Concentrating force on the fly:
Fighting a war isn't like baking a cake, where you look up a recipe and follow it, and end up with something nice and fluffy and flavorful, and each time you want to make a cake you follow the same recipe.
Every war is unique. Situation change. What led to a huge success last time might fail miserably this time. You always have to take the situation into account, and in particular as the weapons we use change the way we fight wars also has to change. Because if you don't, the only thing you're going to have to show for your efforts is vast numbers of dead bodies and a ruined nation.
That is generally accepted as the lesson of the first years of the western front in WWI. A style of warfare which began before Gustavus Adolphus, which was developed by Frederick the Great, perfected by Napoleon, had finally became a form of mass suicide in face of the triple threat of barbed wire, machine guns and effective massed long range artillery. Mass charges by large formations of men had already become extremely perilous by the time of the American Civil War, where they sometimes were effective but sometimes spectacular failures. There were further failures in Crimea and in the Franco-Prussian war, but there were enough successes in all three that it was not realized that it was rapidly becoming obsolete.
Pickett's Charge failed because massed musketry had become too good. Fire rate was high, range was long and the bullets were highly lethal, and the attackers had to pay too high a price simply to cover ground to reach the defenders. When the defenders were also up a hill, in good morale, behind a fence, and supported by artillery there was virtually no chance, and the men of Pickett's division got slaughtered.
The "modern way of war" was developed more or less in the 1930's and was first used effectively by Germany. It was then adopted by those Germany faced, who were able to do it better mostly because they had more men and more equipment. Probably the canonical example of it was the Normandy invasion. You bring immense amounts of men and matériel into the theater, ready to be used when the time comes, use intense air preparation to weaken the enemy, hit him and then never let up. And everything depends on concentrating the forces needed before you begin.
But modern air power presents you with a dilemma, if the other side has it and can use it against your ground forces. That's what the Germans faced when they prepared their last offensive of the war, known to most of us as the "Battle of the Bulge". An entire force was prepared in the West, unsuspected by the western Allies, and thrown at a weak section of the American part of the front. The attack was timed for a period of bad weather because it meant that the Allied air forces couldn't fly. And it's a matter of record that one reason for the failure of that assault was that the weather cleared. Allied planes (especially American fighter-bombers) were able to fly again, and not only could they learn where the Germans were, but could also begin to bomb them and disrupt movement of supplies.
In 1990 and 1991, in the first Gulf war, we methodically prepared a large force inside Saudi Arabia, moving men and equipment in over a period of months. Once the force was ready, six weeks of air preparation began. During that time the air was cleared of Iraqi planes, and while it continued Schwarzkopf ordered his grand left-movement of a large part of his force to be in position for the "left hook". Then, once that was ready and when it was judged that the Iraqi combat power had been sufficiently eroded, ground ops began.
We can't do that now. We can't fully build up before beginning ground operations. The situation has changed in several critical ways.
It appears now that the ultimate force we'll use will be smaller than in 1991. Then the combined force of Americans and others was in the range of about half a million; this time it looks as if it will ultimately be about half that, maybe a bit less. But in 1990 and 1991 we were deploying in Saudi Arabia and had an immense area to work with. This time it looks like most of the deployment will be in and through Kuwait. Much of that can't be used either because it's populated, or because it's their oil fields, or because it's full of left-over mines and unexploded ordnance from the last war. So the total area available for initial deployment is much smaller, and if we moved the entire force in before combat began, they'd be highly concentrated and would become a fat target for some sort of area attack by WMDs.
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The force this time will be smaller but the area we have to work with is much smaller, and concentration would be much higher.
We know that Iraq has large amounts of chemical weapons (including mustard and nerve gases), and while our forces are equipped and trained to fight through such things, doing so is highly treacherous because it is extremely unforgiving. Even a small mistake can lead to death. A large initial concentration of our men in Kuwait would be an inviting target for something like a short-range attack by chemical-tipped rockets, or even a long range attack by several simultaneous Scuds.
We also can't ignore the possibility that Iraq actually has managed to create a nuke, and if that's true and if they can fit one into a Scud, then it becomes a really serious threat.
This kind of thing is dealt with as a series of layered defenses. For short range rockets to be used, they'd have to be deployed south to get in range, and we would certainly bomb anything that looked like that which was moved into the southern "No Fly" zone. By the same token, we've got Special Forces guys in Iraq looking around trying to spot the Scud launchers and keep track of them. We have anti-missile systems in place (such as the Patriot, which may be debugged by now) and there are other things as well. But these are not perfect and the best way to not be attacked is to not tempt your enemy to attack you. Men who haven't yet arrived in the theater can't be attacked that way.
So though in 1990 we built up the entire force before beginning ground ops, this time the forces for ground ops will deploy while the war is going on. What's in place now in Kuwait (and has been for several months) is a force sufficient to defend against an Iraq spoiling attack (or as much of one as would survive our air assault while it moved towards Kuwait) plus logistics and engineer units which have been moving in supplies and creating facilities to support a much larger force.
When the time comes that hostilities begin, the initial phase will be air preparation. That's standard American doctrine and for the moment there's no reason to believe that will change. The initial goal will be to attain air supremacy, so the initial targets will be Iraqi air defense systems, Iraqi command-and-control bunkers, and Iraqi air fields. At least to begin with, most of that will be handled by cruise missiles and stealth bombers operating at night. The best time for that is dark of the moon.
Once we attain air supremacy and have eliminated the threat from Iraq's air defenses, more conventional aircraft will be able to operate with impunity and there will be more general attacks on a larger variety of targets. In 1990 one of the main goals was to actually try to destroy their front line forces, but this time the main goal will be to destroy commanders while minimizing the number of Iraqi grunts who have to die for their country. We've been dropping leaflets telling the Iraqi Army that they won't be harmed as long as they don't fight, but if any of them actually do limber up and seem to be moving to oppose us, they'll be hammered. There can be no mercy in that case; they have to die, and they will.
And because we'll have air supremacy over the entire theater, and will have such things as JSTARs operating, keeping track of what Iraq is doing, it will be much less perilous to begin to build up ground forces in Kuwait, and men will begin to pour in. But even in this case it won't be that all of them will arrive before any move out. Instead, there will be an initial force which will move into southern Iraq. Some of them will attack and either capture or surround Basrah (best guess is that the Marines get this job), while others will move north. As they capture territory, it will open space behind them and further troops will deploy in part as reserves (a good commander always has reserves) and in part to move out to take other objectives as the battle develops and the front broadens.
This is "just in time" deployment. Forces will hit the ground, spend a few days getting it together, and then move out and join the war. If the puzzle in WWI was how you could break through a front line guarded by machine guns and barbed wire, the puzzle now is how you can gain sufficient concentration of force to do any fighting at all without the force being so concentrated as to be an inviting target for area-effect weapons.
No one does that better than us, and by that I mean on both sides of that question. Everyone who has faced us in combat in the last 15 years has had the problem of how they could mass men without having them slaughtered by our use of cluster bombs and FAEs and similar weapons. And no one is better at moving troops rapidly and deploying them dynamically than we are, which is a good thing for us.
Because this time we also face that danger of making our forces targets if they bunch up too much. The good news is that even if Iraq does have such weapons, they'll be crude by our standards, and as long as our forces move fast and stay spread out, and only concentrate at the last instant, then vulnerability to that kind of attack against us can be minimized. Speed is life on the modern battlefield; your enemy can't hit you if he doesn't know where you are.
So we're sending the Marines. We're sending the 4th Infantry division (mechanized). We're going to send elements of First Infantry, First Armored and First Cavalry. The 101st will be there. The Brits are sending 26,000 men, which amount to an armored division, and they've also sent 3000 Royal Marines.
But they won't all arrive at once, and a lot of them will deliberately arrive after hostilities have begun.
I remain convinced that the formal announcement of hostilities will be the 31st. The British would not have sent their armor if Blair was going to spend his time here on the 30th and 31st trying to talk Bush out of attacking; it's clear that Blair's visit is all part of a plan. Blair and Bush will together announce the attack (which will be politically far more effective than if Bush did it alone), and the first stage of air preparations by F-117's and B2's will take place during the dark of the moon in the first three days of February, after which Iraqi air defenses will largely be gone and the air assault will intensify. Ground ops will begin sometime between the 10th and 16th, and further troops to support ground ops, and to be available as reserves, and to be available for post-war occupation duty, will still be being deployed as late as the middle of March, though the bulk of them will be on the ground by the end of February.
This is, of course, extraordinarily speculative and there are a lot of ways that this could end up changing. For instance, if we know where Saddam is hiding and kill him in the first few days of the bombing, the war could end much sooner with an Iraqi surrender. When the bombing starts there could be a coup and surrender. It might be that the air preparation needs to take a bit longer or be done sooner. It isn't a schedule so much as a list of objectives, and it takes as long as it does. What I'm describing above is what I think the highest-probability "worst case" scenario would involve, which is to say what happens if we don't get lucky in any significant way, such as by bagging Saddam early. That's the way to plan, and this is how I think Franks has it planned. If so, he is doing just as good a job this time as he did in Afghanistan and is showing just as much flexibility.
One of the great failings for any military is to refight the last war. It's clearly not something we're doing this time. It is becoming obvious that we're crafting the plan to fit the problem, and not the other way around (which is a prescription for failure). The devil is always in the details, and you ignore them at your peril.
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