Every Man a Tiger: The Gulf War Air Campaign

by Tom Clancy

  Though he seemed a little shaken by my sharp words, he quickly turned to his target listing. And here John Warden had the real thing. No doubt about it. I could not fault him for the glittering listing of targets he laid out then. Not only did he have access to target materials we had never seen before, but he had a good understanding of target systems, such as the relationship of the communications networks and the KARI air defense system. Most of all, he had a way to rack and stack the targets so we could relate their importance to overall political objectives. It was a solid piece of work, and he and his team could rightfully take pride in it.

  But then, after some discussion, I began asking questions, and the wheels started to come off.

  Keep in mind that the event had two aims. The briefing itself was important. But I was also conducting a job interview. If John Warden handled himself well—as I had every reason to expect he would—he’ d become my planning chief.

  So I had questions for him about the briefing and the CHECKMATE plan—more or less factual questions (but which would at the same time show me how well he thought and judged); and I also had questions aimed at discovering his thought processes. I wanted to know how his mind worked and how he solved problems. To this second end, I threw a number of questions at him that would give him the opportunity to reveal the depth of his knowledge.

  For example, I asked him, “Do you think we direct too much effort toward gaining control of the air?” Now, there is no right or wrong answer to a question like that, but an answer would show his reasoning process in building his plan. However, instead of grabbing the opportunity to show how his mental machinery worked, he simply dropped something like, “No, it’s about right,” telling me that he either knew it all and did not want to share it with me, or else he didn’t have a clue about gaining control of the air and had just filled the “control of the air” bin with some sorties because he needed to fill the square.

  His responses to the more factually directed questions were similar. He danced around them—either because he didn’t know the answers (easy to understand; there was more plan than any less-than-divine mind could easily comprehend), or else because he didn’t want me to be screwing around with his efforts. I suspect it was a little of both.

  Thus, when I tossed at him a question dealing with my broad concerns about the emphasis on targets in the Baghdad metroplex, he dodged it. To explain: Any attack within an urban area carries with it the almost certain guarantee of damage to civilian property, and civilian casualties. But worse, because of its historical and cultural significance among Arabs, the devastation of the ancient city of Baghdad by Western airpower could engender a hatred for the West lasting well beyond the immediate postwar period. It would be an Arab grievance and incitement to revenge for centuries into the future.

  But, as I recall, he had no real answer for this, except perhaps to repeat his confidence in PGMs. Well, okay, I thought. But what if PGMs don’t work as well as we hope? What then? At that point, Warden, as ever, got fuzzy. (In the event, PGMs performed superbly.)

  The truth is, by letting go of a little bit of control over the briefing, he could have easily provided me with useful answers. The plan was the work of many people. If he didn’t know the answer to some question or other, it would have been simple enough to turn to the subordinate on the staff who handled such matters and ask him. He could have easily said to Dave Deptula, for instance, “Dave, you built the air control part of the plan. Can you tell General Horner its basis, your assumptions, any limitations you see, and any possible holes in it?” While doing that would have brought risks, if in fact his subordinates had done their work, it would have been a mark of confidence and trust for him to let them answer. And of course, he could have corrected them as he saw fit. As it was, he was either too proud or too dense to try that solution.

  There were also a number of other issues where we disagreed.

  First, Warden’s plan envisioned pulverizing Iraqi air bases and their command-and-control structure. Though that is good airpower doctrine, I didn’t feel that going that far was either necessary or productive. It seemed to me that if we could render the KARI air defense network ineffective, then we could put the rest of the bombing sorties to better use. If an existing system is no longer going to be used effectively against you, what’s the gain in destroying it?

  Second, I had serious doubts about the way his plan allocated targets by area: some to the U.S. Navy, others to the U.S. Air Force. Though his reasons made some sense (he did it because of the physical constraints of the various aircraft types’ payload and range), he unfortunately ran up against the personal experience of those who’d been frustrated, as I had, by the Route Package system in Vietnam. Now here was an Air Force colonel creating a concept that would easily lead to Route Packages once more. That wasn’t about to happen on my beat.

  But what I really choked on came next.

  The six days of attacks, foreseen by INSTANT THUNDER, were to be directed primarily against vital targets throughout Iraq, and principally on targets in the Baghdad area. That meant, for the most part, that Iraqi forces deployed in Kuwait and on the Saudi border would not be hit.

  Warden’s reasons for this emphasis were straightforward: Airpower properly applied against the Iraqi centers of gravity would cause that nation’s leaders to surrender and withdraw their forces from Kuwait. In his view, Iraqi land forces were actually a detriment, a drain, less a threat than a hungry mass that had to be fed and supplied. Therefore, once we had removed the core national strengths, the Iraqi Army would simply go home.

  Though I admired Warden’s singleness of purpose and his love of what airpower could accomplish, he was not the air commander. I was. More pressingly important, I was the on-scene CINC, and had other matters to consider, the most serious of these being the Iraqi divisions still poised just north of the Saudi boarder in Kuwait. At that moment, we had very few land forces in place to stop them.

  First, while Colonel Warden held that because of our devastating strength in the air, the Iraqi land forces could not succeed in a ground attack, I was not in such a position to hope for the best. I knew that if we started the INSTANT THUNDER operation with only weak forces on the ground, our bases in northern Saudi Arabia might very well be overrun by the Iraqi Army. That makes it very difficult to rearm and refuel aircraft.

  Second, though Warden was certainly correct in his assertion that airpower would play the major role in any forthcoming conflict, I did not consider, as he did, that Iraqi ground forces—or our own ground forces, for that matter—were unimportant. But when I pressed him on these issues, the debate went further downhill.

  Where I had expected intelligence (and Warden was certainly intelligent), I was getting a university academic teaching a 101 class. At every question I asked that dealt with the Iraqi ground forces, he would dismiss my concerns as unimportant. Even if he was right (which I greatly doubt), he would have been wise to forgo the temptation to treat me like a boob. The commander on the scene may well have been a boob, but he doesn’t like to be treated like one. Warden’s problem, I’ve come to realize, was partly due to personal arrogance. He doesn’t easily suffer those who disagree with him. But it was also due to his absolute conviction that the entire package he was presenting was perfect. To question it, much less to doubt it, much less to consider changing it, was for him unthinkable.

  Still, because I was much impressed with the excellence of his overall effort, I kept my patience, a rare thing, and continued to ask questions. “Humor me, John, just for the sake of discussion, what if the Iraqi Army attacks? . . .” But each time, he seemed certain I was too stupid to grasp his central concept and gave me a patronizing “If you could only understand what I’m trying to tell you” answer.

  Soon, as the discussions became increasingly disjointed, the room grew tense. One thing was clear: John Warden and I looked at the problem of air campaign planning differently. He viewed it as an almost Newtonian science, with the targeting l
ist being an end unto itself, while for me, air warfare revolves around the ATO, logistics, joint service and allied agreements, and the million and one little things that he never had to worry about back in the Pentagon. For me, the campaign plan and the targeting list are just the starting point. They are the place where the real work on an air war begins.

  The more he talked, the more I realized that the major flaw in his plan was more than the piece he had left off about the Iraqi Army. The major flaw was that he did not have an executable document. He had no idea of the processes used to integrate the air war and all that is involved. He says, “Hit this and that target.” Fine, but where is the tanker schedule and the airspace deconfliction plan? Where are the rules of engagement, code words, IFF [Identification Friend or Foe] procedures, Coalition forces, radar coverage and orbits, and on and on? He skimmed through the details for a few days’ effort, and ignored the problems he didn’t want to or couldn’t deal with. He saw war in terms of the SIOP: execute this plan and the enemy is defeated. Well, good. But what if he decides not to be defeated? What do we do then?

  In the end, it took weeks to build the first offensive air campaign plan. Much of Warden’s work was in it, but it went far, far beyond his work.

  Sadly, I realized that his brilliance as a thinker would not carry through working with the team in Riyadh. Though I would have liked to use his efforts and his team to build an offensive air campaign, John Warden was too much in love with his own thinking, and too prickly to handle the give-and-take—the communicating—that Riyadh required. I decided he was better off away from the Gulf theater. I did keep the lieutenant colonels he brought with him, to help form the nucleus of the planning cell that we would create.

  John Warden went home, where he did continue to support us by sending forward a flow of valuable planning and targeting information. But as far as I was concerned, he was out of the war.

  BUSTER GLOSSON AND THE BLACK HOLE

  The forced departure of John Warden left Chuck Horner in a bind. He had to take the remains of the CHECKMATE effort, the Internal Look plans, and the discussions with the CINC, and meld these with the thousands of other details needed to build a campaign plan that fit into the CINC’s intentions and, later, his overall plan for the liberation of Kuwait. This included the mundane aspects of logistics, communications, and day-to-day priorities. But more than all that, Horner needed a living, breathing plan that could adapt to the chaos of war, and not a set-piece, preordained effort that would lock him into a battle plan that was based on how his people conceived the world.44 He needed an air strategy that could unfold in an ever-changing struggle, reacting to the enemy, maintaining the initiative and flexibility that airpower—and only airpower—could provide in this conflict.

  Who could he put in charge of the plan? He needed the job filled now—August 20. He looked over his options:

  Jim Crigger could do the job, but he was tied up running day-to-day operations. These were enormous, and getting bigger by the minute, as more reinforcements flowed into the AOR. Tom Olsen could also do it, but CENTAF needed a commander, and Schwarzkopf was still days away from coming in-theater, meaning that Olsen had to continue as Horner’s stand-in for the time being. Brigadier General Larry “Puba” Henry had arrived the day before, on loan until October from General Bob Russ, who had sent him to provide planning expertise on electronic combat operations (Henry had been an electronic-warfare officer—EWO). Few nonpilots make general, and none get to command fighter wings. Henry had done both. He was that good, and that smart. He would have been perfect as planning chief, but Horner needed his full efforts on the electronic-warfare elements of the plan, and besides he was only there on loan. His continued presence wasn’t guaranteed. Brigadier General Pat Caruana was also a possibility (he’d been sent to work the bomber/tanker force), but Horner didn’t know him, so he was out.45

  “I was in a fog about who to pick,” Horner recalls now. “Then, just like in cartoons when the lightbulb comes on over somebody’s head, it hit me. Buster Glosson!”

  Brigadier General Buster Glosson was already in-theater. In June of 1990, he had been exiled (for reasons lost to Chuck Horner) to work for Rear Admiral Bill Fogerty (aboard the USS LaSalle docked in Manamah, Bahrain) as deputy commander, Joint Task Force Middle East (JTFME), a job given to the Air Force in recognition of the important role the AWACS radar aircraft and air refueling tankers played in Operation EARNEST WILL (escorting Kuwaiti oil tankers down the Arabian Gulf and through the Straits of Hormuz). When Horner had arrived in Riyadh, Glosson had flown up to brief him on the KC-135 tanker deployment to the United Arab Emirates during July of 1990, which had been the opening U.S. response to Saddam’s threats prior to the invasion of Kuwait. During the meeting, Buster had asked Horner to keep him in mind if he could be of any use.

  “Yes,” Chuck Horner told himself on August 20. “Now I can use Buster.”

  Buster Glosson was a South Carolina patrician—silver-haired, stocky, extremely intelligent, a smooth talker, quick to laugh . . . also complex, mercurial, and flamboyant. And very political; he was always working an agenda with great skill;46 he was always intriguing; and he was extremely competitive, extremely combative, abrupt, a bulldog: for him, like Vince Lombardi, winning was the only thing. If you were not on his team, then you must be the enemy—an attitude that inevitably caused friction in the staff. In some quarters he was (and is) despised.

  Because he was himself an innovative thinker and doer, and liked aggressive innovators around him, he was a good leader for people with thick skins and daring. But he inflicted deep distress on those with an accountant’s view of the world, or even on those seeking order and quiet.

  Because he liked public praise, he was easy to motivate: praise him publicly and privately point out his shortcomings, and he would work harder than ever. And yet he was for the most part indifferent to what other people thought of him; he marched to his own drum.

  Because he was usually decisive, he had to be reined in now and again, but for Chuck Horner, this was no sin. He would much rather have someone who took action, even if wrong, than someone who stood around waiting to be told what to do.

  Chuck Horner had known Buster Glosson for years, and their relationship had sometimes been stormy, yet Glosson was obviously the one to head the planning effort. It wouldn’t be fun or pretty, but he would get results. He would form a team, and he would seek feedback from the troops who might have to execute the offensive air campaign that he would be tasked to draft.

  Horner called him that night (the twentieth) and ordered him to Riyadh. He was in Horner’s office in the MODA building the next day.

  Horner’s instructions to Glosson were simple: Take the CHECKMATE effort and build an executable air campaign. To begin with, he had to build a team. He could have the CHECKMATE group that remained in Riyadh, he could have Larry Henry, he could raid deployed wings and bring over anyone else he wanted from the States; but since Horner could not spare many from the small CENTAFF staff, he was on his own. Second, Horner wanted to keep the effort U.S.-only, until they had a handle on the details of who was going to be joining in the effort. At the same time, he wanted to open up the effort to the Coalition partners as soon as possible. Third, Glosson’s team needed to get their act together fast; the CINC would arrive in-theater within the week, and Horner didn’t yet know when he would need an air campaign plan. Fourth, his guidance to Glosson was to prepare an ATO for the first two and a half days of the war and then, starting at day three, to be ready to build a new ATO every day until the enemy was defeated. Finally, above all else, Glosson needed to keep very close hold on security. Horner had been led to understand this last point was paramount, not only from the standpoint of operations security, but also because all the Coalition nations were doing their best to persuade Saddam to leave Kuwait peacefully. It would not help negotiations if he found out that the United States intended to destroy him if he didn’t leave.

  Glosson went straight to w
ork. In his usual, brusque fashion, he commandeered everything in sight, including the small conference room adjacent to Tom Olsen’s office on the third floor of RSAF headquarters, as well as a number of CENTAF staff Horner had specifically told him not to touch. He also stole every high-quality person who showed up to augment Jim Crigger’s CENTAF staff. Glosson would grab them, take them into his conference room, and tell them they were going to win the war by themselves, and if they told anyone what they were doing, he would personally rip their lips off their faces. Glosson was such a difficult person to deal with, not everyone was eager to join him, yet once they did, they adored it. The team he forged was tight-knit, and it was an exciting place to work.

  The secrecy of the work, plus the fact that Glosson’s people worked sixteen to eighteen hours a day, meant that a new person who came to Riyadh simply disappeared if he shanghaied them for his team. It was as if they had been sucked up by a black hole. And so Buster Glosson’s area came to be known as “The Black Hole.”

  Late in August, after the D Day plan came to be more or less routine, Horner decided it was a good moment to mix some of the D Day experience and thinking into Glosson’s team (most of Glosson’s group were newcomers, while most of the D Day planners were Ninth Air Force staff who had been around a long time). Thus it was decided to beef up the “Black Hole” shop with a few of the D Day planners—a plan that was somewhat complicated by the secrecy associated with offensive operations: The D Day planners and the Black Hole planners could neither work together nor talk to each other.

  One of the early D Day additions to the Black Hole group was Sam Baptiste. Though he was at first unwilling to work for Glosson (he liked working for Crigger—a preference many shared: Crigger led, Glosson drove), at Horner’s insistence, he came around and agreed to work for Glosson. Baptiste and Army Lieutenant Colonel Bill Welch, a member of Battlefield Coordination Element (BCE) team, became the key planners in building the Kuwait Theater target lists.47