briefing as soon as possible. According to Tom, INSTANT THUNDER went well beyond anything produced by the intelligence teams that had so far passed through Riyadh peddling their wares.
Since I was anxious to hear what John Warden had to say, I made a spot for him on my next day’s schedule. And at 1300 on August 20, I arrived in the RSAF Headquarters small conference room, where the CENTAF staff chiefs and the CHECKMATE team had assembled.
The briefing, unfortunately, started off poorly, the problem being that Colonel Warden had built it for a different audience than those like me who have been studying the Persian Gulf theater for years and airpower for decades. He had prepared the briefing as a stand-alone presentation for people at the JCS and CINC level, who had no idea of how Iraq as a country, or airpower as a tool, worked. That meant there was a lot of boilerplate up front, to bring the audience up to speed and to lay the groundwork for his subsequent points. Patience is not my long suit, and I don’t like being talked down to, so I waved Warden off from this preparatory material and told him to get on with his main points.
Though he seemed a little shaken by my sharp words, he quickly turned to his target listing. And here John Warden had the real thing. No doubt about it. I could not fault him for the glittering listing of targets he laid out then. Not only did he have access to target materials we had never seen before, but he had a good understanding of target systems, such as the relationship of the communications networks and the KARI air defense system. Most of all, he had a way to rack and stack the targets so we could relate their importance to overall political objectives. It was a solid piece of work, and he and his team could rightfully take pride in it.
But then, after some discussion, I began asking questions, and the wheels started to come off.
Keep in mind that the event had two aims. The briefing itself was important. But I was also conducting a job interview. If John Warden handled himself well — as I had every reason to expect he would — he’ d become my planning chief.
So I had questions for him about the briefing and the CHECKMATE plan — more or less factual questions (but which would at the same time show me how well he thought and judged); and I also had questions aimed at discovering his thought processes. I wanted to know how his mind worked and how he solved problems. To this second end, I threw a number of questions at him that would give him the opportunity to reveal the depth of his knowledge.
For example, I asked him, “Do you think we direct too much effort toward gaining control of the air?” Now, there is no right or wrong answer to a question like that, but an answer would show his reasoning process in building his plan. However, instead of grabbing the opportunity to show how his mental machinery worked, he simply dropped something like, “No, it’s about right,” telling me that he either knew it all and did not want to share it with me, or else he didn’t have a clue about gaining control of the air and had just filled the “control of the air” bin with some sorties because he needed to fill the square.
His responses to the more factually directed questions were similar. He danced around them — either because he didn’t know the answers (easy to understand; there was more plan than any less-than-divine mind could easily comprehend), or else because he didn’t want me to be screwing around with his efforts. I suspect it was a little of both.
Thus, when I tossed at him a question dealing with my broad concerns about the emphasis on targets in the Baghdad metroplex, he dodged it. To explain: Any attack within an urban area carries with it the almost certain guarantee of damage to civilian property, and civilian casualties. But worse, because of its historical and cultural significance among Arabs, the devastation of the ancient city of Baghdad by Western airpower could engender a hatred for the West lasting well beyond the immediate postwar period. It would be an Arab grievance and incitement to revenge for centuries into the future.
But, as I recall, he had no real answer for this, except perhaps to repeat his confidence in PGMs. Well, okay, I thought. But what if PGMs don’t work as well as we hope? What then? At that point, Warden, as ever, got fuzzy. (In the event, PGMs performed superbly.)
The truth is, by letting go of a little bit of control over the briefing, he could have easily provided me with useful answers. The plan was the work of many people. If he didn’t know the answer to some question or other, it would have been simple enough to turn to the subordinate on the staff who handled such matters and ask him. He could have easily said to Dave Deptula, for instance, “Dave, you built the air control part of the plan. Can you tell General Horner its basis, your assumptions, any limitations you see, and any possible holes in it?” While doing that would have brought risks, if in fact his subordinates had done their work, it would have been a mark of confidence and trust for him to let them answer. And of course, he could have corrected them as he saw fit. As it was, he was either too proud or too dense to try that solution.
There were also a number of other issues where we disagreed.
First, Warden’s plan envisioned pulverizing Iraqi air bases and their command-and-control structure. Though that is good airpower doctrine, I didn’t feel that going that far was either necessary or productive. It seemed to me that if we could render the KARI air defense network ineffective, then we could put the rest of the bombing sorties to better use. If an existing system is no longer going to be used effectively against you, what’s the gain in destroying it?
Second, I had serious doubts about the way his plan allocated targets by area: some to the U.S. Navy, others to the U.S. Air Force. Though his reasons made some sense (he did it because of the physical constraints of the various aircraft types’ payload and range), he unfortunately ran up against the personal experience of those who’d been frustrated, as I had, by the Route Package system in Vietnam. Now here was an Air Force colonel creating a concept that would easily lead to Route Packages once more. That wasn’t about to happen on my beat.
But what I really choked on came next.
The six days of attacks, foreseen by INSTANT THUNDER, were to be directed primarily against vital targets throughout Iraq, and principally on targets in the Baghdad area. That meant, for the most part, that Iraqi forces deployed in Kuwait and on the Saudi border would not be hit.
Warden’s reasons for this emphasis were straightforward: Airpower properly applied against the Iraqi centers of gravity would cause that nation’s leaders to surrender and withdraw their forces from Kuwait. In his view, Iraqi land forces were actually a detriment, a drain, less a threat than a hungry mass that had to be fed and supplied. Therefore, once we had removed the core national strengths, the Iraqi Army would simply go home.
Though I admired Warden’s singleness of purpose and his love of what airpower could accomplish, he was not the air commander. I was. More pressingly important, I was the on-scene CINC, and had other matters to consider, the most serious of these being the Iraqi divisions still poised just north of the Saudi boarder in Kuwait. At that moment, we had very few land forces in place to stop them.
First, while Colonel Warden held that because of our devastating strength in the air, the Iraqi land forces could not succeed in a ground attack, I was not in such a position to hope for the best. I knew that if we started the INSTANT THUNDER operation with only weak forces on the ground, our bases in northern Saudi Arabia might very well be overrun by the Iraqi Army. That makes it very difficult to rearm and refuel aircraft.
Second, though Warden was certainly correct in his assertion that airpower would play the major role in any forthcoming conflict, I did not consider, as he did, that Iraqi ground forces — or our own ground forces, for that matter — were unimportant. But when I pressed him on these issues, the debate went further downhill.
Where I had expected intelligence (and Warden was certainly intelligent), I was getting a university academic teaching a 101 class. At every question I asked that dealt with the Iraqi ground forces, he would dismiss my concerns as unimportant. Even if he was right (which I greatly doubt), he would have been wise to forgo the temptation to treat me like a boob. The commander on the scene may well have been a boob, but he doesn’t like to be treated like one. Warden’s problem, I’ve come to realize, was partly due to personal arrogance. He doesn’t easily suffer those who disagree with him. But it was also due to his absolute conviction that the entire package he was presenting was perfect. To question it, much less to doubt it, much less to consider changing it, was for him unthinkable.
