Much of the USN buildup was additional carriers.

The buildup posed many problems.

For Chuck Horner himself, the pace of his own planning grew ever more frantic. Each day he had to ask himself yet again: “What has changed? What new force can we accommodate? How can we support it? At what location? How will we introduce them into the existing ATO?”

At Horner’s level, planning meant anticipating potential problems, then working out in advance how to avoid them, or solve them if they could not be avoided. It was his job to foresee everything that might happen, then to bring about the good outcomes and to head off the bad ones.

While the staff were up to their necks working immediate issues, he looked beyond what they were wrestling with to anticipate the next issues they needed to address when they finished what they were doing.

In this he was mostly successful, he now believes, for the war brought few surprises, while a thousand prepared-for events didn’t happen. His two chief anticipatory lapses were the impact of Scuds on the Israelis and the Khafji invasion—significant errors, yet easy to miss.

★ Meanwhile, there were many countless practical and immediate buildup-related problems:

Command arrangements had to be both spread out and strengthened. On December 5, Horner decided that his span of control was too large. He therefore put the fighters under Buster Glosson (officially, he became the fighter division commander); the bombers and tankers under Pat Caruana; the electronic assets under Profitt; and the airlifters under Ed Tenoso.

The constant arrival of new intelligence led to changes in the offensive ATO. However, now that there were more strike and support forces, more targets could be hit, so the ATO grew larger and more complex.

The best use of the new Joint STARS had to be worked out (it arrived for the first time only a day before the war started).

New players such as VIIth Corps had to be accommodated.

The airlift west of XVIIIth and VIIth Corps had to be worked out, once ground movements had been finalized (during their move west to attack positions, the only land artery, the Tapline Road, was paved with trucks. The intratheater airlift created an airbridge that relieved some of that pressure).

More tent cities had to be built, to accommodate the increased numbers of personnel.

There had to be ample munitions at each base. The plan was to have a sixty-day supply on hand; but when the new aircraft arrived, it went down to thirty days. Yet within a few weeks, Bill Rider and his logistics team, with enormous support from the logistics organizations in Europe and the United States, brought munitions up to the required sixty-day supply. Saddam Hussein, constantly underestimating airpower, had told his troops openly that the Coalition would run out of bombs after a few days. He was wrong yet again. Not only did Horner have sixty days’ worth of bombs and missiles on hand when the war started, but they would keep that level day in and day out as the war progressed.