by Tom Clancy
★ For Horner, the leadership environment he liked to create tended to approach the edge of chaos… but a focused chaos. A “chaotic” style goes with the fighter-pilot ethos, partly because fighting in air-to-air battles is by definition chaotic; partly because a fighter pilot’s quickness of mind thrives in situations where inputs are many and varied and come lightning-fast; and partly because fighter pilots are themselves notably chaotic.
Wherever I went, if I didn’t find chaos, I made it. Or else I did outrageous things. Why? Because I was goddamned if I was going to let anybody control my life. And that was an outward sign of letting people know that this is an individual. It’s a revenge against the uniformity of the military service.
★ Yet Horner brought chaos down to earth and made use of it.
If you impose control to bring about order, then you will snuff initiative. My job was to exploit professionals and to get them to produce their best. I had to focus them, while letting them be themselves. Sometimes this generated friction, conflicts, or even explosions. So be it. A little friction is the price you pay for getting everyone to feel free to act and to use their initiative and talents; and this was especially true of the highly spirited people I was usually lucky enough to command.
On the other hand, some kinds of friction can be nonproductive. So it’s very important to create the kind of environment where people can dislike each other yet remain civil. You need an atmosphere where they can debate and where you can get the best arguments from them; yet you have to make sure they don’t come to blows or fall into some kind of irrational rage. Sometimes my subordinates would gang up on me. And sometimes I’ d arrange situations that would make that happen. When I saw people getting too diverted by personal differences, I would turn myself into the enemy — not by doing anything hostile, but normally by humor with a sting in it… I had no plan here; it was just instinctive, situational; it was a gut thing.
I’ve learned to support my guts. I’ve learned to trust myself. Not that I always get it right. But you have to make decisions based on uncertainty. You have to make decisions when the evidence is not clear. The black-and-white decisions are easy to make; they’re nobrainers. If what to do or where to go is so clear-cut that anybody can recognize what to do, then you don’t need a leader to make a decision. The hard decisions are the ones where the results are fuzzy, and where there’s no convincing rationale to tell you that one way is right and the other is wrong. What I learned is to go with my instincts, even when other people had equally valid arguments on the other side of the issue.
★ By the time he commanded the 47th TFW, Horner had come a long way toward internalizing and bringing to life these principles. He knew that he could create an environment where the NCOs and officers were permitted to tell the truth and give their unbiased opinion — and that his respect for them and trust in their judgment and integrity in those areas where they were experienced would lead them to make every effort to succeed and bring the unit along with them.
★ Horner’s handling of his NCOs and officers was one of the most crucial aspects of his leadership.
Noncommissioned officers — sergeants — are the heart and soul of the Air Force. They run its day-to-day operations, and they are fiercely independent.
The NCO’s job is to manage the enlisted force, lead and train the young airmen, and enforce discipline. Within that frame, they don’t think a great deal about officers, except insofar as an officer can cause the NCO problems while he attempts to do his job. They love a good commander who gives them meaningful work to do, and they despise a commander who undermines the performance they are trying to enforce among the enlisted members of the wing. If a commander loses their respect, they’ll dismiss him as useless and wait out his time in office in the hopes that a good commander will come along.
Pity the poor officer who loses their trust. They can kill an outfit’s productivity and capacity just by doing little or nothing. They do not have to work against the commander, they only have to do the job as told… and the commander will not fly his sorties, pass his inspections, or win his war. On the other hand, the simple act of listening to their advice and their views pays huge dividends in gaining their respect and loyalty.
Another way to win their support is to fire the right NCO. It goes without saying that not all NCOs are good and productive. The NCOs know who is getting the job done and who is coasting, but they will never tell on a fellow NCO to an officer. Fortunately, good NCO leadership is easy to detect. The best NCO leader is usually so busy getting the job done that the commander can’t even find him unless he scours the flight line or back shops. There he will find clues: a clean wheel and tire shop; a hangar floor so scrubbed you can eat dinner off it; an office filled with pride, military courtesy, and helpful airmen; a motor pool where the vehicles are in good operating condition and neatly parked in straight rows.
The NCO who tells you how to run the wing, or finds a thousand faults with the way his boss is doing the job, is likely to be one with weak leadership skills and a bad attitude, and he or she needs to go before it infects the rest of the organization. That is why it is important that a new wing commander fire the right NCO. If he targets the NCO who is not carrying his weight, and is an embarrassment to the other NCOs, that wing commander has it made; the NCO force will make sure he is a success. If the hapless new wing commander fires the NCO he should recognize as one of the unsung heroes, then the other NCOs will at best perform cautiously. Why should they try extra hard if their boss is too stupid to know the difference?
So when a commander sees a unit that’s gone bad, he has to fire or reassign the leadership of the unit, firmly and without hysterics. It is the hardest thing to do in command, for he can never be certain that he has accurately identified the person truly responsible.
By way of illustration, Chuck Horner tells this story:
When I took command of the 47th wing at Nellis, I made some immediate changes that upset a few people. For starters, I sent NCOs who had been sitting in air-conditioned offices out on the flight line, with instructions given in private, “You’re going to do it right, or you’re going to retire.” Young airmen who’d been playing loose with how they wore their uniform, got their hair cut, or shined their shoes also came in for close scrutiny from the new wing commander; and if they needed to be sharpened, I stuck them verbally in the sharpener — to include also their NCO supervisors (in the event they had forgotten what we were all about).
For a while, the wing went silent, while everyone decided if I was a good or bad commander. If I was to get their trust or loyalty, I had to earn it.
The first breakthrough came one day when one of the best NCOs in the unit pulled me aside and told me to keep it up. I asked what that meant, and he told me that I must be doing good, because of what he saw when he stopped for a beer in the Tiger Inn, the bar just outside the back gate at Nellis. While any of the NCOs might stop there for a beer en route home, it was a pretty wild place. The folks who usually hung out there were the malcontents and young men looking to get thrown in jail or out of the Air Force. So this good NCO told me that I must be doing it right because the walls of the bathroom cubicles were filled with graffiti about how much of a shit Colonel Horner was. “Colonel,” my confidante said, “at least you are pissing off the right people.”
To this day I am certain that I made mistakes. However, the wings I commanded all had measurably higher output, aircraft in commission rates, more sorties flown, and better inspection results, to name a few, so I must have been right more times than I was wrong. I know in my heart that at each base I had the NCO corps solidly behind me, making up for my lack of experience and providing the leadership I was not able to provide.
What I had was a deep desire to make the unit better. I walked the flight line day and night. When I saw something that needed to be fixed, I made sure the person I gave the job to had the resources to get the job done. I used to lobby at the headquarters for construction supplies
. I challenged my own maintenance people to fix their own work spaces so they were neat and clean. You’d be amazed how it makes people more productive if they have a shiny floor to work on in the hangar. The light is better under the aircraft, and people don’t get oily when they have to go down on the floor. Same for dining halls, same for clubs, dorms, offices, every aspect of the work and housing area. You start at the flight line so everyone knows what is most important in the Air Force: getting the aircraft and pilots ready to go to war. But then you also pay attention to the toilets, so the troops have a decent place to relieve themselves. Ditto for the dorms; they have to be clean too, and we had a program to fix up the dorm rooms so they were not dingy, moldy, and overcrowded, with rusty showers, broken blinds, and missing fixtures and light covers. I expected very high performance standards from the troops, but only because that is what they wanted from themselves.
I made sure I was their servant, and I made sure my officers felt the same way. It was a no-harm, no-foul environment. I listened to the NCOs, but was never afraid of them or unwilling to say, “Thank you very much for your view, I will take it under consideration. In the interim, get your ass out there and lead,” and they did. All of us were working so hard to get the job done that we didn’t worry about who was in charge. In reality, they were in charge, since they were the only ones who could bring about success.
Officers are different from NCOs in a lot of ways. First of all, they stand out more, so it’s easier to see how they are performing, and then there are several classes of officers:
To start with, there are the young ones whom you’re grooming, the lieutenants and the captains with a future in the Air Force. So you’ll want them to be energetic. You want them to make mistakes, but you want to keep close supervision on them.
Then there are the career officers who rose up from NCO and who went to officers’ training school. Though they might be smart and talented, their careers have time limits. They’ll almost certainly never be promoted to command ranks, just because they don’t have enough time. Even so, they’re proud of being officers. It’s a big deal for them, because they’ve done it on their own (nobody in their family ever went to college or had anything like a professional career). So if you treat them honorably and with great respect and encouragement, they’ll give you fine, steady work. When they do screw up (or anyone else, for that matter), you chew their ass (I tried never to let a screwup go unpunished; letting them go creates apprehension and leaves things hanging out of balance).
Then you have the fast movers. You’re hard as hell on them, because if they’re worth a damn, they can withstand your withering blasts and profit from them. If they’re not worth a damn, if they bullshit their way, you need to destroy them. You need to push them so hard that they fail, and fail totally. You want to get them the hell out of there, and they want to get the hell out of there and go someplace where they can suck up to somebody and get ahead.
★ By the time Chuck Horner was given his first command, the Horner family had grown to five: Susan had been born at RAF Mildenhall, in Suffolk, England; John at Seymour Johnson; and Nancy Jo came while Horner was serving in Washington. While the Air Force does not officially admit it, wives (and now spouses) are an integral part of their society. This is not a formal thing. Each wife is expected to find her own niche, and yet, even though the commanders’ wives are not in charge, the younger ones tend to look to them for leadership. Life in the unit is much easier when the commander’s spouse promotes harmony among the nonmilitary side of the community.
Over the years that Chuck was growing as an Air Force officer, Mary Jo grew as an Air Force wife. During that time they’d frequently run into wives of senior officers who tried to wear their husbands’ rank. That didn’t work. Back when they came into the Air Force, there was still a stiff and formal relationship based on rank. Wives were expected to conform in such ways as wearing hats and gloves to the teas at the officers’ club or to some senior wife’s house when she was hosting a coffee. That pretty much died out during the sixties.
Mary Jo had a different approach. As they moved around from base to base to base, everyone liked her, because she was spontaneously enthusiastic and genuinely liked other people. She was strong enough not to put up with any guff from her commander — and later senior commander — husband, yet she was and remains a loving wife and capable mother. People came to bare their troubles to her, because they knew they wouldn’t get the conventional response from her or a moralizing lecture. Often at night she would share their pain with Chuck — a husband got passed over for promotion, or Chuck had fired him, or the couple was facing a long separation because of a remote assignment. In a very real sense, they were in the job together, and each had a role to play.
Chuck Horner learned never to discount the role of the spouse in the military community. “You know immediately,” he says, “when you have a dysfunctional spouse at work, especially if she is the wife of the commander. Common sense says you don’t make a big deal of it, but you can’t help but be aware. Sure, you always try to pick the best person for the job — man, woman, married, unmarried, working spouse, whatever. Still, if you are choosing between two equal men to make a subordinate commander, and one has a wife who promotes harmony, and one has a wife who (for whatever reason) is constantly causing trouble, you may select the former, just because you have too much to do already and don’t need any headaches caused by strife in the distaff side of the house.”
GENERAL HORNER
Over the next years Horner commanded at four different bases, two air divisions, the Air Defense Weapons Center, and finally Ninth Air Force.
After commanding the 474th, he was promoted to brigadier general, and from 1981 to ’83 he was a division commander over two wings at Holloman AFB in Alamogordo, New Mexico.
From Holloman, he moved to Tyndall AFB in Panama City, in the Florida Panhandle. There he commanded the Southeast Air Defense Regional Air Division. As division commander of the southeast region, he had responsibility for U.S. air defense from New Jersey to Texas. Active-duty and Air National Guard fighter squadrons under his command sat alert at bases along the coast from Houston to Cape May, while radar sites every two hundred miles or so were collocated with FAA radars and were netted to provide an air picture at the command headquarters in a large building in Tyndall.
Three months after starting the job at Tyndall, he was moved over to command of the Air Defense Weapons Center (also at Tyndall), a more interesting and important job. It involved transitioning the wing from F-106s to F-15s, operating the radar controllers school, operating the Gulf air-to-air missile testing ranges, conducting Red Flag-type air defense exercises, called Copper Flag, and operating a large fleet of T-33s for air targets and F-100/F-4 drones for shoot-down aerial targets.
Bill Creech retired during Horner’s tour in that command, to be replaced by General Jerry O’Malley. Soon after he took over, however, O’Malley and his wife were killed in a plane crash, and Bob Russ became the new TAC commander.
Then, as a major general, Horner replaced Tony McPeak as the TAC Deputy Chief of Staff for Plans at Langley (where he had worked at TAC as a major). He was responsible for the beddown of the forces and for preparing input on such matters as the budget, manpower, doctrine, war plans, studies and analysis, and joint matters. He also worked closely with the Army at nearby Fort Monroe, where their doctrine effort was centered.
From there he moved to command of Ninth Air Force and CENTAF, where one bright day in August he was ordered out of the sky and to Shaw AFB, ready to begin the biggest challenge of his life…
II
Shield in the Sky
4
Mission to Jeddah
Saturday, August 4th: it was time to fly to Camp David to brief President Bush and his chief advisers.
Well past midnight, Horner, Schwarzkopf, and the other Camp David pilgrims boarded a C-21 Learjet, the Air Force transport normally used by VIPs, for the flight to Andrews AFB. The
trip was tense and uncomfortable. The seats were small and the jet was full, so legs cramped, necks and rear ends ached. Everyone was exhausted, on edge. Horner himself was anxious; the thought of briefing the President was unsettling… not because it frightened him, but because he wanted to get it right, and that made it difficult to relax.
The CINC eased his great bulk into the tiny seat and tried to sleep; he was so large, he seemed to take up the entire plane. Horner slipped into a backseat next to Admiral Grant Sharp, the CENTCOM J-5 (Director of Plans), and reviewed his slides.
Sharp, a tall, gentlemanly, naval surface officer with gray hair and glasses, was a quiet man who spoke in well-constructed, thought-out phrases. Though he was old Navy and loved the service (his father, also an admiral, had been the Commander in Chief, Pacific Forces), he seemed more academic than military, which put him at a disadvantage when dealing with the fiery and mercurial Schwarzkopf. Sharp liked order and thoughtful discourse and hated the CINC’s tirades, while Schwarzkopf never warmed to scholarly types.
After a 4:00 A.M. touchdown at Andrews, they were driven across town to Wainwright Hall, the Distinguished Visitors Quarters at Fort Meyer on the Virginia side of the Potomac, and a five-minute drive from the Pentagon. At Wainwright, Horner grabbed a twenty-minute nap and a shower, which took away some of the cobwebs and grunge of the previous day and night.
Despite the antipathy of the ejection-seat technicians in the Life Support shop to storing clothes where they didn’t belong, Horner habitually kept a shaving kit and blue, short-sleeve uniform tucked up in the canopy of his F-16. Pilots normally used an underwing baggage pod for carrying personal baggage, but the pod limited maneuvering to only three Gs; and since he’d set out Friday morning to fight F-15s, there was no way he was going to stand for that.