And it didn’t take God long to answer the second prayer. Horner was soon in front of the slide projector, walking his way though the air component briefing. Though he was nervous, years of briefing very difficult generals about his failure to keep jets from hitting the ground and killing their pilots made this one easy. First, he talked about the size of the force they’d need (as it turned out, this would be about 30 percent of the actual war power finally deployed or at their disposal).24 Then he talked about how long it would take them to reach the Gulf and how soon they’d be ready to fight, if it came to that: about thirty-six hours to put the force in place, and another day to take the munitions out of prepositioning storage or off of ships on the way to the Gulf from Diego Garcia. Following that, he discussed the types of missions that would be flown against which targets, in the event the Iraqi Army came across the Saudi border (including types and amounts of munitions, sortie rates, levels of success expected, and possible losses). There would be, of course, direct attacks against the lead elements of the Iraqi armoredforce, but the strategy was to trade space for time, and therefore to attack the logistical support of the attackers—the fuel, ammo, food, and water supplies. As a result, while U.S. forces might seem to be losing in head-on engagements on the ground, the Iraqi Army would be starving itself to death, and at some point—a week or two?—their attack would grind to a halt and U.S. air would then attrit the remnants in the desert wastes of Saudi Arabia.

Following the briefing, questions were asked—the kind where the questioner already knows the answer but wants to let everyone else around the table see that he’s present and accounted for. For the most part, however, these questions were not relevant, or even intelligent. “How are you going to give close air support to the Arab allies?” Answer: “The same way we give close air support to anybody else.” To Horner, the procedure was more interesting than the questions themselves. First, Horner gave Powell and Schwarzkopf a chance to field the question, while they in turn waited for Cheney. Horner felt he looked a little dense standing up there, waiting ten or twenty seconds for the senior leaders to finish their waltz.

The silliest, most shallow queries mostly came from Chief of Staff John Sununu—What’s this idiot doing here? Horner asked himself—but later, while watching CNN, he saw that the same “dumb” questions were the ones the reporters were asking, and his respect for Sununu grew. Sununu had simply been doing his job.