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

by Tom Clancy

  Unlike the Germans, the U.S. Army did not form armored corps or armored armies. They relied instead on the basic division formation for armored forces. Two or more armored divisions could be found in corps during World War II, but at no time did U.S. planners form a totally armored corps for a deep thrust as envisioned by the interwar theorists, choosing short tactical thrusts instead. Even so, U.S. forces were all to a certain extent mobile, given the availability of truck transport.

  The large-scale armor successes in World War II, together with the continuing influence of the leaders of armored maneuver formations, would cause maneuver theories and their application in equipment and formations to dominate thinking up through the 1960s and into the early 1970s. Swift battlefield victories by Israel, first in 1956 and then again in 1967, reinforced these ideas.

  Transition

  Many new maneuver war-fighting ideas and theories were advanced and tried following World War II, mostly experiments with forms of movement and organizational changes. Some methods developed in World War II continued. In Korea, for instance, maneuver played a large role, as troops came from the sea at Inchon in an amphibious assault. U.S. forces were mainly foot and truck mobile north, and tanks mainly supported infantry in up to battalion-sized formations, since the terrain did not permit major mounted maneuver.

  In 1956, the U.S. Army experimented with and then adopted what was called the "pentomic" division, a radically new organizational design to allow freedom of action and maneuver options on what was anticipated as a nuclear battlefield. This doctrine was abandoned in 1962 for a return to more evolutionary methods of combining all arms in a division, while retaining the maneuver option.

  Mounted soldiers and units played a big role in U.S. tactical victories in Vietnam. The largest ground-mounted unit in that war was the 11th ACR, Blackhorse, which was skillfully employed over a large area of operations in a wide variety of typical mounted missions to inflict heavy losses on Viet Cong and North Vietnamese units. It was not only able to reposition quickly to continually gain positional advantage over North Vietnamese units, it also had a large firepower advantage when finding and fixing enemy forces in the battles that followed.

  The most significant innovation in warfare of that generation was initiated in that war, with the introduction by the U.S. Army of army aviation as a maneuver element. First, with experiments at Fort Benning, then later in combat in Vietnam with the 1st Cavalry Division, the U.S. Army pioneered air assault and the use of the third dimension in ground maneuver warfare. The creation of some pioneer theorists and tacticians in the 1950s and early 1960s, air assault and attack aviation led to new thinking and new dimensions of maneuver warfare that the U.S. Army would practice with newer technology during Desert Storm.

  The 1967 war in the Middle East demonstrated once again the deadly linkage of tank forces with tactical air when combined in a series of mutually supporting actions.

  Yet even as all these events were playing out, and as both NATO and the Warsaw Pact fielded more powerful and capable mounted forces through the early to mid-1960s, a change was taking place that threatened the continued existence of maneuver on the battlefield.

  The change most clearly made its presence felt not in Europe, but in the 1973 war in the Mideast.

  On the Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur, 1973, Egyptian and Syrian forces made surprise attacks into Sinai and the Golan with new weapons and new combinations of forces. The introduction in a big way of the SAGGAR missile, combined with an effective air defense umbrella, allowed attacking Egyptian and Syrian forces to gain a series of initial advantages, and in the case of the Egyptians, to inflict heavy losses on some counterattacking Israeli units. For the first time, this broke the Israeli air-ground team. The Israelis fought outnumbered on defense, and after heavy losses themselves but heavier losses on the attackers, they won engagements to go on the counterattack.

  The U.S. Army took a very hard look at that war. Fighting outnumbered, and winning, was easy for that Army to identify with, considering its own situation in Central Europe.

  The first and hardest lesson of the two-week '73 war was the threat to hard-won battlefield maneuverability. Tanks no longer restored the mobility lost with the demise of horse cavalry. Though the Israelis managed to restore maneuver during the war's closing days, initially, the war pitted brute force against brute force. Forces of roughly equal mobility and firepower faced each other. On the war's first day, with three divisions forward and two to follow, close to 1,000 Syrian tanks attacked Israeli positions on the Golan. A comparable number of Egyptian tanks in the Sinai attacked in formations similarly echeloned, with divisions stacked one behind the other. This echelonment permitted successive waves of mounted forces to hurl themselves at defenders, and then to wear them down and fracture the integrity of the defense. The Arab forces battered themselves against Israeli defenders much as World War I infantry formations did — with the same high cost of people and material on both sides. In both the Golan and Sinai, these attrition tactics, using waves of attacking armor, came dangerously close to breaking Israeli forces. It was only late in the two-week war that Israeli formations were able to stop advancing threat forces and have sufficient combat power to maneuver to positions of advantage on the west bank of the Suez and toward Damascus, east of the Golan.

  Gone was Hart's expanding torrent. Instead of the light, speedy breakthrough formations envisioned in the 1920s, attacking softer targets in the enemy rear and shattering the less mobile front lines, mounted forces were now like harvesting machines in a Kansas wheat field. Formations defending front lines in 1973 had as much mobility and firepower as the mounted attacker. Although attacking formations were still capable of sweeping deep to attack vulnerable enemy capabilities there, it was apparent they must also now be principally designed and used as the forces to close with and destroy an equally powerful defending enemy force.

  Forces roughly equal in firepower and mobility had been opposing each other since the early 1940s in the deserts of North Africa and on the plains of Russia, but now this was also true on virtually every terrain suitable for large mechanized formations.

  Meanwhile, foot-mobile infantry was also still required, as World War II in the Pacific, Korea, and Vietnam clearly demonstrated. (To restore maneuver in Vietnam to foot-mobile infantry, U.S. Army thinkers, most notably Generals Howze and Kinnard, introduced the air cavalry and air assault formations mentioned earlier.) Even so, where mounted formations could be employed, they ruled the battle areas. It was, however, proving to be a perilous rule, for close combat of every kind had become increasingly lethal. The firepower invented to offset the mobility advantages seen in World War II — principally the antitank guided missile, attack helicopters, and tactical air with precision munitions — saw to that. Mobility and hence maneuver were once again threatened by increasingly lethal firepower.

  Faced with this challenge, maneuver theorists were still able to employ all arms and depth, but with the added realization that mounted formations now had to become the principal destructive agents on the battlefield. To fill this expanded role, mounted units now required considerable firepower of their own to be able to sustain themselves in increasingly high-tempo, high-lethality battles. This increase came mainly in the following areas: air defense, deep fires (the ability to strike far into the enemy rear), some redundancy of capabilities (the ability to absorb casualties and still go on), and the ability to sustain themselves with supplies such as fuel and ammunition in those high-tempo, high-lethality battles.

  U.S. ARMY AIRLAND BATTLE DOCTRINE

  In the late 1970s and early 1980s, U.S. Army theorists, notably General Donn Starry, returned depth to the battlefield, but added to it.

  From his studies of the '73 war, Starry had seen that the only way to counteract the density of both Syrian and Egyptian mounted attacks was to fight them close and deep at the same time. In order to defend against the echelonment doctrine of Soviet and Soviet-style forces (such as Syria and E
gypt), Starry considered it necessary to bring depth back to U.S. Army doctrine. Like Syria and Egypt in '73, Soviet forces used waves of attacking echelons to ultimately overwhelm a defender by attrition at the point of attack. If the defender did not attack follow-on echelons at the same time he defended against attacking echelons, he would soon be overwhelmed. By separating the echelons and stopping the momentum of the attack, while destroying valuable or irreplaceable battle assets deep in the enemy rear, the combination of close and deep attacks would first slow down and then defeat echeloned attacks.

  In Starry's view, depth meant both delivery of firepower from aerial platforms and artillery and ability of maneuver forces to occupy and control key areas by attacking vital enemy capabilities in deep ground assaults. In other words, mounted forces needed to be able to move quickly into the enemy rear (like the Israelis in their crossing of the Suez and in their armored counterattack out of the Golan toward Damascus). But in addition, they also needed to be able to target and attack deep in the enemy's rear with fires and their own attack aviation. In consequence, a mounted commander now had to see in much greater depth the battle space assigned to him to accomplish his mission.

  In this effort to rethink depth, Starry was assisted by Colonels Huba Wass de Czege and Don Holder, who, as mentioned before, not only developed more fully than ever before the concept of depth, but also expanded on the important tenet of initiative, so vital to an American army, and especially to one that anticipated fighting outnumbered.

  Starry and others to follow him at TRADOC, notably General Glen Otis and General Bill Richardson, gave these thoughts life in U.S. Army doctrine and capabilities. The name they gave these theories was AirLand Battle. Though the concepts included under the AirLand Battle rubric were first introduced by Starry in the U.S. Army's doctrine FM 100-5 in 1982, they were the product of study and analysis he and others had been doing since 1973.

  Operational Art

  One other idea resurrected from the past the U.S. Army called "operational art." In essence, successful battles and engagements had to be linked together in both time and space in the design of a campaign to achieve a larger operational objective. Achievement of that operational objective would lead to gaining the overall theater strategic objective and victory. Such theory had been routinely practiced in World War II. In other words, to achieve the theater result in Western Europe in 1944-45 of unconditional surrender, it was necessary to secure the lodgment in Normandy, conduct a breakout from there, cross the Rhine, and then finally defeat remaining German forces in their homeland from the west as Russian forces advanced from the east. Those series of major battles would together achieve the overall theater objective of German defeat.

  U.S. Army writers began writing about operational art at the U.S. Army War College at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, in the early 1980s. Brigadier General Don Morelli, then chief of doctrine at TRADOC, and General Glen Otis, TRADOC commander, included the idea in the 1982 version of FM 100-5. Building on that beginning, General Bill Richardson and Lieutenant General Carl Vuono, and later Lieutenant General Bob RisCassi, expanded on those thoughts, making "operational art" a major change to the revised FM 100-5 in 1986.

  After some debate on the level of command that could best handle this new doctrine on the tactical battlefields anticipated, the U.S. Army settled on the corps. The corps was selected because it was the Army's largest tactical formation that was self-contained; it had the necessary all-arms and support requirements to operate independently, and the redundancy to sustain longer-duration campaigns. Therefore, the U.S. Army corps would be self-contained and have two to five divisions in it for maneuver. It was to be different from World War II corps in that it would have its own logistics organization. Where it was necessary in NATO to employ multiple corps, NATO army groups would also practice the operational art. In that arena, corps would design a series of battles and engagements necessary to be won to achieve the operational objective assigned by the army group.

  During the Cold War, it was not anticipated that the U.S. Army would fight in multicorps campaigns outside NATO. Hence there were no provisions for U.S.-only headquarters capable of commanding two or more U.S. corps. These decisions to abandon the field army were made by Army leadership well before AirLand Battle doctrine, and were driven by NATO considerations, yet were essentially revalidated in the 1982 and 1986 versions of the U.S. Army's doctrine. Thus, in the fall of 1990, there were no provisions for a U.S.-only field army or army group headquarters.

  Though the Army ran into initial problems in theater because of these last issues, AirLand Battle and operational art dominated the thinking and organization of U.S. mounted forces in Desert Storm: all arms, destructive effects on the enemy, battles in depth both by fires and maneuver, and the linkage of these battles to achieve the campaign result.

  ORGANIZATION

  Role of the Corps

  The corps bridges the strategic and the tactical levels of war. Using land, sea, and air forces, strategy decides the overall campaign objective. The operational level then devises a campaign plan of a linked series of battles and engagements that, when fought and won, will together achieve the strategic objective. The tactical level fights these battles and engagements successfully to achieve the operational results that in turn achieve the strategic objective. The corps participates in the design of the campaign and directly conducts the tactical operations to gain the campaign objectives.

  The corps is the largest land formation in the U.S. Army. It is built with a mix of units that provides the commander a wide range of options. These options derive from the variety of combinations of units that he can put together to accomplish a given mission against a given enemy on a particular piece of terrain.

  A mounted corps is a team of teams. The U.S. Army calls these teams echelons of command. They begin with the smallest entity, normally an individual vehicle and its crew, then build into echelons of command such as platoons (four to six vehicles), companies (four to six platoons), battalions (four to six companies), brigades (four to six battalions), divisions (six or more brigades), and a corps (two to five divisions, with up to eight to ten non-division brigades and a cavalry regiment). At each of those echelons is an officer chain of command, with a commander and subordinates, and a noncommissioned officer network that normally places a noncommissioned officer directly subordinate to each officer. It additionally places an NCO in direct command of individual crews and sections where there is no officer. The U.S. Army uses noncommissioned officers more extensively than any other army in the world, a proven practice going all the way back to the Revolutionary War. It is why the NCO corps is often called the "backbone of the Army."

  Each division in the corps is a carefully balanced combined-arms organization consisting of combat capabilities, direct combat-support capabilities, and logistics or combat service support, and is also a team of teams. The cavalry regiment has a similar organization. Each of the other non-division units in the corps is likewise a team of teams, with its own ability to support itself for short duration. But none of these is a balanced combined-arms organization. Rather they are single-function organizations of artillery, engineer, aviation, signal, intelligence, military police, medical, etc.

  Even though all corps are different, they do have common organizational characteristics. Normally for a mounted corps, this mix of units will consist of from two to five armored and mechanized infantry divisions, usually eight to ten various non-division brigade-size units, and include armored cavalry and aviation, an artillery command of varying numbers of types of brigades, and a support command that will vary widely in terms of numbers and types of units for logistics support, depending on the theater of operation.

  Tailoring a Corps

  From this common organizational base, corps normally are tailored for a specific geographic theater of operations against a specific enemy. They are each tailored for their mission and anticipated use and they train for that specific purpose.

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p; To accomplish this tailoring, the numbers and types of complete teams — or major command echelons to be included in the corps — are determined by examination of the factors of METT-T (or Mission, Enemy, Terrain, Troops available, and Time to accomplish the mission). Commanders look at these factors and compile the right mix of combat units (armored divisions, cavalry regiment, air defense, aviation brigade, artillery, and engineer), combat-support units (military police, military intelligence, and signal), and combat-service-support units (personnel, finance, medical, transportation, maintenance, supply, etc.) to give the widest range of options or combinations to accomplish anticipated missions.

  Depending on the results of a particular METT-T analysis, the mix of units in a corps and their training will vary considerably. For example, a corps in Korea, given a mission there in that terrain, will be configured with units specially trained to conduct operations against the possible enemy there and on that terrain. It might have a mix of infantry, armor, and artillery quite different from a corps configured to fight on the deserts of the Persian Gulf region. During the Cold War, V and VII Corps in Germany were configured with units to operate in a NATO army group, in a relatively advanced civilian infrastructure of roads, railroads, and communications, on terrain that offered few restrictions to armored movement, and against the Warsaw Pact modernized armor formations. During Desert Storm, VII Corps was built sequentially as it arrived in the theater unit by unit, tailoring it for that theater and the mission there. Only approximately 42,000 of the VII Corps's 146,000 soldiers of Desert Storm had been in the NATO VII Corps. VII Corps was complete in theater only at the end of the first week in February, two weeks before the ground attack. It was only in the final move to attack positions on 14 to 16 February that Fred Franks had the one and only opportunity to train and maneuver that corps as a corps in the conduct of what would be a complex maneuver a week later to destroy the Republican Guards Forces Command.