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—
to serve as a “trip wire.” Their rapid deployment was a “show of resolve, a way to say to the Iraqis, ‘if you run down the highway [toward Dhahran] … you are at war with the United States …. [General Schwarzkopf] never believed for one minute that [the entire 82nd, let alone its DRB] could do anything against a sustained offensive armored onslaught.”[7]

As the lead elements of the 2nd Brigade arrived in theater, the Iraqis had been sitting in Kuwait for seven days. They were preceded by “the first Air Force planes—a C-141 carrying “Air Force logistics and communications gear, and twenty-four F-15 fighters from Langley, Virginia.”[8] The F-15s were already flying surveillance missions. The Navy was already in the area of operations with two aircraft carriers. The Eisenhower had entered the Red Sea and the Independence was operating in the Gulf of Oman.[9] Rounding out the show of force was “a lightly armed Saudi Arabian National Guard brigade which guarded the highway leading to the economic heart of Saudi Arabia” the conglomeration of oil and port facilities about midway down the eastern coast of Saudi Arabia. 

In order for this “what if” scenario (the Iraqi Army’s engagement with and destruction of the 82nd Airborne Division’s DRB) to have occurred, some combination of the eleven Iraqi divisions occupying Kuwait would have had to have traversed most of the 400 kilometers separating the two armies—a distance that could easily have been covered in twelve hours—fighting their way through the thin layer of the Saudi National Guard brigade, close air support of the F-15s, and what artillery and TOW Missile capability the DRB possessed. It was a mission that was very doable. In fact, “to logical military minds,” according to the official U.S. Army history of the war, “Saddam’s best option seemed to be to continue the attack into Saudi Arabia to seize the airfields, ports, and oilfields,”[10] in other words, the very territory the DRB was sent to protect. 

Logical military minds, however, were not on the list of outstanding characteristics of Iraqi generals or Saddam. Decisive and bold action on their part could have wiped out the 2nd Brigade and, in all probability, could have won for them the ports and oilfields and the economic heart of Saudi Arabia before the main U.S. force ever got on the plane. But, decisive and bold action, it is well known, were not among the capabilities of Saddam or his army, as evidenced by the events that played out over the ensuing seven months of Desert Shield and Desert Storm Of course, in the unlikely event that Iraqis had come across the border and had closed with, and destroyed the 82nd’s DRB in battle, the likely shock and outrage of the American people would have been such that Secretary of Defense and his top two generals—Powell and Schwarzkopf—would have been out of job faster than the Kuwaitis found themselves without a country. 

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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), 51. 

[2] Ibid. 

[3] 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), 54. 

[4] Consolate General of the United States, Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, http://dhahran.usconsulate.gov/about_the_embassy.html (accessed 15 September 2012). 

[5] Gordon and Trainor, 61. 

[6] Charles Lane Toomey, XVIII Airborne Corps in Desert Storm: From Planning to Victory (Central Point, OR: Hellgate Press, 2004), 26. 

[7] Interview with Noman Schwarzkopf, Gordon and Trainor, 56. 

[8] Gordon and Trainor, 54-55. 

[9] Ibid., 55. 

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