En route to President Bush, the briefings went through the usual reviews, which agreed that while the air campaign was well constructed and credible, the focus of the land campaign on sending forces directly into the teeth of the Iraqi defenses appeared unimaginative. Of course, it was not a lack of imagination that had given birth to this unhappy situation, it was a lack of friendly forces.

The briefing to the President had mixed results. The air briefing delivered by Buster Glosson was generally accepted, though not without questions about the plan’s assumptions of success. It simply looked too good. It was hard to accept its claims.

It’s worth looking at what lay behind these doubts—an outdated mind-set that did not yet understand the full impact and capabilities of modern airpower. Let’s examine a pair of facts:

First, the reputation of airpower had been created long before by air campaigns whose success had at best been mixed—the P-40s at Kassarine Pass, the B-17s over Germany, the F-100s bombing the Vietnam jungle. If such actions were paradigms for all air campaigns, then President Bush and his advisers had good reason to throw hard questions at Buster Glosson. How could any human endeavor go as well as he promised?

Second, technology had outrun conventional perceptions. In the years after Vietnam, airpower had taken a technological leap comparable to the shift from cannonballs to rifled shells. Now there were laser-guided bombs on Stealth aircraft, A-10s with Maverick missiles, and 30mm cannon shooting up tanks and APCs in the desert. The air campaign would go that well.

In the event, despite attempts to poke holes in it, the air briefing stood up.

The Army briefing didn’t fare so happily. For reasons unknown to Chuck Horner, it was never made clear that General Schwarzkopf had intended all along to offer Joe Purvis’s plan as a straw man that would justify the extra corps the CINC wanted very badly. To the best of Horner’s knowledge, Schwarzkopf had told Colin Powell time and again, “This plan is not what I want, but I can’t do what needs to be done without another corps at the minimum.” So Joe Purvis, courageously, stood up and got pummeled (and by implication, Norman Schwarzkopf got pummeled with him). The Army plan was called unimaginative, timid, risky. There were jokes about it: “Hey, diddle diddle, right up the middle.” All the while, Joe Purvis stood up time and again and absorbed the hits that led people to come to the hard conclusion that more ground forces would be needed if offensive operations were to be initiated. Though he never got much credit for it, he turned out to be a key factor in the success of Desert Storm.

And in the end, General Schwarzkopf got his second corps.

TRAINING

As the plan of attack was being developed and briefed, the Coalition air armada was being deployed to the Gulf and trained to fight.

What did this take?