Every Man a Tiger: The Gulf War Air Campaign

In 1977, while Horner was at Seymour Johnson, home of not only a TAC wing but a Strategic Air Command bomber wing, special agents from the Air Force’s Office of Special Investigations discovered a drug problem on the base. One night after a change of the guard mount assigned to protect the weapons-storage area, the security policemen turned in their weapons and left the building, intending to go home or back to the barracks. Instead they entered a waiting phalanx of lawyers and OSI agents, who proceeded to read Miranda rights to 151 of a total of 225 policemen. They then charged all 151 with use or possession of illegal drugs (in this case, marijuana).

Another night a year later, at Luke AFB, where Horner was wing commander, OSI agents boarded the van used on the wing’s flight line to transport mechanics out to the various F-15 fighter aircraft that needed maintenance. They arrested not only the van’s driver for dealing in illegal drugs, but seven technicians who just happened to be taking a “hit” before going to work in the vitals of a $30 million jet.

There was a race problem, too, but race was not as serious an issue in the Air Force as it was in the nation as a whole. Racial polarization in the Air Force setting was in reality a reflection of the alienation of the young from the officers and NCOs. A unit that had pride and discipline did not tolerate racial polarization, because they were a team. Unfortunately, there were all too few teams.

Chuck Horner takes up the story:

The lack of retention of trained mechanics and aircrews, the drugs, and the apparent lack of defense funding were the excuses. But the real reason we were on our ass was much simpler: we had lost the vision of who we were, what was important, and how to lead and how to follow, how to treat our people both with love and discipline and a sense of mission. In short, we had lost pride in ourselves. Pride is not arrogance. As Dizzy Dean said, “If you done it, it ain’t bragging.” Our “ done it” was simply being ready to go to war, and in war to win.

Well, we weren’t able to honestly claim we’ d “ done it.” The result was we were living a lie and had lost our pride. Do not scoff at pride. For a military person, pride is vital. How else do you think we get people to work long days and weekends, leave their families at a moment’s notice, endure living in tents and eating packaged food that no grocery store could sell, and do all that with minimum pay and the expectation that they might have to lay down their very lives? Military units live on pride, pride born of confidence in themselves and the man or woman on their left and right. Sure, they take pride in serving the nation, and they get goose bumps when they see its flag. But what really counts is pride in doing their job well, pride in their subordinates and leaders, and pride that their lives are spent serving a cause higher than themselves. After Vietnam, we tore pride down instead of building it. We lied about our readiness, we shortcut our maintenance, we chased our tails trying to fly more when in fact we flew less, our aircraft were dirty and broken and they looked broken, we dumped our people in housing that wasn’t habitable, our pay was frozen (in an effort to halt inflation), and our troops worked in temporary buildings left over from World War II that would have embarrassed any Third World slum. Discipline along with pride had fallen by the wayside, so the good ones walked and the feeble ones turned to drugs. We had become a Communist nation within the very organization that was to protect our nation from the threat of communism.

? Then, in 1978, General W. L. “Bill” Creech was appointed commander of TAC.

A onetime leader of the Skyblazers and Thunderbird acrobatic teams, Bill Creech was a consummately skilled and precise fighter pilot. After a tour as Director of Operations at the Nellis Fighter Weapons School, he’d served as the senior assistant to General Sweeney, the bomber pilot who then commanded TAC, and the author of those infamous impromptu phone calls. Though he never said an unkind word about General Sweeney, Creech took care never to emulate him. Above all, Bill Creech was a practical philosopher and psychologist. In analyzing problems, his philosophical side looked well beyond the obvious in a search for root causes; he then doggedly worked for ways to prevent things from going wrong again. As a psychologist, he was a student of human nature, seeking to understand why people made mistakes — not in order to rebuke them, but to find ways to change the environment that led to the failures.

He was eccentric, fastidious about his personal appearance, tireless in his search for excellence, and as demanding of himself as he was of others.

How did he begin to address the problems of the Air Force?

The essential Air Force vision has always remained the same: the application of force — quickly, precisely, violently, massively. Aircraft in the air doing whatever it takes to gain control of the air, putting weapons precisely on their targets, flying as safely as possible. Success in each of these areas can be measured. The data can be very precise. How many aircraft do you have flying (and not, for example, in the hangars being repaired)? How many hours are the pilots in the air learning their skills? How well are they learning those skills? How many bombs are on target? How many planes crashed per given period of time?

By any serious measure, the Air Force was not answering those questions satisfactorily, but why? What was preventing good, highly motivated people from doing the work that they passionately wanted to do?

The answer, Creech decided, was centralization, the top-down management structures so beloved of Robert McNamara and the SAC generals. Creech hated centralization, because it robbed the individual of ownership of his job, deprived him of responsibility, and destroyed his initiative. The people in the Air Force, he liked to say, had turned into Russian workers: “We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.” For him, centralization was a fantasy based on the dream of a totally efficient institution, but it wrecked against the hard rocks of actual, everyday human personality and behavior. People simply didn’t operate the way centralization expected and predicted they would.[23]

Every organization is made up of building blocks, and if the organization is running smoothly, these building blocks mesh smoothly together. The way centralization does it is to organize them from the top down, and functionally — that is, by functional specialty, and by the job done within that function. For instance, specialists are gathered together in centralized locations and sent to work on jobs as needed: electricians work together with other electricians, hydraulics specialists work with other hydraulics specialists, all parts are located in a centralized supply area, and so on.

Under this system, all jets and all the people who work on them are alike and interchangeable. The whole mass is rated, and individual success or failure is obscured. The basic rationale for this is “economies of scale”: efficiency, cost savings, elimination of duplication.

When Bill Creech arrived at TAC Command, however, he found no hard data supporting any of these claims — in fact, quite the opposite. When all the electricians worked from a centralized shop, and were dispatched in trucks to service an entire wing’s flight line (three squadrons of twenty-four aircraft apiece, a total of seventy-two fighters), there was a lot of travel, coordination, and paperwork involved. There were no economies of scale. With a centralized storage area, it took an average of three and a half hours from the time a part was ordered from the storage area to the time it was delivered to its customer. By then the technician who ordered it would have either moved on to another job, cooled his heels and drunk several cups of coffee with his buddies, perhaps lost interest in the job, or even conceivably forgotten the nature of the problem he was originally fixing. Out of the 4,000 TAC aircraft, 234 a day, on average, were what were called “hangar queens,” those grounded for more than three weeks for supply or maintenance problems. Of those aircraft that broke in some way during a normal flight, only one out of five were flyable again on the day they broke. And overall mission-capable rates were at 50 percent or less. (By way of comparison, in the stress and high tempo of Desert Storm, mission-capable rates were at over 95 percent.)

The “functional fiefdoms” (as Creech called them) of electricians, supply, weapons specialists, and so on, were oriented, he discovered, not toward satisfying the needs of the primary product (the aircraft) and of the various subsidiary products and functions connected with keeping the aircraft in the air, but toward satisfying the needs of the organization. Also, because of the vertical orientation of these fiefdoms, they did not work easily or comfortably together with the other fiefdoms — they didn’t mesh well with each other, as Creech put it.

“When’s the last time you washed a rental car?”

— A SERGEANT IN CONVERSATION WITH BILL CREECH

What did Creech do to change TAC?

First he started an education campaign, and used hard data to persuade those who believed in centralized