Making of Bill Creech - Project Gutenberg Consortia Center

TO DESERT STORM AND BEYONDHorner and his Airmen benefited from the years of realistictraining and logistics planning that preceded the Gulf War. In describingthe first few tense weeks of Operation Desert Shield, onewriter chronicled Horner’s reaction:Watching from Riyadh as one squadron after another touched downafter the exhausting overseas flight, Chuck Horner said a silent prayerof thanks to all the Checkered Flags and Blue Flags and operationalreadinessinspections that Bill Creech had force-fed the Tactical AirForces, getting them in the habit of deploying quickly as a way of life. TheAir Force had promised Schwarzkopf five squadrons in place by the endof the week, and while the rest of the deployment was already behindschedule, they had actually delivered more than double that projection. 70As they flowed into theater, the squadrons were the beneficiariesof the groundwork laid a decade earlier when Creech andseveral of his TAC deputies proposed that the Saudis overbuildtheir main air bases while building bare bases in the desertand prepositioning American munitions and materiel withinthe kingdom. As a result, Air Force forces were ready to fightalmost immediately upon arrival.Post–Desert Storm: Changes in the WindAfter Desert Storm, Army and Air Force relations took a decidedturn for the worse as Airmen began to reassert the decisivenessand independence of airpower, often at the expense ofthe cooperation and general harmony that had characterizedArmy–Air Force relationships since the end of the Vietnam War.Capturing the essence of much of the debate was an August1991 memorandum written by an officer on the secretary of theAir Force’s staff group who had been involved in the air planningfor the Gulf War. In it, he decried TAC’s propensity for seeingitself in an Army support role: “The danger in this relationship[in which TAC speaks directly to TRADOC—the Army’sservicewide doctrine organization] is the potential for the subordinationto the Army, and/or neglect of, capabilities and doctrineunique to the Air Force.” 71 He suggested that “herein liesthe crux of the problem—one which became painfully evidentin dealing with CENTAF in developing the Gulf Air Campaign—their view of how to employ airpower was ensconced in AirLand117