Every Man a Tiger: The Gulf War Air Campaign

ongoing operations — who is flying what CAPs where, the status of forces in terms of buildup, and where they are deploying in the desert. Hamad says little, and the individual Saudi chiefs are reluctant to talk too much in front of him, probably because they wish to keep their own prerogatives and enjoy working with their U.S. counterparts. Thus, the RSAF and USAF work well together, while the RSAF and RSLF, though friendly and polite, do not have a history of close cooperation.

2230 I’m back upstairs putting out fires. There’s a telephone call from a civilian contractor at one of the U.S. compounds asking if it is true that the Iraqis had launched an attack and that poison gas had been used. “It’s not true to my knowledge,” I tell him, “but I will check into it.” A quick check of headquarters (the TACC in the RSAF) shows that all is quiet as far as AWACS can tell. RSLF listening posts on the border have not reported anything unusual. I get back to the contractor and calm him down, or else I have Don do it if I am busy with something else.

Now callers begin stopping by the office. You can never forget that most serious business in the Arab world is done between 11:00 P.M. and 3:00 A.M. A couple of print newsmen spend fifteen to thirty minutes asking me questions. Since it’s too early in the deployment for a Public Affairs Officer to be in theater, I use my best judgment and depend on their honesty and willingness not to make me look like a fool. (I never really had a problem except with Jack Anderson, who was writing reports back in the States that gave the impression he was in Riyadh; he even “quoted” me. The man has no integrity.)

Midnight I am really getting tired and fall asleep reading messages. My eyes start burning and watering, so I put some ice cubes on them, which gives some relief. I still doze off from time to time.

Even this late, there is lots of activity, and the phones are ringing off the wall (it’s daytime at CENTCOM Rear in Tampa and in Washington). I avoid most of the calls, and John Yeosock and Don Kaufman do most of the talking to important people, while the small stuff is handled by Grr. I do talk to Schwarzkopf if he calls, but he seldom does this late. And I also may talk with USAF generals, but I usually refer them to Tom Olsen at RSAF rather than try to do both jobs. There will be plenty of time to command the air forces when Schwarzkopf comes, and for now the people need a commander for all the theater.

Later, John comes in, and we sit and talk. Others join in, and we go over what we can do if the attack comes at first light or anytime tomorrow. I may call Tom Olsen, Gary Luck, or Walt Boomer if I have something to say to them, but I usually don’t, as their forces are just getting settled in and mating up with their equipment on a very piecemeal basis. When I talk to them, I do a lot of listening as to what they think and are planning, and I give suggestions based on what John and I have discussed. But for the most part, John Yeosock is in charge of organizing whatever ground forces we can muster, and Tom Olsen has the air forces along with Ahmed Sudairy, the RSAF/DO, who is an incredibly brilliant and take-charge airman.

0300 Things seem to be settling down. The night shift people are slowing down and starting to sit around and talk over coffee. But they will still be organizing reports, answering questions, or directing activities (such as rerouting an incoming C-5 so it lands at Dhahran and not at Jeddah). By now I am pretty much useless, due to fatigue; and John and I reluctantly head for the sack.

On some days, like Friday (Islamic Sunday), we might sleep in till 8:00 A.M. On some nights, just as we crawl into bed, the phone will ring with someone from the States calling one or the other of us. The idiot, not realizing the time in Riyadh, is trying to get a problem solved or a question answered before he leaves the office. They usually start off with, “Did I bother you? By the way, what time is it where you are?” Both questions mark him as an idiot.

6 Planning the Storm

It was time to start formulating the Plan.

War is essentially chaos, and the line between control and sickening confusion is paper-thin. If one takes care, the violence applied can be focused with precision, yet even when care is taken, it can easily degenerate into wild and formless mayhem. Look at Bosnia, Cambodia, and Rwanda.

It is no surprise that commanders devote much of their best effort to reducing chaos. One of the major means to that end is the Plan.

Planning in the U.S. military starts with the national command authorities — the President, aided by his chief advisers — who articulate the political objectives and overall goals to be achieved by the use of military force. The ball is then passed to the CINC in whose Area of Responsibility the force is to be used, and he determines how to put together and marshal the forces available to him in order to bring them to bear on his nation’s adversaries with the maximum focus and effect (and thus with the minimum of disorder and chaos). It is then the responsibility of the various component commanders to construct a plan to achieve the CINC’s objectives — a campaign.

? That all sounds simple enough, but the reality is more complicated. To begin with, it is easy to assume too much for the capabilities of military force. What can military force actually do? What is its capacity to achieve a goal? The answer is: not very much, and very little well. At best, a specific goal can be more or less precisely matched with a specific use of military force — evicting the Iraqi army from Kuwait, for instance. But no amount of force could bring democracy to Iraq.

It is equally easy to assume too much, or too little, for an air campaign. The doctrinaire advocates of airpower believe, as an article of faith, that destroying the “controlling centers” of an enemy nation will render the enemy impotent and helpless, no matter how powerful his forces in the field. The doctrinaire advocates of land power conceive of air only as flexible, longer-range artillery, really useful only against those same enemy forces in the field. The reality does not so much lie in between as it varies with the demands of each situation.

There is further debate among airpower intelligentsia about whether the attack should be aimed at destroying an enemy’s means (his military forces and the various facilities that allow him to make war) or his will (his determination to resist). The extremists on both sides hold that if you do one, then you don’t need to do the other. Both are wrong. Attacking an enemy’s will can pay big dividends, but it is hard to know exactly how to do it. Bombing cities into dust sometimes works, as does targeting his military capabilities, but both are costly and have many drawbacks; so the theorists can debate in their ivory towers until they run out of words.

Meanwhile, the men and women in the field have to select the best of both as they apply to their given situation, and sometimes they don’t get the mix right. This was one area, in fact, where airpower failed in the Gulf War.

In Desert Storm, Coalition air forces attempted to destroy the will of Iraq by bombing leadership targets in Baghdad, but these attacks failed miserably to degrade Iraq’s determination to resist. Why? Because Coalition air commanders did not know what constituted the sources and strength of Saddam’s will. As Chuck Horner is the first to admit, he had the means to destroy Saddam’s will but didn’t know how to do it.

In contrast, when the Coalition attacked the means of the Iraqi Army in the field, it also destroyed that army’s will. Thus, when Coalition land forces engaged forty-two Iraqi divisions, the result after four days was 88,000 Iraqi POWs and only 150 U.S. ground force deaths (half of which were accidentally inflicted by U.S. forces).

What went wrong? The first problem was with intelligence. U.S. intelligence operatives have not been trained to think in terms of the effects of military force on a given enemy. As a result, instead of risking judgments, they behave like accountants (with numbers, there is little risk). Intelligence operatives like to count enemy airplanes rather than determine the effect of killing an ace pilot.

The second problem was with the Plan. The Plan is not chiseled in stone. It is a script, and no performance ever goes according to script. After the first bomb drops, the enemy changes. Perhaps he is stronger than before, perhaps he is weaker. But changed. So the theorist is right at the opening moment of the war, and wrong ever after.

We’ll be discussing both problems in more depth later on.