Every Man a Tiger: The Gulf War Air Campaign

because all the Coalition nations were doing their best to persuade Saddam to leave Kuwait peacefully. It would not help negotiations if he found out that the United States intended to destroy him if he didn’t leave.

Glosson went straight to work. In his usual, brusque fashion, he commandeered everything in sight, including the small conference room adjacent to Tom Olsen’s office on the third floor of RSAF headquarters, as well as a number of CENTAF staff Horner had specifically told him not to touch. He also stole every high-quality person who showed up to augment Jim Crigger’s CENTAF staff. Glosson would grab them, take them into his conference room, and tell them they were going to win the war by themselves, and if they told anyone what they were doing, he would personally rip their lips off their faces. Glosson was such a difficult person to deal with, not everyone was eager to join him, yet once they did, they adored it. The team he forged was tight-knit, and it was an exciting place to work.

The secrecy of the work, plus the fact that Glosson’s people worked sixteen to eighteen hours a day, meant that a new person who came to Riyadh simply disappeared if he shanghaied them for his team. It was as if they had been sucked up by a black hole. And so Buster Glosson’s area came to be known as “The Black Hole.”

Late in August, after the D Day plan came to be more or less routine, Horner decided it was a good moment to mix some of the D Day experience and thinking into Glosson’s team (most of Glosson’s group were newcomers, while most of the D Day planners were Ninth Air Force staff who had been around a long time). Thus it was decided to beef up the “Black Hole” shop with a few of the D Day planners — a plan that was somewhat complicated by the secrecy associated with offensive operations: The D Day planners and the Black Hole planners could neither work together nor talk to each other.

One of the early D Day additions to the Black Hole group was Sam Baptiste. Though he was at first unwilling to work for Glosson (he liked working for Crigger — a preference many shared: Crigger led, Glosson drove), at Horner’s insistence, he came around and agreed to work for Glosson. Baptiste and Army Lieutenant Colonel Bill Welch, a member of Battlefield Coordination Element (BCE) team, became the key planners in building the Kuwait Theater target lists.[47]

Glosson and the Black Hole gang worked day and night, and as the hours grew longer, tempers grew shorter. Glosson didn’t have much patience with slow learners or foot-draggers. And when a few of the original CHECKMATE team proved unable to adapt their thinking, they had to return to the States. Others, like Dave Deptula, excelled; the harder it got, the more they flourished.

The biggest of their problems was the moving-train aspect of planning. As soon as they’d have some piece of it set up, another unit would arrive and have to be accommodated in the plan; and this, in turn, could change everything else. Or else someone would gain a new insight into a better way to conduct an attack or defeat a system, and that would turn the whole plan upside down. Or else they’d outline a course of action, only to get bogged down in a shortage of aerial refueling tracks or of appropriate types and numbers of munitions. Each day was more confusion than order and light, yet they steadily hard-worked their way through it.

? On August 23, General Schwarzkopf arrived in Riyadh.

As soon as possible, Horner left him with all the diplomatic problems and organizational worries and hurried back to CENTAF, sharing an office in RSAF headquarters with Tom Olsen. Next door, the Black Hole gang was in full swing, with Buster Glosson constantly rushing in and out, trying out new ideas and sharing progress reports with Horner and Olsen. It was a heady time.

On August 26, Glosson emerged from the Black Hole to brief his offensive air campaign to Horner. This did not turn out to be one of Buster Glosson’s shining moments. Though the plan itself was splendid, the briefing was a disaster. And Horner made his disappointment loudly apparent. When a crestfallen Buster Glosson returned to the Black Hole, and the others there asked him how it went, he summarized Horner’s criticisms this way: “The briefing,” he told them with searing honesty, “was (1) ill-prepared, (2) poorly presented, and (3) violently received.” They needed to go back to work.

The issue for Horner was not about the quality of the plan. He already saw that was shaping up just fine. The issue was that once Horner had signed off on it, the briefing would go to General Schwarzkopf. And the CINC would not only have to understand the plan, he would also have to buy into it as his own; and then he would also have to be prepared to defend this plan before General Powell, Secretary Cheney, and the President. Since the CINC’s greatest fear was to lose his reputation, it was important to make sure that nothing happened that might embarrass him. That meant he had to comprehend what Horner and Glosson were telling him in sufficient detail that he was certain not to fail to answer any question Powell, Cheney, or Bush might ask him. And that meant Horner had to give him something he could comprehend (and alter if he so desired); but most of all, it had to be something that made him feel comfortable.

However, the briefing was so fuzzy, poorly organized, and broad that it was difficult for a listener to understand — especially if he was not an airman. It gave the impression that the Air Force didn’t have a strong focus on its battle aims; it showed no understanding of the sequential effects of its plan of attack. Instead, they just seemed to be running around blowing things up in a helter-skelter fashion.

Later, Horner and Glosson got together to work out what needed to be done. Here, as throughout the planning process, Buster Glosson did the basic planning brainwork, while Horner made the plan intelligible to other people — and especially to non-airmen. He coached, he was a cheerleader and a sounding board, but he tried to stay out of the details. He was quick with pats on the back when the planning showed promise and innovation, and a frowner and barb-tosser when it did not.

During their discussion, Horner hit on the idea to turn Schwarzkopf’s briefing into something like a movie that would tell the unfolding story of how they planned to use airpower. The “movie briefing” would work something like this:

First, they would talk about the weeks preceding the strike, when extra sorties would be flown every night, to get the Iraqis used to seeing activity. Likewise, in the days preceding the strike, tankers would begin to move forward with the fighter packages. And then in the opening scene of the “movie,” the jets would take off late at night in minimum moonlight, to reduce the chance an Iraqi fighter could find the F-117 contingent visually as they slipped across the border at altitude. The scene would unfold with the nonstealth aircraft flying beneath the coverage of the long-range Iraqi radar. Then Special Operations helicopters would lead in the Army Apaches, which struck the first blow when they fired Hellfire missiles against a pair of border radars. (This was actually a later change, made after Schwarzkopf realized that Special Operations was going to strike the first blow. Since Schwarzkopf was famously suspicious of Special Forces, it was decided that the U.S. Army Apaches would strike the first blow, all of which helped sell the plan.) The rest of the briefing-movie scenes would follow:

The F-117s would hit Baghdad and the communications centers. F-111s would hit the Sector Operations Centers for KARI. F-15Es would hit fixed Scud sites. F-18s/F-16s/A-10s/AV-8s would hit Iraqi Army units. A host of allied aircraft would also be doing their part: RAF Tornadoes would hit airfields; RAF Jaguars would hit the Iraqi Army; RSAF F-5s would hit airfields in the western parts of Iraq; Special Operations helicopters would be infiltrating to pick up downed airmen; there were tankers, AWACS, F-15 and Tornado ADV (Air Defense Variant) CAPs; there was Rivet Joint on the Voice Product Network (a secure, encrypted voice network that allowed the intelligence technicians on the Rivet Joint to relay vital information to the AWACS controller, who would then pass it on to the fighter in unclassified form). It was the full panoply of all that would unfold in the opening days of the war. And it would give a clear indication of what would continue. That is, the Iraqi Army would be so worn down that the land war to come would feature very few casualties.

To make all this work, Horner had Glosson build a series of plastic overlays with symbols showing where the various aircraft would be at various times, together with the targets they were planning to strike. Thus, the 0300 overlay showed F-117s near Baghdad, while the tankers with assorted fighters were well to the south, and the Rivet Joint and AWACS were in the orbits they usually occupied. Then the 0400 overlay showed explosion symbols on the targets being struck, together with the next wave of attackers. This overlay also showed the MiG CAPS over Iraq and not Saudi Arabia, as they had been all during Desert Shield. The movie unwound before the viewer not unlike a primitive jerky cartoon. Even so, anybody watching would get a sense of the timing, the enormity, the integration, and the sequence of attacks and how they related to taking down the air defenses, and hitting critical time-sensitive targets.

Owing to the CINC’s anxieties about the Republican Guard, one significant element was added by Schwarzkopf to the plan, and to the briefing. Provisions had to be made to attack the elite Iraqi force early and