VII CORPS COMMAND POSTS
Though we had spent considerable effort to think our way through command post arrangements and to keep each other informed during the anticipated fast-moving operation, these arrangements, we knew, were fragile. Even so, I was confident they would work. While there was still time, though, I took one final look at them:
Of our three command posts, the rear CP would stay at Al Qaysumah, a town with an airfield about thirty kilometers east of Hafar al Batin on the Tapline Road; the main would stay right where they were, about forty kilometers south of the border; and the TAC CP and the two 'jump TAC' CPS would move and stay physically close to the battle.
The TAC CP would initially remain close to the middle of the 3rd Armored formation. It would move late on G+1, after the success of the breach was assured and I shifted the main effort of the corps to the enveloping force.
One 'jump TAC' would stay well ahead with the 3rd Armored, so they could communicate with 2nd ACR, 1st AD, and 3rd AD. The other 'jump TAC' would be at the breach site, where Brigadier General Gene Daniel was to command passage through the breach of the appropriate corps units — the British, our two artillery brigades moving to join their divisions, the 400-plus vehicles that would make up Log Base Nelligen, the 1st CAV (as I hoped), as well as other corps units needed north in the attack. We also needed two-way traffic in the breach to evacuate prisoners and for resupply.
My personal plan was to stay closest to the corps main effort. That meant I would spend that night at the main CP (its location was closer to the breach than the TAC's), then shift to the TAC on G+1. I planned to use the main TAC and the two smaller jump TACs as my operating bases and command the corps from the front. To ensure a positive link to my nerve center at the main CP, we had arranged for my executive officer, Lieutenant Colonel Russ Mulholland, to make two courier runs to the main TAC daily, at 0900 and at 1700 (John Landry had directed the staff to have information current as of 0830 and 1630). In this way, I could be forward to command face-to-face, get my 'fingerspitzengefuhl' of the battles, and obtain the latest information from the corps main, which had much better long-haul comms.
We also planned to use aerial retrans capability — a helicopter relay of line-of-sight comms, like a manned low-orbiting satellite, to essentially double our comm range. This worked reasonably well, except when weather kept the helos on the ground (quite often, it turned out).[22]
STRATEGIC CONTEXT AND TACTICAL COMMANDER
During the flight to the TAC CP, I shifted my thoughts to our part in a larger theater campaign plan. We were not operating alone, and I could never let myself lose sight of that.
Nobody in an operation this vast and important was a free agent. We all operated within the context of a mission and objectives, and the discipline to stay within those. That applied to me as well as to Generals John Yeosock, Norman Schwarzkopf, and Colin Powell, Secretary of Defense Cheney, and even to President Bush. I always had the opinion to go to my commander and try to get something changed if I thought it was getting in the way, but in reality, as a senior commander, you have to pick your spots, and you don't do it often. Otherwise, you're either a whiner or a disruption to the operation. So, as in any operation, there were some constraints (must-dos) and restraints (do-nots).
They were not unreasonable, and I agreed with them.
The major constraint on us was to reinforce the theater deception scheme. That meant we had to stay hidden from the Iraqis out west until we attacked and reinforce the 1st CAV deception.
As for our major restraint, this had been set out to us in an order that my chief of staff, John Landry, had gotten from Third Army on 22 February. We were directed not to conduct any 'irreversible' actions — that is, actions that would throw off the theater attack timetable. During a call to Cal Waller (when he was Third Army commander in Yeosock's absence), I told him I assumed that meant we were not to conduct any operations that might affect the diplomatic maneuvering then going on. Cal agreed but left further interpretation up to me. My choice then was to interpret the restraints as very tight. This was my interpretation and no one else's.[23]
This order had been a formal follow-through on Cal Waller's informal instructions during his 20 February visit that we should not conduct any battles that could provoke a strategic decision (that would get ground forces so involved it would set off a clamor for the beginning of the entire ground war in the United States). At that point, a couple of days before the attack, there was still a possibility that the ground war would be called off.
Why is all that important? Because this restraint and my own interpretation tied our hands for cross-border operations with Apaches (although we had in fact conducted one with our 11th Aviation Brigade earlier in February). Both the 1st Armored and the 3rd Armored Divisions, for example, had well-thought-out plans to send their Apaches into Iraq. Though I had gotten excellent briefings from both division commanders on both operations and had no hesitation about executing the plans, the restraint put any such plans on hold.
The 3rd AD wanted to go after artillery that was about fifty kilometers from the border in their assigned zone. Because this artillery was also in range of the 1st INF breach, the attack would help out the Big Red One as well. We were having difficulty getting TAC air to go after the artillery, and we couldn't reach it with our own artillery, so I had talked to Butch Funk about using our Apaches. Soon after that, Colonel Mike Burke, the aviation brigade commander, put together a plan to go after the artillery, and I told Butch to execute. But then I got the instructions from Third Army to restrain, and the attack had to be put off. (On G-Day, I authorized Butch to conduct the attack that night.)
Meanwhile, Ron Griffith wanted to conduct an armed reconnaissance with Apaches in front of the 1st Armored Division out to a depth of some sixty or seventy kilometers to confirm, as we thought, that parts of a brigade of the 26th Division were out there trying to refuse the Iraqi west flank. He also wanted a better assessment of the difficult terrain through which the division would have to travel for fifty kilometers just north of the border. The confirmation of that intelligence on the enemy and terrain would allow Griffith to fix and bypass the Iraqi force (and the Apaches could take out some Iraqis on their own as well), and also speed Ron's advance toward al-Busayyah. I had to disapprove Ron's plan for the same reason. (As with Butch, I gave the OK to Ron to execute on G-Day after the restraints came off.)
Though the reasoning behind this Third Army restraint made complete sense to me, it is still an illustration of the fits and starts that last-minute diplomatic maneuvering cause in military operations. As uncomfortable as this may be for commanders, we all better get used to it. More recent diplomatic maneuvering at the last minute forestalled our airborne assault in Haiti.
If I had known that our attack was going to be moved up from G+1 to G-Day, my decisions on the twenty- third would have been much different, and I would have put the corps into a much more aggressive posture on the twenty-fourth. In particular, I would have hit the Iraqis hard with our own aviation for a few days before our ground units attacked. You can turn some operations off and on in a short period of time; but not most of them.
0830 VII CORPS TAC CP
After we landed at the TAC CP, I went immediately inside the tent extensions behind the M577s. The weather was still good for flying, but the wind was picking up. The temperature was in the low forties.
Inside the TAC there was a roughly twenty-by-fifteen-foot 'floor' of sand with three M577s on one end and two on the other. Four vertical poles and long horizontal tube steel poles held the canvas up to a height of about seven feet. Behind each M577 was a small work area for that section, usually consisting of a green, wooden two- by-three-foot collapsible field desk with field telephones. There was the ever-present, never-shut-down coffeepot working away nearby as well as the steady hum of the generators. At the rear of the G-3 M577 were two desks, one for me with my own phones and one for the G-3. In front of those desks was a situation map, 1:250 000 scale, over which you could put separate sheets of heavy acetate, each annotated with information, such as enemy,
