Fighter Wing: A Guided Tour of an Air Force Combat Wing

Desert Storm: Planning the Air Campaign

Recently, the anniversary of Operation Desert Storm brought back memories of those incredible hours we spent glued to our televisions back in January of 1991 and the vivid images we saw: F-15s launching from Saudi runways; bombs dropping through windows; massed tanks crossing the desert; soldiers digging in on terrain that looked like Mars; ragged, dispirited Iraqi POWs trudging down roads littered with the wreckage of their army; those extraordinary sights of AAA bursts at night over Baghdad; and so much more. The media coverage of the war against Iraq was splendid. Yet when you think about it, for most of us the impression that remains is scattered, fragmented. Something is missing. What? That there was a plan. On the ground. And in the air. The war against Iraq was no "Hey, kids, let's put on a show" kind of affair. It took time, and the work of not a few brilliant minds.

The plan for the air war, for instance, grew out of three decades of intellectual and spiritual growth by the USAF officers who command combat aviators. In Armored Cav, we talked with two of the men who helped win the ground victory, General Fred Franks and Major H. R. McMaster. Now we're going to talk with two men who helped win the air war.

Now, I have to emphasize that many airmen from many services, from many countries, contributed to the victory in Desert Storm. Nevertheless, the plan for the air war against Iraq was uniquely U.S. Air Force.

USAF officers spent years trying to build a new vision of air power — a vision that was not based on traditional roles and missions, such as nuclear deterrence against the Soviet Union or bombing a bridge in North Vietnam, but on the deep-rooted belief that airpower can be a decisive tool at the operational or theater level of warfare. According to this new vision, it wasn't enough to know how to fly planes, shoot missiles, and drop bombs; you also had to know how to plan and lead an air campaign.

Different men came to these ideas by different routes. Some saw the vision as they were being shot at by MiGs, SAMs, and AAA guns while trying futilely to bomb worthless suspected targets in North Vietnam, targets picked by politicians with no coherent goal in mind. Others followed the lure and seduction that airpower has always held for true believers in the magic of flight. Commonly called airpower zealots, they dedicated decades of hard work and sacrifice to the single-minded goal of giving the United States the greatest concentration of that oh-so-intangible force.

You have to have a plan. You have to have leadership.

The air bombardment campaigns against Germany and Japan in World War II were costly failures until the introduction of escorting fighters and the identification of targets that truly could affect the final outcome of a war. Later, when the 8th AF acquired long-range P-51 escort fighters and began to methodically strike the German petrochemical and transportation industries, the effects were felt almost immediately in every theater of the war. It should have been obvious to anyone who understood airpower that the key is the right mix of forces, hitting the right combination of targets, at the right time. In short, the right plan. Such a plan would require packaging the proper aircraft, ordnance, and personnel into forces capable of destroying the right targets to do maximum damage to an enemy's war effort. It would also require officers trained and experienced in leading such an effort. Not just from USAF units, but from the other services, as well as allies from other nations. Such leaders would have to be credible flyers, and also diplomats, logisticians, and even public-relations experts.

Naturally, though it seemed logical to the airpower supporters that the U.S. Air Force should recruit, train, and control these forces, the other services in the U.S. military had their own ideas. Many USN and USMC aviation officers felt, with some justification, that turning over de facto control of their aviation assets would be tantamount to giving the USAF a stranglehold on the use of airpower in future operations.

So the vision remained just that, a vision, until several well-known failures in air operations during the 1980s (notably the bungled hostage-rescue mission to Iran) led to changes in how airpower would be used in the 1990s. Foremost among these changes was the Goldwater-Nichols Military Reform Act, which redefined the military chain of command. It also recognized that different kinds of fighting forces (naval, ground, air) should be organized and headed by appropriate professionals. Airpower would be run by an airman known as a Joint Forces Air Component Commander (JFACC). At the theater level, the JFACC is a USAF lieutenant general (0-9-three star), directly responsible to the unified Commander in Chief (CinC). A "theater" of operations is a distinct geographical area in which air, land, and naval forces are coordinated usually against a single enemy. In World War II the European and Pacific theaters were virtually separate wars.

During Desert Shield and Desert Storm, the JFACC for CENTCOM was Lieutenant General Charles A. Horner, USAF. In August 1990, just prior to the invasion of Kuwait, he was the commander of the U.S. 9th Air Force based out of Shaw AFB, South Carolina. One of four numbered air force commanders based in the United States, he had a secondary responsibility as commander of the Central Command Air Forces (CENTAF). CENTCOM — U.S. Central Command — is the unified command responsible for most of the Middle East (Southwest Asia). CENTCOM, which replaced the Rapid Deployment Force created during the Iranian hostage crisis, is a command without forces. These are assigned to CENTCOM's operational control only in event of a crisis. As commander of the CENTCOM air forces, Horner led the staff that would eventually plan and execute the air war against Iraq.

Born in 1936 in Davenport, Iowa, Chuck Horner (as he prefers to be called) is a graduate of the University of Iowa. After graduation, he entered the Air Force in the early 1960s and flew two tours in Southeast Asia, with some 111 missions on the second tour alone. His particular specialty was the hunting of Surface-to-Air (SAM) and Anti-Aircraft Artillery (AAA) radars. Known as "Wild Weasel" missions, they were (and are) very hazardous, with casualties running high among the crews. Like so many other young USAF officers, he lost much of his faith in the Air Force "system" in the skies over North Vietnam.

Tom Clancy: You fought in Vietnam. What did it teach you?

Gen. Horner: All fighter pilots feel they are invulnerable until they get shot down. The day they get shot down, and jump out of the cocoon that's their cockpit, then you really see a change in them. Having never been shot down, I really can't speculate on that. But I can say there is nothing better than to come back and not be killed. You really feel good.More to the point, I just sort of became fascinated by ground fire, SAMs, and stuff like that. I thought that was interesting. The thing is, I'm a practical person, I'm a farmer; so when we were sent up to hit some dumb target and there was a great target available, I made a mental note that this would never happen if I was running things. Sometimes it didn't happen, because there were no policemen up there [in North Vietnam] to check on what we were bombing.When you have the people in Washington who think they are running the war, and the people over the battlefield who are fighting the war, and they are not on the same emotional and psychological level, and you don't have trust, you've got nothing. Unfortunately, integrity was the first casualty in the Vietnam War.

While Chuck Horner was flying combat missions in Vietnam, a new generation of USAF officers was emerging, with a new set of ideas and values. Among these was an intellectual young officer named John A. Warden III. Born in 1943 in McKinney, Texas, he came from a family with a long record of military service. Fascinated by military history and technology, he was one of the earliest graduates of the new Air Force Academy at Colorado Springs, Colorado, in the 1960s. While he did his share of flying in fighters such as the OV-10 Bronco and F-4 Phantom in Southeast Asia, his real passion throughout his career has been planning doctrine for the successful execution of air campaigns.

Tom Clancy: In the post-Vietnam era, what was the vision of the Air Force and the other services as they came out of Southeast Asia into the late 1970s?

Col. Warden: In Vietnam, the Navy did well at a tactical level; and afterward it was generally pleased with itself, but realized it needed to rethink its force structure. And so it developed its "Maritime Strategy," which focused on taking the Soviet Navy out of the picture and then attacking the "bastion" areas of the Soviet homeland waters. It was a pretty good set of ideas, and gave the Navy a good vehicle for training and force building. The Air Force, though, came out with some wildly different ideas. On the one hand, people like me believed we had done well tactically with the tools at our disposal, but that those tools had been used for the wrong purposes strategically. In other words, I was disgusted that we had squandered our men and machines for the wrong reasons in the wrong way. And my resolution was never to have anything to do with a war that didn't have identified political objectives and a coherent way to engage them. For example, the idea of gradual escalation seemed to me to be really stupid.On the other hand, many Air Force officers learned an entirely different set of lessons. To them, the strategic side of the war was irrelevant. What was important was the way it was fought, so their lessons were at a different level. And then later, after the war, the fighter officers rapidly took control of the Air Force from the officers who had grown up in Strategic Air Command. Many of these new Air Force fighter leaders, having spent the majority of their Vietnam tours doing close air support in South Vietnam, came out of the war believing that the future of the Air Force was in supporting the Army. Now, there is nothing wrong with supporting the Army or the Navy — or the other way around — but making this the sole function severely circumscribed the potential of airpower, because it was all focused on tactical events.

John Warden, like other airpower supporters, advocated the inherent virtues of airpower. In his view, in order to realize airpower's unfulfilled promise, new ways of using it would have to be devised. Though there was much debate about these new ways, no consensus about them was reached. Then in 1988, Warden published a little book called The Air Campaign: Planning for Combat. It was the first new book on air operations to be published since the end of World War II, and the first to deal specifically with the issue of planning an entire air campaign. Thus it was an instant must-read among officers and systems analysts. It also caused a storm of controversy, since it argued that airpower should be treated as more than just a supporting arm in a ground campaign. Let Colonel Warden tell the story.

Tom Clancy: Will you tell us about The Air Campaign: Planning for Combat?

Col. Warden: I was a grad student at National War College, and I decided I wanted to do three things: write a book, learn to use a computer, and run a marathon. For the book, I had two possibilities: modern applications of the ideas of Alexander the Great, or something on operational-level airpower. My academic advisor told me I would probably get more out of the operational-airpower subject, so I chose that one. I worked on the book for about six months, in between attending classes. General Perry Smith, who was the commandant then, read an early draft, liked it, and sent copies to some key USAF generals. When the book finally worked its way through the publishing process and came out in 1988, it already had a fair amount of circulation around the USAF in its draft form. As for the book itself, the fundamentals are as valid today as they were when I wrote it. However, now I have a far better understanding of war and airpower, so I would like to write a couple of more books on a higher level.

In 1988, John Warden, now a colonel, moved over to the Office of the USAF Directorate of Plans in the Pentagon as its Deputy Director for Strategy, Doctrine, and Warfighting. While there, he had responsibility for the team that would develop Instant Thunder, the basic plan for the air war against Iraq some three years later.

Tom Clancy: In 1988 you moved to the USAF Plans Directorate in the Pentagon. Tell us about that.

Col. Warden: My new boss, General Mike Dugan, then Deputy Chief of Staff for Plans and Operations (the future USAF Chief of Staff), had given me the job helping to change the Air Force mind-set. I had about a hundred officers in the Plans Directorate under my command, and we began by giving them some operational and strategic-level airpower concepts. Then, we all spent a lot of time debating and refining the ideas. Our weekly staff meetings would run three or four hours — not because we were discussing administrative trivia, but because we were dealing with large operational or strategic topics that would force all the divisional and other people to work these things hard. By and by, we were ready to start turning our ideas into action, and we rewrote the AFM 1–1 [the Air Force Basic Operations] manual, and put together a program to reform the USAF professional military education program. We had literally dozens of projects going on, with all of them having the common thread of, "Let's start thinking seriously about airpower at the operational and strategic levels."Here's an example of a project we ran at Checkmate [one of the organizations in the plans division]: Let's start out with the hypothesis that fuel is the "center of gravity" [a vital necessity for operations] for the Soviet Army. So we talk to the intelligence people, and they say, "You're wasting your time — the Soviets have a one-hundred-eighty-day supply of fuel buried in hardened storage tanks under East Germany. You only have about fourteen days before the war goes 'nuke,' or before the Soviets achieve their objectives. There simply isn't enough time to destroy that amount of fuel in hardened storage tanks."Well, this doesn't make sense to the Checkmate officers. So they ask another question: "How does the fuel get from the underground storage to the main battle tanks that actually use it up on the front?" It's a simple question about distribution. So we went back and found out that the Soviets had established about twenty-five operational-level fuel depots that stretched from the Baltic (in the north) to the Alps (in the south). They were designed to bring bulk fuel in from the East, and then "push" it out farther to the West. Now, number one, there were no north-south cross-connections between these depots. And number two, although the hardened underground storage of this stuff was done very well, each depot had only about three output manifolds. It was like a filling station with only three gas islands. A fuel truck would drive up, fill up, then head west to the next lower echelon, where it would off-load and then return for more. There was also a manifold for tactical pipelines [field fuel lines laid by battlefield engineers following the forward echelons into combat]. So all the fuel from these great big depots ended up flowing through three or four very fragile output manifolds.Now, what happens if we shut those down? We decided to look a little further, and it turned out that the depot units were undermanned and didn't have the allotted number of trucks required to meet the established doctrinal movement rates of their tank units. There was no "elasticity" in the Soviet system, so if we stop the flow of fuel [by bombing the depot fuel manifolds], in four or five days they run out.Now, imagine you're a Soviet tactical commander, and you know that your fuel has been cut off. Although you might not physically run out of the last drop of gas you're carrying with you for three to five days, you're probably going to stop, dig in, and wait for more supplies. The way their system was designed, work-arounds were almost impossible, so the Soviet-style corps which was dependent on a particular depot to its east was simply out of luck until someone fixed the problem — and it couldn't be fixed in a few days. We learned from this exercise that a handful of fighter-bomber sorties properly employed against operational centers of gravity could have a hugely disproportionate effect on fighting at the front itself. We used these lessons to good stead in planning for the Gulf War. Everyone we briefed liked the concept, except the intelligence people.

When they look at a problem, analysts like to use what they call a "model." This is a concept or simulation which can be used as a method of testing or expressing ideas. Colonel Warden's model of the enemy as an array of strategic targets envisions five concentric rings, with the military/civil leadership at the center, then key production facilities, transportation infrastructure, civilian morale/popular support, and in the outermost circle deployed military forces. Let's hear his views on it.

Tom Clancy: Through these studies, had you established a process of analysis that would serve you when you started to look at Iraq?

Col. Warden: Yes, the overarching system we used was the one I developed for General Dugan in the spring of 1988. This was what became known as the "Five Rings" model. In essence, it tells you to start your thinking at the highest system-level possible, that your goal is to make the enemy system become what you want it to become, and do what you want it to do. The Five Rings show how all systems are organized — they are fractal in nature. For example, an army corps has a pattern of organization very similar to a nation or an air force. Every system has centers of gravity, which, when attacked, tend to drive the whole system into lower energy states, or into actual paralysis. In the Deputy Directorate for Operations, we had been discussing this concept for almost two years; so it was easy to apply it quickly after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.

While Colonel Warden had been working to change the Air Force intellectually, officers like General Chuck Horner had been doing the routine work to keep the force going and improve it. Then, in 1987, General Horner was given command of the U.S. 9th Air Force, headquartered at Shaw AFB, South Carolina. As commander, his mission was to act as the JFAAC for any air operations that might be conducted by CENTCOM, as well as commander of any air forces that might be assigned to CENTCOM. Let's hear his thoughts on the appointment.

Tom Clancy: Would you please talk about your assignment to command of 9th Air Force?

Gen. Horner: 9th Air Force was at its best during World War II. Then it became a training command back in the United States. Then in 1980, along came the Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force [RDJTF], the predecessor of the present CENTCOM organization. Larry Welch was the Director of Operations in TAC then, and the RDJTF was the hottest thing going. It had to do with the Carter Doctrine to make the Middle East an area of vital national interest to the United States.Later, when RDJTF became CENTCOM, 9th AF was to be the air component. The next 9th AF commander, General Bill Kirk, was probably the best tactician the Air Force has ever produced. I wound up replacing him. So from Larry Welch, with his tremendous intellectual capability, and Bill Kirk, with his tremendous tactical capability, I inherited a staff that was war-oriented and really working the problem day in and day out. I also was one of the first to benefit from the Goldwater-Nichols Act. Now, one thing Goldwater-Nichols did was free me from a lot of administrative responsibility. I got to spend a lot of time as commander of ten combat wings, visiting those wings. What I didn't have to do was a lot of administrative things. And since General Wilber Creech [the commander of TAC] had taken care of maintenance, I didn't have to worry about maintenance. Also, General Creech had fixed operations; so I didn't have to worry about operations. All I had to do was give the wing commanders another set of experienced eyes, chew them out or give them a pat on the back, hand out medals, and fly with them to know what they were doing. So I really could spend eighty percent of my time on CENTCOM's problems. The system was working pretty well at that time.

Tom Clancy: You had this new responsibility as a JFACC — Joint Forces Air Component Commander. As you understood it, what did it all mean to you at the time?

Gen. Horner: It meant that if we went to war, all the air forces would function under the overall structure and guidance of the JFACC. I never used the word "command," because that just irritated the Marines [whose air units were independent of the JFACC's command, but operated under his "guidance"]. The big thing we had going for us was an exercise called Blue Flag. Whenever we would run the CENTAF Blue Flag, I would bring in the Navy and Marine Corps. In addition, the Army was always willing to come. However, the Navy and Marines would always drag their feet, but they did come. Eventually, these were the same guys I went to war with.

Tom Clancy: You were there a long time, five years, so you got to see the shift from the Cold War to the post-Cold War period. Talk a little about this.

Gen. Horner: We were still fighting the Russians in our training scenarios until Norman Schwarzkopf came in as the CENTCOM CinC in November of 1989. He reviewed the existing plans and said, "Put them on the shelf, we are never going to use them. We will never fight the Russians." He knew the Cold War was over.

Tom Clancy: Prior to the invasion in 1990, what were your people doing with regard to campaign and operations planning?

Gen. Horner: A variety of things. We had been exercising a lot. This was not unusual, though; and we were also running exercises in the Middle East. Also, there was the material pre-positioning program, which is a good program, a product of the Cold War. Those supplies were available for any kind of regional contingency in the Persian Gulf area. What really jump-started our planning for Iraq was the Internal Look exercise, which was conducted in July of 1990. Meanwhile, General Schwarzkopf had already defined the threat there as Iraq invading Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.

With Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, all the ideas that had been put down on paper were dusted off and put to use. For General Horner, this meant a trip to Saudi Arabia to assist Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney and General H. Norman Schwarzkopf in briefing the Saudi Arabian leadership and securing permission to deploy U.S. forces to the region. This done, General Schwarzkopf left Chuck Horner to act as "CENTCOM Forward" for several weeks, so that he might return to CENTCOM headquarters in Tampa, Florida, and more rapidly push forward the forces needed to deter further Iraqi aggression in the region.

Tom Clancy: During your visit to Jedda, Saudi Arabia, you and General Schwarzkopf had a little talk about building an air campaign. Please talk about that.

Gen. Horner: In April of 1990, I went down to Tampa to brief Schwarzkopf in preparation for the July Internal Look exercise, because I did not want to go off on a tangent and show up with the "wrong" plan. There I gave him an overview on a number of things, one of them being the concept of a "strategic air campaign" in the region. He liked the briefing and the idea; he bought everything all the way.Later, when we were finishing up our briefings in Jedda, just before he got on the airplane to Tampa, he decided that when he got home, he should investigate having someone develop such a campaign plan. I could have hugged him! Let me tell you, the greatest thing in the world is when your boss looks at you and says, "Now, Horner, the first thing I want you to do is get air superiority."

When General Schwarzkopf returned to the United States, one of his first actions was to contact the USAF Air Staff to ask for support in the development of a strategic air campaign plan. The assignment wound up on Colonel Warden's desk, and was assigned to the Checkmate team. There were a few interesting diversions along the way, though.

Tom Clancy: What was your first involvement with the planning process for the air war?

Col. Warden: On Monday morning, the 6th of August, I brought a dozen or so officers together into Checkmate to start serious planning in the hope that we would figure out some way to sell our plan. I told my boss my ideas, and he told the Vice-Chief, Lieutenant General Mike Loh, and the Chief of Staff [General Mike Dugan]. On Wednesday morning, August 8th, General Schwarzkopf called General Dugan on the phone, but spoke to General Loh instead, as General Dugan was out of town at the time. General Schwarzkopf told General Loh that he needed some help in building a strategic air campaign plan, and could the Air Staff do anything for him. General Loh told him that we already had some people working on it, and would have something to him as quickly as possible. General Loh asked us when he could see a draft of the plan. We told him that afternoon — and we delivered.From that first draft, we started refining our ideas with more in-depth intelligence data and analysis. After a short period of time, we were able to start asking the intelligence agencies [Air Force Intelligence, CIA, National Security Agency, Defense Intelligence Agency, etc.] to start giving us information to fill in the blanks. We knew what to ask for, because of our understanding of how nation states, military units, and other entities are organized. This allowed us to understand how Iraq worked at the highest levels, and it was merely a matter of getting down a couple of layers through the available information to find out the specifics. It was only because we had a "systems" view of the world that we were able to move very quickly.

With their mission defined, the Checkmate staff worked on. Using a pair of joint targeting lists from CENTAF (218 targets) and CENTCOM (256 targets), they developed a series of targeting plans (known as Instant Thunder) to attack targets inside Iraq and Kuwait. It was almost two hundred pages long, and took advantage of the full range of new aircraft, weapons, sensors, and other technologies.

Tom Clancy: Would you please tell us about your Instant Thunder briefing with General Schwarzkopf?

Col. Warden: General Alexander went down with us in a C-21 [the military version of the Learjet]. Also accompanying us were Lieutenant Colonel Ben Harvey, Lieutenant Colonel Dave Deptula, and one or two other guys. When we got there, General Alexander and I went into the office of the CENTCOM Director of Operations [Major General Bert Moore]. Shortly thereafter, General Schwarzkopf joined us with his deputy commander. We sat around a table, and I showed paper copies of our briefing viewgraphs to General Schwarzkopf. This was the first iteration for what we called Instant Thunder. It went over very well. Schwarzkopf said, "You guys have restored my faith in the Air Force." He was a good listener and had no negative observations. He did give us some additional tasking. At the conclusion of our session with General Schwarzkopf, he told us to brief the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Colin Powell, as soon as possible.The purpose of Instant Thunder was to impose strategic paralysis on Iraq, so that it would be incapable of providing support to its army in Kuwait, so that it would be put in an impossible position. Beyond that, it was designed to reduce the overall power of Iraq as a player in the Persian Gulf, so that there would be a more appropriate balance of power in the region after the war. One of the big debates we had with many individuals in the Air Force, but not with General Schwarzkopf, was this: The original Instant Thunder plan was to go right to the heart of Iraq and shut it down. Many senior USAF officers thought that the Iraqi Army in Kuwait would then march south [into Saudi Arabia]. At the time, I said logistically it was too hard. In all of history, no army ever marched forward offensively when its strategic homeland was collapsing.At our session with General Powell, I had made the comment about inducing Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait. He replied that he didn't want it to withdraw; he wanted to destroy it in place. I told him we could do that too. So shortly thereafter, we began to develop Phases II and III of the Instant Thunder plan to destroy the Iraqi Army. By mid-October, we had a good plan worked out, which we faxed to Dave Deptula, who by this time was in Riyadh. We also sent it in hard copy via Major Buck Rogers when he went over to relieve Dave for a month or so.

Tom Clancy: What happened next?

Col. Warden: A little less than a week after our briefing to General Powell, I went back to Tampa under the auspices of the Joint Staff to give General Schwarzkopf the full briefing, complete with the logistics assessments, concepts of operation, deception, and psychological warfare plans, etc. After this presentation, which included most of his senior staff, he asked me to take the plan to General Horner, who was then serving as Central Command's forward commander. The next day, we left for Riyadh. Late on Sunday evening, August 20th, we briefed the CENTAF staff in Riyadh. The trouble began with the briefing to General Horner the next day. We just failed to communicate.The problem, I feel, was General Horner's view of how ground forces move. His view also was that the only way to stop ground forces was with other ground forces, aided by airpower. So in his mind, he had an impossible problem as CENTCOM Forward. At that time, he had no significant ground forces to stop enemy ground forces. Now, here's this "armchair colonel" coming in from Washington with a plan that's got funny words in it like "offense" and "strategic targets," and they just didn't make sense to General Horner.

Colonel Warden returned home following the briefing, but not all that he said to Chuck Horner fell on deaf ears. On the contrary, much of what he had said fitted exactly into what General Horner had in mind for the coming air campaign. He also kept three of Warden's briefers for his own staff to start the planning for the coming war. Let's hear it in his own words.

Tom Clancy: Would you tell us about your perceptions of Colonel Warden's briefing of the proposed Instant Thunder plan?

Gen. Horner: Colonel Warden and his planning team showed up in Riyadh, and I was struck by the brilliance of the plan. He is a very intelligent guy. But it was not a campaign plan; it was a really insightful listing of targets. He and his staff had accessed information that we never had access to. We had had good briefings from the Navy about two weeks before, so we knew how to take out the Iraqi air defense control system. But he had good stuff on nuclear weapons production, chemical and biological weapons storage that we did not have. Where the briefing fell down is that it did not address to my satisfaction the theater aspects of the war — hitting the Iraqi Army. When I questioned him about it, he said, "Don't worry about it; it's not important." Now, he may not have thought it was important, but I did; and that's where it broke down. Nevertheless, I said, "These guys are good," and I needed additional planning staff team members to do the offensive air plan, so I kept the three lieutenant colonels from Colonel Warden's briefing team to work with me, as my staff was overloaded with the day-in-and-day-out things we were already tasked with during Desert Shield.This regular workload was already starting to pile up, so I said, "Who am I going to get to do this offensive air campaign and run this outfit?" My answer was Major General "Buster" Glosson. Buster had been exiled down to the Gulf to Rear Admiral Bill Fogerty aboard the flagship USS LaSalle, and was dying to get out of there and get up to Riyadh. So I just called him and said, "Buster, go AWOL and get up here." And he did. Now, Buster gets things done in a hurry. As soon as he arrived, I sat down with him and said, "You are going to go in and get this briefing [from the three remaining briefers]. You will find a lot of great things in it and I want those kept in, but you have to make this a practical plan. We have to make it something we can put into an Air Tasking Order [ATO]."Of course, the planning staff continued to grow. In fact, as new people came in to CENTAF headquarters, if they showed any reasonable planning skills at all, we would put them to work under Buster. This was all going on in a conference room [called the Black Hole] right next to my office, because we didn't want anyone to know that we were planning offensive operations. Schwarzkopf wanted all this kept secret, because we were still trying to negotiate the Iraqis out of Kuwait. So, whenever a person signed onto the Black Hole team, they would have to swear that they would not talk to anyone else except the team. The team worked eighteen hours a day. It must have smelled like hell in there…

Back home at the Pentagon, Colonel Warden had returned without his three lieutenant colonel briefers, but still with some hope of supporting the growing planning effort in Riyadh. Let's let him pick up the story from there.

Tom Clancy: The briefing with General Horner doesn't go well, but he asks to keep three of your guys, as well as your viewgraphs and plans. He has felt your presence and has kept your men. How were you feeling?

Col. Warden: I decided then that we would keep the Checkmate planning operation going and continue to develop plans to support future operations — in the hope that they would find some application at CENTAF headquarters. My idea was to do everything possible to make sure we fought the right kind of air war. It was clear to me at this point that we had resources in Washington which the Riyadh planning staffs would be unable to tap. Also, it was clear that Dave Deptula could not hope to find enough of the right kind of people to help him finish off the plan we had begun in Washington. Thus, I committed the Checkmate team to feeding plans and information to Dave. We put as little identification as possible on the products we sent, so as not to irritate the leadership in Saudi Arabia.

Tom Clancy: What is your view of the CENTAF staff and how the Instant Thunder plan developed?

Col. Warden: The CENTAF staff at that time really had to be thought of as two different groups. The overwhelming majority was associated with the traditional Tactical Air Control Center operations staff that up until three or four days before the war actually started thought that their only job was to work on the defensive plan for Saudi Arabia. Then, there was a relatively small group that was operating in the Black Hole — fifteen to twenty people maximum, working under "compartmented" security conditions. It was those folks working in the Black Hole planning center — Glosson, Deptula, etc. — that we were trying to support by pushing data and ideas forward. The intelligence bureaucracy was putting out megabytes of data also, but the problem with their institutional products was a lack of correlation. So, we sent over processed data in the form of target coordinates, specifications, and strike/targeting plans. Buster and Dave were under no compulsion to use it, but they found most of it pretty good and did end up using it. What we were doing was putting it into something as close as possible to an executable plan. In many cases, all you had to do was put a tail number [i.e, assign aircraft] to it, and say what time it was supposed to happen.

In November 1990, with diplomatic options running out, President George Bush ordered the reinforcement of the existing forces assigned to Desert Shield, with additional units designed to provide "an offensive option," should it be required. General Horner picks up the story at this point.

Tom Clancy: November 1990 comes, and the President decides that if Iraq doesn't get out of Kuwait, the U.S.-led coalition will use force to get them out. Where are your people in the planning process now?

Gen. Horner: I think we had an offensive air campaign laid out pretty well in October 1990. Then, when President Bush made that decision, the Army was told it needed more forces. So of course, the Air Force needed more forces to support the Army. We basically doubled the size of the overall Air Force in-theater, being intelligent about where we could base more airplanes. This was because at that point, ramp space [for parking and servicing coalition aircraft] was becoming the driving limitation on adding more aircraft to our force.As for the strategic air campaign plan itself, I would only let them plan the first two days. Another problem was that a multi-national coalition force was forming. As you can imagine, respecting the various host countries' laws, and ensuring that the host nations knew what was going on, was of vital import. Thus, if you wanted to fly, you had to be in the ATO. The Saudis wanted that, because then they knew what was going on, and could say, "No you can't fly here." Or ask, "Who owned those planes that sonic-boomed that camel herd?"

January 1991 came in like a lion, and with it came the war. General Horner remembers his surprise at the successes of the early moments of Desert Storm, and his reservations about the inevitable costs ahead.

Tom Clancy: If you were to summarize the objectives of the air campaign plan that became Desert Storm, how would you characterize them?

Gen. Horner: First, to control the air (Phase I). Secondly, cripple the Iraqi offensive capabilities, in particular the SCUDs and nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons to the extent we could (Phase II). Then, isolate the battlefield (Phase III), and prepare it for the ground war (Phase IV).

Tom Clancy: The first night of the war (January 16th/17th, 1991), did you have any idea of how well things were going?

Gen. Horner: No. Partly because — along with the rest of the USAF — I represented twenty five years of pessimism. I guess I had started believing the stuff that we heard all these years — that we were no good. As a society, we thought our military forces were a bunch of dummies.That kind of pessimism is useful in my profession, because it's much better to be surprised the way we were than the way the Lancers were in the Crimea [the famous "Charge of the Light Brigade"]. The highlights of that first night were how the F-117As were able to penetrate Baghdad, and the fact that we lost just one airplane [a Navy F-18 Hornet]. A tragedy, but not the thirty or forty lost aircraft that some had predicted.

Tom Clancy: Talk about "Poobah's Party."

Gen. Horner: "Poobah's Party." That was planned by Larry "Poobah" Henry, probably one of the best planners we ever had. He was the only navigator [backseater] who was a wing commander in the Gulf. He looks mediocre, he's got navigator wings, but he's an incredible genius. The man's an absolute fiend when it comes to hunting SAMs. He arranged to have a mass of air- and ground-launched decoys, and one hundred HARM missiles all in the air at the same time. It was devastating to the Iraqis, something they never recovered from during the war.

While General Horner and his staff were launching the aerial assault on Iraq, back at the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., Colonel Warden and the Checkmate staff were watching it on CNN, just like the rest of us. Nevertheless, the events of that night are worth his recollection.

Tom Clancy: What was it that the CENTAF units were actually hitting at the first bang, H-Hour (0300 hours local time)?

Col. Warden: The national command authority, centers of operations, any place that we knew was serving as a command post; the two principal communication facilities in downtown Baghdad, as well as the electrical power grid and the key nodes in the KARI [Iraq in French, spelled backwards] air-defense system. These are the things that were being hit in a matter of a couple of minutes or so at H-Hour [0300L, January 17th, 1991]. Essentially, at this point, Iraq was unable to respond, due to the breakdown of its systems.

Back in Riyadh, General Horner and his staff were trying to deal with the inevitable changes and difficulties that come with trying to execute any sort of complex plan. The worst of these was the threat posed by the Iraq ballistic missile systems, generically known as SCUDs.

Tom Clancy: Did the Iraqis do anything smart in their conduct of the war?

Gen. Horner: Well, they did the command and control of the SCUDs pretty well, using motorcycle couriers; and they hid the SCUDs well. Their COM-SEC [communications security] was awesome. We had the impression that Saddam had orders out that anyone who used a radio would be shot.

Tom Clancy: Talk about the underestimation of the SCUDs.

Gen. Horner: Being a military person, I tend to do my pluses and minuses in military terms. Civilians just don't exist in the mind of a military man until you get into a war; then you are surrounded by them. What happened was the SCUDs started coming at us. Now, the Saudi society handled it pretty well. On the other hand, the Israelis went into shock, and that surprised me. The SCUDs would hit their cities, and the Israelis would go into panic; people literally died from fear.

Tom Clancy: How did you feel about the performance of the Patriot SAM missiles in intercepting the SCUDs?

Gen. Horner: Good. Let's put it this way, though. Who cares if they ever really intercepted a SCUD? The perception was that they did. The SCUD is not a military weapon, it's a terror weapon. So if you have an anti-terror weapon that people perceive works, then it works.

Colonel Warden had his own set of perceptions on the SCUD threat, and the measures taken to deal with it.

Tom Clancy: How about the attacks on the SCUD missile sites?

Col. Warden: There are two ways of looking at the results of the air attacks on the mobile SCUDs. The popular view is that we failed to destroy a single launcher. But the Iraqis had a preferred firing rate of about ten to twelve missiles a day, based on what they were doing before the counter-SCUD operations got under way. Almost instantaneously, as these missiles and their launchers were being hunted, the firing rate dropped to about two a day, except for some spasmodic firings at the very end of the war; and the Patriot SAMs were not encountering too many incoming missiles. That was the real result of the anti-SCUD effort — perhaps a tactical failure but an operational and strategic success. And it is at the operational and strategic level where wars are won or lost.

One of the more interesting problems faced by General Horner and his staff was that after the first few days of Desert Storm, the Iraqi Air Force decided not to fly anymore. They had apparently decided to go into their hardened shelters at their airbases and "ride out" the attacks, just as the various air forces had done in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. It was a good idea that did not work out well for the Iraqis.

Tom Clancy: Whose idea was it to go after the shelters and were you confident that the BLU-109 warheads on the GBU-24 and -27 LGBs could do the job on the shelters?

Gen. Horner: Buster Glosson was the guy that did all the thinking on that. And when the first films came back to us, yes, we were confident. The shelters that we were concerned about were the Yugoslav-built ones. They were massive. They looked like big cow-dung heaps. When we saw they were being destroyed on the films, we knew that the rest would not be a problem.Bomb damage assessment [BDA] was something we were not worried about. It really didn't matter; we were just trying to keep up the pressure on the Iraqis. Knowing when to start the ground war really didn't matter to me, because at some point the Iraqis were going to tell us that they were tired. You'd know that from defections, etc. Thus we were looking for outcome more than input.

As days moved into weeks, the campaign plan moved on towards its goals. Some of General Horner's thoughts at this time are interesting, for they begin to give you some idea of what running the air war was like for him personally. Not all his thoughts were happy.

Tom Clancy: By the end of the first week, did you have the feeling that you had won air supremacy?

Gen. Horner: Yes. The only thing we were worried about was how efficient we were. Quite frankly, the stuff we did in the strategic war was interesting, but when you get right down to it, the only thing that seemed to matter to the Iraqi Army was killing tanks. We didn't know about some of the nuclear facilities, and there was no way we were going to get all the chemical weapons — we knew that. He [Saddam Hussein] just had more than could possibly be attacked. We did a poor job of taking battlefield intelligence and reacting rapidly to it — we just didn't have the setup. Also, my Air Force guys weren't allowed to interrogate the prisoners, because the Army Special Forces thought that was their job.

Khafji is a small Saudi coastal town just south of the Kuwaiti border. On January 16, 1991, before the start of the air war, the civilian population was evacuated. And on January 29–30, 1991, the Iraqis moved into the town. This was partly a "reconnaissance in force," to test how the Coalition would react; partly a "spoiling attack," to disrupt Coalition preparations for the ground war in this area; and partly a political gesture of defiance. Let's hear General Horner's impressions of the battle:

Tom Clancy: Talk about the Khafji offensive.

Gen. Horner: Jack Liede, CENTCOM's J-2 [intelligence officer] gave us a heads-up that the Iraqi 3rd Armored Division commander was up to something. I did not know what it was, or who it was, but we started watching with the E-8 JSTARS radar aircraft that had arrived in-theater just prior to the war. All the action took place at night. The thing that cinched it was a Marine unmanned aerial vehicle [UAV] came back with pictures of armored personnel carriers close to the berm between Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. I remember saying, "Hey, the ground fight is on!" We had beaten on them quite a bit before their deployment, and it showed when the Saudis, Qataris, and U.S. Marines finished beating on them.

General Horner was also dealing with the day-in, day-out problems inherent to the war effort. Losses and schedules were key on his mind.

Tom Clancy: How were you feeling about losses at this point?

Gen. Horner: Every loss was a tragedy. In fact, every day I would try and take a nap about four to seven in the morning. And upon returning to the Tactical Air Control Center, the first place I would stop was the rescue desk to see just how many we had lost. I can't really explain it other than it's very difficult. I got my former aide into the F-15Es of the 4th Wing; and when he was killed up near Basra, I felt as if I had killed him myself.

Tom Clancy: Talk more about your day-to-day routine.

Gen. Horner: The key players running the TACC were four colonels — Crigger, Reavy, Volman, and Harr. When I would come in the morning, I would stop and discuss with Dave Deptula the overnight updates on the Baghdad targets, and then I would go and see the Army guys. I would generally have a routine of checking on targeting, that we were getting the ATO out on time, that sort of thing. I sometimes did some paperwork, read messages, ate lunch, talked with people about what they thought was going on, slept a little, and then got ready for the evening briefing. Buster and I would then go to General Schwarzkopf's daily meeting, and he would always change the Army targets that we were assigned to hit. And then around 11:00 or 12:00 PM, the action would heat up. SCUD things, JSTARS would be up, and we'd get some movers [moving ground targets], etc. I slept about two hours a night, along with some naps during the day. I did have to get hold of myself, though, because after the first few days of the war, I was too "wired" to sleep.

Back at Checkmate in the Pentagon, Colonel Warden was busy supporting the operations in the Persian Gulf, as well as dealing with the other situations unique to a capitol city at war.

Tom Clancy: At this busy point in the war, what were you and the Checkmate team doing?

Col. Warden: All kinds of things were going on, one of them being that we were trying to give the Secretary of Defense and the White House a true picture of what was going on… because much of the analysis of the war coming out of the traditional DIA and CIA bureaucracies was "Newtonian" [static] analysis of what was a "quantum" [dynamic] situation. By that I mean that we had entered into an entirely new epoch of war — a military technological revolution, if you will. So the methods the old-line intelligence bureaucracies were using were the equivalent of trying to use a vacuum tube tester to see how well a microchip was working. The tester would say that it wasn't — and the conclusion would be completely irrelevant.

Tom Clancy: How important were the space satellite systems to operations in the Gulf?

Col. Warden: I like to think of the Gulf War as the first genuine "World War." Things were going on all around the globe, with realtime effects on the combat theater. World War II was not a true global war — it was a series of campaigns that took place in scattered places. Satellite systems are what made genuine world war possible and real during Desert Storm.

Tom Clancy: Could you please talk a little about the conditions that the aircrews were having to deal with during the war?

Col. Warden: Keep in mind that we were having a terrible time with the weather. Historically it was the worst weather since they began keeping records in that area, which went back to about 1947. A significant number of F-117 sorties simply could not drive home their attacks, given the rules of engagement [ROE], which essentially said: If you're not sure you're going to hit the target, don't drop. The F-16s and F/A-18s were not doing so well either, because by the second day, they were flying at a medium altitude [from 12,000 to 20,000 feet/3,657 to 6,096 meters] to reduce losses. So they're trying to drop dumb bombs from there. This does not mean that they would never hit a particular target, just that it would take many more sorties than with laser-guided bombs from an F-111F or F-117A.

Tom Clancy: Let's talk about the transition to Phase II.

Col. Warden: Well, it's important to understand that rather than transitioning from phase to phase, what really happened was a merging of Phases I, II, and III. We had originally planned distinct phases, but that was when we had a limited number of aircraft available. We had wanted to concentrate every ounce of our strength against the strategic centers of gravity within the Iraqi war machine in Phase I. We simply did not feel that we could do anything in Kuwait until we had completed the operation in Iraq.Phase II, though, was originally designed to be a one-day operation, where we would finish off the air superiority problem in Kuwait. This meant knocking out some missile [SAM] sites, as there was no evidence of Iraqi aircraft being based in Kuwait. The next phase, Phase III, was to destroy the Iraqi Army in Kuwait. The Army wanted to call this "battlefield preparation." But Dave Deptula had it right when he told General Horner, "We're not preparing the battlefield, we're destroying it!" The intention of Phase III was to reduce the Iraqi Army to fifty percent of its pre-war strength. This would make it operationally ineffective. If necessary, we could have gone beyond that and literally destroyed it. We were absolutely confident that if we imposed a fifty percent attrition rate on units in the Iraqi Army, and it didn't become operationally ineffective, then it would be the first army in history not to do so. After a lot of discussion in the fall of 1990, we based the Phase III plan on eliminating the Republican Guard units first, followed next with the regular and conscript army near the Saudi border.

Tom Clancy: Talk about the Bomb Damage Assessment [BDA] controversy.

Col. Warden: The BDA problem goes back to World War II. The intelligence guys are somewhat conservative, since they don't want to say something is destroyed if it really isn't. It's a reasonable presumption that if it's rubble it's destroyed. If there's a wall knocked down, it's damaged. Otherwise it's undamaged. But with targets hit by precision weapons, there may be little or no evidence of damage or destruction that fits any of the standard intelligence criteria. The majority of the analysts were going by the rules they had been taught. So the Air Force says, "We're out there blowing up things." And the CIA says, "No, you're not." Here's a good example. We had an overhead picture of a tank that the CIA said was undamaged. Then somebody got an oblique shot [picture] from a reconnaissance aircraft, and you saw the turret was shifted about a foot, and the gun tube was drooping into the sand. Destroyed tank.This sort of thing led Buster Glosson to come up with "tank plinking," where we used small LGBs to destroy armored vehicles. The common wisdom was that it was ridiculous to use an expensive [$12,000] precision LGB against a tank. But when you send four planes out with four bombs each and they come back with an average of twelve kills, that's cheap.

As February 1991 moved on, a greater percentage of the sorties generated by CENTAF were being dedicated to supporting the planned ground operations that would evict the Iraqi forces from Kuwait. Despite what others were judging from the daily results, General Horner had his own criteria for success.

Tom Clancy: Preparing the way for the ground war to start, did you have the feeling that your people were effective? What factors were limiting what you were doing?

Gen. Horner: Quite frankly, we had all the time we wanted. I was not overly concerned about when the ground war would start. I never really worried about "how effective" we were, because we knew by things like Iraqi desertions. If you think about it, we were going to get them all. The weather was really not a factor, because if we didn't get it today, I was confident we would get it tomorrow. They [the Iraqis] weren't going anywhere. Where we really started making money was when Buster thought up "tank plinking." That worked great!

On February 24th, the ground war started, and the air campaign against Iraq began to wind down.

Tom Clancy: What were your impressions of the situation when Desert Storm was completed at the end of February 1991?

Gen. Horner: I was glad to see the ground war go so quickly and so well. I tell you, we were tired of war, really tired of killing people. I guess we all would have liked it if Saddam had gone; but Saddam was not a target, the command and control system was. The Iraqi Army would hold staff meetings, we would confirm the location by "other sources," and we would bomb the location, destroying the notes from the meeting.The last few days of the war we were really working hard to find things to hit. My general impressions of the air campaign? I was pleased with it. You're never totally satisfied, but the overall loss rate was good, the munitions worked better than anticipated. But because of my personality, I was never completely satisfied with it.

Colonel Warden spent the end of the war watching the ground war from the Checkmate center in the Pentagon, and then went home for a well-deserved couple of days of sleep. Afterwards, though:

Tom Clancy: What happened to Checkmate after the war ended?

Col. Warden: Right after the war we had an absolutely marvelous party. Cases and cases of champagne. Our friends from CIA, DIA, and NSA came down. The Secretary of the Air Force [Donald Rice] and the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy spent the afternoon with us.Soon after that, we became a "politically incorrect" organization that seemed counter to Goldwater-Nichols. And so Checkmate was shut down a couple months or so after the war. However, it was eventually reborn. Today, it does a lot of contingency planning for the Air Force Chief of Staff. As for me personally, I left the Pentagon about two months after the war ended, and went to the White House to work as a special assistant to Vice President Quayle. I worked exclusively on non-military things, ironically.

Tom Clancy: Today, the effects of the Gulf War are clear. The plan was executed well in your opinion?

Col. Warden: Yes. On balance, I think we achieved just about exactly what we wanted. For me, though, the really gratifying thing is that we achieved such momentous results with so little blood shed on either side. I am not aware of any war on this scale where so much happened at so little cost in blood. In addition, it also seems to me a demonstration of what you can accomplish with airpower when you use it correctly. I just hope that we continue the revolution and don't fall back into the old ways of doing things because of bureaucratic pressures in the Department of Defense, and in the Congress.

Today, both General Horner and Colonel Warden are looking forward to their lives after military service. After the war, Chuck Horner was promoted to general (four stars), and took over the unified U.S. Space Command at Colorado Springs, Colorado. There, he handled a variety of tasks, including the direction of the North American Air Defense Command, as well as working on ballistic missile defenses. Following his retirement in the summer of 1994, he and his wife Mary Jo have settled in Florida, where he is writing his own memoirs of the 1990/1991 Persian Gulf Crisis/War. Colonel Warden has finished his career with one of the most satisfying appointments he could have imagined, commandant of the Air Command and Staff College at the USAF Air University, located at Maxwell AFB, Alabama. There he has transformed the curriculum, emphasizing air campaign planning for joint service and international students from all over the world. He will retire from the Air Force in the summer of 1995. Arguably, he has become the Clausewitz or Alfred Thayer Mahan of airpower, having codified the use of airpower in The Air Campaign: Planning for Combat. Both Horner and Warden have undeniably made their marks in the USAF and the history of airpower.