Every Man a Tiger: The Gulf War Air Campaign

by Tom Clancy

THE FIVE-FACED LABYRINTH

  As it turned out, Horner arrived at the Pentagon at just the right time. It was a heady period. The war was still ongoing, there was money in the defense budget, and the Air Force had started to acknowledge its shortcomings in training and equipment.

  Once there, Horner joined a small basement office of unconstrained thinkers and freewheeling activists, which went under the name of Weapons and Tactics, TAC Division of DCS Operations, under the leadership of Colonel Bill Kirk, a slow-talking, rumpled-uniform warrior who was an old friend of Horner’s from Nellis.19

  Their job was to make sure new equipment fit real-world tactics, and that the doctrine being written upstairs made sense to the operators who would have to follow it in combat. They produced studies and papers; briefed Congress about war in general and specific emerging programs such as the E-3 AWACS and new air-to-air missiles; pushed electronic-warfare systems and the laser-guided bomb programs; and when Israel fought the ’73 war, they sent people over to study the tactics, and mistakes, and how the various USAF and Soviet systems had been used.

  Most of all, they pushed to improve air-to-air training.

  Dick Pearson’s trip to Washington to explain how a pair of F-105s had been shot down by MiG-17s had had some effect on air-to-air training, but it was pretty tame. The problem was that F-105s fought like F-105s. One F-105 turned, accelerated, and climbed pretty much like another. As a consequence, pilots learned to estimate range against a big fighter, and learned to turn with another Thud, but they knew very little about exploiting the advantages of their fighter against an enemy aircraft of another type—like, say, a MiG- 21. The Air Force needed dissimilar training.

  The problem that put dissimilar training on the front burner was the exchange ratios in Vietnam—the number of U.S. aircraft lost compared with the number of enemy shot down. In Vietnam, exchange ratios were horrendously bad. In Korea, they had been something like six to one in favor of the United States. In Vietnam, owing to the limitations in the way the war was fought, they were often less than one to one—in other words, the North Vietnamese shot down more U.S. pilots than U.S. pilots shot down North Vietnamese. By 1972, when Horner was assigned to the Pentagon, more than 1,000 U.S. aircraft had been lost to MiGs, SAMs, and AAA. Very clearly, something serious had to change.

  Thanks to the Fighter Mafia, it did.

  THE FIGHTER MAFIA

  In the late fifties and early sixties, a few Air Force, Navy, and Marine officers came to the conclusion that the dominance of strategic nuclear thinking was sucking the life out of real airpower, and gathered in an informal fraternity of fighter pilots and other like-minded types, which came to be called the Fighter Mafia. Some were veterans of Korea, and membership was not confined to fighter pilots or weapons systems officers. It was attitude that mattered—if a man could think outside the narrow SAC box. Early on, they began to make their presence felt, and they grew in influence as the Vietnam War progressed, and as people started to realize how ineffective U.S. training and weapons were for fighting a conventional war. They peaked in the early seventies, when Chuck Horner arrived at the Pentagon.

  Inside the Pentagon, the bureaucratic path from a bright, shiny new idea to its implementation in an actual working program involved coordination throughout the staff. People like Horner and his colleagues in Bill Kirk’s office would have to walk the idea through various duchies in the Labyrinth to obtain signatures of approval—approvals that many of the dukes were loath to give, since every good new idea meant the death of some preexisting idea. Much of the staff felt threatened by anything new. It was a zero-sum situation: you get budget money for your idea; I lose money for mine. As a result, it was important to have people you could turn to. If you knew a fighter pilot in the office in which you needed to get your package coordinated, you would work out with him how to push your idea through the office without running into known problem officers or potential problem officers—those too inept to make a decision, and who would therefore sit on your package.

  This was the Mafia. They helped each other and schemed about ways to move the Air Force, and they grew very skilled. Their main value was as critics and as conceptual thinkers about warfare. They proclaimed early, for instance, the importance of timely action versus executing a preordained, changeless plan, such as the SIOP. They realized that any plan might be out of date when the time came to act on it, owing to enemy actions or changes in the environment. They also made conceptual inputs to aircraft design. The F-16 can trace its roots back to original Mafia work, because it was they who argued for lower-cost, small, and agile fighters.

  They were not always right. For instance, the small jet they envisioned would not even have a radar. In those days, radars were big and complex, which meant building big and complex aircraft. This in turn drove up the cost, since every pound of radar on a jet required six additional pounds of structure, which meant larger engines to carry the added weight, which meant fuel to give the larger engines an effective range, which meant more structure to hold the fuel, and so on. In order to escape this spiral, they maintained, stop it at the beginning: don’t put radar in the nose of the jet.

  In fact, this kind of solution was foolish, because radar is simply too valuable not to have in combat. During the Gulf War, for example, the overwhelming number of air-to-air kills were achieved using a radar-guided missile. The better solution was to make radars smaller, which is what happened. Over time, advances in radar and missile technology have allowed the F-16, with its small and relatively low cost, to evolve into the premier fighter aircraft in the world.

  The Fighter Mafia began to lose its punch as more and more conventional force people began to populate the leadership positions in the Air Force, and as mainstream Air Force thinking began to concentrate on air superiority and conventional bomb dropping. Later, when Bill Creech arrived on the scene, the old, original Fighter Mafia (by this time aging, pre-Vietnam rebels) tried to maintain their separateness and their control by continuing to rebel, but now there was nothing to rebel against, and Creech simply put them in their place.

  During Chuck Horner’s tour in the Pentagon, however, the Fighter Mafia was a godsend20—and he felt their influence immediately in the push for Aggressor Training.

  AGGRESSOR TRAINING

  Horner made his first appearance at the Pentagon on a Wednesday morning, and the first thing his new boss, Bill Kirk, asked him was what he thought about starting up an Aggressors program—that is, a force that could visit the wings all over the world and give them realistic air-to-air training. The idea was that they’d buy MiG-21s from a Third World nation who’d been equipped by the Soviets, train a few really good fighter pilots in Soviet tactics, then study how to use our fighter force to its best advantage.

  Horner was enthusiastic, and elaborated on why it needed to be done. When he’d finished, Kirk smiled and handed him a message from General Momyer to General Jack Ryan, the Chief of Staff of the Air Force and a SAC man, who had passed the note down the chain of command to Kirk. Momyer’s note to Ryan said, “I’ll be up to see you on Friday to talk about starting Aggressor training,” and in passing the note to Kirk, General Ryan had implied: “You better have something good for me.”

  Kirk asked Horner to prepare a paper that outlined options for Ryan to use on Friday, and Horner immediately found an empty desk in the basement and started developing his thoughts about dissimilar air combat training. The paper discussed the kinds of aircraft needed to emulate the most likely enemy (the MiG-21); the organization of a Soviet-style Aggressor force, schooled in Soviet tactics and doctrine; and three optional force structure packages. After some rewriting at Kirk’s direction, Kirk then called in a Mafia person from Forces Branch, who costed out Horner’s options and helped him work out where to find the equipment and personnel to build this force. Together, they put together a package that recommended taking a small number of excess pilots, training them in T-38s (later F-5s), and assigning them to Nellis to form an initial
Aggressor squadron. They further identified the source of money for the squadron and the types of training they would accomplish. The Aggressors, like the Navy’s Top Gun School in Miramar, California, would do air-to-air training, but they wouldn’t do it only at one base, but would visit each fighter wing and give training over a two-week period.

  By late that same Wednesday night, Horner had a package and a staff summary sheet ready to do battle for coordination. The next day, he took on the Pentagon. Horner and Jim Mirehouse, a Mafia lieutenant colonel who had flown Weasels with Horner, steered a tortuous course though the bosses and got the package coordinated through the variously reluctant offices. For instance, when the head of Air Force Programs, a lieutenant general, refused to sign off on the coordination, they waited until he went to lunch, so his deputy, a major general who despised him, could sign off on the package. There were other similar but lesser battles.

  By 11:00 P.M. on Thursday, Horner had the package coordinated and delivered to the Chief of Staff ’s office; and the next morning, Momyer paid his visit. Afterward, the package was ready for pickup at the chief ’s front office. Attached to it was a two-inch-square piece of paper that said simply, “Do it. R.”

  The Air Force Chief of Staff had given the go-ahead for the Aggressors, despite his SAC prejudices. Later, when Horner appeared before General Hill so the general could program the aircraft into Nellis and authorize the money to man and operate the squadron, Hill flew into a towering rage. And yet, for all his shouts, he could not ignore that two-inch-square slip of paper that said, “Do it. R.”

  And so the Aggressors were born. It was a hugely successful program—as evidenced, for example, by the exchange ratios in Desert Storm.

  RED FLAG

  Red Flag came next. A vast scale-simulated combat exercise, based at Nellis and “fought” against Aggressors, it was primarily the creation of Moody Suter, a captain when he was at Nellis, and a major at the Pentagon. Suter, cocksure, irreverent, and boundlessly creative, had the face of a hunting hound, an overactive, not always orderly mind, and a brash confidence that never endeared him to the Air Force brass. Though all of his ideas were brilliant, many were too radical to be implemented. Either way, he worked and worried his ideas until they came to fruition . . . or else so enraged the senior leadership in the Air Force that he had to go into hiding until things calmed down.21

  While Horner was still at Nellis, General Taylor had instigated a major study that envisaged an enormous training area using the combined Hill AFB and Nellis ranges. This area would include the airspace over the government land comprising half of the state of Utah and Nevada—enough room for a great many aircraft to maneuver with no interference from civilian airliners; enough room, also, to practice air refueling. The area would be open to supersonic flight and unrestricted military operations, from the ground up. It would have extensive radar coverage, including AWACS, so that pilots could debrief what went on during the simulated combat exercises. Live bombs would be dropped and missiles would be fired. There would be simulated SAM and AAA in the ground in the target areas. And the Aggressors who were not on the road giving training would be used to create an enemy air force.

  After Horner left Nellis, Suter continued to work this program hard, developing the concept in operational details beyond the original engineering study. Later, in 1972, when Suter came to the Pentagon, Bill Kirk had him assigned to his office, and Suter brought this concept with him.

  In October 1973, a new commander came to TAC, another SAC general named Bob Dixon, who was known as the Tidewater Alligator for his habit of tearing flesh from colonels and generals under his command (and from anyone else, for that matter; he was famous for indiscriminate hatred). Dixon had been in the Pentagon for years and was savvy about how to play the game there, and he was not about to let wild visionaries from Nellis sell him a pig with wings.

  Before Suter and the others on the team wanted to take on Dixon, they built briefings aimed at selling the concept to the air staff. These came out of some telling creative analysis: At Korat and Ta Khli, the practice had been to give new pilots ten missions in the less dangerous southern parts of North Vietnam (in Route Packages I and II), where there were only a few SAMs and no MiGs. After gaining experience in those ten missions, they were ready to go “downtown”—to Route Package V, VI A, or VI B, which was Hanoi and its adjacent areas. When building the new Red Flag briefing team, the team used this experience to build a graph that showed loss rates and numbers of missions flown. What this graph said, in effect, was that the first ten missions a pilot flew were his most dangerous, and that if he could survive this without getting shot down, then his chance of survival significantly increased. “Why not give him the first ten combat missions over the Nellis-Hill ranges,” the briefing went on to say, “where he can survive his mistakes and learn from his errors before the bullets and SAMs are real?”

  Red Flag was taking shape conceptually. Meanwhile, however, it was running into bureaucratic problems. Though the Fighter Mafia had tried to push the idea up the chain at TAC, the support of colonels and generals leery of Dixon’s temper was conspicuously absent.

  It was time to pitch the concept to General Dixon. The job was to show him how this could be his idea.

  At that point Moody Suter devised a scheme, which offered itself when the team received word that the Army’s chief scientist was interested in battle lab training and emulation of combat to test Army systems. In other words, he was thinking about a land-warfare equivalent of what was becoming the Red Flag concept. (In time, the Army made this happen, with great success, at Fort Irwin in California.) Suter then slipped word to the scientist that the Air Force had been working on the exact concept he had in mind, and was busy developing a realistic training environment in the Nellis complex that would also be used for operational testing. Naturally, the scientist was very interested in learning more about the specifics of the Air Force program, and so he asked for a formal briefing. In point of fact, at that time they had no program, just a bare-bones concept that needed meat and structure. What they needed were slides, the chief props of a military briefing.

  In due course, some graphics people who were also in the basement of the Pentagon began working with Suter and Horner to produce slides for the Army briefing. On the title slide, the head of the graphics section sketched a plain red flag, then used the logo on the subsequent slides. The “Red Flag” stuck, and so the program was named.

  Now came the payoff to Suter’s scheme: since Bill Kirk’s team was going outside the Air Force to brief the Army, and since Nellis was owned by TAC (i.e., General Dixon), it was their duty to let General Dixon know what they were doing. This message implied much more than was stated: With the Army’s “interest” in the proposed Red Flag program at Nellis came the implicit threat that the Army would want to start using Nellis for their own battle lab, which could then grow to the Army owning the base.

  The result—and the whole point of the scheme—was that Dixon asked to hear the briefing.

  Suter put on his armor and took him on. Ferocious, but no fool, Dixon clearly saw the merits of Red Flag. After the briefing, he told Suter simply, “I’ve got it.” Red Flag was airborne.

  In its early days, Red Flag had predictable problems—too many crashes, for instance. In time, however, everyone learned, the training setup grew more realistic, and the young pilots realized they couldn’t take chances in combat. The safety record improved. It wasn’t long before the Red Flag loss rate was lower than that of the normal home station training.

  Over the years, range instrumentation also improved, and the Air Force started to look at the integration of tactics and new equipment. They discovered how to configure a strike package of bombers, fighter-bombers, escorting fighters, rescue forces, Wild Weasels, and command and control, which included AWACS, Rivet Joint (an EC-135 aircraft that collected signals intelligence—“sigint”), and Compass Call (an EC-130 aircraft that not only collected sigint, but also jamm
ed enemy signals between aircraft, their ground controllers, and their ground radar network).

  In time, Red Flag also began to involve integrated flying operations with Navy and Marine aircraft and with foreign air forces—French, British, Korean, Saudi, Israeli, and German. Air Guard and Reserves also flew in Red Flag, so that in the future, whenever a task force of USAF and non-USAF fliers were brought together (whether in Desert Shield or some Bright STAR exercise), they had no problem immediately integrating operations. Common terms and equipment were used, as were common rules and tactics.

  Desert Shield and Desert Storm went so easily in great part because everyone had been there before. They had flown their first ten combat sorties together and had already been indoctrinated as a team. It paid off, not so much in terms of tactics development or even individual aircrew training, but because the people had worked together and understood one another.

  ★ It was while he was Assistant Deputy Commander for Operations to the 4th Tactical Fighter Wing at Seymour Johnson in North Carolina from 1976 to 1979 that Horner participated in his first Red Flag. Fresh from the Pentagon and a year at the National War College at Seymour Johnson, he worked for the DO, Colonel Harvey Kimsey, who worked for the wing commander, Colonel Bob Russ. It was a prime assignment, since it meant he was back flying, in F-4Es (then used in an air-to-air combat role). His job was to do whatever the DO didn’t want to do. Since Kimsey was primarily interested in flying jets and didn’t like paperwork, that left a great deal of work for his assistant, a situation that did not at all bother Horner, who was happy doing most of the jobs DOs do—looking after intelligence, tactics, standards/ evaluation, plans, scheduling, and shops. The wing had three squadrons of twenty-four aircraft and thirty pilots, commanded by lieutenant colonels. Horner planned exercises and monitored flying, both by watching the schedule and by flying with each of the squadrons.