"President Buckman's statement about sending down the thunderbolts of the gods has been one of the most talked about public statements of his presidency, by turns praised and ridiculed. The more bellicose among us loved it but many here in Washington considered it ill-advised and war-mongering. How dare the President make a statement such as that? It must be the sign of a foolish and uncultured barbarian, and they wonder why his press secretary isn't running around and apologizing for him.
I have known Carl Buckman for almost twenty years, since before he became a Congressman, and long before he became the President. While we don't agree on a lot of things, he is not a foolish and uncultured barbarian. He is a warm, smart, sophisticated, and civilized man. He is most definitely not a war-monger. He is generous to a fault, and exceedingly gracious. He is loyal to his subordinates, perhaps too much so, and they return that loyalty. He adores his wife, dotes on his children, and even has a big, goofy dog that he drags around with him everywhere.
He is also one of the most ruthless men I have ever known, and I say that in a positive sense. You can see that in his personal life. When, both in junior and senior high school, he was attacked by bullies, he didn't respond eye-for-an-eye. He destroyed his tormentors, crippling them. He extends that protection to those around him, as well. When his wife was assaulted in the Bahamas and a young mother-to-be was attacked in a diner in his hometown, those attackers were hospitalized and arrested. You may attack him once, but you will never do so a second time. You do not mess with Carl Buckman and get away with it.
If you want to know what the Buckman Doctrine is, that's it in a nutshell. He takes his responsibilities very seriously. When he took responsibility for the nation, he became equally ruthless in dealing with threats to the nation. So when he says that if you kill American citizens and soldiers and diplomats he will send down the thunderbolts of the gods, he means it. Speaking as a member if the so-called Washington elite, I am horrified. Speaking as an American citizen, that sounds pretty good to me."
Will Brucis raised the topic at the morning staff meeting, and I had laughed and said I thought that Bob had me figured out, but there was no specific 'doctrine'. When Will was asked later in the morning at the daily press briefing, he simply smiled and said, "There's never been a discussion of any sort of Buckman Doctrine, so I can't really answer that. I can say that the President disagrees with the characterization of Stormy as big and goofy. He considers Stormy big and loveable. We've begun taking suggestions and voting on them back in the offices." That prompted a flurry of emails and letters offering other descriptions, generally favorable, of the mutt.
The late night comics also had fun with this. Jon Stewart discussed it and then began scribbling out a note – 'Note to Iran and North Korea: Don't piss off Carl Buckman!' Stephen Colbert did ten minutes on it, extolling the Buckman Doctrine, and then segued into his 'Threatdown' segment, where his Number One Threat (Bears) were warned by him to stay out of my neighborhood. Oh, brother!
After roughly a month had gone by, at the start of the second week of April, I was called to the Pentagon for a dog and pony show. The 1st Armored from Fort Bliss in Texas, parent unit of the 1st Brigade sent from Germany, had managed to get their gear onto transports and had sailed for Turkey, and the ships would be docking in Izmir shortly. The troops would follow on chartered commercial airliners. It would take another two weeks to offload the equipment, sort it out, and load them on trains and send them into Kurdistan, and then some additional weeks to prepare and practice. That one division was far more powerful than everything the Iraqi Republican Guard had available to stop them, no matter how they were combined, but effective combat action wouldn't be able to take place until sometime in May. The Pentagon wanted to show me a different plan.
As things stood, we were currently in a stalemate position across the front. Republican Guard units were on Kurdish soil with two wings poised to wrap around Kirkuk. The Iraqis were still bombarding the front lines and Kirkuk, but were increasingly forced to operate at night. Nobody was advancing, the Guard because they didn't have enough combat power, and the Americans and Kurds because they didn't have the mobility. The European-based units were forming up in the Kurdish rear, along with the Screaming Eagles, which were also forming up. Before things slowed down, the Iraqis had managed some reinforcements to the Guard, so they were operating at almost the strength they had prior to the attack. Meanwhile the nightly Scud attacks had ended. The best guess was that while the Iraqis had about a hundred missiles at the start of the war, only about half had actually worked (missiles are quite fragile and tricky) and they had run out of missiles to launch.
Fortunately, the gas attacks had also run down, probably because rear area bombing had destroyed the chemical depots and manufacturing facilities, or because interdiction had slowed transport to a crawl. The Pentagon had modified some drones so that they had a chemical signature detection capability. While they were initially used to map out areas of chemical weapon contamination to avoid, probes inside Iraq showed areas with three really major mustard gas spills, one at an army base where it was suspected that the gas was being stored and loaded onto shells, one at a fertilizer factory that had been destroyed, and one on a road that had been bombed one night. In all three locations it was seen that the Iraqis were avoiding those areas, and routing traffic around and away from them.
The Pentagon's plan called for an armored envelopment of the envelopment, sort of. As it stood, the British had the 7th Armored, a brigade of Challenger 2 tanks and Warrior armored fighting vehicles on the eastern pincer, and we had deployed both the 1st Brigade of M-1 Abrams tanks and M-2 Bradleys and the 2nd Stryker Cavalry, a brigade of Strykers, which I had never really seen before, on the heavier western pincer. The 101st was also ready to move into action. These outfits would be the offensive punch needed to destroy the Republican Guard.
In Phase One, to be launched in the dead of night, the 101st would be airlifted into blocking positions south of the Guard units facing the Kurds and Americans. They would form the anvil upon which the hammer of the armored units would land. Then, at dawn, Phase Two would begin. The Brits planned to swing wide to the east, and come in on the Iraqis from the Iraqi right flank. The Americans planned to smash straight forward into the Republican Guard starting in the west, and then to swing eastward and roll them up from the Iraqi left flank. If the Iraqis tried to run, they were going to either run into the 101st to the south or the Brits to the east or the American and Kurdish infantry to the north.
I stared at the computer simulation at the Pentagon. I knew our equipment was good, and that during the Gulf War we had blown through Iraqi positions like shit through a goose, but this was beyond that! During the Gulf War we had enjoyed massive combat superiority. The killing was going to be done by the armored formations. As it stood, we planned to assault six armored and mechanized divisions of highly motivated troops with two heavy brigades and one light brigade. Audacity didn't begin to cover this idea!
"You plan to take them head on?", I questioned. I looked over at the Army Chief of Staff, and the Army colonel who had given the presentation. I could see from Colonel Buford's uniform that he was an armored officer himself, probably up from Fort Knox, the home of the armored corps. "I know I'm just an overage battery commander, but I always thought you wanted to attack when the odds were in your favor, not the other way around!"