could cut off nearly half of the region’s oil exports.”
“Ha4(the Persian Gulf oil?”
“Exactly,” Freeman acknowledged. “And the threat doesn’t stop there. With a few massive air raids, Iran can cut the Gulf pipelines flowing out of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman, and the UAE—there goes another twenty-five percent of the region’s oil. With their new long-range Backfire supersonic bombers, they might be able to cut the transArabian pipelines running west to the Red Sea—there goes another ten to fifteen percent. The rest—flowing from Iran itself—would presumably be cut by us. If successful, Iran could cut the entire world’s oil supply by thirty percent, all by itself, in a very, very short, lightning-fast blitzkrieg.”
“No oil from the Middle East,” Hartman murmured aloud. “One-third of the world’s oil supply … almost half of America’s oil supply.
It would be a catastrophe, Mr. President,” “And we couldn’t stop it from happening,” Chastain said. “I can say, as we stand right now, that it would take far longer than six months to amass a force equivalent to the one mobilized in Desert Shield, and it would be far more dangerous to U.S. forces. Even if the Iranians made the same mistake as Iraq did and let us accumulate our forces in Saudi, it would take us almost a year to build up a seven- hundred-fifty-thousand-man fighting force.”
“A year!” Vice President Whiting exclaimed. “You’re exaggerating!”
“I wish I was only trying to be conservative, Ellen,” Chastain said, “but I believe that’s an accurate assessment. At the end of the Cold War, we switched from a deployed counteroffensive force to a defensive expeditionary force—except that the money wasn’t spent on boring, low-tech things such as more cargo planes, container ships, and railroad cars. In addition, we’ve got fewer active-duty forces, and we pulled them out of overseas bases back to the U.S. We’ve got fewer soldiers, they’re farther from the Middle East, and we’ve got fewer transports to take them where they need to go. Bottom line, Mr. President: we plan on a year and hope for a miracle.” Everyone in the Cabinet Room was stunned into silence.
They all remembered the buildup prior to the Gulf War of 1991; although the first American defensive forces had arrived in Saudi Arabia less than a day after the invasion of Kuwait, it had seemed it would take forever to build up to what could be called an offensive force. Even when Desert Shield had turned into Desert Storm, no one had been sure if they had enough men and equipment to do the job. It had been sheer luck—and they all knew it, although few dared admit it—that Saddam Hussein had decided not to press his attack on Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Turkey during the Coalition’s long mobilization, and that Coalition forces had had powerful, oil-rich friends with large military facilities. “What do we have over there right now, Arthur?” Martindale asked.
“We’ve got a token force over in the Persian Gulf region right now,” Chastain replied. He quickly scanned his briefing notes, his shoulders visibly slumping as he read: “One carrier group currently within striking distance of Iran; one F-16 attack wing and one F-15 fighter wing in Saudi, just forty planes and one thousand men; three Patriot anti-missile and antiaircraft companies, split up between Kuwait, Saudi, and Turkey, plus one training company in Bahrain and one training company in Israel; one bomber wing in Diego Garcia. A total of about fifteen thousand troops—a trip-wire force, nothing more.
“Everyone else is stateside, and I mean stateside—we have one fourth of the troops deployed in Asia and Europe now that we did in 1990,” Chastain continued. “The air units could set up rapidly in Saudi, Israel, or Turkey—if the Iranians haven’t destroyed the big Saudi bases, or if Turkey doesn’t prohibit combat forces from staging there, like they tried to do in 1991—but we can’t count on any ground forces for several months because we don’t have the same size forces forward-deployed in Europe or Asia. Most of our infantry and heavy-armor units would deploy from North America—that would take them an extra four to six months to get to the Middle East. Our sea and air supply bridges will need some time, perhaps six full months, to come up to full capacity. And, of course, there’s no easy land bridge to Iran—we can’t deploy to an allied country and roll across a flat desert at high speed to get to Iran, like we could against Iraq …”
“If I may interject here, Mr. President,” Jeffrey Hartman said, “but as distasteful as this may sound, it appears as if we have an even trade—we shot up their island, they shot up our spy ship. I don’t believe we are on the verge of war here. Iran is flexing its muscles, to be sure, but the entire world knows that the Khomeini battle group is a paper tiger.
“Mr. President, General Freeman, I know losing even one man is hard, but I don’t believe that this is a prelude to war, nor should we make it so. After all, we started this mess by bolstering the Peninsula Shield attack mission. The loss of those ISA agents was tragic, but we took a gamble and we lost. We should just back off and let everyone cool down. We stirred up one big hornet’s nest, Philip.”
“Maybe someone should have taken care of the nest before it got so big that it threatened all the neighbors,” Freeman retorted. “The only mistake we made was letting the GCC fight our battle for them.”
“So we should’ve sent in a bombing raid on Abu Musa Island?”
Hartman asked. “We should’ve bombed that Iranian island? We’d be the bullies then, General.”
“Instead, we’ve lost a major intelligence-collecting vessel,” Freeman pointed out, “and Iran will just park their carrier task force in the Strait of Hormuz and rebuild the missile systems on that island. Do we dare sail a carrier into the Gulf, Jeffrey?
What will we have to concede to Iran so we get a guarantee that they won’t attack the carrier group?”
“They are not going to attack our carriers, Philip,” Hartman said, shaking his head. “This whole thing is a non-issue, General. We back off, let them rant and rave, and things will be back to normal. We’ve sailed a dozen carrier battle groups past those Iranian military bases in the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz over the past few years, and the Iranians have ignored us.”
Freeman didn’t continue the argument, and that surprised President Martindale, who studied his National Security Advisor for a moment in silence. In the previous administration, Philip Freeman had been the long-suffering Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a lone voice urging a definitive, hard-hitting military policy in a White House that had seemed very reluctant to use military force. Before that, he’d been one of the main engineers of the Pentagon’s “Bottom-Up Review,” or BUR, a comprehensive review of U.S. military doctrine that was supposed to decide the future of the military forces for the next twenty-five years.
Freeman was a true visionary—even Martindale, leader of the political opposition at the time, had recognized it. Freeman knew that America was done fighting grand intercontinental World War III-scale wars. No longer were nuclear weapons and massive armored columns streaking across the European countryside—or even the Arabian deserts—guaranteed to win wars; in fact, Freeman had written, the nukes and the big, slow, resource-draining weapons systems were sapping the life out of the U.S. military. Speed was life. Wherever and whenever America was threatened, America had to respond rapidly, with the application of accurate, deadly—but not necessarily massive—firepower. Hit and Rit. Shoot and scoot. It wasn’t necessary to flatten the entire battlefield to cripple an enemy’s ability to make war—every little cut, every little break weakened him. Philip Freeman had showed why America didn’t need thirty bases in Germany or ten bases in England or eight bases in Japan or fifteen carrier battle groups. Global reach and global power could allow America, with proper funding and support from Congress, to fight two MRCs—major regional conflicts, Desert Storm-sized wars—and win, even with fewer forces.
But Freeman had seen his hard work and dedication to duty go to waste, as the best military machine in the world crumbled around him due to a lack of funding and, more important, a lack of strong leadership. The White House and Congress had taken the BUR cuts and effectively doubled them, reasoning that if America could win two Desert Storms with 20 percent fewer forces, it could win one Desert Storm and hold another enemy at bay with 40 percent fewer forces. Congress seemed totally out of control: bases that the Joint Chiefs thought were useless but were located in areas popular with lawmakers were given added funding, while vital logistical and construction bases in major cities with a large civilian payroll were closed.
Foreign-policy disasters had frustrated Freeman as did domestic affairs. He had been deeply hurt after the deaths and public disfigurement of eighteen U.S. soldiers in Somalia, especially since the Somali warlord responsible for the humiliation was not only still breathing, but being flown around by United Nations officials. He had been angry and frustrated over the deaths of U.S. and allied peacekeepers in Bosnia; he had been professionally frustrated when Congress wouldn’t budget enough money even for the greatly scaled-down BUR military, He’d seen the U.S. military being sucked into a Vietnam-like quagmire in Bosnia, and seen belligerent Iran, North Korea, and China growing in military strength while the United States was constantly scaling back. War fighting was out, and peacekeeping was in—and to a soldier’s soldier like Freeman, it was like stepping into a boxing ring wearing handcuffs.
It had been obvious to presidential candidate Kevin Martindale that these perceptions were tearing Philip
