Into the Storm: On the Ground in Iraq

by Tom Clancy

  When they first looked at their sector, it appeared that the Iraqis would continue to build their barrier system all the way across it. If that happened, VII Corps would have to breach that line in order to achieve a penetration for the heavy forces to move toward the RGFC. After passing through the breach, the heavy forces would move north to a concentration area, and then they would attack to destroy the RGFC.

  All of this was slow and deliberate, and Franks did not like it. During this analysis, he started asking about a flank. In fact, since at that time CENTCOM plans for XVIII Corps placed them far to the west of their eventual attack corridor, VII Corps could have gone even farther west than they eventually went, but their terrain analysis showed that traffic ability out there was not good for a large formation. Either it could not move rapidly north or the formation would have to spread out too much and be too far away to concentrate against the RGFC. Thus they assumed they had to punch a breach through the barrier and assemble the attack at a concentration point on the way to the RGFC. (As it happened, when the 3rd ACR traveled that terrain during the war they had a hard time getting through it, and had to move a lot slower than the 1st Armored to their east.)

  VII Corps planners analyzed the breach in great detail. They figured its width and its depth, then how many vehicles could pass at what speed, then worked out specific time lines for each type unit in the corps.

  Franks still didn't like it. None of his planners did. Not only would it take too much time to bring his forces through the breach, but once they were through, they would be strung out north to south when he wanted them aligned east to west and coiled to strike from south to north.

  He again told his planners that he preferred to flank the Iraqi barrier so that he could achieve a more rapid concentration of forces for the attack on the RGFC. After some thought and examination of that option, he seized on the idea of an "audible." What he wanted to do was look over the Iraqi line of scrimmage, as it were, to determine how far west their defense was set. If they were in a defense for the play VII Corps had called--i.e., if the barrier extended across VII Corps's sector--then they would run the breach play. If, on the other hand, the Iraqis left an opening to the west, they would change their plan that put units in that opening and let them race to the RGFC and mass against them much faster.

  They did this initial planning with only a few planners, all approved by Franks in their secure room in the basement of VII Corps HQ at Kelly Barracks in Stuttgart. His chief of staff and G-3 also were present.

  In early December, he picked the Big Red One to make the breach. They'd had recent NTC experience in breaching, they were an infantry division, and Tom Rhame volunteered to do it.

  On 6 December, Franks made a three-day return trip to Saudi Arabia with Corps staff Don Holder and 3rd AD chief Jerry Smith to personally greet the first arriving units from the 2nd ACR. He made this entry in his journal: "Saw 2/2 ACR. Troops look great. Spirited, cleaning weapons. Chain of command present. Landed in A.M. and right on their vehicles w/o sleep. Inspiring. Gave coins to soldiers cleaning weapons to remind them to continue." He discussed the plan with John Yeosock, as well as a myriad of other details of deployment, and briefed the breach option, stressing that he thought the VII Corps and XVIII Corps attacks should be mutually supporting. He discussed the need for deception and questioned how CENTCOM would conduct operations deep with air. Franks also met with Cal Waller, vital in any communication with General Schwarzkopf, but not with Schwarzkopf himself.

  Franks made his final move to Saudi Arabia on 13 December.

  In preparation for the briefing on 20 December for Secretary Cheney and General Powell, Franks briefed General Schwarzkopf on 14 December on his attack plan. His instructions from Schwarzkopf then were to brief the plan in sufficient detail (especially the breach) that when Secretary Cheney and General Powell left they would be convinced the plan was viable, and that it was set in concrete and difficult to change. Schwarzkopf wanted approval of what he was doing, and no more suggestions from Washington. Armed with that guidance, Franks and his planners prepared that type of briefing. The plan had six phases and the audible.

  On 20 December, Franks principally briefed the breach-only plan, but explained that there was an audible plan available if the Iraqis gave him an opening farther west. As a point of interest, in the light of General Schwarzkopf's later dissatisfaction with the speed of the VII Corps attack, no one in Franks's superior chain of command commented about the laborious task of passing a three-division corps through a relatively narrow opening, assembling the corps, and then moving toward the enemy 150 kilometers away. Franks had misgivings about the plan, as indicated in his journal, even though he did not yet have an alternative.

  "Believe operationally we might be violating principle of mass (if we send all our units thru breach one behind the other in column). In our scheme the principal worry is tight movement thru breach. Do not want a bridge too far (thinking of the WW II operation and piecemeal one-unit-at-a-time commitment on a narrow front)."

  He is still pleased that he did not have to execute it.

  In answer to a question from Dick Cheney about the mission Franks had for the British 1st AD, he replied that he anticipated giving them the mission to defeat the Iraqi VII Corps tactical reserve so that his heavy forces could move to destroy the RGFC without worrying about their rear, flank, and fuel.

  A thornier issue had to do with the 1st CAV, the theater reserve (on which subject the CINC continued to be especially sensitive). As he went through his presentation, Franks explained that even though the 1st CAV was theater ground reserve, since it was a Third Army assumption and logical for the theater reserve to be assigned to the main attack (if it was not needed elsewhere), he was including plans for their use by VII Corps.

  This assumption did not go down well with Schwarzkopf. Later, in fact, in his autobiography, he charged that Franks was not prepared to attack unless he had the 1st CAV.

  The charge--with all its implications--is not true. In providing a place for the 1st CAV in his scheme of maneuver, Franks was doing what any commander would do and what Third Army had instructed him to do.

  THE last week in December was an intense period for Franks and his planners. There were many reasons for it: Franks wanted to settle on his intent, to nail down the plan, go over it with his commanders in a session (with a BCTP exercise) at King Khalid Military City in early January, and then lock it down and train and rehearse with specific tasks in mind. At the same time, he suspected that the air war was going to start soon. When it did, the Iraqis would be frozen in place. His suspicion was correct; the air war did start soon (on 17 January), and that did freeze the Iraqis in place--with the result that their picture of the Iraqis in mid-January turned out to be essentially the one they would have when they attacked.

  Meanwhile, there were long sessions with Creighton Abrams, John Landry, Stan Cherrie, John Davidson, and the planners. There were still many questions about the breach and the audible, questions about logistics support (mainly fuel trucks), questions about when to move the British west to the corps TAA, questions about construction of an exact breach replica so that the 1st INF and the Brits could rehearse (this was done), questions about the feints and deceptions up into the Ruqi Pocket (so that the Iraqis would be deceived into believing the main attack would go up the Wadi al Batin), questions about air-ground rules in the theater that were totally different from NATO's, and questions about growing frustrations with lack of intelligence, especially imagery of Iraqi defensive positions. (At one point, Franks told Yeosock that tourists had better pictures of Iraq than he did. He'd be better off, he told him, sending his own C-12 to fly along the border with the door open and use a personal camera to get pictures. . . . He was exaggerating, but frustration was high.)

  One serious disagreement between Franks and his planners was over whether or not there should be a pause by the corps before they hit the RGFC. Regardless of the final choice about the audible, they calc
ulated that continuous movement and enemy action over the distances the corps would have to travel (over 150 kilometers) would require what doctrine calls an operational pause to refuel and rearm in an area they had called Objective Collins (after Lightning Joe Collins, the VII Corps commander in World War II).

  Franks vetoed that suggestion. "No pauses," he ordered. He did not disagree with their calculations (friction was inevitable), with their recommendation for an area of concentration, or even with the possible need for adjustments to the rate of movement, in order to better focus the impact of the heavy forces, but he did not want to build a deliberate pause into the plan, especially one right in front of the main enemy location. A pause was bad motivationally: once you are two or three days into an attack and really rolling, it is better to keep rolling than to stop and then try to get tired troops moving again; and tactically: he did not want to give the Iraqis a chance to adjust their defense (it was Franks's belief that giving them time to set up a position defense was playing to their strength).

  The planners then began to work out some other way.

  As it turned out, Franks decided to adjust the corps's rate of advance during the first day and a half. Those adjustments allowed the corps to roll hard into the RGFC with the greatest possible momentum, with concentrated combat power, with fresh troops, and with a sustainable logistics posture. For these adjustments, Franks has since been sharply criticized by many analysts and chroniclers of the war in the Gulf, and most notably by General Schwarzkopf, their assumption being that several thousand M1A1s, Bradleys, and other heavy armored vehicles should have been able to charge across 150 kilometers or so of desert the same way horse cavalry in a John Ford movie charge down a valley. The issue goes back to knowing about what cavalry people call the "tempo of a mounted attack": You want not only to hit your enemy hard and fast with your heavy stuff, and hit them from an unexpected direction, but you want to hit them with a coherent formation so that your combat power is focused and can hit hard and keep hitting until the enemy quits. That meant that for Fred Franks the question was whether to stop in front of the main enemy objective or to "go slow now and go fast later," as the old German saying goes. He chose to do the latter.

  ON 28 December, Franks moved the VII Corps Main CP out of the port area of Dammam to the desert at a point about seventy-five kilometers east of King Khalid Military City.

  On 2 January, he visited the soldiers who were by then erecting the exact replica of the Iraqi obstacle system. During the visit he determined that his people were building at the rate of twenty-five meters per hour.

  That made for some interesting further thinking: Could the Iraqis, he asked himself, extend their defensive barrier west as fast as our engineers? And even if they could, how far west could they go at that rate?

  The answer, it seemed to Franks, was that his soldiers were more skilled than the Iraqis. Based on his troops' timelines, he determined that in the time they had, the Iraqis wouldn't be able to extend their barrier system all the way across the VII Corps sector, especially if the air attacks began soon.

  He called the "audible" during a plans and issues session in King Khalid Military City, 6 to 8 January, attended by all the major subordinate commanders of the corps plus their planners.

  At that time, the two forces he had available for the enveloping maneuver were the 2nd ACR and the 1st AD. Third AD was then the VII Corps reserve; as such it was to be the force Franks wanted to put in the Ruqi Pocket to carry out the deception mission. According to the current configuration of the plan, 3rd AD would be feinting in the Ruqi Pocket before VII Corps attacked. When the real attack started, 3rd AD would back out of there and then either pass through the breach or follow 1st AD north through the gap in the west.

  Franks was not pleased with this arrangement of units, because it probably meant that 3rd AD would take too long to disengage from Ruqi and catch up with 1st AD for the RGFC attack, and this would cause a piecemeal attack into the RGFC.

  Even though he was to be CENTCOM reserve, John Tilelli attended the briefings. "Don't forget about us," he told Franks.

  Franks didn't forget him.

  During this meeting, Franks also talked to the new Third Army G-2, Brigadier General John Stewart. Stewart's area was intelligence, and in order to decide what formation to order VII Corps into for the attack on the RGFC, Franks had to know the RGFC's final disposition. He needed to make the decision about twenty-four hours before execution, Franks figured, and since it would take about forty-eight hours to get to the RGFC, he told Stewart he needed the final intelligence twenty-four hours after VII Corps attacked--no later. Stewart would deliver the information he needed on the afternoon of 25 February, right on time.

  In the days following the meeting at King Khalid Military City, there were a number of what turned out to be false alerts that Iraqi forces were coming across the border.

  On 11 January, there was a report that four Iraqi aircraft had penetrated Saudi airspace and had been driven back by F-16s. On 17 January, just after the air attack began, there was a report that fifty-five Iraqi tanks were engaging the Egyptians. At that time, VII Corps's 11th Aviation Brigade alerted their two Apache battalions, and the 2nd ACR sent a squadron out to intercept the force. When he got this intelligence, Franks was visiting Tom Rhame on a rifle-firing range. He dropped everything, immediately flew forward to 2nd ACR, and soon learned that no Iraqi tanks had crossed the border.

  While none of these reports turned out to be accurate, they did serve to exercise the corps's rapid-response capability and communications. Franks was pleased with the ability of subordinate commanders to react quickly, to listen to the radio, to anticipate actions, and on their own initiative make things happen.

  On 8 January, the 1st CAV and the 2nd Brigade, 101st Airborne Division, were attached to VII Corps for a mission to protect Tapline Road from a possible Iraqi preemptive attack south down the Wadi al Batin (Franks was also ordered to tie in with French forces west of King Khalid Military City in order to protect the western flank). The 2nd Brigade flew into position on 12 January. And on 13 January, because of reports of a probable Iraqi attack, Franks ordered the 1st CAV forward to a position just south of the road. It then occurred to him that now that he had the 1st CAV for this mission, it would be logical to move them forward to defensive positions just south of the Iraqi border and adjacent to the Egyptians east of VII Corps. Not long after that, he ordered John Tilelli north to this location . . . which was, as it happened, the Ruqi Pocket.

  So why not use 1st CAV, Franks asked himself, instead of 3rd AD to conduct the feints and demonstrations up the pocket to deceive the Iraqis? If he could free the 3rd AD from that mission, he could move them out west to join the 1st AD and the 2nd ACR. It was a stroke of luck. Franks took advantage of it.

  Once that was solved, he had another question: Was there enough room on the ground to place both armored divisions side by side? Or would he have to put them one behind the other? He had forty kilometers to work with in that sector, and uncertain terrain. Franks wanted the divisions side by side. He asked for analysis. The result: several opinions. Franks's staff favored putting the two divisions in column; they didn't think the terrain forward of the border would support two divisions side by side. He told his two commanders to take a look at the terrain. Butch Funk and Ron Griffith both favored two divisions abreast. It would be tight, they said, but they could do it.

  To settle this question, Franks sent a ground reconnaissance party out to the area to look around, and on 24 January, he and Stan Cherrie went out to look at it from his Blackhawk. That same day, after his own look and when the recon report came back positive, Franks decided to put the two divisions side by side. Because 1st AD had farther to go, and more to do initially (they had to seize the Iraqi town of al-Busayyah early in their attack), Franks put 1st AD on a twenty-five-kilometer, two-brigade front, and 3rd AD on a fifteen-kilometer, one-brigade front. This would mean that 3rd AD would stretch to the rear over 100
kilometers, and that it would take time and considerable coordination for them to get in a combat posture of two brigades forward. But that was better than putting them behind the 1st AD.

  Now Franks had the geometry of his forces that he wanted. He had an enveloping force to the west--2nd ACR, 1st AD, and 3rd AD. He had the 1st INF doing the breach, with the 1st UK following quickly through the breach to defeat the tactical reserves to the east. Logistics, particularly fuel, could also now be easily transported through the breach to the north, where it would be available to the enveloping force. Supporting artillery brigades could be initially passed through to join the enveloping armored divisions before their RGFC attack.

  On 26 January, Franks made this note in his journal: "Planning session A.M. Trying to 'what-if' mobile Iraq forces. Think he will fight attrition battle from successive positions. Must shape battle with air, not extend myself logistically, and beat him to positions. East flank vulnerable. If Egyptian attack stalls, then flank thru UK is vulnerable. Must attrit 12th (Iraqi) Div (the one in reserve just behind the frontline Iraqi divisions) so UK can push east and hold while I go north with 1st AD to threaten his flank. Keep 3rd AD in reserve in center able to go east to assist UK or commit north. Should not commit 3rd AD until sure I'll get 1st CAV."