The Commander
BARNES, FRED
The Commander How Tommy Franks won the Iraq war BY FRED BARNES Tampa, Florida President Bush had a slightly anxious question for General Tommy Franks, the commander of American and allied forces...
...A few weeks into the war, there was pressure on Franks to jettison the plan and deploy more ground troops...
...During the war, Franks ordered his subordinates, particularly his civilian public affairs aide, Jim Wilkinson, to talk to reporters and relieve him of that chore...
...We learned small units on the ground leveraging airpower are powerful...
...The press clamored for Franks to brief, but he did so only three times during his weeks in the war zone...
...Here's how Pace describes the American advantage in situational awareness: "The combination of overhead cover and unmanned aerial vehicles and manned aircraft and special operations and the true integration of CIA assets with special operations folks really gave a clearer picture of the battlefield itself...
...We learned the linkage of [CIA] operations with military operations is very powerful for both intelligence and operational purposes...
...It can gain a quicker victory with fewer troops and fewer casualties by surprising and discombobulating the enemy...
...Iraqi defenders there "didn't have a lot of time to be caught by surprise because we killed them," Franks said in an interview last week at Central Command headquarters in Tampa...
...And they wanted him to concentrate on winning the war, not waste time with television interviews...
...Weeks before the war, American military officers learned from their Turkish counterparts that Turkey was unlikely to allow the U.S...
...One result: Most civilians didn't flee the city...
...Special operations...
...4 th Infantry Division to invade Iraq from Turkey in the north...
...Jointness...
...When Franks sat down with Bush in Crawford, the ostensible purpose of the meeting was to update the president on the Afghan war...
...He just didn't care...
...Franks thinks it was...
...The troops weren't needed...
...With the Franks plan, American forces repeatedly achieved tactical surprise in the war, notably when American, British, and Australian special forces from Jordan captured Iraq's Scud missile sites in western Iraq two days before the larger war began...
...Franks, by the way, is a consumer of MREs, the meals ready to eat for troops in the field...
...But Schwarzkopf erred gravely by letting Iraq keep the helicopters it subsequently used to kill thousands of Shias...
...They believe Franks is the only general who could have scripted a revolutionary war plan for Iraq, dealt effectively with an overbearing defense secretary, suppressed longstanding rivalries among the Army, Navy, Marines, and Air Force, and directed allied forces to victory in less than three weeks...
...Bypass that force and move as quickly as possible to Baghdad...
...Precision...
...A final improvement was in logistics...
...Had allied forces encountered serious resistance, Franks had alternatives...
...The most dramatic meeting was by teleconference several days before the invasion of Iraq...
...And the smaller force has a striking advantage...
...With new technology, commanders can see, in real time, where the enemy is and where their own forces are as well...
...Bush addressed the commanders one by one, asking how each felt about the strategy put together by Franks...
...He has gone out of his way to differentiate himself from Schwarzkopf, the high profile Gulf War commander who delivered energetic press briefings almost daily...
...The principal reason for the variables was the war plan itself...
...A small force moving rapidly can have the same impact—the same firepower—as a large force advancing slowly...
...Rumsfeld and Franks are opposites...
...Major General Dennis Jackson, Centcom's logistics boss, is a fan of Jeff Bezos, the Amazon CEO who established a state-of-the-art distribution system...
...A goal for decades, it was achieved for the first time in Afghanistan and Iraq...
...It turned out to be the right decision...
...In the Gulf War, the forces of each branch were "de-conflicted"—in other words, they operated on separate tracks...
...Army, special ops, and CIA agents worked together in northern Iraq to push the Kurds out front as a fighting force, just as they had done in Afghanistan with the Northern Alliance...
...Special ops forces had blown up bridges the Iraqis would have needed to cross to get at the Americans...
...And by drawing Republican Guard divisions into the open, they created a target-rich environment for American warplanes...
...Now it takes little more than a week...
...Targets that once took many sorties to destroy can now be wiped out by a single precision-guided bomb...
...Rather, he'd come back with a pared-down, swifter, riskier war plan...
...Franks eats them on plane trips...
...Is it normal for a war plan to have this many variables this late in the day...
...His orders to commanders of American forces invading Iraq from the south were to race to Baghdad...
...Without the president's faith in the plan, it might be jettisoned at the first sign of trouble...
...In World War II, it took 3,000 sorties to guarantee the destruction of a target...
...Speed...
...In the past, each branch sought to expand its own role, the Army arguing for more of its troops on the ground, and so on...
...They were "depleted" before confronting allied divisions...
...This time," Franks said, "we had reliant operations, where one service is reliant on the performance of another service...
...Because the Turkish option didn't materialize, Franks turned to a backup plan to combine a small American force with Kurdish fighters...
...Precision, Pace said, allows "you to destroy military targets and not destroy civilian targets...
...Lessons from Afghanistan were applied on a broader scale in Iraq...
...Partly for that reason, the media have given him the bulk of the credit for transforming the American military from a grinding, troop-heavy force into the modern, high-tech powerhouse that sprinted to victory in Iraq...
...Soon, however, Rumsfeld and his aides concluded Franks was a valuable ally, a bit thin-skinned maybe, but smart and shrewd and able to provide quick answers to virtually any question the defense secretary might have...
...It was anything but normal...
...The change in ratios is amazing...
...Now one plane can take out 10 targets...
...Then, it meant outnumbering the enemy or at least coming close to matching the enemy's troop strength...
...He went to bed...
...For decades, special operations forces were the neglected stepchild of the military...
...By the Gulf War, that was reduced to 10...
...I have to believe the regime was surprised...
...They leveraged their presence to locate targets for destruction by precision munitions fired by warplanes...
...The whole refugee problem was averted, in large measure because we were very precise in the way we did our business," Pace said...
...They did not always get along swimmingly...
...And soon enough the war was on...
...Drones, radar planes, and the like spied constantly from the air on Iraqi forces...
...There's a debate over whether operational (or strategic) surprise was attained—that is, something approaching total surprise of the Pearl Harbor variety...
...The actual rescue was \ watched live by Franks's aides on a monitor as it was transmitted by a Predator drone hovering | above the hospital...
...Rumsfeld's reaction: "That looks pretty good...
...And he has campaigned noisily for the transformation of the military into a smaller, more mobile, and less risk-averse force...
...Franks showed Bush the Pentagon's off-the-shelf plan for conquering Iraq and deposing Saddam...
...It could instantly be determined exactly where the item was and how soon it would arrive...
...Precision also magnifies the value of airpower...
...the president asked...
...This amounts to a new definition of overwhelming force, a concept touted by Colin Powell when he was Joint Chiefs chairman during the Gulf War...
...Afghanistan was a laboratory for military transformation...
...Jointness is designed to produce synergy...
...The new warfare wasn't the sole source of the success in Iraq, nor is it the only aspect of transformation...
...I believe that is transformational...
...When soldiers in Afghanistan said they needed saddles, they were delivered in four days...
...It represented a radically new kind of warfare that was bound to accelerate the transformation of the American military and redefine the concept of "overwhelming force...
...With this technology, "I am watching the transformation of warfare," said Franks...
...This is the ability to destroy what you want and nothing else...
...After Private Jessica Lynch was snatched from an Iraqi hospital, Franks was wary of publicizing the rescue excessively...
...For his war plan to succeed, Franks had to win the confidence of the commander in chief, Bush...
...I never saw this operation as anything approaching a gamble," Franks said...
...He treated Franks like the rest of the military brass...
...The occasion was a White House gathering of Bush with top military commanders and their wives...
...Even though Saddam Hussein was aware of the gradual military buildup just outside Iraq, he was led to believe an attack was weeks away at the earliest and might still be averted altogether...
...In Afghanistan, it took only a few hundred special ops personnel and CIA agents on the ground to rout the Taliban...
...Bush had inherited Franks as Centcom commander from the Clinton administration...
...It took 25 to 30 days for an item, once ordered, to arrive...
...In the Gulf War, equipment, fuel, and food poured slowly into Kuwait...
...We got ham- | mered—I mean really hammered—by the press because Franks was invisible," an aide said...
...Such an attack was a critical part of the Franks plan...
...He told aides his constituents were the mothers, fathers, and spouses of the troops in the field...
...fought...
...It looked risky...
...At the White House, Bush and Vice President Cheney are admirers...
...General Creighton Abrams changed the course of the Vietnam war, but it was lost anyway...
...Franks is fond of saying, "Speed kills...
...Rumsfeld deserves enormous credit...
...This is a Rumsfeld obsession, and rightly so...
...This is not what we are going to do," Franks told the president...
...A Bush administration official said Franks is "easy to underestimate," and Rumsfeld initially seemed to do just that...
...On September 12, 2001, the day after the assault on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, Rumsfeld asked Franks for a plan to attack al Qaeda terrorists in Afghanistan...
...The two plans—the standby plan and the smaller option—were the "bookends" for a year-long struggle at Centcom headquarters and the Pentagon over a new strategy for Iraq, a struggle that occasionally pitted Franks against Rumsfeld, and branches of the armed forces against each other...
...Be audacious and do not get bogged down with any major Iraqi force," Franks told them...
...He mentioned to Bush the plan involved political circumstances in Iraq's neighborhood which themselves had many variables...
...Jackson may have gone Bezos one step better...
...If that didn't persuade Saddam that he had, in Franks's words, "more rope," the American commander had another trick...
...It worked...
...But Franks, a self-confident artilleryman who had spent a year fashioning the plan in hands-on collaboration with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, reassured the president he'd made the right call in adopting it...
...He reminded aides of the warning by Dallas Cowboys coach Tom Landry i against spiking the football in the end zone after a touchdown...
...The Turkish gambit was Franks's boldest effort to deceive Saddam...
...Each one endorsed it, as Bush already had...
...In Iraq, an estimated 10,000 special ops troops spread across the country, seizing hundreds of oil wells and the bridges that allied ground troops would cross on the road to Baghdad...
...We showed him a concept with special operations forces working with locals, tied into CIA operations and supported by airpower," Franks said...
...Franks and his top aides were met by their families at the MacDill Air Force Base terminal in Tampa and gathered privately afterwards...
...This is an awkward word for the integration in battle of the four branches of the armed services...
...Bush and Rumsfeld were at the White House, Franks in Saudi Arabia, and his sub-commanders spread from Qatar to Bahrain to Kuwait...
...The Commander How Tommy Franks won the Iraq war BY FRED BARNES Tampa, Florida President Bush had a slightly anxious question for General Tommy Franks, the commander of American and allied forces in Iraq...
...It was Desert Storm Plus: 500,000 or more troops and weeks of airstrikes preceding ground operations...
...Then, despite talk of a pause before moving on Baghdad, Franks agreed with ground commanders to send tanks and troops into the city immediately on a "thunder run...
...Instead of sending ground troops into Iraq after weeks of bombing, Franks sent the 3rd Infantry Division, the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, and a British Division across the southern border the day before bombing began...
...It is that Rumsfeld forced a new paradigm of warfare on an unimaginative and deeply conventional Franks...
...The strongest evidence of operational surprise is that the Iraqi army neither went on the attack nor mounted a serious defense of any region, installation, or city, Baghdad included...
...One was deception...
...Troops dashing to Baghdad relied on airpower for protection...
...He was brusque and demanding...
...Last March, the special ops forces that slipped into the west at night took out all the Scud sites before a single missile was fired...
...Though Franks had grown up in Midland, Texas, and had graduated from Midland Lee High School a year ahead of Laura Bush, he didn't meet the president until the spring of 2001...
...There was no TV coverage...
...Critics of this strategy, Franks said, "didn't have the situational awareness I had...
...According to Pace, "you still have overwhelming force, but your overwhelming force is a combination of agility and size as opposed to simply mass humanity...
...This isn't true...
...Rumsfeld threw a fit, and Franks felt the brunt of it...
...At the time, Bush mentioned he knew of Franks's Midland connection, but he left it at that...
...Pace refers to them as "preplanned audibles," like the calls a quarterback might make at the line of scrimmage...
...And in that war, Iraq fired dozens of missiles on Israel from its "Scud zone" in western Iraq...
...Yet Franks, who will retire in July, remains a littleknown figure and not quite an identifiable national celebrity...
...Old concepts carried out more efficiently played a part...
...Improved technology has made weapons far more precise than they were in the Gulf War...
...But Franks was the indispensable man...
...Vision...
...At one point, Franks picked out a unit on the panel and simultaneously watched a second panel with a live report from a journalist embedded in that unit...
...At the Centcom command post in Doha, Qatar, none of the technology was older than six months...
...Franks believes warfare requires risk— "prudent risk" or "moderate risk" is how he puts it—but never a gamble...
...Franks knew Iraqi divisions on the right flank couldn't get near the speeding Americans...
...Over the next two years, Franks returned to the White House to brief the president on war plans at least a dozen times...
...There's no proof, but the best guess is it affected Saddam's expectations of when an invasion might occur...
...During the Afghan war, Centcom lawyers dithered over whether a caravan carrying Mullah Omar, the Taliban chieftan, was a legitimate target...
...We learned precision [bombing] is good and it makes the difference," Franks said...
...So Franks insisted ships with the 4th Infantry's tanks and equipment remain off the shore of Turkey for weeks, as if awaiting the Turkish okay to unload...
...Speed raises "the possibility of catastrophic success," said Marine General Peter Pace, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which is roughly what Franks achieved...
...Rumsfeld, like Schwarzkopf, is a strong presence...
...In Iraq, the plan meant that three different ground wars would be fought at the same time: a secret commando war in western Iraq, a war relying on Kurdish troops in the north, and an invasion by three divisions of American and British soldiers from the south...
...And in Franks's view there were two other fronts—the air and information (or mind-game) wars...
...Transponders with each American unit beeped their location...
...It was a week or so before the fighting began, and Bush was looking at a war plan with a dizzying array of separate but simultaneous actions, plus options and alternatives...
...Rumsfeld was particularly insistent about deploying special operations forces—the Delta Force, Navy Seals, Army Rangers...
...He has few competitors...
...At least two-thirds of the bombs used by coalition forces in Iraq were precision-guided by lasers of global-positioning satellites, compared with just 13 percent of the bombs we used in the 1991 Gulf War," President Bush has noted proudly...
...In Baghdad, only military facilities were targeted...
...In fact, disinformation that the Turks would ultimately permit American troops to operate from their soil was slipped to Saddam's inner circle...
...With Franks, it didn't work...
...It occurred to me I was watching transformation in more than one way," Franks said...
...During the war, he told Franks the military now has the capability to feed its troops in the field forever...
...The military calls it situational or battlefield awareness...
...Had special ops failed in the west, Franks had Plan B, sending a large contingent of forces from Kuwait to attack the Scud sites...
...Both have impressive leadership skills, but the defense secretary is outspoken and passionate, Franks terse and unflappable...
...Franks, an Army man, opposed that traditional practice as he wrote the war plan...
...Franks didn't stay up to watch...
...In any case, the swift victory in Iraq following the defeat of the Taliban in Afghanistan has stamped Franks, 57, as the greatest American military leader since Douglas MacArthur a half century ago...
...He rejected the idea...
...He was obsessed with not letting the Army be elevated," an aide said...
...You don't want to look sur- N prised at having scored...
...When American troops advanced, they found "hundreds of destroyed vehicles" and minimal resistance, said Air Force Major Gen...
...It wasn't, causing heartburn among Army generals, but creating a more coherent force in Iraq...
...Mullah Omar got away...
...But absent a northern front, Franks wanted Saddam to think an invasion from Turkish soil was still likely and that the war couldn't begin until weeks after the Turkish issue was resolved...
...Victor Renuart, the Centcom operations chief...
...Not the least of the accomplishments of precision weapons was the shredding of Republican Guard divisions outside Baghdad...
...In the Gulf War, Schwarzkopf denigrated special forces as "snake eaters...
...By the time they decided it was, it was too late...
...Or, to use another of Franks's favorite phrases, by "getting into the threat's decision cycle...
...In Iraq, each shipped item had a radio transmitter tag rather than a bar code...
...A myth surrounds the war plan...
...In the new warfare, it means applying the same or more firepower with fewer troops, equipped with cutting edge technology and augmented by airpower...
...When he returned to Tampa last month, there was no victory ceremony or parade...
...But the plan belonged to Franks, who began thinking about Iraq while the war in Afghanistan was still being Fred Barnes is executive editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...General Wesley Clark's victory over Serbia involved only bombers flying at 35,000 feet, nothing more...
...When he joined the president at his Crawford, Texas, ranch in December 2001, he promised "a small option [for Iraq] that's extremely fast and very risky" if war with Iraq became necessary—a plan quite different from that of the Gulf War a dozen years earlier...
...So the Iraqi divisions sat in place "until they were decimated" by American airpower...
...A week later Franks presented one...
...General Norman Schwarzkopf waged a two-dimensional war in 1991 that saw Iraqis decimated by B-52s and driven out of Kuwait...
...By taking the strengths of each of the services and integrating these capabilities," said Renuart, you can produce an even greater effect "at a center point on the battlefield...
...The new plan, finalized last February, combined five elements of 21st-century warfare that reflect a remade military...
...But the discussion shifted quickly to Iraq...
...A flat blue panel showed exactly where each allied unit was...
Vol. 8 • June 2003 • No. 37
