FIGURE 1.1 General Franks’ Lines and Slices Matrix
Source: American Soldier
On December 4, 2001, a week after his initial tasking by Secretary Rumsfeld, Franks briefed Rumsfeld and General Myers via secure video teleconference on the first iteration of his commander’s concept for a war against Iraq, with the main objectives being regime takedown and elimination of any Iraqi WMD. Franks subsequently briefed this approach to the president on December 28. During the course of that briefing he indicated that he could set a start date for a planned offensive as early as April to June 2002 if a number of preparatory measures were undertaken in a timely way. Those preparatory measures (a dozen in all) included establishing the requisite interagency intelligence capability, commencing influence operations, gaining needed host-nation support, forward-deploying CENTCOM’s headquarters and needed equipment, forward-deploying the lead Army division, and creating a sustainable logistical line of communications. They also entailed preparing to use the secondary CAOC at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar in case the primary one in Saudi Arabia should not be available, positioning the lead Marine Corps force, preparing for combat search-and-rescue (CSAR) operations, surging a third carrier battle group to the region, pre-positioning other Marine Corps equipment, and pre-positioning aircraft at selected hubs around the world so that an air bridge would be in place and ready to move forces and equipment when they were needed.41
After Franks concluded his briefing to the president, Rumsfeld directed him to come up with an executable war plan within ten days. Franks put his component commanders to work toward that end, with each commander assigned a separate security classification compartment. Only his director of operations, Maj. Gen. Gene Renuart, and a few others were allowed to see the entire picture, with Renuart pulling the overall plan together for Franks.42 Rumsfeld and Franks both later characterized the close interpersonal relationship that evolved between them during this time as “an iterative process.”43
On January 7, 2002, Franks informed his inner circle at CENTCOM that his commander’s concept would be the basis for OPLAN 1003V, a major redesign of OPLAN 1003-98 in response to specific tasking from Secretary Rumsfeld.44 The strategic goals for 1003V were to bring down and drive out the regime of Saddam Hussein; to identify, isolate, and eliminate Iraq’s WMD; to capture or drive out terrorists who had found safe haven in Iraq; to collect intelligence on terrorist networks in Iraq and beyond; to secure Iraq’s oil fields and other resources; to immediately deliver humanitarian relief; and to help the Iraqi people restore and rebuild their country.
The operations order for 1003V, as summarized by CENTCOM’s deputy air component commander, stated that the campaign objectives would be to minimize the strategic exposure of the coalition by a “fast and final” application of overwhelming force that would attack simultaneously along multiple lines of operation, work inside Saddam Hussein’s decision cycle, be prepared for the achievement of “catastrophic success,” and attempt to set the necessary conditions for Iraq’s reconstruction once the Ba’athist regime was driven out.45 The Bush administration’s leadership accepted General Franks’ concept and timetable, and the revised OPLAN 1003V became the “Generated Start” plan. Its underlying premise was that all allied forces would be in place before major combat operations commenced. The plan’s new timeline allowed 30 days for preparation of allied airfields and pre-positioning of equipment (what Franks called the “enablers”), followed by 60 days to deploy the force forward, 3 to 7 days of offensive air operations before the start of ground combat, and 135 days of joint and combined operations to bring down Hussein’s regime. The final committed force would number 300,000 military personnel, a larger force than had been fielded for Desert Storm, but with its required deployment time halved from 180 to 90 days.46
For its contribution to Generated Start, CENTAF divided Hussein’s regime into three broad target categories: leadership, security forces, and the command and control network. With respect to fielded enemy forces, CENTAF wanted to persuade Iraqi ground units to surrender or cease resisting before allied ground forces contacted them directly. Failing that, Iraqi ground units would be attacked from the air until they were neutralized or destroyed. The underlying presumption here was that a focused combined-arms assault would bring about an early collapse of the regime. The principal concern entailed the extent of risk that could be tolerated in any effort to establish the required conditions for such an early regime collapse, particularly considering that the near-concurrent onset of air and ground operations would offer little time to assess the effects of the air offensive before allied ground forces were committed to combat.47
In response to tasking from General Franks, General Moseley established eleven air component objectives for the buildup of forces in the forward area and the subsequent campaign: (1) neutralizing the regime’s ability to command its forces and govern effectively; (2) suppressing Iraq’s tactical ballistic missiles and other systems for delivering WMD; (3) gaining and maintaining air and space supremacy; (4) supporting the maritime component commander to enhance maritime superiority; (5) supporting the land component commander to compel the capitulation of Republican Guard and regular Iraqi army forces; (6) helping to prevent Iraqi paramilitary forces from impeding allied ground operations; (7) supporting the needs of the SOF component commander; (8) supporting efforts to neutralize and control Iraq’s WMD infrastructure and to conduct sensitive site exploitation; (9) establishing and operating secured airfields within Iraq; (10) conducting timely staging, forward movement, and integration of follow-on and replacement force enhancements; and (11) supporting CENTCOM’s quest for regional and international backing. The main challenges that General Moseley saw standing in the way of meeting these objectives included streamlining a suitable command structure for conducting major theater war, standing up the alternate CAOC at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, seeing to the needs of theaterwide force protection, securing host-nation basing approval, and meeting expeditionary combat support requirements. General Moseley also underscored the severely limited number of available tanker aircraft for in-flight refueling support, significant fuel sustainment requirements, and multiple host-nation airspace challenges.48
General Franks and his staff also began discussing a “Running Start” option, in which covert operations would commence before the start of major combat. This discussion focused on what Franks called “strategic dislocators,” such as Iraq’s firing of Scud missiles into Israel. The prevention of that occurrence, which might provoke Israel to enter the war, was a top priority for CENTCOM because Israeli leaders had put the Bush administration on clear notice that they would not refrain from retaliating against Iraq during this impending war as they had done when Israel had endured repeated Scud attacks during Operation Desert Storm in 1991.49 One way of avoiding that undesirable turn of events would be for allied forces to seize control of all potential Scud launch boxes in western Iraq as soon as possible.50
On February 7, 2002, Franks briefed CENTCOM’s refined Generated Start plan to President Bush. This was the first time the president had been shown a plan that CENTCOM’s leaders believed could actually be implemented. The plan required 225 days for completion, in a breakdown that Franks labeled “90-45-90”: 90 days for laying the groundwork and moving forces to CENTCOM’s area of responsibility, 45 days of aerial bombardment and SOF activities to fix Iraqi forces while CENTCOM assembled its ground force, and then 90 days of joint and combined operations to bring down the Ba’athist regime. The plan envisaged an invasion force reaching 300,000 toward the end, with 2 armored and mechanized infantry corps attacking from the south and a third from the north, should the Turkish government ultimately consent to allow CENTCOM to conduct combat operations from Turkish territory.51
On February 28, 2002, in what Woodward described as taking the lines of operations and slices “from starbursts on paper to weapons keyed on buildings and people,” Franks briefed Rumsfeld on some four thousand potential targets that C
ENTCOM planners had identified from the latest overhead imagery.52 Those target candidates ranged from leadership, security, and military force concentrations to individual ground-force and air defense units and facilities. They also embraced paramilitary forces, including Hussein’s Special Security Organization (consisting of about four thousand personnel) and Special Republican Guard; command and control nodes; and more than fifty of Hussein’s palaces. Key concerns at CENTCOM included the possibility of Iraq mining waterways, firing Scud missiles into Israel, torching the country’s oil fields, and using chemical weapons (referred to colloquially as “sliming”). The possibility of such disruptive actions forced CENTCOM to compress the so-called shaping phase to an absolute minimum. (On this point, General Moseley later indicated that he had been sufficiently concerned over the possibility of a large-scale Iraqi use of chemical weapons that he arranged for a ninety-day food supply at every CENTAF bed-down location within range of a potential Iraqi air or missile attack.)53
On March 22, 2002, almost a year to the day before the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom, Franks gathered all of his component commanders for his first joint force “huddle” at Ramstein Air Base, Germany. Using an old SOF expression indicating that he was convinced that war was coming and that the time had come for CENTCOM to get serious about it, he told them: “Guys, there is a burglar in the house.”54 He added that CENTCOM’s planning activity was no longer an abstract endeavor and that each component now had to begin focus on its likely operational tasking. For the air component, this meant, first and foremost, precise determination of probable target sets and timing. Outlining his 7 lines and 9 slices and his “90-45-90” plan for a 225-day effort, Franks added: “Don’t let yourself believe that this won’t happen.”55
Franks emphasized his determination to have “joint planning for joint execution,” with “no time [allowed] for service parochialism.”56 Yet despite that injunction, and not surprisingly, in hindsight, a pronounced divergence in outlook regarding how the campaign should begin soon emerged between CENTCOM’s air component commander, General Moseley, and the Army’s land component commander at the time, Lt. Gen. Paul Mikolashek. General Moseley insisted that he needed a minimum of ten to fourteen days, preferably more than that, of air-only operations to disable Iraq’s integrated air defense system (IADS) before allied ground forces commenced their offensive. He particularly stressed the importance of beating down what his planners had taken to calling the “Super MEZ” (missile engagement zone) around Baghdad, which had remained untouched by periodic allied air attacks against various Iraqi IADS nodes inside the northern and southern no-fly zones throughout the twelve years since Desert Storm. Mikolashek, however, wanted the ground component to make the first move, not only to ensure timely seizure and securing of the endangered Rumaila oilfields but also to catch the Iraqis—who would naturally be expecting the war to begin with an air-only offensive—by surprise.57
Franks was reportedly uncomfortable with both men’s perspectives, feeling that Moseley’s prolonged air-only phase exceeded his anticipated needs, but also that Mikolashek’s alternative concept of operations would take too long to get allied ground forces to Baghdad. While he worked to come up with a better solution, he asked General Moseley to start thinking about how the air component might “adjust” (i.e., degrade) Iraq’s air defenses by responding more “vigorously” to Iraqi violations in the no-fly zones.58
In addition, General Moseley unfolded his first cut at a concept of air and space operations for a joint and combined air-land offensive. He stressed that the air armada that would figure centrally in any such offensive was not the one that took part in Desert Storm, Deliberate Force, and Allied Force. CENTCOM’s air component had sharpened its combat edge dramatically since then in four important areas: (1) its command and control and ISR capabilities, including the Global Positioning System (GPS) constellation of navigation satellites, the E-3 Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS, pronounced “a-wax”) and E-8 Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System (JSTARS, pronounced “jay-stars”) aircraft, and the RQ/MQ-1 Predator and RQ-4 Global Hawk UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles); (2) its improved precision all-weather target attack capabilities that would allow CENTAF to engage multiple aim points with a single aircraft rather than the other way around; (3) its improved efficiencies in effects-based operations through more scaled and selective target destruction; and (4) its greatly improved hard-target penetration capability.
To expand on the important third point noted above, effects-based operations tie tactical actions to desired strategic results. They are not about inputs, such as the number of bombs dropped or targets attacked, but rather about intended combat outcomes. At bottom, they ensure that military goals and operations in pursuit of them are relevant to a combatant commander’s core strategic needs. As such, they are better thought of as an organizing device rather than as a more narrow approach to targeting. A classic example of “effects-based targeting” is selectively and methodically bombing enemy ground troops or surface-to-air missile (SAM) sites to induce paralysis or to inhibit their freedom of use rather than attacking them seriatim to achieve some predetermined level of desired attrition through physical destruction.59
General Moseley further noted that CENTAF’s air assets slated for deployment to the war zone would allow attacks against roughly 1,000 Iraqi target aim points per day. In the first category he listed as anticipated targets some 300 enemy IADS facilities, 350 airfields, and 250 systems for the possible delivery of WMD. In the second category he highlighted 400 identified leadership targets, 400 national command and control targets, 400 enemy security and intelligence facilities, 100 key lines of communications, and more than 1,000 potential counterland targets.60 Two days thereafter, the JCS initiated a related planning exercise called Prominent Hammer aimed at assessing the practicality of OPLAN 1003V in such areas as transportation, its impact on U.S. forces worldwide, and its effect on the war on terror and on homeland security. Remarkably, not a hint of this planning exercise ever leaked to the press.61
Franks earlier had decreed that once the war order was given he would need forty-five days to deploy the initial force forward, air operations for another forty-five days, after which offensive ground operations would commence at day 90. He later concluded that ninety days before starting the ground push was an unacceptable length of time and began working on his lines of operations to compress the allotted time, in the process accepting a modicum of risk at the operational level in order to mitigate risk at the strategic level.62 This phase compression inescapably complicated General Moseley’s force apportionment challenge because he was facing a need to conduct five concurrent air battles: the Scud hunt in western Iraq, the establishment of theater air superiority, strategic attack against leadership and command and control targets in Baghdad and elsewhere, support to land-component and SOF operations in southern Iraq, and the same in northern Iraq.63
On March 28 General Moseley convened the first “merge” meeting of planners and operators engaged in the conduct of Operations Northern Watch and Southern Watch to discuss differences in special instructions (SPINs) for aircrews, command and control arrangements, and rules of engagement governing combat operations in each of the two no-fly zones. Because Northern Watch was being conducted under the auspices of U.S. European Command (EUCOM) rather than CENTCOM, this initial meeting provided early insights into what would sometimes prove to be a frustrating relationship between CENTCOM and its sister combatant command in trying to fight a war from several countries that were not in CENTCOM’s area of responsibility. Also during this first merge meeting, CENTAF planners developed a first cut at determining the air component’s likely munitions requirements. Although these assessed requirements would later undergo numerous changes at the margins, this early estimate gave CENTAF’s logistics planners a clear initial look at the problem. In addition, the initial anticipated airspace plan and prospective SPINs for coalition aircrews were drafted for a major air war a
gainst Iraq.64
CENTAF’s main operations planners convened their first so-called Dream Team meeting on April 17, 2002, to lay the groundwork for assembling a world-class combat plans team. General Moseley personally met with this group and discussed command and control issues and desired arrangements with respect to Marine Corps involvement in the joint air war to come, as well as best ways of incorporating ongoing Northern Watch operations, combat air patrol (CAP) locations for the defensive counterair mission, and the use of the nation’s global power-projection capabilities. CENTAF’s planners concurrently forwarded their initial master air attack plan (MAAP, pronounced “map”), drafted the previous February, to the Air Staff’s Project Checkmate and to the Air Force Studies and Analysis Agency in Washington so that those expert groups could provide feedback regarding the adequacy of the draft MAAP for anticipated opening-night campaign needs. The feedback that the two groups provided included initial consideration of possible enemy GPS jamming efforts, with Checkmate providing a detailed GPS-jamming study that greatly helped CENTAF planners working to negate any such possible threat.65
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