thedrifter
03-24-03, 07:13 AM
In War, Plans Yield To Improvisation
By Peter Baker
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, March 24, 2003; Page A16
CAMP COMMANDO, Kuwait, March 23 -- The reports coming over the computers were tantalizing. Intelligence indicated that one of Iraq's most notorious military officers was at a house in the eastern Iraqi city of Amarah. A pair of Navy F-14 Tomcats swooped in for the kill.
When the bombs dropped, however, they hit the wrong place. Inside the Marine command center here, officers scrambled to help. According to a computer display of red and blue lights, they had a pair of F/A-18 Hornets nearby. The officers took the problem to Lt. Gen. James T. Conway, the Marine commander. "He basically said, 'Whatever you've got to do, make it happen,' " Lt. Col. Brian Delahaut said afterward.
The Hornets streaked to Amarah and within 15 minutes hit the designated house with two GBU-16 bombs. The excitement in the Marine command center was palpable. With any luck, they had gotten one of their top targets, Gen. Ali Hassan Majeed, a cousin of President Saddam Hussein. Majeed had recently been named commander for southern Iraq but was better known as "Chemical Ali" for his role in a 1988 gas attack on rebellious Kurds in northern Iraq.
"We think he's no longer breathing air," exulted one officer.
In the end, though, Majeed was still breathing air. He had not been in the house, the second time he had eluded U.S. bombs meant for him since the war began. Grim Marines stowed their disappointment and returned to the battle. There would be other opportunities, they told themselves.
The war as seen from the inside of the Marine Combat Operations Center, where few outsiders are admitted, is a roller coaster of highs and lows and a constant cabaret of improvisation. For the past 14 months, Marine planners mapped out the campaign against Iraq, and yet from the beginning of the ground war last Thursday, the commanders have often found themselves winging it based on events on the battlefield.
That comes as no surprise to veteran officers, who often say a war plan lasts only until the war starts. "The plan is nothing; the planning is everything," said Col. Larry Brown, the Marines' chief operations officer here, repeating another military aphorism stressing that the process of preparing helps commanders deal with the unexpected.
Asked on the night the ground war started if everything was going according to plan, Rear Adm. Charles R. Kubic, head of a Navy Seabee unit attached to the Marines, smiled broadly. "Well," he joked, "which plan?"
Indeed, the plan changed repeatedly in the weeks and months leading up to the invasion, right up until the final hours. The day the Marines ultimately crossed the border, the timing of the attack changed three times, finally being accelerated an additional four hours for fear that Hussein was torching oil wells in southern Iraq.
What has emerged in the three days since then has been a carefully calibrated blend of helicopter-borne special forces raids, stealthy reconnaissance missions, tank assaults, surrender negotiations and aerial and artillery bombardment. The Marines, and the British troops operating under their command, have taken oil and port installations in southeastern Iraq, blocked forces guarding the key city of Basra and begun moving the main land force toward Baghdad.
In that broader sense, when it came to achieving their major objectives for the first 72 hours of the war, the Marines checked off all the boxes they had expected to, based on the classified plan in place before the first shots were fired. Most important, the Marines and the Army have made dramatic progress toward Baghdad and could be there in days.
"This sounds bad because I'm the planner," said Lt. Col. George Smith, a top aide to Conway, the Marine commander, "but we are on our plan."
Yet Smith acknowledged that not everything has gone as it was drawn up. Iraqi forces have not surrendered in droves and have put up stronger resistance than expected in the south, keeping U.S. and British forces busy trying to wipe out small hit-and-run ambush squads. The Persian Gulf port of Umm Qasr continues to defy control, and the Marines and Army encountered a particularly tough fight around Nasiriyah today, with a number of U.S. troops reported killed or wounded.
On the other hand, Hussein has not destroyed the oil fields, blown up bridges or dams or deployed chemical weapons, as worst-case planning envisioned.
Watching Conway, Brown and other officers manage the Marines' drive into Iraq from a converted warehouse with electronic shielding here at their desert headquarters 25 miles south of the Iraqi border offers a rare inside look at 21st-century warfare, American-style. The sign on the door says, "Secret. Authorized Personnel Only. No Reporters." However, four American journalists have been given access to the center in exchange for allowing their dispatches to be reviewed by military officials, who have made no significant deletions.
The command center is the hub of Marine and British land operations in the Persian Gulf. Brown, a Fredericksburg native and University of Virginia graduate, calls it his "House of Angst" and has hung up a poster featuring Edvard Munch's "The Scream" and labeled "World Tour 2002-2003 -- Kuwait-Iraq."
At cafeteria-style tables, dozens of officers keep track of 85,000 Marines and British troops reporting to Conway, as well as hundreds of planes and ships, Army units, special forces and enemy divisions. Fire control officers munch Oreos as they direct warplanes dropping thousand-pound bombs.
If the atmosphere appears more businesslike than martial, perhaps that is because 60 percent of the staff running the command center are reservists, often civilians from the corporate world. "We're all business managers in a lot of ways," Delahaut, a manufacturing company vice president in civilian life, said as he studied the "kill box" for Marine warplanes displayed on his computer screen.
Just as business managers manage unforeseen contingencies, the officers in the Marine command center have been adjusting to circumstances on the battlefield. The first was the quick start.
In the war plan, Objective Alpha had been the Umm Qasr port, where most of Iraq's food is imported. The nearby Rumaila oil fields were listed as Objective Bravo. But with satellite imagery showing several wells ablaze, the Marine officers decided to rush immediately toward Rumaila. The fields were secured quickly enough, but Umm Qasr remains dicey even now.
The accelerated launch also may have resulted in fewer capitulations by Iraqi soldiers than anticipated. The military dropped leaflets explaining in detail exactly how Iraqi soldiers could avoid being targeted -- they had to put their vehicles in a square, turn off radios and radar, rotate tank turrets backward and stay 1,000 feet from equipment. But shortly after the leaflets were dropped, the Marines began pouring over the border, leaving the Iraqi troops no chance to quit.
"If they got the message, it was probably right before ground forces were upon them," said Smith, the planner. "Our ability to judge their response was zero."
On the first night of ground combat, as Marines moved toward the Kuwaiti line, 11 precision-guided bombs were dropped on a key, 550-foot-high hill west of the border town of Safwan to blast an Iraqi observation post. A helicopter swept north to drop a Marine Force Reconnaissance team on the hill to make sure the Iraqi troops there were neutralized, but dust and haze obscured the view and the mission had to be aborted.
Hours later, surveillance showed seven or eight Iraqi vehicles moving south across the Hammer Marsh Causeway, a bridge about 30 miles north of the Kuwait border. Maj. Gen. Jim Mattis, commander of the 1st Marine Division, sent in a request to bomb the bridge. Conway, the commanding general of the command operations center, concurred and dispatched F/A-18s.
"Attention COC," announced a watch officer. "Decision Point Two has been met. The CG has ordered the cratering of Hammer Marsh Causeway."
The planes blew a crater in the north end of the bridge, while leaving most of it intact.
Similarly, the Marines used aircraft to counter the emerging threat from Iraqi missiles fired at U.S. bases and civilian targets in Kuwait. While they were launched generally one at a time and either were knocked down by Patriot anti-missile batteries or landed harmlessly, they had been driving soldiers and Marines into their bunkers every hour or so.
So commanders had A-10 Thunderbolt attack planes loiter around the border until the next launch; once a pair of Iraqi launchers peeked out from under the tent and building where they had been hiding and launched, surveillance spotted their infrared signatures and the A-10s, which soldiers call Warthogs, zoomed in.
"Once we did that," noted Delahaut, "we saw that we weren't getting any more launches from that area."
© 2003 The Washington Post Company
Sempers,
Roger
By Peter Baker
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, March 24, 2003; Page A16
CAMP COMMANDO, Kuwait, March 23 -- The reports coming over the computers were tantalizing. Intelligence indicated that one of Iraq's most notorious military officers was at a house in the eastern Iraqi city of Amarah. A pair of Navy F-14 Tomcats swooped in for the kill.
When the bombs dropped, however, they hit the wrong place. Inside the Marine command center here, officers scrambled to help. According to a computer display of red and blue lights, they had a pair of F/A-18 Hornets nearby. The officers took the problem to Lt. Gen. James T. Conway, the Marine commander. "He basically said, 'Whatever you've got to do, make it happen,' " Lt. Col. Brian Delahaut said afterward.
The Hornets streaked to Amarah and within 15 minutes hit the designated house with two GBU-16 bombs. The excitement in the Marine command center was palpable. With any luck, they had gotten one of their top targets, Gen. Ali Hassan Majeed, a cousin of President Saddam Hussein. Majeed had recently been named commander for southern Iraq but was better known as "Chemical Ali" for his role in a 1988 gas attack on rebellious Kurds in northern Iraq.
"We think he's no longer breathing air," exulted one officer.
In the end, though, Majeed was still breathing air. He had not been in the house, the second time he had eluded U.S. bombs meant for him since the war began. Grim Marines stowed their disappointment and returned to the battle. There would be other opportunities, they told themselves.
The war as seen from the inside of the Marine Combat Operations Center, where few outsiders are admitted, is a roller coaster of highs and lows and a constant cabaret of improvisation. For the past 14 months, Marine planners mapped out the campaign against Iraq, and yet from the beginning of the ground war last Thursday, the commanders have often found themselves winging it based on events on the battlefield.
That comes as no surprise to veteran officers, who often say a war plan lasts only until the war starts. "The plan is nothing; the planning is everything," said Col. Larry Brown, the Marines' chief operations officer here, repeating another military aphorism stressing that the process of preparing helps commanders deal with the unexpected.
Asked on the night the ground war started if everything was going according to plan, Rear Adm. Charles R. Kubic, head of a Navy Seabee unit attached to the Marines, smiled broadly. "Well," he joked, "which plan?"
Indeed, the plan changed repeatedly in the weeks and months leading up to the invasion, right up until the final hours. The day the Marines ultimately crossed the border, the timing of the attack changed three times, finally being accelerated an additional four hours for fear that Hussein was torching oil wells in southern Iraq.
What has emerged in the three days since then has been a carefully calibrated blend of helicopter-borne special forces raids, stealthy reconnaissance missions, tank assaults, surrender negotiations and aerial and artillery bombardment. The Marines, and the British troops operating under their command, have taken oil and port installations in southeastern Iraq, blocked forces guarding the key city of Basra and begun moving the main land force toward Baghdad.
In that broader sense, when it came to achieving their major objectives for the first 72 hours of the war, the Marines checked off all the boxes they had expected to, based on the classified plan in place before the first shots were fired. Most important, the Marines and the Army have made dramatic progress toward Baghdad and could be there in days.
"This sounds bad because I'm the planner," said Lt. Col. George Smith, a top aide to Conway, the Marine commander, "but we are on our plan."
Yet Smith acknowledged that not everything has gone as it was drawn up. Iraqi forces have not surrendered in droves and have put up stronger resistance than expected in the south, keeping U.S. and British forces busy trying to wipe out small hit-and-run ambush squads. The Persian Gulf port of Umm Qasr continues to defy control, and the Marines and Army encountered a particularly tough fight around Nasiriyah today, with a number of U.S. troops reported killed or wounded.
On the other hand, Hussein has not destroyed the oil fields, blown up bridges or dams or deployed chemical weapons, as worst-case planning envisioned.
Watching Conway, Brown and other officers manage the Marines' drive into Iraq from a converted warehouse with electronic shielding here at their desert headquarters 25 miles south of the Iraqi border offers a rare inside look at 21st-century warfare, American-style. The sign on the door says, "Secret. Authorized Personnel Only. No Reporters." However, four American journalists have been given access to the center in exchange for allowing their dispatches to be reviewed by military officials, who have made no significant deletions.
The command center is the hub of Marine and British land operations in the Persian Gulf. Brown, a Fredericksburg native and University of Virginia graduate, calls it his "House of Angst" and has hung up a poster featuring Edvard Munch's "The Scream" and labeled "World Tour 2002-2003 -- Kuwait-Iraq."
At cafeteria-style tables, dozens of officers keep track of 85,000 Marines and British troops reporting to Conway, as well as hundreds of planes and ships, Army units, special forces and enemy divisions. Fire control officers munch Oreos as they direct warplanes dropping thousand-pound bombs.
If the atmosphere appears more businesslike than martial, perhaps that is because 60 percent of the staff running the command center are reservists, often civilians from the corporate world. "We're all business managers in a lot of ways," Delahaut, a manufacturing company vice president in civilian life, said as he studied the "kill box" for Marine warplanes displayed on his computer screen.
Just as business managers manage unforeseen contingencies, the officers in the Marine command center have been adjusting to circumstances on the battlefield. The first was the quick start.
In the war plan, Objective Alpha had been the Umm Qasr port, where most of Iraq's food is imported. The nearby Rumaila oil fields were listed as Objective Bravo. But with satellite imagery showing several wells ablaze, the Marine officers decided to rush immediately toward Rumaila. The fields were secured quickly enough, but Umm Qasr remains dicey even now.
The accelerated launch also may have resulted in fewer capitulations by Iraqi soldiers than anticipated. The military dropped leaflets explaining in detail exactly how Iraqi soldiers could avoid being targeted -- they had to put their vehicles in a square, turn off radios and radar, rotate tank turrets backward and stay 1,000 feet from equipment. But shortly after the leaflets were dropped, the Marines began pouring over the border, leaving the Iraqi troops no chance to quit.
"If they got the message, it was probably right before ground forces were upon them," said Smith, the planner. "Our ability to judge their response was zero."
On the first night of ground combat, as Marines moved toward the Kuwaiti line, 11 precision-guided bombs were dropped on a key, 550-foot-high hill west of the border town of Safwan to blast an Iraqi observation post. A helicopter swept north to drop a Marine Force Reconnaissance team on the hill to make sure the Iraqi troops there were neutralized, but dust and haze obscured the view and the mission had to be aborted.
Hours later, surveillance showed seven or eight Iraqi vehicles moving south across the Hammer Marsh Causeway, a bridge about 30 miles north of the Kuwait border. Maj. Gen. Jim Mattis, commander of the 1st Marine Division, sent in a request to bomb the bridge. Conway, the commanding general of the command operations center, concurred and dispatched F/A-18s.
"Attention COC," announced a watch officer. "Decision Point Two has been met. The CG has ordered the cratering of Hammer Marsh Causeway."
The planes blew a crater in the north end of the bridge, while leaving most of it intact.
Similarly, the Marines used aircraft to counter the emerging threat from Iraqi missiles fired at U.S. bases and civilian targets in Kuwait. While they were launched generally one at a time and either were knocked down by Patriot anti-missile batteries or landed harmlessly, they had been driving soldiers and Marines into their bunkers every hour or so.
So commanders had A-10 Thunderbolt attack planes loiter around the border until the next launch; once a pair of Iraqi launchers peeked out from under the tent and building where they had been hiding and launched, surveillance spotted their infrared signatures and the A-10s, which soldiers call Warthogs, zoomed in.
"Once we did that," noted Delahaut, "we saw that we weren't getting any more launches from that area."
© 2003 The Washington Post Company
Sempers,
Roger