I nodded. “Colonel, you want to give the civilians a quickie answer?”
He smiled and nodded. “Okay.” He turned to the side where Frank and Will were sitting. “You build an army by putting together pieces of smaller units. At the most basic level you have tank companies, which are mostly tanks, and infantry companies, which are mostly soldiers plus some vehicles to drive them around in. A tank company might have from a dozen to a dozen-and-a-half tanks, and an infantry company might have 100 to 200 soldiers. With me so far?”
Both men nodded.
Colonel Buford continued, “Everything else gets built up bigger and bigger. A tank battalion usually has two or three tank companies plus an infantry company, and an infantry battalion would have two or three infantry companies plus a tank company. A brigade is made up of a mix of battalions, and a division is made up of a mix of brigades. At the top, you have something called a corps, which is made up of several divisions. Until this morning, the Iraqi Republican Guard had two corps of three divisions each.”
Frank turned to me and asked, “Where were you in this?” as he motioned up and down with his left hand.
I motioned down at the bottom. “I had an artillery battery, which is sort of like an artillery company, the same level of troops and organization the colonel is talking about.”
“So this Hammurabi Division was bigger than the brigade which attacked it?” asked Will.
I answered, “Will, back when I was young and foolish and in the army, the standard rule of thumb was that if you were planning on making a successful attack, you needed odds of at least three to one to pull it off. In other words, to destroy a division, we would have to attack with three divisions. Follow me?” He nodded. “So, we just did the reverse! We attacked with the equivalent of about a brigade-and-a-half a division of about three brigades! That’s impossible!”
I looked over at Colonel Buford, but it was one of the watch officers who stepped in at that point. “It’s more like attacking four brigades’ worth. The Republican Guard has top priority on equipment and manpower. For instance, a regular Iraqi Army armored brigade has three tank battalions of three tank companies each, while the Republican Guard has three tank battalions of four companies each. It’s like getting a free tank battalion. The same thing happens with their mechanized brigades. In effect they are at least a quarter stronger than an equivalent regular army unit.” Colonel Buford nodded in agreement.
“So, how did they do it?” asked Frank.
Excellent question! Colonel Buford fiddled with a keyboard and a close-up of a tactical map showed on the screen. “This is just an example, from something we have been practicing. This isn’t from today. Anyway, this is an enemy battalion down here, spread out in a defensive position…” He used a laser pointer to start showing dots on the map. “… and here are the American positions of a tank company with some M-1s and Bradleys. The important thing is that before the battle even starts, we’ve had drones flying over the entire area, and have every enemy position pinpointed. More than that, those positions are actually downloaded into the computers in each American vehicle. When they attack, they will already know where the enemy positions are. When they roll into battle their guns will already be pointed at the enemy! They just need to find them in their sights and pull the trigger, and then move on to the next shot.”
“And that’s what they did?” asked Frank. “How many tanks did they destroy?”
“A Republican Guard armored division might have, on the books anyway, about 400 T-72 tanks, and about 250 BMPs, or some other armored personnel carriers. They also have about 12,000 or 13,000 troops. In reality, they don’t have that many T-72s, so they have maybe half that many and fill out the rest with older T-55s and T-62s. For all practical purposes the older tanks are nothing but moving targets, but against light infantry they are still pretty dangerous. From what we have been seeing, the Hammurabi Division doesn’t have any tanks left, and only a couple of dozen infantry vehicles.”
“How many soldiers did we have attacking?”
“Nowhere near as many. An American heavy armored brigade probably has about 100 tanks, tops, and maybe 5,000 troops. Believe me, they were on the short end of the ledger!” said the Colonel.
“What about the soldiers? Can’t they keep fighting?”
John McCain answered that one. “It doesn’t work that way, Frank. Combat is actually quite specialized. Tankers without a tank are just really lousy infantry. It’s the same for artillerymen without their guns.” I nodded agreement with that, since I knew just how right he was. “As for the infantry, most of their gear is on the vehicles, and right now they don’t even have food and water. They might as well just sit down and surrender.”
“The 1st Brigade deployed in a single long line, with the 2nd Stryker right behind them as the reserve. The M-1s and Bradleys blew away the T-72s and BMPs and then kept rolling, blowing straight through the lines, and the Strykers came through on their asses, blowing away anything left over, like BMPs and trucks. Meanwhile, the drones kept reporting what was ahead of them, and the Apache gunships were shooting at things and watching the flanks. The plan now is to pivot to the east and smash the next division on the lineup, the 6th Nebuchadnezzar. That shouldn’t be any worse, because they suffered severely when attacking the 82nd in Azwya a few weeks ago.”
“And nobody was hurt? We didn’t lose anybody?” I pushed.
“We lost about half a dozen tanks and Bradleys from mechanical problems, thrown tracks and the like, and probably a couple of dozen guys got banged up bouncing around inside them. You always get that sort of thing,” he answered. He hesitated another second, and then added, “Mister President, these guys are really amped up. The 1st Brigade has taken to calling themselves the ‘Thunderbolt Brigade’, and the 2nd Strykers went in carrying a couple of battalions of Kurdish Peshmerga, and they are calling themselves ‘Task Force Thunderbolt.’ They even renamed the forward operating base in Erbil ‘Forward Operating Base Thunderbolt.’ When you were on television and called them the thunderbolts of the gods, they loved it! These guys are ready to invade Baghdad and just keep going!”
“Holy shit!” I muttered. I looked over at Tom Ridge and John McCain, both Viet Nam veterans. “Do you believe this?”
Tom threw his hands up in the air. “I mean, I get reports on this, and I’ve been to the bases to see the troops and all, but this… I mean, I’ve been told about this, but you just don’t believe it.”
“Same here,” admitted the Vice President.
I looked over at Will Brucis. “We want to be real low key on this. I can see several possible outcomes. For one thing, tomorrow this may all break down and the Iraqis could hand us our cranks on a platter!” John snorted in amusement at that, but nodded his head. “For another thing, even if that doesn’t happen, it might not work out so well, and we could still get stuck in a mess. And finally, I want to destroy the Republican Guard, not just win. If we start bragging, people are going to start thinking we should stop, like in ’91. Nobody gets away free on this!” I thought for a second. “What’s the feeling from the press on this whole thing? What are you hearing the most from them?”
He gave me a wry look. “Probably the biggest thing is that we did this whole thing without inviting them to the party!”
“Excuse me?”
“They spend half their time comparing this to the Gulf War in ’91. In that one Saddam Hussein was polite enough to give us six months to prepare, and every journalist in the world showed up and was officially embedded and linked up with a unit and given free satellite time. This time? We had the absolute rudeness to have a war and not invite the press! Not a one of them had ever even heard about Kurdistan before this and couldn’t have found it on a map with a laser pointer and a GPS. It is going way too fast for most of them, and we never geared up for public relations. Now it looks like we are going to defeat the Iraqis before the network anchors have managed to unpack their bags. Some of them are simply freaking out about that!”