Early in Desert Shield, Bill Rider, the CENTAF logistician, and his director of transportation, Bob Edminsten, had set up a C-130 airline in the theater. The C-130s flew regular, scheduled passenger flights, called Star routes, and cargo flights, called Camel routes. Starling determined what had priority on these flights, and Tenoso’s airlifters put that in the Air Tasking Order.

This “airline” was already a vast operation before the move west, but the effort associated with that move was simply staggering (and largely unsung), with a big C-130 landing every five to ten minutes, every hour of the day, every day of the week, for two weeks after the start of the war on the seventeenth of January, hauling the vast army to faraway places like Rafhah, hundreds of miles up the Tapline Road—a nose-to-tail stream of C-130s.

★ As the armies completed their moves to the west, and the forces south of Kuwait came up on line, weather became the enemy.

Chuck Horner now takes up the story:

★ As February wound down, General Schwarzkopf was under great pressure from Washington to initiate the ground attack before the Iraqi Army was able to negotiate a surrender that would allow them to leave Kuwait with their remaining tanks and guns. The date Schwarzkopf selected for G day was the twenty-fourth of February.

A few days before the big moment, we had had our final war council before the ground war. Generals Franks, Luck, and Boomer had come to Riyadh to brief their final schemes of maneuver to Schwarzkopf, while the Egyptian, Syrian, Saudi, and Gulf Cooperation Council forces were doing the same with Khaled. For all the others, this meeting had to be a high-anxiety affair (they were, after all, on the line), but for me it was a relief. For once, someone else was briefing the CINC, and the airmen were (sort of) getting the day off after being the only show in town for thirty-seven days.

So when the war council started, I relaxed in my chair, wondering how well plans would be executed, and how many men would die bravely, needlessly, or because of our failures of leadership. All three U.S. generals were calm and deliberate. No surprises.

Then the weatherman got up and briefed the weather forecast for the night of February 23-24, and it was going to be terrible—rain, fog, winds, and cold temperatures. Cloud bases would be touching the ground, so visibility for the troops would be measured in yards, not miles. That in itself would not be so bad, as enemy troops would suffer the same limitations. In fact, that would cause them far greater problems, since they had to see attacking troops in order to direct their fires. But the bad weather would cause us one problem: it would keep our aircraft and helicopters from providing close air support to attacking forces. Not only would they be denied the power of massed aircraft striking at enemy strong points in their path, but if they chanced to be pinned down in a minefield by Iraqi artillery, they would find themselves in a seriously bad way. This situation, predictably, left the CINC visibly anguished.