★ Before the middle of February, I actually paid little attention to the specifics of the war. I listened to all the BDA bullshit, but only to the extent that it told me what else needed to be done. I was trying not to rest on our laurels. Or, as Bill Creech told us, “Don’t read your own press clippings.” What was important was what was coming next. So I paid attention to what we had done only when it helped me with that. Each day we learned more about the Iraqis, and the thoughts about what that new information meant were my most important thoughts.

You don’t really know about war until you engage in it against a specific enemy in a specific environment. Sure, you can make general assumptions that will in all likelihood hold up when the shooting starts, but you have to be careful about relying on these. It’s like preparing for a boxing match. You study previously demonstrated tendencies, strengths, and weaknesses, but when the bout starts, that has only a limited value. Now you are concerned with your opponent’s punches and openings. Strategies change because of many factors, such as fatigue or injury, that can only be known during the fight.

CONTROL OF THE AIR

Air superiority is not a precise concept. And the process of gaining it is no less fuzzy. What do you mean by air superiority, and how do you know when you’ve got it? There is no handy chart that lets you plot the x- and y-axis and find where the two lines cross.

What I wanted was to operate freely over Iraq and not lose too many aircraft. Okay, what does that mean? What is too many? I don’t know exactly, but I guess I will know if it is too many. Later in the war, too many A-10s targeted against the Republican Guards were getting shot up. Because they were suffering too many casualties, I ordered them to other targets. Were there any specific numbers involved in this decision? No. It was a gut call.

Free operation over Iraq raises other issues. For starters, not every aircraft could be expected to go everywhere. Or if it could go everywhere, it might not do that all the time. The F-117s could go anywhere, but when the Iraqi Air Force was flying, they could only go at night. (Again, we wanted to fly the F-117s in conditions where they wouldn’t be seen.) The A-10s, on the other hand, were never sent to Baghdad, even after we controlled the air.

In other words, control of the air is a complex issue, filled with variables.

To take the question a step further, I considered that I had air superiority when I could do what I wanted to within the strengths and limitations of my force, and when I could hold the Iraqi targets at risk while employing all my air assets as appropriate. That meant, for example, that my strike aircraft did not have to jettison their payload due to Iraqi defenses such as fighter interceptors.