THE FIVE-FACED LABYRINTH
As it turned out, Horner arrived at the Pentagon at just the right time. It was a heady period. The war was still ongoing, there was money in the defense budget, and the Air Force had started to acknowledge its shortcomings in training and equipment.
Once there, Horner joined a small basement office of unconstrained thinkers and freewheeling activists, which went under the name of Weapons and Tactics, TAC Division of DCS Operations, under the leadership of Colonel Bill Kirk, a slow-talking, rumpled-uniform warrior who was an old friend of Horner’s from Nellis.[19]
Their job was to make sure new equipment fit real-world tactics, and that the doctrine being written upstairs made sense to the operators who would have to follow it in combat. They produced studies and papers; briefed Congress about war in general and specific emerging programs such as the E-3 AWACS and new air-to-air missiles; pushed electronic-warfare systems and the laser-guided bomb programs; and when Israel fought the ’73 war, they sent people over to study the tactics, and mistakes, and how the various USAF and Soviet systems had been used.
Most of all, they pushed to improve air-to-air training.
Dick Pearson’s trip to Washington to explain how a pair of F-105s had been shot down by MiG-17s had had some effect on air-to-air training, but it was pretty tame. The problem was that F-105s fought like F-105s. One F- 105 turned, accelerated, and climbed pretty much like another. As a consequence, pilots learned to estimate range against a big fighter, and learned to turn with another Thud, but they knew very little about exploiting the advantages of their fighter against an enemy aircraft of another type — like, say, a MiG- 21. The Air Force needed dissimilar training.
The problem that put dissimilar training on the front burner was the exchange ratios in Vietnam — the number of U.S. aircraft lost compared with the number of enemy shot down. In Vietnam, exchange ratios were horrendously bad. In Korea, they had been something like six to one in favor of the United States. In Vietnam, owing to the limitations in the way the war was fought, they were often less than one to one — in other words, the North Vietnamese shot down more U.S. pilots than U.S. pilots shot down North Vietnamese. By 1972, when Horner was assigned to the Pentagon, more than 1,000 U.S. aircraft had been lost to MiGs, SAMs, and AAA. Very clearly, something serious had to change.
Thanks to the Fighter Mafia, it did.
THE FIGHTER MAFIA
In the late fifties and early sixties, a few Air Force, Navy, and Marine officers came to the conclusion that the dominance of strategic nuclear thinking was sucking the life out of
Inside the Pentagon, the bureaucratic path from a bright, shiny new idea to its implementation in an actual working program involved coordination throughout the staff. People like Horner and his colleagues in Bill Kirk’s office would have to walk the idea through various duchies in the Labyrinth to obtain signatures of approval — approvals that many of the dukes were loath to give, since every good new idea meant the death of some preexisting idea. Much of the staff felt threatened by anything new. It was a zero-sum situation: you get budget money for your idea; I lose money for mine. As a result, it was important to have people you could turn to. If you knew a fighter pilot in the office in which you needed to get your package coordinated, you would work out with him how to push your idea through the office without running into known problem officers or potential problem officers — those too inept to make a decision, and who would therefore sit on your package.
This was the Mafia. They helped each other and schemed about ways to move the Air Force, and they grew very skilled. Their main value was as critics and as conceptual thinkers about warfare. They proclaimed early, for instance, the importance of timely action versus executing a preordained, changeless plan, such as the SIOP. They realized that any plan might be out of date when the time came to act on it, owing to enemy actions or changes in the environment. They also made conceptual inputs to aircraft design. The F-16 can trace its roots back to original Mafia work, because it was they who argued for lower-cost, small, and agile fighters.
They were not always right. For instance, the small jet they envisioned would not even have a radar. In those days, radars were big and complex, which meant building big and complex aircraft. This in turn drove up the cost, since every pound of radar on a jet required six additional pounds of structure, which meant larger engines to carry the added weight, which meant fuel to give the larger engines an effective range, which meant more structure to hold the fuel, and so on. In order to escape this spiral, they maintained, stop it at the beginning: don’t put radar in the nose of the jet.
In fact, this kind of solution was foolish, because radar is simply too valuable not to have in combat. During the Gulf War, for example, the overwhelming number of air-to-air kills were achieved using a radar-guided missile. The better solution was to make radars smaller, which is what happened. Over time, advances in radar and missile technology have allowed the F-16, with its small and relatively low cost, to evolve into the premier fighter aircraft in the world.
The Fighter Mafia began to lose its punch as more and more conventional force people began to populate the leadership positions in the Air Force, and as mainstream Air Force thinking began to concentrate on air superiority and conventional bomb dropping. Later, when Bill Creech arrived on the scene, the old, original Fighter Mafia (by this time aging, pre-Vietnam rebels) tried to maintain their separateness and their control by continuing to rebel, but now there was nothing to rebel against, and Creech simply put them in their place.
During Chuck Horner’s tour in the Pentagon, however, the Fighter Mafia was a godsend[20]—and he felt their influence immediately in the push for Aggressor Training.
AGGRESSOR TRAINING
Horner made his first appearance at the Pentagon on a Wednesday morning, and the first thing his new boss, Bill Kirk, asked him was what he thought about starting up an Aggressors program — that is, a force that could visit the wings all over the world and give them realistic air-to-air training. The idea was that they’d buy MiG- 21s from a Third World nation who’d been equipped by the Soviets, train a few really good fighter pilots in Soviet tactics, then study how to use our fighter force to its best advantage.
Horner was enthusiastic, and elaborated on why it needed to be done. When he’d finished, Kirk smiled and handed him a message from General Momyer to General Jack Ryan, the Chief of Staff of the Air Force and a SAC man, who had passed the note down the chain of command to Kirk. Momyer’s note to Ryan said, “I’ll be up to see you on Friday to talk about starting Aggressor training,” and in passing the note to Kirk, General Ryan had implied: “You better have something good for me.”
Kirk asked Horner to prepare a paper that outlined options for Ryan to use on Friday, and Horner immediately found an empty desk in the basement and started developing his thoughts about dissimilar air combat training. The paper discussed the kinds of aircraft needed to emulate the most likely enemy (the MiG-21); the organization of a Soviet-style Aggressor force, schooled in Soviet tactics and doctrine; and three optional force structure packages. After some rewriting at Kirk’s direction, Kirk then called in a Mafia person from Forces Branch,
