Every Man a Tiger: The Gulf War Air Campaign

become a high muckety-muck, like the Chief of Staff of the Air Force, with everyone congratulating you and telling you how smart you are and how pretty. The line between self-confidence and inflated ego is very fine, and generals too easily slip over to the inflated side of the line. I know I’ve done that, and it is likely that Mike Dugan did this time, and paid for it.

BRIEFINGS IN WASHINGTON

Even as Buster Glosson and his Black Hole team were pounding out the air campaign, a select group of Army planners had been developing a ground campaign. The team, called the Jedi Knights, was led by Lieutenant Colonel Joe Purvis from the Army’s School of Advanced Military Studies at Fort Leavenworth. The Jedi Knights had developed a ground campaign plan that called for a single U.S. Army Corps, U.S. Marine Corps, British, and Islamic force attack into Kuwait.

Bear in mind that they were looking to attack an army twice the size of theirs — half a million men, including the elite Republican Guards, with their up-to-date Soviet armor and equipment — and that the Iraqis had been busily fortifying the Saudi-Kuwait border with artillery, mines, trenches, barbed wire, fire ditches (ditches that would be filled with oil and then ignited), and other obstacles to invasion.

By October 6, Purvis’s planners had developed several options. The most desirable of these involved an enveloping flank attack to the west of the Iraq-Kuwait border (which lay along the Wadi al Batin, the dry riverbed that slanted north and east from the southwest corner of Kuwait). However, there were initial problems with this choice (which, of course, was the plan that was eventually adopted): Primarily, it was thought that not enough forces were available to effect the envelopment, keep the pressure on Iraqi forces along the Saudi-Kuwait border, and maintain a sufficient reserve. Army doctrine requires certain force ratios — that is, friendly-to-enemy ratios; and the forces then available to CENTCOM didn’t satisfy these numbers. Secondarily, no one knew whether the desert west of Kuwait could support armor. How hard was the ground? No one knew for sure.

What options were then open to Schwarzkopf? None of his other choices was appealing. The best of them seemed to be to focus his attack into the western sector of Kuwait, drive north to the heights near Mutlaa Pass (west of Kuwait City), and hope that counterattacking Republican Guards could be taken out by air. And if that somehow didn’t go as planned?… Well, they’d improvise.

Predictably, Schwarzkopf was set against this. That he never liked attacking into the heart of Iraqi defenses was always clear to Chuck Horner; that he liked armor was also clear: the lightly armored XVIIIth Airborne Corps was never his favorite attacking force against armor. And in fact, he didn’t have far to look: he had the “Left Hook”—the envelopment west of the Wadi. For that, however, he would need another heavy corps. How was he going to get it? He would present what he had to President Bush, Secretary Cheney, and General Powell — with all of its limitations. When they saw how risky this was, they would realize he needed more, and they would give him the extra corps he required for the Left Hook.

In hindsight, we now know that the Army planners never sufficiently took into account the ultimate effect of the air campaign on the Iraqi Army, though in all fairness, no one — not even the most optimistic airpower advocate — anticipated how seriously air attacks would damage the Iraqi Army prior to the ground campaign. If this success had been taken into account, the Left Hook would have been executable with pre-VIIth Corps Coalition forces.

? On October 9, Buster Glosson and a team from CENTCOM left for Washington to brief the air campaign to General Powell (on October 10) and to the President and his chief advisers (on October 11). Heading the team was Major General Bob Johnston, the CENTCOM chief of staff. The other Army briefer was Lieutenant Colonel Joe Purvis.

Before the briefers left Riyadh, Schwarzkopf made it forcefully clear to Johnston that he was not recommending any of the ground schemes Purvis was going to brief. His aim was to generate the question “What do you need to develop an acceptable ground campaign?” With the expected answer being “A heavy corps.”

En route to President Bush, the briefings went through the usual reviews, which agreed that while the air campaign was well constructed and credible, the focus of the land campaign on sending forces directly into the teeth of the Iraqi defenses appeared unimaginative. Of course, it was not a lack of imagination that had given birth to this unhappy situation, it was a lack of friendly forces.

The briefing to the President had mixed results. The air briefing delivered by Buster Glosson was generally accepted, though not without questions about the plan’s assumptions of success. It simply looked too good. It was hard to accept its claims.

It’s worth looking at what lay behind these doubts — an outdated mind-set that did not yet understand the full impact and capabilities of modern airpower. Let’s examine a pair of facts:

First, the reputation of airpower had been created long before by air campaigns whose success had at best been mixed — the P-40s at Kassarine Pass, the B-17s over Germany, the F-100s bombing the Vietnam jungle. If such actions were paradigms for all air campaigns, then President Bush and his advisers had good reason to throw hard questions at Buster Glosson. How could any human endeavor go as well as he promised?

Second, technology had outrun conventional perceptions. In the years after Vietnam, airpower had taken a technological leap comparable to the shift from cannonballs to rifled shells. Now there were laser-guided bombs on Stealth aircraft, A-10s with Maverick missiles, and 30mm cannon shooting up tanks and APCs in the desert. The air campaign would go that well.

In the event, despite attempts to poke holes in it, the air briefing stood up.

The Army briefing didn’t fare so happily. For reasons unknown to Chuck Horner, it was never made clear that General Schwarzkopf had intended all along to offer Joe Purvis’s plan as a straw man that would justify the extra corps the CINC wanted very badly. To the best of Horner’s knowledge, Schwarzkopf had told Colin Powell time and again, “This plan is not what I want, but I can’t do what needs to be done without another corps at the minimum.” So Joe Purvis, courageously, stood up and got pummeled (and by implication, Norman Schwarzkopf got pummeled with him). The Army plan was called unimaginative, timid, risky. There were jokes about it: “Hey, diddle diddle, right up the middle.” All the while, Joe Purvis stood up time and again and absorbed the hits that led people to come to the hard conclusion that more ground forces would be needed if offensive operations were to be initiated. Though he never got much credit for it, he turned out to be a key factor in the success of Desert Storm.

And in the end, General Schwarzkopf got his second corps.

TRAINING

As the plan of attack was being developed and briefed, the Coalition air armada was being deployed to the Gulf and trained to fight.

What did this take?

Deployability is a major part of the normal, necessary business of the U.S. Air Force. Units are graded according to their ability to deploy quickly, and are often tasked to deploy to an isolated area on their own base, from which they fly sorties at surge rates[49] to make sure they have brought the correct amount of spares and other equipment. Deployment to the Gulf was made additionally easy for the USAF because of pre-positioned stores and Coalition equipment at collocated bases.

The U.S. Navy and Marine Corps had different methods of achieving the same results. Primarily, the Navy and embarked Marine jets were already in deployed status when their carrier left the United States, while the Marines had spares kits (containing thirty days’ supply of line-replaceable units, such as radios or altimeters) just like the USAF.

Though NATO units practiced deployment, it was usually not to the same intensity as U.S. services. However, since they were closer to home, they could use C-130s to ferry spares or equipment rapidly. Some units arrived with nothing more than aircrews and aircraft, but these were collocated with U.S. units that used the same