School of War - Ep 262: Mark Jones Jr. on Special Air Operations and American Military Dominance

Episode Date: January 2, 2026

Mark Jones Jr., chief pilot of experimental flight test with the Honda Aircraft Company and recently retired U.S. Air Force test pilot and special operations commander, joins the show to talk about the nature of special air operations and the extraordinary air raid that kicked off Desert Storm. ▪️ Times 02:45 9/11  05:58 Test Pilot  11:52 Special Air Operations 17:54 Two Vastly Different Experiences  21:24 Kabul 24:18 Desert Storm 32:30 Harder to See, Not Invisible    34:46 Battle Damage 39:55 September 1990 42:21 Party In 10 45:05 Navigation Technology Follow along on Instagram, X @schoolofwarpod, and YouTube @SchoolofWarPodcast Find more content on our School of War Substack

A few minutes before 3 a.m. on 17 January, 1991, the first shots were fired in Operation Desert Storm, baptizing by fire two related new eras of warfare. The dominance of precision strike technology was the first, and the second, of course, was the military dominance of the United States itself. We're still in the precision strike era, even as the period of total American military dominance seems to be coming to a close. As is our way here on School of War, we're going to look back at those first shots, a harrowing special air operation to open a corridor to Baghdad for follow-on strike packages to see what we can learn that's relevant for today. As usual, it's a lot. Thanks for joining this community we're building here at School of War.

Happy New Year. Let's get into it. In him, the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a state. We continue to face the great situation in the ground. We'll fight on the beaches. There's a fight on the landing ground. We'll fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never have no rest. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean.

Thanks for joining School of War. I am delighted to welcome to the show today, Mark Jones Jr. Mark is the chief pilot of experimental flight tests for the Honda Aircraft Company, and he recently wrapped up a 31-year career, counting both active and reserve service, for the United States Air Force. Mark, thank you so much for joining School of War. Thank you, Aaron.

I am humbled and honored. Long-time fanboy, so thank you for having me on the show. Now, it's a pleasure to have you. I'm really looking forward to our conversation day. We're going to spend the bulk of our time talking about the Gulf War and this special air operation that launched the war. It's really cool. And I guess it's like the first use of Apache's in common.

right this is the story of task force Normandy we'll get to that but it would be I think kind of a crime for me to just skip over your own career and experience so you you graduated from the Air Force Academy in 1999 correct? Yes sir. And then I mean it was it was kind of an incredible run for the next three decades one of your last big jobs was you were commander of the second special operations squadron and a lot happened in between those things how did not I I mean, you graduate two years before 9-11. Tell me about 9-11 for you and how it affected what came next. Certainly.

So as a graduate of the Air Force Academy, there are a few graduates who get the opportunity to go directly to graduate school. And so I spent a couple months studying mathematics at the University of Hawaii, which is a hardship tour, is extremely difficult to study math and be near the beach at the St. 5. So that delayed my entry into pilot training, but I got to Moody Air Force Base in 2000. 2001, and that was going to be the first base where the T6 was used for pilot training. At the time, the Air Force was transitioning from the T-37 aircraft as a trainer to the T-6. I was stationed at the base when 9-11 happened. I had just gotten my pilot's license just a few days prior to 9-11 because at the time,

the Air Force was using the private's pilot certificate and just conventional flying in a Cessna 172 were a Cessna 152 as a screening program while they were transitioning the screening program that they had been using in the Slings v.T3 that was now rounded. So there I was at Moody Air Force Space when the Twin Towers came down. Our pilot training class was started a few weeks late as a result of it, but I mean, I started my flying career in the shadow of the fall of the Twin Towers. It completely changed my outlook on what would happen. But for the next two decades, I was full throttle, both figuratively and literally, supporting the global war on terror. Why did you want to fly in the first place?

My dad was a whizzo in the backseat of an F4 for as long as I can remember. I grew up watching my dad fly the F4 and then later the KC-1-35 when his unit transitioned. and I just, I grew up flying small airplanes too because he was a private pilot as well. I loved airplanes from the very beginning and wanted to join the Air Force for as long as I can remember. So you spend these years after 9-11, you're a C-17 pilot or become a C-17 pilot. You're flying all around the world in support of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But at some point, you become a test pilot. Tell me about that.

Tell me, how does one become a test pilot in the United States? It sounds so, I can't express how. cool it sounds. And my, my embarrassing confession, Mark, is when I was a young man, you know, my dad had been an infantry officer, so I kind of ended up like you following in the family footsteps in the end. But for years there, I wanted to be a pilot. And attentive fans have noticed that some pictures of myself that I've posted here and there from my childhood years will show me wearing Air Force T-shirt, which is an embarrassing, embarrassing fact on the ground. But it's true. I did want to be a pilot. And then it became obvious to me the older I got that to be a pilot,

let alone a test pilot, you actually had to be pretty good at math. And that was just never really my strongest suit. This is a completely true story, by the way. So, you know, like so many guys who aren't that great at math, into the infantry, I went. But how do you become a test pilot in the Air Force? I mean, so I'll back up back to my childhood again. I loved math and reading in science as a child. And at some point during my childhood, again, I don't remember exactly when my dad explained to me

that I could be an experimental test pilot, that I could go to the air. Air Force Test Pilot School, and it required a degree in either one of two cure science, physics or mathematics, or one of several engineering disciplines. So as long as I've wanted to be a pilot, surely thereafter I've wanted to be an experimental test pilot. I studied a lot of math in high school. I majored in math in college. I've got a graduate degree in math, which I don't know if that was the brightest thing

to do, but it is what I did. And I had my sights set on being a test pilot from the very beginning. I got to Charleston Air Force Base in 2003, the war in Iraq had just kicked off. So I spent four years flying in support of both Iraq and Afghanistan. But during that time, I was sure to tell each of each commander that I had what my career goals were. While I was there at Charleston, I actually enrolled in what's known as Special Operations Low Level 2, which is Air Mobility Command support to J-Soc. and in 2006, I kind of reached a fork in the road.

I had the choice to either continue down the path of upgrading from co-pilot in Special Operations Low Level 2, up to jump pilot and then to aircraft commander, or applying to Air Force Test Pilot School. And at the time, I chose to apply to Air Force Test Pilot School and got in on my first time, I think I found out just before Christmas 2006 and then was PCS to Edwards Air Force. force space in 2007 to attend Air Force Test Pilot School. The program is a year long. You spend a year flying the same airplanes that every pilot who's going through Air Force Test Pilot School flies, studying the same kinds of thing, which is a lot of engineering, a lot of technical report writing, a lot of presentations and program management, and everything that anyone knows about the Defense

Act of Michigan University. We drank a lot of that Kool-Aid as well. And in 2008, in June of 2008, I graduated with my TPS graduate patch and started my career as a test pilot. And so I'm just going to kind of ask some dumb questions here because I don't really, I struggle to picture it. Like, what are you, in addition to the acquisition systems and how to, you know, inform the engineers and the people paying the money with what they need to know, what is the actual flying like, both in the training pipeline? And then as a test pilot itself, like, what exactly are you testing, I guess?

is a good way to put it. Because I'll tell you, my only real reference here is the movie The Right Stuff. And that looks awesome, also kind of insane. What's it like in real life? So in real life, some of it is absolutely mundane because kind of using the scientific method, we predict exactly what's going to happen and then it happens precisely that way. And some of it's a little bit more exciting. We do a wide range of things, everything from putting a new line replaceable unit,

a new computer on the airplane just to replace one that's become obvious. obsolete, or dropping things out the back that have never been dropped before. That's one of the things that I got to do as a C-17 pilot. That was particularly exciting. For example, at the time NASA was developing the Orion spaceship and the Ares launched vehicle. Now, both of those vehicles are recovered by a parachute, and so they had these drop test vehicles that we airdropped out the back of the C-17 at Yuma, Arizona, in increasingly higher weights. The first time that we dropped it was well within the C-17sinal envelope, but the three

final drops were well above the C-17 envelope. So we had to do a lot of analysis to see how the aircraft would respond to air drops outside of its envelope and then drop these things for our customers for NASA. We also did some things where we flew in formation, two C-17s in very close formation, so that the airplane in the number two position could actually ride on the vortex, the wind tornado that's created as a way of reducing fuel consumption. But we did a wide variety of things, some of which were perfectly boring because they went exactly to plan, and some of which were slightly more excited. And you set a couple of world records during your test pilot career. What kind of stuff did that involve? It involved the drop of the Ares Jembo drop test vehicle,

which essentially looked like a rocket, but it was built to be a ballistic model of the rocket, but it had the parachute set up in the back of it. I've set the first world record at 72,000 pounds for the airdrop of that, but then some of my colleagues who stayed there longer at Edwards than I did set even bigger and better world records going all the way up to 90,000 pounds with drop of those things. Wow. And so the last bit of your career I want to linger on before we get to our main subject,

well, it relates to our main subject, because our main subject is a kind of air special operation that occurred, in the very opening moments of the Gulf War. And your career takes you into the Air Force Special Operations Command towards the end. Here's kind of a really big picture question for you. I expect most listeners can picture what special operations mean on the ground or even at sea because there have been lots of movies made about them. What are Air Special Operations?

What does the Air Force's piece of this puzzle look like? That's a great question, Aaron, and probably would get some argument both from people I know and as well as your listeners, I would suggest that the first special air operation was Jimmy Doolittle's Raid of Tokyo. It was a special mission using special airplanes designed to launch from a carrier and was never duplicated. In 2025, however, specialized air power consists of airmen who have special training together with aircraft that are usually modified specially from the rest of the Air Force

fleet in support of special operations. So they might be doing airlift or airdrop for special operations. They might be doing close air support for air operations, psychological operations, or things of that nature. I would suggest that anything you can think of that's a special mission or a special operation. If there is an air component in it, it is probably a specialized air power, as AFSOC calls it. Does the Air Force's search and rescue capability live within the Special Operations Command, or is that separate? Mostly no. It lids in Air Combat Combat Command. Most of the Combat Search and Rescue lives in Air Combat Command. AFSC does retain some specialized capability for search and rescue using their special tactics team, which includes the PJs or the Paralympestrian men as well as the Special Tactics Officers and the Combat Controlers.

So the PJs are in AFSC then? There are some PJs and NASA. Yes, most of them are owned by Air Combat Command. I ask as exactly the PJs are kind of the only piece of this puzzle that I have personal experience with. And they're just phenomenal, phenomenal human beings with really incredible capabilities. I'm personally grateful to them. Last question then, you know, what does it mean to be a squadron commander in this line of work? I expect it involves a lot of complexity and variation in a way even more so than a normal squadron.

And in our modern way of war, it's hard for commanders to kind of be forward and share the burdens of guys doing the missions and things like that. You could argue that especially in the special operations context, it's hard to strike good balance because you can kind of get in the way, too. What is it? What was it? Talk about life as a squadron commander in that billet. Sure. I was the commander of the second special operations squadron, which is an Air Force Reserve Command Squadron. So it's a squadron full of reservists, some of which are.

full-timers like I was and some of which are traditional part-time reservists. And we were under the operational control of Air Force Special Operations Command. We flew the MQ9, the Reaper drone, and all of our missions were flown in support of all of the operations going on in the world of the time. I took command in 2020 and relinquished command in 2022. So I straddled the fall of Afghanistan and the withdrawal from Afghanistan. but you can, you know, pick the name of an operation going on in the world, and we're probably conducting ISR in support of that operation. A thing that made it especially challenging is the fact

that we're all living here at home in the United States operating these drones inside what's known as a ground control station, which is essentially a cockpit that's on the ground. It feels, it looks, it even smells like a cockpit, but your aircraft is somewhere else. else halfway across the world and your head and your heart are in the fight that's going on in the ground or in the skies over these combat zones. That's kind of unique. So you walk into the skiff, into the ball, and then into your airplane. You fly a mission for about three hours at a time for a total of nine hours, and then you walk out and you drive home to see your wife and your kids. I mean, that part has been hard for all drone operators since the beginning of time.

watching the fall of Afghanistan, however, during my command was probably particularly hard because we had spent so much time in the skies over Afghanistan. And it just took so much from our hearts. It hurt so bad to watch what was happening then. And I could probably spend an entire episode so I won't, but I could spend an entire episode talking about that. But, I mean, I would say two things. One is you're dealing with all of the people things outside of the vault as the squadroner commander. I usually let the director of operations, my second in command, handle the things that were going on inside of the vault. I tried to go back there and fly the airplane at least once a week so I could keep my finger on the pulse of the operations. And I got to shoot missiles and practice dropping bombs and do all of the things that everybody else got to do, most of which were born.

I mean, hundreds of hours and boredom with a few hours of pandemonium and chaos and excited. It's hard to imagine, well, maybe in a way, actually what you just said suggests I should modify this premise, but it is hard to imagine two more different experiences of flying than being a test pilot, where you are, you know, the whole idea is to push the limits. And when you push the limits, you know, you haven't really shared any harrowing stories yet. Maybe I should push you on that front. But the whole idea of pushing the limits is every now and then something goes wrong. and that's why you need to have really, really good pilots

because things are going to go wrong and you've got to be able to save yourself in the aircraft. To this experience, this disorienting experience of the world's most realistic video game, which, by the way, has real consequences for real human lives, but you personally are not there. It's hard to imagine two more different situations,

but at the same time, you're really alike. So I'll say two things about that. Number one, as a test pilot, I felt like it was my professional responsibility to get some operational experience flying remotely, remotely controlled aircraft, or remotely piloted aircraft, RPA, as the MQ9 drones known. So that's kind of why I chose that assignment, and then I was honored to get the chance to command while I was in that squatter.

The second thing I'll say is that Frank Borman, former astronaut, once said that an expert pilot uses his expert judgment to avoid situations that require his staff. expert skill. There's probably nothing that kind of defines the true discipline of what it means to be a test pilot. Anytime that we push the limits, we do it with a very disciplined approach. But I also think that's what makes airmen and pilots really good at special operations as well.

I would argue that special operations airmen take what they know about the airplane, what all the other airmen know, and then they make it special. They push it a little bit farther. They use it in a situation that hasn't been used before. They package it together in a way that it hasn't been packaged before. And that's what I asked the squadron to do when I was the commander. Those are the kinds of things that we did as we tried to accelerate, change, or lose, which was General Brown's mantra at the time.

One of the most harrowing things that I did in the MQ9 was probably let the squadron land the MQ9 on island in the Pacific using basically the autopilot for the first time. For many years, the NQ9 had to be landed by pilots who were on the ground in close proximity within the radio line of sight of the aircraft. We called those the launch and recovery element, or LRE. While I was in command, they deployed the technology to let the air crew land wherever they were anywhere in the world using basically satellite technology plus autopilot. And our squadron got to land the airplane on an island in the Pacific for the first time as part of the baby steps, discipline approach we were taking to make the MQ9 a special asset on behalf of Bass Sok and

Socom. Well, that sounds like a relevant thing to be able to do in 2025 land and takeoff remotely from Pacific Islands. Absolutely. Yep. Well, on your point on the fall of Kabul, I actually do, I want to get to our main subject. So I'm going to leave it for now. But let's lay down a marker because I do want to talk to you about those experiences.

experiences here in 2026. So let's figure that out. We had an incredible episode in 2025 with Jeff Ball, who was the company commander at the Abbey Gate during the suicide bombing there. It was just an incredible conversation as he sort of reflected on that incident and the broader leadership challenges of being there. You know, as something fell apart that he, he bore no responsibility for the falling apart, but there he was the guy in the spot as it all came crashing down. And I can only imagine, I don't know if you were flying missions at that particular moment, but what it was like to fly missions is this thing just fell apart. Yes, you were.

You were. You were. Okay, well, now I have to ask with apologies to our main subject. What were you? What did that all look like from your perspective? I mean, we were flying Afghanistan for the entire year leading up to the withdrawal from Afghanistan. So not only did we fly many a combat air patrol and ISR mission, over the airport there, but we flew increasingly small circles in the nation of Afghanistan

as the U.S. forces retreated to the airport. Honestly, to be honest, I think things like watching the news, you know, when I wasn't on shift, was emotionally harder. One of the things I remember in particular was a group of Afghan commandos who surrendered, walked out in the streets with their arms raised, and they were gunned down by the Taliban. and that was one of the things that really made me break down and start crying while I was off shift. I think when you're on shift, you retain a little bit of clinical detachment. You're so busy flying the airplane and moving the sensors to where they need to be

that you kind of keep your emotions in check. But we did watch every C-17 take off from the airport on that last day, and it was kind of a full-circle moment for me, having served in C-17 Special Operations, low level, and then serving in MQ9s and watching them withdraw from the airport was kind of a full circle moment. Let's transition back to the early 1990s and leave your comments just for the last minute or two as a kind of trailer because I want to bring you back and I want to do a whole episode on that that experience.

But you've been giving a lot of thought to this special ops mission, or special mission, at least, because it's actually a little bit complicated considering who flies it, that is the opening kinetic mission of Desert Storm. I confess I'd never heard of it until you alerted me to its existence. I also will make another confession, which we're going to get into the details of what happened, but when I first sort of read the summary of what happened, which is this air raid on a couple of radar sites, my first thought to myself was, well, yeah, isn't that what we do?

Isn't that what the Air Force does? Like, what's cool, but in the way that all air raids are cool, what's so specifically cool here? And I don't think I fully appreciated how things that seem, not that it would be easy in 2025, but things that seem normal in 2025 would not have been so normal in the early 1990s and that this was all being sort of figured out

and put together with brand new cutting edge technology that the absence of which would have made this mission the way that it happened impossible just a few years earlier. So, Mark, how did you get interested in that? Why are you spending all this time thinking about the events of the opening minutes of Desert Storm. There's probably a fabric of which there are many threads,

but honestly, it was when I was in command in Air Force Special Operations Command that I started digging into the history of what specialized air power was and looking at the history of the Air Force in general and because of the fact that we were going through this change that General Brown had directed, this accelerate change or lose.

You know, one of the hypotheses that I presented to my squadron was that we simply need to look back into history and see what we've been doing and then figure out how to apply that to where we work today and where we need to go. In 1991, I was in ninth grade. It's probably the first time I remember the United States entering a war, which is probably for a good reason. I think I understood what the Cold War was, but I had friends whose brothers were old enough to go to go serve in Operation Desert Storm at the time. And just like you, I did not hear of Task Force Normandy for many, many years. In fact, it was in my last assignment, maybe two or three years before I retired,

that someone told me the name of the task force, and then I studied the story and was just blown away by what happened. But the other reason that is interesting is because I think it repeats a theme that I see over and over and over again in the Air Force, if not in war in general. And that's when you show up at the next war, all of the new technology you have, of which Desert Storm had many. Stealth technology was in its first iteration. GPS technology was being used.

Precision strike was going to have its heyday in Desert Storm. So several kinds of technology are converging. But one of the first operational problems that needed to be solved in Desert Storm was how to eliminate these two early warning radars. And it just turned out that all of the technology we have couldn't solve the problem perfectly. And it took a special plan to put together a strike package to take out these two targets. Yeah, I think this is why the story seems so cool to me is a theme we keep returning to on the show. In fact, it was actually the subject in some ways of the very first episode. of School of War, which was with H.R. McMaster and his experiences as a troop commander in the

Gulf War and cavalry troop commander and how that all sort of affected his thinking about the nature of warfare going forward. This story of Task Force Normandy are literally the first shots fired at this moment when the American military machine sort of demonstrates that it has mastered this new precision strike style of warfare in a way that it proves it has this dominant position, which then lasts for a couple decades in which we all now know is it's contested. But you've found the first few seconds. You found the first few minutes of what that dominance actually look like. And what's so funny is sitting, this is in my experience, surveying it from, you know, the right end of the timeline is it looks humdrum.

Well, I hate to say hum and drum, but it looks normal. It looks normal. It looks like a normal kind of stuff U.S. air power does. And it was not normal leading up to it. It was harrowing and dangerous and all happening in the background of Desert One, right? Which maybe you could spend a minute on that, that joint special air operations in the year 1990, the thought of it probably did not fill everyone with joy. Right.

So in 1980, Desert One, as you just mentioned, Operation Eagle Claw was a disaster that happened in the Carter administration, resulting in the loss of many troops, several airplanes, and an embarrassment to the United States. Over the next decade, the entire Department of Defense went through many growing pains that I won't labor here. But in 1987, the United States Special Operations Command was formally established. And in 1990, Air Force Special Operations Command was formally established after 10 years of growing pains that took a lot of reflection and introspection about why we failed in 1980. And I don't have time. You could go back 10 more years to 1970. We could talk about specialized air power in Vietnam.

I don't have time to talk about that. But succeed in Vietnam, at least tactically, and in sale in 1980. And then to go through all the growing pains of the 80s, we arrive at 1990, just having organized Air Force Special Operations Command, although Special Operations Squadrons have been around for many, many years. We show up in the Middle East in September of 1990, and the Special Operations Squadrons there, the 20th SOS in particular, have been assigned to do combat search and rescue.

The MH53J Pavelo is a brand new iteration of this helicopter outfitted with special avionics that will allow it to do a low-level navigation using its GPS and some terrain following radar to do what only it can do. And the first task the planners were given in September of 1990 was to figure out, out how to eliminate these two early warning radars. And they decided that the MH-53s, the Pavellos, were good at getting to the target, but the only weapons they had were 50-millimeter mini-guns, and they didn't think they could completely eliminate the target to the level of assurance that General Schwarzkopf required in

order to launch his stream of strike packages led by the stealth fighters and then other conventional aircraft. And so the 20th SOS, their leadership together with the leadership of the first special operations wing, his wing commander, came up with this combined plan to use Apache helicopters and MH53s. The M853s were going to lead the low crawl, as it were, a kind of low crawl over the desert to get to the target using their GPS navigation, using their train following radar. And once they had arrived over a pre-planned geographic reference, that the Apaches could use to synchronize their targeting systems, the Apaches were then going to prosecute the attack.

For special operators to come up with this idea and to do it in a way that kind of tears down the silos and lays aside the normal hubris that goes with special operations, I think is a unique characteristic of task force, Normandy, that I think we should continue to aspire to today. Yeah, we had an officer in my infantry battalion, very charismatic. company commander we all looked up to who had been a enlisted force reconnaissance Marine before jumping over to the commissioned ranks. And he used to say, I remember this coming up particularly when we had some disciplinary issues

with our scout sniper platoon. His line he would return to is it's called special operations, not special people. Yep, yep. Which is always, always stuck with me. But let's zoom out for a second. Then we'll zoom back in. So just to zoom out, people will remember or if they don't remember, they'll have read. you know, Saddam Hussein's invaded Kuwait.

We've built up all these forces in Saudi Arabia for Desert Shield, and now we're talking at the opening moments of the offensive campaign to liberate Kuwait. There's going to be this massive air campaign that opens everything. Obviously, this operation that Task Force Normandy is going to conduct is the opening salvo of that operation. Why do these two early warning radar sites matter more than all the other radar sites? Why are they first? Why do they get so much attention?

Like what's the problem of Iraqi air defense that's being solved here? So stealth technology makes airplanes harder to see on radar, not invisible. They actually do have a radar cross-section, but they still can be seen. Intelligence analysis showed that these two particular early warning radars were critical nodes on the path that the strike packages were intending to find. fly, which included not only F-117 stealth fighters, but there were some conventional aircraft that were going to be used. They had to take out both nodes.

They had to do it simultaneously to retain that element of surprise. And those two particular nodes would open up a 40 nautical mile wide corridor that would allow the strike packages basically to advance unhindered on Baghdad and the rest of the commanding control structure of the. the integrated air defense system where I ads of Iraq. To zoom back into the actual planning and composition of the mission, you know, one of the striking things is that the Apaches don't have GPS technology. Again, in 2025, I mean, I've got my phone right here.

It will tell me to within, I think within a meter where I am. It kind of worries me about who else knows where I am to within a meter at any given time. But that we have this, you know, high-end, brand new workhorse attack helicopter. that's going to, you know, play an important role in the history of American warfare for years and years after that that doesn't have GPS speaks to just how novel the whole system is.

I guess GPS really, is it the early 80? When do we even start putting the satellites up? Reagan era. Yeah, yeah. So not long, not long before this. This is really pioneering. So you have only some of the helos, like the coolest special ops heloes are the only ones with it.

And you've got to pair them with. Why can't, why was the idea rejected to just take, say, the F-117, which granted has some radar signature? But they did consider, right, just a more conventional bombing with stealth. Why were bringing the heloes in? Why was that considered a superior option? I think there were several layers, several requirements that General Schwarzkopf had put on the team. One of them was the requirement for high assurance battle damage assessment. They needed someone to say, yes, these early warning radars have been destroyed and destroyed to a particular level, and they're not going to detect our stealth fighters as they come in.

And that was one of the early requirements. And then another requirement was for the ability to do a re-attack if necessary, if the first salvo of the strike didn't destroy it to the necessary level. So those were two of the factors that played into why they developed the strike package. several others based basically the risk to the force that was accomplishing the mission. But I think those were primarily the two driving factors that resulted in this strike package. I do kind of love that one iteration of the planning just involved flying these 53s over the targets and machine gunning them and just keeping going until it was done. I mean, there is something like audacious and kind of cool about that even if somewhat impractical.

But this is two, one of your broader lessons that you draw from all this is that the mission plan, the squadron planning this mission, doesn't actually have really the stuff it needs to do it. And so you end up with this unusual joint Army Air Force package of Apaches and Pavellos. I mean, not having the, so it was the squatter commander himself who decided that the 50 millimeter mini guns weren't going to do the job. He, I mean, that's the kind of courage that I believe the airmen have carried in the Air Force throughout all time. It's, and it's probably something that's a little bit harder to find Nowadays, squadron commanders willing to say, hey, I can't do the job with what you have,

and here's my plan to overcome that. The Apaches clearly had the ability to carry all of the necessary ordinance into the target area, including the Hellfire missile, which I think ended up being the primary weapon used to attack it, but they also had rockets and machine guns as well. But, I mean, to the, again, a reoccurring theme is that our modern weapons probably won't cover all the gaps that we think they will cover. There will be a scene that needs us to think creatively about how to put together kind of a combined arms approach. That's another thing that probably the Air Force doesn't do well. I'm not even sure they can spell it, much less figure out what it

means. But I do think not just in the Air Force as a component, but across the joint force, you know, reestablishing ourselves in the basics, the fundamentals of things like combined arms approaches are several of the lessons that we can take away from task force. Well, talking about executing fundamentals, another thing that I found kind of, again, incredible for its simplicity was, I guess, I mean, I've, you know, highly limited aviation experience all as a passenger. Though I will say, is there's a quirky fact that I've learned about my own psychology is back when I was occasionally on Helos as a Marine because I was usually the senior Marine on the helo, I would be up, you know, talking to the pilots and sometimes sitting up front with them. And even though, statistically speaking, even in training, even in Cantlajeune, this is like, you know, it's not the safest thing you're ever going to do with your life. But you put me in the back of a commercial airliner where I have no control and no visibility and I get nervous. I don't know what this is about myself, whereas commercial aviation is actually quite safe statistically.

Although helicopters, I think I kind of agree with you. It's probably smart to be a little bit scared. Helicopters are referred to as a thousand parts flying in formation beating the air into submission. question to safety of a helicopter. So, but back to this question of fundamental. So I was amazed by the fact that, you know, you have this combined package of Pavellos and Apaches, and there's an objective release point.

It just shows how little I know about air tactics. But, you know, this is how we would plan a ground raid. You know, you have the scouts, the guys you know the way leading the Apaches. And then they mark it with like basically infrared, you know. Clostics, yep. Close. they mark it with glow sticks. Yeah.

They mark it with glow sticks. I mean, it was stunning that this is, in 1991, like, maybe we still do it today. I don't know. But in 1991, we marked the objective release point for the Apaches to go off into the desert and actually do their stuff by dropping glow sticks on the ground. That's, that was wild. Yeah, we, glow sticks are used to this day. They are quite ubiquitous and everyone carries a couple of them.

And I think it was probably the delight of the load master of that helicopter to be able to get to throw something out of his helicopter because we don't get to do that very often. So talk about the mission itself. You talk about the importance of fundamentals. You also talk about the importance of everyone having having their job. I mean, I think there was the anticipation that there could be real casualties and losses on this as it happened. And in a way that kind of set the tone, honestly, for Desert Storm and the decades of American military dominance that followed, the thing was relatively smooth. How did it actually play out? So there's probably two or three things that go into the success of the execution. And the first one goes back to

September of 1990. In September of 1990, when the 20th Soss and the once out commander were presenting this plan, many people were, didn't want to believe that it would be a successful plan, including J-Soc, you know, and all of their elite tier one operators. And so J-Socq required, and General Schwarzenegov required the 20th Soss, this combined package, to demonstrate that they could actually accomplish their mission. I encourage listeners to go read the narrative of the of the rehearsal exercise because it is it's riveting but within about you know a minute to 30 seconds of the expected time on target the J-Soc guys and the 20th Soss guys are probably standing in a in a control tower that overlooks a training firing range and the J-Soc guy says well I guess your guys aren't going to make it on time because he doesn't hear a helicopter he doesn't see anything he doesn't suspect anything and then within seconds of the team you know, live fire erupts on the training range, demonstrating the effectiveness of the package. So not only did they have to demonstrate that they could do it, but I think rehearsal,

I think that kind of varsity-level scrimmaging is one of the things that makes special operations special, their willingness to dedicate the time and energy and resources into realistic rehearsals over and over and over again. You can think of any missions. You can think of the raid to get Osama bin Laden, but the rehearsals are so realistic, and they hold themselves to such a high standard that by the time it comes, by the time it's 17 January, 1991,

they've been through so many iterations and seen so many variations that they can accommodate any of the changes to the task. But in this case, it was the intel analysis of the objective area, of the Iraqi early warning systems, basically that presented exactly what we thought that also made the mission of success. And there are multiple stages to the attack itself, right?

So the Apaches leave the objective release point, and then how does it actually go down? The one liner that I think you'll find in most of the narratives that you read is that radio silence is broken by static, you know, the slight squeal or hiss of the breaking of the squelch in a single voice says party intent. and then it goes silent again. And then 10 seconds later, you know, the sky erupts, probably approximately 10 to 15 kilometers from these early warning radar sites. And hellfire missiles are on their way. Health fire missiles are followed up with rockets where necessary and machine guns were necessary.

And then some BDA runs to collect the necessary ISR to make sure that the targets were destroyed. And then, you know, turn around and exit the area. and communicate back to the command and control note that the target has been destroyed because fighters and bombers are already in the air on the way to their entry point to Iraqi airspace as well. It's an incredible story, and it really is. It's literally the – it's like the opening notes played in the overture to this period of total American military dominance, which is now transitioning into something, some new period as we speak.

It also, you know, it's kind of fascinating. Obviously, all the technology is evolved and the problems that had to be solved in 1991, like the fact that some of the key, that the Hilo's actually doing the strike didn't have the navigation technology they needed. Like, we don't have those problems anymore. But presumably we have new problems and new technological challenges or just new challenges, period, that face our pilots or our special operators. I don't know if you want to reflect on that.

You know, this is also, I think there's a story that's not been well told to a general audience about the special operations community in the last few years, transitioning from a period where for what, 20 years, this community was consumed by counterterror essentially missions and all the kind of kit and caboodle that came with Iraq and Afghanistan and everywhere else, you know, hostage rescue, raids to capture high value targets, all this kind of stuff that's very specific, not necessarily only. only for those kinds of wars, but you get a lot of it in those kinds of wars. Back to the sort of great power power conflict expectations and the great power conflict expectations and what special operations means in those contexts for which task force Normandy, even though in the end we have conventional army pilots partnered up with special air force pilots is a good kind of indicator of the kinds of missions you would expect in this new world that is in some ways the old world. Yeah. Man, there's so many things I could say. One of the first first off say is that navigation technology in particular, what we're seeing on the battlefields in

Ukraine is that navigation technology actually is changing. I mean, we've gone from, you know, drones that have all of the cool radios and sensors and large electromagnetic signatures to now drones that are being operated by fiber optic. And so maybe we don't get the advantage of all the ubiquitous GPS and precision navigation technology that we've had over the years. we need to get back to the fundamental of being able to navigate from the clock to the chart and then to the ground outside of the airplane. So that's just one example of, you know, how technology is changing in ways that maybe we need to get back to our roots. But Air Force history is so full of examples of airmen doing things for special parts of the mission. I mean,

even dropping airborne troops, you know, prior over Normandy, you know, in the dark hours before Normandy and developing all of the techniques needed to get paratroopers to their targets. I mean, those airmen weren't special operations, but they were doing something that nobody had done before and never had imagined before. So one of the analogies I like to use when I think of how to use specialized air power on the next war, and one of the things that I think T.F. Normandy illustrates is that of a sniper rifle. I mentioned earlier that I think Jimmy Doolittle was the original special operations specialized air power i mean striking targets with air power is something that we wanted to do all the time that's a conventional use of air power just like striking targets with

the rifle is kind of a conventional use of a rifle but you can take a rifle and you can put a high powered scope on it and you can train the operator in a lot of special tactics and techniques and he can low crawl for hours or days and get very close to a target. And with a single shot now out of a rifle, deliver an asymmetric effect on a special mission against a special target at a special time. And I think that's kind of a good analogy for how we need to think in the future. Whatever we can do with air power, how do we make it special? What is the special target? One of the things I like to say about TF Normandy is that it reminds us of how,

special operations was used in a conventional war because as you said for years now special operations have been the tip of the sphere they've been the element that's getting supported they've been the one getting all the time and money and energy and so we haven't had to wonder how we're going to operate but when you think about conventional wars against modern integrated aerial defense systems we have to think a little bit differently maybe it's a a single shot that we're going to take which is what a AFSOC calls specialized strike, but maybe it's not an actual shot we're going to take. Maybe it's a piece of intel that we're going to gather. I would love for us to put an airplane somewhere in the Pacific and be there when an adversary sub surfaces for the first time and may notice that we're

flying overhead. It's just us flexing saying we can find you with our intel and we will be there to kind of disrupt your abilities. That's not particularly aggressive. So I think it's something you could do in the environment today. But certainly taking all of the things that air power can do and thinking about the special place, the special time, the special targets that need to be either collected on or targeted or supported in future combat scenarios, is how I imagine us using specialized air power in the future.

Mark Jones, Jr., he fly for Honda now, 31 years in the Air Force. has been an incredible conversation. I've really enjoyed it. And you're going to come back, right? So we can talk about Afghanistan. Thank you so much for coming on today to talk about Task Force Normandy. Thank you, Aaron. It's been a pleasure.