Horner, 54, was little known to the public until last week, when many Americans met him during a televised briefing from Riyadh on the second day of war. As Horner provided voice-over to videotapes of pilot’s-eye views of air raids, viewers saw smart bombs drop with precise accuracy on Iraqi targets. “This is my counterpart’s headquarters,” the general wryly remarked, as a modern high-rise building in Baghdad took a hit.
Horner has been air commander for U.S. forces in the Middle East for nearly four years, and he is thoroughly familiar with the region. On his desk back at Shaw Air Force Base in Sumter, S.C., are stacks of books on the Middle East. Horner has cultivated contacts with Arab officers throughout the gulf, and he regularly brings in experts for political briefings. Aides say he often hops into a fighter plane and flies over Saudi terrain to get a better feel for the environment his pilots will encounter.
“He’s a warrior,” says a senior Air Force officer who’s worked with the general. An Iowa native, Horner joined the service after graduating from the University of Iowa in 1958. Since then he has racked up more than 4,500 flying hours in the Air Force’s modern fighters. He flew 111 combat missions over North Vietnam as an F-105 Wild Weasel pilot; and it was a successor to the F-105–the F-4G Wild Weasel–that flew in the very first sorties over Iraq last week, jamming and destroying enemy radar systems. In his 32 years of service Horner has won a sheaf of medals and decorations, including the Silver Star and the Distinguished Flying Cross.
“He’s a big, tough-looking kind of guy,” says one aide. “But he’s very understated and soft-spoken.” Nevertheless, aides say he can make junior officers cower just by walking into a room. And he can be demanding. After a rash of jet-fighter accidents in Saudi Arabia in August and September, the general hauled his wing commanders into a room and gave them hell. “Every plane you lose to an accident gives Saddam Hussein a victory without him firing a shot,” Horner thundered. The accident rate quickly dropped.
“He thinks of the military as a calling,” says a colleague. “But he’s very quiet about it.” Married to a church organist form Iowa, Horner is deeply religious and patriotic, but wears neither on his sleeve. Around Sumter he is best known as an easygoing general who mixes well with the local folks. “He can knock a golf ball a country mile, although he doesn’t always know where it’s going,” says Sumter Mayor Stephen Creech, who regularly golfs nd hunts quail with Horner.
In a service preoccupied with high-tech hardware, Horner hasn’t lost touch with people. In the second week of Operation Desert Shield, when the Air Force still worried about a possible Iraqi invasion of Saudi Arabia, a staff officer phoning the Air Force’s temporary command post in Riyadh from Langley Air Force Base in Virginia was surprised to have Horner pick up the phone–it was midnight, Saudi time. The officer needed routine approval for an editorial that would run in the base newspaper, under Horner’s signature. But the general–who was serving as the temporary on-scene commander of all the U.S. forces before General H. Norman Schwarzkopf arrived–didn’t like the copy. He spent the next hour dictating a new editorial over the phone, choosing his words carefully to reassure the nervous families waiting at Langley. “He wanted to make sure that the families back home knew he was taking care of his people,” says the staff officer.
Fellow officers insist that Horner doesn’t have the parochial streak that cost Air Force Chief of Staff Michael Dugan his job last September, when he boasted that the Air Force by itself could bring Saddam to his knees. “He realizes the Air Force is part of the solution, not the entire solution,” says a colleague. yet Horner would like nothing better than for his pilots’ achievements to cut back or even eliminate the need for ground warfare. With the end of the cold war, the Air Force faced huge budget cuts: its conventional war mission–blasting Soviet tanks from the sky and dueling MiGs in Europe–has all but disappeared. Now the service is eager to prove it can be first to win a war. If Horner’s pilots continue to perform well in the Middle East, their success may determine how the service performs in a more unpredictable war– the battle over the future size and shape of the Air Force.
