Horner: American people, in particular, like simple answers to complex problems and one of the answers might be why don't you just nuke 'em? Well the answer to that is you've got to study weapons effects and what can happen, it would take a lot of nuclear weapons to get one tank division and I don't think the American people are going to stand for two/three hundred nuclear weapons going off in the desert, plus the fact you get 'em more efficiently by using laser guided bombs, so nuclear weapons are only good against cities and they're only good against civilian populations.


Q: The Winnebago missions, we talked about those, did you ever find out that you got close to him?

Horner: There is a story that came through intelligence that Saddam Hussein was nearly killed one night when he was in his Winnobago truck in a part of a convoy and the A10s attacked the convoy - they got several other vehicles but they didn't get that vehicle. I guess those guys feel pretty badly about their close miss, but they did a good job.

Q: At the end of the war, did you know where Saddam Hussein was?

Horner: Towards the end of the war we had good intelligence as to where he was hiding. He was in a residential .. he was in a bunker under a residential area in Baghdad. We did not attack it because it was in a residential area.

Q: You could have attacked it?

Horner: We could have attacked that bunker, there's no way of knowing that we would get him and it was certainly that we were going to wreak a lot of havoc among the residential area of Baghdad.

Q: The good old B52 .. Remember when Schwarzkopf came to inspect your plans and he saw you hadn't put any B52s ......

Horner:That's not true. About two nights before the war started, General Schwarzkopf came down to the headquarters - we were all excited because we were very proud of what we'd done. He got in the first room and he noticed that there was like six or eight B52 sorties against the Republican Guards and he said, I thought there were more than that, and we said no, that's the way it's been all along, and he became quite excited about that - some people say he lost his temper, I won't, he threatened to fire me and I said that's his privilege, so what we did is we went upstairs and we got out the briefing that he'd received innumerable times and the numbers were there all along. Now obviously he'd misunderstood something I'd said or some briefing he'd gotten, but the facts were on the briefing charts and he acknowledged that, and the next day he called me up and apologized and wished us well.

Q: Khafji. How did you hear they were attacking, what did you do?

Horner: The most significant ground battle in the whole Gulf War was probably the attack on Khafji. We'd heard that they were planning something, we knew that one of their top armour commanders, III Corps commander, was involved in getting ready to do something and in fact we'd bombed a meeting, one of his staff meetings, we'd gotten word from the Kuwaiti resistance that he was having. We really didn't know what was going on exactly until the first elements came into the town of Khafji, which is over on the coast in the northern area, command area of the Saudi army. What we did then is of course we started putting more air over there but again it was just a few elements and it was night-time, we were in the dark, and there were other Iraqis out in the desert that we didn't know about because there was nothing out there for them to run into.

The first real good information we had came from two different sources, one was a Marine unmanned drone aircraft that went up and took pictures at night and we saw all these APCs, these armoured personnel carriers, that were parked on the burn between Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, that's the closest they'd ever gotten. Another thing that happened is we then put a B52 strike in, we called it the Kuwaiti national force, it was an area of south central Kuwait where some trees had been planted in an experimental way to try and hold the desert, make the desert green, and the 52 strike went in and then we put A10s and the A10s on their infrared maverick missiles brought back pictures of hundreds of vehicles and what was interesting is the A10s got so they'd go down, if they saw the Iraqi soldiers getting out of the vehicle and running away from it, they'd go to one that was moving, so they got the guys that weren't afraid and wanted to fight.

What we did then is the next two days we poured literally hundreds of sorties in on that area. Most of the battle of Khafji occurred in Kuwait, on the road from Kuwait City to the town of Khafji in Saudi Arabia, that's where we got most of the Iraqi armor, the Iraqi soldiers that were going to the battle - a few did get into Khafji and several tanks got in there, the Saudi Arabian army and the peninsula shield force, the Arab guys who were serving with the Saudis did a marvellous job and defeated that attack and freed the town.

Q: And what about JStars, George Malden was telling me they spotted a convoy of reinforcements coming down as well.

Horner: Critical to all of our operations, particularly the battle of Khafji and then later when the ground war started, was the Joint Stars aircraft, the radar aircraft. It was able to tell us where the Iraqis were moving at night and of course it was a tip-off on Khafji reinforcement and it was also a tip-off when the Iraqi army started to flee.

Q: So do you remember, you had a terminal, were you looking at this convoy setting off or you got a call from someone, how did it work?

Horner: The way the JStars works is you have on board someone who looks at the on board sensors, they're also being processed and sent to ground stations at army headquarters, Schwarzkopf would get 'em. The problem with when you send 'em to the ground stations is it takes too long because first of all the sergeant looks at it and he says, there's something there, so he goes and tells the captain, the captain looks at it and says, I might make major if I go show this to the colonel, he goes and shows it to the colonel and finally it gets up to General Schwarzkopf. One night General Schwarzkopf called me and said, Chuck, there's 30 vehicles on this road, go get 'em, I says you got it, so I called up the AWACs and we diverted a flight over on to that target and when they got there, there was nothing there. I got looking into it, the information Schwarzkopf got was 3 hours old, they were 3 hours out into the desert, so after that whenever he'd call me with a joint stars product I'd always say, yes sir, we'll look into it and if it's there we'll kill it and we'd look into it and in every case it wasn't there, so it's important that you have somebody on board the joint stars aircraft who's empowered to divert airplanes and he works with AWACs or other airplanes, command control airplanes, and that's how you maximise the use of joint stars.

Q: Why was Khafji a watershed?

Horner: The battle of Khafji was a watershed event in several areas. First of all it showed that the Iraqi army was not invincible, second of all it showed that air power could defeat the army before it got to the battle, and third of all it showed that the Saudi army was very very capable and faced with a fight they could get the job done and they did.

The battle of Khafji did validate the idea that air power could be used to defeat the enemy army before it closed with our own ground forces, that it could feed the battle indigestible chunks for our own friendly ground forces. If he had gotten all his divisions that he sent to Khafji into the town of Khafji, it had been a much more difficult problem for the Saudi army to solve, so in that regard Khafji validated what a lot of airmen had been saying for a long time.

Q: What's the most dramatic moment you remember about the Khafji engagement, you personally.

Horner: One of the most serious but yet humorous stories to come out of the war was during the battle of Khafji. Khalid Ibn Sultan, the head of the Islamic forces, Schwarzkopf's counterpart, had gone to the scene of the battle when it was unfolding and Khalid's a good friend and so Ahmed B........., the head of the Saudi air force, and I were sitting side by side in the tactical air control centre and we're watching things unfold and Khalid calls B......... and they talk a minute in Arabic and then B....... says, Chuck, it's Khalid, 01.11.32 and hands me the phone, so I said, Khalid, yeah, he says, Chuck, I need B52s -well one thing you know when a ground guy asks for B52s, he's in trouble, so I said, Khalid, we're sending air, he says, no, he says I need a lot of air, and I said, Khalid, trust me, we're sending air, he said, no, I really need air, I said Khalid, trust me, you're going to get more air than you ever imagined. He says, I am? I said, trust me. And then you know that little devil that lives in all of us, just before he hung up I said, now Khalid, while you're trusting me I want you to remember something, you're sitting in a bunker at Khafji, I'm sitting in a bunker in Riyadh, and I hung up!

Q: After Khafji you started to get almost immediately the air campaign altering in nature-- someone got angry with Cruise missiles.

Horner: There was a decision to quit using the Tomahawk after we'd used 'em pretty much in the month of January. The reason is, is because the Tomahawk is expensive, it's an expensive bomb - it also does not have the capability to penetrate hard targets so it has some limitations on what you can use it for. The importance of the Tomahawk was that it gave us a surge capability early in the war to service a lot of time critical targets in a hurry and so quite frankly we quit using 'em when it no longer made sense to use them.

Q: What does that mean, service a lot of time critical targets?

Horner: The importance of the Tomahawk was very early in the war when we had to hit a lot of targets that were time sensitive, you know, if they didn't get 'em they'd move or go away or they posed a very serious threat to our air campaign, so we were able to use the Tomahawk, although it's a very expensive weapon, we were able to use it to hit a lot of targets quickly. After we'd gotten over the hump, in other words gotten control of the air and hit the biological storage areas and hit the nuclear production plants and things like that, then we could scale down our operations into a more businesslike tempo and we didn't need the Tomahawk missile.

Q: Can you talk about the Al Rashid?

Horner: Again one of the humorous points of the war was the fact that we were using the Al Rashid hotel as the final update point for the Tomahawk Cruise missiles and so you saw it come into town and it hit the .. it'd fly over the Rashid hotel, then turn on its final run, because we knew precisely where the Rashid hotel was, so we used that for a final update.

Q: In early February, the army commanders started to get concerned, they said you weren't bombing artillery, that you weren't bombing tanks. How were you first made aware of this?

Horner: Oh dear,there was concern by the ground commanders that the air campaign was not striking the targets they wanted struck. I think those were legitimate concerns, any ground commander wants to get the job done with the least loss of his own troops, but you don't have a ground commander in charge of the air campaign because they don't have a theatre wide look like an airman does. We were all working for Schwarzkopf, we were all going to strike the targets Schwarzkopf wanted hit, so I generally was able to understand their complaints and generally dismiss them because I was hitting the targets Schwarzkopf wanted hit, because you see what the ...... wants to do is win the war. So after the war there were Army guys who said, gee, you should have done this or that or the other thing - well I think the results are in, the election was held and we won.

Q: But Schwarzkopf put Cal Waller in charge of making sure you hit the targets.

Horner: He did not put Cal Waller in charge of .. General Waller, Cal Waller, came over to be Schwarzkopf's deputy. When he arrived there he settled in and was the deputy C-in-C . General Waller's role as the deputy to General Schwarzkopf was to sit in the command center when General Schwarzkopf didn't want to sit there, to work those things that General Schwarzkopf did not want to work. As a result he had a lot of time, because General Schwarzkopf's a very energetic guy. When the criticism from the army was that their targets were not being struck, I went to Cal Waller and said, Cal, look-it, you are in the meeting every night when General Schwarzkopf picks the divisions that we hit with air, so you know how the process works. I'm attempting to bring the five different corps target lists up and make something out of it, why don't you do that, and he agreed to do that, he had the same amount of success I did at holding the concerns of the army corps commanders. The point everybody misses is this, General Schwarzkopf was the land component commander and air was going to go where General Schwarzkopf wanted it to go.

Q: But there are those who say the emphasis on getting front line things bombed meant that the Republic Guard didn't get as much attention...did that happen?

Horner: We put a lot of strikes in on the front line units because those were the immediate concern to the Army Corps commanders, so they appeared often in their requests, because when you're a ground guy you tend to be more concerned about things that are close to you than things that you're going to run into 3 days from now. Unfortunately the Republican Guards were not close to 'em, they were located in the back, to be used as the killing force after our army had used itself up on these throwaway divisions that Saddam Hussein put on the front lines. General Schwarzkopf was concerned about the Republican Guard so when he picked the targets he made a Republican Guard division queen for the day, if you will, so today it would be Medina day, tomorrow would be the ... day, and that's how we conducted our operations.

Q: But there's a lot of Republican Guard left at the end of the war.

Horner: There's a lot of Republican Guard left at the end of the war for several reasons, first of all it was closer to the bug-out routes, the main highway from Al Nasiriyah and Basra. Once they were able to get into Basra, we were not going to attack 'em.

Q: But before that, I mean I suppose what I'm wondering is if they'd been bombed so heavily how come there was so much at the end of the war?

Horner: Well, you can't get it all, there were 42 divisions up there, I mean can you imagine the size of that army? At the end of the war there wasn't much of the Iraqi army left, but there was a lot of Iraqi army left because there was a lot of Iraqi army to start with. If you look at the number of divisions they had, if they were full strength, that would have been half a million men, thousands and thousands of tanks, armoured personnel carriers, artillery, so after six weeks of war we had treated a lot of it and I think that showed up in the results of the ground campaign where about 150 troops were killed defeating 42 divisions - that's unprecedented in warfare. Um .. a lot of people say you didn't get all the Republican Guards and the answer to that is, yes, that's true, but now think about it, first of all the Republican Guards, one division was located in Baghdad, we were never going to strike it. Several divisions were located very close to the interstate highway so they could bug out of the area much easier than the army units who surrendered. Also why we killed a lot of tanks, there were just an awful lot of tanks to kill, so I would say we got a sizeable portion of that army, but that was a huge army.

Q: February the 5th, tank blinking, why was it necessary to come up with that technique, what had been happening earlier?

Horner: As the air war shifted from hitting fixed targets in the Baghdad area and getting control of the air, and that occurred in the first couple of weeks, then those assets were then released to treat the Iraqi army in Kuwait and southern Iraq. Among those assets were the laser guided bombers which had been so effective at taking out key command control modes, the F111s, the F15Es, the F117s. Also at this time we had an awful lot of 500-pound laser guiding kits. Prior to the war, when I'd watched these kits being in storage over there I said to myself, we will never use that many 500-pound laser guided kits - I was wrong, because they turned out to be a superb weapon for killing armoured vehicles in the desert. When an Iraqi would move his armoured vehicle during the day it would get hot, the motor running and the sun soaking up the armour. The tank cooled off slower than the desert around it, so at night they stood out on our infrared sensors like spotlights in the desert, and one bomb, one tank, one bomb, one tank. We called it tank blinking. We'd practised it prior to the war in an exercise we called Desert Camel. When I started reporting these results to Schwarzkopf, he looked at me, and being an old army armour officer, he said, Chuck, you can't call it tank blinking, I order you to not call it tank blinking, that's demeaning to the armour. I said, General Schwarzkopf, you don't know fighter pilots, if I order them to stop calling it tank blinking, it'll go down in history ... it's in history.

Q: Why was it necessary, presumably the strikes against tanks before that had run into problems?

Horner: No .. tank blinking was another way to try and bring efficiency to warfare. We were hitting 'em in the day with maverick missiles and F16s with bombs, but there's nothing that's better on a tank than a 500-pound laser guided bomb, and it gave us the capability to hit a lot of tanks at night and the precision munitions, like the infrared mavericks, like the A10 gun, were all very effective at killing armour, so it was just a case of bringing efficiency to warfare.

Q: The Al Firdos bunker-- can you tell me first of all, why was it bombed?

Horner: Prior to the war we laid out categories of targets - command and control was a vital function, we wanted to isolate the Iraqi army from their leadership, we wanted 'em paralysed, so it's important to hit command and control and that might be cutting a fibre optic cable in the desert, it might be bombing a television station, it might be bombing a communications satellite relay, say. What we did with regard to the command and control facilities, we racked and stacked 'em. The one that was most important was hit the first night. Some of the others that were sort of back-up facilities or capable of being command and control were further down the list, so late in January we came to the lower part of the list and one of those targets that we hadn't been able to get to before, because it wasn't high priority, was the bunker in the A area of Baghdad. We put it on the schedule, an F117 went out and dropped two bombs precisely where he was ordered to, the next morning we woke up and on CNN they were carrying hundreds of dead women and children out of that bunker. It was obviously being used as an air raid shelter, we didn't know that, we had no intelligence, certainly we would not have struck it, but on the other hand why did they need an air raid shelter, we were not striking .. they were safer in their homes than they were anywhere near a military target. It was just one of those tragedies of war. After the war people called it a colossal intelligence failure - I bristle at that. War is not .. you don't have 100% of knowledge in war. Now, the other important point was, war is about killing and innocent people are going to die, that's why war should be avoided if at all possible.

Q: What did you feel?

Horner: After the Al Firdos bunker, obviously I think all of us felt very very bad, I felt personally very bad about it. We wondered, you know, momentarily if in fact there was some sort of a propaganda ploy and these people were Kurds that Saddam Hussein had murdered and then put in there, things like that, but it was obvious that in fact it was being used as an air raid shelter. Obviously from a professional standpoint it was bad because it meant that there would be pressure then not to strike any targets in Baghdad. Fortunately we'd already gotten most of the important targets in Baghdad we knew about, so when the pressure inevitably did come to lay off of targets in Baghdad because of bombing that bunker, it was not of tremendous significance, we'd pretty well done most of the heavy work - we didn't get 'em all because we didn't know about all of 'em, but we got the ones pretty much that we knew about, that we wanted to get, nuclear manufacturing facilities, things of that nature.

Q: Did it matter that you were no longer able to hit Baghdad?

Horner: You've got to keep in mind the important goal we went to achieve in this war was to get the Iraqi army out of Kuwait. The war in Baghdad was important, but we were not there to change regimes in Iraq, so the .. the limitations to our strategic campaign in Baghdad that were imposed as a result of the Al F....... bunker incident, given the fact we'd already gotten all the high priority targets there anyway, it was not that critical. One of the lessons we learned from this war is we didn't do things as well as we should have .. I'll give you an example. One of the targets we wanted to use to discredit the regime was the hated secret police, so we went at it like Americans would go at it, we bombed secret police headquarters in Baghdad. The average guy in Iraq doesn't care about Baghdad and he didn't care about the secret police in Baghdad, he wants us to hit the secret police in his village - that's who we should have been bombing, that would have discredited the secret police in the eyes of the people, that would have weakened Saddam Hussein. We just didn't understand what we were doing in these areas.