Airborne: A Guided Tour of an Airborne Task Force

capability as the only parachute division in the U.S. Army. It is a strategic response force in the sense that from the time that they receive an alert order, within eighteen hours they can begin movement to virtually any place in the world. That is a formidable capability, and it is clearly an instrument that the NCAs have at their fingertips to use. I do believe that it is also a deterrence force as well, because its capabilities are well known. Any country is very rapidly approachable by the 82nd, and they know that we have the aircraft and resources to get our soldiers and their equipment there very quickly. The 82nd, probably more than any other division in our Army, sends a message when it is deployed. When we commit the 82nd, it’s an expression of the political will of the nation. It’s also a statement to anybody who is involved or observing that the United States is really serious. They have just put their best on their airplanes, and they are coming!

One interesting thing about the 82nd, though. When people think of the 82nd, they certainly think of the paratroopers with their rifles, packs, and machine guns. But it’s much more than that. When the 82nd goes someplace, it takes lots of combat power with it. We deliver parachute artillery with them, along with air defense systems, command and control vehicles, and all the other instruments of war the 82nd needs to do its business. This gives them a lot of combat power upon arrival!

101st Air Assault Division (the “Screaming Eagles”). Another unique organization, one of the two specialized divisions in the XVIII Airborne Corps and our Army. Like the 82nd, it was born out of the history of the airborne and its rich tradition. It still has the same esprit and spirit that it has always had. Its special capability is that it can take, within a theater of operations (like the Persian Gulf or the Balkans), brigade-sized task forces and move them out to distances of up to 93 mi/150 km ahead of the forward lines, and do it within hours. It’s the only organization of this kind in the world that can do something like that. During Desert Storm, they moved 155 mi/250 km deep into Iraq in just twenty-four hours, a maneuver that today is still being studied by military academicians. It was an incredible performance. How they were able to move so far, so fast, into the northwest part of the Area of Operations [AOR] is still a marvel to most folks. Then General Schwarzkopf ordered them within a day or so to move to Basra, over on the eastern side of the AOR, flying across corps and divisions to accomplish the task. Making a lateral move of this sort was unheard of in military operations. Since they operate independent of the tyranny of terrain, their mobility gives them an enormous capability. It is a very flexible organization, and with seventy-two AH-64 Apache attack helicopters as part of their organization, they pack one hell of a wallop!

10th Mountain Division (Light).[10] The 10th Mountain Division is our foot-infantry division. Our lightest force, and smallest in terms of personnel and equipment, even compared to the 82nd. By way of comparison, the 10th Mountain has 8,700 personnel compared with 15,000 for the 82nd and 17,000 for the 101st. Those 8,700 soldiers are split between a pair of foot-infantry brigades with a very high leader-to-led ratio, not much of a logistics or sustainment base compared to our other divisions, and very few vehicles and aircraft. The idea behind all this is to be able to quickly move them to a theater of operations, conducting either a permissive [i.e., unopposed] entry, or as part of a follow-on force to a forced entry. The 10th Mountain Division has been deployed quite a bit over the past few years, participating in peacekeeping operations in Somalia and disaster relief operations following Hurricane Andrew, and the primary force during Operation Uphold Democracy in Haiti. In fact, since the end of the Gulf War in 1991, they have been the busiest infantry organization in the whole U.S. Army.

3rd Mechanized Infantry Division (Formerly the 24th Mechanized Infantry Division at Fort Stewart, Georgia). The 3rd Mechanized Infantry Division [MID] is a typical armored force, what we refer to as a “heavy” division. They represent raw combat power when you need an iron fist. In fact, they are the largest such unit in the Army today. They have 250 M1A1 Abrams tanks alone, with hundreds of other armored vehicles like M? Bradley fighting vehicles and other systems. In and of themselves, the 3rd MID would have no problem utterly destroying two or three equivalently organized units, given their technological and training advantages and overmatches. This is especially true using sensors, night-fighting capabilities, and raw firepower.

2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment (ACR)—Based at Fort Polk, Louisiana, this is a light armored cavalry regiment currently undergoing a review of its organization and equipment. Presently, 2nd ACR’s cavalry squadrons are supported by their own organic artillery and engineers. This is a very flexible unit capable of rapid deployment, it was a major contribution to our success in the Haiti operation.

Attached Corps Brigades. Along with the major component units, we have thirteen separate attached corps brigades. They include a military intelligence [MI] brigade, which gives us an enormous capability on a daily basis to reach into the national intelligence assets, and also to supply intelligence products to deployed operations overseas. Obviously, this unit has the capability to tie into all the various platforms, agencies, and systems, manned and unmanned, that supply intelligence at all levels. The MI brigade has the necessary downlinks to their headquarters, and we can see all of this data real-time. It’s an extraordinary capability, though some of what we have now we did not have during Desert Storm and some of our other earlier operations.

This improvement in our MI capability has a lot to do with the criticisms of General Schwarzkopf and other senior leaders following the Gulf War. Remember that back then our field commanders and units did not have access to the full variety of tactical intelligence products, particularly those from national-level sources. Since then, the intelligence agencies and the Department of Defense [DoD] have worked hard to make that [information] available to us. Not only to push it out to us, but also to give us the capability to pull on it as well, right into our operations centers within the XVIII Airborne Corps. We can display lots of that information real-time in our operations center, and provide that intelligence information to our units. This is a very powerful organization in terms of what it can provide to us in both basic information and intelligence data. In addition, they provide a robust analytical capability to take information and data, and then turn it into something that is useful for our field commanders and units.

In the artillery business, we’ve got units equipped with both tube artillery and the M270 Multiple Launch Rocket System [MLRS], firing both rockets and the Army Tactical Missile Systems [A-TACMS]. So we have lots of rocket artillery, in addition to tube artillery. We also have two AH-64 Apache battalions in the XVIII Airborne Corps aviation brigade, as well as all the other helicopters necessary for us to move and support our soldiers on the battlefield. The corps also has an entire air-defense brigade with Patriot and Avenger/Stinger surface-to-air missile [SAM] systems. There’s also an entire engineering brigade in support of the corps, with a number of different and specialized battalions in it. Those are the combat support organizations that keep us functional, along with the logistics units. In fact, the toughest part of our business may be logistics.

No other army in the world is doing what we do with the numbers of people and things that we deploy. So the capability we have to organize ourselves and do that, to use airlift as well as sealift, takes logisticians of the Army and the other services, and it is an enormous undertaking. Then to sustain that army in the field is another thing entirely.

We as Americans sort of take it for granted that we are taking an army, in many cases, to an immature [i.e., undeveloped] theater of operations, where from the minute that we arrive we cannot even drink the water! And yet everybody in that army has to drink to survive. They also have to eat in a place where the food may be tainted, and we obviously have to protect ourselves from disease. So logisticians have got to get these things right, in terms of how they organize themselves and our sustainment operations. It goes back to the ways that they put things on ships and in airplanes, so that they arrive in the theater of operations in concert with when we need them.

This is an area where our National Guard and Reserve components are especially useful to us. Now, while the XVIII Airborne Corps probably has a larger active-duty logistics force than most other units because of its rapid- response mission, we depend heavily on the Reserve and Guard for logistics, as well as areas like civil affairs and psychological warfare operations.

The logistics side of XVIII Airborne Corps operations, which we call the COSCOM [Corps Support Command], also includes our personnel and finance groups, which are very important to us in sustaining our operations.

You know, our army has a history of producing and conducting excellent logistical efforts. World War II was an example of our mastery of the logistical art, with the way we projected our combat power into Africa, Italy, and Normandy. We’re still doing that kind of thing today, but we’re having to do it much more rapidly as well.

It is an axiom that in these times of downsizing and declining defense budgets, joint and coalition warfare has become the norm. No other military organization in the world has more experience in such operations than