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General Schwarzkopf’s misnamed “Hail Mary” envelopment of the Iraqis was tactically pedestrian but logistically brilliant. Much credit for its success, however, should go to General Colin Powell, who quietly urged the wide envelopment and made extra forces available for it.
The U.S. Army tries to predict greatness. Every crop of newly commissioned officers is carefully watched during their fledgling years. Those who show promise are given assignments of greater responsibility. In time, those with the greatest potential enter the fast track of prestigious but demanding assignments. Institutional Army then stands back and watches the “golden boys” compete with one another on the racetrack to success. Along the way, the competitors usually acquire unofficial sponsors to help them—normally senior generals
whom the officers have served well. An officer’s “rabbi” can hustle a bright career along quite well.
The route to success is clearly marked through command and staff assignments at every level, war college, and assignments outside the Army fold—to see if outsiders think an officer is as good as the Army thinks. It is a cutthroat competition for accomplishment, reputation, and visibility. During the course of a career, some of the contenders fall by the wayside, victims of mistakes or just bad luck. Most make colonel. A few of each graduating
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class make star rank; fewer still make it to four-star general; and an infinitesimal number get to the top jobs in he Army or to command of a unified command.
Along with his peers. General H. Norman Schwarzkopf entered the race the day he graduated from West Point. He ran well, but never was a front runner. He touched all the bases. He was a successful adviser in Vietnam, when few could claim that distinction.
He had wounds and medals to show he was a genuine warrior.
He served in the airborne, infantry, and mechanized infantry.
He attended the Army War College and served in the civilian Army secretariat, a Navy- dominated staff in the Pacific, and the Army staff at the Pentagon.
He gained momentary if questionable notoriety as the senior Army officer during the clumsy 1983 Grenada operation.
He made one star and then a second. He also acquired a sponsor in the person of General Carl Vuono, one of his former commanders, who in his own race with his peers had made it to the top as Chief of Staff of the Army. Vuono pulled Schwarzkopf along with him and gave him the most prestigious staff job in the Army, that of Operations Deputy. It carried with it three stars and entree to the tight circle of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
At the time Schwarzkopf’s reputation as a competent officer was solid, but he was not considered vintage stock. Most of those who knew him professionally doubted he would have been made a lieutenant general if it had not been for Vuono. Those who worked with him in the JCS “tank,” including Admiral William Crowe, the Chairman at the time, were not overly impressed by his performance. But the power of a service chief is not to be underrated. General Vuono was in his final posting, and before he stepped down he did one last favor for his protege.
The U.S. Central Command (CentCom), which rotated between the Army and the Marines, was coming open at the end of 1988—and it was the Army’s turn to command it. Heading off a Navy attempt to snag the billet for the first time, Vuono sold his fellow chiefs on appointing Schwarzkopf to the post. Most of the chiefs were relatively indifferent. The best talent in the Army went to the European theater, while the Navy rotated its golden boys between the Atlantic and Pacific commands. The Air Force had its own preferences. CentCom was a place where the services sent many of their faithful officers of lesser talent for their last years of active duty before retirement. The Iran-Iraq War was over, as was the Cold War.
A draw down of the military was on the horizon. Cent
Com was not high on anyone’s priority list of important theaters. Indeed, as the military shrank, there was some doubt that CentCom would even exist two years later. Nobody really cared who would oversee its demise.
Schwarzkopf received his fourth star and took command of his theater. He was as happy as could be. As a youngster, he had spent time in the Middle East accompanying his father, and he looked forward to renewing the old acquaintance. With characteristic zeal he set about refocusing CentCom’s mission from its Cold War target of the Soviet Union to the only logical threat to U.S. interests in the region—Iraq. He was well on his way to modifying CentCom’s contingency plans when the Iraqis invaded Kuwait and catapulted his near-moribund command into the limelight.
Iraq’s invasion shocked Schwarzkopf—as it did everyone else. The ball was in his court. To deal with the invasion he had to depend upon a staff of uncertain talent whose makeup was based more on service balance than knowledge of desert warfare. He had no forces permanently assigned to his command. He would have to accept whatever was loaned him from other commands. Schwarzkopf was an anxious man, who was uncertain of the degree and quality of support he would receive from his masters in Washington. If things really went wrong he would be hung out to dry and get the blame for an American defeat in the Gulf. Army General Colin Powell, who had relieved Crowe as the Chairman of the JCS, sensed Schwarzkopf’s anxiety and went out of his way to reassure him the Chiefs had confidence in him and promised him that he would get all the support he needed to do his job. The two of them talked on the phone daily throughout the crisis. Powell was as good as his word. He constantly reassured Schwarzkopf of his support and tried to lighten the burden of command that weighed so heavily on his shoulders.
From a professional standpoint, Schwarzkopf was eminently qualified by background and training to meet the challenge of war with the Iraqis. He was not an academic soldier. He knew what war was like from first-hand experience and knew how to fight one, even though he personally was revulsed by war’s butchery. When he took command of CentCom, however, he hardly expected to be a wartime commander. Even his initiatives to reorient his command toward war with the Iraqis were more theoretical than practical.
His career showed that he was a good soldier, but not a military genius like Douglas MacArthur. But he was more than a Dwight Eisenhower, because he knew first hand what war was like, an experience that Eisenhower did not have when he became the Supreme Allied Commander in World War II. Schwarzkopf’s superiors in
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Washington, most of whom could not match his combat experience, expected a competent if uninspired performance from their man in the Gulf. They were prepared to ensure that he did not make a mess of things.
But Schwarzkopf knew how Washington worked and loathed its ways. If he was the man on the spot he would succeed or fail on his own merits. He would look to the JCS for support, but not for guidance on how to fight his war. He would not have staff officers in Washington, devoid of responsibility, giving him unsolicited advice. He prohibited his staff from even having routine dialogue with their counterparts on the Joint Staff at the Pentagon.
Once he had overcome his initial shock of being at center stage in a major drama and determined that he would be master of his own fate, Schwarzkopf settled comfortably into his role as warlord. In time, he came to love it.
The way he organized his burgeoning command was consistent with his concept of command in war. Although he had graduated from the Army War College, he never accepted a doctrinaire approach to war. He was more influenced by his experiences in Vietnam and the training exercises he had as commander of the 24th Mechanized Infantry Division. Schwarzkopf intuitively rejected a battle by formula of the sort taught at the Army schools and practiced by the U.S. forces in NATO.
He had seen how poorly the Army had performed in Grenada in trying to conduct operations from a checklist. Experience taught him that successful warfare was decentralized. Fighting units must be free to fight in their own manner, so long as they conformed with the goal and strategy of the overall commander.
Schwarzkopf concluded early on that was the way he would fight his war. The Air Force and Navy were free to conduct their operations as they saw fit, as long as they met his strategic requirements. Fully aware that the Marines and the Army were not only different in organization but also in battle philosophy, he decided to let each have its own sector, to fight the way each thought best. He also recognized that even within the Army there were differences in combat philosophies. Air-assault soldiers thought and acted differently than tankers. He was determined to respect these differences and he made no attempt to impose a doctrinal template on the two culturally different corps that made up the Army contribution to Desert Storm.
He did not interfere with his Arab allies, either. He treated them with deference and respect and encouraged them as equally brave and competent partners in the coalition. The Arabs would have their own coequal command
and although both they and he knew that the Americans were running the show and would do the really serious fighting, the figment of teamwork was maintained to the satisfaction of all throughout the war. In short, Schwarzkopf decided to give a slice of the desert to each of his commanders. Within their own sandboxes they could do their own thing while he orchestrated the overall campaign.
His unique brand of generalship was never really tested during the war. How well it would have stood up to a series of battlefield defeats and reverses is questionable, but Schwarzkopf had no intention of putting the system to the test of defeat, and he planned to hit the Iraqis so hard that there would be no reverses. His policy of quasi-independence also caused friction between some of the parts in his grand coalition, but in the larger scheme of things,
these were more a function of personalities—including his own—than of flaws in his command philosophy. It was an amazing feat. The war, short as it was, almost devoid of the sort of interservice and international bickering that had plagued MacArthur and Eisenhower, the giants of World War II. That in itself earns him high marks for generalship.
As U.S. forces flowed into Saudi Arabia during the summer of 1990, Schwarzkopf began to relax and turn his thoughts to ways of kicking the Iraqis out of Kuwait. He had a staff that was fully engaged in managing the flow of reinforcements. They had little time to think about offensive operations. Besides, they were peacetime planners and not a battle staff. Schwarzkopf turned to Vuono for help. He needed a war-planning cell. His mentor responded by sending a team of the Army’s best and brightest to the Gulf. Trained at the Army’s Command and General Staff College at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas, the team, soon to be dubbed the “Jedi Knights,” went to work, meticulously planning an offensive. But Schwarzkopf was never comfortable with his Jedis. They used computers and statistics to draw up their plans. They did not seem to share his intuitive feel for battle. The Jedis suffered mightily from their leader’s scathing tongue throughout the planning process and were ultimately discredited in Schwarzkopf’s eyes as being too doctrinaire. Although they had been brought on board to generate the offensive plan for the entire coalition, they eventually ended up as a planning cell for only the Army.
To the surprise of none of the senior generals who knew him, Schwarzkopf’s strategy for Desert Storm was predictably pedestrian. With a large enemy force entrenched in front of him, he would outflank them, in the standard maneuver taught to officers from lieutenant to colonel.
Proceedings / May 1994
Even the Iraqis anticipated such a move and reinforced their exposed right flank to cope with it. What made his flanking movement sufficiently unique for him to proudly call it a “Hail Mary pass” (a misnomer) at a post G-Day (commencement of the ground campaign) press briefing, was the wide arc it took. The Iraqis never contemplated such a maneuver, so wide and so deep into the western desert. It was considered logistically impossible. As it turned out it was logistically brilliant. Future students of warfare will study the U.S. Army’s swing through the desert not for its strategic or operational merits, but for its logistical accomplishments.
Schwarzkopf can take only partial credit for the roundhouse maneuver. The basic concept of operations against the Iraqis was his, but its breadth and scope were almost imperceptibly influenced by Colin Powell and Pentagon planners. This of course flew in the face of the Schwarzkopfs determination to be free of Pentagon interference. Powell knew this and was smart enough not to try shoving advice down his throat. Rather he incrementally planted the idea of a wider envelopment of the Iraqis and sweetened the prescription by doubling the forces with which Schwarzkopf could do it. For his part, Schwarzkopf knew his standing in Washington, including the White House, was not too high, so he muted any objection he might have had to outside suggestions. This takes no credit away from Schwarzkopf. He was the one to make the final decision and he would be the one held responsible for its success or failure.
Schwarzkopf, however, was guilty of the very sin he ascribed to the Jedis. He failed to “read” his enemy and fell into the very trap he sought to avoid, that of being too mechanical in his planning. While he criticized what was taught about planning at Army schools he could have benefited from one of their lessons. The Army (and the Marines) teach that at the outset of planning for a military operation there are many unknowns. But planning cannot wait to collect all the data needed. To get on with the process, a planner is taught to make reasoned assumptions wherever hard facts are unknown. As planning progresses, hard facts developed by intelligence sources
replace the educated guesses made originally. When planning is completed, a planner should then evaluate any “assumptions” remaining. If any of them are critical to the | success of the plan, provisions should be made to adjust the plan to accommodate for the possibility of their being wrong. This usually takes the form of an “alternate” plan. The one key assumption that is usually left hanging in any plan is what the enemy is going to do.
This basic lesson in planning was overlooked by Cen- , tral Command. A key assumption in its plan was that the ' Iraqis would stand and fight as they had done during the Iran-Iraq War. By G-Day there was sufficient evidence to question that assumption. After the Iraqi defeat at Khafji at the end of January 1991 and intelligence reports of desertions and demoralization of the Iraqi field forces there was every reason to believe that the Iraqis would not de- | fend in place, but retreat when the allies launched the ground action. But nobody wanted to underestimate the Iraqis. No changes were made to the offensive plan and no alternate plan was developed in the event the Iraqi defenses collapsed. On the contrary, in the days before the offense, all plans continued to assume a stiff Iraqi defense. VII Corps, for example, planned to take seven days to methodically envelop and destroy the Republican Guards.
As a result of CentCom’s miscalculation, when the allies attacked and the Iraqis broke, Schwarzkopf’s strategy for destroying the Guards and the Iraqi field army unraveled. To make up for his oversight, he tried to speed up the VII Corps attack. But improvisation proved to be no substitute for good preliminary planning and many Iraqi units he aimed to destroy began escaping by the end of the first day of the ground attack.
General Trainor, former Marine Corps Operations Deputy and Military Correspondent of The New York Times, is director of the National Security Program at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. This is the second of three essays that became the genesis of his book, The General's War (Little, Brown), which will be published early this summer. Proceedings published “Schwarzkopf the Man” in April and will publish “Schwarzkopf and his Generals” in the June issue.
Only in Annapolis
Several years ago, my daughter had a chance conversation with one of the venerable ladies who can often be seen making their way along the brick sidewalks of Historic Annapolis. This particular lady was the widow of a pre-World War I graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, and she had longstanding ties to both the Academy and the town.
“Are you going to the Army-Navy game this year?” she asked my daughter.
“No, ma’am. My parents have tickets and they will go—unless my brother comes home on leave from the Marine Corps. In that case, he will take my mother’s ticket and go with my Dad.”
“Oh—is your brother a graduate of the Naval Academy?”
“Yes, ma’am—Class of ’82.”
A wistful look crossed the little old lady’s face. “Good heavens,” she said. “I remember when the Class of ’82 were all old men.”
Wes Hammond