Every Man a Tiger: The Gulf War Air Campaign

by Tom Clancy

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

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

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

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

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

  Chuck Horner says in summary:

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

  BRIEFINGS IN WASHINGTON

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  TRAINING

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

  What did this take?

  Deployability is a major part of the normal, necessary business of the U.S. Air Force. Units are graded according to their ability to deploy quickly, and are often tasked to deploy to an isolated area on their own base, from which they fly sorties at surge rates49 to make sure they have brought the correct amount of spares and other equipment. Deployment to the Gulf was made additionally easy for the USAF because of pre-positioned stores and Coalition equipment at collocated bases.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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