commander, Walt Boomer.
In point of fact, John Yeosock should have been the man to work the problem out, but he did not command the two Islamic corps (who were under Khaled) or the USMC ground forces (the U.S. ground component commander was Schwarzkopf, remember). There is no doubt in my mind that John Yeosock would have been a superb ground commander, and there is no doubt in my mind that Walt Boomer could have worked for John with the same respect and loyalty he showed the CINC. Finally, there is no doubt in my mind that Paul Schwartz and al-Shaikh at C3IC could have worked with John Yeosock. Yet this was not to be. So we remained in some ways a debating society for air until the evening meeting with Schwarzkopf, when he would decide how much air would be tasked against which Iraqi division two days hence.
The debate was a waste, and never-ending, because some corps commanders were never satisfied with what they were getting and could never accept some kind of rational harmonizing of their needs with those of the other commanders. More important, they could never accept that the Air Force was not under their control. We wanted to service their genuine needs, but we stopped being a branch of the Army fifty years ago. What they could — and should — have done was send in their target nominations and accept whatever they got. If they had a specific need, all they had to do was tell the BCE, and if it made sense they would have gotten it. On the other hand, since the CINC made the final decisions about targets, it was all a tempest in a helmet.
On February 4, an attempt was made to end the logjam among corps commanders. The DCINC, Cal Waller, would develop the prioritized target list, a list that would take into account the needs of all ground components.
The idea was that he would draw up the list of targets. Then the combined Coalition staff in the Black Hole would apply air expertise to determine what could and could not be hit. Then the list would return to the DCINC for approval, after which point the ATO would be cut.
Brigadier General Mike Hall, Horner’s liaison with Cal Waller for this program, would work up a seventy- two-hour rolling target list, based on the requirements of the combined divisions, as modified by their corps headquarters, as modified by the Third U.S. Army, C3IC, and the USMC component. Thus, on a normal day, Waller’s prioritized list would send about 1,000 sorties to strike Iraqi Army units. Buster Glosson’s targeteers would meanwhile continue to work up targets outside the KTO, and these would be serviced by sorties taken off the top, usually by F-117s, F-111s, and half the F-15Es (the rest continued to hunt Scuds).
This should have worked, but it didn’t, and Chuck Horner never expected it would, since he never imagined that Waller would be able to bring into harmony the various corps demands.
Soon after the system was set up, Colonel Clint Williams, Waller’s point man on the effort, relayed to the duty officer in the TACC that the DCINC was unable to come up with a list.
Colonel Dave Schulte, the head of the BCE, was tasked with finding out what was holding things up, and he immediately set out to find out how the ARCENT target list was built. Colonel Schulte spent five hours with the ARCENT Deep Operations shop, where he learned that the VIIth and XVIIIth Corps representatives received and worked their target inputs differently, primarily because each used different software to track Iraqi forces and analyze the target nominations.
But the real problem remained. The representatives from each corps — usually majors — were unable to stop fighting among themselves over air. Each thought he was responsible for grabbing as much for his corps as he could (it was thought of as a zero-sum game), and Waller wasn’t strong enough to bring sense and system to the situation, or to get the majors organized and working in harmony. That’s why I offered to let Waller build the list in the first place. Because I felt he couldn’t do it, and Baptiste and Welch were doing fine as it was, especially since Schwarzkopf made the final decisions anyway.
Meanwhile, a Captain Simms had done what he could to bring order to the building of the priority lists, and had tried to come up with a fair and reasonable way to allocate target selection. His system was to rotate the nominations from each corps on a 5-3-2-2 weighted basis. That is, each list had five ARCENT targets first, followed by three VIIth Corps targets, and two each XVIIIth Airborne Corps and Northern Area Command targets. The next five would come from the ARCENT list, and so on. Any priority among targets was made by the unit nominating it.
At least it was a list. If the Army was happy with it, then I was happy with it. But they weren’t. The corps commanders wouldn’t accept Simms’s system of priorities.
The target priority controversy continued after the war. Various war councils were held, lessons learned were published, and a variety of doctrinal documents were drafted. The goal of these councils was to increase the voice of the ground commanders over where, when, and how air was used. Their basic premise was that the joint force air component commander would misuse his office, ground would not control the air, and air would not be used properly. It made little difference that Desert Storm was a success by most every measure. That aberration was simply the result of the friendship and trust between Yeosock, Boomer, Arthur, and Horner.
Well, let me tell you, this doctrinal bickering is horse manure. First of all, in Desert Storm we had one ground commander for each of the two forces, and they approved every target. Their names were Schwarzkopf and Khaled, and they trusted their air component to organize a daily air campaign, which they reviewed as land component commanders, and then as CINCs either changed or approved. Though all the subordinate ground commanders had their say in the process, they had to understand that they were not in charge of the air effort — or, for that matter, of the ground effort. They could not own the air, and it stuck in their craw.
Secondly, all subordinates in a war must understand that no joint force commander wants to lose. He hopes to use air, land, sea, and space assets in a way that will bring victory on the battlefield. So back in the Pentagon, quit writing doctrine that is a compromise between the way each separate service wants to fight wars, because they don’t fight wars. Unified commanders and their allied commanders (in Desert Storm, Schwarzkopf and Khaled) are in charge. If we follow the doctrines of compromise published by the services and the Joint Staff, we will end up with “war fought by committee”—a sure loser.
I thank God Schwarzkopf was in charge in the Gulf, because there was no wondering about which service doctrine was going to prevail. There no component would dominate the planning. This was not Vietnam, where the Pentagon warriors dictated targets, tactics, and procedures. We were a team with one vision of what needed to be done. It is true that we had to muddle along as we figured it out (as was the case in identifying Iraqi Army target priorities); but I knew we would get the job done, however we decided to do it, because the CINCs were in charge, and the components respected and trusted each other.
