Horner: I think the first night of Desert Storm could be considered a watershed in military affairs or warfare because it featured things like the employment of Stealth technology. It was the first time the air campaign was the dominant plan, all the other campaigns were supporting to that plan, and it also featured modern tactics, way of doing business, three-dimensional thinking in the warfare that we hadn't always seen in the past.

Q: What did the first Stealth bomber do with those first bombs?

Horner: The first bombs that fell on Baghdad from an airplane ...

Q: What was the purpose of that mission?

Horner: The first missions to form Desert Storm were fired by an Apache helicopter, army helicopter, against two radar sites on the border of Saudi Arabia. The F117s had already passed overhead, the Tomahawk missiles were already in-bound to their targets in Baghdad, but we wanted to feed in F111s and F15s which are not stealthy, so what we did is we found two radars very close, we used special operations helicopters to guide these Apaches in, they took out those two radars and blew a hole in the Iraqi air surveillance. That increased the survivability odds for those F15s and F111s that went in to hit Scud sites and air operation centres.

Q: And then you had another Stealth drop a bomb on something to do with the air defences, what was that about?

Horner: The primary targets the Stealths hit were the heavily defended targets that supported the command and control for the air defence, the telephone exchange in Baghdad was one of the first targets, a supporting tower, a microwave tower was one of the first targets, also they hit the hardened anti-air defence shelters where they had put one bomb in, dig out the over-burden, and then put a penetrating bomb into the sector operations centres.

Q: And this business with the drones, how did that work?

Horner: One of the things we wanted to do was put fear in the hearts of the SAM operators, so we knew we weren't going to surprise 'em strategically, tactically we may, but we felt that they were going to really be surprised by the Stealth, they probably figured they could shoot it down, so we ran the Stealths and the Tomahawks in, then that woke everybody up, now bombs are going off around the city, so immediately you knew every SAM operator was going to report to work, if he wasn't on his radar already. Then the next thing we did, we gave 'em something they could see, they were unmanned drones, and you know what, they shot down every one of 'em, they reported shooting down .. I think it was 47 and that's how many launched for Baghdad, but also behind those drones, in the air, were these anti-radiation missiles, so the SAM operator, feeling very confident, turns on his radar, lines up that drone, shoots at it and sucks up an anti-radiation missile. We must have been successful because for the rest of the war they shot a lot of SAMs but very seldom did they have the radar guidance to go with them to make 'em work.

Q: When the planes were taking off that night, you were in your headquarters, what were you thinking?

Horner: I think the worst moment of the war for me was the initial moments of the war, because we sat there, we were filled with uncertainty. Our press had been telling us that our generals couldn't general, that our technology didn't work, and our young people were no good. Now we didn't believe it but we worried about it, because it was sort of imbued in our whole national psyche - Vietnam was a ghost we carried with us - so we have the worry that it's going to be bad, plus I think even more overwhelming was the idea that we were about to embark on an operation where our friends were going to be killed and also we were going to take life, and I don't know of a single soldier or airman or Marine or sailor from any country that doesn't really look back on that and say how can I answer to God for what I've done, and the answer is you can't, you can only ask for forgiveness, and that's the real downer of being part of war, knowing that you're in this situation and you're doing to do these horrible things and you wish it was otherwise and you wish you were some place else.

Q: What were your war games, your computers, telling you that the casualties were going to be that night?

Horner: In preparation for the air campaign, we flew the air tasking order, the whole sorties, out against the Iraqi defences and the results tended to be unbelievable, some of them were very pessimistic and some were very optimistic, it depended on the assumptions going in - the old saying, garbage in, garbage out. For example, one of the computers came out and said the whole war would be over in a week or four days, well, that didn't pass the form of logic that, you know, that it wasn't going to happen. As far as attrition, we've always been suspicious of attrition models because they're always conducted in pure examples, the SAM operator's never afraid, the radar always works, the airplane is always going straight and level, so those attrition models were not very good - some of the estimates we got were hundreds of airplanes, I remember seeing one stage said we'd lose a hundred and something airplanes the first night, I remember Tony Peak, the head of the air force when he briefed President Bush at Camp David in late December or early January, said that he felt we'd lost 175 airplanes. Buster turned to me before the war started, just minutes before the war started, and he said, boss, how many airplanes we going to lose - I took a piece of paper and I wrote 37 on it. I think our actual loss was 41 or 42. Now, I could say I made a really accurate prediction, I thought we were going to lose 37 Air Force airplanes, we didn't lose nearly that many, we lost a total, in all of those causes, all the airplanes, forty something.

Q: What happened when the telephone building was hit?

Horner: When the war started, when the Tomahawk missiles were going into Baghdad, we got word that it was on CNN television, that Bernie Shaw had a microphone out the window of the Al Rashid Hotel, so we knew that he was sending those pictures out via the telephone communications system, satellite. And the telephone building was one of the most important targets and the F117 bomber, Stealth bomber, was supposed to hit it right at 3 minutes after the hour, so I sent one of my officers upstairs to my office where I had a television set, said turn it on and get on the hot line and tell me what happens, and just as the second hand passed through the 12 o'clock position, when that bomb was supposed to hit that building, the fellow upstairs called on the hot line and said Bernie Shaw just went off the air, CNN, the screen went blank, and we knew that we were successful and a whole cheer went up in the tactical air control centre, people started beating each other on the backs and feeling good, so we went from this funeral like environment to suddenly this carnival like environment, and I had to get everybody calmed down because we were in for a long hard flight.

Q: What do you remember about the rest of that night, what were the significant moments for you. When did you realise how low the losses were?

Horner: I think the first we realised that we were in for a much better fight than we initially thought with regard to losing our own aircraft was as the day broke on the first day, the first night, we got through that first night and I think we lost one airplane, an F18 was shot down, probably by a surface to air missile or ground fire, and while I felt very badly about that, you can imagine the relief we also felt in that that was our only loss, and I think that told us that we were going to have a much better time of it than even our wildest imagination.

Q: Do you remember what you said to Buster Glosson or what he said to you at the moment, as you realised, hey, this has gone well?

Horner: I think everybody after that first .. as the morning came, everybody had a sense of relief that it was going to go much better than our worst fears. Now, we shouldn't get confused, we lost a lot of people, I mean and those were not easy days that followed, and we'd go two/three days and not have a loss and we'd start feeling good and then the tragedy .. I'd come in in the morningand we'd lost an A10 or an OV10 or the RAF had lost a Tornado and those were very sobering moments, you realised that war is not fun, it's not a game, it's not anything but something that's horrible.

Q: When people look back at that first night, when the historians look back at the first night, what should they make of it?

Horner: When we seized control of the air, that set the battle, and we seized control of the air that first night - every time the Iraqi interceptor planes, their best defences, took off, it was take off, gear up, blow up, because we had two F15s sitting on every airfield, overhead every airfield, and so we never gave them a chance. In Vietnam, we gave the Vietnamese air force free rein, we didn't attack their airfields, we felt that that would escalate the war. We weren't interested in escalating this war, we were interested in getting this war over with, so it was escalated from the very first moment, as high as we could get it.

Q: And then they started firing the Scuds, how did you first hear that the Scud was being fired?

Horner: We knew we were going to have Scud attacks, in fact as far back as April of '90 when we were preparing for the war game with Schwarzkopf, I talked about Scuds, and we put the Patriot missiles against the critical airports and seaports in order to protect against the Scuds, so we expected to have Scuds shot at us, we also felt that they would shoot them at Israel to try and break up the coalition, to try and bring the Israelis into the war. So when the first Scud came, it wasn't unexpected, we got warning from the satellite that looked down and saw the Scud shooting, and the voice came over the air, we had a woman who sat right down the room from me and she always yelled, Scud alert, I'll always hear those words, all of us will. Immediately everybody started jumping into their chemical warfare gear, I looked over and there was a coalition member whose country had not given him any gear so I just sat there, didn't put mine on, and I thought to myself, if you die from poison gas, you're the dumbest general that ever lived. The Scuds were a problem, we never were able to shut 'em down, we did .. were able to suppress 'em.

Q: You were flying sorties from that first night but Dick Cheney two/three days in, he pounded the table and said, hey, only 30 sorties going out, I want something done. Colin Powell gets on the line to Schwarzkopf, what did Schwarzkopf say to you?

Horner: The Scuds had been first and foremost in our discussions prior to the war, that's why we put two 2000 pound bombs on to every fixed Scud site in the opening moments of the war, but I had promised the Secretary of Defence in our briefings that I would do my utmost to suppress them but I could not guarantee the mobile Scuds wouldn't be able to shoot. I think they shot more than I thought they would, but the point I missed about the whole operation is the terror the Scud induced in the people in Israel, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, it was almost overwhelming, and that's why all the pressure to shut the Scuds down. Militarily they really didn't matter, there was only Scud that really caused big problems, that's the last one fired that killed all the army guys over in Dharhran. My problem then was how do I shut 'em down, they'd wait till the weather was bad, they would hide 'em, they'd bring 'em out, shoot and scoot. We did not have the satellites we needed in order to locate the targets and we didn't have any ballistic missile defences other than the kind that shoot 'em down overhead, so we were in pretty poor shape that way. What we did is we just put more and more sorties - now there was a lot of pressure, I got a lot of phone calls, but we were doing the best we could, we had one half of our F15Es, our most capable night systems with the linear pods on the F15 operating against the western Scuds, and we had almost one half of our F16 linear equipped airplanes, our most capable, the F16 night attackers operating against the eastern, it took an inordinate amount of our effort to try and suppress the Scuds.

Q: But I mean, what sort of phone calls were you getting?

Horner: Well, always .. we knew Scuds were going to be a priority target but as more and more were launched and our efforts to suppress 'em were not as good as they could be, we just had to put more and more effort into it. I'd get phone calls to say what else can you do and I'd say, okay, we'll do this, and I'd just allocate more airplanes.

Q: Who were the phone calls from?

Horner: Generally from Schwarzkopf.

Q: What was he saying?

Horner: The initial impact of the Scud was so immense that General Schwarzkopf was very concerned about it and he would call me and I'd say, well, we're doing this, this and this, and he'd say can you do anything else and so I'd say, sure, I can take airplanes off these targets and put 'em on suppressing Scuds, so that eventually we got to the point where we kept airplanes overhead the Scud launch areas 24 hours a day for all practical purposes. Of course the only time they launched was at night and when there was bad weather, but we just had to do those kinds of things in order to suppress the Scuds - we got 'em down to where they weren't shooting very much.

Q: What else was tried?

Horner: We tried to use the JStars to find the Scuds, that's the radar airplanes like AWACs, only it looks at targets on the ground, it can see movers, and it's a very high resolution radar so it can tell the difference between a tank and a truck. The problem is, the area is huge out there and we were taking a very valuable asset and getting very little return out of it, when we wanted to use it to locate the Iraqi army, so our initial attempts to use the JStars radar airplane to locate the mobile Scuds met with no success because quite frankly they weren't moving, but it was just a waste of that asset. The best thing that we did to suppress the Scuds was when we started putting Sir Peter de la Billiere's Special Air Service guys on the ground and they would go into Iraq and occasionally they'd see a Scud coming on the highway, they'd follow it and then call on the radio to the F15s overhead - unfortunately the weather was always bad so they were bombing on radar and things like that and I don't know whether we ever got a Scud or not.

Q: They were a big problem in the end, if you look at the successful weapons.

Horner: If you want to learn lessons from warfare, look to failures, and our in ability to stop the Iraqis from launching ballistic missiles certainly could be considered a failure. That is a lesson that's not going to be lost on other people and that's why it's so important that we develop the satellites we need to locate accurately launch sites, that's why we need to develop ballistic missile defences, not to shoot 'em down over your own room but to shoot 'em down over the enemy territory, because next time they're not going to have high explosive warheads, they're going to have chemicals and biological warheads.


Q: What would you have done if they started to fire Scuds with chemical weapons?

Horner: There's a lot of speculation about what our reaction would have been if the Iraqis had used chemical weapons on their Scuds. Now from the very start, I said they would not do that. The reason they wouldn't do it had nothing to do with Saddam Hussein being a good guy, it's the technical problem - how do you fuse a Scud warhead to dispense the chemical, it's got to go off precisely. We have never been able to solve that problem and I didn't think if we couldn't that the Iraqis could, and so I didn't feel that they'd ever use chemical weapons and if they did all you'd have is a crater with a bunch of goo in the bottom of it, if you'd eaten a piece of it you'd have died.

Q: Did you ever think of dropping a few tactical nuclear weapons over in that desert there?

Horner: People have asked me did I ever think about using nuclear weapons .. .. you could use nuclear weapons but for what targets? The nuclear weapon's only good against cities, it's not any good against troops in the desert, I mean it takes too many of 'em, so the problem you have is, you have a war where if you kill a lot of people, particularly women and children, you lose the war no matter what happens on the battlefield, and you want to use a nuclear weapon, nuclear weapons are useless to except to deter a rational enemy. The Cold War, the nuclear weapons worked, deterring the United States and Russia from attacking each other. In terms of real war they're not going to deter anybody except .. they're not going to be useful to anybody except a madman.

Q: But you could have put them out there in the desert, there was no-one out there and it would have solved the Scud problem.

Horner: No it wouldn't have solved a thing on the Scud problem.

Q: Why's that?

Horner: Well, it would [have] blown a big hole in the desert so the guy driving the Scud had to go, say oops, there's a nuclear crater there and turn .. nukes are .. nukes are useless, I mean you can get rid of all of 'em, zero nukes.

One of the major lessons of Desert Storm is the fact that it's about the new world, it's not about the Cold War world, it's about how useless nuclear weapons are except to people who have no conscience, and one of the principal targets that we had was the nuclear weapons capability of Iraq, the counter proliferation effort that's going to characterise military operations in the future. What is the real critical crisis in the world today? North Korea building nuclear weapons, concern about India and Pakistan having nuclear weapons, concern about Israel having nuclear weapons - this is the new warfare, the counter proliferation war against nuclear weapons and weapons of mass destruction.

Q: How did you come to decide to start to hit the biological warfare targets ?

Horner: One of the thorniest problems we had in targeting, and discussed in great detail, was the biological warfare, storage areas - we knew they were storing anthrax and botulism. We didn't know how they intended to dispense it - again if they'd put it in a Scud it probably wouldn't have been very good because the Scud comes in so fast you can't fuse it so you can't get it to disperse, it'd just go in the bottom of the crater. You could put it in artillery shells but it's not really good against troops in the field because they just get sick, they don't die, and I mean it takes 'em two weeks to get sick sometimes. So it's really a terrorist weapon and it's best dispensed by a fog or a thing like you use to kill mosquitos. So we knew he had 'em, we didn't know how he was going to use 'em, but we wanted to strike them because we didn't want him to have the option of using 'em.

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: Did it give you nightmares, was it something you worried about when the first couple happened?

Horner: I never really had any emotional problems with the war other than this knowledge that we were involved in this business of killing people, how you kill somebody, really it doesn't matter. I remember during Vietnam people didn't like napalm - well, that's a pretty horrible way to die but any way you die is pretty horrible normally, so I'm pretty anti-war and I don't have any particular dreaders on what's a cleaner way to kill somebody.

Q: But you weren't having a nightmare that by dropping a bomb on one of these BW sites you were going to wipe out the Gulf?

Horner: No, because I knew that wasn't going to happen.

Q: Hunting Saddam, what was the philosophy here, you wanted to get him, didn't you?

Horner: I don't think any of us would have lost any sleep if Saddam Hussein had been killed in this war. As a matter of policy we were not trying to assassinate him but we dropped bombs on every place that he should have been at work. Now that's .. you know, we're getting kind of fancy with words but in reality that's the truth of the matter. Would have killing Saddam Hussein solved the problems in Iraq, I think the answer to that is flat out no, it's like the Mafia, they've got a head gangster, they kill him, another 23-30-48 gangsters going to take over. You'd have to just pull the entire Ba'th party out of power, you'd have to get rid of all the Republican Guards, all the secret police, and it's just not fixable, the society out there has been corrupted, so whether we killed Saddam Hussein or not really to me was not a big issue.


Q: Tell me the story about the Winnebago stuff, how did all that happen? Tom Lennon was telling me he dropped some bombs on them.

Horner: Now, wherever Saddam Hussein was the central command and control target, so you see we weren't targeting Saddam Hussein, we were targeting the central command and control - again it's getting fancy with words but nonetheless it's important. Now we also knew that he had a series of these self-contained motor homes, we call 'em Winnebagos and they used 'em as mobile command posts, they had communications and he could sleep and eat and drive round and they were air-conditioned, the whole thing. One night we got word that Intel had just located one of these Winnebagos parked next to one of these hardened bunkers and so we diverted the F111s fromTom Lennon's guys, on to those targets, and they struck it. I don't know who the general was that borrowed one of Saddam Hussein's Winnebagos but I'm sure he regretted it!