In December, General Schwarzkopf called a command performance for his component commanders on the twentieth of the month to brief Secretary Cheney, General Powell, and Assistant Secretary Paul Wolfowitz at his headquarters at MODA. This was to be the last major war council before the proposed January U.N. deadline.
Though all the components were scheduled to participate, discussion of Army plans was to be minimal. Because the only war in the immediate, post-January 15 period would be the air war, the air campaign was to be the central focus. It was also Schwarzkopf’s intention (Horner suspects) to limit the land force briefing to logistical matters, in order to avoid premature judgments about the tactical details of the proposed ground attack. There would be time for that after the progress of the air war could be analyzed.
The Navy and Marine discussion would also be kept to a minimum. Though the Navy was handling the embargo of Iraqi shipping in their usual solid, professional way, there was little to be said about that. There were, however, potential questions about a Marine amphibious operation into Kuwait, which a few Marine leaders in Washington were pressing for — though enthusiasm for such an operation died the closer one came to Riyadh (neither Schwarzkopf nor Boomer wanted one). The defenses the Iraqis were setting up on the shores of Kuwait looked murderous. In the end, an amphibious deception was part of the final ground plan, and it tied down several Iraqi divisions during the land phase of the war.
The briefing was held in Schwarzkopf’s war room at MODA, and it was scheduled to last an hour, of which Horner had been allotted fifteen minutes; but since air would be the major topic, he prepared a fifty-viewgraph update of the briefing Buster Glosson had presented to the Secretary in October. That briefing had laid out a picture of the first three days of the war and a general look at the activities beyond that. Now Horner would explain in detail how all that would be accomplished, how long it would take, how the Air Force planned to fight as part of a coalition, and how they were going to support the ground forces when they came up at bat. Finally, he had been warned by Cheney’s military assistant that the Secretary was especially concerned about Iraq’s ballistic-missile and germ-warfare threats (in Horner’s shorthand, Scuds and Bugs), and for that reason, he had prepared two separate briefings about his plans to handle them.
Horner expected to be candid and straightforward, and to tell the Secretary honestly what airpower could and couldn’t do. For instance, he expected efficiency to drop for a time after the first three days. There would be an unavoidable lag until intelligence could be exploited and aircraft directed onto new targets (though this new targeting would be done in a matter of minutes). During the briefing, the Secretary seemed to welcome the candor, and in retrospect, it is clear that he would not have accepted a slick presentation that promised smooth and easy success.
When Horner made his presentation, he stood in front of a table where Cheney was sitting, with Schwarzkopf on Cheney’s left, Powell on his right, and Wolfowitz on Powell’s right. The other key component commanders were seated in the back, and the lights were low. As far as Horner was concerned, there were just five people in the room. Nobody else mattered. Though Cheney, Powell, and Wolfowitz did not expect him to fail, and they were not there to score debating points, their questions and comments were intense and probing; they intended to examine their concerns in detail.
The results, though, were rewarding. After it was all over, it was clear that the Secretary fully understood Horner’s intentions and accepted his inability to answer every question as one of the prices of honesty.
Schwarzkopf made few initial comments. He seemed to be waiting to see how Horner made out before he took sides.
As it turned out, hopes for an hourlong briefing were misplaced. It went three hours that day, and continued into the next.
The first hard questions addressed the destruction of Iraqi forces in the Kuwaiti theater of operations — specifically, how long would it take to destroy 50 percent of Iraqi armor and artillery. Because different studies gave different answers, Horner walked Cheney through the analytical effort that provided the basis for his own estimate.
A Pentagon air staff study had claimed the 50 percent goal would be achieved in less than a week, but that just didn’t pass the common-sense test, so Buster Glosson had asked the Plans and Analysis people to change their assumptions and fine-tune the data. Their new study expanded the campaign to three weeks — still unrealistic, in Horner’s view. In his best judgment, it would take up to six weeks of air combat to prepare the battlefield.
Cheney gave a nod to indicate that this made sense to him, and the briefing continued (the six weeks figure turned out to be substantially accurate).
The two hardest issues concerned Scuds and biological weapons. Though chemical weapons were also discussed, these were expected to be delivered by artillery shells and used primarily against military targets. Since the military had protection against these weapons,[56] Cheney was not greatly worried about them.
The “Bugs” were another thing. Not only could biological agents be spread in Israel and the populated areas of Saudi Arabia with relative ease, but there were no effective antidotes against them.
Earlier that month, Saddam Hussein had test-fired his homebuilt, “improved” version of the Soviet Scud missiles. To double the range of his Scuds, Saddam had to cut his warhead in half. Moreover, the Scud was already terribly inaccurate. To a military person like Horner, this meant the weapon was insignificant. To a civilian, however, a wildly inaccurate, seemingly unstoppable weapon capable of randomly destroying your house and family was very significant. As was demonstrated by the V-2 attacks in World War II and the Scud attacks in the 1980s War of the Cities between Iran and Iraq, even inaccurate ballistic missiles can terrorize civilian populations. Horner missed the point about the Scuds. Dick Cheney did not. He was a lot closer to the voters.
Horner outlined for the Secretary how his bombers would attack the fixed Scud erector launchers in western Iraq during the first hours of the air campaign. This was followed by a description of the strikes planned for Scud production, storage, fuel production, and repair facilities (although he believed most of these would be empty of the Scuds and their mobile launchers). Finally came the words Cheney was not eager to hear: “There is no way I can stop the Iraqis from launching Scuds at Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Israel from their fleet of mobile launchers.” When the Secretary pressed further, Horner wanted to assure him that the problem would be temporary and the solution was at hand; but there was no way he could honestly claim that. At best he could only describe their measures to suppress Scud launches, or, failing that, to defend against them with Patriot batteries once they were launched. Stopping the Scuds, Horner had to admit, was hopeless.
This did not please Cheney, but he was a realist. He understood that if Horner had possessed a bullet — magic or otherwise — that prevented Scuds from falling on Israel or Saudi Arabia, he would have used it.
? Saddam Hussein’s use of poison gas on his own people and during the Iran-Iraq War was widely known. Less was known about Iraqi research and production of germ-warfare weapons. That meant there were a number of “what-ifs” to consider long before the Cheney briefing, all posing a number of dilemmas. The first problem was to isolate the Iraqi capabilities to produce, store, and deliver biological weapons.
Though intelligence information pointed to a number of laboratories capable of producing such agents, targeting production facilities was difficult, since very little was required to grow the agents — especially for people indifferent to protecting their work force from inadvertent exposure. To manufacture biological agents, no special chemicals (as in the case of most poison gases) or special equipment (as in the case of nuclear weapons) were required. Every hospital has a laboratory capable of producing biological agents, and food-production facilities can be changed into germ factories without difficulty.
If production facilities were hard to counter, delivery was even harder. Biological agents can be distributed to their intended victims any number of ways.
Against military forces, these were the choices:
The most effective delivery system would have been an aerosol-fogging machine (like those used for mosquito control) pulled behind a car or truck; but driving such a device into Israel or Saudi Arabia presented obvious problems. A helicopter equipped with spray bars could also have worked, but given the effectiveness of U.S.-Saudi air defenses, its potential for harm was limited. The agents could have been shot in artillery shells, placed in missile warheads, or dropped in bombs, but in each of these cases, dispersal patterns are small, and any explosion used to break open the projectile case would have proved fatal to some of its payload. In short, delivering biological agents against Coalition troops in the field would not have been efficient, especially since those forces were already prepared to endure attack from chemical weapons. The suit and mask designed to protect the soldier
