When there are problems in the world, the phone always rings first at Fort Bragg.
For the airborne troopers of the 82nd Airborne Division, trouble always seems to come in the dark of night. This time was no exception. Two days earlier, on August 6th, 1990, at 2300 hours/11:00 PM Eastern Daylight Time, the division had received a “Red Line” or “Red X-Ray” message. This was to inform them that they had been placed on alert for a possible deployment to Saudi Arabia in response to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait a few days earlier. The next day, less than eighteen hours after the arrival of the alert message, the first units of the 82nd, a battalion of the division’s 2nd Brigade (325th Airborne Infantry Regiment), were ready to roll. All they needed was an order to go. That came quickly enough.
On the other side of the world, an American delegation of top-ranking Administration and military leaders were briefing members of the Saudi Royal family, including King Fahd.[52] Viewgraphs were flipped, satellite photos were shown, ideas and offers were put forward. Then, after just a few minutes of deep thought, a profound decision was reached. U.S. military forces were to be invited to the Kingdom to defend against a possible Iraqi invasion, and to help begin the process of freeing Kuwait from the hold of Saddam Hussein. Secretary Cheney and General Schwarzkopf made phone calls home to the U.S., and the great deployment was on.
However, Saddam’s forces were already on the ground, just a few miles/kilometers from the Saudi Arabian border and the oil fields that would clearly be the target of any invasion. The nearest U.S. forces designed for this kind of deployment were over 8,000 miles/12,850 kilometers away. The key would be who could hold control of a handful of air bases and ports in northern Saudi Arabia through which virtually all of the Coalition forces would flow in the next six months. Clearly, if Iraq had any sort of ambition for taking a piece of Saudi Arabia, they had a huge head start over the U.S. forces that would be defending against an invasion.
The United States and their allies had something just as important: forces that were more agile and mobile than anything Iraq has ever had. Back at Fort Bragg, in the Corps Marshaling Area (CMA, a sealed compound where units can prepare their equipment and themselves for a combat deployment), the units of the 82nd’s 2nd Brigade were all set to answer the call when it came. Within minutes, the first units boarded buses for the short ride over to the Pope AFB Green Ramp. There, a number of chartered jumbo jets waited to take them on the trip to the airfield at Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. Just eighteen hours later, the first of the chartered jets touched down, and were personally guided to a revetment. Then, in a crush of newspaper and television personnel, the first ground troops strode off the jet and headed off to an assembly area.
Within just a few hours of landing, they would be digging in north of Dhahran, holding the line for what would eventually be a flood of a half-million personnel from America. For the next few days, they would be the only U.S. ground forces in the Kingdom. It was a scary time. The 2nd Brigade had arrived with only three days’ rations (MREs, of course!), no heavy armor, and only whatever ammunition they could carry on their backs. The temperatures went up to 130° F/54.4 °C, forcing the troopers to drink over eight gallons/thirty liters of fluids each day. Three Republican Guards Divisions were only 60 miles/100 kilometers away, and the paratroops wryly joked that if the Iraqis came south, they would be little more than “speed bumps”!
However, the Iraqis did not come on August 8th, 1990. Their reasons remain perhaps the greatest “what if” of that entire episode in the Persian Gulf. Was it that they had actually run out of supplies, and needed time to refit and resupply? Or was an invasion ever one of Saddam’s goals? We may never know the truth for sure. However, one thing is certain. Had the Iraqis come south, they would have been engaging American and other Coalition soldiers defending the soil of a nation that had done them no harm. It would have happened in full view of the world press, causing what became known as the “CNN effect” six months earlier than it eventually did.
In the end, though, those Republican Guards divisions stayed on their side of the border, where they would have to wait six more months to be chopped up by Chuck Horner’s airmen and the armored troopers and attack helicopters of Fred Franks’s VII Corps. The 82nd Airborne would be there too, though playing a relatively minor role in the actual fighting. But during those heart-stopping days in August of 1990, the “speed bumps” of the 2nd Brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division were all that stood between Iraq and control of 70 percent of the world’s known oil reserves.
No matter how you view the results of the 1990/1991 military actions in the Persian Gulf, one thing is certain. The rapid deployment of the 82nd’s first units to Dhahran was a defining moment in the crisis. It showed the world, especially Iraq, that America was serious about its commitment to keeping Iraq in check. It also showed that the U.S. was capable of rapidly putting ground forces into the theater, albeit ones with limited weapons and supplies. These images had a heartening effect on our allies, and probably caused a pause or two in places like Baghdad, Amman, and Tripoli. Quite simply, the rapid deployment of those first airborne troopers may have made Saddam blink. Once again, the 82nd had likely deterred aggression against an ally, though perhaps only by a narrow margin.
In the Persian Gulf, the narrow margin was their deployment speed. The ability of the 82nd to go from a cold start to having the first combat unit in the air in under eighteen hours is their vital edge. The famous Confederate cavalry leader General Nathan Bedford Forrest is supposed to have said that victory goes to the combatant “that gets there firstest with the mostest.” Today, the 82nd is America’s living embodiment of this classic concept. When the All-Americans go off to a crisis, they do so leaner, meaner, and faster than almost any other unit in the U.S. military. They do pay a price for their strategic mobility in terms of firepower and sustainability, but the payoff is the ability to beat the bad guys into a crisis zone. In a time when appearances (at least on television) are frequently more important than reality, getting there first can be as important as victory itself. Sometimes, it is victory!
Having shown you how the 82nd is constructed as well as how it gets to war, it is time to finally show you how the whole concept comes together: the Division Ready Brigade and the eighteen-week/eighteen-hour operational cycles that are the cornerstones. When you are finished, I think you will understand why the 82nd is so respected by our allies, and feared by our enemies.
Division Ready Brigade: The 82nd Concept of Operations
To understand the 82nd Airborne Division’s rapid ability to deploy, you need to accept a few little rules that might be considered the “fine print” of airborne warfare. First, you do not normally move an entire airborne division (over 16,000 personnel) all at once. It can be done, but it takes days of planning and preparation, something usually lacking in a crisis situation. The next point is that since you probably will
These points made, let’s make a few assumptions. First, the National Command Authorities will give you just eighteen hours to go from a cold start to the first battalion task force (roughly a third of an airborne brigade) being “chuted ups” loaded and wheels-up, flying to their assigned objective area. Second, those same command authorities will want additional units making up the rest of the brigade task force to follow in the shortest time
