JOHN WARDEN AND CHECKMATE

As Tom Olsen, Jim Crigger, and their staffs were setting up the planning and operational machinery required in theater, General Schwarzkopf was making good on his undertaking to Chuck Horner in Jeddah on August 7 to ask the Joint Staff to start the planning process for a strategic air campaign.

Recall that Horner had several reservations about the CINC’s plan. He was, first of all, dead set against Washington making strike plans for the forces in-theater to execute (as in Vietnam). Schwarzkopf assured him that wouldn’t happen. Horner was also worried that the CINC, and by extension the planners in Washington, would misinterpret the aims latent in the term “strategic.”

On the other hand, on the ramp in Jeddah, Schwarzkopf raised the issue of a possible offensive air campaign should hostilities erupt immediately (either because of an Iraqi attack south or because the Coalition decided to initiate an attack north in the near future). He was thinking offense even while the immediate need was for defense. To Horner (as to any airman), such a campaign was mother’s milk. This kind of campaign, every airman knows, would require striking the enemy as a system, not necessarily at his deployed military forces, but at what have come to be known as a nation’s “centers of gravity” (a term from Clausewitz: “The point at which all energies should be directed”), such as its communications systems, power systems, oil refineries, industrial basis, centers of government, and in general, its means to sustain war.

When General Schwarzkopf returned home to MacDill AFB, he talked with Colin Powell, and later to the Vice Chief of the Air Force Staff, Lieutenant General Mike Loh, about development of an air campaign. Loh then called on a small planning cell, called CHECKMATE, to do the initial work. Formed in the late seventies to examine the strengths and weaknesses of U.S. and Soviet military forces and to create simulations, in 1990 CHECKMATE was headed by Colonel John Warden, a brilliant airpower theorist. While at the National Defense University, Warden had published what many considered a groundbreaking study of the subject, The Air Campaign: Planning for Combat, as well as several articles on the employment of air forces.40

Warden was the kind of airpower enthusiast who saw air strikes as the decisive influence on conflict, while other supporting arms, such as the Navy and ground forces, had become superfluous and obsolete. People have been preaching the virtues of airpower pretty much from the time of the Wright Brothers, and some of these sermons have had considerable impact. The problem for airpower enthusiasts was that hundreds of thousands of bombs had been dropped, but aircraft had yet to deliver the decisive blow in a war (leaving aside the atomic weapons dropped on Japan in 1945).

John Warden was different from earlier enthusiasts in that, for him, it was not the material shortcomings of airpower (i.e., aircraft and weapons) that had failed to deliver the decisive blow, but its ineffective organization and application. In other words, if the violence was applied quickly, precisely, and in the right places, the desired results would inevitably follow.