THE LESSONS OF THE GULF WAR

FROM THE MOMENT SADDAM Hussein invaded Kuwait, I never doubted that he would be expelled. What made that belief a certainty was my first sight of Al Jubail airfield, where I landed in early November. Helicopters and fighters were parked to the horizon in every direction. The port of Jubail, just north of Dhahran, had been transformed into a perfectly organized forward operating base, where Patriot missile batteries stood among mountains of stores and trains of trucks, busy munitioning the U.S. Marines Corps and the British 1st Armored Division.

The sight reminded me of the south of England before D-day in 1944, when I was just a small boy. Those Anglo-American preparations defeated Hitler and the Wehrmacht. What hope, I asked myself, had Saddam and his raggle-taggle army against power of such magnitude?

Two men--Gens. Colin Powell and Norman Schwarzkopf--were the architects who amassed this awesome display of military might. Only soldiers, not politicians, could have framed the astonishing strategy that carried the allied armies to triumph on the Euphrates in 100 hours of ground fighting.

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the commander of Operation Desert Storm were deaf to doubters and faint-hearts, made a timetable and stuck to it, and refused to move until they had in the Gulf the best and most of everything the United States’ war machine had to offer. This may be the foremost of the war’s lessons.

Vietnam haunted everything that Powell and Schwarzkopf thought and did. At the root of the United States’ ordeal in Southeast Asia lay the policy of “incrementalism”--no more troops were sent at any one time than the situation seemed to warrant, reinforcement was authorized only under pressure of crisis, and strategy was determined only in response to events. A subsidiary and highly damaging feature of incrementalism was the policy of keeping units in Vietnam while rotating the personnel on a “one year in country” basis, which meant that at any one time a unit leader had under his command soldiers who were inexperienced and those whose time “in country” was nearly up. This was a recipe for destroying the “combat cohesion” essential to victory.

For Powell and Schwarzkopf, the policy of incrementalism was almost as much the enemy as Saddam. From the outset, they insisted on taking whole units to the Gulf and keeping them there, intact, until battle was joined. (The fact that the United States Army is now regular, not conscript as in Vietnam, made that policy easier to impose.) They also insisted on having the resources their judgment told them a strategy of victory demanded. The first deployment, in August, was sufficient to deter Iraqi aggression into Saudi Arabia. When President Bush decided in November to liberate Kuwait, the two generals demanded, and got, an army--eventually about 514,000 U.S. troops--that could unleash blitzkrieg on the Iraqis, a blitzkrieg as swift as that the Israelis have made their specialty but even more devastating. Israel fights for survival. Powell and Schwarzkopf fought for victory and the extinction of the slur of Vietnam--a cause to them as important as the military reputation of the United States itself.

The generals could not have set out to crush Iraqis but for decisions made a decade earlier. “Power projection” is a concept to which all the services pay lip service. But in the struggle for funding, each general prefers to fight for battlefield weapons rather than the mundane equipment that takes weapons where they are needed. Ten years ago, Congress made a better decision. It authorized the purchase of the eight Algol-class fast sea-lift transports that together can ship the equipment of a heavy division from the United States to any point on the globe in two weeks. The Algol ships were the bridge that got the 24th Mechanized Infantry Division from Ft. Stewart, Ga., to the Gulf in the very beginning.

An equally good investment proved to be the three groups of Marine Corps prepositioning ships, which got the Marines’ tanks and artillery to the Gulf within the first month of the confrontation. Meanwhile, the C-5s, C-141s and C-130s transports of the Military Airlift Command were flying round the clock, at the extreme of maintenance capability.

Saudi Arabia had been well prepared for power projection. Knowing that, with their tiny population, they would never be able to defend their riches against greedy neighbors, the Saudis created the best military infrastructure money could buy. Logistics, then, were the necessary preliminary to allied victory; they could not, however, guarantee victory on their own. The United States services had excellent logistics in Vietnam. But logistics could not prevail against terrain, vegetation and a committed enemy.

There has been a firepower revolution since the end of the Vietnam War. The first hint of it was the bombing of the Hanoi bridges in 1972, when a few laser-guided bombs did the damage hundreds of “dumb” bombs had not achieved before. In the intervening years, military science has applied “smart” technology to a variety of weapons, from the large cruise missiles that first appeared as the German V-1 of 1944 to man-portable anti-tank rockets.

One result of the firepower revolution is that, as Francois Heisbourg, director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, has put it, bombing need no longer entail “the mass murder of civilian populations.” Indeed, during the war, television brought us the extraordinary spectacle of the population of Baghdad going about its business while the necessities of everyday life--electrical power supply, water filtration, telecommunications--were destroyed about its ears.

“Carpet bombing,” by B-52s dropping “dumb” bombs, may have inflicted widespread casualties on the Iraqi troops. The real damage done to the Iraqi army during the five-week air campaign, however, was the work of “smart” ordnance, point-targeted at tanks and artillery pieces. The effect was ghastly--as the British 1st Armored Division found to its cost. Its heaviest casualties were the result of “friendly fire,” when American Maverick missiles in the fog of battle hit two of its Warrior fighting vehicles. The ordinary Iraqi infantry, by contrast, was terrified into desertion and surrender by the sound and fury of the allied bombing and artillery barrage.

So much for the fighting capability of “the fourth-largest army in the world.” This description, repeated ad nauseam, was true as it stood. What it left out of account was that Saddam achieved his massing of numbers only by conscripting every fit Iraqi male between the ages of 18 and 40. In modern war, mere numbers count for very little, as the sight of pathetic Iraqi captives struggling to kiss the desert boots of embarrassed American Marines demonstrated.

Third World armies, if highly motivated and when fighting on their own ground, may prove a match for Western armies, as the Vietnamese did. In “pure” warfare, of the sort made possible in the desert, First World soldiers will always prevail. What Gens. Powell and Schwarzkopf did in the six months of preparation for Desert Sabre was to assemble in northern Saudi Arabia most of the American and British NATO forces that had been trained and equipped for 30 years to fight the Soviet Army. No Third World army approaches the Soviets’, least of all in the mobile warfare to which both Warsaw Pact members and NATO were committed.

The capacity of Schwarzkopf’s army surpassed, moreover, conventional mobile operations. During the 1980s, American staff officers, looking forward to the next century, devised a tactical system they called AirLand battle 2000. The Reagan Administration authorized funding to make it reality. The AirLand battle was the tactical basis of Desert Sabre, thus bringing to the desert a form of warfare that in effect belonged to the future. By contrast, during the eight years of the Iran war, the Iraqi army had fought static trench battles, 1914 style. The AirLand fight, on the other hand, distributes firepower over the whole depth of the battlefield, which may be 100 miles or more. Its instruments include the tank, the armed helicopter, the anti-tank aircraft, the multiple rocket launcher, self-propelled artillery and the “deep strike” capability of the tactical air force. Iraq possessed tanks in plenty, most of them obsolete; otherwise, it possessed none of those things. It was outgunned before the battle even began.

What’s more, while the Allies engaged in breath-taking maneuvers through obstacle belts, past tank brigades and in a great flanking motion around whole divisions, the Iraqis had never practiced so much as a divisional maneuver. Their command and control system, heavily battered by the preliminary air offensive, was relatively primitive.

It is, indeed, sobering to imagine what the experience of the Iraqis during Desert Sabre must have been like. The best of their soldiers were allocated to strongpoints and dug-in armored vehicles behind the obstacle belt. When the shooting started, their artillery was overwhelmed by the guns and rocket launchers of the Allies, whose engineers were able to lift the protecting mines in relative safety. The Iraqis were then called upon to defend themselves in the dark of night, although they lacked what the enemy possessed plentifully--night-vision devices.

Iraqi tank crews, searching for targets, would have seen their neighbors’ vehicles erupting in flame from hits delivered by enemy tanks that remained invisible. The Allies’ superior tank guns consistently hit at more than 6,000 feet while the Iraqis were limited to an engagement range of 4,950 feet and rarely hit at all. It is little wonder that, when dawn broke, allied tank crews found white flags flying over Iraqi trenches. The night battle meant certain death for any who revealed their position by returning fire; it brought death to many who merely remained inert.

The worst casualties were suffered by the Iraqis who tried to escape en masse from the converging allied columns at Kuwait City toward the end of the fighting. It was there that allied air power wrought its worst. In the flight from Kuwait City, when vehicles were jammed nose-to-tail and 10 abreast, the A-10s and Apache helicopters had a target they could not miss, and the awful weapons of modern war, particularly cluster bombs--which distribute hundreds of explosives from a single canister--killed the fugitives by the thousands. Military history teaches that the most dangerous decision in battle is to run away after the front has been broken; terrified soldiers never remember the lessons of military history and so have died in the thousands ever since Hannibal defeated the Romans at Cannae 2,100 years ago.

Schwarzkopf had not merely contrived a rout. He achieved the largest encirclement of an army in modern times, and one of the most complete. High on the list of allied accomplishments stands their skill in deception. Schwarzkopf used the embarked Marines of amphibious groups merely to mount a feint, which held as much as six Iraqi divisions in coastal defense positions, while sending the French, highly experienced in deep desert warfare, in a long thrust toward An-Nasiriyah on the middle Euphrates, and using the 18th Airborne Corps to seize crossings on the river there and to leap beyond it to the Tigris. The full nature of that operation, the most daring of Desert Sabre, has still to be revealed. It epitomized, however, the essence of the AirLand battle and ensured that the Iraqi army’s routes of escape into its homeland would be blocked even before its commanders--or Saddam Hussein--realized that it had suffered a catastrophic defeat in the Kuwaiti desert.

Together, the three operations--buildup, air offensive, ground attack--ensure that would-be regional imperialists, particularly those with nuclear ambitions, will be given pause to think for decades to come. The operations demonstrate that there is no point on the globe to which the power of the United States cannot reach. The head of the Gulf is, from either coast of the continental United States, the most inaccessible place in the world. The proof that it is nevertheless within the orbit of U.S. power projection will be a comfort to all who believe in and are ready to accept American world leadership.

The three operations also lay down lessons for those who design U.S. defense policy, not all of which may be welcome. Britain, which seeks a large “peace dividend,” nearly gave its military all to the Gulf War and is now deeply perturbed about what savings it can safely make after victory. The United States has reason to be even more perturbed. It, too, seeks a peace dividend, and with even greater reason, for it has borne the lion’s share of defending the West throughout the Cold War.

Yet the nature of the Gulf War seems to imply that there is no place in the United States’ defense structure where it can safely begin to make cuts, since every service contributed an essential part. Without the military air- and sea-lift commands, it could not have gotten its forces to Saudi Arabia in the first place. Without the strategic and tactical air forces, it could not have beaten down the Iraqi air defenses or shaped the battlefield before the troops went in. Without heavy and light forces--Marine and Army--the troops could not have mounted so comprehensive an offensive. Without European involvement, the armed forces as a whole could not have counted on the intimate cooperation with the British and French that imbued the campaign with its international character, so essential from a diplomatic point of view.

Cuts must come. What they must not take away is the ability of the United States armed forces to intervene at the farthest reach from the shores of America, with both heavy and light forces, under an impermeable air umbrella and in concert with its true allies. These strengths, together with the unsurpassable qualities of the American armed forces, are the heritage of Gens. Powell and Schwarzkopf. They must not be compromised.