Into the Storm: On the Ground in Iraq sic-1 Read online

  Early on, Franks directed commanders to raise their tolerance for imperfection, to work on those things they could do something about, and when time was created by transportation delays, to use it for training. He did not want the command frustrated over things over which they had little control: "Keep your heads on the war fighting and preparing for war," he emphasized again and again. "Keep focused on the objective and do not take your eye off the ball." It wasn't easy, but the commanders and troops did it.

  The whole Department of the Army operation in Washington was a masterpiece of organization by Army Chief General Carl Vuono, who held daily meetings to anticipate requirements. His vice chief, General Gordon Sullivan, quarterbacked the effort, and was constantly on the phone to Franks, Luck, Yeosock, and Pagonis, seeking ways to help. FORSCOM commander, General Ed Burba, not only deployed active component units, but put together combinations of active and Reserve component units to fit theater needs. It was exactly the kind of situation — the provisioning of a warfighting theater — that the Goldwater-Nichols National Security Act of 1986 had anticipated. Franks and VII Corps became provisioned as a contingency corps almost overnight.

  Not everything arrived on time. One minor frustration for both Sullivan and Franks, and a potential issue with the troops, was the fact that no one in the corps had yet received the desert battle dress uniforms, the sand-colored BDUs (called DCUs). XVIII Corps had them, as did the support troops in the port area, and troops in Riyadh. But not VII Corps. Rumors flew about the elusive uniforms: "They're at the port." "They're shipped." "One pallet arrived by air from Dover in Frankfurt. Meet the plane in Dammam." No DCUs. First it was frustrating. Then it was a joke. "To hell with the desert uniforms," one of the soldiers in 3rd Armored Division said finally. "Tell them we don't want them. We're the troops from Germany. We were trained to beat the best the Russians had. When the Iraqis see us, they'll know that and it will scare the crap out of them." Everyone in VII Corps felt the same way. They didn't get the sand-colored DCUs until almost April; and some of the troops only got issued a set on their way home after the war. Chemical overgarment protective suits covered them up anyway.

  TRAINING

  Everything in Saudi Arabia had to be started from nothing. That included training. There were no training facilities for VII Corps to use, and they had to train. Though the experience of XVIII Corps provided valuable lessons, they still had three months' lead. The enemy, as always, was time and the myriad concurrent activities that distracted commanders and soldiers from preparing for war. Nonetheless, leaders dived into training as an immediate priority.

  Fred Franks had started out with a four-week plan for his units before he sent them into the attack: They would have a week to get individual units assembled, to find everything, and to get to Tactical Assembly Areas, and three weeks for training. He wanted a full three weeks of training in order to adapt European skills to the desert, and to get desert-smart and desert-tough. He also wanted time for mission rehearsals. This plan was not based on any scientific analysis, but on his best professional experience and judgment.

  Though he did not think these plans were unrealistic, he realized he was not a free agent and might have to make some adjustments. Adjustments were OK, but not compromises that would cause his troops to be unprepared.

  In the event, his three-week training goal proved hard to meet — he had to reduce the three weeks to two — and time kept pressing him harder and harder.

  On 23 December, ten days after he arrived in-country, he made this comment in his journal: "How can we get ahead of time? Friction to overcome is enormous… Maybe I need to change my style. Help yourself and do not worry… Need some major muscle movement to make things happen. Not sure at this point we can make it and have three weeks' training. Settling in taking longer than I'd like. Thought seven days was OK, then three weeks to train. Unit integrity not good. Must get that fixed. We'll make another assessment end of this week."

  During a meeting in Riyadh on 27 December, called by General Schwarzkopf and attended by Franks, Gus Pagonis, Gary Luck, and John Yeosock, the CINC announced that he thought they'd be at war in three weeks. After the meeting, Franks wrote in his journal, "What I must do is drive this corps to a new level of effort to get ready to go to war. We are not moving fast enough."

  And on 2 January 1991, he wrote, "Time getting short. How to best prepare the corps… Think we'll be OK if only I can give the troops two weeks." He'd had to adjust his earlier plan by then. "Must shoot. Must get some batting practice. Night moves. CSS on the move" — combat service support, or logistics—"Meet, plan, visit, assess, and make adjustments. Also have to get troops work at night."

  The 1st Infantry Division Forward command team's running the growing port operations made a major contribution to the training effort. Since many soldiers were forced to remain in port for two to three weeks without their equipment, Franks asked Brigadier General Mullen to establish a training service for commanders and units in port. Mullen set up facilities where unit commanders could do individual preparation. Though these facilities were elementary, leaders immediately began exercises in firing individual weapons, chemical protection, driving in Saudi Arabia, and desert navigation.

  Meanwhile, corps units needed gunnery ranges in the desert where they could refine weapons skills without endangering other units and whatever local populace might be in the area or passing through. An element in VII Corps headquarters was formed to assist unit commanders in acquiring the real estate, and unit commanders took it from there, building stationary targets from scrap lumber or whatever else they could get their hands on.

  Franks gave directions to allow soldiers to fire service ammunition (actual wartime ammunition, something they had never done in Germany). He wanted soldiers — ground and air — to see the full capability of this ammunition, so that they would be familiar with it when the war started. This was both a risk and a trade-off, for wartime ammunition (especially Hellfire missiles) was in short supply. He took the risk.

  In order to practice for the breaching operation, corps engineers (the 588th ENG Battalion from Fort Polk, Louisiana) built an exact replica of the Iraqi defensive system, complete with berms and antitank ditches. It was five kilometers long and even faced the same direction as the actual Iraqi system so as to replicate actual light data. It took two weeks to build at the rate of twenty-five meters an hour. Afterward, the 1st Infantry Division conducted full-up training rehearsals on this system, and the combat elements of the 1st UK Armored Division, with all of their nearly 4,500 vehicles, twice practiced their planned night passage of lines through the Big Red One.

  The 1st UK was placed under tactical control of VII Corps in mid-December. The day before Christmas, Lieutenant General Sir Peter de Billiere came to see Franks at his trailer HQ in a parking lot in the port of Dammam. De Billiere was the senior British military officer in-country, and they had never met before, and it was crucial to talk about the conditions of employment of the British forces.

  It was not the first time Franks would have foreign troops under his command. In Germany in NATO, he had commanded both Canadian and German forces, and he had also played in an exercise under the tactical control of the German II Corps, so he knew what it looked like from the other direction. Franks knew that building mutual trust was vital, and also that the mission assignment needed to be within that unit's capabilities and that he needed to be sensitive to different doctrinal processes for planning and for communicating orders. Logistics is always a challenge, because the official policy is that logistics is a national responsibility, meaning that every country is responsible for supplying its own troops — a totally unworkable policy from a tactical standpoint and one that needs changing. Finally, he was never satisfied that the staffs could work closely enough unless they were totally integrated. Armed with all those thoughts, he met de Billiere.

  From his point of view, they hit it off right from the start. De Billiere was a no-nonsense soldier ungiven to
posturing or reminders of the importance of his position. He wanted the best for his British troops and he wanted them to make a meaningful contribution to the success of the mission. It was purely a commander-to-commander meeting, also attended by Major General Rupert Smith, newly appointed to command the British division: just the three of them.

  Their most important conclusions:

  • The British would be employed as a division (in other words, Franks would not break up the division and place the parts under other American control);

  • future U.S.-UK relationships depended on the success of their venture together;

  • de Billiere agreed to make the switch as soon as Franks wanted (Franks said right away, because he wanted them to move out on planning);

  • de Billiere was concerned about the impracticality of the policy that "logistics is a national responsibility"; Franks told him not to worry because it was his intent not to let that get in the way, including in the treatment of each other's casualties;

  • de Billiere did not want to unplug from their national intel too soon, to which Franks was quick to agree, since he thought their products had to be better than what he was getting from his own national system (as it turned out, it was a valuable connection, even though U.S. intel got much better toward mid-January);

  • they agreed to integrate their staffs rather than following the usual liaison cell practice (a new step at the tactical level, even though it was routinely done at strategic levels of command);

  • Franks agreed to be sensitive to the British need for training and for forming the division, since it was happening on the fly, just as with VII Corps;

  • they agreed on tight OPSEC, since they did not want anyone to know that the British were moving from the coast inland and joining VII Corps (to this day there are few official pictures or films of the U.S. VII Corps and the UK training and fighting together, due to rigid OPSEC discipline).

  Their meeting lasted about forty-five minutes to an hour. They shook hands as soldier to soldier, in a mutual understanding that what they had agreed to verbally was the way it would be. No contracts, no treaties, no paper exchanged, just two soldiers trusting each other. Franks was proud of the corps's service with the British and of their mutual respect and trust. It all started that day.

  After de Billiere left, Franks had a session with Rupert Smith and selected members of his staff, in order to get to know their capabilities and to give Smith some initial planning guidance.

  Rupert Smith was bright, intense, focused, and very much at ease with himself, and Franks could see they would get along well. Although he had come from a Special Forces, light-infantry background, he was not intimidated in the least with commanding an armored division, and was also quite willing to listen and to give his subordinate commanders wide latitude in their methods for mission accomplishment. He wanted to get to work immediately. He took notes, asked questions, clarified guidance when Franks was not clear, and was candid in expressing his views but seemed quite willing and comfortable to take orders from an American. Franks was glad to have them on the team.

  On 19 January, Franks visited them. At their assembly area along the east coast, the British had staked out a live-fire maneuver area where the downrange impact area for direct-fire systems was out over the water. There they could maneuver a brigade and conduct live fire with their tanks, artillery, aviation, as well as practice minefield clearing and berm breaching. During his visit, in the course of an attack exercise by 7 Brigade, commanded by then-Brigadier Patrick Cordingly, Franks rode a Challenger tank and fired a few rounds. They were training hard and aggressively. Franks liked what he saw and told Major General Rupert Smith so.

  Smith had his hands full. The British were forming a division by assembling the most modern forces from all over their army. Only their 7 Brigade was a set unit. Smith was putting the others together as they flowed into theater. He had the same team-building and training challenge as Franks himself, and Franks understood. With that in mind, he determined to leave Smith and his division at this training area and close to their logistics base as long as possible. They could accomplish twice as much in the same period of time as they could when they picked up and moved to the west to join VII Corps's Tactical Assembly Area.

  Meanwhile, units were crafting a variety of innovative training techniques. For example, they constantly practiced refuel on the move. They set up fuel trucks and long hoses, quick-disconnect nozzles, and the fastest pumps they could get and made an arrangement something quite like a service station crossed with an auto-racing pit stop. The tanks and other vehicles drove to the hose ends laid out on the desert floor at a spacing that could accommodate whatever size unit they wanted to refuel (within reason — usually determined by the terrain and the availability of refueling material). The drill was to anticipate when they needed fuel, preposition the fuel trucks at a spot, direct the tankers to it, get them there and through it as fast as possible, then get the unit back into its tactical organization… all the while maintaining some semblance of organizational integrity. It took lots of practice to get it right.

  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 h
eadquarters 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.