Every Man a Tiger: The Gulf War Air Campaign sic-2

by Tom Clancy

  By late that same Wednesday night, Horner had a package and a staff summary sheet ready to do battle for coordination. The next day, he took on the Pentagon. Horner and Jim Mirehouse, a Mafia lieutenant colonel who had flown Weasels with Horner, steered a tortuous course though the bosses and got the package coordinated through the variously reluctant offices. For instance, when the head of Air Force Programs, a lieutenant general, refused to sign off on the coordination, they waited until he went to lunch, so his deputy, a major general who despised him, could sign off on the package. There were other similar but lesser battles.

  By 11:00 P.M. on Thursday, Horner had the package coordinated and delivered to the Chief of Staff ’s office; and the next morning, Momyer paid his visit. Afterward, the package was ready for pickup at the chief ’s front office. Attached to it was a two-inch-square piece of paper that said simply, “Do it. R.”

  The Air Force Chief of Staff had given the go-ahead for the Aggressors, despite his SAC prejudices. Later, when Horner appeared before General Hill so the general could program the aircraft into Nellis and authorize the money to man and operate the squadron, Hill flew into a towering rage. And yet, for all his shouts, he could not ignore that two-inch-square slip of paper that said, “Do it. R.”

  And so the Aggressors were born. It was a hugely successful program — as evidenced, for example, by the exchange ratios in Desert Storm.

  RED FLAG

  Red Flag came next. A vast scale-simulated combat exercise, based at Nellis and “fought” against Aggressors, it was primarily the creation of Moody Suter, a captain when he was at Nellis, and a major at the Pentagon. Suter, cocksure, irreverent, and boundlessly creative, had the face of a hunting hound, an overactive, not always orderly mind, and a brash confidence that never endeared him to the Air Force brass. Though all of his ideas were brilliant, many were too radical to be implemented. Either way, he worked and worried his ideas until they came to fruition… or else so enraged the senior leadership in the Air Force that he had to go into hiding until things calmed down.[21]

  While Horner was still at Nellis, General Taylor had instigated a major study that envisaged an enormous training area using the combined Hill AFB and Nellis ranges. This area would include the airspace over the government land comprising half of the state of Utah and Nevada — enough room for a great many aircraft to maneuver with no interference from civilian airliners; enough room, also, to practice air refueling. The area would be open to supersonic flight and unrestricted military operations, from the ground up. It would have extensive radar coverage, including AWACS, so that pilots could debrief what went on during the simulated combat exercises. Live bombs would be dropped and missiles would be fired. There would be simulated SAM and AAA in the ground in the target areas. And the Aggressors who were not on the road giving training would be used to create an enemy air force.

  After Horner left Nellis, Suter continued to work this program hard, developing the concept in operational details beyond the original engineering study. Later, in 1972, when Suter came to the Pentagon, Bill Kirk had him assigned to his office, and Suter brought this concept with him.

  In October 1973, a new commander came to TAC, another SAC general named Bob Dixon, who was known as the Tidewater Alligator for his habit of tearing flesh from colonels and generals under his command (and from anyone else, for that matter; he was famous for indiscriminate hatred). Dixon had been in the Pentagon for years and was savvy about how to play the game there, and he was not about to let wild visionaries from Nellis sell him a pig with wings.

  Before Suter and the others on the team wanted to take on Dixon, they built briefings aimed at selling the concept to the air staff. These came out of some telling creative analysis: At Korat and Ta Khli, the practice had been to give new pilots ten missions in the less dangerous southern parts of North Vietnam (in Route Packages I and II), where there were only a few SAMs and no MiGs. After gaining experience in those ten missions, they were ready to go “downtown”—to Route Package V, VI A, or VI B, which was Hanoi and its adjacent areas. When building the new Red Flag briefing team, the team used this experience to build a graph that showed loss rates and numbers of missions flown. What this graph said, in effect, was that the first ten missions a pilot flew were his most dangerous, and that if he could survive this without getting shot down, then his chance of survival significantly increased. “Why not give him the first ten combat missions over the Nellis-Hill ranges,” the briefing went on to say, “where he can survive his mistakes and learn from his errors before the bullets and SAMs are real?”

  Red Flag was taking shape conceptually. Meanwhile, however, it was running into bureaucratic problems. Though the Fighter Mafia had tried to push the idea up the chain at TAC, the support of colonels and generals leery of Dixon’s temper was conspicuously absent.

  It was time to pitch the concept to General Dixon. The job was to show him how this could be his idea.

  At that point Moody Suter devised a scheme, which offered itself when the team received word that the Army’s chief scientist was interested in battle lab training and emulation of combat to test Army systems. In other words, he was thinking about a land-warfare equivalent of what was becoming the Red Flag concept. (In time, the Army made this happen, with great success, at Fort Irwin in California.) Suter then slipped word to the scientist that the Air Force had been working on the exact concept he had in mind, and was busy developing a realistic training environment in the Nellis complex that would also be used for operational testing. Naturally, the scientist was very interested in learning more about the specifics of the Air Force program, and so he asked for a formal briefing. In point of fact, at that time they had no program, just a bare-bones concept that needed meat and structure. What they needed were slides, the chief props of a military briefing.

  In due course, some graphics people who were also in the basement of the Pentagon began working with Suter and Horner to produce slides for the Army briefing. On the title slide, the head of the graphics section sketched a plain red flag, then used the logo on the subsequent slides. The “Red Flag” stuck, and so the program was named.

  Now came the payoff to Suter’s scheme: since Bill Kirk’s team was going outside the Air Force to brief the Army, and since Nellis was owned by TAC (i.e., General Dixon), it was their duty to let General Dixon know what they were doing. This message implied much more than was stated: With the Army’s “interest” in the proposed Red Flag program at Nellis came the implicit threat that the Army would want to start using Nellis for their own battle lab, which could then grow to the Army owning the base.

  The result — and the whole point of the scheme — was that Dixon asked to hear the briefing.

  Suter put on his armor and took him on. Ferocious, but no fool, Dixon clearly saw the merits of Red Flag. After the briefing, he told Suter simply, “I’ve got it.” Red Flag was airborne.

  In its early days, Red Flag had predictable problems — too many crashes, for instance. In time, however, everyone learned, the training setup grew more realistic, and the young pilots realized they couldn’t take chances in combat. The safety record improved. It wasn’t long before the Red Flag loss rate was lower than that of the normal home station training.

  Over the years, range instrumentation also improved, and the Air Force started to look at the integration of tactics and new equipment. They discovered how to configure a strike package of bombers, fighter-bombers, escorting fighters, rescue forces, Wild Weasels, and command and control, which included AWACS, Rivet Joint (an EC-135 aircraft that collected signals intelligence—“sigint”), and Compass Call (an EC-130 aircraft that not only collected sigint, but also jammed enemy signals between aircraft, their ground controllers, and their ground radar network).

  In time, Red Flag also began to involve integrated flying operations with Navy and Marine aircraft and with foreign air forces — French, British, Korean, Saudi, Israeli, and German. Air Guard and Reserves also flew in Red Flag, s
o that in the future, whenever a task force of USAF and non-USAF fliers were brought together (whether in Desert Shield or some Bright STAR exercise), they had no problem immediately integrating operations. Common terms and equipment were used, as were common rules and tactics.

  Desert Shield and Desert Storm went so easily in great part because everyone had been there before. They had flown their first ten combat sorties together and had already been indoctrinated as a team. It paid off, not so much in terms of tactics development or even individual aircrew training, but because the people had worked together and understood one another.

  ★ It was while he was Assistant Deputy Commander for Operations to the 4th Tactical Fighter Wing at Seymour Johnson in North Carolina from 1976 to 1979 that Horner participated in his first Red Flag. Fresh from the Pentagon and a year at the National War College at Seymour Johnson, he worked for the DO, Colonel Harvey Kimsey, who worked for the wing commander, Colonel Bob Russ. It was a prime assignment, since it meant he was back flying, in F-4Es (then used in an air-to-air combat role). His job was to do whatever the DO didn’t want to do. Since Kimsey was primarily interested in flying jets and didn’t like paperwork, that left a great deal of work for his assistant, a situation that did not at all bother Horner, who was happy doing most of the jobs DOs do — looking after intelligence, tactics, standards/ evaluation, plans, scheduling, and shops. The wing had three squadrons of twenty-four aircraft and thirty pilots, commanded by lieutenant colonels. Horner planned exercises and monitored flying, both by watching the schedule and by flying with each of the squadrons.

  For his first Red Flag, Horner commanded two squadrons from his home base. General Hartinger,[22] Ninth Air Force Commander, also assigned him another job: he was to be the man responsible (officially: the Ninth Air Force Senior Representative). In other words, if there was an accident at Red Flag, then he expected Horner to explain it. As a result, while Horner commanded only the primary unit, the two squadrons from Seymour Johnson, he was responsible to the Ninth Air Force commander for everything that went on; and if anything went wrong, God help his career. Since the threat of hanging tends to focus one’s attention, he made sure he sat in on the briefings and planning, spoke up if he sensed someone was going to do something stupid, and sent people home who didn’t play by the rules. The result: everything went smoothly.

  In time, Horner flew in more than his share of Red Flags, and he learned there many things. For instance, his long-held opinion about the absurdity of low-level penetration of enemy defenses was reinforced at first hand at a Red Flag in January 1977. His squadrons were playing the role of red air (enemy air) in F-4Es, while blue air F-111s were trying to sneak in on the deck. These particular F-4Es were equipped with TISEO, a TV telescope mounted on the left wing root that could be slaved to the radar. That way, on their radar screen, pilots could see a TV picture of the target they were locked into, which allowed visual ID of the target while it was still beyond eyeball range. Using TISEO, pilots could tell the type of aircraft they were facing at sufficient distance to launch an AIM-7 medium-range missile in a head-to-head engagement, closing at a total speed of 1,000 to 1,300 knots. The 111s themselves, with their distinctive, ungainly look, were easy to spot; and because they were flying close off the ground, visual acquisition was a snap. Then, for Horner’s red team, it became just a matter of gaining sufficient smash (airspeed) to convert on them and film them with gun cameras. “It wasn’t unlike shooting strafe at a banner,” Horner remembers, “except in this case the target was moving at six hundred knots over the ground at fifty or a hundred feet. Just stay above the target and you won’t hit the ground.”

  Pilots learned other basic lessons at Red Flags, as well: how to evaluate their situation in the confusion of combat (even as some people were talking too much on the radio, and others were talking too little); the necessity of looking after their wingmen and of herding a flight into the target and then into the return without soaking up fatal shots (even if they were only on video recorders); the necessity of using simple conservative tactics, so all can cope when the plan does not unfold as expected; the necessity of keeping situational awareness, even as hundreds of aircraft are swirling every which way at supersonic speeds; and the difficulty of finding the target and bombing accurately when a pilot’s radar warning receiver is screaming in his ear that he is going to die in a few seconds unless he does something (most likely what he is already doing).

  Though Red Flags did not totally replicate combat, they definitely caused pressures that resulted in the same adrenaline flow and the same cotton-mouthed feeling.

  THE GCC SYSTEM

  Finally, the GCC — Graduated Combat Capability — system, like Aggressor Training and Red Flag, was another way to train the way they planned to fight. To make this a reality on a day-to-day basis, standards were devised and an accounting system established: for a base to be combat-ready, so many sorties of a certain type had to be flown each quarter. For example, in an F-15 air-to-air wing, each pilot needed to fly X number of one-versus-one maneuvering, and Y number of multi-ship two-versus-two (or more) tactics missions. If a pilot then aimed for a higher level of readiness, he needed additional and more demanding missions.

  The accounting system kept track of aircrew training activity and quality, in order to define the combat readiness of the force. More experienced pilots were given lower requirements. Thus there were A-, B-, C-, and D-level pilots, based on their total fighter time, and time in the current aircraft (a fighter pilot with 1,500 hours total time, of which 300 hours was in his current jet, might be an A-level pilot, whereas a new pilot with 800 hours of fighter time might need 750 in the current jet to reach A level). The pilots then operated at three levels of combat readiness — basic, advanced, and ultimate. A pilot at the ultimate level was so experienced, and was flying at such a high rate, that he was certified combat-ready in any mission the jet was capable of performing.

  THE BILL CREECH REVOLUTION

  All of this new training was wonderfully effective, but it still didn’t address the root, systemic causes of the Air Force’s problems with morale and discipline. The men could fly better, but the legacy of Vietnam had taken its toll on military institutions, and the old leaders followed styles of command — fear and intimidation — that had been in vogue during World War II and Korea but were useless today.

  These problems were compounded, once again, by SAC’s dominion over the Air Force. To a SAC general, all bombers and bomber crews were interchangeable. Fighter generals played the team according to the strengths and weaknesses of the individual pilots and their individual jets, but there weren’t enough fighter generals to make an impact on the culture at TAC. As a result, midlevel TAC leadership of Chuck Horner’s age group had for the most part either died in the war or left the service to avoid that fate.

  Pilots, in particular, were leaving the Air Force in droves. The reasons were clear: they had joined the Air Force to serve their nation flying jet aircraft. Instead, they would come to work at 5:00 A.M. to brief for a 7:00 A.M. takeoff, wait until 9:00 A.M. until three of the four scheduled aircraft were reported by maintenance to be actually ready to fly, and finally mount up on these three planes, only to find after they started them up that one of them was in fact not capable of safe flight. Meanwhile, since the two planes that got airborne did not have working fire-control radars, the crews burned holes in the sky in a valiant effort to fly out the wing’s assigned number of hours.

  The situation grew worse daily, and so, monthly and yearly, the flying-hour program was revised downward, in the hope of discovering the minimum level of flying operations that was supportable. It wasn’t anybody’s fault. There was no money for spare parts; maintenance mechanics were not trained, owing to the hemorrhaging caused by the lack of experienced personnel; readiness reports were shaded to look good, so higher headquarters felt justified in reporting to their boss in Washington that the Air Force was ready to carry out its wartime mission.

 
Experienced pilots were sick of the false reporting, the meaningless ground jobs (designed to keep them busy when there were no aircraft to fly), and the seemingly endless tragedies, as young, inexperienced, and noncurrent pilots died in needless aircraft accidents.

  The drug problem was endemic in the nation, so it was no surprise that it affected the military, too. But it was one thing to be high on drugs at a party, and another to be high while guarding nuclear weapons or maintaining jets.

  A case in point:

  In 1977, while Horner was at Seymour Johnson, home of not only a TAC wing but a Strategic Air Command bomber wing, special agents from the Air Force’s Office of Special Investigations discovered a drug problem on the base. One night after a change of the guard mount assigned to protect the weapons-storage area, the security policemen turned in their weapons and left the building, intending to go home or back to the barracks. Instead they entered a waiting phalanx of lawyers and OSI agents, who proceeded to read Miranda rights to 151 of a total of 225 policemen. They then charged all 151 with use or possession of illegal drugs (in this case, marijuana).