apply their combat power on the ground relative to the enemy.
But for Desert Storm they had flat, one-dimensional paper maps.
Maps come in different scales to represent certain sizes of ground. In Desert Storm, VII Corps used three scales—1:250 000, 1:100 000, and 1:50 000. The smaller the scale, the more detail. In the desert, where the ground is relatively flat, scale does not really matter much
U.S. Army maps in a command post are normally mounted vertically on a piece of plywood and covered with acetate. The acetate allows you to mark up the map and change the markings. This procedure was begun in World War I and continues to this day. When the first U.S. tank crossed the Sava River into Bosnia in December 1995, the tank commander was standing in his hatch in the tank turret, looking at a map, and relating it to what he was seeing in front of him.
Skill in relating the map to the ground and in moving units in relation to one another to get the maximum combat power on the enemy (while the enemy is doing the same thing) is the art of war at the tactical level. When you are a small-unit commander, you can normally see all the ground your unit will operate on physically. The more senior you get, the more this skill becomes a function of your imagination, as you figure what combination should go where over terrain you cannot see and against an enemy with a mind of his own.
FRED Franks spent a lot of time before the attack looking at maps, meditating on them, playing all the combinations over and over again in his mind, and then actually moving around on the ground. He wanted to inform his senses about what was possible on the ground, about how forces and various combinations of forces would fit, how much room they took, and how long it took them to move from one place to the other. He also did it with the Iraqis. Then he wanted to relate all that to a paper map. In that way he could begin to imagine the battle and the various combinations of possibilities.
He was helped in this by his experience in the deserts of Fort Bliss, Texas, with the 3rd Cavalry. Others in the corps had had similar experiences at Fort Bliss or at Fort Irwin. The desert was no stranger to them.
In early February, Franks asked his G-2, John Davidson, to put together a 1:100 000 map (the kind used most frequently in Germany at corps level) and put it flat on a table so as to better visualize the battle. It took an eight-by-ten-foot board to get the whole area on it. That flat map board became their primary planning and briefing tool in the last stages of attack preparation in the two weeks before the attack. It was around that map that Franks asked his commanders if they had enough room to carry out the missions he had given them. They all answered it would be tight, but they could do it.
By the time VII Corps attacked, that map, VII Corps forces, and the Iraqi forces were burned into Franks's mind. He had seen the fight ahead of time and could see the ground and his own forces on it. During the attack, his task was to relate what was actually happening on the field to the picture in his mind, and make adjustments. His big challenge was to keep his own forces continually arrayed in the desert in time, space, and distance in relation to one another for the first two days, so he could have all seven of his FRAGPLAN options available to choose from when he saw the final RGFC disposition. That was why he spent so much time looking at the map. He was playing all the combinations over and over again in his mind. His subordinate commanders were doing the same in their sectors.
The end goal of all this thinking and meditation was to inform Franks's intuition. Commanders decide things because, they often say, 'it feels right.' What they mean is that all their years of training and education, that focused concentration, that intense desire to win at least cost to their troops, and their own intellectual capacity for synthesis tell them intuitively that their orders are the right thing to do in that given circumstance. Sometimes you cannot explain it.
THE CENTCOM PLAN
The VII Corps plan of attack was not an isolated grand concept entire of itself. Rather, in order to ensure harmony in the overall campaign, it was nested within the larger scope plans of Third Army, CENTCOM, and Coalition strategic objectives. CENTCOM planned the entire theater campaign — including the Coalition allies, land, sea, air, and Special Forces — to accomplish both national and Coalition objectives. Third Army planned the ground operation of VII and XVIII Corps in a way consistent with the overall CENTCOM plan. VII Corps planned its piece of the Third Army plan.
The concept that General Schwarzkopf briefed to Franks and the other commanders on 14 November grew out of another plan that had its origins in early October. At that time General Powell had instructed Schwarzkopf to devise an offensive option and then to send a team to Washington to brief it to the Joint Chiefs. The briefing was held on 13 October.
According to this plan, the heavy elements of XVIII Corps — the 24th MECH, the 1st CAV, and the 3rd ACR — and the Marines would attack just east of the Wadi al Batin in the general direction of Kuwait City. (Schwarzkopf and his planners had rejected a possible flanking move to the west of the Wadi, because logistics would be too difficult, and because the attack would be vulnerable to counterattack on its own flank by Iraqi armored divisions.) Schwarzkopf was not at all happy with this plan: he was by no means certain that it would get the mission accomplished, and there was a possibility of seriously unacceptable casualties (computer projections estimated 10,000, with perhaps 1,000 killed). Still, it was, in his view, the best course he had with the forces available.
In fact, the argument that Schwarzkopf made through his planners (he himself wasn't present at the briefing) was that the original plan's very inadequacies argued for more forces if there was to be a real offensive option. He had protested to General Powell about even sending a briefing to Washington because of his concerns. The problem at the time was that Schwarzkopf did not seem to know what to do with those forces if he got them.
The plan briefed on 13 October — even with Schwarzkopf's caveats — was not well received in Washington by the Joint Staff and the Secretary of Defense. It was less well received in the White House. Schwarzkopf's nervousness about the plan, his request for more forces, and the overall perception that he wasn't aggressive enough did not sit well there.
The briefing did not make Schwarzkopf look good, and that was a major sore point with the CINC. His sensitivity on that score continued even after the two-corps plan was developed.
Following the failed briefing, General Schwarzkopf directed General Yeosock to become involved in ground planning, and Yeosock turned to Brigadier General Steve Arnold, who had come from Korea just after Labor Day to become Third Army G-3. Arnold was called on to direct both Third Army planning and CENTCOM land operations planning, and he held these two responsibilities until final approval of the plan in early January. During that period, Arnold led the so-called Jedi Knights, the graduates of the U.S. Army's School for Advanced Military Studies, who were doing the planning work at CENTCOM and Third Army. (As it turned out, the planners of both VII and XVIII Corps also were SAMS graduates, which was a good thing for both communications and the overall planning effort.)
Meanwhile, General Powell had decided to go to Saudi Arabia to hear further plans discussions and, if necessary, to get personally involved in moving the planning forward. On 22 October, he attended a briefing on a two-corps option, but still was not satisfied. That evening in the guest quarters in Saudi Arabia, he sketched out for General Schwarzkopf on some hotel stationery a scheme of maneuver that would place the two U.S. corps west of the main Iraqi defenses in an enveloping maneuver.
Schwarzkopf agreed with this concept, which then became the basis for new guidance to Steve Arnold. Following Powell's return to Washington, Arnold and the planners sent copies of their early work on this new concept to the Joint Staff to demonstrate its feasibility. Once he himself was assured it would work, General Powell
