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Lucky War" Third Army in Desert Storm Richard M. Swain
U.S. Army Command and General Staff College Press |
| Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Date Swain, Richard M. (Richard Moody) 1943 "Lucky war": Third Army in Desert Storm 1 Richard M. Swain. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. 1. Persian Gulf War, 1990-1991--United States. 2. United States. Army. Army, 3rd.-History-Persian Gulf War, 1991.1. Title. DS79.724.U6S91994 966.7044'2373--dc20 94-30290 CIP |
The views expressed in this article are those of the
author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of Defense or
the U.S. Government.
Note: The figures found in this work are adapted from Headquarters, Third Army, Command Group, briefing slides held in the Third Army Collection in the Gulf War Archive at the CAC History Office, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas (unless otherwise noted).
TO THE SOLDIERS |
|
OF THIRD ARMY |
| Contents |
Appendixes
| Contents |
| Illustrations |
Figures
Maps
| Contents |
| Preface |
There is a crossroads near Safwan in southeastern Iraq. Nearby, there is a small hill and an airstrip. After the Gulf War, Safwan became a gathering point for refugees fleeing the Iraqi Army as it reestablished control of Basrah. Prior to that, the airstrip was the site of the dictation of armistice terms to that army by the victorious coalition's military high command. Still earlier, at the end of the coalition attack, the absence of American forces on the airstrip and at the road junction was the source of the most serious command crisis of the U.S. expeditionary forces. Its resolution put at risk American soldiers and threatened the reputations of the very commanders who had just conducted the greatest offensive of concentrated armored forces in the history o£ the United States Army. In many ways, events at Safwan in late February and early March are emblematic of the Gulf War. It is to explain how U.S. forces arrived at Safwan, what they did and did not do there, and what this all meant, that this book is written.
The Gulf War was an undoubted success. It was also a war of clear, sharp contrasts. Saddam Hussein's rape of Kuwait was an obvious wrong that begged for setting right. Saddam's stranglehold on much of the world's proven oil reserves presented a clear and present danger to Western interests, and his wanton attack on Kuwait posed a clear threat to his Arab brothers. Moreover, Saddam's own ineptness in dealing with the crisis ensured the unity of the global community against him unless the diplomatic effort to resolve the situation was seriously mishandled. It was altogether a war of the old comfortable sort-good against evil, a wrong to be righted---a crusade.
It was for all that a difficult strategic and operational challenge for the American armed forces, which at first found themselves badly out of position. Though freed of the Soviet threat, U.S. forces were still deployed along the inter-German border and, half a world away, in the continental United States. Saddam was able to snap up Kuwait before Western military forces could intervene. In early August 1990, there was much to be done and precious little time in which to do it. It was a long road to the greatly unbalanced victory on the last day of February in 1991.
The purpose of this book is to provide an account, from the point of view of the U.S. Army forces employed, of the 1990-91 Persian Gulf War, from the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait to the withdrawal of coalition forces from southeastern Iraq. Like all contemporary history, this is written in one respect, to provide work for revisionists. That is to say, it is written from the evidence at hand and from the author's observations as the Third Army historian. Much evidence remains unavailable. The Army is very bad at collecting the documentary record of its activities in any sort of systematic way. It certainly is not expeditious about it. The principal actors are only beginning to tell their stories. General Schwarzkopf's account, flawed by much unsupported special pleading, remains to be answered by those he indicts. Moreover, we know very little of the enemy's intentions and the reasons and details surrounding Saddam Hussein s actions. Perhaps we may never know much more.
So in many ways this history, like all history, is necessarily imperfect. Yet it must be written to form a part of what shall eventually become the historic view of these events. This work also offers an accounting to the American people for the employment of their resources and the conscious imperiling of their sons and daughters in the cause of liberating Kuwait. It is hoped that it will also provide a useful institutional record that can be called upon in the future when policy makes similar demands upon the Army. Most important, this work reminds the reader that the decisions and actions that took place in Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm occurred in a larger and quite specific context, one often beyond the influence of the people on the ground who so often were portrayed as able to control events and their own destinies far more than was the case. In the end, no completely free agents existed in Saudi Arabia. The story of this and all wars depends on how commanders adapted to circumstances as they found them and how they turned existing conditions to their benefit.
This book's focus is on the Army's part in this war, particularly the activities of the Headquarters, Third Army, and the Army Forces Central Command (ARCENT). It looks especially at the activities of the VII Corps, which executed ARCENT's main effort in the theater ground force schwerpunkt-General Schwarzkopf's "Great Wheel." The book is titled "Lucky War" after the affectation of Third Army, whose telephone switch, as far back as General George Patton's World War II headquarters, has been named "Lucky." In the same fashion, the Third Army's tactical operations center in Desert Storm was referred to as "Lucky TOC." Its forward command post was "Lucky Wheels," and so on. "Lucky" is a talisman to Third Army as, incidentally, are "Jay Hawk" to VII Corps, and "Danger" to the 1st Infantry Division. It is for that reason alone that "Lucky" is incorporated in the title.
The author has made only limited use of oral interviews concerning tactical operations. Others in the field have more than adequately tapped the memories of participants at the ground level as well as in the high command. This work is based primarily on documentary evidence, clarified by interviews with participants, rather than the other way around.
This book does not presume to be an official history. The author speaks in his own voice and makes his own judgments and evaluations based upon available evidence. Thus, this is public history, written at public expense for public purposes: the education of Army officers and an accounting to the public of its Army in the operations in Southwest Asia as viewed from a military technical point of view.
The distinction between public and official history was laid down by Immanuel Kant almost two hundred years ago when he distinguished between the public and private use of reason. Kant allowed that those employed in the government's business might often be required to support the government's actions contrary to their own views. "One certainly must not argue," Kant says, "instead one must obey."1 Such obedience is a hallmark of military discipline, particularly during a war.
Yet the Army has an institutional need for honesty and frankness in order to learn from its experiences. This requires not just a recording of events and actions but a critique that sets decisions and actions in context and evaluates them in light of available alternatives. Kant pointed out that, notwithstanding their official status, officials did not cease to surrender their membership in the wider community. He argued that in this broader persona, the official might address the public "in the role of the scholar . . . , without harming the affairs for which as a passive member he is partly responsible."2 One of Kant's examples of someone divided in personal responsibility, interestingly enough, was a soldier, who, he noted, must obey any order he receives. "But as a scholar," Kant maintains, "he cannot be justly constrained from making comments about errors in military service, or from placing them before the public for its judgment."3 This spirit animates this book.
This work was written against a deadline-or what the Army calls a "suspense." That constraint imposed limits on mastering even the incomplete materials available. But while this limitation will offend historical purists, haste was both necessary and justifiable. It was necessary because the information is perishable. Sometimes by the time an entirely "scientific history" is written, the practical need for it may be past. One is reminded that the Israeli Army's history of its 1967 war was not in the hands of that army when the 1973 war broke out. But facts alone are not the only interest of historians, who deal in interpretations of evidence that are, to a degree, merely approximations or imperfect representations of past reality. The reader can judge whether or not the evidence cited here is adequate to support the conclusions drawn.
In his magisterial work Peace and War: A Theory of International Relations, Raymond Aron chose three lines of inquiry-theoretical, sociological, and historical-as a way of understanding international relations. This book will attempt to take the same approach, though perhaps applying Aron's method in different proportions. This work is first of all a history, a narrative account disciplined by evidence. But war is essentially a social activity, not only because it occurs within political societies but because armies are themselves social organizations. To understand why and how decisions were made and actions were taken, one must understand the social milieu in which the actors existed. The story that follows does not ignore interpersonal relations in telling what really happened, for the history of the war would be distorted by the omission of discussion of this very human problem. That would be wrong indeed. As for theory, it will be used from time to time for its explanatory value.
Some judgments are necessary on the performance of the leaders who directed the successful effort to eject Saddam Hussein from Kuwait. This is done not from any mean-spirited belief that the author himself could have done it better had he the opportunity. There is a wide difference between knowing and doing, and commanders depend far more on the latter than the former. Clausewitz pointed out years ago that flanking maneuvers and concentration and maintenance of aim are not complex ideas, but their achievement is very difficult, indeed. ". . . let a general try to imitate Frederick!" he wrote, and that requires great reserves of "boldness, resolution and strength of will."4
One prejudice and two criteria undergird the judgments found in this book. The prejudice is simple: that killing in war is a means to an end, not an end in itself. What distinguishes the U.S. Army from many others is its recognition that there is a point, defined by diminishing utility to attainment of the goal sought, where simply killing the enemy ceases to he acceptable. Though one could not claim that this prejudice is a universal value in the Army, the capstone document for American armed forces doctrine, Joint Chiefs of Staff Publication 1, Joint Warfare of the U.S. Armed Forces, carries with it a categorical imperative and a warning that seems to underscore the point:
We also must have the courage to wield military power in a scrupulously moral fashion. We respect human rights. We observe the Geneva Conventions not only as a matter of legality but from conscience. This behavior is integral to our statue as American fighting men and women. Acting with conscience reinforces the links among the Services and between the U.S. Armed forces and the American people, and these linkages are basic sources of our strength.5
The repeated willingness of American soldiers to comfort their captured adversaries in the field and the concern of the entire chain of command to avoid unnecessary loss of life or destruction would seem to indicate that this view of moral conduct is widespread in the U.S. Army.
One of my criteria for judgment came from the vice chief of staff of the Army, General Gordon Sullivan, on a trip to Saudi Arabia shortly after the war. Sullivan spoke to a Third Army staff, perhaps too full of themselves after their still recent success, and he took any tendency for swagger out of them with a simple observation. "The American people," he said, "expect only one thing from us: That we will win! What you have done is no more than they expect. You have won." We must now ask, therefore, whether the actions in question contributed to the ultimate success of the war. And to this, I would add, whether the accomplishment of the goals set by the coalition and national political executive were economical.
The second criterion was set by General Schwarzkopf himself, and it has to do with character. As Schwarzkopf told television interviewer David Frost: "I admire men of character and I judge character not by how men deal with their superiors, but mostly how they deal with their subordinates. And that, to me, is where you find out what the character of the man is."6 The author will leave judgments of character to the reader, but he will not ignore events that seem to reflect upon this aspect of the American high command. The U.S. Army claims to invest great effort in the development and evaluation of this human attribute. To ignore its influence would be to suppress a vital part of the story of Operation Desert Storm.
Finally, a number of themes are evident in the account of Third Army's part in the Gulf War. The first is the success of the U.S. Central Command in anticipating the contingency that occurred. When Iraq occupied Kuwait, Central Command had planned for just such a contingency and was, therefore, able to respond much more promptly than would have been possible otherwise.
Central Command's anticipation notwithstanding, the threat posed by Iraq was not the one the U.S. Army of 1990 had been fashioned to meet. The Army had been organized, trained, and equipped to meet a Soviet invasion of Europe. A number of consequences for the Gulf War grew out of that salient fact. The Army and, indeed, the entire military panoply were equipped with the finest fighting equipment in the world. It lacked, however, the means for offensive operational maneuver because the European mission did not require them. Further, the Army had no doctrine and only a skeletal organization for echelons of command above the corps, like Third Army. The mobilization of an army-level headquarters and support structure had to be effected as events unfolded. How this was done is the second major theme of this book, and the story contains lessons about force building and deployment that should be useful for an Army that must increasingly respond to global contingencies in distant locales.
A third theme has to do with the corporate nature of the operational planning for Operation Desert Storm. Military doctrine and most historical accounts would suggest that military operations normally take place in response to a sequential and hierarchical planning sequence-from top to bottom. In Desert Storm, the process was multilevel, interactive, and simultaneous-as well as horizontal and vertical. The story of how the plan took form over a period of months and the assumptions that fashioned and shaped it in the theater of war are a central part of the story told in these pages.
The central role of logistics in operational war fighting, the power of personality in war, the unchanging features of war-friction, chance, and contingency-all are subordinate themes in the story of Third Army in Operation Desert Storm. The practice of command itself, the ability of a leader to make decisions and cause other men to both understand and obey him-in short, the role of the commander at the theater, operational, and tactical levels of war in an era of global tactical satellite communications-is the ultimate theme of this account. At the end of the day, it is the author's hope that the story told here will not be totally unfamiliar to those named in these pages.
Notes
| Contents |
| Acknowledgments |
During the Gulf War, I had the matchless opportunity to be assigned as theater army historian on the staff of the Third Army in Saudi Arabia. Though one would not necessarily draw such a conclusion from most published accounts of the Gulf War, Third Army was the senior operational headquarters of the United States Army in the Persian Gulf. Third Army was commanded by Lieutenant General John Yeosock, who was on Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm from the start. Indeed, the Desert Storm army was largely his creation. But Yeosock had earlier served in an Army whose attitudes had been formed over the years by NATO scenarios in which the largest national formation was to be a corps. The U.S. Army had not foreseen a requirement to deploy a multicorps army. The interposition of an army headquarters between the corps and the theater commander was not without difficulties and gave rise to a certain cognitive dissonance at times. Yeosock himself is a man who shies from public exposure and who does not do particularly well before the camera. Criticism of the conduct of the war has tended to ignore the intervening headquarters between the two Army corps commanders and the very visible commander in chief, H. ("Stormin"') Norman Schwarzkopf. This picture is very wrong, and among other reasons, it is to correct this impression that this account is written.
This book would never have been completed without the material assistance of a number of people to whom the author owes a considerable debt. First, there is Bill Stacy, the historian of U.S. Army Forces Command, who made it possible for the author to go to Saudi Arabia as Third Army historian. Bill also has been a source of assistance and encouragement since then. He is everything an Army historian must be and so few are. His principal assistant, Mrs. Tammy C. Howls, must also be acknowledged for her assistance while the author was assigned to Fort McPherson, Georgia. I should also express appreciation to Lieutenant General Leonard Wishart, commandant of the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College (CGSC), and then Brigadier General John Miller, the deputy commandant in 1990-91, for permitting me to go.
The commander and staff officers of Third Army made it possible for me to watch much of what took place and to collect the documents necessary to write this account. The army staff' officers, busy with the conduct of the war, accepted the historian as a fellow professional, even though they often failed to understand why the headquarters needed a historian. Nonetheless, they always took the time to answer questions and to explain why various perceptions might be incomplete. Lieutenant Colonels Dave Mock, Mike Kendall, and the G3 planners were particularly helpful and supportive. The 44th Military History Detachment, commanded by Major Larry Heysteck, laid the foundation for the army history office, and Sergeant Bonnie Gray and Major Guy Sanderson helped run it. All were enthusiastic and great professionals, and the successes I enjoyed in Saudi Arabia are largely due to their efforts. The chief of military history, Brigadier General Hal Nelson, provided me with the opportunity to spend a year researching the records and writing the first draft of this account, sometimes in the face of opposition from his organization. Hal provided me with the time and resources to set up a research office in the Combined Arms Research Library (CARL) at Fort Leavenworth. There, I was assisted by three great confederates who, in truth, did most of the hard work. These were Dr. Pat Swann and Captains Russel Santala and Mark Traylor. Without them, nothing would have been accomplished. Pat is a geographer whom the Staff College could not figure out how to employ properly. She has now left the college for other government work. Russ Santala and Mark Traylor, both exceptionally gifted officers and veterans of the war, were invaluable in tracking down records, finding evidence, and criticizing the author's flights of fancy. Mrs. Elaine Hoinacki, the team typist, spent many long days listening to recorded interviews and transcribed faithfully all that was intelligible therein. Thanks are also owed the librarians of CARL's third floor, who made room and welcomed three intruders and their various file cabinets and safes into an already overcrowded attic.
I enjoyed the advice, too, of an excellent board of editors: Dr. Pete Maslowski, Dr. Larry Yates, Colonels Jim McDonough and Greg Fontinot, Major Mark Blum, and Don Gilmore. Professor Edward M. ("Mac") Coffman also read the draft and provided wise counsel. Their advice was always thoughtful, and I followed most of it. I likely should have followed it all, but old colonels are fixed in their views. The errors that remain are, thus, entirely my own. Mrs. Sharon Torres, my secretary and administrative assistant during my years in the Combat Studies Institute at CGSC, has been a great help, particularly in mediating between my Luddite ignorance and the world of computers and word processors. I also wish to thank D. M. Giangreco, design editor of the Military Review, and Byron G. McCary, visual information specialist at the Training Support Center (TSC), for their generous offer of photos to be used in this work. I am also indebted to Edward J. Carr and Robin Inojos, visual information specialists, and Alfred Dulin, graphics supervisor, for their coordination and layout of the manuscript. In addition, Carolyn D. Conway, editorial assistant, Combat Studies Institute, deserves credit for her diligence and skill in inputting, correcting, and formatting the manuscript.
Finally, this book would have died in the hold box of the Center of Military History (CMH) but for the determination of the George C. Marshall Professor of Military History at CGSC, Dr. Roger Spiller, that it be published. Dr. Spiller recovered it from CMH, set up an editorial board, and encouraged, prodded, and otherwise motivated the author to take it up again and push it through to completion. Spiller has been chief editor and principal source of energy for seeing the project through to publication. Whatever errors remain are simply indications that no editor can do everything to correct the accumulated flaws of an author. Roger Spiller has been my intellectual mentor for seven years, and I owe him a great debt. That I am all too aware of the price he has paid, in terms of much time he might otherwise have turned to far more valuable projects of his own, only increases my ;ease of obligation.
| Contents |
| Introduction |
For a description of the human and material wreckage left in the aftermath of the Persian Gulf War, Richard Swain reaches back to the classical world. It was, he writes, "'a hecatomb'-a gruesome sacrifice of hapless victims on a terrifying scale, meant to propitiate the ancient gods "1
Hapless, note, not helpless. Saddam Hussein s soldiers did not begin their war meaning to be victims. That role was meant for the people of Kuwait. Saddam's soldiers were made that way by their own leaders and by the combined forces of an international military expedition.
But the outcome of this war was not inevitable. The human and mechanical scale of the war, its geographical scope, its technical complexities, and its highly lethal effects posed choices for all the combatants that only rarely were self-evident or obvious. If the allied victory was not foreordained, neither was the process by which that victory was achieved. That depended upon a war fought as professionally and precisely as possible, with as strict attention to military and technical detail as the allies could muster. How this professional and technical process unfolded, as it was viewed from the United States Third Army headquarters and in the military formations whose operations that headquarters controlled, is the subject of Richard Swain's book, "Lucky War."
History may never be able to learn just why Saddam Hussein decided to invade Kuwait in the summer of 1990. Seeing only a future that he preferred to see, Saddam may have been encouraged by the West's compliant policies toward Iraq during its long war with Iran. Perhaps he believed he had stored up credits of favor with the West by spending so much in that war. Or he may have misled himself with a spurious view of Iraq's brief national history; once in possession of Kuwait, supposedly a former Iraqi province, he may have planned to create a new pan-Islamic union in the region. Or, perhaps, there was only the oil: emboldened by the prospect of controlling a major part of the world's supply, he may have convinced himself that the rest of the world would countenance his fait accompli.2
But for any or all of Saddam's imaginings to yield success, it was imperative that he be allowed to keep what he had taken. This, he was not allowed to do. Once in Kuwait, Saddam's army could not leave, and the United Nations could not leave it there.
Modern military history records few examples of such a grossly miscalculated adventure as this one. It was a gamble, foolishly taken, badly played from the outset. The revolution in the Soviet Union had relaxed superpower tensions, but not so much that Western armies had irrevocably demobilized. Large, highly trained, and well-equipped standing armies were still in place in Europe and America and not lately used. If he thought about such matters at all, Saddam may have believed that, after so many years of cold war, the major powers would not so soon recommit themselves to a serious military enterprise.
In this, as in so much else, Saddam was mistaken. As a superpower and leader of the free world during the cold war, the United States looked forward to exercising its leadership in an atmosphere free of long-standing international antagonisms. The invasion of Kuwait challenged America's still optimistic ambitions for a post-cold war peace, a "new world order." When President Bush announced, shortly after the invasion, "This will not stand," his fervor seemed to arise at least partly from disappointment that there would be no respite from the demands of international leadership. The president's announcement marked the effective beginning of the Persian Gulf War.
As we now know, the president's decision was all his.3 Some months were to pass, however, before the true dimensions of the military commitment by the United States and its allies would reveal themselves, and that was chiefly the business of the military professionals and the military policy makers. As Swain shows here, that business was marked by decisions taken, as usual, in an ambiguous and contingent atmosphere: the allied effort looked far different in late October than a month later, when it was finally agreed that only a military offensive against occupying Iraqi forces would suffice to meet the policy objectives set forth in United Nations Resolution 678.
Although some military pedants still dream of planning and conducting a war immune from the intrusions of policy, the course of military planning from Operation Desert Shield to the execution of Operation Desert Storm that Swain describes was a thoroughly modern war, bounded on all sides and shaped daily by the demands of policy. In recent years, presidents and their commanders have indulged in the conceit that they have not gotten in each other's way, but the history of recent military operations tells a different story entirely. Nearly instantaneous global and public telecommunications make certain that modern wars can no longer be fought as though they are quarantined from public view. Analysts now use the term "crisis transparency' to describe a diplomatic environment in which statesmen communicate with one another more by public than official means.4 The effects of these technical advancements meant that policy could reach deeply into the allies' military machinery, affecting timehonored professional habits and behavior. When a field commander can tune in to his commander in chiefs latest news conference, and then watch as his immediate superiors translate that news into military intent, we can see that, while the game may be the same in its essentials, the playing field has been dramatically changed.5 If it has ever been so, it is no longer so that policy falls silent when the first guns are fired. It was not so in the Persian Gulf War.
The success of coalition-making in war depends upon all parties finding agreement on the war's purposes, shapes, and ends. The sturdiest coalition is one that does not bind its members too tightly to precise objectives that may be dear to one party but not to another. What is more important is that all parties to a coalition can agree in like measure and commitment, even if the resources each invests are disproportionate. These principles were followed in this war, and they manifested themselves as limitations on national operations.
For the Americans, this meant that there would be no overt campaign to dethrone Saddam, although, perhaps, accidents of war would not have been unwelcome. This meant, further, that no ground forces would cross the Euphrates River and make for Baghdad. The air war did not suffer this particular constraint, but allied airmen worked under their own unique limitations all the same. No terror bombings this time; no Dresdens or Tokyos were ever in the offing.
Those limitations extended not only to actions against the enemy but to the way in which allied operations were framed and conducted. Allied military objectives were to be met by commanders who husbanded the lives of their soldiers more strictly than in any other major conflict. And as the time drew closer for the ground offensive to begin, these commanders subordinated their operational plans and established tactical measures of control to prevent casualties from "friendly fire." One brigade commander has been frank to admit that the threat of friendly fire in tactical zones dense with soldiers and weapons, not the enemy, governed his tactical dispositions, and higher-ranking officers have not been reluctant to express the depth of their concern over this age-old problem of military operations.
These concerns, it must be said, did not arise so much from highminded humanitarianism. American commanders were willing to surrender certain tactical advantages because of the possibility that casualties by misadventure might somehow erode popular confidence back home. Indeed, a curious agreement existed on this issue between Saddam and the commanders who fought against him. Paul Wolfowitz, who served as the undersecretary of defense for policy during the war, has written that Saddam "seemed to have concluded, from observing both the Vietnam war and the U.S. withdrawal from Beirut, that the United States lacked staying power . . ."6 The human costs of the coming war on the ground, whether by friendly or enemy fire, posed a dramatic and unresolved question that, for the Americans especially, reached back to those earlier conflicts.
From the president downward through the chain of command, the ghost of the Vietnam War hovered over every proceeding.7 All that was necessary to ignite calls for U.S. withdrawal, Saddam seemed to have thought, was the prospect of high casualties, and these he bluntly forecasted on several occasions. If Saddam had been watching carefully, however, he would have seen that the tempo and pace of the allied build-up showed no signs of slacking, even after American casualty forecasts as high as 30,000 were made in public.8 No evidence has yet come to light suggesting that casualty projections impeded the operations of the allied expedition in any way.
All of which is not to say that these anxieties had no effect on official views or behavior. Instead of shrinking from the prospect of the war, those anxieties seem to have moved the Americans in precisely the opposite way, toward an unstinting commitment of force of arms. Policy might dictate operational limitations, but there were to be no half-measures. Having himself thoroughly imbibed the "lessons" of Vietnam, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Colin Powell, told the Saudi Prince Bandar in the early days of the crisis, "If we have to [fight], I'll do it, but we're going to do it with everything we have."9
In this sense, the Persian Gulf War was to be a redemptive war. commanders were intent on avoiding what they regarded as the mistakes of the past. Quite apart from immediate policy objectives, this war had institutional goals as well: it would be fought so as to reclaim for the U.S. Army preeminence in the world of professional soldiering. The actions of the American commanders suggested that they were not about to design another war so susceptible to the uncertainties of an American national will they viewed as fragile. They would design a war that would not, insofar as possible, again test the strength of that will. This war was to be planned from the outset as a short, violent, massive, and decisive victory whose conduct capitalized upon material abundance and professional and technological acumen as the means of reducing the human costs of the war. This war would be everything the Vietnam War had not been. And when the war was over, it would be the president himself who framed its larger significance. The victory celebrations were an opportunity for the nation to "kick the Vietnam syndrome" by affording returning troops a proper welcome of thanks. 10
Within the shifting context of domestic experience and reaction, international diplomacy and strategy, there remained the fact of the war itself: the necessity that armed force was required to decide the issues at hand. The distance between conceiving and executing this decision entailed the mobilization, deployment, sustainment, and direction of a huge multinational force toward politically and militarily achievable goals thousands of miles from its points of origin.
The result, as we now know, was by no means the "near-run thing" so dear to the hearts of military romantics. It was a victory as complete as was wanted or could reasonably be had. In its fundamental character, it was a thoroughly American kind of war. Russell Weigley, the dean of American military historians, has written of the "American way of war," a national style of warfare, defined by its attritional impulse even in those instances when a more strictly modulated application of violence may have been more appropriate.11 Erstwhile strategists will find no exquisite, stylish innovations in this conflict. Perhaps the most arresting, and telling, of Richard Swain's images in the pages that follow is his depiction of the coalition's ground attack as that of a "drill bit," boring remorselessly into a rock face. In its design, in its conduct, and perhaps even in it ending, the Persian Gulf War bore an unmistakably American stamp.
If materiel could be made to fight this war, then materiel could win it by sheer mountainous weight. The character of the American side of the war was, as Swain's metaphor suggests, relentlessly industrial. The humblest subjects-ones that do not ordinarily arrest the attention of strategists, "operational artists," or even tacticiansplayed critical parts in the war's design. That design required above all moving what amounted to a small city thousands of miles around the world and keeping it in good running order until the time came to close the assembly line and shut down the factory once more. No shortages of soldiers beset the generals, and because the work of most soldiers in this war had to do with the servicing of machines in one way or another, the older problem of numbers in war was replaced by one of distribution. Witness Swain's discussion of HETs, the heavy equipment transporters whose shortage occupied the time and energy of the Third Army's commanding general as did few other subjects. HETs, how many available, where and when, the strength and state of their crews-indeed, where to get more? These were questions of substance, the assembling and organizing of assets, that called upon the true métier of the Americans-organization.
And organized the war certainly was, so thoroughly organized that the actual fighting seemed almost anticlimactic-except, of course as always, for those who actually had to fight. At one point, the force-to space ratio very nearly squeezed an entire division between two others. No adroit maneuvering permitted or desired here: any dispersion or movements that would have elicited sighs of approval from the audience would have dissipated the concentrated power of the attack that had been planned from the beginning.
The Persian Gulf War was a professionals' war, and so Swain's book is by and large a professionals' book. "Lucky War" was conceived and written for military officers and other serious students of the military art. It is particularly meant to illuminate and explain the technical complexities of the war, matters that general war literature so often takes for granted or merely ignores. As an operational history of the war, it does not neglect to show how even the finest details of military planning and violent execution are subjected to the dynamic interactions of an event with so many moving parts. It is written from the vantage point of the U.S. Third Army, the headquarters placed between the fighting corps and the unified command of the war. From this vantage point, a clear view of both the highest and lowliest aspects of the war was available. From this position, Swain scouted in all directions for the sources of this history, from briefing rooms in Riyadh to the front-line traces. "Lucky War" is thus a book by both an informed observer and a participant.
`When Iraq invaded Kuwait, Richard Swain was a colonel, serving on the faculty of the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College as the director of the Combat Studies Institute. A graduate of West Point, a field artillery officer, and veteran of Vietnam, Swain had also won a doctorate in history from Duke University. Between command and staff assignments, he had taught at West Point and at the Staff College's School of Advanced Military Studies. Along the way, he had made of himself one of the Army's most disciplined and productive students of the history of the military art.
Shortly after the invasion, Swain was asked for a forecast of the strategic end state of the crisis, whose barest outlines were only beginning to be revealed. He was not confident that the United States would intervene militarily, and he hoped that economic sanctions would resolve the trouble. But as the crisis grew more serious, Swain was quick to see that the U.S. Army was on the verge of another limited war, and one of significant proportions. A historic event of some magnitude was in the making. As the Army mobilized for the conflict, Swain was convinced that history should mobilize with it.
Armies preparing for war are rarely if ever sympathetic to the presence of historians. Historians and their work have to do with matters that seem remote to commanders and staff officers consumed by events at hand. The work of history seems all too easily postponed. Once the war is concluded, however, the reverse seems to be true. Armies at once become interested in commemorating and celebrating their victories, if indeed a victory has been recorded. They want to know, too, what lessons may be learned from their recent experience, the theory being that those lessons might be applied in future operations. In practice, however, these efforts seldom produce insights that alter professional behavior. Soon enough, armies revert to the routines of the garrison.
Swain was fully aware of these problems. He knew that armies in the past had paid for ignoring their own experience. He knew as well that commemorating an experience was no substitute for understanding it. And he knew that the discipline and patience demanded by close historical study would not permit the instant production of a book. If the war was serious enough to be fought, he believed, its history deserved a serious and deliberate effort.
Finally, Swain was moved by concerns that transcended his professional interest in the war and its history. As an American soldier, Swain believed that his nation deserved an accounting of its army's performance, that his fellow citizens had a right to demand a means of understanding how the energy of their sons and daughters and the fruits of their labors had been spent in a war that had been fought in their interests. Swain meant his history as a contribution to that understanding.
In late November 1991, Swain was finally notified of his appointment as the theater army historian. He was ordered to deploy to Third Army headquarters in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, there to oversee the operations of several official military history detachments then operating with major unit formations and to record and eventually to write the history of the war. He arrived in Saudi Arabia in January 1991, just before the beginning of the ground offensive. He returned to the United States in May and for the next two years continued his research and writing.
"Lucky War" is Swain's fulfillment of his assignment. It is "official military history," a variety of history that the British military historian, B. H. Liddell Hart, once condemned as a contradiction in terms. Jaundiced by his relations with the British Army's official historians from World War I, Liddell Hart denied that serving officers, or anyone with intimate official relations, could produce a military history that a reader might approach with confidence. The shadow of Liddell Hart's opinion has darkened official history for decades. Swain was guided in his own research and writing by the ambition to prove Liddell Hart wrong once again. This, he has done in full measure.
| ROGER J. SPILLER Fort Leavenworth, Kansas |
Notes
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| 1 Prologue to Operation Desert Shield |
In the first two months of 1991, the armed forces of an unprecedented global coalition attacked and destroyed the core of Iraq's military forces, thus freeing the small but oil-rich state of Kuwait from Iraqi occupation. Although the United States contributed almost half the friendly military forces engaged, the coalition based its international authority on a large majority vote of the United Nations Security Council.1 Military contributions came from thirty-seven separate states and financial and material donations from others.2 The regional legitimacy conferred on the endeavor by the U.S. partnership with the Saudi government and the participation, under Saudi sponsorship, of other Gulf States and major Arab powers was equally important.
Because the Gulf War was a coalition war, it remained a war of limited objectives. At no time was the destruction of Iraq a serious consideration. The strategists seem always to have had a keen eye on what the postwar regional balance of power would look like, not wishing to exchange one destabilizing imbalance for another.
The war occurred in a "new world" context. The old post-World War II framework of Soviet-American confrontation had been supplanted by a multipolar global community. Within this new global political environment, former members of the Warsaw Pact contributed contingents and materiel to serve in a variety of symbolic ways.
The fundamental causes of this war reach back a thousand years or more to the birth of Islam and its spread throughout the world. Certainly they extend to the breakup of the last great Islamic empire at the end of World War I. And they include the stresses operating since that time throughout the developing world as traditional societies have coped with the twin pressures of modernization and competing foreign (Western) ideologies. These causes, however, are largely beyond the scope of this study. Iraq's violation of the sovereignty of a weak brother Arab state was the sufficient cause of the 1990-91 Gulf War. This action alone-which threatened Saudi Arabia, the minor Gulf States, and the regional and global economic balance o£ power-called the anti-Iraq coalition into existence. With the collapse of the old world order, a clear precedent was called for in the form of united military action that would punish this wanton act by a mighty nation against a weak one and place it beyond the pale of legitimate international behavior. These are the circumstances that led to war.
Since World War II, the United States Department of Defense has divided the world into a number of geographic regions. Joint service military headquarters have been assigned responsibility for these regions, and they are responsible for conducting necessary military operations and forestalling trouble. Following the fiasco of Operation Desert One, the aborted attempt to rescue U.S. hostages in revolutionary Iran, a new theater, U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), was carved out in the Persian Gulf, Arabian Sea, and eastern Indian Ocean area. CENTCOM's headquarters were located at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida. The commander in chief of CENTCOM in 1990, General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, directed all U.S. military operations in the Gulf War. His headquarters and those of his subordinate service components, Army, Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force, actually began to prepare for hostilities with Iraq long before fighting broke out.
Army units participated in the operations in Southwest Asia as part of a joint military response to Iraqi aggression. The contributions of other U.S. military services were at least as vital to the outcome as those of the Army. Each service contributed its own unique capabilities. Indeed, the Air Force can claim, with some justification, to have been the predominant service in this desert war. While this book will focus on the Army's contribution-particularly those of Third Army, its two assigned corps, and support command-the Army was but one service among five (counting the Coast Guard) in a coalition in which the armed services of many nations contributed to the final outcome, each in accordance with its own capabilities.
The military actions of August 1990 to January 1991 (Operation Desert Shield) and those of January and February 1991 (Operation Desert Storm) were only a part of the strategic response by the United States, Saudi Arabia, and their coalition allies to the Iraqi aggression. The total effort against Iraq combined economic, political, and military instruments of interstate power. Establishing the necessary political framework for military action often set the pace at which military preparations could be made. Many opportunities were available for any of the parties to have gone another way-except, perhaps, the government-in-exile of Kuwait. None of what actually happened was preordained.
Only the choices of the various players led to the resolution that came to pass. For many weeks, it appeared that a military standoff of undetermined duration had developed and that, behind the scenes, economic and political forces would have to be given time to impose a resolution. Only that prospect accounts for the discussion concerning transition of Third Army from a contingency headquarters to the status of a more permanent major army command and the simultaneous planning for the rotation of ground forces in and out of theater. These discussions went on in the fall of 1990 even as planning went forward for possible offensive actions in Southwest Asia.3 Each succeeding step toward war was contingent on earlier measures, and nothing was very certain-except the determination of Saddam Hussein to remain in Kuwait and the equal determination of the coalition to have him out, one way or the other.
President George Bush did not announce development of an offensive military option, until 8 November. Not until early January did the United States Congress-and not by an overwhelming mandate-follow the United Nations Security Council in authorizing the use of military force to break the deadlock in the desert.4 The importance of the president's political strategy to the final outcome cannot be overstated, nor the skill with which he and his secretary of state, James Baker, orchestrated their actions. The secretary of state's ability to challenge the United States Senate on 5 December 1990-to demonstrate the same resolve already shown by the United Nations Security Council on 29 November-is indicative of the Bush administration's political skill.5
Finally, it is vitally important to understand that the ability to complete various military actions during the war's offensive phase, Desert Storm, was contingent on the need to compensate for earlier decisions made in response to a quite different set of assigned tasks and assumptions in effect during the earlier protective (defensive) phase, Operation Desert Shield. Decisions taken for good reasons in August and September, both at the political and theater level, had significant implications for how business could be done in December and January, as military forces in Saudi Arabia prepared for an offensive. Simply put, a force built for attack has different communications, logistics, intelligence, and force structure requirements than one created for deterrence and defense and under political guidance to deploy only "minimum essential forces." Over and above all these short-term influences lay another reality: the armed forces committed to the Arabian Peninsula had been designed and structured originally for a very different war-a forward defense of NATO on the Central Front in Europe. This accounts for such anomalies as the Army's shortage of line-haul trucks, particularly heavy equipment transporters (HETs), the large flat-bed trucks used to transport heavy armored vehicles to the front.6
Strictly speaking, Operation Desert Shield began on C-day, 7 August 1990, when the president ordered U.S. military forces to the Arabian Peninsula to defend the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia from the threat of Iraqi aggression following Saddam Hussein's 2 August (0140Z) invasion of Kuwait.7 (See map 1.) In fact, the operation was anticipated by several months of Central Command planning actions that placed Army forces, particularly Third Army and XVIII Airborne Corps, in an especially favorable position for the accomplishment of their assigned missions. Any account of this operation, then, must start by considering events that began in November 1989, when some critics considered Iraqi aggression against Kuwait scarcely creditable.
In the fall of 1989, the postwar global power structure had broken down. The Soviet Union was undergoing dramatic internal stresses, while its European empire was falling away rapidly. As Soviet interest turned inward, military planners everywhere responded by considering the emerging multipolar world as the strategic environment of the 1990s. U.S. estimates examined the restructuring of the American military in light of new threat assessments.
For Central Command, that meant shifting its focus from opposing a Soviet attack through Iran, the principal threat envisioned from 1983 to 1989, to a more regional threat, a hypothetical Iraqi attack against its weak but oil rich neighbors to the south. In November 1989, General Schwarzkopf directed that the theater operations plan that addressed an Iraqi threat to Saudi Arabia (Operations Plan [OPLAN] 1002-90) be made the priority for Central Command planning and that the plan be revised as quickly as possible.8 In December, Schwarzkopf requested and was granted permission to shift the focus of a forthcoming Joint Chiefs of Staff war game from the disappearing Soviet threat (OPLAN 1021) to the defense of the Arabian Peninsula. In January 1990, Central Command called for the preparation of war plans against an Iraqi threat to the Arabian Peninsula. These were to be the basis of the exercise, Internal Look, scheduled for July 1990.9
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| Map 1. Saudi Arabia |
Baghdad emerged from its eight-year war with Iran still strong enough to attack Saudi Arabia. Indeed, while recommending that the United States "continue to develop its contacts with Iraq by building selectively on existing political and economic relationships," General Schwarzkopf told the Senate Armed Forces Committee in January 1990 that "Iraq is now the preeminent military power in the Gulf, and It is assuming a broader leadership role throughout the Arab world. Iraq has the capability to militarily coerce its neighboring states should diplomatic efforts fail to produce the desired results."10 Critics of this view argued that Iraq lacked the intent or economic capability to move against its neighbors. Some suggested the CENTCOM analysis was no more than an attempt to justify the command's existence.11
As Saddam Hussein increased tensions in the region throughout the spring, U.S. assistance to Iraq (which dated back to the Iran-Iraq War) would become a political issue. In April, CENTCOM planners were directed to drop the country's identifications in their planning documents and to substitute the less politically sensitive color codes of RED (Iraq), ORANGE (Iran), and YELLOW (People's Democratic Republic of Yemen).12
Third Army, as the Central Command's Army component, was also reevaluating the regional threat. The principal Army war plan in the fall of 1989 assumed a Soviet attack through Iran to the Persian Gulf. The plan called for five and two-thirds U.S. divisions in the defense, mostly light and heavy forces at something less than full strength (apportioned to it by the Joint Strategic Capability Plan [JSCAP]), Less than two divisions were apportioned to the separate plan then in place for the defense of the Arabian Peninsula.13
Even before Schwarzkopf changed Central Command's planning priorities, ARCENT began adjusting to the idea that Iraq constituted the major regional threat. Third Army also held that any U.S. response to the potential danger would require a significantly larger and heavier force than had been anticipated. As early as March 1989, Third Army began to coordinate with the Army Concepts and Analysis Agency (CAA) in Bethesda, Maryland, to conduct a war game simulation of the existing war plan for the Arabian Peninsula to examine this hypothesis.
CAA ran Wargame Persian Tiger 89 in February 1990, as planning for a revised defensive concept got under way. Persian Tiger posited a defensive force of three Army light brigades (one airborne, two airmobile), a battalion of the Ranger regiment, an air defense artillery brigade, corps aviation, and artillery. Two Marine expeditionary brigades and aviation forces allocated under the existing plan were also portrayed. The findings of the game, which began to emerge in February but which were not published until August 1990, were that U.S. forces could not arrive in theater in time to resist an Iraqi invasion if deployment were ordered only upon outbreak of hostilities. It was learned also that the allocated U.S. force structure was too light to do what was required of it, in any event.14
By the time the results of Persian Tiger were published, Central Command's own planners had arrived at many of the same conclusions. The exercise provided a mechanism that supported ongoing Third Army planning in the spring of 1990 and offered an opportunity for Third Army and subordinate XVIII Corps planners to begin gaining practical experience in the problems they would actually face in August.
Between January and July 1990, Central Command, Third Army, and XVIII Corps planners prepared draft operation plans for the new contingency, and in July, United States Forces Command (FORSCOM), the headquarters commanding all continental U.S. Army combat forces, began selecting units to meet Army Forces Central Command's requirements.15 The deputy commanding general of Third Army, Major General William Riley, began visiting various headquarters with a briefing on Third Army's view of the changing regional threat.16 Back at Fort McPherson, Georgia, Riley and the Third Army staff conducted a functional analysis of the forces required for the new plan. This was the first step toward development of Desert Shield time-phased force development data (TPFDD), a troop list to support the new plan.
A number of features of the draft Third Army plan (1002-90), published in July 1990, show how prewar planning guided Third Army's actions during Operation Desert Shield. The plan was intended to direct the Army's contribution to Central Command's broader-objective regional plan "designed to counter an intra-regional conflict on the ARABIAN PENINSULA to protect UNITED STATES (U.S.) and allied access to ARABIAN PENINSULA oil."17 Central Command's strategy for a regional contingency spelled out its strategy this way:
The USCENTCOM regional contingency strategy to counter an intraregional threat initially seeks to (secure] U.S. and allied interests through deterrence. Should deterrence fail, the strategy is to rapidly deploy additional U.S, combat forces to assist friendly states in defending critical ports and oil facilities on the ARABIAN PENINSULA. Once sufficient combat power has been generated and the enemy has been sufficiently attrited, the strategy is to mass forces and conduct a counteroffensive to recapture critical port and oil facilities which may have been seized by enemy forces in earlier stages of conflict.
Notably, as a precondition of execution, the plan indicated that "the scope of operations requires that this plan be executed independently of other major contingencies."18
The plan portrayed an Iraqi attack through Kuwait and into Saudi Arabia. The attack force consisted of sixty brigades, supported by 640 fighter/ground-attack aircraft and a minimum of 3,200 tanks. The plan assumed four days would be needed to take Kuwait and another five to reach the port of Al Jubayl. It credited Iraq with an operational reach no longer than Al Hufuf-enough grasp to occupy the main Persian Gulf ports and key oil facilities. The plan also assumed three to six months' increased regional tension and up to thirty days' strategic warning.
The corresponding Third Army plan assumed a deployment decision at least nineteen days prior to hostilities, an immediate 200,000-man selected Reserve call-up, and availability of assigned National Guard roundout brigades and necessary combat service support units.19 In the pre-Desert Storm Army force structure, roundout brigades were National Guard formations that were expected to fill out incomplete Regular Army divisions and deploy with them to war. In the event, Third Army would enjoy neither the advanced warning nor have the benefit of an early selected Reserve call-up. The absence of both would influence significantly how Third Army went to war.
The Third Army plan was designed for the defense of critical port and oil facilities in the vicinity of Al Jubayl and Abqaiq, the operation of common-user seaports, and the provision of combat support and combat service support (logistics) to Central Command forces in theater.20 The concept of operations called for a three-phase deployment.21 Phase one addressed the introduction of "deterrent forces," the Third Army and XVIII Corps' forward headquarters, an aviation brigade task force, and troops from the 82d Airborne Division. These forces, along with Marine units, were to establish a deterrent force north of Al Jubayl to secure the points of debarkation at Jubayl, Ad Dammam, and Dhahran and, upon arrival of the Marines, to establish a defense of the Abqaiq oil facilities. The deterrent effect of ground forces would be greatly enhanced, of course, by the simultaneous arrival of air and naval forces. Indeed, in the first month of any deployment, the U.S. and Saudi air threat to extended Iraqi lines of communication was the deterrent.
Phase two of the Third Army deployment was to involve the 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault), the 24th Infantry Division (Mechanized) and the 5th Infantry Division (Mechanized) with their reserve component "roundout" brigades, a brigade of the 9th Infantry Division (Motorized) (then undergoing deactivation), and the 197th Separate Infantry Brigade (Mechanized). Arrival of these heavier forces would permit the establishment of a defense in depth behind Saudi and Gulf Cooperation Council forces to the north along the Saudi border and forward of the ports and oil facilities. Should the enemy attack at this point, the Air Force component (principally Central Command Air Forces [CENTAF]) was assigned to contest the offensive. The Army aviation task force of attack helicopters would link the ground forces with the theater air interdiction program. The brigade of the 9th Division (Motorized) was to be held in theater reserve. Phase three called for a coordinated counteroffensive involving Saudi, U.S. Army, and Marine forces to restore lost territory and facilities.22
In mid-July, Third Army and the other CENTCOM component planners went to Eglin Air Force Base, Florida, to test their plans in Exercise Internal Look.23 Third Army's Internal Look concept of operations also called for a three-phased operation: building up a corps-sized force, defense of critical facilities, and a counteroffensive. Tactical command was to be the province of the commander, XVIII Airborne Corps. Third Army would assemble and sustain the force as the Army component of Central Command. A key assumption was that sustainment in an environment with no developed or prepositioned United States military forces would require maximum host-nation support to succeed. Country RED was portrayed as possessing significant armored forces (around 4,000 tanks), theater ballistic missiles, a strong air force, and a chemical and biological capability.24
Like the Third Army plan, the Internal Look scenario called for an Army force consisting of an attack helicopter brigade task force, the 82d Airborne Division, the 101st Air Assault Division, the 24th Infantry Division (Mechanized) (two brigades), the 197th Separate Infantry Brigade (Mechanized), the brigade from the 9th Division (Motorized), and the 5th Infantry Division (Mechanized) (two brigades). It also assumed the presence, late in the sequence of arriving units, of the 48th Infantry Brigade (Mechanized) and the 256th Infantry Brigade (Mechanized)-both National Guard roundout brigades-to complete the 24th and 5th Divisions. This was a total of seven light brigades (three airborne, three air assault, one motorized) and seven heavy brigades. The scenario assumed prior warning. Dday, the date of attack, was C-day plus 18 (C-day is the date upon which the force would be ordered to deploy). This assumption, in turn, permitted a further assumption, perhaps more tenuous, of the presence in theater on D-day of the corps headquarters, the aviation brigade task force, the airborne division, the 11th Air Defense Brigade, elements of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, and the ARCENT headquarters.25
The Marine Corps forces of Central Command were expected to land and move into a defensive sector along the coast protecting the port of Al Jubayl. Third Army was to defend inland, forward of Ad Dammam, Dhahran, and Abqaiq. The component boundary was located east of An Nuayriyah. The scenario, like the earlier plans, assumed participation of Gulf Cooperation Council members and Royal Saudi Land Forces in their own defense.
During planning, it had become clear to Third Army staff officers that their force was inadequate. The Third Army commander, Lieutenant General John Yeosock, used Exercise Internal Look as an opportunity to make a case with General Schwarzkopf that additional heavy forces and Patriot air defense systems were required to execute the assigned missions. Third Army believed that, although the currently assumed force could get to the theater rapidly and thus provide a credible deterrent (depending on the depth of the intent of the aggressor), it had inadequate armor to deal with the anticipated threat, an inappropriate covering force, and a lack of a counteroffensive capability required to restore any territory lost. Third Army also believed the motorized brigade provided was an inadequate theater reserve.26
While Internal Look took place, General Yeosock had his staff prepare alternative force lists. Option 1 called for a force of ten heavy brigades (three and one-third divisions). It eliminated the airborne and air assault divisions and the separate brigades and portrayed a force of an armored cavalry regiment, three heavy divisions (two mechanized and one armored), and included reserve component roundout brigades. The helicopter brigade task force, now the 6th Cavalry (Air Combat) Brigade, and the air defense brigade were the only Army units in the C+12 force. Such a force would double the armor capability. It would provide an armored cavalry regiment for the covering force and a counteroffensive capability. But it would not allow for rapid deployment and thus would not, by itself, form a strong deterrent in the early days of any crisis 27
A second alternative retained the air assault division as a C+12 force, along with the air defense brigade, to accomplish the deterrence mission. This called for a C+50 force of an armored cavalry regiment, two mechanized divisions, and one armored division-that is, ten heavy and three light brigades. This was the favored option, although it was recognized that sealift would be exceeded at C+40.28 In addition, the Third Army commander used Internal Look to argue for the addition of more Patriot missile units.29 All options required additional fast sealift to accommodate the heavier forces.30 For Schwarzkopf, who was faced with a fixed resource in strategic transport, any increase in the Army's requirements would have to be met by a reduction in some other force's arrival time or a longer period of deployment. In the early hours of a crisis, the premium on the combat potential of tactical air forces would militate against any shift in priorities. Third Army briefers took the results of this exercise to the Department of the Army and briefed the plan only hours before Iraq invaded Kuwait.31
All this effort was not so much evidence of prescience as it was of professional military planners doing their job. It is the business of planning headquarters to anticipate possible threats to national security within their areas of responsibility and to plan to deal with them. Iraq was the greatest potential threat in the region once the Soviets were eliminated as a possible attacker. U.S. interests were genuine and of long standing. It can be argued that the threat of Iraq was always present and had just been countenanced because of the overriding global nature of the U.S.-Soviet rivalry and residual U.S. hostility with Iran.
For six months prior to commitment, the Third Army and XVIII Airborne Corps staffs had thought through the problems involved in the operation they were about to undertake. As a consequence, the Third Army commander had succeeded in convincing the chief of Central Command and the Department of the Army of the requirement for heavier, more lethal, forces and the need to employ the Patriot missile as a theater antitactical ballistic missile system. These decisions were to be justified in the following weeks and months. The studies also pointed out, as the deployment itself would confirm, that available strategic sealift was a significant weakness in the security of the United States' vital interests in the Persian Gulf area.
Notes
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| 2 Executing a Contingency |
Neither Central Command nor Third Army had operational forces assigned to them during normal times. Both operated on reduced establishment, which meant that both were confronted with the need to create expanded headquarters at the same time major forces were being deployed to the theater of operations under their command. Because of the distance from American and European bases and limits on strategic lift, U.S. forces were dependent upon host-nation support from the outset. Arrangements for provision of such support had to be made as troops flowed in. On top of this, because no doctrine existed for Third Army's role, much of what was done had to be made up as the process unfolded. The focus of this chapter is on the actions taken by Third Army to establish itself in theater in the late summer of 1990 the beginning of Operation Desert Shield, the defense of the Arabian Peninsula.
This chapter also assesses the personalities of the men selected to lead the Army's land effort. If the unwritten cultural values or prejudices of the Army are correct, the highly successful war in Southwest Asia was directed by the wrong generals. For the Army, the Gulf War was a tanker's war. Although he had commanded a mechanized division in the United States, General Norman Schwarzkopf was not ordinarily thought of as an authority on armored warfare.1 The commander in chief (CINC) was a light infantryman, respected as an aggressive, indeed, combative leader. He was also known as a boss who "shot messengers," a big man whose leadership style was that of a classic bully, a commander who employed his size as a weapon of intimidation and tolerated neither fools nor honest disagreement gladly. Yet Schwarzkopf was also a leader known for the genuine affection he felt for his soldiers, and there are those who maintain that, in spite of his sometimes brutal treatment of subordinates, in the long run he rarely followed through on threats made in bad temper.
Schwarzkopf was said by retired Air Force General Charles E. ("Chuck") Yeager to have admitted to being put out to pasture when he was sent to CENTCOM as commander in chief.2 That is not an entirely inapt assessment, for whatever planning was done in the 1980s for Persian Gulf contingencies, it would have been hard to find many Army officers who believed a major land war in that area likely. Deployment time for heavy forces was considered an insurmountable problem, although significant efforts were made to address this shortcoming.3 The Army's premier tanker, General Crosbie Saint, a former commander of III Corps at Fort Hood, Texas, had been sent to Europe to command U.S. Army Europe and NATO's Central Army Group in the event of mechanized war breaking out across the Iron Curtain. But that was before the sudden arrival of a "new world order."
Schwarzkopf had been an assistant division commander of the 8th Infantry Division (Mechanized) in Europe and had commanded the 24th Infantry Division (Mechanized) in Georgia, but he had never commanded a large armored force in the field. In 1985, he became the deputy chief of staff for operations (DCSOPS) at the Department of the Army and, thereafter, the commander of I Corps at Fort Lewis. The position of DCSOPS doubtless prepared him for his role as a joint-service commander, but it would have contributed nothing to his practical knowledge of mechanized warfare on a large scale. The I Corps commander commanded a headquarters and various light and Reserve Component forces focused largely on Korea and other Pacific theater contingencies. While commanding the 24th Division, Schwarzkopf had been appointed deputy to the Commander in Chief, Atlantic, during Operation Urgent Fury, the 1983 U.S. invasion of Grenada. No doubt his experiences in that operation instructed many of his decisions as Commander in Chief, Central Command.
In his memoir, Schwarzkopf portrays himself as something of a regional expert at the time he assumed command because he had lived in the region as a boy. It must be remembered, however, that he had last seen the Middle East as a 14-year-old on holidays from school. While he seems to have retained an emotional attraction to the region, one suspects whatever expertise he possessed in 1990 came from hard work done as commander in chief far more than from any earlier practical experience in the area .4
Lieutenant General John Yeosock, the Third Army commander, brought to his job a number of experiences that would be directly relevant to the tasks he would have to perform during the Gulf War. Yeosock was a career armored cavalryman.5 He commanded a squadron of the 3d Armored Cavalry at Fort Bliss, Texas, and the 194th Armored Brigade at Fort Knox. Later, he had been chief of staff, assistant division commander (ADC), and commander of the 1st Cavalry Division at Fort Hood. The division participated in Reforger (Return of Forces to Europe) exercises while he was both ADC and division commander. Yeosock commanded the division at the time General Saint was III Corps commander, and he took part in one of the most ambitious of the Reforger exercises, one in which the III Corps exercised its role as a reinforcing corps to Allied Forces Central Europe. Yeosock's association with Major General William G. Pagonis, Forces Command's J4, whom he would select to be his support command commander, went back to a Reforger exercise in which both officers moved the 1st Cavalry Division to Europe and back. Pagonis was then deputy commander of the 21st Support Command in U.S. Army Europe.
Equally important, Yeosock had served as assistant deputy chief of staff for operations when Schwarzkopf was the DCSOPS. He understood the commander in chiefs personality and guided his behavior accordingly. More to the point, he was generally able to interpret the CINC's temperamental outbursts and able to extract from them the necessary information to get on with the business at hand.
Yeosock, in fact, was an uneasy complement to Schwarzkopf. Where Schwarzkopf was mercurial, forceful, and dynamic, Yeosock was thoughtful, thorough, and circumspect. The commander in chief was sensitive to his prerogatives, a characteristic that assumes clear definition of responsibility and a positivist view of bureaucracy. Yeosock thrived on ambiguity and the indirect approach. He was laconic by nature and his guidance could sometimes be cryptic. However, by not concerning himself with gaining credit, which might have appeared as an infringement on the CINC's business, Yeosock often succeeded in influencing or expanding his operating environment. He also seems to have made it a cardinal rule to disagree with Schwarzkopf only in private and to use his staff officers as stalking horses (what he called, "recon by fire") to feel out the theater commander's views on sensitive issues. This method of dealing with the theater commander was generally successful, perhaps even necessary, given the personalities involved. It may have sometimes disappointed subordinate commanders and staff officers, who would have preferred a more confrontational advocate with the CINC especially since they would not have to carry the hod.
Although Yeosock, as a lieutenant general, was selected to be deputy Forces Command's commander and commander of Third Army, rather than being given command of a corps, he had other qualifications that especially suited him to his Desert Shield-Desert Storm responsibilities. As a former program manager for the Saudi Arabian National Guard (PMSANG), he knew the country, he knew the Saudi armed forces, and, most important, he knew the Saudi civilian and military leadership. Yeosock had experience in desert operations, not just from his tour in Saudi Arabia but also from his period as a squadron commander in the 3d Armored Cavalry Regiment at Fort Bliss; as commander of the 1st Cavalry Division, learning from unit experience at the National Training Center; and as the Third Army commander taking part in various exercises and consultations with regional leaders.6 As deputy commander in chief of Forces Command, Yeosock had a thorough grasp of the capabilities of the Reserve Components and their place in contingency plans, and he knew how the FORSCOM staff itself would respond to the mission to deploy his forces. Finally, Yeosock had conducted the Army's analysis of the Department of Defense plan to downsize the armed forces (The Defense Management Review). Consequently, he probably had more knowledge about Army force structure than most of his peers, knowledge that would be vital to creating a theater-level command and support structure in Saudi Arabia.
Interestingly enough, Yeosock was almost entirely innocent of Army professional schooling. He had attended the Marine Corps Amphibious Warfare School, the Armed Forces Staff College, and the National War College. But if he had missed the Army's institutional fascination with abstract theory and doctrine during the 1980s, he had mastered thoroughly two traditional doctrinal concepts: the commander's estimate by evaluation of METT-T (mission, enemy, terrain and weather, and troops and time available) and the application of the complementary principles of war-mass (concentration) and economy of force. He would use the estimate process throughout Desert Shield and Desert Storm to balance shortand long-term risks involved in the various trade-offs required by political circumstances, changing missions, and the exigencies involved in operating at the end of a long strategic line of communications. He would employ the principle of mass to focus combat power against the enemy's most vital forces. These simple theoretical guides, combined with his practical experience in moving heavy forces, would be more than adequate to the task at hand.
For all that, the cultural value system of the Army held that the plum assignments for lieutenant generals were the two heavy corps in Europe (V and VII), and the III Corps at Fort Hood, Texas. For light soldiers, there were the XVIII Airborne Corps at Fort Bragg and the I Corps at Fort Lewis. Moreover, in 1990, the U.S. Army had no coherent doctrine addressing the roles and missions of an army-level of command. Since Vietnam, the Army had been structured physically and intellectually to go to war as part of a NATO organization in which member nations would contribute national corps to coalition army groups. The corps was the largest national tactical organization. The irony that the Third Army commander had never commanded at the corps level did not escape his principal tactical subordinates, fellow Lieutenant Generals Gary Luck of XVIII Corps and Frederick Franks of VII Corps.
These cultural norms were not eased at all by the nature of Third Army. Third Army, in normal circumstances, was a small planning headquarters of 222 active-duty officers. It was located at Fort McPherson, Georgia, and assigned responsibility for performing the Army planning and exercise duties pertaining to Central Command.7 Sixty-five percent of Third Army's go-to-war logistics structure was in the Reserve Component. A significant part of its internal staff manning consisted of Army Reservists assigned to a local Army Reserve Troop Program Unit located in Atlanta. In fact, of the anticipated wartime headquarters strength of 894 officers and enlisted spaces (it actually reached over 1,000), 376 were Reserve Component, and 167 were not even provided for prior to mobilization.8
The detailed work of running Third Army fell upon the deputy commander, a major general. A colonel served as chief of staff, and fellow colonels as division chiefs. In many cases these were officers at the end of their careers. This contrasted sharply with the staff of XVIII Airborne Corps, which tended to attract hard chargers on their way up.9 Staff officers at XVIII Corps, not infrequently and with no little arrogance, were accustomed to looking down on Third Army as "sleepy hollow," a view that did not facilitate interstaff coordination for going to war.
Third Army often appeared to be an appendix to the larger Forces Command headquarters. Indeed, the army commander served as the deputy commander of Forces Command, and the duties associated with the latter title often took precedence over those of the former. In fact, General Yeosock maintained two offices, and he spent more time in that associated with Forces Command than he did in the one down the street associated with Third Army. FORSCOM commands all continental-U.S.-based tactical forces, including XVIII Airborne Corps and all Reserve Component units. The XVIII Airborne Corps, which quite properly considered itself the Army's premier intervention force, ordinarily dealt directly with Forces Command, and only the preceding December, the corps had acted a8 a joint task force (JTF) and, for a time, as the JTF's Army Forces headquarters as well during Operation Just Cause in Panama.
On 2 August 1990, what had been a speculative exercise two weeks before became a real-life contingency. Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. That same day, the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 660, condemning the invasion and calling for the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of Iraqi forces from Kuwait.
That day, President George Bush delivered a speech to the Aspen Institute in Colorado.10 His address concerned the need to restructure U.S. military forces in response to changes in the global environment, specifically the rapid decline of Soviet power. The president's proposal called for an orderly reduction of U.S. military forces over five years. That plan was about to suffer a temporary interruption. On the 2d, the United States imposed an embargo on Iraq, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff issued an order for deployment of Air Force tanker squadrons and the movement of the USS Independence Carrier Battle Group into the North Arabian Sea.11
On the evening of 4 August, around 1900, John Yeosock was eating dinner at a neighbor's home when he received a telephone call from General Schwarzkopf at MacDill Air Force Base, Florida.12 Schwarzkopf, who had briefed the president at Camp David earlier that day, instructed Yeosock to report to MacDill immediately and indicated that if there were no flights, a plane would be dispatched to pick him up. Yeosock had a few words with General Edwin Burba, commander in chief of Forces Command, followed by a brief meeting with his immediate staff. He then flew to MacDill. He took General Pagonis in tow to help him identify logistic requirements, especially for host-nation support.13 Yeosock expected his absence from Atlanta to be brief. Instead, it would last almost a year and involve assembling an army and fighting a war half the world away. That same day, the European community imposed a trade embargo on Iraq.
The following morning, Schwarzkopf; his J4 (joint logistics staff officer), Major General Dane Starling; J5 (joint operations officer), Rear Admiral Grant A. Sharp; Yeosock; and Lieutenant Colonel Larry Gresham, chief of Third Army's G4 plans, flew to Washington, D.C.14 There, they joined Lieutenant General Charles A. Homer, commander of Central Command Air Forces, CENTAF, and Colonel William Rider, his deputy chief of staff for logistics (DCSLOG). Horner had been called to Washington the previous day to participate in Schwarzkopfs briefing to the president at Camp David.15 Following quick meetings in the Pentagon, these seven officers flew to Saudi Arabia with Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney. They were to be the first contingent of Operation Desert Shield.
On the 5th, global reaction to the invasion of Kuwait continued to grow. Japan suspended oil imports from Iraq. The same day, Forces Command ordered the Army Reserve's 1185th Transportation Terminal Unit (TTU) to the Port of Savannah, where, for the 1185th's annual active duty training exercise, the unit would outload the 24th Infantry Division. It was to be a longer than normal summer camp for members of the 1185th and many other Reserve Component soldiers.16
The secretary of defense and his party arrived in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia on 6 August. Following historic nighttime meetings with the Saudi king in Jedda, during which King Faid requested U.S. assistance in the defense of Saudi Arabia, the secretary and CINC returned to the United States. The six military officers who had accompanied them traveled to Riyadh to begin Operation Desert Shield. That day, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 661, calling for an international embargo on Iraq and occupied Kuwait.
On 7 August, responding to the king's request, President Bush directed the commitment of U.S. military forces to the defense of Saudi Arabia (see map 2). The Joint Staff issued the initial deployment orders for operation Desert Shield. The president announced his decision to the public the following day.17
Conducting a military operation in Saudi Arabia is no simple task. The Arabian Peninsula is a large area, approximately the size of the United States east of the Mississippi. It has almost no modern road or rail network. The countryside consists almost entirely of a variety of desert terrains. There are no continuous rivers. Climatic conditions are extreme, especially in the high summer months during which the Kuwait crisis developed. On the other hand, the country's few urban areas possess a modern commercial infrastructure from which U.S. forces could and would draw support. There were a large number of modem airfields around the country, modern port facilities, especially at Dammam and Jubayl, and a developed system of basic services. Food, fuel, water, a modern (if limited) phone system, and shelter were all available if they could be tapped. Notwithstanding the absence of a developed road network, buses and trucks-particularly line-haul (long-distance tractor-trailer) trucks-were present in abundance. Because of the heavy investment of oil revenues in modernization and the annual need to accommodate the influx of pilgrims to the Islamic holy sites, the Saudi commercial structure was already heavily dependent upon contracting as a way of doing business. This would facilitate the acquisition of large-scale support to sustain U.S. and coalition forces.
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| Map 2. KTO: COMPARISON TO EASTERN UNITED STATES |
The U.S. military, however, possessed no operational infrastructure in the peninsula other than a Military Training Mission (USMTM) and the Office of the Program Manager, Saudi Arabian National Guard, both of which normally trained various parts of the Saudi military. These two groups, at least, provided some additional hands with which the Army and Air Force commanders could begin to build a U.S. military force in theater. As a former program manager for the Saudi National Guard, Yeosock leaned heavily on that office, using Brigadier General James B. Taylor, the incumbent program manager, as his initial interim chief of staff.
Yeosock's concept of Third Army, once deployed, was summed up in his idea that "Third Army is three armies."18 (See figure 1.) As ARCENT (Army, Central Command), it was a service component headquarters for a unified commander. As such, it accomplished coordination with sister services and allied ground forces as the principal U.S. land force. The ARCENT commander exercised command over all Army forces assigned (less operational command for certain specified special operations forces) and advised the theater commander on Army matters. As Third Army, it was a "theater army," the major Department of the Army headquarters in theater. The theater army developed an echeloned force structure to support army and theater requirements for various technical capabilities in accordance with Department of Defense directives and the CINC's guidance. Among these were intelligence, communications, transportation, air defense, logistics, civil affairs, military police, and engineering. Finally, the theater army provided the linkage between Army units in the field, other major Army commands, and the Department of the Army.
The duties of service component and theater army are implicit, that is, they always obtain. In addition, the headquarters had to be able to assume a third role, that of a numbered field army. As a field army, Third Army planned operations, allocated combat power and sustainment resources, synchronized theater-level operating systems, and directed execution within the operational span of control assigned by the theater commander.
This division of these three complementary responsibilities is essentially heuristic; that is, it provides a means to address the various duties assigned to the army commander in such a way as to reflect the differing lines of accountability in terms of the army's several functions. It is important to note, however, that all functions were performed by the same staff under the authority of the army commander, often without any clear idea which "army" was performing at a given time. The army headquarters structure had to be flexible enough to reconfigure according to the functions it was expected to perform. In the case of Third Army, a major staff restructuring took place in November and December 1990 when the headquarters' functions were expanded consequent to the president's decision to create an offensive option.
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| Figure 1. |
The tripartite scheme reflected the division of responsibility within the Department of Defense.19 The various defense reorganization acts since 1947 have retained separate service departments within a unified Defense Department. Service departments have been assigned responsibility for providing organized and equipped forces to theater commanders, whose operational chain of command runs directly to the secretary of defense.20 Service departments have been responsible for the sustainment of their forces in theater, except where otherwise provided for. Service chiefs of staff answer to a service secretary on departmental matters and simultaneously sit as members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a collective body headed by a chairman who is subordinate to the secretary of defense and president.21
The Goldwater-Nichols Act (Defense Reorganization Act of 1986) transferred to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff responsibility and authority formerly vested in the corporate Joint Chiefs. It also provided for a greater role by theater commanders in determining the adequacy and direction of departmental budgeting and wartime theater sustainment. It left intact the departmental structure within the Department of Defense, however, and provided that any disputes that might arise between a theater commander and service departments would be forwarded by the CINC, through the chairman, for resolution by the secretary of defense.22
A major purpose of the Goldwater-Nichols Act was to provide theater commanders full latitude to organize their commands to achieve assigned national objectives. One method that has been used since World War II to respond to small contingencies with limited purposes has been the formation of a joint task force, generally commanded by an officer of the predominant service within a unified command and charged with the conduct of necessary operations. The Just Cause, XVIII Airborne Corps example has already been mentioned. General Schwarzkopf, however, chose to organize his forces generally as service components (see figure 2). That is, his major subordinate commands were Army Central Command, Central Command Air Forces, Marine Central Command (MARCENT), and Navy Central Command (NAVCENT). The exception to this organization was a fifth component, Special Operations Command, Central Command (SOCCENT), which held operational command of selected special operations forces from the separate services.
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| Figure 2. |
Within this general structure, the theater commander might assign executive agency or authority to a single component commander for performance of particular tasks. In this way, the commander of CENTAF was appointed Joint Forces Air Component commander to provide centralized direction to the theater air campaign.23 The Army commander was given responsibility, among other things, to operate common-user seaports during Desert Shield and to exercise directive authority over rear-area terrain management and main supply route (MSR) priorities in the combat zone during Desert Storm.24 The Army commander, in turn, assigned these responsibilities to one of his major subordinate commands, the 22d Support Command. Various grants of authority, or limits thereto, ordinarily went along with this sort of joint service responsibility. Also, within the general framework, forces from one component might he placed under the command of another, as the "Tiger Brigade" (the 1st Brigade of the 2d Armored Division deployed as the third ground maneuver brigade of the 1st Cavalry Division) was placed under operational command of the MARCENT commander for Operation Desert Storm.
The first phase of Operation Desert Shield, which lasted from 7 August 1990 until 8 November, consisted of the deployment of a joint military force to defend American and allied interests against Iraqi aggression, a force of sufficient strength adequate to enforce UN sanctions while defending the Arabian base (see figure 3). The Army's role consisted of building a viable ground combat force and a support structure sufficient to sustain, to various degrees, committed forces of all services. Both the Army combat contingent and theater support structure had to be built from scratch using forces from halfway around the world.
Schwarzkopf returned to Tampa in order to supervise personally the joint deployment. Such actions, however, are inherently decentralized. Senior officers managing each service's deployment are used to acting on their own, and Schwarzkopf found himself losing control. The Air Force, for example, deployed twice the number of F-15 and F-16 squadrons expected at the end of the first week. Thus, wrote Schwarzkopf, the requirements to bring in related support forces "tied up dozens of flights we had allocated for other units."25 The XVIII Airborne Corps, to Schwarzkopfs irritation, led its deployment with an advance corps headquarters at the expense of paratroopers from the corps' 82d Airborne Division.
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| Figure 3. |
Army forces had to be deployed and sustained in a hostile and comparatively undeveloped environment. They were to deter aggression and to defend and restore Saudi territory should the Iraqis attack. This entailed, at the start, creating a crisis action time-phased force deployment list (TPFDL)-a list of units prioritized for movement-to ship the XVIII Airborne Corps' force of four and twothirds division-force equivalents: 82d Airborne Division; 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) plus the 12th Aviation Brigade from Europe; 24th Infantry Division (2 brigades) plus the 197th Infantry Brigade (Separate); 1st Cavalry Division (2 brigades) plus the 1st Brigade, 2d Armored Division (the "Tiger Brigade"); and the 3d Armored Cavalry Regiment, with supporting corps combat support and combat service support elements.26 The commitment of forces also involved designing and deploying an army echelon-above-corps headquarters and the theater support structure appropriate for the conditions obtaining in Southwest Asia.
To complicate the task further, the deployed force in the beginning would have to be built solely from available units of the Regular Army. It would take some time for the president to mobilize the necessary political support to call up and retain the Reserve forces that had always been assumed to make up a major part of Third Army and XVIII Airborne Corps. This political mobilization, which is a remarkable story in itself, took place simultaneously with the initial deployment of Army forces. Yet even when Reserve units were fully manned and equipped, they still required time to be brought into active federal service and prepared for overseas deployment. This further delayed getting them into the theater.
Meanwhile, the force build-up had to proceed. Some deployment requirements could be and were met by Reserve Component units that volunteered or were assigned annual training in support of the active force deployment (like the 1185th TTU). Some Reservists even deployed as individual volunteers to Saudi Arabia. As a consequence, the governing assumptions for the Third Army staff were in a constant state of flux for some time, and essential personnel arrived in theater under a wide variety of legal provisions and service obligations.27
One very positive characteristic of the U.S. military operations in Southwest Asia was the extent to which the Bush administration consistently maintained a clear understanding of both political and military objectives. On 8 August, the president announced the initial deployment of U.S. forces to the Persian Gulf. At that time, he declared four national objectives: (1) to achieve the withdrawal of Iraqi forces from Kuwait, (2) to restore the legitimate government of Kuwait, (3) to defend Saudi Arabia, and (4) to protect American citizens abroad.28 These political goals were translated that same day into three more limited military objectives by Secretary of Defense Cheney and by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Colin Powell. These were (1) to deter further Iraqi aggression, (2) to improve Saudi Arabian military and defensive capabilities, and (3) to defend Saudi Arabia.29 The difference between the two lists reflected the initial reliance on a variety of nonmilitary means to achieve the declared national goals. This pattern of formulating military objectives on the basis of policy announcements was maintained consistently through February 1991. Because such announcements were covered live by television's Cable News Network (CNN), the senior military chain of command could receive the commander in chiefs guidance from the president himself, thus enhancing the coherence of the vision shared by all major commanders in the field.
By the time the initial policy directives had been issued, Yeosock and his small band of Army officers in Saudi Arabia had identified three immediate tasks for Third Army.30 These were (1) to arrange for reception and onward movement of Army, Air Force, and Marine Corps forces (as yet without a host-nation agreement or plan), (2) to get the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to change its traditional way of doing business in order to respond to the urgency of the moment, and (3) to this end, to establish a national-level, integrated warfighting command and staff.31 The first task involved preparing to receive Army and Marine forces and Air Force heavy equipment through sea and aerial ports at Al Jubayl, Dhahran, and Ad Dammam. The last two tasks led Yeosock to create the Coalition Coordination Communication and Integration Center (C3IC) (to be discussed hereafter).
On 8 August, the ARCENT staff was practically doubled, to fiftytwo, with the arrival of an advanced command and control element. ARCENT established itself in the Royal Saudi Land Forces Building, while the CENTCOM staff moved into the Saudi Ministry of Defense. Four more key figures arrived on the 11th: the deputy commanding generals, Brigadier General (later Major General) Robert Frix (Operations) and Major General (later Lieutenant General) William G. ("Gus") Pagonis (Support); Brigadier General James W. Monroe, Army G4; and Colonel Gene Holloway, the G3 plans. Like Pagonis, Frix and Monroe had previous connections with Yeosock. Frix had been Yeosock's chief of staff in the 1st Cavalry Division. Monroe, who like Yeosock had served in Saudi Arabia before (with USMTM), had been G4 of the Third Army before his promotion to brigadier general. Indeed, his family had not yet moved to his new post in Detroit. He simply moved back into his old job at a higher grade.
Jim Monroe, the Third Army logistic staff officer, presented an interesting contrast to Pagonis, the army's logistic executive. Pagonis is short, peripatetic, dynamic, a Greek fighting cock, albeit with a sense of humor that can remind an onlooker of the antihero on the television series "M*A*S*H," Corporal Klinger. Monroe, on the other hand, was a tall, handsome African-American, sober and deliberate, patient and soft-spoken-an excellent counterbalance to his more dynamic opposite number.
Another key member arrived at army headquarters on the 11th, Major General Paul Schwartz. Schwartz, then serving as deputy commander of I Corps at Fort Lewis, Washington, was another former PMSANG. He had been brought in to build the U.S. side of the C3IC, which he would direct, first, for Third Army, then, for Central Command.32 He, like Pagonis, Monroe, and Frix, had been selected by Yeosock almost immediately upon receipt of his own alert. Yeosock knew Schwartz from Fort Hood, where both had been chiefs of staff for neighboring heavy divisions. Schwartz was also the officer who had become PMSANG when, within months of Yeosock's departure from the desert kingdom, his immediate successor did not work out with the Saudis. Schwartz, a tanker, was by disposition and sympathies an ideal choice to work the interalliance staff. He was a patient, low-key and humane man with a perpetual sheepish grin and the patience of Solomon. Most important, he had long experience working in Saudi Arabia and a great respect for Saudi culture. Frix, Pagonis, and Schwartz were Yeosock's principal deputies from the early days of Desert Shield.
The Third Army's forward CP arrived in two echelons on 14 and 23 August, bringing the headquarters to 266 officers and men (see figure 4). These men and women would undertake the twin tasks of creating the instrumentalities of coalition cooperation, organization, procedures, and host-nation support agreements, while performing more traditional echelon-above-corps functions of force generation, sustainment, and coordination with higher and adjacent headquarters.
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| Figure 4. |
A new Third Army G3, Brigadier General (later Major General) Steven Arnold, arrived on 7 September direct from Korea where he had been assistant division commander of the 2d Infantry Division. A general officer G2, Brigadier General John Stewart, was assigned in December.33 These two key officers were not known to Yeosock before their arrival, though each, in his own field, would be essential to the success ultimately enjoyed by ARCENT. The fact that Yeosock was prepared to allow the Army to assign him a G3 and G2 while he took particular care who would serve his logistics and coalition needs probably says a good deal about where the army commander saw the headquarters' immediate problems and how he saw his own role in the developing theater command structure. In the end, he was most fortunate all around in his command team.
In August and September, the immediate tasks at hand included developing an Army component force capable of achieving the assigned military objectives in concert with sister services and alliance forces. Third Army would have to build and deploy a force that could fight on arrival and sustain long-term operations in an environment of strategic lift constraints, as yet limited host-nation support, changing requirements, and acceptance of prudent risk.
The fast and obvious decision, given the immediacy of the threat, was to bow to necessity and deploy combat forces early-especially critical combat multipliers such as aviation units, air defense systems, and antiarmor weapons-in order to buy time should hostilities commence. The experience of Internal Look was useful if not completely satisfying. Internal Look had addressed only combat force requirements. Much of the postexercise work of designing the necessary support structure and identifying speck forces remained to be done. Furthermore, much of the work had to be accomplished manually, as predeployment data had not been entered into the necessary computer data bases.34
The decision to bring in combat forces first was not without cost. It meant that forces in theater would have to maintain themselves under austere conditions for some time and that host-nation support, both donated and contracted, was a sine qua non to sustain the force for the immediate future. This decision was only possible because of the availability of supplies-particularly tentage, food, and ammunitionprepositioned on ships in the Indian Ocean. These prepositioned assets bought the time required to begin the flow of supplies from the host nation and the United States.35 (See figure 5.)
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| Figure 5. |
The overall concept for the deployment of U.S. armed forces, of which Army forces were but a part, was characterized by General Powell on 11 September as consisting of three phases.36 The phasing was designed to integrate the complementary capabilities of each arm, balancing great strategic mobility with staying power. Phase one, intended to provide an immediate deterrent force, consisted of the concentration of deployed naval forces organized around two carrier battle groups, the USS Eisenhower and USS Independence groups, off the Arabian Peninsula; deployment of Air Force air-superiority forces from the 1st Tactical Fighter Wing in the United States; and dispatch of light ground forces.37 As early as 12 August, on the strength of these forces, President Bush directed the Navy to enforce an embargo on Iraqi oil shipments and most imports. On 25 August, the UN Security Council approved the use of force to enforce UN sanctions (Resolution 665). The first U.S. shots had been fired enforcing the naval blockade on 18 August.38 It is important to remember that, throughout Desert Shield and Desert Storm, indeed long after, a naval conflict, separate but related to actions on the ground, was going on in the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea approaches to Iraq and Jordan.
The second phase of the U.S. deployment, which commenced within days, brought in ground-attack aircraft, additional airsuperiority fighters, and various maritime forces, specifically the 7th Marine Expeditionary Brigade (MEB) and, later, the 1st MEB, for which maritime prepositioning ships (MPS), with their heavy equipment and thirty days' supplies, were available in Diego Garcia and Guam.39 The Marines prepositioned M60 main battle tanks-old but still highly effective models-provided the first true U.S. armored ground capability.
The two Marine Corps MPS completed off-loading on 2 and 5 September. The 82d Airborne finished its deployment on 9 September. It was joined by elements of the lead brigade task force of the 101st Airborne Division with its attack helicopters and elements of the 12th Aviation Brigade from Europe. The 101st Aviation Task Force arrived by strategic airlift, notwithstanding the high cost in airframes. This added the potent antiarmor combat power of the All-64 attack helicopters to the deployed light forces. About the same time, the USS Saratoga Carrier Battle Group replaced the USS Eisenhower, and the USS Kennedy deployed to the Mediterranean with a third carrier battle group to support Central Command operations as required.
Finally, in phase three, the heavy ground, air, maritime, and sustainment forces required to ensure a successful defense of Saudi Arabia followed. Fast sealift ships (FSS) carrying the 24th Infantry Division (Mechanized), the Army's first heavy division to deploy, departed Savannah, Georgia, starting on 13 August, a week after the U.S. commitment. The first ship arrived in theater on the 27th.40 (For a comparison between force generation in Desert Shield versus that in Vietnam, see figure 6.) The 4th MEB deployed from Camp Lejeune as a self-contained amphibious force the same day the 24th left Savannah. It arrived by 16 September and presented a continuous amphibious threat to the Iraqi seaward flank. The 24th Division completed its deployment on 25 September with the arrival of the attached 197th Infantry Brigade (Separate).41 The 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) completed its movement on 7 October; the 3d Armored Cavalry Regiment, on 14 October; and the 1st Cavalry Division closed on 25 October.42 These heavy forces provided the theater commander with the capability not only to defend but to counterattack in the increasingly less likely event of an Iraqi offensive against Saudi Arabia.
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| Figure 6. |
The Army's deployment actions had been begun upon President Bush's decision to commit U.S. forces. Staff officers used the Draft ARCENT OPLAN 1002-90 TPFDD (time-phased force and deployment data) created in conjunction with the Internal Look exercise as a starting point (four and two-thirds division force equivalents [DFE] or 253,000 personnel). The task of developing a revised force list was assumed by the Forces Command staff headed by its chief of staff, Major General Pete Taylor. Taylor was the pivotal figure in the force deployment "negotiations," acting as deputy commander in chief of Forces Command when dealing with Central Command, and as ARCENT's deputy commander (Rear) when responding to Third Army.43 As Forces Command's chief of staff, he had visibility over all available U.S. Army active and Reserve Component units. He drove the Forces Command staff and the U.S. Transportation Command (TRANSCOM) to draft various force design alternatives against available transportation assets in order to achieve a reasonably balanced, if austere, C+90 deployed force.44
The assumptions that governed the force design process initially were that the force would have to be capable of fighting on arrival and also of conducting long-term sustained operations.45 This meant the Army package would contain not only combat elements addressed in Internal Look but also a supporting force capable of meeting the specific needs of a mature theater in Southwest Asia. These assumptions had to be modified almost immediately to accommodate delays and limitations on Reserve Component mobilization, limits in strategic lift, and guidance that only minimum-essential forces were to be deployed.
General Powell was quoted as stating, with regard to Reserve Component mobilization, that the principle of minimum-essential force would be exceeded when one soldier got on CNN to complain of not being usefully employed.46 (See figure 7.) This Army concern for the public perception of the legitimacy of any need to mobilize was indicative of the tentative nature of the initial U.S. commitment to military action. It also was clear evidence of the pervasive presence of Ted Turner's revolutionary all-news network. Meanwhile, the political leadership worked to build a positive response on the part of the American people.
Third Army had long based its war plans on the assumption that Reserve Component forces would be available immediately for any large-scale deployment. This was the basis of the Total Force Concept, a plan, attributed to General Creighton Abrams following the Vietnam War, to avoid commitment of active forces without some sort of mobilization of the public.47 The concept was politically attractive, not just to the post-Vietnam-era Army but to a Congress concerned about "Imperial Presidencies." What the plan failed to take into account was the likely delay in mobilization in any case short of outright attack on American forces or territory. Such a delay would be the result of policy makers' proper concern with the full consideration of the available alternatives and public response, as well as the variable readiness of various Reserve (and Regular) Component units. The flaw in the concept was that events might not wait upon the convenience of defense decision makers.
Such was the case in August 1990. Deployment of Regular units was well under way before the president called up the first increment of Reserve Component forces. Had it been politically desirable, deployment of the two affected roundout brigades for the 24th Division and 1st Cavalry Division might have been delayed to the end of the XVIII Corps deployment as anticipated in the Internal Look planning. However, the Department of Defense decided to forgo calling any Army combat units in the first increment of Reserve Component activations.48 It was decided, instead, to use two Regular units more immediately available, and not subject to loss in 90 days (or 180 with an extension), to round out the two two-brigade divisions. Even in the case of combat support and combat service support units that were called, the need for immediate deployment also affected how Third Army structured its own echelon-above-corps forces, particularly the army headquarters and its theater support organization.
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| Figure 7. |
On 15 August, the secretary of defense requested that the president employ his authority to call up the selected Reserves.49 The following day, Pentagon planners prepared advice for the president about the exercise of his authority to activate Reserve forces. Internal Look assumptions had presumed immediate use of the full 200,000-man presidential call-up authority under Title 10, United States Code, Section 673b. The Department of the Army estimated a requirement for 33,772 Reservists by 31 August, assuming combat operations had not begun, and 88,000 if hostilities commenced.50 On 22 August, the president informed the leaders of Congress that he had authorized the secretary of defense to exercise his authority under 673b. On the 23d, Secretary Cheney authorized the Army to order to active duty no more than 25,000 members of the Army Selected Reserve for the purpose of providing combat support and combat service support.51 The other services were also limited in their authority, although these limits may have had as much to do with the rate at which the active services could absorb Reserve soldiers as with any reluctance to mobilize the Reserves in the long term.
In October, concern about "minimum essential force" was ultimately translated into a requirement that theater-deployed force levels not exceed 250,000 (a limit abandoned with introduction of the offensive capability of a second corps in November).52 This limit was borne primarily by the Army, first, because it was the most manpower-intensive service; and second, because it was the largest, last, and slowest deploying component. Thus, the Army offered more opportunities for modification within the deployment sequence. The Army also benefited more from host-nation support, since it was responsible otherwise for providing much of the theater support for all deployed forces.
Initial Army deployment efforts focused on getting the XVIII Corps forces lined up to come into theater. Once that seemed to be on track in early September, attention turned to the echelon-above-corps structure. Some decisions had already been made by that date, among them the decision to form a provisional theater support command rather than to bring in the theater army area command (TAAC) called for in prewar plans. To begin with, there was a lack of sufficient strategic lift to transport the total doctrinal force.53 Starting on 15 August and reporting out on the 26th, Headquarters, Forces Command, produced a revised force structure for a 151,000-man Army force. This was still too large an increment to arrive by C+90, so a second force structure design was forwarded to Saudi Arabia on 4 September. This force called for a ceiling of 142,000, down from 220,000. The creation of this force rested upon a number of assumptions, one being that the new numbers represented "a minimum essential force that hedges toward combat multipliers and accepts risk in selected support functions."54 Heavy combat multipliers, field artillery, air defense artillery, chemical, and combat engineers were retained because of the time involved in their deployment. It was assumed lighter elements, for example intelligence units, could be called forward with dispatch. The corps support command was reduced in this plan to 12,500 from 20,000 and the theater support command to 10,400 from 25,000. Much of the balance was to be made up by host-nation support, the remainder by risk and a less than desirable sustainment and transportation capability. Troops would bear part of the cost involved in an austere desert environment.
General Edwin Barba's personal assessment was that this structure was "a prudent course with acceptable risk." "All must understand though," he continued, "at the first major indicator of an enemy offensive, we must quickly pile on combat service support with air and fast sealift."55 In his reply, General Schwarzkopf seemed to agree. He pointed to the theater's dependence on host-nation support that permitted economies during the deterrent phase but noted that these economies might rapidly disappear should hostilities break out-especially given the Saudi dependence on third nation workers and contractors.56
Whatever his fears, Schwarzkopf in early October established a ceiling on Army end strength at 140,000.57 Certain shortcomings, which became evident after the November build-up decision, and which were criticized after the fact, are understandable only when considered under the terms of reference in which the original tradeoffs were made. In August and September, the mission assigned Third Army was to create a force capable of deterrence and defense and to do so with the minimum essential forces under a ceiling fixed largely by limits on strategic transport capability. A defensive force requires a comparatively small logistic base and, in particular, shorter logistic land legs than a mechanized and aerial force designed for offensive operations. It also requires a less robust intelligence structure, since most of the ground to be fought over is in one's own hands.
In early October, General Yeosock reported to General Carl Vuono, Army Chief of Staff, and Michael Stone, Secretary of the Army, that Third Army headquarters had only 346 of the anticipated 825 officers and enlisted personnel called for by the table of organization and equipment. (See figure 8.) The Army force had been reduced to 141,000 troops to be deployed, with 49,000 on call against contingencies. The formations-above-division to division force ratio was 1:1, compared to a design ratio of 2:1 in a mature theater. All this had been done by a combination of accepting prudent risk, by trading off housekeeping and base support activities (thus increasing soldier austerity), and by using direct and contracted host-nation support- particularly for water, fuel, and transportation-and other "work arounds" like reliance on out-of-theater depot maintenance support.58 Among the limitations thus accepted was a force that was essentially not deployable out of its coastal sector-a condition acceptable so long as the mission was deterrence and defense but one that would defer a transportation and infrastructure cost if higher powers wanted to use the forces already deployed to do something else.
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| Figure 8. |
In November, Third Army would be called upon not only to bring on a second corps but to make up for legitimate economies accepted in the fall for quite understandable reasons. Third Army also had to create a significantly different type of echelon-above-corps structure, one for which the Army as a whole had not had to prepare when the principal design contingency was a NATO or Korean defense. It had to re-create itself into an army designed for an operational and strategic offensive.
Meanwhile, the army-level logistic organization designed to back up the corps support command and sustain echelon-above-corps units could be, and was, reduced to some extent by charging many of its duties to the already austere corps support command.59 Some theater support structure was still required to operate ports of debarkation and to perform the theater army functions of operating the theater communications zone, integrating host-nation support, and supporting other services according to various Department of Defense directives. Third Army headquarters bore much of the burden of coordinating directly with the host government for host-nation support. The idea that XVIII Corps could have simply picked up the echelon-above-corps functions and dispensed with the army-level headquarters while giving full attention to operational matters does not seem realistic, even in the circumstances of Desert Shield.60
Most of the structural cuts accepted in the fall were borne in the sustainment area by limitations on the introduction of intermediate headquarters for echelons-above-corps functional commands and by combining theater-level and corps functions where possible.61 From 15 August until 9 October, the ARCENT force structure was in a constant state of flux as guidance on minimum essential force deployment, authority to mobilize Reserve Components, and strategic lift constraints were all balanced against a notional C +90 force.
It was known at the outset that much of the absent support structure could be compensated for by host-nation support, but the ability of the host nation to supply support, or perhaps more important, the limits on this ability, was by no means immediately apparent to either Third Army planners or the host-nation government. No structure existed to tap it. This meant that such assumptions, cast into the force design process, carried a certain amount of risk, particularly given lead times required to acquire and deploy various specialist units.
General Yeosock designed his own echelon of command according to some basic principles.62 First, he recognized the need to emphasize the early introduction of combat forces. Accepting implicitly the risk of diminished capacity, he brought in army-level units only at the last minute in order to ensure they were present when he absolutely required them and not a minute sooner. Second, he decided to minimize the creation of army-level functional commands (with their resultant layering of staffs) by providing that, so long as possible, army-level units would be commanded by his deputy commanding generals, using the Third Army staff. Functional commands would be established only when the task at hand exceeded in complexity the ability of the DCGs to perform this function. Even then, Yeosock would resist introducing general officer commanders and their associated staffs unless absolutely necessary. He recognized that those functions that were for the most part internal to the army echelon could often be performed adequately by incumbents already on the ground. For example, Colonel Chuck Sutten, commander of the 11th Signal Brigade, was given a much reduced functional command staff-part of the normal 6th Signal Command-and made its commander. A similar arrangement was made with the Medical Command (MEDCOM), with Colonel (Dr.) D. G. Tsoulos serving as both ARCENT surgeon and MEDCOM commander. (See figure 9.)
General Pagonis, as deputy commanding general (logistics), established an ARCENT forward headquarters at Dhahran. Initially, the executive functions of theater sustainment were performed under Pagonis' direction by the 7th Transportation Group, commanded by Colonel Dave Whaley, and a Provisional Area Support Group established in Dhahran.63 Pagonis remained a deputy commanding general and assumed command of a provisional, later, the 22d Support Command, on 19 August, when the logistic structure grew beyond that capable of direction by the combined organization. Upon giving up command of his group, Whaley moved to the Support Command (Provisional) staff as an assistant commander, there to perform the role doctrinally assigned to a commander of a theater transportation command. (See figure 10.)
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| Figure 9. |
There was another reason to operate this way. In the absence of a Status of Forces Agreement and facilities utilization agreements, numerous individual understandings had to be achieved immediately with the host-nation authorities and local contractors just to introduce U.S. forces. Most agreements were made on-site and as personal undertakings. It was not until 17 October that the Department of Defense dispatched a team to negotiate a variety of host-nation support agreements, principally for fuel, water, food, transportation, and shelter.64 Officers of the Support Command had been making agreements and receiving extensive support almost since arrival. Meanwhile, it was essential that personnel changes be kept to a minimum to ensure the continuity of these agreements. A theater support agency had been necessary as soon as forces began to enter the theater, and one was put together on an ad hoc basis under the pressures of the moment_ By the time limited authority existed to call up Reservists, a nascent theater support structure was already in place.65
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| Figure 10. |
The first Central Command operations order was issued on 10 August.66 The order identified a ground threat of five Iraqi divisions in Kuwait. The mission statement provided that "USCENTCOM forces will deploy to the area of operations and take actions in concert with host-nation forces, friendly regional forces, and other allies to defend against an Iraqi attack into Saudi Arabia and be prepared to conduct other operations as directed."67 The plan called for a three-phase operation, Phase I called for deployment to deter an Iraqi attack, the conduct of combined training, preparations for defense, and exercises with allied forces in theater. Phase II, which would occur if deterrence failed, involved the defense of the Arabian Peninsula against Iraqi attack, with particular regard to the critical air and sea ports at Al Jubayl, Ad Dammam, and Dhahran. Phase III provided for a counterattack to restore the integrity of the Saudi border. The order indicated that Central Command forces would remain organized as components, the single major exception being SOCCENT, under whose operational control the service components would place certain of their special warfare forces. This reservation of operational command of special operations forces (SOF) to theater level was a normal doctrinal practice reflecting the strategic nature of many SOF actions.
The Central Command Army component was to deploy designated subordinate forces in order to support or implement deterrent measures as required, to be prepared to defend the critical oil and port facilities in the vicinity of Dhahran, to attrit and delay advanced enemy forces as far forward as possible, and when directed, to redeploy and defend in sector to protect the critical petroleum facilities in the vicinity of Abqaiq.68 Other selected taskings involved commanding (less operational control) selected Army special operations forces (psychological operations and civil affairs forces excepted); conducting psychological and civil affairs operations; acting as Central Command executive agent for civil affairs and as coordinating authority for military psychological operations to include joint planning; operating common user seaports; providing combat support and combat service support in accordance with interservice agreements; conducting enemy prisoner of war operations; and supporting noncombatant evacuation operations as required. ARCENT was also to provide a brigade-sized theater reserve by C+55 and be prepared to conduct counteroffensive operations to restore the integrity of Saudi Arabian territory.
ARCENT Operations Order (OPORD) 001 was issued on 22 August and generally followed the CENTCOM order and the Internal Look concept of operations.69 Two more Desert Shield operations orders would be issued by ARCENT: 002 in October and 003 in December.70 Each reflected a new stage in the development of U.S. capabilities. The first was directed at covering the initial force deployment and reflected the paucity of forces that would exist for some time. The October order reflected a more robust force after the deployment of the XVIII Airborne Corps. OPORD 003 incorporated VII Corps into the defensive scheme following the president's 8 November announcement of the corps deployment.
OPORD 001 envisioned an enclave defense behind the Saudi and Gulf Cooperation Council forces that were securing key port facilities. The main purpose of the defense was deterrence. OPORD 002 provided for a defense-in-depth as heavy forces arrived. ARCENT would assume a zone alongside a MARCENT force, in a position behind the ArabIslamic Forces and forward of the ports and oil facilities at Abqaiq. The XVIII Airborne Corps was to screen forward with the 101st Air Assault Division and the 3d Armored Cavalry Regiment and defend in-depth with the 24th Infantry Division and 1st Cavalry Divisions abreast, while the 82d Airborne Division secured the port and oil facilities.71 (See map 3.) Contingency plans for the defense of Riyadh were added to the base plan. The VII Corps Desert Shield Order (003) called for a defense by two corps abreast and referred only vaguely to follow-on operations. (Desert Storm planning was taking place separately but simultaneously.)
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| Map 3. |
All the while, the U.S. build-up had progressed steadily. Army forces had begun to deploy to Saudi Arabia on 8 August. The first troops to arrive had been the forward command post of the XVIII Airborne Corps, which arrived at Dhahran on the 9th, with troops from the division ready brigade of the 82d Airborne Division.72 The rapid deployment of these lightly armed troops, while risky in terms of effective fighting power against a heavily armored force, enabled the United States to make a clear demonstration of national intent in the hope that Iraq would be deterred from any further advance to the south. The first plane was guided to its parking slot by the ARCENT commander himself, as there was no existing base structure to receive them. These Army ground forces were accompanied and followed by significant air, naval, and Marine forces.
In August, all Third Army efforts had been directed toward the build-up of a viable combat force under command of the XVIII Airborne Corps. The Third Army commander saw his principal task as the generation and sustainment of forces with which the corps would fight any subsequent battle. The 82d Airborne Division continued to deploy forces through Dhahran and, on 12 August, established a forward operational base at Al Jubayl, the port through which the Marine forces would enter the theater. Army-level units also began to arrive.
On 14 August, the 2d Brigade of the 82d Airborne Division (the division ready brigade) completed its deployment. It was accompanied by one battalion of AH-64 attack helicopters from the 82d Aviation Brigade, which had become operational the day before. The same day, the commander of the 11th Signal Brigade entered the theater and began to establish a theater army communications network utilizing both Saudi commercial nets and Army systems. The 11th Air Defense Brigade began to introduce the Patriot batteries that would prove so vital to theater air defense or at least to a sense of security in the face of Iraqi missile attacks. The first two batteries arrived on 17 August, the same day the first elements of a 141st Airborne Division Aviation Task Force and the 24th Infantry Division's advanced elements came into theater.
Although the build-up seemed slow at the time, apparently it was not without effect. On 19 August, intelligence sources remarked that the Iraqis had begun building barriers across the Saudi-Kuwait border.73 In retrospect, this was probably the first clear indication that Iraq's intention was to hold what it had seized rather than continue to the south. (A less-clear indicator would have been the Iraqi preoccupation with securing Kuwait City in early August rather than proceeding directly into Saudi Arabia.) On the 22d, President Bush authorized a call-up of Reserves. On 24 August, the Third Army's nightly situation report (SITREP) contained its most optimistic assessment to date, reporting: "ARCENT NOW HAS A POTENT COMBAT FORCE WITH ALMOST A FULL ABN DIV, TWO BNS OF ATK AND THEIR SLICE OF CS AND CSS.. . . SITUATION IMPROVES SLIGHTLY EACH DAY.... AS OF TODAY, WE ARE CONFIDENT IN OUR ABILITY TO DETECT AND PUNISH A MAJOR ARMORED ATTACK."74
The following day, MARCENT was able to assume the security mission for Al Jubayl. By 28 August, the first heavy equipment of the 24th Infantry Division had begun to arrive. (The sea voyage could last from fourteen to twenty-five days.) On the 30th, the commander's SITREP reported, as it would more or less until the beginning of Desert Storm: "COMMANDER'S INTENT IS TO BE PREPARED TO FIGHT A COMBINED/JOINT BATTLE AT NIGHT WITH GIVEN FORCES, TRANSITION FROM ENCLAVE DEFENSE TO DEFENSE IN SECTOR, BUILD COMBAT POWER, IDENTIFY, SECURE, AND ESTABLISH BASES AND MSRS TO SUPPORT FUTURE OPERATIONS AND MAXIMIZE SECURITY AND SAFETY OF THE FORCE."75
By 31 August (C+24), the Iraqi force was estimated to be fifteen heavy and nine light brigades.76 These forces were confronted along the Saudi border by a growing Arab force backed up by an American force of three infantry brigades, two attack helicopter battalions, elements of a Sheridan battalion (Sheridans are tracked, light-armored vehicles, not considered to be tanks), and division artillery. Two Ml tank battalions and one mechanized infantry battalion were in-country but not yet ready for action. When the Marine forces were included, 602 (land) antiarmor systems were available to Schwarzkopf. U.S. aircraft strength in theater was 106 air-to-air, 204 air-to-ground, and 214 dual-role aircraft, for a total of 524 combat aircraft.77 These air assets obviously formed the main deterrent against land attack until the arrival of substantial heavy land forces.
It would be 30 October before XVIII Corps could report its entire force list assembled in theater, but the intervening time was busy. In early September, Schwarzkopf issued guidance for combined training with Saudi allies.78 On 10 September, the Third Army commander acknowledged three missions: force generation, defense, and training. As a consequence, on the 13th, ARCENT began to look at expansion of its headquarters staff to an organization more closely resembling a major army command, which it was rapidly becoming in light of administrative and training tasks not envisioned by the peacetime TOE. These discussions were highly academic in light of force ceilings then being developed.
On 14 September, Schwarzkopf instructed Third Army, whose defensive sector had heretofore run east of Riyadh, to develop a contingency plan for the capital's defense. On the 24th, the 24th Infantry Division's equipment had all arrived, followed soon after by the 3d Armored Cavalry Regiment's. The First Cavalry Division's equipment began to arrive on 5 October.
Divisions moved through the ports and began to take up positions in the army defensive zone. They were confronted with the triple tasks of acclimatization-learning to live in 120 degree (or hotter) temperatures in the harsh desert environment, building a base structure, albeit austere, and training for the coming clash, be it defensive or offensive. In so doing, they had to confront a number of challenges, not all environmental. Early on, there was little or no training ammunition, and it would not do to fire up the basic load. As a sea line of communication was established, it was possible to get training ammunition, but units found that in recent years, ammunition sections of unit staffs had become part of the installation structure in the United States. The positions had been civilianized to save military force structure, as had range activities. Consequently, units had to learn not only how to obtain range areas in Saudi Arabia but how to run them.79
Simultaneously with creating the Army component of a viable deterrent, then defensive force, it was necessary to develop the instrumentalities of a coalition command, both to achieve unity of effort in any ground combat and, of more immediate importance, to provide points of access through which to address issues such as hostnation support. Doing this, largely without instructions or authority, may well constitute General Yeosock's principal contribution to Desert Shield, along with his detailed work creating the Army force structure.80 Yeosock undertook the task almost at once, creating the Coalition Coordination Communication Integration Center (C3IC).
Why did the Army create the C3IC rather than headquarters Central Command? It did so largely because Yeosock realized that during operations in an allied state, ground forces bear a unique burden. They must occupy, train, and operate on land that belongs to another nation. They must do so without undermining the legitimacy of the host government whose continued security is the reason for their presence in the first place. For that reason and because ground forces are the most socially and culturally intrusive, the predominant land force commander, normally the Army component commander, must expect to be responsible for much of the practical U.S.-host-nation military intercourse. This is especially true where no system of allied agreements preexists at the onset of military operations.
Yeosock did not believe the Army component was relieved of this inherent responsibility by the presence of a theater commander. The problem is simply overwhelming in its detail and magnitude and must be accomplished within general theater guidelines by those executive agents who know the scope and detail of what must be done. In early August, Schwarzkopf was in Tampa. Yeosock was on the ground trying to get his forces established in the peninsula, as was General Horner who, incidently, was the deputy commander in chief, forward. Yeosock could not wait for the CENTCOM staff to begin building a coalition command structure when he had troops in the air almost immediately. He saw what needed doing, he did it, and it worked. Schwarzkopf underwrote it, once it was done, and ultimately took the organization into his own headquarters.
Unlike NATO or even Korea, this new coalition was starting from scratch to develop those organizations and procedures, not to mention provision for essential host-nation logistic support, that would guarantee unity of effort. As an old Saudi hand, Yeosock was aware of the difficulties involved in obtaining a quick decision in a society governed by a monarch, where the power of decision was highly centralized and family-based, and inaction was often the key to political survival. Yeosock was aware that U.S. forces would be heavily dependent on a responsive host-nation support system just to get ashore and survive and that the traditional methods would not be responsive enough to meet the demands soon to be placed upon them. However, whatever instrumentalities were established, it was essential that Saudi authority not be undermined by an appearance of U.S. domination. Respect for the authority of the host nation had to remain a central element of any solution.
In the same way, as a former PMSANG, Yeosock was aware of the professional strengths and limitations of the Saudi land forces, a dual military (the Royal Saudi Land Forces and Saudi National Guard) consisting of brigade-sized units distributed geographically. He recognized the need to improve the Saudis' professional competence without slighting their political and cultural sensitivities. To this end, he devoted considerable effort to the development of the C3IC. This combined body was established on 13 August under the authority of the Joint Military Committee, the organ created to achieve unity of effort between the Saudi and American militaries while maintaining the independence of both.81 (See figure 11.)
On the Saudi side, the C3IC was headed by Lieutenant General Khalid, the son of the minister of defense and a member of the royal family. Each of the Saudi and American principals had a deputy. The first Saudi deputy was Major General Abdul Aziz Al Sheik, who played a particularly important role in negotiating host-nation support. As the responsibilities of these officers increased with the growth of the Arab-Islamic Coalition Joint Forces Command, the Saudis appointed a succession of general officers to represent the Joint Forces Command in the C31C. As indicated previously, Yeosock's deputy in C31C was Major General Paul Schwartz. Schwartz was appointed vice deputy commanding general of Third Army, a title selected by Yeosock so that, on the one hand, no one on the American side would be quite sure what he did and, on the other, because the Saudis particularly respected the title qualifier "Vice. "82
The C31C was the principal interface organization between the Americans and Saudis. In December, Central Command assumed direct control of C31C, taking Schwartz along with it. The C3IC was successful in becoming a forum through which the U.S. side could work a variety of coalition issues more rapidly than they could have done otherwise. By placing the Third Army planning staff in the C31C (until its transfer in December), it also served as a model, by example, for the Saudi staff officers and, through "leadership by question," got the Saudis to do a sort of combined planning they might not have done otherwise. For Schwartz, the most important function of the C31C was to act as a "reduction gear," to prevent "type A" American hard chargers from overwhelming the less compulsive Saudis.83
The location of the Third Army plans section in the Ministry of Defense building with the C31C organization had mixed results. Aside from facilitating communication and coordination among coalition ground forces and stimulating and guiding much of the Saudi planning, it also permitted close coordination with the Central Command planners who were likewise located in the Ministry of Defense.84 On the negative side, it separated the G3 Plans Section from the Third Army G3, who was located with the army headquarters in the Royal Saudi Land Forces headquarters some distance away. Since the G3, General Arnold, was new and had not learned to look for Colonel Gene Holloway as his principal planner, and since Holloway was effectively General Schwartz s chief of staff at C31C, some internal stresses and delays in decision making resulted.
C3IC did not become an integrated headquarters as, perhaps, the U.S. side would have preferred, but it did allow combined staffing of issues of mutual interest, most particularly combined fire support and joint recognition procedures. It also provided a point of entry to develop host-nation support agreements.
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| Figure 11. Coalition coordination structure in Operation Desert Shield |
In November 1990, Schwartz summarized the C3IC's accomplishments. 85 As its greatest achievement, he singled out orienting the Saudi staff to the operational processes used by U.S. forces. He noted that U.S. members brought to the task at hand a knowledge of multicorps operations. The Saudis could provide information about local terrain and operating constraints. Moreover, he observed that the process of professional interaction had a value in itself, referring to the C3IC as a "24 hour a day model classroom on how to establish and maintain an operations center."86 The C3IC served as a conduit to the Saudi Joint Staff and spawned such vital forums as the Joint Forces Support Committee, where the army G4, Brigadier General James Monroe, could address host-nation support issues. If the organization did not meet staff college principles for unity of command, it was particularly well adapted to dealing with the complexity of Saudi politics and society.
Also among the most important activities undertaken early in Desert Shield was the force modernization of selected units. This complex procedure, involving replacement of older, less capable equipment with more modern, improved models, or introducing wholly new equipment into the force, could not be done without ensuring its costs did not exceed its benefits. Force modernization normally requires that soldiers be retrained to use new equipment; thus, it demands some time during which the unit is less than fully combat ready. More important in this case was the requirement for transportation, both intertheater and intratheater, a cost that could be very high in circumstances where transportation assets were always at a premium. In a theater where every HET was precious, as many as forty-four could be required each day to transfer modernization equipment. The whole process had to be managed closely. The commander's intent was to "field fully employable systems that contribute substantially to combat capabilities and require a minimal train-up."87
Interestingly enough, the first system brought in proved to be one of the least difficult to move or assimilate, and its contribution was decisive. Indeed, Yeosock was to call its introduction one of three keys to success.88 The system was the small lightweight global positioning system receiver, a hand-held or vehicular-mounted device that tells the user where he is in the featureless desert. It was these devices and other comparable global positioning systems (GPSs) that made possible the decisive and simultaneous maneuver in formation of five armored divisions and an armored cavalry regiment during Desert Storm. Global positioning systems were also absolutely essential to maintaining accurate indirect fire in the fast-moving mechanized attack.
SLUGR and similar but less expensive (and less capable) longrange, very-low-frequency navigation systems (LORAN) were purchased "off the shelf" Introduction of SLUGR was requested by Lieutenant General Gary Luck, the commander of XVIII Airborne Corps, who had used the devices during Operation Just Cause.89 Purchase of a limited supply of GPSs for contingency operations had been discussed at the Department of the Army as recently as 1 August. The first Desert Shield-Desert Storm purchase was authorized by Major General Jerome Granrud, the ADCSOPS for force development, as early as 24 August 1990. Consequently, 7,509 GPSs were issued in theater, down to maneuver platoons and artillery batteries.
In addition to GPSs, by the beginning of the ground attack in February, seventeen battalions/squadrons had been reequipped with new MlAl tanks, the first taken from European stocks on 24 October for delivery to XVIII Corps units in November. The first major item of equipment issued in theater was the AH-1F helicopter, which arrived for the 3d ACR on 22 October. Prior to Desert Storm, thirteen battalion sets of countermine equipment were issued along with forty-three combat engineer vehicles (CEVs) mine rakes (eight were loaned to the Egyptians). Eleven battalions/squadrons received M2A2/M3A2 Bradley fighting vehicles. Ninty-nine M9 Armored Engineer vehicles also were issued. In addition, 1,802 M939A2 five-ton trucks, 2,642 HMMW Vs (including 50 or so "borrowed" by the Marines at Dhahran), sixty-one AH-lFs, and thirty-two UH-60Ls were brought into the force.90
Aside from improving troop confidence and effectiveness, force modernization also introduced greater mechanical reliability, a major contributor to operational success. That these systems came from throughout the Army, from all theaters, indicates the support the entire Army gave to Operation Desert Shield-Desert Storm.
Sometimes, the introduction of new systems also contributed to global efforts not immediately associated with actions in the Persian Gulf. Introduction of the M1A1 tanks is a case in point. The introduction of MlAls involved Army Materiel Command project managers, Europe's 7th Army Training Command New Equipment Training Teams, and much departmental and ARCENT staff coordination.91 Since the tanks came from Europe, their arrival enhanced the rate of mutual disarmament on the NATO Central Front while contributing to combat effectiveness in Saudi Arabia. The ARCENT commander's ability to tap into Army equipment stocks around the world is perhaps the most vivid example of what a component commander can do for the theater commander in his "departmental" as opposed to `joint" role.
As C+90 approached, Army forces in Saudi Arabia were completing their deployment. The naval embargo was in place, and Saddam Hussein was digging in in Kuwait. Toward the end of October, unmistakable signs appeared that the American administration had no intention of allowing a long-term stalemate to take hold.
Notes
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| 3 Planning a Ground Offensive I: The CINC's Study Group |
The popular view of the Persian Gulf War, at least in the Army, is that it was a war of maneuver. It was nothing of the sort, at least not if "maneuver" is viewed as the psychological undermining of an enemy by movement alone. Viewed from the theater level, Desert Storm was a war of attrition based upon air power. Coalition air forces disrupted the Iraqi national command and control structure, won air supremacy (unopposed freedom of action in the air) early, and then prepared the theater of operations through a program of continuous bombing. Some still believe air power worked so well that the ground operation only reaped the effects achieved from the air, effects which, given a week or two more, would have led to an Iraqi withdrawal without a ground attack at all.1
The ground attack was ultimately a necessary but clearly dependent and contingent part of the theater campaign plan. Time was running out. As the holy month of Ramadan approached (starting 15 March), to be followed by the end of the cool season and the heat of the Arabian summer, the impasse with Iraq had to be broken.2 Looking ahead, it was becoming increasingly impossible to gamble that air power would compel Saddam's withdrawal without ground action to force the pace.
Nonetheless, the ground offensive was seen to depend absolutely upon the air arm's success in achieving air supremacy. This dominance would free the ground forces to reposition to the west, build up the massive supply bases required for mechanized warfare, and concentrate for attack without interference. Ground commanders from General Schwarzkopf to the lowest armored battalion commander believed that success on the ground depended on the Air Force inflicting significant destruction upon enemy ground forces, particularly the artillery and armored reserves who were believed to outnumber coalition forces greatly and to be well armed and capable of tough resistance. Most analysts assumed Iraq would employ chemical weapons, particularly once threatened with defeat.
Army commanders did not doubt that the execution of a ground attack would be necessary at some point, first, to drive dug-in enemy formations above ground so that they would be subject to destruction by both ground and air attack; second, because liberation of Kuwait ultimately required taking possession of territory-Kuwait itself, as the primary mission, and southeastern Iraq, to ensure negotiations. The ground offensive was planned and conducted in accordance with the Army's AirLand Battle doctrine. Developed during the decade following the U.S. defeat in Vietnam, Air-Land Battle doctrine is an application of classic twentieth-century maneuver theory for mechanized forces.
Since the attack on the Somme in World War I, ground maneuver commanders have tended to discount the disruptive effects of fire, even though it forms the basis of any army's minor tactics. They prefer to think of operational maneuver, in which fire plays a subordinate and supporting role as the key to unlocking enemy defenses. Indeed, two competing views of modern mechanized warfare might be characterized loosely as the romantic and the realist. The romantic view is often associated with B. H. Liddell Hart and his concept of the indirect approach. This view emphasizes dislocation of the enemy as the objective of maneuver. Indirection and speed of execution are the means. These hold out the ideal of so upsetting the enemy by operational movement that no tactical engagement at all is required to bring about the foe's destruction.3 For Liddell Hart, the characteristic maneuver of the indirect approach in ground warfare was the turning movement, with the hope that seizure of position alone might cause the enemy to surrender or at least force him to battle where the operational attacker had the advantage of the tactical defense.
The realist's view of armored warfare was based upon the more Jominian tradition of achieving victory by the successive destruction of fractions of the enemy's force by masses of one's own. Best articulated in the works of J. F. C. Fuller, the benefit of mechanization had to do largely with the ability of mechanical transport to concentrate forces rapidly against more vulnerable and more decisive rear areas before an enemy could react to the traditional rear attack.4 For Fuller, battle, albeit on favorable terms, was the necessary end of maneuver; dislocation was but a means to a tactical end. In Fuller's view, speed of execution is a more relational concept because it is measured against the enemy's ability to respond before decision is reached, rather than on the psychological effect achieved. For Fuller, the envelopment was the more productive maneuver.
The Army's AirLand Battle doctrine, as articulated in FM 100-5, Operations (May 1986), reflected both views. The defining passage maintained that
The object of all operations is to impose our will upon the enemy.... To do this we must throw the enemy off balance with a powerful blow from an unexpected direction, follow-up rapidly to prevent his recovery and continue operations aggressively to achieve the higher commander's goals. The best results are obtained when powerful blows are struck against critical units or areas whose loss will degrade the coherence of enemy operations in depth.5
AirLand Battle doctrine assumed the synergistic employment of Air Force ground-attack systems both in support of the close (directfire) battle and in depth, interdicting enemy forces not yet engaged by ground forces or withdrawing beyond their reach. The doctrine assumed, implicitly, possession of air superiority.
These ideas formed the theoretical context within which plans were drawn up for the ground portion of Operation Desert Storm. Although the aerial isolation of the operational area south of the Euphrates, and the deep envelopment of the Iraqi front-line forces through the Iraqi desert, employed elements of indirection, Schwarzkopf placed himself ultimately in the realist camp by his selection of the Iraqi operational reserves, particularly the Republican Guard, as the focus of his attentions. Destruction of the Iraqi armored forces was part of his strategic and operational program. In fact, his analysis of his mission required it.6 His hopes for the success of the attrition-ground preparation phase of the air campaign-to "open the window for initiating ground offensive operations by confusing and terrorizing Iraqi forces in the KTO and shifting combat force ratios in favor of friendly forces"7-indicate he was also no stranger to the value of dislocation, though his faith rested in fire more than maneuver.
A most important feature of planning for Desert Storm ground operations was the extent to which commanders themselves were involved in all key decisions. The plan itself had a hundred fathers, but no decision of consequence was taken except by the senior commanders. Therefore, some key events in the evolution of the plan must be set forth at the outset. The first was the theater commander's briefing to his commanders on 14 November. From that time on, what had been a closely controlled planning process grew horizontally and vertically in an environment in which each commander, from division level and above, had heard the general concept of operations from Schwarzkopf himself.
From the November briefing to early January, there were a number of key back-briefings-from the corps to Third Army, from Third Army to the theater commander, and on 20 December, to the secretary of defense and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff-on the status of theater preparations for offensive action.
During the last week of December, Third Army held a map exercise (MAPEX) in Eskan Village, near Riyadh, attended by senior Army commanders and representatives of the other U.S. service components. This event provided the opportunity for the senior Army commanders and their staffs to work out the details of their plans. The staffs addressed those details that could be resolved and identified those that could not. After the formal sessions, the two corps commanders, the Support Command commander, and the Third Army commander retired to a conference room alone. There, closing discussions took place on the ARCENT concept of operations.
The MAPEX was followed by briefings to Schwarzkopf on 4 and 8 January. Schwarzkopf seemed to have misgivings but then renewed his confidence in the plan of attack. A final "commanders' huddle" was held by the Third Army commander on 1 February, then the secretary of defense and chairman were briefed again on the 9th. Subsequently, only decisions involving matters of detail and execution remained to be made, most contingent on the outcome of initial combat actions. These conferences and briefings constituted the major turning points in the planning process. Each marked a new advance in the evolution of the plan that led to the victory in Desert Storm.
The planning process for ground operations began in mid-September 1990. Central Command campaign planning had begun even earlier while the deployment of U.S. forces was still in its first days. Because the allied air forces (reinforced by U.S. Navy and Marine air wings) provided the first offensive capability available to the alliance high command, an offensive air campaign was planned almost at once and largely independent of consideration of any specific ground operations that might follow. Much of this planning was done by the U.S. Air Force staff in Washington and then adapted by CENTAF.8 The theater campaign plan ultimately grafted a ground operation plan onto the existing air plan because the latter continued to be an appropriate-indeed necessary-way to proceed with the employment of available coalition air power. Targeting in the Kuwaiti Theater of Operations (KTO), to be sure, would be affected at some point by the details of the ground operation, but the air component's "major muscle movements" remained constant.
According to his memoir, Schwarzkopf came under pressure from Washington to develop a concept for a ground offensive to free Kuwait almost upon initiation of the Desert Shield defensive deployment.9 He resisted the pressure because he was convinced that the force he had just begun to deploy was both inadequate to the task and configured only for defense. The pressure continued intermittently, though Schwarzkopf seems to have done nothing substantive until he relocated to the theater of operations in late August.
To develop a ground offensive plan, the CINC requested and was assigned four recent graduates of the Army's bastion of the operational art, the School of Advanced Military Studies (SAMS), located in the Command and General Staff College, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. The officers were reassigned from joint posts and other duties in Army units not yet alerted for movement to the Gulf. They were Lieutenant Colonel (later colonel) Joe Purvis, at the time assigned to the U.S. Pacific Command staff in Hawaii; Major Greg Eckert, G3 training, 4th Infantry Division, at Fort Carson, Colorado; Major Dan Rob, executive officer, 708th Main Support Battalion, 8th Infantry Division, in Germany; and Major Bill Pennypacker, executive officer, 1st Brigade, 1st Infantry Division, at Fort Riley, Kansas.
However these officers were chosen, fortune favored Schwarzkopf in the choice of team chief. Purvis was an officer of medium height, slender, and quiet in demeanor, but he concealed in his taciturn nature a highly disciplined and most perceptive intellect not easily swayed by bluster and bravado. When he said something was so, you could bank on it, for the simple reason that Purvis would not say he knew until he was sure he did. He also had a wry sense of humor and the ability to laugh at his own discomfort, no small talent in the high-pressure world he entered in September 1990.
These officers formed a small planning cell for consideration of ground operations. They would be at the center of planning for Operation Desert Storm. The life of this group was instructive about how Central Command and Third Army worked together, how Schwarzkopf exercised his command, and about the role played by General Yeosock and ARCENT in achieving U.S. and coalition goals in Southwest Asia.
Planning was evolutionary.10 While the Third Army staff focused on deploying its forces and developing the defensive plans for Operation Desert Shield, Purvis and his planners began to explore the possibility of a U.S. ground offensive by examining what could be done with forces available in the fall of 1990- Planning soon expanded to look at options that would be feasible only with the addition of more U.S. forces, forces that were allocated in November. All of this went on while the XVIII Airborne Corps was still arriving and during a period when there was no commitment to remove Saddam Hussein from Kuwait by force of arms-when, in fact, decisions were being made that were contrary to the needs of a major operational offensive.
Responsibility for planning, although limited at first to a small group at theater headquarters, eventually involved both Yeosock and his G3, General Arnold. Once Schwarzkopf was satisfied he knew what he wanted his components to do, planning for Army operations was transferred to the Third Army staff and transformed over several weeks into a process of simultaneous and iterative dialogue between commanders and staffs from division to theater, with each command echelon having a part in the process in accordance with its immediate and legitimate interests. These officers were assisted in their adaptation to the new requirements by the knowledge they had acquired exploring various counterattack options.
ARCENT offensive planning continued until 8 January, when Schwarzkopf approved the ground operational plan in its essentials. Incremental adjustments were made up to the eve of the attack. The principal linkage between Third Army's planning and Schwarzkopfs work at Central Command was the CENTCOM planning cell itself. Once Schwarzkopfs concept was formulated, Purvis and his team continued to work in the Central Command headquarters in the basement of the Saudi Ministry of Defense Building. However, they were placed under the supervision of Yeosock and Arnold, who were given responsibility for further development of a theater ground attack plan. The Central Command operational concept was gradually worked into a more detailed, all-component and coalition ground offensive plan. Eventually, as planning spread outward to encompass all participating units, the Purvis Group planners resumed duties as a cell within the theater staff dealing with all components alike.11
Ground operational planning involved a process of iterative negotiation from bottom to top. This established a single concept in the minds of all commanders, an essential element of successful synchronization of their disparate activities. However, it is now clear that certain divergences of view and philosophy also began to appear, particularly about Iraqi abilities to absorb the Air Force preparation fires. Though little remarked at the time, these divergences would lead to painful misunderstandings during and after the offensive.
The "gang of four," as the Purvis Group became known, reported to Headquarters, Central Command, in Riyadh on 16 September 1990.12 On the 18th, Schwarzkopf charged them to plan an offensive ground campaign using the forces available in theater at the time-one corps of two heavy, one light (airborne), and one medium (air assault) divisions; an armored cavalry regiment; a combat aviation brigade; a Marine amphibious force of one division; and the various coalition forces then arriving.13 The CINC's initial comments made clear that he was looking for an indirect approach, not a frontal attack into enemy strength.
At the outset, only ten or so CENTCOM personnel were to have knowledge of the Purvis Group's activities and plans. For the group, that meant that getting information was often difficult, as it was not possible to tell the source exactly why a piece of information was required. In this, the network of SAMS graduates assigned throughout the theater proved most useful. Many occupied key operational and planning positions at all levels of Army command. These officers knew each other and were willing to study questions and respond to their caller without spending a great deal of time asking why he needed to know.14 Within Central Command headquarters, on the other hand, inquiries often required a great deal of creativity to make the request plausible without giving away the game.
The Purvis Group was enlarged by the addition of a naval rating, Petty Officer First Class (ISI) Michael Archer, who would be the team's intelligence specialist. In early November, Brigadier Tim Sullivan, a British Guards officer, joined as well. From time to time, experts from various agencies were called in as semipermanent members or for consultation. Among these were Major James Mudd from the Central Command Combat Analysis Office and Lieutenant Colonel (later colonel) John Carr from the ARCENT Provisional (later 22d) Support Command. As the concept took form, the Commander, MARCENT, whose headquarters was not located in Riyadh (as were Headquarters, ARCENT and CENTAF), was kept informed through briefings to his liaison officer to CENTCOM.
The planning group developed and refined various concepts in light of the CINC's guidance, briefed the CINC periodically, received new guidance based on whatever the commander's current concerns happened to be, then went back to the drawing board for another iteration. In a real sense, the group served as Schwarzkopf's alter ego as he clarified his own thinking. Their product was a broad, general outline that would have to be filled in, in ever greater detail, by the components and their major commands. The process, best characterized as a series of "negotiations," was more important than the written products, for it was the process that ultimately produced not just direction but the detailed understanding at every level of how the battle would be fought. The written orders, like interstate treaties, simply provided a reference to the resolution of issues already decided. There certainly were flaws in the understanding achieved, but these had to do with style, not substance.
By 25 September, Purvis and his group had developed a set of operational considerations for review by the CENTCOM J5, Rear Admiral Grant A. Sharp.15 First for consideration was the principle that CENTCOM forces should seek to fight only a minimum number of the enemy's formations; they would bypass others. The second and perhaps key assumption was that the air offensive would have to reduce enemy forces about 50 percent in aggregate if acceptable friendly-to-enemy force ratios were to be realized prior to beginning any ground attack. This assumption, which quickly became an article of faith at all levels of the Desert Shield-Desert Storm command, made the acceptability of ground offensive operations explicitly dependent on the success of air operations in the Kuwait theater of operations. Third, with mechanized tratficability in the theater being what it was, it was apparent that rapid intelligence acquisition, reporting, and targeting would be essential to success.
Finally, the whole issue of sustainability became an early and long-lived concern.16 Operational reach of mechanized ground forces is bought by wheeled vehicles. The Army, which had been designed for defensive war in Europe, was short of wheeled vehicles in general and heavy equipment transporters MEW in particular. It was also short of line-haul fuel trucks, especially fuel trucks capable of long-distance off-road movement. HETs provide the ability to concentrate armored forces operationally without undue wear and tear on tracks and power trains. Fuel trucks make it possible to keep the armored columns moving forward in the attack. These shortages of wheeled vehicles had been aggravated by decisions having to do with achieving minimum essential forces for the Desert Shield deployment. A great deal would depend upon the ability of the host nation and allied nations to make up the deficit in all categories.
In addition to stated U.S. national goals, Central Command planners assumed as implied objectives the destruction of an Iraqi offensive capability and a consequent restoration of a regional balance of military power.17 They assumed that the allied coalition would support a combined offensive to free Kuwait, that Iraq would use chemical weapons in its defense, and that alliance forces would not employ nuclear weapons. It was assumed that any offensive operation must ensure, in its movements, the continued security of ports and critical oil facilities. Obviously, any plan should minimize friendly casualties and collateral damage to civilian populations. The primary risks recognized at the outset were the dependence of any attack on extended lines of communication over unimproved roads, the possibility of terrorist attacks in the coalition's rear areas, and the difficulty of judging with any accuracy residual Iraqi capabilities as enemy forces came under sustained air attack. The theater planning mission was simply stated: "On order, friendly forces conduct offensive operations to eject Iraqi forces from Kuwait; be prepared to secure and defend Kuwait."18
By mid-September, intelligence analysts knew the Iraqis in Kuwait were laying out a multiechelon, deliberate defense in depth.19 Regular Iraqi infantry and growing numbers of conscript units occupied fixed positions facing south and east (to sea) in increasingly better-prepared defensive belts. Mobile tactical and operational reserves and regular army mechanized forces were positioned to react to any allied penetration. The Republican Guard Forces Command, pulled back from Kuwait to southeastern Iraq, constituted a theater reserve to conduct the decisive counterattack once the coalition forces were tied down in the forward defenses.
It became clear from their open western flank that the Iraqis believed their defensive array was secured by the empty, featureless Iraqi desert beyond the Wadi al Batin. Aside from some token forces securing the few roads in that area, Saddam continued to pour his defensive forces into Kuwait, trying to build a defensive "nut" too tough to crack. The Iraqi leader failed to consider several things that would negate his assumptions: the cumulative effect on his soldiers of a coordinated air campaign by the world's leading air power; the aggregate technological advantages enjoyed by his enemy, not to mention the skill of the men and women employing them; the specific navigational capability that inexpensive global positioning systems (devices for which civilian analogs exist in any Radio Shack store) might give allied ground forces; the immediate and hostile response of the Arab world to his initial incursion into Kuwait; and the determination of President George Herbert Walker Bush to have him out of that country.
The planning cell briefed their recommended courses of action to Schwarzkopf and selected members of his primary staff on 6 October. In response, Schwarzkopf directed the development of a concept of operations that would place the coalition main ground attack west of the elbow or panhandle of Kuwait, penetrate the Iraqi defenses, exploit to seize an objective cutting the north-south line of communication (the Basrah-Kuwait City highway) sixty kilometers north of Kuwait City, and, on order, continue the attack to seize the Rawdatayn oil fields and secure the northern Iraqi-Kuwaiti border (see map 4). It was Schwarzkopfs judgment that, although such an attack risked failure in light of the unfavorable force ratios, the force itself would not be at risk of catastrophic loss.20
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| Map 4. |
This plan and the air offensive plan were taken to Washington 0n 9 October by Major General Robert B. Johnston, the CENTCOM chief of staff, Brigadier General Buster C. Glossen, a CENTAF planner, Lieutenant Colonel Joe Purvis, and Major Richard F. Francona from the CENTCOM intelligence staff (J2). The plan was presented to the Joint Staff and then, on the 11th, to the president and his advisers.21 Concerns were expressed that the ground offensive plan attacked into the enemy strength and that barrier-breaching operations would be extremely difficult. Schwarzkopf's view was that, while this might be true, the command lacked sufficient forces and logistics support, particularly cross-country tankers, to attack farther west, avoiding enemy strength entirely.
Schwarzkopf told David Frost in March 1991 that he had told the president the Saturday after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait that, if the national policy were to escalate to require a ground offensive to remove Iraqi forces from Kuwait, he (Schwarzkopf) would require a force larger than that allocated for Desert Shield.22 At an October briefing, he had General Johnston state that the plan for the one-corps offensive was submitted under some duress; indeed, the briefing itself was followed by the disclaimer: "That is not what the Commander in Chief of Central Command is recommending. It is a weak plan and it is not the plan that we are recommending.... if we are serious about ejecting them [Iraq] from Kuwait what we need is more forces to be able to execute a proper campaign."23
Colonel Purvis, who was present in Washington during the October discussions, made some important observations about these exchanges. He believed the real value of the meetings was that they established a dialogue between the nation's civilian political leaders, the Joint Staff, and the theater commander. Whatever disagreement existed was, in his view, by n0 means arbitrary. The president's civilian advisers apparently believed Schwarzkopf had not considered adequately an "Inchon-like" envelopment. Central Command did not agree, and the dialogue continued.24
Following the Washington briefing, Schwarzkopf, who had remained in Riyadh, directed that the planning group examine some new questions. What could he do with a new corps? What should it look like? When would it be available? Still, the group's focus remained on the one-corps option. The J2 was asked to identify Iraqi logistical vulnerabilities that the allied forces might exploit. The real chore, however, was to try and project a future threat, since Saddam had already begun what was to be a long-term process of reinforcement of the occupation forces in Kuwait, an action that proved to be his undoing.25
On 17 October, the United Kingdom's theater commander and General Yeosock were brought into the planning process in two separate briefings. Sir Peter de la Billiere, the British commander in chief, had arrived in Saudi Arabia on 6 October. Like Yeosock, Sir Peter had a long association with desert operations, in his case with the British Special Air Services, the famous SAS. At this time, the British land commitment was a single armored brigade, the 7th. This was increased to a balanced two-brigade division shortly after the United States announced its commitment of a second heavy corps in November.
During the briefings they received, Yeosock and de la Billiere raised a number of issues. Among these were questions of allied capabilities and the willingness to participate in an offensive, the need to keep forces concentrated in the face of unfavorable force ratios, the trafficability of terrain north of the Saudi border, the desirability of a deception plan, the difficulty of staging adequate logistic support in a timely fashion given the distances involved and the lack of good supply routes, and the need to keep the east covered adequately while forces were concentrated for an attack in the west.26
Yeosock also received a briefing from the Third Army's Support Command concerning sustainment issues associated with a one-corps offensive plan. The plan at issue provided for the movement of the XVIII Airborne Corps' heavy forces (3 ACR, 24th Infantry Division, 1st Cavalry) to the Saudi border area with western Kuwait, east of Hafar al Batin. Support Command's planners calculated that it would take nine to thirteen days to complete the movement at night. The principal constraint was the number of trucks available. The briefing noted that by 25 November there would be no more than 112 U.S. military HETs in theater (on 10 October there were none) and that it would take up to nineteen days, using all military and known hostnation capabilities, to move the one-corps force to attack east of Wadi al Batin.27 Prestockage of forward logistic bases would take from three to sixteen days depending on when the execution date came and whether or not both day and night movement could be used.28 It was quite evident that, for any offensive concentration inland, the force would have to use a combination of commercial, host-nation, and military HETs. Consequently, the acquisition and allocation of HETs would be the Third Army commander's biggest concern in December and January.
On the 18th, Admiral Sharp was briefed on three courses of action for a two (U.S.) corps attack. The favored alternative called for two corps to attack abreast west of the Kuwaiti border, with a follow-on mission to destroy the Republican Guard Forces Command. Later that same day, the group briefed Brigadier General James Monroe, the Third Army G4. Monroe was perceived to be very receptive and helpful, which was important, as he would play a key role in the sustainment of any operation. At this time, logistic prepositioning and unit repositioning to forward assembly areas were the major conundrums involved in any two-corps plan.
Schwarzkopf was briefed on 21 October. He approved the idea of a ground offensive plan with a main effort consisting of two U.S. Army corps attacking west of the Kuwaiti border to get behind the principal Iraqi forces. He personally set the operational objective of the attack as the physical destruction of the Republican Guard, which he recognized as a strategic center of gravity in the KTO.29 Pointing to a map, he said,
With these two corps there [pointing at the US corps] . . .
I've got forces here [pointing into Kuwait].
I sit on Highway 8.
I've defeated him in his mind.
I've threatened his Republican Guard; Now, rll destroy it.30
Schwarzkopf identified as issues outstanding the question of trafficability and supportability (Yeosock estimated that the concept was supportable), the proper role for coalition forces given their varied capabilities and the absolute political as well as military necessity for their active participation, and the need to find a proper role for MARCENT in light of the corps' short logistic legs, sea-based close air support, and proximity to forces afloat.31
The following two days, the Central Command staff in Riyadh briefed the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on both the one- and two-corps options, with emphasis on the possibilities of the former. Powell apparently believed that a one-corps offensive could succeed. It took two and one-half hours on Friday, 22 October, and two more on Saturday, to convince him that a one-corps attack was a gamble, not just a risk. The chairman's guidance to Schwarzkopf was straightforward and entirely supportive: "Tell me what you need for assets. We will not do this halfway. The United States military is available to support this operation."32
The conclusion was that a second U.S. Army corps (at that time, two divisions and an armored cavalry regiment; later, a third division was added at the request of the Third Army commander) would provide the necessary forces to permit maneuver to the west, around the Iraqi main deployments. Air Force resources would increase proportionally, as would deployed naval forces. Obviously, Third Army would have to build a substantial theater and host-nation logistic support structure simultaneously with arrival of the new corps if there were to be sufficient means to project the offensive force the distances required to bring it into contact with the Republican Guard troops and to sustain it in battle once joined. Most of the theater logistic forces would have to be drawn from the Reserve Components.
Through the vicissitudes of international politics, Southwest Asia, heretofore a secondary theater where the rule had always been one of economy of force, was now within days of becoming the main effort for the United States' armed forces. The chairman took the two-corps graphics back to Washington with him.33
On 24 October, the planning cell was placed under operational control of the Third Army commander to develop further the concepts for ground operations. The group continued to be located at Central Command to maintain its security. Yeosock and Arnold would work to flesh out the theater ground offensive plan and, at the same time, begin preparing for the main ground effort within that plan.
For the time being, however, focus remained on one-corps options, the principal case at this time, with a U.S. Army corps west of the Kuwait border (considered to be possible, if risky, with the then current threat), the MARCENT and United Kingdom (U.K.) brigade just inside the border protecting the XVIII Corps' eastern flank, and the Egyptian and Syrian corps farther to the east by the "elbow" of Kuwait. Amphibious operations were planned only as demonstrations and feints. No Inchons seemed likely.34
Colonel Purvis observed that, the one-corps focus notwithstanding, his group believed the two-corps option would be selected because of the chairman's reaction. Schwarzkopf, however, was not yet ready to allow them to brief the two-corps option to the components. ARCENT and the Department of the Army were still discussing rotation policies for forces already in theater. But confirmation of the Purvis Group's hunch was not hard to find. On 25 October, immediately following the chairman's return to the United States, the secretary of defense appeared on the morning news programs of all four major TV networks and announced a pending increase of U.S. ground forces. He hinted broadly that the number could reach 100,000 and involve units from Europe.35
As planners anticipated approval of the two-corps option, a question was raised on 27 October about U.S, attacks on airfields and surrounding SCUD sites located in western Iraq within missile range of Israel. Concern about Iraq's ability to disrupt the U.S.-Arab coalition by prompting an Israeli intervention had begun to grow in Washington. In response, ARCENT set up another special planning group staffed with representatives of the ARCENT and XVIII Airborne Corps. Its members were Lieutenant Colonel Bob Butto, from the 513th Military Intelligence Brigade; Lieutenant Colonels Bob Westholm and Matt Kriwanek, from the commanding general's personal staff; Major Bob Dement, ARCENT's G4 plans; and Lieutenant Colonel Dave Huntoon and Major Teri Peck from XVIII Airborne Corps' G3. Major Matt Smith, the 1st Cavalry Division liaison officer to ARCENT, rounded out the group and looked out for the interests of III Corps' headquarters should it be deployed.36
The ARCENT and corps planners evaluated options for attacking these targets, particularly the airfields, called H2 and H3, but saw such efforts by conventional ground forces as both a significant logistical risk and an unproductive diversion of forces from the main effort.37 Further inquiries elicited the same response. Ultimately, special operations forces from the United States and Special Air Service forces from the United Kingdom were committed to the SCUD hunt in western Iraq (see map 5). SCUD hunting also caused a significant diversion of air support during the conduct of air operations after 16 January.
On 6 November, two days prior to the president's announcement of further deployments, Secretary of State James Baker and King Fahd agreed to an allied command plan that essentially blessed the existing structure of dual command, with Saudi preeminence in decisions involving defense of the kingdom itself and American freedom of action for U.S. forces for contingencies beyond the Saudi borders, with the caveat that offensive action would require advance agreement by both heads of state. Baker was quoted as saying that "'a new phase' had begun in the Persian Gulf crisis in which the global community is prepared to `resort to force' if a peaceful solution is not found."38 By the end of the month, there would be agreement in the United Nations Security Council to just that. The agreement on coalition command, it was reported, did not bind other nations, who would be brought in by separate bilateral agreements.
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| Map 5. |
For a time, the focus of the planning process remained in the Ministry of Defense basement. Lieutenant Colonels Westholm and Kriwanek acted as Third Army points of contact as required, as did Lieutenant Colonel Huntoon and Major Peck at XVIII Airborne Corps. The ad hoc solution at Third Army was called for, not only because of security considerations, but because, as previously noted, the regular Third Army planners had been used to set up the C31C organization in August. They simply were not readily available, and presumably there would have been concern about possible compromise of the plan to the Saudis before the proper diplomatic preparation had been accomplished.
Planning continued on the one- and two-corps options and the H2H3 airfield excursion. Schwarzkopf was briefed on H2-H3. He objected to the operation as being too risky because of the distance the airfield attack force would be from any sustaining base and the main effort. His guidance was to focus planning on the two-corps concept. On 31 October, forces available for planning included five U.S. heavy divisions, two armored cavalry regiments, the airborne and air assault divisions, six field artillery brigades, two aviation brigades, the French light armored division(-), a British armored division(-), four Saudi heavy brigades, a Kuwaiti heavy brigade, two Egyptian heavy divisions, a Syrian heavy division(-), two U.S. Marine divisions, and two Marine expeditionary brigades. Objectives as far west as Samawah on the Euphrates were considered for a secondary attack. Although Baghdad was mentioned, the conclusion was that it was too far away to hold even if it could be captured and, more to the point, that its capture would exceed the UN charter for coalition forces, which limited their objective to the liberation of Kuwait.39
On 1 November, a number of sustainment issues were raised by a representative from 22d Support Command, Colonel John B. Trier. Trier followed the earlier work done by Colonel Carr and became the point of linkage with the support command for development of the sustainment concept for Desert Storm. Concerns identified in November generally involved the burden of introducing a new corps package. Given the existing strains already accepted in the theater logistics structure and recognizing that the overriding need for haste that had governed the August deployment no longer obtained, the new corps' logistic elements would have to precede tactical units to provide necessary life support and transport. Because the ports lacked the infrastructure to support linkup and marshaling, incoming forces would have to pass through the ports rapidly and transition to the assembly areas to "stand up.40
A recommendation was made that the area around King Khalid Military City (KKMC, southwest of Hafar al Batin, serve as the logistics center for the concentration of the incoming corps. In December and January, VII Corps would concentrate in the desert, east and south of KKMC and west of XVIII Airborne Corps. This would require that the new corps pass through the area defended by XVIII Airborne Corps. Subsequently, this would also require XVIII Airborne Corps to pass in front of VII Corps for deployment for the attack. Though this sounds inconvenient, it allowed XVIII Airborne Corps to continue to perform its Desert Shield defensive mission while VII Corps deployed and formed in the desert. It became a major part of the deception operation for Operation Desert Storm. Third Army established KKMC as a major forward operating and logistics base, the pivot for the redeployment to attack positions west of Wadi al Batin that began on 17 January.
The planners were beginning to deal with the fact that the existing and anticipated operational areas between KKMC and the port of Ad Dammam were limited to a road net consisting of an irregular polygon of roads, mostly two lanes wide, often unimproved and full of Saudi civil traffic in ubiquitous white Toyota pickups. If one went on out to Rafha (as ARCENT would), that added another 168 miles of adequate-to-bad two-lane road. This created an extraordinary transportation problem, compounding the general shortage of HETs and line-haul trucks. The distances involved far exceeded those of the famous Red Ball Express of World War II.
On 2 November, the planners briefed Yeosock on their two-corps concept: an attack west of Wadi al Batin by a notional heavy corps that would drive north to the Euphrates, turn the Iraqi defenses, and destroy the Republican Guard in the area of Iraq just north and west of the Kuwaiti border.41 At that time, it was envisioned that the Marines would attack and penetrate defenses just inside the Kuwaiti border. Two Royal Saudi Land Force brigades would attack on the Marines' left, up the Wadi some limited distance. The XVIII Corps would follow the Marines in sector, pass through and conduct a supporting attack eastward across northern Kuwait. The bulk of the Arab Islamic forces would attack and penetrate into Kuwait from the south. A variant showed XVIII Corps attacking toward An Nasiriyah to the northwest, while the notional heavy corps advanced on an axis of advance approximating the Kuwaiti border, northeast then east.
On 6 November, Schwarzkopf was briefed along with his principal staff and, finally, his component commanders. Schwarzkopf emphasized the need for a deception plan to avoid giving away the scheme of maneuver. The deception was intended to portray the threat of attack only through the Kuwaiti southern border area, with no intent to enter via Iraqi territory. No U.S. force or logistic prepositioning was to be allowed west of Wadi al Batin prior to the start of the air offensive. That, it was hoped, would blind the Iraqi defenders. American units, which would make the main attack, were to be kept behind Arab-Islamic forces and off the border until just before the attack itself.42
The deception plan had several implications. It meant that the massive logistic preparations for an offensive would have to take place simultaneously with the operational repositioning of maneuver forces, both using a very limited road net and a limited number of wheeled vehicles. It meant, as well, that intelligence collection and, consequently, air preparation of the battlefield would have to be from the top down, from theater and army level to corps and division, because of the resulting blindness of attacking tactical units. Tactical commanders and some ARCENT staff members found these considerations to be increasingly discomforting. The deception plan also meant that air preparations of the KTO would have to be conducted in such a way that those targets most important to Army commanders in the main attack would be attacked last, a consequence that tried the patience of all.
Schwarzkopf found the concept as briefed too detailed and indicated component commanders should be given greater flexibility in development of their own concepts. In fact, he also seems to have warned the component commanders to allow their subordinates to do their business without over-centralization at component level.43
Schwarzkopf directed the Marines to be employed in the east, both for reasons of logistic sustainment and in order to maintain the cover story of an attack through Kuwait. (As late as 20 February, Iraq continued to push forces into the "heel" of Kuwait, no doubt in part due to the highly visible Marine Corps presence ashore and afloat.) Schwarzkopf also set out his priorities for the air attack in support of ground operations, the disruption of command and control facilities and the logistics supporting the KTO, and the attrition of the Republican Guard. The operational goal remained the cutting off and destruction of the Republican Guard.44 Finally, the theater commander identified three major issues for resolution: the shape of the new U.S. Army forces and the time needed to get them in position ready for use, the logistical supportability of the concept, and the matter of trafficability. Regarding the last issue, XVIII Corps was to do a good deal of desert driving on terrain similar to that in southeastern Iraq in order to develop some empirical data.
On 8 November, President Bush announced the deployment of the European-based VII Corps to Central Command in order to establish an offensive option for the resolution of the Kuwait crisis.45 Talk of troop rotation plans were set aside and preparation for a possible offensive were taken in hand. Component plans continued to be fleshed out and back-briefed to Schwarzkopf until he was comfortable with them. The secretary of defense and chairman would make two trips to the theater, in December and in February, before they would be convinced that the details were sufficiently in hand for them to recommend to the president a date for the ground attack. Meanwhile, there was now a theater concept within which the components could begin their own considerable hard work.
On 14 November, Schwarzkopf held what was probably his most important briefing of the war from the standpoint of transmitting the commander's intent: he briefed his ground commanders, division level and above, in Dhahran. The commanders from deploying units were brought to Saudi Arabia from their U.S. and European bases for the meeting. Schwarzkopf laid down the primary objective: "to destroy the Republican Guard."46 He also enjoined absolute security concerning the scheme of maneuver and indicated he expected the Iraqis to employ chemical weapons, though he seems to have drawn no particular operational conclusion from that fact. The one discordant note Schwarzkopf would later record was an observation by Lieutenant General Fred Franks, the commander of the VII Corps, Schwarzkopf's major maneuver force, that he would need additional forces, specifically the 1st Cavalry Division, to carry out his assignment.47 In retrospect, this seems to have been the first of a series of events that would lead to various postwar recriminations. At the time, it did not seem a major issue.
Major General Tom Rhame, the commander of the 1st Infantry Division (Mechanized) from Fort Riley, Kansas, emphasized the importance of this briefing in an interview later televised by one of the cable TV networks.48 Rhame pointed particularly to the CINC's clear articulation of the task at hand, "to destroy the Republican Guard," as a mission that even privates could understand and upon which they could concentrate their efforts. This briefing and subsequent conferences and briefings ensured an extraordinary degree of unity of effort in the U.S. offensive. The selection and clear articulation of the command's military objective may well have been Schwarzkopfs greatest contribution as theater commander, for it produced a harmony of action rare in complex operations. The harmony was, in part, enforced, as in the period following the briefing, the CINC would make it quite clear, sometimes with implicit threats, that tactical (corps and division) commanders would do well not to spend time second guessing his offensive concept,49 a message that would prove to be counterproductive in the long run. Nonetheless, from the 14 November briefing onward, planning for the offensive proceeded at all levels with continuous discussion and negotiation.
Third Army and coalition planning continued for a while to be concentrated in the Purvis Group, working under Yeosock's guidance. After the commander's conference, there was additional guidance from Schwarzkopf that had to be accommodated.50 The CINC demanded a heavy division as theater reserve. For obvious reasons, the division would have to come from ARCENT. The 1st Cavalry Division, less the "Tiger Brigade" (1st Brigade, 2d Armored Division), would ultimately fill this role. The XVIII Corps would be committed in the west in the area from As Salman to As Samawah. The U.K. forces, which were to be increased to a division, were to remain with the U.S. Marines. (Ultimately the British forces were reassigned to ARCENT in exchange for the "Tiger Brigade.")
The time from 15 to 23 November was a period of adjustment and revision. Schwarzkopf wanted a placement of coalition forces that would best utilize the different capabilities represented and that would take into account regional animosities and suspicions. Concern remained about the off-road trafficability of the area in which XVIII Corps would operate and about casualties at the breach site. These concerns would remain active to the point of execution.
On 23 November, Schwarzkopf was briefed again. He gave qualified approval to Third Army's draft plan, which was issued to the Army major subordinate commanders the following day.51 The plan called for a four-stage operation: logistical build-up, prepositioning, ground offensive, and consolidation. It set a stockage level for forward bases of five days of supply in class III (fuel) and class V (ammunition), plus the necessary stocks to support the forces in their tactical assembly areas. The entire ground operation was expected to take up to eight weeks.
The plan called for VII Corps to be in a defensive position west of XVIII Corps no later than twenty-five days prior to the ground attack. Northern Area Command would pull its forces east of Wadi al Batin, and the French 6th Light Armored Division, which drew its support from the Red Sea, would screen the area west of the wadi. Redeployment of the two corps to their preattack tactical assembly areas was expected to take two weeks. The XVIII Corps was to be on the left, VII Corps on the right, both west of Hafar al Batin. Repositioning was to take place in conjunction with the initiation of air operations. The destruction of the Iraqi Air Force, together with any ground sensors likely to detect allied movement in time for the Iraqis to react, was essential if the ground attack was to achieve surprise and the ability to concentrate.
The ground attack itself was expected to take up to two weeks. The plan assumed that coalition fixing attacks would go in at daylight on D-day (later G-day to differentiate ground from theater [air] attack), with the main attack following twelve hours later (H+12), to "maneuver deep West of Kuwait to destroy the RGFC and cut off LOCs to Iraqi forces in the KTO."52 For reasons that will be addressed later, this delay ultimately grew to twenty-four hours. The initial offensive was to be followed by a consolidation phase anticipated to last up to four more weeks during which Iraqi forces remaining in Kuwait would be defeated.
The four major coalition commands from east to west would be, starting on the right, the Eastern Area Command (Joint Forces Command East), which was to attack north along the Kuwaiti coast to deceive the enemy and fix his reserves, and MARCENT. MARCENT, then including the U.K. armored division, was to attack near the elbow of Kuwait to penetrate forward Iraqi defenses, fix tactical reserves south of the As Salem airfield, occupy a blocking position, link up with the Northern Area Command on the left, then, in conjunction with the Northern Area Command, isolate Kuwait City and conduct consolidation operations. In the center, the Northern Area Command (later Joint Forces Command North) containing the Egyptian and Syrian combat units, as well as Royal Saudi Land Forces and a SANG brigade, was to penetrate the enemy defenses, drive to the north of the As Salem airfield, join with Third Army, and occupy a blocking position north of Kuwait City on the north-south Kuwait City-Basrah highway. The two Arab-Islamic commands would liberate Kuwait City.
The VII Corps was to conduct the Third Army's main attack. It was to penetrate the enemy's forward defenses and attack in zone to defeat the Republican Guard. On the left of the ARCENT sector, the XVIII Corps would conduct a supporting attack to block the Highway 8 valley. The corps would be prepared to continue the attack to the east down the valley in order to assist VII Corps in destruction of the Republican Guard. Both corps would prepare plans for consolidation and occupation of sectors in western and northern Kuwait.
Schwarzkopf approved this outline for planning. He charged Yeosock to guarantee supportability of the concept or to modify it.53 On 24 November, the Third Army commander briefed his subordinate commanders. On the 28th, there was a logistics conference at Dhahran to work out a concept of support. The next day, the regular ARCENT planning staff was brought into the process, and planning at Third Army gradually flowed back into normal component channels. The special planning group reverted to CENTCOM control on 18 December. The C31C passed to Central Command at about the same time. This released the ARCENT planners back to the Third Army's G3. Major General Schwartz, who would have become Yeosock's principal deputy had he returned to Third Army, was retained as chief of the C3IC, working directly for Schwarzkopf.
On 30 November and 7 December, the XVIII Corps and the VII Corps, respectively, gave their initial briefings to the Third Army commander, at times offering significant modifications to the conceptual plan. For example, VII Corps proposed, among other alternatives, either moving the XVIII Corps to VII Corps' eastern flank (very much like the old two-corps option) in order to extend the maneuver area for Schwarzkopf's "Great Wheel," or having XVIII Corps penetrate and VII Corps pass through into the attack. The effect in either case would have been to force the lighter XVIII Corps troops into the breaching operations required ultimately of the 1st Infantry Division, a move neither Yeosock nor Schwarzkopf was likely to contemplate. The corps' passage of lines would have been prohibitively time consuming. In any event, General Rhame had volunteered his 1st Infantry Division to do the breaching operation because of the training it had completed prior to alert for Desert Shield. VII Corps thus remained the inner (U.S.) corps.54
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| Map 6. |
Another point of contention concerned the proper employment of the French 6th Light Armored Division (ultimately placed under Tactical Control of the XVIII Corps on the far left flank) and the 1st U.K. Armored Division. Two different issues were involved. In the case of the French, the issue was political. In its simplest terms, French Minister of Defense Jean-Pierre Chevenement opposed subordination of the French to the U.S. commander. (The defense minister very likely opposed U.S. policy altogether.) This situation changed when Chevenement resigned in December and was replaced by Pierre Joxe. The British commander, General de la Billiere, was for his part concerned about casualties if the British remained with the Marines in the fixing attack and wanted his force employed in the sort of open maneuver warfare for which it was trained. Schwarzkopf, with some misgivings, acceded to de la Billiere's request and replaced the British two-brigade division with the "Tiger Brigade." By the time Secretary of Defense Cheney was briefed on 20 December, ARCENT had already planned for the employment of the French division with the XVIII Corps on the extreme left and the British with the VII Corps.55 (See map 6.)
As boundaries changed east or west, it became increasingly evident that there was going to be a significant transportation problem to be solved, one that involved both the general shortage of some types of critical vehicles and the rate at which transportation units could be brought into theater. The influx of transportation units had not only to respond to the needs of the new corps, but it also had to remedy cuts accepted when the force structure guidance had been based upon the concept of "minimum essential forces."56
The concept paper or draft plan passed by the CENTCOM planning group to the ARCENT G3 planners (and briefed to the commander in chief on 23 November) was neither a normal joint headquarters directive nor a coordinated operations plan, though it was formatted generally as the operations portion of the latter. The details of the actual actions of the two corps on the ground remained to be worked out, although the general parameters had been established and would be retained: the VII Corps would attack on the ARCENT right, west of Wadi al Batin, driving north and east and destroying the Republican Guard Forces Command; the XVIII Corps would conduct a secondary effort designed to distract the Iraqi high command with a putative or apparent threat to Baghdad. Meanwhile, the light corps would attack to As Samawah and, more important, cut the major axis of withdrawal along Highway 8 south of the Euphrates River. Ultimately, the corps could advance southeast along the river to secure the northern fringe of the pocket of southeastern Iraq, which the allied high command wished to hold at the end of the operations, and, simultaneously, assist VII Corps in the destruction of the Republican Guard.57
A Third Army planner, Major Steve Holley, was detailed from the plans section in the C3IC organization and, with Lieutenant Colonel George H. Del Carlo, another Third Army G3 staff member, established an office in a small room on the fifth floor of the Royal Saudi Land Forces headquarters (the location of ARCENT's headquarters in December) to prepare the draft Third Army operations plan for Desert Storm in conjunction with the Purvis Group in the Ministry of Defense. In mid-December, these two officers were joined by Major Dan Gilbert, a SAMS graduate assigned, like most new staff members, from a unit not identified for deployment to Desert Shield. Gilbert developed the ARCENT MAPEX that provided the formal venue for the major commands and commanders to discuss their concepts and begin hammering out the comprehensive plan for the Desert Storm main attack.
Notes
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| 4 Planning a Ground Offensive II: The ARCENT Process |
The Third Army planning process was marked by continuous dialogue. Discussion took place horizontally, within the ARCENT staff, and vertically, between Central Command above and subordinate corps and support command staffs below. Major decisions were made, or in some cases deferred, at commanders' conferences.1 Similar processes were going on in each corps. This sort of activity lasted into late January and up to the "commander's huddle," when the army commander and his principal subordinates gathered at King Khalid Military City on 1 February for a final meeting.
By the time General Schwarzkopf and his component, corps, and support command commanders briefed Secretary of Defense Cheney and General Powell in mid-December, the Third Army plan had taken a fairly clear form. The concept called for a two-corps attack on a broad front that would block the Iraqi routes of escape and destroy the Republican Guard Forces Command (RGFC).2 The Air Force component was responsible for isolating the theater of operations south of the Euphrates River by keeping bridges down. The army commander's intent was to penetrate and envelop the defensive forces, fix and block forward-deployed heavy forces in order to secure the flanks and lines of communication, and continue the attack deep to destroy the Republican Guard.3
The VII Corps would be the coalition mass of maneuver. It would carry out the decisive part of the theater commander's ground attack plan as the Third Army's main effort. The 1st U.K. Armored Division, after December under tactical control of VII Corps, would pass through a 1st Infantry Division breach, turn east, and defeat the Iraqi tactical reserves. It would secure, thereby, the deep movement of the U.S. heavy "fist." The fist itself was to consist of the 2d Armored Cavalry Regiment, the 1st and 3d Armored Divisions, the let Infantry Division (once the breach was secure), and the 1st Cavalry Division(-), should the latter be released to Third Army by the theater commander. While VII Corps' mission was oriented toward force rather than terrain, it was assigned a zone of action within which to maneuver. The corps zone did not include the highway running northwest from Basrah south of the Euphrates River. That corridor belonged to the XVIII Airborne Corps and, ultimately, to the 24th Infantry Division.
Initially, the VII Corps plan called for the entire corps to pass through a breach to be made by the 1st Infantry Division in the Iraqi defensive line. As the corps grew familiar with the ground and identified the end of the Iraqi defenses-which terminated "in the air" (or simply petered out) about forty kilometers from an escarpment that dominated the right flank of XVIII Corps' zone-plans for the two armored divisions and armored cavalry regiment were gradually modified to move the core of the iron fist around the end of the Iraqi positions but still east of the escarpment. This idea was tested in a simulation conducted in January at King Khalid Military City by the team from the Battle Command Training Program (BCTP). In consultation with his division commanders and in the face of his staffs continuing doubts, Lieutenant General Frederick M. Franks, Jr., revised his plan. The modified version called for a maneuver around the enemy defenses by the 1st and 3d Armored Divisions (behind the 2d Armored Cavalry Regiment), with only the 1st U.K. Armored Division following the 1st Infantry Division through the breach.4 The end run was to be a tight squeeze. It required the 3d Armored Division to move in a column of brigades with a fifteen-kilometer front. The 1st Armored Division, with a frontage of twenty-five kilometers on its left, was only marginally better off, but this maneuver avoided the necessity of passing successive divisions deployed in column through an obstacle belt.
Once beyond the breach, the corps' armored fist was to move north to the vicinity of Phase Line (PL) Smash, a lateral road about halfway to the Euphrates. It would then turn gradually to the right, looking for the RGFC, which it expected to encounter in Objective Collins, a large open expanse of desert just northeast of the point where the corps would turn eastward across PL Smash. In effect, the corps plan called for two successive, deliberate attacks: first, the breaching operations by the 1st Infantry Division and, second, the movement to contact by the armored fist. The weight of the corps' supporting forces, principally its artillery, would have to be shifted from right to left, from one effort to the other, while the corps moved north. Maintaining balance and concentration would require a good deal of the corps' energy as it moved to the battle.
XVIII Corps, on the extreme left of the coalition line, was to launch the 101st Airborne Division toward As Samawah, on the Euphrates, in the far northwestern corner of the corps sector, to block the Iraqi escape route down Highway 8. The 24th Infantry Division was to launch its three brigades into the empty desert to link up with the 101st and then turn down the same highway to attack enemy concentrations along the river. The French 6th Light Armored Division, under tactical control of the XVIII Airborne Corps and with the 82d Airborne Division in support, was to attack north on the Third Army's left flank toward the settlement and airfield at As Salman. The 3d Armored Cavalry Regiment was to attack on the corps' right flank, parallel to the VII Corps boundary (the plan called for the regiment to maintain contact with its neighbor).5
Planning was based on the assumption that forces and supplies, both of which depended upon a fixed and fairly predictable rate of arrival in theater, would be prepositioned in tactical assembly areas (TAAs) east of Wadi al Satin by 31 January and that the corps would have two weeks, during the preliminary air campaign, to move into attack positions west of the wadi. These assessments are important precisely because they were fixed. VII Corps' 3d Armored Division could not complete its arrival in Saudi Arabia until 31 January (in fact, it was late due to shipping delays and did not close in the TAA until 12 February).6 The fact that the air attack began on 17 January in no way influenced the ground forces' arrival schedule. Indeed, ARCENT's principal task throughout the planning effort seems to have been to find ways, using computer graphics, to display the progressive build-up so that the higher decision makers could understand what forces they had to work with at any given moment. In resolving this problem, the Third Army commander was often his own action officer, supported by his small personal staff with their desk-top graphics. The success, or lack thereof, of any briefing to Schwarzkopf depended on the clarity of the display of information, thus making a staff officer's facility with computer graphics an essential skill at higher levels of command.
The critical constraint was strategic sealift, particularly roll-on and roll-off ships that carried unit equipment sets (soldiers were usually moved by air). There were not enough ships to establish a continuous arrival rate equal to the capability of available ports to receive units. The ground operation was subject, first of all, to the arrival of heavy forces and was constrained by limits on strategic sealift. Second, it was limited by capacity for operational ground movement, which was plagued by shortages in heavy wheeled vehicles, HETs, heavy expanded mobility tactical trucks (HEMTTs), fuelers, and so forth. The quantity of these unglamorous vehicles fluctuated, depending on the Army's ability to bring in, or even find, long-haul trucks of various types. The December briefing to Secretary of Defense Cheney showed a theater requirement for 1,295 HETs and a projected strength of only 788 available from all sources. Only 250 HETs were expected to arrive in the peninsula by 15 January.7 These wheeled vehicles established the port throughput rate, which never equaled unloading capacity.
G-day, the date of the ground attack, depended on the ability of planners to get coalition forces to the start line. If VII Corps were to participate, that would not be possible at all before 31 January. Even then, the forces would still be incomplete. This was the real significance of the famous December interview with the newly arrived deputy commander in chief, General Calvin Waller. Waller told the press covering Cheney's December briefing that the Army would not be ready to attack by the UN deadline in January (see figure 12). This was correct, although there was certainly sufficient combat power in the peninsula to conduct an air offensive, a fact that appears to have escaped the journalists.8
The other key operational issue was the likely ratio of opposition to friendly forces. This calculation was, by necessity, purely Jominian. It was presented as such on a briefing slide that projected 50 percent attrition of the enemy by the air campaign. Given this assumption, VII Corps would have an advantage of 11.5:1 at the breach site, 3.8:1 en route to the Republican Guard, and 2:1 at the decisive point.9 These figures are important because the overall force ratio expected in the VII Corps' sector (counting friendly and enemy brigades as roughly equivalent) was assumed to be no better than 1.3:1, far below any acceptable theoretical rule of thumb. VII Corps was seeking, in Jomini s words, "to obtain by free and rapid movements the advantage of bringing the mass of the troops against fractions of the enemy."10 That these calculations may have been proved pessimistic by subsequent events in no way detracts from their influence on the planners and fighters who believed them at the time.
Between 23 and 28 December, a group directed by General Pagonis conducted a planning exercise in Dhahran to develop a final movement plan for repositioning Third Army west of Wadi al Batin. Pagonis and his staff had been developing movement plans to support various offensive options since September. The purpose of the December exercise was to fill in details for the execution of Schwarzkopf';s concept, with particular regard to logistics-the provisioning of food, fuel, ammunition, medical support, and, always the critical issue, transportation. All this had to be laid out against a schedule.11 Major Steve Holley from the Third Army G3 (plans) and Colonel Robert Kleimon, the ARCENT transportation officer, represented the ARCENT G3 and G4. The result was publication of a transportation annex for the attack plan and a briefing for the commander in chief that was given on 28 December.12
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| Figure 12. |
Schwarzkopf's strict guidance in support of the deception effort was that no preparations for Desert Storm were to be made west of Wadi al Batin prior to initiation of the air campaign. Because of the distances involved in the operational redeployment and those anticipated during the offensive, it would be necessary to create two forward logistic bases (one for each corps) west of the wadi. This could not begin before D-day. The movement briefing assumed a D-day (air attack day) of 16 January and a G-day (ground attack day) of 1 February. Based upon these dates, the logistics plan provided for creation of two theater army logistic bases, Charlie and Echo, west of the wadi. Three intermediate bases-Alpha, Bravo, and Delta-were to be established in the east (see figure 13). These could be filled prior to D-day. They were essential, in any event, to support the forces deploying into tactical assembly areas, as well as serving as intermediate depots thereafter. Log Base Alpha, around which VII Corps was to form in the desert, was located on Tapline Road at the forward end of the corps' defensive (Desert Shield) zone. As early as October, Pagonis and his staff had planned to begin building up supplies forward in the Desert Shield zone to facilitate future offensive options.13
The two corps would plan subsequently to open corps forward bases (Oscar, Romeo, and "Nellingen") along Main Supply Route (MSR) Virginia, the lateral oiled road (also PL Smash) through the desert about halfway to the Euphrates. These bases would be one day's round trip along the Tapline Road from the theater bases to the south. A day's round trip beyond MSR Virginia, the division support commands would establish their forward bases, and the fighting units would operate about a day's drive beyond them. In short, the army would reach its operational (logistic) limit at about the point it ran out of terrain to clear.14
Based upon projected transportation resources and anticipated arrival dates, Pagonis and his group estimated Log Bases Charlie and Echo would reach their desired stockage levels (five-day supply of rations, 3.4 million gallons of fuel, and 15,000 to 45,000 short tons of ammunition for XVIII and VII Corps respectively) no sooner than 11 February.15 The build-up of Army medical capacity, 11,280 beds (in Saudi Arabia or loaded on vehicles for movement), would be finished no sooner than 13 February.16 Units were expected to be in attack positions by 7 February.17
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| Figure 13. |
Each briefing chart told the CINC where he would be 0n the road to completion on any possible G-day. Three large flow charts displaying transportation availability were created. These showed the daily requirement for line-haul trucks and a forecast of the number available. Interestingly enough, the transportation estimates showed a deficit of vehicles, which would have to be made up from some source if time lines were to be met (see figure 14). In short, success required significant acquisition of transport vehicles and movement of them on schedule. The CINC told Pagonis that these projections were his "contract."18
From 27 to 30 December, while the logistics study was being completed, the Third Army commanders and their staffs met at the new army headquarters for the MAPEX. Originally, General Arnold's intention was that this should be a war-gamed exercise, but this seems to have run afoul of the commanders' sense of their prerogatives or just the number of people involved.19 Instead of a war game, this meeting was, in fact, a mutual briefing session in which questions could be asked by the commanders and principal staff officers (and the staffs then turned loose to resolve the issues raised) and issues requiring further work or decisions could be identified. The results were briefed back to the commanders on the 30th. Representatives from CENTCOM, CENTAF, MARCENT, and SOCCENT attended, and, indeed, one of the major long-term issues carried out of the exercise was a concern about the extent to which the Army would be able to influence the air preparation of the battlefield. Another issue involved the distribution of resources. This was generally accomplished to the detriment of the XVIII Airborne Corps, now a supporting actor rather than the only show in town. The evolving plan called for the corps to attack into an area that just did not have many enemy forces to overcome. General Luck appeared to find this experience somewhat frustrating.20
On 4 January, Yeosock and Arnold went again to Central Command headquarters to brief the theater commander on the ARCENT concept of operations. The object of the briefing was somewhat confused. Information had arrived that Syria would not agree to its troops participating in the offensive. At best, this required some readjustment of missions along the coalition front lines. At worst, it sowed suspicions that Syrian forces might go over to the Iraqis if the attack itself seemed unlikely to succeed.21 Moreover, the Egyptians used the event to request substantial support from the United States as insurance against failure. Among other things, Egypt requested reinforcement by an American division and attachment of U.S. attack helicopters. Yeosock was challenged to find alternatives to present to Schwarzkopf that would reassure the Egyptians without weakening the theater main effort.
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| Figure 14. |
The briefing seems to have been intended originally to address the adjustments that the Syrian decision might demand, but Yeosock also had another agenda. He had to "smoke out" from Schwarzkopf, now rather late in the day, clear indications of the limits of his own freedom of action as field army commander. Somewhat typically, he would do this by indirection, to no little discomfort on the part of Arnold, his G3, who in such cases served as the stationary target for the CINC. Schwarzkopf's patience was probably not improved by the frustrations that had led to the need for such a briefing: four days of high-level squabbling with his Arab allies, a report that a British staff officer in London might have compromised the plan, and the fact that he had spent the day of the briefing in the north, attending a grand review for the Saudi king.22
Yeosock and Arnold went to brief Schwarzkopf with a set of options rather than a single ARCENT concept of operations. This method frustrated Schwarzkopf, who dismissed his subordinates with some heat and ordered them to come back in four days with a new briefing.23 Arnold was clearly crestfallen by this experience, but Yeosock left believing he now knew the rules of the game, albeit at some cost to his G3's self-esteem.24
Schwarzkopf had attacked his subordinates' plan on three main points.25 The first was the decision to send the XVIII Airborne Corps' 101st and 24th Divisions northwest to As Samawah. The second was his belief that ARCENT and VII Corps were greatly overestimating the practical strength of the Iraqis, particularly following the anticipated 50 percent attrition of them by the air interdiction program. Finally, Schwarzkopf was extremely discomfited by the idea that, as the plan was presented to him, VII Corps intended to observe an operational pause, once the corps was through to the enemy tactical depths, to rearm and refuel in the vicinity of Objective Collins, According to the one non-general officer present (the "slide turner" at the briefing), Schwarzkopf expressed the view that if VII Corps halted along Phase Line Smash to rearm and refuel, it would miss the war that he predicted would be over in twenty-four to forty-eight hours.26 Notably, in light of later developments, General Franks was not present at this briefing.
Schwarzkopf's "guidance" addressed a number of other issues for reexamination: the role of the 82d Airborne Division (as a follow-on force and in support of the French 6th Armored Division), the location of boundaries, the timing of attacks (synchronization of the corps), and the location of the XVIII Airborne Corps attack. Schwarzkopf directed that forces stay out of built-up areas and towns and that no force be put at risk to block Highway 8. Logistic support remained a further concern.27
There were substantive issues about which Schwarzkopf had good reason to be concerned. Leaving aside for the moment his objection to the XVIII Corps plan, the CINC's optimism about the Iraqis' powers of resistance seems to have been borne out by the events that followed. There is no evidence, however, that he ever convinced his subordinates that he was correct in this view, and ARCENT's assessments remained sober through G-day. Schwarzkopf seems to have been unwilling to impose his views on his Army commanders and unable to convince them. His concerns about the threat and the importance of maintaining momentum are important in light of subsequent events.
The idea of an operational pause was a concept that seems to have originated with staff planners. It was an idea that senior commanders were never able to kill. It was compounded by a confusion over the precise meaning of this quasi-doctrinal term. General Franks had decided as early as a pre-Desert Shield Battle Command Training Program exercise in Germany that accepting an operational pause, if by that one meant stopping the entire corps, would be to surrender the initiative.28 At the MAPEX in December, he spoke of the importance of relentless attack.29
The ARCENT staff, nonetheless, had discussed such a pause along Phase Line Smash, the one east-west line of communications (MSR Virginia) in southeastern Iraq running through As Salman. But Yeosock ultimately rejected the idea for the same reason Franks did. Indeed, in a postwar discussion, Yeosock indicated that above the brigade level, the corps was always in motion. The reconnaissance line, he noted, advances at about five kilometers an hour, slow enough that the armored brigades, which are the fighting formations of a corps, can stop periodically to rest and refuel and still catch up by employing their power of acceleration, since they are traveling through a zone already cleared.30 In Yeosock's mind, a pause was no more than an intellectual stocktaking. He clearly believed such stocktaking would be necessary before closing with the Republican Guard. The Guard was bound to react to VII Corps' initial penetration, and the final attack plan had to account for whatever the enemy did. It also appears that he intended to meet with the corps commanders to review the situation when the troops crossed PL Smash, but that would not, in itself, require stopping divisions, which advance pretty much on their own.31 Interestingly enough, given some of the postwar criticism, Franks remembered later that General Waller raised the matter of a pause with him just prior to G-day, at a time when Waller was acting as Third Army commander in Yeosock's absence.32 The idea of a "pause" seems to have been on a lot of minds.
Whatever the commanders thought, the staffs knew that the maneuver brigades (and divisions) would run out of fuel about the time they got to PL Smash, and they continued to address among themselves the necessary refueling halt in terms of a pause. The 2d Armored Cavalry Regiment assumed the need to stop for fuel on PL Smash in a late December staff exercise. The 1st Armored Division plan allowed for time to refuel and regain balance before attacking across PL Smash.33 In the XVIII Corps area, the 24th Infantry Division foresaw a pause-refueling halt before advancing beyond PL Smash and again before its last attack southeast along Highway 8.
The fuel problem did not go away. The question boiled down to how much of the force would stop, at any time, to refuel and rearm before getting on with the war. Could refueling be accommodated by rippling it along the front, a brigade at a time? Because large units, divisions and corps, rarely exercise as complete units in the field, the problem of refueling a division, much less a corps on the move, is seldom confronted. Moreover, refueling in an offensive posture is harder to accomplish, than while in a delay or retrograde movement, because of the need to carry fuel forward to the moving forces rather than being able to preposition it along the way. It seems apparent that the term "pause" had different connotations for different officers depending on their immediate concerns and that much of the discussion that seemed to settle on the issue only sowed further confusion.
There remained the problems of the XVIII Corps plan to attack toward As Samawah on the Euphrates, in the northwest corner of the corps' sector, and Schwarzkopf's belief that the ARCENT commanders overestimated the enemy. Aside from the distance over which sustainment would have to be accomplished-down the road to Rafha and up to As Samawah-this objective would take the 24th Infantry Division and the 101st Airborne Division away from the main attack before they turned down the Euphrates valley along Highway 8. The force, attacking into a great empty area, would not be in supporting distance of VII Corps.
Why had the army commander not pulled the 24th Infantry Division in toward the main attack to begin with? Perhaps the first explanation to suggest itself is that the idea of going to As Samawah had originated with Schwarzkopf himself, and he had shown himself ready to react violently to any attempt to question his concept by providing alternatives. Indeed, at the MAPEX, General Luck stated quite clearly that the principal argument for the move was its origin.34 The CINC said to do it that way! Second, Yeosock would seem to have been reluctant to interfere with the corps commander's judgment of how to do his business, perhaps as a result of an ambiguity still existing about the army commander's authority over operational questions between the CINC and the corps commanders. Luck had been given a mission and forces to accomplish it, and Yeosock was not disposed to interfere with his subordinates unless he perceived a risk to the whole operation.
Third, XVIII Corps had a real practical problem with the alternative to its planned route. A large area in the center of the corps' sector consisted of very rough, rocky terrain. If the corps sent its mobile forces east, they would have to move across this area, perhaps against resistance; they might also be pushed into a narrow sector of advance in order not to interfere with the VII Corps' maneuver space, essential for it in the main attack when it would send as large a force as possible around the enemy fortifications.35 If there was resistance, the 24th Division might not arrive at the Euphrates in time to achieve its mission of blocking the enemy route of withdrawal.
Fourth, there were few potential lines of support available to XVIII Corps, but one ran from Rafha, through As Salman, to As Samawah. The 24th Division probably could have gotten to that point to link up with the 101st, but it would have become increasingly attenuated as it advanced down the Highway 8 corridor toward Basrah. Indeed, the plan provided only for a ground advance to Tallil (with a possible follow-on assault by the 101st toward An Nasiriyah). On the other hand, if the corps' heavy forces were to advance in the eastern sector, as they ultimately did, initial support would have to come through As Salman and turn east until a more direct route was created by engineers in the rear of the advancing heavy forces. Then, VII Corps would have to open a line of communication for them through its own rear area once they turned southeast. The VII Corps could not do that, however, until after its own maneuver forces had turned east, and no commander likes his MSR in someone else's territory. This, in fact, is what was done. XVIII Corps did try and fail to gain possession of the necessary strip of terrain by requesting a boundary change, a request pursued into Desert Storm. Consideration was given to attaching the 24th Division to VII Corps for that part of the operation, but the idea never gained support with either General Waller during his interregnum as Third Army commander or General Yeosock.36
In short, these questions came down to a subjective appreciation of relative risk and comparative gain. If the Third Army and XVIII Corps commanders elected to move the 24th Infantry and 101st Divisions east, there was the risk of the enemy reacting to the initial attack and confronting the turning force37 in compartmented and generally rough terrain. There was also a risk inherent in a more complex sustainment problem and, perhaps most important, the risk of appearing to challenge Schwarzkopf in an area of command he felt was peculiarly his own. Nonetheless, it is difficult to argue with Schwarzkopfs final conclusion. If VII Corps required the assistance of XVIII Corps' heavy forces to destroy the Republican Guard, the "Victory Division" would have been too far away under the original XVIII Corps plan. If it turned out that they were not required for the destruction mission, any slowdown in their northward progress as a consequence of eastern sustainment problems would not matter much. The CINC might always call on air power to block the Highway 8 line of retreat until the ground forces could establish a blocking position. The 101st Airborne Division made it to the river first in any event! The advance to the Euphrates by the 24th Division was almost unimpeded except for the difficulties of terrain, and the division was on the river on G+2. The advance of the Victory Division demonstrated again B. H. Liddell Hart's assertion: "Natural hazards, however formidable, are less dangerous and less uncertain than fighting hazards. All conditions are more calculable, all obstacles more surmountable, than those of human resistance. By reasoned calculation and preparation they can be over-come almost to time-table."38
All this seems to have been Yeosock and Luck's conclusion as well, because when Schwarzkopf was briefed again on 8 January, the axis of advance for the 24th Division was moved to the general direction of An Nasiriyah to the northeast, with the 24th Division and 3d Armored Cavalry Regiment, in effect, becoming the outer wing of Schwarzkopf's great wheel.39 At this briefing, the slides depicting the build-up were far clearer and more definitive. Not surprisingly, Schwarzkopf approved the plan. What should have been far more unsettling for the army commander was the theater commander's very optimistic views about the likely effect of the air effort on the Iraqis' ability to resist on the ground and the idea that ARCENT commanders were greatly overestimating the strength of the enemy.
Those who would actually be called upon to lead ground forces into battle would remain far less sanguine about the effect of the air campaign on enemy capabilities than the theater commander, and therein lay much mischief. Schwarzkopf may appear to have been vindicated by events, though the clear technological advantages enjoyed by ground forces in direct-fire engagements and artillery counterbattery tire may lead one to underestimate the resistance still remaining in the Republican Guard forces and the Iraqis' better regular army units.40
Before 28 February, none of that could be known for sure. General Franks, who would lead the coalition's main attack, argued consistently for what he believed were three essentials for success. These were relentless attack (no pauses once the operation was under way), maintenance of concentration-hitting with a closed fist rather than open fingers-and the absolute need for three heavy divisions at the point of impact with the RGFC, this based upon various means of analysis and simulation and, no less, on professional judgment 41
The need for concentration meant a tightly controlled advance and a corps attack that moved deliberately in a particular sequence. The fist, the 1st and 3d Armored Divisions and the 2d Armored Cavalry Regiment, would have to move under corps control to begin with, just to avoid having the units separated or intermingled-something to be avoided, not only to maintain concentration but also to avoid fratricide. The rate of march, like that of a fleet at sea (which the divisions so closely resembled on the desert floor), could not exceed the speed of the slowest vehicle, very likely the M109 howitzer, which moved no faster than fifteen miles per hour. Moreover, the whole body could not get so far ahead of the 1st U.K. Armored Division as to expose the "fist's" eastern flank to interruption by Iraqi tactical reserves. Moreover, since the 1st Cavalry Division(-) did not appear likely to be released in time to get into the VII Corps fight with the RGFC (as the division's release was increasingly tied to the success of the Egyptian attack), the 1st Infantry Division would have to be the third heavy division upon which the VII Corps commander believed success rested. That meant, again, that the wheeling divisions would have to retard their movement long enough for the 1st Infantry to breach the enemy line, pass the 1st U.K. through, then fall in on the "fist's" right or rear. This, too, called for a highly disciplined, closely controlled maneuver, not the "devil-take-the-hindmost" charge-of-the-light brigade rash and gallant dash the more romantic critics would seem to have anticipated.42
The difference in opinions about the situation comes back to differing degrees of confidence in the ability of the air operations to break the spirit of the only forces in the theater that mattered-the heavy forces of the Republican Guard and the regular Iraqi Army. Also worthy of much discussion were the implications of concentrating and maneuvering twenty-five armored battalions, sixteen mechanized battalions, and three regimental cavalry squadrons (8,508 tracked vehicles, 27,652 wheels) in a confined space. After 8 January, however, the broad outline of the ARCENT Desert Storm plan was set, and internal planning and negotiation turned to matters of force allocation and details of execution.
On 1 February, General Yeosock held his final commander's planning meeting at King Khalid Military City, site of his mobile command post and the support command forward headquarters. Attending were the corps and support command commanders, the ARCENT's primary staff, and the commander of the theater reserve, Major General John Tilelli, Jr. By 1 February, air operations were in their sixteenth day. Most of VII Corps had closed into the tactical assembly areas around King Khalid Military City, and XVIII Corps was well into its displacement to the west. G-day was approaching, but as yet, the estimated attrition of the Iraqi forces in Kuwait was disappointing to the Army commanders.43
The logistic build-up continued, and anyone driving south on either of the MSRs would have been overwhelmed by the number of heavy trucks of all sorts on the road north. The most important service member in theater was probably the military policeman at the intersection of the main highways at Hafar al Batin, who fed the traffic from east and south into the combined westward flow (see figure 15 for distances between major locations). No one driving south or east in the face of the endless convoys-containing everything from armored vehicles on carriers to fuel trucks, ammunition trucks, and flat-beds full of mail or, alternatively, prefab privies-could doubt a major attack was imminent.
The "commander's huddle" was held in the aftermath of the battle of Khafji. Khafji was the single Iraqi attempt, on 29 January, to conduct a spoiling attack against the Saudi Joint Forces Command East and the U.S. Marine forces. The defeat of this probe seems to have reinforced Schwarzkopf's confidence that the Iraqis would not be able to mount a coherent defense. If anything, Khafji had the opposite effect on the ARCENT commanders.44 This was no meeting of men confident that the enemy would not stand. These were men seriously intent on seeing to it that when they closed with an enemy, whom they fully expected to fight and fight hard, they would have every available means at hand. Emphasis was on achieving simultaneous employment of the total ARCENT heavy force (from both corps) when it came time to fight the Republican Guard. Concern was expressed about the potential use of gas by the Iraqis, a capability that was taken quite seriously by all concerned, through G-day and through the four-day battle that followed.
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| Figure 15. |
The G2, Major General John Stewart, laid out three major possibilities for employment of the Republican Guard. The first of these was to counterattack if the Iraqis sensed a possibility for success. The second was to fall back and defend Basrah and Kuwait City to drag out the war. A third possibility was another drive south to seize a bargaining chip in case of a stalemate.45 General Yeosock estimated the Republican Guard would either "hunker down" at Basrah and give up Kuwait, or it would defend and stand fast. In any event he was not prepared, now or even on G-day, to decide before it was necessary on the particular plan for the destruction of the Republican Guard. Like the Elder Moltke, he would wait and see how the plan survived the first contact.46 In response to a question from General Franks, Yeosock said the corps would likely receive its first order from him the first night, but it would be for execution seventy-two to ninety-six hours later.47 In the event, however, the war would move much faster than anyone anticipated on 1 February.
By the time of the "commander's huddle," the Third Army attack had been thought through in extraordinary detail. Multivariate matrices plotted battlefield preparation actions for the eight days preceding the attack, and the ARCENT staff produced a twenty-threepage written scenario that examined various enemy responses to ARCENT's actions and possible reactions. A detailed planning time line anticipated closing with the Republican Guard Forces Command at H+74 in a scenario in which VII Corps did not begin its attack until H+26.48
What the "huddle" did not do was produce a decision on the preferred option for the destruction of the RGFC or for the actual timing of the attack across the front. In part, these issues may have been deferred because they were not subject to final resolution at that time. That more was not accomplished may also have been because the meeting got badly off schedule and the anticipated executive session could not be held after the staff briefings because General Luck had to leave for another engagement.49
The split timing of the various attacks, particularly the synchronization of the attacks of the two corps, had been a point of contention with Schwarzkopf and continued to be a matter of discussion at the "commander's huddle" and after. According to the plan, the Marines and Joint Forces Command East were to attack on G-day. The VII Corps and Joint Forces Command North were to attack on the following day, on G+ 1, after Iraqi attention and reserves, it was hoped, had been fixed by the G-day attacks. The reasons for this were complex (see figure 16).
Because the engineers would have to establish a direct line of communication behind the 24th Infantry Division and 3d Armored Cavalry Regiment, and the road for this would not be immediately available on G-day, XVIII Corps wanted to attack with the French 6th Light Armored Division and 82d Airborne Division on the corps' left at least twenty-four hours (twice as long as originally planned) before the heavy forces in order to open an initial main supply route through As Salman. The 101st Airborne was to conduct an early morning air assault on G-day as well, to a forward operating base midway to the Euphrates River. Intending to synchronize the coalition's logistics flow with its maneuver, planners also argued that these attacks would pose a threat fixing Iraqi forces not yet deployed to the south. Of course, the attacks might also have drawn Iraqi mobile forces west, before the coalition's heavy forces attacked. That was not necessarily bad, since it would pull the Iraqis into the open for attack from the air and perhaps jeopardize their flank. By seizing As Salman, the corps would not only protect ARCENT's left flank but would allow supplies to flow north, then east, on the lateral oiled road (MSR Virginia). The corps would also build the coalition's first intermediate logistic base to the east of As Salman.50
For the most part, the ARCENT's planning effort was completed at the "commander's huddle." Questions of the roles of the two headquarters echelons (corps and army) also seem to have been resolved. On 9 February, the secretary of defense and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff returned to Riyadh to receive a briefing from General Schwarzkopf and his commanders on preparations (and presumably the need) for a ground offensive. General Yeosock; General Franks; the commander of the 24th Infantry Division, Major General Barry McCaffrey; and the commander of the 1st Armored Division, Major General Ronald H. Griffith, briefed their respective plans.
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| Figure 16. |
Prior to the briefing, Schwarzkopf expressed his concerns to Yeosock that the VII Corps attack might be overly cautious in light of the extent of the aerial preparation. "I want VII Corps to slam into the Republican Guard," he said, and warned against any pause for rearming and refueling in light of the chemical threat.51 Yeosock explained Franks' concerns to the theater commander. Beyond that, it is not clear what else he was to do. First of all, he seems to have shared the general skepticism of the other ground commanders that the aerial preparation would be as effective as advertised.52 Then, he was as aware as his corps commander that the initial challenge for the heavy corps would be winning the necessary maneuver room. This challenge would require, on the one hand, squeezing two heavy divisions into a narrow opening between the Iraqi defensive line and the escarpment to the west and, on the other, a deliberate breaching operation by the 1st Infantry Division. The breaching operation would be followed by a passage of lines by the 1st U.K. Armored Division (reinforced by the U.S. 142d Artillery Brigade, Army National Guard). The British were to turn to the east and attack the Iraqi tactical reserves in order to protect the corps' flank and to relieve the pressure on the Egyptian Corps, thus freeing the theater reserve for the main attack. To Yeosock and Franks, these deliberate preliminaries were essential if the Third Army and VII Corps' mass of maneuver-three armored divisions and an armored cavalry regiment-were to "slam into the Republican Guard," which had to be located and fixed. Having explained Franks' tactical concerns to Schwarzkopf and having acknowledged the CINC's operational intent, Yeosock kept his own counsel when discussing the issues with Franks, who continued to believe his plan had Schwarzkopf's s confidence.
The ARCENT briefing on the 9th addressed the attrition of the enemy force, noting that it had not reached the 50 percent desired; moreover, it was proceeding at a rate one-half that required. General Stewart displayed a chart showing that, given an increase of 1 percent a day (to 2 percent) in the rate of attrition, the 50 percent point could be reached in two weeks.53 This, of course, implied an increased investment of air assets in preparation for the ground attack.
Based upon this estimate, a graph was shown indicating to Secretary Cheney and General Powell that, if the decision were taken to begin the necessary preparation of the battlefield for the ground attack (G-13), movement into attack positions could begin in six days (G-7) as attrition mounted, and preparation for attack would follow from G-5 to G-day.54 (See figure 17.) No dates appeared on the slide, but as the date of the briefing was the 9th, the earliest date that would meet the schedule for the attack was the 23d. This chart was followed by a depiction of final ground preparations (G-8 to G-day), the timing of attack, and alternatives for achieving destruction of the Republican Guard based upon the enemy's response. Other charts demonstrated that after 21 February, the sustainment resources (particularly trucks) necessary for the operation would be in-country. Based upon a continuous monitoring of Iraqi maneuvers, or rather the complete failure to detect any in the Kuwait theater of operations, the ARCENT commander concluded that the enemy would not maneuver but that he would fight, that the corps were ready, and that there was sufficient fuel and ammunition on hand to support the plan. 55 (See figure 18.)
General Franks briefed the ARCENT main attack. He was followed by General McCaffrey and General Griffith, who seemed to have been present to show the chairman that the tactical details of communications, movement, and sustainment had been worked to the last detail, as well as to give the high command a sense of the confidence of the leaders who would actually direct the coming battle. In his memoirs, Schwarzkopf adds gratuitously to his account of these briefings: "All very impressive, I thought, except Franks, whose plan was still too deliberate and who insisted on telling the secretary and the chairman that he was to need the reserves."56 If the theater commander felt that way at the time, there is no evidence he allowed his frustration to find voice, either in the presence of his superiors or after their departure.
At the end of the rehearsal briefing at ARCENT on the 8th, in response to an inquiry from Yeosock if anything else was on their minds, Franks observed that, while it was above his pay grade, he hoped someone had thought about how it all was supposed to look on the ground when it was over. He hoped someone had thought about a "war stopper."57 Later, Franks would observe that at the end o£ his briefing on the 9th, the secretary of defense raised the same question and asked how Franks thought the end of the ground battle would look.58 In the event, the complex problem of war termination would be the one detail not well thought out by the strategic leadership before the secretary's question was posed. Events on 28 February raised the question of whether it was adequately studied thereafter. Franks and McCaffrey would find themselves in no small difficulty as a consequence.
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| Figure 17. |
A World War I general, perhaps French Marshal Joffre or Field Marshal Hindenburg, was once asked who had won his greatest battle. It is said that he thought for a moment and replied: "I don't know who was responsible for the victory. But I know who would have been blamed for the defeat." The commander is always responsible, particularly for defeat. Victory, according to an old proverb, has many fathers; defeat is an orphan. Among the several things that stand out in the Desert Storm planning process, perhaps the most important is that the Desert Storm plan was the result of a process, not an event, not one man's brilliant or clever insight.
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| Figure 18. |
Perhaps all successful military operations are the product of the corporate skills of the institution, but this was particularly the case of Desert Storm. Colonel Joe Purvis and his team started the process with a good deal of personal direction (and sometimes abuse) from General Schwarzkopf. Certainly Schwarzkopfs forensic abilities counted heavily, both in convincing Colin Powell that two corps were required for an offensive and in articulating to his subordinates a clear vision of what they were about. General Steve Arnold's role was decisive in linking the efforts of ARCENT and the two corps with those of CENTCOM. Tireless and good humored, even under what at times was severe hammering from Schwarzkopf over issues like planning for the employment of the theater reserve, Arnold was the heart and soul of the ARCENT staff planning effort. His ability to draw in and combine harmoniously the efforts of multiple, independent, and often competing agencies and powerful personalities was matchless. General Pagonis was everywhere on the MSR in his command van with cellular phone in hand, but he was still able to oversee planning of the most difficult and dynamic logistic build-up since Korea, and he saw to it that the operators' goals were made possible. Many supporting agencies not addressed here, the CENTCOM Analysis Agency and BCTP representatives particularly, provided simulation analysis to support the commander's judgments and provide many bright ideas as well. Finally, the ability of the Third Army commanders to bury their differences and strong personalities to produce a comprehensive plan like that for Desert Storm is a tribute to the character of the men who have risen to command the Army of the nineties.
The plan itself had several points of interest. First of all, although the CENTCOM OPLAN spoke of a campaign of four phases (strategic air campaign, air supremacy in the KTO, battlefield preparation, and ground offensive plan), the coalition offensive would consist of two separable and distinct parts: (1) an air offensive of three parts (attacks to achieve air supremacy, strategic bombing in Iraq north of the KTO, and air operations in the KTO designed to reduce the Iraqi forces in occupation) and (2) an air-ground offensive should it prove necessary all carried on within the ongoing naval interdiction effort. The logic of the strategic situation would not require a follow-on ground operation if Saddam Hussein bowed to the logic of his situation and agreed to withdraw and comply with the pertinent UN resolutions. Certainly, the air operations provided significant persuasion to that end. It is equally certain that the air operations were unsuccessful in convincing Saddam to retreat under circumstances acceptable to the president and the coalition leadership.
The requirement for subsequent political permission to undertake ground operations shows that the ground offensive was conceived to be an escalation, separable from the air attacks. The ground attack was contingent, not concomitant, to the air campaign, notwithstanding Schwarzkopf's complaints in his memoir that he was repeatedly pressured to initiate a ground attack before he was ready. Ultimately, the plan fit neither of the two patterns posited at the start of the last chapter: destruction by maneuver-induced psychological dislocation or rear attack. Rather, it was an amalgam, perhaps best characterized as pragmatic. The plan clearly hoped for psychological dislocation (albeit one achieved by aerial fires as well as maneuver). But the plan ultimately provided for physical destruction at all levels should that be required.59 Indeed, the physical destruction of Iraqi armored forces became an important, if collateral, objective to ensure future regional stability-a strategic goal. At the end of the day, there is little so psychologically dislocating as daily subjection to a battering from which there is no relief and for which there is no reply.
This understanding of the theater campaign plan is important, because it accounts for the fact that commitment of air resources to prepare the ground specifically in support of the Army ground operation (as opposed to achieving attrition of the forces in the KTO as a part of the air campaign) was delayed until eight or nine days before the start of the ground attack. The campaign of attrition (the first part of Phase 111) was directed by the joint forces Air component commander in accordance with the theater commander's guidance and priorities---a fact many Army ground tactical commanders found hard to accept, though it was entirely consistent with the nature of the campaign plan. Once the decision was taken to launch the ground attack (and final approval undoubtedly followed the visit of the secretary of defense and chairman on 9 February), air resources began to be employed to prepare for ground operations. At the same time, the Air Force continued the general process of air-ground attrition, strategic bombing, and maintenance of air superiority.
The allied ground forces were employed in ways that accorded with their capabilities and the needs of the coalition. The "piano key" deployment of the forces across the front-Joint Forces Command East, MARCENT, Joint Forces Command North, and ARCENTensured that the two Arab-Islamic commands could call on U.S. components for assistance, particularly for help obtaining and controlling air support (see figure 19). It also ensured that Arab forces were properly positioned to liberate Kuwait City. The Egyptian Corps, part of Joint Forces Command North but a force with which the U.S. Army had some experience through periodic Bright Star exercises, was aligned with VII Corps' eastern flank. The U.S. Army provided support on a bilateral basis to bolster the Egyptian effort, to include the loan of some required breaching equipment, positioning of the theater reserve, and the provision for on-call AH-64 support. Third Army sent a special liaison team to the Egyptian Corps as well as to Joint Forces Command North.
MARCENT was positioned near the coast in light of the short operational reach of Marine forces and appeared to be the landward part of an amphibious envelopment. The Marines were highly visible on CNN and in press reports, an unwitting contribution by the news media to misleading the Iraqis. The 1st U.K. Armored Division was employed with the NATO-based U.S. corps in accordance with the British desire to take part in more open, less costly maneuver operations. The French, whose thoroughly professional but light force was based on the Red Sea to the west, were placed on the ARCENT's left to seize As Salman and open the limited road net behind XVIII Corps, a task they accomplished in exemplary fashion in the time deemed necessary by the XVIII Corps before the fact.
The burden of the planned ground attack rested firmly on the VII Corps. All else could come a cropper and yet, if VII Corps succeeded in destroying the Republican Guard and Iraqi operational. reserves, come right in the end. If VII Corps failed and the Republican Guard was able to counterattack, the offensive through the Iraqi defenses could become very bloody indeed, although the success of U.S. air power against the Iraqi armored forces at Khafji probably indicated that coalition success was inevitable once the Iraqi forces had to come above ground and concentrate to resist the attacking ground forces. That was not yet as clear in February 1991 as it is today. What was clear was that air supremacy was a sine qua non for the entire ground effort, as was the preattack concentration west of Wadi al Batin.
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| Figure 19. |
Ultimately, the ARCENT plan was Lieutenant General John Yeosock's. Not because he can be seen working any particular part of it. Indeed, he seemed to have spent the greatest part of his time in the introduction of Army forces into the theater, provisioning of host nation support, creation of an echelon-above-corps intelligence capability, and obtaining whatever he could beg, borrow, or steal from other major Army commands to make Desert Storm work. But it was Yeosock who married what was possible, largely General Pagonis' business, with what was thought to be required by his two corps. His life from November to February was a series of trade-offs and work arounds. He evaluated what was required and more often decided what could be done with what was available. At the same time, he balanced risks and generally strove to unencumber the corps so they could concentrate on the immediate problems of training, deploying/redeploying, and preparing for the anticipated offensive.
Notes
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| 5 Build-up to Attack |
The president's 8 November announcement did not change General Yeosock's conception of his command. Third Army would continue to be three armies: service component, theater, and numbered field. It would expand its heretofore limited operational responsibilities. The new circumstances, with two assigned corps conducting an operational offensive instead of one corps defending in depth, required a dramatic restructuring of the headquarters and the army-level force structure. This had to be done while bringing VII Corps on line and seeing to it that the logistic build-up and operational redeployment were properly executed. New units arriving from Europe and the continental United States (CONUS) had to be fitted into the transportation sequence, so they did not arrive a day before they were required, but just in time to participate in the offensive.
Some environmental acclimation was desirable for combat units, though this was not always possible. Much of the 3d Armored Division became acclimated on the way to the line of departure. However, February weather in Saudi Arabia is nothing like the heat of the summer; rain can be heavy as a monsoon and accompanied, notwithstanding, by blowing sand. Temperatures range well into the thirties during the night while remaining cool throughout the day. (It was reported one morning at the ARCENT command briefing that, during the night, temperatures had reached 27 degrees Fahrenheit in the area occupied by the 24th Infantry Division.)1 Adapting to desert conditions, of course, requires a good deal more than becoming accustomed to temperature. The sheer emptiness and unlimited vistas make orientation difficult and distort estimates of time and distance. For those more used to houses and trees, the desert can contribute to a sort of melancholy.
The process of concentrating an expanded Third Army in the Arabian Peninsula was not easy to manage. An unavoidable delay occurred between identification of a need and mobilization, shipment, arrival, and deployment in theater. Anything required in February had to be identified by the end of the previous November. The deficits left by the ceiling on the size of the initial army and corps organizations had to be corrected and a new corps force structure built. This was made easier after ARCENT's various force structure excursions, both to hold down the size of the force (minimum essential force guidance) and to examine the requirements involved in making Third Army an Army MACOM (major army command). Much of the design work, too, had been ongoing in Europe for some time. The VII Corps and U.S. Army Europe had long anticipated possible calls for forces to reinforce the Persian Gulf army.
The new deployments involved bringing together in the theater of war, at the proper time, units from Europe and the United States. The new units had to be introduced quicker and in larger numbers than during the initial XVIII Corps deployment.2 (See figure 20.) This, of course, implied the acquisition, through call-up or contract, of additional strategic transportation resources by the joint service transportation command. Often there were no good answers. Choices involved trade-offs, each possessing attendant risks.
The U.S. Army was not structured or trained for an operational offensive in open desert terrain such as that now confronting its commanders. Because it had been designed for war in Europe, it was seriously sub-optimized and required significant augmentation. The operation required tactical and operational movement of large units that rarely had assembled in one place for training, let alone maneuvered tactically in formation. The means of operational transport, both vehicles and drivers, were not readily available and could not be assembled in time. A number of expedients had to be formulated in December and January, then coordinated with the Department of the Army as well as the host nation, to make up for the deficiencies.
Yeosock continued to define his task as "un-encumbering" the two corps so that they could concentrate on training and fighting. In addition to bringing the VII Corps into the theater, it was also his job to project the gathering forces to the west and deploy them with all the means necessary to launch and sustain both corps for up to two weeks of intense combat. For the most part, accomplishing this would be the task of General Pagonis and the 22d Support Command. The ARCENT commander focused most of his efforts on solving problems, while his staff concentrated on planning and coordination. Meanwhile, subordinate maneuver units prepared for battle.
Before 8 November, Third Army's responsibilities for operational oversight of its single corps were minimal. It is probable that, had the Desert Shield defensive plan ever been executed, General Schwarzkopf would have taken direct operational command of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force and XVIII Corps. Moreover, the defensive plan, which was limited in geographic scope, did not require a large echelonabove-corps structure. Logically, then, Third Army headquarters had been one of the biggest bill payers for the minimum essential force ceiling, retaining only, with limited exceptions, its peacetime premobilization size and structure and even providing the personnel to man the U.S.-Saudi C31C staff.
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| Figure 20. |
Now that ARCENT would command two corps operationally and a substantially larger echelon-above-corps force, the headquarters structure, and even its way of thinking about itself, had to be changed in very short order. To assist in this change of orientation, the army commander developed a system of liaison teams, "directed telescopes," that were to be located in all key headquarters across the front and offer, not just to ARCENT but to CENTCOM, a quick, extra-bureaucratic source of immediate information on the situation of friendly forces. These teams provided one more vital bridge to cover the gaps in the allied command structure to compensate for the coalition's lack of true unity of command. Third Army also created an advanced mobile command post (CP) called "Lucky TAC," or "Lucky Wheels," since it was housed in wheeled expando-vans.
How all this was done and why provides insights into the nature of operational command and coalition and joint warfare. It is also a story that is only complete when various human aspects of what was done are examined; for the headquarters restructuring had social as well as organizational consequences that had to be dealt with on a daily basis.
In the fall of 1990, Colonel John Jorgenson, the ARCENT deputy chief of staff, expressed the view to General Yeosock that the army headquarters was, to its detriment, dominated by light infantrymen and field artillery officers, particularly in the operations staff.3 The observation was partially correct. General Arnold, the G3, had been a brigade commander in the 82d Airborne Division, then an assistant division commander in the 2d Division in Korea. Colonel Bob Beddingfield, the deputy G3 (and displaced premobilization G3), and Colonel Glenn Lackey, the G3 operations chief, were field artillery officers. Colonel Gene Holloway, the G3 plans, was an aviator. Major Steve Holley, the principal staff planner for Desert Storm, was an air defense officer-and so on!
The Army, like any large organization, has its unofficial unions and organizational shibboleths. The issue raised by Jorgenson, that only heavy maneuver arms officers could understand large-unit heavy-force operations, is typical of these and, in the main, perhaps, quite valid-if not in the specific case of all the officers named above. It is worth pointing out that, although Arnold had commanded a light (airborne) infantry brigade, he had held a number of posts in the 8th Infantry Division in Germany, to include battalion command, so heavy forces were not entirely foreign to him. These general beliefs, however, are not unimportant. To the extent they are honored, they affect the legitimacy of an organization's members to do their business. It is also true that experience, if not the best, is ordinarily the most effective teacher.
So an effort was made to infuse the staff with what were called "long ball hitters." These were up-and-coming officers, drawn by the Army Personnel Command from throughout the Army on the basis of training, education, and experience to fill specific requirements in the Third Army headquarters. Their arrival supplemented and sometimes displaced the proprietary Third Army staff officers, while bringing in a good bit of talent. Among those selected were Lieutenant Colonel Dave Mock, Major Paul Hughes, Major Dan Gilbert, Major Rick Halblieb, and Major Clay Newman.
Dave Mock is a quiet, firm, and rock-solid cavalryman. He was the balance wheel in the army's forward operations cell, maintaining a modicum of order and rationality in an environment that could, on occasion, resemble a futures market. Paul Hughes is a tall, shy, but extraordinarily competent communicator. He played a vital role in establishing the communications network, linking the forward headquarters with army units in the forward area of operations. Dan Gilbert, a bright and studious infantryman, became a principal Desert Storm planner, while Rick Halblieb, an aggressive, articulate, and sometimes obsessive intelligence officer, became the principal targeting-battle damage assessment officer in General Stewart's G2 section. Indeed, when Stewart arrived to be G2 in late December, his "long ball hitters" all but marginalized the existing G2 organization. Clay Newman, a persistent logistician, served as a logistics expediter for the army staff, helping to locate lost or misdirected equipment during the build-up and redeployment. All but Newman were SAMS graduates.
Obviously, this rapid expansion produced some strains in the headquarters organization. Colonel Jorgenson himself was a victim of the process. Jorgenson was one of the most talented senior staff officers in Third Army. He was a former heavy maneuver brigade commander who had, in a previous assignment, served as Yeosock's squadron executive officer in the Third Armored Cavalry. Professionally frustrated by nonselection for general, Jorgenson was looking toward retirement when Desert Shield broke out. Faced with the need to fill his primary staff positions with general officer principals, Yeosock also had to find a general officer chief of staff. This was particularly the case since the G4, Brigadier General Jim Monroe, had served on the Third Army staff, under Jorgenson as "chief."4 Yeosock appointed his deputy commander, General Bob Frix, ARCENT chief of staff as well as deputy commanding general. Jorgenson became his deputy.
Had General Schwartz returned to ARCENT in December, when C31C was absorbed by CENTCOM, he would have become Yeosock's principal deputy for operations, leaving Frix to act as a traditional chief of staff. But Schwartz did not return. Frix, as deputy commanding general, continued to work primarily as Yeosock's main troubleshooter and "outside man," ultimately moving forward in January with the advanced command post and then heading Task Force Freedom to reconstruct Kuwait after the war. Jorgenson did the work of running the staff through the staff section deputies (colonels) and acted as the principal mediator between the field grade staff and the commander. But he did not attend the daily general officer meetings where major decisions were made and command guidance was provided. Once General Frix moved forward, the chief of staff functions were picked up by the commander himself, his G3 General Arnold, Colonel Jorgenson, and the commander's executive officer, Lieutenant Colonel Michael Kendall.
Restructuring the army headquarters had to accord with a fundamental belief on the part of Yeosock that, as an army commander, he commanded two corps commanders, not two corps. He believed his principal role was ensuring the sustainment of the force and the allocation of force multipliers not otherwise accessible to the corps-especially logistics, air power, and intelligence. He was also charged with organization of such necessary but generally neglected functions as postal services, graves registration, enemy prisoner of war (EPW) operations, and medical support and evacuation. Yeosock recognized that corps commanders were men largely capable of synchronizing their own battles and that, in any event, corps were large organizations whose response to new orders was bound to take some time, given the number of echelons of command between the army and the level where orders are carried out, i.e., the platoon and squad. Yeosock was determined to deal only in major issues and only with large units. Moreover, he was disposed to take a somewhat Jeffersonian view of high command as something done best when done least. This view was probably necessary because of the compulsive activist behavior of the CINC, not to mention a sense of lingering ambiguity about the extent to which Schwarzkopf might intend to deal directly with his corps commanders and their restiveness under a peer who had not commanded at their level.
So as long as ARCENT, as the operational headquarters, could assign missions, allocate forces, set objectives and boundaries, conduct deep fires, and monitor progress, it was, in Yeosock's view, synchronizing the operations of the two corps. That could be done from wherever the army commander had communications and a picture of what was going on in an operational level of detail. Unstated was a realization that there were two geographic and two "environmental" conditions requiring, in Yeosock's view, his presence in Riyadh.
The geographic considerations were the location of the theater intelligence apparatus and the proximity of General Pagonis in Dhahran, or at least his headquarters. Pagonis himself seemed to be in continuous motion all over the theater. Operational intelligence was critical to decision making, and the immediate linkages with strategic and operational systems were at Riyadh. Proximity to Support Command (SUPCOM) was important to the demands of keeping the movement process from the ports to the corps in order, a process in which Yeosock took a personal daily interest from December through February.
The first "environmental" condition was the need to stay close to the commander in chief. This was a consequence of the personality of the CINC himself. Schwarzkopf, an active, mercurial, highly emotional, and often impatient man, was best dealt with face to face and one on one.5 In many ways, Schwarzkopf used Yeosock as Grant used Meade. In both cases, higher duties no doubt mandated such a solution, but such working relationships are seldom comfortable for either partner. Yeosock believed proximity was vital.
The second "environmental" requirement was the need to be able to work face to face with major coordinating commands, especially the Saudis and the CENTAF commander, General Horner, with whom Yeosock shared quarters. Yeosock knew from his experience as PMSANG that proximity to principal Saudi decision makers, often civilians, was essential to coordinate the fight and to address vital issues of host-nation support, particularly transportation, fuel supply, and prisoner of war support.6 Circumventing the bureaucratic Army/Air Force interface by direct discussions with Horner permitted Yeosock to understand Schwarzkopf's view of the Air Force as a distinct operational instrument. Thus, Yeosock could work on a personal level for Army needs within the broader theater-strategic vision.
Yeosock was confident that army communications could give him a picture of the battlefield adequate to provide his forces the appropriate guidance and coordination while he remained in the capital. He had his communication system designed accordingly, and his G2 built a massive intelligence structure next door to his headquarters. In November and December, Yeosock also created two additional elements of the headquarters to ensure his concept could be realized-a mobile CP and seven liaison teams designed to be "shadow staffs," or "directed telescopes." The commander's intentions for the mobile CP seem always to have been largely misunderstood by key subordinates. Yeosock would call the liaison teams one of the three chief reasons for success in Operation Desert Storm.7
As early as 27 October, General Frix, as ARCENT chief of staff and deputy commanding general, alerted General Taylor at Forces Command (and deputy commander, ARCENT rear) that a great deal of attention was being given to the headquarters' ability to act as a field army, an operational headquarters. Taylor was told to expect requests for both "senior officers with experience in Armored/Mechanized Operations and Communications Equipment and signal personnel capable of communication over great distances."8 About the same time, Colonel Glenn Lackey, G3 operations officer at ARCENT, was to build an Operations and Intelligence Center (war room) in the Eskan Village school house, from which the commander and his G3 could monitor operations and communicate with higher, lower, and adjacent headquarters. He was to create six, later seven, liaison teams to send to adjacent and subordinate headquarters. And he was to develop a mobile command post.
Lackey received his guidance from both Yeosock and Arnold. Colonel Chuck Sutten, the G6 (communications electronics and information management staff officer), provided technical advice and designed the communications system. Assistance in obtaining the equipment and manpower for the mobile CP and liaison teams was provided by Major General Jerry Granrud's Force Development Office at the DCSOPS in the Pentagon, and the two projects were tied together under the titles of Project 5 and 5A (liaison parties and mobile CP respectively). A related project to obtain a mobile armored CP for the XVIII Corps was undertaken at the same time.
Yeosock had a clear vision of what he wanted from the liaison parties. Arnold observed that his own first idea was simply provision of traditional two- or three-man teams whose purpose would have been limited largely to communications. Yeosock was thinking bigger, especially in the case of those teams assigned to the Arab-Islamic coalitions two commands. He wanted an organization "that could be a minicorps headquarters if it had to be. "9
The broad concept was similar to that of the C3IC organization. The liaison party was not just to be a means of communication but an instrumentality to influence how the allies did business, even to assist them in complex staff work if necessary. This put a premium on the quality and seniority of the officers and men assigned. Team chiefs, with one exception, were colonels who were War College graduates. The one exception, Lieutenant Colonel Rick Gutwald, was a talented staff officer who became team chief when the colonel originally assigned clashed with corps staff and was reassigned to another team to promote harmony. Gutwald's team was assigned to XVIH Airborne Corps.
In the case of the Arab-Islamic allies, the liaison parties provided an ARCENT linkage with Special Operations Forces (SOF) assigned by Central Command to Arab tactical units to provide advice and training.10 By cooperating and combining ARCENT efforts with the SOF liaison parties, the U.S. command, in fact, had a communications and command information net in the Arab forces more reliable than that possessed by the Northern and Eastern Area Commands themselves. The ARCENT liaison teams assisted in planning and obtaining deep targeting support for the Arab forces from CENTAF, offered Arab tactical commanders intelligence not otherwise available, provided immediate "ground truth" to the ARCENT commander and, during the ground campaign, to the CENTCOM commander as well. A team was also provided to the Egyptian Corps, which was subordinate to Joint Forces Command North but closely associated diplomatically and militarily with the Americans. The presence of this team ensured both close cooperation with VII Corps' eastern neighbor and often ensured communication between the Egyptians and their own higher operational commander at Joint Forces Command North. (See figure 21.)
The liaison parties with U.S. coordinating forces facilitated the army commander's provision of various types of support to MARCENT. It allowed him to influence positioning of the CENTCOM reserve division, 1st Cavalry Division(-), prior to commitment, as well as to keep the reserve division commander informed about Third Army's current intentions. For principal subordinate forces (VII and XVIII Corps), the mission was more conventional but more substantial in light of the caliber of officers assigned and their ability to achieve immediate access to the army commander when necessary. On one occasion after the cease-fire, for example, a liaison team was able to report to the Third Army commander the premature withdrawal of occupation forces from Iraq by a senior subordinate commander understandably interested in getting his forces home.11 Another team, in what must have been the loneliest job in the theater, acted as the permanent point of contact with Iraqi representatives after the ceasefire agreement in March.
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| Figure 21. Liaison teams |
These parties were to be large-up to thirty or so officers and enlisted soldiers-and multifaceted, to cover all staff functions. They were to have several vehicles and redundant robust communications, particularly multichannel TACSAT (tactical satellite) equipment.12 Liaison officers (LNOs) were not just to pass on information but to evaluate it from the point of view of the army commander. They were, in fact, to provide information that distances and circumstances prevented the army commander from obtaining firsthand. The chief LNOs were to be "directed telescopes"-the eyes and ears of the commander. In Yeosock's words after the war, the key was "to bridge" the command and control functions of the land component commander (in the absence of such a figure). The solution was to use LNO teams that had capabilities in command, operations, logistics, plans, and communication. "For U.S. forces it was overkill, but for Arab-Islamic forces it became in many respects a shadow staff to make up for their inability to deal with planning at the level required."13
While these parties were created by ARCENT, those teams assigned to duty with the Marines and Joint Command East were virtually taken over by CENTCOM once operations were under way. Particularly with the Arab forces, the teams became a means of addressing a variety of coalition problems whose resolution was required to ensure the success of Desert Storm. During the conduct of the battle, the two parties with the American corps and those with the Egyptians and the Joint Forces Command North acted as an extension of the army commander's personal staff and reported not through the G3, though they kept him informed, but through the commander's executive officer. This allowed Yeosock to circumvent the bureaucratic delay imposed by a large general staff structure. All seven team chiefs reported to the army commander's executive officer at least twice daily to update the commander on the situation where they were located.
If the idea of large liaison staffs was the commanding general's, the mobile CP seems to have been General Arnold's. Arnold was thinking in terms of a division or corps tactical CP.14 Indeed, he took the idea from his experiences as G3 in the 9th Division and, later, I Corps. For Yeosock, the facility was never to be more than an alternative command post that he could use if the main CP were destroyed or interfered with.15 In either case, the facility had to be mobile (the Department o£ the Army provided nine expando vans), have a sophisticated communications package approximating that of the main CP, and be manned with a talented staff to monitor ongoing operations.
After 12 January, Yeosock used the mobile CP as a base for his deputy, General Frix, and Frix's de facto deputy (actually a deputy G3 who had arrived in theater as director of the Army's Training and Doctrine Command [TRADOC] Battle Command Training Program), Colonel Carl Ernst. They could act as ARCENT expediters-that is, as informed representatives of the commander, who could go and see what was happening, interpret guidance, synchronize ongoing operations, and provide feedback to the commander. This was done in a situation where the corps headquarters maintained communications with the main CP and the army commander. Subordinate commanders could refer to either when the interpretation of the expediters did not fit their own notions.16
Third Army was working out its command and control structure and processes as it deployed two corps and re-created itself from a basic shell. The mobile CP was an entirely new creation with a scratch team, like the rest of ARCENT, and its place in the command and control structure was unclear. It had to be developed even as it coordinated a major operational redeployment. The difference of creative vision between the tactical CP and the mobile alternate, as well as the presence of so much talent forward, sometimes produced a sort of schizophrenia in the headquarters. Moreover, both Arnold and Stewart, back at the main CP, seemed to be convinced that army command should be conducted forward. Yeosock, however, had always maintained he needed to be in the capital.
The principals at the forward CP clearly did perform as the field army "tactical" headquarters-that is, the operational center of the command and control apparatus for near-term actions during the assembly of the army around King Khalid Military City and for its redeployment to the west. The forward CP, "Lucky TAC" (after Patton's forward headquarters in World War II), included cells from the Support Command's 318th Movement Control Agency and the 89th Military Police Brigade, which had responsibility for ensuring the one east-west MSR operated efficiently. A small plans element headed by Major Kevin Reynolds developed contingency plans and served as something of an alter ego to the Plans Cell at "Lucky Main" in Riyadh. The G3 argued that the tactical CPs (TACs) should talk to corps TACs, the main CP to the corps' main CP, that fragmentary orders (FRAGOs) should be issued by the TAC (this was granted, but approval still came from the main CP and, when time was scarce, was not always observed anyway), and that contingency planning should be the sole province of the TAC, while long-term plans would be drawn up in the main CP.17
What all this "structure" failed to comprehend was that command takes place where the commander is. Throughout, Yeosock, who did not believe operational command and tactical command are analogous, maintained limits on the initiative of the mobile CP, which frustrated its aspirations to operational control. In the end, the army's war was run largely by the commander, through his personal staff at Eskan Village and his liaison teams (with key subordinate and adjacent headquarters), while using his general staff for detail and longer-term work. The mobile CP, as Yeosock always intended, was an alternate command post, a base for expediters who could untangle immediate problems and a headquarters to oversee the operations of the various echelon-above-corps troops. It did oversee important actions leading up to the initiation of the ground attack, not only redeployment but prisoner of war camp construction, development of echelon-above corps communications systems, the conduct of mass casualty drills (in anticipation of chemical warfare), and replacement system operations-thereby freeing the army commander and his G3 to focus on future operational issues. The mobile CP also served as an aggressive seeker of information, supplementing the work of the liaison officers and main CP. One mark of its capabilities was that General Waller, who served as interim commander from 17-23 February while Yeosock underwent surgery in Germany, indicated that he intended to command from the mobile CP rather than the main CP.18
Whether Waller's solution would have been more or less successful than Yeosock's is speculative. The communication net at the mobile CP was not as robust as that at the main CP, which had been designed as the center of a communications web. Moreover, selection of the commander's location depended upon the respective officer's assessment of his relationships, not just with subordinates but with his superior and coordinate commanders. To have made the mobile CP a TAC was more congenial with most officers' cultural values, but it seems to have implied a great deal more direct control of tactical events than Yeosock intended or thought necessary. Waller's view also reflected greater confidence in his personal ties to Schwarzkopf and less concern with maintenance of personal contact with the joint air component commander and Arab officials once the ground attack began.
The third of Colonel Lackey's projects, the war room, was the least novel, though perhaps the most important one, since it was from here and the commander's office adjacent to it that the ARCENT war was run. The war room, a large bay-like facility, was built in the courtyard of the Eskan Village school house. Staff officers and liaison officers were placed in parallel banks of desks, with secure phones, in front of a large operational map. It was a sort of field expedient version of the NASA operations rooms. The war room had an extraordinary communication network that allowed the commander or G3 to speak to anyone from the JCS to the divisional CPs. G2 and G3 operations were integrated. This was underpinned by Generals Arnold and Stewart having held corresponding positions in the 9th Division earlier in their careers. Thus, the physical layout was backed up on the more personal level.
One external influence on the expansion of the army staff (and those of the corps and Support Command) should be addressed. This had to do with the Battle Command Training Program (BCTP), of which Colonel Carl F. Ernst was the director prior to his seconding to Third Army. BCTP is important because its multilevel involvement in planning and organizational activities is indicative of the extent to which the entire Army immediately focused its energies on supporting the forces in theater, sometimes overwhelming the actors with good ideas but generally making a large and positive contribution.
The BCTP is an organization designed to exercise and stretch the capabilities of senior staffs by providing an evaluated, interactive, computer-based war game to division and corps headquarters. It is the headquarters' combat training center. The BCTP evaluators are a group of bright, skilled, and often aggressive staff officers who critique in detail the staff processes and applications of doctrine by the units that are required to contend with their unforgiving opponent. To the extent that Colonel Purvis and his colleagues from SAMS represent the intellectual legacy of General William E. DePuy's organization of TRADOC, BCTP represents the countervailing tendency to a technical and positivist view of war reflected in the Army Training and Evaluation Program (ARTEP) and the national training centers. Its creed is tough, evaluated, realistic training to standard.19
Upon the initiation of Desert Shield, Colonel Ernst immediately offered his services and those of his organization to XVIII Airborne Corps, and as the crisis developed, he supported both the corps and the army headquarters by running staff exercises, developing simulations to test different planning options and, perhaps most important, seeding the various staffs with BCTP evaluators who became full working members of the organization (while retaining their contact with Ernst).20 Two of these, Lieutenant Colonel Bob Schmidt and Major Kevin Reynolds, played key roles in writing operations plans for both corps and ARCENT.
BCTP members also set the standards for staffs coming together under pressure, as a large number of new members flowed in, particularly at ARCENT but also at VII Corps. This was not always without friction with the proprietary staff members, but most of the BCTP people were able to provide instruction without appearing to be Field Marshal Montgomery coming to "save" the Americans at the Bulge.
Ernst was ultimately retained as deputy G3 at ARCENT. Colonel Mike Hawk, one of his team chiefs, was deputy chief of staff at VII Corps. Ernst kept three BCTP members, among them Major Reynolds, with him in the mobile CP as a sort of alternate plans cell. Lieutenant Colonel Schmidt became chief of plans at VII Corps. The BCTP network, whatever else it did, provided another channel for information to flow between headquarters, sometimes to get previously rejected ideas reconsidered, often to get new ideas on the table. It is a measure of the trust vested in Ernst and his team that XVIII Corps took liberties with security surrounding the war plan to allow the colonel to test various offensive options against simulation, thereby widening significantly the circle of those privy to the ground attack plan, to include stations in CONUS.21 The secret was held and useful insights were developed that subsequently assisted the command in preparing for Operation Desert Storm.
With the late December-early January forward deployment of the liaison teams and mobile CP and the development of the war room, ARCENT-Third Army had become a warfighting headquarters. At the same time, ARCENT continued to be a theater army, the departmental command in theater. In addition to, and simultaneous with, introducing a new corps, ARCENT had to expand its echelonabove-corps force structure to provide for a significantly greater demand for operational (theater) transportation, intelligence information, and such practical functions as engineer construction, graves registration, enemy prisoner of war operations, and civil affairs-matters generally not addressed in Army schools or on peacetime exercises. The 416th Engineer Command, 352d Civil Affairs Command, and the 800th Military Police Brigade were Reserve Component units. ARCENT also formed an echelon-above-corps personnel command.
At the same time, ARCENT had to continue, indeed expand, the force modernization programs already under way, work out a scheme for replacement operations in anticipation of heavy combat losses, and organize a vast medical support structure built almost entirely on Reserve Component hospitals.
The expansion of the intelligence capabilities was extraordinary. When the ARCENT mission had called for a defense fought only by a single corps, that corps' intelligence organization had been deemed adequate. The intermediate army intelligence structure had been limited, and the ARCENT G2, unlike the G3 and G4, was a colonel, Beauford W. Tuton. Tuton had planned for expansion of the intelligence structure but had not been able to bring the desired augmentees forward under the minimum essential force guidance. Then, in November, the mission changed.
On 1 November, the echelon-above-corps intelligence brigade (the 513th Military Intelligence Brigade) had only 453 personnel in country; by 1 December, only 647. On 21 December, General Stewart was appointed Third Army G2 upon the medical evacuation of Colonel Tuton. Stewart had been commander of the Army Intelligence Agency. On 15 January, 1,546 members of the 513th had arrived in theater, and by 14 February, there were 1,792.22
Stewart was not responsible for calling forward the remainder of the 513th, but he did bring to the problem of establishing a theater army intelligence structure the rank and authority of a general officer, a great deal of dynamic energy (he was a tireless promoter of intelligence systems), and a fund of personal knowledge of the wider Army intelligence community that allowed him to bring in a number of talented assistants and several developmental systems for managing and distributing intelligence information. He thoroughly integrated the 513th into the G2 organization until, to all intents and purposes, he headed a staff section of almost 2,000, housed in a highrise apartment complex next to the "School House," surrounded by barbed wire, and marked by a large number of satellite antenna dishes, communication vans, people in civilian clothes, and other attributes of a little "Langley," In essence, Stewart assembled and energized the theater ground intelligence structure in the month prior to D-day.
Stewart has provided a massive classified history of intelligence in the desert war and a personal executive summary.23 The major issues from the standpoint of Army operations would seem to be these. Intelligence, prior to G(day)-8, was, by virtue of the deception plan and the nature of tactical intelligence systems, largely top-down. Because the echelon-above-corps intelligence structure arrived only late in the day, a good deal of operational and necessary tactical intelligence was not available when VII Corps arrived. Indeed, General Franks has noted that he could get little intelligence upon which to base his offensive plans when he began responding to the CINC's initial briefing in November.24
The lack of photographic support was particularly troublesome for forces that would have to breach the enemy defenses. Engineer diagrams on maps did not give breaching units the same confidence that overhead photography might have. Photographic imagery would be a continuous and emotional issue with tactical commanders, a consequence of paying for sophisticated strategic satellite systems by retiring older, but more numerous, operational and tactical aviation and Air Force systems without adequate replacements. Satellite imagery was excellent in quality, but its capability was limited in the number of targets it could handle at any given time. Because priorities for strategic systems were set elsewhere and because system design has been based largely on strategic needs, there was a clear loss of the capability that most division and brigade commanders had known in Vietnam. They were not happy about it.
On the other hand, in December Schwarzkopf had decided to bring in joint surveillance target attack radar system (J-STARS), a joint Army-Air Force system that was clearly the greatest operational intelligence success of the war. J-STARS are sets of down-looking airborne radars carried in old Boeing 707s that are capable of tracking moving targets on the ground. It lets operational commanders look on the other side of the hill, both for purposes of targeting and responding to operational initiatives by the enemy. In the uncharacteristically bad weather that marked Desert Storm, J-STARS was essential both to read the battlefield and interdict retreating Iraqi units.
Stewart was also successful in linking the ARCENT intelligence community with other departmental and extradepartmental sources and in introducing new intelligence information distribution systems still in the developmental stage.25 The support and direct involvement of the Army Intelligence Agency seems to have been exceptional.
Some problems could not be solved. A shortage of Arabic linguists was overcome partially by the use of Kuwaiti student volunteers, but there were never enough. Stewart was forced to create a special intelligence distribution communications network from developmental systems, and VII Corps had to borrow an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), while the Navy was using drones to adjust naval gunfire from its battleships. Investment in tactical and operational intelligence had not kept pace, or else maneuver commanders had not been prepared for the economies of scale with which they were forced to contend.
In light of the comparatively late arrival of intelligence units and a general officer G2, the potential contribution of intelligence was underestimated, particularly in view of the implications of the theater deception plan and the key role battle damage assessment (BDA) played in the synchronization of ground and air operations. On the other hand, delay in bringing in the 513th Military Intelligence (MI) Brigade was consistent with policy on minimum essential forces that obtained until November and the ARCENT commander's decision to delay introduction of echelon-above-corps units until the last minute to give priority to combat forces and, after December, essential logistics support. It would be hard to find something brought in that could have been left out of the flow in order to introduce the remainder of the 513th MI Brigade any sooner than was done. As it was, artillery units were still flowing in country on G-day, and a large number of HETs arrived only in time to evacuate units from Iraq. Unquestionably, the 513th did arrive in time, if only just.
There was no G2 present at the ARCENT commander's daily general officer meetings prior to Stewart's arrival to argue army issues from the standpoint of likely Iraqi responses and to represent the intelligence field for a place on the priority list. However, Yeosock believed that he benefited from the council of Brigadier General Jack Leide, the CENTCOM J2, whom he believed to be one of the best intelligence professionals in the business.26 In short, Yeosock did not feel that he was short of good intelligence for the major decisions required of him under the circumstances. After December, Stewart was the right man in the right place to deal with the problems of the "unforgiving minute."
More characteristic of the role of ARCENT were the actions undertaken to wrestle with the problem of operational transport. Once the two corps were in theater, the Third Army had to oversee and harmonize their movement to operational assembly areas and the build-up o£ their respective logistic bases. Although General Pagonis, as 22d Support Command commander and deputy commander for logistics, was responsible for the executive effort, the anticipation of requirements and oversight of the execution remained Yeosock's responsibilities. When need be, he acted as a referee between consumers (the two corps commanders) and supplier (the SUPCOM commander).
As has been said before, operational art is conducted in the offensive by trucks, HETs, lowboys (another form of heavy equipment transport vehicle), other line-haul vehicles, and cargo and fuel carriers that are able to accompany fighting vehicles into an enemy's operational depths. In Europe, where the Army was designed to fight, an extensive highway infrastructure permitted heavy dependence on commercial line-haul vehicles and the superb German rail system. In the Iraqi desert, there was no road net to speak of, and rough terrain vehicles capable of carrying ammunition and fuel had to be found to make the large units employed capable of continuous movement to the enemy's operational depth (about 300-400 kilometers).
To deploy VII Corps to its assembly area east of King Khalid Military City (274 or 334 miles away, depending on the arrival port) and to redeploy the 1st Cavalry Division, the 24th Infantry Division, and 3d Armored Cavalry of XVIH Corps to the west of Wadi al Batin (330 to 375 miles away, depending on the unit), heavy equipment transporters and lowboys had to be found. (See figure 22.) Furthermore, none of these initiatives would be of any use at all if drivers could not be located for the vehicle trains. Yeosock invested his time and energies in December and January resolving these problems. The nature of the solutions, again, is instructive for those who would understand the role of the theater army.
The most sensitive problem had to do with the HETs required to move tanks (and the lowboys, which move only smaller-tracked vehicles). Based upon the arrival dates of tanks from Europe, the intention to complete the movements within two weeks of the onset of air operations, and various force modernization initiatives, ARCENT planners arrived at a requirement for 1,295 HETs against a supply of only 897 in the entire Army inventory.27
In late November and throughout December and January, Yeosock and his chief supplier, General Gordon Sullivan, the Army vice chief of staff, began the great HET hunt. Pagonis networked the logistics community, and CENTCOM approached the European allies through U.S. European Command.28 On 14 January, there were only 461 HETs in theater, 335 from the host nation, 126 from U.S. sources. On 29 January, there were 653 including 100 Egyptian HETs. On 14 February, there were 759 HETs, including U.S. commercial and Italian models, compared to an expectation in December that 788 would be in theater by 15 January.29 The 1,295 requirement would be met only after Desert Storm, when a total of 1,404 HETs had been acquired from various sources.30
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| Figure 22. |
HETs were of sufficient importance that they gradually moved up the priority list in the ARCENT situation report until, on 7 December, they became the number-one equipment issue. Material-handling equipment was also considered a "war stopper."31 The goal was to complete the movement to the tactical assembly areas and stock the two eastern logistic bases by 31 January. In December, it was clear that this was to take an extraordinary effort given the shortfall in trucks, the limitations in the road net, the distances involved, and the sheer scale of the problem.
Use of various line-haul assets became the ARCENT commander's principal command issue in December and January. Each day, following his morning operational update and general officers meeting, Yeosock would retreat to his office, where he would figure the progress on land movement to date. During the night, Colonel Bob Kliemon, the transportation officer in the ARCENT G4 office, provided information on vehicle availability. Colonel Dave Whaley, the commander of the 7th Transportation Group, would provide information about what was in the port requiring movement forward. In this way, Yeosock could manipulate the limited resources in hand and ensure that various problems--a poor run of HET tires, the need for repair parts, whatever it took to keep the flow goingwere addressed at the highest levels of the Army.32 Ultimately (12 January), he dispatched General Frix and the mobile CP to King Khalid Military City to provide overwatch of the various pieces for the great trek west. Yeosock's problem was far different from that of the planner who figures the requirements to do a job. His task was to take the "glass half-full" and make sure it met the demands of the situation at hand. And, of course, the people who had to live up to the expectations were the transportation managers of the 22d Support Command.
Besides centralized management of all aspects of the movement, Yeosock and Pagonis used what the former referred to as "work arounds," temporary expedients to compensate for shortages. The 1st Cavalry Division began moving to King Khalid Military City in late December in anticipation of the shift west. This move also reduced the surge load anticipated for mid-January when the VII Corps was to arrive at the same time the XVIII Corps was to begin its movement westward and the Support Command was to initiate the army logistics build-up west of the wadi. When the "Tiger Brigade" shifted north to join MARCENT in January (to replace the 1st U.K. Armored Division that came to VII Corps), it was sent overland rather than mounted on wheeled carriers. Repair parts were surged behind the brigade from the base at Dhahran to compensate for wear and tear on the vehicles. In similar fashion, two Bradley battalions of the 1st Armored Division self-deployed to the VII Corps assembly area.33 Still, out on the MSR, a wheeled vehicle passed the MP at Hafar al Batin intersection about every fifteen seconds.
The forces in Saudi Arabia were heavily dependent upon host nation vehicles and donated equipment from many nations to meet line-haul transportation needs. These vehicles were of limited use without American drivers or, in the case of vehicles driven by third country nationals, "assistant drivers."34 On 22 December, ARCENT laid out its requirements for drivers, and the 10th Personnel Command, the newly formed echelon-above-corps personnel manager, addressed itself to the task of obtaining no fewer than 7,444 soldiers to drive buses and trucks and to serve as "supercargoes" and back-up drivers on third country vehicles in case the civilian drivers decided not to come to the war.35 To fill these requirements, the Army called up Reserve Component units and deployed them without vehicles. The Army accelerated training for new soldiers and even converted an air defense battalion (3/2d Air Defense Artillery) wholesale.36 A number of highly trained light infantrymen went to war in the cab of a third country line-haul truck.
The measure of the success was in the doing. By 9 February, the date of the briefing to the secretary of defense, SUPCOM had moved the two corps to their new assembly areas. It had stocked logistic bases that had not existed thirty days before with more than five days' rations-close to 100 percent of the forward fuel stockage objective (VII Corps' Log Base E was at 100 percent; XVIII Corps' Log Base C was at 73 percent) and ammunition (60 percent or better in the forward bases).37
The time required to complete the build-up past the 31st was a consequence of continued shortages in line-haul trucks, delays in ship arrivals, and the general constraints in the system. In the event, a line-haul truck took three days for a round trip-a day going, a day returning, and a day for maintenance and crew rest. Sometimes, the average was more like four days. That meant that two-thirds of the fleet was not productively engaged at any one time. Efficiency could be further reduced when maintenance availability declined. (The original SUPCOM plan had assumed only a 60 percent operational rate.) The delay in build-up was compensated for by the additional time involved in arriving at the 50 percent attrition of the Iraqi forces in the KTO. That, as it happened, was achieved as the troop build-up and force redeployment was coming to an end.
In addition to finding thousands of drivers, Personnel Command (PERSCOM) also established a replacement system that would provide trained squads, teams, and crews (with their combat systems) as unit replacements. PERSCOM also oversaw the normal individual replacement flow as well. Designated replacement battalion commanders were collected in theater against potential losses.38 The scale of the medical system that backed up the combat forces and the investment in the replacement systems is indicative of an Army prepared for significant combat losses and another indication that, before 24 February, no one in authority expected an easy victory. About 13,580 beds were available in the ARCENT area of operations on G-day, backed up by facilities in Europe and CONUS.39 The Army located a training team from the 7th Army Training Command in Europe at King Khalid Military City. This detachment set up a training program for the replacement squads, crews, and teams.40 The presence of these basic combat units in Saudi Arabia represented a great cost to the total Army but reflected the corporate effort invested in victory.
The force modernization (the replacement of older systems with newer models) of Bradley and Abrams units that had begun before the dispatch of VII Corps continued. All units were not modernized before the offensive, however. Two armored battalions of the lot Infantry were not upgunned (the 3d and 4th Battalions of the 37th Armor). And the 197th Infantry Brigade (Mechanized) (Separate) in the 24th Infantry Division attacked with infantry still in M113 armored personnel carriers rather than Bradley infantry fighting vehicles. In addition to combat vehicles, units swapped old commercial four-wheeldrive trucks for the ubiquitous high-mobility multipurpose wheeled vehicles (HMMWVs), the successor to World War II Jeeps.41 Perhaps most important, by 23 February, in order to improve divisional offroad logistic mobility, 203 heavy expanded mobility tactical truck (HEMTT) fuelers and 435 HEMTT cargo trucks had been issued to ARCENT units, including the 1st Cavalry Division and "Tiger Brigade."42 HEMTT fuelers were so important that significant air transport was dedicated to bringing in 269. Without the 100 HEMTT fuelers issued to the 24th Division, it is unlikely that the "Victory Division" would have made it to the Euphrates valley.
The principal addition to the Third Army was the VII Corps, designated to be the striking force for the coalition ground offensive. The VII Corps started its preparation for Desert Storm in August 1990, although no one knew it at the time. Almost at once, following the Iraqi invasion, General Franks convened a small planning group in his headquarters "to get our heads in the game a little bit."43
Franks would command the largest armored force concentrated in a single attack in U.S. military history. He is not a typical cavalryman in appearance or demeanor. He is short, circumspect, and deliberate. A lot of U.S. service members are very likely alive today because of that circumspection. Franks is one of the few generals in the Army who wears a mustache, and he holds a Master of Philosophy degree in literature from Columbia University. He is a gentleman, a man of quiet firmness, extraordinary character, and self-discipline. Franks lost a leg in Vietnam (as did his G3, Colonel Stan Cherrie) while a staff officer in the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment. He remained in the service, rising to command of the 11th Cavalry, the 1st Armored Division, and the VII Corps. He served between command tours as deputy commandant. o£ the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth. In Desert Storm, he would move five heavy divisions against the Iraqi flank, maneuvering two of them and an armored cavalry regiment north, then east, in formation while retaining concentration-a maneuver reminiscent of another Frederick at a place called Leuthen.
At first, VII Corps' problem was to deploy various small formations and individuals from Europe to reinforce XVIII Corps, but Franks and his staff also speculated on the possibility of having to send larger elements, for example an armored division. Later, Franks would say he had been reminded, by the end of the cold war and the drawdown then in progress, of the transfer of European divisions to the Pacific in World War II following VE-Day. In addition, Franks had recognized the operational implications of the collapse of the Soviet bloc and had reoriented corps training to focus on movement to contact and attack from the march, in contrast with the European General Defense Plan scenario of linear forward defense that had dominated Army thinking since the fall of South Vietnam 44
When ordered to deploy the corps, Franks' earlier exploratory work proved invaluable. General Crosbie Saint, the commander of U.S. Army Europe, met with Franks on 4 November, even before the presidential deployment announcement, to decide on what units to deploy. Saint assumed responsibility for the deployment itself, thus freeing Franks and VII Corps to concentrate on their responsibilities in Saudi Arabia.45
It was decided that two armored divisions would be sent with the corps, as well as the corps troop package that included its armored cavalry regiment (the 2d Armored Cavalry). The decision was made, too, to take only units already modernized in favor of those still requiring new M1A1 tanks and M2 or M3 Bradleys. The 3d Armored Division from V Corps, the other U.S. Europe-based corps, was to be one of the divisions. VII Corps' own 1st Armored Division was the second. The 3d Armored Division was commanded by Major General Paul Funk. Coincidentally, Funk's son, who served as a captain in the Persian Gulf, was married to General Yeosock's daughter. The 1st Armored was commanded by Major General Ron Griffith. Later, the 1st Infantry Division, a Reforger unit from Fort Riley, Kansas, was added at Yeosock's request.46 The 1st Infantry was commanded by Major General Tom Rhame.
Accommodation had to be made for units already in the process of deactivation and for certain NATO political sensitivities concerning reversion of U.S.-operated facilities to German control.47 Saint and Franks elected to send a brigade package of the 3d Infantry Division (built around the 3d Brigade of the 3d Infantry) in lieu of one brigade of the 1st Armored. They also decided to replace the 1st Infantry Division (Forward), a brigade group of the 1st Infantry Division based in Germany, with V Corps' 2d Armored Division (Forward), another Europe-based brigade group of the U.S.-based 2d Armored Division.48 The 1st Infantry Division (Forward), whose connection with its parent division was limited, was in an advanced stage of deactivation. Moreover, sending the 2d Armored Division (Forward) configured the 1st Infantry Division as an armored division, title notwithstanding. An armored battalion and air defense battalion of the 8th Infantry Division rounded out the 3d Armored Division.49
The 1st Infantry Division (Forward) went to Saudi Arabia to operate the ports that received the VII Corps, thus speeding the corps to the front. The men of the brigade were retained through the ground war as part of the potential replacement pool.50
In addition to forming the combat force, another task required coordination between U.S. European Command (USAREUR), Forces Command, and CENTCOM. The VII Corps support command had to be raised to a wartime strength suitable for an out-of-theater deployment. This involved an expansion of about 300 percent, largely by Reserve Component soldiers deployed by Forces Command from the United States. The Vil Corps added 19,908 Reserve Component soldiers to its force structure.51
Deployment, of course, had to be in consonance with the Third Army plan. General Franks went to Saudi Arabia almost at once to meet with General Yeosock to discuss deployment and to conduct a reconnaissance. Before departing, Franks had received a call from Yeosock and General Pagonis to provide general guidance on preparing for the transfer of forces. Unlike XVIII Corps, which was involved in rapidly building a deterrent combat force, VII Corps could front-load sufficient engineers, command and control, and sustainment elements to prepare the corps assembly area for the inbound combat forces. Not surprisingly, Pagonis told Franks to bring all the HETs he could get his hands on.52 An additional advantage enjoyed by VII Corps was the ability to talk to commanders already on the ground in advance of deployment. The corps made up a draft time-phased force deployment list, and Franks took it to Saudi Arabia for Yeosock's approval.53
Just as the 1st Infantry Division (Forward) was dispatched to handle inbound port operations for the corps, the 3d Infantry Division, one of the Army's proudest combat units, took responsibility for supporting port operations in the three ports used to depart Europe. The 3d also provided weapons and support personnel so the corps could conduct final predeployment training at the 7th Army Training Area at Grafenwohr, Germany.54 An Army that had prepared for reception of state-side Reforger units for war in NATO now reversed the process and moved divisions, regiments, brigades, and groups to the ports of Antwerp, Bremerhaven, and Rotterdam by train, barge, and road.55 Some aviation units simply flew to ports in Italy. One of the unique features of Desert Shield-Desert Storm was that units in both CONUS and Europe moved to deployment ports on inland waterways by barge, not a normal way of doing business in either theater.
On 30 November, the ARCENT SITREP contained an entry concerning VII Corps that read: ". . . INITIALLY, THE CORPS WILL ESTABLISH A STRONG C2 AND LOGISTICAL CAPABILITY, DEPLOY A REINFORCED CAV REGT, AND PREPARE TO RECEIVE THE REMAINDER OF THE CORPS."56
By then, fifteen ships were en route to the ports. Of the corps equipment, 40 percent had departed the home station. XVIII Corps continued to modernize tanks and infantry units, and the 24th Division was conducting joint training with Saudi units.57 XVIII Corps' 1st Corps Support Command (1st COSCOM) was completing its deployment, still playing catch-up from the earlier minimum essential force guidance. Meanwhile, the strength of Iraqi forces was estimated to have reached 3,790 tanks and 2,390 armored personnel carriers.58
By 15 December, as CENTCOM prepared to brief the secretary of defense, VII Corps could report forty-eight ships en route to the theater, four unloading, and two more due that day. Two days later, the 24th Division conducted a combined-arms live-fire exercise with a combined U.S.-Saudi force, the culmination of the corps' efforts at combined training. 59
By the end of the year, the 2d Armored Cavalry Regiment, reinforced by the 210th Field Artillery Brigade, was screening the corps' assembly area west of the XVIH Corps, while the divisions prepared to receive their combat battalions. The 1st Cavalry Division was en route to assembly area Wendy, southwest of King Khalid Military City. At that time, 27 January, the last of VII Corps' equipment was expected.60
The new deployment was not without difficulties. To speed VII Corps to the theater, ships were loaded without regard to unit integrity. That meant a good bit of confusion existed, and sorting was necessary at the reception ports. The shortage of HETs led to clogged ports and concentrations of soldiers, who arrived by plane, then waited for up to three weeks for their equipment.61 As late as 14 January, General Arnold observed to General Taylor at Forces Command that "Early deployment of combat units over CSS units and equipment continues to haunt us. MHE [materiel handling equipment] shipped and enroute will solve many of our problems. HETS, Low Boys & S.&Ps. continue to be well short of requirements. Backlog at the ports is considerable and growing."62
On 16 January, HET tires were identified as one of the highestpriority items, with 3,000 required immediately.63 The estimate of Iraqi strength had reached 4,280 tanks and 2,880 armored personnel carriers. The next night the war began. (See figure 23.)
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| Figure 23. Allied deployments the day prior to the start of air operations |
Notes
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| 6 Desert Storm: Air Power and Final Issues |
It was one thing for the president to announce his intentions to create an offensive option in early November. It was quite another matter for him to build the national and international consensus to use it. Indeed, The New York Times lead editorial on 27 October pointed to the need for such an effort, observing that "The burden is on President Bush to show that a significant increase in American forces will make less likely their use in battle [emphasis added]."1 In late October, Bush's personal popularity had been at an all-time low as he came through, and essentially lost, a bruising preelection budget battle with Congress.2
The political strategy selected by the president was to solve his international problem first, then use the prestige of international approval to influence the Congress. Theodore Draper and others have characterized this as a cynical ploy to permit presidential war making without congressional consent.3 It was, in fact, nothing of the kind.
First of all, international approval was by no means assured, particularly since the acquiescence of China was required in the Security Council. Whether the president would have been willing to proceed without international sanction is not clear. If he failed to win support, he risked giving much aid to his congressional opponents-of whom there was no shortage in December and early January.
Second, Congress was neither dependent upon the approval of the president to raise the issue nor to vote on it, and no president to date has been willing to initiate a war in the face of a clear congressional mandate not to. Congress, it seems, was of two minds about how to proceed, but Senator Sam Nunn held hearings in December and a vote was taken soon after convening the new Congress in January.
Critics like Draper forget that Congress had been sensitized by its Vietnam experience and that the congressional decision to hold hearings-joined with a growing movement to hold a January debate and vote-demonstrated that Congress insisted on being part of the decision process if a course were set for war. There was nothing certain about the ultimate outcome when the president started building support for his two related, but essentially distinct, expressions of approval. The vote of the United Nations Security Council on 29 November setting a 15 January deadline for Saddam to withdraw from Kuwait was most helpful. The vote was twelve to two, with China abstaining.4
Congressional hearings followed in December, but not without presidential opposition. The administration's inability to stop the hearings, indeed, its offer to hold discussions with Saddam in December (ultimately carried on to no evident gain in Geneva in January) is evidence of Congress' ability to make itself felt in these matters.5 Congress finally voted to use force on 12 January following an impassioned and often eloquent debate. The congressional resolution, tantamount to a declaration of war, authorized "the use of United States Armed Forces pursuant to United Nations Security Council Resolution 678.."6 The Congressional resolution was passed by a vote of 52 to 47 in the Senate and 250 to 183 in the House-by no means a wide margin.
A The New York Times-CBS News poll published on 15 January showed the American people were almost evenly divided over the issue of war-47 percent for its initiation, 46 percent for additional use of sanctions.7 The president did not wait long. On 16 January, he announced initiation of the Desert Storm campaign plan, beginning forty-two days of air operations against strategic targets in Iraq and operational targets in the Kuwait theater of operations. The first air attack of the war was conducted by Army AH-64s to destroy early warning radars in southern Iraq as part of a joint and combined air operation.8 Soon afterwards, the president ordered a partial mobilization that authorized the retention of Reserve Component soldiers for up to a year.9
On the first morning of Operation Desert Storm, Third Army began moving west. (See figure 24.) The 1st Cavalry Division and 2d Brigade of the 101st Airborne Division had been placed under the tactical control of VII Corps on 12 January to provide for the security of the Hafar al Batin-King Khalid Military City area. The 2d Brigade of the 101st was located at Al Qaysumah. On the 17th, the 1st Cavalry Division moved north of the Tapline Road, just east of Wadi al Batin. That same day, the VII Corps fired its first shots in anger since World War II, when the corps' artillery fired Army tactical missiles (ATACMS) against Iraqi air defense sites as part of the joint suppression of the enemy's air defense.10 Meanwhile, corps engineers overcame a major obstacle to movement on the friendly side of the border by pushing up large sand ramps to permit armored and wheeled vehicles to cross the east-west above-ground oil pipeline that paralleled the Tapline Road and whose continuous presence gave the road its name.11
Iraq was not slow to respond. On 18 January, seven Scud missiles fell on Israel, followed by one on Dhahran. The decision, taken during Internal Look, to make the 11th Air Defense Brigade a theater air defense asset now proved to have been wise indeed. Patriot missiles, by their rapid response and evident success in intercepting incoming Scuds, quickly restored confidence to those in the target areas, whatever the missiles' practical value in destroying Scud warheads. (See figure 25.)
As a military weapon, the Scud was tactically ineffective. Iraqi attacks on Israel, nonetheless, did have a significant impact; Scud attacks caused the diversion of a substantial number of tactical aircraft that otherwise would have been preparing the KTO. Instead, these aircraft attacked unproductive targets in western Iraq to reassure the government of Israel and keep that state out of the war. Even J-STARS (joint surveillance target attack radar system), upon which the coalition was dependent for early warnings of Iraqi spoiling attacks, was shifted to Scud hunting.12 The diversion of political energy to keep Israel out of the war was also significant. Given the threat an Israeli attack on Iraq posed to coalition unity, these actions were understandable and probably unavoidable. Ultimately, British and U.S. special operations forces were committed to locating and calling down attacks on Iraqi mobile Scud launchers.13
U.S. leaders were fortunate that the only American military losses to Scud attacks occurred after the ground operations had begun. The incident, a strike on a troop billet in Dhahran that housed the Army Reserve's 14th Quartermaster Detachment, killed twenty-eight Americans and wounded ninety-eight more. It was the largest single incident of American losses of the war. One can only speculate on how well public support for the war would have stood up to such an event had it occurred on 19 January.
In the deployment of coalition forces, Third Army had to coordinate the movement of the Syrian forces eastward, out of what was now the Third Army sector. The Syrians were armed with Soviet equipment (as were the Iraqis) and, given Syria's ambivalence about joining the coalition offensive at that time, they were not entirely trusted. Great care was taken to ensure that they did not accidentally bump into U.S. forces moving west.14
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| Figure 24. |
The creation of an enemy prisoner of war holding capability also required the army commander's time. All of the logistic support for this project, which amounted to feeding, clothing, and housing the population of a small city, was provided by a single Saudi contractor. Construction of the POW camps had to be accomplished by the 416th Engineers and the 800th Military Police Brigade, and that required a good bit of General Frix's attention from King Khalid Military City. General Yeosock was determined that U.S. enemy prisoner of war facilities should exceed international standards, and like everything else Third Army did, construction of adequate facilities and the securing of a fleet of buses for transporting prisoners were accomplished in a race against a growing demand. The first prisoners taken by Third Army troops were some Iraqi border police captured by the 3d Armored Cavalry Regiment in a skirmish on 22 January.15 Also, about that time, Army psychological warfare teams, in coordination with the Air Force bombing schedule, began a sustained program of leaflet drops designed to encourage the surrender of Iraqi troops.
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| Figure 25. |
From January on, Third Army also spent a good deal of energy trying to solve the potential problem of fratricide, the killing or injuring of one's own forces by what is ironically called "friendly fire," a term given currency by a book concerning an incident of fratricide in a battalion commanded by General Schwarzkopf in Vietnam.16 "Fratricide," according to historian Roger Spiller, "is the military version of an industrial accident."17 Not new in war, fratricide generally has been accepted as part of the risk of soldiering.18 The U.S. Army, nonetheless, became extraordinarily sensitive to such incidents during the period of post-Vietnam War recrimination, when popular American comedienne, Carol Burnett, took the serious role of the mother of a victim of fratricide in a television adaptation of the book about the incident in Schwarzkopf's battalion. In the minds of U.S. leaders, fratricide was elevated from the cost of doing business to "the worst thing we can do."19 Concern about fratricide was so great that it had a direct and profound impact on the conduct of battle in southeastern Iraq.
The fundamental problem in the desert was that Army antiarmor systems could kill at ranges almost three times beyond those at which the target acquisition systems (visual sights) could discriminate between friendly and enemy systems. This problem was compounded in the desert because the general flatness of the terrain meant that there was little to get in the way of errant rounds.20 The problem was complicated further because some items of coalition equipment-those manufactured in the Soviet Union, France, and the United States were used by both coalition forces and the Iraqi Army. Thus, significant command attention was paid to getting a number of identification devices to the troops: reflective tape in inverted Vs, markings on helicopters (the Iraqis used a number of French models), and various emitting devices. Indeed, keeping a tight hand on vehicle and unit maneuver, as well as unit fire control, was an anti-fratricidal measure.
None of these efforts was 100 percent effective, and before the ground attack was launched, incidents of friendly air attack on misidentified ground vehicles, particularly at Khafji and later in the 1st Infantry Division, raised the level of concern to palpable dimensions. Just as continuous warnings about maneuver damage in NATO exercises in years past contributed to a U.S. proclivity to remain on roads and out of fields during the annual maneuvers, the concern for fratricide would introduce an element of caution into the conduct of the Gulf War that would slow and even stop operations of corps-sized forces. In spite of all efforts, of the 148 U.S. service members killed in action during the war, 35 died by "friendly fire." Of 467 wounded, 72 were hit by friendly fire.21 These figures, of course, are as much or more a testament to the scale of the U.S. technological advantages over the Iraqis, both in killing and protective systems, as they are any indication of carelessness in the field. As a proportion of total casualties, the numbers look very high, but considering the total coalition fighting systems operative, the numbers are minuscule.
With the start of air operations, tension grew between the Air Force, which was concentrating its efforts on strategic and independent operational strikes, and the leadership of Third Army, which assumed that the ground attack would be the theater commander's principal means to achieve success and must, therefore, be given priority for direct employment of air assets. At its root, the argument was an old one, reflecting differing views of the role of air power in theater operations.
There were also problems over methods of battle damage assessment-that is, judging the extent of damage inflicted on Iraqi ground forces from the air-and others about the amount of air power to be dedicated to attacking specific targets nominated by Army tactical commanders. The interservice friction that characterized the period was a consequence, first of all, of locating control of all air forces at theater level. This was proper and inevitable given the relative scarcity of air assets and their wide range of maneuver and power of instant concentration. Air forces are the theater commander's most responsive form of combat power and the only form with theater-wide reach. But Army tactical doctrine and the experiences of senior Army leaders had created the expectation that air assets would be available to them in quantity. Moreover, heavy air attack of the enemy's firstline positions and, particularly, the artillery, which constituted the key to the Iraqi defensive system, was believed to be essential to success on the ground. Senior Army leaders failed to anticipate or understand their relative position in the competition for air assets or to divest themselves of service parochialism in the name of the jointness so applauded at war's end.
In January and early February, General Schwarzkopf ran the air war himself, with no one intervening between him and General Horner. Because Horner was also busy as joint force air component commander (JFACC), many believed the air war was being conducted by his principal subordinate, Brigadier General Buster Glosson, for his own amusement.22 Glosson, unfortunately, got off to a bad start with the senior Army commanders at the ARCENT MAPEX and never regained their trust, becoming, perhaps, the most despised senior officer in theater to some Third Army commanders.23 Glosson, unfortunately, appeared to be too glib in his assurances of Air Force support to an assembly of men highly concerned about the task before them. Colonel Joe Purvis, who was at CENTCOM throughout the war and is no mean judge of men, insists that Glosson was misunderstood by senior Army officers and was quite sincere in his promises of decisive support.24 Glosson, of course, had to respond, first of all, to the orders of the theater commander. Thus, even if suspicions were true and Glosson was some sort of evil genius indifferent to Army requirements, Schwarzkopf permitted his actions and, indeed, was satisfied to have it that way.
Within the ground forces, this view of the conduct of the air war produced a great deal of angst, especially after 31 January-which was always seen as a sort of decision point on shifting the theater focus from air attack to a ground offensive as the principal military means of political suasion. This frustration came about not only because of a perceived need for air support to achieve assigned tactical and operational missions but because of the traditional way Army officers continue to view the dynamics of warfare.
The average senior officer in the U.S. Army is a prisoner of his own experience, which is almost entirely tactical-that is, focused 0n ground battle at division level and below. It is in battalions, brigades, and divisions that most Army officers gain their training and experience in war. In 1982, as part of the doctrinal revolution fostered by the Training and Doctrine Command, Field Manual (FM) 100-5, Operations, introduced the concept of operational art. Borrowed largely from the Soviet Army, though attributed generally to German practices in World War II, operational art involves the systematic use of tactical events to achieve strategic goals. Its innovation is the recognition that tactical success is not an end in itself but a means to a larger purpose in which tactical considerations must naturally be subordinated, though not necessarily sacrificed.
The consequence has been an Army whose rhetoric extolled jointness and high military art but which had a visceral belief in the relationship of arms and services best expressed by John Huston's vision in the movie San Pietro. San Pietro describes a bloody battle in Italy during World War II. At San Pietro, the Germans were in prepared positions. "No amount of artillery fire or aerial bombardment," Huston says, "could force them to withdraw."
That was for the infantry to do; employing those weapons that confine and destroy life in narrow trenches, caves and fighting holes. It was up to the man with the rifle, the man under fire from all weapons, the man whose way all our weapons, land, air, and sea, serve only to prepare (emphasis added]. It was up to the foot soldier to attack a hidden enemy over ground that was sown with mines....25
The problem with this ethic, once generalized, is that it is only true on the battlefield in the tactical sense. It is the negation of jointness, defined as "attacking the right target at the right time with the right weapon,"26 and the opposite of true operational art, which has long since become three dimensional.
A ground force is an operational and strategic instrument that destroys enemy forces and capabilities and occupies ground, generally to deny some advantage to the enemy. In a total war, the ground occupied may be the entire enemy state. AirLand battles are only a means to this end. Ground force objectives may be terrain- or forceoriented. The goal and unique capability of any ground force is the occupation or control of something. Air forces, because of their ubiquity, are capable of striking an enemy's strategic depths, without lengthy attritional battles and at relatively low cost. Therein lies their attractiveness. Unfortunately, they are also constrained by rational and legal limitations on the conduct of war that often limit their decisiveness as an arm acting by itself.
The concept of control from the air still seems elusive. In all wars to date, save in the one case where employment of atomic weapons (on an enemy unable to respond in kind) seemed warranted, there has been a point of diminishing return where air power alone was insufficient to bring about the strategic end state required. Ground forces have had to be committed to finish the job. In Desert Storm, Iraq proved remarkably resistant to air bombardment, and there was no indication Saddam was prepared to remove his occupying forces from Kuwait in response to air attack alone on targets in Iraq or on forces in Kuwait. Once again, it was ultimately up to the ground soldiers to seize that which the enemy's own infantry had occupied.
There was, thus, a tension between the importance of employing air power alone to achieve the valuable operational and strategic goals of which it is capable and using many of the same resources in a subordinate role in direct support of the ground forces in the achievement of their operational tasks. The Marine Corps force structure included high-performance air platforms. The Army's did not. The Army was dependent on the Air Force for the air component of AirLand Battle. Just as ground operations always seemed to be necessary-if not sufficient-for strategic success, significant air support was also necessary-if not sufficient-for tactical and operational success on the ground. Indeed, the idea of using deep fires, air and ground, simultaneous with close battle as a means of shaping future events was central to the concept of operational art. The control of such fires, especially those delivered by air, have remained a point of contention between Air Force and ground commanders. For years, it has been the central issue in interservice arguments over definitions of categories of air interdiction.27
Only the commander charged with achieving the strategic military objectives in the theater-only the theater commander in chief-was called upon by his position and responsibilities to accomplish the integration of the service arms. He had to be convinced that there were operational and strategic implications associated with any possible (ground) tactical failure. Or, put another way, he had to be assured there was the likelihood of a significant operational benefit as a return on the investment before he would commit his most responsive strategic and operational instrument (the air tool) to any tactical battle. Before committing tactical airplanes, he also had to be sure the ground force could not do the job in question with its own less expensive assets-attack helicopters, ATACMS, or multiple launch rockets.
In Operation Desert Storm, the theater campaign plan provided for a four-phase operation that was to begin with strategic bombardment, the gaining of air superiority, and preparation of the KTO for ground attack (the latter eventually came to mean isolating the KTO by destroying the bridges across the Euphrates and reducing Iraqi heavy forces by 50 percent, in the breach sites, even more). Only then would AirLand operations commence.28 There was some hope that the first three phases might convince the Iraqis to give way and accept the UN resolutions concerning withdrawal from Kuwait.29 Even if there was to be a ground attack, the deception plan required that much of the attrition effort focus on the Iraqi forces in Kuwait to convey the illusion of preparation for a main attack in the east. In addition, to ensure that the Northern Area Command (which faced strong Iraqi defenses) would attack successfully, ARCENT gave it a relatively high priority in the air effort.30 Consequently, from D-day to early February, very little air power was invested in the tactical preparation of the corps' battlefield, a fact that became of primary importance to the corps and division commanders.
The situation became increasingly more frustrating as Army officers, who never doubted that a ground attack was a sine qua non to final success, saw most air assets employed against strategic or operational targets, especially the hunt for Scud launchers. They became increasingly concerned that they would be ordered into battle with their battlefield unprepared. By 1 February, a sort of consensus was achieved that about nine days of tactical preparation would be necessary for a successful ground attack. This would include destroying enemy artillery in range of the lst Infantry Division breach site and fighting a counterreconnaissance battle to gain immediate tactical intelligence otherwise unavailable.31 The difficulty was that no one knew when G-day (the start of the ground attack) would arrive, so no one knew if Schwarzkopf would reallocate his air assets in support of ground priorities in time to do what tactical commanders felt was important for their own success. Because Schwarzkopf saw any sort of questioning of his actions as an intrusion on his prerogatives and tended to react with intense anger when he felt challenged (particularly about the campaign plan), ground commanders were not likely to have much confidence in his sympathy with their needs. Instead, they turned increasingly to General Waller, since November Schwarzkopf's deputy, to mediate their needs with the CINC.32
These fundamental discontinuities were exacerbated by the lack of a mutually agreed-upon doctrine for air-ground coordination. Doctrine for air-ground integration is theater specific and generally (unless overruled by the CINC) the purview of the theater joint air component commander, in this case General Horner. A host of minor problems had to be resolved in theater, and their resolution increased Army suspicion of an air arm few took the trouble to understand. Among these issues were the question of whether AH-64s should be integrated in the air tasking order (they were not, unless they were part of a joint air attack plan) and whether ATACMS, with ranges of well over 100 kilometers, could be fired into an area in which air force planes were flying.
The air tasking order (ATO, which knit together all air missions flying on a particular day, was a lengthy document requiring about seventy-two hours lead time to prepare from the time a target was nominated until it was attacked. The ATO seemed unnecessarily rigid to ground commanders. Yet after the war, XVIII Corps' staff officers admitted that, within this rigidity, they were very successful in obtaining what they called opportunity CAS (close air support) or mission diversions by using various air-ground liaison systems: air liaison officers with the Army units, ground liaison officers with Air Force units, and the battlefield control element (BCE), an organization designed to provide for real-time Army-Air Force coordination.33 A Third Army deep battle cell was formed at army headquarters only days prior to initiation of the air war.34 This was the army-level staff agency where corps targets were consolidated and prioritized in accordance with the Third Army commander's priorities and then passed on to the Joint Targeting Board controlled by the Air Force. From the standpoint of officers of the lower headquarters, this Army staff agency was probably the source of some of the temporal rigidity and "unwarranted" subordination of tactical priorities that they believed they suffered. The Deep Battle Cell targeters ("targeteers") also reported later that they were generally successful in getting the Air Force to deviate from an air tasking order to pursue higher-value targets.35 The source of friction, then, seems to have centered on the application of air power against numerous discrete and routine enemy positions on the desert floor and principally in the breach sites. These positions collectively threatened the success of the initial ground assault but individually could not compete with other theater-level priorities.
As much as Air Force action or inaction, the feedback to Army commanders was part of the problem. Because of the nature of the deception plan and the enemy communications posture (which avoided radio communication prior to the initiation of the ground attack), most target validation and battle damage assessment were based on means other than communications intercepts-a capability in which corps and divisions are strong. Therefore, target validation (accommodating movement of targets within the targeting cycle) had to be accomplished by Third Army with information moving both laterally to the Air Force and downward to the corps, the latter in such a way that it would be connected with targets nominated earlier against older information. This was often done inefficiently from the standpoint of the tactical commands, where target attack belongs to one staff agency and target "maintenance" to another. Moreover, simple feedback on targets attacked seems not to have been rapid or discrete enough to satisfy the Army briefing cycle. Hence, corps commanders were sometimes ill-informed about which of their targets were actually being hit.36 Much of the frustration with this system was focused on the Air Force, notwithstanding that a good bit of the rigidity was in the Army targeting structure.
On the Air Force side, Army assessment of the damage inflicted on Iraqi forces by air attack (BDA-battle damage assessment) was not without its own confusions. The simple fact is that BDA is an art, largely subjective, and both services try to cloak this in what appear to be objective criteria. These, when they do not seem to be working, are changed. This naturally undermines mutual confidence in what is going on.37 Assignment of authority for ground battle damage assessment to the Army is essential, since only the Army has both the expertise in what is important to ground warfare and the problem of ultimately having to live with the consequences of its errors. The lack of truely objective criteria, however, sometimes seems suspicious to airmen, who feel they are not getting credit for the good work they are doing at no small risk to their lives.
Both these cases, the BDA effort and the process of pre-attack target validation, were complicated by Schwarzkopf's proclivity to change his targeting focus within the ATO cycle. Because of the shortage of aerial and space-based observation platforms, operational reconnaissance, too, had to be projected days in advance to synchronize it with attack targeting. When the CINC shifted his focus from one enemy division to another, as he was wont to do, reconnaissance assets often could not respond in time. Hence, it was often impossible for the Army to present a timely target list to the Air Force operations cell, which then had to develop other means to ensure there was something on the ground to bomb at the grid submitted by some corps commander perhaps days before.38 Poststrike analysis was also seldom rapid enough to respond.
On 5 February, General Arnold reported to the army commander that ARCENT was getting only 20 percent of the air support sorties it had requested. A revised target review process-an Army initiative that involved oversight by General Waller as the CINC's deputy-was supposed to start 0n the 7th. On the 8th, it seemed to be working, as VII Corps was scheduled to have its top eleven targets hit.39 On the 11th, Arnold's cover note to the daily SITREP informed ARCENT units that the introduction of F-111s into the attack of ground targets was having a significant effect on attrition of the Republican Guard. On the 13th, however, the cover note reflected a falling off of delivered air support (31 percent accomplished versus 45 percent projected). That same day, General Yeosock expressed concern about the apparent shortfall and instructed Arnold to begin briefing Waller on the daily status of requests versus target attacks. 40
Then, during the early morning hours of 14 February, Yeosock was hospitalized. He would not return to his headquarters until noon on the 23d, the day before the ground attack was launched. That morning (the 14th), the ARCENT SITREP that Arnold prepared, contained the following message:
WE ARE CONCERNED THAT THE NUMBER OF AIRCRAFT SORTIES NOW APPORTIONED TO ARCENT IS INADEQUATE TO PROPERLY "SHAPE THE BATTLEFIELD" PRIOR TO OFFENSIVE OPERATIONS. AERIAL PREPARATION OF THE BATTLEFIELD IS ESSENTIAL TO FUTURE OPERATIONS, AND ARCENT WILL CONTINUE COORDINATION WITH ALCON TO EFFECT REALIGNMENT OF AIR APPORTIONMENT PRIORITIES.41
On t
