by Tom Clancy
Everyone bared their souls, as they would at a mission debriefing, but with even greater intensity, brainstormed the potential pitfalls, and shared anguish for the organizational failures that had caused the deaths in the desert.
The actual reason for most of the accidents was not hard to discern: the crews were training too hard, pushing their aircraft, pushing the rules, and flying tactics far too risky for the situation. When pilots deploy away from home, constraints are lessened. And when they deploy in anticipation of war, the lure to go beyond the limits seems justified. As a result they often exceed their own capabilities and create situations that saturate their capacity to cope; they put their aircraft in positions that defy the laws of physics and are unable to recover.
Most of those at the meeting agreed that everyone needed some time off. Many of the pilots had been in the desert for over sixty days, living in crowded quarters, often with painfully uncomfortable sleeping arrangements, working twelve to fifteen hours a day, seven days a week. The troops were tired.
As luck would have it, living conditions were already getting better. Some of the units were now taking a weekly day off. As more tents became available, the number assigned to each tent was decreased. Recreation facilities were being established. But greater efforts were taken to lessen the stress.
★ The October meeting in Riyadh marked an important turning point in the period leading up to the war: Though other accidents happened, the curve went down. The dangerous trend was over. More important, the meeting marked the moment of truth when all the commanders realized they were going into the war in an orderly fashion, and that pilots must fly more conservatively in wartime than in peacetime. In peacetime they practice against a threat—SAMs, MiGs, AAA—that is perfect and omnipresent, while in an actual war they fly against an enemy operator, pilot, or gunner who is scared, tired, and working with equipment that cannot be well maintained and operated twenty-four hours a day. Very few accidents occur in combat. In combat, pilots avoid undue risks and keep everything as simple as they can. If an enemy kills you, that’s a tough break, but no one wants to be killed by his own dumb mistake.
ROTATION POLICY
In the midst of the training and deployment, Horner had a serious disagreement with the generals and lieutenant generals in Washington over rotation policy. They wanted to rotate troops back to the States; he didn’t.
He could not forget Vietnam, with its one year or 100 missions over the North, a policy that had robbed the deployed force of its commitment to success. He was going to have nothing like that in the Gulf . . . or he would go down swinging.
There were phone calls from General Russ, seeking Horner’s views about such a policy. “Chuck,” he asked, “what do you think about this—120 days in the AOR, and then we rotate the individual but not the unit?”
Horner’s reply was close to an ultimatum: “Respectfully, General, there’s no way I’ll ever agree to a rotation policy.”
“See here, Chuck,” General Russ answered, disturbed by Horner’s attitude. “This isn’t a discussion of whether or not we are going to have a policy. It’s a given that we are. Rather, it is a chance for you to give us your views about what policy we should implement. We can’t keep those people in the desert forever.”
To which Horner replied, “General, I respect what you are trying to do and appreciate your concern, but I will never agree to a rotation policy. We have been sent over here to do a job. When we get the Iraqis out of Kuwait, then bring us home. We are here until victory.”
These were brave words . . . and maybe foolhardy ones, Horner told himself, and sometimes he didn’t think he could make them stick. Yet he felt that this was one of those issues he needed to get fired over if it went the wrong way.
Fortunately, General Schwarzkopf felt as he did (probably as a consequence of his own Vietnam experience, though Horner can’t say this for sure), and so Horner’s policy stood—even in the face of higher-ups in Washington.
After that, Horner had to convey this hard message to the troops.
I found, he says, that if I told them the truth, they understood: That in fact I didn’t know when we would go home, that I didn’t know when the war might start, but that in Vietnam we had a rotation policy which made it our goal not to win but to stay alive until we rotated, and that I wasn’t going to be caught in that trap again.
I also told them that I wanted to be home as much as they did, and while I had better living conditions than theirs, I understood their frustrations. “We came to do a job,” I went on to say, “and it’s a worthwhile job. So as far as I’m concerned, we all stay until that job gets done. Sorry, but none of us can go home until the Iraqis are out of Kuwait, and the murder, rape, and robbery stop. It is my decision to make, and that is the decision I have made. If I get fired, then the new guy can do whatever he wants, but for us today it is here until victory.”
Certainly, we let people with special circumstances go home, and we had to let some of the reserve forces rotate their people, because they were on active duty for only a limited time. As for everyone else, morale was sky-high; people understood the contract and they had a stake in the outcome. They were committed to it, so let’s get on with it. A far cry from Vietnam.
THE AGONY OF KUWAIT AND THE HOME FRONT
Every day, the commanders in Riyadh and their staffs received reports of the Kuwaitis trapped in their occupied country—firsthand accounts of brutal acts of murder, torture, rape, and looting. At their best, the Iraqis in Kuwait City were a gang of thugs, stripping cars and houses. At their worst, they were beasts, executing children in front of their parents, decapitating with power saws men suspected of being resistance fighters, gang-raping foreign women once employed as domestic servants in wealthy homes.
Meanwhile, there was governmental and U.N. uncertainty about how best to remove Iraq from Kuwait, including considerable talk of alternatives to fighting. Most Americans wanted to avoid war, while many in and out of government—highly respected people such as Senator Sam Nunn and General Colin Powell—were counting on diplomatic initiatives and the U.N. embargo imposed soon after the invasion of Kuwait.
Others felt that the United States should not rush into a war where thousands of Americans might be killed, simply to secure Kuwait’s oil—or as some op-ed wag put it: Would the United States have risked so much of its wealth and so many of its young warriors if the chief export of Kuwait had been broccoli? (President Bush famously disliked broccoli.)
The view in the Gulf was vastly different. Proximity to the suffering in Kuwait made war seem increasingly better than waiting for the always doubtful success of the embargo or other initiatives.
All the talk of delay, along with the confusion of aims among their leaders, disheartened the families of those who were deployed, and left them in a conceptual bind. Without the appreciation of events in the Gulf afforded by firsthand knowledge, they were reduced to whatever information was provided by the U.S. media—a perplexing variety of views about what should be done to end the crisis in the Gulf. The families at home saw at best a vague end in sight to the crisis—and what appeared to be an ever-longer separation from their loved ones.
Yet—as always with service families—they bore up under the stress of separation in always inventive and heartening ways.
The spouses, most often wives, began to call themselves “the left-behinds.” The support they gave and received was a lifesaver, not only for their overall morale but also for their success in coping with everyday problems.
The yards in Sumter, South Carolina, near Shaw AFB, never looked so good, as neighbors turned out to mow and edge the lawns of families whose husbands had deployed to the desert.
The “left-behinds” began to bond together. Meetings were held to squash rumors, find out who needed help, and provide communication for those families living in unusual isolation. The wives got together for social functions, for a chance to just plain bitch to one another, and to take pride in not having
to endure their terrible loneliness and pain on their own.
The shared sacrifice helped ease the panic and tears that came stealing into them when they were alone at night, wondering not only “when” but more importantly “if ever again” they would see their mates. Those in the desert had knowledge (though always sketchy and imperfect); they were busy; they were involved in a great and noble act; while the “left-behinds” worked to make their faithful, lonely lives seem normal at a time of almost unbearable abnormality. They did it because it was expected of them, because they had no other choice, and because of their courage and selflessness. They were real heroes of Desert Shield and Desert Storm.
★ On October 24, Chuck Horner at long last answered what had been Mary Jo’s constant question: “When are you coming home?”
I don’t know when we are coming home, I wrote her—with added comments—but for sure it will be after we fight Iraq. So the question is when are we going to fight? The answer is pick one of the following: 1. After the ’90 election. (Generals always try to sound politically aware.)
2. After the U.S. Embassy in Kuwait runs out of food and water. (We had plans to rescue the trapped staff, if their lives appeared to be in danger.)
3. After another 100,000 troops arrive. (More than 200,000 additional troops actually came.)
4. Before Ramadan begins. (The Islamic period of fasting and holy days, due to start in March.)
5. Before next summer. (I didn’t think we could survive the heat one more time.)
6. After next summer. (My attempt at humor.)
7. After Iraq attacks us.
8. Before Saddam starts killing the hostages.
9. Whenever President Bush and the other leaders say so.
10. Whenever the U.N. says to do it.
As it turned out, number ten, U.N. approval, occurred in late November, when the Security Council ordered a January 15, 1991, deadline for an Iraqi pullout from Kuwait, and number nine came with the President’s approval of the air campaign briefing. This decision grew stronger with the November decision to deploy the VIIth Corps from Germany and to double our naval and air forces, and was cast in stone with the congressional approval of military action in January of 1991.
My advice to Mary Jo was simple: “Just listen to President Bush. He is telling you the truth, and he is telling you what we are going to do.”
As for me, I had inside information. I knew that unless Saddam Hussein made an uncharacteristic change in his strategy, we were going to fight. In November, talk of rotation policy died, to be replaced by a growing sense of urgency, a clearer perception of what lay ahead, and an increasing awareness that, sometime after the first of the year, we were going to war.
BUILDUP
The first signs of the end of uncertainty came quickly. In November, the President’s approval of the additional corps began to take visible effect when the heavy VIIth Corps began to deploy from Germany to Saudi Arabia. In Germany, VIIth Corps had defended the strategic Fulda Gap in the face of the now rapidly disintegrating Warsaw Pact; in the Gulf, their mission was to be the armored fist of Schwarzkopf’s flanking attack aimed at the armored divisions of the Republican Guard, now based near the northwest corner of Kuwait.
Early that month, General Schwarzkopf called a commander’s conference at the “Desert Inn,” a military dining facility at Dhahran Air Base, to outline his plan for those who were new to CENTCOM, Lieutenant General Fred Franks and his VIIth Corps commanders, who had just flown down from Germany for an initial look-around. The old CENTCOM hands, like Yeosock, Boomer, Luck, and Horner, were already familiar with what the CINC would be telling them. They’d come to the Dhahran conference essentially to meet and greet. Though they were more than happy to have VIIth Corps and its Abrams tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles, the old hands had their brown desert camos and suntans, and their close comradeship developed in the desert, and to them the new men looked just a little out of place and edgy in their pale skins and forest-green camouflage fatigues. The new people would fit in—that’s what they were all trained and paid for—but there would be many tough moments in the weeks ahead.
In his briefing, the CINC covered what air was going to do, what the USMC, the XVIIIth Airborne Corps, and the Islamic Corps were going to do, and what he expected VIIth Corps to do. The Marines and the Islamic forces would attack the heart of the Iraqi defenses in Kuwait. XVIIIth Corps and the French would move into Iraq in the west, where they would support the flank of the main, VIIth Corps attack. When XVIIIth Corps reached the Euphrates River, they’d turn east and join the attack against the Republican Guards.
The CINC’s final message was simple: Hit them hard. Hit them fast. Never let up. Never slow down. “We are going to move out fast,” he told his commanders. “If you have commanders who are going to worry about outrunning their logistic tails, or about having their flanks exposed, don’t bring them to this fight. This attack will slam into an army that has been greatly weakened from weeks of air attack; and I want you to start out running and keep running until we surround them and destroy them as a fighting force.”
★ The buildup that followed was spectacular. There had been nothing like it since the buildup in the south of England in the spring of 1944. In November alone, CENTAF’s force grew by close to 40 percent, and that was only the beginning. Here is a snapshot of what was going on:*
Material Buildup
People Buildup
Much of the USN buildup was additional carriers.
The buildup posed many problems.
For Chuck Horner himself, the pace of his own planning grew ever more frantic. Each day he had to ask himself yet again: “What has changed? What new force can we accommodate? How can we support it? At what location? How will we introduce them into the existing ATO?”
At Horner’s level, planning meant anticipating potential problems, then working out in advance how to avoid them, or solve them if they could not be avoided. It was his job to foresee everything that might happen, then to bring about the good outcomes and to head off the bad ones.
While the staff were up to their necks working immediate issues, he looked beyond what they were wrestling with to anticipate the next issues they needed to address when they finished what they were doing.
In this he was mostly successful, he now believes, for the war brought few surprises, while a thousand prepared-for events didn’t happen. His two chief anticipatory lapses were the impact of Scuds on the Israelis and the Khafji invasion—significant errors, yet easy to miss.
★ Meanwhile, there were many countless practical and immediate buildup-related problems:
Command arrangements had to be both spread out and strengthened. On December 5, Horner decided that his span of control was too large. He therefore put the fighters under Buster Glosson (officially, he became the fighter division commander); the bombers and tankers under Pat Caruana; the electronic assets under Profitt; and the airlifters under Ed Tenoso.
The constant arrival of new intelligence led to changes in the offensive ATO. However, now that there were more strike and support forces, more targets could be hit, so the ATO grew larger and more complex.
The best use of the new Joint STARS had to be worked out (it arrived for the first time only a day before the war started).
New players such as VIIth Corps had to be accommodated.
The airlift west of XVIIIth and VIIth Corps had to be worked out, once ground movements had been finalized (during their move west to attack positions, the only land artery, the Tapline Road, was paved with trucks. The intratheater airlift created an airbridge that relieved some of that pressure).
More tent cities had to be built, to accommodate the increased numbers of personnel.
There had to be ample munitions at each base. The plan was to have a sixty-day supply on hand; but when the new aircraft arrived, it went down to thirty days. Yet within a few weeks, Bill Rider and his logistics team, with enormous support from the logistics organizations in Europ
e and the United States, brought munitions up to the required sixty-day supply. Saddam Hussein, constantly underestimating airpower, had told his troops openly that the Coalition would run out of bombs after a few days. He was wrong yet again. Not only did Horner have sixty days’ worth of bombs and missiles on hand when the war started, but they would keep that level day in and day out as the war progressed.
Communications had to be built up, both to support the added forces and to execute offensive operations. Though there were more communications per person in this war than in any other, the miracles performed by Colonel Randy Witt and his communicators were never enough. The TACC could not get timely intelligence from Washington, and then they could never move it fast enough down to the wings. The link providing the AWACS air picture to the air defense command centers and the ships at sea was very fragile. The deployment into the desert of hundreds of thousands of troops with their small satellite terminals drained away vital communication links. And once the bombs started falling, the Air Tasking Order grew geometrically, yet still needed to be distributed on time.
All the while, the basics had to be attended to—such as air defense, in case the Iraqis tried a conventional air attack. AWACS orbits were set up and integrated with the Saudi Air Defense systems, providing complete radar coverage of southern Iraq and northern Saudi Arabia. Twenty-four-hour airborne CAPs were manned with USAF and RSAF F-15s and RAF and RSAF Tornado Air Defense Variants. Occasionally, an Iraqi would fly south at high speed as though planning to cross the border, but would turn back when the airborne CAPs, vectored by AWACS, maneuvered to intercept him. Sometimes they tried to lure Coalition fighters into elaborate ambushes in Iraq, but this never worked, because the AWACS saw the Iraqi ambush aircraft.