had much to consider. My first thinking was for the passage to happen late the next afternoon, but that was beginning to look doubtful. If they could not make it by then, I had another decision: should I continue to push the 2nd ACR and pass the 1st INF early in the morning of the twenty-seventh, or pass them forward tomorrow night? That decision was coming, but I didn't have to make it now.
I had a quick huddle with Don and his executive officer, Lieutenant Colonel Steve Robinette. Don was a superb commander, with a great feel for covering force operations and the tempo of the covering force in relation to the main body. A year before, during REFORGER 90, when he had been in a covering force mission in front of VII Corps, he had developed a situation that exposed an enemy vulnerability (an opening for a preemptive attack), but the main body (or follow-on force) had been too far behind them to exploit the vulnerability. Neither of us wanted that to happen again. I had known Steve Robinette in the Center for Army Tactics at the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, and I had seen him in action at Hohenfels and in REFORGER in Germany. He was a superb tactician, who could picture the tactical situation in his head and accurately assess friendly abilities as well as any officer I knew. I trusted both their judgments completely. Tactically, we were in one another's heads.
What Don had in mind just then — based on my mission to him not to get decisively engaged, and on the expectation that the 1st INF was closer than they actually were — was that the regiment should go over to the defense very soon and let the 1st INF pass through the next day. (More accurately, he wanted to get into a stationary position that would allow the follow-on division to pass through the regiment with the fewest potential complications.) He was unaware that the British were just now only partway through their passage, or that the time/distance to get the 1st INF forward was greater than he thought.
After I clarified the actual time/distance for 1st INF, I pointed out that I was not yet ready for him to go on the defense. 'What I want you to do,' I said, 'is continue to maintain contact with the enemy. Keep pressure on the Tawalkana. Fix the RGFC. Locate flanks. And then be prepared to pass 1st INF to the east.'
Don understood.
It was not an easy mission. He'd have to revise his formation alignment, then go into the teeth of the stiffening Iraqi defense in order to both fix and find the flanks of more than a division, and figure out the tempo to do all of that. And he'd have to do it all without getting so tangled up that I'd have to rescue him by committing combat units at a time and place dictated by the enemy and not by our own initiative… with the end result that I wouldn't be able to pass the 1st INF through. I trusted Don and the 2nd ACR to get the job done. And I knew I'd go back to see how they were doing it.
What I had just done with 2nd ACR was to reinforce the offensive cover mission. So far, 2nd ACR's mission had been to protect the movement of the main body from enemy action, and Don and the regiment had been adjusting their tempo to stay about thirty minutes in front of the main body. Now that was about to change.
I had now ordered Don on a reconnaissance mission — part of an offensive cover — which meant that he now had to orient himself more directly on the enemy in front of him than on the corps behind him. It also meant that the movement tempo could change, that is, he was no longer restricted to keeping about thirty minutes ahead of the lead elements of the rest of the corps. Don and the 2nd ACR were now focused on the enemy, while at the same time estimating a place where they could pass the 1st INF through. I would rely on Don's tactical judgment to decide the tactics and to adjust the tempo for this mission.
Estimating where to make the forward passage of two moving units is more art than science. You could attempt a passage of one unit through another while both are moving in the same direction, like a relay team in track, but in my experience that does not work. You must designate some battle handover point, a clear separation of the responsibilities for where the passing unit is to take up the fight.
In our NATO missions, all our passages of lines had been in the defense, called a rearward passage of lines, where a defending unit on the move backward had passed the fight to a stationary unit in a defensive position. We had done it many times when I had commanded the Blackhorse in the Fulda Gap from 1982 to 1984.
Those were easy compared to the maneuver facing us soon. For one thing, we were attacking. In the attack, I wanted the maximum out of the 2nd ACR, that is, I wanted them to find, fix, and locate the enemy flanks, and also to push as far east as they could go before passing the 1st INF. Sooner or later, however, the 1st INF would be ready to pass, and the 2nd ACR must stop, either of their own accord or because of enemy actions. As they tried to fix that point (judging both enemy resistance and the availability of the 1st INF to pass), the 2nd ACR would almost surely have to go through some fits and starts, and there would also almost surely be some frustrations among junior leaders in the regiment who wanted to press east. I liked that aggressive attitude, but it was better for the larger 1st INF to keep moving steadily while the 2nd ACR did the fits and starts; a cavalry regiment is much more agile and able to handle the interruptions than an 8,000-vehicle, three-maneuver-brigade division.
All this was in my mind as Don, Steve, and I worked things out.
Based on his estimate that the Tawalkana security zone started at 65 Easting and extended about eight kilometers west, Don figured that from where they were, the 2nd ACR should attack to about 60 Easting in order to collapse the security zone. By that time, the 1st INF would be ready to pass through. However, if the RGFC turned out to be farther east than that, or if the 1st INF turned out to be farther behind than we expected, or if the 2nd ACR was able to go farther east than the 60 grid line, then they would continue to attack east.
I thought about that for a second — and about a larger issue that I had to keep forcing into my thinking. Just then I was intensely focused on the present. As tempting as that might be, I knew I had larger responsibilities. I could concentrate on the present only to the extent that its outcome affected future operations. It was not easy — I had commanded a cavalry regiment and there I was in the middle of combat with one — but I had to let that pass and force myself to look to the future — and especially at the decision on FRAGPLAN 7. It was up to Don to fight the regiment in the present.
After a quick look at FRAGPLAN 7 on the map, I looked ahead at both 3rd AD and 1st INF in relation to the 2nd ACR. We needed to pass both divisions through the 2nd ACR to take up the fight against the Tawalkana and the developing RGFC defense, but the two divisions were in different circumstances.
The 3rd AD was immediately available to execute, and was to the west-southwest of the 2nd ACR by about thirty minutes to an hour — just about right. It'd been a hell of a feat for them to get there only twenty-four hours after we had launched — they'd had to start fifteen hours early, and in a column of brigades; they'd had few cuts in the border berm to use, and so the tactical integrity of their formations had been fractured, forcing the units to go through single file, and then reassemble on the far side into two brigades forward and one back. The 3rd AD had taken hundreds of prisoners, some bypassed by the 2nd ACR, and they'd had some combat: Iraqis retreating away from the 1st INF attack had run into the 3rd AD's eastern flank. Because we were concerned about fratricide on that flank, I had placed a five-kilometer buffer zone in between the two divisions. Some Iraqi units in that zone had been attacked by both divisions. In other words, it had not been an idle or combat-free twenty-four hours for the 3rd AD.
On the other hand, the 1st INF was in the breach about sixty to eighty kilometers away from the 2nd ACR, and fixed in place until the British could pass through. By the time the British finished passage, the 1st INF would be a good eight or ten hours behind the 2nd ACR. The next day I would need to make the tactical judgment about how to keep the 2nd ACR attacking east while moving the whole 1st INF forward to catch them, pass through, and take up the attack.
It was all coming together. I knew what I wanted to do. I would use FRAGPLAN 7—but with the 1st INF in place of the 1st CAV, who were still held in CENTCOM reserve. This would cause major adjustments to be made in the 1st INF and adjustments in graphics overlay at corps. To do both on the move would require many orders to be oral rather than written, and maps would have to be hastily marked. But it all could be done.
With the decision came an assumption: Since the Tawalkana was fixed, the other two RGFC heavy divisions would also doubtless fight in that defense. So far, I had the Tawalkana intelligence I needed from the 2nd ACR. I would soon confirm my assumption about the other two RGFC heavy divisions from the intelligence update from my G-2, and from Third Army. Earlier, I had figured with the Third Army G-2, Brigadier General John Stewart, that this was about the point in the fight when we would have to make a prediction about the disposition of the RGFC. I was confident they would have that intelligence for me when I rendezvoused a little later at the TAC with John Davidson, VII Corps G-2.
Meanwhile, the orders that set the plan in motion were clear. I had ordered Tom to move forward. I had ordered Don to continue to attack. I had ordered Ron Griffith to be in the northern area of Collins by midmorning the next day. Now it was time to get an update from my staff and see if Third Army had any orders for us before I gave FRAGPLAN 7 orders to the corps.
