On some days, like Friday (Islamic Sunday), we might sleep in till 8:00 A.M. On some nights, just as we crawl into bed, the phone will ring with someone from the States calling one or the other of us. The idiot, not realizing the time in Riyadh, is trying to get a problem solved or a question answered before he leaves the office. They usually start off with, “Did I bother you? By the way, what time is it where you are?” Both questions mark him as an idiot.

Chapter 6 - Planning the Storm

6

Planning the Storm

IT was time to start formulating the Plan.

War is essentially chaos, and the line between control and sickening confusion is paper-thin. If one takes care, the violence applied can be focused with precision, yet even when care is taken, it can easily degenerate into wild and formless mayhem. Look at Bosnia, Cambodia, and Rwanda.

It is no surprise that commanders devote much of their best effort to reducing chaos. One of the major means to that end is the Plan.

Planning in the U.S. military starts with the national command authorities—the President, aided by his chief advisers—who articulate the political objectives and overall goals to be achieved by the use of military force. The ball is then passed to the CINC in whose Area of Responsibility the force is to be used, and he determines how to put together and marshal the forces available to him in order to bring them to bear on his nation’s adversaries with the maximum focus and effect (and thus with the minimum of disorder and chaos). It is then the responsibility of the various component commanders to construct a plan to achieve the CINC’s objectives—a campaign.

★ That all sounds simple enough, but the reality is more complicated. To begin with, it is easy to assume too much for the capabilities of military force. What can military force actually do? What is its capacity to achieve a goal? The answer is: not very much, and very little well. At best, a specific goal can be more or less precisely matched with a specific use of military force—evicting the Iraqi army from Kuwait, for instance. But no amount of force could bring democracy to Iraq.

It is equally easy to assume too much, or too little, for an air campaign. The doctrinaire advocates of airpower believe, as an article of faith, that destroying the “controlling centers” of an enemy nation will render the enemy impotent and helpless, no matter how powerful his forces in the field. The doctrinaire advocates of land power conceive of air only as flexible, longer-range artillery, really useful only against those same enemy forces in the field. The reality does not so much lie in between as it varies with the demands of each situation.