Colonel Randy Witt and his communicators were never enough. The TACC could not get timely intelligence from Washington, and then they could never move it fast enough down to the wings. The link providing the AWACS air picture to the air defense command centers and the ships at sea was very fragile. The deployment into the desert of hundreds of thousands of troops with their small satellite terminals drained away vital communication links. And once the bombs started falling, the Air Tasking Order grew geometrically, yet still needed to be distributed on time.
All the while, the basics had to be attended to — such as air defense, in case the Iraqis tried a conventional air attack. AWACS orbits were set up and integrated with the Saudi Air Defense systems, providing complete radar coverage of southern Iraq and northern Saudi Arabia. Twenty-four-hour airborne CAPs were manned with USAF and RSAF F-15s and RAF and RSAF Tornado Air Defense Variants. Occasionally, an Iraqi would fly south at high speed as though planning to cross the border, but would turn back when the airborne CAPs, vectored by AWACS, maneuvered to intercept him. Sometimes they tried to lure Coalition fighters into elaborate ambushes in Iraq, but this never worked, because the AWACS saw the Iraqi ambush aircraft.
Finally, the existing air bases had to be enlarged, or in some cases new ones created.
First, each base was surveyed to see how much more it could accommodate. At some — such as Khamis Mushyat, where the F-117s were based — not much had to be done, since there were only a few more available to deploy. Other bases required much more.
Often, additional munitions storage areas had to be built. At Al Dhafra, in the UAE, one of these was dug in a small hill near a wadi. When it rained, the place filled up with water. The bombs weren’t harmed, but the dunnage and fuse boxes were set afloat.
Even before the buildup, some bases were short of fuel storage. The added aircraft just made the problem worse, and increasing fuel storage was not possible (adding fuel bladders might give a base a day’s additional supply). Bill Rider solved that problem by increasing the flow of fuel to the bases — that is, he increased the number of Saudi tanker trucks moving between fuel-processing facilities and bases. At Al Kharj and other bases, the flying depended on a constant stream of fuel trucks from the fuel-processing facility (in the case of Al Kharj, from Riyadh, about thirty miles north).
Fuel storage at Al Kharj was a problem because it didn’t start out as an air base; it started out as a runway/parking apron — and nothing else — surrounded by sand.
In Desert Shield, the F-15Es had been deployed initially to Thumrait, Oman. Thumrait was a fighter base, it had the fuel and munitions storage required, and much of the Air Force’s pre-position housing was stored there. The F-15E was a long-range attack aircraft, so the nearly eight-hundred-mile one-way trip to the (projected) battlefield (near the Kuwait-Saudi border) was not a problem. In fact, this distance was desirable if the battle started to move south and the Iraqis overran the more northern airfields. However, now that the projected battlefield was about to move north, the long round trip became a big disadvantage. It was therefore decided to move them five hundred miles north to the runway/parking apron the RSAF had built at Al Kharj. This move would put them an hour closer to the war.
Colonel Ray Davies and the 823 Red Horse Squadron, the Air Force’s heavy construction battalion, having just finished building ramps at Al Minhad in the UAE, and taxiways and parking at Sheikh Isa in Bahrain,[51] were sent north by Colonel Hal Hornberg to build a base and a host of living facilities throughout the desert for Air Force, Army, and Navy troops. The Red Horse would raise a city for over five thousand people in a matter of days.
The problems were daunting. For starters, the sand would not hold the tie-down stakes for the Air Force’s temper tents — air-conditioned and heated desert tents that were the envy of their army brothers. Red Horse’s answer was to lay down a deep base of clay over the sand. The clay hardened like cement and gave the camp a stable base. It’s easy when you can think big.
They found and dug out ton after ton of clay, then overlaid miles of desert where they wanted to set down the tents. The next problem was no water or fuel. Their solution was to bring huge rubber bladders from pre- positioned stocks in Oman and Bahrain. Hangars for the airplanes were also up in hours, again from pre-positioned supplies. Munitions storage areas, dining halls, shops, a chapel, operations, even a sand golf course, all rose in weeks. By December, the base was ready to receive two F-15E squadrons, two F-16 squadrons, an F-15C squadron, and a C-130 airlift squadron.
? The creation of the quick-turn base at KKMC was even harder.
Quick-turn is a simple concept: The great reliability of modern American military aircraft allows them to make several sorties a day, like airliners, lugging bombs instead of passengers. It therefore made sense to locate a base close to Iraq, where the aircraft could be quickly refueled and reloaded, and the pilot could be given target information for a new mission. In that way, they could strike the enemy four or five times a day — in a tempo that would leave the Iraqis reeling.
Though it had drawbacks, the choice for this base fell on KKMC, less than fifty miles from the border with Iraq. As with Al Kharj before the Red Horse, it contained a runway and taxiways, and little else. More worrying, it could be a prime target for enemy artillery. For that reason, no aircraft would be assigned there. The birds would only come to refresh.
Now Horner needed someone to build a tent city, munitions and fuel storage, and an operations area, and set up intelligence, air traffic control, and maintenance services… all in two weeks — no excuses. To bring off that miracle, he brought in Colonel Bill Van Meter to be the wing commander at the quick-turn base.
On December 21, Van Meter appeared in Horner’s office, still groggy from his rush trip to Saudi Arabia. His challenge: to build a base at the end of the supply line, working his people day and night in an extremely new and isolated environment, while preparing them to survive missile or artillery attack and perhaps be overrun by an armor thrust.
With a rueful smile, he left to talk with Bill Rider and George Summers, the logisticians. Six days later, Horner flew up to KKMC. What he found there amazed him. The base was far from finished, but bulldozers were carving munitions storage berms out of the desert; pipes were being laid for the fuel farm that would enable the fighters to refuel and rearm without shutting down their engines; and a tent city was rising in the desert between the town and the base.
As they toured the base, Van Meter told Horner about a young female airman who had just arrived, disoriented and tired. During his briefing to the newcomers about their mission and responsibilities, she had sat calmly, but when he had touched on the possibility of enemy attacks, it had hit her that she just might die. And tears ran down her cheeks.
Flash forward to the days when Scuds were falling and pilots were beginning to die in shot-up jets. That same young woman proved to be one of the strongest combat leaders at KKMC.
COMMAND AND CONTROL
Managing the vast aerial armada called for an immense, intricately connected command-and-control system. Here are some of its more notable elements:
• TACC Current Ops — Located in Riyadh, the Tactical Air Command Center was the central node for the planning and execution of the air war. Chuck Horner maintained his headquarters there.
• AWACS — A Boeing 707 command-and-control aircraft with a large, long-range radar that could see aerial targets at all altitudes, provided they had a velocity over the ground relative to the AWACS aircraft. Though this number was adjustable, it was usually set at speeds greater than seventy knots, so cars would not show up as aircraft. The AWACS provided an air picture to all the theater, and the AWACS air controllers provided navigation assistance and controlled aircraft from pre-tanker rendezvous to poststrike refueling, as needed. F-15s and F-16s, with their powerful air-to-air radars, did not need such help; other aircraft often did.
• ACE Team — A small command-and-control node — usually a planner/ executor, an intelligence person, and one or two duty officers — located on board the AWACS and operating in parallel with the TACC current ops.
