120                                   U.S. MARINES IN THE PERSIAN GULP, 19901991

down.   It was like a North Carolina front passing through there coupled with
smoke.  We were lucky.    Every time the ground guys got into a bad situation,
somebody could get to them.    When the counterattack took place in the 1st
Division's area, some F/A-18s and AV-8s got in to help them out, but, more
important, the Cobras got in.
   Mike Myatt [1st Division commander] got in front of some of his battalions
a little bit, just south of his reconnaissance teams, and they started coming back
through his party, and all of a sudden he looked up and here come Iraqi tanks.
He said the greatest sight he ever saw was a flight of four Cobras that came up
right up behind his command vehicles and started firing on the Iraqis.
   The same thing happened in the 2d Division area.    They ran into some very
stiff battalion-sized blocking positions about the end of the third day, and we
pounded them.    So whenever we needed it, the weather lifted just enough that
somebody got in to them.

Prnceedings: The Navy has commented that in its type of war it needed more
precision-guided ordnance and didn't have enough on board ship.  How did the
ordnance you had on your attack helicopters and on your fixed-wing turn out?
Did it work as advertised, or did you have any problems?

Moore: There are guys walking around saying, "We need precision-this and
precision-that," and that's okay, but sustainability won the battle for us.  Yes,
you need some precision stuff, but I almost ran out of bombs. On Thanksgiving
Day, I wrote a message with me as the action officer to everybody who was in
the bomb-family chain of command.     "Okay.   Here are the assets we have out
here.  Here is the threat we're going against.   We have looked at that threat
from every angle, and this is the ordnance that I need for 60 days."
   Well, we got a great bureaucratic runaround out of that message.           We
received a reply that said, "Well, wait a minute.  The Third Wing is a Pacific
wing, so he can have only Pacific allocation; he can't have the Atlantic
allocation."   We would go back to them and say, "We've got Atlantic and
Pacific squadrons.  This is war." Well, you know, ten days, 15 days would go
by.   Then I'd hear, "Well, we don't think he needs as many Mk-82 [500--
pound] bombs." It was really frustrating.
   At one point in the war, I got down to a day and a half of bombs left for
Mk-83 1,000-pounders and half-a-day of Mk-82s before a resupply ship got to
us.
   Now, as to the ordnance, about 25% of my sorties went out with the wrong
ordnance, meaning lower kill probabilities.   So instead of sending Mk-83s, I
might send Mk-82s and Rockeye cluster bombs.         We dropped an enormous
amount of Rockeye out in the desert, and it proved to be a good weapon.       But
we had to do some ballistics on it because we didn't have the high-altitude
delivery tables for those weapons.  We had to develop that for the F/A-18 and
the AV-S.
   But I've got to tell you, I ended the war with 14 days of ordnance left of a
44~ay war.      I got an awftil lot of help from Headquarters Marine Corps.