Every Man a Tiger: The Gulf War Air Campaign

  ★ Of course, there were other problems, as well.

  Working out corps boundaries between the USMC and the XVIIIth Airborne Corps, for instance, might seem easy enough—draw a few lines on a map; you stay on this side; you stay on that—but it wasn’t. The corps had to be placed carefully so that the enemy couldn’t take advantage of the terrain.

  The basic situation was this: Khaled’s Arabs (the EAC—Eastern Area Command) were on the coast; the Army’s XVIIIth Corps was on the left; and the USMC was in between. The problem was that significant avenues of attack had to be properly covered, and could not be split between different units. For example, the north-south highway needed to be entirely in one corps area, if for no other reason than simplified traffic control, but since there were curves in the highway, the corps that owned it had considerable area to defend. To make matters more difficult, the sepkas caused chokepoints, and these chokepoints funneled the enemy back and forth from one corps area to another.

  Since it was vital for Walt Boomer and Gary Luck to work out these issues together, from time to time Horner called on one or the other to make sure everything was going well. Though they didn’t always reach full agreement, they achieved reasonable cooperation.

  There were also disagreements about the placement of EAC forces—two separate issues, really, though they were related.

  First: Khaled insisted that if the Iraqis attacked, Arabs had to be the first casualties. Horner understood the significance of that position, and he did not disagree. That meant placing Khaled’s forces close to the border—too close, as it turned out. They were within Iraqi artillery range, which gave the Iraqis the opportunity to inflict easy casualties. In time, Khaled’s objections were overcome, and the EAC and the SANG (Saudi Arabian National Guard, a small, elite force whose normal function was to protect the two principal holy places, Mecca and Medina) pulled back from the border. (This jammed them into the USMC coming out of Jubail, but that problem was also solved.)

  Second: Khaled had orders from the King not to give up Saudi land. This was all well and good, but unfortunately, in those early days, the Coalition did not have sufficient land forces to execute that strategy, and even if they had, they’d have incurred large numbers of casualties. Though Khaled was truly caught in the middle between Horner and his King, he played his cards adroitly: even as he cooperated with the mobile defense concept the Coalition was faced with implementing, he extracted promises that U.S. forces would do their best to join with their Saudi allies to contain an attack on Saudi Arabia.

  KHALED

  Working out corps boundaries wasn’t the only hurdle Walt Boomer and Gary Luck faced. More serious for both men was logistics—food, water, housing, latrines, and gunnery ranges. The last item became a problem when the Bedouins who had herds grazing in the parts of the desert that were to be given over for ranges declared that they didn’t want to vacate them. Prince Khaled had to fix that.

  Then congestion in the port at Al Damman became a problem. John Yeosock’s port masters couldn’t find anyone in charge. They would go to one agency, only to be told that some other agency worked the problem, and when they went to that one, they were sent to another. No one was responsible, yet everyone could cause delays or raise obstacles.

  After a visit from Horner and Yeosock, Khaled stepped in. He put one of his people in charge, with full responsibility, and that was that. Then, when it was clear that there were not enough trucks to carry the stuff off the piers, it was Khaled who found more trucks.

  His Royal Highness, Khaled bin Sultan, got things done. Another instance came with the problem of where to put the tens of thousands of Americans pouring into the nation. They had to be housed in a place where they’d be both comfortable and safe—and where Saudi society could be protected from so many antithetical cultural and religious customs.

  Khaled came up with the answer. Eskan Village, a huge housing complex on the southeast side of the city, became home to most of the U.S. forces stationed in or near Riyadh. It had been originally built as military housing, but then the base it had been designed to support was delayed, so this huge compound had been mothballed.

  Horner and the CENTCOM J-4 (logistics chief), Major General Dane Starling, took a tour of Eskan Village to see if it would meet their needs. They found hundreds of villas, each with three bedrooms and three bathrooms. There were also high-rise apartments, schools, swimming pools, and recreational areas—a complete village just waiting for power and water to be hooked up. It was perfect.

  Still, Khaled could not solve every problem. He could find housing for 30,000 people and open seaports, but when Chuck Horner asked him for a television and videocassette player for each villa at Eskan, he balked and grew evasive. Horner was amazed. It was such a simple request. Only a few thousand TVs and video players, so the troops could watch Armed Forces Television and play videotapes from home.

  One day, over a cup of cappuccino in his office in the MODA building, Horner pressed the issue, and the reason for Khaled’s refusal came clear. His people didn’t know where to buy thousands of TVs and video playback units.

  “If I can get them,” Horner asked, “will you pay for them?”

  “No problem!”

  So Dane Starling phoned in the order to some lucky electronics dealer in Atlanta, and in a few weeks, the troops had their TVs.

  SHEPHERDING COMMANDERS

  Probably the most difficult issue for Horner as “CENTCOM Forward” was the determining of command relationships. At that time, command relationships between United States forces were not always easily understood or conducted. No one doubted General Schwarzkopf ’s authority, as defined by Goldwater-Nichols, but several areas needed work.

  For example, there were air component and naval component commanders in CENTCOM, but there was no separate and distinct land component commander, which raised a number of nagging questions.

  On the ground, Lieutenant General John Yeosock commanded the U.S. Third Army, which was in those days composed of one corps, XVIIIth Airborne Corps, commanded by Lieutenant General Gary Luck (later Lieutenant General Fred Franks’s VIIth Corps would be added to Third Army). There was also a United States Marine Corps component, MARCENT, commanded by Lieutenant General Walt Boomer, with his 1st Marine Expeditionary Force (1st MEF). 1st MEF was initially composed of the 7th MEB, with their attached MAW and support elements, about 20,000 personnel; but eventually it grew to more than two divisions ashore, with over 90,000 Marines.

  In the best of worlds, a ground component commander would have coordinated the various land forces, but for various political and practical reasons—primarily to keep the Army and Marine chauvinists in the Pentagon from going to war over the issue of which service was in charge, and to make sure that he himself was the focal point of the ground war, his area of expertise—General Schwarzkopf decided to retain the authority of land component commander for himself. The result was that when Schwarzkopf was wearing his CINC hat, he commanded the air, navy, and land components, but when he was wearing his land component hat, he was merely the equal of the air and navy commanders. So who was talking when? Things never got out of hand, but the situation was murky.

  Meanwhile, Khaled and John Yeosock devised an organization between them to coordinate their efforts, one that would integrate the land forces of the host nations with the land forces of the non-host nations, principally those of the United States, France, and Great Britain. They named the organization C3IC—an acronym that meant nothing at all. The idea was to fuzz things up, to let the name mean all things to all people. A precise definition would have started debates about command and control between the nations. By keeping its nature amorphous, everyone was able to work together without the need for rigid guidelines telling who had to do what to whom.

  C3IC was located in a large space with a two-story-high ceiling on the main floor of the MODA command bunker. It was there mainly because Horner and Khaled knew that General Schwarzkopf would eventually make his headqu
arters at MODA, and he was going to be the U.S. land component commander. John Yeosock brought a superb officer, Major General Paul Schwartz, to head the U.S. side of C3IC, while Khaled provided an equally talented Saudi Army general, Brigadier General Abab Al-Aziz al-Shaikh.

  Also on the main floor was the CENTCOM J-2 intelligence shop, and the CENTCOM J-3 operations shop in the hall. Schwarzkopf’s command center, where evening meetings were held, was located in a small conference room near the command center. On the other side of the command center wall was a small amphitheater, where larger staff meetings were held until the air war started in January. Then all meetings migrated to the command center. On the floor above were offices manned by Saudi officers working with the Americans. There was also a main conference room with windows that looked down on the C3IC room.

  ★ As time went on, it did not prove practical to integrate every command, though C3IC remained. In the beginning, all commands were fully integrated; but over time, Third Army staff outgrew the Royal Saudi Land Forces headquarters, where the land commanders had originally set themselves up. So John Yeosock and the other land commanders found it more useful to maintain separate locations, and Yeosock moved Third Army headquarters to Eskan Village.

  On the other hand, air planning and execution were fully integrated throughout the war. Integration is easier with air than ground. Once there’s an Air Tasking Order, then the individual wings retain command of the units: Americans work for an American wing commander, though on a Saudi or UAE base; and the flight leader of a Saudi flight is Saudi, even though the flight might be part of a larger package commanded by a British flight leader.

  Major General Jousif Madani, RSLF, the J-3 for the MODA staff, was a quiet, thoughtful man, who was charged by Hamad to sit down with Horner and work out the command and control issues; and Horner spent considerable time with him. Horner’s problem was that he could go only so far without Schwarzkopf ’s approval. Though the CINC had empowered him during those days to do what he thought best, he didn’t want to handcuff Schwarzkopf with any arrangements the CINC would have to change later. So, for once, it was the Americans and not the Saudis who were moving glacially.

  However, Horner and Madani reached a general agreement that Khaled and Schwarzkopf would serve on an equal footing, which would also place Hamad and Powell on the same level. This equality issue was of some concern to the Saudis, because it was important to them to make sure they were respected by the Americans.

  All of this activity provided a framework for the buildup of forces that were beginning to flow into the region, but it in no way anticipated the eventual size of the Coalition force that would go to war some six months later. Time and events would severely strain these early arrangements, but for the time being, they had to do.

  ★ As air component commander, Horner had to solve a few other command relationship problems, as well.

  According to Goldwater-Nichols, the various services still organized, trained, and equipped their forces, and they still watched over promotions, but U.S. forces did not “belong” operationally to them. Operationally, U.S. forces belong to the unified commander. Goldwater-Nichols further stated that the unified commander could organize his force any way he saw fit. In other words, neither service doctrine nor the service chiefs (nor even the Joint Chiefs of Staff) could make him use or organize his force in a way he did not want.

  Meanwhile, service doctrine favored service commands—Central Command Air Forces, Army Central Command, Naval Forces Central Command, and Marine Central Command—while the unified CINCs tended to find functional command arrangements more to their liking—land, sea, air, and now space—since that allowed for better coordination and unity of effort. The passage of Goldwater-Nichols inevitably led to struggles between the CINCs and service doctrines and the service chiefs.

  Like most CINCs, Norman Schwarzkopf favored functional command arrangements. Thus, all CENTCOM air was integrated under one commander, called JFACC (Joint Forces Air Component Commander). The CENTCOM JFACC was Chuck Horner. Though integrating functions made sense both philosophically and operationally, it wasn’t always easy in practice. The Goldwater-Nichols command structures had never in fact been tried in wartime.

  According to Marine doctrine, Marine air was intended for close air support of Marine ground units; it was a substitute for the heavy artillery they didn’t normally carry with them. Marine doctrine or no, however, the air component commander in Desert Shield/Desert Storm was ferociously opposed to splitting airpower into separate duchies, and he fought to keep it from happening. Some accounts of the war tell a different story: that Horner and Boomer worked out a deal that gave Horner command of Marine air until it was directly needed for close air support of Marine ground units. These stories are not true.

  What happened was that soon after Boomer arrived in-theater, he and Horner met in Riyadh, and Horner said: “Look, Walt, I don’t want your air. But, by God, we are not going to fragment airpower. So your planes are going to come under me, and you will get everything you need.”

  To which Boomer said, “Okay by me.”

  And that was that.

  Meanwhile, Boomer’s air commander, Major General Royal Moore, who felt that a higher power than Goldwater-Nichols had ordained him to be in charge of the Marine air, tried everything possible to undermine the centralized tasking that placed Marine air under Horner. Before the war started, he tried to pull Marine air out of the Air Tasking Order, but he ran into the brick wall that was the air component commander. Later, during the war, he continued to play games, but in fact it didn’t bother Horner. Moore was generating sorties to hit the enemy, and that is all Horner wanted him to do. The bottom line was that Horner, not Moore, was in charge.

  In Horner’s words, “If an Army unit had needed that air, I would have sent it to them and told Moore to piss up a rope. But it never came to that. In fact, just the opposite. Schwarzkopf shortchanged the Marines. Not on purpose. He was just fixated on the Republican Guard and the VIIth Corps attack against them. So when it became apparent by sortie count that Boomer’s and the EAC’s guys were not getting as much air as the VIIth Corps and that they had more enemy to attack, we shifted air over the eastern sector. This was the right thing to do, and it paid off, as evidenced by the collapse of the Iraqis in the face of the initial attacks in the east [before VIIth Corps took off].”

  ★ Like the Marines, the Navy was also protective of its own air.

  Admiral Hank Mauz, who was NAVCENT when Rear Admiral Bill Fogerty took over, and then Vice Admiral Stan Arthur, was not an airman, so he was not aware of some of the issues that had burned in pilots’ souls ever since Vietnam, such as “Route Packages.” Air Force pilots had hated the practice of dividing up sections so that only Navy planes flew in one, and Air Force planes in another, but thinking it was a convenient way to keep his carrier admirals happy, Admiral Mauz suggested dividing Iraq up into sections, so the Air Force and the Navy could conduct their operations without getting in each other’s way.

  He was more than a little surprised when Horner gave him a withering look and told him, “Hell no. I’ll retire before we try anything as stupid as that.”

  Mauz got the message.

  THE CNN EFFECT

  An invasion of sorts did occur in Saudi Arabia in August of 1990: not the Iraqis, the reporters.

  The phenomenon of twenty-four-hour news network programming—instant and live—has fundamentally changed the way military professionals conduct war. Chuck Horner calls this phenomenon the CNN Effect.

  War is by definition bad news. People are killed; homes and workspaces destroyed; money thrown away in obscene amounts. And now the TV camera provided people back home with instant access to it all. Unlike print, the TV camera sees what it sees. It’s there. The tape can be edited, but, basically, the camera is not held hostage to the credibility and adroitness of the reporter’s use of language. Whether he liked it or not, the presence of TV on the battlefield, on both sides of the lin
es, had a profound impact on how the military did business.

  Chuck Horner elaborates:

  As soon as the folks at home see on TV part of a battle, part of a battle space, or even a major player walking down an aircraft boarding stairs in some faraway country (signaling major league interest in the place), there’s a serious impact. Folks worry. They’re relieved. They’re angry. They form opinions about how you are doing that job. They may agree with what you are trying to do but disagree with the way you are doing it. The effect of a military decision is not only felt on the battlefield, it is felt immediately back home. And the impact of that can find its way back to the battlefield within hours. In a democratic society, of course, the effects of well-done planning are immediately available, while the effects of poor execution or misguided adventures may take some time to discern.

  When a military leader thinks through what he is doing and how he is doing it, part of that mental process damn well better include the impact of his choices back home and in the rest of the world. If not, he’s likely to be in for surprises on the battlefield.

  The Saudis were aware of the CNN Effect from the start (they carefully watch over their press, screening it for offensive material). So when Secretary of Defense Cheney walked down the airplane stairs in Jeddah on the sixth of August, 1990, the press was there because the King wanted them there. Why? I suspect he wanted to tell the Iraqis to keep out of here, because the powerful United States had sent its Secretary of Defense to offer its help.

  Did Grant figure into his campaign the impact of widespread instant communication of the battlefield to all the world? You bet he didn’t. But it sure happened to us in the Gulf War, and it was a driver in everything we did.