Into the Storm: On the Ground in Iraq sic-1

by Tom Clancy

  The U.S. Army still uses paper maps to picture that ground. As with service station maps, they have lines and use colors to represent various features, but they also include an overprinted grid system that allows soldiers and leaders to describe their locations from coordinates. They also include terrain contours that allow them to determine hills, valleys, etc. Newer technology will soon allow soldiers to see the terrain in three-dimensional virtual reality, and indeed fly over it, drive around on it, or walk through it. This technology will allow commanders to better apply their combat power on the ground relative to the enemy.

  But for Desert Storm they had flat, one-dimensional paper maps.

  Maps come in different scales to represent certain sizes of ground. In Desert Storm, VII Corps used three scales—1:250 000, 1:100 000, and 1:50 000. The smaller the scale, the more detail. In the desert, where the ground is relatively flat, scale does not really matter much—except that on large-scale maps it is much harder to indicate both enemy and friendly units and the speed of unit movements. That is to say, if you indicate an enemy brigade with a small map sticker (say an inch-by-half-inch rectangle) that sticker might cover an area on the map occupied by two brigades on the ground. It's not hard to imagine misperceptions and confusion resulting from that. Meanwhile, if you move an inch on a 1:250 000 map, you have in fact moved about ten miles on the ground. If you are attacking a determined enemy on tough ground, ten miles is a long way. But if you are looking at that map at a higher headquarters, or a larger-scale map, that inch might appear to you as no movement at all.

  U.S. Army maps in a command post are normally mounted vertically on a piece of plywood and covered with acetate. The acetate allows you to mark up the map and change the markings. This procedure was begun in World War I and continues to this day. When the first U.S. tank crossed the Sava River into Bosnia in December 1995, the tank commander was standing in his hatch in the tank turret, looking at a map, and relating it to what he was seeing in front of him.

  Skill in relating the map to the ground and in moving units in relation to one another to get the maximum combat power on the enemy (while the enemy is doing the same thing) is the art of war at the tactical level. When you are a small-unit commander, you can normally see all the ground your unit will operate on physically. The more senior you get, the more this skill becomes a function of your imagination, as you figure what combination should go where over terrain you cannot see and against an enemy with a mind of his own.

  FRED Franks spent a lot of time before the attack looking at maps, meditating on them, playing all the combinations over and over again in his mind, and then actually moving around on the ground. He wanted to inform his senses about what was possible on the ground, about how forces and various combinations of forces would fit, how much room they took, and how long it took them to move from one place to the other. He also did it with the Iraqis. Then he wanted to relate all that to a paper map. In that way he could begin to imagine the battle and the various combinations of possibilities.

  He was helped in this by his experience in the deserts of Fort Bliss, Texas, with the 3rd Cavalry. Others in the corps had had similar experiences at Fort Bliss or at Fort Irwin. The desert was no stranger to them.

  In early February, Franks asked his G-2, John Davidson, to put together a 1:100 000 map (the kind used most frequently in Germany at corps level) and put it flat on a table so as to better visualize the battle. It took an eight-by-ten-foot board to get the whole area on it. That flat map board became their primary planning and briefing tool in the last stages of attack preparation in the two weeks before the attack. It was around that map that Franks asked his commanders if they had enough room to carry out the missions he had given them. They all answered it would be tight, but they could do it.

  By the time VII Corps attacked, that map, VII Corps forces, and the Iraqi forces were burned into Franks's mind. He had seen the fight ahead of time and could see the ground and his own forces on it. During the attack, his task was to relate what was actually happening on the field to the picture in his mind, and make adjustments. His big challenge was to keep his own forces continually arrayed in the desert in time, space, and distance in relation to one another for the first two days, so he could have all seven of his FRAGPLAN options available to choose from when he saw the final RGFC disposition. That was why he spent so much time looking at the map. He was playing all the combinations over and over again in his mind. His subordinate commanders were doing the same in their sectors.

  The end goal of all this thinking and meditation was to inform Franks's intuition. Commanders decide things because, they often say, "it feels right." What they mean is that all their years of training and education, that focused concentration, that intense desire to win at least cost to their troops, and their own intellectual capacity for synthesis tell them intuitively that their orders are the right thing to do in that given circumstance. Sometimes you cannot explain it.

  THE CENTCOM PLAN

  The VII Corps plan of attack was not an isolated grand concept entire of itself. Rather, in order to ensure harmony in the overall campaign, it was nested within the larger scope plans of Third Army, CENTCOM, and Coalition strategic objectives. CENTCOM planned the entire theater campaign — including the Coalition allies, land, sea, air, and Special Forces — to accomplish both national and Coalition objectives. Third Army planned the ground operation of VII and XVIII Corps in a way consistent with the overall CENTCOM plan. VII Corps planned its piece of the Third Army plan.

  The concept that General Schwarzkopf briefed to Franks and the other commanders on 14 November grew out of another plan that had its origins in early October. At that time General Powell had instructed Schwarzkopf to devise an offensive option and then to send a team to Washington to brief it to the Joint Chiefs. The briefing was held on 13 October.

  According to this plan, the heavy elements of XVIII Corps — the 24th MECH, the 1st CAV, and the 3rd ACR — and the Marines would attack just east of the Wadi al Batin in the general direction of Kuwait City. (Schwarzkopf and his planners had rejected a possible flanking move to the west of the Wadi, because logistics would be too difficult, and because the attack would be vulnerable to counterattack on its own flank by Iraqi armored divisions.) Schwarzkopf was not at all happy with this plan: he was by no means certain that it would get the mission accomplished, and there was a possibility of seriously unacceptable casualties (computer projections estimated 10,000, with perhaps 1,000 killed). Still, it was, in his view, the best course he had with the forces available.

  In fact, the argument that Schwarzkopf made through his planners (he himself wasn't present at the briefing) was that the original plan's very inadequacies argued for more forces if there was to be a real offensive option. He had protested to General Powell about even sending a briefing to Washington because of his concerns. The problem at the time was that Schwarzkopf did not seem to know what to do with those forces if he got them.

  The plan briefed on 13 October — even with Schwarzkopf's caveats — was not well received in Washington by the Joint Staff and the Secretary of Defense. It was less well received in the White House. Schwarzkopf's nervousness about the plan, his request for more forces, and the overall perception that he wasn't aggressive enough did not sit well there.

  The briefing did not make Schwarzkopf look good, and that was a major sore point with the CINC. His sensitivity on that score continued even after the two-corps plan was developed.

  Following the failed briefing, General Schwarzkopf directed General Yeosock to become involved in ground planning, and Yeosock turned to Brigadier General Steve Arnold, who had come from Korea just after Labor Day to become Third Army G-3. Arnold was called on to direct both Third Army planning and CENTCOM land operations planning, and he held these two responsibilities until final approval of the plan in early January. During that period, Arnold led the so-called Jedi Knights, the graduates of the U.S. Army's School for Advanced Military Studies, who we
re doing the planning work at CENTCOM and Third Army. (As it turned out, the planners of both VII and XVIII Corps also were SAMS graduates, which was a good thing for both communications and the overall planning effort.)

  Meanwhile, General Powell had decided to go to Saudi Arabia to hear further plans discussions and, if necessary, to get personally involved in moving the planning forward. On 22 October, he attended a briefing on a two-corps option, but still was not satisfied. That evening in the guest quarters in Saudi Arabia, he sketched out for General Schwarzkopf on some hotel stationery a scheme of maneuver that would place the two U.S. corps west of the main Iraqi defenses in an enveloping maneuver.

  Schwarzkopf agreed with this concept, which then became the basis for new guidance to Steve Arnold. Following Powell's return to Washington, Arnold and the planners sent copies of their early work on this new concept to the Joint Staff to demonstrate its feasibility. Once he himself was assured it would work, General Powell briefed the concept personally to the President on 30 October and secured approval (he already had Cheney's) for the introduction of VII Corps and an additional 250,000 troops into the theater.

  The formal announcement was made on 8 November, the Friday after the fall elections.

  The main question then at CENTCOM revolved around how far west the flanking maneuver should be. This had to be decided before Third Army could begin to do any definitive planning of its own. Likewise, the two corps would also have to wait for final decision from Third Army before taking their own plans very far. This was especially the case for VII Corps, the main effort, with their force-oriented mission.

  Because he himself was under pressure from Washington to look at extremely wide flanking movements, General Schwarzkopf initially gave Steve Arnold guidance to look at sending some forces 500 miles to the west near the Jordanian border (where they could presumably attack Scud capabilities and perhaps cause the Iraqis other discomforts, such as threatening Baghdad); even after this option was discarded (it would have been a logistics nightmare), Schwarzkopf continued to press Arnold and the planners to consider options that placed forces far to the west of where they eventually ended up. This may have been craftiness on Schwarzkopf's part. Showing how insupportable they were may have been his way of getting "Washington ideas" off his back. Yet by the time of the 14 November briefing, XVIII Corps was still attacking far to the west of VII Corps.

  Meanwhile, Arnold was convinced that an XVIII Corps attack to the west was not just logistically insupportable, from an operational sense it did not focus on the principal objective of liberating Kuwait and destroying the RGFC, and he continued to try to convince the CINC to agree with him on that. A number of options were considered, all focused on the question of how far west to put XVIII Corps.

  As soon as Franks saw the plan on 14 November, he got involved with the planners and with John Yeosock in pressing for a two-corps mutually supporting attack against the RGFC. The concept of a wide attack by XVIII Corps was raised again at the briefing to Cheney and Powell on 20 December. Though Arnold's recommendation then was to drop it, there was no discussion either way about the option. In the end, it was logistics support that drove General Schwarzkopf finally to decide, on 8 January 1991, on a two-corps, side-by-side attack.

  This decision freed Third Army to finalize its plans. From there the key decisions were about final force allocation to the two corps and about their mission assignments for the final attack on the RGFC.

  Arnold and the planners, thinking conservatively, were convinced that in order to destroy the RGFC, Third Army needed more combat power than it then had. By mid-December they had succeeded in getting VII Corps an additional division, the 1st (UK) AD. (Since the British division was originally slated to join in the Marines' attack to the east of VII Corps, that ended up costing an armored brigade to replace them, which Franks persuaded Waller to ask Schwarzkopf to take from the 1st Cavalry Division rather than the 1st INF.) But in the view of Arnold and his planners, the 1st UK was still not going to be enough. In order to destroy all three heavy RGFC divisions, as well as their three infantry divisions and artillery, the planners thought the theater reserve division, the 1st CAV, should be released early to VII Corps — that is, to the main attack. The CINC, on the other hand, because he felt he might have to send it to help the Egyptians if their attack stalled, wanted to keep this division in theater reserve under his control, with no promises of release. Repeated discussions by planners with General Schwarzkopf on this issue made him very sensitive on that point. The release of the 1st CAV would consequently dog operational planning right up to and including the actual operation. And they were not in fact released from CENTCOM control until 0930 the morning of 26 February, or more than two days after the beginning of the ground war.

  Picking the 1st CAV as theater ground reserve was a point for some discussion among planners. Normally, you choose as your reserve a unit that can influence the battle throughout the theater. In the choice of units for that role, the 101st Airborne (Air Assault) might have been a logical choice. With four AH-64 helicopter battalions, their long and lethal reach could influence the theater outcome. On the other hand, the 1st CAV was chosen because CENTCOM wanted an armored unit available to reinforce the Egyptian attack if that became bogged down. Franks had spent time with the Egyptians and seen their plan. As far as he was concerned, they had what it took to accomplish their mission on the VII Corps flank.[14] If the theater had been willing to take a small risk on them, they could have given 1st CAV to VII Corps from the start, kept the 101st as theater or Third Army reserve, and effectively employed the 101st on the last two days to isolate the Kuwaiti theater of operations. Those are choices that are made early and are easy to second-guess later.

  Meanwhile, planning efforts continued, and each corps worked on its own plans and kept both Third Army and CENTCOM aware of its work. There was no mystery to what each major HQ was doing. Commanders above the corps level also were well aware of planning work, and had the opportunity on several occasions to intervene if they did not like what they heard. Thus there should have been no surprise later on about the speed and tempo of the VII Corps attack. On 14 December, in preparation for a briefing of Secretary Cheney and General Powell, Franks and the other corps commanders briefed General Schwarzkopf on their plans so far. The CINC approved what he heard. In fact, it was now, in his words, "my plan." He had taken ownership of it.

  On 20 December, during the briefing to Secretary Cheney and General Powell, Cheney made a somewhat mysterious comment to Franks, just after he had gone over his concept of attack. "Thanks," Cheney said, "I feel better now."

  Franks didn't know then that Cheney was referring to the more than two months of discussions and planning in which he had participated. He had seen the early — and unsatisfactory — one-corps plan, the early two-corps planning, and had listened to General Powell sketch out a bolder two-corps plan to the President. Now he was seeing how the two-corps offensive concept would actually be put into action in the theater. And so for the first time, for him, all the pieces were really falling in place.

  From 27 to 30 December in Riyadh, Lieutenant General Yeosock convened a MAPEX, which both Franks and Luck attended on the first day and the last. Yeosock had originally intended to use this as a war game of final Third Army plans, but couldn't, since the CENTCOM plan was not yet final. Instead, the session became a discussion of resource allocation between VII and XVIII Corps, and of air support to the ground phase of the operation. Franks continued his discussions with John Yeosock over the necessity for a coordinated two-corps attack. Yeosock was sympathetic and, with Steve Arnold, went back to Schwarzkopf beginning on 4 January with a series of options.

  On 8 January General Schwarzkopf made his final decision on Third Army positions for the attack. Instead of a wide west maneuver north by XVIII Corps, with a gap between corps, the two corps would attack abreast. It then became a matter of Third Army determining how to destroy the RGFC.

  THE THIRD ARMY PL
AN

  Third Army planning intensified starting in mid-January.

  The CINC directed Lieutenant General Yeosock to plan for offensive actions beginning anytime after the start of the air campaign on 17 January. Brigadier General Arnold and his planners, with the assistance of both corps, followed up on this. Taking into consideration the status of the two corps, the combat power available, and assumptions about possible RGFC choices,[15] they developed five different options for an attack.

  Though timelines for the various attack options and forces available were developed, most of the planning energy was devoted to the one that assumed Third Army would attack only after all forces were ready and that the RGFC would defend in place. This timeline had both XVIII Corps and VII Corps in place by H+74 for a coordinated two-corps attack against the RGFC (H-hour — the start of the attack on G-Day). In actuality, since the heavy forces of both corps would not begin their attack until H+26, this meant these forces would hit the RGFC forty-eight hours from that point.

  On 1 February 1991, a meeting to discuss final plans was held at King Khalid Military City, hosted by Lieutenant General Yeosock and attended by Franks and Luck and key members of their staffs.

  Since, at that late date, a coherent Third Army two-corps order had not been published, Franks continued his strong argument to Yeosock at the end of the meeting (after General Luck had had to leave) for a two-corps coordinated attack against the RGFC if they stayed in place. He proposed that VII Corps would turn ninety degrees east and XVIII Corps would attack to their north. Both Yeosock and Arnold liked the concept. After that meeting, Third Army developed its plan for the Army to attack the RGFC and published the order on 18 February, during the time that Lieutenant General Cal Waller was temporarily in command.