Chapter 9 - Hits and Misses

9

Hits and Misses

CHUCK Horner continues:

During the first three days of the war, we were euphoric, and so were the folks at home. We were winning. The home team had scored time after time. And our touchdowns had been faithfully transmitted back to the States—amazing pictures of laser-guided bombs slaying doors of bunkers, airshafts of buildings, and the tops of aircraft shelters. For the first time since World War II, generals had become popular—Schwarzkopf with his energy, intensity, and focus, standing up and glaring at dumb questions; Powell with his warmth, intelligence, and smooth confidence.

Even I had a brief moment of fame. During a press conference, we ran a video of the Iraqi Air Force headquarters taken by one of our aircraft. I pointed at the display with my government-issue ballpoint pen. “This is my counterpart’s headquarters,” I announced as the building exploded. I wish I could take credit for the nice line. But the truth was I’d forgotten the name of the target, and it was all I could think of. Sometimes you get lucky; the incident landed on national TV.

It’s just as well that I spent very little time in front of the cameras. I wasn’t eager to press my luck under the glare of the lights when I needed to put all my energy into running the air war.

Most of my time, in fact, was spent urging on the team, deciding what needed to be done next, and trying to bring order to chaos.

Since we had no clear idea of what the enemy was doing, we had to guess. We’d take those guesses—officially called intelligence estimates or analysis—and try to deliver violence in such a way that the enemy could not do what we thought he was trying to do. That was working far better than we had dreamed.

Meanwhile—as in every war I’d seen—the Air Tasking Order was getting out late. Some problems are inevitable. Bad weather over targets required changes in the target lists, and there’d always be computer hiccups. Other problems were less forgivable: planners lust after the perfect plan, and generals like to general; both often pay more attention to doing their own thing than to taking care of the needs of the troops who are getting shot at.

There will never be a perfect plan until the intelligence that drives planning touches perfection. Don’t hold your breath. Yet planners obsessively fiddled and tinkered with the daily plan, trying to squeeze every drop of efficiency out of it . . . as though it were a work of art and not a rough script. When we stopped the presses to make small changes affecting only a few units, we risked delaying the ATO for everyone. And that risked increasing confusion or, worse, chaos.