Into the Storm: On the Ground in Iraq

by Tom Clancy

  Units performed a lot of live fire, including what the Army calls calibrating, boresighting, and zeroing their major direct-fire weapons systems to make sure rounds hit where they aimed them--different procedures for each type of weapons system.

  Major General Butch Funk at the 3rd AD had a particularly challenging training situation. Since his division equipment was the last to be shipped from Germany and it had been loaded in such a way that the tactical integrity of his units was lost, the assembling of his division was a major challenge. Yet in some ways he knew that 3rd AD was ahead of the game, since they had just completed their semi-annual gunnery and maneuver training in Germany. What they needed to do, he realized, was work on major unit moves and formation changes in the desert, maneuvers not possible to train in Germany, and so he turned the assembly of the division over to his junior officers and his noncommissioned officers, led by division command's Sergeant Major Joe T. Hill, took his commanders out into the desert to his Tactical Assembly Area, and used HMMWVs to move and navigate in the desert, spaced like the whole division. It was a masterful use of the entire chain of command to handle a variety of simultaneous activities.

  Major General Ron Griffith had a different challenge. Though he, too, had to assemble his division amid fractured unit integrity, his division had had the bad luck of arriving when competition was highest for trucks to transport them the 400 kilometers to their desert assembly areas. On top of all that, Franks gave Griffith responsibility to be VII Corps reserve for an ARCENT mission to protect the ARCENT lines of communication (the road networks designated for unit and supply movements, in this case, the Tapline Road) from a preemptive Iraqi attack while XVIII Corps moved west. This was a real mission, requiring staff planning and orders--no small amount of work for a division-sized organization. Thus he had a real mission, plus he had to assemble and train the division all at the same time.

  Griffith drilled his division hard and conducted as much live-fire training as he could fit in. He also worked his artillery, including MLRS, into his maneuver training. For their live firing, the 1st Armored used what was called Jayhawk range, a ten-by-fifty-kilometer piece of uninhabited desert the corps had arranged with the Saudis. A daily major exercise for all the units using this range was to make sure that no unsuspecting Bedouin and his herd wandered into the impact area--not to mention U.S. military vehicles or aircraft. There were no fences, no roads, no terrain features, and no electronic or phone communications with the Bedouins who shared the desert with VII Corps.

  IN the period before the battle, Fred Franks simultaneously devoted his most concentrated efforts--with the help of a great many smart, skilled people--to working out the corps's plan of attack. Before we get to that, though, we need to spend some time placing the story in its context. We need to look at the nature of military plans and maps, and then at the planning processes in the headquarters above his, in CENTCOM and Third Army, to show how his plans were formed out of those and how he helped influence them.

  PLANS

  Plans and orders are not the same. Plans are options. Orders make things happen. Units make many plans, but some never get executed.

  The job of a unit's staff is to manufacture feasible options--and to continue manufacturing them. The commander needs as many options as possible. You try to be like the pool player, Franks likes to say, making a shot but also lining up the cue ball for the next shot.

  Normally with plans, there are such words as "effective for planning on receipt, execution on order." This allows subordinate units to do their own planning and work out all the details. If events turn out anywhere close to the assumptions in your plan, then it is a matter of telling the organization to execute a specific OPLAN. That rarely happens without adjustment.

  Sometimes you update the plan: when your mission or troops available to you have been modified, when your senior HQ modifies their own plan, when the enemy does something different or unexpected, when you get a better idea, or when you spot an enemy vulnerability to exploit. U.S. units make lots of plans, which on occasion causes concern with our allies. Their much smaller staffs are not capable of producing the prodigious numbers of contingency plans that Americans can generate.

  Nonetheless, the more options, the better. Thinking through a situation and developing a wide range of options, then keeping your force in a physical posture where those options remain available to you, lets you outthink an enemy and then outfight him. It is a process that continues during a battle.

  MAPS

  Land forces use terrain. They fight on the ground. How they dispose their forces on that ground relative to the enemy and with what weapons are crucial to the successful outcome of a battle or a series of battles.

  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 were 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 fin
alize 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.