briefed the concept personally to the President on 30 October and secured approval (he already had Cheney's) for the introduction of VII Corps and an additional 250,000 troops into the theater.
The formal announcement was made on 8 November, the Friday after the fall elections.
The main question then at CENTCOM revolved around how far west the flanking maneuver should be. This had to be decided before Third Army could begin to do any definitive planning of its own. Likewise, the two corps would also have to wait for final decision from Third Army before taking their own plans very far. This was especially the case for VII Corps, the main effort, with their force-oriented mission.
Because he himself was under pressure from Washington to look at extremely wide flanking movements, General Schwarzkopf initially gave Steve Arnold guidance to look at sending some forces 500 miles to the west near the Jordanian border (where they could presumably attack Scud capabilities and perhaps cause the Iraqis other discomforts, such as threatening Baghdad); even after this option was discarded (it would have been a logistics nightmare), Schwarzkopf continued to press Arnold and the planners to consider options that placed forces far to the west of where they eventually ended up. This may have been craftiness on Schwarzkopf's part. Showing how insupportable they were may have been his way of getting 'Washington ideas' off his back. Yet by the time of the 14 November briefing, XVIII Corps was still attacking far to the west of VII Corps.
Meanwhile, Arnold was convinced that an XVIII Corps attack to the west was not just logistically insupportable, from an operational sense it did not focus on the principal objective of liberating Kuwait and destroying the RGFC, and he continued to try to convince the CINC to agree with him on that. A number of options were considered, all focused on the question of how far west to put XVIII Corps.
As soon as Franks saw the plan on 14 November, he got involved with the planners and with John Yeosock in pressing for a two-corps mutually supporting attack against the RGFC. The concept of a wide attack by XVIII Corps was raised again at the briefing to Cheney and Powell on 20 December. Though Arnold's recommendation then was to drop it, there was no discussion either way about the option. In the end, it was logistics support that drove General Schwarzkopf finally to decide, on 8 January 1991, on a two-corps, side-by-side attack.
This decision freed Third Army to finalize its plans. From there the key decisions were about final force allocation to the two corps and about their mission assignments for the final attack on the RGFC.
Arnold and the planners, thinking conservatively, were convinced that in order to destroy the RGFC, Third Army needed more combat power than it then had. By mid-December they had succeeded in getting VII Corps an additional division, the 1st (UK) AD. (Since the British division was originally slated to join in the Marines' attack to the east of VII Corps, that ended up costing an armored brigade to replace them, which Franks persuaded Waller to ask Schwarzkopf to take from the 1st Cavalry Division rather than the 1st INF.) But in the view of Arnold and his planners, the 1st UK was still not going to be enough. In order to destroy all three heavy RGFC divisions, as well as their three infantry divisions and artillery, the planners thought the theater reserve division, the 1st CAV, should be released early to VII Corps — that is, to the main attack. The CINC, on the other hand, because he felt he might have to send it to help the Egyptians if their attack stalled, wanted to keep this division in theater reserve under his control, with no promises of release. Repeated discussions by planners with General Schwarzkopf on this issue made him very sensitive on that point. The release of the 1st CAV would consequently dog operational planning right up to and including the actual operation. And they were not in fact released from CENTCOM control until 0930 the morning of 26 February, or more than two days after the beginning of the ground war.
Picking the 1st CAV as theater ground reserve was a point for some discussion among planners. Normally, you choose as your reserve a unit that can influence the battle throughout the theater. In the choice of units for that role, the 101st Airborne (Air Assault) might have been a logical choice. With four AH-64 helicopter battalions, their long and lethal reach could influence the theater outcome. On the other hand, the 1st CAV was chosen because CENTCOM wanted an armored unit available to reinforce the Egyptian attack if that became bogged down. Franks had spent time with the Egyptians and seen their plan. As far as he was concerned, they had what it took to accomplish their mission on the VII Corps flank.[14] If the theater had been willing to take a small risk on them, they could have given 1st CAV to VII Corps from the start, kept the 101st as theater or Third Army reserve, and effectively employed the 101st on the last two days to isolate the Kuwaiti theater of operations. Those are choices that are made early and are easy to second-guess later.
Meanwhile, planning efforts continued, and each corps worked on its own plans and kept both Third Army and CENTCOM aware of its work. There was no mystery to what each major HQ was doing. Commanders above the corps level also were well aware of planning work, and had the opportunity on several occasions to intervene if they did not like what they heard. Thus there should have been no surprise later on about the speed and tempo of the VII Corps attack. On 14 December, in preparation for a briefing of Secretary Cheney and General Powell, Franks and the other corps commanders briefed General Schwarzkopf on their plans so far. The CINC approved what he heard. In fact, it was now, in his words, 'my plan.' He had taken ownership of it.
On 20 December, during the briefing to Secretary Cheney and General Powell, Cheney made a somewhat mysterious comment to Franks, just after he had gone over his concept of attack. 'Thanks,' Cheney said, 'I feel better now.'
Franks didn't know then that Cheney was referring to the more than two months of discussions and planning in which he had participated. He had seen the early — and unsatisfactory — one-corps plan, the early two-corps planning, and had listened to General Powell sketch out a bolder two-corps plan to the President. Now he was seeing how the two-corps offensive concept would actually be put into action in the theater. And so for the first time, for him, all the pieces were really falling in place.
From 27 to 30 December in Riyadh, Lieutenant General Yeosock convened a MAPEX, which both Franks and Luck attended on the first day and the last. Yeosock had originally intended to use this as a war game of final Third Army plans, but couldn't, since the CENTCOM plan was not yet final. Instead, the session became a discussion of resource allocation between VII and XVIII Corps, and of air support to the ground phase of the operation. Franks continued his discussions with John Yeosock over the necessity for a coordinated two-corps attack. Yeosock was sympathetic and, with Steve Arnold, went back to Schwarzkopf beginning on 4 January with a series of options.
On 8 January General Schwarzkopf made his final decision on Third Army positions for the attack. Instead of a wide west maneuver north by XVIII Corps, with a gap between corps, the two corps would attack abreast. It then became a matter of Third Army determining how to destroy the RGFC.
THE THIRD ARMY PLAN
Third Army planning intensified starting in mid-January.
The CINC directed Lieutenant General Yeosock to plan for offensive actions beginning anytime after the start of the air campaign on 17 January. Brigadier General Arnold and his planners, with the assistance of both corps, followed up on this. Taking into consideration the status of the two corps, the combat power available, and assumptions about possible RGFC choices,[15] they developed five different options for an attack.
Though timelines for the various attack options and forces available were developed, most of the planning energy was devoted to the one that assumed Third Army would attack only after all forces were ready and that the RGFC would defend in place. This timeline had both XVIII Corps and VII Corps in place by H+74 for a coordinated two-corps attack against the RGFC (H-hour — the start of the attack on G-Day). In actuality, since the heavy forces of both corps would not begin their attack until H+26, this meant these forces would hit the RGFC forty-eight hours from that point.
On 1 February 1991, a meeting to discuss final plans was held at King Khalid Military City, hosted by Lieutenant General Yeosock and attended by Franks and Luck and key members of their staffs.
Since, at that late date, a coherent Third Army two-corps order had not been published, Franks continued his strong argument to Yeosock at the end of the meeting (after General Luck had had to leave) for a two-corps coordinated attack against the RGFC if they stayed in place. He proposed that VII Corps would turn ninety degrees east and XVIII Corps would attack to their north. Both Yeosock and Arnold liked the concept. After that meeting, Third Army developed its plan for the Army to attack the RGFC and published the order on 18 February, during the time that Lieutenant General Cal Waller was temporarily in command.
