WHAT IS AN AIR CAMPAIGN?
An air campaign is a series of military actions that employs air vehicles in order to achieve a political goal. It may be a phase in an overall campaign that also uses land, sea, and space vehicles, or it may be a phase that uses air vehicles primarily. (Air is the area above the surface of land or sea and below the vacuum of space. The edge of space is currently reckoned to be about 90,000 feet above mean sea level, but in the future it will probably rise to about 350,000 feet above MSL.) A commander has a wide range of missions, available to him as part of those actions — air superiority, air interdiction, air reconnaissance, airlift, and close air support.
In addition, an air campaign (in fact, any campaign) has to address a specific situation — in this case, the invasion south by Iraq into Kuwait and, potentially, Saudi Arabia.
Once the objectives and the actual situation have been determined, how does a commander build an air campaign?
He starts by using his available intelligence information to decide on an overall plan, which contains all the elements he thinks are needed. Then he examines the contributions airpower can make and decides how it will be used. This last is primarily a list of functions, such as: “I want to gain control of the air and keep the Iraqi Army from inflicting casualties on our ground forces.” This, in turn, leads to target selection, such as, for example: “I’ll want to bomb a particular Sector Air Defense Operations Center.” Or, “AWACS sees a MiG-23 flying south. We need to stop it.” Or, “We need to destroy tanks and artillery in order to keep our own losses on the ground low.” Once the targets have been determined (and the target list will always be changing), he aligns the targets with the attack forces he has available. He then overlays all the other support elements needed to get the job done — intelligence, command-and-control measures, refueling, search and rescue, AWACS, electronic countermeasures, Wild Weasels, communication codes — and lists them in the daily Air Tasking Order (called the Frag in Vietnam). This is the control document that tells virtually everything that flies what to do in the air, where to be, and when (including where
We’ll discuss the ATO in depth in a little while. Before that, however, Horner had a much bigger task in front of him as he began to figure out his air campaign.
THE PLAN AND THE CINC
Plans are not made in the abstract. They are addressed to specific commanders, and though this is primarily to satisfy the commander’s expressed needs, it is also inevitably tailored to the commander’s personality. As the various plans that eventually grew into the actual plan of attack in Desert Storm were created and developed, Chuck Horner was sensitive to both the needs and to the personality of H. Norman Schwarzkopf.
He was aware, first of all, that Schwarzkopf was a landman, not an airman. As a result, from the beginning of their relationship in CENTCOM, he had tried to elevate the CINC’s sights into thinking about the importance of airpower to devastate the enemy in ways that were not directly connected to land warfare. He feared that Schwarzkopf would fall into the land-centric error that too many land officers made: thinking that war was
Horner wanted the CINC to consider the use of airpower to achieve goals that were not about destroying the enemy army. And in fact, he succeeded.
As it turned out, Schwarzkopf wished to be the kind of CINC who approached warfare from a much broader perspective than is usually the case with land-centric thinkers. He wanted Goldwater-Nichols to work. The proof of it was in the way he created a theater leadership capable of blending the best of land, sea, air, space, and special operations activities and capabilities.
Horner didn’t know that yet, however. This is the way he saw him at the time.
First of all, Schwarzkopf was extremely intelligent. It never took him long to grasp what he was being told.
Like Bradley, he deeply loved ground troops. He cared passionately about their safety.
Like Patton, he believed in his own destiny. This meant that he feared history would not remember him as the heroic man of destiny he considered himself to be… or rather, that others would foul things up for him and prevent him from achieving his historic destiny.
Finally, his ego was enormous, yet he was enormously insecure.
His insecurity was the key to his famous rages. For instance, Schwarzkopf could never handle well being put on the spot; and when he was put on a spot, his tendency was to lash out and bully or to throw blame on someone else. For this reason, Horner learned never, never to put him on the spot. He never confronted him in public, but always in his office, when they were alone or with another person the CINC trusted. This not only protected the CINC from himself and his insecurities; but when the CINC was nervous and insecure, he sometimes made wrong decisions, which might require a lot of work to undo.
To have constructed any kind of war plan without taking consideration of these and other personality and character issues would have been far worse than unwise.
INTERNAL LOOK AND THE EVOLUTION OF THE PLAN
Norman Schwarzkopf took command of CENTCOM on November 23, 1989. Chuck Horner took the first major opportunity he could to talk to him about airpower.
This came during the preparations for the Internal Look exercise planned for July 1990 in which Country Orange invaded Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. In April 1990, Horner gave General Schwarzkopf a briefing that covered his planned use of airpower in Internal Look — a briefing that came to have important consequences for Desert Storm, both in the way air was actually used operationally and in the way it added to General Schwarzkopf’s understanding of airpower.
The briefing made a number of key points:
First, it showed the new CINC the deployment priorities for airpower in the Middle East region. The immediate need it foresaw was to build up air defenses (with fighters, AWACS aircraft, and SAMs), so that all the other component forces could deploy under a defensive umbrella covering Saudi airports and seaports. Next, attack and bomber aircraft would deploy to deter invasion, or (if an invasion occurred) to slow the invading forces until sufficient friendly ground forces could be put in place. Then came a whole basket of airpower capabilities most people did not appreciate: command-and-control aircraft to manage and facilitate air support of a ground battle, intelligence-collection aircraft, and vital support systems such as intertheater airlift. These were followed by discussions of mundane but essential issues such as how and where the air forces would be bedded down, supported logistically, and tied together with communications networks. Horner also described how his people would take over the air traffic control system and manage the airspace over the area of responsibility.
During all of this, the CINC listened closely and appeared to appreciate the important details.
Now came a discussion of actual operations. Here Horner described how they would manage intelligence assets and collection; air defense CAPs (Combat Air Patrols) and AWACS coverage; employment of Patriot missiles to defend against Scud attacks, and counter-air attacks on Iraqi airfields, radars, and SAM sites; as well as the overall command-and-control system networking them together. He covered interdiction of Country Orange (Iraqi) forces in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia (if those countries had been invaded), and cutting them off from resupply. He described how they would provide close air support (CAS) to ground forces, using the tactical air control system, and ways to provide that same support to potential Arab allies. And he covered possible nuclear, biological, and chemical (NBC) weapons targets.
