As part of a continuing analysis of U.S. military history, strategy, and operations, the Robert R. McCormick Tribune Foundation and the U.S. Naval Institute hosted a 4 to 5 March 1998 conference on the Gulf War of 1991. More than 40 veteran policy makers, military officers, scholars, and journalists assembled in the neoclassical splendor of the main hall of the Cantigny First Division Museum in Wheaton, Illinois, to discuss the operational characteristics and limited success of Operation Desert Storm. The participants were fully cognizant that the topic is of great interest to a United States faced with the recurring resistance of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein to all United Nations efforts aimed at curtailing his development of weapons of mass destruction.
Retired Marine Corps Lieutenant General Bernard E. Trainor (coauthor of The General’s War: The Inside Story of the Conflict in the Gulf [New York: Little, Brown & Co., 1995] delivered the conference’s opening address. The United States, he said, had snatched “a modest victory from the jaws of triumph.” The principal mistake, General Trainor contended, was the failure to “get rid of Saddam Hussein,” and to “have left him in place for the last seven years to cause mischief.” He faulted General Colin Powell, then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for shifting his focus from the military situation to an unspecified “political aspect of the conflict” and for recommending to President George Bush cessation of combat and withdrawal of U.S. forces from the Gulf before Saddam Hussein could be toppled.
This allegation disregards the core tenet of the strategic bible used by today’s U.S. military, Carl von Clausewitz’s On War, in which the great Prussian theorist holds steadfastly that the political desiderata of warfare always must control and take precedence over military goals and operations.1
The first panel of the conference dealt with the question, “What Should We Have Done Differently?” Moderated by Dr. John Hillen, a junior officer in the 2d Armored Cavalry Regiment during the war and then the Olin Fellow for National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, the panel featured four retired senior veterans of Desert Storm, each of whom contributed insights gained from a career in one of the U.S. military services, tempered by the experience of fighting a war as part of an international Coalition.
The initial speaker was retired Marine Corps General Walter E. Boomer, Commanding General, 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, during the war. General Boomer eschewed “a strategic perspective” and spoke instead from an “operational viewpoint.” By this standard, he said, “Very little went wrong.” The Marine Corps carried out its attack “almost flawlessly,” as did “the magnificent Army brigade that we had attached to us.” Intelligence, however, was another matter. He complained that he did not appreciate “until fairly late” that most of the Iraqi forces were going to run rather than fight, because “we never received any superb intelligence,” despite its availability in Washington.
Retired Army Lieutenant General John J. Yeosock, Third Army Commander for Desert Shield and Desert Storm, took a geopolitical view of the war and rebutted General Trainor’s criticism of General Powell. He focused on the strategic goal of the Coalition, which he said was simply to expel Saddam Hussein from Kuwait. “The truth of the matter is the Saudis put the Coalition together with bilateral relations with each and every nation state that entered therein.” They “were the ones who established the glue that held the Coalition together” and “everybody [else] was a hired gun.” When the Coalition drove Saddam’s forces out of Kuwait, it achieved the initial strategic objective. Hence, the Saudi commitment to the Coalition evaporated. Immediate termination of hostilities followed inevitably, as prescribed by the Clausewitzian dictum that nations going to war should have a clearly defined strategic objective to which they remain faithful.
From General Yeosock’s elevated perspective, the discussion returned to the technicalities of the operational experience. Retired Navy Admiral Stanley R. Arthur, former Commander, U.S. Naval Forces Central Command, defended the Navy’s aloofness from the other services. He explained that he had not joined Army General Norman H. Schwarzkopfs supreme command headquarters in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, because he had not been allowed enough time to establish necessary communications between Riyadh and the forces afloat. Concentrating on the danger enemy minefields posed to U.S. naval vessels in the Gulf, Admiral Arthur said, “I think from my standpoint the folks in Riyadh had very little understanding until we finally got [General] Schwarzkopf out on the ship and gave him a line of what it takes once you’ve got an in-place minefield.” Whether right or wrong, Admiral Arthur’s summation did not enhance anyone’s confidence in the ascendancy of “jointness” within senior U.S. military commands.
Retired Air Force General Charles A. Homer, Commander, U.S. Air Forces Central Command for Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm, indirectly and perhaps unwittingly undermined the concept of institutional jointness himself by attributing the military success of Desert Storm to the “unusual relationship between the four people sitting at this table. It probably never has existed before and it probably won’t exist in the future.” This assertion disregards the kind of harmony that characterized the Civil War relationship between General Robert E. Lee and Lieutenant General Thomas J. (Stonewall) Jackson, which was cut short by Jackson’s death at Chancellorsville and which by its absence contributed to Lee’s failure at the Battle of Gettysburg.2
In his luncheon address, James Hoagland, associate editor and chief foreign correspondent of The Washington Post, cut to the heart of the relationship between force and diplomacy. He praised the United States and its Coalition partners for waging “a just war, fought by valiant men and women upholding and observing the highest standards of battlefield behavior.” Yet Hoagland admitted regretfully that “while the United States won the war, it did not win the incomplete peace that has followed.” Like General Trainor, Hoagland is bedeviled by the survival of Saddam Hussein and his determined “clawing ... to the surface of international politics every six months or so.”
Beyond the Middle East, Operation Desert Storm carries a warning for the future. The great destructive capability of the conventional or non-nuclear weaponry used in the Gulf War, Hoagland said, “makes war unthinkable for developed countries of even roughly similar capabilities. Carl von Clausewitz has been superseded.” He rejected as no longer relevant to Europe “north of the Balkans” or to “much of the rest of the globe” the best-known dictum of Clausewitz: “war is a continuation of political intercourse, with the addition of other means.”’
Retired Navy Vice Admiral Robert F. Dunn—whose combat experience as a senior naval aviator has been complemented by a long affiliation with the U.S. Naval Institute in major editorial capacities—moderated the second panel of the conference, entitled, “Did Air Power Carry the Day?”
Air Force veteran Dr. Thomas A. Keaney, a professor of military strategy at the National War College and co-author of Revolution in Warfare? Air Power in the Persian Gulf (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1995), delivered a succinct, highly balanced and provocative assessment of the impact air power had on the war. In the planning phase, the principal objectives set for missile and bombing attacks were to destroy the Iraqi leadership, disrupt its command and control of weapons of mass destruction, incapacitate the national electrical power network, take out Iraqi Scud missiles, and interdict the army’s overland logistical train. Unexpectedly and surprisingly, air attacks against deployed Iraqi ground forces turned out to be the “aspect of the bombing in the war [that] was a decisive aspect.”
Interrupting a spontaneous and spirited discussion of Keaney’s assessment, Admiral Dunn called on the second scheduled panelist, Dr. Richard P. Hallion, Director of Air Force History. Alluding to the ongoing “Revolution in Military Affairs” (RMA) in which he believes, the author of Storm over Iraq: Air Power and the Gulf War (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997) traced the RMA’s origins to the “pre-precision air power era, back in the 1940s” and to General Heinz Guderian, the German “great grandfather of mechanized warfare.” Guderian, in Hallion’s words, recognized that “success in the air could be exploited for ground warfare which in turn would consolidate the aerial victory.” In a trenchant definition of Desert Storm’s validation of the RMA of the last half-century, Hallion said that air power “now gives us the opportunity to reach the conflict termination stage rapidly, . . . because we can now deliver . . . the traditional surface forces to a point where they can do anything with the opponent that we choose. They don’t have to fight with the tremendous attrition [of past wars] ... to win the right ... to enter that enemy country.”
Navy Rear Admiral John (“Carlos”) Johnson, Head of the Aviation Plans and Requirements Branch in the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations, took a similar stance. He observed that, in the Gulf War, air power “dominated Iraq,” which is “roughly the same size as Germany.” The qualitative and quantitative transformation in aerial destructiveness since World War II was not merely the result of the evolution of weapons technology. “We had air dominance in Vietnam,” said Admiral Johnson, “but we didn’t have the will.” In the aftermath of Vietnam, a “change of will” or a “change in the mindset” infused U.S. military doctrine, planning, and weaponry. As a result, in the Gulf War air power “enabled the day but [did] not necessarily win the day, because it clearly wasn’t won until we occupied the land. . . . And that takes combined force, a combined army.”
One of Admiral Johnson’s “guys in the field,” retired Marine Major General James M. Myatt, who commanded the 1st Marine Division during the liberation of Kuwait City in February 1991, gave an extremely lucid explanation of the value of air power in war. Iraqi artillery pieces outnumbered Marine Corps artillery by about 1,200 to 250, which meant that a U.S. ground offensive would have cost an enormous number of casualties. Therefore, said General Myatt, the air and ground forces developed a strategy of electronic deception that lured Iraqi artillerymen into manning and firing their guns to reveal their positions, at which point they suffered a pummeling from the air.
The objective, said General Myatt, was not “to destroy artillery pieces.” Rather, he said, “we were trying to defeat the minds of the Iraqi soldiers.” By breaking the enemy field artillerymen’s will to fight, air power provided the “key to allow us to drive the Iraqis [out of Kuwait] with a minimum number of Marine casualties.” In a stunning Clausewitzian summation of the Marine Corps position on warfare, General Myatt quoted a 1931 essay by J. F. C. Fuller, the chief of staff of the British Tank Corps in World War I: “obsession with destruction is a failure to recognize the true object of war,” namely that “war is a contest between human wills and not a physical process of mass against mass.”
Day two of the conference opened with “What We Knew—What We Needed to Know.” The previous day’s numerous attacks on the nature and availability of intelligence during Desert Shield and Desert Storm already had placed this panel on the defensive. The moderator, Rick Atkinson, an assistant managing editor of The Washington Post, set the stage briskly and efficiently. “By my count,” he said, “yesterday there were at least 27 precision- guided darts tossed at the Gulf War intelligence operation.” Conceding that indeed “there were catastrophic intel shortcomings” and innumerable “perceived shortcomings,” Atkinson nonetheless defended the overall accuracy of tactical intelligence. When the commander of “the Big Red One [First Infantry Division] got up into Iraq, he found that the Iraqi units were pretty much where intelligence had told him they were going to be,” Atkinson said. “I’d have to say that ain’t bad.”
Retired Navy Admiral William O. Studeman, Director of the National Security Agency during the war, confessed to “shortfalls” in two principal categories: accuracy of bomb damage assessment and insufficient “imagery dissemination” to appropriate levels of command. Each of these has profound inherent difficulties that must be addressed constantly by the relevant agencies in Washington—Central Intelligence, Defense Intelligence, and National Security. Interagency disharmony and the very nature of the problems themselves will limit progress, and theater commanders always are going to be somewhat frustrated by the intelligence they receive.
The CIA’s “ground analyst” for Iraq during Desert Storm, Dr. Kenneth M. Pollack, defended the U.S. wartime intelligence effort: “I think in general a lot about intelligence in the Gulf War went right.” The problems he cited stemmed mainly from the transitional between 1990 and 1991: the Cold War was virtually over, but the traditions and structure of U.S. intelligence remained steeped in four decades of preoccupation with the Soviet Union and its thermonuclear arsenal. The CIA had been “set up to support the National Command Authorities. I was there to tell the President what was happening.” General Horner later underscored the debilitating seriousness of this arrangement: “The CIA does not come to major [operational military] exercises. If they do show up, they stay in a little huddle.”
Retired Marine Corps Lieutenant General W. M. Keys, who led the 2d Marine Division during its assault on Kuwait City in February 1991, described his perspective as that of “a deploying division commander.” It was not one that comforted the other panelists. He faulted the U.S. intelligence agencies for concentrating on “Iraqi command and control, their weapons of mass destruction, and the Republican Guard.” Not nearly “enough effort was put down at the tactical intelligence level.” Much of the analysis from unnamed “higher headquarters,” General Keys thought, “was poor. A lot of intelligence we got I think we could have got better from CNN [the Cable News Network].” The total number of Atkinson’s “precision-guided darts” had just climbed to well beyond 30.
Emphasis on the operational level of the war carried over to the final panel of the conference, “Small Unit Operations: Making them Work.” Moderated by syndicated columnist and retired Army Colonel Harry G. Summers, the session featured three relatively junior veterans of the Gulf War.
Air Force Lieutenant Colonel William Bruner served on the Directorate of Campaign Plans in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, during Desert Shield and flew combat missions as the airborne command element for the Saudi airborne warning and control system (AWACS) during Desert Storm. The Gulf War, he believes, uncovered a fundamental tension “between the necessity to centralize aerospace power for planning purposes—because it is a scarce resource—and the efficiencies gained in war from decentralizing its execution.” This tension will increase as the United States moves further into an era where warfare is dominated by electronic information technology and the engaged infantryman can beam his targeting “laser directly into the cockpits of our F-16s.” If the missions and targets of combat air power are overly constrained by prior planning, its optimal effectiveness in support of the ground forces will diminish, he warned.
Another aviator, Navy Commander Mark I. Fox, scored the Navy’s first MiG kill on 17 January 1991 and flew a total of 18 combat sorties during the war. He drew two central conclusions from his combat experience. First, merciless air-to-air fighter training is of utmost importance to the operational performance of aviators in the first few days of actual combat. Second, Commander Fox pleaded for an improved flow of intelligence to “the guy that squeezes the trigger that kills somebody. ... I know it is important for us to have this network centric information that flows around, but after all is said and done, you finally reach the point where there is some guy really scared on the other end of all that information pretty much functioning on brainstem power at that point. And we have got to figure out a way to make sure that he gets that information reliably, the first time, correctly.”
The final speaker of the panel, Army Major H. R. McMaster, who commanded an armored cavalry troop in Desert Storm, also discussed the crucial importance of pre-combat training. In the course of a 23-minute battle, his nine tanks and supporting vehicles “destroyed the better part of an Iraqi brigade, about 50 armored vehicles” without suffering a single casualty. For this absolute victory he credited a year of highly focused training as a team, the most important payoff of which was “the psychological carryover to soldiers, because what you need soldiers to do is to have a willingness to take risks. You need them to have a willingness to aggressively close with and destroy the enemy in close combat.” Modern electronic intelligence, or “information dominance, [also] is great at the operational level,” the tank veteran said. “But once the tactical fight begins, I would suggest that intelligence is a very limited utility, because events progress so rapidly.”
In his luncheon address, a self-proclaimed Jeffersonian with “a profound respect for the common man’s collective judgment” concentrated on the domestic political aspects of U.S. war-making. Former Congressman James Slattery (R-KS) believes that the highly unpopular prolongation of the Vietnam War compels future policy makers to consult with the people and Congress before deciding to go to war. In a proposition wholly congruent with Clausewitz’s treatise, he insisted that U.S. military forces never should be committed to action “without a clear military mission, . . . one that’s achievable also.” Moreover, because the Constitution empowers Congress to declare war, Congress must be included in the process of committing U.S. forces to combat. President Bush, said the former congressman, understood these principles, and it was “a stroke of genius” on his part to seek congressional approval for Desert Storm. The vote of authorization in January 1991 was close in both houses, but the debate displayed Congress in its “finest hour.”
Immediately after former Congressman Slattery’s speech, General Sir Peter de la Billiere, the highly decorated commander of the British Middle East forces during Desert Storm, redirected the attention of the conference to the international military dimensions of the Gulf War. In a virtuoso solo performance, this distinguished student of the Middle East explained why Desert Storm succeeded in expelling Saddam Hussein’s forces from Kuwait and why it was unique. Molded by sophisticated political leaders, the international Coalition of more than 30 nations “was the essence of the success of the operation in the Gulf War.”
At the operational level, General Schwarzkopf worked tirelessly to knit and hold the Coalition together. He would have failed without the “unambiguous and fulsome support” and the vast military-logistical infrastructure of Saudi Arabia, which felt threatened by Saddam’s occupation of Kuwait. Even so, the Coalition did not represent a military monolith. As General Yeosock observed in commenting on Sir Peter’s remarks, the Arab nations in the Coalition would “go in and help liberate Kuwait,” but they would not attack through Iraq because of their reluctance to invade a neighbor. This meant that once the Iraqis had been expelled from Kuwait, centrifugal nationalistic and cultural forces were certain to fracture the Coalition. Barring another act of overt aggression by Iraq, it could not be reconstituted. This dissolution would leave the United States and Great Britain virtually alone as proponents of future air strikes against Iraq, said Sir Peter in an observation he might well have repeated during Operation Desert Fox in December 1998.
Following General de la Billiere at the lectern was an outstanding U.S. military historian. Professor Russell F. Weigley, Distinguished University Professor at Temple University, addressed the topic, “What’s Missing in Desert Storm History?”
Weigley argued forcefully that civilian control over the military is fundamental to the country’s constitutional system. Reaching back into history, he praised General John J. Pershing, the commander of the American Expeditionary Forces in World War I, for willingly subordinating his military strategy to political and diplomatic constraints throughout most of his career as a general officer. He contrasted Pershing’s subservience with the overreaching behavior of General Powell, who was “encouraged by the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986” to trespass on the civilian prerogative of policy-making in a variety of disturbing ways. Powell too vociferously opposed going to war in the Gulf, insisted on withdrawing from the war before Saddam’s Republican Guard had been destroyed, and inappropriately dominated the peace-making process at the end of the war.
Weigley’s brief and concentrated remarks raised a question about the applicability to the United States of Clausewitz’s contention that the supreme military commander properly must become a member of the highest policy-making circles of the nation. Perhaps a Prussian theorist writing under the influence of the Napoleonic Wars deserves less prominence than he now enjoys in the curricula of U.S. war and staff colleges as they enter the 21st century.
The question of Clausewitz’s relevance to the contemporary United States reemerged at a panel entitled “Desert Storm: Who Won What? and What It Means Today” held during the Naval Institute’s 124th Annual Meeting and 8th Annapolis Seminar on 23 April 1998. Moderated by Bob Woodward, renowned journalist, author, and assistant managing editor of The Washington Post, the session reunited three principals from the Cantigny meeting: Lieutenant General Yeosock, Dr. Hillen, and former Congressman Slattery. In reiterating positions taken at Cantigny, they added fresh vehemence and candor.
At the time of the Gulf War, Representative Slattery’s district in Kansas embraced Fort Leavenworth to the east—the location of the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College—and Fort Riley to the west—the home of the “Big Red One,” the First Infantry Division. Slattery recalled the public outpouring of enthusiasm for the troops during the mobilization and build-up of forces in the Gulf. He drew explicitly from this manifestation a confirmation of Clausewitz’s dictum that war is a continuation of politics.
Hillen was less nostalgic and far more acerbic in comments focusing on the post-Gulf War period. Decrying the “politically correct wonderland that passes for the U.S. military today,” he faulted the top leaders of the Clinton administration—whom he described as “weak people trying to look strong”— for talking tough but not brandishing the legendary “big stick” of Theodore Roosevelt.
General Yeosock noted that General Powell, General Schwarzkopf, Secretary of State James Baker, and Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney all had declined to run for public office from the platform of national recognition each had gained in the war. His conclusion, drawn from recent experience in the corporate world, is that a great number of very good people in the United States do not feel they can bear the pain and humiliation attendant upon seeking and holding high public office today.
The Annapolis panel and the Cantigny conference featured a preponderance of men and women who had participated in the war. The level of consensus reached was striking, as was the breadth and depth of feeling about several issues. First, the war achieved its strategic goal of expelling Iraqi forces from Kuwait. Second, the Coalition could not have achieved more than that without risking its own integrity. Third, by winning congressional approval for military action prior to final commitment, President Bush accomplished something remarkable for the United States: he restored public confidence in the constitutional process and in the executive branch of the government, both of which had been under a cloud of disrespect and suspicion since the Vietnam War. Fourth, by way of the fiery brilliance of its high-tech victory, the U.S. military won the admiration of a public that had scorned it since Vietnam. And finally, in the mind of at least one observer, the discussions at Annapolis and Cantigny invited a thorough reassessment of Clausewitz’s proper role in 21st-century U.S. strategic theory.
1. The favored version is Carl von Clausewitz, On War, edited and translated by Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976).
2. See Russell F. Weigley, The American Way of War: A History of United States Military Strategy and Policy (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1977), pp. 114-116.
3. Clausewitz, On War, p. 605.