to thirty days. Yet within a few weeks, Bill Rider and his logistics team, with enormous support from the logistics organizations in Europe and the United States, brought munitions up to the required sixty-day supply. Saddam Hussein, constantly underestimating airpower, had told his troops openly that the Coalition would run out of bombs after a few days. He was wrong yet again. Not only did Horner have sixty days’ worth of bombs and missiles on hand when the war started, but they would keep that level day in and day out as the war progressed.

Communications had to be built up, both to support the added forces and to execute offensive operations. Though there were more communications per person in this war than in any other, the miracles performed by Colonel Randy Witt and his communicators were never enough. The TACC could not get timely intelligence from Washington, and then they could never move it fast enough down to the wings. The link providing the AWACS air picture to the air defense command centers and the ships at sea was very fragile. The deployment into the desert of hundreds of thousands of troops with their small satellite terminals drained away vital communication links. And once the bombs started falling, the Air Tasking Order grew geometrically, yet still needed to be distributed on time.

All the while, the basics had to be attended to — such as air defense, in case the Iraqis tried a conventional air attack. AWACS orbits were set up and integrated with the Saudi Air Defense systems, providing complete radar coverage of southern Iraq and northern Saudi Arabia. Twenty-four-hour airborne CAPs were manned with USAF and RSAF F-15s and RAF and RSAF Tornado Air Defense Variants. Occasionally, an Iraqi would fly south at high speed as though planning to cross the border, but would turn back when the airborne CAPs, vectored by AWACS, maneuvered to intercept him. Sometimes they tried to lure Coalition fighters into elaborate ambushes in Iraq, but this never worked, because the AWACS saw the Iraqi ambush aircraft.

Finally, the existing air bases had to be enlarged, or in some cases new ones created.

First, each base was surveyed to see how much more it could accommodate. At some — such as Khamis Mushyat, where the F-117s were based — not much had to be done, since there were only a few more available to deploy. Other bases required much more.

Often, additional munitions storage areas had to be built. At Al Dhafra, in the UAE, one of these was dug in a small hill near a wadi. When it rained, the place filled up with water. The bombs weren’t harmed, but the dunnage and fuse boxes were set afloat.

Even before the buildup, some bases were short of fuel storage. The added aircraft just made the problem worse, and increasing fuel storage was not possible (adding fuel bladders might give a base a day’s additional supply). Bill Rider solved that problem by increasing the flow of fuel to the bases — that is, he increased the number of Saudi tanker trucks moving between fuel-processing facilities and bases. At Al Kharj and other bases, the flying depended on a constant stream of fuel trucks from the fuel-processing facility (in the case of Al Kharj, from Riyadh, about thirty miles north).

Fuel storage at Al Kharj was a problem because it didn’t start out as an air base; it started out as a runway/parking apron — and nothing else — surrounded by sand.

In Desert Shield, the F-15Es had been deployed initially to Thumrait, Oman. Thumrait was a fighter base, it had the fuel and munitions storage required, and much of the Air Force’s pre-position housing was stored there. The F-15E was a long-range attack aircraft, so the nearly eight-hundred-mile one-way trip to the (projected) battlefield (near the Kuwait-Saudi border) was not a problem. In fact, this distance was desirable if the battle started to move south and the Iraqis overran the more northern airfields. However, now that the projected battlefield was about to move north, the long round trip became a big disadvantage. It was therefore decided to move them five hundred miles north to the runway/parking apron the RSAF had built at Al Kharj. This move would put them an hour closer to the war.

Colonel Ray Davies and the 823 Red Horse Squadron, the Air Force’s heavy construction battalion, having just finished building ramps at Al Minhad in the UAE, and taxiways and parking at Sheikh Isa in Bahrain,[51] were sent north by Colonel Hal Hornberg to build a base and a host of living facilities throughout the desert for Air Force, Army, and Navy troops. The Red Horse would raise a city for over five thousand people in a matter of days.

The problems were daunting. For starters, the sand would not hold the tie-down stakes for the Air Force’s temper tents — air-conditioned and heated desert tents that were the envy of their army brothers. Red Horse’s answer was to lay down a deep base of clay over the sand. The clay hardened like cement and gave the camp a stable base. It’s easy when you can think big.

They found and dug out ton after ton of clay, then overlaid miles of desert where they wanted to set down the tents. The next problem was no water or fuel. Their solution was to bring huge rubber bladders from pre-positioned stocks in Oman and Bahrain. Hangars for the airplanes were also up in hours, again from pre-positioned supplies. Munitions storage areas, dining halls, shops, a chapel, operations, even a sand golf course, all rose in weeks. By December, the base was ready to receive two F-15E squadrons, two F-16 squadrons, an F-15C squadron, and a C-130 airlift squadron.

★ The creation of the quick-turn base at KKMC was even harder.

Quick-turn is a simple concept: The great reliability of modern American military aircraft allows them to make several sorties a day, like airliners, lugging bombs instead of passengers. It therefore made sense to locate a base close to Iraq, where the aircraft could be quickly refueled and reloaded, and the pilot could be given target information for a new mission. In that way, they could strike the enemy four or five times a day — in a tempo that would leave the Iraqis reeling.

Though it had drawbacks, the choice for this base fell on KKMC, less than fifty miles from the border with Iraq. As with Al Kharj before the Red Horse, it contained a runway and taxiways, and little else. More worrying, it could be a prime target for enemy artillery. For that reason, no aircraft would be assigned there. The birds would only come to refresh.

Now Horner needed someone to build a tent city, munitions and fuel storage, and an operations area, and set up intelligence, air traffic control, and maintenance services… all in two weeks — no excuses. To bring off that miracle, he brought in Colonel Bill Van Meter to be the wing commander at the quick-turn base.

On December 21, Van Meter appeared in Horner’s office, still groggy from his rush trip to Saudi Arabia. His challenge: to build a base at the end of the supply line, working his people day and night in an extremely new and isolated environment, while preparing them to survive missile or artillery attack and perhaps be overrun by an armor thrust.

With a rueful smile, he left to talk with Bill Rider and George Summers, the logisticians. Six days later, Horner flew up to KKMC. What he found there amazed him. The base was far from finished, but bulldozers were carving munitions storage berms out of the desert; pipes were being laid for the fuel farm that would enable the fighters to refuel and rearm without shutting down their engines; and a tent city was rising in the desert between the town and the base.

As they toured the base, Van Meter told Horner about a young female airman who had just arrived, disoriented and tired. During his briefing to the newcomers about their mission and responsibilities, she had sat calmly, but when he had touched on the possibility of enemy attacks, it had hit her that she just might die. And tears ran down her cheeks.

Flash forward to the days when Scuds were falling and pilots were beginning to die in shot-up jets. That same young woman proved to be one of the strongest combat leaders at KKMC.

COMMAND AND CONTROL

Managing the vast aerial armada called for an immense, intricately connected command-and-control system. Here are some of its more notable elements:

• TACC Current Ops — Located in Riyadh, the Tactical Air Command Center was the central node for the planning and execution of the air war. Chuck Horner maintained his headquarters there.

• AWACS — A Boeing 707 command-and-control aircraft with a large, long-range radar that could see aerial targets at all altitudes, provided they had a velocity over the ground relative to the AWACS aircraft. Though this number was adjustable, it was usually set at speeds greater than seventy knots, so cars would not show up as aircraft. The AWACS provided an air picture to all the theater, and the AWACS air controllers provided navigation assistance and controlled aircraft from pre-tanker rendezvous to poststrike refueling, as needed. F-15s and F-16s, with their powerful air-to-air radars, did not need such help; other aircraft often did.

• ACE Team — A small command-and-control node — usually a planner/ executor, an intelligence person, and one or two duty officers — located on board the AWACS and operating in parallel with the TACC current ops. Because it was closer to the fight, and more aware of what was going on than the TACC staff, the ACE Team had the authority to divert sorties. Normally, though, they kept in close contact with the TACC directors. They could also have acted as a temporary backup if a Scud hit had closed down the TACC.

• ABCCC (Airborne Command, Control, and Communications; pronounced “AB triple C”) — A C-130 aircraft used primarily for command and control of close air support. A command-and-control module in the cargo compartment held about fifteen people, half of whom were likely to be Army or Marines after the ground forces were engaged. The Marine ABCCC was called the Airborne Direct Air Support Center, or DASC.

• Compass Call — An EC-130H configured to jam communications, such as Iraqi military communications.

• Commando Solo — An EC-130 configured to conduct psychological operations by broadcasting television and radio.

• Rivet Joint (RC-135) — A special reconnaissance version of the Boeing 707 that provided data on enemy air defense systems and other intelligence information.

• Joint STARS (E-8A) — A modified Boeing 707, equipped with a large radar that provided Moving Target Information (MTI) and Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images of surface targets. This information was presented to air controllers on the aircraft, who tracked, identified, and directed strikes against enemy ground targets. Because the E-8 was still undergoing testing, it was largely crewed by Northrop Grumman civilian engineers who had volunteered for the war. The Joint STARS radar and air controllers proved to be of immense value in halting the Iraqi ground attack into Saudi Arabia at El-Khafji in late January.

• Killer Scouts — F-16 fighters assigned to patrol kill boxes (twenty-mile-square areas in Iraq and Kuwait) and locate Iraqi army units visually or by radar. They provided target information to flights of attack aircraft fed into their kill box area by ABCCC, AWACS, Joint STARS, or the TACC.

After the ground war started:

• Air Liaison Officers (ALOs) and Ground Forward Air Controllers (FACs)[52]— Both connected ground units with air and handled close air support. The difference lay in their rank and the level of army units to which they were assigned. FACs were usually junior officers assigned at battalion level or below. ALOs were usually majors or above and assigned to brigade or above. For example, a colonel would be the ALO at corps level, a lieutenant colonel at division. The ALO role emphasized senior-level experience and thus made the ALO the air adviser to the Army commander. While the ALO could control a strike, most often strikes were controlled by FACs, who were closer to the battle.

• Air Operations Support Center — A mini-headquarters, usually a corps ALO, heavily equipped with communications and computers. It was to the corps headquarters, or Army group headquarters, what the BCE was to the TACC. The Marine equivalent was called a Direct Air Support Center.

Other elements in the system:

• Control and Reporting Center (CRC) — A ground-based van that could also include one or more TPS-75 radars to provide an air picture. CRC controllers backed up AWACS controllers when the AWACS was too busy or not available — though they could not do the job as well as AWACS, because ground-based radar could not see airborne targets at low altitude due to ground clutter and the curvature of the earth. Other elements in the command-and-control systems with a similar function included U.S. Aegis cruisers and the Sector Operations Centers, operated by the Saudi Air Defense system and co-manned primarily by the RSAF and USAF. CRC displays were also linked into the AWACS and other radar nets, and provided the AWACS picture to those who didn’t otherwise have it. Thus, a CRC was set up at KKMC to give the Syrians and Egyptians an input into the air picture.

• Control and Reporting Posts (CRP) — Individual ground radar units that performed essentially the same functions as the CRC or AWACS, but were smaller and depended heavily on the other two for a comprehensive air picture. They were also called gap fillers.

• Wing/Squadron Command Posts — This was the primary hub linking the squadron, wing, or base with the TACC current ops. Each base would have a main command post, but its size and complexity varied with the base’s size and activity level. At a base with just a few jets, like Arar, the CP might be a tent with a telephone, a CAFMS terminal, and a table with maps used for planning. At a big operation like Dhahran, the CP might have air defense displays with the AWACS picture, intelligence computers to display updated threats, and a wealth of duty officers and cells to coordinate operations.

• Flying Squadron Operations — Here pilots planned the missions and got intelligence not provided by wing operations, briefing rooms, and scheduling boards. The ATO came from the TACC Plans to Wing Operations, where it was broken out and parceled out to the squadrons to execute.

• The Air Traffic Control System — This included towers, departure and approach control, and air traffic aids — TACAN, VOR, ILS, ADF, runway lights, Air Base Operations, GCI, and GPS.

• And a number of support elements such as maintenance control; security police operations; civil engineer operations (who watched over runway shutdowns); fire operations; bomb disposal; and hospital operations.

The center of it all, the TACC (pronounced “T-A-C–C”), had two functions: current plans and current operations. Plans — the Black Hole, current plans, and the computer room (which was part of current plans) — built the ATO; Operations executed it. However, in normal conversation, the TACC meant Operations, which was much larger than Plans, and more was going on there.

The Operations section changed the ATO.

In a perfect world, where nothing unforeseen happens, no plan goes amiss. In the real world, where the ATO was already forty-eight hours old when it was executed, a system was required that could change the ATO quickly, based on new intelligence, weather changes, unforeseen enemy actions, new opportunities, or even relatively small mishaps, such as a KC-10 tanker aborting a takeoff. The jets that tanker was scheduled to refuel had to somehow find fuel, and one of the teams in the TACC Ops section had to find a way to provide it. Likewise, if the weather was bad in the ATO target area, one of the TACC teams would likely change the scheduled flight from its preplanned route to a new target area.

During the war, the closest that planning came to perfection was perhaps 50 percent, and on some days virtually every sortie was altered.

★ When the Ninth Air Force came to the Gulf, they brought their command center with them, originally housed in an inflatable building (called “the rubber duck”), which was set up in the parking lot behind the RSAF building in Riyadh. It soon became evident, however, that a better site was needed. For one thing, the American airmen needed to adapt their operation to the immediate situation. Since they were in Saudi Arabia, the appropriate site for the control center was with the air force of the host nation. For another, the rubber duck — based on an outdated vision that placed the Air Force out in the countryside with the Army — was obsolete and only marginally functional. It was too small, too dark, and most of its technology came from the fifties (though some systems, like CAFMS, were newer). The 150-plus members of the TACC staff needed a more efficient layout — and hard walls to shield against the Scud threat.

The obvious site was in the basement of RSAF headquarters. In December, Operations took over a fifty-by-seventy-five-foot room previously used by the RSAF to teach computer operators. Power generators, communications vans, and satellite dishes, however, remained in the parking lot, and their cables were rerouted into the new TACC.

A TOUR OF THE TACC

At the front of the Ops room was a small open space. Down the room’s large center section were ranks of tables, covered with phones and computer terminals. Beyond a pair of side aisles were desks, most facing the center.

The right front wall contained BCE maps with plastic overlays depicting the strength and position of allied and enemy ground forces. To their left were a pair of large screens displaying the AWACS air picture and intelligence data, such as Scud launch and impact areas, active Iraqi radars, or data about airfields, transportation networks, or any other data loaded into the intelligence systems computer.

The commanders’ table was at the front center.

Seated at its far right (facing forward) was a Kuwaiti Air Force officer, Lieutenant Colonel Abdullah Al-Samdan. On leave in Jordan when the war broke out, Al-Samdan had left his wife and children there, leapt into his car, driven to Riyadh, and set himself up as the Kuwaiti Air Force representative at RSAF headquarters. He was at the commanders’ table because he held a special place of honor: it was his country they were there to free. But he also “paid his keep” by providing access to the resistance leaders in occupied Kuwait (they risked their lives daily by using their satellite phones to relay target data to him[53]) and by flying missions during the war. His parents, brothers, and sisters remained trapped in Kuwait City.

The RSAF leader, General Behery, sat on Al-Samdan’s left, with Horner next to him, and either Major General Tom Olsen or Major General John Corder next to Horner (Olsen generally worked days, Horner worked nights, and Corder, it seemed, worked all the time). Horner had brought his old friend Corder onto the team as a general officer director of operations. Though Jim Crigger had been performing splendidly in the DO role, he had no stars on his collars and so was not taken seriously in high-level meetings with other services. The intense, intellectual,[54] selfless Corder could handle the point man role superbly, and allow Crigger full time to run daily operations.

The last two chairs were occupied by the TACC Directors — Jim Crigger and Al Doman (Mike Reavy and Charlie Harr worked the night shift). Their job was to run current operations — that is, to execute the air war. When a change was made to the ATO, they were the approval authority, ensuring that all the pertinent people were informed and coordinated.

Behind the commanders’ table was a square table with a large map of Iraq under Plexiglas, around which sat the national leaders of the coalition air partners — Major General Claude Solnet from France, Major General Mario Alpino from Italy, Lieutenant Colonel John McNeil from Canada, and RAF Air Vice Marshal William Wratten, RAF, who was also the deputy to Great Britain’s top military leader in the Gulf, Sir Peter de la Billiere.

On their left sat the people who actually ran the TACC, primarily Lieutenant Colonels Bill Keenan and Hans Pfeiffer. They saw to it that people and equipment stayed in working order (they were the TACC’s “building superintendents”).

Duty officers — liaison officers from the various bases, air forces, and services — occupied the rows of tables down the center of the room;[55] their job was to organize changes to the preplanned ATO. Since most changes occurred after a flight was airborne, they were usually passed to the flights by the AWACS; but the airborne command element aboard one of the AWACS aircraft, or another command-and-control element, such as ABCCC aircraft or Killer Scouts, was also sometimes pressed into service.

The system also required a number of support and liaison elements, such as weather, intelligence, search and rescue, air defense, AWACS, airspace management (to keep objects from occupying the same place at the same time), electronic warfare, special operations, and the BCE (the liaison between the Air Force and the Army).

All of these elements were important. A few deserve more explanation:

The air is the Air Force’s sea, so weather was obviously important — far more important than knowing whether or not it was going to rain. The decision to load TV-guided Maverick missiles, for instance, depended on the forecast of optical slant ranges: Could the pilot see through the haze with his Maverick so he could lock the missile onto the target? The current operations weather section (supported by Colonel Jerry Riley’s larger weather shop across from the Black Hole down the hall) answered such questions and kept everyone in the TACC advised about weather in the target areas, refueling tracks, and airbases.

The large intelligence section in Current Operations received data from several sources: national intelligence sources (such as the DIA); units flying missions (their intelligence shops would debrief the pilots and call in anything hot); and analysts in tents on the soccer field in the USMTM compound next to the RSAF headquarters. The soccer field also sent target materials to the wings and made studies of the Iraqis (which went, for example, to the Black Hole, so the findings could be incorporated into the targeting process).

In the rear corner of the operations room was the search-and-rescue cell, led by Colonel Joe Stillwell. His team initiated, coordinated, and tracked rescues. For this they could call upon any available asset — navy ships, army helicopters, or Special Operations infiltration capabilities. Because search and rescue required joint resources, the SAR team in the TACC worked officially for the CINC and not for Chuck Horner. However, since search and rescue efforts were directed primarily toward downed aircrew in territory that was accessible only to air, and since the first indication of a loss, as well as its location, came from the AWACS picture, the team was located in the air operations center in the TACC.

Each morning that Horner entered the TACC, his first stop was at this cell, to check on losses and rescue efforts. As he saw it, there was no more fitting way for a commander in wartime to start the day than to be reminded of the cost of his mistakes.

NIGHT CAMEL

Airmen are always experimenting with better ways to fight.

During Desert Shield, 48th Wing F-111F aircrews flying over the Saudi desert discovered somewhat unexpectedly that friendly tanks were visible on their PAVE TAC screens, even when the tanks were dug into revetments in the sand.

The PAVE TAC pod was located under the F-111F fuselage. This pod housed an infrared scanner that gave a fuzzy television picture of the ground 10,000 to 15,000 feet beneath the aircraft. Since the metal in the tanks heated and cooled more rapidly than the surrounding desert, the tanks showed up brightly when the aircraft pointed its sensor in their direction. Once they got a glimpse of a hot or cold spot, they’d lock the sensor onto the target, and it would track the target as the aircraft moved overhead. The sensor was quite sensitive and could present an excellent picture of anything in its field of view; but there was a trade-off. The field of view was very narrow. For the aircrew, it was like looking through a soda straw at objects three to five miles away.

Also in the pod turret was a laser slaved to the IR sensor. After the air crew had found a tank and locked the sensor in a track mode, they would confirm the sighting with their cockpit television scope. The weapons system officer would then illuminate the tank with the laser and send a laser-guided bomb homing in on the laser reflection (F-15Es and F-16s equipped with LANTIRN Pods achieved similar results).

These tactics and procedures, practiced and refined during the Night Camel exercises in November and December, became tank plinking in Desert Storm. At the height of the Storm, the 48th Wing were killing over a hundred tanks a night.

Plinking had unintended effects. Soon after the campaign began in mid-January, reconnaissance photos began to show slit trenches some distance away from the parked tanks. During the war with Iran, Iraqi tankers had gotten into the habit of sleeping in their tanks — tanks being on the whole safer than the surrounding desert. Tank plinking ended that haven.

Later, during the ground war, U.S. tankers always seemed to get off the first shot against Iraqi dug-in tanks; and as the battles progressed, enemy tank fire was often sparse. Later analysis showed that when U.S. ground forces approached, the Iraqis were not in their tanks, and then as the first shots hit the Iraqis, the Iraqi tankers concluded they were under air attack and went into bunkers. By the time the truth hit them, it was too late. Though the bravest tried to crawl back to their tanks, they were often cut down by U.S. machine guns; and those who reached their tanks successfully were too confused to fight effectively.

Night Camel not only seriously weakened the Iraqi Army, it had a major impact on the ground war.

DECEMBER BRIEFING

In December, General Schwarzkopf called a command performance for his component commanders on the twentieth of the month to brief Secretary Cheney, General Powell, and Assistant Secretary Paul Wolfowitz at his headquarters at MODA. This was to be the last major war council before the proposed January U.N. deadline.

Though all the components were scheduled to participate, discussion of Army plans was to be minimal. Because the only war in the immediate, post-January 15 period would be the air war, the air campaign was to be the central focus. It was also Schwarzkopf’s intention (Horner suspects) to limit the land force briefing to logistical matters, in order to avoid premature judgments about the tactical details of the proposed ground attack. There would be time for that after the progress of the air war could be analyzed.

The Navy and Marine discussion would also be kept to a minimum. Though the Navy was handling the embargo of Iraqi shipping in their usual solid, professional way, there was little to be said about that. There were, however, potential questions about a Marine amphibious operation into Kuwait, which a few Marine leaders in Washington were pressing for — though enthusiasm for such an operation died the closer one came to Riyadh (neither Schwarzkopf nor Boomer wanted one). The defenses the Iraqis were setting up on the shores of Kuwait looked murderous. In the end, an amphibious deception was part of the final ground plan, and it tied down several Iraqi divisions during the land phase of the war.

The briefing was held in Schwarzkopf’s war room at MODA, and it was scheduled to last an hour, of which Horner had been allotted fifteen minutes; but since air would be the major topic, he prepared a fifty-viewgraph update of the briefing Buster Glosson had presented to the Secretary in October. That briefing had laid out a picture of the first three days of the war and a general look at the activities beyond that. Now Horner would explain in detail how all that would be accomplished, how long it would take, how the Air Force planned to fight as part of a coalition, and how they were going to support the ground forces when they came up at bat. Finally, he had been warned by Cheney’s military assistant that the Secretary was especially concerned about Iraq’s ballistic-missile and germ-warfare threats (in Horner’s shorthand, Scuds and Bugs), and for that reason, he had prepared two separate briefings about his plans to handle them.

Horner expected to be candid and straightforward, and to tell the Secretary honestly what airpower could and couldn’t do. For instance, he expected efficiency to drop for a time after the first three days. There would be an unavoidable lag until intelligence could be exploited and aircraft directed onto new targets (though this new targeting would be done in a matter of minutes). During the briefing, the Secretary seemed to welcome the candor, and in retrospect, it is clear that he would not have accepted a slick presentation that promised smooth and easy success.

When Horner made his presentation, he stood in front of a table where Cheney was sitting, with Schwarzkopf on Cheney’s left, Powell on his right, and Wolfowitz on Powell’s right. The other key component commanders were seated in the back, and the lights were low. As far as Horner was concerned, there were just five people in the room. Nobody else mattered. Though Cheney, Powell, and Wolfowitz did not expect him to fail, and they were not there to score debating points, their questions and comments were intense and probing; they intended to examine their concerns in detail.

The results, though, were rewarding. After it was all over, it was clear that the Secretary fully understood Horner’s intentions and accepted his inability to answer every question as one of the prices of honesty.

Schwarzkopf made few initial comments. He seemed to be waiting to see how Horner made out before he took sides.

As it turned out, hopes for an hourlong briefing were misplaced. It went three hours that day, and continued into the next.

The first hard questions addressed the destruction of Iraqi forces in the Kuwaiti theater of operations — specifically, how long would it take to destroy 50 percent of Iraqi armor and artillery. Because different studies gave different answers, Horner walked Cheney through the analytical effort that provided the basis for his own estimate.

A Pentagon air staff study had claimed the 50 percent goal would be achieved in less than a week, but that just didn’t pass the common-sense test, so Buster Glosson had asked the Plans and Analysis people to change their assumptions and fine-tune the data. Their new study expanded the campaign to three weeks — still unrealistic, in Horner’s view. In his best judgment, it would take up to six weeks of air combat to prepare the battlefield.

Cheney gave a nod to indicate that this made sense to him, and the briefing continued (the six weeks figure turned out to be substantially accurate).

The two hardest issues concerned Scuds and biological weapons. Though chemical weapons were also discussed, these were expected to be delivered by artillery shells and used primarily against military targets. Since the military had protection against these weapons,[56] Cheney was not greatly worried about them.

The “Bugs” were another thing. Not only could biological agents be spread in Israel and the populated areas of Saudi Arabia with relative ease, but there were no effective antidotes against them.

Earlier that month, Saddam Hussein had test-fired his homebuilt, “improved” version of the Soviet Scud missiles. To double the range of his Scuds, Saddam had to cut his warhead in half. Moreover, the Scud was already terribly inaccurate. To a military person like Horner, this meant the weapon was insignificant. To a civilian, however, a wildly inaccurate, seemingly unstoppable weapon capable of randomly destroying your house and family was very significant. As was demonstrated by the V-2 attacks in World War II and the Scud attacks in the 1980s War of the Cities between Iran and Iraq, even inaccurate ballistic missiles can terrorize civilian populations. Horner missed the point about the Scuds. Dick Cheney did not. He was a lot closer to the voters.

Horner outlined for the Secretary how his bombers would attack the fixed Scud erector launchers in western Iraq during the first hours of the air campaign. This was followed by a description of the strikes planned for Scud production, storage, fuel production, and repair facilities (although he believed most of these would be empty of the Scuds and their mobile launchers). Finally came the words Cheney was not eager to hear: “There is no way I can stop the Iraqis from launching Scuds at Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Israel from their fleet of mobile launchers.” When the Secretary pressed further, Horner wanted to assure him that the problem would be temporary and the solution was at hand; but there was no way he could honestly claim that. At best he could only describe their measures to suppress Scud launches, or, failing that, to defend against them with Patriot batteries once they were launched. Stopping the Scuds, Horner had to admit, was hopeless.

This did not please Cheney, but he was a realist. He understood that if Horner had possessed a bullet — magic or otherwise — that prevented Scuds from falling on Israel or Saudi Arabia, he would have used it.

★ Saddam Hussein’s use of poison gas on his own people and during the Iran-Iraq War was widely known. Less was known about Iraqi research and production of germ-warfare weapons. That meant there were a number of “what-ifs” to consider long before the Cheney briefing, all posing a number of dilemmas. The first problem was to isolate the Iraqi capabilities to produce, store, and deliver biological weapons.

Though intelligence information pointed to a number of laboratories capable of producing such agents, targeting production facilities was difficult, since very little was required to grow the agents — especially for people indifferent to protecting their work force from inadvertent exposure. To manufacture biological agents, no special chemicals (as in the case of most poison gases) or special equipment (as in the case of nuclear weapons) were required. Every hospital has a laboratory capable of producing biological agents, and food-production facilities can be changed into germ factories without difficulty.

If production facilities were hard to counter, delivery was even harder. Biological agents can be distributed to their intended victims any number of ways.

Against military forces, these were the choices:

The most effective delivery system would have been an aerosol-fogging machine (like those used for mosquito control) pulled behind a car or truck; but driving such a device into Israel or Saudi Arabia presented obvious problems. A helicopter equipped with spray bars could also have worked, but given the effectiveness of U.S.-Saudi air defenses, its potential for harm was limited. The agents could have been shot in artillery shells, placed in missile warheads, or dropped in bombs, but in each of these cases, dispersal patterns are small, and any explosion used to break open the projectile case would have proved fatal to some of its payload. In short, delivering biological agents against Coalition troops in the field would not have been efficient, especially since those forces were already prepared to endure attack from chemical weapons. The suit and mask designed to protect the soldier from gas attack also provided a measure of protection from biological weapons.

Biological agents could possibly have damaged Coalition armies and even terrorized many of the troops, but they would have been far more effective in terrorizing and killing civilians in large cities. In cities are herded men, women, and children who don’t have available the gas masks and impregnated clothing needed to counter harmful agents. Because people are packed closely, small numbers of weapons offer effective coverage. Because the diseases can take several days to harm their victims, terror and confusion have ample time to get out of control. And because cities are usually dependent on centralized sources of fresh food and water, these sources are easy to contaminate. One scenario imagined Iraqi infiltrators entering Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf countries and releasing anthrax or botulism spores into water supplies.

Though air defenses and counter-ballistic missile operations could shield against most aircraft or missile-dispersed biological agents,[57] and Saudi border guards were doing a superb job picking up Iraqi infiltrators, such measures could only suppress delivery of biological agents. Total prevention could not be guaranteed.

That left storage as the best place to attack. And intelligence information pointed to Salman Park, just south of Baghdad, where botulism and anthrax spores were stored in Teflon containers in massive, well-constructed, environmentally controlled bunkers.

Yet bombing these bunkers posed a dilemma for Horner and his planners. Would that destroy the spores, or would it release them into the atmosphere, where they could spread and contaminate the entire Arabian Peninsula? The choice then was this: To blow up the bunkers and kill every living thing on the Arabian Peninsula — a position given authoritative voice in a pair of scientific white papers published in England and the United States.[58] Or to let Saddam Hussein release the spores himself, which might also kill every living thing on the Arabian Peninsula.

As he was currently stationed on the Arabian Peninsula, Horner took the warning seriously, and there was no clear answer about the best course of action.

A solution to the dilemma came from an unexpected source.

One day in early December, an Army major, a biological-warfare expert from Fort Meade, Maryland, appeared at Horner’s door and presented his credentials (Horner never actually learned his name). “I understand you are concerned about Iraqi biological agents,” he said. Interested, Horner listened: “While the white papers often lead readers to conclude that any minute exposure to anthrax or botulism will be lethal,” he explained, “anthrax and botulism spores are not in fact as deadly as many so-called experts fear. In fact,” he noted, “we are often exposed to anthrax, perhaps every day; the spores live for years in the soil. Exposure itself is not a problem. It is the amount of exposure that constitutes the danger. And it takes a lot. Or,” he bluntly put it, “the best way to die from anthrax is to kiss a sick sheep.” He then pointed out that while heat, sunlight, and water — especially chlorinated water — killed the spores, these were no guarantees. Therefore, at the risk of fallout (primarily in Iraq), the most reasonable course was to destroy the agents and deny the enemy their use.

That seemed like a good idea to Chuck Horner.

Already, plans for the destruction of the bunkers had been made to minimize fallout. The idea was to crack open the bunkers when the wind was calm just before first light, then put cluster-bomb units on the stored agents to create the maximum heat with the minimum blast. For good measure, the attack would be ended by dropping randomly exploding land mines, in order to prevent the Iraqis from scavenging undamaged Teflon bottles of agents.

★ “Chuck,” Secretary Cheney asked, with deceptive simplicity, “what about attacks against the biological weapons storage areas?”

Horner described the target, summarized the Army major’s position, and then described the attack sequence proposed by his planners and weaponeers.

While Schwarzkopf kept silent and Cheney asked questions to better understand the issues, Powell and Wolfowitz offered counterarguments, citing the white papers condemning such attacks.

It was difficult for Horner to argue with Colin Powell, his military superior, in front of Powell’s superior, the Secretary of Defense, even when he believed he was correct. Nevertheless (diplomacy not being one of Horner’s strong suits), he set forth his reasons, and Powell and Wolfowitz disagreed. For a time there wasn’t much progress, since Cheney was withholding judgment, and Schwarzkopf continued to maintain his silence (though Horner remembers a gleam in his eye that said he enjoyed watching the Air Force general sweat).

The impasse continued until Horner recalled the larger issues. “Yes,” he told himself, “this is a war against aggression. But it is also a war against the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. And while our calculations may be in error, and some innocent Iraqi civilians may die from the fallout resulting from our attack, that would serve a useful purpose. The contamination of Iraq would send a signal, provide a lesson, to any nation contemplating building and storing those horrible weapons.” It didn’t take Horner long to lay out this new line of reasoning. Paul Wolfowitz quickly picked it up, and now began to find reasons to attack the storage bunkers.

As support for Horner’s position waxed, Powell’s opposition waned, until Cheney finally turned to Schwarzkopf and asked, “Norm, what do you think?”

“I think we ought to do it,” Schwarzkopf answered.

Nothing more was said, and the bunkers remained on the target list.

As it turned out, they proved to be a difficult nut to crack, buried as they were under extensive layers of dirt and concrete. The munition selected for the job was the I-2000 bomb (Mark 84 bomb class), which was designed for that kind of job. The I-2000 Mark 84 had a steel nose that would not fracture when it hit reinforced concrete, and its time-delay fuse was in the tail, so the bomb could penetrate before it exploded. Finally, unlike most bombs, which are dropped on a slant, the I-2000 was dropped from medium altitude (which gave the bomb enough kinetic energy to penetrate the reinforced concrete and its earth overburden) directly over the target (which allowed its laser to guide it to a near-vertical angle). The force this generated was sufficient to penetrate most reinforced bunkers.

In the event, when the I-2000 penetrated the biobunker, its explosion touched off an enormous secondary explosion, with a vast fireball and prodigious quantities of billowing smoke. What was stored in that bunker will probably never be known, but it turned night into day.

After the war, Horner researched the available sources to see if there was evidence of fallout of biological agents. Though he found reports of Iraqi guards killed during the bombing attacks, no evidence of deaths from biological fallout appeared (there have been reports of postwar civilian deaths due to disease, but these cannot be connected to the bunker attacks).

After the bunker issue was settled, Horner’s briefing was over, and he returned to his seat between John Yeosock and Stan Arthur at the back of the room. The meeting ended with a brief discussion of ground operations.

COUNTDOWN

The final weeks were a jumble. The buildup and beddown, as well as plans and training, were proceeding satisfactorily, though with lurches and hang-ups. To ensure that the executors of the plan had a say in its planning, Buster Glosson took the ATO around to the bases, briefed the commanders and crews, and ran one last sanity check on the tactics, the timing, and the force packages of various bomb droppers and electronic-combat support aircraft. Anything that looked unworkable was changed on the spot. Horner continued working his role as cheerleader and team builder, visiting the bases and the units, giving encouragement, laying on hands. Yet he always managed to find time to keep up his own flying skills, by combining visits to the bases with training sorties (he averaged four to six F-16 sorties per week).

Surprisingly, not every second was filled with demands. During free moments, he read military history (provided by Dr. Dick Hallion, the USAF historian) to see how others had done the job he was now doing. Two he especially remembers were The Sky Over Baghdad, about the RAF in post- World War I Iraq, and Eagle Against the Sun, about the war with Japan. He learned there that MacArthur’s relationship with his air chief, Kenney, was very like his own with Schwarzkopf (both CINCs knew the importance of air to their overall combat plan, and both trusted their airman to carry out the right air strategy).

Finally, there was a round of official dinners with cabinet ministers, princes, heads of state, near heads of state, and other high-level people — somewhat daunting for a boy from Iowa, yet also a source of pride and a visible sign that he was moving up in the world. And in truth, important work was accomplished:

A dinner at the Crown Prince’s palace found Horner seated between the Saudi Ministers of Petroleum and Finance, both men educated in U.S. business schools, both extremely personable, both working hard to keep the wheels of the Coalition turning; and Horner needed help from them. In August, the Saudi government had agreed to pay for jet fuel, but no one in August had envisioned how large U.S. forces would grow. Later, the Ministry of Finance was reluctant to fund the rapidly increasing fuel bills from the Ministry of Petroleum; and the Ministry of Petroleum was therefore reluctant to refine and ship the jet fuel Horner’s increasingly large air forces were using. It was already costing $20 million a day to keep up air defense CAPs and conduct rehearsal training, and the costs were only going to grow. Over dinner, at Horner’s urging, the Minister of Finance agreed to send the money to the Minister of Petroleum, so he would send the jet fuel to Horner’s bases. (During Desert Storm, Saudi Arabia became a net importer of jet fuel, with an average of forty tanker ships per day inbound to the Kingdom.)

Horner had another problem persuading the Saudis to allow the staging of B-52s at Jeddah (where facilities were large and modern enough to handle them).

Saudi leaders were reluctant to allow large bombers — especially large bombers whose original function was to deliver nuclear weapons — to be based on their territory… and worse, near Mecca. Fighter-bombers and transports were another thing. The Saudis were used to fighters and transports taking off and landing at their bases.

At Prince Sultan’s horse farm about a mile across the highway from the international airport, Horner was able to engage Khaled on this issue.

Always sensitive to the likely Saudi reaction, he crafted his request carefully: “I know you don’t want to do this because of the impact it can have on your people,” he told the Prince, “but I need to base the B-52s closer to the enemy, so I can get more sorties out of them than if they have to fly all the way from England or Diego Garcia. If you’ll let me put them at Jeddah the first night of the war, and operate them out of there afterward, I will redeploy them out the day after the war ends. And besides,” he offered, “during the war there will be so much going on, the people won’t notice them.”

Prince Khaled bought this argument, and he and Horner reached an agreement. The bombers would land at Jeddah after their first combat sortie, then fly the rest of their combat missions into the KTO from General Mansour’s military facilities at King Abdullah Aziz Air Base (the military part of Jeddah New). And Horner kept his side of the deal: the big bombers departed immediately after hostilities concluded.

Each dinner was different. Some were in embassies, some were in desert tents, some were in palaces. At some there were women; at others they were absent. Some went very late; others broke up early. At all of them, Horner drank orange juice, even though at embassy dinners there were normally liquids not readily available in the Kingdom.

And for Horner, not all of his performances were shining.

At an American Embassy reception — trying to play the slick insider — Horner suggested to the AT & T regional manager that the telecommunications infrastructure in Iraq and Kuwait might sustain damage if war broke out, and he might want to think about shipping switching equipment, cable, and other equipment to replace it. “Actually,” the regional manager informed him (punching a large hole in his vanity), “the replacement equipment is already stored in warehouses around the region, awaiting installation after the war.”

★ In December, Horner had to sweat. Tony McPeak, the new Air Force Chief of Staff, nominated him for the job of DCINC, or Schwarzkopf’s deputy, to replace USAF Lieutenant General Craven C. “Buck” Rogers (Rogers, who was scheduled to retire in the fall of 1990, did not deploy to Riyadh).

When a joint position like DCINC came open, the service chiefs were asked to nominate one of their generals for the job. McPeak knew that Schwarzkopf liked Horner, that they worked well together, and that the current DCINC was an Air Force general. If Horner was the DCINC, he reasoned, he could then put another general in CENTAF, which would leave the Air Force well represented in CENTCOM.

“Bad thinking,” Horner reasoned. “Worse, it’s crazy. Nobody in his right mind wants to be deputy. The deputy handles all the issues the CINC doesn’t want to fool with: he’s the one who gives boring speeches, hosts minor guests at headquarters, attends all the meaningless meetings. And in meetings when the CINC is present, the DCINC is supposed to sit there and say nothing. When the CINC is out of town, he runs things, but God help him if he makes a decision not previously discussed with the CINC.”

And so Horner pleaded with McPeak. “Don’t do this to me, General,” he told him. “It’s a thankless job. You are not in charge of anything, and can only influence the CINC in private, which I’m already doing as CENTAF. And look — I know this sounds like big ego — but I don’t know where you’re going to find anyone better prepared to command CENTAF. I’m more operationally astute than most, I have more command experience than any of my contemporaries, I know the Middle East and the Arab military leaders, I’ve been working war in the Middle East since 1987, and the CINC is not likely to give a new guy the confidence that I have built up over the months.”

McPeak, a hardheaded man, resisted these pleas, but to Horner’s immense relief, Schwarzkopf agreed with him; and Colin Powell wanted his own man, Lieutenant General Cal Waller, in the job. Waller, a big, easygoing man, known for his common touch, would be a counterweight, some thought, to the far more imperial Schwarzkopf.

And so Schwarzkopf kept Horner as his air commander, and Waller became DCINC… and immediately stepped on a media land mine, after the manner of Mike Dugan.

Current plans called for the massive relocation west of VIIth Corps and XVIIIth Corps for Schwarzkopf’s Left Hook — but only after the start of the air campaign, to prevent Iraqi reconnaissance aircraft from discovering the surprise Schwarzkopf had in store for them.

After reviewing these plans, including detailed analysis of the difficulties the corps faced in moving, Waller concluded that the two corps would not be in position to attack for several weeks after the air war started.

This led to the following exchange:

“Will the Army be ready to fight on the U.N.’s, and now President Bush’s, January fifteenth deadline?” a reporter asked.

“What’s so important about being ready to fight on the fifteenth?” Waller answered.

He was technically correct. It was not important for the Army to be ready to fight on the fifteenth, it was important for them to be ready to move west, so they could fight where and when the CINC decided.

Unfortunately for Waller, his response implied that President Bush’s deadline for Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait was a sham.

Needless to say, there was little joy in Washington when the headline broke: “CENTCOM DCINC ASKED, ‘WHAT’S SO IMPORTANT ABOUT THE 15TH?’ ”

Afterward, General Schwarzkopf took heavy — and hardly welcome — hits from his superiors, and Cal Waller never really regained the CINC’s confidence, or had much influence in the upper circles in Riyadh. The resulting fallout ended Waller’s shot at a fourth star.

One good result of the flap was the cancellation of media interviews. Horner had better things to do.

★ Christmas came and went — or C+140, as it was jokingly called in the desert. If C day was the first day of the Desert Shield deployment, then C+1 was the day after that, C+2 the next, and so on until C+140—December 25. In the event, it was a lonely, miserable time for American servicemen and servicewomen in the Gulf. They desperately missed their families. “Have a merry C+140” didn’t quite do it. The good news was that everyone knew the climax was coming very soon.

New Year’s Day followed. And for Horner, the rest of January was a blur.

By the end of the first week in January, people were leaving Riyadh, the normally bustling traffic-clogged streets were almost deserted, and weather over Southwest Asia was worsening. It would prove to be the hardest winter in years.

Horner reflects:

As the war drew near, I could see the change in the pilots. Now when I visited, they seemed more mature, more sober in their outlook. No more whining questions. They’d had their innocence baked out of them in the hot sun, dulled by the night combat air patrols, scared out of them by night practices and by large-scale rehearsal missions in the increasingly bad weather. They knew now they were going to war — an event they’d trained for all their professional lives and feared they’d never experience. They were going from the practice field to the Super Bowl. Some would not make it, yet they were not afraid. Neither was there much joy (though there was laughter) — a condition caused not by the threat of war but by loneliness and separation from loved ones.

No longer were we carefree, fun-loving fighter pilots.

On 15 January, I wrote my wife,

“This may be my last letter for some time. My mental attitude will likely be such you won’t want to hear from me anyway. Some days lately I could puke. There are so many people who have no clue about air, people who are jealous because we have the predominant act in this circus. They spend all their time trying to get their two cents in at the expense of getting the job done.

“I try to keep our operations stable and work to stay above the petty crises, because I know that when the shooting starts, the nervous Nellies will run away.

“Forgive such a shitty letter, but we are entering a big game and I have a thousand details to attend to. Perhaps when the rest get doing their wartime thing, I’ll have more time. Till then, know in your deepest secret place, I love you so very much.”