Fighter Wing: A Guided Tour of an Air Force Combat Wing

by Tom Clancy

  In November 1990, with diplomatic options running out, President George Bush ordered the reinforcement of the existing forces assigned to Desert Shield, with additional units designed to provide “an offensive option,” should it be required. General Horner picks up the story at this point.

  Tom Clancy: November 1990 comes, and the President decides that if Iraq doesn’t get out of Kuwait, the U.S.-led coalition will use force to get them out. Where are your people in the planning process now?

  Gen. Horner: I think we had an offensive air campaign laid out pretty well in October 1990. Then, when President Bush made that decision, the Army was told it needed more forces. So of course, the Air Force needed more forces to support the Army. We basically doubled the size of the overall Air Force in-theater, being intelligent about where we could base more airplanes. This was because at that point, ramp space [for parking and servicing coalition aircraft] was becoming the driving limitation on adding more aircraft to our force.

  As for the strategic air campaign plan itself, I would only let them plan the first two days. Another problem was that a multi-national coalition force was forming. As you can imagine, respecting the various host countries’ laws, and ensuring that the host nations knew what was going on, was of vital import. Thus, if you wanted to fly, you had to be in the ATO. The Saudis wanted that, because then they knew what was going on, and could say, “No you can’t fly here.” Or ask, “Who owned those planes that sonic-boomed that camel herd?”

  January 1991 came in like a lion, and with it came the war. General Horner remembers his surprise at the successes of the early moments of Desert Storm, and his reservations about the inevitable costs ahead.

  Tom Clancy: If you were to summarize the objectives of the air campaign plan that became Desert Storm, how would you characterize them?

  Gen. Horner: First, to control the air (Phase I). Secondly, cripple the Iraqi offensive capabilities, in particular the SCUDs and nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons to the extent we could (Phase II). Then, isolate the battlefield (Phase III), and prepare it for the ground war (Phase IV).

  Tom Clancy: The first night of the war (January 16th/17th, 1991), did you have any idea of how well things were going?

  Gen. Horner: No. Partly because—along with the rest of the USAF—I represented twenty five years of pessimism. I guess I had started believing the stuff that we heard all these years—that we were no good. As a society, we thought our military forces were a bunch of dummies.

  That kind of pessimism is useful in my profession, because it’s much better to be surprised the way we were than the way the Lancers were in the Crimea [the famous “Charge of the Light Brigade”]. The highlights of that first night were how the F-117As were able to penetrate Baghdad, and the fact that we lost just one airplane [a Navy F-18 Hornet]. A tragedy, but not the thirty or forty lost aircraft that some had predicted.

  Tom Clancy: Talk about “Poobah’s Party.”

  Gen. Horner: “Poobah’s Party.” That was planned by Larry “Poobah” Henry, probably one of the best planners we ever had. He was the only navigator [backseater] who was a wing commander in the Gulf. He looks mediocre, he’s got navigator wings, but he’s an incredible genius. The man’s an absolute fiend when it comes to hunting SAMs. He arranged to have a mass of air- and ground-launched decoys, and one hundred HARM missiles all in the air at the same time. It was devastating to the Iraqis, something they never recovered from during the war.

  While General Horner and his staff were launching the aerial assault on Iraq, back at the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., Colonel Warden and the Checkmate staff were watching it on CNN, just like the rest of us. Nevertheless, the events of that night are worth his recollection.

  Tom Clancy: What was it that the CENTAF units were actually hitting at the first bang, H-Hour (0300 hours local time)?

  Col. Warden: The national command authority, centers of operations, any place that we knew was serving as a command post; the two principal communication facilities in downtown Baghdad, as well as the electrical power grid and the key nodes in the KARI [Iraq in French, spelled backwards] air-defense system. These are the things that were being hit in a matter of a couple of minutes or so at H-Hour [0300L, January 17th, 1991]. Essentially, at this point, Iraq was unable to respond, due to the breakdown of its systems.

  Back in Riyadh, General Horner and his staff were trying to deal with the inevitable changes and difficulties that come with trying to execute any sort of complex plan. The worst of these was the threat posed by the Iraq ballistic missile systems, generically known as SCUDs.

  Tom Clancy: Did the Iraqis do anything smart in their conduct of the war?

  Gen. Horner: Well, they did the command and control of the SCUDs pretty well, using motorcycle couriers; and they hid the SCUDs well. Their COM-SEC [communications security] was awesome. We had the impression that Saddam had orders out that anyone who used a radio would be shot.

  Tom Clancy: Talk about the underestimation of the SCUDs.

  Gen. Horner: Being a military person, I tend to do my pluses and minuses in military terms. Civilians just don’t exist in the mind of a military man until you get into a war; then you are surrounded by them. What happened was the SCUDs started coming at us. Now, the Saudi society handled it pretty well. On the other hand, the Israelis went into shock, and that surprised me. The SCUDs would hit their cities, and the Israelis would go into panic; people literally died from fear.

  Tom Clancy: How did you feel about the performance of the Patriot SAM missiles in intercepting the SCUDs?

  Gen. Horner: Good. Let’s put it this way, though. Who cares if they ever really intercepted a SCUD? The perception was that they did. The SCUD is not a military weapon, it’s a terror weapon. So if you have an anti-terror weapon that people perceive works, then it works.

  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 damage
d. 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.