Our Gulf Warriors

...the infantry was completely antiquated...

...Schwarzkopf and Powell did participate in a great deal of real combat in Vietnam, however...

...he speaks fluent French and German...

...At present, of course, Powell insists that air strikes alone would not deter Serbian gunners in Bosnia...

...The Panama invasion was quite messy, though, and none of our opponents has been remotely comparable in size or strength to the United States...

...Powell no doubt has mostly been a political confidant to civilians since 1972, but to judge from Schwarzkopf's account of his post-Vietnam years, spent in major part commanding troops, he was a sort of glorified social director, business executive and systems analyst...

...The United Nations, Schwarzkopf notes, authorized the freeing of Kuwait, not Iraq...

...Does his performance as the nation's highest-ranking officer give him claims on the White House...

...Had we pushed on to Baghdad, he believes, "the coalition that we worked so hard to preserve would have been fractured," because no Arab elements would have participated and the French might have pulled out as well...

...Lesson No...

...In addition, Kurdish and Shiite states would certainly press irredentist claims against two important American allies, Turkey and Saudi Arabia, much of whose oil area has a Shiite majority...

...As Schwarzkopf makes clear in his autobiography—sure to be a significant source for the politicomilitary history of the Reagan-Bush period—his generation applied those lessons in Grenada, Panama and the Gulf...

...Should Colin Powell, whose current term as head of the Joint Chiefs ends next September, have anything to say about it, we won't find out, either...

...guys who think that strategic bombing can do it all and that armies are obsolete...

...Vietnam's final lesson is that if we enter an armed engagement without having political aims capable of being realized by military means, we will become bogged down—whether or not we manage to defeat our opponent on the battlefield...

...we were taking a lot of lives that didn't necessarily have to be taken," he testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee...

...The second lesson of Vietnam, as the generals see it, is that American statesmen must be prepared to commit "overwhelming force" to battle if they truly intend to achieve their ends...

...He had been a poor student, so he was not able to specialize in the glamorous atomic stuff, becoming instead a platoon leader and subsequently a liaison officer...

...Late in the 1960s both men returned to Vietnam, serving their second tours under American colors...

...In that country, too, they and their Army contemporaries learned the most fundamental lessons of their calling...

...Schwarzkopf, or at least "some of my subordinate commanders," apparently agreed: They "have told me that they're thankful that the war...

...1, not surprisingly, is, "the American people are not that patient," to borrow Powell's articulation of it to an interviewer...

...We would also have no realistic prospect of relief, I would add, for it is not probable that the overthrow of the Baghdad dictatorship would have resulted in democratic seeds sprouting among the Sunnis...

...support for Operation Desert Shield, Saddam Hussein had only to sit tight and force the coalition to keep a large organization in Saudi Arabia indefinitely: "The mothers and fathers of America would never put up with the idea of their sons and daughters roasting in the hot sun all that time...

...Schwarzkopf, the West Point-educated son of a general who also went to West Point, grew up in an upper-middle class New Jersey suburb, in Iran, where his father helped form the national police, in Switzerland, and in Germany...

...Schwarzkopf himself began in the infantry, as did the subject of Colin Powell: Soldier/Statesman-Statesman/Soldier (Donald I. Fine, 369 pp., $23), an error-ridden and superficial biography by Howard Means, a Washington journalist...

...Even his position in the Gulf, he admits, was in essence that of a diplomat constantly patching up a fragile coalition...

...The long nightmare, whose impact shaped the kind of war we fought in 1991, started not in Vietnam, Schwarzkopf maintains, but at least a decade before, during the aftermath of Korea, when both men became second lieutenants in the U.S...

...Similarly, on August 14, 1990, not two weeks following the invasion of Kuwait, Schwarzkopf reminded Powell that to undermine U.S...

...Oldfashioned infantry, it developed, still had a role—in fact, the main role...

...The Army was then "morally bankrupt," a refuge of alcoholics and liars, Schwarzkopf remembers in his autobiography, It Doesn't Take a Hero (Bantam, 530 pp., $25), written with Peter Petre, a senior editor of Fortune...

...Indeed, air-power theorists speculated that strategic bombing alone could win coming wars...

...Otherwise, two Americans could hardly have more dissimilar backgrounds...

...Overwhelming force means infantry, for the contest between it and air power has not abated...

...In 1962, while Schwarzkopf was earning a master's in guided missile engineering, Powell was dispatched as an adviser to a South Vietnamese division...

...In response, a worried Army began to create tactical nuclear weapons that it could launch by cannon on battlefields, as distinguished from strategic weapons launched by Air Force planes and missiles...

...Schwarzkopf's autobiography never explicitly judges the nuclear Army that had hitherto been the focus of his professional life—he often pulls punches in discussing the service—but his actions speak for themselves: In 1965, he astonished his colleagues in the Department of Mechanics at West Point, where he was teaching, by applying to serve in Vietnam...

...Means and Schwarzkopf provide somewhat conflicting accounts of the end of the ground campaign, just 100 hours after it commenced...

...military might fare against a major or even a minor enemy—Serbia, for instance—determined to resist more obstinately than the Iraqis and the Panamanians did...

...When an Air Force team arrived to brief Schwarzkopf on their plans to bombard Iraq, he was "leery" of their chief, "who was from the Curtis LeMay school...

...This distinction—and the implication that tactical nuclear arms, in contrast to strategic ones, were usable—would later seem absurd, because the Army's new gimcracks were considerably more powerful than the atomic bombs dropped on Japan...

...In fact, we really do not know how the U.S...

...Means, seconding Newsweek, says it was the Chairman himself who was upset by these reports and argued to President Bush that continuing to take an enormously high toll of the enemy—by the day of the ceasefire there were reportedly 70,000 to 115,000 dead?would be un-American and unchivalrous...

...The school let you know that if you didn't master the subject, you didn't have much of a future...

...As soldiers, Powell and Schwarzkopf differ less than has been suggested by the mass media, which are excessively fond of the neat contrast between "politicians" and "warriors" among the top brass...

...Like Powell, he served as an adviser to a South Vietnamese unit...

...Once Kuwait was liberated, Powell, Schwarzkopf and President Bush judged that going on to depose the Iraqi dictator, establish Kurdish and Shiite entities, and promote democracy in the rest of Iraq did not meet the test...

...Army...

...Neither man made a career out of being a warrior in any traditional sense...

...The only alternative, I told Powell, would be to attack...

...Nevertheless, in 1961, when Schwarzkopf went to Fort Benning to receive a year of advanced infantry training, the course "that got the most attention was on the battlefield use of nuclear weapons...

...Means assumes that Powell, contrary to his unconvincing denials, wants to be President—and in all likelihood a Democratic President...

...others drew up and executed the battle plans...

...But they changed their minds, very gradually, as month upon month of strategic bombing failed to subdue the National Liberation Front...

...And they are now being applied in Bosnia...

...Meanwhile, the Army neglected its basic workaday branches, staffing them haphazardly...

...former Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams, one of the author's chief sources, informed him that the Chairman is probably a liberal...

...Although the officer corps of the 1950s benefited from the fact that maintaining a large permanent ground force had become the norm, morale was low...

...Experience and selfinterest had given the CINC and the Joint Chiefs Chairman an utterly different idea, and together they kept pushing up the levels of troops assigned, first, to defend Saudi Arabia and, subsequently, to go on the offensive...

...Under his leadership, it is true, our Armed Forces have been successful...

...and entered the service through the City College of New York ROTC program...

...The United States would currently be occupying Iraq "like the dinosaur in the tar pit," the General remarks, and "bearing the costs of that occupation...

...Writers & Writing OUR GULF WARRIORS BY ROGER DRAPER General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, the recently retired Commander in Chief (CINC) of the coalition forces in the Persian Gulf conflict, and his boss in those triumphant days, General Colin Powell, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, belong to a generation of soldiers who survived a great institutional trauma...

...Powell rose to fame through his associations with three Republican secretaries of defense, Caspar W. Weinberger, Frank C. Carlucci and the present Pentagon chief, Dick Cheney, but he was an adviser to political officials in the Defense Department practically throughout the Carter Administration...

...stopped when it did because...

...To the highest circles in the Army, Vietnam was a distraction from the sexy nuclear programs...

...On February 27, 1991, the General says, Powell indicated that reports describing a "Highway of Death," a four-lane road full of "the burned-out wreckage of more than a thousand [Iraqi] military vehicles," had unnerved the usually hawkish White House...

...The Eisenhower Administration had ushered in "the age of the doctrine of massive [nuclear] retaliation," observes Schwarzkopf, and "the Army believed itself in danger of being completely overshadowed by the Air Force...

...Powell, the son of working-class Jamaican immigrants, was raised in the South Bronx, then a chiefly Jewish neighborhood—he dabbles in Yiddish...