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Published Airpower Power Journal - Summer 1998
Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.
—Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)
MAJ J. P. HUNERWADEL, USAF
Popular author Tom Clancy created the “technothriller” genre almost single-handedly. His novels sell phenomenally well because they are concise, tightly plotted, and filled with technical details and jargon that impart an air of plausibility. Clancy admits to being fascinated with the technical details that fill his books, and the general reading public trusts his command of them. In the last few years, he has capitalized on this trust by publishing a series of nonfiction books that explain, often in excruciating detail, how various real-world military units or systems operate. These books have been valuable to the military by helping popularize, even glamorize, American war fighters and their capabilities.
In a recent book, however, Clancy seems to aim at a deeper understanding of military matters. Into the Storm,1 coauthored by retired Army general Fred Franks Jr., is a great deal more ambitious than Clancy’s previous efforts, which were narrowly focused and acronym-intensive. The book purports to be a “study in command,” part one of a four-volume study “of how leaders learn and grow.” If Clancy indeed intended a study of such weighty matters, he could have chosen better material. What his book in fact seems to be is a high-profile riposte to his coauthor’s critics. Clancy is clearly out of his depth here and should have recognized Franks as a poor subject for a study of inspired field command.
His coauthor is the same General Franks who led US Central Command’s VII Corps in Operation Desert Storm. Franks became embroiled in controversy during and after the war, accused by critics of not moving aggressively enough toward his—and the entire ground campaign’s—most important objective: destruction of the Iraqi Republican Guard. The theater commander, Gen H. Norman Schwarzkopf, had identified the Guard as the campaign’s most important operational center of gravity—the nexus of Saddam Hussein’s power. He assigned Franks’s heavy corps the job of destroying the Guard while the Marines on his right pinned Iraqi regular units in Kuwait and the XVIII Airborne Corps on his left maneuvered to cut off any Iraqi retreat. Franks’s corps failed in its most important task, and much has been written since the war trying to explain why that happened.
Into the Storm is Franks’s attempt to exculpate himself. One of his harshest critics has been General Schwarzkopf, who blamed Franks’s slowness and indecisiveness for the failure. Franks seems to be using Clancy’s name to fire back at Schwarzkopf, whose best-selling memoir, It Doesn’t Take a Hero,2 recounts the accusations. Clancy is apparently unaware of all this, preferring to get lost in the nuts and bolts of corps operations. He lets Franks recount the war himself in the book’s final three hundred pages—in numbing detail.
The details help to highlight a valuable lesson for airmen. General Franks’s approach to war represents the wrong paradigm for future warfare. Certainly, the philosophy that made armored formations so effective in World War II and the Arab-Israeli wars is still valid. The philosophy of dislocation and exploitation embodied in blitzkrieg—and more recently in AirLand Battle doctrine—works for everything from infantry attacks to information operations. But the means of achieving blitzkrieg’s effects have moved away from the wallowing corps-sized land leviathans, weighed down with tanks and other heavy industrial-age baggage. These days, airpower provides the best means of finding, fixing, striking, and exploiting enemy systems. In the foreseeable future, space and information power may have similar capabilities.
Another lesson specifically for airmen is awareness of a ground commander’s perspective on airpower. Franks, obsessed with the prebattle maneuvering of his corps, was barely aware that airpower existed during the 30 days prior to the ground campaign. When he began to maneuver against the Iraqis, he discovered that he didn’t have enough of it. Steeped in AirLand Battle doctrine, he regarded airpower as part of his fire-support plan, its sole purpose to support his ground scheme of maneuver. When interdiction targets nominated by him were overlooked in favor of deeper targets favored by Schwarzkopf, who thought they deserved higher priority, Franks complained that the joint force air component commander was trying to wage an Air Force–only war.
In fairness to Franks, he was not the only ground commander with this perspective. Most of them seemed to fight the war as if they were wearing blinders—as if nothing existed to either side or even in front of them beyond a certain range. What makes Into the Storm valuable is that this perspective comes through more clearly than in other writings. Airmen must understand that the nature and complexity of ground commanders’ tasks bind them to this limited perspective of war. Their focus must be tactical; as airmen, we must have a wider view.
What Franks and the other ground commanders lacked—and what Schwarzkopf possessed—was a truly joint vision of what the forces arrayed in the Gulf could do. Franks moved up strictly through Army channels to the pinnacle of field duty—command of a corps. Schwarzkopf moved to theater command from a variety of joint staff jobs. Some Army circles resented him for achieving “CINCdom” without having paid some Army dues. Franks is too gentlemanly to play to these notions, but something of the same attitude comes through between the lines in his and Clancy’s book.
It was precisely Schwarzkopf’s broader vision that made him the right man for the time and place. His joint experience gave him the necessary background to understand a type of warfare more ambitious than the one envisioned by his ground and air commanders. Schwarzkopf’s insistence on an air campaign with an operational and strategic focus extended the concepts of blitzkrieg to the entire enemy system and achieved Desert Storm’s objectives.
Into the Storm’s biggest lesson, one that has been taught several times throughout military history, is for all war fighters. Franks was brilliant when building or training a force for battle. As head of the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command, he created several innovative “advanced war-fighter experiments” designed to move the Army forward intellectually. He was instrumental in remotivating the post-Vietnam European Army. Franks was also highly regarded by the troops he led. His careful, deliberate manner and his intellectual depth made him nearly the perfect peacetime general. On the field of battle, however, his innate caution took over. He missed great opportunities to dislocate and exploit the enemy because he was too focused on what the enemy might do to him.
Ultimately, Franks’s battle against the Republican Guard looked a lot like the battle of Antietam: the enemy conceded the field, losing the tactical battle—but the victor missed a larger opportunity. Antietam helped accomplish some political goals, but it could have shortened the Civil War by years. Similarly, destruction of the Guard might have accomplished the coalition’s second-order goal: the overthrow of Hussein’s regime. Schwarzkopf’s criticisms of Franks seem exactly in this context. Schwarzkopf stood in relation to Franks much as Abraham Lincoln stood in relation to Union general George McClellan—prodding and cajoling him into action. Both cases provide a valuable lesson: when cautious commanders focus more on what the enemy can do to them than on what they can do to the enemy, they will not win. General Franks did not lose his fight, but he certainly did not win it either. All of Tom Clancy’s writing skill and all of General Franks’s exculpatory detail cannot hide that fact.
Maxwell AFB, Alabama
Notes
1. Tom Clancy with Fred Franks Jr., Into the Storm: A Study in Command (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1997).
2. H. Norman Schwarzkopf with Peter Petre, General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, the Autobiography: It Doesn’t Take a Hero (New York: Bantam Books, 1992).
Disclaimer
The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University.
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