Operation Desert Storm II

[Shortdawg]

STRATEGY
Gulf War Redux
The president seems determined to attack Iraq again. But have we fully grasped the lessons of the last time around?
By WILLIAM M. ARKIN
William M. Arkin is a military affairs analyst who writes regularly for Opinion.

June 23 2002

WASHINGTON -- It is now crystal clear that the Bush administration intends to go to war with Iraq. The armed forces have gone so far as to create a top-secret code name for the planning. They call it "Polo Step," and access is highly restricted and compartmentalized.

Unfortunately, the determination to fight has not been matched by a clear, creative, carefully thought-out approach to developing strategy and tactics--an approach that would take into account the full capabilities of the armed forces today and the real lessons of Operation Desert Storm.

Many members of the Bush national security team are veterans of the first war with Iraq, among them Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell. Yet Pentagon planners have received little guidance beyond hazy injunctions to bring about "regime change" and eliminate Saddam Hussein's capacity to build weapons of mass destruction. The result is a planning vacuum, filled by a cacophony of competing proposals and "concepts" that reflect the biases of individual services or the pipedreams of political factions: Launch 250,000 U.S. ground troops from Kuwait, some suggest; pound hundreds of Iraqi targets with unrestricted air power, others urge; send in the Special Forces to work their Afghanistan-style magic among the Kurds; or, the favorite of right-wing hawks, unleash that phantom resistance force known as the Iraqi National Congress.

The compartmentalized secrecy classification only makes it harder to get the planning process back onto solid ground. Wars cannot be planned on the floors of Congress, or in other public places. But locking out most of the Defense Department's own professionals doesn't work well either. American military power is in the midst of such a radical transition, and the challenge posed by Hussein is so difficult, that President Bush needs the best minds available--all of them--thinking as boldly as possible.

A good place to start would be with "Engagement Area Thomas." Probably no one in the Bush White House would recognize the name, and few if any among the Defense Department's current civilian leadership would either. But "EA Thomas," as the Army called it back in 1991, offers today's war planners a lesson they sorely need right now.

Every armchair general knows about the famous ''left hook'' of Desert Storm, the nighttime sweep across the desert to the west of Kuwait that carried U.S. tanks and other armored forces around the unguarded left flank of Hussein's vaunted defensive line and routed his legions.

Less well known is the role of the 101st Airborne Division. The Screaming Eagles were on the leading edge of the left hook with a specialized assault force of more than 200 Apache and Cobra attack helicopters. The then-new Apaches, in particular, carried the Hellfire antitank missile, which would become famous in Afghanistan a decade later when CIA drones launched them against elusive Al Qaeda targets.

The 101st was to use the firepower and mobility of its attack helicopters and light infantry to slow any Iraqi onslaught until the heavy armor of other divisions could reach the scene. As it happened, after 39 days of bombing by U.S. and allied warplanes, Hussein's forces were no longer in the onslaught business. Instead of fighting a delaying action, the 101st leapfrogged 155 miles farther into southern Iraq. There, it established massive refueling and rearming points in the desert; they were supposed to support further attacks into the ancient heart of Iraq--the Euphrates River valley, which lay at the far northwestern edge of the American battlefield.

By the end of the first day of the ground war, Feb. 24, 1991, the 101st had flown more than 1,000 helicopter sorties. Before U.S. tanks were anywhere near catching up to them, Screaming Eagle helicopters were hovering over Iraq's Highway 8, the strategic southern route between the Kuwaiti theater and Baghdad.

Late in the evening of day two, a desert shamal came howling through the region, a blinding, choking dust storm that shut down almost every element in the American advance. It didn't matter. Iraqi forces in the Kuwait theater were beaten. Their only remaining option was retreat.

The only other possible routes to Baghdad were Highway 6 from Basra far to the east along the Iranian border, or smaller roads along a series of causeways and embankments through the vast marshlands where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers meet. Lt. Gen. Gary Luck, commander of the 18th Airborne Corps, dispatched an additional aviation brigade to the 101st Division force to close off that option.

Enter EA Thomas.

Apache helicopters from the 101st launched attacks into the marshes. And commanders had decided to set up a "kill box" 120 miles farther to the east on a stretch of Highway 6 they designated "Engagement Area Thomas." Thomas was just 10 kilometers north of Basra, Iraq's second-largest city. The division's plan was to airlift its 1st Brigade of light infantry into Thomas, in a move its official history says "would have firmly closed the door on the escaping Iraqi army by blocking the north-south Basra road."

The plan was extraordinarily bold. It meant airlifting hundreds of American troops far beyond the existing battlefront and landing them behind a retreating but still heavily armored enemy. But out of the blue--or so it seemed to the Screaming Eagles--an overall cease-fire was declared and the war ended.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf famously declared the gate closed on escaping Iraqi military units. In fact, the gate was not closed, and much of the Republican Guards, Hussein's best-trained and best-equipped units, escaped into the megalopolis of Basra as the war ended.

Yet the mistake that was made in leaving Hussein an escape route then pales in comparison with the mistakes that have since been made in interpreting what happened in the Gulf War, especially the little corner of it named Engagement Area Thomas.

No U.S. troops landed there, but Apache helicopters flew daylight missions into the area, along the critical escape route, for four hours before the war ended, and they never encountered a single Iraqi tank.

Hussein's was a slow moving and truly defeated army, and the United States had the mobility and the audacity to perform complete surprises, if creative thinkers who actually understood the geography and the battle conditions had been allowed to use their creativity. But Schwarzkopf, and by extension, Washington, did not see what air power had already achieved in defeating Hussein's army.

They were myopically wed to the doctrine that the only effective way to wage a war is to overwhelm a theater of operations with ground troops, effectively matching Iraqi tanks one for one. American military leaders and their civilian superiors could not conceive that southern Iraq could be split off from Baghdad through Army air power--or that an audacious move by airborne troops could isolate an entire Iraqi army, with all the negotiating leverage that would have given the United States against Hussein.

That is precisely the lesson of EA Thomas, however. New weapons and equipment are opening the way to new strategies and new tactics, but the technology is changing faster than the understanding and vision of those who command it.

If the Bush administration is to fight a second war with Hussein, what it needs to do above all else is to break free of its obsession with secrecy and bring its best military minds to bear on the problem of devising strategies and tactics that take full advantage of the revolutionary capabilities our armed forces now possess.

The current Central Command proposal to launch 250,000 troops from Kuwait in a Normandy-style invasion does not represent the kind of audacious thinking the problem requires and our present capabilities will support. Neither does the notion of pounding hundreds of targets in an all-out air war. And the right-wing love affair with the CIA-created Iraqi National Congress or with Kurdish fighters in the north is foolishness.

But a combination of all those approaches, coupling air-mobile Army assault forces with strategic air power and covert operators linked to proxy forces like those in Afghanistan, offers the best hope of a positive outcome--not just on the battlefield but in whatever comes afterward.

So far, that is not happening. Polo Step briefings are filled with arrows and symbols for bridges and other targets, with no sense of taking real advantage of Iraqi geography, the ability to isolate Basra or the fact that the Kurds already control a huge portion of the north--including usable airfields (remember what airfields in Pakistan and Uzbekistan meant for Afghanistan?).

Whatever the Bush administration decides to do militarily, Americans need to approach from three fronts--north, south and west. That means Special Forces and helicopters. It means desert boots and aircraft on Iraqi territory.

Putting U.S. forces inside Iraq will convey the deadly serious message that the United States is not going to walk away this time. It will say the United States is not hoping to match Hussein tank for tank. And it is not going to keep on trying to hit Hussein through the Iraqi civilian population--the one form of warfare he can probably survive indefinitely.

Most important, the best plan for the United States is to say exactly what it is going to do right up to the end, so that the Iraqi people and the rest of the world understand.
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