conditions.
In mid-November, this is what he found when he looked at training specifics:
Third Armored Division had just completed their extensive semi-annual gunnery and maneuver training at Grafenwohr and Hohenfels, and they were currently engaged in a BCTP seminar, so the deployment order had come at a training peak for them. Good news. This was not the case with the 2nd ACR and the 1st Armored Division, however. They had not fired their major direct-fire tank and Bradley weapons systems in some time, and after they began deployment — which was very soon — their equipment would not even be available for training. Franks quickly reached out to the 3rd Infantry Division, which was already at Grafenwohr, but would not be deploying to the desert. In an act of great teamwork that proved to be of enormous training benefit to the corps, the soldiers and leaders of the 3rd Infantry Division formed a cadre and provided their own equipment so that 2nd ACR and 1st Armored Division soldiers could go through an intense period of training. Franks visited the 3rd ID often and never heard a grumble.
Initially, then, things seemed to be in good shape.
Yet after his return from the leaders' recon to Saudi Arabia, Franks began to notice that leaders at all levels were increasingly distracted by the myriad details of deployment. This was completely understandable, he felt, since deployment from a no-notice cold start was certainly not going to go with much precision. There was a lot of 'friction.' Some things just did not get done unless the commander got personally involved.
But some imperfection could be absorbed, because deployment was not the main effort. Training was. So in order to 'get our heads out of CONEX[10] containers,' as he put it, and into war-fighting thinking and training, he decided to convene a war council. They met at Schweinfurt, on 29 November, with 3rd Infantry Division[11] the host, and all the commanders present.
Franks did not want too many commanders' meetings, but it was useful to get them together from time to time, especially since some of them were new. His two consistent objectives at all of these meetings were to focus the commanders on what was important — for now, training, and later, operations — and to establish teamwork. He had a different group now and it was his job to unite them as one team. In a setting such as this, they could talk training and war fighting with one another, see how the rest thought, and Franks could both size them up and further encourage camaraderie.
The agenda that day was simple: the G-2 briefed them on the Iraqi order of battle and the latest from southwest Asia, then 1st Armored Division talked the commanders through a minefield-breaching operation; next everyone discussed how to assemble the corps — to deploy to Saudi Arabia and get everyone back together again in units — and the meeting closed with more 'flat-ass rules' and training.
Some of the FARs were as follows: Because the corps must always fight in depth, they would discuss deep operations at every meeting. (As battle progressed, the tendency was to put one's attention on the battle in close contact and forget about depth — a situation Franks intended to avoid.) Next: though Franks would issue mission orders to encourage and indeed demand initiative, no one was a free agent. He stressed again the role of agility in the corps and the importance of commanders' intent. The intent must be understood two echelons in either direction, he told them. In other words, a battalion commander must know what the division commander intends and a brigade commander must know what a corps commander intends. He stressed that massed artillery fire was at least two or more battalions on the same target (reinforcing Franks's own belief in gaining a decisive edge over the enemy). And finally: 'Get desert-smart and desert-tough,' he said, 'but don't overextend people and machines.'
That meeting would set the command focus for VII Corps's training for their combat mission two and a half months later.
FROM A DISTANCE
There is an old saying that the toughest job in the military is to be a military spouse. VII Corps was about to prove that in spades.
Military families are accustomed to separations, but usually for predictable lengths of time, and there was nothing predictable about what was about to happen. Nor could they use Vietnam as a guideline. With Vietnam, soldiers had gone off to war for a certain amount of time, with certain hardships and casualties, but for the most part, after early unit deployments they had gone off individually, not as a unit, and here it was all different.
Now whole units were going, and family members knew one another, and knew other service members. They were a
Over the long years of the Cold War, military communities had sprung up in Germany, groupings of units and family members essentially into U.S. 'towns,' normally centered on garrison locations called
Meanwhile, over the years, more and more Army service members had become married—60 to 75 percent by 1990—and because it had not been feasible for the Army to build more housing for them, many of them — up to half the families in some locations — lived in local German communities in housing leased from the Germans, some individually, others as blocks of units by the U.S. Army. Needless to say, such arrangements complicated living for those families, and at times, transportation, schools, medical care, and normal socialization with other American families proved difficult.
Such was the general situation when the announcement on 8 November hit VII Corps families with a thunderclap. The good news was that the announcement had named specific units and had gone out over the Armed Forces Network television station, so all the people connected with those units knew immediately. But not all the units had been named, so it was not until twenty-four to forty-eight hours later that everyone knew. And then the question was, what would the families do while the soldiers were off at war?
Family support during periods of separations, and even during normal garrison operations, was not new to the Army. There had been support groups throughout the Army's history to assist families with the many challenges of living in faraway places — in the West after the Civil War, for instance. Such groups normally centered around units, and involved an informal grouping of spouses and a link to the unit's official chain of command. In the early 1980s, the Army even began a program called 'command team seminars' to assist spouses, centering on a weeklong class at Fort Leavenworth while the military command spouse went to his or her pre-command course.
VII Corps deployment to Saudi Arabia built on the already existing informal, yet highly effective, family- support networks. And as for the families themselves, there was no complaining. The attitude was 'We are part of the mission. Let's roll up our sleeves and get to work.'
There also was official help. In General Butch Saint, for instance, they were fortunate to have a USAREUR commander who was both savvy in the ways of mobile armored warfare and acutely sensitive to family issues. He not only was intimately involved with units deploying throughout the command, but he realigned the military communities to see to it that VII Corps communities came under the direct support structure of his HQ, and he formed a family-support task force in the headquarters itself. He also set in motion plans to ensure the security of our families — understandably, there was a lot of anxiety about possible terrorist attacks — and he pledged the total support of the Army's assets for assistance. Wherever medical personnel and military police deployed with VII Corps units, he called in Reserve component units and individuals to come to Germany to replace them.
Meanwhile, on 6 December 1990, Franks published the detailed order to establish VII Corps Base, which would command those parts of the corps that would remain in Europe, an order that went into effect a week later,
