responsibility of presiding over the termination of many of his proud units.
That was several months down the road, however. In the near term, he had more pressing tasks. He had seen the flood of East Germans coming west in November. By early March 1990, he had pulled the 2nd ACR off their over-forty-year border mission. Formal mission changes would eventually be issued, but for Franks and VII Corps, change was needed now in training. He thought of new missions.
One thing was certain: they would be nothing like the terrain-oriented mission the corps had been used to. In a terrain-oriented mission, the lanes and routes the attackers can take are well known. You set up obstacles to slow him down while your own reserves are flown in. If you have to fall back, it is to already prepared positions. Your logistical support and command-and-control structure are clear and well worked out. Your command posts can remain in previously prepared positions where communications are dependable. After four decades of confrontation in Europe, defense against every conceivable attack had been minutely choreographed.
That would no longer be the case. In a rapidly changing world, the new mission for a powerful armored corps like VII would more likely involve finding and killing a similarly powerful opposing force at some distance from the corps's launch point. In other words, it would be a force-oriented mission, involving a long—100 kilometers or more — movement to contact, followed by a meeting engagement.
Thus the corps commander and the corps staff needed to know how to move the corps over those long distances. In contact, they needed to achieve coherence of formation — to keep units physically positioned relative to one another so that they could mutually support one another in a fight — and to rapidly focus their combat power — to arrange their tanks, infantry, artillery, and aviation in the right combination for maximum effect against the enemy. Formation alignments would have to be shifted rapidly… and units would have to be trained to know how to do that. Reactions and responses would have to be trained to a much greater quickness than in terrain-oriented operations. There would have to be far greater adaptability of mind and agility of units. Meanwhile, logistics would become stretched out. A lot of material would somehow have to find its way to the right units, all of them on the move: food, fuel, and ammo. And the entire corps — all of its many component units — would have to be orchestrated the way Franks and Brookshire had orchestrated the 2nd Squadron of the Blackhorse in Vietnam.
Training, training, and more training! More important, a different mind-set from the now-vanishing Cold War scenarios would have to be created. Agility and adaptability don't come easily.
In the fall of 1989, at the start of his command of VII Corps, Franks was already talking about fighting the corps as a corps, and not as a collection of individual units battling to defend a piece of NATO territory. Early in 1990, he published a 'commander's intent' directive with a vision for an 'agile' corps. He followed that in May with details. The corps, he said, must be prepared to 'master rapid transition in tactical maneuvers, attack to defense, defense to attack, attack from the march… ' The tasks included 'moving rapidly over great distances, fighting from the march, retaining the initiative in meeting engagements, conducting hasty attacks/defenses, sustaining combat power continuously… '
Major exercises in 1990 put these ideas into practice. In January, General Butch Saint ordered that the annual REFORGER exercise engaging VII Corps against V Corps begin with tactical movement that brought them to contact and then a meeting engagement. Saint also had been talking about a 'capable' corps, meaning one that clearly must be able to do more than its NATO mission. Later that winter, in a BCTP exercise with Major General Tom Rhame's 1st Infantry Division — the Big Red One — at Fort Riley, Kansas, Franks and VII Corps took the ideas even further.
Because of the old Cold War lineup of forces, VII Corps was the 1st Infantry's immediate headquarters (in the event of war in Europe, the division would have moved to positions in Germany under VII Corps as a REFORGER unit). Even so, VII Corps would not have normally supervised the BCTP, or any of the division's tactical training in the United States. However, Franks recognized that the BCTP exercise was another opportunity to train for the likely new corps mission, so with the okay of III Corps (their normal U.S. HQ) he brought a corps headquarters team to Fort Riley, plugged them into the Big Red One's command structure, and changed the training scenario from the old Cold War defensive mission to something completely different, again involving long unit movements climaxed by meeting engagements.
Adapting to these last-minute changes was no simple matter for Rhame and his commanders and staff, and it was a big risk, too. All those involved could fall flat on their faces in a big way. Specifically, they weren't used to working within the context of a corps offensive operation — that is, as one unit operating in concert with several others, all under the direction of the corps commander. At the same time, they were used to the Cold War scenarios, all set in Germany. This new scenario was not in their planning and training scheme, or their mission requirements, and it required some fast footwork on their part.
In fact, Generals Rhame and Franks did not even know each other. They were all starting completely cold.
As it turned out, it was a terrific exercise for everyone, and it told Franks a great deal about Tom Rhame and his commanders and staff — primarily that they could take rapid mission changes in stride and go on to execute the mission. Later on, this knowledge influenced Franks's mission assignment to Rhame's division not once but twice.
In May, then again later in the summer, Franks used a similar scenario for Major General Dutch Shoffner and the 3rd Infantry Division (their 3rd Brigade would deploy with 1st AD) BCTP exercises — that is, long movement to contact, followed by a meeting engagement, followed by an attack or defense, depending on the success of the meeting engagement. Major General Ron Griffith, on his own initiative, brought his entire 1st AD command element to the field during this exercise. He mirrored what 3rd Infantry was doing and in that manner was able to get an exercise for his division.
In June, VII Corps's 11th Aviation Brigade deployed Apaches to Israel for a live-fire training exercise in the Negev Desert. For Franks and his aviators, it was valuable training that they could not do in Europe, plus they were able to gain lessons on deployment of aircraft and units.
In September, Franks and his commanders and staff did a VII Corps seminar for one week as part of the preparation for their own BCTP WARFIGHTER exercise to take place in early March '91. That week was an intense series of discussions, tactical problem solving, and commander-to-commander interaction. In that seminar, Franks also used a scenario that required the corps to move a long distance and attack from the march. Elements of the corps also trained with a still-experimental JSTARS system (Joint Surveillance Target-Acquisition System), the first time that revolutionary technology had been used by an operational unit. JSTARS aircraft are modified Boeing 707s with the capability, through recently developed radar technology, of seeing unit moves on the ground over a wide radius, and showing these moves in real time over downlink facilities. JSTARS gives commanders the capability of knowing all the enemy's moves over the deep battlefield, a great advantage to have in the kind of force-oriented missions Fred Franks foresaw for U.S. Army corps in the future. Later, in Saudi Arabia, Franks recalled those capabilities and successfully lobbied for the use of JSTARS in theater. Though the system was still experimental, JSTARS was too useful to do without.
A leader has to know how his commanders will respond to situations they're likely to encounter in battle. Training exercises provide the most realistic opportunity to observe commanders in action. These exercises — REFORGER, the BCTPs with the 1st Infantry Division, and the 3rd Infantry Division, VII Corps, BCTP seminar — also provided Fred Franks with the opportunity to see how he himself and his corps staff handled the new situations VII Corps would surely face if it was ever to fight another war.
It wasn't luck that VII Corps was ready, and
On 2 August 1990, the Iraqi army invaded and occupied Kuwait. Soon afterward, President Bush sent U.S. air, sea, and ground units to the Persian Gulf region to deter Iraqi aggression. An extension of Iraqi conquests a few kilometers down Saudi Arabia's east coast would put Saddam Hussein in charge of close to half of the world's known oil supplies. By mid-August the Army's 82nd Airborne Division and the 7th Marine Expeditionary Brigade were taking up positions in northeast Saudi Arabia, showing American resolve — if not a great deal of combat power. During the following weeks, more powerful ground units from the United States and other members of the Coalition that President Bush had created to stop the Iraqi threat arrived in Saudi Arabia. If Saddam Hussein was ever of a mind to continue his conquests toward the south, he now had second thoughts.
Meanwhile, in Stuttgart, General Franks was looking at ways his VII Corps might become useful to the Army
