Who was "Gus" Pagonis?

Part of CENTCOM's area of responsibility

If the name "Gus" Pagonis doesn't ring a bell, you weren't paying attention during the Persian Gulf War.  Pagonis re-wrote the book on U.S. Army logistics during that conflict.

Just how important was logistics during the war? “In the year between August 1990 and August 1991—that is, before, during, and in the wake of the Gulf War—the logisticians of the U.S. Armed Forces in Southwest Asia, in an effort headed by the 22nd Support Command and the 1st and 2nd COSCOMs, planned, moved, and served 122 million meals.”[1] On the basis of just that fact alone, all soldiers would argue that logistics is very important. 

During that same year, while providing all those meals, those same logisticians “pumped more than 1.3 billion gallons of fuel” and drove in support of supply missions “almost 52 million miles” supplying everything from “tanks, planes, and ammunition” to sunscreen.[2] Soldiers, commanders, and everyone else involved in a war effort would surely stipulate that logistics is of the utmost importance in a campaign. 

CENTCOM devoted almost three full pages in its official executive summary of Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm to logistics. The report covered such gigantic undertakings as— 

• Theater construction ... "$600M is critical construction projects were accomplished." 

• U.S. vs Host Nation contracting ... "food, fuel, water, transportation, facilities and accomodations" 

• Combat systems materiel readiness ... "operation readiness rates met or exceeded Service standards ... attributed to the Desert Express air line of communications, supply and support agreements with USEUCOM components, equipment reliability, and an exceptional level of effort from maintenance units." 

• Strategic airlift ... "augmentation of USTRANSCOM's organic lift capability by Civil Reserve Air Fleet ... our deployment air flow missions." 

• Army field feeding ... the plan for which is "based on two T-Ration hot meals and one MRE meal daily."[3]

All these things were accomplished by logisticians. 

Pagonis

Lieutenant William G. “Gus” Pagonis, as a two-star general, was the leader of those logisticians, some 40,000 of them, and the "head of the United States Army's 22nd Support Command."[4] General Schwarzkopf called him “the chief of logistics for the ground forces of Desert Shield.”[5] Pagonis was Lt. Gen. John J. Yeosock’s [the ARCENT/3rd Army commander] G-4 logistics officer. “Not only was he responsible for the logistics plan for Desert Storm,” according to Army Sustainment Magazine, “General Schwarzkopf also put him in charge of executing that plan on the ground.”[6] A significant contributing factor to his skill in managing such a huge logistical challenge like supplying the Gulf War was General Pagonis’ experience over previous years planning and executing logistics support of annual REFORGER exercises. 

Why did Pagonis become so famous? Aside from the fact that General Schwarzkopf described his work as “performing miracles,”[7] Pagonis’s fame was due in part, no doubt, because of his genuine approachableness. Affable, of Greek descent, “General Pagonis held daily press briefings during operations and conducted about 2,000 interviews.”[8] He seemingly was everywhere and he talked to everyone. Seldom was he seen without his red, loose-leaf binder. Said Pagonis— 

"During the Gulf War, I directed my planning team to compile a binder, known within the command as the Red Book, which was a complete and constantly updated collection of data outlining the developments of the conflict. Some four inches thick with charts and tables, it contained virtually all of the information I needed to keep abreast of our situation. While I was in transit from one theater location to another, that book was practically joined to me at the hip. General Schwarzkopf (or another general in the field or stateside) would frequently call me on the road or in the air with requests for specific information: how many tanks here, how much fuel there, how quickly can equipment be moved somewhere, and so on. I know that both my subordinates and superiors were regularly impressed with my almost magical grasp of the numbers. No magic was involved-I just studied the information in that binder every chance I could."[9]

His name became a household word as the Gulf War logistics story unfolded on nightly news broadcasts all around the world. 

General Pagonis has written that “the immediate military goal” of the Desert Shield buildup in the Saudi desert was “to discourage the Iraqi Army—which … included more than 100,000 troops in occupied Kuwait—from spilling over the border into Saudi Arabia.”[10] Therefore, the question must be asked, would the buildup have been dramatically different if Saddam had occupied Saudi Arabia? Such hypothetical “what if” questions have always been a part of military history, mainly because in and of themselves they can be quite interesting. One must be careful with hypotheticals, however, because conclusions drawn from them can skew the actual historical account and the solid lessons learned from that factual history. In the unlikely event that Saddam had invaded and occupied a portion of Saudi Arabia—say, the rich Eastern Province with its oil fields, industrial infrastructure, port facilities, and access to the Persian Gulf, the Desert Storm build up would obviously have been different. How different is difficult to say, because a number of possible courses of action present themselves. For example, the U.S. might have driven the Iraqis back over the border with air power. Force projection into the area might have had to utilize ports further away from the Kuwaiti Theater of Operations, Jedda on the Red Sea, or perhaps Bahrain or Qatar. An amphibious assault somewhere between the Kuwait-Saudi border might have interdicted Iraqi lines of communication and isolated Iraqi forces in and around Dammam, Dhahran, Khobar, and that general area—assuming that those locations would have been the aim of an Iraqi thrust into Kuwait. Whatever the situation, at the end of the day, a massive buildup of forces and capabilities would have to have occurred. Having to push Saddam out of Saudi, in addition to kicking him out of Kuwait, would have made the job more difficult, but certainly not impossible. 

______________________________

[1] William G. Pagonis, Moving Mountains: Lessons in Leadership and Logistics from the Gulf War (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1992), 1. 

[2] Ibid., 2. 

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

[4] William G. Pagonis, "Leadership in a Combat Zone" Harvard Business Review 79, no. 11 (December 2001): 107-117. Business Source Elite, EBSCOhost (accessed September 21, 2012). 

[5] H. Norman Schwarzkopf, with Peter Petre, It Doesn’t Take a Hero: The Autobiography (New York: Bantam Books, 1992), 341. 

[6] “Gulf War Logistics Records Donated to the Sustainment Community,” Army Sustainment, PB 700-10-05 Volume 42, Issue 5, September-October 2010, http://www.almc.army.mil/alog/issues/SepOct10/

pagonis_logrecords.html (accessed 22 September 2012). 

[7] Schwarzkopf, 483. 

[8] Ibid. 

[9] Pagonis, “Leadership in a Combat Zone.” 

[10] Pagonis, Moving Mountains, 5

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.

Kursk

Soviet T-34 Tank

Kursk had been “the springboard from which the [Germans] had launched [their] summer (1942) offensive,” during which they had pushed southeastward into the Caucus region, and westward towards Stalingrad.[1] But in July 1943, the Russians had pushed the front back almost to where it had started the year before. At Kursk, there occurred the largest tank battle of World War II. It was “an immense knotted mass of tanks,” according to a Soviet colonel who fought there,[2] a showcase, perhaps, of armored warfare as the Soviet T-34 main battle tank took on the German Panzers and Tigers. Above all, Kursk was the climactic battle of the German’s Operation ZITADELLE (Citadel), 4 – 13 July 1943. 

The aim of Operation ZITADELLE was cut off the Russian forces that had invested Kursk. Perhaps it is only a bit of a stretch to describe what happened at Kursk as the eastern front’s equivalent of the Battle of the Bulge. As in the west once the Allies had established their lodgment in Normandy, the Germans line of advance in the east had, since mid-1942 been steadily retreating. Germany was on the defensive. B. H. Liddel-Hart, in his history of the Second World War called the events of 1942 “the turn.” Similar to his thrust through the Ardennes that he would make in December 1944, the purpose of which was to open a hole in the Allied lines and cut off the enemy lines of communications from north to south, Hitler sought to make a “break-through” of the Soviet lines running north-to-south by “pinching off the great salient” of Kursk. It was the principle that “‘attack is the best defense.’”[3]

Model’s Ninth Army struck south from Orel while Hoth’s Fourth Panzer Army struck north from Kharov. “Altogether, the attacking German forces numbered 435,000 soldiers, 9,960 artillery pieces and mortars, and 3,155 tanks …. Against these the Soviets brought a million soldiers, 13, 013 artillery pieces and mortars, and 3.275 tanks; in reserve, [they had] 449,133 soldiers, 6, 536 artillery pieces and mortars, and 1,506 armored fighting vehicles.”[4]

The key to the Soviet’s victory at Kursk was that they knew in advance what the German plans were, thanks to Ultra intercepts the British had shared with them. Plus, they had prepared extensive, layered defenses within the city, and they kept a substantial reserve—tactics they had learned during course of the war. “When Hitler abandoned Operation Citadel on July 13, the Germans' last opportunity to influence events on a strategic level in the East was lost.”[5]

____________________

[1] B. H. Liddel-Hart, History of the Second World War (Old Saybrook, Connecticut: Konecky and Konecky, 1970), 480. 

[2] Robert M. Citino, “The Greatest Tank Battle of All Time,” History Net.com, http://www.historynet.com/the-greatest-tank-battle-of-all-time.htm (accessed 28 July 2012). 

[3] Liddel-Hart, 485. 

[4] Williamson Murray and Allan R. Millet, A War To be Won: Fighting the Second World War (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2000), 296. 

[5] George M. Nipe, Jr., “Battle of Kursk: Germany’s Lost Victory inWorld War II,” History Net.com, http://www.historynet.com/battle-of-kursk-germanys-lost-victory-in-world-war-ii.htm (accessed 28 July 2012).

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For both sides, combined, the number of tanks in the battle of Kursk was close to 8,000.  At El Alamein, the number was 2,000.  In the Persian Gulf War, the total number of tanks and other armored vehicles in the conflict was approximately 10,000.  [Rick Atkinson, Crusade: The Untold Story of the Persian Gulf War (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1993), 249-250].