you want to take a unit out of the lead and put in a fresh formation, that means you have to pass one unit through another. For armored brigades, this involves 2,000 vehicles passing through another 2,000, which requires careful coordination just to keep the units from running into one another. If a battle is going on, then the passed unit also has to render tactical assistance to the passing one in order to shift the battle to them.
While you are arranging and maneuvering, you can never lose sight of physical friction. Armored formations have to refuel and rearm, which takes time. They have to repair vehicles with maintenance problems and perform preventive maintenance — clean air filters, check oil levels, adjust track tension, and the like. If you can, you combine maintenance with fuel-rearm halts.
Meanwhile, different vehicles move at different speeds. Tanks go much faster than artillery vehicles, so in an attack you have to make sure that one doesn't outrun the other. Fuel trucks also are slower than tanks and Bradleys cross-country, and since they often can't go where the others can go, you have to bring the tanks and Bradleys to them.
Movement at night is much slower than in the day. You have to work extra hard to maintain unit integrity and to keep vehicles from wandering off course, and when combat is imminent, the pace is even slower. You want to be certain you know where all your vehicles are located before you engage the enemy. Because only a few selected commanders' vehicles in each formation had GPS or LORAN, everyone else had to use those vehicles as a guide, employing either night-vision devices or light signals — a tough task. The high winds and rain complicated these maneuvers… which became especially difficult if the enemy had been bypassed and there was action both to the front and rear.
Soldier fatigue also affects speed. If you're standing in turrets or lying in drivers' compartments for a long time, you get tired and lose concentration. You must give them breaks from time to time.
To do everything you need to do rapidly takes much practice. Because of the limited maneuver possibilities in Germany, VII Corps hadn't had much major unit maneuver practice there, and there hadn't been any opportunity at all to practice desert formations such as the wedge or the box until we actually deployed in Saudi Arabia (some of the formations hadn't even been invented yet). That was why I had so forcefully stressed large-unit training skills in our first meeting on 9 November. As it was, the training time had been limited, and our only full-scale rehearsal was the 180-kilometer move from our TAA to our attack positions in mid-February. If we had gone to war right off the ships and without GPS, our maneuvers on the night of the twenty-fifth and all through the rest of our attack would have been more difficult. That we got it all done in a small attack zone during the eighty-nine hours of the war was a great tribute to the leaders, the soldiers, and to mission-focused training.
As Ron Griffith put it after the war: 'The thing that we didn't have a sense for, because we had never maneuvered on that scale before, is how to array your battle formations. How long does it take, for example, if you decide to provide a base of fire with one brigade and to envelop twenty-five or thirty kilometers into the rear with another brigade? Sometimes our assessment of how long it would take to conduct a particular maneuver would be off by as much as 300 percent… Well, it might take five hours to do that or it might take an hour and fifteen minutes. And so we practiced.'
These were our basic maneuver formations:
DIVISIONS had four formations: a column of brigades; a 'desert' wedge; two brigades forward and one in reserve; and three brigades abreast. From those basic maneuver sets, division commanders could set a base of fire and maneuver to attack.
The division commanders also experimented with aviation. They started out by using their AH-64s' fire to support the attacking ground units, but when they discovered that in-close did not work due to sand clutter (the normal swirl of sand dust kicked up by maneuvering tracked vehicles obscures vehicles from the air and makes laser designation of targets difficult), they quickly adapted by sending the Apaches deeper in front.
On the other hand, since in many cases the Iraqi artillery outranged ours, the commanders pulled their cannon and rocket (MLRS) artillery in close to the lead maneuver units so that they could range Iraqi artillery in counterfire. This even meant pushing the MLRS well forward, which was a violation of doctrine, but it fit the battle conditions.
BRIGADES also had their own attack formations, which resembled division formations: a star, with two battalions forward and two back, plus artillery behind; a wedge, with one battalion forward and two abreast and behind, plus artillery right behind the lead task force; a column of battalions (one behind the other); two brigades up abreast and one back; and the brigade on line with three or four battalion task forces abreast. These basic formations gave the brigade commanders the versatility and options they needed. They used them all.
BATTALIONS. Normally there were no 'pure' battalions of 'only' tanks or Bradleys. In order to get the versatility and combined-arms effects of tanks and infantry, the U.S. Army combined them into task forces, which used the battalion command structure, but involved exchanging companies between battalions. In other words, a tank battalion of four companies would send one of its companies to a Bradley battalion in exchange for a Bradley company, thus making both battalions into task forces. They used the same maneuver formations as the brigades, except that the companies replaced the battalions in the formation alignments: a box — two companies up and two back; a diamond — one company forward, two behind, and one trailing; or all companies on line abreast.
Refueling on the move (ROM) was another thing that units worked hard to perfect, and our soldiers' skill in execution would have made a pit crew at the Indy 500 proud. By G-Day, ROM was a well-choreographed drill, practiced many times in training in the desert: Fuel trucks were brought forward and set up at spots in the desert, then unit vehicles lined up at these 'pit' stops and took on fuel on either side of the truck. Simultaneously, tank crews, before or after refueling, removed air filters (twenty- to thirty-pound metal boxes) from tanks, blew compressed air through them to clean out sand, and performed other maintenance while also checking the tank's main gun boresight (to ensure that the cannon and sights were both on the same spot).
VII CORPS JUMP TAC CP
At around 0100, I went back to the two M577s to see if there had been any change while I was gone. The rain and high winds continued, and the soldiers were wet and cold. The official weather data said we were to have 81 percent illumination, but with cloud cover and rain, I could barely see Toby a few feet away as we stumbled around in the rain getting back to the TAC. I could picture the commanders and soldiers trying to keep the units together while continuing to move and refuel in this weather.
Though the bad weather had caused cancellation of our deep aviation attack, other actions continued.
Since 1500 the day before, 1st AD had attacked the almost 140 kilometers to al-Busayyah and destroyed the better part of a reinforced Iraqi brigade and other Iraqi units in their zone. They had reported destroying 2 tanks, 25 armored personnel carriers, 9 artillery pieces, 48 trucks, 14 air defense pieces, and capturing over 300 prisoners (the accounts of prisoners continued to vary widely). Before the violent rainstorms, their aviation brigade Apaches had struck hard at Iraqi positions in al-Busayyah, and the division was continuing to pound Iraqi targets in the town with cannon and MLRS artillery. Ron had them exactly where I wanted them. The division was in an excellent logistics posture, and the troops were reasonably fresh, although there would not be much rest with the weather that night.
Second ACR had also been active in combat. Though Don Holder had had to cancel a planned Apache attack into the Tawalkana, he had managed to launch a successful MLRS raid that night as a follow-through on my order to keep the pressure on the RGFC. He'd sent Company M of 3rd Squadron to escort the nine-launcher MLRS battery C/4-27 FA.
The unit commanders remembered the action like this: C Battery:
'Guarded by the tank company from 3/2 ACR, C Battery moved outside the regimental defenses to fire the missions. The first two, at 2230 and 0100, were executed unimpeded. The third, at 0430 on the twenty-sixth, was interrupted as the launchers moved behind the tank company through the regimental defenses. An MTLB unit of
