In My Time - Dick Cheney [105]
On September 24, when Powell came to me to make the case for long-term sanctions one more time, I told him I thought he should make his argument directly to the president. It was important for President Bush to hear Powell’s arguments firsthand, I believed—and I didn’t want Powell, after the fact, to be able to say we hadn’t listened to him. I took him to the Oval Office that afternoon, told the president that General Powell had something to say, and Powell said it. A week or so later, President Bush asked for a briefing on our plans to use force to evict Saddam from Kuwait.
On Wednesday, October 10, 1990, a small group gathered in the “Tank,” the Joint Chiefs of Staff conference room in the Pentagon, to hear Schwarzkopf’s representative, Major General Robert Johnston, brief us on their offensive war plan. General Schwarzkopf and the team of planners he had working with him in Riyadh had broken the war plan into four phases. The first three involved air attacks on Iraqi command, control, and communications; Iraqi supply and munitions bases; and the Republican Guard. The fourth phase would be the ground assault. As described that day in the Tank, coalition forces would be moving directly north into the heart of Iraq’s most lethal forces.
It didn’t make any sense. Why would we send our forces—some of which were only lightly armored—up against the heavily armored core of Saddam’s defenses? Why not swing to the west? I wasn’t the only one asking questions. No one in the Tank seemed happy with the ground assault plan. General Schwarzkopf himself wasn’t happy with it. He had ordered that a final slide be included in the presentation that read, “Offensive Ground Plan Not Solid. We Do Not Have The Capability To Attack On Ground At This Time.” The planners in Riyadh believed at least another corps would be needed to undertake an offensive ground operation.
I thought the president needed to see the brief right away. He needed to know, as commander in chief, what the forces in theater were and weren’t capable of doing. I arranged for Schwarzkopf’s briefers to provide the brief to the president and Brent Scowcroft in the White House Situation Room the next day. I opened with an overview for the president in which I explained that the first three phases of the offensive plan, all part of the air campaign, were well planned and ready to execute with three days’ notice. We had a high degree of confidence in the air plan and our ability to execute.
Phase IV, the ground campaign, was a different proposition. We now had nearly 200,000 troops in theater, while the Iraqis had built up to well over 400,000. Saddam had not been idle. His troops had erected fortifications, laid down minefields, and established an effective logistics network. The bottom line, I said, was that while the plan showed how we might use the forces we currently had in theater to liberate Kuwait, it laid out a very high-risk proposition, one that depended on everything going perfectly—which it never does.
Briefing the air campaign to the president and the National Security Council was Buster Glosson, an air force one-star. Glosson had been working in legislative affairs when I first arrived at the Pentagon. When his tour was up, Larry Welch, then air force chief of staff, had assigned him to be deputy commander of the Joint Task Force Middle East. I suspected Glosson had crossed Welch at some point because being an air force officer assigned to duty on board a ship steaming around the Persian Gulf wasn’t exactly career-enhancing.