The town was located in the area of responsibility of the commander of the Eastern Area Command, Major General Sultan Sultan Adi al-Mutairi. After the evacuation, General Sultan placed screening forces near the town, as well as a small troop in the town itself, to protect property until the crisis was over. He also had a significant force approximately fifty kilometers south of Al-Khafji.
Most of Sultan’s forces were Royal Saudi Land Force mechanized infantry and Saudi National Guard mechanized forces. Also under his command were mechanized forces from Qatar, and infantry from Oman, the United Arab Republic, Kuwait, Morocco, and Senegal. Rounding out this force was a sizable force of Saudi marines.
To the west of Sultan was the area of responsibility of Walt Boomer’s United States Marine Corps — two divisions, augmented by a division of British armor (later replaced by the U.S. Army Tiger Brigade).
Very significantly for what was to come later, in November Boomer had concluded that he could not support offensive operations into Kuwait with the logistics setup created for the defense of Saudi Arabia (though Walt Boomer is a genius, he has to be a little crazy). At any rate, he built his logistics stockpiles just south of the Kuwaiti border,
? To fully understand the Battle of Khafji, we need to understand that it was not a single battle but four. Let me explain:
Battle One was the battle for the town itself — the fight the world watched on CNN.
Battle Two was the skillful and desperate struggle by the U.S. Marines to protect their naked storage depots out in the desert. (As it happened, the Iraqis did not know they were there. If they had, they would likely have put real punch into an attack in that direction, and quite possibly have damaged the allied cause.)
Battle Three was our air attacks on the Iraqi divisions forming up to attack Khafji. Overhead, Joint STARS watched these movements and directed hundreds of sorties against them: tank-killing A-10s with Mavericks; the AC-130 on the coast highway, killing a vehicle every ten to thirty seconds; B-52s bombing the “Kuwaiti National Forest” (so called by the pilots because in that part of the desert the Kuwaitis had been trying to grow scraggly trees that could live on the brackish water under the sand), where the Iraqis had been forming up — and trying to hide — for the attack; F-16s and F/A-18s dropping cluster bombs on the lead and tail vehicles of convoys so the burning vehicles blocked the road and trapped all the rest of the tanks, trucks, and artillery pieces; AV-8s and AH-1s strafing the Iraqis as they fled back across the border.
Battle Four was the battle that never happened — the movement of the Iraqis to position for another attack elsewhere, such as down the Wadi al Batin against the Egyptians and Syrians near KKMC. If the Iraqis had succeeded in engaging the Egyptians and/or the Syrians, it would have given us — to put it mildly — major headaches. Because the Iraqis, the Egyptians, and the Syrians often used the same equipment — Russian tanks versus Russian tanks — we would have had a very difficult time deciding which one to kill. And because there were few English-speaking FACs, we would have had a very difficult time sorting out the good guys from the bad guys. The possible results: lots of casualties and Iraqi forces astride the Tapline Road, the single highway connecting the coast and the west. Its possession would have allowed the enemy to prevent movement west of the U.S. VIIth and XVIIIth Corps to their attack positions.
To make matters more complicated, we were at that point very unsure about how well the Arab forces would fight when the crunch came.
In the event, the Saudis did extremely well at Khafji, and later during what has been misnamed the Hundred-Hour War. But it was their country and their king. Would the Egyptians and Syrians be similarly motivated? No one knew.
In hindsight, Battle Four may have been the one Saddam should have put all his chips on (though, in fact, if he’d tried it, he still didn’t have a chance because of the battlefield situational awareness Joint STARS gave us). A dug-in army is tough to kill; an army on the roads is a piece of cake.
To summarize: Battle Three was the key to winning Battles One and Two, and to never having to fight Battle Four.
? As early as the twenty-fifth of January, we began to see glimmers that told us something was up.
First, Brigadier General Jack Leide, the CENTCOM J-2, warned of activity by the Iraqi IIId Corps commander, Lieutenant General Salah Abud Mahmud. (We would get to know him better in March, when he showed up at Safwan to surrender the Iraqi Army.)
About the same time, the Kuwaiti resistance leader, Colonel Ahmed Al-Rahamani, hiding in Kuwait City with a suitcase satellite telephone, phoned the TACC and relayed to the Kuwaiti Air Force duty officer, Colonel Samdan, that some generals were meeting in Kuwait City in an hour.[66] Based on the address provided by Colonel Rahamani, Chris Christon used aerial photographs of the neighborhood to pinpoint the meeting’s location. Christon and Buster Glosson immediately examined further evidence provided by CENTCOM, the Kuwaiti resistance, and our own intelligence; and when they were satisfied that this was a valid target, they tasked some of Tom Lennon’s F-111s to pay a call. Soon, four 2,000-pound laser-guided bombs were knocking on the door. A moment later, a massive ball of fire consumed the house and a flock of Mercedes-Benzes parked in the nearby parking lot. I never learned who was at the meeting or what they were planning.
Then, on the twenty-ninth of January, Chris Christon informed me that several FROG (Free Over Ground Rocket) units had deployed into Kuwait, in his view a tip-off that the Iraqis would attack sometime during the next two weeks. He was the only one I know who even came close to predicting the attack (though he missed the date). That night, Iraqi lead elements entered Al-Khafji.
Despite the hints, we were surprised.
Suddenly, thousands of Iraqi soldiers, thinking the night had made them invisible, began to move out of their dug-in defensive positions and mass for the attack.
Because of all the unforeseeable possibilities, an army in transit is an army ill at ease. Units can take the wrong road and arrive at the wrong place, vehicles can break down and fail to arrive in time to support the attack, weather can turn order into confusion. But never before had an army moving to the attack faced what this army was about to face. Because it was moving, it could be seen on the Joint STARS radar. Because it could be seen, it could be targeted and attacked. And because it was out in the open, jammed on narrow roads without shelter or camouflage, it was going to die. The Iraqi generals trusted that darkness would hide their movement, but the reality of modern technology left them naked to massive doses of death, destruction, and terror from the air. It was any ground commander’s worst nightmare.
As the convoys started their march south to the Saudi border, Joint STARS picked them up. Within moments A-10, F-16, B-52, AC-130, AV-8, and F/A-18 aircraft were diverted from other targets to attack the moving Iraqi Army, and the battle grew in intensity as more and more tanks, APCs, and trucks took to the highways leading to Al-Khafji.
Moments later, the large and orderly movement of Iraqi forces into Saudi Arabia had been turned into chaos. A-10s had bottled whole convoys of tanks on roads by killing the lead and the trailing vehicles; they then methodically set each vehicle in between on fire — and lit up two- to five-mile stretches of road like day. As Maverick missiles turned the stalled vehicles into fiery infernos, Iraqi soldiers ran into the desert to save their lives.
The Iraqi Army had been intent on surprise, and they had achieved it; but surprise did them no good. The ground commander had launched his attack against Saudi Arabia and was preparing to reinforce his attack when he ran up against a menace that was not in his script — hundreds of aircraft dropping thousands of lethal munitions on his forces.
On the ground, Battles One and Two erupted almost simultaneously.
To the west of the road to Khafji, the lead elements of the mechanized division the Iraqis had placed on their right flank to screen their main attack ran into company-size Marine elements near the huge storage area just south of the Kuwait border. Instantly concluding that the attack was directed at the thousands of tons of food, fuel, ammunitions, and petroleum stored in the open desert, the Marines sent armored personnel carriers, aided by close air support aircraft, against the Iraqi units and beat them back decisively. Though the fighting was fierce (several Marines were killed), it was not sustained, as the Iraqis had no intention of making this (Battle Two) the decisive
