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

by Tom Clancy

  Prince Khaled bought this argument, and he and Horner reached an agreement. The bombers would land at Jeddah after their first combat sortie, then fly the rest of their combat missions into the KTO from General Mansour’s military facilities at King Abdullah Aziz Air Base (the military part of Jeddah New). And Horner kept his side of the deal: the big bombers departed immediately after hostilities concluded.

  Each dinner was different. Some were in embassies, some were in desert tents, some were in palaces. At some there were women; at others they were absent. Some went very late; others broke up early. At all of them, Horner drank orange juice, even though at embassy dinners there were normally liquids not readily available in the Kingdom.

  And for Horner, not all of his performances were shining.

  At an American Embassy reception — trying to play the slick insider — Horner suggested to the AT & T regional manager that the telecommunications infrastructure in Iraq and Kuwait might sustain damage if war broke out, and he might want to think about shipping switching equipment, cable, and other equipment to replace it. “Actually,” the regional manager informed him (punching a large hole in his vanity), “the replacement equipment is already stored in warehouses around the region, awaiting installation after the war.”

  ★ In December, Horner had to sweat. Tony McPeak, the new Air Force Chief of Staff, nominated him for the job of DCINC, or Schwarzkopf’s deputy, to replace USAF Lieutenant General Craven C. “Buck” Rogers (Rogers, who was scheduled to retire in the fall of 1990, did not deploy to Riyadh).

  When a joint position like DCINC came open, the service chiefs were asked to nominate one of their generals for the job. McPeak knew that Schwarzkopf liked Horner, that they worked well together, and that the current DCINC was an Air Force general. If Horner was the DCINC, he reasoned, he could then put another general in CENTAF, which would leave the Air Force well represented in CENTCOM.

  “Bad thinking,” Horner reasoned. “Worse, it’s crazy. Nobody in his right mind wants to be deputy. The deputy handles all the issues the CINC doesn’t want to fool with: he’s the one who gives boring speeches, hosts minor guests at headquarters, attends all the meaningless meetings. And in meetings when the CINC is present, the DCINC is supposed to sit there and say nothing. When the CINC is out of town, he runs things, but God help him if he makes a decision not previously discussed with the CINC.”

  And so Horner pleaded with McPeak. “Don’t do this to me, General,” he told him. “It’s a thankless job. You are not in charge of anything, and can only influence the CINC in private, which I’m already doing as CENTAF. And look — I know this sounds like big ego — but I don’t know where you’re going to find anyone better prepared to command CENTAF. I’m more operationally astute than most, I have more command experience than any of my contemporaries, I know the Middle East and the Arab military leaders, I’ve been working war in the Middle East since 1987, and the CINC is not likely to give a new guy the confidence that I have built up over the months.”

  McPeak, a hardheaded man, resisted these pleas, but to Horner’s immense relief, Schwarzkopf agreed with him; and Colin Powell wanted his own man, Lieutenant General Cal Waller, in the job. Waller, a big, easygoing man, known for his common touch, would be a counterweight, some thought, to the far more imperial Schwarzkopf.

  And so Schwarzkopf kept Horner as his air commander, and Waller became DCINC… and immediately stepped on a media land mine, after the manner of Mike Dugan.

  Current plans called for the massive relocation west of VIIth Corps and XVIIIth Corps for Schwarzkopf’s Left Hook — but only after the start of the air campaign, to prevent Iraqi reconnaissance aircraft from discovering the surprise Schwarzkopf had in store for them.

  After reviewing these plans, including detailed analysis of the difficulties the corps faced in moving, Waller concluded that the two corps would not be in position to attack for several weeks after the air war started.

  This led to the following exchange:

  “Will the Army be ready to fight on the U.N.’s, and now President Bush’s, January fifteenth deadline?” a reporter asked.

  “What’s so important about being ready to fight on the fifteenth?” Waller answered.

  He was technically correct. It was not important for the Army to be ready to fight on the fifteenth, it was important for them to be ready to move west, so they could fight where and when the CINC decided.

  Unfortunately for Waller, his response implied that President Bush’s deadline for Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait was a sham.

  Needless to say, there was little joy in Washington when the headline broke: “CENTCOM DCINC ASKED, ‘WHAT’S SO IMPORTANT ABOUT THE 15TH?’ ”

  Afterward, General Schwarzkopf took heavy — and hardly welcome — hits from his superiors, and Cal Waller never really regained the CINC’s confidence, or had much influence in the upper circles in Riyadh. The resulting fallout ended Waller’s shot at a fourth star.

  One good result of the flap was the cancellation of media interviews. Horner had better things to do.

  ★ Christmas came and went — or C+140, as it was jokingly called in the desert. If C day was the first day of the Desert Shield deployment, then C+1 was the day after that, C+2 the next, and so on until C+140—December 25. In the event, it was a lonely, miserable time for American servicemen and servicewomen in the Gulf. They desperately missed their families. “Have a merry C+140” didn’t quite do it. The good news was that everyone knew the climax was coming very soon.

  New Year’s Day followed. And for Horner, the rest of January was a blur.

  By the end of the first week in January, people were leaving Riyadh, the normally bustling traffic-clogged streets were almost deserted, and weather over Southwest Asia was worsening. It would prove to be the hardest winter in years.

  Horner reflects:

  As the war drew near, I could see the change in the pilots. Now when I visited, they seemed more mature, more sober in their outlook. No more whining questions. They’d had their innocence baked out of them in the hot sun, dulled by the night combat air patrols, scared out of them by night practices and by large-scale rehearsal missions in the increasingly bad weather. They knew now they were going to war — an event they’d trained for all their professional lives and feared they’d never experience. They were going from the practice field to the Super Bowl. Some would not make it, yet they were not afraid. Neither was there much joy (though there was laughter) — a condition caused not by the threat of war but by loneliness and separation from loved ones.

  No longer were we carefree, fun-loving fighter pilots.

  On 15 January, I wrote my wife,

  “This may be my last letter for some time. My mental attitude will likely be such you won’t want to hear from me anyway. Some days lately I could puke. There are so many people who have no clue about air, people who are jealous because we have the predominant act in this circus. They spend all their time trying to get their two cents in at the expense of getting the job done.

  “I try to keep our operations stable and work to stay above the petty crises, because I know that when the shooting starts, the nervous Nellies will run away.

  “Forgive such a shitty letter, but we are entering a big game and I have a thousand details to attend to. Perhaps when the rest get doing their wartime thing, I’ll have more time. Till then, know in your deepest secret place, I love you so very much.”

  III

  The Thousand-Hour War

  8

  Storm!

  Chuck Horner tells what happened next:

  I arrived in the TACC shortly after 0100 on the seventeenth of January 1991. The war, scheduled to start at 0300, Riyadh time, was moments away.

  The January 15 U.N. deadline had come and gone. Even the added teeth of President Bush’s threat—“Evacuate Kuwait or face military action”—had produced no concrete results (though there’d been a flurry of diplomatic activity). This didn’t surprise me. I was sure Saddam w
ouldn’t back down, if for no other reason than he had dug too many trenches, piled too many sandbags, and poured too much concrete in the desert. He must have figured he held a winning hand, which had me worried about an ace up his sleeve. Yet how could he, I’d asked myself over and over, when we hold all four aces?

  President Bush had sent a message to General Schwarzkopf: The start of the liberation of Kuwait is up to you, but make it as soon after the fifteenth as possible. The CINC had in turn delegated that responsibility to me. And I had chosen the early hours of January 17 as the best moment to launch the aerial assault.

  This plan was based on a single factor. On that date would occur the least possible illumination in the night sky — no moonlight. Our F-117s were virtually invisible to radar, but they were visible to Iraqi fighter pilots; and they were particularly visible against the backdrop of a moonlit sky. They were attacking the toughest, most heavily defended target ever struck from the air — Baghdad. We were going to give them every possible advantage.

  ★ Knowing that I’d get very little sleep in the next days, I’d gone home to the USMTM compound next door at about 2100 that evening to try to sleep… until midnight, anyway. But sleep did not come. I was too keyed up, too tense. I lay there in the empty apartment (Yeosock and Fong were working at ARCENT and my aide Hoot Gibson had gone to Al Dahfra to fly in combat), trying to get some rest, wondering what I had forgotten, wondering what I had missed that would cost the life of a pilot. Sure, I knew some would die, but I wanted to be certain I had not made the mistake that cost them their lives.

  There had been no last-minute phone calls to General Schwarzkopf, or to anyone else. These would not have been appropriate. We didn’t want an increase in communications traffic to tip off the enemy that something big was in the works, though I am sure they expected something after the fifteenth.

  Shortly after the deadline passed, wheels had been set in motion. And on January 16, B-52s from the 2d Bombardment Wing of the Mighty Eighth Air Force, armed with conventional air-launched cruise missiles (CALCMs), had departed Barksdale AFB, Louisiana (an event duly reported on CNN). The Mighty Eighth would go to war once more, this time under command of the Ninth Air Force. Quite a turnaround from the days of SAC rule. Seven B-52s were to fly a round trip of 14,000 miles in thirty-five hours (the longest combat mission in history) and fire thirty-five CALCMs at eight targets — military communications sites and power-generation and transmission facilities.

  Why send B-52s all the way from Louisiana?

  In any war, there were many time-sensitive targets, that is, targets we wanted to hit early — command-and-control nodes, Scud storage areas, airfields, and so on — all of which we wanted to close down quickly so we could hit our other targets more efficiently as assets (fighter-bombers) became available after turnaround. Therefore, it made sense to plan the opening moments of the war to include as many strikes as possible, as quickly as possible; and cruise missiles, though expensive, gave us the ability to hit many targets simultaneously.

  In this war, cruise missiles were fired not only from B-52s but from battleships and submarines (thus showcasing the Navy). The Air Force’s B-52s and their cruise missiles were the first to take off and the first to fire a shot in anger (thus showcasing the Air Force’s emerging Global Reach Global Power doctrine). Ordnance from Army Apaches was the first to explode. And Air Force F-117s were the first to penetrate the airspace of Iraq. Lots of firsts for everybody.

  Our tankers, AWACS, and fighters flying the air defense combat Air Patrols and training sorties had been flying near the Iraq border every day and night since August 6 (and the RSAF had been doing that alone before we got there). These flights had been carefully increased over the past weeks, so Iraqi radar operators looking across into Saudi Arabia would not be alarmed at the large numbers of radar returns. What they didn’t see were hundreds of aircraft, primarily tankers and bomb-laden fighters, orbiting farther back from the border at altitudes below the Iraqi radar’s line of sight over the horizon.

  The first wave of these were deep-penetrating aircraft — F-111s, F-15Es, Tornadoes, F-16s, A-6s, and more F-117s. These had the range and large bomb loads needed to hit Iraqi command-and-control bunkers, Scud launch pads and storage areas, telecommunications and radio facilities, and airfields. They were complemented by F-15Cs, F-14s, and air defense Tornadoes, which would orbit above Iraqi airfields, waiting for Saddam’s Air Force to rise to the defense of its country.

  Also prowling over Iraq were a host of vital support aircraft — EF-111s to electronically blind Iraqi radar, Wild Weasels and Navy A-7s, equipped with high-speed radiation missiles to physically blind surface-to-air missile radar, and Special Operations helicopters, waiting near Baghdad to conduct pickup of downed aircrew. Throughout the night and next day, RF-4, U-2, RF-5, and TARPS-configured Navy/Marine aircraft flew reconnaissance and provided battle damage assessment of our opening strikes.

  Backing up all of this were countless KC-135, KC-10, KC-130, and A-6 refueling tankers orbiting ever closer to the Iraqi border as the first wave of fuel-thirsty fighters and bombers returned from deep inside Iraq.

  While airpower was striking the heart of Iraq, its army in the KTO did not go unnoticed. Waves of B-52s from England, Spain, and Diego Garcia began an unceasing avalanche of flaming iron upon the Republican Guard and other Iraqi troops. The rising sun brought another form of terror, as deadly A-10s dove down with their Maverick missiles, 30mm guns and bombs on tanks, armored personnel carriers, trucks, artillery, supply depots, and air defense SAMs and AAA guns.

  Worse was to come, from thousands of other aircraft — versatile F-16s, often quickly turned around at KKMC airport, switching in moments from deep striker to hits on Iraqi Army targets minutes north of the border; F/A-18s from the Navy and Marine Corps; allied Jaguars, Mirages, A-4s, F-5s, and F-16s; and waves of bombers and fighters from Incirlik Air Base in Turkey.[59]

  Number of Fighter, Attack, and Bomber Aircraft

  All of these aircraft were waiting for the moment they would start the massive rush across the border that would open the aerial pounding of Iraq, which would go on unabated for the next 1,000 hours. What you don’t know can hurt you.

  Meanwhile, the first BGM-109 Tomahawk missiles were launched by Navy ships, aimed at vital targets in Baghdad, our first act that could not be recalled. When those missiles left their launch tubes and cells aboard the battleship Wisconsin, we were committed to war.

  Even while the Tomahawks and F-117A Stealth fighters were streaming toward Baghdad, the first blow of the war was struck in Iraq’s western desert, as Task Force NORMANDY — a pair of Special Operations MH-53J PAVE LOW helicopters guiding a force of eight AH-64A Apache helicopter gunships — was approaching air defense early-warning radar sites near the Saudi border. The destruction of these sites would blow a hole in Iraqi’s radar “fence” and buy time for ingressing F-111Fs, F-15Es, and Tornado GR-1s tasked to strike air defense and Scud targets in central and western Iraq. The closer these aircraft came to their targets before the Iraqi air defense radars and ground observers alerted their defenses, the greater the odds they would hit their targets successfully and return home. A lot of folks were depending on those soldiers in their Apaches, as well as the Air Force airmen in the PAVE LOWs, whose elaborate navigation and targeting sensors were leading the Apaches through the dark night.

  When the time came, the Apaches launched their Hellfire missiles, and moments later we had our fence hole.

  Meanwhile, as the world would soon see on CNN, thousands of guns and surface-to-air guided missiles defended the Iraqi capital city. Airfields ringing the city bristled with some of the most modern air defense interceptors, their pilots eager to get their first kill. The entire network of defenses was tied together with the ultrasophisticated French-built KARI command-and-control system. Though we didn’t know it yet, KARI was about to commit hari-kari, by getting in the way of a bunch of grimly determined airmen.

  We truly didn’t kn
ow.

  How soon would our strikes silence the command and control? How soon would they spark terror in the gunners, SAM operators, and fighter pilots? How many golden BBs (wildly fired stray bullets) would strike our aircraft? How good were our F-117s? Sure, we had all the test data, all the exercise results, and all the theory; but this was the first time this revolutionary aircraft would play in a big game. (Their debut in Panama had been against undefended targets where the goal was to confuse some sleeping soldiers.) Well, the F-117 team had left the practice fields behind them. Tonight they would receive the air warfare equivalent of a Super Bowl kickoff. Not only did they have to penetrate those intense defenses, they had to hit their targets without fail, since all the rest of the crews behind them were depending on the F-117As to devastate the Iraqi air defenses. They had to hit the system’s eyes and brain — radars, command bunkers, communications sites — with never-before-demanded accuracy, and with no collateral damage.

  ★ At 0100, when I joined our team in the front row of the TACC, almost everyone was there (except for those scheduled to come on the day shift at 0700), watching the growing numbers of radar returns displayed by the AWACS data link on the huge TV screens on the front wall.

  One screen gave the AWACS picture. On it, lines showed the boundaries of Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Israel, Syria, Jordan, and Turkey, as well as the northern ends of the Red Sea and the Arabian Gulf. Baghdad was at the center, Riyadh just off the bottom edge of the screen, Incirlik, Turkey, just off the top, the Mediterranean Sea just off the left, and Tehran just off the right. On the screen were red, yellow, or greenish-blue icons. Red was the enemy, yellow unknown, and the others friendly. Beside each icon was a series of four numbers, indicating the track number given by AWACS to the blip they were receiving on their radar.