Columnist and former soldier
David H. Hackworth is the author of The Price
of Honor, and contributes weekly commentary
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"This on-again, off-again, yes, you're going, no, you're not crap is getting old," grouses a young combat leader at Fort Hood, Tex.
The tens of thousands of warriors waiting in the Gulf and stateside are singing a similar lament. According to a 1st Cavalry Division captain in Texas, "The orders change weekly. One day the word is 'it's Iraq' and the next 'it's Korea.'"
Soldiering has always been about go and no go, wild rumors and operational plans not making it past the first battlefield shell-burst. But Operation Get Saddam – which began at least two years ago, long before 9/11, when the Pentagon's Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz began their campaign to bring down the Butcher of Baghdad – would have to be the most peripatetic war plan in our country's history.
The SecDef and his No. 2 initially thought they could "do" Saddam using mainly stealth warriors – Navy SEALs and Army Special Forces – U.S. whiz-bang air power and a rent-an-army of exiles.
"First the op was Desert Storm Light, modeled after our invasion of Afghanistan," says a planner now in Kuwait with George Patton's old Third Army headquarters, tasked to run the ground war.
But then Gen. Tommy Franks, the overall combat commander, dug in his heels because he knows the Iraqi Republican Guard tank divisions are killer bees compared with the Afghani Taliban fleas. He told the Pentagon couch commandos that the Afghan model wouldn't cut it in Iraq, that a smart invasion would require hundreds of thousands of American troops, war toys and tons of supplies.
Ike knew he'd launch from the British Isles and hit France more than a year before D-Day, which made his 1944 Normandy invasion calculations look like a day at the Officer's Club compared with the burning hoops Gen. David McKiernan – Tommy Franks' guy on the ground – and his team have been jumping through. One of McKiernan's staff officers says, "The Pentagon chiefs initially laid on us more than was humanly possible."
First the general had the OK to attack from the north, south, east and west. Then the Saudis restricted offensive ops from their turf and even prevented our soldiers from passing through their kingdom with rifles, while the Jordanians' threats to toss out their king jeopardized McKiernan's western punch. Then the Turks raised the bribe by asking for more billions, temporarily blocking the northern option. Not to mention that the attack date keeps getting pushed back by the maneuvers of the U.N. inspectors and the manipulations of a predominately anti-war U.N. Security Council.
McKiernan has to watch the clock as carefully as a surgeon eyeballs his scalpel: Every passing day gives Saddam more time to prepare his Stalingrad-like defenses and wire his oil wells with demolitions; the spring desert rains are even now filling the dams, which Saddam could blow and turn our Army's approach to Baghdad into an amphibious op; and come April, the summer desert sun will shine mercilessly on McKiernan's NBC-clad (nuclear, biological, chemical) soldiers.
Then there's the lifeline of war, logistics. Elements of the 4th Infantry Division have practically grown sea legs floating around the Mediterranean waiting for that Turk green light – green being the operative word – while Kuwait's tiny Ash Shu'ayba port has become another possible spoiler. Without the superb infrastructure of Desert Storm's Saudi ports, our supply ships can't unload with the required FedEx efficiency.
A logistics guy there says, "The port's backed up like a pizza parlor run by spastics. My biggest worry is our logistical pipeline won't be able to sustain our fighting elements."
And worry he should. Neither George W. Bush nor Third Army can afford a logistical mega-snafu on the level of George Patton's tanks running out of gas on their way to Berlin, a screw-up which both prolonged the war in Europe by six months and seriously ratcheted up the body bags and Purple Hearts.
McKiernan should be given a medal just for keeping his cool. Sure, time, another key factor in war, has worked for Saddam, but it has also helped "Lucky Forward" – Third Army – as it has allowed the good general to replace the Pentagon's bad plan with one that will hopefully ace the Iraqi army from the get-go.
