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!”
It was the colonel who answered. “Yes, sir, I know. To be fair about it, that’s how I was taught, too. The difference is the equipment we have now. The stuff we have now, it’s like science fiction! I had a platoon of M-1s back in the Gulf War, and when we hit the Iraqis at 73 Easting we never knew they were there until we rolled in on them. We were just better than them, with better equipment and training. Now… sir, our training and equipment is even better, and we know where they all are! We have recon drones all over the front, with cameras and laser designators and GPS. Sir, before I came to this assignment, I had a training battalion out at Fort Knox, where we developed the doctrine and tactics for this. Since then we have been spreading the training out. When we go over the ridge and into a Republican Guard area, they won’t know we’re coming, but we will know where every one of their vehicles is! We’ll be able to blow them away before they even know we are coming at them! We can do this, and do it now!”
I looked at the other officers and they were all nodding in agreement. I was suddenly hit with a wry observation. “You know what they say about military intelligence, Colonel? We bet your life?” He bristled at the implication. “Settle down, Colonel. It’s nothing personal. From my point of view, I’m the one you want to bet their lives. So what do we do if this doesn’t work, hmmm? What happens if the Republican Guard doesn’t just sit there and act like targets?”
The colonel hit a button on his computer and showed two different variations on the ops plan, to allow for disengagement and containment moves, to keep the Republican Guard in a killbox (his word, not mine) and either reduce them slowly or hold long enough for further forces to arrive. My biggest concern was the 101st, stranded between the Republican Guard to the north and the regular Iraqi army to the south. What if they were assaulted from both sides?