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

were the equivalent of trying to use a vacuum tube tester to see how well a microchip was working. The tester would say that it wasn't — and the conclusion would be completely irrelevant.

Tom Clancy: How important were the space satellite systems to operations in the Gulf?

Col. Warden: I like to think of the Gulf War as the first genuine 'World War.' Things were going on all around the globe, with realtime effects on the combat theater. World War II was not a true global war — it was a series of campaigns that took place in scattered places. Satellite systems are what made genuine world war possible and real during Desert Storm.

Tom Clancy: Could you please talk a little about the conditions that the aircrews were having to deal with during the war?

Col. Warden: Keep in mind that we were having a terrible time with the weather. Historically it was the worst weather since they began keeping records in that area, which went back to about 1947. A significant number of F-117 sorties simply could not drive home their attacks, given the rules of engagement [ROE], which essentially said: If you're not sure you're going to hit the target, don't drop. The F-16s and F/A-18s were not doing so well either, because by the second day, they were flying at a medium altitude [from 12,000 to 20,000 feet/3,657 to 6,096 meters] to reduce losses. So they're trying to drop dumb bombs from there. This does not mean that they would never hit a particular target, just that it would take many more sorties than with laser-guided bombs from an F-111F or F-117A.

Tom Clancy: Let's talk about the transition to Phase II.

Col. Warden: Well, it's important to understand that rather than transitioning from phase to phase, what really happened was a merging of Phases I, II, and III. We had originally planned distinct phases, but that was when we had a limited number of aircraft available. We had wanted to concentrate every ounce of our strength against the strategic centers of gravity within the Iraqi war machine in Phase I. We simply did not feel that we could do anything in Kuwait until we had completed the operation in Iraq.Phase II, though, was originally designed to be a one-day operation, where we would finish off the air superiority problem in Kuwait. This meant knocking out some missile [SAM] sites, as there was no evidence of Iraqi aircraft being based in Kuwait. The next phase, Phase III, was to destroy the Iraqi Army in Kuwait. The Army wanted to call this 'battlefield preparation.' But Dave Deptula had it right when he told General Horner, 'We're not preparing the battlefield, we're destroying it!' The intention of Phase III was to reduce the Iraqi Army to fifty percent of its pre-war strength. This would make it operationally ineffective. If necessary, we could have gone beyond that and literally destroyed it. We were absolutely confident that if we imposed a fifty percent attrition rate on units in the Iraqi Army, and it didn't become operationally ineffective, then it would be the first army in history not to do so. After a lot of discussion in the fall of 1990, we based the Phase III plan on eliminating the Republican Guard units first, followed next with the regular and conscript army near the Saudi border.

Tom Clancy: Talk about the Bomb Damage Assessment [BDA] controversy.

Col. Warden: The BDA problem goes back to World War II. The intelligence guys are somewhat conservative, since they don't want to say something is destroyed if it really isn't. It's a reasonable presumption that if it's rubble it's destroyed. If there's a wall knocked down, it's damaged. Otherwise it's undamaged. But with targets hit by precision weapons, there may be little or no evidence of damage or destruction that fits any of the standard intelligence criteria. The majority of the analysts were going by the rules they had been taught. So the Air Force says, 'We're out there blowing up things.' And the CIA says, 'No, you're not.' Here's a good example. We had an overhead picture of a tank that the CIA said was undamaged. Then somebody got an oblique shot [picture] from a reconnaissance aircraft, and you saw the turret was shifted about a foot, and the gun tube was drooping into the sand. Destroyed tank.This sort of thing led Buster Glosson to come up with 'tank plinking,' where we used small LGBs to destroy armored vehicles. The common wisdom was that it was ridiculous to use an expensive [$12,000] precision LGB against a tank. But when you send four planes out with four bombs each and they come back with an average of twelve kills, that's cheap.

As February 1991 moved on, a greater percentage of the sorties generated by CENTAF were being dedicated to supporting the planned ground operations that would evict the Iraqi forces from Kuwait. Despite what others were judging from the daily results, General Horner had his own criteria for success.

Tom Clancy: Preparing the way for the ground war to start, did you have the feeling that your people were effective? What factors were limiting what you were doing?

Gen. Horner: Quite frankly, we had all the time we wanted. I was not overly concerned about when the ground war would start. I never really worried about 'how effective' we were, because we knew by things like Iraqi desertions. If you think about it, we were going to get them all. The weather was really not a factor, because if we didn't get it today, I was confident we would get it tomorrow. They [the Iraqis] weren't going anywhere. Where we really started making money was when Buster thought up 'tank plinking.' That worked great!

On February 24th, the ground war started, and the air campaign against Iraq began to wind down.

Tom Clancy: What were your impressions of the situation when Desert Storm was completed at the end of February 1991?

Gen. Horner: I was glad to see the ground war go so quickly and so well. I tell you, we were tired of war, really tired of killing people. I guess we all would have liked it if Saddam had gone; but Saddam was not a target, the command and control system was. The Iraqi Army would hold staff meetings, we would confirm the location by 'other sources,' and we would bomb the location, destroying the notes from the meeting.The last few days of the war we were really working hard to find things to hit. My general impressions of the air campaign? I was pleased with it. You're never totally satisfied, but the overall loss rate was good, the munitions worked better than anticipated. But because of my personality, I was never completely satisfied with it.

Colonel Warden spent the end of the war watching the ground war from the Checkmate center in the Pentagon, and then went home for a well-deserved couple of days of sleep. Afterwards, though:

Tom Clancy: What happened to Checkmate after the war ended?

Col. Warden: Right after the war we had an absolutely marvelous party. Cases and cases of champagne. Our friends from CIA, DIA, and NSA came down. The Secretary of the Air Force [Donald Rice] and the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy spent the afternoon with us.Soon after that, we became a 'politically incorrect' organization that seemed counter to Goldwater-Nichols. And so Checkmate was shut down a couple months or so after the war. However, it was eventually reborn. Today, it does a lot of contingency planning for the Air Force Chief of Staff. As for me personally, I left the Pentagon about two months after the war ended, and went to the White House to work as a special assistant to Vice President Quayle. I worked exclusively on non-military things, ironically.

Tom Clancy: Today, the effects of the Gulf War are clear. The plan was executed well in