Decentralization was the key. Each man and woman knew what was expected, and each in turn busted his or her ass not only to do their job, but to exceed our highest expectations. Bill Creech had shown us what we were capable of achieving, he had created an environment where failure was not even a factor, and he had given us back the pride we ourselves had given away in the turmoil of Vietnam. There is no doubt the technology you saw on the television screens during Desert Storm was impressive, but to understand the victory, you have to understand the people who operated the bases, maintained the jets, and flew them into combat. You have to know the far-reaching fire Bill Creech lit in each and every one of us in the military services.

TRAINING IN LEADERSHIP

When the Creech Revolution began, Chuck Horner was a colonel. In those days, both his flying skills and his bureaucratic maneuvering skills were well developed; now it was as a leader, as a senior officer, that he had to grow and develop. The service academies, he likes to point out, educate and train top-flight lieutenants, but you learn—or fail to learn—how to be a general when you are a colonel. Only as a colonel do you have the responsibilities, the hard choices, the opportunities for success or failure, that can show you how to lead as a general.

In this stage of his life, Horner had help from a variety of officers senior to him—both good and bad—including, of course, Bill Creech himself.

His first wing commander at Seymour Johnson in 1976 was a good one, Colonel Bob Russ. Russ was hard to please, yet he wasn’t reluctant to reward outstanding performance, while letting those who fell short know they’d done so. And his efforts didn’t stop there; he devoted much of his time to training subordinates in what they needed to know to do their jobs, and ultimately to replace him. Though he was tough, he looked at each problem nonjudgmentally—“How did we get into this particular situation, how do we get out of it, and how do we prevent it from happening again?”—rather than looking for somebody to take the blame. When he could, he anticipated problems and fixed them before they occurred. Finally, because he let them bite off as much responsibility as they could swallow, people worked hard for him.

By contrast, at one point Horner was the vice commander to a brainy but thickheaded wing commander who treated his subordinates with contempt and built his career on the bodies of those he’d stabbed in the back, thus negating his very genuine intellectual gifts. Horner studied this man very carefully, and learned from him that most valuable lesson: how not to act. He did his best to handle people just the reverse of the way his boss did, and in doing so, he learned the even more important lesson: you’ve got to be yourself. If you are the commander, people don’t care if you are tough, or mean, or kind, or gentle, but if you are tough one day and kind the next, they are miserable. If they don’t know who you are going to be on any given day, then they don’t know how to act.