★ Meanwhile, after much blood, sweat, and tears, the Black Hole team had created a complete, executable plan—that is, a plan that could be translated into a series of Air Tasking Orders that munitions and maintenance troops could use to load and marshal the jets, and that the pilots and crews could use to navigate and bomb. It met the CINC’s guidance about political objectives, and it was a living document that would flex in response to changes in the coming battle.

Buster Glosson had been a difficult boss, yet that had had little impact on the morale of the people assigned to the Black Hole. They simply had had so much important work to do that they’d been too challenged and busy to be much bothered by him.

The toughest element in creating an ATO is its open-ended character: it can always be made better, but when one piece is moved, all the other pieces shift—some only a little, others a lot. Though a perfect ATO might exist in some dream (or textbook), it has never existed in fact; and each day the Black Hole crew worked on the offensive air campaign, they discovered things that needed to be done to make it better . . . and at first to make it executable.

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: