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

by Tom Clancy

  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 the 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.

  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.
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  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 workload 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.