Trust between and among commanders is essential. And it has to be earned. Horner earned Schwarzkopf’s trust.

In Horner’s words:

The bottom line was that I was telling him, “I know you are in charge. I am not going to be an Air Force prick, but I know more about airpower than you ever will, and you need to trust me and let me do my thing, so you will be a hero.”

In air-to-air engagements, if you can “lead-turn” a jet flying directly toward you, and he fails to see what you are doing, you will have an advantage when you pass, in that you have already started to turn toward his tail. If he discerns you have started a lead turn, he can negate it by passing as close to your jet as possible. Then each of you has to make up the 180-degree offset in the ensuing maneuvers. If he doesn’t and you have similar-performing jets, then the one who lead-turns wins.

At the April 1990 briefing, I was lead-turning the issues that had been a problem in the past: failure of the Marines to fight jointly, ignorant attempts by the Army to own the air forces, and failure of land force-trained CINCs to understand how to fight airpower. The briefing was a great success for me, for Schwarzkopf, and eventually the country.

I had Schwarzkopf’s confidence, and I got that the old-fashioned way: I earned it. So when he would call me in the middle of the night in the TACC from his war room and say, “Chuck, I am looking at a Joint STARS picture, and I see thirty trucks at XYZ, can you get them?” I could reply, “I will certainly try, but if they are not there because the picture you have is too old, I will send the force to where it was originally scheduled to go.” And he would reply, “Okay.”

★ All the planning and the thousands of actions that go on in war depend on faith and trust. No single commander can know all that needs to be known, can be everywhere to make every decision that needs to be made, or can direct every action that is taken.

The Strategic Plan

The briefing ended with a discussion of what Horner labeled for Schwarzkopf a “strategic air campaign plan” (much to his later regret). What he meant was “targets strategic to Iraq”—that is to say, high-value targets, such as oil production and electrical distribution facilities, that could be held hostage in case Iraq used mass-destruction weapons.

Again, he was talking in the context of the essentially defensive Internal Look Scenario. Thus, the strategic campaign Horner was proposing then was only peripherally related to the plan of attack that later was to emerge in August and September of 1990. Unfortunately, the word strategic carries great magic, especially for commanders, and that day the word worked its magic on General Schwarzkopf. Ever after, he called the plan of air attack against Iraq the “strategic” air campaign, when, in reality, it was an offensive air campaign, a means to achieve the political objectives of the President and the Coalition, should diplomatic efforts and the embargo on Iraq fail.