Never modest–even as a cadet, he announced that he wanted to pattern his career after Alexander’s–Schwarzkopf is hardly indifferent to his place in history. Describing his Marine sappers’ breaching of the Iraqi line, the American commander remarked, “Absolutely superb operation, textbook, and I think it will be studied for many years.” The British commander, Gen. Peter de la Billiere, was more fulsome still: “We are, today, at the end of perhaps one of the greatest victories we have ever experienced. We needn’t be shy about it. A great victory.”
It was, and by any measure: a bombing campaign that was at once surgical and earth-scorching. A blitzkrieg that blasted with hardly any allied casualties past mines and berms and barbed wire. A surprise sweeping maneuver that outflanked the enemy and “slammed the door” on any retreat. Schwarzkopf’s plan was carried out with such efficiency that the most collateral damage done was to the cliche that no plan survives contact with the enemy.
The battle was in many ways a mismatch: as if, one Marine put it, Rhode Island had taken on the United States. Even so, to eliminate a half-million-man Army with 7,000 tanks and armored vehicles and 3,000 artillery pieces is no mean feat. That this was accomplished so quickly and at so little cost of allied lives is remarkable.
The rout of Iraq has few historical precedents. Iraqi casualties may reach 100,000–against some 150 killed in action for coalition forces. At Agincourt in 1415, Henry V of England killed about 10,000 Frenchmen at the cost of a few score countrymen. At the battle of Plassey in 1757, a 2,500-man force under Robert Clive panicked and routed 50,000 Bengalis (securing India as the jewel in England’s crown). At Omdurman in 1898, Britain lost fewer than 500 men while killing or wounding 20,000 Sudanese.
In all these legendary battles, new weapons won the day. At Agincourt, the bow and arrow (the first airstrike) defeated the sword and lance; at Plassey, cannon overcame elephant-mounted cavalry; at Omdurman, machine guns mowed down musketry. But in the Persian Gulf, the Iraqis were supposed to enjoy rough parity. Journalists and pundits may have overstated Iraqi prowess, but then so did the Pentagon. An Army War College study cautioned, “Iraq is superb on the defense. Its army is well-equipped and trained to carry out mobile defense operations.” The Soviets, who trained and supplied the Iraqis, cautioned: “Be warned, they are good.”
But they were led by a fool. If a leader is a poor strategist, Sun-tzu wrote 2,000 years ago, weapons and tactics cannot save him. At his briefing last week, Schwarzkopf dismissed Saddam’s military skills (and just about everything else about him) with a contemptuous “Hah!” The Iraqi strongman was done in largely by his own caution. His crucial mistake was to stop at the Saudi border when he invaded Kuwait. Had he kept going and seized the air base at Dhahran, the Saudis and their American allies would have been almost powerless to stop him. The first paratroopers rushed to Saudi Arabia in August grimly referred to themselves as “speed bumps.” Indeed, at his briefing last week, Schwarzkopf mordantly thanked the American press for exaggerating the size and speed of the U.S. buildup.
Saddam’s second mistake was to defend Kuwait–but fail to protect his flank in southern Iraq. By digging in his armor, Saddam “threw away” any offensive advantage and reduced his tanks to little more than “pillboxes,” said military historian Bryan Perrett. Saddam apparently did not believe that coalition forces could cut off his Army from behind. He read the American press, too–the articles over the years portraying the U.S. military as a gang that couldn’t shoot straight.
Saddam clearly put too much confidence in his own weapons systems. Iraq did have some top-of-the-line Soviet tanks and French warplanes, but not many. Judging from the Persian Gulf War, even the best Soviet technology seems to be about a generation behind the latest U.S. warplanes and missiles. (This did not go unnoticed in the Kremlin: “Something for our military research and development to think about,” observed Gen. Sergei Bogdanov of the Soviet General Staff.)
And the Americans fielded one revolutionary new weapon: stealth technology. Able to slip undetected past the Iraqis’ Soviet-made radar, the F-117 Stealth fighter-bombers drove a wedge through Iraqi air defenses that cleared the way for more conventional warplanes. The smart bombs they dropped hit their targets at fairly low cost to both U.S. forces and Iraqi civilians. The relative precision of the air war deprived Saddam of a political goal: arousing Arab anger and sapping American will at home. At the same time, the relentless raids by workhorse B-52 bombers left Saddam’s forces in the field half dead. In many ways, the ground offensive was merely the coup de grace to the campaign.
It was made more stunning by surprise. Schwarzkopf was able to sneak close to 250,000 men, thousands of tanks and mountains of supplies west of Kuwait to the undefended Saudi-Iraq border. Meanwhile, a feigned amphibious assault kept Saddam’s men pinned down to the east. Without air power, Saddam’s commanders were blind, unable to see Schwarzkopf’s chessboard.
Following Clausewitz’s precept of attacking the enemy at its center of gravity, Schwarzkopf wanted to aim at Saddam. The coalition forces could not target the Iraqi leader directly, if only because they couldn’t catch him out in the open. But by destroying Saddam’s communications with his commanders, the allies in effect beheaded the overcentralized Iraqi Army. Individual initiative is not often seen in a military where defying orders means death. (Indeed, Western intelligence sources report that Saddam shot a half dozen of his division commanders during the crisis.) Saddam’s best weapon was his Republican Guard. But rather than move these seasoned, wellarmed troops to the front to blunt the initial attack, Saddam held them back in reserve. There they were caught off guard. When the tanks of VII Corps rumbled up inside Iraq, many of the Guard’s big guns were pointed in the wrong direction. Many Iraqi tanks noted Marine Gen. Richard Neal, were shot from the rear.
It remains something of a mystery why the Iraqis did not use their much-feared chemical weapons. Allied soldiers found stockpiles of artillery shells with chemical warheads and, in at least one case, orders to use them. But the Iraqis may themselves have been afraid to fight on a battlefield reeking with poison gas, fearful that the coalition would retaliate in kind. Saddam’s artillery was so pummeled by the allied bombardment that his gunners may not have had the chance to shoot back.
Schwarzkopf takes most of the credit for his battle plan, and deservedly so, since he would have taken the blame if it failed. But victory has a thousand fathers, and some of them are officers who rebuilt an army that was badly demoralized and beaten two decades ago. “We have rethought everything since Vietnam,” says Army Vice Chief of Staff Gordon Sullivan (who could not resist adding, “I think it’s clear our critics hadn’t”). The fruit of this thinking is called AirLand Battle, which the Army insists on spelling as one word to emphasize the integration of ground and air power. AirLand Battle emphasizes maneuver and speed over firepower and hard slogging. It is made possible in part by new technology. JSTARS eye-in-the-sky aircraft can look deep behind enemy lines, thus cutting through the fog of war. A communications system that acts like a vast cellular-phone network allows the troops to talk to each other. Night-vision equipment creates a 24-hour battlefield. Computers track the trajectory of incoming rounds so fast that counterfire can wipe out the enemy’s artillery before they get off a second shot.
The “American way of war” used to mean overwhelming the enemy with mass production: fielding a bigger, better-supplied army than any foe. But Desert Storm represents a shift away from mass conscript forces toward a professional elite that knows how to use high-tech weapons on a fast-changing battlefield. That requires intense training. The combat reservists who were sent off to learn desert warfare at Fort Irwin never graduated to the front. The rigor of even simulated modern combat was too great for weekend warriors.
Most of all, the Army’s modern blitzkrieg is made possible by logistics. The great German generals like Manstein and Guderian invented the doctrine, the deep flanking and circling movements by fastmoving armor. But the German Panzers kept outrunning their supply lines, which relied on railroads and horses. (“If we had had American logistics,” Gen. Ulrich de Maiziere, former chief of staff of the German Bundeswehr, once remarked, “we would have beaten Russia.”) The logistical requirements of an armored division in Operation Desert Storm were vastly greater than those of their World War II counterparts: 5,000 tons of ammunition a day versus 500 tons; 555,000 gallons of fuel, 300,000 gallons of water and 80,000 meals versus a mere 300 tons of supplies. But Schwarzkopf’s chief logistician, Gen. Gus Pagonis, the Greek-American son of a short-order cook, found ways to “leapfrog” supplies to the front. The roads leading west to the jumping-off point for the VII and XVIII Corps were bumper to bumper with trailer trucks day and night. Not surprisingly, as many soldiers were killed in traffic accidents as by Iraqi shellfire. Pagonis’s most dramatic innovation was the forward-based refueling station. Giant bladders of fuel, hung beneath Chinook helicopters, were placed well ahead of the advancing troops–a truck stop behind enemy lines.
Desert Storm will be remembered as the final perfection of the blitzkrieg. Schwarzkopf’s model–Montgomery versus Rommel at El Alamein–was fought on a far smaller scale. It pitted 1,200 Allied tanks versus 520 from the Afrika Korps. The coalition forces were able to send 3,500 tanks up against the surviving element–perhaps half–of Iraq’s initial force of 4,280 tanks. But if Desert Storm was the greatest and most overwhelming armor attack, was it also the last? “Desert Storm tells us a great deal about the past. It tells us nothing about the future,” said Martin van Creveld, a military historian at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. The battle will be cited as a triumph of air power, redeeming the false promise of Vietnam. But the Iraqis put up so little resistance that the most apt comparison is probably the use of air power by colonial forces in the 1930s: Italians beating up on defenseless Ethiopians.
The technology used in Desert Storm was for the most part mature, which may account for its success. But new technologies will arrive to counter today’s superweapons. For the moment, infantry cannot defeat tanks. But in a decade or two, the foot soldier may be armed with tank-killing hypervelocity missiles. The technologies spawned by the Star Wars program will likely solve the riddle of how to pierce heavy armor with a lightweight weapon.
A greater certainty is the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Professor van Creveld dismisses the gulf war as “a fluke” because, in the future, any nation rich enough and aggressive enough to mount a Saddam-size army will surely have nukes as well. “Saddam got his timing wrong. He invaded Kuwait three years or so before he had the bomb.” The spread of such weapons of devastation will either make wars less likely–or just more devastating. But at least, thanks to the violent winds of Operation Desert Storm, they won’t be started by Saddam Hussein.
Aug. 3-Jan. 15: As President Bush formed a 38-nation coalition to oppose Iraq, U.S. commanders deployed the largest concentration of military might since World War II. Gen. Schwarzkopf cunningly massed his troops directly south of Kuwait’s border, tricking the Iraqis into guarding against a massive frontal attack.
Jan. 16-Feb. 23: U.S., British and French forces, including 82nd and 101st Airborne troops and the armored U.S. VII Corps, secretly shifted west along Iraq’s undefended border. Its Air Force wiped out, Iraq could not detect Schwarzkopf’s preparations for his assault plan: a flanking maneuver around the fortified front lines.
Feb. 23: At 8 p.m. (4 a.m. Feb. 24 gulf time), Saudi troops and U.S. Marines drove through Iraqi lines into Kuwait, luring the enemy into thinking this was the main assault. Meanwhile, the XVIII Corps to the west “leapfrogged” by air and ground into Iraq, setting up huge fuel and supply stations deep in the desert. Racing farther north to the Tigris-Euphrates Valley–100 miles from Baghdad–the 101st Airborne blocked the retreating Iraqis. The VII Corps and Pan-Arab forces led ground assaults into Iraq and Kuwait.
Feb. 25-28: The threat of a giant amphibious Marine assault kept Iraqi troops pinned down in Kuwait while allied forces from the west systematically destroyed the outflanked Republican Guard and other Iraqi units in several fierce clashes. Bowing to diplomatic concerns, U.S. Marines halted just outside Kuwait City, allowing Pan-Arab forces to formally reclaim the capital. Demoralized, overwhelmed and their escape routes cut off, Iraqi troops quickly crumbled and the liberation of Kuwait was complete.
