Leaders in War

West Point Remembers the 1991 Gulf War

Frederick W. Kagan, Christian Kubik, Frederick W. Kagan, Christian Kubik

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134269259
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

Leaders in War present unique first-person perspectives across the spectrum of American combat operations during the 1991 Persian Gulf War. From division commanders to platoon leaders, the authors deliver an insider's view of tough leadership challenges, tragic failures, and triumphant victories. Leaders in War captures the essence of the post-Cold

Part 1: SENIOR COMBAT COMMANDERS

1: THE BATTLE FOR NORFOLK

Brigadier General John S. Brown

The 2nd Armored Division (Forward) brigade, based in Garlstadt, Germany, deployed to Southwest Asia to become the 1st Infantry Division's 3rd Brigade. This unit provided much-needed additional tank capability to the growing United States VII Corps. That corps consisted of the 1st Infantry Division, along with the 1st and 3rd Armored Divisions, the British 1st Armoured Division, the 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment, and the 1st Cavalry Division, and was one of the most powerful corps in military history¹ Its commander was General Fred Franks, who had left one of his feet in Vietnam more than two decades before.

The 1st Infantry Division's mission within the VII Corps was unique. While the armored divisions to the west would rumble around most of the Iraqi fortifications along the Saudi-Kuwaiti border, the 1st Infantry Division was to punch straight through, clearing safe lanes through the belts of obstacles for the British 1st Armoured Division. The Big Red One (as the 1st Infantry Division is known) would then dash nearly straight north to meet up with the 1st and 3rd Armored Divisions, which were rolling in a wide curve inward from the west. There, in the wastelands of northwest Kuwait, the 1st Infantry Division joined in fierce battles against the vaunted Republican Guard.

The author commanded one of three battalion-sized task forces within the 3rd Brigade of the 1st Infantry Division. This Brigade was the 2nd Armored Division (Forward) brigade from Germany. General Brown's tankers faced several tough missions: breaching, fighting, passage of lines, long range advancements through enemy sectors, and multiple, shared objectives. These challenges demanded near perfection at all levels. Sometimes, as the author points out, this was an unattainable goal, despite the superior training and technology of the US forces. But in the end, the 1st Infantry Division accomplished its mission and more.

Through snapshots of action and insight, General Brown offers an analysis of key character traits and the relevance of those traits to modern combat operations. The true value of traits such as discipline, attention to detail, and truthfulness gives American military leadership the vital edge. In the end, the author shows, character matters, and not only at the individual level. General Brown's experience also shows that when these traits become part of a unit's character, they become tremendous combat multipliers. Leaders of character build units of character. And as we see in this account of small unit warfare in the Gulf War, units of character win battles.

At 2338 hours, on 26 February 1991, the brigade-sized 2nd Armored Division (Forward), attached to the 1st Mechanized Infantry ‘Big Red One,’ pulled on line after a forward passage through the VII Corp's 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment. The cavalrymen, arrayed along the 70 easting west of Kuwait, passed intelligence that the battlefield was clear for 3 kilometers forward. They were precisely correct. At the 73 easting, the brigade's leading M1A1 tanks rolled into a fierce exchange with dug-in Iraqi tanks and infantry. The bloodiest single engagement of the Gulf War, the battle for a map overlay goose-egg code-named ‘Norfolk,’ was on.

The patch of trackless desert being contested may have had a name other than Norfolk; if it did, the Americans fighting for it didn't know it. The 2nd Armored Division (Forward)'s attack was but a small fraction of the gigantic tank battle in which VII Corps crushed Iraq's elite Republican Guard. Norfolk itself was an objective split north from south and shared with the 1st Brigade of the 1st Mechanized Infantry Division, and the sprawling all-night battle through its 200 featureless square kilometers was representative of the worst of the Gulf War fighting. Unlike the elegant precision that television coverage suggested was characteristic of the campaign, this particular ground fighting was nasty, brutal, and confusing. Technology counted for much, but not for all, in its ultimate results.

One definition of discipline is an ability to induce men – and women – to do that which they would not themselves choose to do. Another is to drill sufficient to ensure the reliable execution of rehearsed actions despite personal risk to those who must carry them out. Both definitions applied to American combat behavior on Norfolk. Few soldiers in the vehicles beetling across the horribly exposed desert tabletop amid the surreal confusion of incoming and outgoing rounds would not have preferred to be elsewhere at the time. They nevertheless performed their duties capably, each soldier a small but important player in a huge military system of systems that performed as designed. Consider the nature of the fighting to appreciate the role of discipline in its successful conclusion.

Iraqi defenses on Objective Norfolk were oriented southwest in three belts facing an anticipated attack up the Wadi al Batin; vehicle revetments oriented 225° magnetic. Forty-one days of aerial bombardment had littered the battlefield with wrecked equipment. Nevertheless, 60-plus surviving tanks and several dozen personnel carriers – for the most part from the 37th Brigade of the Iraqi 12th Armored Division – were hidden in the 2nd Armored Division (Forward)'s sector among more than 200 destroyed vehicles and pieces of other types, mostly trucks and artillery.² The Americans attacked at night due east out of the desert. The attacking brigade rolled in a tightly organized mass with task forces three abreast and a total of eight companies in the first wave: frontages of 1,500 meters per company, 100 meters per tank. Within companies, vehicles were actually 50 meters apart, with several times that distance separating companies and over a kilometer between task forces. M3 Bradley scouts worked the intervals between the task forces.

The first exchanges were easy American wins. The Iraqis had no thermal sights, could not see through the darkness, and were facing the wrong way. Some Iraqi tanks could not adequately traverse because of spoil – turned-up earth – flanking their revetments; others presented perfect flank shots when attempting to shift to better positions. The leading M1A1 tanks pushed through this first belt, and the fight became more difficult. Now burning vehicles were behind the Americans, and Iraqis in the second and third belts had illumination with which to see to fire. Task force commanders had already pulled their scouts back behind the M1A1s, realizing that the thinly armored Bradleys would not survive the fire from successive Iraqi positions. The withdrawal of the scouts was anticipated and is in accordance with doctrine. Once they pulled back, however, the leading tanks became the sole source of battlefield intelligence. They had little choice but to bull forward through the obstacles they encountered with little warning, all the while reporting en route. Enterprising M1A1 gunners had discovered that thermal sights would detect the temperature differential of mines under shallow sand. Gunners talked drivers through gaps in the minefields; other vehicles followed precisely in the tracks left by the tanks. The terrain featured more relief than the map suggested, and tank ditches complemented natural obstacles. These were invisible in the darkness. Eleven M1 A1s, including a battalion commander's, fell into tank ditches or through the roofs of Iraqi bunkers. Most crews self-recovered, but a few had to be rescued by intrepid M88A1 Medium Recovery Vehicles. The M88A1 crews had to rush forward to find the stricken vehicle in the confusion and darkness, and had to conduct a major portion of their work dismounted amid the threat of mines and incoming fire.

The most dangerous aspect of the obstacles and recovery efforts associated with them was the proximity of Iraqi infantry. Bunker complexes, well supplied with ammunition, laced together in rabbit-warrens of mutually supporting positions. Fortunately for the Americans, the fighting positions were designed in such a manner that Iraqi riflemen and Anti-Tank Guided Missile (ATGM) gunners had to expose their heads and shoulders for aimed fire. Readily distinguished as thermal hot spots against cold desert sand, these provided all the target well-drilled M1A1 gunners needed. Sheets of M240 machine-gun fire swept through every position where an Iraqi raised his head.

As the lead tanks struggled through the obstacles toward the second belt of defenses, a desperate fight erupted in their rear. Five T-55 tanks and some associated Iraqi infantry with ATGMs, inadvertently missed in the darkness by the M1A1s, rose behind them and opened fire on a trailing M2 Bradley company. We will examine this engagement in some detail later. The fierce exchange destroyed the Iraqis, but left four Americans dead, eighteen wounded, and three M2s disabled. Meanwhile, the leading tanks swept on through the second belt of Iraqi defenses. Here they encountered fewer obstacles, poorly dug positions, and less infantry. The Iraqi gunners missed most of the time and hit without penetrating the rest of the time. The Americans never missed and always penetrated. In little more time than it would have taken to simply drive through without fighting, the M1A1s were on their way to the third belt.

In the third belt the American tankers found themselves in the midst of an entrenched Iraqi infantry battalion. Obstacles were patchy and vehicles few, but resistance determined. The M1A1s paused to avoid allowing ATGM teams to their rear again. With desperate courage, Iraqi ATGM gunners crawled on their bellies past temporarily stationary American tanks, hoping to come up behind them for a grill door shot. With equal determination, American gunners in the second echelon machine-gunned Iraqis crawling through intervals in the first. Task force commanders recognized the extreme risk of remaining in melee with Iraqi infantry at such close quarters. To have dismounted American infantry at this point would have hopelessly intermingled friend and foe. The brigade commander authorized a 500 meter withdrawal and a temporary pause, intending a deliberate artillery preparation before continuing.

Artillery preparation proved unnecessary. As dawn broke on the desert horizon, something broke in the Iraqi will to resist. Perhaps daylight gave them their first full appreciation of the mass of armor opposing them. Starved as they were for supplies of all types, perhaps they were discouraged by the businesslike refueling and resupply they observed executed directly in front of them, but just out of range. Perhaps they despaired when two of their tanks attempted to move in daylight and were immediately destroyed by single rounds from over 2 miles away. Perhaps they had simply had enough. They came in unit sets, bringing their wounded with them. Unlike prisoners the brigade captured elsewhere, prisoners from Norfolk seemed well-fed, well-led, and proud of the fight they had put up. Nine hundred and thirty-seven surrendered to 2nd Armored Division (Forward) on Norfolk that day.³ Perhaps a third as many lay dead in tanks, bunkers, and spider-holes throughout the sector – that figure can never be certain. We do know the American losses: six dead and twenty-five wounded. In retrospect many Americans concluded that the lopsided casualties indicated a fight that had been easy. It was not. The superiorities American soldiers demonstrated with respect to discipline, teamwork, and training radically broadened a margin of tactical advantage that was not as great initially as most might think.

Attention to detail is a trait most military establishments pride themselves upon, and American military leaders have extended that characteristic into a prescriptive fraction of its training system that defines tasks, conditions, and standards for individuals and units at every level. The American penchant for such ‘checklist training’ emerged from the unmilitary character of the American people. Given tiny peacetime military establishments, wars prior to 1965 brought paroxysms of expansion that could have been impervious to order. American managerial talent asserted itself, however, and over time Americans developed techniques to quickly create usable combat organizations where there had been none. This concept reached full fruition in the methodical Army Training Program of World War II, and officers and soldiers in the United States Army remain the beneficiaries of volumes of carefully written checklists defining what is expected in each of a wide variety of training circumstances. Units work through these painstakingly, time and again, in environments as close to war as training can approximate. No system could more thoroughly rehearse units for tactical circumstances they have correctly anticipated.

Army training programs did in fact correctly anticipate most of the tactical circumstances encountered in Southwest Asia. Take, for example, the forward passage of lines that carried the 2nd Armored Division (Forward) through the 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment immediately prior to Norfolk. This was a complex maneuver, executed on the move in the dark virtually without notice on the heels of 100 kilometers of deployed combat operations. It required nineteen separate actions at the battalion level and compressed a brigade moving on a 10-kilometer front through six individual passage lanes following linkups under blackout conditions. If poorly executed, units would have intermingled, the attack would not have occurred on time or in a coordinated manner, and prospects for fratricide would have been enormous. A fortuitously preserved leaf from a battalion commander's notebook captures the complexity involved: contact points, passage lanes, release points, friendly identification, challenge and response, train locations, and critical intelligence. This coordination occurred over the radio from the turrets of moving vehicles under blackout conditions. Nevertheless, commanders who had never met – home stationed as far apart as Bavaria, Lower Saxony, and Fort Riley, Kansas – flowed through each other with a smooth virtuosity. They may not have known each other, but they knew the mission and they knew the detailed coordination necessary to carry it out.

At an entirely different level, tank gunnery provided yet another example of the efficacy of detailed checklist training. The M1A1 represented amazing technical advance, but it did not maintain or shoot itself. Boresighting and applying established zero was a painstaking sixty-three-step daily process involving the entire crew. A trained crew could be through the process within fifteen minutes of first light; many wartime commanders did not permit their crews to eat until they had first boresighted. This daily ritual carried forward countless exacting training hours on snakeboards, in motor pools, in Unit Conduct of Fire Trainer (UCOFT) simulators, and on ranges. What experienced M1A1 gunner could not recite the tasks, conditions, and standards for each often engagements on Tank Table VIII?

M1A1 gunnery translated to the Norfolk battlefield with awesome results. Dozens of Iraqi tanks, destroyed with a single round, revealed neatly defined 120mm entry points centered on the turret ring. Vehicles that were exposed mere inches above their revetments were annihilated at the same pace as more horribly exposed brethren attempting to shift positions or escape. USAREUR gunners had trained to the standard of bringing down individual E-type silhouettes at 600 meters with their 7.62mm M240 coax machine guns. Iraqi ATGM gunners and infantrymen slumped back into open foxholes, precisely drilled through helmets and upper torsos. Whatever one may feel about the human consequences, one must acknowledge the technical skill demonstrated by American gunnery.

By this author's count, Norfolk required the translation to the battlefield of nineteen battalion Army Training and Evaluation Program (ARTEP) tasks, twenty-three company ARTEP tasks, twenty-nine platoon ARTEP tasks, and each of the Tank Table VIII and Tank Table XII engagements less NBC (Nuclear, Biological, Chemical). How one trains is how one fights. The brigade had trained hard; it fought well.

The greatest danger in checklist training and its commitment to drilled responses appears when unanticipated – as opposed to anticipated – circumstances emerge. No one can foresee all that will develop in battle. As near a fit as 2nd Armored Division (Forward)'s training was to the battle it actually fought, there were surprises. A penchant for attention to detail can become a straitjacket if it is not wedded to the flexibility necessary to deal with the unexpected.

An example of the flexibility required in war emerged from contradictions inherent in the purposes the brigade's attack was to serve. It had orders to clear its sector, yet it also was enjoined to sustain a rapid pace of advance to facilitate the expedient destruction of the Iraqi Army. Both were legitimate priorities; the first sanitizes terrain for the subsequent passage of vulnerable logistical assets, the second accelerates the collapse of an already disordered opponent. Unfortunately the two concepts – certainly insofar as they had been exercised in training – have antithetical characteristics. Clearance is painstakingly methodical search and destruction involving considerable dismounted activity. The pace of the advance that senior commanders sought to sustain, on the other hand, had already been 100 kilometers in a day. No one was wrong in dictating both priorities. Follow-on logistics had to push forward quickly, the pressure on the Iraqis had to be sustained, and there was insufficient ‘ramp strength’ –dismounted infantrymen – in an M3 Bradley battalion to leave infantry methodically clearing Norfolk while other battles remained to be fought. This world is an imperfect place. The most feasible dual-purpose solution was adopted: eight companies’ worth of armored vehicles came on line and rolled through the sector in such a manner that no point was more than 100 meters from the path of an armored vehicle in the first wave. A second echelon of combat vehicles covered much the same ground before combat support and combat service support vehicles attempted the crossing. Vehicles encountered en route were destroyed, and prisoners of war disarmed and directed to march to the rear unescorted but in column and fully erect. The matrix of oncoming American vehicles, all of which were in communication with each other, was dense enough that such a column of dismounted Iraqis could be kept under continuous observation until they finally reached the trains and were loaded into a cargo Heavy Expanded Mobility Tactical Truck (HEMTT) or trailer and moved to the rear.

This improvised clearance technique worked reasonably well without much inhibiting the pace of advance. However, several dozen Iraqi infantry and five T-55s remained quietly hidden in deep revetments with their engines off. These were invisible to the thermal sights of the M1A1s that moved past them during the hours of darkness.

The circumstance of T-55s to the rear of the advance was further complicated by the forward movement of combat trains – the small contingent of fuel trucks, cargo trucks, mechanics, and medics tucked inside a battalion task force engaged in a prolonged advance. Doctrine is clear; these supplies and services are so critical that they cannot be allowed to disappear rearwards of thousands of combat and combat support vehicles churning along in the wake the leading tanks. As a rule of thumb, the combat trains accompany the task force – generally inside its armored envelope – in advances of 20 kilometers or more. In training, few task forces encounter circumstances wherein they actually move their combat trains with them. Even at the spacious Fort Irwin National Training Center, task forces generally complete their missions, then bring combat trains forward when consolidating on an objective or realigning their defenses. The sustained charge into Iraq permitted no such neat pauses; combat trains rolled with the tanks. The working mechanics of maneuvering relatively unwieldy collections of trucks – few of which had radios – and thin-skinned vehicles on the battlefield had been rehearsed but were incompletely resolved. In the brigade's central task force the leading tank companies became heavily engaged and the task force commander called the trailing tank company forward of the trains to reinforce his fight to the front. This tank company rolled past two of the hidden T-55s, closely followed by the combat trains. When the T-55s rose behind the task force to join the battle, M977 HEMTTs were between them and the M1A1s that could have destroyed them. It was not supposed to work out that way. The resolution of this dilemma is a tribute to the flexibility of the NCOs who found themselves closest to it. Another phenomenon distinguished the battle for which task forces trained and the one they actually fought. Few gunners had previously engaged hard – i.e., solid metal – targets instead of plywood panels with service ammunition. None had ever fired at a vehicle that was firing back at them; it was their first battle. Through a thermal sight, a tank firing creates almost the same image as a tank being hit. The image created by destroyed vehicles and by those which have not recently moved can be much the same. A tank that is already burning can appear to be firing if the turret remains on, distances are great enough, and flames are not yet catastrophic. Men recently killed are still warm. The actual thermal imagery of the battlefield was new to the gunners fighting on it. It was not uncomm...