That was the theory, anyway. How well it would work was anybody's guess. The 82nd brags that it can be anywhere in the world in 24 hour, but it's a whole lot more complicated than that. Yes, the lead elements, say the first few battalions, can manage that, but afterwards it becomes a real scramble. It would take about a week for the rest of the 82nd and the Rangers to get there, and at least another week before the 173rd Airborne Brigade in Italy showed up to help, and possibly another week after that for the armor in Germany to make it onto the scene. Even that would be light, since we only had one heavy armored brigade available, the 1st Brigade, 1st Armored Division, with M-1 Abrams tanks, and a second brigade, the 2nd Stryker Cavalry, which used a light infantry vehicle. Strykers couldn't fight tanks, or at least not easily. The Brits were also sending a heavy armored brigade, the 7th Armored, also stationed in Germany, which would probably arrive at the same time as ours. Meanwhile, transports returning to the States would pick up any gunships available from the 101st, while the transport helos would be shipped over. The biggest issue in most cases was the lack of enough air transport assets. Even with the beefed up purchases of transport aircraft, we just didn't have enough planes to fly everybody around at once.
The Air Force was in better shape. That first day's missile and bomb attack took the starch out of the Iraqi air force, and subsequent attacks totally destroyed it. I was informed that they tried to stop us, but that in the first two days of combat American pilots shot down 19 planes, with no losses of our own, and nobody else was coming up to play. Once the 82nd was in place, they would be able to call on close air support.
The first contact between American and Iraqi ground forces came on Friday the 17th in a small valley somewhere northeast of the town of Azwya. This was basically south of Erbil and west of Kirkuk, and the western pincer was moving through to try and trap Kirkuk. They had been pressuring the Peshmerga heavily, and while the Air Force was trying to do close support, the Kurds didn't have radios to reach them. They were basically light infantry, brave and trained adequately, but without the gear they needed. They were falling back north up the valley, when a short battalion of paratroopers came over the hill like cavalry, riding a ragtag bunch of beat up civilian trucks. They had with them a battery of 105s being hauled by some Hum-Vees.
The paratroopers managed to form a line across the valley, with the 105s behind them in a reverse slope position, and held firm as the Iraqis advanced. The Peshmerga coalesced around them, like ice freezing around starter crystals in a glass of freezing water. Meanwhile, they began calling in accurate fire support from the Air Force. It was textbook infantry tactics when facing a superior mechanized unit, and it worked; the Republican Guard was stopped cold in its tracks and withdrew to lick its wounds. What they don't show on the sand tables, though, is the price you pay for this. That short battalion had been outnumbered over three to one, facing most of the 1st Brigade, 6th Nebuchadnezzar Mechanized Division, and so far we had a casualty count of over twenty dead and over fifty wounded, and it was expected to end up even worse.
For three nights in a row I spent a couple of hours after dinner in the Situation Room. Kurdistan was seven hours ahead of us, so by dinnertime the day's events would be over. While American troops had night vision equipment, the Peshmerga didn't, and we still didn't have anywhere near the strength to start any night assaults. That was still going to be one of the big issues with this war. Hussein had smartened up a lot. He wasn't letting us get ready for six months and then attack him at our leisure. So far he was the one calling the tune, and even as we pounded him from the air, he had ample combat power to hurt us and the Kurds.
I had gone back up to the Residence on Friday the 17th after getting the latest from the Situation Room and hearing about Azwya. My basic instincts were to get in Air Force One and go over there, but I knew that was simply stupid. I was an out of date battery commander; trying to take control at a headquarters would have been as stupid as Johnson calling some kid in the Delta. Marilyn caught my mood and simply sat quietly in her recliner reading near me. Stormy was dozing next to me in mine. The phone rang about 8:15, and I grabbed it from the coffee table next to me. "Hello?"
It was a pleasant alto voice. "Mister President, this is Colonel Dillard in the Situation Room. We'd like you to come down, sir. The Iraqis have launched missiles."
I swore softly, and Marilyn looked over at me. "I'll be down in a couple of minutes, Colonel." I hung up.
"Problems?", asked Marilyn.
I smiled and shrugged as I stood up. "Just the usual. You know the end of the world and western civilization as we know it."
"Let me know if I have to be worried."
I leaned down and kissed my wife, and then slipped a pair of shoes on and headed downstairs. Once in the Situation Room I grabbed my usual spot at the head of the table and looked at the others. A woman in a Marine uniform with eagles on her epaulets was facing me. "Colonel Dillard, I presume?"
"Yes sir, thank you for coming." She flashed a map of the Middle East onto the big screen. "Approximately fifteen minutes ago, we had eleven launches of either Scud or al Hussein missiles from Iraqi territory. Two were launched at Kuwait, three at Turkey, and six at Israel."
The map had red stars in what I assumed were impact points in the three countries. "Did we get any of them?", I asked. I remembered back during the Gulf War the Patriot missile batteries blew the things out of the sky left and right. During the run up to this war, I was cruelly informed that the performance of the anti-missile systems was extremely overhyped.
"We got some, sir." A few of the red stars turned blue. "One of them was hit by a Patriot battery over Kuwait City, and the other impacted in the desert. There were no chemical signatures. Three were targeted at Incirlik. Again, one was shot down, one impacted in a deserted area of the air base, and one hit in downtown Adana a few miles away. Again, there were no chemical weapons signatures detected. Israel was targeted by six missiles, and the Israelis managed to knock down two of them. The other four landed in what appear to be relatively uninhabited sections near Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and Haifa."
"Four?! That's all we got? Four?"
"That's way better than we did the first time, sir, back in '91.", she answered defensively.
"Jesus Christ!" How much money had we wasted on this stuff? "So, what's the results? Please, for the love of God, tell me the Israelis didn't nuke Baghdad!"
That actually got a small smile from them. "No sir, not yet, anyway." The map changed to a close-up of Kuwait. "The Kuwaiti impact was a desert area, and there were no casualties." We switched to the Incirlik area. "One missile hit an empty transient taxi area and exploded. There were no casualties or damage, but they probably have to fill in the hole. The second impact was much worse. It landed downtown and hit a hospital. We are still getting reports, but there appear to be massive civilian casualties."
"Oh, shit! And Israel?" They were the real wild card in all this. If they responded, the game went into extra innings and nobody knew what would happen.
"From what we could see by satellite, nothing major was hit, at least in Israeli areas. One of the missiles smacked outside of an apartment complex in a Palestinian neighborhood. The Israelis don't consider that to be a big problem, which does not endear them to the Palestinians.", she reported.