Every Man a Tiger: The Gulf War Air Campaign

by Tom Clancy

  For his first Red Flag, Horner commanded two squadrons from his home base. General Hartinger,22 Ninth Air Force Commander, also assigned him another job: he was to be the man responsible (officially: the Ninth Air Force Senior Representative). In other words, if there was an accident at Red Flag, then he expected Horner to explain it. As a result, while Horner commanded only the primary unit, the two squadrons from Seymour Johnson, he was responsible to the Ninth Air Force commander for everything that went on; and if anything went wrong, God help his career. Since the threat of hanging tends to focus one’s attention, he made sure he sat in on the briefings and planning, spoke up if he sensed someone was going to do something stupid, and sent people home who didn’t play by the rules. The result: everything went smoothly.

  In time, Horner flew in more than his share of Red Flags, and he learned there many things. For instance, his long-held opinion about the absurdity of low-level penetration of enemy defenses was reinforced at first hand at a Red Flag in January 1977. His squadrons were playing the role of red air (enemy air) in F-4Es, while blue air F-111s were trying to sneak in on the deck. These particular F-4Es were equipped with TISEO, a TV telescope mounted on the left wing root that could be slaved to the radar. That way, on their radar screen, pilots could see a TV picture of the target they were locked into, which allowed visual ID of the target while it was still beyond eyeball range. Using TISEO, pilots could tell the type of aircraft they were facing at sufficient distance to launch an AIM-7 medium-range missile in a head-to-head engagement, closing at a total speed of 1,000 to 1,300 knots. The 111s themselves, with their distinctive, ungainly look, were easy to spot; and because they were flying close off the ground, visual acquisition was a snap. Then, for Horner’s red team, it became just a matter of gaining sufficient smash (airspeed) to convert on them and film them with gun cameras. “It wasn’t unlike shooting strafe at a banner,” Horner remembers, “except in this case the target was moving at six hundred knots over the ground at fifty or a hundred feet. Just stay above the target and you won’t hit the ground.”

  Pilots learned other basic lessons at Red Flags, as well: how to evaluate their situation in the confusion of combat (even as some people were talking too much on the radio, and others were talking too little); the necessity of looking after their wingmen and of herding a flight into the target and then into the return without soaking up fatal shots (even if they were only on video recorders); the necessity of using simple conservative tactics, so all can cope when the plan does not unfold as expected; the necessity of keeping situational awareness, even as hundreds of aircraft are swirling every which way at supersonic speeds; and the difficulty of finding the target and bombing accurately when a pilot’s radar warning receiver is screaming in his ear that he is going to die in a few seconds unless he does something (most likely what he is already doing).

  Though Red Flags did not totally replicate combat, they definitely caused pressures that resulted in the same adrenaline flow and the same cotton-mouthed feeling.

  THE GCC SYSTEM

  Finally, the GCC—Graduated Combat Capability—system, like Aggressor Training and Red Flag, was another way to train the way they planned to fight. To make this a reality on a day-to-day basis, standards were devised and an accounting system established: for a base to be combat-ready, so many sorties of a certain type had to be flown each quarter. For example, in an F-15 air-to-air wing, each pilot needed to fly X number of one-versus-one maneuvering, and Y number of multi-ship two-versus-two (or more) tactics missions. If a pilot then aimed for a higher level of readiness, he needed additional and more demanding missions.

  The accounting system kept track of aircrew training activity and quality, in order to define the combat readiness of the force. More experienced pilots were given lower requirements. Thus there were A-, B-, C-, and D-level pilots, based on their total fighter time, and time in the current aircraft (a fighter pilot with 1,500 hours total time, of which 300 hours was in his current jet, might be an A-level pilot, whereas a new pilot with 800 hours of fighter time might need 750 in the current jet to reach A level). The pilots then operated at three levels of combat readiness—basic, advanced, and ultimate. A pilot at the ultimate level was so experienced, and was flying at such a high rate, that he was certified combat-ready in any mission the jet was capable of performing.

  THE BILL CREECH REVOLUTION

  All of this new training was wonderfully effective, but it still didn’t address the root, systemic causes of the Air Force’s problems with morale and discipline. The men could fly better, but the legacy of Vietnam had taken its toll on military institutions, and the old leaders followed styles of command—fear and intimidation—that had been in vogue during World War II and Korea but were useless today.

  These problems were compounded, once again, by SAC’s dominion over the Air Force. To a SAC general, all bombers and bomber crews were interchangeable. Fighter generals played the team according to the strengths and weaknesses of the individual pilots and their individual jets, but there weren’t enough fighter generals to make an impact on the culture at TAC. As a result, midlevel TAC leadership of Chuck Horner’s age group had for the most part either died in the war or left the service to avoid that fate.

  Pilots, in particular, were leaving the Air Force in droves. The reasons were clear: they had joined the Air Force to serve their nation flying jet aircraft. Instead, they would come to work at 5:00 A.M. to brief for a 7:00 A.M. takeoff, wait until 9:00 A.M. until three of the four scheduled aircraft were reported by maintenance to be actually ready to fly, and finally mount up on these three planes, only to find after they started them up that one of them was in fact not capable of safe flight. Meanwhile, since the two planes that got airborne did not have working fire-control radars, the crews burned holes in the sky in a valiant effort to fly out the wing’s assigned number of hours.

  The situation grew worse daily, and so, monthly and yearly, the flying-hour program was revised downward, in the hope of discovering the minimum level of flying operations that was supportable. It wasn’t anybody’s fault. There was no money for spare parts; maintenance mechanics were not trained, owing to the hemorrhaging caused by the lack of experienced personnel; readiness reports were shaded to look good, so higher headquarters felt justified in reporting to their boss in Washington that the Air Force was ready to carry out its wartime mission.

  Experienced pilots were sick of the false reporting, the meaningless ground jobs (designed to keep them busy when there were no aircraft to fly), and the seemingly endless tragedies, as young, inexperienced, and noncurrent pilots died in needless aircraft accidents.

  The drug problem was endemic in the nation, so it was no surprise that it affected the military, too. But it was one thing to be high on drugs at a party, and another to be high while guarding nuclear weapons or maintaining jets.

  A case in point:

  In 1977, while Horner was at Seymour Johnson, home of not only a TAC wing but a Strategic Air Command bomber wing, special agents from the Air Force’s Office of Special Investigations discovered a drug problem on the base. One night after a change of the guard mount assigned to protect the weapons-storage area, the security policemen turned in their weapons and left the building, intending to go home or back to the barracks. Instead they entered a waiting phalanx of lawyers and OSI agents, who proceeded to read Miranda rights to 151 of a total of 225 policemen. They then charged all 151 with use or possession of illegal drugs (in this case, marijuana).

  Another night a year later, at Luke AFB, where Horner was wing commander, OSI agents boarded the van used on the wing’s flight line to transport mechanics out to the various F-15 fighter aircraft that needed maintenance. They arrested not only the van’s driver for dealing in illegal drugs, but seven technicians who just happened to be taking a “hit” before going to work in the vitals of a $30 million jet.

  There was a race problem, too, but race was not as serious an issue in the Air Force as it was in
the nation as a whole. Racial polarization in the Air Force setting was in reality a reflection of the alienation of the young from the officers and NCOs. A unit that had pride and discipline did not tolerate racial polarization, because they were a team. Unfortunately, there were all too few teams.

  Chuck Horner takes up the story:The lack of retention of trained mechanics and aircrews, the drugs, and the apparent lack of defense funding were the excuses. But the real reason we were on our ass was much simpler: we had lost the vision of who we were, what was important, and how to lead and how to follow, how to treat our people both with love and discipline and a sense of mission. In short, we had lost pride in ourselves. Pride is not arrogance. As Dizzy Dean said, “If you done it, it ain’t bragging.” Our “ done it” was simply being ready to go to war, and in war to win.

  Well, we weren’t able to honestly claim we’ d “ done it.” The result was we were living a lie and had lost our pride. Do not scoff at pride. For a military person, pride is vital. How else do you think we get people to work long days and weekends, leave their families at a moment’s notice, endure living in tents and eating packaged food that no grocery store could sell, and do all that with minimum pay and the expectation that they might have to lay down their very lives? Military units live on pride, pride born of confidence in themselves and the man or woman on their left and right. Sure, they take pride in serving the nation, and they get goose bumps when they see its flag. But what really counts is pride in doing their job well, pride in their subordinates and leaders, and pride that their lives are spent serving a cause higher than themselves. After Vietnam, we tore pride down instead of building it. We lied about our readiness, we shortcut our maintenance, we chased our tails trying to fly more when in fact we flew less, our aircraft were dirty and broken and they looked broken, we dumped our people in housing that wasn’t habitable, our pay was frozen (in an effort to halt inflation), and our troops worked in temporary buildings left over from World War II that would have embarrassed any Third World slum. Discipline along with pride had fallen by the wayside, so the good ones walked and the feeble ones turned to drugs. We had become a Communist nation within the very organization that was to protect our nation from the threat of communism.

  ★ Then, in 1978, General W. L. “Bill” Creech was appointed commander of TAC.

  A onetime leader of the Skyblazers and Thunderbird acrobatic teams, Bill Creech was a consummately skilled and precise fighter pilot. After a tour as Director of Operations at the Nellis Fighter Weapons School, he’d served as the senior assistant to General Sweeney, the bomber pilot who then commanded TAC, and the author of those infamous impromptu phone calls. Though he never said an unkind word about General Sweeney, Creech took care never to emulate him. Above all, Bill Creech was a practical philosopher and psychologist. In analyzing problems, his philosophical side looked well beyond the obvious in a search for root causes; he then doggedly worked for ways to prevent things from going wrong again. As a psychologist, he was a student of human nature, seeking to understand why people made mistakes—not in order to rebuke them, but to find ways to change the environment that led to the failures.

  He was eccentric, fastidious about his personal appearance, tireless in his search for excellence, and as demanding of himself as he was of others.

  How did he begin to address the problems of the Air Force?

  The essential Air Force vision has always remained the same: the application of force—quickly, precisely, violently, massively. Aircraft in the air doing whatever it takes to gain control of the air, putting weapons precisely on their targets, flying as safely as possible. Success in each of these areas can be measured. The data can be very precise. How many aircraft do you have flying (and not, for example, in the hangars being repaired)? How many hours are the pilots in the air learning their skills? How well are they learning those skills? How many bombs are on target? How many planes crashed per given period of time?

  By any serious measure, the Air Force was not answering those questions satisfactorily, but why? What was preventing good, highly motivated people from doing the work that they passionately wanted to do?

  The answer, Creech decided, was centralization, the top-down management structures so beloved of Robert McNamara and the SAC generals. Creech hated centralization, because it robbed the individual of ownership of his job, deprived him of responsibility, and destroyed his initiative. The people in the Air Force, he liked to say, had turned into Russian workers: “We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.” For him, centralization was a fantasy based on the dream of a totally efficient institution, but it wrecked against the hard rocks of actual, everyday human personality and behavior. People simply didn’t operate the way centralization expected and predicted they would.23

  Every organization is made up of building blocks, and if the organization is running smoothly, these building blocks mesh smoothly together. The way centralization does it is to organize them from the top down, and functionally—that is, by functional specialty, and by the job done within that function. For instance, specialists are gathered together in centralized locations and sent to work on jobs as needed: electricians work together with other electricians, hydraulics specialists work with other hydraulics specialists, all parts are located in a centralized supply area, and so on.

  Under this system, all jets and all the people who work on them are alike and interchangeable. The whole mass is rated, and individual success or failure is obscured. The basic rationale for this is “economies of scale”: efficiency, cost savings, elimination of duplication.

  When Bill Creech arrived at TAC Command, however, he found no hard data supporting any of these claims—in fact, quite the opposite. When all the electricians worked from a centralized shop, and were dispatched in trucks to service an entire wing’s flight line (three squadrons of twenty-four aircraft apiece, a total of seventy-two fighters), there was a lot of travel, coordination, and paperwork involved. There were no economies of scale. With a centralized storage area, it took an average of three and a half hours from the time a part was ordered from the storage area to the time it was delivered to its customer. By then the technician who ordered it would have either moved on to another job, cooled his heels and drunk several cups of coffee with his buddies, perhaps lost interest in the job, or even conceivably forgotten the nature of the problem he was originally fixing. Out of the 4,000 TAC aircraft, 234 a day, on average, were what were called “hangar queens,” those grounded for more than three weeks for supply or maintenance problems. Of those aircraft that broke in some way during a normal flight, only one out of five were flyable again on the day they broke. And overall mission-capable rates were at 50 percent or less. (By way of comparison, in the stress and high tempo of Desert Storm, mission-capable rates were at over 95 percent.)

  The “functional fiefdoms” (as Creech called them) of electricians, supply, weapons specialists, and so on, were oriented, he discovered, not toward satisfying the needs of the primary product (the aircraft) and of the various subsidiary products and functions connected with keeping the aircraft in the air, but toward satisfying the needs of the organization. Also, because of the vertical orientation of these fiefdoms, they did not work easily or comfortably together with the other fiefdoms—they didn’t mesh well with each other, as Creech put it.

  “When’s the last time you washed a rental car?”

  —A SERGEANT IN CONVERSATION WITH BILL CREECH

  What did Creech do to change TAC?

  First he started an education campaign, and used hard data to persuade those who believed in centralized systems that they had failed. Meanwhile, he set up trial units as models of decentralization, and then he compared the two. Once the hard data had proved the superiority of decentralized systems, he began to put those systems in place throughout TAC.

  He reshaped the basic building blocks from vertical to horizontal, and broke up the “functional fiefdoms.” Flight line maintenance, for example, was organ
ized and integrated into product-oriented squadron teams (and smaller), in which electricians, aircraft mechanics, and hydraulics specialists all worked together. Members of one specialty were given elementary training in other specialties, so they could help their colleagues out, when needed, and would also have a better sense of the whole problem. Now, instead of a centrally administered central supply complex, all supplies directly related to aircraft supply were moved to the flight line, together with “dedicated” supply specialists who were devoted only to their flight line customer. Small computers that kept track of inventories also helped.

  The squadron teams each set their own goals and devised their own schedules. Each made its own decisions, all of them aimed at the final product—planes in the air.

  Finally, each fighter aircraft now had a “dedicated crew chief,” whose name was painted on the side of the aircraft. That aircraft was now “his” or “hers.” They “owned” it. It was up to them to be responsible for decisions—including mistakes—rather than waiting for orders from headquarters. While they would surely help one another out if needed, and the various technical specialists within the squadron teams were available to help, their performance was judged on how their jet or flight or squadron unit performed. At the same time, they were given what they needed, including more training, to make their jet perform well.

  In time, Creech’s decentralizing led to real ownership and empowerment, real teamwork, clear-cut accountability (poor performance was now easy to track), and a system in which people were able to operate as humans and not as functions in some machine.

  Problems began to be solved by the people closest to them, to be cut off at the source. The problem solvers were freed both to do it right and also to make mistakes. Mistakes will be made—the key is to try to prevent them from recurring, and the best way is to make sure they are self-correcting.