Waller: Well for days we were scratching our head and worrying about what it was we were going to do to solve this problem of finding these Scuds in this place the size of Maine and I said to General Schwarzkopf, I said, do you know, we're wasting a lot of manpower, a lot of energy, a lot of time, a lot of resources looking for these things when the actual danger of one of these Scuds is about as much danger of being killed by a Scud as it is by being hit by lightning in a Georgia storm. Now Norman Schwarzkopf took that statement and went on national TV and used this analogy in a Press conference and needless to say it did not go over very well when the people of Israel heard this and when many other people around the country heard it, because they thought it was a bit insensitive on his part, and the telephone rang and he got a call from the chairman saying we'd better lighten up on using analogies about Georgia lightning and comparing that to what's happening with the people of Israel, so Norman Schwarzkopf was quite concerned and never used those kind of analogies again.

Q: And he launched a few more missions ... what did he do after that?

Waller: Well we continued to dedicate aircraft to looking for Scuds, we brought in some highly skilled forces to try to find those Scuds and to prevent them from going into their favourite places to launch those Scuds into Israel.

Q: What were the Army guys saying to you as the air campaign went on?

Waller: As the air campaign went on past the two or three week mark and it was obvious to everyone that the Air Force had suppressed the enemy air, that there were no planes being launched against it, that it had pretty much free rein to fly anywhere they wanted to over the battlefield and so forth, the ground forces and especially the ground forces commanders were very concerned that we should start shaping the battlefield and shaping the battlefield in military language means you want to destroy those targets that are in front of the ground forces, that can have a direct influence or impact on what your mission is, so the ground forces commanders were very concerned that the targets out to their immediate front were not being hit with the frequency that they felt that would soften up or destroy these targets so it would make their job easier to breach the enemy lines and to reach their objectives, so I started receiving a lot of phone calls from commanders saying when are we going to do more to shape the battlefield and so then I had to go to General Schwarzkopf and tell him that we weren't doing enough to shape the battlefield and that caused a large problem with the Air Force in accomplishing what we needed to accomplish in shaping the battlefield.

Q: So how did you solve this?

Waller: Well, in order to solve this problem I had to have several different meetings with different people. I met with the commanders of the ground forces and they told me in no uncertain terms that they were not happy with the results of what was happening and so forth, so then I had to meet with the Air Force, we had a single air component commander who all air forces reported to him, which was General Horner, so I met with General Horner and his people to discuss what was taking place and how the ground commanders felt.

Q: Chuck Horner says he met with you and that he was hitting these targets. It was just that Army intelligence was too slow, didn't understand, and anyway he was going to get round to them in the end, it was all a fuss over nothing.

Waller: Well, General Horner thought that maybe it was a fuss over nothing, that he would get around to these targets when he .. when he had time to, but what General Horner evidently didn't appreciate was that when you have to launch your division or your battalion or your brigade across those lines and you see day in and day out that there are thousands of other targets being hit and the ones that are right out in front of you are still there and not being hit, then you keep asking yourself, why do they continue to hit all of those targets in Baghdad when I have hundreds of targets right out in front of me that should be hit but nobody's hitting 'em.

Q: That's because you Army guys don't understand that air power's changed and it's strategic and that they could win the war by hitting these targets.

Waller: Well, there are many commanders who felt that it was absolutely of the utmost importance if they were going to have a ground attack that that battlefield should be shaped and it should be shaped forthwith, rather than to continue to hit strategic targets. Now those people who are into strategic targets may believe and feel that it is more important to hit strategic targets than it is to shape the battlefield but I can guarantee you that when you're on the ground and you're faced with fighting for your life and for your men's lives, that you're going to be far more concerned with what's out in front of you than you are with what's happening in downtown Baghdad.

Q: Buster Glosson was good at giving the hard sell to Norman Schwarzkopf, can you describe what Buster Glosson used to do? . Waller: You know, when you try to set the stage about what was really going on with the Air Force, now this is Cal Waller's opinion, I really believe that Buster Glosson really believed in his own mind that if he could just have a few more days and hit a few more targets, that there wouldn't be a need for a ground war. Now hardly anybody else believed that but I think in Buster's own mind he believed it, so he wanted to use every asset, every resource, to pound those strategic targets that would ultimately bring Saddam Hussein and his leaders or forces to their knees and they would cry ...... and give up, so when I took it upon myself with the blessing of General Schwarzkopf to become the head of the targeting group so to speak and set the priorities for what targets would be hit, it was incumbent upon me to make sure that we were doing an adequate job of hitting those targets in front of the ground forces where the commanders felt that they were most vulnerable.

So every evening at the evening brief, the 7 o'clock follies it was called, when it was time for General Glosson to get up and brief General Schwarzkopf on what targets were going to be hit the next day, Buster Glosson would use an approach that I could draw an analogy to as sort of a snake oil salesman - he would put up his little chart and point so quickly that if you weren't really attuned to what was going on, you might miss what targets were supposed to be hit, and then he would tell General Schwarzkopf in sort of hushed tones so that only General Schwarzkopf and maybe the three or four people who were right there at the table leaning forward straining could hear him say why it was so important to hit these targets that he had hit, and in many cases they were strategic targets and didn't have much to do with shaping the battlefield, so ..

Q: How would he describe them?

Waller: Well, he would say that this is the Didiwad Didibelin, this is where all of the leaders of the political party of Saddam Hussein will be holding their meetings and if we can just destroy this building, you know, it's going to bring everything in Baghdad to a standstill, or he would show some bridge and say that everything that must go anywhere comes over this bridge and this is the single most important bridge in the world, he'd say we've got to hit this one and knock it out and, you know, General Schwarzkopf would say okay and he would show some other building, how important it was, because this is where all of the things are being made that will cause the little .. Republican Guards to materialise and so forth and so on, it was unbelievable as to how he would give this briefing to General Schwarzkopf, and then he would go out and those resources that had been targeted for shaping the battlefield or to solve some of the commanders problems, I think if the weather looked bad, if it looked like there was going to be a cloud over that area, anything that he could do to refrag. or to change that target, he would divert the aircraft from doing it. So after several days of this, I said to General Glosson, Buster, if you change one more target without my approval I'm going to choke your tongue out, so that was pretty graphic but I wanted to make sure he understood the message and that was let's shape the battlefield prior to sending another 10 aircraft to hit the Basra party headquarters which was already in rubble.

Q: Buster Glosson says --if he could carried on hitting the strategic targets, Saddam would have waved the white flag...

Waller: Anyone who says that if they had been allowed just a few more days of strategic bombing that there wouldn't have been a need for a ground attack, I think is absolutely smoking something or is on some form of drugs that is not having he or she deal in reality. We had 41 days of bombing, so how many more days do you need to bring 'em to their knees? We were being severely criticised in the Press here at home and around the world for the Highway of Death, I mean let's get real, how much more rubble could we cause, how much more hitting of strategic targets in Baghdad would have caused Saddam Hussein to move his forces out of the desert? I have never seen a strategic air campaign yet that moved one enemy soldier off of a piece of terrain. Ultimately if you want to gain Kuwait back and if you want to do what the United Nations charged us to do, you've got to go on the ground and take it back. Saddam Hussein was not going to vacate the trenches in the area where he was without someone going in on the ground kicking him out. We had over a month, a month and a third if you want to be more precise, to try to win that war with strategic air and I don't think strategic air would have caused Saddam Hussein to withdraw from Kuwait.

Q: Once you started your job and started to get them to hit these targets, you discovered they were diverting to other things. What were they doing and what did you do about it?

Waller: Well, one of the things that I found after trying to prioritise where the aircraft would go, especially to shape the battlefield, I found that they would put the strike aircraft up that were supposed to go to shape the battlefield and then for the most ridiculous excuse they would divert those aircraft to go hit some strategic target and when I asked the question, why didn't they hit X or Y or Z or B or X-ray target, I was told, well the weather was bad, there was a cloud or .. you know, something, some minor excuse for diverting the aircraft to another target, so I distinctly remember telling Buster Glosson one day, Buster, if you divert another flight of aircraft without my approval, I'm going to choke your tongue out, and I think he got the message after that because he found out that I was serious, and we had less diversion of aircraft and we had more servicing of the targets that the ground commanders cared so much about.

Q: In your early conversations, I've seen in Rick Atkinson's book, you realised that hitting artillery, tanks was a difficult job, it needed to be done from the beginning and you gave some analogy involving a wild cat and spaghetti.....

Waller: Well, it is an enormous task to go out using high performance aircraft, trying to hit floating targets, much like the Scuds, much like trying to find a tank that's moving around or an artillery piece that's moving around, or mobile divisions or mobile units and so forth who can pick up and move from the time you launch an aircraft to the time it gets over the target, it may have moved, it may not be there any more, so it is hard to find, and as I .. as I said to the guys out there using the analogy of the wild cat, it's like poking spaghetti up a wild cat's behind, you don't get much accomplished but you get a heck of a lot of scratch marks on your arm, so while you don't accomplish too much in finding these fleeing targets, the ones that can move, and you don't have the satisfaction of being able to watch all of these Smart bombs go down an air shaft and rubble a building or something, nevertheless if and when you do find them and you can destroy 'em, it makes that infantryman or that Marine or that Egyptian or that other coalition force so much happier that they don't have to deal with those forces hand to hand or machine gun to machine gun or rifle to rifle.

Q: Was there any consideration of relieving General Glosson at that point?

Waller: No, nobody would have .. Nobody was ever even interested in relieving him because he really had the .. Schwarzkopf's, number and he was telling Schwarzkopf what he wanted to hear and he'd come in and weave a story about how important what he was doing was and so forth and Schwarzkopf believed him.

Q: How important was the invention of 'tank blinking?'

Waller: Well, we had enormous problems with trying to shape that battlefield and after telling and showing and pleading and cajoling and threatening Buster and his other band of merry men to make sure that we were giving the ground commanders what they needed and wanted, some smart young air force people came up with the idea, hey, why don't we use our thermal sights in some of the aircraft we have to view through those thermal sights which will cause a warmed up tank, by the sun being on it in the daytime and so forth, it will still be enormously hot at night, so at night under darkness we can go out, use our thermal sights to find these things that will be like a big night-light shining out in the desert and then we can destroy 'em, so the term was called tank blinking or finding tanks that had been camouflaged, many of them had been covered with sand so that they would blend in with the desert, but still that tank or other metal object, whether it was an artillery piece or tank or whatever, would still give off this enormous heat signature and through the thermal sight you could see it and then you could kill it.

Q: What did you feel--'Hey, we're finally getting somewhere now?' ..

Waller: Well, after the invention of what I call good common senses to determine where these vehicles were and we started to have success with them, I was elated because I said now finally we are providing the ground commanders with something that they sorely need to reduce the number of tanks that they're going to be faced with or reduce the number of artillery pieces that will be bringing fire upon them as they cross the desert or try to breach those areas, so everyone was happy, not only me but the ground commanders were elated and we were just thrilled that something was now being done about this problem we had.

Q: You must have wondered why it wasn't done a lot earlier.

Waller: Absolutely, I was wondering why didn't we think about this weeks ago, why didn't we think about it when it first happened, why did it take us this long.

Q: What's the answer?

Waller: ... to come up with this idea. The answer I think is that we were too concerned about the strategic targets, to really concentrate on shaping the battlefield for those ground commanders.

Q: The Brits began to lose a lot of planes .. they were coming with low flying, it was all they could do really. How much concern was there about that?

Waller: Enormous amount of concern about the loss of the British aircraft, it was an unusual high number when we started this that all of a sudden we were losing the British aircraft at this alarming high rate, so we asked the question, are we doing something wrong and of course the leadership of the British forces, Peter de Billiere decided, you know, that it was time to take a reassessment of what was taking place, so after reassessing their tactics and how they were going about accomplishing their mission, they decided to make some modification in these tactics and all of a sudden we stopped losing the enormous number of British aircraft and it was returned .. mind you, I'm not saying that the loss of any life is acceptable but certainly it was unacceptable at the high rate that we were losing 'em, but then once we changed the tactics it was much more acceptable to what was expected, and I'm not saying that ... I'm not making light of what happened.

Q: When General Schwarzkopf was hearing that the Brits had lost yet another plane, what was he saying, what were you all thinking?

Waller: Well, the conversation went something like this because we had a British liaison officer in our war room with us and that officer sat at the table just like all the rest of us, and we would all turn to that officer and say, you know, what is happening, what can you tell us about the situation that will shed some light on why this is going on, can you prepare us, assist us in figuring out what is happening so that we can get some help to solve the problem that we are faced with at the present time.

Q: Why was it a matter of concern?

Waller: The leadership in that war room was concerned about the loss of any lives, regardless of their nationality, we were concerned about why are the coalition forces taking these kinds of losses when other aircraft don't seem to have the same problem, is there something peculiar about this aircraft, are we doing something that's different, so we looked at every .. every situation where we were losing lives and we wanted to assess if we were doing the right thing or if a change in modus operandi might solve that problem, and that's what we did in the case of the British aircraft.