On August 8, 1990, when Olsen and the elements of the CENTAF planning staff arrived in Riyadh, Horner turned over to him command of CENTAF while he himself was occupied as CENTCOM Forward. Olsen quickly set up a warm working relationship with the RSAF commander, Lieutenant General Ahmed Behery.

Almost immediately, Jim Crigger and his staff had joined with the RSAF operations staff, and were conducting the appointment and guidance meetings that initiate the ATO planning cycle. Shortly after this, they were publishing a daily ATO. At first, these only coordinated combined air defense sorties, though they quickly grew to cover all the combined and coalition operational and exercise flying in the AOR. (This system was in place by August 13.)

On August 10, longer-range planning was begun. And on August 12, as the acting CINC, Horner asked Olsen to build a preplanned ATO that would rapidly respond to an Iraqi attack on Saudi Arabia—the “D Day ATO.”

Though (thankfully) the D Day Plan was never put into effect, it served as a springboard to subsequent planning for an offensive air campaign—not, interestingly, because of the planning itself, but as a training device. Training became an issue when the planning staff was augmented with many new people who were familiar with combat, fighters, and bombers, but who had never built an ATO. Putting together the D Day ATO gave these people on-the-job experience in the reasoning processes and the integration that needs to be considered—such as airspace deconfliction, tanker tracks, command-and-control agencies, radio procedures, and code words.

Meanwhile, communication of the ATOs between the TACC and operational units was soon accomplished by means of the Computer-Aided Force Management System (CAFMS)—best understood as a combination of word processor and e-mail. In the CAFMS computers were preprogrammed forms (spreadsheets and text). When these were filled out by the planners they became the ATO. These forms were then accessed by the wings that had communication links with the TACC in Riyadh.

The CAFMS terminals were also used to execute the ATO. At each duty position in the TACC current operations room, the duty officers monitored and communicated with the bases via CAFMS. So, for example, takeoff times would be sent from the wings to the TACC, which meant that the TACC operators knew who was en route to the tankers or their targets and could divert them to other targets if they wished. The TACC would also receive flight abort information, which allowed them to divert other missions against those targets they really wanted to hit.

CAFMS had several limitations. For one thing, the Navy carriers were not equipped with the SHF antennas needed to receive it, which meant that floppy disks containing the next day’s ATO had to be flown out to the carriers each night. (The foreign air forces that did not have a CAFMS terminal went to the USAF unit collocated with them and picked up the ATO there.) There were also systemic limitations. For example, because it was limited to word processor and e-mail functions, CAFMS was not able to show the effects of upstream changes downstream. Thus, if the TACC operators wanted to change a strike, the computer was not able to show how this change would impact on tanker off-loads and other such data.