Desert Storm 20 Years Later: Lessons from Vietnam Guided Commanders as They Planned Gulf War Strategy

Two decades ago, the United States fought a new kind of war, but commanders used lessons from an old one as inspiration. Mistakes from the Vietnam War guided commanders as they planned Operation Desert Storm, which began 20 years ago in January.
Unlike several competing command authorities like there were in Vietnam, Army Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, commander-in-chief of U.S. forces during Desert Storm, assigned air operations to one commander. As the joint force air component commander, retired Gen. Charles A. Horner was the architect of the air campaign that launched the Persian Gulf War.
 “If you aren’t part of the air campaign under Horner, you don’t fly,” General Schwarzkopf said to one of his commanders, according to the Gulf War Airpower Survey.
“I think the lessons that really came out in Desert Storm were the ones we’d been honing and altering in operations from the previous wars,” General Horner said. “In World War I, World War II, Korea and Vietnam, we did things wrong that we learned from, so in Desert Storm, we did a lot of things right.
“We learned bitter, bitter lessons in Vietnam that really paid off in Desert Storm. Our shared experiences in Vietnam [were] one of the reasons Schwarzkopf was so willing to let airpower rule the weight of that war. He wanted to get the job done with the least cost in human life on both sides.”
The U.S. military had 148 battle deaths and 145 non-combat deaths during Desert Storm, according to the 1991 Defense Almanac. Fourteen of 20 Airmen killed during the war were battle-related. The air war was crucial to the ground war that sealed the Iraqi army’s fate on Feb. 23 and ended 100 hours later with a ceasefire on Feb. 28. Coalition aircraft flew more than 65,000 sorties and dropped 88,500 bombs. The aerial bombardment “placed Iraq in a position of a tethered goat,” General Horner said after the war.
“Our loss rate overall in the Gulf War was lower than normal training,” he said. “We lost fewer airplanes in the Gulf War than we would’ve lost flying that number of sorties. It was amazing. One of the problems we had was we made something very difficult look very easy, so people get misconceptions about what it takes to pull something like that off.”
A United Nations-authorized coalition force, led by the United States and United Kingdom, began the first phase of Desert Storm on Jan. 16, 1991 after Iraq failed to meet a UN Security Council’s deadline to leave Kuwait by Jan. 15. Desert Shield began five days after Iraq invaded Kuwait on Aug. 2, 1990 when President George H.W. Bush ordered air and ground forces to Saudi Arabia. It became the largest American deployment since Vietnam. More than 30 other nations joined the coalition, and 18 other countries contributed with financial and humanitarian aid. The coalition built up its force in the Arabian Peninsula during the next six months.
The day General Horner received the call that eventually launched Desert Shield on Aug. 7, 1990, he and his F-16 Falcon were engaged in an air-to-air training mission near the North Carolina coast with two F-15 Eagles from Langley Air Force Base, Va.
General Horner, then commander of 9th Air Force and U.S. Central Command Air Forces at Shaw Air Force Base, S.C., had expected to hear from General Schwarzkopf since Saddam Hussein moved 120,000 Iraqi troops into Kuwait and threatened Saudi Arabia several days earlier on Aug. 2. But once the call from the Federal Aviation Administration came for him to return to Shaw, he knew instantly what it meant. He was on the way to brief President Bush on possible military responses with General Schwarzkopf.
“We’d been following the invasion since it happened,” General Horner said. “In fact, I had the 363rd Tactical Fighter Wing at Shaw and the 1st Tactical Fighter Wing at Langley on alert for about a month to the point it was affecting their peacetime operations. My boss, Gen. Bob Russ, called me and said, ‘Chuck, you probably need to take them off alert. You’re affecting operations.’ I said I can’t. Suddenly, the invasion occurred, just like everybody was predicting.”
Even though the death toll was comparatively low in Desert Storm, it hit one of the largest Air Force Reserve organizations particularly hard months before hostilities began. On Aug. 28, nine Airmen in the 433rd Military Airlift Wing at Kelly Air Force Base in San Antonio died in a C-5 Galaxy crash at Ramstein Air Base, Germany. Wing members wore black bands over their unit shoulder patches when their 68th Military Airlift Squadron was recalled to active duty the next day.
Long before the Gulf crisis began, the American military trained for an eventual showdown with Iraq, especially after the fall of the Soviet Union. A month earlier, a U.S. Central Command war game had a scenario of a “Country Orange” attacking Kuwait and Saudi Arabia from the north. When General Schwarzkopf accepted command of U.S. CENTCOM in November 1989, he told his military leaders since a war with Russia wasn’t likely, “we have to find a new enemy or go out of business,” General Horner said.
“He said he was concerned about Iraq because they came out of the Iran-Iraq War with a huge military, dead-broke and owing a lot of money,” General Horner said. “So he told us to think about that. So I had been thinking about it and in March, I’d gone to brief him about things like using the MM-104 Patriot for ballistic missile defense.
“I knew if we’d ever gotten into a ground war against Iraq, our Army would never know what they’d come up against until they came up against it. So what I wanted to do was to make sure they’d get all the air support they needed when they needed it and where they needed it, but they didn’t tie down the Air Force in anticipation. Those sorties could be out killing the enemy instead of sitting on the ground waiting on the Army to call. Schwarzkopf bought the idea immediately because he was very intelligent and easy to work with.”
When Desert Storm began, General Horner and his staff planned only the first two-and-a-half days of the war. He sent then Maj. Gen. Buster Glosson, his key air war planner, to each base so he could consider the input of Airmen fighting the war.
“We listened to what the captains and sergeants have to say because they’re the ones who have to exercise the war, and they know very well what’s going on,” General Horner said. “I always reserved the right to override them, but nonetheless I wanted to hear what they had to say.”
The air war caught Iraq by surprise, especially Hussein who told Dan Rather in a CBS interview days before the war: “The United States depends on the Air Force. The Air Force has never decided a war.” Then came the opening night of the war Hussein had called “the mother of all battles” when Lt. Gen. Larry L. “Puba” Henry launched unmanned target drones on all Iraqi sand sites in Baghdad and Bazra.
“The next day, they reported shooting down 49 enemy aircraft, and that was exactly the number of target drones we sent up,” General Horner said. “I was amazed – either it was blind luck or they were extremely good at collecting data. The same time they were shooting at these target drones, we had these anti-radiation missiles raining down on both Bazra and Baghdad. As a result, they rarely turned on their guidance radars. The reason was they knew if they turned on that guidance radar, they were going to get a missile.
“On the second night, the Iraqi air force was very reluctant to fly, other than trying to escape. So we went after their minds, as well as their physical capabilities, and it really paid off.”
The coalition organized for both Desert Shield and Desert Storm gave U.S. military services an opportunity to work closely with forces from other nations, as they would do a decade later during Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom. An Air Combat Command exercise called Blue Flag in the early 1980s was intended to train servicemembers who would deploy to Europe or Korea to augment the air operations center. General Horner insisted that his 9th Air Force units work closely with Army, Marine Corps and Navy contingents, “who we would actually be going to war with,” he said.
In addition to learning from Vietnam battle strategy, General Horner also sought help from the history of the Middle East. He took advantage of learning from history, and it served him well during Desert Storm.
 “The thing I used to worry about the most was what was I not doing that I should be doing,” General Horner said. “What mistakes am I making that may cost somebody’s life? That bedeviled me every minute of every day, so I did a lot of thinking, and I listened to a lot of people. I got some great help from Air Force and aviation historian Dr. Dick Hallion, and he used to send me boxes of books about wars in the Middle East. I read those books, and believe me, they helped my feeling of the region and my sense of what to do. You never know where you’re going to get information that’s going to pay off.
“That’s why I think every general ought to be a historian.”