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

by Tom Clancy

  • The ability to generate sorties in combat more than doubled.

  All of this was accomplished with ever more technically sophisticated aircraft, thus burying two myths: (1) that U.S. aircraft were too sophisticated, and (2) that technically sophisticated aircraft couldn’t be kept in the air.

  Chuck Horner takes up the story again:

  What Creech did, what we did, was learn how to be an air force all over again. We learned first how to maintain aircraft and generate sorties, so our aircrews got enough quality training to be ready for combat. The average flying hours per month for our crews more than doubled, from less than ten to more than twenty. Pilots could now hit their targets, as bombing accuracy rose. And they could survive, as their aerial fighting skills were honed to levels previously considered unattainable. The equipment worked, because it was maintained with pride. Each crew chief was given ownership of his own jet, and his name was painted on the side along with the pilot’s. It was his jet and he was responsible for its performance. If his jet wasn’t ready to fly on time and in perfect condition, everyone knew who was responsible. So the crew chief would not accept excuses from the supply sergeant. If he couldn’t get a part, he found a friend whose jet was down for scheduled maintenance and asked to borrow the part he needed. And he didn’t have to ask the colonel’s permission. The transaction was between the two owners of the jets (decentralization at work).

  The base also had pride, as the hospital waiting rooms were neat and clean, and the dining hall was decorated tastefully, with plants and clean walls and floors. Our people were being treated the way they deserved, and they knew it and responded.

  What you saw in Desert Storm was the legacy of Bill Creech. When F-16 squadrons of usually twenty-four aircraft flew over a hundred sorties in a single day, that was because his liberation of maintenance crews from idiotic rules created an environment where individual initiative counted. Each crew chief and his assistants brought to the Gulf pride of ownership of their own aircraft. Add the awareness that we were in a war for a worthy cause, and there was no stopping us. We had pride, productivity, purpose, and a sense of professional dedication.

  Decentralization was the key. Each man and woman knew what was expected, and each in turn busted his or her ass not only to do their job, but to exceed our highest expectations. Bill Creech had shown us what we were capable of achieving, he had created an environment where failure was not even a factor, and he had given us back the pride we ourselves had given away in the turmoil of Vietnam. There is no doubt the technology you saw on the television screens during Desert Storm was impressive, but to understand the victory, you have to understand the people who operated the bases, maintained the jets, and flew them into combat. You have to know the far-reaching fire Bill Creech lit in each and every one of us in the military services.

  TRAINING IN LEADERSHIP

  When the Creech Revolution began, Chuck Horner was a colonel. In those days, both his flying skills and his bureaucratic maneuvering skills were well developed; now it was as a leader, as a senior officer, that he had to grow and develop. The service academies, he likes to point out, educate and train top-flight lieutenants, but you learn — or fail to learn — how to be a general when you are a colonel. Only as a colonel do you have the responsibilities, the hard choices, the opportunities for success or failure, that can show you how to lead as a general.

  In this stage of his life, Horner had help from a variety of officers senior to him — both good and bad — including, of course, Bill Creech himself.

  His first wing commander at Seymour Johnson in 1976 was a good one, Colonel Bob Russ. Russ was hard to please, yet he wasn’t reluctant to reward outstanding performance, while letting those who fell short know they’d done so. And his efforts didn’t stop there; he devoted much of his time to training subordinates in what they needed to know to do their jobs, and ultimately to replace him. Though he was tough, he looked at each problem nonjudgmentally—“How did we get into this particular situation, how do we get out of it, and how do we prevent it from happening again?”—rather than looking for somebody to take the blame. When he could, he anticipated problems and fixed them before they occurred. Finally, because he let them bite off as much responsibility as they could swallow, people worked hard for him.

  By contrast, at one point Horner was the vice commander to a brainy but thickheaded wing commander who treated his subordinates with contempt and built his career on the bodies of those he’d stabbed in the back, thus negating his very genuine intellectual gifts. Horner studied this man very carefully, and learned from him that most valuable lesson: how not to act. He did his best to handle people just the reverse of the way his boss did, and in doing so, he learned the even more important lesson: you’ve got to be yourself. If you are the commander, people don’t care if you are tough, or mean, or kind, or gentle, but if you are tough one day and kind the next, they are miserable. If they don’t know who you are going to be on any given day, then they don’t know how to act.

  Much of the rest of Chuck Horner’s education in leadership came painfully… because it’s painful to have your shortcomings pointed out, especially if you are a fighter pilot with a large ego. Beyond that, if you truly care about the consequences of your acts, then you feel miserable when you make a mistake. “Good people don’t need to be screamed at,” Horner observes now. “They feel far worse about their shortcomings than you can ever make them feel. On the other hand, the bad person doesn’t care or understand, so screaming doesn’t work there, either. And if you are wrong, the good subordinate will reject your leadership in the future. So you just point out the error, to make sure they’ve gotten it, then discuss how to prevent it in the future, to rebuild their self-confidence. And then, if they are worth training, you send them on their way to sin no more.”

  On one occasion, while he was at the 4th TFW, Horner led another aircraft from Seymour Johnson to Hill AFB in Utah to conduct low-level flying training. In North Carolina, fighter pilots were restricted to flying no lower than 500 feet above the ground, but since no one lived in the deserts south of the Great Salt Lake, they could drop down to fifty feet.

  When they reached Hill, Horner’s wingman flew with another flight leader who was already deployed there, and Horner flew with the other flight leader’s wingman, who was qualified to fly at fifty feet. Their two-ship element took off first, and they proceeded along the low-level route, practicing formation flying and lookout at 480 to 540 knots and altitudes as low as the fifty-feet minimum. When they reached a mountain range southwest of Salt Lake City, they ran into weather, with clouds obscuring the mountain peaks, initiated a weather abort, climbed up through a hole in the clouds, and called the other element to let them know about the problem. “We’ll meet you on the gunnery range en route home,” they said as they signed off.

  When the second two-ship element arrived in the mountains, the flight leader turned away from the wingman and started to climb. Unfortunately, he didn’t climb rapidly enough, and the wingman, who was trying to keep the leader in sight, failed to maintain situational awareness and scraped a ridgeline in his flight path. The aircraft skipped off the ridge and barely impacted the ground, but hit hard enough to cause the aircraft to explode.

  Later, Horner and members of a ground crew search party found the bodies and debris in a canyon about two miles away.

  After the missing-man flyby, Lieutenant General Hartinger, the commander at Ninth Air Force, let Horner know that it was his negligence that had caused the accident. He had failed in his responsibility as the leader, and so had “murdered” the two crew members.

  He was already feeling sorry for himself, loathing himself for his failure and for his part in the deaths. Hartinger’s condemnation made it worse. “I’m working as hard as I can,” he told himself. “And now this. This dumbass flight leader doesn’t take care of his wingman. And, shit, that kills my career.” But the self-pity only lasted until he realized that what “The Grr” had pasted
on him was exactly right — an insight that was reinforced by Bill Kirk, who was the DO at Ninth Air Force at the time. Kirk gave it to him straight, and Horner had to agree, that he had flat-out failed, and that he could either give up, or pull himself up, admit his mistakes, and start over.

  I was responsible for these deaths, for a variety of reasons, but mainly because I was the senior officer present. It’s not the flight leader’s fault. It’s mine. I should have ordered the second element to abort the flight and climb when they were in the clear and not assume they’d know what to do when they hit the weather. I was at fault; I should not have made the mistake of passive leadership.

  If you want responsibility, if you want the tough jobs, then you better be ready to stand up and take the criticism and all the anguish when things go wrong. If you can’t take the blame — even for mistakes that are beyond your control — then you are not in a responsible job, no matter what the job title says. The big jobs involve risk of great personal criticism. The jobs worth having are the ones with the biggest downside, and if you don’t admit your own mistakes, you are not worthy of the trust given to you.

  I couldn’t guarantee that I would never again fail. No one can. But I knew that to seek credit for a job well done while ducking the pain and disgrace of failure is not leadership. No more. I would not wear a hair shirt; that’s not my way. But whenever someone under my command was hurt or killed, it was my fault and no excuses would be offered. The only atonement I could make was to do my best to make sure we all learned why the accident occurred and to prevent it from happening again. The only way to give value to the sacrifice of a life either in combat or in peacetime training, the only way to salvage some good out of such a terrible loss, was to do everything in my power to see that it was never repeated.

  I started to become a “hard” man about some things — especially about things that could get people hurt. I never minded risks to myself, but I sure minded unnecessary risks to anyone who came under my command. Others under my command died over the years, but I blamed myself first and then searched for ways to keep the same thing from happening again.

  I was learning to lead.

  ★ His next assignment was at Luke AFB (in Glendale, Arizona, near Phoenix), in 1979, where he was Colonel Pete Kemp’s vice commander at the 58th Fighter Wing.

  Horner met Bill Creech for the first time at Luke, and the two men quickly discovered that they were both from Iowa — there are not too many Iowans in the Air Force. Other than that, it’s hard for Horner to say why he caught Creech’s notice. In fact, it’s hard to imagine two more different personalities. Creech is precise, careful, vain. Horner is wild, outrageous, and sloppy. But notice him Creech did.

  Chuck Horner takes up the thought:

  I have no idea what Creech liked about me. We were certainly never what I would call friends, or even had very much in common, other than a love for flying and the Air Force (Creech loved the joy of being a fighter pilot). So I avoided him as much as possible, and in the beginning, I even fought what he was trying to do. But when I realized he was actually showing us how to succeed and that is exactly what we wanted to do, I became one of his biggest advocates.

  For his part, he was often very hard on me (which was good for me), and he was a giant pain in the ass (because he kept after details). Yet he gave me prime but challenging jobs, then made sure I worked my ass off. And in those jobs we did work hard to improve things — to have better-looking jets, cleaner facilities, and to take control of our own lives rather than ask for help without doing anything to make things better on our own hook. As the same time, I never tried to suck up to him and tried to be honest and admit mistakes to him I did not need to reveal. Though I think he liked that, I didn’t actually do it to impress him. That is just my way.

  In the end, I think he judged me on the scorecard of our accomplishments, based on his awareness of what my NCOs thought of how I was doing. But I will never know.

  ★ By the time Horner and Creech met, Creech was starting to make his presence felt. One of Creech’s notable qualities was his ability to know virtually everything going on in his command. He was simply a powerful listener (“You’ve got to get your ear down at the other end of the pipe,” he liked to say); he was always on the phone, or taking trusted sergeants and officers aside to get the straight story. His network of such people was vast. Thus, he was well informed about the situation at the 58th Fighter Wing when Colonel Chuck Horner first arrived there.

  The immediate challenge at the 58th was that the wing was so large, encompassing F-104s, F-4s, F-15s, and F-5s, that it had to be split in two. Horner was to be the commander of one of these new wings, which he assumed would be the one containing F-4s and F-104s. Meanwhile, he assumed that the existing wing commander, Pete Kemp, who was current in the F-15, would get the far more modern F-15/F-5 wing.

  Since the F-4s and F-104s were far older than the F-5s and F15s and needed better maintenance leadership, Horner worked hard to find the best possible people for those aircraft. He wanted the best for his wing.

  But then on the day before the split occurred, Pete Kemp was told he was leaving for another job, and that Horner would command the F-15/F-5 wing (now called the 405th Fighter Wing). After watching Horner make all the right moves for the F-4s and F-104s, Creech had moved him on to the challenge of making himself proficient in the more up-to-date aircraft.

  ★ In 1980, Horner was sent again to Nellis AFB, but now as the wing commander of the 474th TFW. In those days, the wing was equipped with long-out-of-date F-4Ds, but in a few months it was scheduled to receive the newest F-16As. That meant that, once again, Creech was offering Horner a large challenge, as well as the chance to make himself proficient in still another up-to-date, top-of-the-line fighter. He was to become one of the handful of pilots proficient in both air-to-air and air-to-ground in the two finest fighter aircraft in the U.S. inventory.

  Meanwhile, the 474th offered many additional challenges. Not only were they switching over to the F-16s, but they were also taking on the very demanding Rapid Reactor commitment, because they were pledged to NATO. They had to be ready to deploy hours quicker than any other wing in the Air Force; then they had to be certified in all the mission areas required for a wing stationed in Germany; and at the same time they had to maintain all the other worldwide capabilities of any other wing. The wing successfully handled the commitment, as well as the F-16 changeover, and then six months after taking on their first aircraft and pilots, they won the TAC F-16 gunnery title, while taking an Operational Readiness Inspection and a Nuclear Assurity Inspection. “The results that followed these huge efforts were because of the entire wing effort and were not just a Chuck Horner thing,” Horner is quick to add. “I just had the privilege of being there at the time.”

  In fact, Horner was taking command — a process as natural to him as flying.

  I like a big challenge. That’s what motivates me. I like to be faced with a task that no one else can do — or at least do as well as I can in my own mind. On the other hand, I don’t care a hoot about small tasks, tasks that strike me as mundane or trivial (even though I also understand that the mundane may be as important as anything else; Jonas Salk must have conducted millions of mundane tests and observations to create his vaccine for polio). So I would much rather be given command of a wing in transition than a wing where things are going smoothly, and my challenge would be to make it better (without having a lot of room to make that happen). For instance, I was always happier to command a wing that was transitioning out of an old, difficult-to-maintain aircraft, like the F-4D, into a modern aircraft.

  What turns my key is fear of failure in the face of a great challenge. And what causes me to go into the idle mode is to be given something to do that really doesn’t need much doing.

  None of this means that I have any illusion that I am the reason the big job will get done. That’s not my function: I am a cheerleader, a mender of faint souls; I’m the one who listens to co
ntending views of the path, the method for the use of resources or the organization of effort, and then decides which way to go.

  ★ These facts were not lost on Bill Creech. In the Air Force, commands are doled out very selectively, and most higher officers get only one of them in their entire life. But Creech kept moving Horner: two wings, two air divisions, and an air defense weapons center — all command billets. Then, after two years on staff, he spent five and a half years commanding regular forces, and spent the last few years of his career as a unified commander.

  As a commander, you only get things done through other people. You lead people, you manage things. And if you can’t lead, you command. You order people to do what you want. Sometimes I had to order people; sometimes I just didn’t have time to go through all the niceties that leadership demands and had to lay a little leather on somebody. But leadership is best.

  When you lead, you have to create an environment where the leader is the chief server. That is to say, he is the one who makes it possible for everyone else to do their jobs. He provides the backup and the support. I saw command as an inverted pyramid. I was the lowest guy in the food chain and the airman was the highest guy in the food chain, and it was my job to make sure I was working for all those people as much as possible.

  The environment you create as commander will also have other characteristics. For one thing, it has to suit your personality (so you don’t go crazy); within it, you have to lay down realistic guidelines and goals (so people won’t fall off the face of the earth and will know where they’re going); yet it has to allow those under your command the freedom to do their best and most creative work. And then you have to trust yourself and everyone else to let all that happen.