The Commander
From the June 2, 2003 issue: How Tommy Franks won the Iraq war.
by Fred Barnes
06/02/2003
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A myth surrounds the war plan. It is that
Rumsfeld forced a new paradigm of warfare on an unimaginative and deeply conventional Franks. This isn't true. Rumsfeld was particularly insistent about deploying special operations forces--the Delta Force, Navy Seals, Army Rangers. And he has campaigned noisily for the transformation of the military into a smaller, more mobile, and less risk-averse force.
But the plan belonged to Franks, who began thinking about Iraq while the war in Afghanistan was still being fought. When he joined the president at his Crawford, Texas, ranch in December 2001, he promised "a small option [for Iraq] that's extremely fast and very risky" if war with Iraq became necessary--a plan quite different from that of the Gulf War a dozen years earlier.
With the Franks plan, American forces repeatedly achieved tactical surprise in the war, notably when American, British, and Australian special forces from Jordan captured Iraq's Scud missile sites in western Iraq two days before the larger war began. Iraqi defenders there "didn't have a lot of time to be caught by surprise because we killed them," Franks said in an interview last week at Central Command headquarters in Tampa. "I have to believe the regime was surprised."
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The strongest evidence of operational surprise is that the Iraqi army neither went on the attack nor mounted a serious defense of any region, installation, or city, Baghdad included.
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On September 12, 2001, the day after the assault on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, Rumsfeld asked Franks for a plan to attack al Qaeda terrorists in Afghanistan. A week later Franks presented one. "We showed him a concept with special operations forces working with locals, tied into CIA operations and supported by airpower," Franks said. Rumsfeld's reaction: "That looks pretty good." A few weeks into the war, there was pressure on Franks to jettison the plan and deploy more ground troops. He rejected the idea. It turned out to be the right decision. The troops weren't needed.
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When Franks sat down with Bush in Crawford, the ostensible purpose of the meeting was to update the president on the Afghan war. But the discussion shifted quickly to Iraq. Franks showed Bush the Pentagon's off-the-shelf plan for conquering Iraq and deposing Saddam. It was Desert Storm Plus: 500,000 or more troops and weeks of airstrikes preceding ground operations. "This is not what we are going to do," Franks told the president. Rather, he'd come back with a pared-down, swifter, riskier war plan.
The two plans--the standby plan and the smaller option--were the "bookends" for a year-long struggle at Centcom headquarters and the Pentagon over a new strategy for Iraq, a struggle that occasionally pitted Franks against Rumsfeld, and branches of the armed forces against each other. The new plan, finalized last February, combined five elements of 21st-century warfare that reflect a remade military.
Speed. Franks is fond of saying, "Speed kills." His orders to commanders of American forces invading Iraq from the south were to race to Baghdad. "Be audacious and do not get bogged down with any major Iraqi force," Franks told them. "Bypass that force and move as quickly as possible to Baghdad." Critics of this strategy, Franks said, "didn't have the situational awareness I had."
Franks knew Iraqi divisions on the right flank couldn't get near the speeding Americans. Special ops forces had blown up bridges the Iraqis would have needed to cross to get at the Americans. So the Iraqi divisions sat in place "until they were decimated" by American airpower. "I never saw this operation as anything approaching a gamble," Franks said.
Speed raises "the possibility of catastrophic success," said Marine General Peter Pace, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which is roughly what Franks achieved. A small force moving rapidly can have the same impact--the same firepower--as a large force advancing slowly. And the smaller force has a striking advantage. It can gain a quicker victory with fewer troops and fewer casualties by surprising and discombobulating the enemy. Or, to use another of Franks's favorite phrases, by "getting into the threat's decision cycle."
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Precision. This is the ability to destroy what you want and nothing else. Precision, Pace said, allows "you to destroy military targets and not destroy civilian targets." In Baghdad, only military facilities were targeted. One result: Most civilians didn't flee the city. "The whole refugee problem was averted, in large measure because we were very precise in the way we did our business," Pace said.
Improved technology has made weapons far more precise than they were in the Gulf War. "At least two-thirds of the bombs used by coalition forces in Iraq were precision-guided by lasers of global-positioning satellites, compared with just 13 percent of the bombs we used in the 1991 Gulf War," President Bush has noted proudly. Not the least of the accomplishments of precision weapons was the shredding of Republican Guard divisions outside Baghdad. They were "depleted" before confronting allied divisions. When American troops advanced, they found "hundreds of destroyed vehicles" and minimal resistance, said Air Force Major Gen. Victor Renuart, the Centcom operations chief.
Precision also magnifies the value of airpower. Targets that once took many sorties to destroy can now be wiped out by a single precision-guided bomb. The change in ratios is amazing. In World War II, it took 3,000 sorties to guarantee the destruction of a target. By the Gulf War, that was reduced to 10. Now one plane can take out 10 targets.
Vision. The military calls it situational or battlefield awareness. With new technology, commanders can see, in real time, where the enemy is and where their own forces are as well. Drones, radar planes, and the like spied constantly from the air on Iraqi forces. Transponders with each American unit beeped their location. With this technology, "I am watching the transformation of warfare," said Franks.
At the Centcom command post in Doha, Qatar, none of the technology was older than six months. A flat blue panel showed exactly where each allied unit was. At one point, Franks picked out a unit on the panel and simultaneously watched a second panel with a live report from a journalist embedded in that unit. "It occurred to me I was watching transformation in more than one way," Franks said.
Here's how Pace describes the American advantage in situational awareness: "The combination of overhead cover and unmanned aerial vehicles and manned aircraft and special operations and the true integration of CIA assets with special operations folks really gave a clearer picture of the battlefield itself."
Jointness. This is an awkward word for the integration in battle of the four branches of the armed services. A goal for decades, it was achieved for the first time in Afghanistan and Iraq. In the Gulf War, the forces of each branch were "de-conflicted"--in other words, they operated on separate tracks. "This time," Franks said, "we had reliant operations, where one service is reliant on the performance of another service. I believe that is transformational." Jointness is designed to produce synergy. "By taking the strengths of each of the services and integrating these capabilities," said Renuart, you can produce an even greater effect "at a center point on the battlefield."
Troops dashing to Baghdad relied on airpower for protection. And by drawing Republican Guard divisions into the open, they created a target-rich environment for American warplanes. Army, special ops, and CIA agents worked together in northern Iraq to push the Kurds out front as a fighting force, just as they had done in Afghanistan with the Northern Alliance.
In the past, each branch sought to expand its own role, the Army arguing for more of its troops on the ground, and so on. Franks, an Army man, opposed that traditional practice as he wrote the war plan. "He was obsessed with not letting the Army be elevated," an aide said. It wasn't, causing heartburn among Army generals, but creating a more coherent force in Iraq.
Special operations. This is a Rumsfeld obsession, and rightly so. For decades, special operations forces were the neglected stepchild of the military. In the Gulf War, Schwarzkopf denigrated special forces as "snake eaters." And in that war, Iraq fired dozens of missiles on Israel from its "Scud zone" in western Iraq. Last March, the special ops forces that slipped into the west at night took out all the Scud sites before a single missile was fired.
In Afghanistan, it took only a few hundred special ops personnel and CIA agents on the ground to rout the Taliban. They leveraged their presence to locate targets for destruction by precision munitions fired by warplanes. In Iraq, an estimated 10,000 special ops troops spread across the country, seizing hundreds of oil wells and the bridges that allied ground troops would cross on the road to Baghdad.
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THE NEW WARFARE wasn't the sole source of the success in Iraq, nor is it the only aspect of transformation. Old concepts carried out more efficiently played a part. One was deception. The Turkish gambit was Franks's boldest effort to deceive Saddam. There's no proof, but the best guess is it affected Saddam's expectations of when an invasion might occur.
Weeks before the war, American military officers learned from their Turkish counterparts that Turkey was unlikely to allow the U.S. 4th Infantry Division to invade Iraq from Turkey in the north. Such an attack was a critical part of the Franks plan. But absent a northern front, Franks wanted Saddam to think an invasion from Turkish soil was still likely and that the war couldn't begin until weeks after the Turkish issue was resolved. So Franks insisted ships with the 4th Infantry's tanks and equipment remain off the shore of Turkey for weeks, as if awaiting the Turkish okay to unload. In fact, disinformation that the Turks would ultimately permit American troops to operate from their soil was slipped to Saddam's inner circle.
If that didn't persuade Saddam that he had, in Franks's words, "more rope," the American commander had another trick. Instead of sending ground troops into Iraq after weeks of bombing, Franks sent the 3rd Infantry Division, the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, and a British Division across the southern border the day before bombing began. Then, despite talk of a pause before moving on Baghdad, Franks agreed with ground commanders to send tanks and troops into the city immediately on a "thunder run."
Had allied forces encountered serious resistance, Franks had alternatives. Pace refers to them as "pre-planned audibles," like the calls a quarterback might make at the line of scrimmage. Had special ops failed in the west, Franks had Plan B, sending a large contingent of forces from Kuwait to attack the Scud sites. Because the Turkish option didn't materialize, Franks turned to a backup plan to combine a small American force with Kurdish fighters. It worked.
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