Saddam, it turned out, was a lucky adversary for us. He could have made life much harder for us than he did.

The actual military situation had changed very little during the CINC’s absence. There was as yet nothing much standing between Saddam Hussein’s divisions on the Kuwaiti border and the Saudi heartland. The relatively thin Islamic Peninsula Shield forces were centered in the west in King Khalid Military City,48 while elements of the XVIIIth Airborne Corps and the U.S. Marines were just getting off the boats and airplanes at Dhahran.

The ground defense plan remained for small unit resistance along the coast road, if the Iraqis had attacked that way. And if they had attacked inland, where there were no roads, air would have stopped them. Since the early U.S. defensive force consisted primarily of elements of the 82d Airborne division, and the 82d has no armor (after they drop into battle, they walk), what effectively blocked Saddam from Riyadh was 82d Airborne “speed bumps.”

It would have been a repeat of Korea in 1950—that is, fight where possible, but pull back. Trade land for time. Sting the enemy at every opportunity, but keep U.S. and friendly losses to a minimum. And use air to sap the enemy’s strength until he had exhausted his force, and friendly forces could be built up for a counterattack.

All of this began to change when the 82d Airborne division began to be augmented by the armored punch of the 24th Mechanized Infantry division and their Abrams tanks. At that point, Saddam had a lot more than “speed bumps” to worry about if he moved south.

Meanwhile, Horner was eager to shed the hat he wore as CENTCOM Forward and get back to his real work as CENTAF commander. Working the essentially political job of looking out for General Schwarzkopf’s interests (making sure that when the CINC returned to Saudi Arabia, he could pick up where he would have been if he had not left Jeddah nearly three weeks earlier) was not a grievous burden for Horner; it was an honor that Schwarzkopf had entrusted him with the responsibility. But he was doing the CINC’s work and not his own, and he wanted to get on with his own work—planning for and employing airpower. He wanted to be with his own troops. And he wanted to get into the details he’d had to relinquish to Tom Olsen. Though Olsen had handled things in his usual exemplary way while he himself was occupied with the CINC’s business, Horner did not like being a spectator.

So there was no one happier than Chuck Horner when General Schwarzkopf’s plane touched down on August 23.