want them. We're the troops from Germany. We were trained to beat the best the Russians had. When the Iraqis see us, they'll know that and it will scare the crap out of them.' Everyone in VII Corps felt the same way. They didn't get the sand-colored DCUs until almost April; and some of the troops only got issued a set on their way home after the war. Chemical overgarment protective suits covered them up anyway.
TRAINING
Everything in Saudi Arabia had to be started from nothing. That included training. There were no training facilities for VII Corps to use, and they
Fred Franks had started out with a four-week plan for his units before he sent them into the attack: They would have a week to get individual units assembled, to find everything, and to get to Tactical Assembly Areas, and three weeks for training. He wanted a full three weeks of training in order to adapt European skills to the desert, and to get desert-smart and desert-tough. He also wanted time for mission rehearsals. This plan was not based on any scientific analysis, but on his best professional experience and judgment.
Though he did not think these plans were unrealistic, he realized he was not a free agent and might have to make some adjustments. Adjustments were OK, but not compromises that would cause his troops to be unprepared.
In the event, his three-week training goal proved hard to meet — he had to reduce the three weeks to two — and time kept pressing him harder and harder.
On 23 December, ten days after he arrived in-country, he made this comment in his journal: 'How can we get ahead of time? Friction to overcome is enormous… Maybe I need to change my style. Help yourself and do not worry… Need some major muscle movement to make things happen. Not sure at this point we can make it and have three weeks' training. Settling in taking longer than I'd like. Thought seven days was OK, then three weeks to train. Unit integrity not good. Must get that fixed. We'll make another assessment end of this week.'
During a meeting in Riyadh on 27 December, called by General Schwarzkopf and attended by Franks, Gus Pagonis, Gary Luck, and John Yeosock, the CINC announced that he thought they'd be at war in three weeks. After the meeting, Franks wrote in his journal, 'What I must do is drive this corps to a new level of effort to get ready to go to war. We are not moving fast enough.'
And on 2 January 1991, he wrote, 'Time getting short. How to best prepare the corps… Think we'll be OK if only I can give the troops two weeks.' He'd had to adjust his earlier plan by then. 'Must shoot. Must get some batting practice. Night moves. CSS on the move' — combat service support, or logistics—'Meet, plan, visit, assess, and make adjustments. Also have to get troops work at night.'
The 1st Infantry Division Forward command team's running the growing port operations made a major contribution to the training effort. Since many soldiers were forced to remain in port for two to three weeks without their equipment, Franks asked Brigadier General Mullen to establish a training service for commanders and units in port. Mullen set up facilities where unit commanders could do individual preparation. Though these facilities were elementary, leaders immediately began exercises in firing individual weapons, chemical protection, driving in Saudi Arabia, and desert navigation.
Meanwhile, corps units needed gunnery ranges in the desert where they could refine weapons skills without endangering other units and whatever local populace might be in the area or passing through. An element in VII Corps headquarters was formed to assist unit commanders in acquiring the real estate, and unit commanders took it from there, building stationary targets from scrap lumber or whatever else they could get their hands on.
Franks gave directions to allow soldiers to fire service ammunition (actual wartime ammunition, something they had never done in Germany). He wanted soldiers — ground and air — to see the full capability of this ammunition, so that they would be familiar with it when the war started. This was both a risk and a trade-off, for wartime ammunition (especially Hellfire missiles) was in short supply. He took the risk.
In order to practice for the breaching operation, corps engineers (the 588th ENG Battalion from Fort Polk, Louisiana) built an exact replica of the Iraqi defensive system, complete with berms and antitank ditches. It was five kilometers long and even faced the same direction as the actual Iraqi system so as to replicate actual light data. It took two weeks to build at the rate of twenty-five meters an hour. Afterward, the 1st Infantry Division conducted full-up training rehearsals on this system, and the combat elements of the 1st UK Armored Division, with all of their nearly 4,500 vehicles, twice practiced their planned night passage of lines through the Big Red One.
The 1st UK was placed under tactical control of VII Corps in mid-December. The day before Christmas, Lieutenant General Sir Peter de Billiere came to see Franks at his trailer HQ in a parking lot in the port of Dammam. De Billiere was the senior British military officer in-country, and they had never met before, and it was crucial to talk about the conditions of employment of the British forces.
It was not the first time Franks would have foreign troops under his command. In Germany in NATO, he had commanded both Canadian and German forces, and he had also played in an exercise under the tactical control of the German II Corps, so he knew what it looked like from the other direction. Franks knew that building mutual trust was vital, and also that the mission assignment needed to be within that unit's capabilities and that he needed to be sensitive to different doctrinal processes for planning and for communicating orders. Logistics is always a challenge, because the official policy is that logistics is a national responsibility, meaning that every country is responsible for supplying its own troops — a totally unworkable policy from a tactical standpoint and one that needs changing. Finally, he was never satisfied that the staffs could work closely enough unless they were totally integrated. Armed with all those thoughts, he met de Billiere.
From his point of view, they hit it off right from the start. De Billiere was a no-nonsense soldier ungiven to posturing or reminders of the importance of his position. He wanted the best for his British troops and he wanted them to make a meaningful contribution to the success of the mission. It was purely a commander-to-commander meeting, also attended by Major General Rupert Smith, newly appointed to command the British division: just the three of them.
Their most important conclusions:
• The British would be employed as a division (in other words, Franks would not break up the division and place the parts under other American control);
• future U.S.-UK relationships depended on the success of their venture together;
• de Billiere agreed to make the switch as soon as Franks wanted (Franks said right away, because he wanted them to move out on planning);
• de Billiere was concerned about the impracticality of the policy that 'logistics is a national responsibility'; Franks told him not to worry because it was his intent not to let that get in the way, including in the treatment of each other's casualties;
• de Billiere did not want to unplug from their national intel too soon, to which Franks was quick to agree, since he thought their products had to be better than what he was getting from his own national system (as it turned out, it was a valuable connection, even though U.S. intel got much better toward mid-January);
• they agreed to integrate their staffs rather than following the usual liaison cell practice (a new step at the tactical level, even though it was routinely done at strategic levels of command);
• Franks agreed to be sensitive to the British need for training and for forming the division, since it was happening on the fly, just as with VII Corps;
• they agreed on tight OPSEC, since they did not want anyone to know that the British were moving from the coast inland and joining VII Corps (to this day there are few official pictures or films of the U.S. VII Corps and the UK training and fighting together, due to rigid OPSEC discipline).
Their meeting lasted about forty-five minutes to an hour. They shook hands as soldier to soldier, in a mutual understanding that what they had agreed to verbally was the way it would be. No contracts, no treaties, no paper exchanged, just two soldiers trusting each other. Franks was proud of the corps's service with the British and of
