Fighter Wing: A Guided Tour of an Air Force Combat Wing tcml-3

by Tom Clancy

  During Desert Shield and Desert Storm, the JFACC for CENTCOM was Lieutenant General Charles A. Horner, USAF. In August 1990, just prior to the invasion of Kuwait, he was the commander of the U.S. 9th Air Force based out of Shaw AFB, South Carolina. One of four numbered air force commanders based in the United States, he had a secondary responsibility as commander of the Central Command Air Forces (CENTAF). CENTCOM — U.S. Central Command — is the unified command responsible for most of the Middle East (Southwest Asia). CENTCOM, which replaced the Rapid Deployment Force created during the Iranian hostage crisis, is a command without forces. These are assigned to CENTCOM's operational control only in event of a crisis. As commander of the CENTCOM air forces, Horner led the staff that would eventually plan and execute the air war against Iraq.

  Then-Major General Charles Horner, while commander of the U.S. 9th Air Force and U.S. Air Forces Central Command (CENTAF).

  Official U.S. Air Force Photo

  Born in 1936 in Davenport, Iowa, Chuck Horner (as he prefers to be called) is a graduate of the University of Iowa. After graduation, he entered the Air Force in the early 1960s and flew two tours in Southeast Asia, with some 111 missions on the second tour alone. His particular specialty was the hunting of Surface-to-Air (SAM) and Anti-Aircraft Artillery (AAA) radars. Known as "Wild Weasel" missions, they were (and are) very hazardous, with casualties running high among the crews. Like so many other young USAF officers, he lost much of his faith in the Air Force "system" in the skies over North Vietnam.

  Tom Clancy: You fought in Vietnam. What did it teach you?

  Gen. Horner: All fighter pilots feel they are invulnerable until they get shot down. The day they get shot down, and jump out of the cocoon that's their cockpit, then you really see a change in them. Having never been shot down, I really can't speculate on that. But I can say there is nothing better than to come back and not be killed. You really feel good.More to the point, I just sort of became fascinated by ground fire, SAMs, and stuff like that. I thought that was interesting. The thing is, I'm a practical person, I'm a farmer; so when we were sent up to hit some dumb target and there was a great target available, I made a mental note that this would never happen if I was running things. Sometimes it didn't happen, because there were no policemen up there [in North Vietnam] to check on what we were bombing.When you have the people in Washington who think they are running the war, and the people over the battlefield who are fighting the war, and they are not on the same emotional and psychological level, and you don't have trust, you've got nothing. Unfortunately, integrity was the first casualty in the Vietnam War.

  While Chuck Horner was flying combat missions in Vietnam, a new generation of USAF officers was emerging, with a new set of ideas and values. Among these was an intellectual young officer named John A. Warden III. Born in 1943 in McKinney, Texas, he came from a family with a long record of military service. Fascinated by military history and technology, he was one of the earliest graduates of the new Air Force Academy at Colorado Springs, Colorado, in the 1960s. While he did his share of flying in fighters such as the OV-10 Bronco and F-4 Phantom in Southeast Asia, his real passion throughout his career has been planning doctrine for the successful execution of air campaigns.

  Tom Clancy: In the post-Vietnam era, what was the vision of the Air Force and the other services as they came out of Southeast Asia into the late 1970s?

  Col. Warden: In Vietnam, the Navy did well at a tactical level; and afterward it was generally pleased with itself, but realized it needed to rethink its force structure. And so it developed its "Maritime Strategy," which focused on taking the Soviet Navy out of the picture and then attacking the "bastion" areas of the Soviet homeland waters. It was a pretty good set of ideas, and gave the Navy a good vehicle for training and force building. The Air Force, though, came out with some wildly different ideas. On the one hand, people like me believed we had done well tactically with the tools at our disposal, but that those tools had been used for the wrong purposes strategically. In other words, I was disgusted that we had squandered our men and machines for the wrong reasons in the wrong way. And my resolution was never to have anything to do with a war that didn't have identified political objectives and a coherent way to engage them. For example, the idea of gradual escalation seemed to me to be really stupid.On the other hand, many Air Force officers learned an entirely different set of lessons. To them, the strategic side of the war was irrelevant. What was important was the way it was fought, so their lessons were at a different level. And then later, after the war, the fighter officers rapidly took control of the Air Force from the officers who had grown up in Strategic Air Command. Many of these new Air Force fighter leaders, having spent the majority of their Vietnam tours doing close air support in South Vietnam, came out of the war believing that the future of the Air Force was in supporting the Army. Now, there is nothing wrong with supporting the Army or the Navy — or the other way around — but making this the sole function severely circumscribed the potential of airpower, because it was all focused on tactical events.

  John Warden, like other airpower supporters, advocated the inherent virtues of airpower. In his view, in order to realize airpower's unfulfilled promise, new ways of using it would have to be devised. Though there was much debate about these new ways, no consensus about them was reached. Then in 1988, Warden published a little book called The Air Campaign: Planning for Combat. It was the first new book on air operations to be published since the end of World War II, and the first to deal specifically with the issue of planning an entire air campaign. Thus it was an instant must-read among officers and systems analysts. It also caused a storm of controversy, since it argued that airpower should be treated as more than just a supporting arm in a ground campaign. Let Colonel Warden tell the story.

  Tom Clancy: Will you tell us about The Air Campaign: Planning for Combat?

  Col. Warden: I was a grad student at National War College, and I decided I wanted to do three things: write a book, learn to use a computer, and run a marathon. For the book, I had two possibilities: modern applications of the ideas of Alexander the Great, or something on operational-level airpower. My academic advisor told me I would probably get more out of the operational-airpower subject, so I chose that one. I worked on the book for about six months, in between attending classes. General Perry Smith, who was the commandant then, read an early draft, liked it, and sent copies to some key USAF generals. When the book finally worked its way through the publishing process and came out in 1988, it already had a fair amount of circulation around the USAF in its draft form. As for the book itself, the fundamentals are as valid today as they were when I wrote it. However, now I have a far better understanding of war and airpower, so I would like to write a couple of more books on a higher level.

  In 1988, John Warden, now a colonel, moved over to the Office of the USAF Directorate of Plans in the Pentagon as its Deputy Director for Strategy, Doctrine, and Warfighting. While there, he had responsibility for the team that would develop Instant Thunder, the basic plan for the air war against Iraq some three years later.

  Colonel John Warden outlines the basics of the Instant Thunder campaign plan to the Checkmate staff in early August 1990.

  Official U.S. Air Force Photo

  Tom Clancy: In 1988 you moved to the USAF Plans Directorate in the Pentagon. Tell us about that.

  Col. Warden: My new boss, General Mike Dugan, then Deputy Chief of Staff for Plans and Operations (the future USAF Chief of Staff), had given me the job helping to change the Air Force mind-set. I had about a hundred officers in the Plans Directorate under my command, and we began by giving them some operational and strategic-level airpower concepts. Then, we all spent a lot of time debating and refining the ideas. Our weekly staff meetings would run three or four hours — not because we were discussing administrative trivia, but because we were dealing with large operational or strategic topics that would force all the divisional and other people to work these things hard. By and by
, we were ready to start turning our ideas into action, and we rewrote the AFM 1–1 [the Air Force Basic Operations] manual, and put together a program to reform the USAF professional military education program. We had literally dozens of projects going on, with all of them having the common thread of, "Let's start thinking seriously about airpower at the operational and strategic levels."Here's an example of a project we ran at Checkmate [one of the organizations in the plans division]: Let's start out with the hypothesis that fuel is the "center of gravity" [a vital necessity for operations] for the Soviet Army. So we talk to the intelligence people, and they say, "You're wasting your time — the Soviets have a one-hundred-eighty-day supply of fuel buried in hardened storage tanks under East Germany. You only have about fourteen days before the war goes 'nuke,' or before the Soviets achieve their objectives. There simply isn't enough time to destroy that amount of fuel in hardened storage tanks."Well, this doesn't make sense to the Checkmate officers. So they ask another question: "How does the fuel get from the underground storage to the main battle tanks that actually use it up on the front?" It's a simple question about distribution. So we went back and found out that the Soviets had established about twenty-five operational-level fuel depots that stretched from the Baltic (in the north) to the Alps (in the south). They were designed to bring bulk fuel in from the East, and then "push" it out farther to the West. Now, number one, there were no north-south cross-connections between these depots. And number two, although the hardened underground storage of this stuff was done very well, each depot had only about three output manifolds. It was like a filling station with only three gas islands. A fuel truck would drive up, fill up, then head west to the next lower echelon, where it would off-load and then return for more. There was also a manifold for tactical pipelines [field fuel lines laid by battlefield engineers following the forward echelons into combat]. So all the fuel from these great big depots ended up flowing through three or four very fragile output manifolds.Now, what happens if we shut those down? We decided to look a little further, and it turned out that the depot units were undermanned and didn't have the allotted number of trucks required to meet the established doctrinal movement rates of their tank units. There was no "elasticity" in the Soviet system, so if we stop the flow of fuel [by bombing the depot fuel manifolds], in four or five days they run out.Now, imagine you're a Soviet tactical commander, and you know that your fuel has been cut off. Although you might not physically run out of the last drop of gas you're carrying with you for three to five days, you're probably going to stop, dig in, and wait for more supplies. The way their system was designed, work-arounds were almost impossible, so the Soviet-style corps which was dependent on a particular depot to its east was simply out of luck until someone fixed the problem — and it couldn't be fixed in a few days. We learned from this exercise that a handful of fighter-bomber sorties properly employed against operational centers of gravity could have a hugely disproportionate effect on fighting at the front itself. We used these lessons to good stead in planning for the Gulf War. Everyone we briefed liked the concept, except the intelligence people.

  When they look at a problem, analysts like to use what they call a "model." This is a concept or simulation which can be used as a method of testing or expressing ideas. Colonel Warden's model of the enemy as an array of strategic targets envisions five concentric rings, with the military/civil leadership at the center, then key production facilities, transportation infrastructure, civilian morale/popular support, and in the outermost circle deployed military forces. Let's hear his views on it.

  Tom Clancy: Through these studies, had you established a process of analysis that would serve you when you started to look at Iraq?

  Col. Warden: Yes, the overarching system we used was the one I developed for General Dugan in the spring of 1988. This was what became known as the "Five Rings" model. In essence, it tells you to start your thinking at the highest system-level possible, that your goal is to make the enemy system become what you want it to become, and do what you want it to do. The Five Rings show how all systems are organized — they are fractal in nature. For example, an army corps has a pattern of organization very similar to a nation or an air force. Every system has centers of gravity, which, when attacked, tend to drive the whole system into lower energy states, or into actual paralysis. In the Deputy Directorate for Operations, we had been discussing this concept for almost two years; so it was easy to apply it quickly after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.

  An illustration of Colonel John Warden's "Five Rings" strategic targeting model. The enemy's fielded forces are on the outside, the national/military leadership in the center.

  Jack Ryan Enterprises, Ltd., by Laura Alpher

  While Colonel Warden had been working to change the Air Force intellectually, officers like General Chuck Horner had been doing the routine work to keep the force going and improve it. Then, in 1987, General Horner was given command of the U.S. 9th Air Force, headquartered at Shaw AFB, South Carolina. As commander, his mission was to act as the JFAAC for any air operations that might be conducted by CENTCOM, as well as commander of any air forces that might be assigned to CENTCOM. Let's hear his thoughts on the appointment.

  Tom Clancy: Would you please talk about your assignment to command of 9th Air Force?

  Gen. Horner: 9th Air Force was at its best during World War II. Then it became a training command back in the United States. Then in 1980, along came the Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force [RDJTF], the predecessor of the present CENTCOM organization. Larry Welch was the Director of Operations in TAC then, and the RDJTF was the hottest thing going. It had to do with the Carter Doctrine to make the Middle East an area of vital national interest to the United States.Later, when RDJTF became CENTCOM, 9th AF was to be the air component. The next 9th AF commander, General Bill Kirk, was probably the best tactician the Air Force has ever produced. I wound up replacing him. So from Larry Welch, with his tremendous intellectual capability, and Bill Kirk, with his tremendous tactical capability, I inherited a staff that was war-oriented and really working the problem day in and day out. I also was one of the first to benefit from the Goldwater-Nichols Act. Now, one thing Goldwater-Nichols did was free me from a lot of administrative responsibility. I got to spend a lot of time as commander of ten combat wings, visiting those wings. What I didn't have to do was a lot of administrative things. And since General Wilber Creech [the commander of TAC] had taken care of maintenance, I didn't have to worry about maintenance. Also, General Creech had fixed operations; so I didn't have to worry about operations. All I had to do was give the wing commanders another set of experienced eyes, chew them out or give them a pat on the back, hand out medals, and fly with them to know what they were doing. So I really could spend eighty percent of my time on CENTCOM's problems. The system was working pretty well at that time.

  Tom Clancy: You had this new responsibility as a JFACC — Joint Forces Air Component Commander. As you understood it, what did it all mean to you at the time?

  Gen. Horner: It meant that if we went to war, all the air forces would function under the overall structure and guidance of the JFACC. I never used the word "command," because that just irritated the Marines [whose air units were independent of the JFACC's command, but operated under his "guidance"]. The big thing we had going for us was an exercise called Blue Flag. Whenever we would run the CENTAF Blue Flag, I would bring in the Navy and Marine Corps. In addition, the Army was always willing to come. However, the Navy and Marines would always drag their feet, but they did come. Eventually, these were the same guys I went to war with.

  Tom Clancy: You were there a long time, five years, so you got to see the shift from the Cold War to the post-Cold War period. Talk a little about this.

  Gen. Horner: We were still fighting the Russians in our training scenarios until Norman Schwarzkopf came in as the CENTCOM CinC in November of 1989. He reviewed the existing plans and said, "Put them on the shelf, we are never going to use them. We will never fight th
e Russians." He knew the Cold War was over.

  Tom Clancy: Prior to the invasion in 1990, what were your people doing with regard to campaign and operations planning?

  Gen. Horner: A variety of things. We had been exercising a lot. This was not unusual, though; and we were also running exercises in the Middle East. Also, there was the material pre-positioning program, which is a good program, a product of the Cold War. Those supplies were available for any kind of regional contingency in the Persian Gulf area. What really jump-started our planning for Iraq was the Internal Look exercise, which was conducted in July of 1990. Meanwhile, General Schwarzkopf had already defined the threat there as Iraq invading Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.

  With Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, all the ideas that had been put down on paper were dusted off and put to use. For General Horner, this meant a trip to Saudi Arabia to assist Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney and General H. Norman Schwarzkopf in briefing the Saudi Arabian leadership and securing permission to deploy U.S. forces to the region. This done, General Schwarzkopf left Chuck Horner to act as "CENTCOM Forward" for several weeks, so that he might return to CENTCOM headquarters in Tampa, Florida, and more rapidly push forward the forces needed to deter further Iraqi aggression in the region.