112                                   U.S. MARINES IN THE PERSIAN GULF, 1990-1991


    General [H. Norman] Schwarzkopf, as a ground officer, wanted to prepare
the battlefield; this was very important in the evolution. He was not willing to
let any of us go off and shoot down airplanes, or conduct deep strikes at the cost
of preparing that battlefield in front of the Army, Marines, and Coalition forces.
When it came down to that, General Schwarzkopf really directed all of us to
start concentrating on different areas, and we responded.
    The ATO process is very cumbersome.    That document was upwards of 300
pages.  What I did to make it work for us--and I think the Navy did the same
thing--was write an ATO that would give me enough flexibility to do the job.
So I might write an enormous amount of sorties, and every seven minutes I'd
have airplanes up doing various things--and I might cancel an awful lot of those.
This way I didn't have to play around with the process while I was waiting to
hit a target.  I kind of gamed the ATO process.      The ATO we used, for
example, two days prior to G-Day, would be good today.        I would tailor it at
the Tactical Air Command Center by saying, "I'm not sending that aircraft.
Cancel that one.  Cancel that one. " This eliminated any requirement to add on
a bunch of sorties.
    I tried to make the ATO process work--because it will not respond to the
type of campaign we had in Southwest Asia.    It is a coordination process and
we needed that.   That we had no blue-on-blue air engagements and no midair
collisions attest to the coordination aspect of the process.

Proceedings: How big a liaison team did you have in Riyadh?

Moore: We had a very heavy one, including Colonel Joe Robben, an air
command and control officer.   Of course we had Major General Jed Pearson
there all the time, really as Marine Central Command liaison; and then Major
General Norm Ehlert came in after him.     We had a very heavy target cell of
four or five people as we worked through the original concept of Desert Storm.
We worked all these issues, and the Air Force, in turn, gave us an officer to
work just the ATO process; he was very valuable to us.       Major Robert Sands
did a super job for us.  He is an A-i0 pilot and his father was a Marine.   He
stayed with us the whole six months.  He knew the process and how to do what
we needed to do to influence the process, and it worked.
    Joint operations like Desert Storm badly needed our Marine air command and
control.  We told them that they would need us, that they couldn't do everyth-
ing, that machines like the AWACS and Aegis cruisers would get saturated, that
we all needed to play, and that proved to be true.  I think they understood it.
Our system is the only way that they can really get data link and pure
information from the ships into the Air Force system and vice versa.       That
proved very beneficial.

Proceedings: The Navy was not able to receive the ATO electronically.    Maybe
it was a little easier for Marines ashore, but could you receive the ATO
electronically? How did you get the ATO to the various air groups?