Getting Marines To the Gulf

Few Americans could have identified Saddam Hussein on Wednesday, 1 August 1990, the day before the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. In the Marine Corps, the most interesting things that were happening were taking place in the Philippines and off the coast of Liberia.

Afloat in Philippine waters was the 13th Marine Expeditionary Unit—the 13th MEU—which had sailed from Southern California on 20 June. Originally scheduled for a port visit at Subic Bay and training ashore, the 13th MEU found itself conveniently present to assist in earthquake relief. With Colonel John E. Rhodes as its commander, the MEU included Battalion Landing Team 1/4, reinforced Medium Helicopter Squadron 164, and MSSG-13, a tailored combat service support group.

Already ashore at Subic was a contingency Marine air- ground task force (CMAGTF 4-90) of about 2,000 Marines drawn from the Okinawa-based III Marine Expeditionary Force, ostensibly for training but also with the purpose of providing a deterrent against untoward anti- American guerrilla or terrorist activity. The core of CMAGTF 4-90 was the 3d Battalion, 7th Marines.

Halfway around the world, standing off Monrovia, Liberia, in amphibious ships, was the 22d MEU, with BLT 2/4, HMM-261, MSSG-22, and Colonel Granville R. Amos, commanding.¹ Civil war had progressed to a point where it was obvious that the government of President Samuel K. Doe would fall. The 22d MEU was prepared to evacuate American citizens and foreign nationals.²

As Marine Expeditionary Units, the 13th MEU and 22d MEU were two of the smallest of MAGTFs. With an occasional exception, these formations come in three sizes. Marine Expeditionary Brigades or MEBs being next larger in size, and Marine Expeditionary Forces or MEFs being the largest.³ By doctrine, MAGTFs must have four organizational elements: a command element, a ground combat element, an aviation combat element, and a combat service support element.⁴

Both the 13th MEU and 22d MEU were Marine Expeditionary Units, Special Operations Capable [MEU (SOC)s], meaning that they had become trained and practiced in a wide range of special operations. For example, in addition to being prepared to reinforce beleaguered U.S. embassies and carry out evacuations, they were trained in a number of other missions, including boarding parties on suspect shipping, operations against terrorists, and amphibious raids, day or night.⁵

This special-operations capability is something the Corps has developed to a high art, and it has been a particular interest of the present Commandant of the Marine Corps. Anyone wishing to understand the Marine Corps must understand the status of its Commandant. There has been a Commandant, designated as such, ever since the United States Marine Corps was authorized by the Congress and approved by President John Adams on 11 July 1798. The Corps numbers its Commandants, as kings and popes are numbered. The incumbent is the 28th Commandant. No other service chief seems to have quite the clear and unequivocal control of his service as that enjoyed by the resident of the Commandant’s House at the Marine Barracks, Washington, D.C. Since 1806, all Commandants have lived in that house, the oldest official residence in Washington still being used for its original purpose.⁶

The present Commandant, General Alfred M. (“Al”) Gray, is now in the last year of his four-year tenure. Sixty- two years old, stocky in build, bom in Rahway, New Jersey, and given to chewing tobacco, he spends as little time in Washington as possible.⁷ Gray enlisted in the Marine Corps in 1950, reached the rank of sergeant, was commissioned in 1952, and served with the 1st Marine Division in Korea. Trained as an artillery officer, he was soon doing more esoteric things. In the early 1960s, as a young major, he was engaged in some highly interesting intelligence operations in Vietnam. As a colonel, he commanded the ground combat element of the 9th Marine Amphibious Brigade in the 1975 evacuation of Saigon. Immediately before becoming Commandant in 1987, he was the Commanding General, Fleet Marine Force, Atlantic, and Commanding General, II Marine Amphibious Force.⁸ Before that, he commanded the 2d Marine Division. He is imaginative, innovative, iconoclastic, articulate, charismatic, and compassionate. His Marines love him.

Elsewhere in the world on 1 August 1990, the 24th and 26th MEUs were in pre-deployment workup training at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. The 11th MEU was undergoing special-operations training in California. The 3d Battalion, 9th Marines, embarked in the Belleau Wood (LHA-3), was at Seattle, Washington, taking part in the annual Sea Fair.⁹ An engineer platoon was ashore in Sierra Leone, as part of a West Africa training cruise, working with local forces and keeping an eye cocked towards neighboring Liberia. A Marine detachment in the Caribbean was engaged in anti-drug trafficking operations, and another detachment was operating with other federal agents along our Southwest border. A reinforced battalion from the 7th Marine Regiment was undergoing mountain warfare training in California’s Sierra Nevada mountains. Elements of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Brigade were exercising in Hawaii.

Then came the second day of August. At about 0100 local time, in opening moves reminiscent of North Korea’s invasion of South Korea 40 years earlier, three Iraqi Republican Guard divisions crossed the Kuwaiti border and began converging on the capital, Kuwait City, from the north and west, coordinating their movement with the landing by helicopter of a special-operations division in the city itself. The forces had linked up by 0530 and by nightfall, Kuwait City was in Iraqi hands. By noon of the next day, the Iraqis had reached Kuwait’s border with Saudi Arabia.¹⁰

On Saturday, 4 August, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Colin L. Powell, and the Commander-in-Chief, Central Command, General H. Norman (“the Bear” or “Stormin’ Norman”) Schwarzkopf, both Army generals, met with President George Bush and key members of his administration at Camp David, Maryland. This was a day of decision.

Two days later, the 26th MEU(SOC), Colonel William C. Fite III, commanding, began to load out at Morehead City, North Carolina. The three major elements were BLT 3/8, HMM-162, and MSSG-26. The 26th MEU(SOC)’s Navy counterpart was Amphibious Squadron Two.¹¹ The deployment of the 26th MEU(SOC) on 6 August was a scheduled rotation that had nothing to do with the Gulf crisis. The 26th MEU(SOC) was to relieve the 22d MEU(SOC) on station near Liberia on 20 August. Meanwhile, the 22d MEU(SOC) had begun evacuation operations and had put a reinforced rifle company ashore to protect the U.S. Embassy.

On 7 August, JCS Chairman Powell, as directed by Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, ordered the first actual deployment of forces for Operation Desert Shield. By definition, this was C-Day—Commencement Day. The clock for Desert Shield had begun to tick.

In the case of the Marine Corps, the 1st MEB in Hawaii, the 7th MEB in California, and the 4th MEB on the East Coast were alerted for possible deployment.¹²

Marines have been deploying by brigades for more than a hundred years. The first expeditionary brigade worth counting was the one that went to Panama in 1885. At the turn of the century, another brigade marched to the relief of the embassies in Peking, shouldering aside the Boxers, then returning to the Philippines for service against Aguinaldo’s insurgents.

When the Marine Advance Base Force, the forerunner of today’s Fleet Marine Forces, was formed in 1913, it was a brigade of two small regiments. It also had an aviation detachment: two primitive flying boats. The Advance Base Brigade had its first expeditionary testing at Vera Cruz in 1914. Unfortunately, the aviation detachment did not go along. There was no convenient way to get the short-legged flying boats from New Orleans to Vera Cruz other than to take them apart and put them into boxes.

In 1917, after the United States entered World War I, it was planned that Marine aviation would support the Marine brigade that was sent to France, and which figured prominently at such places as Belleau Wood, Soissons, Blanc Mont, and the Meuse-Argonne. But the 1st Marine Aviation Force—four squadrons of DH-4 DeFlavillands— which reached France in late summer 1918, was used as the Day Wing of the Navy Bombing Group, far from where the Marine brigade was engaged.

Between World Wars I and II, the Marine Corps sent small expeditionary brigades to Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, and China. In every case, these brigades had an organic aviation element. These bush-war Marine aviators of the 1920s and 1930s did not invent dive bombing or its handmaiden, close air support, as Marines sometimes like to claim, but they did do a great deal to develop those concepts and make them work.

In 1933, when the old-style East and West Coast Expeditionary Forces became the Fleet Marine Forces, there was a 1st Marine Brigade based at Quantico and a 2d Brigade based at San Diego. Each had its own aircraft group. At about this time, Marine squadrons began qualifying for aircraft-carrier operations. This carrier qualification cross-training has continued.

In early 1941 the 1st Marine Brigade became the 1st Marine Division and the 2d Marine Brigade became the 2d Marine Division. Correspondingly, the East and West Coast air groups became the 1st and 2d Marine Aircraft Wings. Early World War II Marine Corps deployments were made in brigade strength. In the summer of 1941, a 1st Provisional Marine Brigade was pulled out of the new 2d Marine Division, formed in 15 days, and sent to garrison Iceland. In January 1942, a 2d Brigade was taken out of the 2d Division and sent to American Samoa. Two months later, a 3d Brigade was stripped out of the 1st Marine Division and dispatched to Western Samoa. In 1944, a two-regiment 1st Provisional Marine Brigade (entirely different from the brigade that went to Iceland) was formed for the re-occupation of Guam. But the aphorism is that “The Marine Corps deploys by brigades, but fights by divisions.” Thus it was that by the end of World War II, the Corps had expanded to six Marine divisions and five aircraft wings, and close air support had been developed to a fine art.

After the war, the Marine Corps shrank to a point where it could barely man the skeletons of two divisions and two aircraft wings. When the Korean War erupted on 25 June 1950, the Marine Corps hurriedly stripped down the 1st Marine Division to form a provisional brigade. This brigade landed at Pusan on 2 August and, with the support of a Marine aircraft group with three fighter-bomber squadrons, two of them carrier-based, had a great deal to do with the successful defense of the Pusan Perimeter. On 15 September, this brigade would join with its parent 1st Marine Division, now fleshed out with Reserves, for the landing at Inchon. The 1st Marine Division and the 1st Marine Aircraft Wing remained in Korea for the remainder of the war and turned in a good performance, both in the air and on the ground, but not without some jurisdictional and doctrinal problems with the Fifth Air Force.¹³

The four Marine battalion landing teams that landed in Lebanon in 1958 were brought together into the brigade- size 2d Provisional Marine Force. After that, the time- hallowed term “provisional” fell into disuse. By the early 1960s the MAGTF concept had crystallized and the MEU, MEB, MEF triad had emerged. The Dominican Intervention of 1965 saw the initial employment of the 6th Marine Expeditionary Unit and a buildup to the 4th Marine Expeditionary Brigade.

In Vietnam, the first substantial commitment of U.S. ground combat forces was on 8 March 1965, when the 9th MEB landed at Da Nang. It had, of course, its aviation element. The 9th MEB was followed on 7 May by the landing of the 3d MEB at Chu Lai, some 55 miles south of Da Nang. Both brigades were then absorbed into the III Marine Expeditionary Force, which quickly had its name changed to the III Marine Amphibious Force because it was presumed that the South Vietnamese had unhappy memories of the French Expeditionary Corps. Eventually, the III Marine Amphibious Force would include two Marine divisions, two Marine regimental combat teams, and a huge 1st Marine Aircraft Wing, but this took several years, with battalions and squadrons being fed into the country one at a time. In Vietnam, there were also jurisdictional and doctrinal problems concerning the use of tactical aviation, this time with the Seventh Air Force.

The 1958 intervention in Lebanon had been a near- bloodless success. This would not be the case with the Marine “presence” in Lebanon that began in August 1982 with the landing at Beirut of the 32d Marine Amphibious Unit. In the ensuing months, the 32d MAU was relieved by the 24th MAU which, in turn, was relieved by the 22d MAU (actually the redesignated 32d MAU). Then the 24th MAU returned once again and was there on that fatal Sunday morning, 23 October 1983, when the suicide truck-bomb destroyed the headquarters building of BLT 1/8, killing 241 U.S. servicemen, most of them Marines, and wounding 70 more.

The 22d MAU was routinely on its way from the East Coast to relieve the 24th MAU when it was diverted for the Grenada intervention, landing on that little island on 25 October and, after a week ashore, re-embarking and proceeding to Lebanon.

The designation of MAGTFs as “amphibious” rather than “expeditionary” continued until 1988, when General Gray put things back the way they had been, to reflect more accurately Marine Corps missions and capabilities. Said General Gray in explaining this change: “The Marine air-ground forces which we forward deploy around the world are not limited to amphibious operations alone. Rather, they are capable of projecting sustained, combined arms combat power ashore in order to conduct a wide range of missions essential to the protection of our national security interests.”

For Operation Desert Shield, if the 1st and 7th Marine Expeditionary Brigades were to be deployed, as planned, by air, they would be taking virtually nothing with them but their individual arms and equipment.¹⁴ That would not give them much combat potential. It was expected that their heavy equipment and supplies would be borne to the scene by the Maritime Prepositioning Force.

In early 1980, then-Secretary of Defense Harold Brown testified to the Congress: “Although we can lift a brigade- size force [by air] to the scene of a minor contingency very quickly, that force would be relatively lightly armed. . . .’’To supply such a force by air with substantial mechanized or armored support, along with necessary ammunition, he went on, would occupy almost all of DoD’s airlift force.

Dr. Brown’s recommended solution to this problem was to preposition squadrons of commercial ships at strategic locations, each squadron loaded with most of a MEB’s combat equipment and about 30 days of supply.

Thirteen modem ships, with civilian crews, eventually were dedicated to this concept. By the summer of 1990, there were three Maritime Prepositioning Shipping Squadrons in being: MPSRon-1 in the Atlantic, MPSRon-2 in the Indian Ocean, and MPSRon-3 in the Western Pacific.¹⁵ These ships did not need ports; they could offload either at a pier or in the stream. But they did need a benign environment. They were not a substitute for amphibious ships, which have an assault capability. Skeptics, among them many old-guard Marines, questioned their usefulness. It was dangerous, it was argued, to separate a Marine from his pack. A marriage of men and material on a potential battlefield was problematic. Desert Shield would provide an acid test for the MPS concept.

On 8 August (C + 2), Maritime Prepositioning Shipping Squadron 2 sailed from Diego Garcia—that speck of an island in the middle of the Indian Ocean—and Maritime Prepositioning Squadron 3 sailed from Guam. Destination for both squadrons was the Persian Gulf. MPSRon- 2 was to marry up with 7th MEB, and MPSRon-3 with 1st MEB, if and when those two MEBs deployed.

On 10 August (C + 3), CinCCent, that is, General Schwarzkopf, did indeed call not only for the airlifted 1st and 7th MEBs but also for the seaborne 4th MEB. No two MEBs are exactly alike in structure; they are task-organized. The size of a brigade can easily vary from 7,000 to 17,000 troops or more, mostly Marines, but also a considerable number of Navy men, because the Corps’s medical support and its chaplains, plus some engineering help, come from the Navy.

General Schwarzkopf had succeeded Marine General George B. Crist on 23 November 1988 as commander of CentCom, with a staff of 675. In June 1990, Marine Major General Robert B. Johnston joined his command as chief of staff. Johnston, bom in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1937, emigrated to this country in 1955, and came into the Marine Corps by way of a commission in 1961, after graduating from San Diego State College. As a junior officer, he had two tours in Vietnam, including command of a rifle company. Subsequently, he would have the peacetime command of a battalion, a regiment, and of the 9th Marine Amphibious Brigade.

On 12 August (C + 5), the 7th MEB, moving out from its desert base at Twentynine Palms, California, with nearly 17,000 personnel, entered the air flow for Saudi Arabia.¹⁶ The planning figure was that the deployment of a Marine Expeditionary Brigade by air required 250 C-141 sorties or equivalents. It was no accident that 7th MEB was desert-trained. The brigade had long been earmarked for employment in CentCom’s sandy area of operations.

The first elements of the 7th MEB arrived at A1 Jubayl on 14 August (C + 7). The brigade commander. Major General John I. Hopkins, arrived the next day, as did the first ships of MPSRon-2, and the marriage of the 7th MEB and MPSRon-2 was consummated. Rolling out of the MPS ships came the tanks, howitzers, amphibious assault vehicles, light armored vehicles, and the other weapons, supplies, and equipment which would give the 7th MEB its combat punch. On 20 August its ground elements occupied their initial defensive positions in northeastern Saudi Arabia. They were ready for combat.

7th MEB’s commander, General Hopkins, a 58-year- old New Yorker raised in Brooklyn and a 1956 graduate of the Naval Academy, is a tough Marine and looks the part. A ground officer, he has a Silver Star from Vietnam and a Master’s degree gained at the University of Southern California from part-time study.

On 25 August (C + 18), General Hopkins, as CG I MEF(Forward), fully confident that he could counter an Iraqi offensive in his zone of action, reported to General Schwarzkopf that he was ready to assume responsibility for the defense of the approaches to the vital seaport of A1 Jubayl. His brigade, numbering on that date 15,248 Marines with 123 tanks, 425 heavy weapons, including artillery pieces, and 124 fixed and rotary winged aircraft, had made a 12,000-mile strategic movement, using 259 MAC sorties and five MPS ships.

The 7th MEB’s ground combat element was Regimental Landing Team 7 (RLT-7) with four infantry battalions and a light armored infantry battalion. The latter was equipped with the light armored vehicle (LAV) developed by General Motors of Canada, based on the Swiss Piranha. The LAV is a wheeled, rather than tracked vehicle, and is classified as an 8-by-8, meaning that it has four rubber-tired driving wheels on a side. It comes in a number of variants, but the basic LAV-25—so called because it mounts a 25mm “chain” gun, with its three-man crew—is primarily a troop carrier for six Marines, well-suited for light infantry and reconnaissance missions in the desert. It had, in fact, been tested in Saudi Arabia in the mid-1980s.

The combat service support element was Brigade Service Support Group 7 (BSSG-7).

The aviation combat element was Marine Aircraft Group 70 (MAG-70). A kind of pocket air force, MAG-70 had both fixed-wing and helicopter squadrons, flying a great variety of aircraft. Its fighter-attack aircraft was the F/A-18 Hornet, which the Marine Corps considers to be the best combination fighter and attack aircraft in the world. Its attack aircraft were the AV-8B Harrier and the A-6E Intruder. The Harrier is a true vertical takeoff and landing aircraft. The Marines are the only U.S. service that has this British-designed aircraft.¹⁷

The Corps’s heavy helicopters are the CH-53D Sea Stallion and the CH-53E Super Stallion, its medium helicopter is the CH-46 Sea Knight, and for light helicopters the Corps has the AH-1W Super Cobra and the UH-1N, last in a long line of Hueys.

MAG-70 also had a detachment of KC-130s. The Marine Corps version of the Hercules serves both as a refueler and a transport.

The Commanding General, 3d Marine Aircraft Wing, Major General Royal N. Moore, Jr, had arrived in the objective area on 16 August, one day after General Hopkins. Bom in Pasadena, California, in 1935, Moore had come into the Marine Corps through the Naval Aviation Cadet program, being commissioned in 1958. He has a bachelor’s degree from Chapman College. He is both a fixed-wing and helicopter pilot. In Vietnam he flew 287 combat missions, primarily in high-performance reconnaissance and electronics countermeasures aircraft, and received the Distinguished Flying Cross and 18 Air Medals. His first task in Saudi Arabia was to determine the bed-down sites for the arriving Marine Corps squadrons. Fixed-wing squadrons went to Marine Aircraft Group 11 and helicopter squadrons to Marine Aircraft Group 16. Shortly after his arrival Moore publicly predicted a short, violent air war against the Iraqis.

On 17 August (C + 10), the first echelon of the 4th Marine Expeditionary Brigade, with forces drawn from North and South Carolina bases and air stations, sailed from Morehead City. The brigade, numbering about 8,000, included RLT-2, MAG-40, and BSSG-4. To move 4th MEB, Atlantic-based Amphibious Group Two, with Amphibious Squadrons Six and Eight, divided itself into three Transit Groups of about five ships each. Transit Group 2 would sail on 20 August and Transit Group 3 on 22 August.¹⁸

Major General Harry W. Jenkins, Jr., the 52-year-old commanding general of 4th MEB, is another Californian. A graduate of San Jose State College, he also has a Master’s degree from the University of Wisconsin. Commissioned in 1960, he commanded a rifle company in Vietnam as a captain.

On 25 August (C + 18), the air flow of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Brigade from Hawaii began. The core of 1st MEB was the 3d Marines, with two infantry battalions. No command element was sent, for there was already a sufficient Marine Corps command structure in Saudi Arabia to receive the 1st MEB’s ground and aviation components. On 26 August, MPSRon-3 arrived at A1 Jubayl from Guam, and the marriage of 1st MEB and MPSRon-3 proceeded.

On 2 September (C + 26), the I Marine Expeditionary Force assumed operational control of all Marine forces in CentCom’s theater of operations. I MEF was formed by “compositing” or fitting together the elements of the 7th MEB and 1st MEB. In Marine Corps language, the 7th MEB “stood down” on that date. Either “deactivated” or “dissolved” would be much too strong a word; 7th MEB could be readily reconstituted if the situation required it. Major General Hopkins, the commanding general of the 7th MEB, now became the deputy commander of I MEF.

I MEF’s command element had come from Camp Pendleton, California. The commanding general, Lieutenant General Walter E. Boomer, arrived at Riyadh on 17 August. Boomer is a North Carolinian, commissioned in the Marine Corps in 1960 after graduating from Duke University. As a captain he had two tours in Vietnam, the first as a rifle company commander and the second as an advisor to a Vietnamese Marine Corps battalion. He is an outdoorsman, whose favorite pastime is hunting. He received a Master’s degree in technology of management from the American University in 1973, and then taught at the Naval Academy. As do most general officers, he has a chest full of ribbons, but the most significant are his two Silver Stars from Vietnam. Silver Stars require gallantry in action and are not given lightly by the Marine Corps. He had taken command of I MEF at Camp Pendleton on 8 August, immediately before deployment, coming from command of the Reserve 4th Marine Division. He is now 52 years old.

At the same ceremony. Brigadier General James M. Myatt became the new commanding general of the 1st Marine Division.¹⁴ Myatt had been commissioned a second lieutenant in the Marine Corps after graduating from Sam Houston State University in Texas. Later he would receive a master of science degree in engineering electronics from the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. He served two tours in Vietnam, the first as a platoon leader and company commander and the second as an advisor to the Vietnamese Marines. He, too, has a Silver Star.

On 5 September (C + 29) the 1st Marine Division “stood up,” signifying that the headquarters of the division was in place, having arrived from Camp Pendleton, and was ready to assume control of the ground combat element of I MEF.²⁰

By 6 September, the three major subordinate headquarters of I MEF were in place: the 1st Marine Division, the 3d Marine Aircraft Wing, and the 1st Force Service Support Group, the last commanded by Brigadier General James A. Brabham, Jr. General Brabham is a native Pennsylvanian, born in 1939, and a 1962 civil-engineering graduate of Cornell University. During the first of his two Vietnam tours, he commanded a company in a shore party battalion; during the second he was an engineer advisor to the Vietnamese Marine Corps. Like General Boomer, he had a tour on the faculty of the Naval Academy. In recent years Brabham had been the Deputy J-4 at USCentCom, an almost ideal preparation for his present assignment. In addition to being the commanding general of the 1st Force Service Support Group, he also functioned as ComUS- MarCent; that is, commander of the Marine component of the Central Command until General Boomer’s arrival.

Consistent with existing doctrine and plans, General Schwarzkopf had directed that USMarCent be established as a service component along with Air Force (USAFCent), Navy (USNavCent), Army (USArCent), and Special Operations Command (SOCCent).²¹ ComUSMarCent would have operational control of all Marine forces ashore.

Meanwhile, the 13th MEU(SOC), embarked in PhibRon 5, was on its way from the Philippines, arriving in the Gulf of Oman on 7 September.²² Another name for PhibRon 5 with its embarked MEU was Amphibious Ready Group “A” or “ARG Alpha.”

A second ready group, ARG Bravo, was also activated in the Western Pacific and dispatched to the Gulf, carrying a bob-tailed MAGTF 6-90 under command of Colonel Ross A. Brown and including the headquarters of RLT-4, BLT 1/6, and a combat service support detachment.²³

Back in the Philippines, elements of the 9th Marine Expeditionary Brigade continued to be involved in flood relief in the well-named Operation Mud Pack.

Recognizing the operational flexibility offered by an embarked amphibious force, General Schwarzkopf had decided to keep both the 4th MEB and 13th MEU(SOC) afloat. Command lines here would run from USCinCCent to ComUSNavCent (who was also Commander, Seventh Fleet) to CATF (Commander, Amphibious Task Force), to CLF (Commander, Landing Force). General Jenkins, as CG 4th MEB and CLF, would also have operational control of the 13th MEU(SOC).

On 11 September, the first echelon of the 4th MEB arrived in the Gulf of Oman in Transit Group 1. By 17 September, all three transit groups were in the Gulf of Oman, just outside the Persian Gulf, and the amphibious task force began to plan for landing rehearsals. The first of these landing exercises, which would have the code name “Sea Soldier,” began with a night amphibious raid by the 13th MEU(SOC) followed by the 4th MEB landing across the beaches of Oman by both helicopter and surface craft.

The workhorses for the surface landing were the Marine Corps’ amphibian tractors. In 1985 the Marine Corps changed the designation of the LVTP7A1 to AAV7A1 — amphibious assault vehicle—representing a shift in emphasis away from the long-time LVT designation, meaning “landing vehicle, tracked.” Without a change of a bolt or plate, the AAV7A1 was to be more of an armored personnel carrier and less of a landing vehicle. The LVTP7, which had come into the Marine Corps inventory in the early 1970s, was a quantum improvement over the short-ranged LVTP5 of the Vietnam era. Weighing in at 26 tons (23,991 kg) combat-loaded, and with a three-man crew, it can carry 25 Marines. With a road speed of 45 mph (72 km/h), it is also fully amphibious with water speeds up to 8 mph (13 km/h). It is not as heavily armed or armored as the Army’s Bradley infantry fighting vehicle; on the other hand, the M2A1 Bradley carries only seven troop passengers.

About this time, I MEF learned that the 7th Armoured Brigade (“Desert Rats”) of the British Army of the Rhine was to come under I MEF’s operational control.²⁴ The Desert Rats, numbering some 14,000 soldiers, had earned their name fighting with the British Eighth Army in North Africa in World War II, but it had been a long time since they served in the desert. Their fighting vehicles, however, had names that seemed well-suited to the task at hand: Challengers, Warriors, Scimitars, and Scorpions. The Challenger tank is roughly equivalent to the American M60A3. The Warrior is an armored personnel carrier chosen by the British after competition with the American Bradley. The Scimitars and Scorpions are tracked reconnaissance vehicles that might be called very light tanks.

Going into Desert Shield, the Marines’ main battle tank was the M60A1, an improvement, several generations removed, of the M48 tank of the Korean and Vietnam wars. Weighing 58 tons (52,617 kg) and with a crew of four—commander, gunner, loader, and driver—the M60A1 has as its main armament a 105-mm. gun. Retrofitted with applique armor, it is considered roughly equal to, if lesser-gunned than the best tank in the Iraqi inventory, the much-vaunted Soviet T-72.

The T-72, which came into service in the late 1970s, was successfully met by the Israelis in Lebanon in 1982. Armed with a long-barreled, smooth-bored 125-mm. gun and with a three-man crew, the T-72 at 45 tons (41,000 kg) is considerably lighter than the Marine Corps’s M60A1. Both tanks have six road wheels on a side but the T-72 with its squat hull and long-barreled gun is distinctive in silhouette from the M-60, with its more massive turret.

In the South Atlantic, the 26th MEU(SOC) had arrived on schedule off Monrovia, on 20 August, and began the relief of 22d MEU(SOC). By that time 683 persons had been evacuated and the Marine presence ashore had been reduced to half a company. Next day, 26th MEU(SOC) received a change of mission. It was to proceed to the Mediterranean, leaving behind the USS Whidbey Island (LSD-41) and Barnstable County (LST-1197) and a heavily reinforced rifle company (Co K/3/8), along with helicopters and a combat service support detachment to continue evacuation operations and protection of the embassy. This detachment, under command of Major George S. Hartley, picked up the informal name of “Monrovia MAGTF.”

By C + 60, during the first week of November, Phase I of the Desert Shield deployment was complete. Nearly 42,000 Marines, close to one-quarter of the Marine Corps’s total active-duty strength and a fifth of the total U.S. force in Desert Shield, had been deployed. More than 31,000 were ashore in I MEF. The remainder, the 4th MEB and 13th MEU(SOC), were kept afloat as the landing force of a strong amphibious task force.

But there was much more to come. During an 8 November press conference, President Bush indicated that U.S. forces in the Persian Gulf area would be increased by an additional 200,000 troops. Amplifying news stories conjectured that the number of Marines in the objective area would be doubled by the addition of the II Marine Expeditionary Force from the Corps’s East Coast bases and the 5th Marine Expeditionary Brigade from California.²⁵ The Corps’s Commandant, General Gray, added a footnote to the conjecture:

“There are four kinds of Marines: those in Saudi Arabia, those going to Saudi Arabia, those who want to go to Saudi Arabia, and those who don’t want to go to Saudi Arabia but are going anyway.”

It was a point of pride with the Marine Corps that it had completed Phase I deployments without any callup of the Marine Corps Reserve, except for a few individuals who volunteered for active duty to fill mobilization billets. The President’s decision to expand the force changed that.

On 13 November, for Phase II, the involuntary callup of Selected Marine Corps Reserve units began. These units were drawn from all over the country from the widely dispersed Reserve 4th Marine Division and 4th Marine Aircraft Wing. They were needed to sustain the forces already deployed and to round out the additional forces that were to be sent.

A large-scale amphibious exercise, with the foreboding code name “Imminent Thunder,” was held near the head of the Persian Gulf, beginning 18 November. Uncertain landing conditions were created by shallow water and high winds and the amphibious task force commander cancelled the surface assault because of the sea state. The media got on to this, chattering about the fragility of amphibious landings, not accepting the obvious explanation that in an actual operation the landing could have been made, but that you don’t risk the unnecessary breakup of landing craft and vehicles in an exercise.

The helicopterborne part of the assault, launched from over the horizon, went well. A Marine battalion landing team coming from the sea linked up with I MEF forces ashore. Air support was not only Marine, Navy, and Air Force, but also British and French.

The 5th Marine Expeditionary Brigade, numbering about 7,500, sailed from San Diego on the first of December in the 13 ships of Amphibious Group Three.²⁶ The last operational deployment of the 5th MEB had been in 1962, when it went through the Panama Canal to take station in the Caribbean during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The ground element core of the 5th MEB was the reinforced 5th Marine regiment from Camp Pendleton; the aviation element, MAG-50; and the combat service support element, BSSG-50.

Brigadier General Peter J. Rowe was in command. From Connecticut and now 52 years old, he had been commissioned in 1962 after graduation from Cincinnati’s Xavier University. Later he would take a master’s degree at San Diego State University. In the Vietnam War, after completing Vietnamese language training, he had commanded an interrogation-translation team in the battles for Hue City and Khe Sanh. Before getting command of the 5th MEB, he had been assistant commander of the 1st Marine Division.

The 5th MEB’s schedule called for it to arrive at Subic Bay on 26 December, for a brief training period. Then on 1 January, it was to proceed so as to arrive in the area of operations by 15 January. “Embedded” in 5th MEB was the 11th MEU(SOC)—meaning that the 11th MEU(SOC) could be reconstituted for missions such as those being performed by 13th MEU(SOC).

On the East Coast, the II Marine Expeditionary Force consisted essentially of the 2d Marine Division and 2d Force Service Support Group, based mainly at Camp Lejeune, and the 2d Marine Aircraft Wing, based largely at Marine Corps Air Station, Cherry Point, North Carolina. II MEF called itself the “Carolina MAGTF” and it bore the imprint of General Gray’s time as Commanding General, 2d Marine Division (1981-84), and Commanding General, Fleet Marine Force, Atlantic (1984-87).

In command was the current FMFLant commander. Lieutenant General Carl E. Mundy, originally of Atlanta, Georgia. Commissioned in the Marine Corps in 1957 after graduation from Auburn University, he had served as an operations officer and executive officer of an infantry battalion. Later, his string of operational commands would include the 36th and 38th MAUs and the 4th MAB. Immediately before his assignment to FMFLant in July 1990, he had been the Deputy Chief of Staff for Plans, Policies, and Operations at Headquarters, Marine Corps. But he was not destined to go to the Persian Gulf immediately.

Nearly 30,000 Marines and sailors from II MEF were scheduled for the Gulf. Movement of the fly-in echelon (FIE) began on 9 December and was to continue, at the rate of about 1,000 troops per day, until 15 January. Part of II MEF’s logistic support would come from MPSRon-1, which left the East Coast on 14 November with a scheduled arrival date at A1 Jubayl of 12 December.

The departure of the major part of II MEF for the Gulf was marked by an elaborate farewell ceremony at Camp Lejeune on Monday, 10 December, which saw 24,000 departing troops drawn up in massive squares on the parade ground. Both the Commandant, General Gray, and the Commander in Chief, U.S. Atlantic Fleet, Admiral Powell F. Carter, were there to wish them well. Perhaps the most impressive part of the parade was the massing of the scarlet-and-gold colors of II MEF and its subordinate units.²⁷

But of the major elements, only the colors of the 2d Division and 2d Force Service Support Group would be going to the Gulf, it having been decided that there was not yet a requirement for the command elements of II Marine Expeditionary Force and the 2d Marine Aircraft Wing. The deploying aviation units would be joining the already deployed 3d Marine Aircraft Wing. Thus on 15 January, the I Marine Expeditionary Force would be structured very much like the III Marine Amphibious Force in Vietnam: two divisions, a very large wing,²⁸ and a substantial service support command.²⁹ In addition there would be two Marine Expeditionary Brigades and a special-operations-capable Marine Expeditionary Unit afloat, offering a very powerful landing force for any contemplated amphibious operations.

Except for a demonstration incident to the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, the 2d Marine Division had not been operationally deployed since World War II, where it fought with great distinction at Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Saipan, and Tinian.³⁰ Reminiscent of expeditionary practices before World War I, a rifle company was stripped out of the ceremonial guard at the Marine Barracks, Washington, D.C., and sent to Saudi Arabia, as well.

Commanding the 2d Marine Division was Major General William M. Keys, a Pennsylvanian who had graduated from the Naval Academy in 1960. During his first tour in Vietnam he commanded a rifle company; during his second he was an advisor to the Vietnamese Marines at the battalion and brigade level. He has both a Navy Cross and a Silver Star. A graduate of the National War College, he also holds a Master’s degree from the American University. Peacetime operational commands had included both a battalion and a regiment.

The new year brought an unexpected diversion of forces from Desert Shield. On Thursday, 3 January, a cable arrived in Washington from the U.S. Embassy in Mogadishu, Somalia, requesting immediate evacuation. A two-week urban battle had reached its climax and the government of the octogenarian president, Mohamed Siad Barre, was collapsing. Armed looters had entered the embassy compound. Orders went out to Seventh Fleet. The Trenton (LPD-14), operating in the Indian Ocean, launched two CH-53Es loaded with 70 Marines. The distance was 460 miles; nighttime aerial refueling was done twice from Marine KC-130s flying from Bahrain. The helicopters arrived over Mogadishu early Friday morning, 4 January, and sat down just inside the embassy gate. Part of the Marine detachment secured the perimeter of the luxurious ($35 million) compound, big enough to include a nine-hole golf course. The rest of the Marines sallied forth into the corpse-littered streets to bring in stranded Americans and other foreign nationals, including the Soviet ambassador and his staff of 35 from the Soviet Embassy a mile away. By now more than 260 persons were in the embassy compound. The hired security guards were holding off the looters with small arms fire. A rocket-propelled grenade had impacted on an embassy building. The two CH-53Es took out 62 evacuees on Friday.³¹ The next day, Saturday, 5 January, five CH-46 helicopters from the Guam (LPH-9), which had closed the distance to Mogadishu, continued the evacuation. Altogether more than 260 people were taken out, including 30 nationalities and senior diplomats from ten countries.

Just prior to 15 January the British 7th Armoured Brigade was detached to rejoin its parent, the 1st Armoured Division, which had arrived in Saudi Arabia. The Desert Rats were to be replaced by the 1st Brigade, 2d U.S. Armored Division—the “Tiger Brigade”—some 4,200 soldiers equipped with more than a hundred M1A1 Abrams tanks and a large number of M2A2 Bradley infantry fighting vehicles.

The Marine Corps had not been scheduled to get its first M1A1 Abrams, the U.S. Army’s premier main-battle tank, until November 1990, with an initial operational capability not expected until late 1991. General Gray met with General Carl E. Vuono, the Army’s Chief of Staff, and asked for the loan of some Army Ml A Is. By the first part of January 1991, with U.S. Army cooperation, 1 MEF had a significant number of MlAls, considered the most modern tank in the world. Slightly heavier at 63 tons (57,154 kg) than the M60A1, the MlAl’s most recognizable visual differences are its skirted seven road-wheels and long turret, mounting a 120-mm. smooth-bore gun.

By the 15th of January the Marine Corps had something close to 84,000 troops in the objective area, almost half its active-duty strength.³² Of this total, some 66,000 (just over a thousand of whom were female Marines) were ashore with I MEF. Afloat were the 4th MEB, 5th MEB, and 13th MEU(SOC)—almost 18,000 Marines. Taken together, these forces were close to the number of Marines deployed to Vietnam in the peak year of 1968 and more than the total landed at Iwo Jima in 1945.

Obviously, the Marine Corps’s deployment to the Persian Gulf, constituting as it did the largest Marine Corps movement since World War II, was dependent on the sealift provided by the Navy and airlift provided by the Air Force. Both the sealift and airlift were magnificent.

Contingency plans for deployment to the Persian Gulf— for all Services, not just the Marine Corps—appear to have worked amazingly well. U.S. deployments to the region were a logistical triumph. In the Korean War, under-strength, under-trained, and poorly equipped American troops were flung into battle piecemeal in an act of desperation. In some cases performance was poor, and in many cases losses were frightful. In the Vietnam War, the state of readiness of the armed forces was much better than Korea and often outstanding—but they were fed into the objective area with a deliberate slowness, reflecting the gradualism of the Johnson-McNamara strategy.

This time, as exemplified by the deployment of the Marines, the crux of the Bush-Cheney-Powell strategy was to position a superbly equipped and highly trained force in sufficient numbers on the anticipated battlefield.