by Tom Clancy
Yet — as always with service families — they bore up under the stress of separation in always inventive and heartening ways.
The spouses, most often wives, began to call themselves “the left-behinds.” The support they gave and received was a lifesaver, not only for their overall morale but also for their success in coping with everyday problems.
The yards in Sumter, South Carolina, near Shaw AFB, never looked so good, as neighbors turned out to mow and edge the lawns of families whose husbands had deployed to the desert.
The “left-behinds” began to bond together. Meetings were held to squash rumors, find out who needed help, and provide communication for those families living in unusual isolation. The wives got together for social functions, for a chance to just plain bitch to one another, and to take pride in not having to endure their terrible loneliness and pain on their own.
The shared sacrifice helped ease the panic and tears that came stealing into them when they were alone at night, wondering not only “when” but more importantly “if ever again” they would see their mates. Those in the desert had knowledge (though always sketchy and imperfect); they were busy; they were involved in a great and noble act; while the “left-behinds” worked to make their faithful, lonely lives seem normal at a time of almost unbearable abnormality. They did it because it was expected of them, because they had no other choice, and because of their courage and selflessness. They were real heroes of Desert Shield and Desert Storm.
★ On October 24, Chuck Horner at long last answered what had been Mary Jo’s constant question: “When are you coming home?”
I don’t know when we are coming home, I wrote her — with added comments—but for sure it will be after we fight Iraq. So the question is when are we going to fight? The answer is pick one of the following:
1. After the ’90 election. (Generals always try to sound politically aware.)
2. After the U.S. Embassy in Kuwait runs out of food and water. (We had plans to rescue the trapped staff, if their lives appeared to be in danger.)
3. After another 100,000 troops arrive. (More than 200,000 additional troops actually came.)
4. Before Ramadan begins. (The Islamic period of fasting and holy days, due to start in March.)
5. Before next summer. (I didn’t think we could survive the heat one more time.)
6. After next summer. (My attempt at humor.)
7. After Iraq attacks us.
8. Before Saddam starts killing the hostages.
9. Whenever President Bush and the other leaders say so.
10. Whenever the U.N. says to do it.
As it turned out, number ten, U.N. approval, occurred in late November, when the Security Council ordered a January 15, 1991, deadline for an Iraqi pullout from Kuwait, and number nine came with the President’s approval of the air campaign briefing. This decision grew stronger with the November decision to deploy the VIIth Corps from Germany and to double our naval and air forces, and was cast in stone with the congressional approval of military action in January of 1991.
My advice to Mary Jo was simple: “Just listen to President Bush. He is telling you the truth, and he is telling you what we are going to do.”
As for me, I had inside information. I knew that unless Saddam Hussein made an uncharacteristic change in his strategy, we were going to fight. In November, talk of rotation policy died, to be replaced by a growing sense of urgency, a clearer perception of what lay ahead, and an increasing awareness that, sometime after the first of the year, we were going to war.
BUILDUP
The first signs of the end of uncertainty came quickly. In November, the President’s approval of the additional corps began to take visible effect when the heavy VIIth Corps began to deploy from Germany to Saudi Arabia. In Germany, VIIth Corps had defended the strategic Fulda Gap in the face of the now rapidly disintegrating Warsaw Pact; in the Gulf, their mission was to be the armored fist of Schwarzkopf’s flanking attack aimed at the armored divisions of the Republican Guard, now based near the northwest corner of Kuwait.
Early that month, General Schwarzkopf called a commander’s conference at the “Desert Inn,” a military dining facility at Dhahran Air Base, to outline his plan for those who were new to CENTCOM, Lieutenant General Fred Franks and his VIIth Corps commanders, who had just flown down from Germany for an initial look-around. The old CENTCOM hands, like Yeosock, Boomer, Luck, and Horner, were already familiar with what the CINC would be telling them. They’d come to the Dhahran conference essentially to meet and greet. Though they were more than happy to have VIIth Corps and its Abrams tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles, the old hands had their brown desert camos and suntans, and their close comradeship developed in the desert, and to them the new men looked just a little out of place and edgy in their pale skins and forest-green camouflage fatigues. The new people would fit in — that’s what they were all trained and paid for — but there would be many tough moments in the weeks ahead.
In his briefing, the CINC covered what air was going to do, what the USMC, the XVIIIth Airborne Corps, and the Islamic Corps were going to do, and what he expected VIIth Corps to do. The Marines and the Islamic forces would attack the heart of the Iraqi defenses in Kuwait. XVIIIth Corps and the French would move into Iraq in the west, where they would support the flank of the main, VIIth Corps attack. When XVIIIth Corps reached the Euphrates River, they’d turn east and join the attack against the Republican Guards.
The CINC’s final message was simple: Hit them hard. Hit them fast. Never let up. Never slow down. “We are going to move out fast,” he told his commanders. “If you have commanders who are going to worry about outrunning their logistic tails, or about having their flanks exposed, don’t bring them to this fight. This attack will slam into an army that has been greatly weakened from weeks of air attack; and I want you to start out running and keep running until we surround them and destroy them as a fighting force.”
★ The buildup that followed was spectacular. There had been nothing like it since the buildup in the south of England in the spring of 1944. In November alone, CENTAF’s force grew by close to 40 percent, and that was only the beginning. Here is a snapshot of what was going on:*
Material Buildup
People Buildup
Much of the USN buildup was additional carriers.
The buildup posed many problems.
For Chuck Horner himself, the pace of his own planning grew ever more frantic. Each day he had to ask himself yet again: “What has changed? What new force can we accommodate? How can we support it? At what location? How will we introduce them into the existing ATO?”
At Horner’s level, planning meant anticipating potential problems, then working out in advance how to avoid them, or solve them if they could not be avoided. It was his job to foresee everything that might happen, then to bring about the good outcomes and to head off the bad ones.
While the staff were up to their necks working immediate issues, he looked beyond what they were wrestling with to anticipate the next issues they needed to address when they finished what they were doing.
In this he was mostly successful, he now believes, for the war brought few surprises, while a thousand prepared-for events didn’t happen. His two chief anticipatory lapses were the impact of Scuds on the Israelis and the Khafji invasion — significant errors, yet easy to miss.
★ Meanwhile, there were many countless practical and immediate buildup-related problems:
Command arrangements had to be both spread out and strengthened. On December 5, Horner decided that his span of control was too large. He therefore put the fighters under Buster Glosson (officially, he became the fighter division commander); the bombers and tankers under Pat Caruana; the electronic assets under Profitt; and the airlifters under Ed Tenoso.
The constant arrival of new intelligence led to changes in the offensive ATO. However, now that there were more strike and support forces, more targets could be hit, so the ATO grew larger and more
complex.
The best use of the new Joint STARS had to be worked out (it arrived for the first time only a day before the war started).
New players such as VIIth Corps had to be accommodated.
The airlift west of XVIIIth and VIIth Corps had to be worked out, once ground movements had been finalized (during their move west to attack positions, the only land artery, the Tapline Road, was paved with trucks. The intratheater airlift created an airbridge that relieved some of that pressure).
More tent cities had to be built, to accommodate the increased numbers of personnel.
There had to be ample munitions at each base. The plan was to have a sixty-day supply on hand; but when the new aircraft arrived, it went down to thirty days. Yet within a few weeks, Bill Rider and his logistics team, with enormous support from the logistics organizations in Europe and the United States, brought munitions up to the required sixty-day supply. Saddam Hussein, constantly underestimating airpower, had told his troops openly that the Coalition would run out of bombs after a few days. He was wrong yet again. Not only did Horner have sixty days’ worth of bombs and missiles on hand when the war started, but they would keep that level day in and day out as the war progressed.
Communications had to be built up, both to support the added forces and to execute offensive operations. Though there were more communications per person in this war than in any other, the miracles performed by Colonel Randy Witt and his communicators were never enough. The TACC could not get timely intelligence from Washington, and then they could never move it fast enough down to the wings. The link providing the AWACS air picture to the air defense command centers and the ships at sea was very fragile. The deployment into the desert of hundreds of thousands of troops with their small satellite terminals drained away vital communication links. And once the bombs started falling, the Air Tasking Order grew geometrically, yet still needed to be distributed on time.
All the while, the basics had to be attended to — such as air defense, in case the Iraqis tried a conventional air attack. AWACS orbits were set up and integrated with the Saudi Air Defense systems, providing complete radar coverage of southern Iraq and northern Saudi Arabia. Twenty-four-hour airborne CAPs were manned with USAF and RSAF F-15s and RAF and RSAF Tornado Air Defense Variants. Occasionally, an Iraqi would fly south at high speed as though planning to cross the border, but would turn back when the airborne CAPs, vectored by AWACS, maneuvered to intercept him. Sometimes they tried to lure Coalition fighters into elaborate ambushes in Iraq, but this never worked, because the AWACS saw the Iraqi ambush aircraft.
Finally, the existing air bases had to be enlarged, or in some cases new ones created.
First, each base was surveyed to see how much more it could accommodate. At some — such as Khamis Mushyat, where the F-117s were based — not much had to be done, since there were only a few more available to deploy. Other bases required much more.
Often, additional munitions storage areas had to be built. At Al Dhafra, in the UAE, one of these was dug in a small hill near a wadi. When it rained, the place filled up with water. The bombs weren’t harmed, but the dunnage and fuse boxes were set afloat.
Even before the buildup, some bases were short of fuel storage. The added aircraft just made the problem worse, and increasing fuel storage was not possible (adding fuel bladders might give a base a day’s additional supply). Bill Rider solved that problem by increasing the flow of fuel to the bases — that is, he increased the number of Saudi tanker trucks moving between fuel-processing facilities and bases. At Al Kharj and other bases, the flying depended on a constant stream of fuel trucks from the fuel-processing facility (in the case of Al Kharj, from Riyadh, about thirty miles north).
Fuel storage at Al Kharj was a problem because it didn’t start out as an air base; it started out as a runway/parking apron — and nothing else — surrounded by sand.
In Desert Shield, the F-15Es had been deployed initially to Thumrait, Oman. Thumrait was a fighter base, it had the fuel and munitions storage required, and much of the Air Force’s pre-position housing was stored there. The F-15E was a long-range attack aircraft, so the nearly eight-hundred-mile one-way trip to the (projected) battlefield (near the Kuwait-Saudi border) was not a problem. In fact, this distance was desirable if the battle started to move south and the Iraqis overran the more northern airfields. However, now that the projected battlefield was about to move north, the long round trip became a big disadvantage. It was therefore decided to move them five hundred miles north to the runway/parking apron the RSAF had built at Al Kharj. This move would put them an hour closer to the war.
Colonel Ray Davies and the 823 Red Horse Squadron, the Air Force’s heavy construction battalion, having just finished building ramps at Al Minhad in the UAE, and taxiways and parking at Sheikh Isa in Bahrain,[51] were sent north by Colonel Hal Hornberg to build a base and a host of living facilities throughout the desert for Air Force, Army, and Navy troops. The Red Horse would raise a city for over five thousand people in a matter of days.
The problems were daunting. For starters, the sand would not hold the tie-down stakes for the Air Force’s temper tents — air-conditioned and heated desert tents that were the envy of their army brothers. Red Horse’s answer was to lay down a deep base of clay over the sand. The clay hardened like cement and gave the camp a stable base. It’s easy when you can think big.
They found and dug out ton after ton of clay, then overlaid miles of desert where they wanted to set down the tents. The next problem was no water or fuel. Their solution was to bring huge rubber bladders from pre-positioned stocks in Oman and Bahrain. Hangars for the airplanes were also up in hours, again from pre-positioned supplies. Munitions storage areas, dining halls, shops, a chapel, operations, even a sand golf course, all rose in weeks. By December, the base was ready to receive two F-15E squadrons, two F-16 squadrons, an F-15C squadron, and a C-130 airlift squadron.
★ The creation of the quick-turn base at KKMC was even harder.
Quick-turn is a simple concept: The great reliability of modern American military aircraft allows them to make several sorties a day, like airliners, lugging bombs instead of passengers. It therefore made sense to locate a base close to Iraq, where the aircraft could be quickly refueled and reloaded, and the pilot could be given target information for a new mission. In that way, they could strike the enemy four or five times a day — in a tempo that would leave the Iraqis reeling.
Coalition Air Bases in the Middle East
Though it had drawbacks, the choice for this base fell on KKMC, less than fifty miles from the border with Iraq. As with Al Kharj before the Red Horse, it contained a runway and taxiways, and little else. More worrying, it could be a prime target for enemy artillery. For that reason, no aircraft would be assigned there. The birds would only come to refresh.
Now Horner needed someone to build a tent city, munitions and fuel storage, and an operations area, and set up intelligence, air traffic control, and maintenance services… all in two weeks — no excuses. To bring off that miracle, he brought in Colonel Bill Van Meter to be the wing commander at the quick-turn base.
On December 21, Van Meter appeared in Horner’s office, still groggy from his rush trip to Saudi Arabia. His challenge: to build a base at the end of the supply line, working his people day and night in an extremely new and isolated environment, while preparing them to survive missile or artillery attack and perhaps be overrun by an armor thrust.
With a rueful smile, he left to talk with Bill Rider and George Summers, the logisticians. Six days later, Horner flew up to KKMC. What he found there amazed him. The base was far from finished, but bulldozers were carving munitions storage berms out of the desert; pipes were being laid for the fuel farm that would enable the fighters to refuel and rearm without shutting down their engines; and a tent city was rising in the desert between the town and the base.
As they toured the base, Van Meter told Horner about a young female airman who had just arrive
d, disoriented and tired. During his briefing to the newcomers about their mission and responsibilities, she had sat calmly, but when he had touched on the possibility of enemy attacks, it had hit her that she just might die. And tears ran down her cheeks.
Flash forward to the days when Scuds were falling and pilots were beginning to die in shot-up jets. That same young woman proved to be one of the strongest combat leaders at KKMC.
COMMAND AND CONTROL
Managing the vast aerial armada called for an immense, intricately connected command-and-control system. Here are some of its more notable elements:
• TACC Current Ops — Located in Riyadh, the Tactical Air Command Center was the central node for the planning and execution of the air war. Chuck Horner maintained his headquarters there.
• AWACS — A Boeing 707 command-and-control aircraft with a large, long-range radar that could see aerial targets at all altitudes, provided they had a velocity over the ground relative to the AWACS aircraft. Though this number was adjustable, it was usually set at speeds greater than seventy knots, so cars would not show up as aircraft. The AWACS provided an air picture to all the theater, and the AWACS air controllers provided navigation assistance and controlled aircraft from pre-tanker rendezvous to poststrike refueling, as needed. F-15s and F-16s, with their powerful air-to-air radars, did not need such help; other aircraft often did.
• ACE Team — A small command-and-control node — usually a planner/ executor, an intelligence person, and one or two duty officers — located on board the AWACS and operating in parallel with the TACC current ops. Because it was closer to the fight, and more aware of what was going on than the TACC staff, the ACE Team had the authority to divert sorties. Normally, though, they kept in close contact with the TACC directors. They could also have acted as a temporary backup if a Scud hit had closed down the TACC.