Into the Storm: On the Ground in Iraq

Maneuver warfare is all about moving powerful mounted formations to gain an advantage over an enemy force to defeat or destroy them. How that is done has undergone significant evolution in the twentieth century, up to and including Desert Storm. It will continue to evolve. The thoughts that follow represent the distillation of the experience and wisdom about maneuver warfare and mobile armored formations that Fred Franks has spent the better part of a professional lifetime acquiring:

South of Chancellorsville, Virginia, predawn, 2 May 1862, at a planning meeting between General Robert E. Lee and General Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson:

"What do you propose to do?" Lee asked.

"Go around here."

"What do you propose to make the movement with?"

"With my whole corps."

"And what will you leave me?"

"The divisions of McLaws and Anderson."

"Well, go on," Lee said.

Lee's "Well, go on" set off as grand a maneuver as has taken place in the history of the U.S. military. At a little after 0700 that same morning, Stonewall Jackson began moving his corps of almost 32,000 soldiers and over 100 artillery pieces twelve miles along the covered route of Furnace Road to Brock Road across the front of two Union corps. His movement would put his corps on both sides of the Old Orange Turnpike, facing east in a position of great advantage to attack into the now-exposed west flank of the Union XI Corps, who were facing generally south. Jackson's attack at a little after 1700 that afternoon caught the Union XI Corps completely by surprise and set off a chain of events that led four days later to Union general Joseph Hooker's quitting the field and moving his numerically superior army back north.

Normally, a tactical envelopment requires both a fixing force and an enveloping force. The fixing force holds the enemy in place while the other force maneuvers and envelops the enemy. In this case, Lee was left to fix Hooker with McLaws's and Anderson's divisions, while Jackson commanded the enveloping force.

In the history of warfare, the two warring sides have always tried to gain such positional advantage over each other. The reason is quite simple. Hit the other side from an unexpected direction with enough strength that he cannot recover, and you will soon own the initiative and then the battlefield.

Battle is chaos on a grand scale, with chance occurring continually. What you are trying to do as a commander is keep the enemy in this chaos, while operating with some sense of order and cohesion on your own side. You try to place your soldiers in an advantageous position where they can physically outfight the enemy. But in placing them in such an advantageous position, you are also outthinking the enemy commander — as Lee and Jackson outthought Hooker at Chancellorsville. You are trying to give the enemy more problems to solve in a given time than he and his organization can possibly handle. You are trying to run him out of options, and thus force him to fight you on your terms. Then you physically defeat or destroy him.

Combat is the application of physical force. Yet brute force applied directly against brute force is usually not the most effective application of physical force, and will soon wear down the attacker to the point where he cannot continue. Consequently, the aim of commanders is to maneuver and thereby gain positional advantage that puts the enemy into chaos and keeps him there by repeated blows until he quits or you own the area.

Thus, it is not only forms of mobility that make successful maneuver warfare. It is using whatever form of mobility is available to move forces to positions of advantage. From there you can then overwhelm the enemy with a series of repeated blows. Forms of mobility are important only as they move the attacker to those positions of advantage, and as they give the attacker relative advantage over the defender.

HISTORY

There have been many means of movement to these positions of advantage. Each of these has been adapted continually to remain useful, or else it has been discarded. For example, excellent training, discipline, and physical conditioning of soldiers on foot have given them a relative advantage over their battlefield enemies in many historical situations, and even today on some terrain.

Recent history is full of examples of the advantages gained in maneuver. In May 1940, German attacks into France across the Meuse River and on to the Atlantic coast allowed German armored forces to swiftly position themselves between major elements of the the Allied forces, forcing evacuation of British forces from Dunkirk and creating the opportunity to defeat the now-outnumbered French forces to the south. In 1941-42, Rommel's repeated flank attacks to the south of British Eighth Army defenses in the Western Desert led to the continued collapse of British positions almost up to Alexandria, Egypt. The maneuver of the Japanese fleet to a position north of Hawaii to attack Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941 is another example. Yet the Japanese inability to follow up their initial success gave no staying power to the initial chaos caused by the attack. In September 1950, MacArthur's landing of U.S. X Corps at Inchon, Korea, put a major allied force well behind the North Korean forces and astride their logistics routes, and sped the destruction of that army in the field. Later, in the Vietnam War, refusal by our own government to permit land, sea, and air forces to maneuver to positions to cut off the flow of men and material from North Vietnam to South Vietnam lengthened that conflict and led ultimately to loss of South Vietnam by its physical occupation from the North. In October 1973, the Israeli crossing of the Suez to position a major force to operate well inside Egypt was a key factor in ending the brief but lethal war Israel fought with Egypt and Syria. Simultaneous air assault and airborne maneuvers by elements of XVIII Corps on the night of 20 December 1989 put them in positions to rapidly isolate and physically defeat Panamanian forces in less than forty-eight hours. These examples point to various forms of movement, foot-mobile infantry, tanks, ships, and aircraft, employed on land, sea, or air to gain positional advantage over the defender.

Forms of ground mobility have gone through several changes. The horse and the various formations of what we know as cavalry once gave skilled commanders a shock effect to the immediate battle, as horse-mounted soldiers swiftly attacked less mobile formations. These commanders soon found cavalry also useful for longer-range operations and missions, such as positioning in the enemy rear, then attacking his homeland. One notable example was Colonel B. H. Grierson's cavalry raid from La Grange, Tennessee, through Mississippi, to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, from 17 April to 2 May 1863, during the American Civil War. (This was the Grierson who went on to command the 10th Cavalry, Buffalo Soldiers, in campaigns in the Southwest following the Civil War.) With 1,700 troopers of 6th and 7th Illinois and 2nd Iowa Cavalry, Grierson's deep-attacking force, according to Harper's Pictorial History of the Civil War, "in sixteen days traversed 800 miles of hostile territory, destroying railroad bridges, transportation, commissary stores, paroling a large number of prisoners, and destroying 3,000 stand of arms, at a cost of only twenty-seven men."

The arrival of rapid-firing rifles, machine guns, and more powerful, longer-range, accurate artillery soon called into question these horse-mobile formations in the increasingly deadly killing grounds of the close-combat battle. The idea of gaining a positional advantage, and the disruption it could bring to the coherence of an enemy formation, still had wide appeal, but the mobility to accomplish this was compromised, and then stopped, by the deadly fires of machine guns and artillery. Hence the stalemates of World War I. Not many battles of position. Just battles of brute force against brute force, hurling masses of men at each other in an attempt to break the firepower stranglehold of the other side. The cost in casualties, simply to gain and control even minor pieces of the enemy's real estate, became unacceptable. The result was the incredible human cost of World War I—8 million dead.

Military thinkers, especially in Britain, Germany, and Russia, looked for ways to restore maneuver to a battlefield that had evolved to gridlock.

What to do? The solution lay in developing mobile protected firepower, and then organizing these capabilities into formations that could operate with speed and combat efficiency on a battlefield dominated by defensive firepower. This became possible because of technology already available and in use during the early twentieth century, marking a convenient convergence of military war-fighting ideas and available technology.

Major technology available at the time included the internal-combustion engine, caterpillar-type tracked laying vehicles, wireless radios, and the airplane. The internal-combustion engine led, of course, to a transition from horse-drawn or steam-driven mobility in the civilian sector to power provided by these new engines to a wheeled base for mobility. Heavier vehicles that had to travel over unimproved ground, such as farmland and construction sites, soon turned to machines known as caterpillar crawlers or tracked laying vehicles. Though earlier versions of these caterpillar vehicles had been steam driven, new possibilities arose with the internal-combustion engine. Around 1908, it was demonstrated that a heavy vehicle could be mounted on two oval "tracks." Connecting these tracks to the power output of the internal-combustion engine propelled the vehicle over the ground. The vehicle crawled like a caterpillar, or rather the tracks were laid out on the ground for the vehicle to ride over.

Enter the tank, an effective combination of protection for the crew, mobility to move relatively quickly about the battlefield, and sufficient firepower to destroy enemy machines like theirs.

Unfortunately, early tanks did not work as well as their developers intended. Significant technical problems plagued their early designs, especially during World War I. Not the least of these were difficulties with crew-machine interaction (what modern-day designers call ergonomics) and a reliable track and suspension system.

It was a case where the ideas endured long enough for the technology to catch up. This is not always so, but it was in this case.

Back on the battlefield, now with tanks roaming over it, another piece had to be added, to prevent more chaos. That piece was voice communications. In an attack on the enemy, in order to permit some semblance of continuing organizational coherence, soldiers in tanks needed a means to talk to other tanks. Without such voice communications, it would prove difficult to impossible to keep coherent hundreds of noisy, tracked vehicles moving at various speeds over broken ground. At best, major formations of armored vehicles would have to rely on visual signals in order to remain grouped together, and would have to stop frequently to dismount and talk among themselves to change or adjust orders. Lacking the coherence gained from some kind of fast, dependable communication, the attacker would not be able to physically mass firepower when needed, or to change direction or type of maneuver.

By the late 1920s, wireless radios capable of line-of-sight transmission would permit individual tank commanders to communicate with each other and with their larger unit commanders. Such a breakthrough would allow control of attacking formations without the continuing need to halt, dismount, and communicate. Continuous operations would now be possible, as would the ability to adjust tactics rapidly, while retaining relative order and coherence of attacking formations.

Other wider-ranging possibilities soon became apparent to military theorists. For instance, they quickly saw that indirect fire support could come from longer-range artillery units in formations positioned to the rear of the immediate battle area. Target information transmissions from frontline mounted tankers would allow these units to deliver volumes of accurate and deadly fire in support of tank attacks.

Meanwhile, airpower advocates were discovering that the third dimension of airspace could provide external combat support. They recognized that the skies above the battlefield provided a positional advantage and an attack direction that could produce effects similar to cavalry, both in close-in battles and deeper in the enemy's rear. Observers on the ground looking at enemy targets could pass on the enemy location to aviators via radio. The aviators would then attack the enemy from the air, and further introduce chaos to the enemy. This concept was first used with devastating battlefield effect by the Germans with their Stukas, from 1939 to 1942, and later by Allied forces, notably U.S. ground and air forces of Third Army and 19th Air Force in 1944-45.

Three breakthrough war-fighting ideas significantly influenced the early design and experiments with mounted armored formations in the 1920s and 1930s.

• The first has become known as all arms or combined arms. According to all-arms theory, all combat, combat support, and combat service support functions should be mounted and be immediately available to the mounted commander. This would create a self-contained mobile force, with its own tanks, infantry, artillery, engineers, signal, and logistics (such as trucks for fuel, ammunition, food, and spare parts). Such an all-arms approach allowed the mounted commander to devise a variety of combinations of forces from within his own basic organization. Using these, he could exploit opportunities in changing battle situations without the need to constantly stop and reorganize. Skilled commanders could then conduct operations at a tempo of attack that brought them to positions where they presented the enemy with more situations than he could possibly handle in a given time and space. In this way, the initiative lost in the firepower-dominated battlefields of World War I was regained.

• The second of these theories held that mounted formations would attack dismounted or less mobile units, break through their front lines, then operate in their rear, destroying artillery, command posts, and logistics. Using the metaphor of a small penetrating stream that swiftly swelled into a flood, British theorist B. H. Liddell Hart named this theory the "expanding torrent." According to Hart's theory, the penetrating tank attack would have the effect of first destroying the initial line and eventually of collapsing the front…

Some later critics questioned whether Hart's theory was truly innovative, or whether it was merely an adaptation of the infiltration tactics adopted by both sides to break the deadly trench warfare grip on opposing forces mainly on the western front. In fact, many theories, and many tactics, were tried by military professionals to break this grip. By war's end, they had used every technology available at the time — not only armored forces, infiltration tactics, and air, but also, of course, chemical warfare. Original or not, theories such as Hart's became important for the inspiration they gave to later experiments in restoring the maneuver option. Hart was one of many such theorists, albeit one of the more prolific, readable, and influential writers. Other practitioners worked less noticeably in field experiments with the same goal.

• Third: In battle, it was now considered possible to fight both close and deep. This concept of a battlefield of much greater depth was proposed by Russian theorists, notably Tuchachevsky, in the 1930s. (It must be noted that many ideas were being rapidly exchanged between theorists in England, Russia, and Germany at this time.) Tuchachevsky theorized that it was possible with operational maneuver groups and air to create a zone of attack where you would simultaneously fight close and deep in the enemy rear, unlike during World War I, where units slugged it out along a line. "Our technical equipment," he wrote in 1937, "enables us to put pressure on the enemy not only directly on the line of the front, but also to break through his disposition and attack to the full depth of the battle formation."

Such theories would ironically see their greatest advocates in the early to mid-1980s in the U.S. Army's AirLand Battle doctrine, designed to defeat the military descendants of Tuchachevsky, the Warsaw Pact.

Few new theories advance without hindrance, and such was the case with these. There were many arguments against all of them. Indeed, the arguments particularly held back newer ideas from finding a place in the U.S. Army. In the United States, the Tank Corps of World War I was disbanded, and the National Defense Act of 1920 assigned tanks to the infantry. The doctrine that the tank "is designed to assist the advance of the infantry and the tank service is a branch of the infantry" lasted until 1930. Even as late as 1930, the newly appointed Army Chief of Staff, General Douglas MacArthur, would continue assigning tanks to assist various existing military branches, rather than use them in ways that would be truly militarily useful. In his own words, "The infantry will give attention to machines to increase the striking power of the infantry against strongly held positions." Liddell Hart, always impatient with the propensity among much of the military to lock itself into the status quo, would write about such attitudes, "The most difficult thing with a military mind is not getting a new idea in, it is getting the old idea out."

In defense of the U.S. Army, we should point out that during the Depression, it had a strength of only a little over 100,000 men, it had little money for research and development, it thought as the nation did that another major war was not in its immediate future, and it was anyhow busy with CCC projects and assisting in maintaining federal law and order. (Today we call these last "Operations Other Than War.") The cavalry at Fort Riley even wanted to keep its horses. In other words, the context of the times did not help leaders look much to the future.

Meanwhile, land battles in Europe and Africa saw increasing application of new tank and other mechanized technologies employed in battlefield tactics derived from the three war-fighting theories. Spectacularly, the German Wehrmacht stunned the world with their lightning "blitzkrieg" attacks into Poland in 1939, France in 1940, and Russia in 1941. And Rommel's brilliant flanking maneuvers in North Africa in 1941-42 stunned the world yet again. The Wehrmacht's expert use of both battle in depth and all arms — including air, rapid penetration, and envelopment using mounted forces — not only came as a great surprise to the defenders, it also restored maneuver to the European battlefield lost in World War I. Later, in 1943, British and Soviet formations would apply similar methods and score successes against the same Wehrmacht in both North Africa and Russia. The U.S. Army came to adopt these new theories late, and as a consequence suffered a serious defeat against German forces at Kasserine Pass in Tunisia in February 1943. Learning and adapting swiftly, however, by 1944-45, U.S. armor forces under Patton and others in France and Germany were as expert practitioners of maneuver warfare as any in World War II.

Unlike the Germans, the U.S. Army did not form armored corps or armored armies. They relied instead on the basic division formation for armored forces. Two or more armored divisions could be found in corps during World War II, but at no time did U.S. planners form a totally armored corps for a deep thrust as envisioned by the interwar theorists, choosing short tactical thrusts instead. Even so, U.S. forces were all to a certain extent mobile, given the availability of truck transport.

The large-scale armor successes in World War II, together with the continuing influence of the leaders of armored maneuver formations, would cause maneuver theories and their application in equipment and formations to dominate thinking up through the 1960s and into the early 1970s. Swift battlefield victories by Israel, first in 1956 and then again in 1967, reinforced these ideas.

Many new maneuver war-fighting ideas and theories were advanced and tried following World War II, mostly experiments with forms of movement and organizational changes. Some methods developed in World War II continued. In Korea, for instance, maneuver played a large role, as troops came from the sea at Inchon in an amphibious assault. U.S. forces were mainly foot and truck mobile north, and tanks mainly supported infantry in up to battalion-sized formations, since the terrain did not permit major mounted maneuver.

In 1956, the U.S. Army experimented with and then adopted what was called the "pentomic" division, a radically new organizational design to allow freedom of action and maneuver options on what was anticipated as a nuclear battlefield. This doctrine was abandoned in 1962 for a return to more evolutionary methods of combining all arms in a division, while retaining the maneuver option.

Mounted soldiers and units played a big role in U.S. tactical victories in Vietnam. The largest ground-mounted unit in that war was the 11th ACR, Blackhorse, which was skillfully employed over a large area of operations in a wide variety of typical mounted missions to inflict heavy losses on Viet Cong and North Vietnamese units. It was not only able to reposition quickly to continually gain positional advantage over North Vietnamese units, it also had a large firepower advantage when finding and fixing enemy forces in the battles that followed.

The most significant innovation in warfare of that generation was initiated in that war, with the introduction by the U.S. Army of army aviation as a maneuver element. First, with experiments at Fort Benning, then later in combat in Vietnam with the 1st Cavalry Division, the U.S. Army pioneered air assault and the use of the third dimension in ground maneuver warfare. The creation of some pioneer theorists and tacticians in the 1950s and early 1960s, air assault and attack aviation led to new thinking and new dimensions of maneuver warfare that the U.S. Army would practice with newer technology during Desert Storm.

The 1967 war in the Middle East demonstrated once again the deadly linkage of tank forces with tactical air when combined in a series of mutually supporting actions.

Yet even as all these events were playing out, and as both NATO and the Warsaw Pact fielded more powerful and capable mounted forces through the early to mid-1960s, a change was taking place that threatened the continued existence of maneuver on the battlefield.

The change most clearly made its presence felt not in Europe, but in the 1973 war in the Mideast.

On the Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur, 1973, Egyptian and Syrian forces made surprise attacks into Sinai and the Golan with new weapons and new combinations of forces. The introduction in a big way of the SAGGAR missile, combined with an effective air defense umbrella, allowed attacking Egyptian and Syrian forces to gain a series of initial advantages, and in the case of the Egyptians, to inflict heavy losses on some counterattacking Israeli units. For the first time, this broke the Israeli air-ground team. The Israelis fought outnumbered on defense, and after heavy losses themselves but heavier losses on the attackers, they won engagements to go on the counterattack.

The U.S. Army took a very hard look at that war. Fighting outnumbered, and winning, was easy for that Army to identify with, considering its own situation in Central Europe.

The first and hardest lesson of the two-week '73 war was the threat to hard-won battlefield maneuverability. Tanks no longer restored the mobility lost with the demise of horse cavalry. Though the Israelis managed to restore maneuver during the war's closing days, initially, the war pitted brute force against brute force. Forces of roughly equal mobility and firepower faced each other. On the war's first day, with three divisions forward and two to follow, close to 1,000 Syrian tanks attacked Israeli positions on the Golan. A comparable number of Egyptian tanks in the Sinai attacked in formations similarly echeloned, with divisions stacked one behind the other. This echelonment permitted successive waves of mounted forces to hurl themselves at defenders, and then to wear them down and fracture the integrity of the defense. The Arab forces battered themselves against Israeli defenders much as World War I infantry formations did — with the same high cost of people and material on both sides. In both the Golan and Sinai, these attrition tactics, using waves of attacking armor, came dangerously close to breaking Israeli forces. It was only late in the two-week war that Israeli formations were able to stop advancing threat forces and have sufficient combat power to maneuver to positions of advantage on the west bank of the Suez and toward Damascus, east of the Golan.

Gone was Hart's expanding torrent. Instead of the light, speedy breakthrough formations envisioned in the 1920s, attacking softer targets in the enemy rear and shattering the less mobile front lines, mounted forces were now like harvesting machines in a Kansas wheat field. Formations defending front lines in 1973 had as much mobility and firepower as the mounted attacker. Although attacking formations were still capable of sweeping deep to attack vulnerable enemy capabilities there, it was apparent they must also now be principally designed and used as the forces to close with and destroy an equally powerful defending enemy force.

Forces roughly equal in firepower and mobility had been opposing each other since the early 1940s in the deserts of North Africa and on the plains of Russia, but now this was also true on virtually every terrain suitable for large mechanized formations.

Meanwhile, foot-mobile infantry was also still required, as World War II in the Pacific, Korea, and Vietnam clearly demonstrated. (To restore maneuver in Vietnam to foot-mobile infantry, U.S. Army thinkers, most notably Generals Howze and Kinnard, introduced the air cavalry and air assault formations mentioned earlier.) Even so, where mounted formations could be employed, they ruled the battle areas. It was, however, proving to be a perilous rule, for close combat of every kind had become increasingly lethal. The firepower invented to offset the mobility advantages seen in World War II — principally the antitank guided missile, attack helicopters, and tactical air with precision munitions — saw to that. Mobility and hence maneuver were once again threatened by increasingly lethal firepower.

Faced with this challenge, maneuver theorists were still able to employ all arms and depth, but with the added realization that mounted formations now had to become the principal destructive agents on the battlefield. To fill this expanded role, mounted units now required considerable firepower of their own to be able to sustain themselves in increasingly high-tempo, high-lethality battles. This increase came mainly in the following areas: air defense, deep fires (the ability to strike far into the enemy rear), some redundancy of capabilities (the ability to absorb casualties and still go on), and the ability to sustain themselves with supplies such as fuel and ammunition in those high-tempo, high-lethality battles.

U.S. ARMY AIRLAND BATTLE DOCTRINE

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, U.S. Army theorists, notably General Donn Starry, returned depth to the battlefield, but added to it.

From his studies of the '73 war, Starry had seen that the only way to counteract the density of both Syrian and Egyptian mounted attacks was to fight them close and deep at the same time. In order to defend against the echelonment doctrine of Soviet and Soviet-style forces (such as Syria and Egypt), Starry considered it necessary to bring depth back to U.S. Army doctrine. Like Syria and Egypt in '73, Soviet forces used waves of attacking echelons to ultimately overwhelm a defender by attrition at the point of attack. If the defender did not attack follow-on echelons at the same time he defended against attacking echelons, he would soon be overwhelmed. By separating the echelons and stopping the momentum of the attack, while destroying valuable or irreplaceable battle assets deep in the enemy rear, the combination of close and deep attacks would first slow down and then defeat echeloned attacks.

In Starry's view, depth meant both delivery of firepower from aerial platforms and artillery and ability of maneuver forces to occupy and control key areas by attacking vital enemy capabilities in deep ground assaults. In other words, mounted forces needed to be able to move quickly into the enemy rear (like the Israelis in their crossing of the Suez and in their armored counterattack out of the Golan toward Damascus). But in addition, they also needed to be able to target and attack deep in the enemy's rear with fires and their own attack aviation. In consequence, a mounted commander now had to see in much greater depth the battle space assigned to him to accomplish his mission.

In this effort to rethink depth, Starry was assisted by Colonels Huba Wass de Czege and Don Holder, who, as mentioned before, not only developed more fully than ever before the concept of depth, but also expanded on the important tenet of initiative, so vital to an American army, and especially to one that anticipated fighting outnumbered.

Starry and others to follow him at TRADOC, notably General Glen Otis and General Bill Richardson, gave these thoughts life in U.S. Army doctrine and capabilities. The name they gave these theories was AirLand Battle. Though the concepts included under the AirLand Battle rubric were first introduced by Starry in the U.S. Army's doctrine FM 100-5 in 1982, they were the product of study and analysis he and others had been doing since 1973.

One other idea resurrected from the past the U.S. Army called "operational art." In essence, successful battles and engagements had to be linked together in both time and space in the design of a campaign to achieve a larger operational objective. Achievement of that operational objective would lead to gaining the overall theater strategic objective and victory. Such theory had been routinely practiced in World War II. In other words, to achieve the theater result in Western Europe in 1944-45 of unconditional surrender, it was necessary to secure the lodgment in Normandy, conduct a breakout from there, cross the Rhine, and then finally defeat remaining German forces in their homeland from the west as Russian forces advanced from the east. Those series of major battles would together achieve the overall theater objective of German defeat.

U.S. Army writers began writing about operational art at the U.S. Army War College at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, in the early 1980s. Brigadier General Don Morelli, then chief of doctrine at TRADOC, and General Glen Otis, TRADOC commander, included the idea in the 1982 version of FM 100-5. Building on that beginning, General Bill Richardson and Lieutenant General Carl Vuono, and later Lieutenant General Bob RisCassi, expanded on those thoughts, making "operational art" a major change to the revised FM 100-5 in 1986.

After some debate on the level of command that could best handle this new doctrine on the tactical battlefields anticipated, the U.S. Army settled on the corps. The corps was selected because it was the Army's largest tactical formation that was self-contained; it had the necessary all-arms and support requirements to operate independently, and the redundancy to sustain longer-duration campaigns. Therefore, the U.S. Army corps would be self-contained and have two to five divisions in it for maneuver. It was to be different from World War II corps in that it would have its own logistics organization. Where it was necessary in NATO to employ multiple corps, NATO army groups would also practice the operational art. In that arena, corps would design a series of battles and engagements necessary to be won to achieve the operational objective assigned by the army group.

During the Cold War, it was not anticipated that the U.S. Army would fight in multicorps campaigns outside NATO. Hence there were no provisions for U.S.-only headquarters capable of commanding two or more U.S. corps. These decisions to abandon the field army were made by Army leadership well before AirLand Battle doctrine, and were driven by NATO considerations, yet were essentially revalidated in the 1982 and 1986 versions of the U.S. Army's doctrine. Thus, in the fall of 1990, there were no provisions for a U.S.-only field army or army group headquarters.

Though the Army ran into initial problems in theater because of these last issues, AirLand Battle and operational art dominated the thinking and organization of U.S. mounted forces in Desert Storm: all arms, destructive effects on the enemy, battles in depth both by fires and maneuver, and the linkage of these battles to achieve the campaign result.

ORGANIZATION

The corps bridges the strategic and the tactical levels of war. Using land, sea, and air forces, strategy decides the overall campaign objective. The operational level then devises a campaign plan of a linked series of battles and engagements that, when fought and won, will together achieve the strategic objective. The tactical level fights these battles and engagements successfully to achieve the operational results that in turn achieve the strategic objective. The corps participates in the design of the campaign and directly conducts the tactical operations to gain the campaign objectives.

The corps is the largest land formation in the U.S. Army. It is built with a mix of units that provides the commander a wide range of options. These options derive from the variety of combinations of units that he can put together to accomplish a given mission against a given enemy on a particular piece of terrain.

A mounted corps is a team of teams. The U.S. Army calls these teams echelons of command. They begin with the smallest entity, normally an individual vehicle and its crew, then build into echelons of command such as platoons (four to six vehicles), companies (four to six platoons), battalions (four to six companies), brigades (four to six battalions), divisions (six or more brigades), and a corps (two to five divisions, with up to eight to ten non-division brigades and a cavalry regiment). At each of those echelons is an officer chain of command, with a commander and subordinates, and a noncommissioned officer network that normally places a noncommissioned officer directly subordinate to each officer. It additionally places an NCO in direct command of individual crews and sections where there is no officer. The U.S. Army uses noncommissioned officers more extensively than any other army in the world, a proven practice going all the way back to the Revolutionary War. It is why the NCO corps is often called the "backbone of the Army."

Each division in the corps is a carefully balanced combined-arms organization consisting of combat capabilities, direct combat-support capabilities, and logistics or combat service support, and is also a team of teams. The cavalry regiment has a similar organization. Each of the other non-division units in the corps is likewise a team of teams, with its own ability to support itself for short duration. But none of these is a balanced combined-arms organization. Rather they are single-function organizations of artillery, engineer, aviation, signal, intelligence, military police, medical, etc.

Even though all corps are different, they do have common organizational characteristics. Normally for a mounted corps, this mix of units will consist of from two to five armored and mechanized infantry divisions, usually eight to ten various non-division brigade-size units, and include armored cavalry and aviation, an artillery command of varying numbers of types of brigades, and a support command that will vary widely in terms of numbers and types of units for logistics support, depending on the theater of operation.

From this common organizational base, corps normally are tailored for a specific geographic theater of operations against a specific enemy. They are each tailored for their mission and anticipated use and they train for that specific purpose.

To accomplish this tailoring, the numbers and types of complete teams — or major command echelons to be included in the corps — are determined by examination of the factors of METT-T (or Mission, Enemy, Terrain, Troops available, and Time to accomplish the mission). Commanders look at these factors and compile the right mix of combat units (armored divisions, cavalry regiment, air defense, aviation brigade, artillery, and engineer), combat-support units (military police, military intelligence, and signal), and combat-service-support units (personnel, finance, medical, transportation, maintenance, supply, etc.) to give the widest range of options or combinations to accomplish anticipated missions.

Depending on the results of a particular METT-T analysis, the mix of units in a corps and their training will vary considerably. For example, a corps in Korea, given a mission there in that terrain, will be configured with units specially trained to conduct operations against the possible enemy there and on that terrain. It might have a mix of infantry, armor, and artillery quite different from a corps configured to fight on the deserts of the Persian Gulf region. During the Cold War, V and VII Corps in Germany were configured with units to operate in a NATO army group, in a relatively advanced civilian infrastructure of roads, railroads, and communications, on terrain that offered few restrictions to armored movement, and against the Warsaw Pact modernized armor formations. During Desert Storm, VII Corps was built sequentially as it arrived in the theater unit by unit, tailoring it for that theater and the mission there. Only approximately 42,000 of the VII Corps's 146,000 soldiers of Desert Storm had been in the NATO VII Corps. VII Corps was complete in theater only at the end of the first week in February, two weeks before the ground attack. It was only in the final move to attack positions on 14 to 16 February that Fred Franks had the one and only opportunity to train and maneuver that corps as a corps in the conduct of what would be a complex maneuver a week later to destroy the Republican Guards Forces Command.

Most differences between corps will be in the type of combat units involved (tank, infantry, artillery), support required (communications, engineers, etc.), and logistics (trucks, fuel, ammunition, medical, etc.). Each of these different corps will train according to its specific mission. That will include practicing with various combinations of units to ensure they can operate together.

Working with this basic mix of units, the commander then decides how to array them in time, space, and distance to focus combat power continually on the enemy in a moving zone about 150 kilometers wide and 175 kilometers deep. (The width and depth are functions of the terrain over which you are operating and the enemy forces you face — sometimes you are more condensed and sometimes you can expand even farther.) In other words, you begin with a basic mix of units in the corps that gives you the widest range of options against a particular enemy on a piece of terrain. It is then the commander's job to use effectively the power available to him by arranging those units in such a way that the right combination of units will be at the right place at the right time. And he will either keep them that way or will change the combination as needed to suit changing situations during the series of battles he chooses to fight to accomplish the campaign objective.

A commander also has to look at some inescapable physical realities. For example, each of the close to 1,600 tanks in VII Corps in Desert Storm was capable of firing a projectile at more than a kilometer a second over a range in excess of 3.5 kilometers and destroying whatever it hit. So on a relatively flat desert in confined space, you want to ensure that each of these 1,600 units is pointed in the right direction. Otherwise some of the fire, inadvertently, might not be directed at the enemy but at your own troops. In the desert, for example, on a corps front 150 kilometers wide with all 1,600 tanks on line (not a high probability), you would have a tank every 100 meters. Direction of attack and spacing between units become especially important in such a confined space.

Other inescapable physical realities involve continued support of such a large, moving organization. In VII Corps on Desert Storm, there were almost 50,000 vehicles and close to 800 helicopters, and some 20 fixed-wing two-engine intelligence-gathering aircraft. They needed fuel. Daily fuel consumption was about 2.5 million gallons of diesel for ground vehicles and about half that much aviation fuel for aircraft. With their turbine engines switched on, tanks use the same amount of fuel, moving or stopped. The rule of thumb was to refuel tanks every eight hours. After one refueling, the fuel trucks accompanying units would have to travel to a resupply point, fill up with fuel, then return to their units. Meanwhile, while the fuel trucks were resupplying, their units were moving away in the opposite direction from the resupply run. In medium to heavy enemy contact, the corps used about 2,500 tons of ammunition a day. Normally, tanks and other direct-fire systems carried enough ammunition to last them several days, so they did not need immediate resupply. On the other hand, artillery and mortars firing at a much higher rate required resupply from accompanying trucks. These would then have to make the same resupply runs as the fuel trucks. Some corps units also needed places to operate from — airfields, forward operating bases (for helicopters), staging areas (for logistics support, etc.). This required some real estate management and some need for roads (even in the desert), and priorities had to be established for use of those areas and roads.

PRINCIPLES OF APPLICATION

Since, as stated earlier, battle is chaos on a grand scale, with chance intervening continually, you try to create chaos for the enemy by giving him more situations than he can handle in a given time frame and to keep him in that state. At the same time you must keep a certain amount of control and focus on your own operation.

To create and instill this sense of order to their own side, commanders use "intent" and "orders." They then rely first on the disciplined translation and then on the execution of these by each echelon in their organization. In other words, at each succeeding echelon of command — corps, division, brigade, battalion, company — that commander must understand what the next higher commander ordered, then figure out what his echelon must do to accomplish his part in the overall mission. The idea here is not to stifle initiative in subordinate echelons, but to ensure unity of effort in the entire organization and maximum use of available combat power.

To attain this unity of effort through intent and orders, there is communication, both written and oral. After communication, interpretation and problem solving follow, at each echelon of command, to determine what has to be done at that echelon. During this process, commanders allow room for their subordinates to exercise initiative and to operate with the freedom to adjust to local conditions (in those cases where these local adjustments don't also require adjustments by the whole organization). This need to adjust to local conditions is both the reason why there are so many command echelons and why U.S. Army doctrine demands that each of these exercise local initiative. All this takes time. If orders are not clear, or if they are constantly changing, it takes more time.

In VII Corps, Fred Franks's order as corps commander had to be received by division commanders. Once it was received, each of them had to understand and then decide what they needed to do to comply with it. Then they would translate Franks's order both into their own words and into terms that fit their particular situation. As soon as this was done, they would pass the order to their subordinate echelons. This process would be repeated at each echelon until all members of the corps had their orders.

A commander's "intent" is quite simply his vision of how he sees the operation working out. It is his concise expression of the means, of the end, of the main effort, and of the risks he is prepared to take. Because of its importance in putting the commander's personal stamp on the operation, commanders usually write the intent themselves. Often in battle, if a commander's intent is well understood, subordinate commanders can continue to operate even in the absence of written orders or when communications break down. Late on 27 February 1991, Lieutenant Colonel Bob Wilson and the 1st Squadron, 4th Cavalry, in the 1st INF Division lost communications with his higher headquarters. But because Wilson understood division's and corps' intent of earlier that morning, he and his squadron continued to attack east across Highway 8 between Basra and Kuwait City, where they captured large numbers of prisoners.

An "order" takes that intent and lays out the complete written set of instructions for the entire operation. It is a formal publication that is normally written by the staff using decisions by the commander that contains the commander's intent, a more detailed concept of the operation, and a detailed list of instructions to each of the subordinate echelons, which they in turn use to do their own plan. The order normally has a number of annexes that detail how the combat-support and combat-service-support units will harmonize their operations according to the commander's intent. Characteristically, it is long.

The organization of an order in the U.S. Army follows a five-paragraph organization originated at the turn of the twentieth century. These five paragraphs are:

1. enemy situation, friendly situation, and attachments and detachments in terms of organizations of the major unit;

2. mission;

3. operations — including a concept for the major unit, a concept for maneuver, a concept for fires to include a whole fires annex, a detailed list of tasks to subordinate units, and a list of major coordinating instructions;

4. logistics;

5. command and signal (i.e., the command arrangements), including key radio frequencies for command radio nets and succession of command in case of death or evacuation of the commander.

Annexes will include details of intelligence, engineer, signal, airspace command and control, air defense, logistics, and any other special considerations, such as psychological operations, special operating forces, and deception operations. A complete corps order might total 200 or more pages, complete with graphic drawings and overlays to depict unit boundaries, phase lines, and objective areas used as control measures to ensure coherence of the operation. At more senior tactical echelons, such as brigade, division, and corps, it is also the practice in the U.S. Army to include a matrix — called a "synchronization matrix" — that seeks to synchronize all major activities with battlefield events and time.

In order to achieve focused energy, each subordinate plan must be in harmony with the plan of the next higher echelon. General Bill DePuy used to call such harmonized plans "nested concepts." In U.S. Army doctrine, enough variance is permitted, even demanded, at each subordinate echelon so that commanders can exercise their own initiative as situations develop in their area of operations. Yet, in order to achieve the necessary cohesion in the chaos that is land battle, this initiative must always be exercised within the overall intent of the higher headquarters. Determining how much leeway to allow subordinate echelons is a matter of command judgment, and it is influenced by many factors, including the complexity of the mission, the size of the operating area, and the personality and capabilities of subordinate commanders. Nonetheless, to take full advantage of the leadership and talent available in soldiers and leaders, and thus reach full combat potential, initiative is required and demanded in U.S. Army doctrine.

When VII Corps received an order from its next higher echelon (Third Army in Desert Storm), the corps would make its own analysis and devise its own plan, then issue that plan to the corps as an order in the format described above. This process would have to be repeated seven times to reach a tank crew in one of the divisions in VII Corps. All this, of course, takes time. The rule of thumb in the Army is that you should use one-third of the available time yourself and allow your subordinates to use the other two-thirds. This gives your subordinates time to figure out their own actions (which can be rather complex in and of themselves: a division has about 8,000 vehicles and in Desert Storm had up to 22,000 soldiers), to issue their own orders to their echelons (normally in writing and with sketches and map diagrams), to do some war gaming and other preliminary testing to ensure the plan will work, and then to conduct some rehearsals to ensure that all commanders understand what is expected of them and their organizations. Sometimes these rehearsals suggest changes to the plan.

In a corps the size of VII Corps, the rule of thumb is that this entire process takes as much as seventy-two hours to travel from the commander down to, say, a tank crew. In other words, from the time Franks got his orders from his own next higher echelon (in Desert Storm, Third Army), the orders process was done seven times before that tank crew started moving toward its new objective.

In an attempt to remove as much chance of misunderstanding as possible, this communications process of intent and orders has been refined over the years. Military terms are used, each with a specific meaning, and maps and other graphic symbols are also used, each with its own specific meaning. In spite of this, normal human dynamics, chance occurrences, and enemy actions lead to misinterpretations, and these are often exacerbated by dynamics of fatigue, physical danger, and on occasion by personality and character distortions. In his great classic, On War, the German theorist Clausewitz called the cumulative effect of all this "friction." Such "friction" is quite simply a code word for everything that gets in the way of perfect understanding and perfect execution. Some elements of friction are physical and external, such as effects of weather on soldiers and materiel, cold, heat, sandstorms, light, or lack of it. Others are human, such as fatigue, imprecise language and thus misinterpretation, personality traits of various commanders, etc. Some others are due purely to the kinds of chance events that inevitably occur when so many people and machines operate in confined spaces: map-reading errors, wrong turns, breakdown of key equipment, unexpected enemy actions, etc. Commanders try to be aware of all of these and to minimize their effects.

Since the entire process of battle command — problem solving, dissemination of the solution, and actual physical execution — tends to take a long time, commanders are always looking for ways to reduce that time. They also look to minimize friction, in order to ensure that their own organization can make necessary battle adjustments faster than the enemy. Franks and his commanders worked and drilled this hard in VII Corps.

Battle is always two-sided. As you are working on your problem, your enemy is working on the same problem you are and has his own solution. Thus, while you want to begin with a basic plan or idea of what you want to get done, you always have to tell yourself that plans are never static. Your enemy — and friction — will see to that. That is why plans frequently change after contact with the enemy is made.

After that, you are literally in a fight. In battle, you and the enemy are each constantly looking for the edge to win. You are each looking to gain the initiative. Often it is the side that can adjust most rapidly that will eventually gain the initiative and go on to win. You and your commanders try to outthink the enemy commanders, and thus give your troops all the advantages to outfight the enemy. You try to give him more problems to solve in a given time than he and his organization can possibly handle. You try to run him out of options, break the coherence of his operation, and thus force him to fight you on your terms. Then you physically defeat or destroy him.

Senior commanders must therefore decide far enough in advance of a planned action for their subordinate echelons to do their own problem solving, communicate the solution, and execute it. One of the greatest skills of senior commanders is the ability to forecast. The more senior you are, the farther into the future you have to force yourself to look. You must be able to see beyond what others see. You must be involved in the present to know what is going on, but you must also discipline yourself to leave those actions for your subordinates to handle while you forecast the next battle, and the one after that. And at the same time, you must see that all of these battles are linked in purpose. Then you must decide — leaving sufficient time for subordinates to react both intellectually and physically.

— Intellectually, so they can do their own problem solving and communication to their organizations;

— Physically, so they can get the right combination at the right place at the right time, and with soldiers and units motivated and fit for battle.

Smart commanders share their thoughts. They think "out loud." In the Army, there are terms, and even procedures, for this. For instance, commanders can give subordinates a "heads-up" — "this is what I am thinking of doing" — to put their subordinates into their own head space. A "heads-up" requires no action. They can also issue a "warning order," which does require action. A "warning order" is a shorthand but official communication that tells a subordinate, "I will order your unit to do the following; I'll send the formal, more detailed order shortly."

Once they have forecast and decided, senior commanders must resist the temptation to tinker at the margin of orders they've issued. Tinkering will only contradict and confuse the process. (An emergency caused by an unexpected opportunity or an unexpected enemy action requiring immediate action to preserve the force will of course require a change in orders.) Orders issued are difficult to impossible to retrieve, especially when units and leaders are tired and in physical danger. So decide, make it stick, and leave it alone.

Yet adjustments are necessary, so commanders can and do plan ahead to give themselves and their subordinates choices during changeable situations. For example, if the enemy stands still, you do one thing. If he retreats before you, you do another. If he moves toward you, you do something else. If he tries to maneuver around you, you do still something else. In such cases, you want to be able to make adjustments without going through an entire seventy-two-hour cycle. These adjustments frequently resemble the "audibles" used in football. When a quarterback looks over the defense and sees a situation that's different from what he anticipated when he called the original play, he can call an "audible" — a play from a previously rehearsed list of possibilities. Commanders also develop "plays" to call in certain anticipated future situations. The formal name for these in doctrine is "branches and sequels." (Branches are variances off the original plan; sequels are follow-on actions to continue the original plan.) In VII Corps in Desert Storm, the branches and sequels were called FRAGPLANs. These FRAGPLANs were each contingent on a future battlefield situation. You forecast the future. If it looks like this, you adjust to do this. Meanwhile, each of your echelons will also have developed its own set of FRAGPLANs for execution when or if you call one of yours. No forecast will ever be perfect, so at best some minor adjustments are normally required.

Missions for a mounted corps are normally either terrain or force oriented. The corps will take certain actions principally to occupy or defend terrain, or else they will take other actions principally to defeat or destroy enemy forces. These types of missions are not mutually exclusive, but they are fundamentally different. In NATO, for example, VII Corps had the mission of defending NATO territory. To do that they had to defeat any enemy force that came into their area… and maybe even attack to throw such a force out. But the main aim was preservation of territory. Defeat or destruction of the enemy force was a means to that end. Theoretically, if no enemy had come into their area, they could have gone elsewhere to help someone else. In the offense, terrain orientation means that you want possession of what is called key terrain. If you have key terrain and deny it to the enemy, that will contribute to the defeat of the enemy by giving you positions of advantage. Many times, of course, the enemy has the same appreciation of key terrain that you do and will do his best to occupy it or fight you for it. In that case, you'll have to attack that enemy force in order to occupy or otherwise control the ground. Korea was a good example of terrain orientation on the 38th Parallel. After Chinese intervention and the beginnings of armistice talks, UN forces attacked to gain ground that would put them on or above the 38th Parallel and thus restore the original Korean status quo. In the Gulf War, XVIII Corps had a terrain orientation to interdict Highway 8, in order to prevent Iraqi forces from reinforcing from Baghdad or escaping the Kuwaiti theater to Baghdad. Their mission was to get to Highway 8 fast. Enemy forces were a target only as they got in the way of interdicting Highway 8. Since in fact few enemy forces stood in their way, and since their terrain orientation gave them a fixed geographic spot to reach, measuring how fast they traveled from their start point to Highway 8 made eminent sense.

Force orientation is another matter. In a force-oriented mission your essential task is to aim your force at the enemy force in a posture and in a direction that allows you to accomplish your mission at least cost to your troops. Except that it must be negotiated to get to the enemy, terrain is not of much consequence. Sometimes that is a real problem, requiring considerable effort in the use of bridges and limited road networks, and in bad weather. A mission to conduct a force-oriented attack is time- and space-independent until the commander assigns an area within which to conduct the mission and then adds time or distance constraints if they are required. Though you will have to cover space in order to close with and defeat or destroy the enemy force you are aiming at, your orientation does not directly depend on how fast you go or on the physical distances you cover. In other words, unless your mission requires specific time parameters, you focus on the enemy and operate at the speed and over the distances that allow you to defeat or destroy him. A further priority is to retain physical cohesion and protection of your own force, so that when you strike the enemy you do it with all the advantages to your side. Normally, the enemy force is either stationary in known locations or capable of moving. Thus you are not quite sure where they will be when you reach them.

Because of the greater number of variables involved, aiming your own moving force at a moving enemy force, and hitting it, is the height of skill required in maneuver warfare. Some sports analogies — such as open field tackling or blocking on a screen pass — come to mind. But with a corps you are not talking about a few players on either side but about tens of thousands of vehicles and aircraft. Not only must each of these change direction and speed, but — to generate focused combat power — each of them must also remain in the right physical relationship to the others. Since battles and engagements in land warfare are usually decided by destruction of the enemy, it is vital for you to maneuver the various parts of your force to positions where they can either do that or threaten to do it, and thus cause the enemy to quit or go away. So where you position your tanks, artillery, intelligence collectors, and logistics all determines how much physical combat power or firepower you will be able to focus on the enemy. Thus, even as the two forces are in motion relative to each other, you are looking hard at the capability of your own forces and their disposition, while judging the capability and disposition of enemy forces. Because there is no fixed target to aim your force at when the enemy is moving, after you find him, you try to fix him. The art in this is to make your final commitment to a direction of attack and an organization of your forces that will hit the enemy at a time and place that will result in fixing him at a relative disadvantage, or so that the enemy cannot adjust to your attack in your chosen configuration and direction. Then your troops outfight him and you win.

The success of a force-oriented mission is achieved by the defeat or destruction of the enemy force, as measured against your own losses, within the time you are given, if that is a criterion. The success of a terrain-oriented mission is judged by the occupation of the ground, again within whatever time you are given, if that is a criterion. When comparing unit performance to the sole standard of the amount of ground covered in a given period, the unit with a force-oriented mission will always come out second best.

A mounted corps moving and aimed at a moving enemy force can put itself into any number of configurations on the ground. When you are certain the enemy will be at a place and time and in a known configuration, you can commit your own forces early to the exact attack formation you want and leave them that way. When the enemy is less predictable and has a few options still available to him, then you want to move initially in a balanced formation, and commit to your final attack scheme as late as possible. You want your own forces to be able to execute, but you don't want to give your enemy time to react. That is a matter of judgment and a — much misunderstood — art form that takes much skill, brains, intuition, and practice to develop well. It is the essence of senior-level tactical decision making. To commit to an attack maneuver prematurely is to give the enemy time to react. To commit too late is to prevent your own forces from accomplishing the maneuver.

A commander will also pay attention to traditional military principles.

The principles of war — so called — were derived late in the nineteenth century, but they are still applicable today. They usually characterize any successful operation. They are:

• Mass—physical and firepower concentration on the decisive point;

• Maneuver—ability to gain position advantage over the enemy;

• Surprise—gaining advantage by achieving the unexpected in time, location, numbers, technology, or tactics;

• Security—protection of your own force from the enemy and from other factors, such as accidents and sickness;

• Simplicity—making operations as concise and precise as possible;

• Objective—focus on what is important while avoiding distractions;

• Offensive—gaining and maintaining the initiative over the enemy, usually by attacking;

• Economy of force—using smaller forces—"economizing" — where possible, in order to leave larger forces for the main effort; and

• Unity of command—one commander in charge of each major operation.

During Desert Storm as VII Corps commander, Fred Franks constantly checked his own thinking against these rules to see if he was violating any of them. (Violating them is OK and even called for at times, but you must consciously know you are doing it and why.)

Other principles a commander must consider are the elements of combat power: firepower, maneuver, leadership, and protection. And he must understand further that combat power is situational, relative, and reversible. In other words, you can bring your own combat power to bear on the enemy and enjoy an advantage, but you have to be aware that the advantage is not absolute, does not last forever (the enemy can react and usually does), and depends on a particular situation and a particular enemy force. Situations can change rapidly to your disadvantage. The German surprise attack in the Ardennes in World War II was immediately successful, but after the Allies adjusted to the surprise, they inflicted a crushing defeat on attacking German forces. To put this another way, war will always involve risk and hazard.

In this connection, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, one of the masters of maneuver warfare and battle command, liked to make a distinction between taking risks and taking gambles: With a risk, if it doesn't work, you have the means to recover from it. With a gamble, if it doesn't work, you do not. You hazard the entire force. Normally, to succeed you must take risks. On occasion you have to make a gamble. Because of the extreme difficulty of the maneuver, Franks's decision during Desert Storm to turn VII Corps east ninety degrees and attack at night with three divisions on line was a risk. But the greater risk was to allow the Iraqi defense more time and to fail to use superior U.S. night-fighting capabilities. His decision the first night to halt major ground offensive movement, on the other hand, was a gamble. If the Iraqis discovered it, they could have attacked with chemicals or positioned the RGFC more skillfully to defend against the VII Corps attack and caused more casualties. The greater gamble was getting the corps strung out, causing piecemeal commitment against RGFC units 100 kilometers away. After balancing the vulnerabilities, Franks made his decision. No choices for commanders in war are free of degrees of risk or gamble. Often you must choose between difficult or even bad alternatives.

Just as in any profession, military professionals use precise terms for economy and precision of language. A few of these terms are worth mentioning.

• Center of gravity is a term first used by Clausewitz to designate the source or characteristic from which the enemy derives his power and which should be your aim in your attack. General Schwarzkopf rightly named the RGFC as the center of gravity in the Kuwaiti theater of operations, because the Republican Guards represented the power that permitted the Iraqis to continue to occupy Kuwait and threaten them in the future.

• Culminating point is the limit reached by an attacking force beyond which it is without power to continue or to defend itself in the face of a determined enemy attack. At its culminating point, an attacking force is literally "exhausted." At El Alamein in 1942, Rommel's Afrika Korps had gone past its culminating point.

At the start of an attack, you are at the peak of your power or strength. You know that in time you will be weakened by your own physical actions and by what the enemy does. The art of command is to husband that strength for the right time and the right place. You want to conduct your attack in such a way that you do not spend all your energy before you reach the decisive point. You want to stay at sustained hitting power for as long as you can. If your main objective is at some distance from your starting point, then you want to pace your maneuver toward your objective so that when you reach it, you will be able to sustain your hitting power long enough to finish the enemy. The ability to do that is a function of both physical and human factors, and commanders must pay attention to both.

• Deliberate attacks are conducted when you need time to get your forces arrayed and the possibility of surprising the enemy is low.

• Hasty attacks are normally conducted when it is better to attack than to wait — when waiting longer would give the enemy a better chance to defend. In Desert Storm, except for the breach, which was a deliberate attack, VII Corps units conducted mainly hasty attacks.

• Pursuit is a form of tactical offense. You conduct a pursuit when all or most enemy resistance is broken, the enemy is attempting to flee the battlefield, and you want to prevent his escape. Since Desert Storm, there has been a hot controversy over whether VII Corps was in pursuit or attack during the first three days of the battle (24 to 27 February). The evidence shows that they were in attack until 27 February, when much of the Iraqi resistance was broken. But most of at least two divisions in VII Corps (1st and 3rd Armored) were in hasty attacks right up to the cease-fire.

In attack problem solving — bringing his corps to the right place at the right time in the right combination of units, with his soldiers in the right condition — a corps commander must try to see (in his mind's eye or on a map) the current situation (his own and the enemy's), envision what the future situation must look like to accomplish his mission, then figure out how to move from one state to the other at least cost to his troops, communicate that in clear, precise, concise language and by sketches on maps, and finally command the physical execution of the maneuver. In short, attacking requires what the U.S. Army Infantry School taught Fred Franks a long time ago: "Find, fix, and finish the enemy." Conducting an attack has an intellectual or continuing problem-solving dimension as well as physical and human dimensions.

Successful attack problem solving is a combination of art, science, and years of education, training, and experience. VII Corps had more than fifteen major subordinate units, each with from 500 to 8,000 vehicles. With that many moving parts, there are many opportunities for chance and friction to interfere with plans. Orchestrating such a massively complex organization through even the simplest of maneuvers (the VII Corps attack maneuver in Desert Storm was anything but simple) involves both constant problem solving and raw brute-force physical execution. Knowing how and when to execute the maneuver involves picturing all those moving parts in your mind and having the latest intelligence on the enemy. Then all of your units need skill, hard physical work, teamwork, and discipline, in order to execute the maneuver, in both daylight and darkness.

A mounted corps uses as its instruments of destruction its armored and mechanized divisions with their carefully put-together punch of tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, artillery, and attack aviation. They are the heavyweights. The commander works out how to put the maximum of that power onto the enemy in the shortest possible time. He uses the rest of the corps to reinforce his heavyweight punch. That is the physical. The human dimension rests with his soldiers. They alone bring this awesome physical combat power to its full potential. What is the human dimension? It is the quality of their training and the competence of their small-unit leadership. It is their courage and toughness. It is their motivation to accomplish the mission. It is also their mental and physical state. To the extent you can, you want your soldiers and leaders in such a mental and physical state when they hit the enemy that they are relatively fresh and can sustain the momentum of their attack until the enemy is destroyed.

When the enemy fights back and a battle ensues, adjustments are necessary. That is the essence of fighting. In the midst of these demands, soldiers and small-unit leaders must keep their heads and execute. Leaders must very quickly decide whether to stay the course or adjust. In the face of all this, all soldiers need physical toughness, perseverance, and an iron will. It is a matter of the mind and of the human spirit. Commanders have to influence both.

The forms of maneuver available to the corps to attack an enemy force are well known:

• Penetration—normally an attack on a very narrow front by a concentrated force to rupture an opening in a set enemy defense;

• Infiltration—normally passing through small friendly units by stealth into the enemy's rear, then turning on the enemy from there;

• Envelopment, either single or double—taking your force around one end or both ends of an enemy formation and then either attacking the enemy from the side or bypassing him to reach other objectives;

• Turning movement—a movement around the end of an enemy defense designed to force the enemy to turn out of his defense to face you from a different direction; and

• Frontal attack—usually the most costly maneuver; in a frontal attack, you attack directly into a prepared enemy position, normally seeking to defeat it by weight of numbers and firepower.

In a particular attack, the corps might be in one form of maneuver and the divisions of the corps in another. When VII Corps turned ninety degrees east early on 26 February 1991, the corps itself was executing a turning movement, while the divisions of the corps were executing an envelopment.

Selection of one of these forms of maneuver also involves command preference. "If called on to fight, my preference has always been for use of overwhelming force," Franks says. "My combat experience in Vietnam and in thousands of training exercises has convinced me to crush the enemy force and not sting him. In Desert Storm, I did not want to poke at him with separate fingers; I wanted to smash him with a fist (we even named one of our phase lines "smash"). I've said this before. I'll say it again: Get the enemy down and then finish him off. Get him by the throat and don't let go until he is finished. Go for the jugular, not the capillaries… That thinking influenced my selection of tactics and maneuver options."

Depth of the battle space is a vital element on any modern battlefield. As weapons gain longer reach and become increasingly lethal, formations on land are tending to grow smaller and more dispersed. A similar process has gone on in the air and at sea. It's doubtful that we'll ever see again anything like the massed air and sea armadas of World War II. The developments on the ground allow an army commander to use more and more of the battle space to focus his combat power simultaneously on more and more of a given enemy force. Such capabilities require a senior tactical commander to look ahead in time two to three days, and in distance normally 150 to 200 kilometers.

He must, in short, consider the battle space in depth. During the Cold War, the echelonment doctrine of Soviet and Soviet-style forces — waves of attacking echelons that ultimately overwhelm a defender by attrition at the point of attack — made it necessary to consider depth. If the defender did not attack follow-on echelons at the same time he was defending against attacking echelons, he would soon be overwhelmed. Even after the collapse of the Warsaw Pact, a corps commander in today's battlefield environment must see the battle space given him to accomplish his mission as three dimensional. It has width, depth, and airspace above it. Within that bounded area, the corps decides where, when, and in what priority to continually apply its own combat power (as well as that temporarily available from air-and sea-based forces) to accomplish the mission it has been given.

To gain intelligence of the enemy forces in this depth, the corps has available to it its own intelligence-gathering capabilities in a military intelligence brigade. The corps further depends on the intelligence-gathering assets available to the theater command and those available at the national level.

The corps also receives help in conducting operations in depth from the theater in the form of theater attack air assets. Normally a corps commander will be able to select targets or enemy capabilities he wants destroyed deep in his operational area (up to the forward boundary of his battle space, or about 150 kilometers). Though this was the doctrine in NATO, it was not the practice in Desert Storm; and that greatly influenced how VII Corps and XVIII Corps could shape the battles they were fighting into the depth of the enemy's formations.

Another area for theater help is in logistics. Normally, theater assets are used to rapidly replenish supplies consumed by an attacking corps. In Desert Storm, this was especially critical in the area of fuel. The theater corps logistics support connection worked well.

Meanwhile, in the attack, the idea is to give the enemy no rest. You want to create a moving 150-kilometer-wide and 175-kilometer-deep killing zone in which he can neither hide nor survive. To create this, depth of the corps battle space is normally divided between the divisions and the corps. Divisions will usually fight to a depth of about 30 to 40 kilometers in front of their forward-most units. Beyond that and out to a depth of 150 to 200 kilometers, the corps will normally fight simultaneously with the divisions, mainly with fires. The killing zone of the attacking divisions dominates the terrain and the enemy. It is all-inclusive. Beyond this 30- to 40-kilometer killing zone, the destruction is more selective, because the attacking assets are usually limited to air, attack helicopters, and long-range Army tactical missiles. With those attacking assets, corps normally go after targets and enemy capabilities that, if taken out, will leave the enemy weakened for the advancing divisions, or take apart the enemy's coherence and cause chaos. Some of these targets might well be the enemy's command centers, his long-range artillery, his logistics and supplies, and his reserves (to keep them out of the division's fight and to severely attrit them).

In some circumstances, the corps commander might see an opportunity to break through with a ground formation and send them deep into the enemy's rear. Such an action can severely disrupt the enemy, for a ground force has not only destructive power but staying power. That is (unlike air, which has limited staying-power effect and eventually goes away), it stays and controls the area it is in, thus denying it to the enemy. In Desert Storm, for example, XVIII Corps positioned the 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) on Highway 8, thus blocking early any hope of RGFC retreat toward Baghdad. When to do this and when not to is a major decision for the corps commander and involves both combat power and the capability to continually support such a deep attacking force.

Allocating airspace boundaries above the landmass is also important, so that all air assets can be used simultaneously. For example, the corps wants to be able to operate its own helicopter fleet (up to 800 in VII Corps), while allowing centrally controlled fixed-wing assets to attack targets simultaneously within the same battle space. In Desert Storm, an airspace boundary of 1,000 feet was agreed to; that is, VII Corps could fly its helicopters wherever and whenever they wanted, as long as they stayed below 1,000 feet. This did not prove to be a problem, as air forces flew combat missions normally at 10,000 feet or above.

With only passing regard to VII Corps's maneuver during its eighty-nine-hour attack in Desert Storm, let us look at a hypothetical situation in which a mounted corps moves to contact an enemy force that is also moving. Imagine, for example, a three-division corps moving toward an enemy force that is itself moving toward the corps. Each formation has the mission to defeat the other. Perhaps 200 kilometers initially separate the forces. One might also assume air forces are in parity, that is, the air battle at the moment gives no advantage to either side.

The friendly commander's first priority in this situation will be to designate a point of main effort. Let us imagine that the corps sees an enemy vulnerability and a terrain avenue of movement that will allow a swift attack against the enemy's key reserve units (that is, the reserves he is saving for his own main effort). The friendly commander then designates that operation as his main effort. This designation signals that it is that particular operation that must receive the full support of the corps, and that if the operation is successful, the corps will accomplish its mission. The friendly corps commander designates this part of the operation as his main effort to focus energy and support of his corps. If there is any question, support goes there. Subordinate commanders of all the various units in the corps (especially artillery, aviation, signal, engineers, and logistics) devise their own unit operation to assist the main effort.

At the same time, the corps commander might have another operation in progress that, while necessary, he will designate as a secondary attack or an economy of force. To this and other secondary operations will be allocated only minimum essential resources, so that maximum resources can be applied to the main effort. In this way, the commander can occupy the attention of enemy forces while allowing his main attack to succeed and freeing up some of his own forces for his main effort.

Sometime during the course of the main effort, the corps commander will adopt a basic form of maneuver to attack the enemy force. He will shift to this formation alignment when he determines that the enemy formations are identified well enough for effective plan making, and likely to remain in that posture long enough for the chosen corps maneuver to be successful. If this is not possible and the enemy is not precisely located or fixed, the corps puts itself into a form of the tactical offense called "movement to contact." This is a formation of units on the ground that permits the widest variety of maneuver options once the enemy force is more precisely fixed. It is like an offense in American football coming to the line of scrimmage and lining up in a basic formation from which it can shift rapidly once it determines the other side's defense. In the U.S. Army, this is called staying in a "balanced stance."

In a movement to contact, the lead element will normally be the corps armored cavalry regiment, and the regiment will be spread over the entire width of the corps sector. The regiment's mission is to cover the main corps movement while simultaneously finding and fixing the enemy force so the corps commander can maneuver the main punch of the corps in for the kill. Sometimes an artillery brigade (an additional forty-eight 155-mm howitzers and eighteen MLRS launchers) and an aviation battalion (twenty-four Apaches) will be added to the regiment's organic assets to accomplish its mission. The cavalry regiment so reinforced will have about 8,000 soldiers, 123 M1A1 tanks, 125 Bradleys, 72 155-mm howitzers, 27 MLRSs, and 32 Apache helicopters. It will project a lethal zone twenty to thirty kilometers to its front. On desert terrain, a regiment might cover a frontage of sixty to eighty kilometers and extend to the rear perhaps twenty-five kilometers. In Central Europe, its sector might be somewhat smaller. Meanwhile, the corps will be looking deeper in zone, partly with its own intelligence assets and partly with the assistance of theater reconnaissance assets. With the intel thus gained, the corps can attack key targets deep and thus influence the enemy's posture by shaping the upcoming battle for the divisions, which are its heavy punch. This intel also allows the corps to warn the cavalry regiment of enemy locations and dispositions. Theater air operations are vitally important to this early action. If air elements gain air supremacy, they will be able to attack freely targets at distances of up to 150 to 200 kilometers beyond the advancing corps while keeping enemy air and intelligence-gathering means away from the advancing corps.

Behind the advancing cavalry regiment, divisions normally follow by thirty minutes. In other words, they are at a distance from which they could take up the fight thirty minutes after the cavalry regiment has found and fixed the enemy. The divisions normally advance on a front about forty kilometers wide. In that posture they will usually have two of their three (ground) maneuver brigades side by side and one to the rear. Each of their lead maneuver brigades normally has 116 M1A1 tanks and about 40 Bradleys. Artillery battalions (twenty-four 155-mm howitzers) normally move with advancing brigades, and are available for immediate fire support. Supporting trucks and other logistics units follow behind the advancing combat units. Each advancing brigade brings its own support with it; this is replenished as required from division assets farther to the rear. An armored or mechanized division[9] so configured on desert terrain advances on a forty-kilometer front and extends to the rear about eighty to one hundred kilometers.

In the attack, there are normal additions to divisions. These include an artillery brigade of three battalions of artillery, two with twenty-four 155-mm howitzers and one with eighteen MLRS rocket launchers. There is also a MASH (mobile army surgical hospital). There are specifically tailored support groups from the corps with additional transportation assets for fuel and ammunition and other supplies. Depending on the mission, each division grows from its standard 18,000 soldiers to up to 24,000. (In Desert Storm the 24th Mechanized Division got so much additional fuel-hauling capability for its mission that strengths reached more than 24,000. VII Corps Divisions had from 20,000 to 22,000 soldiers.)

If divisions are part of the corps's main effort, they will receive other assets from corps to "weight" the main effort. In some cases corps attack aviation could be added to divisions. Additional artillery and more CAS (close air support) also can be added. And intelligence priorities can be shifted from corps units to assist main attack divisions. Meanwhile, other corps units are normally behind the divisions, but they can also be co-located with them, either operating independent of division control or else assigned temporarily to the divisions for specific missions. These corps units normally extend behind divisions by another 80 to 150 kilometers, and they can either be moving steadily or leapfrogging from position to position, depending on their mission. In total, the corps would extend from front to rear of its own formations 125 kilometers wide and up to 300 kilometers deep. Its reach into the enemy depth would extend another 150 to 300 kilometers.

As the corps advances, the corps support units will be accomplishing missions that keep the corps moving and ready to transition rapidly into the attack. For example, units of the engineer brigade will be ensuring mobility by building or maintaining roads and bridges, clearing obstacles, and even building airfields for C-130 aircraft or unmanned drones (which are used for intelligence gathering of enemy forces). Military intelligence brigade units will position themselves to listen to the enemy, jam his communications where appropriate, and fly drone or aviation unit missions deep to locate and target enemy capabilities. It will also use its specially trained infantry company by clandestinely inserting them deep into enemy territory to report directly on observed activity. The signal brigade will be operating a moving communication infrastructure that lets the corps communicate by voice and images on screens, as well as with paper orders and diagrams of future maneuvers. It will also establish continuing communications with the corps's higher headquarters, sometimes at great distances (in Desert Storm, higher headquarters was more than 500 kilometers away in Riyadh). The military police brigade will be securing roads used by the corps advance and by corps resupply going both ways (even in the desert it was necessary to have improved roads for resupply). Military police will additionally ensure disciplined use of those roads so that the right priority units can use them when required. And they will operate any prisoner-of-war compounds and move and process prisoners (a huge task in Desert Storm). The air defense units of the corps will alternately move and set up to provide continuous coverage over the corps as it advances.

The corps aviation brigade normally conducts attacks deep into the enemy rear with its two eighteen-Apache battalions. These attacks will be well forward of the cavalry regiment — normally at distances of up to 150 kilometers and normally at night. Meanwhile, the remainder of this brigade will be moving supplies with its heavy helicopters, providing command support with specially configured aircraft and providing troop lift where required.

Logistics support to a moving corps is provided by a combination of means. Some supporting units are placed directly with advancing units, providing area coverage (any unit in that area can go to that unit to get supplies). Meanwhile, logistics bases with fuel and ammunition are prepositioned at convenient locations, and unit supply vehicles from advancing units will go there for replenishment. The order of magnitude of supply is staggering: an advancing corps of five divisions will consume about 1.5 million gallons of fuel a day (an amount carried by about 600 trucks, each with 2,500- or some with 5,000-gallon capacity). In an attack, the corps will consume about 2,500 tons of ammunition a day (one truck carries 5 tons). In calculating the rate of movement and distances you expect for your corps advance, you have to figure in these numbers. Such calculations put a limit on advance. When the limit is reached, you either have to stop or else displace logistics bases forward. Without this displacement, advancing units travel so far from logistics bases that replenishment vehicles cannot make the turnaround from divisions to bases before units run out of supplies. This is especially the case with fuel.

While all of this movement and formation alignment is proceeding, the enemy is trying to do much the same thing you are doing. He is trying to gain intelligence on you that allows him to predict where you might be vulnerable; and he is seeking either to attack you or else to cause you to attack him where he is strong (which will dissipate your combat power and make you vulnerable to his counterattack). It is a deadly contest of hiding your intentions from the enemy and seeking to strike hard at the last moment, and keep striking, until you win.

Seeing a force like the one above bearing down on him, an enemy commander might choose to defend. If he began to set a defense with an extended security zone in front and supported by artillery, the attacking corps commander would want to discover this and to select his form of attack and act before the enemy commander can get set.

Both enemy and friendly forces are working on the same problem, and both are using the same time parameters and the same weather and terrain. Battle victory goes to the side that can more quickly solve those problems, and disseminate and act on the solutions, and that can keep doing that faster than the enemy until he quits or runs out of the wherewithal to continue.

When the commander determines (by a combination of means) the location and posture of the enemy force he is attacking, he arranges his units on the ground from their balanced formation alignment to his chosen attack formation (usually one of the forms of maneuver discussed above). If, for example, the cavalry regiment was leading, and it was followed by two divisions, with a third division in reserve, he would alter that alignment to a more potent combination. As soon as the cavalry regiment succeeds in finding and fixing the enemy force, he will quickly remove them from the lead and bring the full combat power of his divisions to bear. He does this with all units moving constantly toward the enemy.

If the cavalry regiment has surprised the enemy or has discovered an exploitable flank or gap in enemy forces, the corps commander might bring his reserve division forward. He might perhaps then concentrate two of his divisions on a narrow attacking front (maybe sixty kilometers) at the discovered or created vulnerability, while simultaneously distributing his third division on a broader economy-of-force front (maybe also sixty kilometers).

If an enemy facing the corps has a vulnerable flank, the corps commander might use his two lead divisions as a fixing force and maneuver his third division around to the flank and rear of the now-fixed enemy.

If there appears to be no assailable flank, the corps commander might concentrate combat power on a narrow front and force a penetration of enemy defenses, then pass follow-on corps maneuver elements through the breach rapidly into the enemy rear.

He will normally time his selected maneuver so his units have time to execute, but also late enough so that the enemy will not have time to react (he wants the enemy to stay fixed in the posture best suited for the attacking corps to be successful). In order to accomplish whatever maneuver he selects, the divisions will pass through the cavalry regiment (which is already engaged with the enemy). The 8,000 vehicles of each division will maneuver through parts of the cavalry regiment that are spread across the corps front. Sometimes this is done in daylight; sometimes in dark. It is never easy. Meanwhile the corps intensifies the deep fight with its own Apache aircraft, long-range tactical missiles, and support from theater air. These attacks are normally another eighty kilometers in front of the division attacks of fifty to seventy-five kilometers deep.

Divisions take up the fight from the cavalry regiment with their 300-plus tanks, 200-plus infantry fighting vehicles, 72 155-mm howitzers and 18 MLRS launchers (each with 12 rockets), and 24 Apache attack helicopters. They maneuver in their sectors, choosing their own form of maneuver (penetration, infiltration, envelopment, or frontal attack) for the mission. When the entire corps is brought on line, the seventy-five-kilometer-wide-by-thirty-kilometer-deep division sector of destruction is now extended in front by another seventy-five kilometers. This last zone of destruction will not be total, however, but will depend on available assets. Behind the main zone of attack, the supporting elements of the corps stretch some seventy-five to one hundred kilometers deep.

The corps will also normally have a reserve. The reserve can exploit an opportunity to maintain the momentum of the attack, or else it can be available to react to an enemy surprise. In a three- to five-division corps, the reserve might initially be a single division in the movement to contact, or it might be the cavalry regiment after the attacking divisions have passed through.

In short, the mounted corps will be the principal means of destruction of the enemy force. It not only is capable of attacking the enemy directly, but it also has the mobility to move deep in the enemy rear and do its damage there.

To create such a powerful force means putting together a complex organization with many moving parts. Such a force will usually be tailored for a specific theater of operations and a known enemy. It will usually have two to five armored or mechanized divisions. It will also have eight to ten non-division organizations, such as an armored cavalry regiment, an artillery command of two to four artillery brigades, an aviation brigade, an engineer brigade, a military intelligence brigade, a signal brigade, an air defense brigade, a personnel brigade, and a finance brigade. Its support command is normally bigger than any of the divisions.

To quote Franks: "Modern warfare is tough, uncompromising, and highly lethal. The enemy is found and engaged at ranges from a few meters to thousands of meters. Casualties are sudden. Because of that, commanders and soldiers at every level are also aware of the intense human dimension of war. The results are final and frozen in time for a lifetime. There are no real winners in war. Objectives are achieved, but always at a cost to your soldiers. That is why force protection is a vital ingredient of combat power. It is why at all levels the aim always is mission at least cost. Commanders and soldiers have to feel it all to really know what to do. But in feeling it all, they must not be paralyzed into inaction. They must decide, often in nanoseconds, make it stick, and go on. They must feel, but they also must act. They cannot give in to second-guessing themselves or to emotions. That is what makes combat leadership so demanding and why officers train so hard and constantly throughout a professional lifetime to make the few tough decisions they have to make in battle. It all comes down to that."

U.S. Army commanders, soldiers, and units regularly train to move and fight such a complex and powerful organization to achieve its full potential. Each officer and noncommissioned leader demonstrates competence at each succeeding level of command and responsibility before being entrusted with the next level. Moreover, NCOs and officers are afforded opportunities for education and training at each advancement progression to reinforce the level of competence. Normally it takes from twenty-eight to thirty years of experience, personal study, demonstrated competence, education, and training to develop a corps commander. A division commander normally has twenty-two to twenty-five years. Brigade commanders from twenty to twenty-two years. Battalion commanders and their Command Sergeant Majors seventeen to twenty years. Company first sergeants usually fifteen to eighteen years, platoon sergeants ten to fifteen years. In Desert Storm in 1991, most battalion commanders had entered the Army in the early 1970s. No other army in the world has such depth in officer and noncommissioned officer leadership or goes to such lengths to train and educate that leadership.

Devastating combat actions executed by mounted units on the battlefield don't just happen. They are planned, synchronized, and executed by skilled professionals, always so that the combat power can be brought to bear to accomplish the mission at least cost to the soldiers.