by Tom Clancy
After leaving the FWS, graduates were called patch wearers: instead of their flying squadron patch, they wore on their right shoulder the FWS patch — gray with yellow circles and a bomb impacting this bull’s-eye. After finishing the course, receiving their patch, and returning to their home base, patch wearers became the promoters of fighter excellence in their squadron or wings.
Graduates additionally received an “S” prefix on their Air Force Specialty code. Thus, AFSC A1115E signified the following: “S” meant FWS grad; “1115” meant pilot; and “E” meant F-105. When personnel people noticed the S on an AFSC, they knew this pilot needed to be handled specially, not only because of his special training, but also because of the Air Force’s huge investment in him. For that reason, patch wearers were more likely to be assigned the good flying jobs.
★ In August 1967, Chuck Horner returned to Nellis to an assignment in the Combat Crew Training wing. This was not an appealing career move, since the wing was then converting from F-105s to F-111s, which was much more of a bomber than a fighter. After some finagling of dubious legality that kept him technically AWOL for six months but let him avoid his official assignment, he found himself flying as an instructor at the Fighter Weapons School, where a friend, Gary Willard, was the commander. There Horner went to work teaching Wild Weaseling and Electronic Combat for pilots and electronic warfare officers. He also took on special projects, such as testing a new radar bombing system for the F-105 and new Wild Weasel black boxes. Meanwhile, after six months of less than official status, a friend in personnel took care of the paperwork that made Horner legal again.
In March 1968, Major Paul Kunichica asked Horner to join the team at the new Fighter Weapons Center at Nellis. Though the FWS had been set up to teach graduate-level fighter aviation, it soon found itself managing test projects, writing doctrine, and conducting advanced studies, all of which detracted from the quality of its principal mission, and so the center was created to take care of all those noneducation functions, all the projects and functions that needed the expertise resident at Nellis. Instructors from the FWS populated the center, and though they still flew with the FWS, they now spent most of their time working on new bombs or writing requirement documents to guide the development of new aircraft.
Horner and Kunichica, a Japanese-American from Hawaii, had flown with each other a number of times and were friends. Kunichica worked for Colonel Dick Bond, who in turn worked for Brigadier General (soon to be Major General) Zack Taylor. Bond was very smart, below the zone (promoted to rank early), and liked cocky young men who enjoyed staying late at the office, while Taylor, a soft-spoken but tough-as-nails Virginia gentleman who’d been an ace in World War II, was the father of the Fighter Weapons Center, and a man of conspicuous integrity.
After he moved up to the Center, Horner still flew with the squadron and taught, but he spent most of his time on projects such as a study of F-111 bombing accuracy, and on concepts that defined the capabilities needed in the fighter aircraft destined to replace the F-105 and F-4. Out of these concepts came the FX and AX, which eventually turned into the F-15 and the tank-killing A-10.
More important personally, Horner began to understand what mentoring meant in the military, as the newly promoted Major General Taylor took him under his wing. “Bond and Taylor challenged me,” Horner says now. Bond threw Horner into some of the General’s pet projects, which meant that Horner and the General often found themselves on their hands and knees on the floor of the General’s office, building charts that the General could use to brief his four-star boss, General Spike Momyer, at the time the TAC commander.
In young Captain Horner (promoted to major in 1969), Taylor saw a man who would see the problems through to a solution. Horner fought problems the way a dog worries a rag. He plunged into them and let fly. He loved making order out of chaos. When the smoke cleared, the floor would be covered with debris, but there’d also be the glimmers of a solution here and there, which Horner would gather up and present to his boss. During this process, he and Taylor would argue the concepts, push them and pull them, and in so doing Taylor often elevated Horner’s sight picture, got him to aim better at the real target, propelled him toward working the right problem… often to stop thinking small. Taylor showed him how to think big.
This was Horner’s first time really working the bureaucracy — an experience not too very different from combat, he quickly realized: a lot of men were gunning for him — not because he was arrogant, but because he wasn’t afraid to stick his neck out and do the work at a pace they could not generate.
The largest question facing the Fighter Weapons Center had to do with its continued existence. After the Vietnam surge in weapons development ended, the various Tactical Centers had to be reorganized, and those that were no longer really useful or viable, eliminated. Besides Nellis, Shaw AFB had the Reconnaissance Center, Pope AFB the Airlift Center, Eglin AFB the Air Warfare Center, and Hurlburt AFB the Special Operations Center. Taylor involved Horner in a study to look at what they needed to do at Nellis. When it was done, Taylor took the briefing to Langley and his new boss, General Momyer, and even suggested that the F-100 test aircraft at Nellis could be retired, which would save much-needed funds. Momyer then ordered that all the Centers be studied, to determine if there could be additional assets cut or even if the Center was still needed. Taylor picked Horner to be the representative from Nellis on that study, as he had worked up the formulas that allowed Taylor to make the cuts there. Before Horner left, Taylor gave him some very simple but important advice. “Don’t defend Nellis,” he told him. “Do what is best for the nation and the Air Force.” It was a magnificently empowering directive, for there was no hidden agenda. At the end of the day, Nellis’s Fighter Center and Eglin’s Air Warfare Center remained, but all the other Centers were shut down.
LANGLEY
When it was time for Horner to move on, General Taylor continued to take care of him — most importantly, by passing him on to Major General Gus Henry, the TAC planner, when Horner was assigned to Headquarters Tactical Air Command at Langley AFB, Hampton, Virginia. For the two years from 1970 to 1972, Horner was a staff officer, called the Action Officer (AO), in the office of the Deputy Chief of Plans in Plans in Studies and Analysis, under General Henry. There were five AOs, and for the most part they put together studies that aimed at answering questions such as how many fighter wings were needed, how best to use laser-guided bombs, and what the relative cost was of a sea-based attack sortie versus a land-based sortie (answer: ten times more expensive if you flew the sortie off a carrier).
At Langley, Horner learned the elementary lessons of what it takes to be a staff officer. It was a demanding job, filled with intrigues and battles, within both the TAC staff and the Air Force, and beyond, within the Army, Navy, and Marines. Horner’s agenda was to push “tactical” as opposed to “strategic” aviation. Instead of funneling the bulk of the Air Force’s efforts and budget into the nuclear war mission, he wanted to put the best equipment, training, doctrine, and tactics at the disposal of the people who might fight the actual wars.
The staffs themselves were war zones. At the TAC staff, the enemy was sometimes Strategic Command Headquarters, sometimes the Army, which was always trying to take control of the Air Force, sometimes another Deputy Chief of Staff who wanted his influence and power to grow at someone else’s expense. Sometimes it was the “doctrine” of the other services.
Military doctrine is a conceptual statement, or even a philosophy, of how a service looks at its mission and intends to accomplish it. The essentials of Air Force doctrine can be stated simply: The first requirement of modern war is to gain and maintain control of the air. Airpower provides flexibility, range, and firepower. It can be adapted to a multitude of strategies, from attacking the enemy’s capacity to sustain war to attacking the enemy’s military forces directly.
The doctrines of the other services tended to be much more codified and specific, which presented probl
ems for Horner. The other services’ staff officers were better trained in their own doctrine than he was in the Air Force’s, which was more intuitive, so when he had an argument with the Army or Marines, they threw their doctrine at him from the rule book, while he had to make his points more with logic and enthusiasm. Landmen are lawyers; airmen are evangelists. Landmen think about defeating the enemy army; airmen think about defeating the enemy. Navy men fall in between: they look beyond defeating the enemy navy, but only think about defeating the enemy from the sea.
It soon became apparent that all the services advocated doctrines that optimized their own role in battle, but downplayed the overall role of joint operations. Fortunately, there were men in each branch, Chuck Horner among them, who felt differently. They were sickened both by interstaff and interservice parochial arguing, and the compulsion to defend service prerogatives and programs. They simply wanted to get the job done.
All through his career, Horner would run into people who had gone through the same catharsis, and when he did, they tended to get along, because of shared unspoken beliefs. They didn’t lie to one another. If they thought someone had a dumb idea, they called him on it without attacking him as an individual, but if they thought he was being less than honest, they attacked him without remorse. They came to know whom they could trust, and it had nothing to do with the color of a uniform or with rank.
From the TAC staff at Langley, Horner moved on to the Armed Forces Staff College in Norfolk, Virginia, where he trained in planning for joint and combined air, land, and sea combat. During this period he was promoted to Lieutenant Colonel below the zone, in 1972. He then spent four months at the College of William and Mary, where he earned an MBA. And then it was on to the Pentagon, the Five-Faced Labyrinth, for a three-year tour.
THE FIVE-FACED LABYRINTH
As it turned out, Horner arrived at the Pentagon at just the right time. It was a heady period. The war was still ongoing, there was money in the defense budget, and the Air Force had started to acknowledge its shortcomings in training and equipment.
Once there, Horner joined a small basement office of unconstrained thinkers and freewheeling activists, which went under the name of Weapons and Tactics, TAC Division of DCS Operations, under the leadership of Colonel Bill Kirk, a slow-talking, rumpled-uniform warrior who was an old friend of Horner’s from Nellis.[19]
Their job was to make sure new equipment fit real-world tactics, and that the doctrine being written upstairs made sense to the operators who would have to follow it in combat. They produced studies and papers; briefed Congress about war in general and specific emerging programs such as the E-3 AWACS and new air-to-air missiles; pushed electronic-warfare systems and the laser-guided bomb programs; and when Israel fought the ’73 war, they sent people over to study the tactics, and mistakes, and how the various USAF and Soviet systems had been used.
Most of all, they pushed to improve air-to-air training.
Dick Pearson’s trip to Washington to explain how a pair of F-105s had been shot down by MiG-17s had had some effect on air-to-air training, but it was pretty tame. The problem was that F-105s fought like F-105s. One F-105 turned, accelerated, and climbed pretty much like another. As a consequence, pilots learned to estimate range against a big fighter, and learned to turn with another Thud, but they knew very little about exploiting the advantages of their fighter against an enemy aircraft of another type — like, say, a MiG- 21. The Air Force needed dissimilar training.
The problem that put dissimilar training on the front burner was the exchange ratios in Vietnam — the number of U.S. aircraft lost compared with the number of enemy shot down. In Vietnam, exchange ratios were horrendously bad. In Korea, they had been something like six to one in favor of the United States. In Vietnam, owing to the limitations in the way the war was fought, they were often less than one to one — in other words, the North Vietnamese shot down more U.S. pilots than U.S. pilots shot down North Vietnamese. By 1972, when Horner was assigned to the Pentagon, more than 1,000 U.S. aircraft had been lost to MiGs, SAMs, and AAA. Very clearly, something serious had to change.
Thanks to the Fighter Mafia, it did.
THE FIGHTER MAFIA
In the late fifties and early sixties, a few Air Force, Navy, and Marine officers came to the conclusion that the dominance of strategic nuclear thinking was sucking the life out of real airpower, and gathered in an informal fraternity of fighter pilots and other like-minded types, which came to be called the Fighter Mafia. Some were veterans of Korea, and membership was not confined to fighter pilots or weapons systems officers. It was attitude that mattered — if a man could think outside the narrow SAC box. Early on, they began to make their presence felt, and they grew in influence as the Vietnam War progressed, and as people started to realize how ineffective U.S. training and weapons were for fighting a conventional war. They peaked in the early seventies, when Chuck Horner arrived at the Pentagon.
Inside the Pentagon, the bureaucratic path from a bright, shiny new idea to its implementation in an actual working program involved coordination throughout the staff. People like Horner and his colleagues in Bill Kirk’s office would have to walk the idea through various duchies in the Labyrinth to obtain signatures of approval — approvals that many of the dukes were loath to give, since every good new idea meant the death of some preexisting idea. Much of the staff felt threatened by anything new. It was a zero-sum situation: you get budget money for your idea; I lose money for mine. As a result, it was important to have people you could turn to. If you knew a fighter pilot in the office in which you needed to get your package coordinated, you would work out with him how to push your idea through the office without running into known problem officers or potential problem officers — those too inept to make a decision, and who would therefore sit on your package.
This was the Mafia. They helped each other and schemed about ways to move the Air Force, and they grew very skilled. Their main value was as critics and as conceptual thinkers about warfare. They proclaimed early, for instance, the importance of timely action versus executing a preordained, changeless plan, such as the SIOP. They realized that any plan might be out of date when the time came to act on it, owing to enemy actions or changes in the environment. They also made conceptual inputs to aircraft design. The F-16 can trace its roots back to original Mafia work, because it was they who argued for lower-cost, small, and agile fighters.
They were not always right. For instance, the small jet they envisioned would not even have a radar. In those days, radars were big and complex, which meant building big and complex aircraft. This in turn drove up the cost, since every pound of radar on a jet required six additional pounds of structure, which meant larger engines to carry the added weight, which meant fuel to give the larger engines an effective range, which meant more structure to hold the fuel, and so on. In order to escape this spiral, they maintained, stop it at the beginning: don’t put radar in the nose of the jet.
In fact, this kind of solution was foolish, because radar is simply too valuable not to have in combat. During the Gulf War, for example, the overwhelming number of air-to-air kills were achieved using a radar-guided missile. The better solution was to make radars smaller, which is what happened. Over time, advances in radar and missile technology have allowed the F-16, with its small and relatively low cost, to evolve into the premier fighter aircraft in the world.
The Fighter Mafia began to lose its punch as more and more conventional force people began to populate the leadership positions in the Air Force, and as mainstream Air Force thinking began to concentrate on air superiority and conventional bomb dropping. Later, when Bill Creech arrived on the scene, the old, original Fighter Mafia (by this time aging, pre-Vietnam rebels) tried to maintain their separateness and their control by continuing to rebel, but now there was nothing to rebel against, and Creech simply put them in their place.
During Chuck Horner’s tour in the Pentagon, however, the Fighter Mafia was a godsend[20]—an
d he felt their influence immediately in the push for Aggressor Training.
AGGRESSOR TRAINING
Horner made his first appearance at the Pentagon on a Wednesday morning, and the first thing his new boss, Bill Kirk, asked him was what he thought about starting up an Aggressors program — that is, a force that could visit the wings all over the world and give them realistic air-to-air training. The idea was that they’d buy MiG-21s from a Third World nation who’d been equipped by the Soviets, train a few really good fighter pilots in Soviet tactics, then study how to use our fighter force to its best advantage.
Horner was enthusiastic, and elaborated on why it needed to be done. When he’d finished, Kirk smiled and handed him a message from General Momyer to General Jack Ryan, the Chief of Staff of the Air Force and a SAC man, who had passed the note down the chain of command to Kirk. Momyer’s note to Ryan said, “I’ll be up to see you on Friday to talk about starting Aggressor training,” and in passing the note to Kirk, General Ryan had implied: “You better have something good for me.”
Kirk asked Horner to prepare a paper that outlined options for Ryan to use on Friday, and Horner immediately found an empty desk in the basement and started developing his thoughts about dissimilar air combat training. The paper discussed the kinds of aircraft needed to emulate the most likely enemy (the MiG-21); the organization of a Soviet-style Aggressor force, schooled in Soviet tactics and doctrine; and three optional force structure packages. After some rewriting at Kirk’s direction, Kirk then called in a Mafia person from Forces Branch, who costed out Horner’s options and helped him work out where to find the equipment and personnel to build this force. Together, they put together a package that recommended taking a small number of excess pilots, training them in T-38s (later F-5s), and assigning them to Nellis to form an initial Aggressor squadron. They further identified the source of money for the squadron and the types of training they would accomplish. The Aggressors, like the Navy’s Top Gun School in Miramar, California, would do air-to-air training, but they wouldn’t do it only at one base, but would visit each fighter wing and give training over a two-week period.