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

work of not a few brilliant minds.

The plan for the air war, for instance, grew out of three decades of intellectual and spiritual growth by the USAF officers who command combat aviators. In Armored Cav, we talked with two of the men who helped win the ground victory, General Fred Franks and Major H. R. McMaster. Now we're going to talk with two men who helped win the air war.

Now, I have to emphasize that many airmen from many services, from many countries, contributed to the victory in Desert Storm. Nevertheless, the plan for the air war against Iraq was uniquely U.S. Air Force.

USAF officers spent years trying to build a new vision of air power — a vision that was not based on traditional roles and missions, such as nuclear deterrence against the Soviet Union or bombing a bridge in North Vietnam, but on the deep-rooted belief that airpower can be a decisive tool at the operational or theater level of warfare. According to this new vision, it wasn't enough to know how to fly planes, shoot missiles, and drop bombs; you also had to know how to plan and lead an air campaign.

Different men came to these ideas by different routes. Some saw the vision as they were being shot at by MiGs, SAMs, and AAA guns while trying futilely to bomb worthless suspected targets in North Vietnam, targets picked by politicians with no coherent goal in mind. Others followed the lure and seduction that airpower has always held for true believers in the magic of flight. Commonly called airpower zealots, they dedicated decades of hard work and sacrifice to the single-minded goal of giving the United States the greatest concentration of that oh-so- intangible force.

You have to have a plan. You have to have leadership.

The air bombardment campaigns against Germany and Japan in World War II were costly failures until the introduction of escorting fighters and the identification of targets that truly could affect the final outcome of a war. Later, when the 8th AF acquired long-range P-51 escort fighters and began to methodically strike the German petrochemical and transportation industries, the effects were felt almost immediately in every theater of the war. It should have been obvious to anyone who understood airpower that the key is the right mix of forces, hitting the right combination of targets, at the right time. In short, the right plan. Such a plan would require packaging the proper aircraft, ordnance, and personnel into forces capable of destroying the right targets to do maximum damage to an enemy's war effort. It would also require officers trained and experienced in leading such an effort. Not just from USAF units, but from the other services, as well as allies from other nations. Such leaders would have to be credible flyers, and also diplomats, logisticians, and even public-relations experts.

Naturally, though it seemed logical to the airpower supporters that the U.S. Air Force should recruit, train, and control these forces, the other services in the U.S. military had their own ideas. Many USN and USMC aviation officers felt, with some justification, that turning over de facto control of their aviation assets would be tantamount to giving the USAF a stranglehold on the use of airpower in future operations.

So the vision remained just that, a vision, until several well-known failures in air operations during the 1980s (notably the bungled hostage-rescue mission to Iran) led to changes in how airpower would be used in the 1990s. Foremost among these changes was the Goldwater-Nichols Military Reform Act, which redefined the military chain of command. It also recognized that different kinds of fighting forces (naval, ground, air) should be organized and headed by appropriate professionals. Airpower would be run by an airman known as a Joint Forces Air Component Commander (JFACC). At the theater level, the JFACC is a USAF lieutenant general (0-9-three star), directly responsible to the unified Commander in Chief (CinC). A 'theater' of operations is a distinct geographical area in which air, land, and naval forces are coordinated usually against a single enemy. In World War II the European and Pacific theaters were virtually separate wars.

During Desert Shield and Desert Storm, the JFACC for CENTCOM was Lieutenant General Charles A. Horner, USAF. In August 1990, just prior to the invasion of Kuwait, he was the commander of the U.S. 9th Air Force based out of Shaw AFB, South Carolina. One of four numbered air force commanders based in the United States, he had a secondary responsibility as commander of the Central Command Air Forces (CENTAF). CENTCOM — U.S. Central Command — is the unified command responsible for most of the Middle East (Southwest Asia). CENTCOM, which replaced the Rapid Deployment Force created during the Iranian hostage crisis, is a command without forces. These are assigned to CENTCOM's operational control only in event of a crisis. As commander of the CENTCOM air forces, Horner led the staff that would eventually plan and execute the air war against Iraq.

^{Then-Major General Charles Horner, while commander of the U.S. 9th Air Force and U.S. Air Forces Central Command (CENTAF).}

^{Official U.S. Air Force Photo}

Born in 1936 in Davenport, Iowa, Chuck Horner (as he prefers to be called) is a graduate of the University of Iowa. After graduation, he entered the Air Force in the early 1960s and flew two tours in Southeast Asia, with some 111 missions on the second tour alone. His particular specialty was the hunting of Surface-to-Air (SAM) and Anti- Aircraft Artillery (AAA) radars. Known as 'Wild Weasel' missions, they were (and are) very hazardous, with casualties running high among the crews. Like so many other young USAF officers, he lost much of his faith in the Air Force 'system' in the skies over North Vietnam.

Tom Clancy: You fought in Vietnam. What did it teach you?

Gen. Horner: All fighter pilots feel they are invulnerable until they get shot down. The day they get shot down, and jump out of the cocoon that's their cockpit, then you really see a change in them. Having never been shot down, I really can't speculate on that. But I can say there is nothing better than to come back and not be killed. You really feel good.More to the point, I just sort of became fascinated by ground fire, SAMs, and stuff like that. I thought that was interesting. The thing is, I'm a practical person, I'm a farmer; so when we were sent up to hit some dumb target and there was a great target available, I made a mental note that this would never happen if I was running things. Sometimes it didn't happen, because there were no policemen up there [in North Vietnam] to check on what we were bombing.When you have the people in Washington who think they are running the war, and the people over the battlefield who are fighting the war, and they are not on the same emotional and psychological level, and you don't have trust, you've got nothing. Unfortunately, integrity was the first casualty in the Vietnam War.

While Chuck Horner was flying combat missions in Vietnam, a new generation of USAF officers was emerging, with a new set of ideas and values. Among these was an intellectual young officer named John A. Warden III. Born in 1943 in McKinney, Texas, he came from a family with a long record of military service. Fascinated by military history and technology, he was one of the earliest graduates of the new Air Force Academy at Colorado Springs, Colorado, in the 1960s. While he did his share of flying in fighters such as the OV-10 Bronco and F-4 Phantom in Southeast Asia, his real passion throughout his career has been planning doctrine for the successful execution of air campaigns.

Tom Clancy: In the post-Vietnam era, what was the vision of the Air Force and the other services as they came out of Southeast Asia into the late 1970s?

Col. Warden: In Vietnam, the Navy did well at a tactical level; and afterward it was generally pleased with itself, but realized it needed to rethink its force structure. And so it developed its 'Maritime Strategy,' which focused on taking the Soviet Navy out of the picture and then attacking the 'bastion' areas of the Soviet homeland waters. It was a pretty good set of ideas, and gave the Navy a good vehicle for training and force building. The Air Force, though, came out with some wildly different ideas. On the one hand, people like me believed we had done well tactically with the tools at our disposal, but that those tools had been used for the wrong purposes strategically. In other words, I was disgusted that we had squandered our men and machines for the wrong reasons in the wrong way. And my resolution was never to have anything to do with a war that didn't have identified political objectives and a coherent way to engage them. For example, the idea of gradual escalation seemed to me to be really stupid.On the other hand, many Air Force officers learned an entirely different set of lessons. To them, the strategic side of the war was irrelevant. What was important was the way it was fought, so their lessons were at a different level. And then later, after the war, the fighter officers rapidly took control of the Air Force from the officers who had