What follows is my record of a long conversation I held with General Tommy Franks, CENTCOM and campaign commander, during a visit he paid to London shortly after the war. I saw General Franks alone, apart from the presence of two of his staff officers. I subsequently sent the record to General Franks for his approval of its accuracy.
1. During the course of a long presentation, General Franks outlined for me, with remarkable frankness and great clarity, the course of the Iraq crisis and the ensuing war, from the point of view of Central Command and himself as commander. He described the campaign from the inception of the planning until the present moment. He also answered a number of questions I put, though I put few because I did not wish to break the flow of his highly fluent discourse. Moreover, General Franks organized his presentation so effectively that few questions were necessary. As I remarked afterwards to his Executive Officer, his briefing was the most impressive I have ever received from a military officer.
2. General Franks began by dating the inception of planning, which he put in the month of December 2001. He was then requested by the President to visit him at Crawford, Texas, to outline Central Command’s existing plan for an operation against the Saddamrégime in Iraq. The plan existed simply as a planning requirement, in accordance with its policy of preparing plans for foreseeable eventualities, and was not predicated on a casus belli.
3. General Franks told the President that the plan, when he examined it, struck him as too ‘heavy’ in conception, making little allowance for the use of surprise or for responding to the unfolding of events. It envisaged the deployment of up to 500,000 ground troops with a full range of heavy equipment. General Franks called this plan ‘the heavy bookend’. He asked his staff to plan a ‘light bookend’, for an operation that would be mounted largely with special forces, the total numbers to be deployed amounting to about 50,000 at most.
4. The ‘bookends’ were planning devices. By examining likely outcomes at either end, and at points in between, by discussion, paper exercises and computer modelling, he expected to arrive at an eventual plan that would achieve the desired outcome, the defeat of the Saddam military structure; the staff procedures would also determine the necessary force size, points of entry, axes of advance, objectives and subordinate tasks, including those of airpower. As planning proceeded, the operational concept moved away both from the ‘heavy’ and ‘light’ bookends to settle somewhere between the two. The eventual choice of force was two divisions for the initial phase, the 3rd Infantry Division and the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, with the British 1st Armoured Division to be committed in the south against Basra; the 82nd Airborne and the 101st Air Assault Divisions were earmarked for intervention later.
5. At a later point, General Franks also touched on the role of the 4th Infantry Division which, before 19 March, had been brought to the eastern Mediterranean embarked. At the outset it was expected that permission would be given by the Turkish government for the division to land, to deploy in southern Turkey and to intervene in northern Iraq. In the event the Turkish government withheld permission. It nevertheless proved possible, General Franks explained, to make use of the 4th Infantry Division, in the following way: using covert deceptive means, information was passed to the Saddam régime suggesting that, after an interval, the Turkish army would exert its political authority to extract permission for the division to land and intervene in the coming operation. This deception was believed, with the result that two Republican Guard and several Iraqi regular army divisions were retained north of Baghdad and so took no part in the defence of the country against the coalition offensive.
6. General Franks also disclosed that, before the operation opened, his staff had established contact with the commanders of several of the Iraqi regular army divisions in the south. He was hopeful that the divisions could be brought over before the fighting began. In the event, Saddam installed Ba’athist teams at these divisional headquarters and frustrated the attempt at subversion – though, in practice, the divisions did not resist very strenuously. He emphasized the importance of the Ba’athist forces, and others loyal personally to Saddam, including fedayeen, throughout the campaign. It was they, he agreed, who did much of the fighting. He deprecated, however, their effectiveness. All too often, he said, once operations began, they simply set up their base in the local Ba’athist headquarters of a town and operated from there. As the locations of such headquarters were either known to Central Command or readily identifiable, it was not difficult to destroy them, thus often neutralizing the Ba’athists associated with them.
7. As preparations were being finalized, the ultimate phases of the plan came to be denoted, General Franks said, as ‘Five, eleven, sixteen, one-two-five.’ The formula stood for five days for the President and Prime Minister to make last-minute adjustments to the plan, eleven days of ‘final flow’, the concluding military adjustments, then sixteen days of special operations, followed by 125 days of decisive fighting. As he pointed out, the end of the 125 days had not, on 1 July, yet been reached; he was not, therefore, seriously concerned that sporadic attacks on coalition forces were continuing, as that eventuality had been foreseen.
8. The general then turned to the war itself, taking it front by front. There had, he said, been five fronts, the southern, the western, the northern, the Baghdad front and the intelligence front. The northern front has already been dealt with above, in his references to the deception over 4th Infantry Division. The management of the intelligence front he narrated by describing the way in which his personal command centre was arranged in his headquarters at Qatar. In front of his desk, he said, he had four screens which he viewed continuously. One displayed, at five-second intervals, the different outputs of the main television news channels, CNN, Fox, BBC; he needed to know what each was broadcasting because public coverage of the war so closely affected strategy. A second screen displayed the location of friendly ground units at the front of contact, a third the location of air units, the fourth the current intelligence estimate, including the location of enemy units. It was possible to superimpose the images if desired and it was also possible to call up an ‘eyeball vision’ picture of critical encounters in progress. General Franks was emphatic, however, that despite the theoretical ability thus provided for him to intervene in the conduct of small-unit operations, he declined to do so, regarding such interference by high command in the responsibilities of the local commander as undesirable, indeed deplorable. He had learned in Vietnam, he recalled, as a cavalry unit leader, how little ‘Snowball Six’ (the superior commander), overflying the battlefield in a helicopter at several thousand feet, could grasp of what was transpiring in a firefight.
9. In describing what occurred on the southern front he addressed two main topics: the employment of special forces and the use of armour in built-up areas. He had, he said, forty-eight special forces teams available, drawn from American Special Forces and British and Australian SAS. Many were deployed into the operational area before the main ground force crossed the Iraq–Kuwait border on 19 March. They had both reconnaissance and strike roles. One of their most important operational roles was to identify ‘Scud pans’ – points from which Scud missiles could be launched – in the western Iraqi desert. The Scud needs an area of hard-standing from which to launch. The special forces teams surveyed the desert to identify ‘soft’areas, which form the majority of the desert surface, and ‘hard’ areas, the minority, which could then be targeted by airpower. In the two nights either side of 19 March, special forces also destroyed all Iraqi watch posts on Iraq’s borders with Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Jordan, so as to assure the governments of those countries that the Saddam régime was deprived of the opportunity to launch Scud attacks into their territories.
10. Special forces also targeted bridges and crossing points across the Euphrates and Tigris, to forestall attempts by Saddam’s forces to demolish them before the arrival of coalition ground troops. The ability of the coalition to cross the large water obstacles (which I found so mysterious when I was commenting daily on the war in my newspaper) was thus explained: the defences of the bridges had already been overcome. Nevertheless, the general said, it was necessary to bridge, with engineering bridge columns of the National Guard, at some points, where demolitions had succeeded; the bridging columns also used ferries and pontoons as necessary.
11. About the use of armour in built-up areas, such as Basra and Nasiriyah: the general emphasized that it was a deliberate policy not to block city highways by using airpower to demolish buildings, so that tanks could manoeuvre freely and target points of resistance with their main armaments. The policy, he said, proved highly successful. Tanks operated with great success, against conventional thinking, in built-up areas. Some Iraqi units were able to immobilize tanks, by using RPGs against their road wheels, but the number of successful attacks was few. The Iraqis suffered heavy casualties in attempting to ‘swarm’ tanks with foot soldiers.
12. Turning to the western front, the general responded at length to my question about using the ‘hard’ desert to bypass the area of paved roads west of the Euphrates and press the advance on Baghdad. He said that it was a misunderstanding to think that the advance from Basra to Baghdad had been achieved across the gravel desert. In fact, most of the advance had been made along the highways and it was only just short of Baghdad that the 3rd Infantry Division’s armoured columns had left the paved roads to make use of a ‘spit’ of naturally hard surface between Karbala and the adjacent lake to press forward.
13. He turned finally to discuss the Baghdad front. Baghdad, he said, had always been seen as the critical focus of the offensive, and the place where the ‘tipping point’ of the campaign would occur. The exact focus was Baghdad International Airport. It was a location of vital prestige to the régime. Its capture intact would also – as the Ba’athists would recognize – permit the reinforcement of the ground offensive with troops and supplies virtually at the point of final assault – at the place of victory or defeat. General Franks reflected here on what he called the ‘inside-out’ nature of the air attack on Iraqi formations defending Baghdad. He stressed very strongly that he sought to avoid ‘collapsing’ the Republican Guard into the city, thus filling its buildings and streets with the better-trained Iraqi soldiers. He wanted them to remain outside. With that object in view, airpower was used to attack the divisions’ rear areas and lines of retreat, so as to persuade the enemy that they were safer where they were. The procedure was successful. Few of the Republican Guard left their positions and the divisions were engaged and neutralized by advancing American units well outside the city limits. They were unable to manoeuvre so as to defend Baghdad airport so that, as it began to fall into American hands, the ‘tipping point’ was reached.
14. Because the built-up areas of Baghdad had deliberately not been devastated by air attack, he was able to use armour in a novel way inside the city. In an aside, the general revealed that he had never cared for the use of the term ‘shock and awe’ and, though no doubt the initial bombing of the government quarter did cause shock and awe, he had not seen that effect as the point of the air offensive. He saw the point as the dislocation of the command and administrative structure. The forecasts of Baghdad becoming ‘another Stalingrad’ were proved wrong; armoured units were able to fight with almost the same freedom of action inside as outside the urban area, and to achieve rapid and decisive results. Main armament was fired effectively, down boulevards, at ranges of as much as 1,000 metres (1,093 yards).
15. In answer to a question, General Franks said it was his impression that, once large scale operations began, the Iraqi command and control system was not effective. He did not think that anyone was in charge,‘anyone’ including Saddam, Uday or Qusay. He believed that the Iraqi defence system ‘went onto automatic’, simply reacting as it had been trained to do in peacetime, not responding to American attacks by calculated counter-thrusts.
16. After taking over an hour and a half of General Franks’s time, I felt I had trespassed long enough on his patience and goodwill. I also felt, correctly, that I had acquired a comprehensive overview of the sequence of the war’s main events, and of the interaction of offence and defence. The General’s presentation was a tour de force. No military analyst could have expected more in the time available.
17. In retrospect, I nevertheless recognize grey areas and blank spots in my understanding. For example, were there critical engagements in the ground fighting and, if so, when, where and between which formations? How important was the role of the air forces – in ground attack, in heliborne operations, in interdiction? How important was intervention by 82nd Airborne and 101st Air Assault? Was there at any stage, as the media alleged, a shortage of force on the ground? Was it true, as alleged, that there was a lack of ‘force protection’ on the march up to Baghdad? Was there a ‘wobble week’? On that subject, did the embedded media assist or detract from the evolution of the operation? Could the British have taken control of Basra earlier than they did?