an anti-terror weapon that people
Colonel Warden had his own set of perceptions on the SCUD threat, and the measures taken to deal with it.
Tom Clancy: How about the attacks on the SCUD missile sites?
Col. Warden: There are two ways of looking at the results of the air attacks on the mobile SCUDs. The popular view is that we failed to destroy a single launcher. But the Iraqis had a preferred firing rate of about ten to twelve missiles a day, based on what they were doing before the counter-SCUD operations got under way. Almost instantaneously, as these missiles and their launchers were being hunted, the firing rate dropped to about two a day, except for some spasmodic firings at the very end of the war; and the Patriot SAMs were not encountering too many incoming missiles. That was the real result of the anti-SCUD effort — perhaps a tactical failure but an operational and strategic success. And it is at the operational and strategic level where wars are won or lost.
One of the more interesting problems faced by General Horner and his staff was that after the first few days of Desert Storm, the Iraqi Air Force decided not to fly anymore. They had apparently decided to go into their hardened shelters at their airbases and 'ride out' the attacks, just as the various air forces had done in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. It was a good idea that did not work out well for the Iraqis.
Tom Clancy: Whose idea was it to go after the shelters and were you confident that the BLU-109 warheads on the GBU-24 and -27 LGBs could do the job on the shelters?
Gen. Horner: Buster Glosson was the guy that did all the thinking on that. And when the first films came back to us, yes, we were confident. The shelters that we were concerned about were the Yugoslav-built ones. They were massive. They looked like big cow-dung heaps. When we saw they were being destroyed on the films, we knew that the rest would not be a problem.Bomb damage assessment [BDA] was something we were not worried about. It really didn't matter; we were just trying to keep up the pressure on the Iraqis. Knowing when to start the ground war really didn't matter to me, because at some point the Iraqis were going to tell us that they were tired. You'd know that from defections, etc. Thus we were looking for outcome more than input.
As days moved into weeks, the campaign plan moved on towards its goals. Some of General Horner's thoughts at this time are interesting, for they begin to give you some idea of what running the air war was like for him personally. Not all his thoughts were happy.
Tom Clancy: By the end of the first week, did you have the feeling that you had won air supremacy?
Gen. Horner: Yes. The only thing we were worried about was how efficient we were. Quite frankly, the stuff we did in the strategic war was interesting, but when you get right down to it, the only thing that seemed to matter to the Iraqi Army was killing tanks. We didn't know about some of the nuclear facilities, and there was no way we were going to get all the chemical weapons — we knew that. He [Saddam Hussein] just had more than could possibly be attacked. We did a poor job of taking battlefield intelligence and reacting rapidly to it — we just didn't have the setup. Also, my Air Force guys weren't allowed to interrogate the prisoners, because the Army Special Forces thought that was their job.
Khafji is a small Saudi coastal town just south of the Kuwaiti border. On January 16, 1991, before the start of the air war, the civilian population was evacuated. And on January 29–30, 1991, the Iraqis moved into the town. This was partly a 'reconnaissance in force,' to test how the Coalition would react; partly a 'spoiling attack,' to disrupt Coalition preparations for the ground war in this area; and partly a political gesture of defiance. Let's hear General Horner's impressions of the battle:
Tom Clancy: Talk about the Khafji offensive.
Gen. Horner: Jack Liede, CENTCOM's J-2 [intelligence officer] gave us a heads-up that the Iraqi 3rd Armored Division commander was up to something. I did not know what it was, or who it was, but we started watching with the E-8 JSTARS radar aircraft that had arrived in-theater just prior to the war. All the action took place at night. The thing that cinched it was a Marine unmanned aerial vehicle [UAV] came back with pictures of armored personnel carriers close to the berm between Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. I remember saying, 'Hey, the ground fight is on!' We had beaten on them quite a bit before their deployment, and it showed when the Saudis, Qataris, and U.S. Marines finished beating on them.
General Horner was also dealing with the day-in, day-out problems inherent to the war effort. Losses and schedules were key on his mind.
Tom Clancy: How were you feeling about losses at this point?
Gen. Horner: Every loss was a tragedy. In fact, every day I would try and take a nap about four to seven in the morning. And upon returning to the Tactical Air Control Center, the first place I would stop was the rescue desk to see just how many we had lost. I can't really explain it other than it's very difficult. I got my former aide into the F-15Es of the 4th Wing; and when he was killed up near Basra, I felt as if I had killed him myself.
Tom Clancy: Talk more about your day-to-day routine.
Gen. Horner: The key players running the TACC were four colonels — Crigger, Reavy, Volman, and Harr. When I would come in the morning, I would stop and discuss with Dave Deptula the overnight updates on the Baghdad targets, and then I would go and see the Army guys. I would generally have a routine of checking on targeting, that we were getting the ATO out on time, that sort of thing. I sometimes did some paperwork, read messages, ate lunch, talked with people about what they thought was going on, slept a little, and then got ready for the evening briefing. Buster and I would then go to General Schwarzkopf's daily meeting, and he would always change the Army targets that we were assigned to hit. And then around 11:00 or 12:00 PM, the action would heat up. SCUD things, JSTARS would be up, and we'd get some movers [moving ground targets], etc. I slept about two hours a night, along with some naps during the day. I did have to get hold of myself, though, because after the first few days of the war, I was too 'wired' to sleep.
Back at Checkmate in the Pentagon, Colonel Warden was busy supporting the operations in the Persian Gulf, as well as dealing with the other situations unique to a capitol city at war.
Tom Clancy: At this busy point in the war, what were you and the Checkmate team doing?
Col. Warden: All kinds of things were going on, one of them being that we were trying to give the Secretary of Defense and the White House a true picture of what was going on… because much of the analysis of the war coming out of the traditional DIA and CIA bureaucracies was 'Newtonian' [static] analysis of what was a 'quantum' [dynamic] situation. By that I mean that we had entered into an entirely new epoch of war — a military technological revolution, if you will. So the methods the old-line intelligence bureaucracies were using
