Every Man a Tiger: The Gulf War Air Campaign

by Tom Clancy

  ★ The D Day ATO tasked the air forces assembled in Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf nations, as well as those aboard the Navy aircraft carriers in adjacent waters, where and when to strike attacking Iraqi forces. It was modest at first, but as more and more aircraft deployed into the AOR, and as more and more planners from the Coalition allies came aboard, the daily ATO (updated daily and stored on floppy disks ready for immediate execution) grew in size and complexity. Meanwhile, as strength on the ground grew with the arrival of more and stronger ground forces, the targeting emphasis changed to reflect new overall campaign strategies.

  ★ Three people watched over the development of the D Day Plan—Major General Tom Olsen (Chuck Horner’s deputy), Colonel Jim Crigger (Horner’s Director of Operations), and Lieutenant Colonel Sam Baptiste from the CENTAF operations staff.

  It would be hard to imagine a more suitable deputy than the silver-haired, grandfatherly, commonsensical A-10 pilot Major General Tom Olsen: Olsen was loyal; thoughtful when Horner tended to be rash; non-egotistical (so he worked Horner’s agenda, not his); and he made decisions Horner could easily live with. Olsen, in Horner’s absence, was the senior commander who approved or disapproved the ATOs and other efforts.

  Colonel Jim Crigger was more directly the driving force behind the setting up of the TACC and its processes to produce the ATOs. Crigger had been the last commander of the 474th TFW at Nellis (the wing was phased out in 1989) and then, when he didn’t make General because of the draw-down resulting from the end of the Cold War, he became available for the Director of Operations job at Ninth Air Force/CENTAF. Crigger was intensely quiet, modest, and self-effacing, yet exceptionally smart (both in intellect and common sense), very tough, and deeply compassionate. After Horner hired him, he very quickly established his credibility with the hard-nosed staff (no small challenge, as they were the world experts in building an ATO and fighting war in the Middle East, having been together for over six years). The staff loved working for him; he coaxed their best efforts without driving them. Not only was his work as DO first class (he asked for guidance only when he needed it), he kept his mouth shut, and let the actions of his staff take the credit—always putting his people in front of himself when laurels were handed out, while taking the shots personally when things went wrong. Instead of ranting and raving at mistakes, he quietly dealt with them (including his boss’s) in private with constructive criticism. It wasn’t just his staff work that was exceptional; he was the point of contact with the deployed wing commanders, the man on the staff who, because he had himself just left wing command, could understand both their comments about ATOs and their needs, but could be counted on for good advice. The result was excellent chemistry with his commander.

  Sam Baptiste had been operations officer for a squadron deployed in Iceland when a pilot had been killed in a crash and the blame laid on him, thus effectively ending his Air Force career. Afterward, Horner arranged to have him assigned to Ninth Air Force. Despite the cloud he was under, few people had his knowledge of fighter operations and intelligence. In the early days of Desert Shield, Baptiste handled the operations staff that determined which units would do which tasks if the Iraqis attacked; and in general, he laid out the details (such as CAPs) for Crigger. Later in the war, he joined Army Lieutenant Colonel Bill Welch in the more important job of planning the Kuwait Theater of Operations (KTO) portion of the daily ATO.

  On August 8, 1990, when Olsen and the elements of the CENTAF planning staff arrived in Riyadh, Horner turned over to him command of CENTAF while he himself was occupied as CENTCOM Forward. Olsen quickly set up a warm working relationship with the RSAF commander, Lieutenant General Ahmed Behery.

  Almost immediately, Jim Crigger and his staff had joined with the RSAF operations staff, and were conducting the appointment and guidance meetings that initiate the ATO planning cycle. Shortly after this, they were publishing a daily ATO. At first, these only coordinated combined air defense sorties, though they quickly grew to cover all the combined and coalition operational and exercise flying in the AOR. (This system was in place by August 13.)

  On August 10, longer-range planning was begun. And on August 12, as the acting CINC, Horner asked Olsen to build a preplanned ATO that would rapidly respond to an Iraqi attack on Saudi Arabia—the “D Day ATO.”

  Though (thankfully) the D Day Plan was never put into effect, it served as a springboard to subsequent planning for an offensive air campaign—not, interestingly, because of the planning itself, but as a training device. Training became an issue when the planning staff was augmented with many new people who were familiar with combat, fighters, and bombers, but who had never built an ATO. Putting together the D Day ATO gave these people on-the-job experience in the reasoning processes and the integration that needs to be considered—such as airspace deconfliction, tanker tracks, command-and-control agencies, radio procedures, and code words.

  Meanwhile, communication of the ATOs between the TACC and operational units was soon accomplished by means of the Computer-Aided Force Management System (CAFMS)—best understood as a combination of word processor and e-mail. In the CAFMS computers were preprogrammed forms (spreadsheets and text). When these were filled out by the planners they became the ATO. These forms were then accessed by the wings that had communication links with the TACC in Riyadh.

  The CAFMS terminals were also used to execute the ATO. At each duty position in the TACC current operations room, the duty officers monitored and communicated with the bases via CAFMS. So, for example, takeoff times would be sent from the wings to the TACC, which meant that the TACC operators knew who was en route to the tankers or their targets and could divert them to other targets if they wished. The TACC would also receive flight abort information, which allowed them to divert other missions against those targets they really wanted to hit.

  CAFMS had several limitations. For one thing, the Navy carriers were not equipped with the SHF antennas needed to receive it, which meant that floppy disks containing the next day’s ATO had to be flown out to the carriers each night. (The foreign air forces that did not have a CAFMS terminal went to the USAF unit collocated with them and picked up the ATO there.) There were also systemic limitations. For example, because it was limited to word processor and e-mail functions, CAFMS was not able to show the effects of upstream changes downstream. Thus, if the TACC operators wanted to change a strike, the computer was not able to show how this change would impact on tanker off-loads and other such data.

  JOHN WARDEN AND CHECKMATE

  As Tom Olsen, Jim Crigger, and their staffs were setting up the planning and operational machinery required in theater, General Schwarzkopf was making good on his undertaking to Chuck Horner in Jeddah on August 7 to ask the Joint Staff to start the planning process for a strategic air campaign.

  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 M
acDill 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 1990 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 days41 (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 French42), 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 a
s 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.