we are able to truck the munitions quickly from the port to the build-and-storage areas. Rapidly generating the thousands of tons of bombs needed to support a high-tempo operation is no small thing. Even getting rid of the dunnage that the bombs came packed in is a major undertaking. And then specialized machines are needed to lift the bomb bodies and attach the fins and lugs. If you get careless, then you don’t live to tell about it, and you’ll probably take many of your friends along with you. Once the munitions have been built up, you have to deliver them to the aircraft and load them on the racks attached to the jets. About an hour before takeoff, the weapons troops place fuses and safety wires in each bomb.
? 0730 The formal briefings are finished, and now all at the head table swivel their chairs and face the back of the room for Chris Christon’s more speculative Intel briefing. This is where Chris sticks his neck out in a thoughtful, considered way, and it is understood that he does not have all the answers, and won’t need an excuse if he is wrong. He also has a second, unofficial job — to keep General Horner awake, for I am now fighting off sleep with a vengeance. I make notes, just to keep my eyes open, but have trouble maintaining focus.
After he finishes (and it may be five or thirty minutes, depending), all feel free to challenge him, argue, or comment. Here we do our brainstorming. Obviously the junior officers are reluctant to speak, but if there is a burning idea they speak up; and if what Chris or someone else has said doesn’t convince them, the bullshit flag is thrown.
Now it is somewhere near 0800, and I open the discussion to the national leaders, the top representatives from the Army, Navy, USMC, and Special Ops, and my own staff leaders. Some talk a little, some say nothing, and some have long but insightful comments. Anyone who gets long-winded, we joke into brevity. When I sense all have had their say, I wrap up the meeting with some nonthreatening (but sometimes negative) feedback and thoughts about where we need to go. When I have to threaten, I do it in private and give the individual a chance to explain.
By about 0815 to 0830 the meeting is over, and the night shift heads out. ? 0830 Down the street, the CENTCOM staff is coming up to speed, which means that the phones will occasionally ring with their questions. Though I leave these matters to the TACC directors or my generals, I do want to know what questions are being asked, as the subject will likely come up in the CINC evening meeting, which means I have to be on top of it.
This is also a good time to chat with the national leaders, since they tend to leave during the day to visit their forces, or perhaps to escort some bigwig from their home country or grab a nap.
Tom Olsen has gone to bed. He is tireless, but getting on in years, and the night shift is a strain for him.
? 0900 I go for a cup of coffee at the snack bar just off the right-hand side of the TACC toward the rear, over by airspace management. The cookies are abundant, and I take too many for my own good. The American people have kept us in goodies at a staggering rate. No wonder morale is so high. We know that our people at home are pulling for us and proud of us… so unlike Vietnam, so different.
I take my coffee and chat with the AWACS and Patriot teams, then pass by the Scud warning lady (since it’s daytime, she won’t have anything to do and can safely read her mystery or romance novels), the airspace management team, the duty officers on my left, the admin section on my right, and out the rear door. On good days, I make it without spilling any coffee.
Now I stroll down the hall past the ATO room, which is going full speed in mass confusion, and into the Black Hole for the daily strategy meeting. I will take what comes out of this to Schwarzkopf that night. Inside the Black Hole, Glosson, Tolin, and Deptula are drinking coffee and arguing about how the war is going and what we ought to do next. Though doctrine writers wax eloquently about this level of strategic thinking, as always it is coming down to people who don’t have a clear understanding of what exactly needs to be done yet are far from blind, since they have intelligence not available to others, etc.
For my part, during the run-up to the war, I had read all I could about Saddam and the history and culture of Iraq. Dick Hallion, the USAF historian, had flooded my office with books on these subjects, which I’d devoured, sometimes reading more than one a day. It’s funny how focused you get when final exams are approaching. This is the final exam of my military career.
As soon as I wander in, Dave Deptula, Buster Glosson, or Tony Tolin goes to the wall where a map of Iraq is stuck with colored pins indicating various category targets (blue might represent air defense; red, leadership; orange, NBC facilities; and green, Scud-related targets), and we discuss what needs to be done two days from now. (Sometimes when I am busy with a crisis, they do this without me; sometimes Buster comes down to the TACC and kneels beside my chair, and we go over what he is thinking.)
After we discuss the so-called strategic targets I move to the next room, where Bill Welch and Sam Baptiste will be dealing with long lists of targets nominated by our land force brethren. Fred Franks’s VIIth Corps worked this list hard, both because they believed it was their duty and responsibility and because they believed air would be wasted going after targets that didn’t matter to the real war if they didn’t. XVIIIth’s list was much shorter. Gary Luck had fewer Iraqis in front of him, and he would not get into the heavy stuff until his divisions had wheeled to the right along the rivers and attacked toward Basra. I also believed that he figured we knew how to do what was best and if he needed help he could count on us. In fact, I never got the impression he felt he was going to need any significant help. Walt Boomer’s list was not as short as Luck’s but much shorter than Fred’s, perhaps because he figured he had his own Marine Air Force at his fingertips if he needed it. That was true in some ways, because the Harriers were thought of as CAS aircraft and really couldn’t go very deep, due to range and vulnerability considerations. On top of that, the Marines will be loyal to one another in ways the Army and Air Force may not. (Neither Walt nor I have this attitude, but it may have influenced his iron majors and kept them from submitting long lists of targets in order to make sure they got their fair share of airpower, whatever that is or was.) The Northern Area and Eastern Area lists were submitted by Colonel Ayed al-Jeaid, the RSAF representative working in the C31C at MODA.
In fact, few specific targets came out of any of those lists, partly because we had adopted the kill box and level of effort concepts for attacking targets in the KTO, but mostly because Schwarzkopf really called the tune on this part of the ATO. Thus at the evening CINC meetings, the KTO targets would be briefed as 200 sorties against Iraqi divisions in this area and 150 sorties against divisions in that area. And every day, a Republican Guard division would be the “target du jour,” and we would devote a great deal of effort to it. So every day we would work up a target list and present it to him; but each night he would to some extent redistribute the air level of effort. Though he was just doing his “land component commander” thing (as was his right and duty), in truth which targets we hit didn’t really matter, since we were going to get them all before we started the ground war.
? The air-superiority efforts (under Glenn Profitt) are planned in the next room of the Black Hole, but I don’t have to spend much time there after the first days of the war. By now, the folks there mostly make sure the CAPs are in the right place at the right time, with emphasis on MiGs fleeing to Iran. They also frag the Wild Weasels, EF- 111s, and EA-6Bs for support jamming; but that is easy, as our flights in the KTO consume most of the current effort, and about all they have to do is make sure there is coverage. Still, a few special flights require detailed support planning, such as the B-52 raid on the industrial complex north of Baghdad, or F-16s going after a nuclear R & D facility, but for the most part their work has become routine.
On my way out of the Black Hole, I pass the Scud cell, which is now empty. About all we can do is chase Scuds in real time with SAS and special forces on the ground and F-15E/F-16C LANTIRN-equipped patrols in the air. So planning consists of fragging the jets to provide coverage throughout the night, making sure we have maximum coverage at the most likely times for Scud launches. Because we have no idea where the Scuds are hiding, we have to dedicate significant resources — forty-eight jets — to work the problem.
If we were in the same boat today, I suspect we would use more human intelligence assets on the ground (such as paid Bedouin spies wandering around in places that are too hot for Westerners), and better technical solutions (such as Joint STARS with automatic target recognition programs in their onboard computers, which would mean that controllers on the Joint STARS would not have to dig the target out of the maze on their scopes).
The automatic target recognition program would work like this: When the Joint STARS radar picked up a
