OT: How Tommy Franks Won The War In Iraq (Sorta Long)

[Guest guest]

Hi y'all,

 

Below is a detailed overview or strategic and tactical analysis .. or

better still, an After Action Report .. on Central Command (CentCom)

planning and execution of the war in Iraq. Those who are not interested

in history should zap it now.

 

I greatly appreciate the information here .. as I know of the continuous

efforts put forth by planners in CentCom and their subordinate commands,

AfCent, SoCom, NavCent and ArCent. My last stateside assignment was at

Fort McPherson, Georgia with the Army Component CentCom (ArCent) .. my

duty was ArCent Chief of Provost Marshal Plans & Operations. We lived

and breathed planning and testing of our plans in peacetime exercises

throughout the Middle East and Eastern Africa .. and on the highways and

ports of California, where we renamed many California ports for ports in

the Middle East .. twas fun at times. ;-p

 

In fact, my last three military assignments were Joint or Combined/Joint

Commands .. and I've seen the inherent difficulties in meshing efforts

of different military services. In my opinion, Tommy Franks pulled off

a fantastic operation .. but there was no doubt in my mind that he could

and would do this .. even when some of my retired military buddies were

criticizing the bypassing of enemy units in the drive to Baghdad, even

though I knew nothing of the plans being executed, I had confidence that

Tommy Franks and his staff knew EXACTLY what they were doing - they did!

 

I've also held staff positions in NATO .. and watched the attempts to

create an " interoperability " between the NATO forces. I'm thinking that

this goal may never be achieved to the degree we would like to see.

 

One of the AMAZING points below is the increase in efficiency of aerial

bombing since WWII .. that increase is close to 30,000 percent. :-)

 

CentCom's area of tactical responsibility at that time was the Middle

East and Africa. I expect it will increase in scope now. Butch

--------------------------------

How Tommy Franks Won the Iraq War .. by Fred Barnes

From the June 2, 2003 issue, The Weekly Standard:

06/02/2003, Volume 008, Issue 37

 

Tampa, Florida

PRESIDENT BUSH had a slightly anxious question for General Tommy Franks,

the commander of American and allied forces in Iraq. It was a week or so

before the fighting began, and Bush was looking at a war plan with a

dizzying array of separate but simultaneous actions, plus options and

alternatives. It looked risky.

 

" Is it normal for a war plan to have this many variables this late in

the day? " the president asked. It was anything but normal. But Franks,

a self-confident artilleryman who had spent a year fashioning the plan

in hands-on collaboration with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld,

reassured the president he'd made the right call in adopting it.

 

Franks believes warfare requires risk-- " prudent risk " or " moderate risk "

is how he puts it--but never a gamble. He mentioned to Bush the plan

involved political circumstances in Iraq's neighborhood which themselves

had many variables.

 

The principal reason for the variables was the war plan itself. It

represented a radically new kind of warfare that was bound to accelerate

the transformation of the American military and redefine the concept of

" overwhelming force. " In Iraq, the plan meant that three different

ground wars would be fought at the same time: a secret commando war in

western Iraq, a war relying on Kurdish troops in the north, and an

invasion by three divisions of American and British soldiers from the

south. And in Franks's view there were two other fronts--the air and

information (or mind-game) wars.

 

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. "

 

There's a debate over whether operational (or strategic) surprise was

attained--that is, something approaching total surprise of the Pearl

Harbor variety. Franks thinks it was. Even though Saddam Hussein was

aware of the gradual military buildup just outside Iraq, he was led to

believe an attack was weeks away at the earliest and might still be

averted altogether. 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.

 

In any case, the swift victory in Iraq following the defeat of the

Taliban in Afghanistan has stamped Franks, 57, as the greatest American

military leader since Douglas MacArthur a half century ago. He has few

competitors. General Creighton Abrams changed the course of the Vietnam

war, but it was lost anyway.

 

General Norman Schwarzkopf waged a two-dimensional war in 1991 that saw

Iraqis decimated by B-52s and driven out of Kuwait. But Schwarzkopf

erred gravely by letting Iraq keep the helicopters it subsequently used

to kill thousands of Shias.

 

General Wesley Clark's victory over Serbia involved only bombers flying

at 35,000 feet, nothing more.

 

At the White House, Bush and Vice President Cheney are admirers. They

believe Franks is the only general who could have scripted a

revolutionary war plan for Iraq, dealt effectively with an overbearing

defense secretary, suppressed longstanding rivalries among the Army,

Navy, Marines, and Air Force, and directed allied forces to victory in

less than three weeks.

 

(MY NOTE: As Commander In Chief (CINC) of Central Command, General

Tommy Franks was one of a select few 4 Stars who commanded Joint Forces

numbering in the 100s of thousands .. there's no higher tactical command

position in the armed forces. I am told by some credible sources that

General Franks could have had Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff as

his next assignment .. but Tommy Franks is not a politician. He is a

field soldier .. and one you wanted to have on your side .. to be on his

$hit List was not a good thing. ;-p)

 

Yet Franks, who will retire in July, remains a little-known figure and

not quite an identifiable national celebrity. He has gone out of his way

to differentiate himself from Schwarzkopf, the high profile Gulf War

commander who delivered energetic press briefings almost daily. The

press clamored for Franks to brief, but he did so only three times

during his weeks in the war zone. When he returned to Tampa last month,

there was no victory ceremony or parade. Franks and his top aides were

met by their families at the MacDill Air Force Base terminal in Tampa

and gathered privately afterwards. There was no TV coverage.

 

During the war, Franks ordered his subordinates, particularly his

civilian public affairs aide, Jim Wilkinson, to talk to reporters and

relieve him of that chore. He told aides his constituents were the

mothers, fathers, and spouses of the troops in the field. And they

wanted him to concentrate on winning the war, not waste time with

television interviews. " We got hammered--I mean really hammered--by the

press because Franks was invisible, " an aide said. " He just didn't

care. "

 

After Private Jessica Lynch was snatched from an Iraqi hospital, Franks

was wary of publicizing the rescue excessively. He reminded aides of the

warning by Dallas Cowboys coach Tom Landry against spiking the football

in the end zone after a touchdown. You don't want to look surprised at

having scored. The actual rescue was watched live by Franks's aides on a

monitor as it was transmitted by a Predator drone hovering above the

hospital. Franks didn't stay up to watch. He went to bed.

 

RUMSFELD, like Schwarzkopf, is a strong presence. Partly for that

reason, the media have given him the bulk of the credit for transforming

the American military from a grinding, troop-heavy force into the

modern, high-tech powerhouse that sprinted to victory in Iraq. Rumsfeld

deserves enormous credit. But Franks was the indispensable man.

 

Rumsfeld and Franks are opposites. Both have impressive leadership

skills, but the defense secretary is outspoken and passionate, Franks

terse and unflappable. They did not always get along swimmingly. During

the Afghan war, Centcom lawyers dithered over whether a caravan carrying

Mullah Omar, the Taliban chieftan, was a legitimate target. By the time

they decided it was, it was too late. Mullah Omar got away. Rumsfeld

threw a fit, and Franks felt the brunt of it.

 

A Bush administration official said Franks is " easy to underestimate, "

and Rumsfeld initially seemed to do just that. He treated Franks like

the rest of the military brass. He was brusque and demanding. With

Franks, it didn't work. Soon, however, Rumsfeld and his aides concluded

Franks was a valuable ally, a bit thin-skinned maybe, but smart and

shrewd and able to provide quick answers to virtually any question the

defense secretary might have.

 

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.

 

Afghanistan was a laboratory for military transformation. Lessons from

Afghanistan were applied on a broader scale in Iraq. " We learned

precision [bombing] is good and it makes the difference, " Franks said.

" We learned small units on the ground leveraging airpower are powerful.

We learned the linkage of [CIA] operations with military operations is

very powerful for both intelligence and operational purposes. "

 

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. "

 

According to Pace, " you still have overwhelming force, but your

overwhelming force is a combination of agility and size as opposed to

simply mass humanity. " This amounts to a new definition of overwhelming

force, a concept touted by Colin Powell when he was Joint Chiefs

chairman during the Gulf War. Then, it meant outnumbering the enemy or

at least coming close to matching the enemy's troop strength. In the new

warfare, it means applying the same or more firepower with fewer troops,

equipped with cutting edge technology and augmented by airpower.

 

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.

 

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.

 

A final improvement was in logistics. In the Gulf War, equipment, fuel,

and food poured slowly into Kuwait. It took 25 to 30 days for an item,

once ordered, to arrive. Now it takes little more than a week. When

soldiers in Afghanistan said they needed saddles, they were delivered in

four days.

 

In Iraq, each shipped item had a radio transmitter tag rather than a bar

code. It could instantly be determined exactly where the item was and

how soon it would arrive. Major General Dennis Jackson, Centcom's

logistics boss, is a fan of Jeff Bezos, the Amazon CEO who established a

state-of-the-art distribution system. Jackson may have gone Bezos one

step better. During the war, he told Franks the military now has the

capability to feed its troops in the field forever. Franks, by the way,

is a consumer of MREs, the meals ready to eat for troops in the field.

Franks eats them on plane trips.

 

FOR HIS WAR PLAN to succeed, Franks had to win the confidence of the

commander in chief, Bush. Without the president's faith in the plan, it

might be jettisoned at the first sign of trouble. Bush had inherited

Franks as Centcom commander from the Clinton administration. Though

Franks had grown up in Midland, Texas, and had graduated from Midland

Lee High School a year ahead of Laura Bush, he didn't meet the president

until the spring of 2001. The occasion was a White House gathering of

Bush with top military commanders and their wives.

 

At the time, Bush mentioned he knew of Franks's Midland connection, but

he left it at that. Over the next two years, Franks returned to the

White House to brief the president on war plans at least a dozen times.

The most dramatic meeting was by teleconference several days before the

invasion of Iraq.

 

Bush and Rumsfeld were at the White House, Franks in Saudi Arabia, and

his sub-commanders spread from Qatar to Bahrain to Kuwait. Bush

addressed the commanders one by one, asking how each felt about the

strategy put together by Franks. Each one endorsed it, as Bush already

had. And soon enough the war was on.

 

Fred Barnes is executive editor of The Weekly Standard.