Armored Cav: A Guided Tour of an Armored Cavalry Regiment

by Tom Clancy

  The battle of Suwon. Supported by ATACMS missile strikes, the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment conducts a spoiling attack to stop the North Korean drive to the Yellow Sea.

  JACK RYAN ENTERPRISES, LTD., BY LAURA ALPHER

  The U.S. 1st Cavalry Division (the First Team), from Fort Hood, Texas, and the 1st Mechanized Infantry Division (the Big Red One), from Fort Riley, Kansas, began disembarking in Pusan during the first week of March to provide Eighth Army with an offensive option.

  Meanwhile, the Dear Leader had contemptuously ignored so many UN resolutions that on March 13 the DPRK became the first nation ever expelled by the General Assembly.

  The cherry blossoms were already blooming on hillsides that had not been ravaged by shell fire when Eighth Army struck back. The entire U.S. 1st Marine Expeditionary Force8, quietly joined by a British Royal Marine battalion and a brigade-sized task force of French light armor, had boarded amphibious assault ships and steamed into the Yellow Sea, escorted by a battle group built around the carriers Constellation and Theodore Roosevelt, threatening the long west coast of the peninsula. In consequence, the North Koreans had to tie down a dozen infantry divisions in static coastal-defense missions. They expected a replay of Douglas MacArthur’s surprise 1950 Inchon landing somewhere along their long and vulnerable coastline. They were fooled.

  Tuesday, March 31th, 1997, 0530 Hours

  3rd ACR, heavily reinforced with artillery, engineer, and reconnaissance units, led the IX Corps assault north and west out of Chonpyongchon, with the armor-heavy U.S. 1st Cavalry Division close behind. Critically short of fuel to maneuver, the North Koreans could do little but dig in and wait to be bombarded, cut off, surrounded, and bypassed. On the first day, the cavalry squadrons advanced over twenty miles, while the air cav squadron ranged forty or fifty miles deeper to shoot up supply trucks and rear-area headquarters units. On April Fool’s Day, the old 2nd Infantry Division base at Tongduchon (Camp Casey) was recaptured in bitter fighting; and elements of twelve enemy divisions were trapped in a pocket around Uijongbu. As the enemy’s air-defense missile and ammunition supply ran out, the Marines were brought ashore by relays of helicopters, in deep “vertical envelopments.” Units began to surrender—instead of fighting to the death—by squads and platoons on the second day, by companies and battalions on the fourth. Less than a week after the start of the counteroffensive, the advance of the cavalry squadrons reached the DMZ, brushed aside weak resistance at Panmunjom, and took the town of Kaesong inside North Korea.

  Wednesday, April 15th, 1997, 1200 Hours

  The North Korean situation clearly was hopeless. It was no surprise when the noon broadcast from Pyongyang Radio announced that the Dear Leader, and the top leaders of the Workers’ Party had been taken into custody, and the provisional military government was requesting a cease-fire and immediate negotiations for reunification of Korea. It was April 15th, but the taxpaying citizen soldiers of the Eighth Army felt that this time, they had gotten their money’s worth.

  Operation Rapid Saber: Uganda, June 1999

  The 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment (2nd ACR, The Dragoons) had been reconfigured in the early 1990s as an Armored Cavalry Regiment-Light (ACR-L), an easily transportable armored unit to provide mobile armored firepower to the troops of the XVIII Airborne Corps, typically the first American soldiers to deploy when an emergency is too far from the shore for the United States Marines. The Army fought long and hard to have this unique unit equipped with the latest technology. Designating it an experimental unit helped (for Pentagon accounting purposes), though its performance in maneuvers was the best justification for the expense. The M1 Abrams tanks had been replaced one-for-one with the new M8 Armored Gun System (AGS). In addition, all of the Bradleys had been replaced with M1071 “Heavy Hummers”-HMMWVs protected by advanced composite armor. Every vehicle was “wired” into the IVIS command and control network. Some were equipped with .50-caliber machine guns, others carried Mk- 19 40mm grenade launchers and lightweight TOW launchers. About one out of every five carried a new weapons system, the Non-Line of Sight (N-LOS) missile, with eight missile rounds in a vertical launcher. Every 2nd ACR-L dismounted trooper had the new Virtual Battlefield helmet, with a built-in GPS receiver, helmet sight, and data link onto the IVIS network. They called themselves “Starship Troopers.”

  As part of the XVIII Airborne Corps stand-alert force, one of the regiment’s three armored cavalry squadrons was always kept on alert, and a wing of Transport Command (TRANSCOM) airlifters was similarly kept “hot” to transport the squadron. It was mere coincidence that when the Uganda Crisis broke, the 2nd Squadron of the 2nd ACR-L had “the duty,” along with the 512th Military Airlift Wing, a reserve outfit at Dover, Delaware, which would be the first off the flight line to Fort Polk, Louisiana.

  Uganda, June 1999

  Nobody ever expected Idi Amin to reappear on the world stage. Since he was thought to be terminally ill from venereal disease (or already long dead), his return to Uganda was as unexpected as the Israeli rescue mission to Entebbe in July of 1976. With the help of Sudanese and Libyan agents, he escaped from his maximum security (but luxurious) house arrest in Saudi Arabia. Then, with the help of Sudanese “volunteers,” he scattered a handful of demoralized border guards and swept into Kampala, the capital city of Uganda. The self-proclaimed “Field Marshal” and “President for Life” and his armed followers quickly took control of the airport, the TV and radio station, the central bank, and as many of the country’s fourteen million emaciated citizens as they could abuse and bully. Though ravaged by disease and chronic anarchy, the tragically unlucky nation in the Central African Highlands had nevertheless begun to recover in the late 1990s. There had been enough security and order to allow the return of the UN AIDS Task Force. The international team of 200 physicians and nurses had been in-country for a mere five weeks, with some promising new treatments for the lethal virus that had infected over half the Ugandan population. Amin’s first official act was to seize the medical personnel and demand, as a condition of their release, international recognition of his return to power. The murder of the mission leader, a French physician from Pasteur Institute whose resistance to Amin’s thugs had been just a little too courageous, immediately crystallized the nature of the crisis. As the bloody pictures appeared on televisions worldwide, phones were picked up, and pre-set contingency orders activated. It was the French President who uttered the words that set things in action, though his choice of words jolted the American chief executive:

  “No peace with Bonaparte.”

  For the French Republic, the killing of a French citizen was a matter of honor, and the Force Reaction Rapide (FRR) began to form up. But the French light-infantry force was indeed light, with little more than machine guns and a 30mm automatic cannon on their lightly armored scout cars and some shoulder-fired anti-tank missiles. Talking heads all over the world noted this, and pointed to aging but quite real Russian T-72 tanks, Mi-24 Hind helicopters, and MiG-29 fighters visible on the Russian real-time satellite reconnaissance photographs of Kampala and Entebbe now available to CNN and other news media. Crewed mainly by Libyan and Sudanese “volunteers,” and reinforced by loyal survivors of the old Ugandan Army (recruited mainly from Amin’s own small Kakwa tribe), the force was organized into three ragtag brigades and an air wing. Amin recruited enough Egyptian and Pakistani renegade mercenary technicians to keep the engines tuned and the radars calibrated. To prove his sincerity as a champion of militant Muslim fundamentalism, Amin began the systematic massacre of Ugandan Christians. That played well in Khartoum and Benghazi, and kept the money and ammunition flowing.

  No match for a Western division—indeed, no match for the armor-heavy 3rd ACR—Amin’s army was enough to outgun the French FRR and render a rescue of the international medical team impossible—so agreed the talking heads on news-analysis shows worldwide. None of the talking heads, however, had ever met General du Brigade Jean-Jacques Beaufre or Lieutenant Colonel Mike O’Connor, a Legionnair
e and a cavalryman, both veterans of Desert Storm. Professional soldiers hate doing things on short notice. When human life is at stake, careful planning is the minimum requirement, but the danger to civilian lives in this crisis precluded normal concern for the lives of soldiers. That was part of the job, too.

  The multi-national action group for the operation was as curious as the mission planners. Intelligence came from overhead imagery developed commercially from Russian recon satellites under contract to Agence France-Presse. The French would be first on the ground and needed the data the most. There was an agreeably flat spot fifty kilometers west of the objective. It was—had to be—close enough, because the Ugandan Army still remembered what had happened when the Israelis made their unexpected visit to Entebbe. All three runways at Entebbe, and the connecting taxiways, were solidly blocked by lines of parked trucks, tanks, and armored vehicles. To discourage helicopter assault, 23mm anti-aircraft guns and surface-to-air missiles were dug in all around the airport perimeter. Weather information came from NOAA, and looked good during the probable operations time “window.” The mild climate of Uganda presented few problems, but the clouds of mosquitoes that rose from the lakeside marshes every evening made malaria precautions essential.

  The U.S. Defense Mapping Agency has the best cartographic information in the world, and gigabytes of it started flowing over a satellite data link to Paris. All the while, secure phone lines burned between two frantic operations staffs, laboring to do the impossible in two languages at once. With more than a little screaming and profanity (thankfully not fully understood by either side), an operational concept was rapidly hammered out, just as the American forces assigned to the operation boarded their C-17 and C-5 transports for the long hop to Africa. While the world watched replays of the French physician’s death on CNN, and the talking heads worried about the expected negotiation process, Operation Rapid Saber, the first-ever airborne armored cavalry mission, got under way.

  Maps of the approach by Allied forces on Uganda. C-17s from Fort Polk, Louisiana, arrive with elements of the 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment-Light, as well as French special-forces personnel.

  JACK RYAN ENTERPRISES, LTD., BY LAURA ALPHER

  The discussion of the plan at the Elysee Palace was brief. General Beaufre’s force included an elite volunteer hostage-rescue team, detailed from the Direction General de Securite, wearing Foreign Legion paratroop uniforms and carrying fake identity papers. Though they were a critical national asset that the Minister of Defense was reluctant to risk, the president told him the honor of France was at stake. When the Minister of Defense was about to raise an elegantly worded, logical, and tactful objection, the French president slammed down his bottle of Perrier on the antique, polished, inlaid surface of the cabinet table and told him to shut up and have the men at the airfield in two hours.

  June 23, 1999, 0400 Hours9

  The hardest mission fell to the tanker aircraft, decidedly unglamorous birds, mainly flown by Air Force Reserve crews—most of them plucked from their airline jobs—so rapidly called into service that FAA rules for crew rest time on domestic airlines were quietly violated for the next several weeks. One by one, the cargo transports linked up with the aging KC-135Rs and newer KC- 10As, topping off their fuel tanks. Distance, time, and tanker assets dictated a direct great-circle course that overflew several African countries. Fortunately, most of these were former French colonies, and through a combination of quiet diplomacy and well-placed French nationals in the various air-traffic-control centers, the 300-mile-long stream of American aircraft flew the width of Africa as uneventfully as a red-eye flight from LAX to JFK.

  June 23,1999,1930 Hours

  The French paratroopers arrived first, just eighty minutes before the American aircraft. Two battalions landed just after sunset, worried that the sun was glinting off the contrails of the transports—but it was too late for that. On hitting the ground, the squads assembled and formed up into platoons that raced outward to secure a perimeter. Crisp, short, radio transmissions reported negative contact with hostile forces. A few bewildered civilians were located and held. Three telephone lines were found and cut, along with every electrical power line shown on the satellite photos. The landing zone instantly became a black hole of information. Anyone unlucky enough to wander in was quickly captured and held in a detention area for later release.

  Satisfied that the landing zone (LZ) was secure, the senior French officer got on his radio and called in the approaching transports even before his troopers deployed the lines of chemical landing lights on the hard red dirt of Central Africa. First in was the French command group. General Beaufre quickly set up his CP at a pre-arranged point, while the other transport aircraft shuttled in and out. Not even taking the time to stop their engines, they lifted off quickly to refuel at Bambari in the Central African Republic. Beaufre now had just under a thousand elite paratroopers on the ground, but armed with only light weapons and a few Renault jeeps. Their commanding general grumbled about his country’s meager airlift capacity, a mere four squadrons with some seventy aging C-160 Transalls. Well, maybe they’d listen to him next year....

  June 23, 1999, 2050 Hours

  Lieutenant Colonel Mike O‘Connor, sitting in the jump seat of the lead C-17 transport, was thinking the same thing. Watching the approach through night-vision goggles, he caught the glow of the chem lights, while a twenty-nine-year-old Air Force captain named Tish Weaver flared her aircraft in for a soft landing. The pilot’s acute senses felt the impact and pronounced it good. The ground here was firm enough for the rest of the first “stick” of transports to land safely, and probably even for the older C-5s, known derisively as Freds [F**king Ridiculous Expensive Disasters] to the drivers of the newer C-17s. First off was Lieutenant Colonel O’Connor in his command HMMWV. While his driver negotiated his way to the CP, two radio operators rigged their antennas, and a traffic-control officer formed up with his French counterparts. When O’Connor reached the CP, salutes were exchanged, and the two unit commanders sized each other up face-to-face, instead of via picture phone and radio. Together they huddled over maps during the two hours it took for the long line of jet transports to land and rig their loading ramps. They had one more hour to assemble, give final briefings, and move out. Every soldier for miles around cringed from the roar of fan-jet engines. Nobody could believe that the mission was still covert. If the MiG jets and Hind-D attack choppers at Kampala got into the air, the landing zone would become a death trap.

  June 23, 1999, 2400 Hours

  The motorized reconnaissance elements arrived. Everything was on a shoestring. In this case, a total of eight “Hummers” covered a frontage of 12 kilometers, alternately darting forward from one high point to another. Reaching one, they would stop for a few minutes to look, comparing their positions with maps and satellite photos—the former not always agreeing with the latter—and updating their tactical overlays on their IVIS terminals. Along the way, every telephone line encountered was cut—nec—essarily some were cut more than once—and villages were bypassed. The ground-recon element was halfway to the objective before the first OH- 58D scout/attack chopper appeared overhead. Such was the urgency of the mission.

  From the pilot’s seat of the lead Kiowa Warrior, CWO-4 Jennifer Grayson looked out across moonlit rolling hills dotted with scraggly cotton and cornfields, a few scrawny cattle, and the thatched rooftops of half-deserted villages. It was a far cry from the amber waves of grain that covered her native county back in Kansas. Twenty years of civil war, and the horrendous mortality rates of “slim disease” (the ironic African term for AIDS), had devastated this beautiful country. It had taken two 4th Squadron mechanics and a crew chief less than seven minutes to roll the OH-58D down the ramp of the C-17, bolt on the mast-mounted sight, unfold the rotor blades, and prepare the machine for takeoff. Grayson had offered to help—she knew every centimeter of the graceful little helicopter intimately—but the ground crew had practiced this intricate drill so well that
an extra pair of hands would only get in the way. Besides, it was their bird after all.

  Tonight’s mission was to take out the MiGs and Hind-Ds based at Kampala. When his force stormed Entebbe Airport, Colonel O’Connor didn’t want any interference from Amin’s air force. On the long flight from Fort Polk, Grayson had studied the satellite photos. They were oblique shots, at about 10-centimeter/4-inch resolution, with good lighting and careful image processing to emphasize the details of the revetments and aircraft shelters. Those Russian birds took some nice snaps, she thought.

  June 24, 1999, 0100 Hours

  The M8 Buford Armored Guns clattered down the ramps of the C-17s and rattled off into the African night, leaving only a whiff of diesel exhaust behind. When the first production units had been delivered the year before, the Army had named them to honor John Buford, the Union cavalry general who had used the repeating rifles of his few dismounted troopers to delay the advance of a Confederate corps on the first day at Gettysburg. It was an eternal lesson every cavalry trooper knew instinctively: Volume of fire carries more weight than superior numbers.