Every Man a Tiger: The Gulf War Air Campaign

by Tom Clancy

  Glosson and the Black Hole gang worked day and night, and as the hours grew longer, tempers grew shorter. Glosson didn’t have much patience with slow learners or foot-draggers. And when a few of the original CHECKMATE team proved unable to adapt their thinking, they had to return to the States. Others, like Dave Deptula, excelled; the harder it got, the more they flourished.

  The biggest of their problems was the moving-train aspect of planning. As soon as they’d have some piece of it set up, another unit would arrive and have to be accommodated in the plan; and this, in turn, could change everything else. Or else someone would gain a new insight into a better way to conduct an attack or defeat a system, and that would turn the whole plan upside down. Or else they’d outline a course of action, only to get bogged down in a shortage of aerial refueling tracks or of appropriate types and numbers of munitions. Each day was more confusion than order and light, yet they steadily hard-worked their way through it.

  ★ On August 23, General Schwarzkopf arrived in Riyadh.

  As soon as possible, Horner left him with all the diplomatic problems and organizational worries and hurried back to CENTAF, sharing an office in RSAF headquarters with Tom Olsen. Next door, the Black Hole gang was in full swing, with Buster Glosson constantly rushing in and out, trying out new ideas and sharing progress reports with Horner and Olsen. It was a heady time.

  On August 26, Glosson emerged from the Black Hole to brief his offensive air campaign to Horner. This did not turn out to be one of Buster Glosson’s shining moments. Though the plan itself was splendid, the briefing was a disaster. And Horner made his disappointment loudly apparent. When a crestfallen Buster Glosson returned to the Black Hole, and the others there asked him how it went, he summarized Horner’s criticisms this way: “The briefing,” he told them with searing honesty, “was (1) ill-prepared, (2) poorly presented, and (3) violently received.” They needed to go back to work.

  The issue for Horner was not about the quality of the plan. He already saw that was shaping up just fine. The issue was that once Horner had signed off on it, the briefing would go to General Schwarzkopf. And the CINC would not only have to understand the plan, he would also have to buy into it as his own; and then he would also have to be prepared to defend this plan before General Powell, Secretary Cheney, and the President. Since the CINC’s greatest fear was to lose his reputation, it was important to make sure that nothing happened that might embarrass him. That meant he had to comprehend what Horner and Glosson were telling him in sufficient detail that he was certain not to fail to answer any question Powell, Cheney, or Bush might ask him. And that meant Horner had to give him something he could comprehend (and alter if he so desired); but most of all, it had to be something that made him feel comfortable.

  However, the briefing was so fuzzy, poorly organized, and broad that it was difficult for a listener to understand—especially if he was not an airman. It gave the impression that the Air Force didn’t have a strong focus on its battle aims; it showed no understanding of the sequential effects of its plan of attack. Instead, they just seemed to be running around blowing things up in a helter-skelter fashion.

  Later, Horner and Glosson got together to work out what needed to be done. Here, as throughout the planning process, Buster Glosson did the basic planning brainwork, while Horner made the plan intelligible to other people—and especially to non-airmen. He coached, he was a cheerleader and a sounding board, but he tried to stay out of the details. He was quick with pats on the back when the planning showed promise and innovation, and a frowner and barb-tosser when it did not.

  During their discussion, Horner hit on the idea to turn Schwarzkopf’s briefing into something like a movie that would tell the unfolding story of how they planned to use airpower. The “movie briefing” would work something like this:

  First, they would talk about the weeks preceding the strike, when extra sorties would be flown every night, to get the Iraqis used to seeing activity. Likewise, in the days preceding the strike, tankers would begin to move forward with the fighter packages. And then in the opening scene of the “movie,” the jets would take off late at night in minimum moonlight, to reduce the chance an Iraqi fighter could find the F-117 contingent visually as they slipped across the border at altitude. The scene would unfold with the nonstealth aircraft flying beneath the coverage of the long-range Iraqi radar. Then Special Operations helicopters would lead in the Army Apaches, which struck the first blow when they fired Hellfire missiles against a pair of border radars. (This was actually a later change, made after Schwarzkopf realized that Special Operations was going to strike the first blow. Since Schwarzkopf was famously suspicious of Special Forces, it was decided that the U.S. Army Apaches would strike the first blow, all of which helped sell the plan.) The rest of the briefing-movie scenes would follow:

  The F-117s would hit Baghdad and the communications centers. F-111s would hit the Sector Operations Centers for KARI. F-15Es would hit fixed Scud sites. F-18s/F-16s/A-10s/AV-8s would hit Iraqi Army units. A host of allied aircraft would also be doing their part: RAF Tornadoes would hit airfields; RAF Jaguars would hit the Iraqi Army; RSAF F-5s would hit airfields in the western parts of Iraq; Special Operations helicopters would be infiltrating to pick up downed airmen; there were tankers, AWACS, F-15 and Tornado ADV (Air Defense Variant) CAPs; there was Rivet Joint on the Voice Product Network (a secure, encrypted voice network that allowed the intelligence technicians on the Rivet Joint to relay vital information to the AWACS controller, who would then pass it on to the fighter in unclassified form). It was the full panoply of all that would unfold in the opening days of the war. And it would give a clear indication of what would continue. That is, the Iraqi Army would be so worn down that the land war to come would feature very few casualties.

  To make all this work, Horner had Glosson build a series of plastic overlays with symbols showing where the various aircraft would be at various times, together with the targets they were planning to strike. Thus, the 0300 overlay showed F-117s near Baghdad, while the tankers with assorted fighters were well to the south, and the Rivet Joint and AWACS were in the orbits they usually occupied. Then the 0400 overlay showed explosion symbols on the targets being struck, together with the next wave of attackers. This overlay also showed the MiG CAPS over Iraq and not Saudi Arabia, as they had been all during Desert Shield. The movie unwound before the viewer not unlike a primitive jerky cartoon. Even so, anybody watching would get a sense of the timing, the enormity, the integration, and the sequence of attacks and how they related to taking down the air defenses, and hitting critical time-sensitive targets.

  Owing to the CINC’s anxieties about the Republican Guard, one significant element was added by Schwarzkopf to the plan, and to the briefing. Provisions had to be made to attack the elite Iraqi force early and often. The problem for him was this: Colin Powell had decreed that success involved killing the Republican Guard, which for him was the Iraqis’ strategic military center of gravity. Thus, Schwarzkopf did not want the loss of the Republican Guard to take place on his watch, and so he feared that when the bombing started, the Republican Guard would pull up stakes and head for Baghdad, and he would be judged a failure. In order to ease the CINC’s ever-growing anxieties, a large part of the air campaign was given over to preventing the Republican Guards from leaving the battlefield. They were bombed heavily, with more B-52 sorties added later. (In fact, Horner always doubted that the Republican Guards would leave the field. First of all, it would have put them on the roads, where they would have been easy pickings. And second, if Saddam’s strategy remained as it appeared then—that is, to plunge Coalition forces into the defensive arrangements he had worked so hard to erect along the border—then it didn’t make sense to remove his strongest forces from the battle. In this, Horner later proved to be right.)

  After Horner and Glosson worked through this “movie briefing,” Glosson went back into his office, and a few hours later he emerged with the plastic overlay briefing tha
t was to be his until the war started in January (though updated and fine-tuned constantly). This briefing in its various evolutions was given many times to General Schwarzkopf (who liked it enough to instantly make it his own), to Colin Powell on his September 12 visit to Riyadh, and to the Secretary of Defense and the President in Washington, D.C., a month later.

  One change Horner added to the early briefing was to have a chart made that showed the fight taking place in phases. By phases he meant that various objectives would be emphasized at various times—that is to say, the four phases did not actually indicate separate actions, one beginning as the last ended, but levels of focus. They offered a way to communicate airman talk to non-airmen, and they were basically simple, the first phase being to gain control of the air, and the last to prepare the battlefield and support the land attack.

  So:• PHASE I—STRATEGIC AIR CAMPAIGN. To gain control of the air and hit the Iraqi leadership, NBC, Scuds, and electric and oil infrastructure. The idea was to deny Saddam supplies but not necessarily to destroy his heavy industry. That is, power and fuel would be attacked, but in such a way that facilities could be reconstituted relatively easily after the war—e.g., grids would be hit instead of generators.

  • PHASE II—AIR SUPERIORITY IN THE KTO. This idea came from General Schwarzkopf, who was thinking like an army general, in terms of land area and lines on maps. Even though this phase was redundant (gaining control of the air would happen simultaneously over Iraq and over Kuwait), Horner didn’t fight him on it. It gave him buy-in to the plan (as in, “I thought of that”), so why argue with him?

  • PHASE III—PREPARATION OF THE BATTLEFIELD. This included isolating the battlefield, killing tanks and artillery, and destroying morale. It was at this point that Horner and Glosson introduced into the plan the important (and later well-known) goal of destroying 50 percent of Iraqi tanks, APCs (armored personnel carriers), and artillery.According to Army doctrine, when a land unit’s effectiveness has been reduced to 50 percent or less, then it is no longer combat-useful. At the end of the planned air campaign, the Iraqi Army would be reduced by 50 percent. Hence, in essence, when the air effort was over, the war would be over, and little would remain to be done save collecting prisoners.

  To understand this goal, it is important to remember that Norman Schwarzkopf genuinely loved his troops. Their safety and ultimate survival was one of his chief passions. Thus, any air plan that ignored the troops on the ground would be dead if presented to the CINC. It is also important to understand that Schwarzkopf did not insist on a ground campaign. On the contrary, he would have been delighted if the Iraqis had surrendered before his land forces went into battle. All the same, he knew there was a 95 percent chance of land war, and he wanted to make sure air operations were conducted to maximize the survival of the men and women of his land forces. Thus, the air plan talked about “preparation of the battlefield” and attriting “50 percent” of the Iraqi armor and artillery.

  Why “preparation” instead of just bombing the Iraqis into the Stone Age? Because “preparation of the battlefield” has special doctrinal meaning to the U.S. Army. If a battlefield is well prepared, few U.S. soldiers have to die. Ergo, the more thoroughly the Air Force can prepare the battlefield, the happier Norman Schwarzkopf would be.

  Airmen are too often perceived as fighting some war other than the land commanders’ war. This war would be different. It would be the CINC’s war. Though it would primarily be an air campaign, to sell that campaign, Horner had to get the approval of General Schwarzkopf the land commander, before he got it from General Schwarzkopf the CINC.

  The CINC bought this idea, and even thought it was his. (By the by, if the Air Force actually achieved this goal, they would clearly demonstrate airpower’s decisive effect on the battlefield—perhaps for the first time. Did matters unfold that way? We shall see.)

  • PHASE IV—THE GROUND WAR.

  How long would the campaign take?

  The truth was, no one knew, and so estimates changed and varied. When the air staff ran the original ATO through the computer, the estimate was about a week. This seemed ridiculously hopeful to Buster Glosson, and so the time grew to three weeks. By November, it was thought that the planned Phase I would be pretty well achieved in less than a week (five to six days); Phase II in two days; Phase III in two weeks; and Phase IV would take up to three weeks. Later still, in a December briefing, Horner told Secretary Cheney that the computer models showed the war lasting from one to three weeks, but that he himself thought it would last at least six weeks. (This guess actually proved substantially correct.)

  As it turned out, Phase I took from ten minutes to three days, depending on how success is measured. Phase II happened during Phase I. Phase III took five-plus weeks. And Phase IV took four-plus days.

  War Duration in Days: December Estimate Versus Reality

  The numbers of days do not total. For example, the thirty-eight days of Phase III include strikes conducted during the three days of Phase I. The message is that the impact of airpower on the enemy was underestimated, and the ability of airpower to destroy a deployed enemy was overestimated. The airman is always too optimistic, while the landman is too pessimistic.

  ★ Finally, it would be useful to compare the changes that took place in the air campaign from John Warden’s INSTANT THUNDER, to the September iteration of Buster Glosson’s briefing, and then to the ATO when the war started. Here are some numbers:*

  Target Growth by Category

  This chart (a counting of the targets to be struck in the first two and one-half days) illustrates that while the first effort by CHECKMATE was commendable, it was out of date shortly thereafter. The number of targets doubled between INSTANT THUNDER and mid-September. And then the 174 targets in September grew to 218 in October, to 262 in December, and to 476 by war’s start. And as the war itself unfolded, the number of targets grew to thousands.

  INSIDE THE BLACK HOLE

  The Black Hole started out in the conference room adjacent to the Olsen/ Horner office on the third floor of the RSAF headquarters. In November, it was moved into the basement complex of that building. In that complex was also housed the TACC Current Operations Center, the computer room, the RSAF Command Post, and other offices. A long hall connected these; the TACC Current Ops occupied the far (or south) end of the hall, while the Black Hole was at the north end. The RSAF Current Operations Center was on the left, about halfway down the hall from the TACC to the Black Hole. On the right and across the hall from the RSAF Current Ops was the Computer Center, a large room (perhaps sixty feet by fifty feet) filled with computers. There were many CAFMS terminals, all fed by the single large computer that was used to pull the ATO together. Between the large computer and the CAFMS terminals was a laptop that translated the input from the large computer into data the CAFMS terminals could display and manipulate. At the end of the hall, and straight ahead, was a stairs that led down to the RSAF Peace Shield bunker (another hundred or so feet below ground). Though it was still under construction, it was used as an air raid shelter during the first few Scud strikes on Riyadh.

  Just before these stairs, and a ninety-degree turn to the right, was the entrance to the Black Hole. Up until the war started in January, this door was closely guarded (what lay beyond being top secret). After the war started, the door was simply left open.

  The conference room the Black Hole occupied was about thirty feet wide by fifty feet deep. Immediately inside the room and on the right there was a small administrative section. Straight ahead was a small office shared by Buster Glosson and his excellent deputy, Tony Tolin (who had recently given up command of the F-117 wing and was in line to be promoted to brigadier general). To the left was a room with maps on the wall and a bank of televisions. In this room, Dave Deptula led the group that worked the targets in and around Baghdad. (The televisions were supposed to display target information, but they never worked and weren’t used.)

  Down a small hall (created by plywood sheets)
and to the right was a small room occupied by the Scud targeting section. Inside, pictures of fixed Scud launch sites were pinned to the wall. Also on the wall were maps showing Scud storage areas, Scud support facilities, factories, and the plants where Scud fuel was manufactured.

  Because the missiles were moved out before the war started, once the fixed sites and the storage and production facilities were hit, there was nothing more to do but allocate sorties to Scud-hunting (A-10s by day, and F-15Es and LANTIRN Pod-equipped F-16s at night). As a result, the Scud targeting section turned out to be only partially useful.

  A side story: Scud fuel was stable for only a limited time, and once it became unstable, it couldn’t be used. The Black Hole planners therefore figured that if the fuel production factory was destroyed, the Iraqis would have to stop shooting Scuds roughly three to four weeks afterward. In due course, the factory was bombed in the opening days of the war; but it appears the Iraqis didn’t follow the technical data, because they fired Scuds for the next six weeks.

  Across the hall was the KTO (Kuwait Theater of Operations) Room, also containing many maps. Here Sam Baptiste and Bill Welch put together the effort to hit the Iraqi Army.

  Behind it was the room occupied by the Air Superiority section, headed by Glenn Profitt, where Wild Weasel schedules and EF-111/EA-6 support were planned and put into the ATO (Profitt had taken over from Lenny Henry in October). As it turned out, once the war started, air superiority was attained faster than expected. And so work in this section, as in the Scud section, soon became routine, and the team became quickly unemployed.

  Lastly, there should have been an “interdiction section” (that is to say, an “isolating the battlefield” section). To Chuck Horner’s later regret, there wasn’t. The reason not deserves an explanation. Let’s let him give it: