He was aware, first of all, that Schwarzkopf was a landman, not an airman. As a result, from the beginning of their relationship in CENTCOM, he had tried to elevate the CINC’s sights into thinking about the importance of airpower to devastate the enemy in ways that were not directly connected to land warfare. He feared that Schwarzkopf would fall into the land-centric error that too many land officers made: thinking that war was only the battlefield meeting of two land armies. Those officers understood that you bombed the enemy homeland, government, and infrastructure, but they were never sure why or what relevance that had to real war, which to them meant surviving on a battlefield and destroying the enemy soldiers. Next to these, all else was of limited relevance.

Horner wanted the CINC to consider the use of airpower to achieve goals that were not about destroying the enemy army. And in fact, he succeeded.

As it turned out, Schwarzkopf wished to be the kind of CINC who approached warfare from a much broader perspective than is usually the case with land-centric thinkers. He wanted Goldwater-Nichols to work. The proof of it was in the way he created a theater leadership capable of blending the best of land, sea, air, space, and special operations activities and capabilities.

Horner didn’t know that yet, however. This is the way he saw him at the time.

First of all, Schwarzkopf was extremely intelligent. It never took him long to grasp what he was being told.

Like Bradley, he deeply loved ground troops. He cared passionately about their safety.

Like Patton, he believed in his own destiny. This meant that he feared history would not remember him as the heroic man of destiny he considered himself to be . . . or rather, that others would foul things up for him and prevent him from achieving his historic destiny.

Finally, his ego was enormous, yet he was enormously insecure.

His insecurity was the key to his famous rages. For instance, Schwarzkopf could never handle well being put on the spot; and when he was put on a spot, his tendency was to lash out and bully or to throw blame on someone else. For this reason, Horner learned never, never to put him on the spot. He never confronted him in public, but always in his office, when they were alone or with another person the CINC trusted. This not only protected the CINC from himself and his insecurities; but when the CINC was nervous and insecure, he sometimes made wrong decisions, which might require a lot of work to undo.

To have constructed any kind of war plan without taking consideration of these and other personality and character issues would have been far worse than unwise.

INTERNAL LOOK AND THE EVOLUTION OF THE PLAN

Norman Schwarzkopf took command of CENTCOM on November 23, 1989. Chuck Horner took the first major opportunity he could to talk to him about airpower.