Every Man a Tiger: The Gulf War Air Campaign (Commander's)

The book is basically three parts, the first section talks about the Generals career in the Air Force, the Air Force development from Viet Nam to the Gulf War and a touch of the politics involved within the different military branches. The second section of the book deals with the build up to the air war. The final section deals with the air war both the stand-alone part and as a joint effort with the ground war.

The author does not give you an action packed, inside the cockpit type of story. What we do get is the process for building up the forces, developing a plan, working with the other countries and military forces and finally the execution of the plan. I found the discussions of target selection and the relationship between the air and ground element to be the most interesting. Overall this is a well-written and constructed book. It has a lot of value if you are interested in the Gulf War or just how current U.S. battles are planned and fought. From watching the nightly news you can see that many of the same processes and tactics discussed in this book were used with the current U.S. military efforts in Afghanistan


The operational level of modern air warfare   March 6, 2001
Brasidas (Virginia, USA)
13 out of 15 found this review helpful

General Chuck Horner, with the writing help of Tom Clancy, crafted a wonderful book that tells the story of how to organize, equip, deploy and employ massive yet diverse airpower during the Gulf War in 1990-1991.

There are three parts and fifteen chapters in this book. The first third focuses on the past (1960-1989) for Chuck Horner and America's Air Force before Desert Shield. The focus is on the unique climate amongst pilots, especially fighter pilots (Horner's primary skill set) and the entire aviation community. The emphasis Horner places on teamwork is striking, and shows the importance of every airman who contributes to launching and aircraft and its payload down the runway and into the skies. This part of the book also describes the strategic vision of Air Force leaders in the 1970's as they sought to apply the lessons learned from the Vietnam War, and reemerge from the post war malaise as a coherent fighting organization.

Throughout the first part are snapshots of what Horner was trying to create in the chaos that followed the Presidential decision to reinforce Saudi Arabia to deter further Iraqi aggression and finally expel Iraq from Kuwait. Horner, who became Commander in Chief, Central Command (Forward) CINCCENTFWD noted that everywhere he initially went, the staffs' "efforts lacked order and focus...missing essential details such as basing logistics and sortie rates." Horner's essential task was to understand the intent of General Schwarzkopf and the National Command Authority, and to focus the effort of the CENTCOM team to deploy and employ forces in a logical way that would accomplish the national strategic goals. In short, Horner had to translate strategic guidance into operational constructs that would provide specific guidance for tactical commanders while simultaneously forcing them to address and crack the individual nuts.

The second part of the book focuses on the CENTCOMFWD role in building and fighting the "halt phase" of the Gulf War. Everything from the tyranny of time, to building a coalition with forces of dissimilar training and equipment is covered. Of greatest interest, though, is the building of the plan for executing the war against Iraqi forces. The original genesis of the plan as a result of CENTCOM's Internal Look exercise and Gen Horner's discussion of airpower with Gen Schwarzkopf are covered. How to integrate Marine Corps air assets is covered. The transfer of the CHECKMATE plan to CENTCOM was problematic due to the clash of personalities, but ultimately worked. The influence of Clausewitz is everywhere evident in the planning phase-how to measure the will of the enemy, the simple things are hard, etc. Finally, the translation of all this down to sortie rates and targeting processes is covered in great detail, suggesting that General Horner was one tired man by the end of Desert Storm.

The last part of the book details the actions during the attack phase, "Desert Storm." Every detail from bridge busting, and artillery and tank killing, to SCUD chasing and sustaining sortie rates is covered. The assessment piece of the targeting cycle is criticized, but air based assessment is never as accurate as ground based assessment (but ground assessment is much riskier-everything has its tradeoffs). The integration of tactical air control parties with flanking units is discussed in detail. Lastly psychological operations are discussed, and Gen Horner candidly admits that it is very difficult to measure the effectiveness of operations aimed at psychologically disabling the enemy.

General Horner's bottom line, perhaps, is that "the impact of airpower on the enemy was underestimated, and the ability of airpower to destroy a deployed enemy was overestimated." If you want to understand how a modern air campaign is embedded into an overall campaign plan, Every Man a Tiger is a must read.


A good book about a soldier by an arrogant jerk   December 26, 1999
historyone (Republic of Texas, USA)
12 out of 27 found this review helpful

This is a good book by an unfortunately arrogant jerk who has patted himself on the back to many times about being a so called "military expert". I have met Mr. Clancy when I was stationed in the Navy in Groton, CT. When I met Mr. Clancy he was to busy spouting off who he knew in the Government to someone in the line. Then he gave me a come hither look when he signed the book "Sum of All Fears" and just as arrogantly didn't say anything when I complimented him on his works. This is NOT the ONLY TIME he has done this to people but has done this many times to his fans. Yes he is a good author but unfortunately when you meet him you meet a pompous self righteous know it all who is not the voice of the US Navy, but just another lucky author who was graced with good timing and good publishers.


Excellent book   November 29, 1999
Aaron Hedrick (Lawrence, Kansas)
10 out of 11 found this review helpful

This is an excellent book. Both the first half, describing the life and career of General Horner, and the second half, detailing the planning and execution of the war in the gulf are engrossing and kept me reading. This book gives a good look at how a theater-level conflict is planned and the many parties that are involved.

I would highly reccomend this to anybody who has an interest in the U.S. Air Force or national security strategy.


Politika interesting, but full of errors   January 3, 2000
Gary W. Goldberg (Silver Spring, MD USA)
9 out of 42 found this review helpful

Here's a letter I sent to the author care of his publisher. I have received no reply:

Dear Mr. Clancy,

I have read several of your books with interest as someone who has followed the Soviet Union and the Russian Republic for more then 30 years. While I have enjoyed them for the escapism they offer, I would have hoped that errors that crept into Cardinal of the Kremlin would have been eliminated from such a recent work as Politika. If you have no one to check your facts with as pertains to Russia, you can try me, especially since I understand you're considering the former as a basis for a movie.

Here's what I am talking about (assuming the pagination in the Australian edition is the same as the US edition; I bought Politika at the Sydney airport):

Page Erratum Comment

18 Bashkir...Far Eastern I think you mean "Siberian"; the Bashkirs are not in the Far East. If "Bashkir" is not an ethnic Bashkir, why does he have this name? (There is a famous pianist with the name Bashkirov)

30 Romual Perhaps you mean the Polish first name Romual'd (the apostrophe indicating the Russian soft sign, that being how the name is spelled in Russian)

43 Bishir yetso Neither I nor another experienced Russian linguist have any idea what this means.

62 vor v. zakone The period is not necessary (it's not a middle name!); rather than "godfather", such a person is more like the Mafia "made man" or, simply, "professional (as opposed to petty) thief", who subscribes to a code. See "Soviet Prison Camp Speech", by Meyer Galler, based largely on Solzhenitsyn's early works, for an excellent reference on this subject

110 Republican convention ?the previous summer"; in 1998?

181 Gorbachev He wasn't president in 1992

235 MIDI MIDI is a digital protocol governing the transmission of musical data between sound modules/synthesizers and computers or other sound modules/ synthesizers

261 Zgranitsa etc. Za granitsa (SIC) is a prepositional expression; no native Russian speaker would use it as the subject of a sentence like an English speaker might.

337 Mercedes Wold a rabid Russian nationalist/ Communist be seen in one of these? Bad image.

343 Komerade ? You mean "tovarishch"? "Komerad" is what German soldiers traditionally say when about to surrender

364 IL-76 This is a cargo plane, not a passenger plane. Although it is used to carry paratroopers, they don't sit in "passenger seats" any more than US airborne units do.