Glosson: Why was the Iraqi advance not stopped prior to Khafji? A very straightforward simple question deserves a very straightforward simple answer.

It was not the Air Force's best day. Had it not in fact been for General Horner later on, Khafji would be remembered as a day that the Air Force would like to forget because the JStars clearly showed advancement of armor moving South but, for whatever reason, decisions were being made in the Ops Center that did not, or were not, consistent with the gravity of the situation from a time standpoint nor a momentum standpoint.

When I walked in the Ops Center, and I believe it was about midnight, I could see the movement of the armor on the J Stars screen and so I obviously asked what was going on and the way it was explained to me made me extremely uncomfortable and so I walked upstairs and told General Horner that I felt that the Iraqis were moving South and that we were operating in kind of a business as usual mode.

He came to the Ops Center and the significance and the results of Khafji, in my opinion, were totally changed as a result of him walking in the Ops Center and taking over because from the decisions he made and the actions he took basically put a stop to it.

Q: Once you guys got to work, what did air power achieve at Khafji?

Glosson: Once General Horner started directing things, basically destroyed the better part of a division's armor -- between thirty and forty tanks-- and made it impossible for them to reinforce and very quickly severed or cut off those four or five tanks that were out in the lead element and isolated them. And so you wound up with three or four tanks, five tanks into Khafji, and then everything behind it was either headed North or burning.

Q: Did you click immediately to the significance of this?

Glosson: When we took an assessment of Khafji the next day General Horner's assessment best summarizes it,I thought, when he said "We proved last night what we've known all along that without air superiority you can't do anything on the ground. Now what lessons should we take from this?"

In other words are there changes that we should make in the air campaign in preparation if and when we start a land campaign. And we came to the conclusion that there weren't and the reason that we came to that conclusion is because exposed armor moving in a desert is in its most vulnerable position to air, especially when you have total air superiority.

So what, in fact, Khafji proved is it proved what we were saying all along. If we could just get the Iraqis to move either North or South we'll decimate 'em and it's more painful to try to destroy them dug in , you know, by a factor of two or three and so in a sense Khafji only confirmed what we had anticipated and or otherwise had thought would happen when movement started with the armor anyway.

Q Now about this time the Army started to say "Hey, we're getting into early February" -- "We're not getting enough". Were you concentrating too much on bombing targets in Baghdad and not enough on bombing the things that kill Americans?

Glosson: The intensity of the strategic air campaign and when to switch that intensity to more a tactical mode or more toward the field army deployed was always a controversial issue. The Army had one view and the Air Force obviously probably with the Navy had another view.

We believed, and I still do, that the attacking of targets in Baghdad had as much or more to do with the success or failure of that field army than attacking it directly in the overall scheme of what our coalition was trying to accomplish.

It's not a matter of not destroying tanks or not destroying armor or not destroying their fire trenches or the fire pipeline connections that they had set up to create this wall of fire when the ground troops went across. It's a matter of doing it at the correct time so that everything is sequenced together.

If it had not been for General Schwarzkopf, the land commanders would have absolutely gone off the deep end in trying to get us to take out the T Junctions and so forth that fed that fire trench.

But I assured General Schwarzkopf that the 117s could take that out and there was no doubt in his mind they could take it out and we wanted to take it out close enough to when the land campaign started that he didn't have time to repair it.

And it's exactly what we did and, other than two or three trenches that were filled with old oil in front of the marines, there were no oil trenches filled up andmassively set on fire.

The same way with the artillery. Three nights before the land campaign started we put every 111 and every F15 sortie on destroying artillery because that's what the CINC wanted destroyed and so the bottom line in this issue is that General Horner and I tried very hard to do exactly what was consistent with General Schwarzkopf's scheme of war, a combination of air and ground.

We were not running an air campaign off in one section oblivious to the fact that a land campaign was going to take place in three or four days or three weeks down the road.

We were trying to tie it all together in the way that General Schwarzkopf wanted it tied together.

Q: Cal Waller had to come in to check you were doing it properly, that you weren't cheating.

Glosson: General Schwarzkopf gave General Waller the responsibility of having a meeting every afternoon and prioritizing the land commanders target list because, in any war, any commander's appetite is going to be greater than the capability in one particular day. It may take three days to get all of his targets struck but he wants 'em all struck right now.

And the only problem that I had with General Waller and the group that met and prioritised the list of targets is that their Intelligence of what the state of those particular targets, by the time they got on the target lists, happened to be was not cross-checked and two, their decisions were not consistent with the CINCs direction in many many cases.

And so it was a very easy decision for me when something was inconsistent with the CINCs direction, I didn't do it and if the Intelligence that I had showed that a target that they wanted destroyed had either been moved or already destroyed by artillery or something else, I didn't strike that either.

But I need to emphasise that this air campaign, in its totality, was Norman Schwarzkop's air campaign, it wasn't Cal Waller's, nor Buster Glosson nor Chuck Horner's and the campaign was part of .. Schwarzkopf's overall war plan.

We executed that the way he wanted it executed. If that happened to not be the way Cal Waller thought it should be executed, that's tough.

Q: Did the Army get their fair share? In a nutshell, had they any right to be frustrated?

Glosson: I have been asked numerous times did the ground commanders have a right to be frustrated, did they get the air support that they wanted. And I think probably the truthful answer to that is, "Yes they had a right to be frustrated and they didn't get the amount of air support that they thought they needed".

But they were only one small element of the overall war effort and when General Schwarzkopf said, "Don't drop any bombs West of the Wadi", if they were West of the Wadi, I don't care how much they wanted, they didn't get anything. And therein is where a lot of the tension and the friction occurred.

But I can tell you one thing for certain, if the United States Army thought that they did not have enough air power in the Gulf War then we are in a sad state of affairs because there were many times when we had eight, ten airplanes orbiting overhead with bombs on them waiting to drop that the United States Army could not find a target that needed to be destroyed.

And if they'd had them then the communication system failed so bad that we did not know that they were asking for that type of strike.

So my point is one of two things, either we have a massive failure in our communication structure, if they didn't get what they wanted, or they were asking for things that were counter to what the CINC had given permission for us to do or the way he wanted his scheme and manoeuvre to occur.

And it's just that simple because the number of airplanes we had in the coalition for this war was significantly more than we needed. There was never a shortage of airplanes at any time during the war.

Q: Tell me.. tank linking, how did that come about?

Glosson: Tank linking came about as a result of us not destroying tanks fast enough because, believe it or not, we had set out a time line of how many, you know, destroying tanks how fast it was that they were going to be destroyed and so forth and we thought that we would destroy tanks somewhere between the twenty and thirty a day after we focused solely on destroying tanks.

And we weren't coming anywhere close we were down in the are of six or eight. And so after about ten days of that I knew that we had to do something different.

So I talked to some of my planners and we were just kind of brainstorming the thing and we were talking about the fact that a particular individual two thousand pound bomb did not have the accuracy to hit a tank and then we discussed the guidance system on the two thousand pound bomb and the fact that a five hundred pound bomb has the exact same guidance system.

So from a pure physics standpoint, the accuracy of a five hundred pound bomb with the exact same fins and guidance system as a two thousand pound bomb is going to increase its accuracy just because of the weight. We didn't know how much it would increase it so we decided we'd give it a try. So I called Tom Lennon, the Wing Commander of the F111s, and I said, I want you to do this tank linking mission" and I didn't at the time call it tank linking, I called it destroying tanks and I said, "I want you to draw up LGBs on tanks."

And he was not totally convinced that that was the brightest thing that we'd every asked him to do but he went along. And so I told him to make sure that everybody understood the significance, I wanted him to lead the mission and do it himself.

So he did and after the mission he called me and said that that they'd just landed and they had seven out of eight direct hits and I think I pimped him by asking him what happened to the eighth one.

And that is the way it started and then it mushroomed and it went to the F15Es then to the A6s and we got up to about the level of destroying armor that I thought we could be at by using the other types of munitions which we just couldn't do with the tanks dug in.

Q: It was an important development.

Glosson: Very significant in the amount of armor that the ground forces faced and when, you know, we talk about the air.. campaign and what it accomplished or what it didn't accomplish and whether we shifted our emphasis too quick and all those different things, the bottom line is how long and how difficult was the force confronting the ground forces when they started the war.

I mean, if it had been any easier we should have sent a police force over there. I mean, it only took what three days. Remember three days. Three months earlier we were talking about a six month war, losing twenty thousand people, everybody forgets that.

Now, obviously, it was overstatement of what the Iraq capabilities were, that was a significant part of it, but the bombardment that that country absorbed from the coalition airforces was the predominant reason that that land war went so quick and we had so few casualties.

Q: One of the cruise missiles went off course and you got the message from General Powell via General Schwarzkopf... no more cruise missiles?

Glosson: The infamous cruise missile fly by of the Rashid Hotel, the one that was shown on CNN live as it went by the window, resulted in us being told ... no more cruise missiles.

And that was unfortunate from the standpoint that you talk about that intensity and that constant unnerving or being unsure of what's happening and not permit you to just operate at will, that significantly altered that because the cruise missile was the only thing that we were using to go into Downtown Baghdad during the daylight hours.

Q: What was the logic that was given to you for the decision?

Glosson: I'm not the right person to ask that. I think you need to ask Schwarzkopf that. I was told at the time that there was concern that the cruise missile might you know, strike a hotel or something, you what I mean, inadvertently.

Q: Al Firdos ....Just take me through the story of why it was targeted.

Glosson: Certainly one of the most troubling times of the war for me was the Al Firdos bunker and that was solely because of the civilian casualities associated with it.

Prior to the war, during the planning phase, the Intelligence community had laid out the shelter complex in Baghdad and the twenty plus shelters that were there.

We had also been able to ascertain that seven, eight of those had been upgraded in kind of a peculiar way and then, additionally, that three of those seven had been even more upgraded with communications gear and putting in the mode of almost a command and control, back-up command and control facility, which is what, quite candidly, we thought they were going to be used for.

We thought that once we would bomb the underground bunkers that were deeply buried that they would gravitate to these three bunkers to try to control things from them, we felt that was the whole process.

And then we got the word the day before the air campaign started that one of those three bunkers had been activated and so the first night of the war we destroyed one of those bunkers.

So that left two of the types of bunkers that concerned us from a military standpoint.

Our Intelligence on those bunkers was continuous and we monitored what was going on with all of the Intelligence means available.... both signals and imagery that was available to us, some of it from sources and some of it from the eKuwaiti resistance quite honestly that showed some of the leadership people going to this bunker at different times during the night and leaving. And some of the signals that we were picking up indicated that things were happening in that bunker, it was not just a place to go sleep.

And so that's why it became a military target and that's why we bombed it when we did when the activity got fairly significant.

In other words, if you were watching a bunker and maybe there's one or two things occurring on a given night and then all of a sudden the intensity starts getting higher and higher to the point that it looks like it's kind of a constant flow or an hourly flow, so to speak, then that inidicated to us that there was more control coming out of that bunker than had been previously and that's why we decided to er take it out.

Q: How much thought went into hitting this bunker, how much care had been taken?

Glosson: The irony of the situation with the Al Firdos bunker is that probably more thought and more consideration and scrutiny went in to bombing the bunker than almost any other one target we bombed.

And that's the frustrating part, is to have spent that amount of time and effort in focusing on making sure that it was being used for military purposes and then have the catastrophe that happened with the civilians being killed.

Q: You must still be puzzled, frustrated that the Intelligence just missed out the one vital factor.

Glosson: When you look at things in hindsight, as everybody knows, they always become a lot clearer.

In this case that hasn't happened yet and that's also part of the frustration associated with this. Because, given the same set of events, the same circumstances, and putting someone else into my position at that particular time, in the future that type of target would be destroyed again.

And that's what we should be concerned about the most is to make sure that that type of mistake is not made in the future.

Q: Chuck Horner recalls going to.. 'evening prayers' he called it, and seeing this on target and saying to you "Oh, we're getting pretty much to the end of the list now, we're running out of things to hit in Baghdad". Do you recall that conversation?

Glosson: I remember having a conversation with General Horner as we were going over to General Schwarzkopf's evening meet about the particular types of targets and so forth and there was a frustration that both of us felt because the Intelligence community was not being able to give us more concrete hard evidence ofchemical, biological , nuclear that sort of thing, because those were the things that.. that we wanted to definitely take out.

We had basically disrupted the communications, the command and control, to the point that we were reasonably satisfied with where we were there.

So, in that respect, I remember on one of the evenings we were driving over and we were looking at the targets we were striking and knowing that there were .. or at least believing that there were chemical and biological and other targets that were very significant that we didn't have the Intelligence to know where to strike.

I remember us discussing the fact that we did not think that we would have been striking targets that to us, in the overall scope of things, were as low in value as they were compared to when we first started the war. I remember having that discussion yes.