Chuck Horner continues:
During the first three days of the war, we were euphoric, and so were the folks at home. We were winning. The home team had scored time after time. And our touchdowns had been faithfully transmitted back to the States — amazing pictures of laser-guided bombs slaying doors of bunkers, airshafts of buildings, and the tops of aircraft shelters. For the first time since World War II, generals had become popular — Schwarzkopf with his energy, intensity, and focus, standing up and glaring at dumb questions; Powell with his warmth, intelligence, and smooth confidence.
Even I had a brief moment of fame. During a press conference, we ran a video of the Iraqi Air Force headquarters taken by one of our aircraft. I pointed at the display with my government-issue ballpoint pen. “This is my counterpart’s headquarters,” I announced as the building exploded. I wish I could take credit for the nice line. But the truth was I’d forgotten the name of the target, and it was all I could think of. Sometimes you get lucky; the incident landed on national TV.
It’s just as well that I spent very little time in front of the cameras. I wasn’t eager to press my luck under the glare of the lights when I needed to put all my energy into running the air war.
Most of my time, in fact, was spent urging on the team, deciding what needed to be done next, and trying to bring order to chaos.
Since we had no clear idea of what the enemy was doing, we had to guess. We’d take those guesses — officially called intelligence estimates or analysis — and try to deliver violence in such a way that the enemy could not do what we thought he was trying to do. That was working far better than we had dreamed.
Meanwhile — as in every war I’d seen — the Air Tasking Order was getting out late. Some problems are inevitable. Bad weather over targets required changes in the target lists, and there’d always be computer hiccups. Other problems were less forgivable: planners lust after the perfect plan, and generals like to general; both often pay more attention to doing their own thing than to taking care of the needs of the troops who are getting shot at.
There will never be a perfect plan until the intelligence that drives planning touches perfection. Don’t hold your breath. Yet planners obsessively fiddled and tinkered with the daily plan, trying to squeeze every drop of efficiency out of it… as though it were a work of art and not a rough script. When we stopped the presses to make small changes affecting only a few units, we risked delaying the ATO for everyone. And that risked increasing confusion or, worse, chaos.
Generals don’t feel like generals unless they make their presence felt. Fair enough, when they know where they are going and keep a light hand on the reins. That’s leadership. Too often, though, they don’t know where they are going, yet pretend they do (in the absence of virtue, the appearance of virtue is better than nothing); and then get the staff to plan the trip. Once the staff plan is prepared, the general will inevitably make lots of changes. General-induced changes make big ripples in the planning cycle. In our ATO planning process, we had lots of general-created tidal waves, including too many from me.
Despite the screwups, we gradually brought order to this confusion and speeded up the planning process in an orderly way that allowed humans to accommodate to them. Very early in the war, we learned to make changes early in the ATO, not by stopping the presses, but by sending change sheets directly to the units involved. We’d tell them something like: “When you get the ATO tonight, your F-16s are targeted against Target X. Disregard that and go to Target Y.” At first the new systems confused the wings, but they caught on rapidly.
After the war, the armchair generals had their say about speeding up the planning process. “We’ve got to get the ATO cycle time down,” they’d assert. “Two days is too long.” They were right, we had to speed up the process; but they were blaming the wrong villain. The two-day cycle wasn’t hurting us. You must give people some reasonable planning horizon, and two days is short but manageable. What needs to be worked on is the change cycle — the cycle of gaining intelligence about what you want to do and then implementing the required changes. In other words, we’d use the two-day plan to head the troops in the right general direction, and then we’d fine-tune as needed. For example, because the Iraqi Army units moved daily, we were never able to pinpoint their location in the two-day cycle. At first, we tried to update the ATO. But this only left the ATO in constant flux and therefore late to the customers. Instead, we put the F-16 killer scouts over the Iraqi Army, then sent forth hordes of A-10s, F-16s, and F-18s in a well-planned orderly stream. When they arrived on scene, the killer scouts pointed out targets, and the fighter-bombers dropped their loads and returned home for more.
The timeline we had shortened was the time needed to bring intelligence to the attackers. Because the killer scouts’ eyes were the intelligence collectors, the intelligence was only seconds old when the attacking aircraft acted on it.
For generals who liked being generals, this was not a happy situation; it put them out of the loop. Captains and majors were picking the targets… and it worked. We in Riyadh had succeeded in seizing from Washington the responsibility to pick targets, only to cede it to F-16 pilots over the battlefield. Sure, Washington still provided broad guidance; and sure, the generals in Riyadh told the killer scouts what divisions to orbit over and gave them the rules needed to prevent them from killing one another or breaking international laws; but in large measure, this war now belonged to the folks who were getting shot at.
