Interview with General Charles Horner, Commander of the U.S. Ninth Air Force

The problem with striking 'em is when you put a bomb in you get an explosion ..The problem with striking biological weapons storage areas is when you put the bomb into the storage area, you get an explosion and you get debris and you release these spores. Well, there were several scientific studies that said if we attack those sites, every living person on the Saudi Arabian peninsula would have been killed - we had a white paper from England and a white paper from the United States that said that, concerned scientists. I shared their concerns but I thought their studies were a little bit Draconian. So, I was sitting in my office and in walked an army major, a biological warfare guy - I don't know where he came from, God must have sent him, and he said to me, he says I understand you're worried about hitting biological weapon sites and I says, I sure am, and he says, well let me tell you something, you're exposed to anthrax every day of your life. I said, you are, and he said of course you are, he says the only way you die from anthrax is if you get too much - if you kiss a sick sheep, is what he said.

I thought, this guy's weird, but I listened to him - the next thing he talked about is he says there's a bunch of studies that says that these spores will be evenly distributed, he says they won't be, if you set off an explosion they're all going to blow down wind, so pick a time to do your attack when there's no wind. He said, the other thing is sunlight kills them and chlorinated water kills them 100%, so he says the idea they're going to get in the water system and kill everybody, he says, it's nonsense, and what you want to do is attack the site early in the morning so you get maximum sunlight on the site and kill as much of 'em as you possibly can.

I gave that briefing to the Secretary of Defence, he okayed the strikes because we were more concerned about them using them on us than using on them, but we were still very concerned about fall-out and I think the telling argument came is when we were discussing this and we said, there has to be a penalty to a country that would build and store these horrible weapons, so maybe if some people are killed, no matter how bad that is, it sends the right signal to anybody that would build biological weapons. We struck 'em and to the best of my knowledge there was nobody died from the fall-out from those attacks.

Q: When you turned up there, how worried were you that the Iraqis might come steaming over the border?

Horner: The problem we faced initially in the war was the unknown of what the Iraqi army was going to continue to do, were they going to come across the border or not. We couldn't really worry about what they thought they were going to do, we had to worry about what they were capable of doing, so our plans right from the very start was how do we stop an invasion, given the force we had that given night, and of course the force built as we went on, but I can tell you this, those first few nights were pretty strenuous, we didn't have very much to stop 'em.

Q: You were ready from the regard if they came?

Horner: The plan, the technical plan we had for the forces was to attack the supplies for the attacking army, slow 'em down that way, and meanwhile we kept a full tank of gas in all... of our cars and we were ready to go to Jeddah.

Q: When did you start to feel comfortable with what you had out there?

Horner: I think the turning point in Desert Shield with regard to the ability to stop an Iraqi invasion was when the 24th Infantry Division arrived with their heavy equipment, their tanks, and then we had a capability of fighting in place. Up to then we had light troops, the 2nd Airborne, the Saudis national guard, and quite frankly they'd have been speed bumps to the attacking Iraqi army.

Q: Were you confident you could have stopped the Iraqis if they'd come?

Horner: The way we would have handled an initial invasion of Saudi Arabia was we would have harassed 'em, we would have fought, but no decisive battles because our forces would have been chewed up, and eventually they're going to overrun their lines of supply and I thought initially if we could hold 'em ... about the border with .....or the border with the UAE in the west, there's some high terrain in the middle of Saudi Arabia that would have slowed 'em down, that would have been pretty good, and then we were pretty confident that we could hold 'em say in Dharhran area when we got the 24th I.D.

Q: I got the impression in terms of planning instant thunder...

Horner: When Schwarzkopf told me he was going to develop a strategic air campaign plan with the joint staff in Washington, in Jeddah, when he left me there and went back to the States, I was concerned because in Vietnam the targets were picked in Washington and it's one of those Vietnam lessons that's engrained in all of us, the fact you don't pick the targets outside the theatre, that's not the way to do it, and so I was concerned about that - fortunately he was also concerned about it and when the instant thunder plan was built by John Warden... they came over and briefed us, and we took it and made an air campaign out of it, there to start.

Q: And the other thing about this campaign was that in Vietnam, rolling thunder, escalation, lots of little rules, you can't do this unless they fire at you, all that was out the window?

Horner: I think to understand the successes... I think to understand the success of Desert Storm, you have to study Vietnam. That's where the lessons were learned - you don't learn from success, you learn from failure, and we had plenty of failure in Vietnam to study, things like gradualism, things like not fighting a war decisively, things like not fully understanding the political goals and limiting those goals within military operations to the things the military can achieve. The military can't achieve all things, there's only certain things it can achieve and you need to understand what they are.

Q: So clear goals, overwhelming force, clear objectives, just sum it up for me, what was different this time?

Horner: I think the things that we had were we had excellent political goals the President and the coalition leaders had laid down, get the Iraqi army out of Kuwait, cripple the nuclear, biological, chemical capabilities while you're at it - we were not given the goal of fixing Iraq, we couldn't fix it militarily, so in other words we had political goals that were achievable militarily. Other things were we didn't worry about the press per se, people said oh you managed the press, we didn't, we told 'em the truth and we held from 'em those things that we weren't sure of, because we didn't want to get in this .. you know, this escalating idea of what did you do for me today or how successful .. that's why we didn't play the number game. You never heard Schwarzkopf talk about body count, he was adamant, because I mean if you had success A today, then you have to have success B bigger the next day or people become disenchanted.

There were other things, the importance of the coalition - in Vietnam we walked in and sort of said to the Vietnamese, sure guys, stand over here, we're going to save your country. Well, the capital of that country's called Ho Chi Minh City today. This time we went in, we were the guests, there was a host country, primarily Saudi Arabia, although Bahrain, UAE, Qatar and those countries also hosted our forces. But we said, may I, please, thank you, and we worked together, and every member of the coalition was equal, didn't matter whether it was a country with just a few airplanes or a country with a whole air armada, everybody was equal and we sat around the table, we talked to each other as equals, we listened to one another, and the same thing was happening at the political level among the President of the United States and Mrs. Thatcher and then later Majors, and certainly it happened with regard to King Fahd, and all the players were equal.

Q: Was there ever a day you didn't think about Vietnam?

Horner: I don't think there was a day during this war that we didn't touch back and sort of touch those sore points from Vietnam. One of the first casualties in Vietnam was integrity, the people, our generals, it wasn't so much of not telling the truth but when they were faced with impossible situations they tried to make do. In this war we were not about to do that, so I remember one time one of my pilots shot down two airplanes in Iran .. shouldn't have been there, he was chasing them, honest mistake, 22.17.04 the first thing he did was call me and says, boss, we just shot down two in Iran, we knew we weren't supposed to be there, it was an honest mistake .. I said, don't worry about it, just don't do it again, he said got it. I called Schwarzkopf, he called Cheney - now I knew in the Pentagon there'd be somebody who'd say, we need to put a buffer zone up on the border, and so I said .. I sat down with a yellow pad of paper and I started marshalling my arguments about why I didn't want to do that, because it was stupid and but I knew I couldn't succeed, because I knew it would be coming from the Pentagon, some assistant Secretary of Defence... or urban affairs and housing, so what I did is, I sat down and wrote my letter of resignation, right in the height of the air battle, and fortunately the word never came because other people learned from Vietnam as well, to include Secretary Cheney and President Bush.

Q: They let you get on with the job.

Horner: They let the military make the decisions the military should make, they were fully informed on everything, it wasn't a case of the political leadership letting go, the political leadership was always in charge, but they delegated.

Q: When did you have your air campaign ready--the plan?

Horner: The plan to conduct the offensive air campaign came together about late August, early September. In the interim we had a D-Day plan, a defensive campaign, in case the Iraqi army came, and that was appropriate at that time. Then what we did, after we got the offensive air campaign jelled up...put together and got everything lined up, then we folded in the defensive campaign, but again now it was conducting operations against the Iraqi army over in Iraq, not in Saudi Arabia.

Q: On October the 6th actually .. Joe Purvis briefed you guys on the land plan, do you remember sitting there?

Horner: I sat in the room, obviously being the airman in the crowd nobody expected me to speak, but I remember that briefing and the thing that struck me is the plan seemed to go directly at the strength of the Iraqi army, hit 'em where they were in Kuwait, where they were dug in, where they had the fortifications, so I couldn't stand it any longer, I held up my hand, I said, boss, you don't want to hear from me because I'm an 22.19.28 airman, I'm not supposed to know anything about land operations, but I don't like that, and Schwarzkopf said, well you'll like this one better, and he had an alternative that started a flank up the..., it was a little bit of a left hook, but he was not pleased with the land campaign... initially and recommended when the briefing came back to the White House that it not be implemented, that he needed more forces and then he would develop a much better land campaign which .. that's what happened.

Q: But that initial briefing caused a lot of problems, were you aware of all the political flak flying back and forth?

Horner: I'm sure there was a lot of flak back in Washington, I was busy in Riyadh so I really let Washington take care of Washington's problems, I had enough to do at home.

Q: You were convinced by that time you had a really good plan and the Army didn't have to worry too much.

Horner: I think the thing that struck me in those initial briefings on the air campaign plan was really how well it all came together. Now you've got to understand, this particular theatre, this particular enemy, this particular situation, really emphasises the attributes that air brings to the battle. In another situation, say for example today in Yugoslavia, air does not have nearly the importance because of terrain, weather, the nature of the enemy, things of that nature - look at Haiti, I mean offensive air operations in Haiti are out of the question.

Q: Did it ever occur to you not to bomb Iraq? I remember listening to debates at the time saying, well they'll probably only bomb Kuwait because they won't want to bomb Iraq and escalate it, --did it ever occur to you not to?

Horner: Early in the thinking, strategic thinking with regard to this campaign, there were those who wanted to go back to the Vietnam way of doing things, they thought this was acceptable, they said we'll bomb him and that'll make him leave - if we hit Baghdad then we won't have to hit the army - or there was all sorts of theories about using air power. The point I think we came out of Vietnam with was if you're going to fight somebody, if you're going to go to this horrible thing of taking somebody else's life, you'd better do it as viciously as you possibly can and get it over with, that's the only humane thing you can do, that's the only moral thing you can do in this great immoral thing called war, so it never occurred to us to do anything but fight this war just as hard as we possibly could and get it over just as soon as we possibly could with the least amount of loss on both sides.

Q: Can you recall the moment and who told you and how it was told to you that the war was going to happen?

Horner: My wife used to call me over in Riyadh, write me letters and say we're not going to war, are we? Well, I knew in late October that the air campaign plan had been a hit, I knew that the President was facing a lot of problems with regard to Ramadan, the heat of another summer, more than anything else the suffering that the Kuwaiti people trapped in Kuwait were going through with the torture and the rape and the robbery and the murder, so I knew all those factors were present. When he got the U.N. vote through late November, I knew then we were going to go to war, and if you go back and look at the tapes, newsreel tapes of President Bush, he says exactly what he was going to do - it was just people didn't believe it. I told my wife in those letters, I'd say, listen to the President, he's telling you the truth, and it was.

Q: But when did General Schwarzkopf or whoever, when did they actually say to you, okay, it's happening?

Horner: The .. physical fact that we were going to war, I signed an order for the air war about 3 days before the war.

Q: Take me through how that happened, I mean how were you told that you could sign it?

Horner: In late December, Secretary Cheney and Colin Powell came over and we sort of gave them the final briefing, this is what we plan to do, we talked at length about things like bombing biological storage areas, things of this nature. That decision .. at that point then they went back and we knew then we were going to go to war. When the Congress approved it, that really kind of sealed it, that took care of the one remaining loose end that we had on the U.S. side. Each of the coalition nations had to decide whether they were going to take part in the operations and all but one came in right away, that one country waited and came in the next night, so politically we were in January .. early January, we were together on this. Then the question is when do you start the war and the guidance was Schwarzkopf picks the date, Schwarzkopf turned to me and he said, Chuck, the air's starting it, when do you want to do it, so what we did quite frankly is .. he said, it just has to be as soon after the 15th as possible, that was the only guidance, and we took a look and of course the leading edge attack was going to be those Stealth airplanes, so we used the moon phase, the least amount of moonlight would benefit the survivability of the Stealth aircraft and that's how we picked the time for starting the war.

Q: How did the date get picked for the beginning of the air war...?

Horner: The President had given General Schwarzkopf the responsibility for picking the date. General Schwarzkopf turned to me and said, Chuck, it's going to be an air operation, what time do you want to start, so .. and the only guidance was the President had told Schwarzkopf, start it as soon after January 15th as you possibly can. So the thing we looked at is what's starting the war and of course it's the F117s penetrating Iraq and so the criteria we used is when is the least amount of moonlight and that's the time we picked, the 17th in Saudi Arabia, the 16th back here in the United States, was the time we picked to start the war because it enhanced the survivability of the F117s.

Q: How did you come to set the date?

Horner: The way we set the date of starting the war, the President had told Schwarzkopf to pick the date, just make it as soon as possible after the 15th of January. Schwarzkopf turned to me and he said, Chuck, it's an air campaign, you pick the date, so what we did is we looked at the weather and the moon and we were concerned about the Stealth bombers so the moon was the least during ..

Q: How did you come to set the date?

Horner: The President had told Schwarzkopf, you pick the date, just make it as soon after the 15th of January as possible. Schwarzkopf turned to me and said, Chuck, it's an air campaign starting it off, you pick the time and the place, and I said, well, I was worried about the Stealth bombers flying over Baghdad and of course the darker the night the more survivable they are, so we picked the time based on when the least amount of moonlight was present and that's how we picked the 17th, the morning of the 17th, that was the lowest moon phase during the month of January.

Q: Just before we go on to what happened that first night, do you remember when Schwarzkopf gathered with all his army generals, mid-November, you were there, can you describe that to me? I'm told he was there with his blackboard covered with a black cloth ...

Horner: The first time we really all got together, land, sea and air, down to beyond just the component commanders, is we went down to Dharhran and we went to the NCO club down there and General Schwarzkopf had a big board set up and he brought in the VII Corps leaders, Fred Franks and his generals came down. We sat there, he got up and he gave a brief overview of what the air campaign was all about and what it was going to do, and then he talked about the land campaign, and I'll never forget these words, he turned to those guys and he said, if any of you have soldiers when they come here who are not ready to fight and take off and go, don't bring 'em to this war, this one's going to be lightning fast any minute.

Q: Can you recall for me what happened in that briefing?

Horner: General Schwarzkopf brought us all together in November, down in Dharhran, we went into an NCO club mess where the Saudis ate, and he got up and he gave an overall briefing about the air campaign and then he went into what he wanted from the ground commanders and they were principally the ones who were there, Fred Franks was there with all his guys from Germany and of course Gary Luck and the other .. the Marine Corps, and he said something I'll never forget, he talked about the need to attack with great speed and audacity, and he told those commanders, he says, if you have a ground commander, once you start this war the air is going to have them debilitated, if you have anybody there that doesn't want to charge straight ahead, full bore, he said don't bring 'em to this war, and I was really impressed with that.

Q: What did he say about the Republican Guard, do you remember that?

Horner: Of course, one of the main goals that Schwarzkopf always had and I think Powell as well was to get the Republican Guard - he considered them more of a political force almost than a military force. As a result, that was the importance of the left hook, that was the importance of Gary Luck's coming down the road from An Nasiriyah, that was the importance of Barry McCaffrey's tanks getting in amongst 'em and also Freddie Franks wheeling to the right and engaging the ....and the Republican Guards units to the south. I think they did a pretty good job, there are people that say no, but you're never going to get 'em all.

Q: The first night of the air war, what were you trying to achieve?

Horner: The very first night, really the first two or three days of the war ...

Q: What were you trying to do to Iraq that night?

Horner: The first night of the war we wanted to seize control of the air first and foremost, and we also wanted to introduce shock into their entire system - that's why we shut down the electrical grids, first of all it supported hitting the command and control structure, that's why we hit the communications buildings, the sector operation centers, the radars in the airfields, but also we wanted them to feel completely overwhelmed and I think we achieved that.

Q: How formidable was that air defence system?

Horner: The defences around Baghdad were probably the most heavy of any target in the world. Certainly the Kuwaiti theatre operations out there, they had more SAMs and more guns than probably have ever been seen in any combat. They were the most formidable that anybody's ever been up against. Those of you who got to watch the battle from Baghdad or on CNN know what was going up in the air, and remember, for every bullet you saw there were probably eight or ten that were going up that you didn't see.