Thank you for your time, and God bless our nation and our soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen. Thank you.”
Chapter 162: Going to War
It is very tempting to bury yourself in a single cause once you are in the White House. The stuff that lands on your desk is really important, life and death matters in many cases, and you can spend every waking hour micromanaging pieces of the job. Obviously war is the most important thing, and it is very tempting to put all your time in on this.
Not all Presidents can keep from doing this. Roosevelt lined one of the downstairs rooms with maps, giving it the still current name of the Map Room, and would spend hours in there every day following troop movements and how the front changed. At least he managed to win his war. Johnson would spend hours every night wandering the hallways in his pajamas and bathrobe, and would haunt the Situation Room. Worst of all, telecommunications had advanced to the point that he could actually pick up a telephone and be connected to a platoon leader in the Mekong Delta on a search and destroy mission, and give him tactical advice and orders. He did that several times.
What a REMF Navy Reserve Lieutenant Commander thought he knew about infantry tactics was questionable at best. Johnson and McNamara thought they were smarter than all the generals and admirals around them, and didn’t mind firing them. However, after that, the Pentagon went out of its way to keep the President from exercising tactical control, and the post-Viet Nam generation wasn’t above telling us to behave ourselves. That generation was pretty much gone now, but we had learned that lesson. The problem now was that a lot of the current military leaders came of age during Desert Storm, and thought that war was a video game. I wasn’t sure how that was going to work out, but my own low level experience said that it was a whole lot dirtier than that.
Not much happened until the afternoon of the 14th, as we began lining up assets and preparing a response. At that time, shortly before I spoke to the nation, the Navy launched over 400 Tomahawk cruise missiles at Iraqi targets from ships and submarines. The initial targets covered air bases, air defense sites, military bases, and anything that anybody could imagine might be harboring chemical weapons stockpiles. Other targets covered most of the country’s infrastructure, including bridges, power plants, chemical factories, canal locks, and dams. Shortly after that, we had F-15s and F-16s flying combat air patrols and interdiction runs out of Incirlik and Kuwait, and F-18s doing the same thing off carriers in the Gulf. Then the heavies showed up, B-1s and B-2s and B-52s, to destroy anything the cruise missiles might have missed.
Back in the 1920s, an Italian general named Giulio Douhet came up with the theory that by massively bombing an enemy, you could win a war without troops. His theory, which was refined into the concept of strategic bombing, was that by bombing the enemy, especially his deep targets — infrastructure and cities — you would inflict massive damage and destroy their will to fight. It certainly sounded like a good idea, and for most of the Twentieth Century that was what we tried to do. It didn’t work in Germany or Japan, it didn’t work in Korea or Viet Nam or Serbia, and it didn’t work in Iraq the first time. In every case it became necessary to send in the troops. Fortunately, by the time we got to Desert Storm, everybody knew that this was going to be necessary. Bombing could still be extraordinarily useful, but it was not going to help the Kurds on its own.
By Wednesday afternoon we were beginning to develop a pretty good feel for what was going on and the Iraqi strategy. Saddam Hussein had two corps of Republican Guards armored and mechanized troops in the field. This worked out to about six divisions, though they were all considerably smaller than an equivalent American division. Still, that was about 75,000 troops, and 1,000 T-72 tanks, and lots of other older tanks, armored personnel carriers, and trucks. They were split into two groups, and were trying to pincer Kirkuk between them, so as to envelope it. Chemical weapons were being used in isolated Kurdish towns and cities, but not in areas the Guard planned to move forward through. It was standard Russian doctrine, because that was where they got most of their equipment and training from.
By the morning of the 16th some of the real horror began becoming known to the rest of the world, as Iraqi civilians began arriving after fleeing the areas which had been hit with mustard gas. The chemical burns and blisters were so horrible that most of the media refused to show it. Not all, however, and some of the tabloids ran front page pictures in full color, which was enough to make you vomit. After that, the others started showing them also. We also started getting reports of American casualties along with Peshmerga troops caught by the mustard gas, and found out that Bismarck Myrick, our Special Envoy, was one of those who had died. Condi Rice told me that, and I promised her that we would do right by his family.
It took a full day to fly the lead elements of the 82nd to Incirlik in C-17s, where they then transferred to smaller and handier C-130s for the flight to Erbil. Erbil was far enough from the front that it wasn’t in danger of being immediately overrun. They were offloaded there, and then carried on whatever local transportation they could beg, borrow, or steal in order to get to the front. The Peshmerga were fighting valiantly, but Kalashnikovs and RPGs were not going to cut it against T-72s, and they were falling back. The battle plan was that the infantry forces we were sending in first would be able to stabilize the front lines long enough that our armored and airmobile stuff coming in from Europe would be able to break the Iraqis.
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.