The irony of the Gulf War victory was that quite possibly the wrong branch of service and the wrong military leaders had been celebrated at its conclusion. American ground troops led by their armored units had humiliated an allegedly mighty but now bedraggled Iraqi army, and the final and most permanent images of that war were of pitiful Iraqi prisoners stretched out as far as the eye could see. The sight was so pathetic to much of the world that the war’s architects decided to terminate it more quickly than they might normally have, fearing the negative consequences such scenes might have when they were shown in the Arab world. The final impression of the war was that it had been a singular victory for ground troops, and the two heroes who emerged had both been army men, Norman Schwarzkopf and Colin Powell. Some analysts, however, believed that the victory belonged more to the air force and the advent of its new precision-guidance munitions and highly sophisticated delivery systems.
If one man was responsible for this most original aspect of the Gulf War, these analysts believed, it was a brilliant but little-known air force strategist, Colonel John Warden, called affectionately by some of his junior officers (but not to his face) Mad John. If one of the newsmagazines had wanted to run on its cover the photograph of the man who had played the most critical role in achieving victory, it might well have chosen Warden instead of Powell or Schwarzkopf. Moreover, they believed that although what had taken place in the Gulf War was merely a beginning, it marked a decisive change in the nature of America’s air strategy that now allowed the nation to maximize its use of these supremely sophisticated new weapons. Precision-guided weapons, in their embryonic stage in Vietnam, had come of age in this war, and America was obviously far and away the leader in their production and use. Thus America had been catapulted into a potential position of unmatched military power—short of nuclear weapons—that had never before existed in the post–World War II era, and the consequences of this unprecedented power might be far-reaching in both political and military terms.
A large coterie of senior military officers had watched the unique progress of the high-technology air campaign in the first five weeks and were convinced that the war was effectively over before ground forces joined the battle, the Iraqi army already battered to the point of disintegration by the unprecedented use of airpower. But the forty-three-day air campaign had lacked faces and humanity, while the ground war had given the American people what they wanted: faces and a final visual—and very palpable—victory. As a result, a truly revolutionary moment in modern warfare might have been significantly underestimated, not just by the public at large, but by many civilians who were in charge of national security, and quite possibly by some senior military men.
At the time of the Gulf War, Warden was the head of a top-secret air force group working inside the Pentagon known as Checkmate. He was considered by some military experts to be an important figure, emblematic not just in the air force but across the board among a younger generation of officers eager to adjust military thinking, planning, and structure to the uses of the new weaponry. The principal opponents of Warden’s radical ideas turned out to be not, as one might expect, army men or even civilians, but senior officers in his own branch of service, especially the three- and four-star officers who dominated much of air force strategy and theology and came from the Tactical Air Command (TAC). They had a much more conventional view of the order of battle and believed that airpower was there to support the army on the ground and to interdict enemy forces. They despised Warden and his ideas, a hostility that never lessened.
In preparation for Desert Storm, Schwarzkopf had immediately requested an air plan, and from the moment Warden took on the assignment, he had a number of powerful enemies in the Washington area and particularly in TAC, where he was known as a maverick who was assaulting the orthodoxy of his own profession. The TAC people were influential within the air force, constituting, one officer said, a powerful mafia all its own. Normally the request from Schwarzkopf would have gone to Lieutenant General Jimmie Adams, air force deputy chief of staff for plans and operations, another old-fashioned TAC strategist. But Adams was away on leave and the request was funneled to Warden. The difference in their respective philosophies could not have been greater. Adams and the other senior TAC officers wanted to use the new weaponry in the traditional manner, supporting American ground forces and interdicting enemy armies in the field. They viewed Warden as both too radical and too theoretical. Warden, in turn, saw them as men from another century who did not understand the possibilities that the new generation of weapons offered strategists.
An iconoclastic officer who had graduated from the Air Force Academy in 1965, Warden had flown fighter planes and aerial reconnaissance missions in Vietnam and had left there immensely frustrated by what he believed was the misuse of airpower. When he thought of Vietnam, what he remembered were the castrating rules of engagement. Enemy trucks parked along borders of the Ho Chi Minh trail, their lights still on, were targets that he and his colleagues were not allowed to hit until they started down the trail, by then with lights off. He recalled with some bitterness his farewell dinner in Thailand, when he had gotten up and said he never wanted to be part of anything like that again. He thought it was immoral—not the war itself, fighting the North Vietnamese, but the way we had fought it, with so many restraints. His fellow airmen gathered at the party were all in agreement and cheered him enthusiastically, although an army special forces captain, misunderstanding what he had said about the immorality of the war, later challenged him to a fistfight outside the restaurant.
By the mideighties, when he was in midcareer, Warden was considered brilliant, truly innovative, and equally difficult, a man who did not know how to stay within the chain of command. He burned so brightly with his own ideas, was so sure that he was right on every issue, that he rarely listened to those who dissented from him. Another of his nicknames among his peers was “Right Turn” Warden because if he had a compelling idea and a superior rejected it, he simply took a right turn and went to the next higher level. Failing there, he would take yet another right turn and go to the next higher level, infuriating in the process a long line of his superiors. Predictably, the system hated him, although isolated, young iconoclastic officers working inside the system and often frustrated by it thought he was one of the most original thinkers in the service. But even an admirer once noted that Warden had no sense of proportion. Convinced of his rightness in all matters, he would argue as hard on some small, peripheral issue as on a matter of global strategy and refuse to back down. He had commanded a wing very briefly in the eighties in Germany, but it had not gone well. His subordinates had chafed over his edicts that women on the base had to wear dresses instead of pants at the PX and the various clubs, and over parking privileges. His tour as a wing commander was cut short.
To the TAC people the air force was for pilots, and pilots flew, and if you did not fly, if you wrote or planned, you were not really an air force man. You were somehow outside the culture, not really one of them. Their disdain for Warden was palpable, but somehow he managed to survive inside the system, always able to find one important sponsor who would harbor him on the lee side of the bureaucratic storms where the traditionalists could not get at him. At the start of the Gulf War, that role was played by General Mike Dugan, the air force chief of staff, himself soon to be fired by Dick Cheney for what were considered to be outrageous statements made on the eve of the war. Warden had been preparing for a war like this long before Iraqi soldiers crossed into Kuwait. In the seventies and especially the eighties, as the technology of modern munitions had become increasingly sophisticated, he had worked on a strategy that would give the United States (and the air force), both leaders in this new high-technology game, the maximum effect from such innovative weapons and technologies. The problem with most senior military strategists, air force or otherwise, Warden believed, was that when given what were virtually brand-new weapons with brand-new capabilities, they tended to use them with the old strategies, thus to no small degree neutralizing their full potential.
That was more true than ever with the coming of Stealth fighters and precision-guided bombs. Most senior TAC officers had been trained to think of airpower as a formidable weapon of attrition in case we fought the Soviets in a land war in Europe. In that eventuality, we would arm our Stealth fighters with these amazingly accurate weapons and use them to interdict Soviet troops and matériel on their way across Eastern Europe. Warden could barely contain his contempt for that strategy as a misuse of energies.
Instead he eventually came up with his own strategy, based on the modern state’s unusual vulnerability to these new weapons. The more modern the state, the greater its dependence upon electrical power, communications systems, sources of petroleum, and transportation systems, then the more it was endangered by this kind of warfare. With the accuracy of modern airpower it was possible to paralyze the modern state by taking out its central nervous system, as if quickly and swiftly injecting it with a temporary poison that stilled its capacity to function both militarily and otherwise as a state. Moreover, it could be done with limited risk on the part of American forces, it caused limited collateral damage given the amount of munitions dropped, and it even caused comparatively limited physical damage, or at the least, the physical damage could be fairly accurately controlled. With this strategy you could harm the people who had started the war, not the poor grunts whose misfortune it was to be soldiering out in the field.
Warden understood that because of the immense success and dynamism of the American domestic economy and the great strides in computer and satellite technology, the United States was far ahead of the rest of the world in its techno-military progress and that these advances accrued primarily to the air force, perhaps a little to the navy with the cruise missiles, and very little to the army. By the late eighties, these advances had been taking place for some twenty years, incrementally increasing the degree of accuracy until what existed was nothing less than a quantum change. We could now, he believed, use airpower as no nation had ever been able to do in even the recent past, and we even had a remarkable new delivery system for these precision-guided bombs, the F-117 Stealth fighter (actually more a small bomber than a fighter), which was largely immune to radar detection.
Warden saw the enemy as a bull’s-eye on a target, with five concentric rings around it, and inside each ring something of high value to the targeters: the power grid, the military communications system, the fuel supplies, the normal communications system, which was ancillary but almost as important as the military communications system, and the transportation systems, both military and civilian. You could, he believed, paralyze an enemy and bring him to the table without destroying his people. When he finally presented his plan first to General Schwarzkopf and then to General Powell, it was notable for the primacy of its assault upon the Iraqi political and military communications systems, and its almost complete indifference to the Iraqi army in the field, which he, unlike the two army generals, saw as being of little consequence once the Iraqi central nervous system was numbed. Adjustments were eventually made at Schwarzkopf’s and Powell’s requests to pay more attention to attacking Iraqi field forces.
In the past, most notably in the air assault upon Germany in World War II, bombing had been serial instead of parallel. Because the bombing techniques were so primitive and the accuracy so limited, it would take a week of sustained effort for the Eighth Air Force to inflict relatively severe damage on a target, often only partially crippling it. Then the bombers would go on to the next target, while the Germans would have a chance to repair the latest damage. That in Warden’s definition was a serial campaign. But the new technology allowed the planners to go after as many different targets as they wanted on the first day or two and take them out with remarkable precision. The new weaponry had reversed the traditional equation of airpower. In World War II, it had been a question of how many planes were needed to take out one target; now it was a question of how many targets one plane with precision-guided weapons could take out. Warden had studied the air campaign against Germany, and in all of 1943 when the Allies were going after German targets, they had hit only fifty of them. But now if you had fifty or sixty key targets, you could hit them all with devastating accuracy in the first few hours of the war. Thus you had a parallel rather than serial campaign.
When Schwarzkopf’s request for an air campaign came through to Warden in August 1990, it was the assignment he had always wanted. The pressure for immediate results was on, and in just two days he put together a master plan for using airpower based on his ideas and strategies. The TAC people were sure to be against it, but one of Warden’s superiors shrewdly delayed a briefing Warden was supposed to give them until after Warden had briefed Schwarzkopf, so that it would be a fait accompli. Not everyone was happy with it, and at one high-level briefing a senior air force officer said that it was all wrong. The way to do it was to drop one big bomb relatively near Baghdad to demonstrate to Saddam what we could do, and if that did not bring him to the table, then drop the bombs closer and closer to him.
To Warden that was bizarre, a kind of gradualism reminiscent of Vietnam. Still bitter over the misuse of airpower in Vietnam and the incremental use of airpower in Rolling Thunder, he had deliberately entitled his campaign Instant Thunder. “This is not your Rolling Thunder. This is real war,” he told the junior officers in his own shop, “and one of the things we want to emphasize right from the start is that this is not Vietnam! This is doing it right! This is using airpower!”1
Of all the top people in the chain of command who responded to Warden’s early briefings, the most enthusiastic was Schwarzkopf himself, who wanted desperately to limit American and allied casualties in the war and understood immediately the possibilities that Warden was offering him. At first Schwarzkopf had been suspicious of Warden, thinking he was, in Schwarzkopf’s words, a new-age Curtis LeMay clone who believed airpower was the answer to everything. But Schwarzkopf was delighted with the flexibility and originality of Warden’s plan, quite pleased that it had been put together so quickly.2 The American commander would eventually disagree on some points with Warden; he, like Colin Powell, wanted more emphasis on bombing the Iraqi army in the field. But he listened carefully to Warden’s presentation and his belief that we had the capability to knock out the Iraqi airpower and air-defense systems in just six days. “This is exactly what I needed,” Schwarzkopf said. Warden was, of course, thrilled to have so powerful a sponsor, and from of all places the army, and he was not shy about trying to hold on to him. As he was finishing his briefing, he went over to Schwarzkopf and told him, “General, if you do this, you’ll be the first person since Douglas MacArthur landed at Inchon to have so complete a victory.” One of the senior air force officers who had escorted Warden to the Schwarzkopf briefing, Major General Robert Alexander, was appalled by Warden’s blatant flattery—fearing that it might jeopardize the entire plan. Schwarzkopf did not say anything, but he seemed to beam and expanded a bit.3
Colin Powell was also impressed by the plan, as was Dick Cheney. By then Warden had learned that no small part of his problem was making people who had little knowledge of the specifics understand the dramatic change in weaponry that had taken place in the last ten years or so. So he and his people pointed out that during World War II, an average B-17 bomb during a bombing run missed its target by some 2,300 feet. Therefore, if you wanted a 90 percent probability of having hit a particular target, you had to drop some nine thousand bombs. That required a bombing run of one thousand bombers and placed ten thousand men at risk. By contrast, with the new weaponry one plane flown by one man with one bomb could have the same level of probability. That was an improvement in effectiveness of approximately ten-thousand-fold. At the end of the briefing, Cheney sat back and said, “Now for the first time I understand why you people are so confident about this whole thing.”
This was the moment when the new age in air force tactics was colliding with the old one. For Warden, dealing with men like Schwarzkopf, Powell, and Cheney turned out to be easier than dealing with his own superiors. The biggest roadblock was Lieutenant General Charles Horner, the man who would command all the American airpower in the theater. Horner was a TAC man through and through, a traditionalist closely linked to both General Robert Russ, the four-star TAC commander based at Langley, and Jimmie Adams. Schwarzkopf told Horner that Warden and his team were coming to brief Horner, and Schwarzkopf knew that his top air commander was furious at the idea of a campaign created by junior subordinates in Washington. “Sir, the last thing we want is a repeat of Vietnam where Washington picked the targets! This is the job of your air commander,” Horner angrily told Schwarzkopf over the phone.4 To Horner, a strategy that emanated from Washington brought back painful memories of Vietnam, as well as a sense of the possible diminution of his own role as commander.
The meeting in Riyadh was nothing less than brutal. Warden had expected that it would be a difficult session as he would finally have to deal with the formidable TAC opposition he had deftly bypassed back in Washington. But he was stunned nonetheless, as he later told friends, by the degree of personal venom he encountered. Knowing he might have a tough sell, he had brought some goodies he had been told were hard to get in Saudi Arabia—Chap Stick and sunscreen. He tried to give them to Horner as a peace offering at the beginning of their briefing, but Horner asked, “What is this shit?” and swept the goodies across the table. It was not an auspicious start for a colonel trying to brief a three-star on a brand-new strategy. The rest of their meeting did not go much better. One witness remembered that from time to time Horner turned his chair away from Warden so that he was talking to Horner’s back. Whatever Warden said, Horner challenged. Unlike Warden, he did not have much confidence in either the new strategy or the new F-117 Stealth fighters. He was also worried that Warden’s plan, aimed in the beginning at virtually everything in the Iraqi military component save its vast army already in the field, some of it sitting very close by on the Saudi borders, would leave Horner open to a major assault from Iraqi tanks. He was hardly eager to listen to some bright young theoretician dispatched from Washington—even one who already had Schwarzkopf’s approval.
It was, indeed, a collision between the old air force and the new air force. Horner was, some of Warden’s people thought, openly contemptuous of him, and at one point Horner asked one of his aides, as if had been talking to a madman, “I’m being very, very patient, aren’t I?” The aide said he was. “I’m being very, very tolerant, aren’t I?” The aide again agreed. “I’m being really nice not to make the kind of response that you would expect me to make, aren’t I?” he then asked. Again the aide agreed.5 Finally, near the end of the meeting, Horner turned to some of his people and said, “And you didn’t think I could hold my temper, did you?”6 He thought Warden’s plan much too theoretical.
That meeting marked the end of an era in the use of airpower: one strategy replaced by an entirely new one. Horner had pounded Warden mercilessly. Then, the meeting virtually over, he pointed at Warden’s top four aides and asked them, one by one, if they would join Horner’s staff, which they did. It was over, he had humiliated Warden, taken his staff and his strategy—Horner had no choice about that; it was what his boss, Schwarzkopf, wanted—and sent Warden back to Washington alone. In an odd way, Warden thought, even severing him from the plan and returning him to Washington, painful though it was, had an upside. He could now work the corridors of Washington, explaining the plan to influential doubters. The TAC resentment of Warden, despite the fact that the essence of his strategy had been adopted by the air force, remained intense. Even Lieutenant General Mike Short, who eventually commanded the air component in Kosovo and used some of Warden’s tactics, spoke disparagingly of him. (Warden never made general, but was assigned to teach at the air force’s elite war college in Montgomery, Alabama, where he dealt with the institution’s brightest young officers and, ironically, became more influential than ever.)
Part of Warden’s air campaign was based on the ability to use the Stealth fighter, the F-117 Nighthawk, as a lead instrument of battle. The Stealth fighter, which could elude enemy radar, was just coming into its own. Two squadrons would fly in the Gulf War and were instrumental in taking out the most heavily defended targets, thus opening corridors for more traditional fighters and bombers. But they were hardly at the core of Warden’s plan. The key was the accuracy of the weapons they carried, which allowed them to do parallel rather than serial bombing. It would have been essentially the same strategy without the Stealth fighters, Warden later noted, though the casualties would almost surely have been a good deal higher. The military success that Warden had promised Schwarzkopf was in fact close to the one he received. For six weeks, the American forces, using land-based aircraft, naval aircraft, and missiles, systematically pounded the Iraqi military and its parallel civilian instruments of power, paralyzing them and making them virtually useless. Iraqi airpower was suppressed, communications interrupted. Iraqi tanks, waiting in the field for the coming battle, provided marvelous target practice for the air force, and the phrase tank plinking was born.
Stationed in the desert, where the daytime heat was extraordinary, the tanks, like everything else, became very hot. In the evening, however, the sand cooled much faster than the tanks, and so American F-111s, each armed with six five-hundred-pound, laser-guided bombs and a thermal guidance system, could pick them out virtually at will because of the infrared signal they gave off. Some fifteen hundred tanks were readily destroyed that way. After the war an Iraqi tank commander told his American captors that war had become a kind of hell for the Iraqi tankers. During their war with Iran, he said, the tanks had been where they took refuge at night, but against the Americans they had been terrified to be in them at night for fear they would be killed.
What happened in Iraq was a precursor to the future. During the Gulf War, only about a third of the bombs were precision instruments, whereas two-thirds of the targets were hit by them. That meant precision munitions were giving the commanders a level of accuracy and efficiency never before known, and an advantage almost unprecedented in warfare. It was as if the airpower available during World War II had been enjoyed exclusively by one of the major combatants in World War I. In terms of what might soon be accomplished because of rapidly developing new technologies, it was just a beginning. The bombs were likely to become ever more precise and the ability to avoid enemy radar through Stealth flights even greater.
To show that we had only scratched the surface, when the Gulf War was over, Warden put a bright young man on his staff, Lieutenant Colonel Robert Owen, in charge of an unusual assignment. He was to take the level of accuracy now available to American fighters and project it onto the aerial needs of the World War II campaign against Germany, as if we had had the technological ability then that we had now. It had been a three-year campaign requiring as many as six thousand aircraft to shut down German military production. It was crude, not necessarily accurate, and caused innumerable casualties, both among the bomber crews and civilians. One thousand planes might be needed to hit a target. The circle of error—that is, the circle into which you could realistically expect to put 50 percent of your bombs—was comparatively large, some twenty miles for the night bombing in the beginning, closing to about one thousand meters near the end. Collateral damage was immense. By the Gulf War that figure had dramatically changed; the circle of error was closer to six feet or even smaller. Owen estimated that two squadrons of F-117s (a total of forty-eight Stealth fighters, not even the B-2 Stealth bombers soon to come) would have shut down the production of Germany in approximately six weeks.
Thus had the strategy been matched up with the weaponry. But the conversion would be both slow and difficult, in part because both civilians and military men (especially senior army men) felt that the air force had often boasted before about what airpower alone could do, without any real proof. Most people in the ruling elite in both civilian and military circles had attitudes shaped by previous wars and were slow to adjust to new possibilities.
What was exceptional and would be of importance if the United States ever went to war in the Balkans was that the air campaign in Iraq was just the start. The air force and navy were rapidly switching over most of their planes to precision-guided platforms, and the munitions themselves, laser-guided and photo-image-driven, were becoming more accurate all the time. The military was gaining the ability to pick out a building and not merely hit it, but also determine which floor and which side of the building to hit. It was a fascinating part of the technological revolution. As the technology of modern communications was making it more difficult for a democracy to go to war and risk casualties, the modern technology of armaments was offering for the first time the possibility of a new kind of war, waged at a distance with superior precision, demanding fewer risks and inflicting less permanent physical damage on the enemy—a campaign, said the foreign policy analyst Les Gelb, “of immaculate destruction.” Virtual war, it would soon be called.
The technology was at hand, but knowledge of it and confidence about using it had yet to permeate the military-civilian thinking. Also uncertain were attitudes about whether this kind of military success could create parallel political value. But its temptations were obvious in terms of American domestic politics. For future administrations, anxious to exert American force overseas, but wishing to minimize risk, unsure of public and congressional support, and distrusting of an intrusive media, it might seem like manna.