Desert Shield or some Bright STAR exercise), they had no problem immediately integrating operations. Common terms and equipment were used, as were common rules and tactics.
Desert Shield and Desert Storm went so easily in great part because everyone had been there before. They had flown their first ten combat sorties together and had already been indoctrinated as a team. It paid off, not so much in terms of tactics development or even individual aircrew training, but because the people had worked together and understood one another.
? It was while he was Assistant Deputy Commander for Operations to the 4th Tactical Fighter Wing at Seymour Johnson in North Carolina from 1976 to 1979 that Horner participated in his first Red Flag. Fresh from the Pentagon and a year at the National War College at Seymour Johnson, he worked for the DO, Colonel Harvey Kimsey, who worked for the wing commander, Colonel Bob Russ. It was a prime assignment, since it meant he was back flying, in F-4Es (then used in an air-to-air combat role). His job was to do whatever the DO didn’t want to do. Since Kimsey was primarily interested in flying jets and didn’t like paperwork, that left a great deal of work for his assistant, a situation that did not at all bother Horner, who was happy doing most of the jobs DOs do — looking after intelligence, tactics, standards/ evaluation, plans, scheduling, and shops. The wing had three squadrons of twenty-four aircraft and thirty pilots, commanded by lieutenant colonels. Horner planned exercises and monitored flying, both by watching the schedule and by flying with each of the squadrons.
For his first Red Flag, Horner commanded two squadrons from his home base. General Hartinger,[22] Ninth Air Force Commander, also assigned him another job: he was to be the man responsible (officially: the Ninth Air Force Senior Representative). In other words, if there was an accident at Red Flag, then he expected Horner to explain it. As a result, while Horner commanded only the primary unit, the two squadrons from Seymour Johnson, he was responsible to the Ninth Air Force commander for everything that went on; and if anything went wrong, God help his career. Since the threat of hanging tends to focus one’s attention, he made sure he sat in on the briefings and planning, spoke up if he sensed someone was going to do something stupid, and sent people home who didn’t play by the rules. The result: everything went smoothly.
In time, Horner flew in more than his share of Red Flags, and he learned there many things. For instance, his long-held opinion about the absurdity of low-level penetration of enemy defenses was reinforced at first hand at a Red Flag in January 1977. His squadrons were playing the role of red air (enemy air) in F-4Es, while blue air F- 111s were trying to sneak in on the deck. These particular F-4Es were equipped with TISEO, a TV telescope mounted on the left wing root that could be slaved to the radar. That way, on their radar screen, pilots could see a TV picture of the target they were locked into, which allowed visual ID of the target while it was still beyond eyeball range. Using TISEO, pilots could tell the type of aircraft they were facing at sufficient distance to launch an AIM-7 medium-range missile in a head-to-head engagement, closing at a total speed of 1,000 to 1,300 knots. The 111s themselves, with their distinctive, ungainly look, were easy to spot; and because they were flying close off the ground, visual acquisition was a snap. Then, for Horner’s red team, it became just a matter of gaining sufficient smash (airspeed) to convert on them and film them with gun cameras. “It wasn’t unlike shooting strafe at a banner,” Horner remembers, “except in this case the target was moving at six hundred knots over the ground at fifty or a hundred feet. Just stay above the target and you won’t hit the ground.”
Pilots learned other basic lessons at Red Flags, as well: how to evaluate their situation in the confusion of combat (even as some people were talking too much on the radio, and others were talking too little); the necessity of looking after their wingmen and of herding a flight into the target and then into the return without soaking up fatal shots (even if they were only on video recorders); the necessity of using simple conservative tactics, so all can cope when the plan does not unfold as expected; the necessity of keeping situational awareness, even as hundreds of aircraft are swirling every which way at supersonic speeds; and the difficulty of finding the target and bombing accurately when a pilot’s radar warning receiver is screaming in his ear that he is going to die in a few seconds unless he does something (most likely what he is already doing).
Though Red Flags did not totally replicate combat, they definitely caused pressures that resulted in the same adrenaline flow and the same cotton-mouthed feeling.
THE GCC SYSTEM
Finally, the GCC — Graduated Combat Capability — system, like Aggressor Training and Red Flag, was another way to train the way they planned to fight. To make this a reality on a day-to-day basis, standards were devised and an accounting system established: for a base to be combat-ready, so many sorties of a certain type had to be flown each quarter. For example, in an F-15 air-to-air wing, each pilot needed to fly X number of one- versus-one maneuvering, and Y number of multi-ship two-versus-two (or more) tactics missions. If a pilot then aimed for a higher level of readiness, he needed additional and more demanding missions.
The accounting system kept track of aircrew training activity and quality, in order to define the combat readiness of the force. More experienced pilots were given lower requirements. Thus there were A-, B-, C-, and D- level pilots, based on their total fighter time, and time in the current aircraft (a fighter pilot with 1,500 hours total time, of which 300 hours was in his current jet, might be an A-level pilot, whereas a new pilot with 800 hours of fighter time might need 750 in the current jet to reach A level). The pilots then operated at three levels of combat readiness — basic, advanced, and ultimate. A pilot at the ultimate level was so experienced, and was flying at such a high rate, that he was certified combat-ready in any mission the jet was capable of performing.
THE BILL CREECH REVOLUTION
All of this new training was wonderfully effective, but it still didn’t address the root, systemic causes of the Air Force’s problems with morale and discipline. The men could fly better, but the legacy of Vietnam had taken its toll on military institutions, and the old leaders followed styles of command — fear and intimidation — that had been in vogue during World War II and Korea but were useless today.
These problems were compounded, once again, by SAC’s dominion over the Air Force. To a SAC general, all bombers and bomber crews were interchangeable. Fighter generals played the team according to the strengths and weaknesses of the individual pilots and their individual jets, but there weren’t enough fighter generals to make an impact on the culture at TAC. As a result, midlevel TAC leadership of Chuck Horner’s age group had for the most part either died in the war or left the service to avoid that fate.
Pilots, in particular, were leaving the Air Force in droves. The reasons were clear: they had joined the Air Force to serve their nation flying jet aircraft. Instead, they would come to work at 5:00 A.M. to brief for a 7:00 A.M. takeoff, wait until 9:00 A.M. until three of the four scheduled aircraft were reported by maintenance to be actually ready to fly, and finally mount up on these three planes, only to find after they started them up that one of them was in fact not capable of safe flight. Meanwhile, since the two planes that got airborne did not have working fire- control radars, the crews burned holes in the sky in a valiant effort to fly out the wing’s assigned number of hours.
The situation grew worse daily, and so, monthly and yearly, the flying-hour program was revised downward, in the hope of discovering the minimum level of flying operations that was supportable. It wasn’t anybody’s fault. There was no money for spare parts; maintenance mechanics were not trained, owing to the hemorrhaging caused by the lack of experienced personnel; readiness reports were shaded to look good, so higher headquarters felt justified in reporting to their boss in Washington that the Air Force was ready to carry out its wartime mission.
Experienced pilots were sick of the false reporting, the meaningless ground jobs (designed to keep them busy when there were no aircraft to fly), and the seemingly endless tragedies, as young, inexperienced, and noncurrent pilots died in needless aircraft accidents.
The drug problem was endemic in the nation, so it was no surprise that it affected the military, too. But it was one thing to be high on drugs at a party, and another to be high while guarding nuclear weapons or maintaining jets.
A case in point:
