by Tom Clancy
After Horner and Glosson worked through this “movie briefing,” Glosson went back into his office, and a few hours later he emerged with the plastic overlay briefing that was to be his until the war started in January (though updated and fine-tuned constantly). This briefing in its various evolutions was given many times to General Schwarzkopf (who liked it enough to instantly make it his own), to Colin Powell on his September 12 visit to Riyadh, and to the Secretary of Defense and the President in Washington, D.C., a month later.
One change Horner added to the early briefing was to have a chart made that showed the fight taking place in phases. By phases he meant that various objectives would be emphasized at various times — that is to say, the four phases did not actually indicate separate actions, one beginning as the last ended, but levels of focus. They offered a way to communicate airman talk to non-airmen, and they were basically simple, the first phase being to gain control of the air, and the last to prepare the battlefield and support the land attack.
So:
• PHASE I — STRATEGIC AIR CAMPAIGN. To gain control of the air and hit the Iraqi leadership, NBC, Scuds, and electric and oil infrastructure. The idea was to deny Saddam supplies but not necessarily to destroy his heavy industry. That is, power and fuel would be attacked, but in such a way that facilities could be reconstituted relatively easily after the war — e.g., grids would be hit instead of generators.
• PHASE II — AIR SUPERIORITY IN THE KTO. This idea came from General Schwarzkopf, who was thinking like an army general, in terms of land area and lines on maps. Even though this phase was redundant (gaining control of the air would happen simultaneously over Iraq and over Kuwait), Horner didn’t fight him on it. It gave him buy-in to the plan (as in, “I thought of that”), so why argue with him?
• PHASE III — PREPARATION OF THE BATTLEFIELD. This included isolating the battlefield, killing tanks and artillery, and destroying morale. It was at this point that Horner and Glosson introduced into the plan the important (and later well-known) goal of destroying 50 percent of Iraqi tanks, APCs (armored personnel carriers), and artillery.
According to Army doctrine, when a land unit’s effectiveness has been reduced to 50 percent or less, then it is no longer combat-useful. At the end of the planned air campaign, the Iraqi Army would be reduced by 50 percent. Hence, in essence, when the air effort was over, the war would be over, and little would remain to be done save collecting prisoners.
To understand this goal, it is important to remember that Norman Schwarzkopf genuinely loved his troops. Their safety and ultimate survival was one of his chief passions. Thus, any air plan that ignored the troops on the ground would be dead if presented to the CINC. It is also important to understand that Schwarzkopf did not insist on a ground campaign. On the contrary, he would have been delighted if the Iraqis had surrendered before his land forces went into battle. All the same, he knew there was a 95 percent chance of land war, and he wanted to make sure air operations were conducted to maximize the survival of the men and women of his land forces. Thus, the air plan talked about “preparation of the battlefield” and attriting “50 percent” of the Iraqi armor and artillery.
Why “preparation” instead of just bombing the Iraqis into the Stone Age? Because “preparation of the battlefield” has special doctrinal meaning to the U.S. Army. If a battlefield is well prepared, few U.S. soldiers have to die. Ergo, the more thoroughly the Air Force can prepare the battlefield, the happier Norman Schwarzkopf would be.
Airmen are too often perceived as fighting some war other than the land commanders’ war. This war would be different. It would be the CINC’s war. Though it would primarily be an air campaign, to sell that campaign, Horner had to get the approval of General Schwarzkopf the land commander, before he got it from General Schwarzkopf the CINC.
The CINC bought this idea, and even thought it was his. (By the by, if the Air Force actually achieved this goal, they would clearly demonstrate airpower’s decisive effect on the battlefield — perhaps for the first time. Did matters unfold that way? We shall see.)
• PHASE IV — THE GROUND WAR.
How long would the campaign take?
The truth was, no one knew, and so estimates changed and varied. When the air staff ran the original ATO through the computer, the estimate was about a week. This seemed ridiculously hopeful to Buster Glosson, and so the time grew to three weeks. By November, it was thought that the planned Phase I would be pretty well achieved in less than a week (five to six days); Phase II in two days; Phase III in two weeks; and Phase IV would take up to three weeks. Later still, in a December briefing, Horner told Secretary Cheney that the computer models showed the war lasting from one to three weeks, but that he himself thought it would last at least six weeks. (This guess actually proved substantially correct.)
As it turned out, Phase I took from ten minutes to three days, depending on how success is measured. Phase II happened during Phase I. Phase III took five-plus weeks. And Phase IV took four-plus days.
War Duration in Days: December Estimate Versus Reality
The numbers of days do not total. For example, the thirty-eight days of Phase III include strikes conducted during the three days of Phase I. The message is that the impact of airpower on the enemy was underestimated, and the ability of airpower to destroy a deployed enemy was overestimated. The airman is always too optimistic, while the landman is too pessimistic.
★ Finally, it would be useful to compare the changes that took place in the air campaign from John Warden’s INSTANT THUNDER, to the September iteration of Buster Glosson’s briefing, and then to the ATO when the war started. Here are some numbers:*
Target Growth by Category
This chart (a counting of the targets to be struck in the first two and one-half days) illustrates that while the first effort by CHECKMATE was commendable, it was out of date shortly thereafter. The number of targets doubled between INSTANT THUNDER and mid-September. And then the 174 targets in September grew to 218 in October, to 262 in December, and to 476 by war’s start. And as the war itself unfolded, the number of targets grew to thousands
INSIDE THE BLACK HOLE
The Black Hole started out in the conference room adjacent to the Olsen/ Horner office on the third floor of the RSAF headquarters. In November, it was moved into the basement complex of that building. In that complex was also housed the TACC Current Operations Center, the computer room, the RSAF Command Post, and other offices. A long hall connected these; the TACC Current Ops occupied the far (or south) end of the hall, while the Black Hole was at the north end. The RSAF Current Operations Center was on the left, about halfway down the hall from the TACC to the Black Hole. On the right and across the hall from the RSAF Current Ops was the Computer Center, a large room (perhaps sixty feet by fifty feet) filled with computers. There were many CAFMS terminals, all fed by the single large computer that was used to pull the ATO together. Between the large computer and the CAFMS terminals was a laptop that translated the input from the large computer into data the CAFMS terminals could display and manipulate. At the end of the hall, and straight ahead, was a stairs that led down to the RSAF Peace Shield bunker (another hundred or so feet below ground). Though it was still under construction, it was used as an air raid shelter during the first few Scud strikes on Riyadh.
Just before these stairs, and a ninety-degree turn to the right, was the entrance to the Black Hole. Up until the war started in January, this door was closely guarded (what lay beyond being top secret). After the war started, the door was simply left open.
The conference room the Black Hole occupied was about thirty feet wide by fifty feet deep. Immediately inside the room and on the right there was a small administrative section. Straight ahead was a small office shared by Buster Glosson and his excellent deputy, Tony Tolin (who had recently given up command of the F-117 wing and was in line to be promoted to brigadier general). To the left was a room with maps on the wall and a bank of televisions. In this room,
Dave Deptula led the group that worked the targets in and around Baghdad. (The televisions were supposed to display target information, but they never worked and weren’t used.)
Down a small hall (created by plywood sheets) and to the right was a small room occupied by the Scud targeting section. Inside, pictures of fixed Scud launch sites were pinned to the wall. Also on the wall were maps showing Scud storage areas, Scud support facilities, factories, and the plants where Scud fuel was manufactured.
Because the missiles were moved out before the war started, once the fixed sites and the storage and production facilities were hit, there was nothing more to do but allocate sorties to Scud-hunting (A-10s by day, and F-15Es and LANTIRN Pod-equipped F-16s at night). As a result, the Scud targeting section turned out to be only partially useful.
A side story: Scud fuel was stable for only a limited time, and once it became unstable, it couldn’t be used. The Black Hole planners therefore figured that if the fuel production factory was destroyed, the Iraqis would have to stop shooting Scuds roughly three to four weeks afterward. In due course, the factory was bombed in the opening days of the war; but it appears the Iraqis didn’t follow the technical data, because they fired Scuds for the next six weeks.
Across the hall was the KTO (Kuwait Theater of Operations) Room, also containing many maps. Here Sam Baptiste and Bill Welch put together the effort to hit the Iraqi Army.
Behind it was the room occupied by the Air Superiority section, headed by Glenn Profitt, where Wild Weasel schedules and EF-111/EA-6 support were planned and put into the ATO (Profitt had taken over from Lenny Henry in October). As it turned out, once the war started, air superiority was attained faster than expected. And so work in this section, as in the Scud section, soon became routine, and the team became quickly unemployed.
Lastly, there should have been an “interdiction section” (that is to say, an “isolating the battlefield” section). To Chuck Horner’s later regret, there wasn’t. The reason not deserves an explanation. Let’s let him give it:
In our doctrine, we assign air to attack targets. When these targets are associated with the enemy air defense, our missions are called counter air. When these targets are in close proximity to our friendly ground forces, our missions are called CAS. When these targets are associated with whatever supplies the war effort, our missions are called air interdiction (that is, using air to interdict fielded forces from their support, logistics, command and control, reinforcements, movement, letters home, etc.). Other doctrinal missions include air superiority and nuclear strike (there is not a doctrinal mission called “strategic attack”).
Now, what do we call bombing a secret police headquarters that supports the evil regime? It isn’t counter air. It isn’t CAS. It isn’t interdiction (although we have to file it under that mission area now). So what is it?
What we need is a category of effort that addresses missions that are designed to defeat an enemy through means other than attacking his military forces. That is, once we have gained control of the air and hit the various fixed targets, our main effort has to be to isolate the battlefield. In Vietnam we hit the North for two reasons: (a) to interdict supplies coming south; and (b) to punish the North Vietnamese into stopping their support of the insurgency in the south. This latter category (b) really needs a name. Some would call it strategic, but strategic technically means either attacking a nation’s vitals or nuclear operations. Take your pick. I like the term offensive airpower, as this indicates you are doing something over enemy territory that is neither air superiority, air interdiction, nor CAS.
★ The Plan, of course, is only a step toward the war. Once the planning process was under way, there remained the millions of necessary actions, operations, procedures, problems solved, and just plain acts of sweaty labor that translated the Plan into focused violence.
7
Band of Brothers and Sisters
By the time General Schwarzkopf returned to Saudi Arabia on the twenty-third of August, the offensive air plan had been hammered into workable shape, and Chuck Horner had come to realize that the United States would almost certainly have to fight Iraq. Says Horner:
By then I had no doubts that at some point we would have to go on the offensive. It was just a question of when — sooner if the Iraqis launched an attack, later if we did. I hoped that my convictions were wrong and that perhaps diplomacy would work, but the fortifications rising in Kuwait made it very evident that diplomacy was going to fail. That would leave us with the job of throwing the Iraqis out of Kuwait. Though I was convinced this would mean hard work for us, I also felt the fight would go fast. As events unfolded, I was pretty much right.
One option open to Saddam that may have saved him from war (and, thank God, he was probably too proud or too stupid to take it) was for him to have pulled out of Kuwait City and simply remained in occupation of the oil fields in North Kuwait and the islands at the mouth of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. Doing that would have posed a terrible dilemma for us: To stay and not fight? To declare victory and go home? Or to fight, even though Saddam had given up the greater part of his spoils? If we went home, then Saddam could continue to threaten his neighbors with an intact army. If we stayed without fighting, we would not only risk looking like an army of occupation, but it was a hard land and climate for our troops. But then, would an offensive to eject Saddam be justified?
Saddam, it turned out, was a lucky adversary for us. He could have made life much harder for us than he did.
The actual military situation had changed very little during the CINC’s absence. There was as yet nothing much standing between Saddam Hussein’s divisions on the Kuwaiti border and the Saudi heartland. The relatively thin Islamic Peninsula Shield forces were centered in the west in King Khalid Military City,[48] while elements of the XVIIIth Airborne Corps and the U.S. Marines were just getting off the boats and airplanes at Dhahran.
The ground defense plan remained for small unit resistance along the coast road, if the Iraqis had attacked that way. And if they had attacked inland, where there were no roads, air would have stopped them. Since the early U.S. defensive force consisted primarily of elements of the 82d Airborne division, and the 82d has no armor (after they drop into battle, they walk), what effectively blocked Saddam from Riyadh was 82d Airborne “speed bumps.”
It would have been a repeat of Korea in 1950—that is, fight where possible, but pull back. Trade land for time. Sting the enemy at every opportunity, but keep U.S. and friendly losses to a minimum. And use air to sap the enemy’s strength until he had exhausted his force, and friendly forces could be built up for a counterattack.
All of this began to change when the 82d Airborne division began to be augmented by the armored punch of the 24th Mechanized Infantry division and their Abrams tanks. At that point, Saddam had a lot more than “speed bumps” to worry about if he moved south.
Meanwhile, Horner was eager to shed the hat he wore as CENTCOM Forward and get back to his real work as CENTAF commander. Working the essentially political job of looking out for General Schwarzkopf’s interests (making sure that when the CINC returned to Saudi Arabia, he could pick up where he would have been if he had not left Jeddah nearly three weeks earlier) was not a grievous burden for Horner; it was an honor that Schwarzkopf had entrusted him with the responsibility. But he was doing the CINC’s work and not his own, and he wanted to get on with his own work — planning for and employing airpower. He wanted to be with his own troops. And he wanted to get into the details he’d had to relinquish to Tom Olsen. Though Olsen had handled things in his usual exemplary way while he himself was occupied with the CINC’s business, Horner did not like being a spectator.
So there was no one happier than Chuck Horner when General Schwarzkopf’s plane touched down on August 23.
★ Meanwhile, after much blood, sweat, and tears, the Black Hole team had created a complete, executable plan — that is, a plan that could be translated into a series of Air Tasking Orders that
munitions and maintenance troops could use to load and marshal the jets, and that the pilots and crews could use to navigate and bomb. It met the CINC’s guidance about political objectives, and it was a living document that would flex in response to changes in the coming battle.
Buster Glosson had been a difficult boss, yet that had had little impact on the morale of the people assigned to the Black Hole. They simply had had so much important work to do that they’d been too challenged and busy to be much bothered by him.
The toughest element in creating an ATO is its open-ended character: it can always be made better, but when one piece is moved, all the other pieces shift — some only a little, others a lot. Though a perfect ATO might exist in some dream (or textbook), it has never existed in fact; and each day the Black Hole crew worked on the offensive air campaign, they discovered things that needed to be done to make it better… and at first to make it executable.
In late August, the plan was little more than a briefing, covering the highlights that the ATO would in time cover in detail, but it was a briefing that carried much on its shoulders, for it was tasked with conveying the plans and intentions of Chuck Horner and his staff to those who had to approve them — Schwarzkopf, Cheney, and Bush. Later, the President would also bring approval of the United Nations and Congress along with him. Specifically, the briefing had to convey the mental images of thousands of airplanes in a nearly three-day-long ballet.