Fighter Wing: A Guided Tour of an Air Force Combat Wing

by Tom Clancy

  While the final production number is still in flux, a figure of about $100 million is a fair estimate of what each F-22 will cost the taxpayers. In spite of this, the F-22 remains just about the highest-priority acquisition program that the USAF has today. It should keep the Air Force pushing the edge well into the next century.

  Desert Storm: Planning the Air Campaign

  RECENTLY, the anniversary of Operation Desert Storm brought back memories of those incredible hours we spent glued to our televisions back in January of 1991 and the vivid images we saw: F-15s launching from Saudi runways; bombs dropping through windows; massed tanks crossing the desert; soldiers digging in on terrain that looked like Mars; ragged, dispirited Iraqi POWs trudging down roads littered with the wreckage of their army; those extraordinary sights of AAA bursts at night over Baghdad; and so much more. The media coverage of the war against Iraq was splendid. Yet when you think about it, for most of us the impression that remains is scattered, fragmented. Something is missing. What? That there was a plan. On the ground. And in the air. The war against Iraq was no “Hey, kids, let’s put on a show” kind of affair. It took time, and the work of not a few brilliant minds.

  The plan for the air war, for instance, grew out of three decades of intellectual and spiritual growth by the USAF officers who command combat aviators. In Armored Cav, we talked with two of the men who helped win the ground victory, General Fred Franks and Major H. R. McMaster. Now we’re going to talk with two men who helped win the air war.

  Now, I have to emphasize that many airmen from many services, from many countries, contributed to the victory in Desert Storm. Nevertheless, the plan for the air war against Iraq was uniquely U.S. Air Force.

  USAF officers spent years trying to build a new vision of air power—a vision that was not based on traditional roles and missions, such as nuclear deterrence against the Soviet Union or bombing a bridge in North Vietnam, but on the deep-rooted belief that airpower can be a decisive tool at the operational or theater level of warfare. According to this new vision, it wasn’t enough to know how to fly planes, shoot missiles, and drop bombs; you also had to know how to plan and lead an air campaign.

  Different men came to these ideas by different routes. Some saw the vision as they were being shot at by MiGs, SAMs, and AAA guns while trying futilely to bomb worthless suspected targets in North Vietnam, targets picked by politicians with no coherent goal in mind. Others followed the lure and seduction that airpower has always held for true believers in the magic of flight. Commonly called airpower zealots, they dedicated decades of hard work and sacrifice to the single-minded goal of giving the United States the greatest concentration of that oh-so-intangible force.

  You have to have a plan. You have to have leadership.

  The air bombardment campaigns against Germany and Japan in World War II were costly failures until the introduction of escorting fighters and the identification of targets that truly could affect the final outcome of a war. Later, when the 8th AF acquired long-range P-51 escort fighters and began to methodically strike the German petrochemical and transportation industries, the effects were felt almost immediately in every theater of the war. It should have been obvious to anyone who understood airpower that the key is the right mix of forces, hitting the right combination of targets, at the right time. In short, the right plan. Such a plan would require packaging the proper aircraft, ordnance, and personnel into forces capable of destroying the right targets to do maximum damage to an enemy’s war effort. It would also require officers trained and experienced in leading such an effort. Not just from USAF units, but from the other services, as well as allies from other nations. Such leaders would have to be credible flyers, and also diplomats, logisticians, and even public-relations experts.

  Naturally, though it seemed logical to the airpower supporters that the U.S. Air Force should recruit, train, and control these forces, the other services in the U.S. military had their own ideas. Many USN and USMC aviation officers felt, with some justification, that turning over de facto control of their aviation assets would be tantamount to giving the USAF a stranglehold on the use of airpower in future operations.

  So the vision remained just that, a vision, until several well-known failures in air operations during the 1980s (notably the bungled hostage-rescue mission to Iran) led to changes in how airpower would be used in the 1990s. Foremost among these changes was the Goldwater-Nichols Military Reform Act, which redefined the military chain of command. It also recognized that different kinds of fighting forces (naval, ground, air) should be organized and headed by appropriate professionals. Airpower would be run by an airman known as a Joint Forces Air Component Commander (JFACC). At the theater level, the JFACC is a USAF lieutenant general (0-9-three star), directly responsible to the unified Commander in Chief (CinC). A “theater” of operations is a distinct geographical area in which air, land, and naval forces are coordinated usually against a single enemy. In World War II the European and Pacific theaters were virtually separate wars.

  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 lea
rned 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.