by John Keegan
33 Sqn, RAF Benson
10, 99, 101, 216 Sqns, RAF Brize Norton
24, 30, 47, 70 Sqns, RAF Lyneham
120, 201, 206 Sqns, RAF Kinloss
7, 18, 27 Sqns, RAF Odiham
RAF Regt
AUSTRALIA
NAVY
HMAS Kanimbla
HMAS Anzac
HMAS Darwin
AIR FORCE
One RAAF sqn F/A-18
Three RAAF C-130
Two P-3C Orion
ARMY
Special forces task group including SAS, and 4 Royal Australian Regt
POLAND
200 special forces
USA
Elements included
US ARMY
Special Operations Command
5th Special Forces Group
75th Ranger Regt
160th Special Ops Aviation Regt
3rd Infantry Division
1st Bn, 39th Fd Artillery Regt
11th Aviation Regt
1st Brigade
2nd, 3rd Bns, 7th Infantry Regt
3rd Bn, 69th Armor Regt
1st Bn, 41st Fd Artillery Regt
2nd Brigade
3rd Bn, 15th Infantry Regt
1st, 4th Bns, 64th Armor Regt
E Troop, 9th Cavalry Regt
1st Bn, 9th Fd Artillery Regt
3rd Brigade
1st Bn, 30th Infantry Regt
1st Bn, 15th Infantry Regt
2nd Bn, 69th Armor Regt
D Troop, 10th Cavalry Regt
1st Bn, 10th Fd Artillery Regt
Aviation Brigade
1st Bn, 3rd Aviation Regt
2nd Bn, 3rd Aviation Regt
3rd Sqn, 7th Cavalry Regt
82nd Airborne Division
2nd Brigade Combat Team
1st, 2nd, 3rd Bns, 325th Airborne Infantry
1st Bn, 82nd Aviation Regt
101st Airborne (Air Assault) Division
1st Brigade, 101st Airborne Division
1st, 2nd, 3rd Bns, 327th Infantry Regt
2nd Brigade, 101st Airborne Division
1st, 2nd, 3rd Bns, 502nd Infantry Regt
3rd Brigade, 101st Airborne Division
1st, 2nd, 3rd Bns, 187th Infantry Regt
101st Aviation Brigade
2nd Bn, 17th Cavalry Regt
1st, 2nd, 3rd, 6th Bns, 101st Aviation Regt
159th Aviation Brigade
4th, 5th, 7th, 9th Bns, 101st Aviation Regt
Divarty [Divisional Artillery]
1st, 2nd, 3rd Bns, 320th Fd Artillery Regt
173rd Airborne Brigade
1st, 2nd Bns, 508th Infantry
173rd Engineer Detachment
173rd Brigade Recon. Company
Battery D, 3rd Bn, 319th Airborne Fd Artillery
US MARINE CORPS
1 Marine Expeditionary Force
1st Marine Division
1st Marine Regt
3rd Bn, 1st Marines
1st Bn, 4th Marines
1st, 3rd Bns, Light Armored Recon.
5th Marine Regt
1st Bn, 5th Marines
2nd, 3rd Bns, 5th Marines
7th Marine Regt
1st, 3rd Bns, 7th Marines
3rd Bn, 4th Marines
1st Tank Bn
1st, 2nd, 3rd Bns, 11th Marines (artillery)
2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade
2nd Marine Division
1st, 3rd Bns, 2nd Marines
2nd Bn, 8th Marines
1st Bn, 10th Marines
2nd Amphibious Assault Bn
2nd Recon. Bn
2nd Light Armored Recon. Bn
2nd, 8th Tank Bns
15th Marine Expeditionary Unit
24th Marine Expeditionary Unit
26th Marine Expeditionary Unit
US AIR FORCE
Special Ops
16th Special Ops Wing (AC-130)
20th Special Ops Sqn (MH-53M)
193rd Special Ops Wing (EC-130E)
Ali Al Salem AB, Kuwait
386th Air Exped. Group
118th Fighter Sqn (A-10)
41st Electronic Combat Sqn (EC-130)
Al Jaber AB, Kuwait
332nd Air Exped. Group
52nd Fighter Wing
22nd, 23rd Fighter Sqns (F-16)
172nd Fighter Sqn (A-10)
332nd Exped. Air Support Ops Sqn
332nd Exped. Intelligence Flight
332nd Exped. Rescue Sqn (HH-60G)
552nd Air Control Wing (E-3 AWACS)
Masirah AB, Oman
355th Air Exped. Group
4th Special Ops Sqn (AC-130U)
8th Special Ops Sqn (MC-130E)
Thumrait AB, Oman
405th Air Exped. Wing
405th Exped. Bomb Sqn (B-1B)
28th, 34th, 37th Bomb Wings (B-1B)
55th Wing (RC-135)
Al Udeid AB, Qatar
379th Air Exped. Wing
49th Fighter Wing (F-117)
4th Ops Group (F-15)
336th Fighter Sqn (F-15)
93rd Air Control Wing (E-8 JSTARS)
Al Dhafra AB, UAE
380th Air Exped. Wing
9th, 57th Recon. Wings (U-2)
11th, 12th, 15th Recon. Sqn (RQ-1A)
Prince Sultan AB, Saudi Arabia
363rd Air Exped. Wing
14th, 22nd Fighter Sqns (F-16)
67th, 390th Fighter Sqns (F-15)
457th, 524th Fighter Sqns (F-16)
363 Exped. Airborne Air Control Sqn (E-3 AWACS)
38th Recon. Sqn (RC-135)
99th Recon. Sqn (U-2)
Diego Garcia
40th Air Exped. Wing
509th Bomb Wing
20th, 40th Bomb Sqns (B-2)
RAF Fairford, United Kingdom
457th Air Exped. Group
23rd Bomb Sqn (B-52)
509th Bomb Wing
9th Recon. Wing
US NAVY
Theodore Roosevelt Carrier Battle Group
USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN 71)
Carrier Air Wing 8
USS Anzio (CG 68)
USS Cape St George (CG 71)
USS Arleigh Burke (DDG 51)
USS Porter (DDG 78)
USS Winston Churchill (DDG 81)
USS Stump (DD 978)
USS Carr (FFG 52)
USS Arctic (AOE 8)
Harry S Truman Carrier Battle Group
USS Harry S Truman (CVN 75)
Carrier Air Wing 3
USS San Jacinto (CG 56)
USS Oscar Austin (DDG 79)
USS Mitscher (DDG 57)
USS Donald Cook (DDG 75)
USS Briscoe (DD 977)
USS Dey (DD 989)
USS Hawes (FFG 53)
USNS Kanawha (T-AO 196)
USNS Mount Baker (T-AE 34)
USS Pittsburgh (SSN 720)
USS Montpelier (SSN 765)
Kitty Hawk Carrier Battle Group
USS Kitty Hawk (CV 63)
Carrier Air Wing 5
USS Chancellorsville (CG 62)
USS Cowpens (CG 63)
USS John S. McCain (DDG 56)
USS O’Brien (DD 975)
USS Cushing (DD 985)
USS Vandergrift (FFG 48)
USS Gary (FFG 51)
USS Bremerton (SSN 698)
Abraham Lincoln Carrier Battle Group
USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN 72)
Carrier Air Wing 14
USS Mobile Bay (CG 53)
USS Shiloh (CG 67)
USS Paul Hamilton (DDG 60)
USS Fletcher (DD 992)
USS Crommlein (FFG 37)
USS Reuben James (FFG 57)
USS Camden (AOE 2)
USS Honolulu (SSN 718)
USS Cheyenne (SSN 773)
Constellation Carrier Battle Group
USS Constellation (CV 64)
Carrier Air Wing 2
USS Valley Forge (CG 50)<
br />
USS Bunker Hill (CG 52)
USS Higgins (DDG 76)
USS Thach (FFG 43)
USS Ranier (AOE 7)
USS Columbia (SSN 771)
USS Milius (DDG 69)
Nimitz Carrier Battle Group
USS Nimitz (CVN 68)
Carrier Air Wing 11
USS Princeton (CG 59)
USS Chosin (CG 65)
USS Fitzgerald (DDG 2)
USS Benfold (DDG 65)
USS Oldendorf (DD 972)
USS Rodney M. Davis (FFG 60)
USS Pasadena (SSN 752)
USS Bridge (AOE 10)
Amphibious Task Force East
USS Saipan (LHA 2)
USS Gunston Hall (LSD 44)
USS Ponce (LPD 15)
USS Bataan (LHD 5)
USS Kearsarge (LHD 3)
USS Ashland (LSD 48)
USS Portland (LSD 37)
Marine Aircraft Group 29
Amphibious Task Force West
USS Boxer (LHD 4)
USS Bonhomme Richard (LHD 6)
USS Cleveland (LPD 7)
USS Dubuque (LPD 8)
USS Anchorage (LSD 36)
USS Comstock (LSD 45)
USS Pearl Harbor (LSD 52)
Tarawa Amphibious Ready Group
USS Tarawa (LHA 1)
USS Duluth (LPD 6)
USS Rushmore (LSD 47)
Nassau Amphibious Ready Group
USS Nassau (LHA 4)
USS Austin (LPD 4)
USS Tortuga (LSD 46)
Iwo Jima Amphibious Ready Group
USS Iwo Jima (LHD 7)
USS Nashville (LPD 13)
USS Carter Hall (LSD 50)
Mine Countermeasures Div. 31
USS Ardent (MCM 12)
USS Dextrous (MCM 13)
USS Cardinal (MHC 60)
USS Raven (MHC 61)
Appendix 2
What follows is my record of a long conversation I held with General Tommy Franks, CENTCOM and campaign commander, during a visit he paid to London shortly after the war. I saw General Franks alone, apart from the presence of two of his staff officers. I subsequently sent the record to General Franks for his approval of its accuracy.
REVIEWING THE IRAQ WAR WITH GENERAL FRANKS, 1 JULY 2003 AT THE GROSVENOR HOUSE HOTEL, LONDON by JOHN KEEGAN
During the course of a long presentation, General Franks outlined for me, with remarkable frankness and great clarity, the course of the Iraq crisis and the ensuing war, from the point of view of Central Command and himself as commander. He described the campaign from the inception of the planning until the present moment. He also answered a number of questions I put, though I put few because I did not wish to break the flow of his highly fluent discourse. Moreover, General Franks organized his presentation so effectively that few questions were necessary. As I remarked afterwards to his Executive Officer, his briefing was the most impressive I have ever received from a military officer.
General Franks began by dating the inception of planning, which he put in the month of December 2001. He was then requested by the President to visit him at Crawford, Texas, to outline Central Command’s existing plan for an operation against the Saddam régime in Iraq. The plan existed simply as a planning requirement, in accordance with its policy of preparing plans for foreseeable eventualities, and was not predicated on a casus belli.
General Franks told the President that the plan, when he examined it, struck him as too ‘heavy’ in conception, making little allowance for the use of surprise or for responding to the unfolding of events. It envisaged the deployment of up to 500,000 ground troops with a full range of heavy equipment. General Franks called this plan ‘the heavy bookend’. He asked his staff to plan a ‘light bookend’, for an operation that would be mounted largely with special forces, the total numbers to be deployed amounting to about 50,000 at most.
The ‘bookends’ were planning devices. By examining likely outcomes at either end, and at points in between, by discussion, paper exercises and computer modelling, he expected to arrive at an eventual plan that would achieve the desired outcome, the defeat of the Saddam military structure; the staff procedures would also determine the necessary force size, points of entry, axes of advance, objectives and subordinate tasks, including those of airpower. As planning proceeded, the operational concept moved away both from the ‘heavy’ and ‘light’ bookends to settle somewhere between the two. The eventual choice of force was two divisions for the initial phase, the 3rd Infantry Division and the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, with the British 1st Armoured Division to be committed in the south against Basra; the 82nd Airborne and the 101st Air Assault Divisions were earmarked for intervention later.
At a later point, General Franks also touched on the role of the 4th Infantry Division which, before 19 March, had been brought to the eastern Mediterranean embarked. At the outset it was expected that permission would be given by the Turkish government for the division to land, to deploy in southern Turkey and to intervene in northern Iraq. In the event the Turkish government withheld permission. It nevertheless proved possible, General Franks explained, to make use of the 4th Infantry Division, in the following way: using covert deceptive means, information was passed to the Saddam régime suggesting that, after an interval, the Turkish army would exert its political authority to extract permission for the division to land and intervene in the coming operation. This deception was believed, with the result that two Republican Guard and several Iraqi regular army divisions were retained north of Baghdad and so took no part in the defence of the country against the coalition offensive.
General Franks also disclosed that, before the operation opened, his staff had established contact with the commanders of several of the Iraqi regular army divisions in the south. He was hopeful that the divisions could be brought over before the fighting began. In the event, Saddam installed Ba’athist teams at these divisional headquarters and frustrated the attempt at subversion – though, in practice, the divisions did not resist very strenuously. He emphasized the importance of the Ba’athist forces, and others loyal personally to Saddam, including fedayeen, throughout the campaign. It was they, he agreed, who did much of the fighting. He deprecated, however, their effectiveness. All too often, he said, once operations began, they simply set up their base in the local Ba’athist headquarters of a town and operated from there. As the locations of such headquarters were either known to Central Command or readily identifiable, it was not difficult to destroy them, thus often neutralizing the Ba’athists associated with them.
As preparations were being finalized, the ultimate phases of the plan came to be denoted, General Franks said, as ‘Five, eleven, sixteen, one-two-five.’ The formula stood for five days for the President and Prime Minister to make last-minute adjustments to the plan, eleven days of ‘final flow’, the concluding military adjustments, then sixteen days of special operations, followed by 125 days of decisive fighting. As he pointed out, the end of the 125 days had not, on 1 July, yet been reached; he was not, therefore, seriously concerned that sporadic attacks on coalition forces were continuing, as that eventuality had been foreseen.
The general then turned to the war itself, taking it front by front. There had, he said, been five fronts, the southern, the western, the northern, the Baghdad front and the intelligence front. The northern front has already been dealt with above, in his references to the deception over 4th Infantry Division. The management of the intelligence front he narrated by describing the way in which his personal command centre was arranged in his headquarters at Qatar. In front of his desk, he said, he had four screens which he viewed continuously. One displayed, at five-second intervals, the different outputs of the main television news channels, CNN, Fox, BBC; he needed to know what each was broadcasting because public coverage of the war so closely affected strategy. A second screen displayed the location of friendly ground units at the front of contact, a third the location of air units, the fourth the
current intelligence estimate, including the location of enemy units. It was possible to superimpose the images if desired and it was also possible to call up an ‘eyeball vision’ picture of critical encounters in progress. General Franks was emphatic, however, that despite the theoretical ability thus provided for him to intervene in the conduct of small-unit operations, he declined to do so, regarding such interference by high command in the responsibilities of the local commander as undesirable, indeed deplorable. He had learned in Vietnam, he recalled, as a cavalry unit leader, how little ‘Snowball Six’ (the superior commander), overflying the battlefield in a helicopter at several thousand feet, could grasp of what was transpiring in a firefight.
In describing what occurred on the southern front he addressed two main topics: the employment of special forces and the use of armour in built-up areas. He had, he said, forty-eight special forces teams available, drawn from American Special Forces and British and Australian SAS. Many were deployed into the operational area before the main ground force crossed the Iraq–Kuwait border on 19 March. They had both reconnaissance and strike roles. One of their most important operational roles was to identify ‘Scud pans’ – points from which Scud missiles could be launched – in the western Iraqi desert. The Scud needs an area of hard-standing from which to launch. The special forces teams surveyed the desert to identify ‘soft’ areas, which form the majority of the desert surface, and ‘hard’ areas, the minority, which could then be targeted by airpower. In the two nights either side of 19 March, special forces also destroyed all Iraqi watch posts on Iraq’s borders with Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Jordan, so as to assure the governments of those countries that the Saddam régime was deprived of the opportunity to launch Scud attacks into their territories.
Special forces also targeted bridges and crossing points across the Euphrates and Tigris, to forestall attempts by Saddam’s forces to demolish them before the arrival of coalition ground troops. The ability of the coalition to cross the large water obstacles (which I found so mysterious when I was commenting daily on the war in my newspaper) was thus explained: the defences of the bridges had already been overcome. Nevertheless, the general said, it was necessary to bridge, with engineering bridge columns of the National Guard, at some points, where demolitions had succeeded; the bridging columns also used ferries and pontoons as necessary.