An air campaign is a series of military actions that employs air vehicles in order to achieve a political goal. It may be a phase in an overall campaign that also uses land, sea, and space vehicles, or it may be a phase that uses air vehicles primarily. (Air is the area above the surface of land or sea and below the vacuum of space. The edge of space is currently reckoned to be about 90,000 feet above mean sea level, but in the future it will probably rise to about 350,000 feet above MSL.) A commander has a wide range of missions, available to him as part of those actions—air superiority, air interdiction, air reconnaissance, airlift, and close air support.

In addition, an air campaign (in fact, any campaign) has to address a specific situation—in this case, the invasion south by Iraq into Kuwait and, potentially, Saudi Arabia.

Once the objectives and the actual situation have been determined, how does a commander build an air campaign?

He starts by using his available intelligence information to decide on an overall plan, which contains all the elements he thinks are needed. Then he examines the contributions airpower can make and decides how it will be used. This last is primarily a list of functions, such as: “I want to gain control of the air and keep the Iraqi Army from inflicting casualties on our ground forces.” This, in turn, leads to target selection, such as, for example: “I’ll want to bomb a particular Sector Air Defense Operations Center.” Or, “AWACS sees a MiG-23 flying south. We need to stop it.” Or, “We need to destroy tanks and artillery in order to keep our own losses on the ground low.” Once the targets have been determined (and the target list will always be changing), he aligns the targets with the attack forces he has available. He then overlays all the other support elements needed to get the job done—intelligence, command-and-control measures, refueling, search and rescue, AWACS, electronic countermeasures, Wild Weasels, communication codes—and lists them in the daily Air Tasking Order (called the Frag in Vietnam). This is the control document that tells virtually everything that flies what to do in the air, where to be, and when (including where not to be—“airspace deconfliction”).

We’ll discuss the ATO in depth in a little while. Before that, however, Horner had a much bigger task in front of him as he began to figure out his air campaign.

THE PLAN AND THE CINC

Plans are not made in the abstract. They are addressed to specific commanders, and though this is primarily to satisfy the commander’s expressed needs, it is also inevitably tailored to the commander’s personality. As the various plans that eventually grew into the actual plan of attack in Desert Storm were created and developed, Chuck Horner was sensitive to both the needs and to the personality of H. Norman Schwarzkopf.