The Commanders

by Bob Woodward

  The weekend newspapers were filled with stories about discord among the coalition members and the difficulties Bush would have in selling a war, and the problems of fighting a distant war on the ground.

  Scowcroft and his staff began referring to the three-day weekend as the Veterans Day Massacre. Scowcroft felt the administration was facing not so much a military problem as a public relations problem. He was not sure what could be done. A poll published in USA Today was headlined “Bush Support Slim.” It said 51 percent approved of Bush’s handling of the Gulf crisis, down from 82 percent approval three months before.

  Powell found the stories exaggerated, alarmist and speculative. But those stories—not the administration—were defining the issues and debate.

  • • •

  The political uproar continued over the next several days. On Tuesday, November 13, Cheney and Powell had an 8:15 breakfast with Senators Sam Nunn and John Warner. Nunn said he thought the administration’s Gulf policy would play into Saddam’s hands. He was going to open public hearings later in the month. Hearings were his strongest weapon to force the issues of goals and potential costs out in the open.

  Cheney met later in the day with a hundred of his former House colleagues. The main issue was the offensive option. It was a chaotic discussion; everyone present seemed to have a different idea about the new policy.

  After an hour, Cheney said, “I assume all of you guys want to vote up or down on the proposition.”

  The room erupted. There were shouts of no and yes. It only confirmed Cheney’s view that Congress was not equipped to deal with the issue. He found himself thinking of August 1941, just four months before Pearl Harbor, when the House was able to muster only a one-vote margin for continuing the Selective Service system.

  • • •

  Bush and Scowcroft were astounded at the speed with which the support for the Gulf operation seemed to be unraveling. Bush recalled that when he was a congressman during the Vietnam War his fellow Texan, President Lyndon Johnson, had made a mistake by not formally and officially getting Congress to vote on the war, beyond the controversial Gulf of Tonkin resolution.

  Scowcroft was not confident the votes were there. It would be a disaster to go to Congress and lose.

  Some of the top Republicans, including Senate Minority Leader Robert J. Dole of Kansas and Senator Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, were calling for a special session of Congress to debate the Gulf. They argued that Bush would win and congressional backing would strengthen his hand with Saddam. Privately, Lugar was telling Bush it would be better to find out now whether he lacked the congressional support, rather than later.

  On November 14, Bush met with the congressional leaders of both parties and made a plea for unity. He insisted that he had not yet decided on war. “I have not crossed any Rubicon,” he said.

  He pulled out a report of Iraqi news coverage and read aloud some of the headlines showing that Saddam was being presented with a picture of disunity in the United States. The President’s implication was obvious: this was the precise message that would make Saddam think he could stay in Kuwait. Bush also pulled out a pocket-sized copy of the U.S. Constitution and read from Article II, section 2, “The President shall be Commander in Chief. . . .”

  Bush said he wanted the leaders to call a session, but only if he was going to receive a substantial vote in his favor.

  The Democratic leaders said at this time they would not call an emergency session of Congress to debate Bush’s Gulf buildup. Instead, they would hold hearings.

  • • •

  “You can’t make someone else’s choices. You shouldn’t let some one else make yours.” Powell’s rule number 7.

  Now that the President had made his decision to create the offensive option, Powell had his own crucial choices to make about the war plan. He had directed General Tom Kelly to drop out of regular activities as the operations director and set up a special planning cell of half a dozen of his best officers. Working in a special-access room within the Joint Staff, they were coordinating every step with Schwarzkopf’s planners. Powell wanted an absolute sense of urgency. He had ordered the planners to address all needs—from supplies and ammunition to the medical teams, rules of engagement and procedures for dealing with potential prisoners of war.

  The first commandment for a U.S. military leader is “Take care of your men.” Though the overall offensive mission would be to expel the Iraqi Army from Kuwait, the best way to take care of the men was to destroy the Iraqi military. As in Panama, where the Panamanian Defense Forces had to be taken down completely, the Iraqi military capability would also have to be eliminated or disabled—a monumental task compared to Panama.

  But the United States had some very secret advantages.

  At the beginning of November, after the decision had been made to deploy for the offensive option, Cheney and Powell had made several visits to perhaps the most secret part of the Pentagon—2C865, the Special Technical Operations Center (STOC). Just down the corridor from General Kelly’s office in the Joint Staff, the STOC was a Pentagon-within-the-Pentagon, with its own tight rules of access. Here a group of about 30 men ran the only unit in the building where everyone had to take regular lie-detector tests to ensure they were not security risks.

  The center was often called the Starship Enterprise because of the high-tech displays, the computers and the communications to clone centers at the key intelligence agencies and the unified commands, including the Central Command in Saudi Arabia.

  The STOC was the command and communications center for operations involving the sensitive “black” programs known only to those cleared to the special-access “compartments.” Included were special operations units, intelligence-gathering capabilities, and advanced weapons systems and equipment—everything from the Navy SEAL teams to the Stealth jet fighters to special spy satellites. The Navy captain who had headed the STOC from 1982 to 1989 had to be cleared out of 235 special-access compartmented programs when he retired.

  Most of the super-secret black weapons had been developed primarily with one scenario in mind: war with the Soviet Union. But since Iraq had been a Soviet client state, purchasing many of its key weapons from the Soviets, the U.S. weapons were tailor-made to fight the new adversary.

  The United States would be able to capitalize on decades of work. Under a top-secret program code-named EYRE, the CIA and Pentagon over a number of years had acquired specifications and test data on key Soviet electronics, radar, planes and missiles. Many of these systems were used by the Iraqis. In other intelligence operations, the Pentagon had obtained actual Soviet weapons, and then designed U.S. weapons to defeat the Soviet models.

  In another top-secret program, code-named PARCAE, and related signals-intercept operations, the Pentagon could listen to and read some Soviet-made communications systems.

  Satellites had been placed over the Middle East that sent down real-time pictures of Kuwait, flashing them to television consoles. Commanders with battlefield consoles could closely monitor the activities of the Iraqi occupiers.

  The Iraqis behaved as if they thought much of their communications were secure. But the National Security Agency, the largest of the U.S. intelligence agencies, could intercept some of it. The Iraqis’ equipment all came from the Soviets, the United States or Europe, so NSA knew the frequencies and characteristics.

  Yet another black program held out the possibility of covertly destroying all the main electrical power grids in Iraq without leaving any tracks back to U.S. forces. The success of a possible offensive military option depended in part on disabling Iraqi radar, air defenses and communications, all dependent on electricity. It was a military planner’s dream, promising a complete, baffling surprise blow.

  Powell was skeptical of such miraculous whiz-bang solutions. He wasn’t thrilled with the STOC’s cost of approximately $100 million. The center reminded him of Room 208, the high-tech command center in the Old Executive Office Building next to the White Hous
e that Ollie North had used for some of his far-flung, ill-fated operations during the Reagan administration.

  One of the STOC briefings Cheney and Powell received in November was on the special operations capabilities that might be used against Iraq. In the offensive war plan, eight special operations Apache helicopters would start the war by crossing the border to take out key air defense installations inside Iraq.

  Like the Chairman, Cheney was taking all the high-tech with a grain of salt. He expected the people who ran the black programs to be enthusiastic advocates, but he also knew that systems often didn’t perform as advertised. He wouldn’t soon forget the flawed combat debut of the Air Force’s F-117A Stealth fighter bomber in Panama, where the plane’s precision bombs had missed their targets by 50 yards or more.

  Cheney had learned the value of questioning everything. During his 18 months as Secretary, he had spent many hours delving into the top-secret Single Integrated Operation Plan (SIOP) for nuclear war with the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact nations, the most important war plan by far. He discovered that the military had worked rather hard to keep Pentagon civilians out of the process. The SIOP had been running on automatic pilot for years. An incredible system cranked away, applying rules, models, formulas and concepts without adequate thinking or questioning. He had brought the generals and admirals into his office for repeated grillings, taken them to the White House for special briefings, ordered a dozen studies and insisted on answers. The military responded when asked, and Cheney didn’t attribute bad motives to anyone. But he had uncovered a rat’s nest hidden away from civilian oversight.

  It was one of the great secrets: the U.S. military had thousands more nuclear weapons than necessary and the SIOP called for them to be used in a way that would have done far more nuclear violence to the Soviet Union than necessary to achieve the military objectives in a war. Cheney had also discovered that some of the flexibility that all presidents wanted in the plan, and had ordered in a series of presidential directives, was missing. For example, the ability to demonstrate restraint to the Soviets by limiting or controlling the size of a nuclear attack was not there. These issues went right to the heart of presidential and civilian control over the military. Cheney was gradually reforming the SIOP system. Some day when the Gulf crisis was over, he and the President would be able to go public with an outline of sweeping reforms.

  In the same way, he was not taking anything on faith in the Gulf operation. Just as he was determined to understand the SIOP as well as his military commanders did, he was going to understand the Gulf war plan.

  He knew the military was confident about what its weapons and men could deliver. But the line between desirable confidence and dangerous overconfidence was hard to draw. Cheney had adopted what he felt was an appropriately skeptical view of what any single piece of the war plan might be able to accomplish. He took three steps.

  First, he had been very careful not to paint too rosy a picture to the President, the public or the Congress. He had worked to lower expectations, so as to avoid being like the candidate for office who is expected to receive 70 percent of the vote, winds up with 60 percent, and is thought to have failed.

  Second, he had insisted on redundancy in the war plan. He wanted to make sure there was the capability to go to particular key targets several times.

  Third, he personally was digging into the war plan, and the concepts behind it. Drawing on outside experts, briefings he’d received, stories in the press, and background reading he had done on the Iran-Iraq War, he had compiled as many questions as he could, and was using them to pulse the system for information.

  Cheney told Wolfowitz that he didn’t want to micromanage the planners, although he was going to watch closely and ask questions. He had no intention of trying to redo the war plan. “But I intend to own it when it’s finished,” the Secretary said.

  Most mornings Cheney was given an operations and intelligence briefing by the Joint Staff. It was pretty boring, describing the locations of Iraqi and coalition forces, accidents that had occurred on the coalition side, and routine problems. Fidgety, Cheney wanted to know more. He requested that the Joint Staff give him some highly classified presentations on offensive war planning. Beginning November 26, he was given a series of nuts-and-bolts tutorials on such subjects as Building an Air Attack Plan; Target Categories for an Air Campaign; Breaching Iraqi Forward Defenses; Logistics Sustainment; Command, Control and Communications; Deconfliction of Coalition Forces in an Air Campaign; Army Anti-Armor Capabilities; Amphibious Operations; and other sensitive topics like special operations and intelligence.

  Cheney listened in dead earnest. He peppered the Joint Staff experts with questions, and drew them out about uncertainties and reservations. In less than a month, he received 15 briefings. At the last of them, Tom Kelly presented him with a framed diploma stating that Dick Cheney had completed a course in war planning and was now designated a “Joint Planner.”

  “This will be my most treasured possession,” Cheney said with evident sarcasm.

  • • •

  One of Powell’s primary tasks in planning for an offensive war was developing the lists of key strategic targets in Iraq for the three air phases. The targets were divided into categories and then priorities were set within each category.

  Initial target categories were:

  • Command, control and communications systems.

  • Air defense systems and radar.

  • Airfields used by Saddam’s 800 combat planes.

  • The 30 main SCUD missile-launching sites.

  • Iraq’s nuclear reactor.

  • Production and storage facilities for chemical and biological weapons.

  • The eight Republican Guard divisions—the backbone of Iraq’s army.

  • The supply network—storage depots, ammunition dumps, transportation hubs, roads, bridges and railroads.

  • The 12 major petrochemical facilities, including the three refineries.

  • The electrical power system.

  • Other industrial war-supporting facilities.

  • The 400,000 Iraqi troops occupying Kuwait.

  Schwarzkopf’s planners were working with a series of matrixes and computer models to match the targets with the available weapons over a timeline of 20 to 30 days of bombing. It was a giant puzzle. The pieces had to be put together in such a way as to inflict the most damage while ensuring that the U.S. and allied forces were given maximum protection from Iraq’s offensive forces.

  The Phase Four ground campaign would hinge on the levels of damage done in the air war, and finding some way to engage the Iraqi Army on terms favorable to the allies.

  • • •

  On November 28, former JCS Chairman Admiral Crowe testified before Nunn’s committee. It was the day before that he’d told Powell, over lunch at the Pentagon, that he thought it was time for patience in the Gulf crisis.I

  Crowe told the senators: “Our dislike for Hussein seems to have crowded out many other considerations. . . . I would argue that we should give sanctions a fair chance before we discard them. I personally believe they will bring him to his knees, ultimately, but I would be the first to admit, that is a speculative judgment. If, in fact, the sanctions will work in 12 to 18 months instead of six months, the trade-off of avoiding war with its attendant sacrifices and uncertainties, would, in my estimation be more than worth it.”

  Without directly criticizing Bush, Crowe hinted at his fear that the President was leaning toward war. “In my judgment, we are selling our country short by jumping to the conclusion that we can’t stare down our opponent. . . . It is curious that just as our patience in Western Europe has paid off and furnished us the most graphic example in our history of how staunchness is sometimes the better course in dealing with thorny international problems, a few armchair strategists are counseling a near-term attack on Iraq. It is worth remembering that in the 1950s and ’60s, individuals were similarly advising an attack on the USSR. Wouldn�
��t that have been great?”

  The testimony of Crowe and another retired former JCS Chairman, General David C. Jones, both calling for a continuation of the sanctions instead of war, was the main news event that night on television and in the next day’s newspapers.

  Surprised that Crowe had come down so hard for sanctions, Powell vowed that when he left office, he would not publicly second-guess his successors and would not appear voluntarily before Congress. They would have to subpoena him.

  Scowcroft was irked at Crowe. The national security adviser felt that someone who had been in such a senior role in the administration should try to find common ground, not undercut the policy. And Bush told Scowcroft that he was personally disappointed in Crowe.

  Crowe heard about Bush’s distress and wrestled with a letter to the President. But he was too angry, and too convinced that Bush was making a terrible mistake. Going to war—and to Crowe it looked inevitable now—was a failure of policy. He wondered why he should make peace with a president who had failed the country when it needed him most. The letter went unfinished.

  Crowe did, however, compose a letter to his son, Marine Captain Blake Crowe, who was stationed in Saudi Arabia. He told his son not to be guided by his father or his father’s testimony. “You have a strong sense of duty and I know you’ll perform it. When it comes time to fight, you fight. The American people are behind you, you can count on that no matter what they or I say about the policy or the administration. You kids in the desert they are behind.”

  Crowe’s son phoned and told his parents that the bravado, the talk of kicking ass, was gone. It now looked serious and his men and the other Americans there just wanted to be used properly by their leaders.

  Later Crowe received a holiday card from Bush. The President had written a personal note: “May God bless your son.”