Desert Shield: Defence Against an Invasion that Never Came

Gulf War Commander
General H. Norman Schwarzkopf

From August 2, 1990 until January 1991 the coalition forces of Desert Shield were particularly vulnerable to an attack by Saddam toward Riyadh, but such an attack was never inevitable. Nevertheless, there is merit in examining the coalition’s vulnerabilities and how they might have handled such an attack. If the business of history is to understand, sometimes it may help to better understand what happened if one considers what did not happen, in spite of the circumstances, and why events did not play out according to prevailing expectations. 

First, it has generally been accepted that the Iraqi army, at the time of the Persian Gulf War, was the fourth largest army in the world and that, given its size, it must also have been one of the most powerful. The media made much about the size of the Iraqi army in the days immediately following its invasion of Kuwait when it began to become clear that the United States would send forces to the desert to face them. Much was also made of the fact that Saddam Hussein’s army, after its eight-year war with Iran, was a “battle hardened force—and that U.S. forces, by way of comparison, were not. Those reports, along with general media expertise on all things military, played to the fears of the American public, especially those families who might see—or already had seen—loved ones deploy to the region. Since little hard news reached troops in the desert, rumors flourished. Among the most believable of these was that the Iraqi army, having now tasted blood, would continue to march south and invade Saudi territory, probably its wealthy Eastern Province. It was a scenario made all the more believable, not just because it was such a distinct possibility, but also due to the fact that satellite imagery confirmed that eleven Iraqi divisions, mostly armored, were poised along Kuwait’s southern border. That data fed concerns at the highest levels. The sheer weight of numbers was overwhelmingly in favor of the Iraqis. U.S. forces had to come from seven thousand miles away. Even as they began to trickle in, and as Operation Desert Storm kicked into high gear, Iraqi forces maintained a numerical superiority. Their combat power potential was greater than the coalition’s until late September 1990, according to General Schwarzkopf in a postwar interview.[1] "To logical military minds,” wrote one retired major general, describing what many were absolutely certain of, “Saddam's best option seemed to be to continue the attack into Saudi Arabia to seize the airfields, ports, and oil fields [further down the north-south coastal highway]."[2]

If the Iraqi dictator had directed those eleven divisions—and over those initial weeks the number of Iraqi divisions in and around Kuwait steadily increased—to march into Saudi Arabia, what would have been his likeliest aim? Where was the coalition most vulnerable? 

Prior to August 1990, Saudi Arabia, like all the other Arab nations, never believed that Saddam Hussein would actually exercise military force against Kuwait. In accordance with that stance, the country remained standoffish with respect to overtures from the United States to become more involved in what the Saudis plainly did not see as an international crisis. However, with Saddam’s Republican Guard forces in Kuwait, tens of thousands of Kuwaiti refugees streaming across the Saudi border, and the perceived threat of an imminent Iraqi invasion, Saudi Arabia took the historically unprecedented step of asking for U.S. military forces to come and protect the Kingdom. 

Within a day’s march from the Saudi-Kuwait border lay the economic heart of Saudi Arabia. The oil fields, air and port facilities, and the industrial complex of its wealthy Eastern Province—clustered around the cities of Jubail, Dammam, Dhahran, and Khobar—was easily within reach of the Iraqi army. It required only a 250-400 kilometer thrust down the north-south coastal highway. 

The Saudi interior was also vulnerable. In fact, the historic invasion route for an attack out of the north, was the Wadi al-Batin, an ancient river bed whose waters had dried up centuries ago. Despite the fact that one of the Kingdom’s fortresses, King Khalid Military City sat astride this route, it lay 400 or so kilometers inside the country and was sparsely defended. The north-south coastal highway was likewise only lightly protected, if at all. 

These vulnerabilities significantly decreased over time as the coalition—particularly the United States—moved forces into the region. More capabilities to repel an invasion were in place in September than in August, in October the Kingdom was more protected than it had been in September, and so forth. The coalition grew stronger practically by the day. Even so, General Schwarzkopf was not confident that his forces could defeat an Iraqi attack until, at the earliest, “24 September—when the first of the heavy armored divisions deployed to the desert.”[3]

General Schwarzkopf’s remark emphasizes the seriousness with which the United States viewed the Iraqi threat. The United States Central Command had since 1989 focused its contingency planning effort on a Soviet or Soviet-backed “regional threat with Iraq as the focus.” To counter such a threat, CENTCOM had developed OPLAN 1002-90, Defense of the Arabian Peninsula. It was a defensive operations plan that “called for early-deploying U.S. forces to trade space for time, while reducing [through attrition] the attacking [enemy] forces until sufficient [friendly] forces could deploy for a counteroffensive to recapture lost territory.”[4] In August 1990, not only had CENTCOM just witnessed Kuwait fall in less than a day to a rapid-maneuver Iraqi invasion, not only had its commander seen the satellite intelligence which clearly showed the Iraqis had the assets with which to mount an invasion of the Saudi Kingdom, it was conditioned by more than two years of institutional thinking precisely about this kind of military problem—with the spectre of the Soviet Union’s might thrown in for good measure. The cumulative effect of all that worst-case-scenario thinking and planning, on top of the fact that, now, the Iraqi Republican Guard sat just over the horizon poised to strike, tended to push all U.S. estimations regarding the immediate threat to the extreme. ‘The Iraqis were coming and we can’t get there fast enough.’ 

The first U.S. forces to arrive in theater—in terms of numbers and combat assets—were hardly more than a “trip wire,” as Schwarzkopf’s put it in another postwar interview.[5] To call the rapid deployment of an 82nd Airborne Division ‘ready brigade’ with “antiquated”[6] Sheridan tanks (the Iraqis sported Soviet-made T-72s) a “show of resolve”[7] seemed a stretch. Even when that brigade was covered by twenty-four Air Force F-15 Fighters, Saudi F-15Cs, a Saudi National Guard light armored brigade, and a U.S. Navy carrier battle group, the situation was, as termed by the Gulf War Air Power Survey, “precarious.”[8]

By September, the number of Iraqi divisions deployed close to the Saudi border increased to fourteen.[9] Partly in response to that intelligence, but mostly in order to maximize General Schwarzkopf’s options in case offensive operations became necessary, the United States, beginning in late November, doubled its number of forces in the region. Saddam played tit-for-tat and executed a surge of his own. By the end of November, he had committed twenty-six divisions,[10] and that number continued to grow. But it was more than just the numbers that kept U.S. commanders awake at night. 

“We were nowhere near ready to fight.” That was the conclusion of a retired Army colonel, David H. Hackworth, veteran of Trieste, Korea, and Vietnam, who as a military correspondent for Newsweek had been sent by his editors to assess the readiness of the U.S. military to fight a war in the desert with the world’s ‘fourth largest army.’ Utilizing a string of personal contacts, Hackworth was able to go and gain access to places the Joint Information Bureau steered most other members of the media away from—like the brigade headquarters of the “Dragon Brigade, [for example], one the most important units in General Gary Luck’s XVIII Airborne Corps.”[11] (The Dragon Brigade was “an ad hoc brigade containing the headquarters company of the Corps as well as its lone air defense battalion and a chemical battalion.”[12]) While there, he interviewed the brigade commander (who incidentally had gotten him past the JIB minders), the brigade intelligence officer, logistics officer, and some engineers. This opened the door for him to soldiers and marines in many other places, “privates, corporals and sergeants, captains, majors, and lieutenant colonels.”[13] Among the noted shortcomings: some units didn’t have “half of [their] vehicles,” others had “no chemical gear.” Even four months into Desert Shield, some 1st Armored Division soldiers arriving in theater were “bussed out to the middle of the desert, just a few miles from the Kuwait/Iraq border and … dropped there without a weapon or ammo.”[14]

That wasn’t all. “A brigade from the 101st was deployed at some point in front of us [part of the 1st Armored Division] because they feared a cross border raid by the Iraqis. Why did the 1st Armored Division need the 101st Airborne to defend them? Because we weren't capable of defending ourselves.”[15] The history of the Gulf War deployment is rife with stories of units arriving in country without their equipment, a single unit’s equipment arriving in multiple shipments over multiple days, vehicles arriving with dead batteries, shortages of everything. In an expedition of that size, some circumstances like these are to be expected. But they certainly compounded the coalition’s posture with respect to its combat readiness 

How would the coalition have handled an Iraqi invasion into Saudi territory? Schwarzkopf’s concept of operations for defending the Saudi kingdom against those menacing Iraqi divisions was essentially to have executed OPLAN 1002-90. Using his available air assets, he would have eroded Iraqi combat power by attrition, trading space for time, as he continued to build up his armored capabilities as rapidly as he could; then, once he had sufficient combat capability to do so, he would have counterattacked and pushed the Iraqis out of the country, liberating Kuwait in the process. The focus of his defense would have been to protect Saudi oil fields and critical infrastructure in the Eastern Province(s). 

Schwarzkopf’s plan, however, was not well received by the Saudis, who had granted permission for the coalition to operate from within the Kingdom’s borders with the idea that coalition forces would protect all of Saudi Arabia, from its northern borders to its vast interior, not just isolated areas where concentrations of coalition forces encamped. CENTCOM’s postwar executive summary captures the essence of the disagreement— 

"When the Saudi's were briefed on the concept, they wanted U.S. forces to enter ... through ports much farther north … and establish defenses along the northern Saudi Arabian border. This … disconnect was the result of divergent military objectives; the U.S. focused on critical ports and oil facilities and the Saudis wanted to protect all territory and population centers in the Kingdom. The next several weeks were spent explaining the concept of trading space for time and avoiding decisive engagement until force ratios favored the coalition. USCINCCENT [General Schwarzkopf] met with Saudi military leaders on several occasions to ensure coalition decision makers understood that the risk of a stationary defense along the border was unnecessary and unacceptable, particularly at a time when force ratios so dramatically favored Iraq."[16]

It turned out that such operations—defending Saudi territory against an Iraqi invasion—were never necessary. Though their strength in those early days of August 1990, according to Saudi intelligence, stood at “about 200,000 men and 2,000 tanks,[17] their quantity far exceeded their quality. U.S. intelligence, in early August, put the array of Iraqi forces at “five armored [divisions]; two mechanized; and four infantry. Of these, one armored and one mechanized were positioned opposite the Saudi border.”[18] But they were “a third-rate mob,” according to one Major Marty Stanton, an active duty Army officer, one of David Hackworth’s contacts in theater, who for a time just after the Iraqi invasion, was a prisoner of war, captured while on leave in Kuwait City and held hostage by the Iraqis. The Iraqis released him shortly after Christmas 1990. For a time, until he was discovered in his hotel room, Major Stanton observed the Iraqi military in action and reported what he saw over the telephone to his superiors, and through them to U.S. intelligence officials, who could only urge him to keep observing and reporting as long as he could. It transpired that Major Stanton was evacuated with other prisoners to Iraqi who were used for a time as ‘human shields’ against the event of a coalition air attack. Hackworth recounts part of the major’s story, but it can also be found at the Army Historical Foundation’s website (and Stanton also wrote a book about his experiences).[19] Concerning the Republican Guard, Stanton observed that their “tank crews were sleeping in the shade; they never pulled maintenance; [they] treated their tanks like camels. We’ll knock the snot out them in one minute,” he told Hackworth. It would be interesting to know who had access to Major Stanton’s information in early-to-mid August, and what they did with it. 

Just because they were a “third-rate mob,” however, was certainly not the only reason that Saddam and the Republican Guard never invaded Saudi Arabia. Nor was it, in all probability, for the reason that General Scales intimated, that they lacked “logical military minds.” Air Force Col. John Warden, architect of the Instant Thunder strategic bombing plan, was probably representative of some in the Pentagon who “did not believe that the Iraqis had the logistics to mount a deep push into Saudi Arabia—There was no way,” according to this line of thinking, “[that] the Iraqis could go far in the face of American air superiority.” Warden, by the way, was essentially fired for voicing that opinion to Lt. Gen. Chuck Horner, the air commander and the senior American commander in Saudi until Schwarzkopf moved his headquarters from Tampa in late August.[20]

All these were secondary reasons. The main reason the Iraqis dug in in Kuwait rather than drive just a little further and capture the economic heart of the Saudi Kingdom, was probably because they had no stomach for it. They had invaded another country before and it had gone terribly for them. Very early in the Iran-Iraq, what is sometimes referred to as the first Persian Gulf War, Iraq invaded Iran. They had good success, at first, but their attack soon ran out of steam and was repulsed by the Iranians.[21] A very long, and costly, eight-year slog ensued that left Iraq defeated and broke. 

Nevertheless, the Saudis and the United States forces sent to the Persian Gulf country to protect the Saudi Kingdom were extremely vulnerable, early on, to a concerted effort on the part of the Iraqis to drive south and snatch more territory—according to the numbers, confirmed by high-tech reconnaissance capabilities orbiting the planet. But there was no independent corroboration of that intelligence on the ground. The U.S. had no human intelligence capability within Iraq or Kuwait—with the notable exception of Major Stanton. The Israelis were of some help, but most of their sources were deeper in country and mostly kept track of Saddam’s personal whereabouts, not the state of his military. At least very little, if any, information of that kind was shared with us. We had the very emotionally charged stories of many of the Kuwaiti refugees—including the Kuwaiti ruling family who, after the invasion, came streaming across the Saudi border. But we were unable to put together a complete picture of the enemy—until after the war’s end, when it no longer mattered. Still, there were many early indications that the Iraqis had absolutely no interest at all in Saudi territory. Led by the United States, however the coalition ignored those signs and continued apace with preparations for the worst possible development, the Iraqi invasion that never came. 

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[1] Michael R. Gordon and Bernard E. Trainor, The Generals’ War: The Inside Story of the Conflict in the Gulf (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1995), 57. 

[2] Robert H. Scales, Jr., Certain Victory: United States Army in the Gulf War (Washington: Brassey’s, 1994), 50. 

[3] Gordon and Trainor, Op Cit. 

[4] Eliot A. Cohen and Thomas A. Keany, Eds., Gulf War Air Power Survey Summary Report (Washington, DC, 1993), 2, http://www.afhso.af.mil/shared/media/document/AFD-100927-061.pdf (accessed 20 September 2012). 

[5]Gordon and Trainor, 56. 

[6] Ibid., 61. 

[7] Ibid., Op Cit. 

[8] Cohen and Keany, Eds., Gulf War Air Power Survey Summary Report, 2. 

[9] Ibid., 7. 

[10] Tom Clancy, Into the Storm: A Study in Command (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1997), 192. 

[11] David H. Hackworth, Hazardous Duty: America’s Most Decorated Living Soldier Reports from the Front and Tells it the Way it Is (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1996), 26-27. 

[12] Charles Lane Toomey, XVIII Airborne Corps in Desert Storm: From Planning to Victory (Central Point, OR: Hellgate Press, 2004), 14. 

[13] Hackworth, 28. 

[14] Carl Bradshaw, Sep 16, 2012 9:33 AM forum response to “A Failure of Diplomacy: U.S. Policy Toward Iraq Prior to the Gulf War,” by Tony Howard, Sep 13, 2012 7:14 PM, American Public University, MILH 372 The Persian Gulf War (account required). 

[15] Ibid. 

[16] United States Central Command. “Operations Desert Shield/Desert Storm: Executive Summary.” (11 July 1991), 6-7, http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB39/document6.pdf (accessed 20 September 2012). 

[17] Khaled Bin Sultan, Desert Warrior: A Personal View of the Gulf War by the Joint Forces Commander (London: Harper Collins, 1995), 10. 

[18] Gordon and Trainor, 51. 

[19] The Army Historical Fountation, http://www.armyhistory.org/ahf2.aspx?pgID=877&id=277&exCompID=56 (accessed 20 September 2012). Major Stanton’s book is Road to Baghdad, Behind Enemy Lines: The Adventures of an American Soldier in the Gulf War. New York: Random House, 2003. 

[20] Gordon and Trainor, 93. 

[21] Joana Dodds and Ben Wilson, "THE IRAN-IRAQ WAR: UNATTAINABLE OBJECTIVES." MERIA Journal 13, no. 2 (June 2009): 70-94. International Security & Counter Terrorism Reference Center, EBSCOhost (accessed September 18, 2012).