by Tom Clancy
25 When he came home in April 1991, the wing had converted to new Block 40 F-16s. So there was a much newer and more reliable Lady Ashley. He has no idea what became of the original; he suspects she is parked in the desert getting dusty.
26 Taif is the large city south of Mecca, a major stop on the ancient trade route running from Damascus in the north, through Jeddah, and into Yemen in the south. Because it is situated at about 3,000 feet above sea level in high desert, it is cooler than nearby Jeddah on the coast. The air base is quite modern, with new hardened shelters.
27 Kaufman was the Chief of the United States Military Training Mission (USMTM) to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. His job was to oversee the large number of important Foreign Military Sales (FMS) programs that were being executed between the two nations. He had a staff in Riyadh and people (military and contractor) scattered throughout the kingdom.
28 That is, for Horner, an “offensive” or “attack” air campaign.
29 United States Military Training Mission.
30 Paratroopers are like fighter pilots, with a similar élan. And paratrooper generals have to jump out of perfectly good airplanes, just like sergeants. More practically, the commanders of the XVIII Airborne Corps and the Ninth Air Force have traditionally worked closely together. The Airborne headquarters at Fort Bragg is three hours up the road from Shaw AFB; assigned wings from Shaw provide airborne divisions with the jets they use for training (at Blue Flag and at CENTCOM exercises); and since the Airborne Corps is light, they depend on the Air Force for survival on the battlefield. Going through all of this together, Gary Luck and Chuck Horner had come to like and respect each other.
31 Because he was close to retirement and in fragile health (he was a diabetic), Harawi was replaced early in the crisis by General Iroky.
32 A force of five allows one E-3 to be kept in the air at a time.
33 Don Kaufman and his USMTM staff of military and civil service people played a vital role in getting U.S. efforts off the ground during these early days of Desert Shield. None of them are even cited in the various postwar analyses, or otherwise recognized for their selfless service. Though torn away from their jobs of administering foreign military sales of United States training and equipment to Saudi military forces, they turned without complaint to feeding, housing, and supporting the onrushing tide of coalition forces. If they had not been in place throughout the kingdom, if they had not been trusted counterparts to the Saudi military leadership, the initial U.S. efforts would have failed.
34 Status of forces defines the legal relationship between forces deployed in a foreign country and the host government. It covers jurisdiction in legal matters, limits on carrying loaded weapons, obedience to local laws and customs, and the like.
35 General Henadi was also a devout Muslim, and he has spent many hours over the years (when there’s time) instructing Horner in Islam, the Koran, and the teachings of the Prophet Mohammed.
36 And coauthor, with retired Marine General Bernard E. Trainor, of The Generals’ War (Little, Brown, 1995), a solidly researched and readable but opinionated view of the Gulf War (which it looks at through Marine eyes).
37 Computer-Aided Force Management System—a computer setup that is used to build and execute the Air Tasking Order.
38 Called “AB triple C”—a C-130 carrying a joint army/air force team, and lots of radios. It served as the means for the FAC to talk with people who could talk to many aircraft.
39 Now (in Bosnia, for example), the FAC uses a GPS Receiver and Laser Range Finder (that has a keypad and a radio). The FAC looks at the target with an optical device aligned with the laser. This both tells him the exact range to the target from his position and gives him the target’s location in terms of GPS coordinates. Once he has the target’s location, he types in other information, such as target description and the other elements in the nine-line format. Then he data-compresses the information and data-bursts it to an F-16 equipped with an improved data modem (IDM) that receives the transmission and displays the information on the pilot’s heads-up display. When the pilot flies toward the target, and it is within the HUD’s field of view, the target designator box overlays the target on the HUD. In all of this operation, there are no verbal transmissions, which are easily garbled (and the enemy cannot intercept what is going on).
40 Warden argued that fielded military forces were merely the shell that protected the fragile nation. He then argued that the aim of air attack was to wage war from the “inside out.” That is, in his view, air should attack not the shell but the center of the state. He fleshed out this idea in what he called his “Five Strategic Rings” theory, according to which air would attack violently and simultaneously an enemy nation’s leadership (the central ring: the bull’s-eye), its key production centers (the next ring: power, oil refineries, etc.), infrastructure (the next ring: transportation, roads, rail, etc.), a population’s support for the government (the next ring: hearts and minds), and finally the outer shell, the military. All of this, of course, was premised on attaining air superiority.
41 The six-days plan was predicated on a force of thirty-five squadrons, roughly double the strength then available to CENTCOM.
42 The system was designed and produced by French aerospace firms.
43 At the start of the war, hundreds of Westerners in Iraq and Kuwait were rounded up and placed in detention. Many of these were kept at strategic sites, as human shields. When the war started, Saddam Hussein removed the human shields—an act that, paradoxically, ensured the destruction of the strategic sites.
44 The great mistake among military planners is not so much planning to fight the last war as planning to fight an enemy who is one’s own mirror image. The enemy almost always has agendas planners are not aware of. Thus the need for superior intelligence collection. Sadly, Intel people tend to avoid these areas. They are fuzzy, mistakes are always possible, and Intel people don’t like to risk being wrong.
45 Afterward, Horner got to know Caruana, and when the chance came to pick a major general to be his three-star deputy at the U.S. Space Command, he was Horner’s first choice. But in August of 1990, he had little knowledge of Caruana’s tremendous talents.
46 Before his exile to Bahrain, he was the Air Force’s chief legislative liaison with Congress, a job he handled superbly.
47 The BCE was a hundred-person element that represented the ground effort in the air effort headquarters (TACC). Their team kept the air commander up to speed about what was happening on the ground, about what the ground commanders thought needed to be done, and about intelligence the ground forces were generating about enemy ground forces. Also, the BCE gave feedback to the ground forces about what the air was doing, how they were progressing, and any problems the air was having with the ground forces.
48 The nations of the Gulf Cooperation Council formed a military pact like NATO, but less formal. An expression of this alliance was a Coalition land force with elements from each GCC nation that was stationed at the huge military base at King Khalid Military City near the Saudi-Iraq border.
49 At surge rates, the jets are flown at a much higher than normal sortie rate. The benefit is the amount of ordnance that can be placed on the enemy in a short time. The downside is the buildup of a maintenance backlog on the fleet. This must be taken care of in the future by standing down the flying schedule or by increasing the numbers of maintenance troops.
50 Now a three-star who commands Ninth Air Force.
51 Minhad is a UAE fighter base south of Dubai where Horner had placed F-16s. Sheikh Isa, the air base on the south side of Bahrain, is named after the island nation’s head of state. It is home to two Bahraini squadrons, one of F-16s and another of F-5s. Horner put the USMC F-18s and A-6s on the main ramp, the Bahraini jets at the north end of the field, and the USAF Wild Weasels in the south end of the field in revetments and parking pads built by Red Horse (this was a huge task, as the parking pads and taxiways had to be carved out of coral, one of the hard
est substances on earth).
52 Also called Tactical Air Control Parties (TACPs).
53 They provided excellent target information—e.g., places where the Iraqis were conducting torture, or places where the Iraqi Army was being billeted. Most notably, they reported a meeting of Iraqi generals in a private home. On the day of the meeting, with the house surrounded by Mercedes-Benz cars stolen by the Iraqis and used as staff cars for their generals, the Air Force put four bombs through the roof—and destroyed the cars.
54 The Ready, Fire, Aim concept was his.
55 The term is used generically in the military for people who man a given station. For example, the officer who sits at the Security Police headquarters for an 8-12-hour shift is the duty officer.
56 They could use antichemical suits and bomb forward storage areas (though the Iraqis had so many chemical munitions that Horner could not target all of them with any hope of success).
57 One serious problem: Patriot missiles would only disperse the payload of a biological-tipped Scud overhead.
58 There were glaring errors in the papers. For example, the authors always had the agents spreading equidistant in all directions from the bombed bunkers. Any pilot who has dropped a practice bomb knows the marking smoke always goes downwind.
59 The Turkish government had given permission for us to use their Incirlik base to support the Coalition attack.
60 These CAPs were maintained even after the air-to-air threat was eliminated. Since the F-15Cs, the F-14s, and the Tornado ADV (Air Defense Version) were only capable of carrying air-to-air weapons, I could not use them for other missions. RSAF F-15Cs had the software for air-to-ground, so when we no longer needed them for CAPs over Iraq, we configured them with bombs and used them against the Iraqi Army
61 In the west, SOF forces had pretty much a free ride, as did the British SAS.
62 In fairness to the Special Operations commanders, the paucity of CSAR missions can’t be blamed entirely on them. First, the density of Iraqi air defenses has to be taken into account. Flying a helicopter into a near-certain shoot-down obviously made no sense. Second, several pilots were captured shortly after parachuting over the Iraqi Army units they’d just attacked. Third—and most important—very few aircraft were actually lost in combat. Thus, little CSAR was actually needed.
63 Eberly became dangerously dehydrated during the escape and evasion, and later during his capture (when Iraqi doctors didn’t understand his condition, much less how to treat it). After his return, his blood chemistry was seriously out of balance (a hospital stay cured it).
64 Because of the limited number of laser pods, only a few F-15Es were available for tank plinking. The targeting pods were brand new, and not all of them had been delivered, so some of the F-15Es dropped bombs on targets that the leader had designated with his pod.
65 It was almost entirely destroyed; only 20 percent made it back.
66 We have seen this incident earlier in a slightly different context.
67 My former aide, Little Grr Hartinger, had orders to Ramstein, Germany, a couple of months before the invasion of Kuwait. When we deployed in August, he was waiting for his PCS date, which came in September. Though he wanted to stay, we weren’t sure how long we would be in Saudi Arabia, and I had already selected Hoot to replace him.
68 You got to be s——ing me.
69 The numbers refer to sorties flown against units in front of XVIIIth Airborne Corps (including French forces), VIIth Corps, Northern Area Corps (Egyptians and Syrians), the U.S. Marines, and Eastern Area Corps (Arabs, primarily Saudis), except that the final listing is for sorties flown against the Republican Guard.
70 It should not be forgotten that someone did set target priorities—Norman Schwarzkopf. And in the final analysis, targets were chosen by the airmen in the air, by the Killer Scouts and the controllers in J-STARS. But saying this does not deny the legitimate concerns of the corps commanders, or the problems these concerns gave to Chuck Horner.
71 Target trackers accurately track single or multiple warheads in space so other systems can use this targeting information.
72 Fourteenth AF has a proud World War II heritage. It was the numbered air force in China; and the Flying Tigers (23d Wing) was one of its first units after it was formed.
73 Al-Ayeesh is now a major general and the commander at Khamis. Turki is a colonel and graduated at the top of his class at the USMC Command and Staff course in 1997.
74 Khalid is now Brigadier General Khalid, commander of the UAEAF; and Faris was recently reassigned from Commander of the UAEAF Academy to England for advanced studies.