Gulf War 10th anniversary

By Jon R. Anderson
Stars and Stripes

Stars and Stripes file photo A truck abandoned when the Iraqis fled Kuwait in 1991 was painted with graffiti by victorious allied troops.

Ten years ago, the U.S. Army led a 100-hour ground war that drove Saddam Hussein’s forces out of Kuwait and back to Iraq in one of the most lopsided military victories in history.

But for the Army, the legacy of that war is that in conquering its foe, it became a victim of its own success.

While sweeping changes in just about every aspect of the Army — war gear, training, doctrine and even shifting from the draft to an all-volunteer force — were spurred on by the failures of Vietnam, the unprecedented victory over Iraq has made it tough for the Army to evolve beyond the Cold War.

The legacy of the Gulf conflict has been one of an Army struggling to redefine itself in a world without Goliath rivals, but teeming with would-be Davids all too willing to stand up against the might of the United States.

"I don’t think we did a very good job of figuring out what the post-Cold War world was going to look like," V Corps commander Lt. Gen. James Riley says matter-of-factly.

Riley knows better than most. When the Berlin Wall came down just before the Gulf War, he was working in the Pentagon’s think tank tasked with looking ahead for future flash points.

"We had one guy who was talking about Kosovo as Yugoslavia started coming apart, but most of us just didn’t get it," he says. "We just didn’t have an appreciation for the complexity of it all."

A decade of chaos

In the 10 years since the war against Iraq ended, the Army has found itself struggling to adapt. Even before all the troops were home from the war, the Army was suddenly trying to save thousands of Kurds fleeing Saddam Hussein’s still capable forces in the north.

Three years later, the Army’s intervention in Somalia ended in disaster with dozens of soldiers dead and wounded. What started as a humanitarian aid mission had slipped into a more murky operation against Somalia’s warring factions for which the overconfident Army was untrained and unprepared to deal.

Next came a bloodless invasion of Haiti that, after six years of "nation building" has, by all accounts, left the Caribbean nation worse off than it was before.

What started as a one-year mission for the Army in Bosnia has now turned into five years, with no end — or guaranteed peace — in sight.

The decade began with soldiers standing tall in the Saudi Arabian desert preparing for the liberation Kuwait, and ended with the service hunched over and out of breath, unable to provide much more than a cumbersome, sideline show of force in NATO’s 1999 air war that pushed Yugoslav troops out of Kosovo.

For the first time in history, the United States had won a war without its ground troops, and the Army was left to pick up the pieces in yet another peacekeeping mission without a clear end.

The more things change ...

Pvt. David Hollis was 12 years old when the United States assembled more than half a million troops and liberated Kuwait, after six months of Iraqi occupation.

While for Hollis, a Germany-based V Corps intelligence analyst, the war is mainly CNN images and high school history lessons, he can’t help but listen in awe when veterans talk about those days in the desert.

"A lot of the sergeants talk about the war, what it was like and how things have changed," says Hollis, now 22.

While the world may have changed around the service, Hollis would feel right at home in the Army of 1991. Despite being smaller, it looks essentially the same.

The weapons developed after Vietnam and all used for the first time in large-scale combat during Operation Desert Storm — the Apache and Black Hawk helicopters, the M1 Abrams tank, the Bradley Fighting Vehicle, the Patriot missile and even the workhorse Humvee truck — are all still in service.

Most are older than Hollis, however, with no replacements on the horizon. While whittled down significantly, the Cold War structure of the Army — mostly heavy tanks and armored fighting vehicles inside the unit building blocks of battalions, brigades, divisions and corps — are all still in place as well.

The six months it took the U.S. to mobilize and muster its forces around Iraq should have been a clarion call for changing that structure, argues Col. Doug MacGregor, a Gulf War cavalry leader who directed Gen. Wesley Clark’s joint operations center during Operation Allied Force against Yugoslavia in 1999. For weeks the only forces the U.S could get between the Iraqi armor units and the Saudi Arabian oil fields was a contingent of lightly armed 82nd Airborne Division paratroopers.

That should have been a catalyst for change, says MacGregor, but it was not.

"Instead, the old Cold War Army just got smaller," says MacGregor, who advocated a radical redesign of the Army around smaller brigade-size fighting groups in his controversial 1997 book Breaking the Phalanx.

MacGregor says the Army has yet to adequately integrate itself with the new precision capabilities of the Air Force and Navy or lead any meaningful change harnessing advanced technology for its own forces. In fact, he says, the Army still looks and fights much the same way it did during World War II.

It would not be until the Army’s failure in the conflict against Yugoslavia that top leaders would start calling for many of the same changes pushed by MacGregor.

Victim of success

"Victory in the Gulf War became the rationale for preserving the status quo," says MacGregor, now at the National Defense University. "None of the Army’s transformation initiatives since the Gulf War challenge the division structure, change the World War II fighting paradigm or the institutional policies and mobilization practices of the Cold War army."

The legacy of the Gulf War for the Army, many say, is as much about the changes made before the war as it is about lack of change after it.

While the lessons of failure in Vietnam provided a clear blueprint for change — and a rallying cry among those who fought never to repeat the same mistakes again — the unparalleled victory over Iraq left the Army in a more ambiguous position as it faced the chaos that came with the last decade of the century.

"The legacy of the Gulf War has inhibited the kind of change that was needed with the end of the Cold War," says Douglas C. Lovelace, director of the Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute.

"History has shown that institutions that have been very successful in their last endeavor are reluctant and resistant to change for the next," he says. "We’re a decade past the Gulf War and there is still a great need for transformation. Unfortunately, our victory in the Gulf has really delayed that transition rather than expedited it."

Instrument of change

The Army’s problems during the 1999 campaign against Yugoslavia has in many ways been more of an engine for change than its grand war in the desert.

While fears of casualties would keep the Army out of the fight in Yugoslavia, the Army was heavily criticized for the weeks it took to get a relatively small force into Albania. The forces sent in were untrained for flying at night or in the rugged mountain terrain and it took weeks longer before commanders said they were ready for action.

The problems called into question the Army’s strategic relevance at the end of a decade characterized by flash point diplomacy and short-notice action.

Since then, Riley’s V Corps has focused almost exclusively on lightening loads and building rapid deployment capability into even its most heavy forces. Even his command post, a cumbersome collection of 5-ton trucks that could only be moved into Albania by the Air Force’s biggest lifters, has now been whittled down into lightweight, high-tech tents that can be hopped into action with only the Air Force’s small C-130 workhorse.

The biggest changes are coming Army-wide, however. Mindful of the problems in Albania, but also remembering how long it took to get forces into the Persian Gulf, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki has announced a sweeping reformation of the Army. If implemented, the changes promise to smash many of the sacred doctrines of the service, including doing away with the very icon of victory in the Gulf War, the heavy tank.

Shinseki envisions replacing the tank with lighter wheeled vehicles, both easier to repair and sustain and most importantly capable of getting to hot spots quicker.

Describing the weeks that paratroops waited in the Arabian desert for heavier reinforcements to arrive, Shinseki told congressional leaders recently that "we held our breath" fearing Iraqi tanks would roll through them at any moment.

When the next war or peacekeeping mission comes, he says, it is a situation he does not want to see repeated.

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