Revised FM 3-24 to Hit the Street Soon

Military to unveil new counterinsurgency field manual

by, Stars and Stripes

The part that has always intrigued me ...

"A large number of experts, including academics and active-duty and retired veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, provided input for the rewrite ..."

That's just totally outside my own frame of reference.  I wish it weren't.

 

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? 

The Role of the 2nd Brigade, 82nd Airborne Division, in the Operation Desert Shield

Question: 

When President Bush drew a line in the sand with the 82nd Airborne Division's deployment to the border between Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, back in August 1990—some thought it a suicidal mission--what would have been the American reaction if Saddam destroyed the first Brigade to arrive in theater? Is that something Cheney and Schwarzkopf could have absorbed as leaders? 

Yours Truly Answers: 

The “line in the sand” was, in the president’s rhetoric, a warning to the Iraqi dictator not to do something he already was not going to do, that is, to invade Saudi Arabia. Still, to back up his words, the president dispatched the 82nd Airborne. 

The lead elements of the 82nd faced the early possibility of doing battle with eleven Iraqi Army divisions arrayed in Kuwait—“five armored; two mechanized; and four infantry. Of these, one armored and one mechanized were positioned opposite the Saudi border.”[1] This was an “insufficient” force with which to invade Saudi Arabia;[2] however, there was for a time a very real possibility that this force, or elements thereof, could have tangled with the first U.S. forces that arrived in theater. Those forces were indeed at significant risk, or so it was believed at the time. 

According to its Facebook page, the 2nd Brigade Combat
Team "Falcons" is the only organization in the US Army
to have served as a Light Infantry, Glider Infantry, and Parachute
Infantry Regiment.

The first U.S. ground forces to arrive in theater were the lead elements of the 82nd’s “division ready brigade,” or DRB, which happened to be the 2nd Airborne Infantry Brigade out of Fort Bragg. The first stick landed at Dhahran on 8 August 1990, seven days after the Iraqis invaded Kuwait, with the remainder deploying over the next four to five days. 

The 2nd Brigade’s mission was to “protect the airfield and ports American forces needed to deploy into Saudi Arabia.”[3] These facilities were located in and around Dhahran, an oil town on the eastern Saudi Arabian shore, close to Dammam’s port facilities and the village of Khobar, about 300 kilometers south of the Saudi-Kuwaiti border. The headquarters of the Saudi ARAMCO oil company is in Dhahran. The U.S. Consolate serving “Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the Trucial States (Qatar, UAE and Oman)” also located there.[4]

As a DRB, 2nd Brigade was comprised of three infantry battalions, an artillery battalion equipped with 105mm Howitzers, a forward area support team composed of medical, supply and transport units from the Division Support Command, a combat engineer company, and armor company equipped with M551 “antiquated”[5] Sheridan armored reconnaissance vehicles, an air defense battery, and a communications platoon. When an infantry brigade assumed the DRB mission, so did its supporting units.”[6]

Left unsaid was the DRB’s other mission—

A Failure of Diplomacy: U.S. Policy Toward Iraq Prior to the Gulf War

Ambassador Glaspie (L) and Saddam Hussein

The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and the subsequent Persian Gulf War were consequences of failed United States diplomacy. For almost a decade, from 1980 to 1988, Iraq had been at war with Iran. To a certain extent, the U.S. had aided Saddam Hussein’s government in their conflict with Tehran, Washington’s intent being to deny the Iranians hegemony in the Middle East. The long war placed a severe strain on Iraq’s economy which, with their large standing army, contributed to Iraq’s worsening relations with its neighbors, especially Kuwait. Disputes arose over their shared border, over drilling rights, over crude pricing, and such things. But Iraq’s issues with Kuwait went back much further than that. There had been a crisis in 1961-62 very similar to the 1990 dispute, which had only been quelled by a British show of force. 

There was also a study done in 1979 by Pentagon “conservatives”[1] that warned of an Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia—a scenario very much like what actually occurred in 1990. The study was shelved by the Democrat administration because the 800-pound gorilla in the living room at the time was not Iraq but Iran. It was about that time, in fact, when the American embassy in Tehran was overran by Iranian students and the 444-day hostage drama torpedoed the Carter presidency. The subsequent Iran-Iraq war was seen in Washington as a way to beat down Iran’s designs on the larger Middle East, even if it meant sharing intelligence with Saddam. The Saudis also thought it was a good idea to back the Iraqi regime. By the end of that war, however, old tensions between Iraq and Kuwait resurfaced. A cash-strapped Iraqi government with long-standing designs on its neighbor’s wealth and its access to the sea couldn’t just do nothing. Especially with a 280,000-man army.[2] And the irony of it all was that some of the more prominent “conservative” members of that 1979 study team were serving in the Bush Administration. 

Too much is made, I think, about the role of April Glaspie, the United States Ambassador to Iraq.