The last week in December was an intense period for Franks and his planners. There were many reasons for it: Franks wanted to settle on his intent, to nail down the plan, go over it with his commanders in a session (with a BCTP exercise) at King Khalid Military City in early January, and then lock it down and train and rehearse with specific tasks in mind. At the same time, he suspected that the air war was going to start soon. When it did, the Iraqis would be frozen in place. His suspicion was correct; the air war did start soon (on 17 January), and that did freeze the Iraqis in place — with the result that their picture of the Iraqis in mid-January turned out to be essentially the one they would have when they attacked.
Meanwhile, there were long sessions with Creighton Abrams, John Landry, Stan Cherrie, John Davidson, and the planners. There were still many questions about the breach and the audible, questions about logistics support (mainly fuel trucks), questions about when to move the British west to the corps TAA, questions about construction of an exact breach replica so that the 1st INF and the Brits could rehearse (this was done), questions about the feints and deceptions up into the Ruqi Pocket (so that the Iraqis would be deceived into believing the main attack would go up the Wadi al Batin), questions about air-ground rules in the theater that were totally different from NATO's, and questions about growing frustrations with lack of intelligence, especially imagery of Iraqi defensive positions. (At one point, Franks told Yeosock that tourists had better pictures of Iraq than he did. He'd be better off, he told him, sending his own C-12 to fly along the border with the door open and use a personal camera to get pictures… He was exaggerating, but frustration was high.)
One serious disagreement between Franks and his planners was over whether or not there should be a pause by the corps before they hit the RGFC. Regardless of the final choice about the audible, they calculated that continuous movement and enemy action over the distances the corps would have to travel (over 150 kilometers) would require what doctrine calls an operational pause to refuel and rearm in an area they had called Objective Collins (after Lightning Joe Collins, the VII Corps commander in World War II).
Franks vetoed that suggestion. 'No pauses,' he ordered. He did not disagree with their calculations (friction was inevitable), with their recommendation for an area of concentration, or even with the possible need for adjustments to the rate of movement, in order to better focus the impact of the heavy forces, but he did not want to build a deliberate pause into the plan, especially one right in front of the main enemy location. A pause was bad motivationally: once you are two or three days into an attack and really rolling, it is better to keep rolling than to stop and then try to get tired troops moving again; and tactically: he did not want to give the Iraqis a chance to adjust their defense (it was Franks's belief that giving them time to set up a position defense was playing to their strength).
The planners then began to work out some other way.
As it turned out, Franks decided to adjust the corps's rate of advance during the first day and a half. Those adjustments allowed the corps to roll hard into the RGFC with the greatest possible momentum, with concentrated combat power, with fresh troops, and with a sustainable logistics posture. For these adjustments, Franks has since been sharply criticized by many analysts and chroniclers of the war in the Gulf, and most notably by General Schwarzkopf, their assumption being that several thousand M1A1s, Bradleys, and other heavy armored vehicles should have been able to charge across 150 kilometers or so of desert the same way horse cavalry in a John Ford movie charge down a valley. The issue goes back to knowing about what cavalry people call the 'tempo of a mounted attack': You want not only to hit your enemy hard and fast with your heavy stuff, and hit them from an unexpected direction, but you want to hit them with a coherent formation so that your combat power is focused and can hit hard and keep hitting until the enemy quits. That meant that for Fred Franks the question was whether to stop in front of the main enemy objective or to 'go slow now and go fast later,' as the old German saying goes. He chose to do the latter.
On 28 December, Franks moved the VII Corps Main CP out of the port area of Dammam to the desert at a point about seventy-five kilometers east of King Khalid Military City.
On 2 January, he visited the soldiers who were by then erecting the exact replica of the Iraqi obstacle system. During the visit he determined that his people were building at the rate of twenty-five meters per hour.
That made for some interesting further thinking: Could the Iraqis, he asked himself, extend their defensive barrier west as fast as our engineers? And even if they could, how far west could they go at that rate?
The answer, it seemed to Franks, was that his soldiers were more skilled than the Iraqis. Based on his troops' timelines, he determined that in the time they had, the Iraqis wouldn't be able to extend their barrier system all the way across the VII Corps sector, especially if the air attacks began soon.
He called the 'audible' during a plans and issues session in King Khalid Military City, 6 to 8 January, attended by all the major subordinate commanders of the corps plus their planners.
At that time, the two forces he had available for the enveloping maneuver were the 2nd ACR and the 1st AD. Third AD was then the VII Corps reserve; as such it was to be the force Franks wanted to put in the Ruqi Pocket to carry out the deception mission. According to the current configuration of the plan, 3rd AD would be feinting in the Ruqi Pocket before VII Corps attacked. When the real attack started, 3rd AD would back out of there and then either pass through the breach or follow 1st AD north through the gap in the west.
Franks was not pleased with this arrangement of units, because it probably meant that 3rd AD would take too long to disengage from Ruqi and catch up with 1st AD for the RGFC attack, and this would cause a piecemeal attack into the RGFC.
Even though he was to be CENTCOM reserve, John Tilelli attended the briefings. 'Don't forget about us,' he told Franks.
Franks didn't forget him.
During this meeting, Franks also talked to the new Third Army G-2, Brigadier General John Stewart. Stewart's area was intelligence, and in order to decide what formation to order VII Corps into for the attack on the RGFC, Franks had to know the RGFC's final disposition. He needed to make the decision about twenty-four hours before execution, Franks figured, and since it would take about forty-eight hours to get to the RGFC, he told Stewart he needed the final intelligence twenty-four hours after VII Corps attacked — no later. Stewart would deliver the information he needed on the afternoon of 25 February, right on time.
In the days following the meeting at King Khalid Military City, there were a number of what turned out to be false alerts that Iraqi forces were coming across the border.
On 11 January, there was a report that four Iraqi aircraft had penetrated Saudi airspace and had been driven back by F-16s. On 17 January, just after the air attack began, there was a report that fifty-five Iraqi tanks were engaging the Egyptians. At that time, VII Corps's 11th Aviation Brigade alerted their two Apache battalions, and the 2nd ACR sent a squadron out to intercept the force. When he got this intelligence, Franks was visiting Tom Rhame on a rifle-firing range. He dropped everything, immediately flew forward to 2nd ACR, and soon learned that no Iraqi tanks had crossed the border.
While none of these reports turned out to be accurate, they did serve to exercise the corps's rapid-response capability and communications. Franks was pleased with the ability of subordinate commanders to react quickly, to listen to the radio, to anticipate actions, and on their own initiative make things happen.
On 8 January, the 1st CAV and the 2nd Brigade, 101st Airborne Division, were attached to VII Corps for a mission to protect Tapline Road from a possible Iraqi preemptive attack south down the Wadi al Batin (Franks was also ordered to tie in with French forces west of King Khalid Military City in order to protect the western flank). The 2nd Brigade flew into position on 12 January. And on 13 January, because of reports of a probable Iraqi attack, Franks ordered the 1st CAV forward to a position just south of the road. It then occurred to him that now that he had the 1st CAV for this mission, it would be logical to move them forward to defensive positions just south of the Iraqi border and adjacent to the Egyptians east of VII Corps. Not long after that, he ordered John Tilelli north to this location… which was, as it happened, the Ruqi Pocket.
So why not use 1st CAV, Franks asked himself, instead of 3rd AD to conduct the feints and demonstrations up the pocket to deceive the Iraqis? If he could free the 3rd AD from that mission, he could move them out west to join the 1st AD and the 2nd ACR. It was a stroke of luck. Franks took advantage of it.
Once that was solved, he had another question: Was there enough room on the ground to place both armored divisions side by side? Or would he have to put them one behind the other? He had forty kilometers to work with in that sector, and uncertain terrain. Franks wanted the divisions side by side. He asked for analysis. The result: several opinions. Franks's staff favored putting the two divisions in column; they didn't think the terrain
