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

(218 targets) and CENTCOM (256 targets), they developed a series of targeting plans (known as Instant Thunder) to attack targets inside Iraq and Kuwait. It was almost two hundred pages long, and took advantage of the full range of new aircraft, weapons, sensors, and other technologies.

Tom Clancy: Would you please tell us about your Instant Thunder briefing with General Schwarzkopf?

Col. Warden: General Alexander went down with us in a C-21 [the military version of the Learjet]. Also accompanying us were Lieutenant Colonel Ben Harvey, Lieutenant Colonel Dave Deptula, and one or two other guys. When we got there, General Alexander and I went into the office of the CENTCOM Director of Operations [Major General Bert Moore]. Shortly thereafter, General Schwarzkopf joined us with his deputy commander. We sat around a table, and I showed paper copies of our briefing viewgraphs to General Schwarzkopf. This was the first iteration for what we called Instant Thunder. It went over very well. Schwarzkopf said, 'You guys have restored my faith in the Air Force.' He was a good listener and had no negative observations. He did give us some additional tasking. At the conclusion of our session with General Schwarzkopf, he told us to brief the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Colin Powell, as soon as possible.The purpose of Instant Thunder was to impose strategic paralysis on Iraq, so that it would be incapable of providing support to its army in Kuwait, so that it would be put in an impossible position. Beyond that, it was designed to reduce the overall power of Iraq as a player in the Persian Gulf, so that there would be a more appropriate balance of power in the region after the war. One of the big debates we had with many individuals in the Air Force, but not with General Schwarzkopf, was this: The original Instant Thunder plan was to go right to the heart of Iraq and shut it down. Many senior USAF officers thought that the Iraqi Army in Kuwait would then march south [into Saudi Arabia]. At the time, I said logistically it was too hard. In all of history, no army ever marched forward offensively when its strategic homeland was collapsing.At our session with General Powell, I had made the comment about inducing Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait. He replied that he didn't want it to withdraw; he wanted to destroy it in place. I told him we could do that too. So shortly thereafter, we began to develop Phases II and III of the Instant Thunder plan to destroy the Iraqi Army. By mid-October, we had a good plan worked out, which we faxed to Dave Deptula, who by this time was in Riyadh. We also sent it in hard copy via Major Buck Rogers when he went over to relieve Dave for a month or so.

Tom Clancy: What happened next?

Col. Warden: A little less than a week after our briefing to General Powell, I went back to Tampa under the auspices of the Joint Staff to give General Schwarzkopf the full briefing, complete with the logistics assessments, concepts of operation, deception, and psychological warfare plans, etc. After this presentation, which included most of his senior staff, he asked me to take the plan to General Horner, who was then serving as Central Command's forward commander. The next day, we left for Riyadh. Late on Sunday evening, August 20th, we briefed the CENTAF staff in Riyadh. The trouble began with the briefing to General Horner the next day. We just failed to communicate.The problem, I feel, was General Horner's view of how ground forces move. His view also was that the only way to stop ground forces was with other ground forces, aided by airpower. So in his mind, he had an impossible problem as CENTCOM Forward. At that time, he had no significant ground forces to stop enemy ground forces. Now, here's this 'armchair colonel' coming in from Washington with a plan that's got funny words in it like 'offense' and 'strategic targets,' and they just didn't make sense to General Horner.

Colonel Warden returned home following the briefing, but not all that he said to Chuck Horner fell on deaf ears. On the contrary, much of what he had said fitted exactly into what General Horner had in mind for the coming air campaign. He also kept three of Warden's briefers for his own staff to start the planning for the coming war. Let's hear it in his own words.

Tom Clancy: Would you tell us about your perceptions of Colonel Warden's briefing of the proposed Instant Thunder plan?

Gen. Horner: Colonel Warden and his planning team showed up in Riyadh, and I was struck by the brilliance of the plan. He is a very intelligent guy. But it was not a campaign plan; it was a really insightful listing of targets. He and his staff had accessed information that we never had access to. We had had good briefings from the Navy about two weeks before, so we knew how to take out the Iraqi air defense control system. But he had good stuff on nuclear weapons production, chemical and biological weapons storage that we did not have. Where the briefing fell down is that it did not address to my satisfaction the theater aspects of the war — hitting the Iraqi Army. When I questioned him about it, he said, 'Don't worry about it; it's not important.' Now, he may not have thought it was important, but I did; and that's where it broke down. Nevertheless, I said, 'These guys are good,' and I needed additional planning staff team members to do the offensive air plan, so I kept the three lieutenant colonels from Colonel Warden's briefing team to work with me, as my staff was overloaded with the day-in-and-day-out things we were already tasked with during Desert Shield.This regular workload was already starting to pile up, so I said, 'Who am I going to get to do this offensive air campaign and run this outfit?' My answer was Major General 'Buster' Glosson. Buster had been exiled down to the Gulf to Rear Admiral Bill Fogerty aboard the flagship USS LaSalle, and was dying to get out of there and get up to Riyadh. So I just called him and said, 'Buster, go AWOL and get up here.' And he did. Now, Buster gets things done in a hurry. As soon as he arrived, I sat down with him and said, 'You are going to go in and get this briefing [from the three remaining briefers]. You will find a lot of great things in it and I want those kept in, but you have to make this a practical plan. We have to make it something we can put into an Air Tasking Order [ATO].'Of course, the planning staff continued to grow. In fact, as new people came in to CENTAF headquarters, if they showed any reasonable planning skills at all, we would put them to work under Buster. This was all going on in a conference room [called the Black Hole] right next to my office, because we didn't want anyone to know that we were planning offensive operations. Schwarzkopf wanted all this kept secret, because we were still trying to negotiate the Iraqis out of Kuwait. So, whenever a person signed onto the Black Hole team, they would have to swear that they would not talk to anyone else except the team. The team worked eighteen hours a day. It must have smelled like hell in there…

Back home at the Pentagon, Colonel Warden had returned without his three lieutenant colonel briefers, but still with some hope of supporting the growing planning effort in Riyadh. Let's let him pick up the story from there.

Tom Clancy: The briefing with General Horner doesn't go well, but he asks to keep three of your guys, as well as your viewgraphs and plans. He has felt your presence and has kept your men. How were you feeling?

Col. Warden: I decided then that we would keep the Checkmate planning operation going and continue to develop plans to support future operations — in the hope that they would find some application at CENTAF headquarters. My idea was to do everything possible to make sure we fought the right kind of air war. It was clear to me at this point that we had resources in Washington which the Riyadh planning staffs would be unable to tap. Also, it was clear that Dave Deptula could not hope to find enough of the right kind of people to help him finish off the plan we had begun in Washington. Thus, I committed the Checkmate team to feeding plans and information to Dave. We put as little identification as possible on the products we sent, so as not to irritate the leadership in Saudi Arabia.

Tom Clancy: What is your view of the CENTAF staff and how the Instant Thunder plan developed?

Col. Warden: The CENTAF staff at that time really had to be thought of as two different