Every Man a Tiger: The Gulf War Air Campaign

Center, a large room (perhaps sixty feet by fifty feet) filled with computers. There were many CAFMS terminals, all fed by the single large computer that was used to pull the ATO together. Between the large computer and the CAFMS terminals was a laptop that translated the input from the large computer into data the CAFMS terminals could display and manipulate. At the end of the hall, and straight ahead, was a stairs that led down to the RSAF Peace Shield bunker (another hundred or so feet below ground). Though it was still under construction, it was used as an air raid shelter during the first few Scud strikes on Riyadh.

Just before these stairs, and a ninety-degree turn to the right, was the entrance to the Black Hole. Up until the war started in January, this door was closely guarded (what lay beyond being top secret). After the war started, the door was simply left open.

The conference room the Black Hole occupied was about thirty feet wide by fifty feet deep. Immediately inside the room and on the right there was a small administrative section. Straight ahead was a small office shared by Buster Glosson and his excellent deputy, Tony Tolin (who had recently given up command of the F-117 wing and was in line to be promoted to brigadier general). To the left was a room with maps on the wall and a bank of televisions. In this room, Dave Deptula led the group that worked the targets in and around Baghdad. (The televisions were supposed to display target information, but they never worked and weren’t used.)

Down a small hall (created by plywood sheets) and to the right was a small room occupied by the Scud targeting section. Inside, pictures of fixed Scud launch sites were pinned to the wall. Also on the wall were maps showing Scud storage areas, Scud support facilities, factories, and the plants where Scud fuel was manufactured.

Because the missiles were moved out before the war started, once the fixed sites and the storage and production facilities were hit, there was nothing more to do but allocate sorties to Scud-hunting (A-10s by day, and F-15Es and LANTIRN Pod-equipped F-16s at night). As a result, the Scud targeting section turned out to be only partially useful.

A side story: Scud fuel was stable for only a limited time, and once it became unstable, it couldn’t be used. The Black Hole planners therefore figured that if the fuel production factory was destroyed, the Iraqis would have to stop shooting Scuds roughly three to four weeks afterward. In due course, the factory was bombed in the opening days of the war; but it appears the Iraqis didn’t follow the technical data, because they fired Scuds for the next six weeks.

Across the hall was the KTO (Kuwait Theater of Operations) Room, also containing many maps. Here Sam Baptiste and Bill Welch put together the effort to hit the Iraqi Army.

Behind it was the room occupied by the Air Superiority section, headed by Glenn Profitt, where Wild Weasel schedules and EF-111/EA-6 support were planned and put into the ATO (Profitt had taken over from Lenny Henry in October). As it turned out, once the war started, air superiority was attained faster than expected. And so work in this section, as in the Scud section, soon became routine, and the team became quickly unemployed.

Lastly, there should have been an “interdiction section” (that is to say, an “isolating the battlefield” section). To Chuck Horner’s later regret, there wasn’t. The reason not deserves an explanation. Let’s let him give it:

In our doctrine, we assign air to attack targets. When these targets are associated with the enemy air defense, our missions are called counter air. When these targets are in close proximity to our friendly ground forces, our missions are called CAS. When these targets are associated with whatever supplies the war effort, our missions are called air interdiction (that is, using air to interdict fielded forces from their support, logistics, command and control, reinforcements, movement, letters home, etc.). Other doctrinal missions include air superiority and nuclear strike (there is not a doctrinal mission called “strategic attack”).

Now, what do we call bombing a secret police headquarters that supports the evil regime? It isn’t counter air. It isn’t CAS. It isn’t interdiction (although we have to file it under that mission area now). So what is it?

What we need is a category of effort that addresses missions that are designed to defeat an enemy through means other than attacking his military forces. That is, once we have gained control of the air and hit the various fixed targets, our main effort has to be to isolate the battlefield. In Vietnam we hit the North for two reasons: (a) to interdict supplies coming south; and (b) to punish the North Vietnamese into stopping their support of the insurgency in the south. This latter category (b) really needs a name. Some would call it strategic, but strategic technically means either attacking a nation’s vitals or nuclear operations. Take your pick. I like the term offensive airpower, as this indicates you are doing something over enemy territory that is neither air superiority, air interdiction, nor CAS.

? The Plan, of course, is only a step toward the war. Once the planning process was under way, there remained the millions of necessary actions, operations, procedures, problems solved, and just plain acts of sweaty labor that translated the Plan into focused violence.

7 Band of Brothers and Sisters

By the time General Schwarzkopf returned to Saudi Arabia on the twenty-third of August, the offensive air plan had been hammered into workable shape, and Chuck Horner had come to realize that the United States would almost certainly have to fight Iraq. Says Horner:

By then I had no doubts that at some point we would have to go on the offensive. It was just a question of when — sooner if the Iraqis launched an attack, later if we did. I hoped that my convictions were wrong and that perhaps diplomacy would work, but the fortifications rising in Kuwait made it very evident that diplomacy was going to fail. That would leave us with the job of throwing the Iraqis out of Kuwait. Though I was convinced this would mean hard work for us, I also felt the fight would go fast. As events unfolded, I was pretty much right.

One option open to Saddam that may have saved him from war (and, thank God, he was probably too proud or too stupid to take it) was for him to have pulled out of Kuwait City and simply remained in occupation of the oil fields in North Kuwait and the islands at the mouth of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. Doing that would have posed a terrible dilemma for us: To stay and not fight? To declare victory and go home? Or to fight, even though Saddam had given up the greater part of his spoils? If we went home, then Saddam could continue to threaten his neighbors with an intact army. If we stayed without fighting, we would not only risk looking like an army of occupation, but it was a hard land and climate for our troops. But then, would an offensive to eject Saddam be justified?

Saddam, it turned out, was a lucky adversary for us. He could have made life much harder for us than he did.

The actual military situation had changed very little during the CINC’s absence. There was as yet nothing much standing between Saddam Hussein’s divisions on the Kuwaiti border and the Saudi heartland. The relatively thin Islamic Peninsula Shield forces were centered in the west in King Khalid Military City,[48] while elements of the XVIIIth Airborne Corps and the U.S. Marines were just getting off the boats and airplanes at Dhahran.

The ground defense plan remained for small unit resistance along the coast road, if the Iraqis had attacked that way. And if they had attacked inland, where there were no roads, air would have stopped them. Since the early U.S. defensive force consisted primarily of elements of the 82d Airborne division, and the 82d has no armor (after they drop into battle, they walk), what effectively blocked Saddam from Riyadh was 82d Airborne “speed bumps.”

It would have been a repeat of Korea in 1950—that is, fight where possible, but pull back. Trade land for