by Tom Clancy
Everywhere it was the same — chaos — with everyone pitching in to help each other survive, build housing, and somehow come up with all the necessary comforts that Americans normally take for granted.
In those early days, only the locals — such as the Ethiopian bus driver — seemed to know what they were doing, though their reasons often mystified the Americans. Faced with the end of a long day and a craving to go home, he’d simply dropped his passengers off in the desert where he knew they couldn’t get hurt or in trouble. When his duty day had ended — at midnight, in this case — he’d gone home to get a good night’s sleep, picked them up the next morning, and taken them to the air base as instructed. He really didn’t understand those strange Americans.
★ Most of the arriving troops came into Dhahran, a huge Saudi Air Force base on the eastern coast. Its commander, Brigadier General Turki bin Nassar, an RSAF F-15 fighter pilot, held a master’s degree in business administration from Troy State University, and was a graduate from the USAF Air University at Maxwell AFB. Prince Turki had hosted a small detachment of Chuck Horner’s people from CENTAF during ELF-1 and EARNEST WILL. Turki was also responsible for the air defense of Saudi Arabia’s vital eastern province, with its vast oil refineries, oil storage, and transshipment points. And then, in August 1990, he had a huge additional job dumped on him.
The 1st Tactical Fighter Wing, commanded by Colonel (later Major General) “Boomer” McBroom, arrived first. Even before all of the forty-eight F-15C fighters had arrived, they were moving to help out Turki’s force of RSAF F-15Cs and Tornado F-2 Air Defense Variant (ADV) fighters in patrolling the skies along the Iraqi and Kuwaiti borders.
Meanwhile, thousands of Army troops from the 82d Airborne Division’s alert brigade were also unloading at Dhahran. Turki’s men opened every facility they had in order to beddown and process the arriving troops as they streamed though the air base en route to their camps in the desert. British and French troops and aircraft also arrived, and Turki found them homes, too.
He and McBroom formed quite a team. Since Turki was the host base commander, for most practical purposes McBroom worked for him, and together they solved a thousand problems every day: where to construct munitions storage areas, how to divide up ramp space, and the like. Cross support of RSAF and USAF F-15s became a daily occurrence, including the sharing of parts. Frequently, one would see USAF and RSAF repair teams helping one another, even if it meant that the two sergeants repairing the jet were a bearded Saudi and a fresh-faced American woman.
Throughout the Kingdom, the emirates, and the other host nations of what was already becoming known as “the Coalition,” other examples of cooperation were going on — from generals and admirals, to sergeants and seamen. Day in, day out, trust, confidence, and cooperation grew as they all turned to defense of the Kingdom.
While all of this was happening, Major General Tom Olsen formed up the Air Force’s Tactical Air Control Center (TACC) in the RSAF headquarters. The TACC was a vital part of what was to happen in the next nine months; the USAF could not have functioned without it. From there each day, Brigadier General Ahmed Sudairy and Colonel Jim Crigger and their staffs published an Air Tasking Order (ATO) for the growing Coalition air force. The ATO is the key document for running air operations in a theater — the sheet music that the aerial orchestra must use in order to play together. It covers everything from fighter and transport flights, to surface-to-air engagement envelopes and artillery fire. Anything that flies through the air needs to be in the ATO if it is to be safe, both for itself and others. In those early days, the ATOs out of the TACC were designed to execute the air defense of the Kingdom and the emirates, and to place aircraft on alert to repel a potential Iraqi invasion.
LINE IN THE SAND
The defense of the Kingdom was the other main driver during the “beddown of troops” period of Desert Shield. Every day, U.S. capabilities to defend Saudi Arabia against Iraqi aggression grew, which meant that new plans for that defense needed to be formed on an almost hour-to-hour basis.
On one of their first nights in-country, Horner asked John Yeosock what he had that night to fight with if the Iraqis decided to attack into northern Saudi Arabia. Yeosock reached into his pocket, pulled out a penknife, and opened its two-inch blade. “That’s it,” he said.
He wasn’t far from wrong.
From the start, air defense was the first order of business. Fortunately, much of this defense was already in place, owing to some congressmen who had weathered criticism in order to support the sale of F-15s and E-3 AWACS to Saudi Arabia. These very aircraft now made possible the safe passage of the giant USAF transports vital to the rapid buildup of U.S. forces.
The first deploying forces were USAF F-15 fighters and E-3 AWACS aircraft, to flesh out the Saudis who had been flying combat air patrols since the beginning of the crisis. Next came the U.S. Navy aircraft carriers, USS Independence and USS Dwight D. Eisenhower, with their attendant battle groups. Then came the first USAF air-to-ground attack aircraft, F-16s from the 363d TFW at Shaw AFB in the States, and others from Europe. A-10 tank busters, known affectionately as “Warthogs,” arrived from England AFB, Louisiana, and Myrtle Beach AFB, South Carolina. All of this was designed to provide enough airpower to blunt an Iraqi thrust, and to devastate their supply lifelines. Horner told Schwarzkopf what air units he wanted in what order, though there were also units that had not been anticipated — such as the F-111s from Europe or the F-117s — since they were not apportioned to CENTAF in the war plans.
Shortly after this, U.S. Marines aboard an Amphibious Ready Group (ARG) arrived offshore, followed by the larger and more powerful 7th MEB (Marine Expeditionary Battalion) from Twenty-nine Palms in California. These units drew their equipment from a just-arrived squadron of prepositioned ships based in the Indian Ocean at Diego Garcia. With them came a Marine air wing of fighters, attack aircraft, tankers, and helicopters to support their efforts. Then 82d Airborne Division began to land in Dhahran.
All these forces deployed along the east coast, the high-speed avenue of attack, to protect the strategic assets there — the oil facilities and the desalinization plants, which supplied water to the interior as well as to the ports, towns, and airports in the eastern province. The forces were small and light, without much of the armored muscle that would be required to stop an Iraqi advance if it came.
The fundamental job during this time was to find places to put all the people and equipment as they arrived, and to do it as fast as possible.
The USAF units were bedded down by Bill Rider and the CENTAF staff, who set up shop in the RSAF headquarters, and were working the USAF beddown right from the start. At Horner’s direction, the F-15s and AWACS went side by side with their counterparts in the RSAF. The F-16s went to the UAE, because they had the range to cover Saudi Arabia, and this way they were based pretty much out of harm’s way from either ground, air, or missile attack. The A-10s went into Fahd Air Base, ten miles west of Dhahran, since they would be vital to stopping an Iraqi tank attack — though in all likelihood they would have had to fall back in the actual event of an Iraqi attack. The F-111s and U-2s went to Taif, near Mecca, and the F-117s went to Khamis Mushayt, south of Taif and about thirty miles north of the Yemen border.
Grant Sharp did most of the Navy work. Since he already had a standing command afloat in the Gulf, the initial actions were to expand that command. Air tasking for the carriers would come out of the RSAF headquarters, while surface actions would come out of Rear Admiral Bill Fogerty (until Vice Admiral Hank Mauz arrived to take over at NAVCENT).
John Yeosock was in charge of the land forces, with Lieutenant General Walt Boomer, the Marine commander, and Lieutenant General Gary Luck, the XVIIIth Airborne Corps commander, working together immediately under him.
The 82d Airborne Division was the first on the ground, but there was no way to move them around except in the limited vehicles they had brought with them and the trucks and rental cars that could be scrou
nged from civilians. Owing to their lack of mobility, not much else could be done with them except to move them out from Dhahran into the desert near the air base, though some elements moved up toward the Kuwait border in position to fight delaying actions.
Defenses were dreadfully thin.
In those days, just in case, John Yeosock and Chuck Horner always kept their staff cars filled with gas, with a case of water in the trunk, and in the glove compartment a map of the road to Jeddah — if all else failed, the last-ditch fallback.
Most of the direst predictions did not envision a retreat that far, instead projecting the loss of the east coast down to Qatar or the UAE borders. In that event, the plan was to take refuge in Bahrain by blowing the causeway to Dhahran, an island.
There would eventually be bright spots, like the arrival of the 24th Mechanized Infantry Division with its M1A1 heavy tanks and M ⅔ Bradley fighting vehicles, or the rapid movement of the French ground forces from the port of Yanbu on the Red Sea across Saudi Arabia to the eastern province. But those events were weeks ahead, at the end of August and early September. For most of August, things were really hairy.
In the event of an invasion, the plan was for the 82d Airborne to act as “speed bumps.” They’d move forward and blow the bridges through the sepkas and then fight until dislodged. Sepkas were swamplike low spots near the coast, where the salt water lay just under the desert crust, making them impassable for vehicles. The 82d would then melt into the desert, escape down the highway… or be captured or killed. They’d do this over and over.
If the Iraqis tried an attack down the Wadi al Batin, the Saudi forces in King Khalid Military City would place a large roadblock across it and try to halt the invaders. If they failed, not much lay between the Iraqis and Riyadh, except some very difficult terrain and airpower.
Such an attack remained unlikely, since the Iraqis’ best avenue of attack would have been to race down the coastal road in the east, then make a right turn at Dhahran and come east toward the capital. But again, distance worked against them: the farther they attacked, the closer they came to the U.S. air bases in Bahrain, Qatar, the UAE, and southwestern and western Saudi Arabia. Additionally, the Iraqis did not have the means to sweep the Arabian Gulf clear of the U.S. surface navy. Thus, the farther south they came, the more they exposed their flank to naval gunfire and air attack from the carriers. To cap it off, there was an aggressive disinformation campaign to inform the Iraqis of a planned U.S. amphibious landing in Kuwait City — the worst-kept secret since the story that D Day was going to take place at the Pas de Calais.
★ Of course, there were other problems, as well.
Working out corps boundaries between the USMC and the XVIIIth Airborne Corps, for instance, might seem easy enough — draw a few lines on a map; you stay on this side; you stay on that — but it wasn’t. The corps had to be placed carefully so that the enemy couldn’t take advantage of the terrain.
The basic situation was this: Khaled’s Arabs (the EAC — Eastern Area Command) were on the coast; the Army’s XVIIIth Corps was on the left; and the USMC was in between. The problem was that significant avenues of attack had to be properly covered, and could not be split between different units. For example, the north-south highway needed to be entirely in one corps area, if for no other reason than simplified traffic control, but since there were curves in the highway, the corps that owned it had considerable area to defend. To make matters more difficult, the sepkas caused chokepoints, and these chokepoints funneled the enemy back and forth from one corps area to another.
Since it was vital for Walt Boomer and Gary Luck to work out these issues together, from time to time Horner called on one or the other to make sure everything was going well. Though they didn’t always reach full agreement, they achieved reasonable cooperation.
There were also disagreements about the placement of EAC forces — two separate issues, really, though they were related.
First: Khaled insisted that if the Iraqis attacked, Arabs had to be the first casualties. Horner understood the significance of that position, and he did not disagree. That meant placing Khaled’s forces close to the border — too close, as it turned out. They were within Iraqi artillery range, which gave the Iraqis the opportunity to inflict easy casualties. In time, Khaled’s objections were overcome, and the EAC and the SANG (Saudi Arabian National Guard, a small, elite force whose normal function was to protect the two principal holy places, Mecca and Medina) pulled back from the border. (This jammed them into the USMC coming out of Jubail, but that problem was also solved.)
Second: Khaled had orders from the King not to give up Saudi land. This was all well and good, but unfortunately, in those early days, the Coalition did not have sufficient land forces to execute that strategy, and even if they had, they’d have incurred large numbers of casualties. Though Khaled was truly caught in the middle between Horner and his King, he played his cards adroitly: even as he cooperated with the mobile defense concept the Coalition was faced with implementing, he extracted promises that U.S. forces would do their best to join with their Saudi allies to contain an attack on Saudi Arabia.
KHALED
Working out corps boundaries wasn’t the only hurdle Walt Boomer and Gary Luck faced. More serious for both men was logistics — food, water, housing, latrines, and gunnery ranges. The last item became a problem when the Bedouins who had herds grazing in the parts of the desert that were to be given over for ranges declared that they didn’t want to vacate them. Prince Khaled had to fix that.
Then congestion in the port at Al Damman became a problem. John Yeosock’s port masters couldn’t find anyone in charge. They would go to one agency, only to be told that some other agency worked the problem, and when they went to that one, they were sent to another. No one was responsible, yet everyone could cause delays or raise obstacles.
After a visit from Horner and Yeosock, Khaled stepped in. He put one of his people in charge, with full responsibility, and that was that. Then, when it was clear that there were not enough trucks to carry the stuff off the piers, it was Khaled who found more trucks.
His Royal Highness, Khaled bin Sultan, got things done. Another instance came with the problem of where to put the tens of thousands of Americans pouring into the nation. They had to be housed in a place where they’d be both comfortable and safe — and where Saudi society could be protected from so many antithetical cultural and religious customs.
Khaled came up with the answer. Eskan Village, a huge housing complex on the southeast side of the city, became home to most of the U.S. forces stationed in or near Riyadh. It had been originally built as military housing, but then the base it had been designed to support was delayed, so this huge compound had been mothballed.
Horner and the CENTCOM J-4 (logistics chief), Major General Dane Starling, took a tour of Eskan Village to see if it would meet their needs. They found hundreds of villas, each with three bedrooms and three bathrooms. There were also high-rise apartments, schools, swimming pools, and recreational areas — a complete village just waiting for power and water to be hooked up. It was perfect.
Still, Khaled could not solve every problem. He could find housing for 30,000 people and open seaports, but when Chuck Horner asked him for a television and videocassette player for each villa at Eskan, he balked and grew evasive. Horner was amazed. It was such a simple request. Only a few thousand TVs and video players, so the troops could watch Armed Forces Television and play videotapes from home.
One day, over a cup of cappuccino in his office in the MODA building, Horner pressed the issue, and the reason for Khaled’s refusal came clear. His people didn’t know where to buy thousands of TVs and video playback units.
“If I can get them,” Horner asked, “will you pay for them?”
“No problem!”
So Dane Starling phoned in the order to some lucky electronics dealer in Atlanta, and in a few weeks, the troops had their TVs.
SHEPHERDING COMMANDERS
Probably the most difficult issue for Horner as “CENTCOM Forward” was the determining of command relationships. At that time, command relationships between United States forces were not always easily understood or conducted. No one doubted General Schwarzkopf ’s authority, as defined by Goldwater-Nichols, but several areas needed work.
For example, there were air component and naval component commanders in CENTCOM, but there was no separate and distinct land component commander, which raised a number of nagging questions.
On the ground, Lieutenant General John Yeosock commanded the U.S. Third Army, which was in those days composed of one corps, XVIIIth Airborne Corps, commanded by Lieutenant General Gary Luck (later Lieutenant General Fred Franks’s VIIth Corps would be added to Third Army). There was also a United States Marine Corps component, MARCENT, commanded by Lieutenant General Walt Boomer, with his 1st Marine Expeditionary Force (1st MEF). 1st MEF was initially composed of the 7th MEB, with their attached MAW and support elements, about 20,000 personnel; but eventually it grew to more than two divisions ashore, with over 90,000 Marines.
In the best of worlds, a ground component commander would have coordinated the various land forces, but for various political and practical reasons — primarily to keep the Army and Marine chauvinists in the Pentagon from going to war over the issue of which service was in charge, and to make sure that he himself was the focal point of the ground war, his area of expertise — General Schwarzkopf decided to retain the authority of land component commander for himself. The result was that when Schwarzkopf was wearing his CINC hat, he commanded the air, navy, and land components, but when he was wearing his land component hat, he was merely the equal of the air and navy commanders. So who was talking when? Things never got out of hand, but the situation was murky.