In Horner’s words, “If an Army unit had needed that air, I would have sent it to them and told Moore to piss up a rope. But it never came to that. In fact, just the opposite. Schwarzkopf shortchanged the Marines. Not on purpose. He was just fixated on the Republican Guard and the VIIth Corps attack against them. So when it became apparent by sortie count that Boomer’s and the EAC’s guys were not getting as much air as the VIIth Corps and that they had more enemy to attack, we shifted air over the eastern sector. This was the right thing to do, and it paid off, as evidenced by the collapse of the Iraqis in the face of the initial attacks in the east [before VIIth Corps took off].”
? Like the Marines, the Navy was also protective of its own air.
Admiral Hank Mauz, who was NAVCENT when Rear Admiral Bill Fogerty took over, and then Vice Admiral Stan Arthur, was not an airman, so he was not aware of some of the issues that had burned in pilots’ souls ever since Vietnam, such as “Route Packages.” Air Force pilots had hated the practice of dividing up sections so that only Navy planes flew in one, and Air Force planes in another, but thinking it was a convenient way to keep his carrier admirals happy, Admiral Mauz suggested dividing Iraq up into sections, so the Air Force and the Navy could conduct their operations without getting in each other’s way.
He was more than a little surprised when Horner gave him a withering look and told him, “Hell no. I’ll retire before we try anything as stupid as that.”
Mauz got the message.
An invasion of sorts did occur in Saudi Arabia in August of 1990: not the Iraqis, the reporters.
The phenomenon of twenty-four-hour news network programming — instant and live — has fundamentally changed the way military professionals conduct war. Chuck Horner calls this phenomenon the CNN Effect.
War is by definition bad news. People are killed; homes and workspaces destroyed; money thrown away in obscene amounts. And now the TV camera provided people back home with instant access to it all. Unlike print, the TV camera sees what it sees. It’s there. The tape can be edited, but, basically, the camera is not held hostage to the credibility and adroitness of the reporter’s use of language. Whether he liked it or not, the presence of TV on the battlefield, on both sides of the lines, had a profound impact on how the military did business.
Chuck Horner elaborates:
As soon as the folks at home see on TV part of a battle, part of a battle space, or even a major player walking down an aircraft boarding stairs in some faraway country (signaling major league interest in the place), there’s a serious impact. Folks worry. They’re relieved. They’re angry. They form opinions about how you are doing that job. They may agree with what you are trying to do but disagree with the way you are doing it. The effect of a military decision is not only felt on the battlefield, it is felt immediately back home. And the impact of that can find its way back to the battlefield within hours. In a democratic society, of course, the effects of well-done planning are immediately available, while the effects of poor execution or misguided adventures may take some time to discern.
When a military leader thinks through what he is doing and how he is doing it, part of that mental process damn well better include the impact of his choices back home and in the rest of the world. If not, he’s likely to be in for surprises on the battlefield.
The Saudis were aware of the CNN Effect from the start (they carefully watch over their press, screening it for offensive material). So when Secretary of Defense Cheney walked down the airplane stairs in Jeddah on the sixth of August, 1990, the press was there because the King wanted them there. Why? I suspect he wanted to tell the Iraqis to keep out of here, because the powerful United States had sent its Secretary of Defense to offer its help.
Did Grant figure into his campaign the impact of widespread instant communication of the battlefield to all the world? You bet he didn’t. But it sure happened to us in the Gulf War, and it was a driver in everything we did.
It affected the way we targeted (and I don’t regret any of this): We did our best to avoid civilian casualties. We planned attack headings to avoid civilian areas. We accounted for the failures of precision munitions to guide properly. We did not shred Iraqi soldiers by dropping cluster bombs from B-52s. We did not drop bombs when we could not positively identify the target. We did our best to advertise the evils the Iraqis were committing inside occupied Kuwait.
And we screwed things up badly a few times: by hitting a command facility that was also being used as an air raid shelter, by demonizing Saddam Hussein instead of the occupation of Kuwait, and by allowing the wreckage on the road out of Kuwait City to be perceived back home as the highway of death, when there was very little death — though lots of destruction. (I am also sure the U.S. Army doesn’t like people seeing what airpower can do to an army… to anyone’s army.)
Thank God Saddam screwed up his own TV ops worse, time and again. Remember the burning oil fields of Kuwait? Remember the hostages? Remember the English hostage boy who was brought in as a “guest” of the great leader? When the President of Iraq came close to pat his little friend on the head, the boy froze with fear. All in glorious color. Saddam, old buddy, get a kid actor to stand in and stage the scene so he greets you with a kiss and a smile.
We in the West are stuck with a free press. It’s not always easy for us in the military to deal with our press, yet the press is our ultimate blessing and our lasting glory. When we are wrong, we will (sooner rather than later) be shown as wrong. When we are right and our actions are good, that will also come out. Sure, we can try to manipulate the press, and the press can attempt to manipulate the truth; but in the end there is enough integrity in both the military and the media to make sure most of the truth gets out to the world. The old boys will try to tell you we lost Vietnam because the evening news showed American boys burning villages and shooting old people. Get a grip. We lost in Vietnam because we were wandering in the wilderness of goals, mission, and policy; and in the process we came to believe that burning villages and shooting old people was good. The CNN Effect means that God’s looking over your shoulder all the time, and I think it is a blessing. It is not pleasant, and you take hits, but in the end it brings out the best in mankind when he is out doing his worst, waging war.
Here is how Horner made his own peace with the television invasion of Saudi Arabia in the summer of 1990:
Boomer and Turki at Dhahran became the stars in the eastern part of the country. I got the job of talking to the press in Riyadh, a job I had very little preparation for. Sure, I’d done local interviews and TV spots as the commander of various stateside bases. But Christ, these were the big boys. How was I going to handle questions I couldn’t answer because the answers were classified? Worse, how was I going to handle questions I didn’t know the answer to, which would make me look like a dumbshit? (Sure, I’m a dumbshit, but I don’t want the whole world getting their jollies watching me prove it on TV.)
Well, I survived the first hits; and I learned a little.
As I gained experience, I learned to talk plain English to the press, to tell as much as I could of the truth, to try not to cover my own ass, and to hell with them if they didn’t like an answer. That approach seemed to make sense to them, and we learned to trust each other. Most of them did their best to report what I said as accurately as they could, and I did my best to give them what I knew. If I didn’t know, I would tell them so; usually they didn’t know either and were just fishing.
In time, I also learned how to listen to a question and figure out the questioner’s story line. So if I thought some reporter was headed down a blind alley, or had the wrong slant, I would tell him so. Often this generated more useful, and more honest, questions.
Soon after I was appointed CENTCOM Forward, a Department of Defense press pool was
