Every Man a Tiger: The Gulf War Air Campaign

transported by air. In fact, the 82d Airborne and to some extent the 101st Air Assault division were designed for air transport.

Enter the USAF’s General Ed Tenoso and his fleet of C-130s.

Up until the move west, the C-130s’ main task had been in high-priority cargo-moving — supporting all the Coalition forces (though with emphasis on United States forces). Where they went and what they moved was decided by Major General Dane Starling, Schwarzkopf’s J-4, or logistician.

Early in Desert Shield, Bill Rider, the CENTAF logistician, and his director of transportation, Bob Edminsten, had set up a C-130 airline in the theater. The C-130s flew regular, scheduled passenger flights, called Star routes, and cargo flights, called Camel routes. Starling determined what had priority on these flights, and Tenoso’s airlifters put that in the Air Tasking Order.

This “airline” was already a vast operation before the move west, but the effort associated with that move was simply staggering (and largely unsung), with a big C-130 landing every five to ten minutes, every hour of the day, every day of the week, for two weeks after the start of the war on the seventeenth of January, hauling the vast army to faraway places like Rafhah, hundreds of miles up the Tapline Road — a nose-to-tail stream of C-130s.

? As the armies completed their moves to the west, and the forces south of Kuwait came up on line, weather became the enemy.

Chuck Horner now takes up the story:

? As February wound down, General Schwarzkopf was under great pressure from Washington to initiate the ground attack before the Iraqi Army was able to negotiate a surrender that would allow them to leave Kuwait with their remaining tanks and guns. The date Schwarzkopf selected for G day was the twenty-fourth of February.

A few days before the big moment, we had had our final war council before the ground war. Generals Franks, Luck, and Boomer had come to Riyadh to brief their final schemes of maneuver to Schwarzkopf, while the Egyptian, Syrian, Saudi, and Gulf Cooperation Council forces were doing the same with Khaled. For all the others, this meeting had to be a high-anxiety affair (they were, after all, on the line), but for me it was a relief. For once, someone else was briefing the CINC, and the airmen were (sort of) getting the day off after being the only show in town for thirty-seven days.

So when the war council started, I relaxed in my chair, wondering how well plans would be executed, and how many men would die bravely, needlessly, or because of our failures of leadership. All three U.S. generals were calm and deliberate. No surprises.

Then the weatherman got up and briefed the weather forecast for the night of February 23–24, and it was going to be terrible — rain, fog, winds, and cold temperatures. Cloud bases would be touching the ground, so visibility for the troops would be measured in yards, not miles. That in itself would not be so bad, as enemy troops would suffer the same limitations. In fact, that would cause them far greater problems, since they had to see attacking troops in order to direct their fires. But the bad weather would cause us one problem: it would keep our aircraft and helicopters from providing close air support to attacking forces. Not only would they be denied the power of massed aircraft striking at enemy strong points in their path, but if they chanced to be pinned down in a minefield by Iraqi artillery, they would find themselves in a seriously bad way. This situation, predictably, left the CINC visibly anguished.

Though he was under intense pressure to start the ground war, his obligation to the troops not to spend their lives needlessly always came first with him, and he was prepared to delay the ground attack, no matter how great the pressure from Washington. Still, this decision, if he had to make it, would not come easy (it would have left him naked to Washington’s slings and arrows). So when the CENTCOM weatherman briefed rain, fog, and misery, Schwarzkopf ’s shoulders slumped, and he placed his huge head in his hands.

Meanwhile, my own weatherman, Colonel Jerry Riley, had already given me a preview of the likely weather on the night of the twenty-third and twenty-fourth. Riley was a spectacular weather “guesser,” both as a scientist and as a seer, reading tea leaves. He not only brilliantly grasped the scientific data sent by satellites and aircraft over the battle space and from meteorological stations all around the world, but he had a record of accurate “gut guesses” as well. Before Schwarzkopf’s high council, Riley assured me that the CENTCOM forecaster’s reading of the tea leaves of isobars, low-pressure areas, upper winds aloft, and frontal passages was wrong. As Riley read them, the worst the weather would throw at us that night would be cloud bases one to two thousand feet above the ground, with visibility of three miles in light rain and fog. I believed him. He had been forecasting the weather over Iraq and Kuwait for the previous five-plus weeks with uncanny accuracy. Though we had faced abysmal weather (it had been one of the wettest, coldest winters on record in the region), time and time again he had figured out the weather we would encounter — where, when, and how severe — well enough to let us plan our air campaign. Though the weather was going to be far from ideal on G day, he assured me that it would be good enough for our jets to slip under the clouds and hit the targets the ground forces needed hit.

So there I was, with positive weather information that I believed; and there was Norman Schwarzkopf, actually suffering over the negative report from his own weather guy. And just then I did something I’d never imagined I would do. I put my right arm around his shoulders and whispered in his ear: “Boss, I have a weatherman who’s been calling the weather accurately for the past six weeks, and he tells me that the weather is not going to be all that bad. The worst we’ll see, he tells me, is a couple of thousand feet of ceiling and a few miles of visibility. We can handle that. I promise you we can provide the close air support your guys are going to need. Trust me on this one, boss. The weather is going to be okay.”

I don’t know whether or not he believed me, but a burden seemed to lift, and we continued the meeting.

Later, he ordered the ground war to go as scheduled.

And when the troops began their attack of Kuwait and Iraq, they did it in the worst damned weather we encountered during the entire war, with rain, fog, low ceilings, and blowing mud.

Because our troops were ready, and the Iraqis debilitated, we began a ground offensive that turned out to be over more quickly, with fewer casualties, than anyone had ever dreamed. So in the end my weatherman wasn’t wrong — the weather was good enough to start the ground war. He just got the numbers wrong, as the weather was for the most part ghastly — zero ceiling, zero visibility.

THE GROUND WAR

At four o’clock on the morning of February 24, 1991, the ground war to free Kuwait began.

That night I had checked into the TACC early. The weather reports were horrible — cold, fog, rain, and drizzle, with blowing winds.

As morning approached and we waited for progress reports from the BCE, the room was filled with tension, even dread. Yet we were also relieved. For airmen, this moment marked the last spurt in a long and difficult struggle. And we were quite simply exhausted.

I tried to imagine what the Marines were going through as they picked their way through the barbed wire and minefields, always waiting for an artillery barrage to rain down on them, which they could only take or retreat.

I knew that the Marines and the Eastern Area Corps were going to give us our best clue about what was really going on. Out to the west, it was going to be more difficult to track the XVIIIth Airborne Corps and French Army, as they became strung out over miles of desert. Though they did not have to confront the massed defensive works that faced Walt Boomer, Gary Luck had problems of his own. Primarily, he had to take his forces and their logistics tails deep into Iraq before the Iraqis discovered they were there, and then he had to place his forces in position to cut off retreat of the forces facing Fred Franks’s VIIth Corps, the British, and the Northern Area Corps (Franks’s main attack was scheduled for launch on the twenty-fifth).

We were, of course, also aware that the Iraqi Army had crumbled, and that Saddam had desperately tried to escape the battlefield and occupied Kuwait. Hours before the attack, the Russians had delivered a desperate message to Washington, promising unconditional Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait, if they were allowed a twenty-one-