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

by Tom Clancy

  Recall that Horner had several reservations about the CINC’s plan. He was, first of all, dead set against Washington making strike plans for the forces in-theater to execute (as in Vietnam). Schwarzkopf assured him that wouldn’t happen. Horner was also worried that the CINC, and by extension the planners in Washington, would misinterpret the aims latent in the term “strategic.”

  On the other hand, on the ramp in Jeddah, Schwarzkopf raised the issue of a possible offensive air campaign should hostilities erupt immediately (either because of an Iraqi attack south or because the Coalition decided to initiate an attack north in the near future). He was thinking offense even while the immediate need was for defense. To Horner (as to any airman), such a campaign was mother’s milk. This kind of campaign, every airman knows, would require striking the enemy as a system, not necessarily at his deployed military forces, but at what have come to be known as a nation’s “centers of gravity” (a term from Clausewitz: “The point at which all energies should be directed”), such as its communications systems, power systems, oil refineries, industrial basis, centers of government, and in general, its means to sustain war.

  When General Schwarzkopf returned home to MacDill AFB, he talked with Colin Powell, and later to the Vice Chief of the Air Force Staff, Lieutenant General Mike Loh, about development of an air campaign. Loh then called on a small planning cell, called CHECKMATE, to do the initial work. Formed in the late seventies to examine the strengths and weaknesses of U.S. and Soviet military forces and to create simulations, in 199 °CHECKMATE was headed by Colonel John Warden, a brilliant airpower theorist. While at the National Defense University, Warden had published what many considered a groundbreaking study of the subject, The Air Campaign: Planning for Combat, as well as several articles on the employment of air forces.[40]

  Warden was the kind of airpower enthusiast who saw air strikes as the decisive influence on conflict, while other supporting arms, such as the Navy and ground forces, had become superfluous and obsolete. People have been preaching the virtues of airpower pretty much from the time of the Wright Brothers, and some of these sermons have had considerable impact. The problem for airpower enthusiasts was that hundreds of thousands of bombs had been dropped, but aircraft had yet to deliver the decisive blow in a war (leaving aside the atomic weapons dropped on Japan in 1945).

  John Warden was different from earlier enthusiasts in that, for him, it was not the material shortcomings of airpower (i.e., aircraft and weapons) that had failed to deliver the decisive blow, but its ineffective organization and application. In other words, if the violence was applied quickly, precisely, and in the right places, the desired results would inevitably follow.

  It is no surprise, then, that Warden embraced with enthusiasm the task of developing a plan to force Iraq out of Kuwait by using airpower to destroy Iraq’s centers of gravity as defined by his Five Rings theory. For him, this task was the culmination of his military experience and of his search for new truths about the decisive potential of aerial attack.

  Warden and his team immediately turned to this planning effort with great zeal and initiative.

  The plan that came out of CHECKMATE was essentially a series of proposed targets to be attacked over a total of six days[41] (after which, presumably, the Iraqi leadership would give up and the war would be over). Attacking these targets would punish the leadership of the Iraqi government until it was driven into them that continuation of their land grab in Kuwait was futile.

  • According to the CHECKMATE plan, Iraqi power and communications grids, command-and-control bunkers and facilities, and infrastructure like transportation and bridges, would be attacked.

  • The plan also aimed strikes at Iraq’s emerging capabilities to produce weapons of mass destruction (NBC) and their delivery systems, such as missiles — like Scuds — and aircraft.

  • Significantly, the CHECKMATE plan took into account the importance of minimizing civilian casualties, primarily through the use of precision-guided munitions (PGMs). This campaign was to be nothing like the city-busting, population-punishing bombing of World War II (which was not only morally suspect but ineffective: it only made people fight harder).

  • Key to making all this happen was to be the concerted effort (called SEAD — Suppression of Enemy Air Defense), in the earliest stages of the campaign, to wreck the Iraqi air defense system (called KARI–Iraq spelled backwards in French[42]), so that U.S. losses would be minimized and aircrews and planners would have the freedom to make most effective use of the new PGMs and delivery systems that had come into the Air Force inventory during the past decade.

  • Finally, though there were some plans to attack the Iraqi military in the field (i.e., in Kuwait), these were relatively modest as compared with the rest of the effort… The CHECKMATE plan did, however, produce some unintended benefits in that direction. There is no doubt, for instance, that it influenced favorably the capabilities of the deployed forces; and because of it, the force that finally deployed was far more capable than the original force allocated to CENTCOM. For example, at Warden’s behest, the air staff deployed the laser and electro-optical-guided bomb-capable F-111Fs from the 48th TFW at Lakenheath (the F-111Fs were later used to great effect in tank plinking) rather than the apportioned F-111Ds from Cannon AFB (which weren’t so equipped). Though no one had any notion of the eventual success of tank plinking until the idea was evaluated in the Night Camel exercises in October and November, the F-111Fs were nevertheless much more valuable than the F-111Ds.

  The CHECKMATE team worked hard on their plan, fine-tuning it with every computer model at their disposal. And through their excellent contacts at the various intelligence agencies around Washington, D.C., they were able to assemble a much larger and more refined target list than was initially in the field in Saudi Arabia (probably their most useful offering to Chuck Horner and his own planners). They also called in representatives of the other services to get their ideas and comments, all of which made valuable inputs to the plan. In particular, the U.S. Navy’s SPEAR team, which had done first-class analytical work in examining KARI as a system, made valuable contributions to the SEAD portion of the plan (around which so much else depended). The SPEAR work gave planners a road map as to where and when to stick the knife into KARI (eventually giving rise to what became known as Puba’s Party, which knocked out Iraq’s air defenses on the first night of the war).

  By the time it was done, the CHECKMATE campaign plan, called INSTANT THUNDER (with reference to the failed, gradualist, Vietnam War ROLLING THUNDER air campaign), ran to over two hundred pages. Given the time constraints levied on the CHECKMATE team, it was a dazzling effort. Now it was time to deliver the product to the customer, and that meant briefing it to senior leaders.

  Warden flew twice to MacDill AFB to brief INSTANT THUNDER to Schwarzkopf, and both briefings were well received by the CINC. Warden’s offensively oriented thinking (he liked to compare his plan, for Schwarzkopf’s benefit, to the Schlieffen Plan and to Inchon) fit exactly into General Schwarzkopf ’s need to define an offensive strategy to free Kuwait. It also provided for options to respond to any Iraqi atrocity perpetrated against Western hostages then held in Iraq, or trapped in Western embassies in Kuwait City.[43]

  One aspect of the campaign plan did bother Schwarzkopf. He found not nearly enough emphasis on reducing Iraqi ground forces, particularly the heavy armored units of the Republican Guards. By way of advice, the CINC mentioned this lack to Warden. It was advice Warden would later regret not taking.

  After Schwarzkopf, Warden briefed Colin Powell, who also voiced his support for the INSTANT THUNDER plan. Now it was time to brief the CENTAF staff and Chuck Horner.

  On August 19, a CHECKMATE team arrived in Riyadh and initially briefed Tom Olsen and the CENTAF staff. The team was headed personally by Colonel Warden, and with him were three of his key lieutenant colonels: Dave Deptula, Bernard Harvey, and Ronnie Stanfill. (Horner had known Deptula at Tyndall AFB, Florida, and thought very
highly of him, both as an officer and as a fighter pilot.)

  At the time of Warden’s arrival, Chuck Horner needed a chief planner for the air campaign; and on paper, John Warden was the perfect man for the job, with every intellectual skill needed to craft a plan that could be executed by Horner’s air forces, and which would drive the Iraqi armed forces to the edge of disaster.

  But all that changed as soon as the two men met. To put it mildly, they didn’t hit it off. The problem was in part personal (which could have been solved; Horner worked all the time with difficult personalities — including the man he eventually made his planning chief) and in part professional: they had irreconcilable views about constructing an offensive air campaign against Iraq.

  Here is Horner’s recollection of their encounter:

  John Warden’s briefing to Tom Olsen and the staff was well received, especially because of the outstanding targeting materials and attack options it contained. (I later learned this data came from Major General Jim Clapper, the head of Air Force Intelligence, whose people worked tirelessly in support of CHECKMATE.) After the briefing, Tom Olsen told me about the accomplishments of Warden and his team, and suggested that I hear the briefing as soon as possible. According to Tom, INSTANT THUNDER went well beyond anything produced by the intelligence teams that had so far passed through Riyadh peddling their wares.

  Since I was anxious to hear what John Warden had to say, I made a spot for him on my next day’s schedule. And at 1300 on August 20, I arrived in the RSAF Headquarters small conference room, where the CENTAF staff chiefs and the CHECKMATE team had assembled.

  The briefing, unfortunately, started off poorly, the problem being that Colonel Warden had built it for a different audience than those like me who have been studying the Persian Gulf theater for years and airpower for decades. He had prepared the briefing as a stand-alone presentation for people at the JCS and CINC level, who had no idea of how Iraq as a country, or airpower as a tool, worked. That meant there was a lot of boilerplate up front, to bring the audience up to speed and to lay the groundwork for his subsequent points. Patience is not my long suit, and I don’t like being talked down to, so I waved Warden off from this preparatory material and told him to get on with his main points.

  Though he seemed a little shaken by my sharp words, he quickly turned to his target listing. And here John Warden had the real thing. No doubt about it. I could not fault him for the glittering listing of targets he laid out then. Not only did he have access to target materials we had never seen before, but he had a good understanding of target systems, such as the relationship of the communications networks and the KARI air defense system. Most of all, he had a way to rack and stack the targets so we could relate their importance to overall political objectives. It was a solid piece of work, and he and his team could rightfully take pride in it.

  But then, after some discussion, I began asking questions, and the wheels started to come off.

  Keep in mind that the event had two aims. The briefing itself was important. But I was also conducting a job interview. If John Warden handled himself well — as I had every reason to expect he would — he’ d become my planning chief.

  So I had questions for him about the briefing and the CHECKMATE plan — more or less factual questions (but which would at the same time show me how well he thought and judged); and I also had questions aimed at discovering his thought processes. I wanted to know how his mind worked and how he solved problems. To this second end, I threw a number of questions at him that would give him the opportunity to reveal the depth of his knowledge.

  For example, I asked him, “Do you think we direct too much effort toward gaining control of the air?” Now, there is no right or wrong answer to a question like that, but an answer would show his reasoning process in building his plan. However, instead of grabbing the opportunity to show how his mental machinery worked, he simply dropped something like, “No, it’s about right,” telling me that he either knew it all and did not want to share it with me, or else he didn’t have a clue about gaining control of the air and had just filled the “control of the air” bin with some sorties because he needed to fill the square.

  His responses to the more factually directed questions were similar. He danced around them — either because he didn’t know the answers (easy to understand; there was more plan than any less-than-divine mind could easily comprehend), or else because he didn’t want me to be screwing around with his efforts. I suspect it was a little of both.

  Thus, when I tossed at him a question dealing with my broad concerns about the emphasis on targets in the Baghdad metroplex, he dodged it. To explain: Any attack within an urban area carries with it the almost certain guarantee of damage to civilian property, and civilian casualties. But worse, because of its historical and cultural significance among Arabs, the devastation of the ancient city of Baghdad by Western airpower could engender a hatred for the West lasting well beyond the immediate postwar period. It would be an Arab grievance and incitement to revenge for centuries into the future.

  But, as I recall, he had no real answer for this, except perhaps to repeat his confidence in PGMs. Well, okay, I thought. But what if PGMs don’t work as well as we hope? What then? At that point, Warden, as ever, got fuzzy. (In the event, PGMs performed superbly.)

  The truth is, by letting go of a little bit of control over the briefing, he could have easily provided me with useful answers. The plan was the work of many people. If he didn’t know the answer to some question or other, it would have been simple enough to turn to the subordinate on the staff who handled such matters and ask him. He could have easily said to Dave Deptula, for instance, “Dave, you built the air control part of the plan. Can you tell General Horner its basis, your assumptions, any limitations you see, and any possible holes in it?” While doing that would have brought risks, if in fact his subordinates had done their work, it would have been a mark of confidence and trust for him to let them answer. And of course, he could have corrected them as he saw fit. As it was, he was either too proud or too dense to try that solution.

  There were also a number of other issues where we disagreed.

  First, Warden’s plan envisioned pulverizing Iraqi air bases and their command-and-control structure. Though that is good airpower doctrine, I didn’t feel that going that far was either necessary or productive. It seemed to me that if we could render the KARI air defense network ineffective, then we could put the rest of the bombing sorties to better use. If an existing system is no longer going to be used effectively against you, what’s the gain in destroying it?

  Second, I had serious doubts about the way his plan allocated targets by area: some to the U.S. Navy, others to the U.S. Air Force. Though his reasons made some sense (he did it because of the physical constraints of the various aircraft types’ payload and range), he unfortunately ran up against the personal experience of those who’d been frustrated, as I had, by the Route Package system in Vietnam. Now here was an Air Force colonel creating a concept that would easily lead to Route Packages once more. That wasn’t about to happen on my beat.

  But what I really choked on came next.

  The six days of attacks, foreseen by INSTANT THUNDER, were to be directed primarily against vital targets throughout Iraq, and principally on targets in the Baghdad area. That meant, for the most part, that Iraqi forces deployed in Kuwait and on the Saudi border would not be hit.

  Warden’s reasons for this emphasis were straightforward: Airpower properly applied against the Iraqi centers of gravity would cause that nation’s leaders to surrender and withdraw their forces from Kuwait. In his view, Iraqi land forces were actually a detriment, a drain, less a threat than a hungry mass that had to be fed and supplied. Therefore, once we had removed the core national strengths, the Iraqi Army would simply go home.

  Though I admired Warden’s singleness of purpose and his love of what airpower could accomplish, he was not the air commander. I was. More pressingly important, I was the
on-scene CINC, and had other matters to consider, the most serious of these being the Iraqi divisions still poised just north of the Saudi boarder in Kuwait. At that moment, we had very few land forces in place to stop them.

  First, while Colonel Warden held that because of our devastating strength in the air, the Iraqi land forces could not succeed in a ground attack, I was not in such a position to hope for the best. I knew that if we started the INSTANT THUNDER operation with only weak forces on the ground, our bases in northern Saudi Arabia might very well be overrun by the Iraqi Army. That makes it very difficult to rearm and refuel aircraft.

  Second, though Warden was certainly correct in his assertion that airpower would play the major role in any forthcoming conflict, I did not consider, as he did, that Iraqi ground forces — or our own ground forces, for that matter — were unimportant. But when I pressed him on these issues, the debate went further downhill.

  Where I had expected intelligence (and Warden was certainly intelligent), I was getting a university academic teaching a 101 class. At every question I asked that dealt with the Iraqi ground forces, he would dismiss my concerns as unimportant. Even if he was right (which I greatly doubt), he would have been wise to forgo the temptation to treat me like a boob. The commander on the scene may well have been a boob, but he doesn’t like to be treated like one. Warden’s problem, I’ve come to realize, was partly due to personal arrogance. He doesn’t easily suffer those who disagree with him. But it was also due to his absolute conviction that the entire package he was presenting was perfect. To question it, much less to doubt it, much less to consider changing it, was for him unthinkable.

  Still, because I was much impressed with the excellence of his overall effort, I kept my patience, a rare thing, and continued to ask questions. “Humor me, John, just for the sake of discussion, what if the Iraqi Army attacks?…” But each time, he seemed certain I was too stupid to grasp his central concept and gave me a patronizing “If you could only understand what I’m trying to tell you” answer.