The Briefing

Wednesday evening, Gen. Schwarzkopf gave his briefing on the operation, as he had planned it and as it had taken place.

The general was not a pantywaist briefer. He is a large man, of commanding physical presence, sharp-tempered, but intelligent and humane. He did not talk down to the reporters, nor to the audience watching the presentation live. He briefed the press in the same direct manner in which good officers present good military briefings, laying out what he had to say from start to finish, logically and concisely.

At the start the Iraqis had outnumbered the allied forces by an estimated 3-2. Due to the heavy logistics tail the Americans required, the ratio of fighting troops was closer to 2-1. The Iraqis had started with 4,700 tanks to our 3,500, and they had a preponderance of artillery. To win a war, we needed a 3-1 ratio in our favor, and preferably as many as 5-1. The air campaign had been designed to bring the numbers more into line with what was required.

On charts, he illustrated and explained each stage of the campaign, leading through the buildup of troops, to the air war, describing the “meticulous hoax” that had kept the Iraqis’ eyes on the Gulf, expecting a suicidal amphibious assault by U.S. Marines while his heaviest force shifted west in a massive and logistically intricate “Hail Mary” move that would encircle the entire occupying force and cut it off from its bases of supply.

As of the time of the briefing there was “a solid wall” of allied forces — XVIII Airborne and VII Corps — both attacking east. Two Marine divisions were in control of Kuwait City and its airport. 29 enemy divisions had been destroyed or rendered combat ineffective. The Iraqis had lost 3,006 tanks, 1,856 of an estimated 2,870 APCs, and 2,140 of an estimated 3,110 artillery pieces. The allies had taken in excess of 50,000 EPWs. The Iraqis did not have enough offensive potential remaining to constitute a regional threat.

Schwarzkopf roguishly admitted to engaging in a bit of disinformation intended to throw the Iraqis off guard: he had let word leak that the allies intended to mount an amphibious landing to keep the Iraqis forces on the defensive along the Kuwaiti coast, while all the time he planned the overwhelming two-corps northward drive to attack from the west that had taken the enemy totally by surprise. As of this writing, the press is still debating the morality of the deception.

The low number of American casualties, he said, is “almost miraculous.”  Then he added: “It will never be miraculous to the families of those people, but it is miraculous.”  He reported the number of American deaths at 79, of whom 28 were killed in the SCUD attack.

Schwarzkopf had taken his place in history with the best of American field commanders, with the best of the world’s commanders. His complete and utter victory over the Iraqis had put him in the same category as Zhukov, Guderian, and Patton. He had done it with the world looking over his shoulder on live television, ready to criticize any misstep. More importantly for him, the butcher’s bill was amazingly small for such a large and serious operation about 90 American dead for the entire campaign.

Schwarzkopf was at his most ebullient and likable that day as he entered the question and answer phase of the brief. The description of the planning and execution of the campaign had been rivetting. The country took him to its heart during the second half of the presentation.

The allies had 50,000 EPWs in custody. What happened to the rest of the Iraqi armed forces in the KTO?  There were a large number of dead — our forces had found some of them in the trench lines. Plus there had been a large number of desertions, very large in fact, up to 30 percent in some units. Additionally, not all the Iraqis had surrendered; some had run, avoiding the allies but not fighting, either.

What more remained to be done in the fighting?  The Republican Guard had to be put out of business. Two Republican Guard divisions were being fought as the briefing took place — these were the Medina and Hamurabi Divisions, being engaged by VII Corps at that time.

Two questions, a reporter asked: Had Schwarzkopf expected that the operation would turn out to be such a “cakewalk”?  And what did he think of Saddam Hussein as a military strategist?  Schwarzkopf’s “Hah!” at the question dripped contempt for the Lord High Executioner. With regard to the first question, no he hadn’t expected it to be that easy; if they’d thought it would be such an easy fight, they’d not have stocked sixty days’ worth of supplies in the logistics bases. With regard to the second question, “As far as Saddam Hussein being a great military strategist, he is neither a strategist, nor is he schooled in the operational arts, nor is he a tactician, nor is he a general, nor is he a soldier. Other than that, he’s a great military man. I want you to know that.”

Schwarzkopf was holding Saddam Hussein up to ridicule, but the Iraqi leader had made himself ridiculous. He had thrust himself forward as a great military leader, as the hope of the Arabs. His words had been loud and boastful, his actions vicious and — through it all — coldly miscalculating.

There was more. With regard to the atrocities that had been perpetrated in Kuwait during the occupation, that had intensified as the Iraqi army had seen the end approaching: “They’re not a part of the same human race, the people who did that, that the rest of us are. I’ve got to pray that that’s the case.”

Another asked, stating beforehand that he had no intention of denigrating the accomplishments of the allied forces — meaning he was going to do just that — “Many of the reports the pools have gotten from your field commanders and the soldiers are indicating that these fortifications were not as intense or as sophisticated as they were led to believe. Is this the result of the pounding that they took, that you described earlier, or is it that they were perhaps overrated in the first place?”

Mike Wallace gets away with those tactics all the time on “60 Minutes.”  The questioner was no Mike Wallace, and Gen. Schwarzkopf was not a crooked used car dealer. “You ever been in a minefield?” he asked, bluntly. The reporter admitted that he hadn’t, and Schwarzkopf was polite enough not to point out that he had — he had won a silver star in Vietnam in a minefield in fact. The obstacles, he admitted patiently, were less severe than the troops had been expecting. They had gone through extensive measures to make them that way.

And how would he rate the Iraqi army?  You can have the best equipment in the world, Schwarzkopf said, but any army needs the will to fight. The Iraqis had no real reason to be in Kuwait, no motivation to fight for it. Desertions had caused the Iraqis to send execution squads in to keep their troops from running that was no way to run an army, that was not what leadership was about. That was why their army had folded disgracefully.

In its January 7th edition, Newsweek’s often witty “Conventional Wisdom Watch” had assessed the standing of the four services, plus the British and the Syrians. Of the Army: “The big loser: thin-skinned Gen. Schwarzkopf hasn’t learned to kiss media butt.”

He never did learn, to his credit. In an era of blow-driers, double-speak, and talking store-window dummies (some of them in the military), Schwarzkopf was a refreshing change, a man who spoke straight. Usually in public life, when a man or woman speaks straight, the speaker is revealed as a crack pot. Schwarzkopf not only told it straight, but he was a.) sane, b.) coherent, and c.) he made sense. He was also d.) gloriously and glaringly successful after enduring months of nay-saying. The same media whose collective butt he had refused to kiss began touting him for president.