by Tom Clancy
He took advantage of the kit and the uniform now and, looking as put together as circumstances allowed, everyone regrouped and got in the cars that were to take them to the helicopter pad on the south end of the Pentagon.
By the time they reached the pad, it was about 6:00 A.M. Shortly afterward, they were joined by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (and Horner’s old National War College classmate), General Colin Powell, who radiated the warmth and humor that make everyone acquainted with him think of him as a best friend. After the greetings, Powell drew General Schwarzkopf aside for some last-minute coaching, to head off the chance that Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney or President Bush might reach conclusions at the briefing that he didn’t approve.
In Chuck Horner’s view, Colin Powell was a decent, honorable, intelligent, and genuinely likable man with unquestionable integrity who was also a brilliant schemer, manipulator, and political operator… and he had one serious flaw: he was Army through and through. He had never been able to admit the ascendancy of airpower. In Powell’s mind, it all came down to a zero-sum game, expressed in a simple syllogism: if airpower was growing in importance, then land power must be decreasing. That was bad for the nation, however; consequently, he had to make sure that brakes were applied to the growth of airpower.
Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, wearing cowboy boots, walked up to the pad a couple of minutes after General Powell, and immediately introduced himself to Horner with a warm handshake and a smile. The Secretary of Defense was of medium height and build, balding, neat, friendly, and, Horner quickly learned, a good listener. Until this morning, the two had never met.
As for Cheney, this was just another general, not even a slim or handsome one, whose shy Iowa mumblings were not likely to inspire a powerful first impression. “What do you call the Secretary of Defense?” Horner kept asking himself. “Mister Secretary? Boss? Dick? Your Honor?” Yet, for his part, Horner liked what he saw: this man was smart, selfless, and straightforward.
Everyone soon piled into a fancy Marine helicopter for the trip to Camp David.
The low man on the totem pole has some advantages. For starters, he can observe; he doesn’t have to show off who he is. So Horner relaxed in the helicopter and watched Schwarzkopf and Powell do a power dance together, as they worked to establish their territory and power base, and made sure that they were recognized for their expertise in military matters and that, in the meeting to come, the Defense Secretary wouldn’t take off on his own. Though Cheney was in charge, the senior uniformed types (as always) did their best to keep the civilian leadership from making military decisions on their own.
Thus, Schwarzkopf ’s body language said to Powell, “You may be the Chairman, Colin, but the Middle East is my theater and I work for Secretary Cheney.” Thanks to Goldwater-Nichols, the CINC had a direct, unmediated working connection with the Secretary of Defense, making the Chairman hardly more than an adviser — though an extremely powerful and influential one. Powell’s body language, on the other hand, said to Schwarzkopf: “Norm, let me guide you through this political maze.” And to Cheney: “Dick, don’t reach any conclusions about using military force until I get a chance to convince you about what should be done. And for God’s sake, don’t go to Norm direct”… despite the chain of command. All the while, Horner wondered if his own body language said what he hoped it said: “Here’s the Joe Cool fighter pilot delighted to have such a beautiful day to fly up and see George, Dan, and the boys in the cabinet. Hope they’ll like Chuckie.”
CAMP DAVID
Camp David turned out to be comfortable, but not luxurious — it had earth-tone colors, a musty odor (like a mostly vacant summer cabin), government-issue hardwood tables, overstuffed brown vinyl sofas, and brass lamps. Since the windows were small and looked out onto the surrounding forest, and their light was only partially supplemented by lamps on end tables, it was dim inside.
Soon after their arrival, Horner and Schwarzkopf went into the conference room to check it out before they had to perform — to reconnoiter the battlefield. As Horner remembers it, the room was wood-paneled, with a neutral-colored office-style carpet on the floor. The meeting table could hold about twenty to thirty people around it, and there were chairs along the walls for straphangers (like him). An overhead slide projector sat on a small table near the right forward edge of the main table, and a portable screen was parked a few feet away in a corner of the room.
While the CINC stepped out to find a breath mint (their mouths being in full rebellion against the previous night’s coffee and stress), Horner was alone until the first attendee entered. He knew the face… it was remarkably youthful; the man looked to be about seventeen years old. True to his Iowa upbringing, Horner did as his mother taught, crossed the room, stuck out his hand, and said, “Hi, Dan, I’m Chuck,” to the Vice President of the United States, Dan Quayle.
Even as his good humor and graciousness took hold, Quayle, like Cheney, probably figured, I don’t know who this odd general is, but I wonder how he made it past sergeant. He shook Horner’s hand, smiled warmly, and said, “Good to meet you, General,” without adding, “Dumb shit,” for which Horner mentally thanked him before retreating to a chair along the wall. He was soon joined there by Admiral Grant Sharp, who sat next to him.
Meanwhile, the rest of the high-level invitees entered the room — Secretary of State Jim Baker; CIA Director Judge William Webster; White House Chief of Staff John Sununu; National Security Adviser General Brent Scowcroft; Dick Cheney and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, who sat immediately behind him; and a few others.
Last came President George Bush, chatting with Generals Powell and Schwarzkopf. Bush was dressed in slacks and a windbreaker, looking young and refreshed for a man who carried the burden of the nation. When the President appeared, Horner searched carefully for what detractors called his “wimp” factor — the limp, willowy New England boarding-school boy with high-toned, squeaky voice and goofy gestures. Nothing of that showed. To the contrary: the man Horner saw was a commander in chief, cordial, polite, but in charge. Not bad, Horner thought, thinking over his initial impressions of both Cheney and the President. If we have to go to war, the civilian leaders we’ll be working for can do the job. He also remembered that the President had himself been a fighter pilot in the Navy in World War II, and knew what it was like to get hit and shot down. He was not surprised when, later, the President approached the day’s deliberations with the visceral knowledge that comes from being shot at and hit.
As he passed through the room, Bush walked past Horner’s chair and graciously reached for his hand, and Horner managed with surprising clarity, “Good morning, Mr. President, I’m Chuck Horner.”
He added to himself, Hooray, I didn’t screw that one up.
Soon the President, Powell, and Schwarzkopf took seats at the table and the meeting began.
The first business was a brief run-through of the CIA’s estimate of the situation in Kuwait and the Persian Gulf region, which was given by Judge Webster. Since Schwarzkopf had better and more recent firsthand information, based on the telephone calls to his major trapped in the hotel across from the American Embassy in Kuwait City, he jumped in with it, clearly loving the fact that he could one-up the CIA.
Score one for the CINC, Horner thought to himself. But shit, is this a tennis match? The obvious maneuvering left him cold.
Schwarzkopf was then officially introduced. As he started his briefing, Horner said two quick prayers: first, for the CINC, that his message would be accurate, accepted, and lead to the right actions. Second, that he himself would not doze off after two F-16 flights the previous day and a night without sleep.
The first prayer was answered when Schwarzkopf proved to be as effective as Horner expected, as he used map outlines to show the possible axes of Iraqi attack — most likely down the coastal highway toward Dhahran — and the ways ground forces could be employed to stop it.
And it didn’t take God long to answer the second
prayer. Horner was soon in front of the slide projector, walking his way though the air component briefing. Though he was nervous, years of briefing very difficult generals about his failure to keep jets from hitting the ground and killing their pilots made this one easy. First, he talked about the size of the force they’d need (as it turned out, this would be about 30 percent of the actual war power finally deployed or at their disposal).[24] Then he talked about how long it would take them to reach the Gulf and how soon they’d be ready to fight, if it came to that: about thirty-six hours to put the force in place, and another day to take the munitions out of prepositioning storage or off of ships on the way to the Gulf from Diego Garcia. Following that, he discussed the types of missions that would be flown against which targets, in the event the Iraqi Army came across the Saudi border (including types and amounts of munitions, sortie rates, levels of success expected, and possible losses). There would be, of course, direct attacks against the lead elements of the Iraqi armoredforce, but the strategy was to trade space for time, and therefore to attack the logistical support of the attackers — the fuel, ammo, food, and water supplies. As a result, while U.S. forces might seem to be losing in head-on engagements on the ground, the Iraqi Army would be starving itself to death, and at some point — a week or two? — their attack would grind to a halt and U.S. air would then attrit the remnants in the desert wastes of Saudi Arabia.
Following the briefing, questions were asked — the kind where the questioner already knows the answer but wants to let everyone else around the table see that he’s present and accounted for. For the most part, however, these questions were not relevant, or even intelligent. “How are you going to give close air support to the Arab allies?” Answer: “The same way we give close air support to anybody else.” To Horner, the procedure was more interesting than the questions themselves. First, Horner gave Powell and Schwarzkopf a chance to field the question, while they in turn waited for Cheney. Horner felt he looked a little dense standing up there, waiting ten or twenty seconds for the senior leaders to finish their waltz.
The silliest, most shallow queries mostly came from Chief of Staff John Sununu—What’s this idiot doing here? Horner asked himself — but later, while watching CNN, he saw that the same “dumb” questions were the ones the reporters were asking, and his respect for Sununu grew. Sununu had simply been doing his job.
Meanwhile, Horner could see that Colin Powell was growing nervous that Horner was making “too good” a case for airpower — he had always found Powell easy to read — but the Chairman had such control of the meeting that he never came right out and said it.
At the first break in the questions, Horner took the opportunity to return to his seat against the wall to watch the debate that followed, primarily between State and Defense, the real centers of gravity that morning. Between those two, there was considerable staking-out of positions and ill-concealed hostility:
STATE: “Let’s not rush into overt action that might make matters worse. We need to know more about what is going on over there.”
DEFENSE: “We better get involved and ready to take action before matters get worse.”
All of this discussion was open, freewheeling, and acrimonious in ways that set Horner wondering. Such open conflicts would never occur in a military conference, in which everyone bows to the senior officer and to the position they feel the commander has in mind. Yet he liked it. He liked to see people looking at the problem from a variety of angles. In the military, he thought, it’s too easy for everyone to back what they think the commander wants. So if you guess wrong and the boss is stupid, you strike out on two counts. Horner called such things “school solutions”—like giving an answer in a classroom because you know the teacher endorses it.
During the discussion, the President scarcely spoke. He seemed detached, even lost in deeper contemplation, as the talk whirled around the table. It was clear that he wanted to hear what people had to say and didn’t want to cast his shadow over the examination of the issues.
When he finally began to speak, two overriding concerns emerged: first, how to use military force against the Iraqis while keeping down the loss of life, and second, how to bring in other nations to form a coalition against Iraq (and thus avoid the arrogance of Vietnam). Chuck Horner easily identified with both concerns. It would have been hard for anyone who’d fought in Vietnam not to.
When Bush began raising the loss-of-life issue, Horner could see in his face and body language that it wasn’t perception, or spin, or bad headlines he was worried about. It was about people bleeding and suffering. His personal anguish over the killing was unmistakably visible, and it wasn’t just a question of U.S. lives, but of everybody’s — U.S., Allied, and even Iraqi.
Horner — already in tune with those feelings — was pretty sure that Schwarzkopf felt the same way, but the others in the room seemed inclined to discuss the issues from a more distant standpoint — the way one would talk about putting out a new product, or taking out a line of credit. “What’s the impact on our stock? What are the chances of success in the marketplace? What’s the price of failure?” But the President saw that the discussion was about human life, and while he seemed willing to go down that road, he knew at a gut level the real price that would have to be paid.
The President’s second set of concerns increased Horner’s growing respect for him, for they represented a departure from the traditional American views of the world. Instead of marching in as the all-knowing Yanks, the President was saying: “We’re not alone in the world. We need help and advice. We all have a problem, and let’s see if we can all find a consensus about fixing it.” It made Chuck Horner want to stand up and cheer.
Next, Bush moved on to practicalities: “What are we going to do about the invasion of Kuwait and the threat to Saudi Arabia?”
Baker continued to take the line that the United States must move cautiously. Powell’s thinking was similar: “We have to protect our interests in the region, but let’s not get into water that’s over our heads.” Cheney was most hawklike, but never outspokenly aggressive. His position was in tension with Baker’s, but without acrimony.
To Horner, it all seemed like a lot of posturing with very little plain talk. It was what he called the “staff two-step.” Everyone danced around the fact that they didn’t have the slightest notion about a course of action. All the smart, articulate presidential advisers, unable to give a meaningful answer, seemed more concerned about avoiding the perception of being wrong than about working the problems.
Once that became clear to the President, which didn’t take long, he asked Baker to consult with other world leaders. Bush already knew what Margaret Thatcher, the tough-minded prime minister of England, advised — he had spoken with her earlier in the week in Aspen, Colorado. She was all for kicking the Iraqis out. He planned shortly to call the French president, François Mitterand, to find out his views. “But what about King Fahd?” he asked. “After all, he is the one most threatened at this point.” Here he struck a dry hole. The President’s advisers simply repeated the positions they’d been taking all morning.
Then he turned to Cheney. “Dick, I want you to fly to Jeddah and talk to King Fahd. Find out what he thinks should be done.”
And that was it. The room was cleared of outsiders, so the principals could carry on in private. To pass the time, Horner took a short tour of Camp David with Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. The two immediately warmed to each other. Wolfowitz was a power in the Pentagon, an insider with the Secretary of Defense and extremely smart, but a humble, thoughtful, approachable, good-humored man, who was just as interested in touring Camp David as Horner was. They were like a couple of starstruck tourists: “Gee, so this is the gym…” “Gee, here’s where they watch TV…”
About the time the tour finished, the meeting of the advisers broke up. Their errand done, Horner and the others in Schwarzkopf ’s party hopped into the helicopter back to the Pentagon, then out to Andrews AFB
and aboard the C-21 back to MacDill AFB.
GOODBYES
By that time, it was late afternoon, and Schwarzkopf dismissed the visibly worn-out Horner at planeside, thinking that his air commander would fly back home to South Carolina. However, a trip home wasn’t possible that day, since he was out of what the Air Force calls “crew rest”: an unbreakable rule — outside of war — says a pilot must have twelve hours of rest before he can fly. So Horner checked on his F-16, which was ready to go as always, then caught a ride over to the Visiting Officers Quarters to get some sleep, planning to fly home first thing the next morning. He was in bed by 7:00 P.M.
The phone rang. It was the Shaw AFB command post.
“General Horner, General Schwarzkopf asks that you call him secure.”
He asked for the number, then realized he didn’t have a secure phone in the VOQ room. Since General Schwarzkopf ’s house was only two blocks away, just in back of the base officers’ club, he got up, dressed, and walked over. When he rang the bell, “BeBe” Bell, the CINC’s executive officer, answered the door.
The CINC was holding a minimum-size staff meeting in the living room, and his mouth gaped when Horner walked in, thinking Horner had reappeared at MacDill via some Star Trek transporter beam.
His message to Horner was brief. Tomorrow the CINC was going to Saudi Arabia for a couple of days, and he wanted these people with him: his Army ground component commander, and old Arab hand, Lieutenant General John Yeosock; his Air Force air component commander, Chuck Horner; and his planner, Admiral Grant Sharp. The flight was leaving from Andrews about noon.
“No problem.”
“Keep the trip confidential,” Schwarzkopf added. “And bring one other person.”