The Generals

by Thomas E. Ricks

  Schwarzkopf likewise invoked Vietnam when discussing military personnel policies. According to a staff log he quotes in his memoir, in October 1990 Schwarzkopf proposed a plan not to have individual soldiers rotate but instead to switch out ground combat units every six to eight months. But Cheney decided that there would be no rotation at all and that soldiers would remain in the war “for the duration”—a sign that the administration of George H. W. Bush would act sooner rather than later and that the duration would simply not be that long, because the president would not let troops sit in the desert waiting endlessly for economic sanctions to change Saddam Hussein’s mind. When briefing his subordinates on his war plan, Schwarzkopf wrote, “For the benefit of the Vietnam vets—practically the whole room—I emphasized that, ‘we’re not going into this with one arm tied behind our backs.’” Unlike in Vietnam, where the American presence increased incrementally to a half-million troops, Schwarzkopf would begin his counteroffensive with that number in place. Likewise, the air campaign was dubbed “Instant Thunder,” specifically to contrast it with the gradualism of the Vietnam War’s bombing campaign, which had been code-named “Rolling Thunder.” In their tense face-to-face meeting in Geneva, Switzerland, on the eve of the war, Secretary of State James Baker would warn his Iraqi counterpart, Tariq Aziz, that if it came to an American assault, “It will be massive. This will not be another Vietnam. It will be fought to a quick and decisive end.”

  Schwarzkopf’s determination not to be a Vietnam-style general might have blinded him to his own shortcomings. In October 1990, Schwarzkopf dispatched a group of his planners to brief the Bush Administration’s national security leadership on his tentative plans to oust Iraq’s military from Kuwait. The reception in Washington from the civilian officials to his proposed head-on assault was chilly. “I found the plan unimaginative,” Cheney would recall drily. One of Cheney’s subordinates, Henry Rowen, mocked it as “the charge of the light brigade into the wadi of death.” Others summarized the Centcom plan as “hey diddle diddle, straight up the middle.” Brent Scowcroft, the soft-spoken national security adviser, was even harsher than Cheney. “I was pretty appalled,” he said years later. “It sounded to me like a briefing by people who didn’t want to do it. . . . The preferred option that they presented was frankly a poor option and my first question is, ‘Why don’t you go round to the west?,’ and the answer was, ‘Well, we don’t have enough gas trucks for it.’” In the wake of that head-slapper, Cheney established his own competing planning operation. Doing so, he said, “sent the signal to everybody, the Joint Staff, out in the field and Central Command: ‘Guys, get your act together and produce a plan, because if you don’t produce one that I’m comfortable with, I’ll impose one.’”

  Despite that disastrous briefing, Schwarzkopf held on to his post. Not all senior officers were so lucky. The Gulf War would be marked near its outset by the relief of a top general, but, in keeping with the new pattern, the firing was conducted by a civilian. In this case, Gen. Michael Dugan, the Air Force chief of staff, angered Powell and Cheney by touting, in a newspaper interview, the role airpower would play in the impending war. Powell’s lingering indignation was evident in his summary of that Washington Post article: “In a single story, Dugan made the Iraqis look like a pushover; suggested that American commanders were taking their cue from Israel . . . suggested political assassination . . . claimed that airpower was the only option.” The next day, Cheney relieved Dugan.

  • • •

  January 17, 1991, brought the first night of the air war against Iraq. It marked the moment it became undeniable that the U.S. military had successfully overhauled itself in the sixteen years since the fall of Saigon. As the air strikes began, even inside the military there was a lingering skepticism about the reliability of America’s new high-tech arsenal, which bristled with largely untried weaponry such as precision-guided bombs and radar-evading “stealth” aircraft. “I don’t give a damn if you shoot every TLAM the Navy’s got, they’re still not worth a shit,” Powell supposedly said about Tomahawk land attack cruise missiles before the war began. As it happened, he was wrong; they worked well. At the Pentagon, Powell and Cheney braced themselves. “We assumed with respect to the air war that our worst night would be the first night,” Cheney recalled. He spent the night at his Pentagon office and was surprised when he was told that out of nearly seven hundred aircraft that flew that night, only one had been lost. “It was just a phenomenal result. I could not believe that we’d done that well.”

  On the second night of the war, there were warning signs that the civil-military discourse, so essential to the healthy conduct of a war, had hit a sticking point. Iraq began its major political gambit of the war, a campaign to draw Israel into the conflict, by firing seven Scud missiles across the border. This was a tactically insignificant move, but it had the strategic aim of provoking Israel to retaliate, which would embarrass other Arab states into leaving the American-led coalition. Schwarzkopf, unattuned to politics, was obtuse about this danger, believing that dealing with the problem was somehow unrelated to his job. In his view, the small, inaccurate Iraqi missiles, which were being pushed to carry warheads far beyond their effective range, posed no military threat, and so the issue was not on his turf. Defense Secretary Cheney, who had pushed Powell away from discussing political considerations, came away from talks with Schwarzkopf doubting that he “fully understood the importance of dedicating assets to hunting Scuds.” Schwarzkopf’s stance provoked Paul Wolfowitz, then a Pentagon policy official, to crack, “The guy supposedly has read Clausewitz and knows wars are political, right?” In fact, Schwarzkopf simply was following both Cheney’s direction and the lessons he had learned in Gen. DePuy’s post-Vietnam Army: Decouple the fighting from the strategy and focus on the tactical level of war.

  To remedy the situation, Cheney ultimately had to intervene. He ordered Schwarzkopf to divert aircraft from planned missions around Baghdad and instead assign them to try to destroy mobile Scud launchers in the vast western Iraqi desert. Even if the anti-launcher effort proved ineffective, Cheney recalled, “I needed to be able to say [to the Israeli government], ‘Look, last night we flew fifty sorties over western Iraq dealing with this and here are the results we got.’ That’s the one place where I intervened really in the conduct of the war. . . . Didn’t kill many Scuds. . . . But it was very important that we tried, that we were perceived as doing everything we could.” Cheney was thinking strategically, but Schwarzkopf was not. Cheney, Powell, and Schwarzkopf all were at fault for not pausing at this point to focus on repairing the quality and clarity of their discourse.

  Instead, Schwarzkopf would blunder on. He failed to consider that in order to find and destroy Scud launchers, it likely would be necessary to insert Special Operations troops as surreptitious observers on the ground in western Iraq.

  He also would prove slow to grasp the implications of early ground actions in the war. At the end of January 1991, the Iraqi army launched a surprise assault into Saudi Arabia. This offensive, now known as the Battle of Khafji, was little understood at the time and is less remembered now. As two of the best analysts of the 1991 war, military journalist Michael Gordon and retired Marine Lt. Gen. Bernard Trainor, put it in their study, this was a well-planned offensive involving three Iraqi armored divisions, “designed to humiliate the Saudi army, start the ground war, and begin to bleed the Americans.” The Iraqis fought as they had against Iran a few years earlier, punching a hole into the enemy line and then sending in reinforcements. But there was a crucial difference in this battle: Iraqi antiair defenses proved ineffective against American attack aircraft, which were able to severely weaken the Iraqi forces, especially by hitting the armored vehicles in massed columns and the supply trucks bringing in ammunition and fuel. The Iraqis were stunned. We know now that Iraqi commanders were surprised by the vigor and precision of the American counterattack. One rattled member of Iraq’s 5th Mechanized Division,
it was reported, said that American airpower had done more damage to his brigade in half an hour than it had suffered in eight years of fighting the Iranians. Senior Iraqi commanders agreed. In a tape captured after the 2003 American invasion, Saddam Hussein was heard telling his advisers, “After the operations of al Khafji, some of the commanders said to me, ‘Sir, we think there has been a mistake. It means all our assessments about the American army were wrong.’”

  Yet neither Schwarzkopf nor Powell appreciated the meaning of the Khafji encounter. Schwarzkopf airily dismissed the three-day battle of Khafji as “about as significant as a mosquito on an elephant.” This was a failure of generalship, of mulling battlefield events and adjusting one’s plans in light of fresh information. Khafji should have made it clear to Schwarzkopf that the Iraqi army was not as formidable as he believed and that it could be defeated more quickly than he thought, but Schwarzkopf did not grasp this message. His failure would have major implications for his handling of the American ground offensive into Kuwait several weeks later.

  • • •

  The lingering differences between Powell and Schwarzkopf came to a head several weeks later, in mid-February 1991, on the eve of the ground attack. Schwarzkopf remained hesitant to begin. Powell confronted him in a heated telephone call, saying to Schwarzkopf, “Look, ten days ago you told me the 21st. Then you wanted the 24th. Now you’re asking for the 26th. I’ve got a president and a secretary of Defense on my back. They’ve got a bad Russian peace proposal they’re trying to dodge. You’ve got to give me a better case for postponement. I don’t think you understand the pressure I’m under.” (That last comment is striking in its pleading tone. It is hard to imagine George Marshall beseeching Eisenhower in such a manner.)

  Schwarzkopf roared back angrily, “My responsibility is the lives of my soldiers. This is all political.” He continued: “My Marine commander says we need to wait. We’re talking about Marines’ lives.”

  Powell probably should have responded coolly that as chairman of the Joint Chiefs it was his job—his obligation—to ensure that politics were connected to military operations. After all, the best-known observation of Clausewitz, the great Prussian theorist of war, is that war is the continuation of politics by other means. A war not fought for political ends is simply mindless bloodshed. Yet Powell did not say any of that. Rather, he responded with full-throated emotion. “Don’t you pull that on me,” he shouted back at his fellow Vietnam veteran. “Don’t you try to lay a patronizing guilt trip on me! Don’t tell me I don’t care about casualties!”

  Schwarzkopf backed down a bit. “You’re pressuring me to put aside my military judgment out of political expediency,” he pleaded. All in all, it was a remarkably revealing exchange, showing neither general in a good light. Schwarzkopf’s unreflective insistence on some sort of separation between war and politics foreshadowed the indeterminate conclusion toward which the two men would steer their campaign.

  CHAPTER 25

  The ground war

  Schwarzkopf vs. Frederick Franks

  T he ground assault brought swift and deadly confirmation of the reemergence of the American ground forces. On the afternoon of February 26, in a half-hour encounter dubbed the Battle of 73 Easting, for its location on the map of the featureless desert just west of Kuwait, a handful of American tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles from the 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment destroyed roughly 30 Iraqi tanks, 20 other armored vehicles, and 30 trucks. The Americans lost one soldier and one Bradley. At the Battle of Medina Ridge, the following day, the Americans would post similarly lopsided results, with the 1st Armored Division destroying 186 Iraqi tanks and a similar number of armored vehicles. It was, in historian Rick Atkinson’s phrase, “a brilliant slaughter.”

  But today, the four-day-long ground campaign against the Iraqis in February 1991 is perhaps best remembered inside the U.S. Army for the squabbling it provoked among American generals. For all their insistence on heeding the lessons of Vietnam, the one that seems to have escaped Schwarzkopf and Powell was one of the most important: the need to relieve subordinates. Schwarzkopf’s memoir of the war is scathing in its portrayal of Lt. Gen. Frederick Franks, a popular one-footed Vietnam veteran who led the Army’s heavy VII Corps, with five divisions and sixteen hundred tanks, through the desert west of Kuwait. Schwarzkopf depicts Franks as jittery and wheedling, misunderstanding the fight he is in, being overcautious, wanting to turn south to clean up some bypassed Iraqi elements before proceeding east with the main attack into Kuwait. “What the hell’s going on with VII Corps?” Schwarzkopf exclaimed at one point to his staff. “Did VII Corps stop for the night?”

  Franks’s own explanation, when he had a chance to offer it much later to a documentary filmmaker, was “I was thinking forty-eight hours ahead. I wanted to be in a posture that when we hit the Republican Guards, that we would hit them with a fist massed from an unexpected direction at full speed, and so what I needed to do was get the corps in a posture that would allow that to happen.” He also worried, legitimately, about fratricidal fire, which is a danger especially at night and in the fluid opening phase of ground operations. In his memoir, Franks would criticize Schwarzkopf as a career infantryman who had little feel for the maneuvering of armored formations and compounded his misunderstanding by being a foul-tempered “chateau general” trying to run the war from an underground bunker four hundred miles to the south in Riyadh. “Since General Schwarzkopf never called me directly or came out to see for himself, he did not have a complete picture of the VII Corps situation,” Franks wrote. He also stated that Schwarzkopf simply was wrong about Franks’s intention to turn south.

  Gordon and Trainor, in their own astute analysis, concluded that Franks, like Schwarzkopf, was wedded to an existing campaign plan, in this case an “overly elaborate plan for a two-pronged attack that could not be easily adapted”—that is, a poor form of DePuy’s synchronization. The friction between Franks and Schwarzkopf intensified, they added, because Schwarzkopf sentimentally left in place as an intermediary Army Lt. Gen. John Yeosock, a diffident man then recovering from an emergency gallbladder operation. Still weak when the land war began, Yeosock was described by one officer as looking “more like he belonged in a morgue than in a war room.” After the war, Schwarzkopf would blame Franks for the Army’s failure to destroy the Republican Guard. In fact, Gordon and Trainor concluded, it was Schwarzkopf’s own war plan that was at fault, by having an all-out Marine attack commence against southern Iraq before the Army had the chance to move in from the west and close the Iraqis’ exit door in northern Kuwait. Thus, instead of penning in Iraqi forces, Schwarzkopf’s war plan pushed them out, like a cork popped from a bottle.

  In his determination not to repeat the mistake in Vietnam of underestimating the enemy, Schwarzkopf had gone to the opposite extreme. “Schwarzkopf’s great shortcoming was his inability to take an elevated view of the battlefield, to recognize and accept the presence of friction in execution and ‘noise’ in the information system,” wrote Richard Swain, an Army historian. “Increasingly behind events, he could neither influence nor understand the limitations on the maneuver of massive armored forces in the field.”

  As a matter of top command, Schwarzkopf failed to handle Franks properly. In World War II, a corps or division commander perceived by his superiors to be suffering from a case of “the slows,” who seemed so resistant to his commander’s direction, almost certainly would have been removed, as happened with Maj. Gen. John Lucas at Anzio and with Maj. Gen. Fay Prickett, commander of the 75th Infantry Division, after the Battle of the Bulge. It almost would have been kinder to relieve Franks than to leave him in place and then pound him in a memoir. In any event, no World War II commander would have pleaded, as Schwarzkopf did in that memoir, that the war would have gone better if only his subordinates had been more responsive. It is not difficult to imagine how George Marshall, Dwight Eisenhower, or Omar Bradley would have responded to such an
alibi.

  Another Vietnam-influenced impulse, the distancing of military operations from political considerations, led Schwarzkopf to his worst moment, which came at the end of the war. Refusing to think politically was, after all, a quixotic, unreasonable approach, because war ultimately must be about achieving political aims. Yet in the war’s final days, Schwarzkopf acted as if he had done no planning or even vague thinking about war termination. He misleadingly told the world in a press conference that “the gates are closed” to a Republican Guard retreat from Kuwait, even as the Guard was escaping. “They have few options other than surrender or destruction.” He was wrong: The Army would conclude that, ultimately, between one-third and one-half of the Republican Guard’s tanks left Kuwait unscathed. Even more remarkably, of the tens of thousands of Iraqi troops taken prisoner, only one was a senior officer of the Guard.

  He did not consult with his superiors before sitting down to parley with the Iraqis. On March 3, 1991, he brought almost no advisers to his cease-fire discussion with Iraqi generals in Safwan, Iraq—no senior civilian officials, nor even someone from the Air Force. He did not know it, but he was flying blind. The nadir of the discussion came when the Iraqi generals asked permission to fly helicopters. “As long as it is not over the part we are in, that is absolutely no problem,” Schwarzkopf responded, according to a transcript of the meeting later published in an Iraqi newspaper. “So we will let the helicopters, and that is a very important point, and I want to make sure that’s recorded, that military helicopters can fly over Iraq. Not fighters, not bombers.”