by Tom Clancy
More practically, he attacked the root causes of TAC’s lack of readiness: He closed sick units so there would be enough trained people and parts to make the better units healthy. He kicked the senior NCOs out of their air-conditioned offices, where they had migrated under the centralized style of management, and placed them out on the flight lines, where they were truly in charge. He expected combat flying proficiency from his colonels and generals, so confidence in combat leadership began to be restored among the warriors. He ruthlessly rooted out and destroyed procedures and processes designed to maintain control for its own sake. He dictated goals and standards, then built visible and understandable scorecards that rated what actually mattered (such as sorties flown or aircraft in commission). As he slowly moved to decentralized leadership, he raised the goals and standards ever higher, as each day the men and women who worked for him proved they could exceed even his expectations.
He also made sure these changes were built on a foundation of absolute truth. Lying, shading of the truth, and making excuses were completely unacceptable. To make that point clear throughout TAC, Creech made a number of highly visible “public executions.”
Here is one example:
Before Creech, the great game among commanders was to tell higher headquarters they could accomplish what was asked of them, when in fact they knew they could not, either because they didn’t have the training or the resources, or because the mission was impossible. In fact, any commander who told the truth was likely to be fired. Under these conditions, the best promised as little as they could get away with, and through their own individual efforts made their units perform adequately; and in that way they didn’t have to shade the truth overly much. On the other hand, the worst commanders simply lied and juggled the books. Some commanders spoke up and told it like it actually was. If they were very intelligent and savvy, they were actually listened to, and some changes were made. Others, not so savvy, were fired for not being team players in what Chuck Horner calls “the grand hoax.”
In the F-4D, for instance, there was a computer-based bomb-release system, called the Dive Toss System, that supposedly allowed the aircrews to drop bombs from high altitude and thus to stay out of most visually aimed ground fire. The problem was that the Dive Toss System didn’t work.
Nevertheless, the training rules called for F-4D aircrews with this system to achieve bomb scores of a certain average—say, CEP (Circular Error Probable) of fifty feet. The aircrew would fly the aircraft out to a bombing range and drop a bomb using the Dive Toss System, the range crew would then score their bomb impacts, and that data would be amassed at the wing and reported to TAC. Unless a certain percentage of the crews achieved the desired CEP or higher, the wing was not judged combat-ready. Yet, achieving a satisfactory CEP was usually a gamble, either because crew training was often inadequate, or worse, because the bomb-release computer in the Dive Toss System was more often than not malfunctioning. That left the aircrews faced with a no-win situation: since the system was incapable of giving them a fifty-foot average CEP, everyone up to the wing commander had to lie, or else the wing commander would be fired (though sometimes the wing commander would fire the squadron commanders and the chief of maintenance instead).
That meant that a crew would roll in on the target and call the pass: “Two’s in for a Dive Toss”; but they would set their switches for a manual release, get the proper sight picture for the dive angle, airspeed, and wind condition, then release the bomb and make an abrupt pull-up so their friend on the ground scoring the bombs would see a Dive Toss, and not a manual dive, maneuver. Often they would drop a bomb with an even smaller CEP, which made the wing look very, very good. The commander would duly be promoted. The only thing that suffered was integrity. The crews called the event Dive Cheat.
Meanwhile, the generals thought they had a superior combat capability in the Dive Toss System, a system that just got better and better the more it was used because as the crews dropped more and more manual bombs, they grew more and more accurate.
One day, one of the F-4D captains suffered an attack of conscience and sent an anonymous letter to Creech that described the Dive Cheat situation. As a result, Creech sent the TAC Director of Operations, Major General Larry Welch, to investigate.
When Welch arrived, everyone in the wing except the wing commander told the truth. However, the wing commander claimed he knew nothing about what was really going on, even though he was current in the jet, and knew how he was getting his own bomb scores and certainly how everyone else was getting theirs. Not only that, he tried to throw the blame on others. He might possibly have survived what followed if he’d at least said something like: “Yes, sir, General Creech, my guys cheated, and I cheated, but that is what you wanted us to do, and we hate you and ourselves for doing it.” But he didn’t. In consequence, Creech had him fired in view of all corners of TAC. Afterward, everyone got the message that there was a new way of doing business that depended on telling the truth, that bad news was acceptable if you had done your best and still failed, and that lying or shading the truth to look good were far worse than failing.
★ All of this restored pride. But that wasn’t enough. Creech also insisted on raising standards of appearance. Pity the poor commander whose base was not clean and painted. If he had to, he went downtown and bought his own tools and paint. He paid attention to color—no Easter eggs, but earth tones pleasing to the eye, yet businesslike. He paid attention to military dress. Combat uniforms were fine, but they better be properly worn, neat, and clean (unless soiled from hard work). It wasn’t just looks that a commander watched out for. He paid attention to his people, he moved among them and listened to them, learning from all ranks as they figured out how to do their jobs more efficiently and quickly. He paid attention to families, too (family support centers and child-care facilities, for instance), so that people could concentrate on their work. Most of all, he paid attention to discipline. Discipline is fundamental to the good order needed to succeed in combat, and fundamental to pride. Hard tests were given in the air, on the flight line, and in all the multitude of areas that are required to carry out wartime missions. There were no excuses: If you failed, it was because you needed training, and you got it. If you needed resources, they were found. If you were overextended, you were given time to grow. But if you lacked the necessary desire, leadership, or integrity to be in the new military, you were given the opportunity to succeed in civilian life.
RESULTS
Here are some of the before-and-after performance data of the Creech reforms at TAC:• The on-average three and a half hours from the order of a part to its delivery shrank to eight minutes.
• Pilot training sorties were doubled, increasing pilot skills and readiness.
• The number of aircraft grounded for maintenance was reduced by 73 percent.
• Hangar queens were reduced from an average of 234 per day to only eight per day.
• Fighters that landed with problems were now fixed much more quickly. The rate of those repaired on the same day was improved by 270 percent. Where before one out of five were flyable again on the same day, now it was four out of five.
• The ability to generate sorties in combat more than doubled.
All of this was accomplished with ever more technically sophisticated aircraft, thus burying two myths: (1) that U.S. aircraft were too sophisticated, and (2) that technically sophisticated aircraft couldn’t be kept in the air.
Chuck Horner takes up the story again:
What Creech did, what we did, was learn how to be an air force all over again. We learned first how to maintain aircraft and generate sorties, so our aircrews got enough quality training to be ready for combat. The average flying hours per month for our crews more than doubled, from less than ten to more than twenty. Pilots could now hit their targets, as bombing accuracy rose. And they could survive, as their aerial fighting skills were honed to levels previously considered unattainable. The equipment worked, because it w
as maintained with pride. Each crew chief was given ownership of his own jet, and his name was painted on the side along with the pilot’s. It was his jet and he was responsible for its performance. If his jet wasn’t ready to fly on time and in perfect condition, everyone knew who was responsible. So the crew chief would not accept excuses from the supply sergeant. If he couldn’t get a part, he found a friend whose jet was down for scheduled maintenance and asked to borrow the part he needed. And he didn’t have to ask the colonel’s permission. The transaction was between the two owners of the jets (decentralization at work).
The base also had pride, as the hospital waiting rooms were neat and clean, and the dining hall was decorated tastefully, with plants and clean walls and floors. Our people were being treated the way they deserved, and they knew it and responded.
What you saw in Desert Storm was the legacy of Bill Creech. When F-16 squadrons of usually twenty-four aircraft flew over a hundred sorties in a single day, that was because his liberation of maintenance crews from idiotic rules created an environment where individual initiative counted. Each crew chief and his assistants brought to the Gulf pride of ownership of their own aircraft. Add the awareness that we were in a war for a worthy cause, and there was no stopping us. We had pride, productivity, purpose, and a sense of professional dedication.
Decentralization was the key. Each man and woman knew what was expected, and each in turn busted his or her ass not only to do their job, but to exceed our highest expectations. Bill Creech had shown us what we were capable of achieving, he had created an environment where failure was not even a factor, and he had given us back the pride we ourselves had given away in the turmoil of Vietnam. There is no doubt the technology you saw on the television screens during Desert Storm was impressive, but to understand the victory, you have to understand the people who operated the bases, maintained the jets, and flew them into combat. You have to know the far-reaching fire Bill Creech lit in each and every one of us in the military services.
TRAINING IN LEADERSHIP
When the Creech Revolution began, Chuck Horner was a colonel. In those days, both his flying skills and his bureaucratic maneuvering skills were well developed; now it was as a leader, as a senior officer, that he had to grow and develop. The service academies, he likes to point out, educate and train top-flight lieutenants, but you learn—or fail to learn—how to be a general when you are a colonel. Only as a colonel do you have the responsibilities, the hard choices, the opportunities for success or failure, that can show you how to lead as a general.
In this stage of his life, Horner had help from a variety of officers senior to him—both good and bad—including, of course, Bill Creech himself.
His first wing commander at Seymour Johnson in 1976 was a good one, Colonel Bob Russ. Russ was hard to please, yet he wasn’t reluctant to reward outstanding performance, while letting those who fell short know they’d done so. And his efforts didn’t stop there; he devoted much of his time to training subordinates in what they needed to know to do their jobs, and ultimately to replace him. Though he was tough, he looked at each problem nonjudgmentally—“How did we get into this particular situation, how do we get out of it, and how do we prevent it from happening again?”—rather than looking for somebody to take the blame. When he could, he anticipated problems and fixed them before they occurred. Finally, because he let them bite off as much responsibility as they could swallow, people worked hard for him.
By contrast, at one point Horner was the vice commander to a brainy but thickheaded wing commander who treated his subordinates with contempt and built his career on the bodies of those he’d stabbed in the back, thus negating his very genuine intellectual gifts. Horner studied this man very carefully, and learned from him that most valuable lesson: how not to act. He did his best to handle people just the reverse of the way his boss did, and in doing so, he learned the even more important lesson: you’ve got to be yourself. If you are the commander, people don’t care if you are tough, or mean, or kind, or gentle, but if you are tough one day and kind the next, they are miserable. If they don’t know who you are going to be on any given day, then they don’t know how to act.
Much of the rest of Chuck Horner’s education in leadership came painfully . . . because it’s painful to have your shortcomings pointed out, especially if you are a fighter pilot with a large ego. Beyond that, if you truly care about the consequences of your acts, then you feel miserable when you make a mistake. “Good people don’t need to be screamed at,” Horner observes now. “They feel far worse about their shortcomings than you can ever make them feel. On the other hand, the bad person doesn’t care or understand, so screaming doesn’t work there, either. And if you are wrong, the good subordinate will reject your leadership in the future. So you just point out the error, to make sure they’ve gotten it, then discuss how to prevent it in the future, to rebuild their self-confidence. And then, if they are worth training, you send them on their way to sin no more.”
On one occasion, while he was at the 4th TFW, Horner led another aircraft from Seymour Johnson to Hill AFB in Utah to conduct low-level flying training. In North Carolina, fighter pilots were restricted to flying no lower than 500 feet above the ground, but since no one lived in the deserts south of the Great Salt Lake, they could drop down to fifty feet.
When they reached Hill, Horner’s wingman flew with another flight leader who was already deployed there, and Horner flew with the other flight leader’s wingman, who was qualified to fly at fifty feet. Their two-ship element took off first, and they proceeded along the low-level route, practicing formation flying and lookout at 480 to 540 knots and altitudes as low as the fifty-feet minimum. When they reached a mountain range southwest of Salt Lake City, they ran into weather, with clouds obscuring the mountain peaks, initiated a weather abort, climbed up through a hole in the clouds, and called the other element to let them know about the problem. “We’ll meet you on the gunnery range en route home,” they said as they signed off.
When the second two-ship element arrived in the mountains, the flight leader turned away from the wingman and started to climb. Unfortunately, he didn’t climb rapidly enough, and the wingman, who was trying to keep the leader in sight, failed to maintain situational awareness and scraped a ridgeline in his flight path. The aircraft skipped off the ridge and barely impacted the ground, but hit hard enough to cause the aircraft to explode.
Later, Horner and members of a ground crew search party found the bodies and debris in a canyon about two miles away.
After the missing-man flyby, Lieutenant General Hartinger, the commander at Ninth Air Force, let Horner know that it was his negligence that had caused the accident. He had failed in his responsibility as the leader, and so had “murdered” the two crew members.
He was already feeling sorry for himself, loathing himself for his failure and for his part in the deaths. Hartinger’s condemnation made it worse. “I’m working as hard as I can,” he told himself. “And now this. This dumbass flight leader doesn’t take care of his wingman. And, shit, that kills my career.” But the self-pity only lasted until he realized that what “The Grr” had pasted on him was exactly right—an insight that was reinforced by Bill Kirk, who was the DO at Ninth Air Force at the time. Kirk gave it to him straight, and Horner had to agree, that he had flat-out failed, and that he could either give up, or pull himself up, admit his mistakes, and start over.
I was responsible for these deaths, for a variety of reasons, but mainly because I was the senior officer present. It’s not the flight leader’s fault. It’s mine. I should have ordered the second element to abort the flight and climb when they were in the clear and not assume they’d know what to do when they hit the weather. I was at fault; I should not have made the mistake of passive leadership.
If you want responsibility, if you want the tough jobs, then you better be ready to stand up and take the criticism and all the anguish when things go wrong. If you can’t take the blame—even for mista
kes that are beyond your control—then you are not in a responsible job, no matter what the job title says. The big jobs involve risk of great personal criticism. The jobs worth having are the ones with the biggest downside, and if you don’t admit your own mistakes, you are not worthy of the trust given to you.
I couldn’t guarantee that I would never again fail. No one can. But I knew that to seek credit for a job well done while ducking the pain and disgrace of failure is not leadership. No more. I would not wear a hair shirt; that’s not my way. But whenever someone under my command was hurt or killed, it was my fault and no excuses would be offered. The only atonement I could make was to do my best to make sure we all learned why the accident occurred and to prevent it from happening again. The only way to give value to the sacrifice of a life either in combat or in peacetime training, the only way to salvage some good out of such a terrible loss, was to do everything in my power to see that it was never repeated.
I started to become a “hard” man about some things—especially about things that could get people hurt. I never minded risks to myself, but I sure minded unnecessary risks to anyone who came under my command. Others under my command died over the years, but I blamed myself first and then searched for ways to keep the same thing from happening again.
I was learning to lead.
★ His next assignment was at Luke AFB (in Glendale, Arizona, near Phoenix), in 1979, where he was Colonel Pete Kemp’s vice commander at the 58th Fighter Wing.
Horner met Bill Creech for the first time at Luke, and the two men quickly discovered that they were both from Iowa—there are not too many Iowans in the Air Force. Other than that, it’s hard for Horner to say why he caught Creech’s notice. In fact, it’s hard to imagine two more different personalities. Creech is precise, careful, vain. Horner is wild, outrageous, and sloppy. But notice him Creech did.