Every Man a Tiger: The Gulf War Air Campaign sic-2

by Tom Clancy

  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 list 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 secu
rity, 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 work. 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]

  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 ve
ry 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.)