116                                    U.S. MARINES IN THE PERSIAN GULF, 19901991

them to relay back to me so we could help.     They got very little intelligence
from the OV-10.     As you know, we brought VMFA(AW)-121 into theater, to
do nothing but forward air controller/tactical air coordinator airborne (FACAl-
TACA) missions.     No night attack, no other fancy stuff, just FACA/TACA.
[See "F/A-i8Ds Go to War," Proceedings, August 1991, page 40.] (reprinted
in this anthology.)
    During the ground campaign, late in the afternoon, an F/A-18D or two
would come into the fray with no other mission than to look at the battlefield.
They would go on in, run in the 2d Division area, run in the 1st Division area,
look at the Saudis' area, look at all of Kuwait, come back, tank, go back, and
report to us.  They had a direct line to the Tactical Air Command Center.  The
crews knew that Colonel Bill Forney, Colonel Charlie Carr, or I would be at the
desk, and they could tell us what was happening on the battlefield.  We would
then catapult them back in--on a couple of occasions with night-vision gog-
gles--to look at the battlefield. After that report--a quick kind of hot look in the
air to us--they passed many other hot looks through the system.      When they
landed, the crews were driven to the Marine Aircraft Group-li operations center
where they picked up the phone and talked directly to one of us with a detailed
report.
    We had brought some very smart Army          intelligence guys   from Fort
Huachuca [Arizona] who prepared the battlefield.     We knew if a particular
[Iraqi] tank unit started to move, that it had to come through a particular choke
point.  The area in Kuwait was very, very small for a pilot, and all our guys,
by this time, after 38 days of combat, knew that area cold. They had names for
everything, so they could pick up the phone and say: "We've got 25 tanks just
west-southwest, five clicks [kilometers] from the ice tray."
    I would take that information and,     every four hours, contact all the
commanders--Lieutenant General Boomer, the 1st and 2d Division commanders,
the logistics commanders--via satellite communications. I would say to them for
example that, on a pure time~istance factor, "There is nobody that can get to
you within a certain period of time." That was of enormous value to those
ground commanders.     That was the only thing that they were getting, and it
allowed them to     bring artillery through, to bring regiments through the
breaching areas, to span them Out, to rearm, resupply, all those things that they
needed to do in the battlefield.

Proceedings: What about remotely piloted vehicles [RPVS] such as Exdrone or
Pioneer?

Moore: We used RPVS.       Without the RF-4s and a lot of good information
coming from the top, we used everything we had.
    We used the Pioneer system extensively.  We had all the Pioneer companies
out there.   [EDITOR'S NOTE:       These systems are assigned to the Marine
divisions, not the aircraft wings.] Aviation had walked away from those guys
because we had the RF4Bs. We walked back because we found that we needed
the RPVS.    General Boomer and Major General Mike Myall and Major General