Every Man a Tiger: The Gulf War Air Campaign

At the April 1990 briefing, I was lead-turning the issues that had been a problem in the past: failure of the Marines to fight jointly, ignorant attempts by the Army to own the air forces, and failure of land force- trained CINCs to understand how to fight airpower. The briefing was a great success for me, for Schwarzkopf, and eventually the country.

I had Schwarzkopf’s confidence, and I got that the old-fashioned way: I earned it. So when he would call me in the middle of the night in the TACC from his war room and say, “Chuck, I am looking at a Joint STARS picture, and I see thirty trucks at XYZ, can you get them?” I could reply, “I will certainly try, but if they are not there because the picture you have is too old, I will send the force to where it was originally scheduled to go.” And he would reply, “Okay.”

? All the planning and the thousands of actions that go on in war depend on faith and trust. No single commander can know all that needs to be known, can be everywhere to make every decision that needs to be made, or can direct every action that is taken.

The Strategic Plan

The briefing ended with a discussion of what Horner labeled for Schwarzkopf a “strategic air campaign plan” (much to his later regret). What he meant was “targets strategic to Iraq”—that is to say, high-value targets, such as oil production and electrical distribution facilities, that could be held hostage in case Iraq used mass-destruction weapons.

Again, he was talking in the context of the essentially defensive Internal Look Scenario. Thus, the strategic campaign Horner was proposing then was only peripherally related to the plan of attack that later was to emerge in August and September of 1990. Unfortunately, the word strategic carries great magic, especially for commanders, and that day the word worked its magic on General Schwarzkopf. Ever after, he called the plan of air attack against Iraq the “strategic” air campaign, when, in reality, it was an offensive air campaign, a means to achieve the political objectives of the President and the Coalition, should diplomatic efforts and the embargo on Iraq fail.

This confusion was to resurface in August on the tarmac in Jeddah when the CINC asserted his desire for a “strategic” air campaign… and yet again in the plan proposed by Colonel John Warden and his CHECKMATE team, about which there will be more to come.

THE D DAY ATO

Deterrence is effected by having a strong military force in place that is ready to fight and capable of winning.

We will probably never know why Saddam Hussein did not attack Saudi Arabia in August. He may well have had that intention, yet was deterred by the rapid buildup of airpower and the U.S. ability to conduct a sustained air campaign within hours of the initial deployment.

Meanwhile, though the military commanders on scene did not know Saddam’s intentions, they had to be ready to counter the very real threat posed by twenty-seven Iraqi divisions on the border.

If Saudi Arabia were to be attacked, the following strategy was foreseen:

• First of all — and most important — air defense would be maintained, so Iraq could not use its own air forces to devastate the cities, ports, and airports in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain.

• There would be direct attacks on the attacking elements of the invading force.

• However, the greater concentration of attacks would be on the logistics lifelines of the Iraqis as they fanned out across the desert.

• Finally, Chuck Horner also asked for attack options against “strategic” targets inside Iraq. In this case, “strategic” attack meant strikes against targets not directly related to Iraqi military forces in the field.

This strategy was translated into what became the “D Day Plan” or “D Day ATO.” This is a good place to discuss just what an ATO is.

Air is a task-organized force — that is, each airplane is tasked to go somewhere and do something that will benefit the overall effort to attain a campaign objective as part of the overall theater strategy to support national objectives. The air commander plans tasks and allocates forces to do those tasks, based on the characteristics of the force elements. So, for example, on January 25, 1991, from 1000 to 1030, the USAF tasked A-10s to patrol a particular road in Kuwait and kill vehicles, using its gun and Maverick missiles. The way this tasking was transmitted to the people who would have to execute it was by means of an Air Tasking Order. In Desert Shield/Desert Storm, the planning that went into the preparation of the ATO was centralized at the headquarters of the JFACC and was done by representatives of all the functional elements (A-10 pilots, F-16 pilots, AWACS pilots, etc.) and nations represented (the United Arab Emirates Air Force, the RAF, etc).

The ATO is a statement of marshaled resources that is based on the best available information and the best available guidance at the time it is prepared. Each day, the commander will have a new appreciation of what needs to be done. Perhaps the enduring objective he sought to achieve has also been modified by new realities (definitely the case for the side that is losing).

That is to say, when constructing the plan and its expression in the ATO, the commander can never forget that the situation is fluid, that chaos is always a close neighbor, and that terrific opportunities may arise in an instant. This is especially true in war, where aircraft move about in the battlespace in minutes or seconds, and information about new situations and alignments of forces arrive in real time and must be acted on instantly. Even though the commander must have principles to hang on to, as time passes, his objectives may become modified, and he will certainly gain more information about the reality of his situation.

To make all this more complicated: The ATO itself is like a moving train. If someone suddenly changes one element, he must consider the ripple effect on other elements. Sometimes the effect is minimal. For example, Tiger Flight is scheduled to hit target X at Y time, but new intelligence comes in that says target X has moved five kilometers north. No problem. The new target coordinates are inserted, the change is added, and the ATO is hardly affected. But suppose that Y time becomes two hours later. Then there’s a serious problem. The new time may well drastically affect the aircraft generation schedule at the base. It may well affect tanker availability. It may well affect airspace deconfliction. And it may well affect the intelligence-collection efforts associated with that strike. For these reasons, it is sometimes better to freeze the ATO early and make up for the changes in the chaos that reigns in the current operations efforts during the day of execution.

Thus, an ATO is the marshaling of available resources against a series of tasks as they are best known when the plan is created. But the day that plan is executed, there will be more information that may in fact require reordering of priorities and tasks.

That means that the old paradigm — ready, aim, fire — has changed. In modern war, you ready, fire, and then aim. The deployment and sustaining of the force, a service responsibility, is the ready; the launch of the force against a preconceived schedule is the fire; while the command and control associated with the operations is the aim. That is, one now often loads up his aircraft, puts them in the air, and then decides what target to hit, based on real-time intelligence.

The plan, again, is not a sacred document. A commander has to be prepared to change it on the fly, and he has to have machinery in place to transmit the changes instantly to the people affected by them. For this reason, during Desert Storm, ATOs were built two and a half days — no more than that — before they were put into operation (since this was the minimum time for necessary preparations). This made it hard for the planners who made ATOs, but it ensured that changes would be more easily and quickly accommodated.

Chuck Horner imposed this two-and-a-half-day limit because he didn’t want his forces to be constrained by planning that went on days or even weeks before the war started. He wanted planners to be forced to evaluate the first day’s efforts and results, and then to plan what to do on day three. To make things easier, he gave them a half-day start. Then, as the days proceeded, they needed to make plans completely from scratch, using what they’d learned as previous days unfolded. “Of course, they had target lists hidden in their pockets,” Horner adds. “I expected that. But I wanted to force them into thinking about where we were at a given time and then planning from that, instead of building an entire air campaign and then just modifying it here and there. Chaos reigns and