Airborne: A Guided Tour of an Airborne Task Force

by Tom Clancy

  There are, of course, numerous other USAF units that might be committed to supporting a deployment by the 82nd. Everything from “Global Power—Global Reach” strikes by B-52s, B-1Bs, or B-2As to additional air superiority aircraft could be assigned to the mission, depending upon the requirements. Whatever is required, though, count on the USAF to find a way to get the airborne task force to the target, keep them supplied, and keep them protected.

  Other Services: The Navy and Marines49

  In addition to the Air Force, the services from the Department of the Navy can frequently provide aid and support for an airborne task force once it is on the ground. One of the most useful things that the Navy and Marine Corps can do for the 82nd is to relieve them. More specifically, they can bring in follow-on forces and supplies so that the 82nd can finish its job, be packed up, and sent home once those heavier and more suitable units arrive and take over. This is particularly critical in overseas situations like those encountered in the Middle East. Sometimes the help can come in the form of one of the Navy Amphibious Ready Groups (ARGs) carrying a Marine Expeditionary Unit (Special Operations Capable) (MEU [SOC]). Another situation might have an airborne task force taking a port/airfield facility and holding it open for a Maritime Prepositioning Squadron (MPS) that can supply and equip a fly-in Army or Marine unit. Either way, the stores aboard the ships can be used by the airborne troopers to augment their own meager supplies. This is what happened when the 2nd Brigade troopers began to draw on the supplies of a Navy MPS from Diego Garcia in 1990. In addition to equipping a Marine regimental combat team complete with armor and aircraft, the MPS ships provided the airborne soldiers with everything from fuel and water to MREs.

  National Agencies: Spooks and Support

  You would have needed to be on the other side of the solar system to not know about the information revolution that has swept the planet over the last two decades. Since the creation of the first lightweight computers and satellite communications systems, the armed forces have developed an insatiable hunger for an ever-increasing flow of data about the battlefields they are on, and the world around them. In addition to civilian sources like CNN, MSNBC, SkyNET, and other worldwide news-gathering services, there are a variety of national agencies that can speed vital and timely data to an airborne task force commander.

  Along with the signals intelligence of the National Security Agency’s fleet of electronic ferret aircraft and satellites, there is a new agency designed to support the warfighter in getting a proper flow of map and imagery data on the battlefield. Called the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA), it is a conglomeration of the old Defense Mapping Agency and Central Imaging Office, with pieces from the National Reconnaissance Office, National Photographic Intelligence Center, and Defense Intelligence Agency. What this all means is that an airborne task force commander can now make just one phone call to get all of the photos and maps of a particular area that the troopers will require. NIMA specializes in rapidly generating maps and imagery of an area, and then quickly distributing the materials to the users. Sometimes, this will involve shipping several tons of maps and photos on pallets for the troops. Other times, the imagery may be transmitted via the Space Warfighting Center in Colorado Springs, Colorado, through satellite links to a brigade or division TOC. However it gets there, though, the rapid flow of this data is going to represent a vital combat edge to the airborne warfighter in the 21st century.

  Foreign Friends: Joint International Support

  It’s nice to have friends, especially when they come from other nations. In the post-Cold War world, taking military action without at least one international partner is a good way to wind up on the losing end of an international embargo. If you doubt this, just ask General Cedras or Saddam Hussein. Today, American national leaders would generally never go into a crisis area without some sort of international consensus, and preferably a United Nations resolution or two. In addition, there are a few countries that can contribute forces to an airborne task force that could be genuinely useful. The United Kingdom, France, Germany, and the Russian Republic are just some of the nations that would contribute airborne units of battalion size or larger to a U.S.-led effort. Along with airborne units, these same nations can also contribute airlift transport to the effort. For example, during Desert Shield/Storm, over a half-dozen nations supplied C-130 Hercules transports to the Coalition theater airlift pool. In the future, it is possible that you might see Russian Aeroflot 11-76 jet transports dropping supplies to an American airborne brigade in the field! Stranger things have happened in the last ten years, and one can only wonder what the next ten will show us in the way of coalition warfare. Like politics here in the U.S., international politics makes for strange bedfellows.

  Building the All-American Team

  Now that I’ve shown you all the building blocks of an airborne task force, let’s put one together, just the way the folks at the 82nd Airborne do it. The troopers of the 82nd, like most other units in the U.S. Army, fight in brigade task forces. These are units with between three thousand and forty-five hundred personnel, as well as the necessary equipment to accomplish their missions. The 82nd has the necessary units to form three such brigades, and this is how the division forms to fight. Normally, each airborne brigade task force is composed of the following component units:• A brigade HHC.

  • A parachute or airborne infantry regiment.

  • A brigade support element composed of a forward support battalion.

  • A battalion of M119 105mm howitzers.

  • A battery of eight M 198 155mm howitzers from the XVIII Airborne Corps Artillery.

  • An aviation component of two troops of OH-58D Kiowa Warriors, a company of UH-60L Blackhawks, and one or two EH- 60 Quick Fix helicopters.

  • One company each of signals, engineering, military intelligence, and air defense personnel and equipment.

  • Platoons of both military police and chemical troops.

  • Other attached fire support and special operations units.

  Each brigade is commanded by the colonel who runs the core airborne /parachute regiment. Put all these pieces together in the time-tested 82nd method, and you have a force capable of taking down and holding a variety of different targets. Some of these include:

  An organization chart of Brigade Task Force from the 82nd Airborne Division.

  JACK RYAN ENTERPRISESLTD., BY LAURA ALPHER

  • International airports and military air bases.

  • Port, rail, and other transportation facilities.

  • Oil drilling and production facilities.

  • Bridges, viaducts, and road routes.

  • Ballistic-missile, chemical, biological, or other weapons facilities.

  • Refugee camps and other areas requiring peacekeeping and/or protection forces.

  These are just a few of the things that airborne forces can take and hold until they are relieved by more conventional forces. More likely, though, is something that has not even been imagined yet. This is because the inherent flexibility of airborne forces to rapidly get into an area and take control is very high. This point alone gives the airborne a lot of deterrence value against the bad guys around the world.

  The 82nd Way of War: Operation Royal Dragon

  By now you are probably wondering just how all of this comes together for the troopers of a brigade task force. Well, to get some idea of just how it does come together, I took the time to observe the largest peacetime airborne exercise since the end of the Second World War, Operation Royal Dragon. Royal Dragon was part of a much larger exercise being run by the U.S. Atlantic Command (USACOM), the primary packager of U.S. military forces for overseas operations. Code-named Combined Joint Task Force Exercise ʼ96 (CJTFEX 96), it was run between April 25th and May 20th, 1996, along the mid-Atlantic seaboard. Over 53,000 personnel were involved, including the carrier battle group of the USS Enterprise (CVN-65), the USS Saipan (LHA-2) ARG, and the 24th MEU (SOC). These forces were combined i
nto Task Force 950, and were practicing amphibious forced-entry procedures prior to deploying to the Mediterranean Sea that summer. CJTFEX 96 is part of the same series of exercises that we followed in 1995 when the 26th MEU (SOC) was getting ready for their Med cruise, and represents the final exam for a number of different units around USACOM.

  For the 82nd Airborne, CJTFEX 96 represented the opportunity to run a division-sized drop with roughly the same numbers of troopers that had been planned for the Haitian drop back in 1994. Prior to the Haitian mission, there had been a series of test exercises, known as “Big Drops,” to see if such a mission was even possible with the downsized airlift forces of the time. Now the 82nd would run a simultaneous three-brigade drop for real, albeit in an extremely large exercise. The exercise area for Royal Dragon would be the Fort Bragg training complex west of the main base, and it would be a busy place. All told, over six thousand paratroops would jump from 133 transport aircraft in a series of eight night drops over three separate drop zones. From there, the paratroops would move south for three days of force-on-force ground maneuvers against a series of opposing force (OPFOR) units drawn from the 10th Mountain Division and other units.

  Along with the large size of the drops, another interesting feature of Royal Dragon was the inclusion of various international forces. A number of naval vessels from around NATO would join Task Force 950, or act as naval OPFORs. The big foreign unit, though, would be the entire British 5th Parachute Brigade, which would face an OPFOR composed of a battalion of world-famous Gurkhas. More than one of us in the pre-exercise briefing chuckled and wondered just how fair that matchup would be! D-Day for the naval part of the operation would be May 10th, but the big day for the paratroops would be Wednesday, May 15th, 1996.

  Since it would be impossible to watch all the action of Royal Dragon, I was teamed with the HHC element of the 1st Brigade of the 82nd, which would have the battle in the middle of the Fort Bragg exercise. 1 st Brigade is based around the 504th PIR, which was Ruben Tucker’s outfit during World War II. In Italy, they became known by their German opponents as “the Devils in Baggy Pants.” Today, they go by the name of the Devil Brigade. In 1996, 1st Brigade was commanded by Colonel Dave Petraeus, U.S.A. Known as “Devil-6” by his friends and on the communications nets, he actually is Dr. David Petraeus, Ph.D. This is because he also carries a doctorate in international relations (from Princeton) in addition to his other intellectual and military achievements. During the summer of 1996, he was ably assisted in this job by Command Sergeant Major Vincent Myers, who was responsible for looking after the welfare and professional development of the enlisted and non-commissioned troopers for Colonel Petraeus.

  Facing 1st Brigade during Royal Dragon would be a brigade of the 10th Mountain Division from Fort Drum, New York. The 1st Brigade’s mission would be to land on a training DZ known as Normandy (each Fort Bragg DZ carries the name of a famous airborne battle), establish an airhead to sustain further operations, and then attack south to take a series of road junctions and other objectives. They would have only three days to complete the mission, and every move would be watched and scored by judges from XVIII Airborne Corps and USACOM. Along with 1st Brigade would be the British 5th Paras landing to their west in the big Holland DZ, and another 82nd brigade to their east in the Sicily DZ. All told, it would be the biggest single drop event since D-Day, and quite a show.

  Wednesday, May 15th, 1996

  I had driven down with my researcher John Gresham to get set for the start of Royal Dragon, but things were already starting to take a nasty turn. The weather was going bad in a hurry, as a result of a cold spring storm that had rolled in from the Atlantic. Nevertheless, the start of Royal Dragon was going ahead despite the heavy rain and fog that had developed. As long as the cloud base stayed above 1,000 feet/305 meters above ground level, the drops would go forward. With this in mind, John and I checked the rain gear in our field packs as we prepared to link up with the HHC of 1st Brigade.

  We got our first look at Colonel Petreaus and his men out at the Pope AFB “Green Ramp” that evening. As they prepared to load up onto twenty-eight C-130s (with twenty more for their equipment and vehicles), we headed out to Holland DZ to watch the first of the British drops at 9:00 PM/2100 hours that evening. By that time, the rain had subsided, though the cloud base was only at around 2,000 feet/610 meters above the ground. Along the edge of the DZ were a number of our old press friends, here to cover this largest of exercises. Already, though, CJTFEX 96 had been troubled with problems. The previous Friday, while practicing a night helicopter insertion, an AH-1W Cobra attack helicopter and a CH-46E transport chopper had collided over Camp LeJeune. Over a dozen Marines had died, and the USACOM exercise controllers were taking extra care not to repeat the accident. With 133 transport delivering their troops and cargo in a period of just five hours, the skies over Fort Bragg were going to be busy and full this night.

  Precisely at 9:00 PM/2100 hours, the curtain on Royal Dragon went up as flights of USAF C-141Bs swept over Holland DZ, dropping the heavy equipment of the British 5th Para Brigade. Since the entire exercise area was blacked out to simulate real-world combat conditions, Major Mark Wiggins, the 82nd’s Public Affairs Officer (PAO), had lent us sets of PVS-7B night-vision goggles (NVGs) to be able to watch the drop. Through the eerie green readouts of the NVGs, each of the big loads silently sank to the ground under a cluster of cargo parachutes. Then, about ten minutes after the heavy drop, several more waves of C-141s arrived over the battlefield, dumping almost two thousand British Paras onto the Holland DZ. The drop went well with only one serious injury, a spinal and cranial injury to one man whose chute had streamed during the jump, landing him on his head! Amazingly, he survived.

  Thursday, May 16th, 1996

  In less than an hour, the drops in the Holland and Sicily DZs were completed, and the friendly (“Blue”) forces had linked up and were fighting out of their DZ towards the first objectives. For us, there would now be a three-hour wait for 1st Brigade to make their jump into the Normandy DZ. Unfortunately, the weather began to take a hand. The cloud base kept dropping closer to the exercise minimums, and a heavy fog had settled over the DZ. Visibility was now under 1,000 yards/915 meters, and it was getting hard to see much. Finally, at 1:00 AM/0100 hours, the flights of C-130s began their equipment drops, followed fifteen minutes later by the transports carrying the 1st Brigade troopers. A number of the C-130 had to go around several times to make their drops, and most of the troopers were landing over 1,000 yards/915 meters away from us, down at the South end of the DZ. John and I were to have joined up with Colonel Petraeus at this time, but heavy fog prevented our meeting. After waiting for a while with General Keane, who was also observing the drop, we headed back to the Fort Bragg PA office to await an opportunity to join up with 1st Brigade.

  While we slept on surprisingly comfortable cots in the PA office that night, the rain came down and turned the exercise area into a quagmire of red clay mud. However, it did not stop Petraeus and his men from getting down to the business of taking their first objectives. Having landed near his planned impact point at the bottom (southern end) of Normandy DZ, he assembled what troopers he could, and moved into the tree line to establish the 1st Brigade TOC. Despite only 60 percent of 1st Brigade’s troopers having jumped before the exercise controllers had closed down the DZ, LGOPs were formed and all of the primary objectives were taken before dawn. By the time the rain stopped and the troopers that had been unable to jump had been delivered to the DZ, it was noon. It was also time for us to finally join up with 1st Brigade, now that Major Wiggins had been able to get a set of GPS coordinates for the TOC.

  Driving south through the Normandy DZ, we watched C-130s dropping loads of food, water, fuel, and other vital supplies for the brigade. Almost as soon as the pallets hit the ground, troopers from the forward support battalion were crawling over them, and loading the pallets onto PLS trucks and other vehicles for delivery to cache sites and distribution points. Less t
han twelve hours after the drop in the fog, the brigade was fully on-line and taking the battle to the brigade from the 10th Mountain Division (the “Red” or OPFOR force). As we found the Brigade TOC in a grove of trees, Colonel Petraeus and Sergeant Major Myers greeted us and offered us a lunch of MREs and coffee. Handing us off to Sergeant Major Myers, Colonel Petraeus headed off to take advantage of an intelligence windfall that had arrived while we were eating. Petraeus is a big believer in patrolling and winning the counterintelligence battle against an opponent, and his efforts had just paid off. One of his patrols had overrun the command post of an OPFOR unit, capturing the entire command element with all of its valuable planning documents. So now Petraeus had the plans for the next twenty-four hours of operations by the Red force, and he was moving to take advantage of the opportunity. While he went to work, the sergeant major took us on a tour of the DZ perimeter, which was growing by leaps and bounds.

  The sergeant major took his personal security seriously, because enemy patrols had already made probing attacks against the TOC the previous night. So while we rode in his Hummer, several others mounting machine guns and TOW launchers convoyed with us so that we would not look like something that needed killing by the troopers of the 10th Mountain. All around the Normandy DZ, OH-58Ds were buzzing just over the trees searching for targets, and transport helicopters were moving units and supplies where they were going to be needed. Clearly, an attack was planned for sometime soon, and we were going to see how 1st Brigade did business. As the sun was setting, we arrived back at the TOC. Another meal of MREs was given to us, and the plan for the evening was explained.