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BUILDUP
The first signs of the end of uncertainty came quickly. In November, the President’s approval of the additional corps began to take visible effect when the heavy VIIth Corps began to deploy from Germany to Saudi Arabia. In Germany, VIIth Corps had defended the strategic Fulda Gap in the face of the now rapidly disintegrating Warsaw Pact; in the Gulf, their mission was to be the armored fist of Schwarzkopf’s flanking attack aimed at the armored divisions of the Republican Guard, now based near the northwest corner of Kuwait.
Early that month, General Schwarzkopf called a commander’s conference at the “Desert Inn,” a military dining facility at Dhahran Air Base, to outline his plan for those who were new to CENTCOM, Lieutenant General Fred Franks and his VIIth Corps commanders, who had just flown down from Germany for an initial look-around. The old CENTCOM hands, like Yeosock, Boomer, Luck, and Horner, were already familiar with what the CINC would be telling them. They’d come to the Dhahran conference essentially to meet and greet. Though they were more than happy to have VIIth Corps and its Abrams tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles, the old hands had their brown desert camos and suntans, and their close comradeship developed in the desert, and to them the new men looked just a little out of place and edgy in their pale skins and forest-green camouflage fatigues. The new people would fit in — that’s what they were all trained and paid for — but there would be many tough moments in the weeks ahead.
In his briefing, the CINC covered what air was going to do, what the USMC, the XVIIIth Airborne Corps, and the Islamic Corps were going to do, and what he expected VIIth Corps to do. The Marines and the Islamic forces would attack the heart of the Iraqi defenses in Kuwait. XVIIIth Corps and the French would move into Iraq in the west, where they would support the flank of the main, VIIth Corps attack. When XVIIIth Corps reached the Euphrates River, they’d turn east and join the attack against the Republican Guards.
The CINC’s final message was simple: Hit them hard. Hit them fast. Never let up. Never slow down. “We are going to move out fast,” he told his commanders. “If you have commanders who are going to worry about outrunning their logistic tails, or about having their flanks exposed, don’t bring them to this fight. This attack will slam into an army that has been greatly weakened from weeks of air attack; and I want you to start out running and keep running until we surround them and destroy them as a fighting force.”
? The buildup that followed was spectacular. There had been nothing like it since the buildup in the south of England in the spring of 1944. In November alone, CENTAF’s force grew by close to 40 percent, and that was only the beginning. Here is a snapshot of what was going on:*
Much of the USN buildup was additional carriers.
The buildup posed many problems.
For Chuck Horner himself, the pace of his own planning grew ever more frantic. Each day he had to ask himself yet again: “What has changed? What new force can we accommodate? How can we support it? At what location? How will we introduce them into the existing ATO?”
At Horner’s level, planning meant anticipating potential problems, then working out in advance how to avoid them, or solve them if they could not be avoided. It was his job to foresee everything that might happen, then to bring about the good outcomes and to head off the bad ones.
While the staff were up to their necks working immediate issues, he looked beyond what they were wrestling with to anticipate the next issues they needed to address when they finished what they were doing.
In this he was mostly successful, he now believes, for the war brought few surprises, while a thousand prepared-for events didn’t happen. His two chief anticipatory lapses were the impact of Scuds on the Israelis and the Khafji invasion — significant errors, yet easy to miss.
? Meanwhile, there were many countless practical and immediate buildup-related problems:
Command arrangements had to be both spread out and strengthened. On December 5, Horner decided that his span of control was too large. He therefore put the fighters under Buster Glosson (officially, he became the fighter division commander); the bombers and tankers under Pat Caruana; the electronic assets under Profitt; and the airlifters under Ed Tenoso.
The constant arrival of new intelligence led to changes in the offensive ATO. However, now that there were more strike and support forces, more targets could be hit, so the ATO grew larger and more complex.
The best use of the new Joint STARS had to be worked out (it arrived for the first time only a day before the war started).
New players such as VIIth Corps had to be accommodated.
The airlift west of XVIIIth and VIIth Corps had to be worked out, once ground movements had been finalized (during their move west to attack positions, the only land artery, the Tapline Road, was paved with trucks. The intratheater airlift created an airbridge that relieved some of that pressure).
More tent cities had to be built, to accommodate the increased numbers of personnel.
There had to be ample munitions at each base. The plan was to have a sixty-day supply on hand; but when the new aircraft arrived, it went down to thirty days. Yet within a few weeks, Bill Rider and his logistics team, with enormous support from the logistics organizations in Europe and the United States, brought munitions up to the required sixty-day supply. Saddam Hussein, constantly underestimating airpower, had told his troops openly that the Coalition would run out of bombs after a few days. He was wrong yet again. Not only did Horner have sixty days’ worth of bombs and missiles on hand when the war started, but they would keep that level day in and day out as the war progressed.
Communications had to be built up, both to support the added forces and to execute offensive operations. Though there were more communications per person in this war than in any other, the miracles performed by
