Fighter Wing: A Guided Tour of an Air Force Combat Wing tcml-3

by Tom Clancy

  Colonel Warden had his own set of perceptions on the SCUD threat, and the measures taken to deal with it.

  Tom Clancy: How about the attacks on the SCUD missile sites?

  Col. Warden: There are two ways of looking at the results of the air attacks on the mobile SCUDs. The popular view is that we failed to destroy a single launcher. But the Iraqis had a preferred firing rate of about ten to twelve missiles a day, based on what they were doing before the counter-SCUD operations got under way. Almost instantaneously, as these missiles and their launchers were being hunted, the firing rate dropped to about two a day, except for some spasmodic firings at the very end of the war; and the Patriot SAMs were not encountering too many incoming missiles. That was the real result of the anti-SCUD effort — perhaps a tactical failure but an operational and strategic success. And it is at the operational and strategic level where wars are won or lost.

  One of the more interesting problems faced by General Horner and his staff was that after the first few days of Desert Storm, the Iraqi Air Force decided not to fly anymore. They had apparently decided to go into their hardened shelters at their airbases and "ride out" the attacks, just as the various air forces had done in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. It was a good idea that did not work out well for the Iraqis.

  Tom Clancy: Whose idea was it to go after the shelters and were you confident that the BLU-109 warheads on the GBU-24 and -27 LGBs could do the job on the shelters?

  Gen. Horner: Buster Glosson was the guy that did all the thinking on that. And when the first films came back to us, yes, we were confident. The shelters that we were concerned about were the Yugoslav-built ones. They were massive. They looked like big cow-dung heaps. When we saw they were being destroyed on the films, we knew that the rest would not be a problem.Bomb damage assessment [BDA] was something we were not worried about. It really didn't matter; we were just trying to keep up the pressure on the Iraqis. Knowing when to start the ground war really didn't matter to me, because at some point the Iraqis were going to tell us that they were tired. You'd know that from defections, etc. Thus we were looking for outcome more than input.

  As days moved into weeks, the campaign plan moved on towards its goals. Some of General Horner's thoughts at this time are interesting, for they begin to give you some idea of what running the air war was like for him personally. Not all his thoughts were happy.

  Tom Clancy: By the end of the first week, did you have the feeling that you had won air supremacy?

  Gen. Horner: Yes. The only thing we were worried about was how efficient we were. Quite frankly, the stuff we did in the strategic war was interesting, but when you get right down to it, the only thing that seemed to matter to the Iraqi Army was killing tanks. We didn't know about some of the nuclear facilities, and there was no way we were going to get all the chemical weapons — we knew that. He [Saddam Hussein] just had more than could possibly be attacked. We did a poor job of taking battlefield intelligence and reacting rapidly to it — we just didn't have the setup. Also, my Air Force guys weren't allowed to interrogate the prisoners, because the Army Special Forces thought that was their job.

  Khafji is a small Saudi coastal town just south of the Kuwaiti border. On January 16, 1991, before the start of the air war, the civilian population was evacuated. And on January 29–30, 1991, the Iraqis moved into the town. This was partly a "reconnaissance in force," to test how the Coalition would react; partly a "spoiling attack," to disrupt Coalition preparations for the ground war in this area; and partly a political gesture of defiance. Let's hear General Horner's impressions of the battle:

  Tom Clancy: Talk about the Khafji offensive.

  Gen. Horner: Jack Liede, CENTCOM's J-2 [intelligence officer] gave us a heads-up that the Iraqi 3rd Armored Division commander was up to something. I did not know what it was, or who it was, but we started watching with the E-8 JSTARS radar aircraft that had arrived in-theater just prior to the war. All the action took place at night. The thing that cinched it was a Marine unmanned aerial vehicle [UAV] came back with pictures of armored personnel carriers close to the berm between Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. I remember saying, "Hey, the ground fight is on!" We had beaten on them quite a bit before their deployment, and it showed when the Saudis, Qataris, and U.S. Marines finished beating on them.

  General Horner was also dealing with the day-in, day-out problems inherent to the war effort. Losses and schedules were key on his mind.

  Tom Clancy: How were you feeling about losses at this point?

  Gen. Horner: Every loss was a tragedy. In fact, every day I would try and take a nap about four to seven in the morning. And upon returning to the Tactical Air Control Center, the first place I would stop was the rescue desk to see just how many we had lost. I can't really explain it other than it's very difficult. I got my former aide into the F-15Es of the 4th Wing; and when he was killed up near Basra, I felt as if I had killed him myself.

  Tom Clancy: Talk more about your day-to-day routine.

  Gen. Horner: The key players running the TACC were four colonels — Crigger, Reavy, Volman, and Harr. When I would come in the morning, I would stop and discuss with Dave Deptula the overnight updates on the Baghdad targets, and then I would go and see the Army guys. I would generally have a routine of checking on targeting, that we were getting the ATO out on time, that sort of thing. I sometimes did some paperwork, read messages, ate lunch, talked with people about what they thought was going on, slept a little, and then got ready for the evening briefing. Buster and I would then go to General Schwarzkopf's daily meeting, and he would always change the Army targets that we were assigned to hit. And then around 11:00 or 12:00 PM, the action would heat up. SCUD things, JSTARS would be up, and we'd get some movers [moving ground targets], etc. I slept about two hours a night, along with some naps during the day. I did have to get hold of myself, though, because after the first few days of the war, I was too "wired" to sleep.

  Back at Checkmate in the Pentagon, Colonel Warden was busy supporting the operations in the Persian Gulf, as well as dealing with the other situations unique to a capitol city at war.

  Tom Clancy: At this busy point in the war, what were you and the Checkmate team doing?

  Col. Warden: All kinds of things were going on, one of them being that we were trying to give the Secretary of Defense and the White House a true picture of what was going on… because much of the analysis of the war coming out of the traditional DIA and CIA bureaucracies was "Newtonian" [static] analysis of what was a "quantum" [dynamic] situation. By that I mean that we had entered into an entirely new epoch of war — a military technological revolution, if you will. So the methods the old-line intelligence bureaucracies were using were the equivalent of trying to use a vacuum tube tester to see how well a microchip was working. The tester would say that it wasn't — and the conclusion would be completely irrelevant.

  Tom Clancy: How important were the space satellite systems to operations in the Gulf?

  Col. Warden: I like to think of the Gulf War as the first genuine "World War." Things were going on all around the globe, with realtime effects on the combat theater. World War II was not a true global war — it was a series of campaigns that took place in scattered places. Satellite systems are what made genuine world war possible and real during Desert Storm.

  Tom Clancy: Could you please talk a little about the conditions that the aircrews were having to deal with during the war?

  Col. Warden: Keep in mind that we were having a terrible time with the weather. Historically it was the worst weather since they began keeping records in that area, which went back to about 1947. A significant number of F-117 sorties simply could not drive home their attacks, given the rules of engagement [ROE], which essentially said: If you're not sure you're going to hit the target, don't drop. The F-16s and F/A-18s were not doing so well either, because by the second day, they were flying at a medium altitude [from 12,000 to 20,000 feet/3,657 to 6,096 meters] to reduce losses. So they're trying to drop dumb bombs
from there. This does not mean that they would never hit a particular target, just that it would take many more sorties than with laser-guided bombs from an F-111F or F-117A.

  Tom Clancy: Let's talk about the transition to Phase II.

  Col. Warden: Well, it's important to understand that rather than transitioning from phase to phase, what really happened was a merging of Phases I, II, and III. We had originally planned distinct phases, but that was when we had a limited number of aircraft available. We had wanted to concentrate every ounce of our strength against the strategic centers of gravity within the Iraqi war machine in Phase I. We simply did not feel that we could do anything in Kuwait until we had completed the operation in Iraq.Phase II, though, was originally designed to be a one-day operation, where we would finish off the air superiority problem in Kuwait. This meant knocking out some missile [SAM] sites, as there was no evidence of Iraqi aircraft being based in Kuwait. The next phase, Phase III, was to destroy the Iraqi Army in Kuwait. The Army wanted to call this "battlefield preparation." But Dave Deptula had it right when he told General Horner, "We're not preparing the battlefield, we're destroying it!" The intention of Phase III was to reduce the Iraqi Army to fifty percent of its pre-war strength. This would make it operationally ineffective. If necessary, we could have gone beyond that and literally destroyed it. We were absolutely confident that if we imposed a fifty percent attrition rate on units in the Iraqi Army, and it didn't become operationally ineffective, then it would be the first army in history not to do so. After a lot of discussion in the fall of 1990, we based the Phase III plan on eliminating the Republican Guard units first, followed next with the regular and conscript army near the Saudi border.

  Tom Clancy: Talk about the Bomb Damage Assessment [BDA] controversy.

  Col. Warden: The BDA problem goes back to World War II. The intelligence guys are somewhat conservative, since they don't want to say something is destroyed if it really isn't. It's a reasonable presumption that if it's rubble it's destroyed. If there's a wall knocked down, it's damaged. Otherwise it's undamaged. But with targets hit by precision weapons, there may be little or no evidence of damage or destruction that fits any of the standard intelligence criteria. The majority of the analysts were going by the rules they had been taught. So the Air Force says, "We're out there blowing up things." And the CIA says, "No, you're not." Here's a good example. We had an overhead picture of a tank that the CIA said was undamaged. Then somebody got an oblique shot [picture] from a reconnaissance aircraft, and you saw the turret was shifted about a foot, and the gun tube was drooping into the sand. Destroyed tank.This sort of thing led Buster Glosson to come up with "tank plinking," where we used small LGBs to destroy armored vehicles. The common wisdom was that it was ridiculous to use an expensive [$12,000] precision LGB against a tank. But when you send four planes out with four bombs each and they come back with an average of twelve kills, that's cheap.

  As February 1991 moved on, a greater percentage of the sorties generated by CENTAF were being dedicated to supporting the planned ground operations that would evict the Iraqi forces from Kuwait. Despite what others were judging from the daily results, General Horner had his own criteria for success.

  Tom Clancy: Preparing the way for the ground war to start, did you have the feeling that your people were effective? What factors were limiting what you were doing?

  Gen. Horner: Quite frankly, we had all the time we wanted. I was not overly concerned about when the ground war would start. I never really worried about "how effective" we were, because we knew by things like Iraqi desertions. If you think about it, we were going to get them all. The weather was really not a factor, because if we didn't get it today, I was confident we would get it tomorrow. They [the Iraqis] weren't going anywhere. Where we really started making money was when Buster thought up "tank plinking." That worked great!

  On February 24th, the ground war started, and the air campaign against Iraq began to wind down.

  Tom Clancy: What were your impressions of the situation when Desert Storm was completed at the end of February 1991?

  Gen. Horner: I was glad to see the ground war go so quickly and so well. I tell you, we were tired of war, really tired of killing people. I guess we all would have liked it if Saddam had gone; but Saddam was not a target, the command and control system was. The Iraqi Army would hold staff meetings, we would confirm the location by "other sources," and we would bomb the location, destroying the notes from the meeting.The last few days of the war we were really working hard to find things to hit. My general impressions of the air campaign? I was pleased with it. You're never totally satisfied, but the overall loss rate was good, the munitions worked better than anticipated. But because of my personality, I was never completely satisfied with it.

  Colonel Warden spent the end of the war watching the ground war from the Checkmate center in the Pentagon, and then went home for a well-deserved couple of days of sleep. Afterwards, though:

  Tom Clancy: What happened to Checkmate after the war ended?

  Col. Warden: Right after the war we had an absolutely marvelous party. Cases and cases of champagne. Our friends from CIA, DIA, and NSA came down. The Secretary of the Air Force [Donald Rice] and the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy spent the afternoon with us.Soon after that, we became a "politically incorrect" organization that seemed counter to Goldwater-Nichols. And so Checkmate was shut down a couple months or so after the war. However, it was eventually reborn. Today, it does a lot of contingency planning for the Air Force Chief of Staff. As for me personally, I left the Pentagon about two months after the war ended, and went to the White House to work as a special assistant to Vice President Quayle. I worked exclusively on non-military things, ironically.

  Tom Clancy: Today, the effects of the Gulf War are clear. The plan was executed well in your opinion?

  Col. Warden: Yes. On balance, I think we achieved just about exactly what we wanted. For me, though, the really gratifying thing is that we achieved such momentous results with so little blood shed on either side. I am not aware of any war on this scale where so much happened at so little cost in blood. In addition, it also seems to me a demonstration of what you can accomplish with airpower when you use it correctly. I just hope that we continue the revolution and don't fall back into the old ways of doing things because of bureaucratic pressures in the Department of Defense, and in the Congress.

  Today, both General Horner and Colonel Warden are looking forward to their lives after military service. After the war, Chuck Horner was promoted to general (four stars), and took over the unified U.S. Space Command at Colorado Springs, Colorado. There, he handled a variety of tasks, including the direction of the North American Air Defense Command, as well as working on ballistic missile defenses. Following his retirement in the summer of 1994, he and his wife Mary Jo have settled in Florida, where he is writing his own memoirs of the 1990/1991 Persian Gulf Crisis/War. Colonel Warden has finished his career with one of the most satisfying appointments he could have imagined, commandant of the Air Command and Staff College at the USAF Air University, located at Maxwell AFB, Alabama. There he has transformed the curriculum, emphasizing air campaign planning for joint service and international students from all over the world. He will retire from the Air Force in the summer of 1995. Arguably, he has become the Clausewitz or Alfred Thayer Mahan of airpower, having codified the use of airpower in The Air Campaign: Planning for Combat. Both Horner and Warden have undeniably made their marks in the USAF and the history of airpower.

  Combat Aircraft

  What is a "classic"? The term has become overused, its meaning fuzzy. Perhaps the best definition I've heard goes something like this: "I can't tell you what it is, but I know it when I see it." When you talk to the people who fly and maintain today's fleet of U.S. Air Force aircraft, they use the word classic a lot. There's a reason: Every USAF fighter, bomber, and support aircraft in service is a classic, because it has to be. It takes so much time, money, and effort to produce
a combat aircraft these days, anything less than a roaring success is going to be a disaster for everyone concerned. Every new combat aircraft must be an instant classic, capable of vastly outperforming the plane or planes it was designed to replace. This chapter will help you get to know some of the classic aircraft programs of recent years.

  Today, when a military service commits to fund an aircraft program, and a company chooses to jump in and build that airplane, both are literally "betting the farm," with severe consequences for both if the program fails. Given the risks involved, it is amazing that anyone wants to be in the aircraft business at all — but the payoffs of a successful program can be immense for a company, its stockholders, the surrounding communities, and the military service that takes delivery of the final product.

  In order to spread their cost over as long a period as possible, modern aircraft tend to have extremely long service lives. For example, the Boeing KC-135 first came into USAF service in the late 1950s, and is planned to be retired in the later 2020s, a run of over sixty years! Even longer lived is the truly classic C-130 Hercules, which first flew just after the Korean War. A new version (the C-130J) is being built right now for use into the middle of the next century by the USAF, as well as by Great Britain and Australia.