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

by Tom Clancy

  Tom Clancy: During your visit to Jedda, Saudi Arabia, you and General Schwarzkopf had a little talk about building an air campaign. Please talk about that.

  Gen. Horner: In April of 1990, I went down to Tampa to brief Schwarzkopf in preparation for the July Internal Look exercise, because I did not want to go off on a tangent and show up with the "wrong" plan. There I gave him an overview on a number of things, one of them being the concept of a "strategic air campaign" in the region. He liked the briefing and the idea; he bought everything all the way.Later, when we were finishing up our briefings in Jedda, just before he got on the airplane to Tampa, he decided that when he got home, he should investigate having someone develop such a campaign plan. I could have hugged him! Let me tell you, the greatest thing in the world is when your boss looks at you and says, "Now, Horner, the first thing I want you to do is get air superiority."

  When General Schwarzkopf returned to the United States, one of his first actions was to contact the USAF Air Staff to ask for support in the development of a strategic air campaign plan. The assignment wound up on Colonel Warden's desk, and was assigned to the Checkmate team. There were a few interesting diversions along the way, though.

  Tom Clancy: What was your first involvement with the planning process for the air war?

  Col. Warden: On Monday morning, the 6th of August, I brought a dozen or so officers together into Checkmate to start serious planning in the hope that we would figure out some way to sell our plan. I told my boss my ideas, and he told the Vice-Chief, Lieutenant General Mike Loh, and the Chief of Staff [General Mike Dugan]. On Wednesday morning, August 8th, General Schwarzkopf called General Dugan on the phone, but spoke to General Loh instead, as General Dugan was out of town at the time. General Schwarzkopf told General Loh that he needed some help in building a strategic air campaign plan, and could the Air Staff do anything for him. General Loh told him that we already had some people working on it, and would have something to him as quickly as possible. General Loh asked us when he could see a draft of the plan. We told him that afternoon — and we delivered.From that first draft, we started refining our ideas with more in-depth intelligence data and analysis. After a short period of time, we were able to start asking the intelligence agencies [Air Force Intelligence, CIA, National Security Agency, Defense Intelligence Agency, etc.] to start giving us information to fill in the blanks. We knew what to ask for, because of our understanding of how nation states, military units, and other entities are organized. This allowed us to understand how Iraq worked at the highest levels, and it was merely a matter of getting down a couple of layers through the available information to find out the specifics. It was only because we had a "systems" view of the world that we were able to move very quickly.

  With their mission defined, the Checkmate staff worked on. Using a pair of joint targeting lists from CENTAF (218 targets) and CENTCOM (256 targets), they developed a series of targeting plans (known as Instant Thunder) to attack targets inside Iraq and Kuwait. It was almost two hundred pages long, and took advantage of the full range of new aircraft, weapons, sensors, and other technologies.

  Tom Clancy: Would you please tell us about your Instant Thunder briefing with General Schwarzkopf?

  Col. Warden: General Alexander went down with us in a C-21 [the military version of the Learjet]. Also accompanying us were Lieutenant Colonel Ben Harvey, Lieutenant Colonel Dave Deptula, and one or two other guys. When we got there, General Alexander and I went into the office of the CENTCOM Director of Operations [Major General Bert Moore]. Shortly thereafter, General Schwarzkopf joined us with his deputy commander. We sat around a table, and I showed paper copies of our briefing viewgraphs to General Schwarzkopf. This was the first iteration for what we called Instant Thunder. It went over very well. Schwarzkopf said, "You guys have restored my faith in the Air Force." He was a good listener and had no negative observations. He did give us some additional tasking. At the conclusion of our session with General Schwarzkopf, he told us to brief the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Colin Powell, as soon as possible.The purpose of Instant Thunder was to impose strategic paralysis on Iraq, so that it would be incapable of providing support to its army in Kuwait, so that it would be put in an impossible position. Beyond that, it was designed to reduce the overall power of Iraq as a player in the Persian Gulf, so that there would be a more appropriate balance of power in the region after the war. One of the big debates we had with many individuals in the Air Force, but not with General Schwarzkopf, was this: The original Instant Thunder plan was to go right to the heart of Iraq and shut it down. Many senior USAF officers thought that the Iraqi Army in Kuwait would then march south [into Saudi Arabia]. At the time, I said logistically it was too hard. In all of history, no army ever marched forward offensively when its strategic homeland was collapsing.At our session with General Powell, I had made the comment about inducing Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait. He replied that he didn't want it to withdraw; he wanted to destroy it in place. I told him we could do that too. So shortly thereafter, we began to develop Phases II and III of the Instant Thunder plan to destroy the Iraqi Army. By mid-October, we had a good plan worked out, which we faxed to Dave Deptula, who by this time was in Riyadh. We also sent it in hard copy via Major Buck Rogers when he went over to relieve Dave for a month or so.

  Tom Clancy: What happened next?

  Col. Warden: A little less than a week after our briefing to General Powell, I went back to Tampa under the auspices of the Joint Staff to give General Schwarzkopf the full briefing, complete with the logistics assessments, concepts of operation, deception, and psychological warfare plans, etc. After this presentation, which included most of his senior staff, he asked me to take the plan to General Horner, who was then serving as Central Command's forward commander. The next day, we left for Riyadh. Late on Sunday evening, August 20th, we briefed the CENTAF staff in Riyadh. The trouble began with the briefing to General Horner the next day. We just failed to communicate.The problem, I feel, was General Horner's view of how ground forces move. His view also was that the only way to stop ground forces was with other ground forces, aided by airpower. So in his mind, he had an impossible problem as CENTCOM Forward. At that time, he had no significant ground forces to stop enemy ground forces. Now, here's this "armchair colonel" coming in from Washington with a plan that's got funny words in it like "offense" and "strategic targets," and they just didn't make sense to General Horner.

  Colonel Warden returned home following the briefing, but not all that he said to Chuck Horner fell on deaf ears. On the contrary, much of what he had said fitted exactly into what General Horner had in mind for the coming air campaign. He also kept three of Warden's briefers for his own staff to start the planning for the coming war. Let's hear it in his own words.

  Tom Clancy: Would you tell us about your perceptions of Colonel Warden's briefing of the proposed Instant Thunder plan?

  Gen. Horner: Colonel Warden and his planning team showed up in Riyadh, and I was struck by the brilliance of the plan. He is a very intelligent guy. But it was not a campaign plan; it was a really insightful listing of targets. He and his staff had accessed information that we never had access to. We had had good briefings from the Navy about two weeks before, so we knew how to take out the Iraqi air defense control system. But he had good stuff on nuclear weapons production, chemical and biological weapons storage that we did not have. Where the briefing fell down is that it did not address to my satisfaction the theater aspects of the war — hitting the Iraqi Army. When I questioned him about it, he said, "Don't worry about it; it's not important." Now, he may not have thought it was important, but I did; and that's where it broke down. Nevertheless, I said, "These guys are good," and I needed additional planning staff team members to do the offensive air plan, so I kept the three lieutenant colonels from Colonel Warden's briefing team to work with me, as my staff was overloaded with the day-in-and-day-out things we were already tasked with during Desert Shield.This regular wor
kload was already starting to pile up, so I said, "Who am I going to get to do this offensive air campaign and run this outfit?" My answer was Major General "Buster" Glosson. Buster had been exiled down to the Gulf to Rear Admiral Bill Fogerty aboard the flagship USS LaSalle, and was dying to get out of there and get up to Riyadh. So I just called him and said, "Buster, go AWOL and get up here." And he did. Now, Buster gets things done in a hurry. As soon as he arrived, I sat down with him and said, "You are going to go in and get this briefing [from the three remaining briefers]. You will find a lot of great things in it and I want those kept in, but you have to make this a practical plan. We have to make it something we can put into an Air Tasking Order [ATO]."Of course, the planning staff continued to grow. In fact, as new people came in to CENTAF headquarters, if they showed any reasonable planning skills at all, we would put them to work under Buster. This was all going on in a conference room [called the Black Hole] right next to my office, because we didn't want anyone to know that we were planning offensive operations. Schwarzkopf wanted all this kept secret, because we were still trying to negotiate the Iraqis out of Kuwait. So, whenever a person signed onto the Black Hole team, they would have to swear that they would not talk to anyone else except the team. The team worked eighteen hours a day. It must have smelled like hell in there…

  Back home at the Pentagon, Colonel Warden had returned without his three lieutenant colonel briefers, but still with some hope of supporting the growing planning effort in Riyadh. Let's let him pick up the story from there.

  Tom Clancy: The briefing with General Horner doesn't go well, but he asks to keep three of your guys, as well as your viewgraphs and plans. He has felt your presence and has kept your men. How were you feeling?

  Col. Warden: I decided then that we would keep the Checkmate planning operation going and continue to develop plans to support future operations — in the hope that they would find some application at CENTAF headquarters. My idea was to do everything possible to make sure we fought the right kind of air war. It was clear to me at this point that we had resources in Washington which the Riyadh planning staffs would be unable to tap. Also, it was clear that Dave Deptula could not hope to find enough of the right kind of people to help him finish off the plan we had begun in Washington. Thus, I committed the Checkmate team to feeding plans and information to Dave. We put as little identification as possible on the products we sent, so as not to irritate the leadership in Saudi Arabia.

  Tom Clancy: What is your view of the CENTAF staff and how the Instant Thunder plan developed?

  Col. Warden: The CENTAF staff at that time really had to be thought of as two different groups. The overwhelming majority was associated with the traditional Tactical Air Control Center operations staff that up until three or four days before the war actually started thought that their only job was to work on the defensive plan for Saudi Arabia. Then, there was a relatively small group that was operating in the Black Hole — fifteen to twenty people maximum, working under "compartmented" security conditions. It was those folks working in the Black Hole planning center — Glosson, Deptula, etc. — that we were trying to support by pushing data and ideas forward. The intelligence bureaucracy was putting out megabytes of data also, but the problem with their institutional products was a lack of correlation. So, we sent over processed data in the form of target coordinates, specifications, and strike/targeting plans. Buster and Dave were under no compulsion to use it, but they found most of it pretty good and did end up using it. What we were doing was putting it into something as close as possible to an executable plan. In many cases, all you had to do was put a tail number [i.e, assign aircraft] to it, and say what time it was supposed to happen.

  In November 1990, with diplomatic options running out, President George Bush ordered the reinforcement of the existing forces assigned to Desert Shield, with additional units designed to provide "an offensive option," should it be required. General Horner picks up the story at this point.

  Tom Clancy: November 1990 comes, and the President decides that if Iraq doesn't get out of Kuwait, the U.S.-led coalition will use force to get them out. Where are your people in the planning process now?

  Gen. Horner: I think we had an offensive air campaign laid out pretty well in October 1990. Then, when President Bush made that decision, the Army was told it needed more forces. So of course, the Air Force needed more forces to support the Army. We basically doubled the size of the overall Air Force in-theater, being intelligent about where we could base more airplanes. This was because at that point, ramp space [for parking and servicing coalition aircraft] was becoming the driving limitation on adding more aircraft to our force.As for the strategic air campaign plan itself, I would only let them plan the first two days. Another problem was that a multi-national coalition force was forming. As you can imagine, respecting the various host countries' laws, and ensuring that the host nations knew what was going on, was of vital import. Thus, if you wanted to fly, you had to be in the ATO. The Saudis wanted that, because then they knew what was going on, and could say, "No you can't fly here." Or ask, "Who owned those planes that sonic-boomed that camel herd?"

  January 1991 came in like a lion, and with it came the war. General Horner remembers his surprise at the successes of the early moments of Desert Storm, and his reservations about the inevitable costs ahead.

  Tom Clancy: If you were to summarize the objectives of the air campaign plan that became Desert Storm, how would you characterize them?

  Gen. Horner: First, to control the air (Phase I). Secondly, cripple the Iraqi offensive capabilities, in particular the SCUDs and nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons to the extent we could (Phase II). Then, isolate the battlefield (Phase III), and prepare it for the ground war (Phase IV).

  Tom Clancy: The first night of the war (January 16th/17th, 1991), did you have any idea of how well things were going?

  Gen. Horner: No. Partly because — along with the rest of the USAF — I represented twenty five years of pessimism. I guess I had started believing the stuff that we heard all these years — that we were no good. As a society, we thought our military forces were a bunch of dummies.That kind of pessimism is useful in my profession, because it's much better to be surprised the way we were than the way the Lancers were in the Crimea [the famous "Charge of the Light Brigade"]. The highlights of that first night were how the F-117As were able to penetrate Baghdad, and the fact that we lost just one airplane [a Navy F-18 Hornet]. A tragedy, but not the thirty or forty lost aircraft that some had predicted.

  Tom Clancy: Talk about "Poobah's Party."

  Gen. Horner: "Poobah's Party." That was planned by Larry "Poobah" Henry, probably one of the best planners we ever had. He was the only navigator [backseater] who was a wing commander in the Gulf. He looks mediocre, he's got navigator wings, but he's an incredible genius. The man's an absolute fiend when it comes to hunting SAMs. He arranged to have a mass of air- and ground-launched decoys, and one hundred HARM missiles all in the air at the same time. It was devastating to the Iraqis, something they never recovered from during the war.

  While General Horner and his staff were launching the aerial assault on Iraq, back at the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., Colonel Warden and the Checkmate staff were watching it on CNN, just like the rest of us. Nevertheless, the events of that night are worth his recollection.

  Tom Clancy: What was it that the CENTAF units were actually hitting at the first bang, H-Hour (0300 hours local time)?

  Col. Warden: The national command authority, centers of operations, any place that we knew was serving as a command post; the two principal communication facilities in downtown Baghdad, as well as the electrical power grid and the key nodes in the KARI [Iraq in French, spelled backwards] air-defense system. These are the things that were being hit in a matter of a couple of minutes or so at H-Hour [0300L, January 17th, 1991]. Essentially, at this point, Iraq was unable to respond, due to the breakdown of its systems.

  Back in Riyadh, General Horner
and his staff were trying to deal with the inevitable changes and difficulties that come with trying to execute any sort of complex plan. The worst of these was the threat posed by the Iraq ballistic missile systems, generically known as SCUDs.

  Tom Clancy: Did the Iraqis do anything smart in their conduct of the war?

  Gen. Horner: Well, they did the command and control of the SCUDs pretty well, using motorcycle couriers; and they hid the SCUDs well. Their COM-SEC [communications security] was awesome. We had the impression that Saddam had orders out that anyone who used a radio would be shot.

  Tom Clancy: Talk about the underestimation of the SCUDs.

  Gen. Horner: Being a military person, I tend to do my pluses and minuses in military terms. Civilians just don't exist in the mind of a military man until you get into a war; then you are surrounded by them. What happened was the SCUDs started coming at us. Now, the Saudi society handled it pretty well. On the other hand, the Israelis went into shock, and that surprised me. The SCUDs would hit their cities, and the Israelis would go into panic; people literally died from fear.

  Tom Clancy: How did you feel about the performance of the Patriot SAM missiles in intercepting the SCUDs?

  Gen. Horner: Good. Let's put it this way, though. Who cares if they ever really intercepted a SCUD? The perception was that they did. The SCUD is not a military weapon, it's a terror weapon. So if you have an anti-terror weapon that people perceive works, then it works.