by Tom Clancy
Meanwhile, Khaled and John Yeosock devised an organization between them to coordinate their efforts, one that would integrate the land forces of the host nations with the land forces of the non-host nations, principally those of the United States, France, and Great Britain. They named the organization C3IC — an acronym that meant nothing at all. The idea was to fuzz things up, to let the name mean all things to all people. A precise definition would have started debates about command and control between the nations. By keeping its nature amorphous, everyone was able to work together without the need for rigid guidelines telling who had to do what to whom.
C3IC was located in a large space with a two-story-high ceiling on the main floor of the MODA command bunker. It was there mainly because Horner and Khaled knew that General Schwarzkopf would eventually make his headquarters at MODA, and he was going to be the U.S. land component commander. John Yeosock brought a superb officer, Major General Paul Schwartz, to head the U.S. side of C3IC, while Khaled provided an equally talented Saudi Army general, Brigadier General Abab Al-Aziz al-Shaikh.
Also on the main floor was the CENTCOM J-2 intelligence shop, and the CENTCOM J-3 operations shop in the hall. Schwarzkopf’s command center, where evening meetings were held, was located in a small conference room near the command center. On the other side of the command center wall was a small amphitheater, where larger staff meetings were held until the air war started in January. Then all meetings migrated to the command center. On the floor above were offices manned by Saudi officers working with the Americans. There was also a main conference room with windows that looked down on the C3IC room.
★ As time went on, it did not prove practical to integrate every command, though C3IC remained. In the beginning, all commands were fully integrated; but over time, Third Army staff outgrew the Royal Saudi Land Forces headquarters, where the land commanders had originally set themselves up. So John Yeosock and the other land commanders found it more useful to maintain separate locations, and Yeosock moved Third Army headquarters to Eskan Village.
On the other hand, air planning and execution were fully integrated throughout the war. Integration is easier with air than ground. Once there’s an Air Tasking Order, then the individual wings retain command of the units: Americans work for an American wing commander, though on a Saudi or UAE base; and the flight leader of a Saudi flight is Saudi, even though the flight might be part of a larger package commanded by a British flight leader.
Major General Jousif Madani, RSLF, the J-3 for the MODA staff, was a quiet, thoughtful man, who was charged by Hamad to sit down with Horner and work out the command and control issues; and Horner spent considerable time with him. Horner’s problem was that he could go only so far without Schwarzkopf ’s approval. Though the CINC had empowered him during those days to do what he thought best, he didn’t want to handcuff Schwarzkopf with any arrangements the CINC would have to change later. So, for once, it was the Americans and not the Saudis who were moving glacially.
However, Horner and Madani reached a general agreement that Khaled and Schwarzkopf would serve on an equal footing, which would also place Hamad and Powell on the same level. This equality issue was of some concern to the Saudis, because it was important to them to make sure they were respected by the Americans.
All of this activity provided a framework for the buildup of forces that were beginning to flow into the region, but it in no way anticipated the eventual size of the Coalition force that would go to war some six months later. Time and events would severely strain these early arrangements, but for the time being, they had to do.
★ As air component commander, Horner had to solve a few other command relationship problems, as well.
According to Goldwater-Nichols, the various services still organized, trained, and equipped their forces, and they still watched over promotions, but U.S. forces did not “belong” operationally to them. Operationally, U.S. forces belong to the unified commander. Goldwater-Nichols further stated that the unified commander could organize his force any way he saw fit. In other words, neither service doctrine nor the service chiefs (nor even the Joint Chiefs of Staff) could make him use or organize his force in a way he did not want.
Meanwhile, service doctrine favored service commands — Central Command Air Forces, Army Central Command, Naval Forces Central Command, and Marine Central Command — while the unified CINCs tended to find functional command arrangements more to their liking — land, sea, air, and now space — since that allowed for better coordination and unity of effort. The passage of Goldwater-Nichols inevitably led to struggles between the CINCs and service doctrines and the service chiefs.
Like most CINCs, Norman Schwarzkopf favored functional command arrangements. Thus, all CENTCOM air was integrated under one commander, called JFACC (Joint Forces Air Component Commander). The CENTCOM JFACC was Chuck Horner. Though integrating functions made sense both philosophically and operationally, it wasn’t always easy in practice. The Goldwater-Nichols command structures had never in fact been tried in wartime.
According to Marine doctrine, Marine air was intended for close air support of Marine ground units; it was a substitute for the heavy artillery they didn’t normally carry with them. Marine doctrine or no, however, the air component commander in Desert Shield/Desert Storm was ferociously opposed to splitting airpower into separate duchies, and he fought to keep it from happening. Some accounts of the war tell a different story: that Horner and Boomer worked out a deal that gave Horner command of Marine air until it was directly needed for close air support of Marine ground units. These stories are not true.
What happened was that soon after Boomer arrived in-theater, he and Horner met in Riyadh, and Horner said: “Look, Walt, I don’t want your air. But, by God, we are not going to fragment airpower. So your planes are going to come under me, and you will get everything you need.”
To which Boomer said, “Okay by me.”
And that was that.
Meanwhile, Boomer’s air commander, Major General Royal Moore, who felt that a higher power than Goldwater-Nichols had ordained him to be in charge of the Marine air, tried everything possible to undermine the centralized tasking that placed Marine air under Horner. Before the war started, he tried to pull Marine air out of the Air Tasking Order, but he ran into the brick wall that was the air component commander. Later, during the war, he continued to play games, but in fact it didn’t bother Horner. Moore was generating sorties to hit the enemy, and that is all Horner wanted him to do. The bottom line was that Horner, not Moore, was in charge.
In Horner’s words, “If an Army unit had needed that air, I would have sent it to them and told Moore to piss up a rope. But it never came to that. In fact, just the opposite. Schwarzkopf shortchanged the Marines. Not on purpose. He was just fixated on the Republican Guard and the VIIth Corps attack against them. So when it became apparent by sortie count that Boomer’s and the EAC’s guys were not getting as much air as the VIIth Corps and that they had more enemy to attack, we shifted air over the eastern sector. This was the right thing to do, and it paid off, as evidenced by the collapse of the Iraqis in the face of the initial attacks in the east [before VIIth Corps took off].”
★ Like the Marines, the Navy was also protective of its own air.
Admiral Hank Mauz, who was NAVCENT when Rear Admiral Bill Fogerty took over, and then Vice Admiral Stan Arthur, was not an airman, so he was not aware of some of the issues that had burned in pilots’ souls ever since Vietnam, such as “Route Packages.” Air Force pilots had hated the practice of dividing up sections so that only Navy planes flew in one, and Air Force planes in another, but thinking it was a convenient way to keep his carrier admirals happy, Admiral Mauz suggested dividing Iraq up into sections, so the Air Force and the Navy could conduct their operations without getting in each other’s way.
He was more than a little surprised when Horner gave him a withering look and told him, “Hell no. I’ll retire before we try anything as stupid as th
at.”
Mauz got the message.
THE CNN EFFECT
An invasion of sorts did occur in Saudi Arabia in August of 1990: not the Iraqis, the reporters.
The phenomenon of twenty-four-hour news network programming — instant and live — has fundamentally changed the way military professionals conduct war. Chuck Horner calls this phenomenon the CNN Effect.
War is by definition bad news. People are killed; homes and workspaces destroyed; money thrown away in obscene amounts. And now the TV camera provided people back home with instant access to it all. Unlike print, the TV camera sees what it sees. It’s there. The tape can be edited, but, basically, the camera is not held hostage to the credibility and adroitness of the reporter’s use of language. Whether he liked it or not, the presence of TV on the battlefield, on both sides of the lines, had a profound impact on how the military did business.
Chuck Horner elaborates:
As soon as the folks at home see on TV part of a battle, part of a battle space, or even a major player walking down an aircraft boarding stairs in some faraway country (signaling major league interest in the place), there’s a serious impact. Folks worry. They’re relieved. They’re angry. They form opinions about how you are doing that job. They may agree with what you are trying to do but disagree with the way you are doing it. The effect of a military decision is not only felt on the battlefield, it is felt immediately back home. And the impact of that can find its way back to the battlefield within hours. In a democratic society, of course, the effects of well-done planning are immediately available, while the effects of poor execution or misguided adventures may take some time to discern.
When a military leader thinks through what he is doing and how he is doing it, part of that mental process damn well better include the impact of his choices back home and in the rest of the world. If not, he’s likely to be in for surprises on the battlefield.
The Saudis were aware of the CNN Effect from the start (they carefully watch over their press, screening it for offensive material). So when Secretary of Defense Cheney walked down the airplane stairs in Jeddah on the sixth of August, 1990, the press was there because the King wanted them there. Why? I suspect he wanted to tell the Iraqis to keep out of here, because the powerful United States had sent its Secretary of Defense to offer its help.
Did Grant figure into his campaign the impact of widespread instant communication of the battlefield to all the world? You bet he didn’t. But it sure happened to us in the Gulf War, and it was a driver in everything we did.
It affected the way we targeted (and I don’t regret any of this): We did our best to avoid civilian casualties. We planned attack headings to avoid civilian areas. We accounted for the failures of precision munitions to guide properly. We did not shred Iraqi soldiers by dropping cluster bombs from B-52s. We did not drop bombs when we could not positively identify the target. We did our best to advertise the evils the Iraqis were committing inside occupied Kuwait.
And we screwed things up badly a few times: by hitting a command facility that was also being used as an air raid shelter, by demonizing Saddam Hussein instead of the occupation of Kuwait, and by allowing the wreckage on the road out of Kuwait City to be perceived back home as the highway of death, when there was very little death — though lots of destruction. (I am also sure the U.S. Army doesn’t like people seeing what airpower can do to an army… to anyone’s army.)
Thank God Saddam screwed up his own TV ops worse, time and again. Remember the burning oil fields of Kuwait? Remember the hostages? Remember the English hostage boy who was brought in as a “guest” of the great leader? When the President of Iraq came close to pat his little friend on the head, the boy froze with fear. All in glorious color. Saddam, old buddy, get a kid actor to stand in and stage the scene so he greets you with a kiss and a smile.
We in the West are stuck with a free press. It’s not always easy for us in the military to deal with our press, yet the press is our ultimate blessing and our lasting glory. When we are wrong, we will (sooner rather than later) be shown as wrong. When we are right and our actions are good, that will also come out. Sure, we can try to manipulate the press, and the press can attempt to manipulate the truth; but in the end there is enough integrity in both the military and the media to make sure most of the truth gets out to the world. The old boys will try to tell you we lost Vietnam because the evening news showed American boys burning villages and shooting old people. Get a grip. We lost in Vietnam because we were wandering in the wilderness of goals, mission, and policy; and in the process we came to believe that burning villages and shooting old people was good. The CNN Effect means that God’s looking over your shoulder all the time, and I think it is a blessing. It is not pleasant, and you take hits, but in the end it brings out the best in mankind when he is out doing his worst, waging war.
Here is how Horner made his own peace with the television invasion of Saudi Arabia in the summer of 1990:
Boomer and Turki at Dhahran became the stars in the eastern part of the country. I got the job of talking to the press in Riyadh, a job I had very little preparation for. Sure, I’d done local interviews and TV spots as the commander of various stateside bases. But Christ, these were the big boys. How was I going to handle questions I couldn’t answer because the answers were classified? Worse, how was I going to handle questions I didn’t know the answer to, which would make me look like a dumbshit? (Sure, I’m a dumbshit, but I don’t want the whole world getting their jollies watching me prove it on TV.)
Well, I survived the first hits; and I learned a little.
As I gained experience, I learned to talk plain English to the press, to tell as much as I could of the truth, to try not to cover my own ass, and to hell with them if they didn’t like an answer. That approach seemed to make sense to them, and we learned to trust each other. Most of them did their best to report what I said as accurately as they could, and I did my best to give them what I knew. If I didn’t know, I would tell them so; usually they didn’t know either and were just fishing.
In time, I also learned how to listen to a question and figure out the questioner’s story line. So if I thought some reporter was headed down a blind alley, or had the wrong slant, I would tell him so. Often this generated more useful, and more honest, questions.
Soon after I was appointed CENTCOM Forward, a Department of Defense press pool was formed, with Carl Roschelle from CNN as the designated leader. Carl was great to work with. But I soon learned that the news business is one of the most competitive in the world. A “can you top this” race between individual reporters, networks, and papers broke out.
The folks in the business are all trying to make a living involving extreme pressures to gather information and meet deadlines. They all want their own organizations to succeed, and that means getting the best, most exciting, most insightful information into the world’s TV sets before any of their competitors do.
This form of combat was brought home to me when ABC’s Sam Donaldson and NBC’s Tom Brokaw showed up at my doorstep in Riyadh. Each wanted an interview for that evening’s news in the United States. They flipped a coin to see who would go first, and Brokaw won. Unfortunately, his crew’s equipment, camera, and lights hadn’t arrived on the airplane with him. But when I suggested we set up with Donaldson’s crew and let the NBC team use that camera, it got very quiet in the room, and it instantly became apparent that Donaldson would do his interview, and if Brokaw wanted to videotape, his guys would have to go out and beg a camera.
As it worked out, we found a Saudi Military Public Affairs camera, so both interviews were done in time to send a satellite feed back to the States.
Our military often fails to understand the dog-eat-dog nature of the news business, or that each form of media has different time lines and communications requirements back to editors or studios. As a result, we often fail to assist and facilitate the media in ways that would be useful for both of us. Thus, the always cynical media pe
rsonalities often lash out against the military, rail against what they perceive as news management, and complain bitterly that they are being censored. Sure, media guys have a lingering fear of the military, another hangover from Vietnam. But in reality, the fault is a simple misunderstanding on the part of the military about how to best support the unique requirements of different media.
One of the toughest interviewers for me was Michael Gordon of The New York Times.[36] He came on with all the warmth of a cobra; his questions were well thought out, difficult to answer, and tough; he clearly thought I was hiding things from him — specifically, that our situation was much worse than I was letting on, and I was an idiot who really didn’t have a grip on what was happening. (He was partially right on the last point.) Yet after reading his stories, I came to a different conclusion about Gordon than his interviews led me to. Media people, I realized, just like the military, live or die on their integrity. If a reporter deliberately strays from the truth, he or she is dead meat among their peers and editorial masters. Even though I might not like the particular story line he was creating, for all his flaws, Michael Gordon reported my words accurately.
During this period, a lot was going on, to say the least. While much of this had to be kept from the Iraqi intelligence-gathering system, it was important to provide reporters with a wide and deep background understanding of the current situation, so their reports were accurate and made sense. That meant they would inevitably learn data that, if reported, could endanger American lives or success on the battlefield. At the same time, we in the military prefer that some stories don’t appear in the media — because they make us look stupid. Or we think we have to keep information secret that’s in fact widely known back home. Trying to keep all of that in balance makes working with reporters a delicate operation.
