Sayings Of Stormin' Norman

By Dean Fischer Norman Schwarzkopf

In an interview with 's Dean Fischer and another magazine correspondent in Riyadh last Friday, General Norman Schwarzkopf reviewed the allied campaign, including the surprise flanking movement of 150,000 troops into western Iraq. Highlights:

Colin Powell and I understood very early on that a strategic bombing campaign in and of itself had never ever won a war and had never forced $ anybody to do anything if they wanted to sit it out. I don't think we ever believed exclusively that that would be it. So therefore we had already started talking about a ground campaign.

In one of my very first briefings with the President, we discussed ejecting Iraq from Kuwait. I gave the President terrible advice because I told him that in order to do the job, I needed about five times more force than I ended up getting, and that it would probably take about seven or eight months longer than it actually took to do the job. By the middle of October, we had a completely robust strategic air campaign that was very executable, right down to a gnat's eyelash. We went back to Washington to brief the President, and we were told, "Oh, by the way, brief the ground plan at the same time." The ground campaign left everybody saying "umm, gee, uh," because my assessment as commander was you can't get there from here. So then the decision was made to send over the remainder of the forces.

If you go back and look at the battle of El Alamein, where Montgomery defeated Rommel, one of the things the British did extremely well was a deception operation that caused the Germans to think that the main attack was going to come someplace else. I remembered that. Way back in August we had launched the amphibious-landing deception plan. So when I saw the way he had stuck all of his forces in this one bag down there, I started thinking. I was worried about the barrier they were building ((in southern Iraq)) and the troops they were digging in behind them. The worst case would be for our troops to go in there and get hung up on the wire and have chemicals dumped on them. Every morning I had that map in my office. I was watching that obstacle system, and it was right across the tri-border area, and it was getting thicker and thicker and heavier and heavier, but it wasn't going any further out to the west. So I remembered the fact that in desert warfare you can deceive your enemy as to the point of the main attack, and I said that's it, that's the key.

Let me tell you why we succeeded. Superb equipment. When you stop and consider that our tanks and armor traveled 200 miles in a period of two days, O.K., I was confident that we could travel those great distances before the enemy could react. I am sure that at one point somebody said, What about this great big open flank over there?, and the Iraqi generals or Saddam Hussein said, Hey, nobody could drive over all that desert that far without their < tanks breaking down and their equipment going to hell. They'll never make it.

There were several Achilles' heels. Dhahran was No. 1. All you have to do is stand in Dhahran and look at the huge amounts of equipment we were bringing in there. If they had launched a persistent chemical attack that had denied the port of Dammam to us, obviously this would have been a major setback. Or take Riyadh air base -- you know three good fighter planes making a run down there could have taken out huge assets. But once the air campaign started, his air force went away, so I no longer worried about Dhahran and Riyadh.