CHAPTER 24

Colin Powell, Norman Schwarzkopf, and the empty triumph of the 1991 war

T he two generals who dominated the public image of the Army of the early 1990s—what might be called the newly vigorous, actively deployed, post-post-Vietnam force—were Colin Powell and, joining him but not supplanting him, H. Norman Schwarzkopf. They were oddly similar men, near contemporaries with parallel experiences in the military: Both were commissioned in the late 1950s and served two tours in Vietnam, first as advisers and then with the bottom-scraping Americal Division. Despite those demoralizing assignments, both stayed in the Army through its post-Vietnam crisis of confidence and labored to rebuild it. In background, both also were somewhat outliers for the Army—Schwarzkopf being a liberal intellectual from New Jersey, Powell a black inner-city New Yorker, also generally liberal but less of an intellectual.

Yet there was one major difference between the two: Schwarzkopf, who had grown up partly in Iran, was more sophisticated, but it was Powell, a son of the South Bronx, who proved more adroit in working in the political world of Washington. The experience that formed Powell, and perhaps resulted in his elevation beyond four-star generalship to become chairman of the Joint Chiefs and then secretary of state, likely was not his service in uniform but rather his time as a White House Fellow.

Schwarzkopf never had any such assignment, and his lack of exposure to the world of politics would show in his contentious dealings with Washington during the 1991 Gulf War. He had the opposite experience: In an early brush with Washington seventeen years before that war, he had been part of a team that labored to develop a list of suggested installations for the Army to shutter as part of its budget cutting. “We were confident that this was the best and fairest base-closure list in military history,” he remembered. What he meant by that was that it was based on the Army’s assessment of what fit the needs of the Army and of the likely impacts on the economy and the environment. When Congress rejected the proposal, Schwarzkopf concluded that there was something wrong not with his thinking but with the political system: “Eighteen months of hard work counted for nothing. . . . To accomplish anything in Washington meant having to compromise, manipulate, and put in the fix behind the scenes.” Schwarzkopf did not pause here to consider his own blindness. He had spent more than a year on a project that would deeply concern hundreds of members of Congress, who would have to approve the proposed closures, but he had not taken that into account before coming to his conclusions. In addition, the Army’s views on base closures would ultimately prove to be hardly “the best” course for the nation, nor even for the Army. Left to its own devices, the Army, in subsequent rounds of closings, tended to shutter installations on the coasts and leave open those in economically depressed sections of the rural South, which, among other drawbacks, was discouraging to military spouses looking to find work. Congress was more attuned to changes in the population than the Army was.

Going along to get along

Colin Powell, by contrast, learned early on not to reject how Washington works but to study it. “Democracy did not always function well in the light of day,” he would remember being advised during his time as a White House Fellow, part of an idealistic program that introduces small numbers of highly promising young Americans to the workings of government. “People have to trade, change, deal, retreat, bend, compromise, as they move from the ideal to the possible. To the uninitiated, the process can be messy, disappointing, even shocking. Compromise can make the participants look manipulative, unprincipled, two-faced.” Powell thrived in this environment, attracting the notice of rising Republican officials such as Caspar Weinberger and Frank Carlucci.

Powell was, in many ways, exactly what the Army needed after Vietnam, to repair its relationship with Washington. Political leaders respect political power, and Powell developed an independent political base. He was a general the American people felt they could trust. He brought to his positions not just a political savviness but also a personal history that appealed to the public. He was black, from a working-class background, and also was a graduate of City College of New York, carrying none of the Westmorelandesque odor of West Point. His combination of an easygoing public persona and an intense work ethic resembled Eisenhower’s, for whom he “always felt a special affinity. . . . I admired him as a soldier, a President, and a man.” Like that earlier officer, he believed in maintaining an atmosphere of “perpetual optimism.” Also like Ike, he brought to the Army a knack for geniality, a trait that might stem from the fact that both men had become powerfully ambitious relatively late in life, after their military careers had begun and their personalities largely had been formed.

That appearance of easygoing motivation might have enabled both men to be involved in troubling episodes without being tainted by them. Ike’s military and political careers were not damaged by his being present during MacArthur’s 1932 attack on the Bonus Marchers. Nor was Powell much hurt by being on the staff of the Americal Division during the attempted cover-up of the My Lai massacre, or by being brushed by the Reagan Administration’s bizarre attempt to illegally fund the Nicaraguan contras by selling weapons to Iran. (In fact, Powell once observed that the latter scandal helped his career, by creating a vacancy in the post of national security adviser to President Reagan in 1987, when he was the deputy adviser. “If it hadn’t been for Iran-Contra,” he once cracked to Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., “I’d still be an obscure general somewhere. Retired, never heard of.”) Also like Eisenhower, Powell enjoyed solving problems. But while Ike was drawn to human puzzles, Powell preferred to relax with the more predictable mechanical issues offered by automobile engines, making a hobby of rehabilitating old Volvos. “Cars, unlike people, lack temperament,” he once explained. “When working on them, I was dealing not with the gods of the unknown, but the gods of the certain.”

Even more than Eisenhower, Powell seemed to attract, or locate, the right sort of mentors, and, better than most officers, he learned how to advance. He worked briefly for Gen. DePuy, that most influential of officers inside the post-Vietnam Army, and in his memoir he labels himself a “DePuy alumnus.” After his White House fellowship, he moved to Korea to take command of the 1st Battalion of the 32nd Infantry Regiment, the same unit Lt. Col. Don Faith had led so tragically on the east side of the Chosin Reservoir in 1950.

But it was command of a brigade that seems to have been more significant for Powell’s career and his approach to generalship. Successful brigade leadership as a colonel is an essential hurdle to clear before promotion to one-star general. In his memoir, as he recalls his time in brigade command, Powell offers an odd little sermon about going along to get along. There is an element of defensiveness in it, but there is also pride, perhaps that of a triple outsider—an African American and New Yorker with an ROTC commission—who learned how to play the Army’s game. “I had long since learned to cope with Army management fashions. You pay the king his shilling, get him off your back, and then go about what you consider important.” He was not inclined to become one of those irritating Army dissidents, he says, in a sentence burdened by three metaphors: “I detected a common thread running through the careers of officers who ran aground even though they were clearly able—a stubbornness about coughing up that shilling. They fought what they found foolish or irrelevant, and consequently did not survive to do what they considered vital.” This willingness to cope was a recipe for getting ahead, as Powell’s subsequent career would demonstrate. It was a trait that would serve him well for decades—but ultimately might have led to his undoing. Powell might have been training himself to kowtow just when he was reaching the age and rank at which he should have been starting to shake off such deferential habits. Retired Army Lt. Gen. David Barno, looking back on his Army career, observed that “the higher you rise, the more pressure there is to conform and to be a loyal team player. The phrase I kept hearing was, ‘stay in your lane.’” This meant, he said, that one should keep quiet and not comment on anything other than one’s own duties: “When we want your opinion, we’ll beat it out of you.” In 1991, Powell, having risen to become chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, would prove to be an Eisenhower without a Marshall—that is, a master implementer lacking a real strategy to implement. His efforts to prod Cheney and his other superiors into mulling the strategic questions would be rebuffed: Cheney would effectively tell him to stay in his lane.

The empty triumph of the 1991 Gulf War

Norman Schwarzkopf also benefited from Colin Powell’s growing influence in Washington. He held his position as commander of American forces in the Gulf War because of Powell. When the post of commander of Central Command (Centcom), the American military headquarters for the Middle East, opened up in 1988, it was, according to a fairly recent tradition, the Navy’s “turn” to fill it. But Powell, by then Ronald Reagan’s national security adviser, believed that the position should go to someone familiar with ground forces—that is, from the Army or Marine Corps—rather than an admiral. He intervened with his old friend and mentor Frank Carlucci, then secretary of defense. “And that,” Powell stated, “is how Norm Schwarzkopf came to obtain the command that would propel him into history.”

On the ground, in the air, and even in diplomacy, the Gulf War of 1991 was designed as the anti-Vietnam. When Iraq invaded Kuwait in the summer of 1990, Powell already had moved from the White House back to the military and had become chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. A major factor driving both Schwarzkopf and Powell as they prepared the American response to Saddam Hussein’s attack was a determination not to repeat the mistakes of the war in Indochina. Looming over all discussions was the Weinberger Doctrine, which Powell had helped develop and which held that America should never go to war again halfheartedly and without the support of its people.

At White House meetings during the run-up to the American intervention to oust Iraqi forces from Kuwait, Powell kept in mind his dismay at the men who had constituted the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the 1960s, “fighting the war in Vietnam without ever pressing the political leaders to lay out clear objectives for them.” His determination to do so led him to raise the question, at a White House meeting, of “if it was worth going to war to liberate Kuwait”—a query that provoked Defense Secretary Dick Cheney to lecture him later that day, saying, “You’re not Secretary of State. You’re not the National Security Advisor anymore. And you’re not Secretary of Defense. So stick to military matters.” Nevertheless, Powell pointedly would flag the need to call up the Army and Marine Reserves, a major stumbling point in the earlier war.

Schwarzkopf likewise invoked Vietnam when discussing military personnel policies. According to a staff log he quotes in his memoir, in October 1990 Schwarzkopf proposed a plan not to have individual soldiers rotate but instead to switch out ground combat units every six to eight months. But Cheney decided that there would be no rotation at all and that soldiers would remain in the war “for the duration”—a sign that the administration of George H. W. Bush would act sooner rather than later and that the duration would simply not be that long, because the president would not let troops sit in the desert waiting endlessly for economic sanctions to change Saddam Hussein’s mind. When briefing his subordinates on his war plan, Schwarzkopf wrote, “For the benefit of the Vietnam vets—practically the whole room—I emphasized that, ‘we’re not going into this with one arm tied behind our backs.’” Unlike in Vietnam, where the American presence increased incrementally to a half-million troops, Schwarzkopf would begin his counteroffensive with that number in place. Likewise, the air campaign was dubbed “Instant Thunder,” specifically to contrast it with the gradualism of the Vietnam War’s bombing campaign, which had been code-named “Rolling Thunder.” In their tense face-to-face meeting in Geneva, Switzerland, on the eve of the war, Secretary of State James Baker would warn his Iraqi counterpart, Tariq Aziz, that if it came to an American assault, “It will be massive. This will not be another Vietnam. It will be fought to a quick and decisive end.”

Schwarzkopf’s determination not to be a Vietnam-style general might have blinded him to his own shortcomings. In October 1990, Schwarzkopf dispatched a group of his planners to brief the Bush Administration’s national security leadership on his tentative plans to oust Iraq’s military from Kuwait. The reception in Washington from the civilian officials to his proposed head-on assault was chilly. “I found the plan unimaginative,” Cheney would recall drily. One of Cheney’s subordinates, Henry Rowen, mocked it as “the charge of the light brigade into the wadi of death.” Others summarized the Centcom plan as “hey diddle diddle, straight up the middle.” Brent Scowcroft, the soft-spoken national security adviser, was even harsher than Cheney. “I was pretty appalled,” he said years later. “It sounded to me like a briefing by people who didn’t want to do it. . . . The preferred option that they presented was frankly a poor option and my first question is, ‘Why don’t you go round to the west?,’ and the answer was, ‘Well, we don’t have enough gas trucks for it.’” In the wake of that head-slapper, Cheney established his own competing planning operation. Doing so, he said, “sent the signal to everybody, the Joint Staff, out in the field and Central Command: ‘Guys, get your act together and produce a plan, because if you don’t produce one that I’m comfortable with, I’ll impose one.’”

Despite that disastrous briefing, Schwarzkopf held on to his post. Not all senior officers were so lucky. The Gulf War would be marked near its outset by the relief of a top general, but, in keeping with the new pattern, the firing was conducted by a civilian. In this case, Gen. Michael Dugan, the Air Force chief of staff, angered Powell and Cheney by touting, in a newspaper interview, the role airpower would play in the impending war. Powell’s lingering indignation was evident in his summary of that Washington Post article: “In a single story, Dugan made the Iraqis look like a pushover; suggested that American commanders were taking their cue from Israel . . . suggested political assassination . . . claimed that airpower was the only option.” The next day, Cheney relieved Dugan.

•    •    •

January 17, 1991, brought the first night of the air war against Iraq. It marked the moment it became undeniable that the U.S. military had successfully overhauled itself in the sixteen years since the fall of Saigon. As the air strikes began, even inside the military there was a lingering skepticism about the reliability of America’s new high-tech arsenal, which bristled with largely untried weaponry such as precision-guided bombs and radar-evading “stealth” aircraft. “I don’t give a damn if you shoot every TLAM the Navy’s got, they’re still not worth a shit,” Powell supposedly said about Tomahawk land attack cruise missiles before the war began. As it happened, he was wrong; they worked well. At the Pentagon, Powell and Cheney braced themselves. “We assumed with respect to the air war that our worst night would be the first night,” Cheney recalled. He spent the night at his Pentagon office and was surprised when he was told that out of nearly seven hundred aircraft that flew that night, only one had been lost. “It was just a phenomenal result. I could not believe that we’d done that well.”

On the second night of the war, there were warning signs that the civil-military discourse, so essential to the healthy conduct of a war, had hit a sticking point. Iraq began its major political gambit of the war, a campaign to draw Israel into the conflict, by firing seven Scud missiles across the border. This was a tactically insignificant move, but it had the strategic aim of provoking Israel to retaliate, which would embarrass other Arab states into leaving the American-led coalition. Schwarzkopf, unattuned to politics, was obtuse about this danger, believing that dealing with the problem was somehow unrelated to his job. In his view, the small, inaccurate Iraqi missiles, which were being pushed to carry warheads far beyond their effective range, posed no military threat, and so the issue was not on his turf. Defense Secretary Cheney, who had pushed Powell away from discussing political considerations, came away from talks with Schwarzkopf doubting that he “fully understood the importance of dedicating assets to hunting Scuds.” Schwarzkopf’s stance provoked Paul Wolfowitz, then a Pentagon policy official, to crack, “The guy supposedly has read Clausewitz and knows wars are political, right?” In fact, Schwarzkopf simply was following both Cheney’s direction and the lessons he had learned in Gen. DePuy’s post-Vietnam Army: Decouple the fighting from the strategy and focus on the tactical level of war.

To remedy the situation, Cheney ultimately had to intervene. He ordered Schwarzkopf to divert aircraft from planned missions around Baghdad and instead assign them to try to destroy mobile Scud launchers in the vast western Iraqi desert. Even if the anti-launcher effort proved ineffective, Cheney recalled, “I needed to be able to say [to the Israeli government], ‘Look, last night we flew fifty sorties over western Iraq dealing with this and here are the results we got.’ That’s the one place where I intervened really in the conduct of the war. . . . Didn’t kill many Scuds. . . . But it was very important that we tried, that we were perceived as doing everything we could.” Cheney was thinking strategically, but Schwarzkopf was not. Cheney, Powell, and Schwarzkopf all were at fault for not pausing at this point to focus on repairing the quality and clarity of their discourse.

Instead, Schwarzkopf would blunder on. He failed to consider that in order to find and destroy Scud launchers, it likely would be necessary to insert Special Operations troops as surreptitious observers on the ground in western Iraq.

He also would prove slow to grasp the implications of early ground actions in the war. At the end of January 1991, the Iraqi army launched a surprise assault into Saudi Arabia. This offensive, now known as the Battle of Khafji, was little understood at the time and is less remembered now. As two of the best analysts of the 1991 war, military journalist Michael Gordon and retired Marine Lt. Gen. Bernard Trainor, put it in their study, this was a well-planned offensive involving three Iraqi armored divisions, “designed to humiliate the Saudi army, start the ground war, and begin to bleed the Americans.” The Iraqis fought as they had against Iran a few years earlier, punching a hole into the enemy line and then sending in reinforcements. But there was a crucial difference in this battle: Iraqi antiair defenses proved ineffective against American attack aircraft, which were able to severely weaken the Iraqi forces, especially by hitting the armored vehicles in massed columns and the supply trucks bringing in ammunition and fuel. The Iraqis were stunned. We know now that Iraqi commanders were surprised by the vigor and precision of the American counterattack. One rattled member of Iraq’s 5th Mechanized Division, it was reported, said that American airpower had done more damage to his brigade in half an hour than it had suffered in eight years of fighting the Iranians. Senior Iraqi commanders agreed. In a tape captured after the 2003 American invasion, Saddam Hussein was heard telling his advisers, “After the operations of al Khafji, some of the commanders said to me, ‘Sir, we think there has been a mistake. It means all our assessments about the American army were wrong.’”

Yet neither Schwarzkopf nor Powell appreciated the meaning of the Khafji encounter. Schwarzkopf airily dismissed the three-day battle of Khafji as “about as significant as a mosquito on an elephant.” This was a failure of generalship, of mulling battlefield events and adjusting one’s plans in light of fresh information. Khafji should have made it clear to Schwarzkopf that the Iraqi army was not as formidable as he believed and that it could be defeated more quickly than he thought, but Schwarzkopf did not grasp this message. His failure would have major implications for his handling of the American ground offensive into Kuwait several weeks later.

•    •    •

The lingering differences between Powell and Schwarzkopf came to a head several weeks later, in mid-February 1991, on the eve of the ground attack. Schwarzkopf remained hesitant to begin. Powell confronted him in a heated telephone call, saying to Schwarzkopf, “Look, ten days ago you told me the 21st. Then you wanted the 24th. Now you’re asking for the 26th. I’ve got a president and a secretary of Defense on my back. They’ve got a bad Russian peace proposal they’re trying to dodge. You’ve got to give me a better case for postponement. I don’t think you understand the pressure I’m under.” (That last comment is striking in its pleading tone. It is hard to imagine George Marshall beseeching Eisenhower in such a manner.)

Schwarzkopf roared back angrily, “My responsibility is the lives of my soldiers. This is all political.” He continued: “My Marine commander says we need to wait. We’re talking about Marines’ lives.”

Powell probably should have responded coolly that as chairman of the Joint Chiefs it was his job—his obligation—to ensure that politics were connected to military operations. After all, the best-known observation of Clausewitz, the great Prussian theorist of war, is that war is the continuation of politics by other means. A war not fought for political ends is simply mindless bloodshed. Yet Powell did not say any of that. Rather, he responded with full-throated emotion. “Don’t you pull that on me,” he shouted back at his fellow Vietnam veteran. “Don’t you try to lay a patronizing guilt trip on me! Don’t tell me I don’t care about casualties!”

Schwarzkopf backed down a bit. “You’re pressuring me to put aside my military judgment out of political expediency,” he pleaded. All in all, it was a remarkably revealing exchange, showing neither general in a good light. Schwarzkopf’s unreflective insistence on some sort of separation between war and politics foreshadowed the indeterminate conclusion toward which the two men would steer their campaign.