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

While Colonel Warden had been working to change the Air Force intellectually, officers like General Chuck Horner had been doing the routine work to keep the force going and improve it. Then, in 1987, General Horner was given command of the U.S. 9th Air Force, headquartered at Shaw AFB, South Carolina. As commander, his mission was to act as the JFAAC for any air operations that might be conducted by CENTCOM, as well as commander of any air forces that might be assigned to CENTCOM. Let's hear his thoughts on the appointment.

Tom Clancy: Would you please talk about your assignment to command of 9th Air Force?

Gen. Horner: 9th Air Force was at its best during World War II. Then it became a training command back in the United States. Then in 1980, along came the Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force [RDJTF], the predecessor of the present CENTCOM organization. Larry Welch was the Director of Operations in TAC then, and the RDJTF was the hottest thing going. It had to do with the Carter Doctrine to make the Middle East an area of vital national interest to the United States.Later, when RDJTF became CENTCOM, 9th AF was to be the air component. The next 9th AF commander, General Bill Kirk, was probably the best tactician the Air Force has ever produced. I wound up replacing him. So from Larry Welch, with his tremendous intellectual capability, and Bill Kirk, with his tremendous tactical capability, I inherited a staff that was war-oriented and really working the problem day in and day out. I also was one of the first to benefit from the Goldwater-Nichols Act. Now, one thing Goldwater- Nichols did was free me from a lot of administrative responsibility. I got to spend a lot of time as commander of ten combat wings, visiting those wings. What I didn't have to do was a lot of administrative things. And since General Wilber Creech [the commander of TAC] had taken care of maintenance, I didn't have to worry about maintenance. Also, General Creech had fixed operations; so I didn't have to worry about operations. All I had to do was give the wing commanders another set of experienced eyes, chew them out or give them a pat on the back, hand out medals, and fly with them to know what they were doing. So I really could spend eighty percent of my time on CENTCOM's problems. The system was working pretty well at that time.

Tom Clancy: You had this new responsibility as a JFACC — Joint Forces Air Component Commander. As you understood it, what did it all mean to you at the time?

Gen. Horner: It meant that if we went to war, all the air forces would function under the overall structure and guidance of the JFACC. I never used the word 'command,' because that just irritated the Marines [whose air units were independent of the JFACC's command, but operated under his 'guidance']. The big thing we had going for us was an exercise called Blue Flag. Whenever we would run the CENTAF Blue Flag, I would bring in the Navy and Marine Corps. In addition, the Army was always willing to come. However, the Navy and Marines would always drag their feet, but they did come. Eventually, these were the same guys I went to war with.

Tom Clancy: You were there a long time, five years, so you got to see the shift from the Cold War to the post-Cold War period. Talk a little about this.

Gen. Horner: We were still fighting the Russians in our training scenarios until Norman Schwarzkopf came in as the CENTCOM CinC in November of 1989. He reviewed the existing plans and said, 'Put them on the shelf, we are never going to use them. We will never fight the Russians.' He knew the Cold War was over.

Tom Clancy: Prior to the invasion in 1990, what were your people doing with regard to campaign and operations planning?

Gen. Horner: A variety of things. We had been exercising a lot. This was not unusual, though; and we were also running exercises in the Middle East. Also, there was the material pre-positioning program, which is a good program, a product of the Cold War. Those supplies were available for any kind of regional contingency in the Persian Gulf area. What really jump-started our planning for Iraq was the Internal Look exercise, which was conducted in July of 1990. Meanwhile, General Schwarzkopf had already defined the threat there as Iraq invading Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.

With Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, all the ideas that had been put down on paper were dusted off and put to use. For General Horner, this meant a trip to Saudi Arabia to assist Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney and General H. Norman Schwarzkopf in briefing the Saudi Arabian leadership and securing permission to deploy U.S. forces to the region. This done, General Schwarzkopf left Chuck Horner to act as 'CENTCOM Forward' for several weeks, so that he might return to CENTCOM headquarters in Tampa, Florida, and more rapidly push forward the forces needed to deter further Iraqi aggression in the region.

Tom Clancy: During your visit to Jedda, Saudi Arabia, you and General Schwarzkopf had a little talk about building an air campaign. Please talk about that.

Gen. Horner: In April of 1990, I went down to Tampa to brief Schwarzkopf in preparation for the July Internal Look exercise, because I did not want to go off on a tangent and show up with the 'wrong' plan. There I gave him an overview on a number of things, one of them being the concept of a 'strategic air campaign' in the region. He liked the briefing and the idea; he bought everything all the way.Later, when we were finishing up our briefings in Jedda, just before he got on the airplane to Tampa, he decided that when he got home, he should investigate having someone develop such a campaign plan. I could have hugged him! Let me tell you, the greatest thing in the world is when your boss looks at you and says, 'Now, Horner, the first thing I want you to do is get air superiority.'

When General Schwarzkopf returned to the United States, one of his first actions was to contact the USAF Air Staff to ask for support in the development of a strategic air campaign plan. The assignment wound up on Colonel Warden's desk, and was assigned to the Checkmate team. There were a few interesting diversions along the way, though.

Tom Clancy: What was your first involvement with the planning process for the air war?

Col. Warden: On Monday morning, the 6th of August, I brought a dozen or so officers together into Checkmate to start serious planning in the hope that we would figure out some way to sell our plan. I told my boss my ideas, and he told the Vice-Chief, Lieutenant General Mike Loh, and the Chief of Staff [General Mike Dugan]. On Wednesday morning, August 8th, General Schwarzkopf called General Dugan on the phone, but spoke to General Loh instead, as General Dugan was out of town at the time. General Schwarzkopf told General Loh that he needed some help in building a strategic air campaign plan, and could the Air Staff do anything for him. General Loh told him that we already had some people working on it, and would have something to him as quickly as possible. General Loh asked us when he could see a draft of the plan. We told him that afternoon — and we delivered.From that first draft, we started refining our ideas with more in-depth intelligence data and analysis. After a short period of time, we were able to start asking the intelligence agencies [Air Force Intelligence, CIA, National Security Agency, Defense Intelligence Agency, etc.] to start giving us information to fill in the blanks. We knew what to ask for, because of our understanding of how nation states, military units, and other entities are organized. This allowed us to understand how Iraq worked at the highest levels, and it was merely a matter of getting down a couple of layers through the available information to find out the specifics. It was only because we had a 'systems' view of the world that we were able to move very quickly.

With their mission defined, the Checkmate staff worked on. Using a pair of joint targeting lists from CENTAF