? In August 1967, Chuck Horner returned to Nellis to an assignment in the Combat Crew Training wing. This was not an appealing career move, since the wing was then converting from F-105s to F-111s, which was much more of a bomber than a fighter. After some finagling of dubious legality that kept him technically AWOL for six months but let him avoid his official assignment, he found himself flying as an instructor at the Fighter Weapons School, where a friend, Gary Willard, was the commander. There Horner went to work teaching Wild Weaseling and Electronic Combat for pilots and electronic warfare officers. He also took on special projects, such as testing a new radar bombing system for the F-105 and new Wild Weasel black boxes. Meanwhile, after six months of less than official status, a friend in personnel took care of the paperwork that made Horner legal again.
In March 1968, Major Paul Kunichica asked Horner to join the team at the new Fighter Weapons Center at Nellis. Though the FWS had been set up to teach graduate-level fighter aviation, it soon found itself managing test projects, writing doctrine, and conducting advanced studies, all of which detracted from the quality of its principal mission, and so the center was created to take care of all those noneducation functions, all the projects and functions that needed the expertise resident at Nellis. Instructors from the FWS populated the center, and though they still flew with the FWS, they now spent most of their time working on new bombs or writing requirement documents to guide the development of new aircraft.
Horner and Kunichica, a Japanese-American from Hawaii, had flown with each other a number of times and were friends. Kunichica worked for Colonel Dick Bond, who in turn worked for Brigadier General (soon to be Major General) Zack Taylor. Bond was very smart, below the zone (promoted to rank early), and liked cocky young men who enjoyed staying late at the office, while Taylor, a soft-spoken but tough-as-nails Virginia gentleman who’d been an ace in World War II, was the father of the Fighter Weapons Center, and a man of conspicuous integrity.
After he moved up to the Center, Horner still flew with the squadron and taught, but he spent most of his time on projects such as a study of F-111 bombing accuracy, and on concepts that defined the capabilities needed in the fighter aircraft destined to replace the F-105 and F-4. Out of these concepts came the FX and AX, which eventually turned into the F-15 and the tank-killing A-10.
More important personally, Horner began to understand what mentoring meant in the military, as the newly promoted Major General Taylor took him under his wing. “Bond and Taylor challenged me,” Horner says now. Bond threw Horner into some of the General’s pet projects, which meant that Horner and the General often found themselves on their hands and knees on the floor of the General’s office, building charts that the General could use to brief his four-star boss, General Spike Momyer, at the time the TAC commander.
In young Captain Horner (promoted to major in 1969), Taylor saw a man who would see the problems through to a solution. Horner fought problems the way a dog worries a rag. He plunged into them and let fly. He loved making order out of chaos. When the smoke cleared, the floor would be covered with debris, but there’d also be the glimmers of a solution here and there, which Horner would gather up and present to his boss. During this process, he and Taylor would argue the concepts, push them and pull them, and in so doing Taylor often elevated Horner’s sight picture, got him to aim better at the real target, propelled him toward working the right problem… often to stop thinking small. Taylor showed him how to think big.
This was Horner’s first time really working the bureaucracy — an experience not too very different from combat, he quickly realized: a lot of men were gunning for him — not because he was arrogant, but because he wasn’t afraid to stick his neck out and do the work at a pace they could not generate.
The largest question facing the Fighter Weapons Center had to do with its continued existence. After the Vietnam surge in weapons development ended, the various Tactical Centers had to be reorganized, and those that were no longer really useful or viable, eliminated. Besides Nellis, Shaw AFB had the Reconnaissance Center, Pope AFB the Airlift Center, Eglin AFB the Air Warfare Center, and Hurlburt AFB the Special Operations Center. Taylor involved Horner in a study to look at what they needed to do at Nellis. When it was done, Taylor took the briefing to Langley and his new boss, General Momyer, and even suggested that the F-100 test aircraft at Nellis could be retired, which would save much-needed funds. Momyer then ordered that all the Centers be studied, to determine if there could be additional assets cut or even if the Center was still needed. Taylor picked Horner to be the representative from Nellis on that study, as he had worked up the formulas that allowed Taylor to make the cuts there. Before Horner left, Taylor gave him some very simple but important advice. “Don’t defend Nellis,” he told him. “Do what is best for the nation and the Air Force.” It was a magnificently empowering directive, for there was no hidden agenda. At the end of the day, Nellis’s Fighter Center and Eglin’s Air Warfare Center remained, but all the other Centers were shut down.
LANGLEY
When it was time for Horner to move on, General Taylor continued to take care of him — most importantly, by passing him on to Major General Gus Henry, the TAC planner, when Horner was assigned to Headquarters Tactical Air Command at Langley AFB, Hampton, Virginia. For the two years from 1970 to 1972, Horner was a staff officer, called the Action Officer (AO), in the office of the Deputy Chief of Plans in Plans in Studies and Analysis, under General Henry. There were five AOs, and for the most part they put together studies that aimed at answering questions such as how many fighter wings were needed, how best to use laser-guided bombs, and what the relative cost was of a sea-based attack sortie versus a land-based sortie (answer: ten times more expensive if you flew the sortie off a carrier).
At Langley, Horner learned the elementary lessons of what it takes to be a staff officer. It was a demanding job, filled with intrigues and battles, within both the TAC staff and the Air Force, and beyond, within the Army, Navy, and Marines. Horner’s agenda was to push “tactical” as opposed to “strategic” aviation. Instead of funneling the bulk of the Air Force’s efforts and budget into the nuclear war mission, he wanted to put the best equipment, training, doctrine, and tactics at the disposal of the people who might fight the actual wars.
The staffs themselves were war zones. At the TAC staff, the enemy was sometimes Strategic Command Headquarters, sometimes the Army, which was always trying to take control of the Air Force, sometimes another Deputy Chief of Staff who wanted his influence and power to grow at someone else’s expense. Sometimes it was the “doctrine” of the other services.
Military doctrine is a conceptual statement, or even a philosophy, of how a service looks at its mission and intends to accomplish it. The essentials of Air Force doctrine can be stated simply: The first requirement of modern war is to gain and maintain control of the air. Airpower provides flexibility, range, and firepower. It can be adapted to a multitude of strategies, from attacking the enemy’s capacity to sustain war to attacking the enemy’s military forces directly.
The doctrines of the other services tended to be much more codified and specific, which presented problems for Horner. The other services’ staff officers were better trained in their own doctrine than he was in the Air Force’s, which was more intuitive, so when he had an argument with the Army or Marines, they threw their doctrine at him from the rule book, while he had to make his points more with logic and enthusiasm. Landmen are lawyers; airmen are evangelists. Landmen think about defeating the enemy army; airmen think about defeating the enemy. Navy men fall in between: they look beyond defeating the enemy navy, but only think about defeating the enemy from the sea.
It soon became apparent that all the services advocated doctrines that optimized their own role in battle, but downplayed the overall role of joint operations. Fortunately, there were men in each branch, Chuck Horner among them, who felt differently. They were sickened both by interstaff and interservice parochial arguing, and the compulsion to defend service prerogatives and programs. They simply wanted to get the job done.
All through his career, Horner would run into people who had gone through the same catharsis, and when he did, they tended to get along, because of shared unspoken beliefs. They didn’t lie to one another. If they thought someone had a dumb idea, they called him on it without attacking him as an individual, but if they thought he was being less than honest, they attacked him without remorse. They came to know whom they could trust, and it had nothing to do with the color of a uniform or with rank.
From the TAC staff at Langley, Horner moved on to the Armed Forces Staff College in Norfolk, Virginia, where he trained in planning for joint and combined air, land, and sea combat. During this period he was promoted to Lieutenant Colonel below the zone, in 1972. He then spent four months at the College of William and Mary, where he earned an MBA. And then it was on to the Pentagon, the Five-Faced Labyrinth, for a three-year tour.
