My American Journey

by Colin L. Powell

  “Tell Prince Bandar what we are prepared to do,” Cheney said to me.

  “We’ll start by bringing in the 1st Tactical Fighter Wing,” I began, “and the 82d Airborne, and a carrier.” I kept adding follow-up units.

  Bandar’s interest quickened, and he interrupted me. “What’s that add up to?” he asked.

  “All told,” I said, “about one hundred thousand troops, for starters.”

  “I see,” Bandar said. “You are serious.”

  “We suggest you urge King Fahd to accept our offer to protect the kingdom,” Cheney concluded. Bandar left, assuring us that he was on his way to report what we had advised.

  After he was gone, Cheney brought up our earlier meeting with the President. “Colin,” he said, “you’re Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. You’re not Secretary of State. You’re not the National Security Advisor anymore. And you’re not Secretary of Defense. So stick to military matters.” He made clear that I had taken liberty for license. I was not sorry, however, that I had spoken out at the White House. What I had said about giving the military clear objectives had to be said.

  Publicly, the President kept his counsel on the Iraqi invasion. All that he had told the American people so far was, “We’re not discussing intervention…. I’m not contemplating such action.” That was where matters stood, from Friday until Sunday afternoon.

  In the meantime, the President went to Camp David in Maryland’s Catoctin Mountains. On Saturday morning, the national security team followed. The centerpiece was to be a Schwarzkopf briefing in depth on what we could do to defend Saudi Arabia—troops required, deployment, armament, the air strategy. I watched the President nodding as this big, bluff, articulate, reassuring soldier spoke. When Norm finished with Saudi Arabia, he added a postscript: “Now, if you want to eject the Iraqis and restore Kuwait it is going to take …” He then reeled off additional troop requirements running to the hundreds of thousands and a timetable taking eight months to a year.

  It was a muggy, drizzly Sunday afternoon. Cheney and Schwarzkopf were on their way to Jidda in Saudi Arabia to urge King Fahd to accept our offer of help. I was at home in my little study, feet on the desk, watching CNN as the President’s helicopter landed on the White House lawn on his return from Camp David. A clutch of microphones had been set up, and the President approached them, walking into a fusillade of questions. The reporters kept pressing him on one point. Was he going to take military action? His face hardened. He began jabbing the air with his finger. “This will not stand, this will not stand,” he said, “this aggression against Kuwait.”

  I sat upright. From “We’re not discussing intervention” to “This will not stand” marked a giant step. Had the President just committed the United States to liberating Kuwait? Did he mean to do it by diplomatic and economic pressure or by force? Had a tail-end option suddenly become the front-end option?

  Though we can never know what goes on in another person’s mind, I had an idea of what had happened. After we had briefed him at Camp David, the President understood the resources at his disposal. He felt confident. His meeting earlier at Aspen, with the British prime minister, no doubt influenced him too. Eight years before, Margaret Thatcher had reversed an Argentine seizure of the Falkland Islands. It also struck me that “This will not stand” had a Thatcheresque ring. The thought process, however, was pure George Bush. He had listened quietly to his advisors. He had consulted by phone with world leaders. And then, taking his own counsel, he had come to this momentous decision and revealed it at the first opportunity.

  I turned off the television set and went to a map on my desk. I might have just received a new mission.

  At 3:30 P.M. on Monday, August 6, Dick Cheney called me from Jidda. He had just left King Fahd, he said. “We’ve got his approval. I’ve informed the President. Start issuing orders to move the force.”

  Unleashing the American military leviathan is an awesome enterprise. We had already alerted the 82d Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, Third Army headquarters in Atlanta, and the ist Tactical Fighter Wing at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia. But not one paratrooper was going anywhere until he could be airlifted by MAC, the Military Airlift Command, the armed forces’ Federal Express. MAC is the air component of a sprawling land, sea, and air system called TRANSCOM, the U.S. Transportation Command, headquartered at Scott Air Force Base in Illinois and led by General H. T. Johnson, another classmate of mine at the National War College. He relayed Cheney’s order to the 21st Air Force at McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey and the 22d Air Force at Travis Air Force Base in California, our East and West Coast MAC nerve centers.

  At any given moment, about 80 percent of MAC’s planes are en route somewhere. When a high-priority order is flashed throughout the system, all other orders are canceled. A transport plane flying spare parts, say, to Ramstein, Germany, is now to land at the nearest terminal, unload, and head home. This activity is repeated all over the world. At Scott Air Force Base, a huge display board hitched to a computer system plots every single MAC aircraft. Scott knows what cargo is aboard, the fuel remaining, the plane’s maintenance schedule, who is in the crew, and the amount of flight time left before each crew member has to be rested and replaced. Cheney’s order was going to divert hundreds of planes from what they were doing and eventually head them toward a new destination, Saudi Arabia. The MAC fleet would zoom from 80 percent usage to 100 percent, putting aloft everything that could fly. Over sixteen thousand paratroopers of the 82d Airborne Division would start to board C-141S. Enough ammunition, spare parts, and maintenance equipment to support an entire wing of about seventy-two fighters would begin rolling aboard mammoth C-5 Galaxies. Flying tankers would take to the air to refuel F-15S headed toward the Persian Gulf. MAC would hire dozens of commercial air charters to round out the airlift. A winged armada was about to fill the skies over the Atlantic.

  And security for this top-secret operation was blown completely.

  The evening I relayed the order, a disbelieving Tom Kelly popped into my office. “They did it again!” Tom said. When so massive an airlift is launched, hundreds of classified messages fan out from the 21st and 22d Air Forces, alerting bases, supply depots, and terminals all over the globe. These orders at the lower level had gone out uncoded. This breach of security occurred at a time when the President was already furious over leaked covert operations. I blew up and started shouting, “Cancel the damn message! Cancel it!”

  “Cancel it?” Kelly asked. “Do you want the flow to start or not?”

  I gave up. I would have to ask Bill Smullen, my press officer, to check the newscasts and newspapers and pray that no reporter was at a key air base. But a sharp correspondent at the Pentagon, CBS’s Dave Martin, broke the story. It was embarrassing. I nevertheless suppressed my irritation. It is next to impossible to keep so mammoth a move a secret for long. The Republic, I told myself, had survived worse.

  The order to MAC went out August 6 at 8:45 P.M. By 9:45 the next morning the first loaded C-141 took off from Charleston Air Force Base in South Carolina.

  We knew from CIA estimates that the Iraqis had at least a thousand tons of chemical agents. We knew that Saddam had used both mustard and nerve gases in his war against Iran. We knew that he had used gas on Iraq’s rebellious Kurdish minority in 1988, killing or injuring four thousand Kurds. We briefly considered and then rejected sending over U.S. chemical weapons. The Iraqi chemical threat was manageable. Our troops had protective suits and detection and alarm systems. In battle, we would be fast-moving and in the open desert, not trapped as civilians might be. A chemical attack would be a public relations crisis, but not a battlefield disaster. What to do about Iraq’s biological capability, however, remained a more troubling question.

  “Look, I’m not going to be briefing generals. I’ll be talking to political leaders. So keep it simple. I don’t want a fistful of charts. I want one chart.” With those directions, given late in the evening of August 14, I sent my graphic
s staff, under Colonel Tim Lawrie, chief of the Joint Operations Division, back to the drawing board. The next day, President Bush was coming to the Pentagon for a briefing by the chiefs and to give a speech. I wanted to seize the opportunity to lay out a troop buildup schedule for the weeks ahead and let him know what decisions we would be needing from him at various trigger points.

  The day before, I had gone to Tampa to see Norm Schwarzkopf. Norm had been antsy. “I need to know where the hell this operation is heading,” he said. I understood his uneasiness. As chairman, I could live with a certain degree of fuzzy policy. But the CINC, the commander in chief who was going to Saudi Arabia to direct troops, ships, and planes, wanted clear-cut instructions. The answers would eventually emerge, but I needed to set the stage for the President to provide them.

  The graphics technicians brought in a chart, simplicity itself, a line graph, the vertical axis showing increasing troop strength, the horizontal axis projecting the weeks through December. My objective was to plant a timeline in the President’s mind. This chart would let him know when he would have to give us the word to reach certain troop levels.

  I had only a fifteen-minute window of opportunity between the end of the chiefs’ briefing and the speech the President was to give from the steps of the Pentagon. Cheney arranged a meeting in his office with only Bush, Cheney, Scowcroft, Sununu, and me present. We sat at the round table, and Cheney let me go ahead. I set copies of my chart before everyone. “Mr. President,” I began, “let me tell you how the buildup is going.” I pointed to the current date on the chart and noted that as of this moment we had nearly thirty thousand troops in Saudi Arabia. “Our current mission is to deter and defend Saudi Arabia. Within a couple of weeks we’ll have completed the deterrent buildup. We should have enough power to discourage Saddam from attacking, if that’s what he has in mind.” As troops and equipment kept pouring in, I pointed out, we would move from the deterrent to the defensive phase, starting in early September. By about December 5, I went on, we would have some 184,000 troops in place, and there would be no doubt we could defend Saudi Arabia.

  The President listened in his intent way, saying little, as I took him through the operation, week by week, also making clear its cost, $1.2 billion through September 30 and $1 billion every month after that. I pointed out that if we kept up the present pace, he would have to begin calling up the reserves; and he would have to make that decision within about a week. “Sir,” I said, “a call-up means pulling people out of their jobs. It affects businesses. It means disrupting thousands of families. It’s a major political decision.” And very soon he would have to activate a contingency plan called CRAF, the Civilian Reserve Air Fleet, which meant diverting commercial aircraft to military use.

  Six days before, the United Nations Security Council had unanimously voted a trade embargo against Iraq. This prompted me to say, “If your goal is only to defend Saudi Arabia and rely on sanctions to pressure Saddam out of Kuwait, then we should cap the troop flow probably sometime in October.” It would take a month or so for the pipeline to clear, producing those 184,000 troops by early December. We would also need to consider a troop rotation based on a six-month tour. “We’ve got about two months,” I said, “to assess the impact of sanctions.”

  The President shook his head. “I don’t know if sanctions are going to work,” he said, “in an acceptable time frame.”

  If, then, he was thinking of driving Saddam out of Kuwait, assuming he could not be negotiated or sanctioned out, I needed to know some time in October, so that instead of letting the pipeline empty, we would keep filling it. There was something else we needed to know, I said. “If we are going to eject Saddam, is the objective only to free Kuwait or, while we’re at it, to destroy his war-making potential at some level?” Each option required a different force level and affected the timetable. I made it clear that I was not expecting decisions now. The President had time to make up his mind. I was simply alerting him.

  And, I was thinking to myself, do we want to go beyond Kuwait to Baghdad? Do we try to force Saddam out of power? How weakened do we want to leave Iraq? Do we necessarily benefit from a Gulf oil region dominated by an unfriendly Syria and a hostile Iran?

  The President thanked us for the briefing and headed for the Pentagon River Entrance to a speaker’s platform the White House advance team had erected overnight. In his remarks to a large Pentagon crowd, he thanked everyone for the preparations so far. And then he stated his goal: “The immediate, complete, and unconditional withdrawal of all Iraqi forces from Kuwait; the restoration of Kuwait’s legitimate government.” Norm and I glanced at each other. The President did not sound like a man willing to wait long for sanctions to work.

  On August 17, Dick Cheney flew to Riyadh for further consultations with the Saudis. He had expressed no particular concern to me before leaving, but something must have happened when he found himself alone in his private cabin aboard the 707 high above the Atlantic. He called me at home over a secure radio telephone, sounding uncharacteristically agitated. “Colin,” Dick said, “we’ve only got a few paratroopers over there, and a wing or so of aircraft, so far.”

  “I know,” I said, “but the flow goes on.”

  “We don’t have enough muscle there to stop anybody yet,” he said. “Suppose all we do is provoke Saddam, push him to invade the Saudis? There isn’t a damned thing we could do.”

  I knew that too. But there was no point in worrying him at this time. Here was a rare Cheney who needed reassurance. “Dick,” I said, “remember what I told everybody when this thing first broke? We have to get some people and hardware in place right away as a signal to Saddam of our intentions. He doesn’t want to fight the United States. I’m sure of it. That’s why we had to get those early forces over there. That’s the real deterrent, sticking the American flag in the desert and saying, ‘Okay, do you want to mess with us?’”

  “But if Saddam moves, we can’t protect the Saudis,” Cheney insisted. “Not yet, at least.”

  “If they were going to invade Saudi Arabia, they’d have done it by now,” I answered. “Remember, Saddam’s never had to extend himself before. He’s always operated on interior lines of communication, against Iran, next door, and now against Kuwait. But Saudi Arabia’s oil fields are another block away. He’s never projected force that far across open, hostile desert. Relax, Dick.” I went on in this vein for at least twenty minutes, hoping I was right. By the time I had finished, that confident, measured timbre had returned to Cheney’s voice. Everybody needs a shoulder to lean on from time to time. And it was somehow reassuring to learn that the lone cowboy did too. He would do the same for me in the difficult months ahead.

  The operation in the Gulf now had a name. Norm Schwarzkopf’s staff and mine had kicked around a number of ideas. The image of a shield cropped up early. “Peninsula Shield”—too awkward. “Crescent Shield”—too Arabesque. Finally, we settled on a name we all thought had just the right ring. Cheney approved, and the mobilization in the Saudi sands to defend the kingdom thus became “Desert Shield.” As we started to develop an offensive option alongside the defensive stance, Norm and I talked about how to differentiate the two. Desert Shield, Phase II? Norm suggested “Desert Storm.” Stormin’ Norman’s storm. It was a natural, and we all went for it.

  Schwarzkopf had by now set up headquarters in the Ministry of Defense building in Riyadh, the Saudi Arabian capital. He spent his days wrestling with the tangle of problems posed by putting a force in place to defend the kingdom. I spent my days funneling troops and equipment into the pipeline from the U.S. end. The service chiefs had the key roles. While their troops served under Norm, the chiefs bore primary responsibility for ensuring that these units were equipped and combat-ready. Since Schwarzkopf was the CINC with the priority, his fellow CINCs, worldwide, were backing him all the way.

  By early September, the buildup was starting to reach mammoth proportions. Tens of thousands of troops were already in the Gulf region or
on the way, streaming to airports and seaports all over the United States. The President had authorized the call-up of up to 200,000 reservists and guardsmen, and many volunteered even before the call. We could not have gone to war without them, and they were to perform superbly. Four aircraft carrier battle groups would soon be on station, supported by battleships and cruise-missile-firing submarines. Transport ships long in mothballs were reactivated. Hundreds of fighter planes, bombers, and cargo planes circled the Arabian Peninsula looking for places to land. The light infantry of the 82d Airborne and the ist Marine Expeditionary Force would soon be joined by armored formations of the 24th Infantry Division sailing from Georgia and the ist Cavalry Division from Texas. Huge bases had to be built in Saudi Arabia to receive this flood of troops and matériel.

  In this early stage, we still did not know definitely if President Bush would resort to war to fulfill his “This will not stand” stance on the occupation of Kuwait. Nevertheless, we had to have contingent strategies ready for all options. Norm and his army component commander, Lieutenant General John Yeosock, my former deputy at FORSCOM, concentrated on devising a defense of Saudi Arabia. The Air Force staff quickly came up with an air campaign, the brainchild of Colonel John Warden, a brilliant, brash fighter pilot and a leading Air Force intellectual on the use of airpower. Before leaving for Saudi Arabia, Schwarzkopf had been impressed by Warden’s work and arranged for him to brief me on August 11 on a plan called “Instant Thunder.” “What I propose, General,” Warden said, “is that we attack deep inside Iraq, knock out their command and control installations, transportation systems, production and storage facilities, and air defense networks.” I was impressed too. Warden’s approach could destroy or severely cripple the Iraqi regime.