Into the Storm: On the Ground in Iraq

by Tom Clancy

  When Ron had encountered elements of a brigade of the Iraqi 26th Division, he had left the 3rd Brigade to finish that fight and pushed the rest of the division forward to just outside al-Busayyah. That meant shifting to a formation of two brigades on line, the 2nd on the left and the 1st on the right. The 3rd Brigade, commanded by Colonel Dan Zanini, closed behind the 1st Brigade later that night, after finishing their fight. At 0500 the morning of the twenty-sixth, after refueling, 3rd Brigade bypassed Purple to the east, wheeled ninety degrees to an easterly attack orientation, and set the 1st AD baseline along Phase Line Smash. Later that morning, 1st and 2nd Brigades would join them giving the division the 1/1 CAV out front, followed by the 2nd, 1st, and 3rd Brigades from north to south. It was a hell of a maneuver, fighting and moving without stopping over thirty kilometers of territory. The division reported that on the twenty-fifth they had destroyed 27 armored vehicles, 9 artillery pieces, 48 trucks, 14 air defense systems, and had counted 314 prisoners, although the total was probably double. The 3rd Brigade of the Iraqi 26th Division had ceased to exist; they had overrun it.

  Today they would move farther, after the right turn, and would attack into the northern part of the defense that the Tawalkana was trying to set. After the turn, they would have an open flank to the north, if XVIII Corps did not rapidly refuel and turn east as well.

  Meanwhile, the 75th Artillery Brigade was not yet back with them from their breach mission. That was troublesome to me, as the 42nd had already linked up with the 3rd AD. I'd have to keep that on my mind and make sure it happened.

  Ron and 1st AD would have their hands full today.

  Here is how TF 2/70, 1st AD, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Steve Whitcomb, which consisted of three M1A1 companies and a Bradley company, spent the night on the outskirts of al-Busayyah: "TF 2-70 arrived at PL South Carolina [about 120 kilometers into Iraq] after 2130 and began its move into position. I wanted to get ourselves set to kick off the attack so that we would not have to reposition the next morning. The wind howled at fifty-plus knots, the cloud cover was low, and we had driving rain. Vehicles were refueled and limited maintenance pulled. The task force was settled in by 0030. The brigade's direct-support artillery battalion, 2-1 Field Artillery, Iron Deuce, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Jim Unterseher, fired harassing and interdiction fires all night on al-Busayyah. Multiple-Launched Rocket Systems pounded the town in preparation for the morning attack. The task force S-3 coordinated with the brigade S-3, and at 0100 returned with the attack order. The task force plan was prepared and approved by 0230. We issued a frag order and briefed the plan at 0500."

  This task force attacked that morning, 26 February, at BMNT (about 0540) as one of four task forces subordinate to 2nd Brigade and as part of a two-brigade attack (the first brigade had three task forces) on al-Busayyah. When they finished the almost four-hour attack, this task force had destroyed seven tanks, two BRDMs (wheeled infantry carriers), one BMP, and twenty-five trucks, and captured sixteen enemy soldiers. They had no casualties (their medics treated Iraqi wounded later that morning). They then turned right ninety degrees with the rest of 1st AD and pressed on toward the RGFC.

  3RD AD was poised to pass around the 2nd ACR to the north and slam due east into the Tawalkana. They had been in a division wedge and had reported taking more than 200 prisoners the night before (in fact, I knew from my meetings with Butch Funk that the totals were much higher than that). Because they had been corps reserve, they had had little enemy contact the first day and a half, and so they would be the most rested of our divisions. When I had given Butch the FRAGPLAN 7 execute order the night before, that had meant, among other things, that they were no longer our reserve, and I was sending them into the heart of the setting Iraqi defense. They were going to be the first division to hit the Tawalkana--which was the right spot in the attack for my freshest division, especially since their nickname was the "Spearhead" Division (Butch Funk had even found the original "Spearhead" emblem from World War II and had it stenciled on the 3rd AD vehicles. In the coming attacks, they would live up to their World War II reputation and then some).

  The night before, after a cross-desert journey of 100 kilometers, the 42nd Artillery Brigade, commanded by Colonel Morrie Boyd, had linked up with the 3rd AD with his approximately 600 track and wheeled vehicles. The feat did not surprise me, as I had seen Morrie Boyd in action in a few other leadership situations and knew he could make that happen.

  Here is how TF 4/67, 3rd AD, which consisted of three M1A1 companies and a Bradley company, and was commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Tim Reischl, spent the night: "At dark the task force continued to move, now into rain, blowing sand, and cloud cover that reduced visibility to less than fifty meters. The move was complicated by loss of satellite and LORAN coverage from 1800 to 1900 hours; the GPS and LORAN position-locating devices were useless. The task force tightened up the formation and used compasses and a lone inertial navigation device in a Fuchs chemical recon vehicle as guides and continued to move in sector. A halt was called at 2030 hours, and the next few hours were spent collecting vehicles, refueling, and repairing weather damage to the equipment. . . . On 25 February the task force had advanced another eighty-five kilometers. . . . Fifty percent alert for security and four hours of sleep nightly for all personnel was the norm during the move through the desert. The advance was resumed at first light on 26 February, amid reports of enemy movement and contact forward of the brigade."

  The nights referred to were 24 and 25 February. This task force was part of the 3rd Brigade, at that time in reserve in the 3rd AD, directly behind the two leading brigades, 1st and 2nd. Third Brigade was part of the 3rd AD attacks the nights of 26 and 27 February.

  2ND ACR had spent the remainder of the night in an active horseshoe defense astride an Iraqi main supply route that the regiment called Blacktop. It was actually the IPSA Pipeline Road along Phase Line Smash. They were there in position to stop Iraqi units from using that route out of Kuwait, either to join the Tawalkana's defense against our attack or to escape the theater.

  Though I was a little surprised to see that the 2nd ACR had not moved forward during the night to "maintain pressure," I had left the tactics up to Don Holder. Don had used the time for local actions to block the Iraqis and to get orders out appropriate to the change in mission I had given him. Given the terrible weather that had canceled the aviation strikes, and the change in mission, I supported his choice.

  Even if they weren't pressing ahead, they weren't sitting on their hands, either. In addition to the action of Company M and the MLRS, they had also had other enemy actions, from an engagement against Iraqi dismounted infantry to heavier action by 2nd Squadron, which had destroyed nine MTLBs and a T-55. Until 0300, most of the action seemed to be in the north of their sector, which is where we were about to attack with the 3rd AD. At a little after 0500 this morning, they reported that 3rd Squadron had turned back an Iraqi recon company attack, destroying twelve vehicles and taking sixty-five prisoners. It had not been an uneventful night for the 2nd ACR.

  Today, they were moving out to gain and maintain contact, to pass 3rd AD to their north, and to be prepared at some point to pass the 1st INF through.

  THE reports to Riyadh, meanwhile, lagged well behind many of these actions, and once or twice they were downright wrong. For instance, the official VII Corps situational report that went to Riyadh as of midnight 25 February (almost two hours after these engagements and actions) said, "Units are in hasty defensive positions preparing to attack BMNT 27 Feb"--!!?? And of the British, it said, "The passage of lines through 1ID went extremely smoothly and according to plan. . . . By 1800C [local time] 7th ARMD had cleared the breach. Fourth ARMD began moving at 1325C from staging area and should complete passage NLT [not later than] 260300C" (that is, at 0300 on the twenty-sixth). Because I was out of communications with the corps main CP, the main was out of line-of-sight communications with the units, and many CPs were on the move, I should not have been surprised at this inf
ormation error.

  Friendly information was always behind in the attack. The faster the tempo of the attack, the more behind it was.

  There was no mention of the fact that the British had been in contact with the enemy and were fighting, nor of 2nd ACR's activities, nor of the 1st AD attacks by fire on al-Busayyah. It was not surprising, since the VII Corps main relied on reports from subordinate units, and just as the main usually cut off its information at a definite time, subordinate units usually cut off their information at a somewhat earlier time. If they had to get a report to the VII Corps main CP by 2300 (to give the main an hour to prepare for its midnight transmission to Third Army), they would probably cut their own information off at 2200 or earlier. So by the time the consolidated VII Corps report went to Riyadh at 2400, the information from the division CPs was already at least three hours old.

  Throw in the weather and interrupted communications from the jump TAC to the main CP, and matters get worse. Worse still, the Third Army liaison officer, Colonel Rock, was stuck with the corps TAC CP in the middle of the 3rd AD sea of vehicles.

  In the absence of any kind of automatic electronic update of the maps at each echelon, this is the way it got done. So by the time the CINC got his morning update at around 0700 or so, the information on VII Corps units was almost twelve hours old.

  Ironically, the enemy information was more current, while Third Army (and CENTCOM) received information on VII Corps primarily from the fragmented voice reports sent by our CPs through the fragile communications 600 kilometers away. If the staff in Riyadh was relying solely on those reports to post their maps and brief the CINC, then the information gap was beginning to widen considerably.

  Mind you, this was not unexpected. All experienced tactical field commanders know and deal with this phenomenon. Even at the edge of the so-called information age, such a lag is simply characteristic of fast-tempo operations and long-distance reporting.

  It is only when senior commanders at higher HQ act on old information without validating it that they can get their decisions wrong. Most of them correct the possible misinformation by finding out for themselves--by visiting subordinate commanders or, at a minimum, calling the subordinate unit to verify facts and discuss the situation. I was later to learn that John Yeosock constantly attempted to ensure that the CINC's briefers had current information.

  During the four days of the ground war, I never saw the reports that went to Riyadh. I trusted my chief of staff and the troops at the main CP to get it right and to do the best they could with the information they had. As it turned out, their reports were particularly sharp on the enemy situation and on our future plans, but the friendly situation was just as I've described. It is a fact of land warfare that you cannot have perfect knowledge of everything going on, so if you want to act, or think you need to act, then the higher you are, the more imperative it becomes to validate the information if your actions will affect the tactical battle.

  The main problem that came out of all this was Riyadh's sense of our movement rate. On the one hand, there seemed to be a perception down there that all the Iraqi forces had been defeated virtually from the get-go (including the RGFC) and that all that was left was to pursue the defeated enemy and mop up (that nothing much was left for the Army and Marines to do but garrison the ruins).

  Well, the RGFC was still very much a fighting force, though greatly weakened. And we were not taking our own sweet time in getting ourselves to them--especially considering the lousy weather and the maneuver skills needed to put together a three-division fist. This wasn't some kind of a free-for-all charge, with tanks instead of horses and raised sabers. It was a focused maneuver involving several thousand fighting vehicles to concentrate combat power in a rolling attack against an enemy defending with tanks, BMPs, and artillery.

  By this time, I was getting sensitive to movement rates, but unless I got specific orders to the contrary from either Yeosock or Schwarzkopf, I was determined to do what I thought looked right to accomplish my mission at least cost to our troops. Suggestions and innuendoes were not what I needed. Commanders with units in combat and taking casualties get very focused. They are not sensitive to casual comments or sideline suggestions, and it is not a time for subtle mind-reading or communication games. You use very direct language and remove as much ambiguity as possible. "Here's what I want you to do. I want you here by such and such a time. Do you understand?" In my own experience, the more tired commanders get, and the more engaged they are in battles, with successes and setbacks and casualties, the more you have to use precise language, commander to commander. So give me a change in orders, I thought, or stay out of the way. Don't second-guess us at 600 kilometers from the fight.

  MY other focus was air. So far, we had had plenty of close air support . . . as much as we wanted, and we got as much as we wanted for the rest of the war. When CAS was able to fly during the previous two days, we had used 98 CAS sorties--38 by 2nd ACR, 44 by 1st INF, and 16 by 1st UK.

  We did have two problems with CAS, however: First, the aircraft normally flew at 10,000 feet (for good reason; twice they came below that in the 1st AD sector and they had two aircraft shot down). Because they had to fly so high, though, the low weather ceilings became a problem. Second, because of the sand stirred up in the battles, the irregular nature of what even loosely could be called front lines, and the need to prevent fratricide, when CAS attacked targets in the immediate battle, everything else we were doing had to stop. Since ground commanders, for obvious reasons, found that situation unsatisfactory, they soon pushed CAS and their own organic Army aviation well forward of their ground elements, thereby creating a lethal zone in front of our maneuver units about twenty to forty kilometers deep.

  Aside from these relatively minor issues, though, the close air support was there for us. It not only destroyed enemy targets and produced a shock effect on the enemy (who would not have been able to see them at 10,000 feet even if there had been no clouds), it also gave a lift to our troops when they saw their comrades in blue working with them as a team. Before the ground attack on the twenty-fourth, the Iraqis particularly feared the A-10; it never seemed to go away, they told us after the war. "I know you are not into it yet," an A-10 pilot told me before the ground war, "but when you are, we'll be there for you." It was the same kind of air-ground team loyalty I had seen in Vietnam. It's powerful.

  That day, we were scheduled to get 146 CAS sorties and 86 AI sorties flown in support of the corps. I decided to allocate the CAS to the three attacking U.S. units--40 percent to 1st AD, and 30 percent each to 3rd AD and 2nd ACR. Since 1st UK also needed CAS, we allocated some for them as well and made appropriate adjustments.

  Even though close air support was never a problem, coordination with CENTAF of the deep attack beyond CAS did continue to bother me. Now that we were in our attack maneuver to destroy the RGFC, I wanted to use air to help me isolate the battlefield, to build a wall of fire that would keep the RGFC from organizing a withdrawal. As we turned east, I wanted a death zone in front of the VII Corps that extended from the forward tanks in our sector all the way to the Persian Gulf, and I wanted to synchronize the sorties with our own attacks.

  But CENTAF still controlled the sorties beyond the FSCL, and as a consequence, I had very little influence on the choice of targets in my sector, and the same was true for Gary Luck and John Yeosock. Since the theater commander made the rules, I had to assume the theater commander would take care of isolating the RGFC.38

  These differences never did get resolved. The result was that I largely ignored the area that CENTAF said they would handle. Even without CAS, there were still the better part of more than 1,000 sorties a day, and CENTAF could do whatever they wanted to with them. So, after the war, when in some accounts the escape of the RGFC was laid at my feet, I had to wonder what CENTAF and the theater commander had been doing with all those sorties and with the other assets at their disposal to isolate the battlefield.

  Meanwhile, since the
most likely escape routes for Iraqi forces to get out of Kuwaiti theater of operations--north from Basra and north over the crossings of the Euphrates--were now in XVIII Corps's, Third Army's, and CENTCOM's area and out of mine, the focus of my attention had turned due east, toward the Gulf and the RGFC and the other forces forming a defense in depth.

  Of course, now that XVIII Corps had the sector to our north, I was very curious about what they would do deep up there, and how that might affect the RGFC units in our sector. I had no information about that, however. At this point in the battle, I was forward about 100 kilometers into Iraq, John Yeosock was 600 kilometers away in Riyadh, and Gary Luck was about 300 kilometers away in XVIII Corps's sector.

  So, now that the RGFC was clearly in the Third Army zone (and not solely in the VII Corps zone), how was Third Army going to use the two corps and the deep air to destroy them? And what would CENTCOM do to influence the outcome?

  My assumption was that XVIII Corps units would swing east with us that day, and that together we would attack to destroy the RGFC divisions and their subordinate units. I also assumed that the theater commander would isolate the battlefield with air. But these were only assumptions, and besides, at this point I had my hands full commanding VII Corps, without trying to do John Yeosock's or the CINC's job as well.