In late August, the plan was little more than a briefing, covering the highlights that the ATO would in time cover in detail, but it was a briefing that carried much on its shoulders, for it was tasked with conveying the plans and intentions of Chuck Horner and his staff to those who had to approve them—Schwarzkopf, Cheney, and Bush. Later, the President would also bring approval of the United Nations and Congress along with him. Specifically, the briefing had to convey the mental images of thousands of airplanes in a nearly three-day-long ballet.

Why only three days? Even though Horner knew the air campaign might go on for several months, he was convinced that no plan would last more than a couple of days before events caused it to be taken apart and put back together, so he allowed Glosson and his team to lay out the first three daily ATOs and nothing else. The general planning went on, of course, but Horner did not want his people to lock into specifics beyond that time.

When the plan was presented to Schwarzkopf, he approved it with little change.

The only detail that bothered him was the use of Special Operations Forces (SOF ) helicopters during the opening moments of the war to lead Task Force NORMANDY, a planned strike on Iraqi early-warning radars located on the border with Saudi Arabia. The issue came up during the third run-through of the briefing. As Chuck Horner tells the story:

The CINC’s concern, and that’s a polite term for an 8.0 outburst on the Richter Scale, was that the Special Forces were going to start their own little war up there. And when they got in trouble, as he feared they would (he had his own ghosts from Vietnam to deal with, remember), he would have to bail them out with regular Army troops. In response, Buster carefully pointed out that the MH-53 PAVE LOW helicopters of the SOFs had to lead the way because they were equipped with the new, accurate NAVISTAR global positioning satellite (GPS) navigation systems needed to find the radars. He further reported that the actual shooting would be done by regular Army AH-64A Apache attack helicopters of the 101st Air Assault division. He then added that the PAVE LOWs would also provide up-to-the-minute satellite communications, as well as provide a combat search and rescue (CSAR) capability, if it was needed.

This idea of Army helicopters striking the first blow of the war really appealed to the CINC and greatly worked in our favor. To wit, even though the F-117 Stealth fighters were approaching Baghdad, and the air- and sea-launched cruise missiles were on their way, the first actual ordnance on target in the war would be delivered by the regular forces of the U.S. Army. It’s sort of like locating your Navy base in South Carolina when Mendel Rivers was in Congress. Though you could build the base at just about any harbor, it sure was going to be a lot smoother if you put it in Charleston, South Carolina. In our case, while anyone could drop the first bomb to hit a target, it made sense to use the Apaches. And it sure made the briefing with the CINC go a lot smoother!