TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/031191/0311993.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 3.7 KB | 82 lines

                                                                                THE GULF WAR, Page 27

Sayings of Stormin' Norman


By Dean Fischer and Norman Schwarzkopf


    [In an interview with TIME's Dean Fischer and another
magazine correspondent in Riyadh last Friday, General Norman
Schwarzkopf reviewed the allied campaign, including the
surprise flanking movement of 150,000 troops into western Iraq.
Highlights:]


     Colin Powell and I understood very early on that a
strategic bombing campaign in and of itself had never ever won
a war and had never forced anybody to do anything if they
wanted to sit it out. I don't think we ever believed
exclusively that that would be it. So therefore we had already
started talking about a ground campaign.

    In one of my very first briefings with the President, we
discussed ejecting Iraq from Kuwait. I gave the President
terrible advice because I told him that in order to do the job,
I needed about five times more force than I ended up getting,
and that it would probably take about seven or eight months
longer than it actually took to do the job. By the middle of
October, we had a completely robust strategic air campaign that
was very executable, right down to a gnat's eyelash. We went
back to Washington to brief the President, and we were told,
"Oh, by the way, brief the ground plan at the same time." The
ground campaign left everybody saying "umm, gee, uh," because my
assessment as commander was you can't get there from here. So
then the decision was made to send over the remainder of the
forces.

    If you go back and look at the battle of El Alamein, where
Montgomery defeated Rommel, one of the things the British did
extremely well was a deception operation that caused the
Germans to think that the main attack was going to come
someplace else. I remembered that. Way back in August we had
launched the amphibious-landing deception plan. So when I saw
the way he had stuck all of his forces in this one bag down
there, I started thinking. I was worried about the barrier they
were building [in southern Iraq] and the troops they were
digging in behind them. The worst case would be for our troops
to go in there and get hung up on the wire and have chemicals
dumped on them. Every morning I had that map in my office. I
was watching that obstacle system, and it was right across the
tri-border area, and it was getting thicker and thicker and
heavier and heavier, but it wasn't going any further out to the
west. So I remembered the fact that in desert warfare you can
deceive your enemy as to the point of the main attack, and I
said that's it, that's the key.

    Let me tell you why we succeeded. Superb equipment. When you
stop and consider that our tanks and armor traveled 200 miles
in a period of two days, O.K., I was confident that we could
travel those great distances before the enemy could react. I
am sure that at one point somebody said, What about this great
big open flank over there?, and the Iraqi generals or Saddam
Hussein said, Hey, nobody could drive over all that desert that
far without their tanks breaking down and their equipment going
to hell. They'll never make it.

    There were several Achilles' heels. Dhahran was No. 1. All
you have to do is stand in Dhahran and look at the huge amounts
of equipment we were bringing in there. If they had launched
a persistent chemical attack that had denied the port of Dammam
to us, obviously this would have been a major setback. Or take
Riyadh air base -- you know three good fighter planes making
a run down there could have taken out huge assets. But once the
air campaign started, his air force went away, so I no longer
worried about Dhahran and Riyadh.