Warrior's Rage

Joining Franks for the meeting were the CENTCOM deputy commander, the J-2 (that is, the deputy chief of staff for Intelligence), two or three other senior officers, Colonel Hayes, and Franks’ executive officer, a Navy commander.

After brief introductions, the meeting opened with a twelve-minute monologue by General Franks during which he assessed the state of affairs in Iraq. His comments were laced with quite a bit of profanity and were difficult to follow. When General Franks finished his remarks, he asked for my opinion.

In roughly seven minutes, I outlined the following points. First, whatever we undertook, it would have to involve actions the Iraqi opponent did not expect or anticipate. Second, a robust, tracked, armored, and highly trained force should strike directly at Baghdad, avoiding contact with the Iraqi army as much as possible, to induce an early and complete collapse of the regime. By avoiding contact with the Iraqi army in the south, I argued, we would preserve as much of the army as possible for use in the postconflict stability phase.

Third, surprise depended on a skillful manipulation of both American and Southwest Asian (SWA) perceptions. Although I argued against a bombing campaign, I made the point that U.S. ground forces would have to be tightly integrated with air forces. This arrangement would allow us to attack from a “cold start.”

General Franks listened patiently and said the following in his colorful, heavy southern drawl: “Attack from a cold or standing start, I agree. Small and fast, I agree. Straight at Baghdad, I agree. Simultaneity or sequentially, simultaneous is probably better, I am not sure yet.”

Franks then mused for another ten to fifteen minutes about what he called a “generated start” along with a series of political-military considerations and comments about carrier battle groups and air forces. He then returned to the subject and said: “What size force are you suggesting?”

“Initially,” I answered, “no larger than 35,000 to 40,000 ground troops, primarily armored combat troops, with rapid reinforcement during the advance and subsequent immediate occupation of Baghdad by 15,000 light infantrymen.”

“You mean about two divisions,” asked Franks. “No, sir,” I replied, “I meant four or five five-to-six-thousand-man armored battle groups on at least two axes.” Armored forces could ignore most of the minor skirmishes that would consume light infantry units dependent on airpower and artillery for survival. The collateral damage would then also be minimized.

The 15,000 infantrymen would be prepositioned in Oman, with a cover story that they were training for employment in the horn of Africa. When Baghdad fell and the airport was ours, they would fly into Baghdad. Backed by armored firepower, they would secure the peace by restoring calm and public order in the capital city until Iraqi soldiers could replace them.

This plan was consistent with the idea of thoroughly controlling Baghdad while leaving the rest of the country under the control of Iraqi army units that cooperated with us until we could turn over Baghdad too. No one at CENTCOM suggested that American soldiers and Marines should occupy and control Iraq.

Based on my experience in 1991, I was sure that if left out of the fight, the Iraqi army and its officers would be useful in restoring order to the country under the direction of a new government. In the concept plan prepared for Rumsfeld I argued that, if possible, Iraqi military units should be integrated into our advance on Baghdad, ensuring that we arrived with Iraqi army troops capable of policing the capital with us. Sympathetic Iraqi army units also offered us the best chance for discovering and securing WMD sites, along with Baathist police and intelligence centers.

Flooding Iraq’s villages, towns, and cities with American soldiers and Marines was a prescription for serious anti-American violence, and I strongly opposed the idea. The Arabs would regard such an intrusive presence as public humiliation, not as liberation.

On the whole, General Franks reacted more positively to my proposal than I expected, although I was unsure at the time whether this was just a performance designed to mollify Secretary Rumsfeld. Since I was nobody’s “boy,” in the sense that I had no four-star sponsor pushing me, I fully expected to be curtly dismissed and guided out of Franks’ office. Instead, Franks talked for some time. Then, once he had made it clear that he was finished expressing his views, he invited the other attendees to give their opinions.

Franks’ deputy commander, Gen. Michael “Rifle” Delong, was the first to speak. He started by raising questions based on the threat from chemical, nuclear, or biological weapons, referred to simply as “WMD.”

DeLong seemed to favor a long air bombardment campaign and a larger buildup on the ground over time, which, in my view, would make the use of WMD much more likely.

I listened politely to his views and then told him that the alternative to a long buildup, a lengthy air campaign, and a ponderous, linear assault on the Desert Storm model was a swift strike at the jugular to collapse organized resistance—a strike that moved faster than the enemy could react. The importance of minimizing strikes from the air against a country that was already exhausted from years of sanctions and whose civil populations needed the water, power, and sanitation infrastructure intact was beyond the generals’ comprehension. The very notion that we should focus our attack away from the Iraqi army, which I was convinced would not fight much—if at all—was ignored.

But the discussion continued. The deputy commander was not satisfied with my responses.

It was now the J-2’s turn to question me.

The deputy chief of staff for Intelligence began by criticizing my concept of operation on the ground that the time frame equated to the period when Iraq’s ground forces achieved their highest state of training readiness. To me this comment was ludicrous; frankly, I did not think that the Republican Guard could stop a toilet from overflowing. But I kept my cool.

Franks interrupted and asked me about the quality of the Iraqi enemy.

I told him that surely, as former assistant division commander of the 1st Cavalry Division, he too recognized that our soldiers and their armor were vastly superior to anything the Iraqis could put into the field against us.

General Franks was trapped. He found it impossible to disagree with this assertion.

When the meeting finally ended, I was led out of Franks’ office into another room, where the discussion continued with the J-2, an Army brigadier general, who—like, unfortunately, most of the officers I talked to—had little or no personal experience of direct-fire combat in Iraq or anywhere else.

When I was asked what we would do in the event that the Iraqi armored formations inside Basra decided to come out of the city and attack near An Nasiryah, I replied, “Great! This will give our air forces something to do. They will annihilate them in minutes.”

My confident reply did not impress the J-2. He strongly objected to my faith in the effectiveness of American airpower as a tool to deal decisively with threats to our flanks or rear, claiming that I overestimated airpower’s effect and the willingness of the U.S. Air Force to cooperate with the Army.

Interservice squabbling seemed to be as alive and well as ever. All too many of those in high command seemed to be permanently afflicted with a high-school mentality.

Though I tried to listen attentively to the general, his lecture grew tiresome and my mind wandered. I had heard these views before—how my ideas and concepts of operation were too risky, why if we did what I proposed our open flanks would crack under Iraqi counterattack, why weeks of bombing and hundreds of thousands of American soldiers would be required to defeat the pathetic Iraqi army. I remembered how the Army generals of 1991 had initiated potentially brilliant maneuvers only to abort them and squander victory because they lacked the will to see them through to completion.

The general sitting in front of me could just as easily have been a general from 1991—nothing had changed in the Army generals’ thinking about war. And why should it? The generals select their friends to succeed them. Thus, it was no surprise that the views of this man were the same as those I heard ten years earlier. We obviously had learned nothing about Arabs or Iraq during the twelve years since the first Gulf War. Still, I was truly shocked when I learned later that General Franks expected that a ground offensive to take Baghdad might last as long as three months—I could not imagine any Iraqi force resisting a determined ground attack by American armored forces for more than a few minutes.²

The Army generals who had seen disaster waiting for them on the other side of every sand dune in 1991 had cloned themselves, producing a new generation of risk-averse, uninspired, uniformed bureaucrats who pretended to be bold leaders but actually were troubled with doubt and fear.

The one glaring difference was that most of the Army generals sitting at CENTCOM and Third Army headquarters had no personal experience of direct-fire combat against the Iraqi military or, in most cases, against anyone who knew what “right looks like.” The names and faces of the generals who would eventually lead Army forces into Iraq for a second time were well known to me. Like their four-star mentors, they were only as good as the canned tactical methods they knew from the training centers and simulations. None of them were inclined to ask what else might work.

Fearing that President Bush and Secretary Rumsfeld would do what Lyndon Johnson and Robert McNamara had done and go to war with the generals they had found on taking office I was overcome by the premonition that whatever plan the generals followed, the outcome would be disastrous. The generals I knew did not know enough about Iraq or its people, and like their mentors in 1991, they were filled with fear of fighting a robust Iraqi army that simply did not exist. They were not the generals we needed. We did not need generals sitting in front of a TV screen watching icons and video feeds while our soldiers fought it out on the ground with an enemy who did not conform to the generals’ plans. Iraq, I feared, would prove to be a nightmare.

I grew weary of the discussion.

Time was suspended while a kind of monumental inner silence filled me. I no longer wanted to listen to the generals’ endless list of fears and concerns. I wanted to go back in time to a different place. I wanted to be with soldiers who did not take counsel of their fears—soldiers I admired and loved—soldiers who advanced under fire without hesitation, following officers who understood combat leadership from the front, the meaning of mobility and firepower, who were always ready to issue concise, relevant “orders from the saddle.”

In the deep recesses of memory, I could still see these men behind me in long columns of armor, submerged in a swirling sea of sand, wind, and black rain. Drifting away from the confines of CENTCOM headquarters, my mind echoed with the noise of tanks grinding against the desert floor of southern Iraq.

After all, I had fought in Iraq once before.