Interview with General Buster Glosson, Chief of CENTCOM offensive air campaign

But I can't be sure that's true. To my knowledge, I'm not sure anyone other than Saddam Hussein can answer that question.

Q: If the Iraqis had started to slaughter people with chemical weapons, biological weapons, what would you guys have done?

Glosson: Unfortunately, I was one of the people that had to wrestle with that and although the answer would certainly have been a political decision, General Schwarzkopf and General Horner and I had the responsibility of making sure that there were a military option there.

And I think that if you accept number one, that we would never respond in kind, then the only other logical thing that you would be able to do that would get somebody's attention is take a look at the river structure and the dams and the dykes and where their located and the impact of them not being there would be to that society.

Q: Were you asked to check out the nuclear contingency planning?

Glosson: Since the war ended I've read a lot about nuclear contingency planning and so forth and so on that took place. I can tell you emphatically I participated in none, nor would I have participated in any and I was never asked by the Chairman or the CINC to do any such planning. The dumbest thing that the coalition could have done would have been to even contemplate the use of any kind of nuclear weapon for any purpose. That is not something that you can limit. In other words, when you start that snowball rolling down the hill, you don't know how large it's going to be when it gets to the bottom. And just my personal view, I would not have been part of that.

Now I've had people ask me well what would you have done if you had been given a direct order. I don't know what extreme steps I would have taken unless that situation had arisen but it is absolutely so repulsive to me that it would change me as a person and I would never agree to do anything for anybody that changed me as a person or changed my own moral values of life.

Q: Why was Stealth so successful?

Glosson: I've been asked many times why I put so much weight or put so much focus on the Stealth aircraft and then a follow on to that same question is normally well why were they so successful.

The answer to the first part of the question is that Stealth in my opinion, gave us the opportunity to take advantage of technology and have minimum exposure or loss of life because of the Iraqis inability to deal with it.

I was confident, based on the tests that we had run in this country, that they were not going to be able to deal with it. I told all the fighter pilots flying the airplanes, the Stealth airplanes, the 117s, that I was putting more pressure on them, thatevery day, when the sun came up until it went down, the focus of that day's war effort from a strategic campaign would be centered around the 117 and that I would always target them first and then the other targets that I had to get I would let other systems take those out.

Q: The targeting gear that the Stealth has isn't particularly special, why is it that the Stealth was so much more accurate?

Glosson: The Stealth targeting system is not that different that the targeting systems that we have in some of our other airplanes.

The primary difference is that they can do that targeting without being disrupted by Triple A and SAMs and Migs because none of the three can see them so they can't hit them.

So you're sitting there with your total focus on being able to maximise the capability of that system and you're not dodging a SAM and then trying to go back and pick it up where you left it off. You're driving along very straight and level and I won't say in a sedate environment because those fighter pilots that are there and would see the blanket of Triple A would tell you it's anything but sedate, but to a certain extent, you can't do anything about it.

Q: What did you say to the Stealth guys before the war started, your speech to them, what did you tell them?

Glosson: I visited each one of the fighter units and I remember when I talked to the F117 guys that I told them that the weight of the war, from a stragegic air campaign standpoint, was going to be primarily squarely on their shoulders and that since none of em had been shot at before, there'd be an experience there that they had never seen anything like and they were going to see walls of Triple A and they were going to say to themselves, "There's no way we can go through that".

And I wanted to make sure they understood that when you're night flying in heavy flak and Triple A that that's not abnormal and people have seen that before and I said the one thing that we will never do is we will never look at that wall of Triple A and say, "That's too thick, I can't make it through." I said so, "We will attack those targets and we will do it as accurately and as quickly as we can because, in the end results, no-one has given any of us any guarantee or made us any more important or our risk of our life any more significant that anybody elses. So one of you F117 pilots are no more important than one of those F15E pilots."

Q: Were you surprised that at least one of the Stealths wasn't shot down.. just through luck? You must have expected to lose a couple.

Glosson: Everything dealing with the 117 was speculative from a standpoint of how many losses we would have. Certainly I thought that the losses would be minimal and now what do I mean by minimal? I honestly did not think that we would lose a single 117 unless we had a mechanical failure. If a gear door or a bomb door stayed open, or if some mechanical malfunction occurred that would highlight the 117, then I obviously I was concerned that.. that we would lose an airplane.

But as long as all the systems worked well I thought that at the outside a Golden BB might get one of them but I really did not expect to see, you know, half a dozen 117s get shot down, I just didn't believe it was going to happen.

Q: Why were cruise missiles so useful to you?

Glosson: Because they allowed you to do in the daytime what you could do with Stealth at night and so they kept the intensity of the war up during the daylight hours on the Downtown Baghdad, not to the same level that the 117s did because you just couldn't fly that many of 'em, but the important thing was the unknown.

The Iraqi leadership did not know when the next cruise missile attack would be coming and so there was no special period of time during daylight hours where they could feel totally free to move at leisure, do what ever they wanted to do and try to get control of things again and show some leadership of the country that they were still in charge and so forth. That's why they were important.

Q: If you could have got Saddam Hussein--remember the story how Jesse Johnson rang you up and said "Hey, Saddam's in a convoy"?

Glosson: Well Jesse Johnson's information to us concerning Saddam Hussein was quite like a lot of other sources we had on Saddam Hussein and that was everybody thought that they knew where he was or where he was going to be. In reality very few, if any, knew where he really was or where he was going to be.

We had a tremendous historical data base. The accuracy that we had of documenting where he was after the fact was phenomenal, but our ability to project where he was going to be or where he was in time to do anything significant concerning his ability to command and control that war and be the leader of that country during the war is incorrect to say that we had information that we could have acted on or that we didn't act on.

Now that doesn't mean that from time to time we did not know precisely where he was within certain parameters. For example, I might know at a particular time that he is in a civilian home and that home is somewhere on this block which is all civilian homes.

Q: Chuck Horner's told me that you pretty much knew where he was at the end of the war. What did you know, why didn't you hit him?

Glosson: I have often been asked why did we not know where Saddam Hussein was and then conversely why we did not attack where he was. The why we did not know where he was obviously is an Intelligence matter and Intelligence failed.

The times that we did know where he was, he was in locations that would have made it unacceptable to attack him even though he, in many cases, had enough communications with him that he could communicate with the outside world so to speak, his own forces and his own leadership in particular. But at the same time you can't go into the middle of a city block and decimate an entire city block because you know that Saddam Hussein has his cellular telephone and he's talking to somebody else in the leadership structure from a particular home.

That's not our way of life, destroying city blocks full of women and children, we don't do that and so to say that we knew where he was, yes we did on several occasions, but it was not in a situation where we would elect to do anything about it.

Q: Tell me about Winnebagos.. there was a great hunt for Winnebagos. Why was that?

Glosson: Well I think the Winnebago thing was blown out of proportion. We got that little tit bit, as you know, from the dealer that provided 'em and they were bought for five particular people in the hierarchy of the Baghdad leadership of which three of those five were in the chain of command in the military operations side.

So we obviously said that those Winnebagos, if we see one of 'em we're going to take em out because especially if it's outside of Baghdad 'cos the likelihood is, that they're involved in prosecuting some portion of the war. And we were successful in destroying two or three of 'em but that's kind of where it ended.

Q: What was the closest that Saddam Hussein ever came to encountering an airforce bomb?

Glosson: I can't be sure what the answer to that is and only Saddam Hussein can probably answer that for you. Some of the speculation is that in a convoy a couple of times and in a bunker once or twice that we were fairly close to having terminated the military leadership of Iraq.

But I can't be sure that's true. To my knowledge, I'm not sure anyone other than Saddam Hussein can answer that question.

Q: What was your directive on low flying, what did you want to happen?

Glosson: Of all the things that occurred in the air war probably the most controversial one single factor that I'm most frequently asked about is low flying versus medium altitude versus high flying. The correct answer to `which is correct?'is that they all are. And it depends on the situation and the circumstances.

When you're trying to get tactical surprise and you have a very significant Sam threat, early on in a conflict you may elect to want to fly at low altitude almost exclusively, which for.. to a large extent we did the first two or three days.

But then anyone that's mindful of military history knows that eighty five to eighty seven percent of all the aviation losses, since the Wright Brothers started flying, has occurred as a result of Triple A. Triple A shoots you down basically below ten thousand feet so why would you fly in the envelope where eighty five to eighty seven percent of all the losses have taken place unless you had to.

The first three days of the air campaign we planned to primarily fly low. There were some exceptions to that but, by and large, the bulk of the flying was going to be done low. The reason for that is because of the tactical surprise you gain and the benefit you get from the SAMs that are the high altitude SAMs, like SA2s, SA3s and 4s and 5s.

But the risk you take is if you do that too long and then you start flying into the strength of a country's capabilities, i.e. Iraq. Iraq's primary capabilities were Triple A and shoulder held SAMs.

Now when we took the command and control system out then all of their Triple A and SAM.. shoulder held SAM units, were operating in an autonomous mode. So why then would we continue to fly into the one area that they had any significant capability of providing a threat to us, that would have been just absolutely criminal.

So we had planned all along after three days, or two or three days, that we were going to fly medium to high altitude so we'd stay out of there. And that's exactly what we did. And all the things you read and all of the second guessing and all the speculation about we did it for some other reason is totally wrong. We planned it from the start that way and that's the way we executed it.

Q: With regard to the RAF and the low flying issue..., can you tell me what happened over that....

Glosson: The low flying issue the most sensitive part is associated with the RAF. Everyone should understand that we asked the RAF to use the particular munition that would close those airfields for four, five, six hours at a time. No-one else had the capability nor the munition to do that. They very willingly accepted that mission.

To continue to have done that mission after it was no longer necessary, when the Iraqis for all practical purposes weren't even flying, would have been criminal. That's why we stopped the mission. For no other reason.

The RAF would have continued that mission until General Horner said that he no longer had a need for it but after the Iraqis basically stopped flying and were not that much of a threat to us, it would have been foolish to continue that low altitude mission and attacking those airfields like that and that's why we made that decision.

We thought that would be the decision we'd made before the war ever started and it turned out to be exactly right that it was.

Q: If people back in London had put pressure on the RAF in theatre to carry on flying low, because that's what they trained to do, what would you have said to the people back in London?

Glosson: The issue of low flying and how much would we have tolerated if the individual coalition member countries had insisted that they fly either low, high or whatever, was an issue that actually came up two or three times.

Segments of the United States Airforce, the RAF, to just mention a couple, and the answer was always the same and it would have been the same no matter how much pressure they tried to exert and that is they were going to fly consistent with the way that General Horner and I had planned and flowed out, the strategic air campaign, or they weren't going to fly.

That's a really very simplistic answer but it's a true answer in that we actually faced that situation in a couple of instances and that was the alternative and we didn't leave any doubt in anybody's mind about that.

Q: Why did you care? Someone else's air force and they do what they want to.

Glosson: I've often been asked the question why General Horner and I really cared if it was a coalition aircraft and it wasn't a US forces aircraft. And that's a very basic, fundamental issue with both of us. It stems from one thing, human life.

We never ask ourselves when we put any aircraft against a target what nation's flying that airplane, but that was a member of the coalition, a living breathing human being and when he went down the pain was the same no matter where he came from or what nation or who he represented in the coalition.

To try to have different rules for different members of the coalition is just totally absurd to my way of thinking.

Q: When the RAF started to take all these losses in the early days, how did you feel, what were you thinking, what was your reaction, as the commander of these guys?

Glosson: One of the most painful times I had was when the RAF experienced their losses early on in closing those airfields because one always, in those type of situations, will step back and take a deep breath and say, "Is there some other way I can do this? Is this really essential for what we are doing?"

And the losses that they took hit very hard and, believe me, if there had been any other way that I could have thought of to deal with the problem of closing those four or five runways that were the most threat to our AWACS and our J Stars I would have done that.

We just could not come up with another way to do it that.. where we had the munitions or compatability of munition and airplane and capabilities all rolled into one.

Q: And later on when you were worried about the air threat again, when you started to bomb the shelters and so on, why didn't you use low level then.. to dump some stuff in the runways?

Glosson: I know that there are a lot of people that characterize so called potential for a Tet offensive I think that that thought process basically came about as a result of some air power zealots trying to have their own thought process turn into the way that the war was being run.

In other words, in essence that they disapproved of what we were doing at the time and felt that other things were of more significance.

The irony of it is when I briefed the Seventh Corps, before the war started, I told them that after about a week we would start blowing shelters apart because the Iraqi air force would stop flying and they'd start trying to hide their airplanes. So it was nothing, no mystique that they went to that mode, we felt they would.

The other thing that gets lost in the rewriting of history sometimes is it's very difficult for you to taxi out an airplane with a flight of four or a flight of six and lead takes off, two takes off, three watches lead blow up and then two all of a sudden is coming back to land, it is tough for three and four to go ahead and roll down the runway, or five and six.

Well that happened, time and time again in the first few days of the war and so it should be a surprise to anybody, or they should not have difficulty in answering the question, "Why did the Iraqis stop flying?"