Every Man a Tiger: The Gulf War Air Campaign

RESULTS

Here are some of the before-and-after performance data of the Creech reforms at TAC:

• The on-average three and a half hours from the order of a part to its delivery shrank to eight minutes.

• Pilot training sorties were doubled, increasing pilot skills and readiness.

• The number of aircraft grounded for maintenance was reduced by 73 percent.

• Hangar queens were reduced from an average of 234 per day to only eight per day.

• Fighters that landed with problems were now fixed much more quickly. The rate of those repaired on the same day was improved by 270 percent. Where before one out of five were flyable again on the same day, now it was four out of five.

• The ability to generate sorties in combat more than doubled.

All of this was accomplished with ever more technically sophisticated aircraft, thus burying two myths: (1) that U.S. aircraft were too sophisticated, and (2) that technically sophisticated aircraft couldn’t be kept in the air.

Chuck Horner takes up the story again:

What Creech did, what we did, was learn how to be an air force all over again. We learned first how to maintain aircraft and generate sorties, so our aircrews got enough quality training to be ready for combat. The average flying hours per month for our crews more than doubled, from less than ten to more than twenty. Pilots could now hit their targets, as bombing accuracy rose. And they could survive, as their aerial fighting skills were honed to levels previously considered unattainable. The equipment worked, because it was maintained with pride. Each crew chief was given ownership of his own jet, and his name was painted on the side along with the pilot’s. It was his jet and he was responsible for its performance. If his jet wasn’t ready to fly on time and in perfect condition, everyone knew who was responsible. So the crew chief would not accept excuses from the supply sergeant. If he couldn’t get a part, he found a friend whose jet was down for scheduled maintenance and asked to borrow the part he needed. And he didn’t have to ask the colonel’s permission. The transaction was between the two owners of the jets (decentralization at work).

The base also had pride, as the hospital waiting rooms were neat and clean, and the dining hall was decorated tastefully, with plants and clean walls and floors. Our people were being treated the way they deserved, and they knew it and responded.

What you saw in Desert Storm was the legacy of Bill Creech. When F-16 squadrons of usually twenty-four aircraft flew over a hundred sorties in a single day, that was because his liberation of maintenance crews from idiotic rules created an environment where individual initiative counted. Each crew chief and his assistants brought to the Gulf pride of ownership of their own aircraft. Add the awareness that we were in a war for a worthy cause, and there was no stopping us. We had pride, productivity, purpose, and a sense of professional dedication.

Decentralization was the key. Each man and woman knew what was expected, and each in turn busted his or her ass not only to do their job, but to exceed our highest expectations. Bill Creech had shown us what we were capable of achieving, he had created an environment where failure was not even a factor, and he had given us back the pride we ourselves had given away in the turmoil of Vietnam. There is no doubt the technology you saw on the television screens during Desert Storm was impressive, but to understand the victory, you have to understand the people who operated the bases, maintained the jets, and flew them into combat. You have to know the far-reaching fire Bill Creech lit in each and every one of us in the military services.

TRAINING IN LEADERSHIP

When the Creech Revolution began, Chuck Horner was a colonel. In those days, both his flying skills and his bureaucratic maneuvering skills were well developed; now it was as a leader, as a senior officer, that he had to grow and develop. The service academies, he likes to point out, educate and train top-flight lieutenants, but you learn — or fail to learn — how to be a general when you are a colonel. Only as a colonel do you have the responsibilities, the hard choices, the opportunities for success or failure, that can show you how to lead as a general.

In this stage of his life, Horner had help from a variety of officers senior to him — both good and bad — including, of course, Bill Creech himself.

His first wing commander at Seymour Johnson in 1976 was a good one, Colonel Bob Russ. Russ was hard to please, yet he wasn’t reluctant to reward outstanding performance, while letting those who fell short know they’d done so. And his efforts didn’t stop there; he devoted much of his time to training subordinates in what they needed to know to do their jobs, and ultimately to replace him. Though he was tough, he looked at each problem nonjudgmentally—“How did we get into this particular situation, how do we get out of it, and how do we prevent it from happening again?”—rather than looking for somebody to take the blame. When he could, he anticipated problems and fixed them before they occurred. Finally, because he let them bite off as much responsibility as they could swallow, people worked hard for him.

By contrast, at one point Horner was the vice commander to a brainy but thickheaded wing commander who treated his subordinates with contempt and built his career on the bodies of those he’d stabbed in the back, thus negating his very genuine intellectual gifts. Horner studied this man very carefully, and learned from him that most valuable lesson: how not to act. He did his best to handle people just the reverse of the way his boss did, and in doing so, he learned the even more important lesson: you’ve got to be yourself. If you are the commander, people don’t care if you are tough, or mean, or kind, or gentle, but if you are tough one day and kind the next, they are miserable. If they don’t know who you are going to be on any given day, then they don’t know how to act.

Much of the rest of Chuck Horner’s education in leadership came painfully… because it’s painful to have your shortcomings pointed out, especially if you are a fighter pilot with a large ego. Beyond that, if you truly care about the consequences of your acts, then you feel miserable when you make a mistake. “Good people don’t need to be screamed at,” Horner observes now. “They feel far worse about their shortcomings than you can ever make them feel. On the other hand, the bad person doesn’t care or understand, so screaming doesn’t work there, either. And if you are wrong, the good subordinate will reject your leadership in the future. So you just point out the error, to make sure they’ve gotten it, then discuss how to prevent it in the future, to rebuild their self-confidence. And then, if they are worth training, you send them on their way to sin no more.”

On one occasion, while he was at the 4th TFW, Horner led another aircraft from Seymour Johnson to Hill AFB in Utah to conduct low-level flying training. In North Carolina, fighter pilots were restricted to flying no lower than 500 feet above the ground, but since no one lived in the deserts south of the Great Salt Lake, they could drop down to fifty feet.

When they reached Hill, Horner’s wingman flew with another flight leader who was already deployed there, and Horner flew with the other flight leader’s wingman, who was qualified to fly at fifty feet. Their two-ship element took off first, and they proceeded along the low-level route, practicing formation flying and lookout at 480 to 540 knots and altitudes as low as the fifty-feet minimum. When they reached a mountain range southwest of Salt Lake City, they ran into weather, with clouds obscuring the mountain peaks, initiated a weather abort, climbed up through a hole in the clouds, and called the other element to let them know about the problem. “We’ll meet you on the gunnery range en route home,” they said as they signed off.

When the second two-ship element arrived in the mountains, the flight leader turned away from the wingman and started to climb. Unfortunately, he didn’t climb rapidly enough, and the wingman, who was trying to keep the leader in sight, failed to maintain situational awareness and scraped a ridgeline in his flight path. The aircraft skipped off the ridge and barely impacted the ground, but hit hard enough to cause the aircraft to explode.