BEFORE 9/11: Armored vehicles don't get "dented fenders": fixing American SOF units: why American SOF units need hybrid-electric M113A4 Gavin light tracked armored fighting vehicles

A seasoned Special Operations Force (SOF) expert comments on why America's commandos didn't get Al Queda before the 9/11 attacks:

"Special Operations was never given the mission. It was very, very frustrating. It was like having a brand-new Ferrari in the garage, and nobody wants to race it because you might dent the fender."

---General Peter Schoomaker, current U.S. Army Chief of Staff and former Delta Force member

Terrorism expert Richard Shultz outlines in a superb article why American SOF is thought to be too fragile to use pre-emptively:

http://fletcher.tufts.edu/faculty/shultz/pdf/SHOWSTOPPERS1.pdf www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/003/613twavk.asp?pg=1

Showstoppers: Nine reasons why we never sent our Special Operations Forces after al Qaeda before 9/11

By Richard H. Shultz Jr.
01/26/2004, Volume 009, Issue 19

SINCE 9/11, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has repeatedly declared that the United States is in a new kind of war, one requiring new military forces to hunt down and capture or kill terrorists. In fact, for some years, the Department of Defense has gone to the trouble of selecting and training an array of Special Operations Forces, whose forte is precisely this. One president after another has invested resources to hone lethal "special mission units" for offensive--that is, preemptive--counter-terrorism strikes, with the result that these units are the best of their kind in the world. While their activities are highly classified, two of them--the Army's Delta Force and the Navy's SEAL Team 6--have become the stuff of novels and movies.

Prior to 9/11, these units were never used even once to hunt down terrorists who had taken American lives. Putting the units to their intended use proved impossible--even after al Qaeda bombed the World Trade Center in 1993, bombed two American embassies in East Africa in 1998, and nearly sank the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000. As a result of these and other attacks, operations were planned to capture or kill the ultimate perpetrators, Osama bin Laden and his top lieutenants, but each time the missions were blocked. A plethora of self-imposed constraints--I call them showstoppers--kept the counter-terrorism units on the shelf.

I first began to learn of this in the summer of 2001, after George W. Bush's election brought a changing of the guard to the Department of Defense.

Training the new team as principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict was Bob Andrews, an old hand at the black arts of unconventional warfare. During Vietnam, Andrews had served in a top-secret Special Forces outfit code-named the Studies and Observations Group that had carried out America's largest and most complex covert paramilitary operation in the Cold War. Afterwards, Andrews had joined the CIA, then moved to Congress as a staffer, then to the defense industry.

I'd first met him while I was writing a book about the secret war against Hanoi, and we hit it off. He returned to the Pentagon with the new administration, and in June 2001 he called and asked me to be his consultant. I agreed, and subsequently proposed looking into counter-terrorism policy. Specifically, I wondered why had we created these superbly trained Special Operations Forces to fight terrorists, but had never used them for their primary mission. What had kept them out of action?

Andrews was intrigued and asked me to prepare a proposal. I was putting the finishing touches on it on the morning of September 11, when al Qaeda struck. With that blow, the issue of America's offensive counter-terrorist capabilities was thrust to center stage.

By early November, I had the go-ahead for the study. Our question had acquired urgency: Why, even as al Qaeda attacked and killed Americans at home and abroad, were our elite counter-terrorism units not used to hit back and prevent further attacks? That was, after all, their very purpose, laid out in the official document "Special Operations in Peace and War" (1996). To find the answer, I interviewed civilian and military officials, serving and retired, at the center of U.S. counter-terrorism policy and operational planning in the late 1980s and 1990s.

They included senior members of the National Security Council's Counter-terrorism and Security Group, the interagency focal point for counter-terrorism policy. In the Pentagon, I interviewed the top leaders of the offices with counter-terrorism responsibility, as well as second-tier professionals, and their military counterparts in the Joint Staff. Finally, the U.S. Special Operations Command, headquartered in Tampa, Florida, is responsible for planning and carrying out counter-terrorism strikes, and I interviewed senior commanders who served there during the 1990s.

Some were willing to speak on the record. Others requested anonymity, which I honored, in order to put before the top leadership of the Pentagon the detailed report from which this article is drawn. My findings were conveyed to the highest levels of the Department of Defense in January 2003.

Among those interviewed, few were in a better position to illuminate the conundrum than General Pete Schoomaker. An original member of the Delta Force, he had commanded the Delta Force in 1991-92, then led the Special Operations Command in the late 1990s. "Counter-terrorism", by Defense Department definition, is "offensive," Schoomaker told me during a discussion we had over two days in the summer of 2002. "But Special Operations was never given the mission. It was very, very frustrating. It was like having a brand-new Ferrari in the garage, and nobody wants to race it because you might dent the fender."

AS TERRORIST ATTACKS escalated in the 1990s, White House rhetoric intensified. President Clinton met each successive outrage with a vow to punish the perpetrators. After the Cole bombing in 2000, for example, he pledged to "find out who is responsible and hold them accountable." And to prove he was serious, he issued an increasingly tough series of Presidential Decision Directives. The United States would "deter and preempt...individuals who perpetrate or plan to perpetrate such acts," said Directive 39, in June 1995. Offensive measures would be used against foreign terrorists posing a threat to America, said Directive 62, in May 1998. Joint Staff contingency plans were revised to provide for offensive and preemptive options. And after al Qaeda's bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, President Clinton signed a secret "finding" authorizing lethal covert operations against bin Laden.

These initiatives led to the planning of several operations. Their details rest in the classified records of the National Security Council's Counter-terrorism and Security Group. Its former coordinator, Dick Clarke, described them as providing the White House with "more aggressive options," to be carried out by Special Operations Forces (or SOF, a category that includes the Green Berets, the Rangers, psychological operations, civilian affairs, the SEALS, special helicopter units, and special mission units like the Delta Force and SEAL Team 6).

Several plans have been identified in newspaper accounts since 9/11. For example, "snatch operations" in Afghanistan were planned to seize bin Laden and his senior lieutenants. After the 1998 embassy bombings, options for killing bin Laden were entertained, including a gunship assault on his compound in Afghanistan.

SOF assaults on al Qaeda's Afghan training camps were also planned. An official very close to Clinton said that the president believed the image of American commandos jumping out of helicopters and killing terrorists would send a strong message. He "saw these camps as conveyor belts pushing radical Islamists through," the official said, "that either went into the war against the Northern Alliance [an Afghan force fighting the Taliban in northern Afghanistan] or became sleeper cells in Germany, Spain, Britain, Italy, and here. We wanted to close these camps down. We had to make it unattractive to go to these camps. And blowing them up, by God, would make them unattractive."

And preemptive strikes against al Qaeda cells outside Afghanistan were planned, in North Africa and the Arabian Gulf. Then in May 1999, the White House decided to press the Taliban to end its support of bin Laden. The Counter-terrorism and Security Group recommended supporting the Northern Alliance.

These examples, among others, depict an increasingly aggressive, lethal,and preemptive counter-terrorist policy. But not one of these operations--all authorized by President Clinton--was ever executed. General Schoomaker's explanation is devastating. "The presidential directives that were issued," he said, "and the subsequent findings and authorities, in my view, were done to check off boxes. The president signed things that everybody involved knew full well were never going to happen. You're checking off boxes, and have all this activity going on, but the fact is that there's very low probability of it ever coming to fruition. . . ." And he added: "The military, by the way, didn't want to touch it. There was great reluctance in the Pentagon."

FROM MY INTERVIEWS, I distilled nine mutually reinforcing, self-imposed constraints that kept the special mission units sidelined, even as al Qaeda struck at American targets around the globe and trumpeted its intention to do more of the same. These showstoppers formed an impenetrable phalanx ensuring that all high-level policy discussions, tough new presidential directives, revised contingency plans, and actual dress rehearsals for missions would come to nothing.

1. Terrorism as Crime

During the second half of the 1980s, terrorism came to be defined by theU.S. government as a crime, and terrorists as criminals to be prosecuted. The Reagan administration, which in its first term said that it would meet terrorism with "swift and effective retribution," ended its second term, in the political and legal aftermath of Iran-contra, by adopting a counter-terrorism policy that was the antithesis of that.

"Patterns of Global Terrorism," a report issued by the State Department every year since 1989, sets forth guidance about responding to terrorism. Year after year prior to 9/11, a key passage said it was U.S.policy to "treat terrorists as criminals, pursue them aggressively, and apply the rule of law." Even now, when President Bush has defined the situation as a war on terrorism, "Patterns of Global Terrorism" says U.S. policy is to "bring terrorists to justice for their crimes."

Criminalization had a profound impact on the Pentagon, said General Schoomaker. It came to see terrorism as "not up to the standard of our definition of war, and therefore not worthy of our attention." In other words, militaries fight other militaries. "And because it's not war," he added, "and we don't act like we're at war, many of the Defense Department's tools are off the table." The Pentagon's senior leadership made little if any effort to argue against designating terrorism as a crime, Schoomaker added derisively.

"If you declare terrorism a criminal activity, you take from Defense any statutory authority to be the leader in responding," a long-serving department official agreed. Whenever the White House proposed using SOF against terrorists, it found itself facing "a band of lawyers at Justice defending their turf." They would assert, said this old hand at special operations, that the Pentagon lacked authority to use force--and "lawyers in the Defense Department would concur. They argued that we have no statutory authority because this is essentially a criminal matter."

In effect, the central tool for combating terrorism would not be militaryforce. Extradition was the instrument of choice. This reduced the Pentagon's role to providing transportation for the Justice Department.

To be sure, Justice had its successes. With the help of the Pakistani government, it brought back Mir Amal Kansi, the gunman who opened fire outside CIA headquarters in 1993; with the help of the governments of the Philippines and Kenya, it brought several of the terrorists responsible for the first World Trade Center bombing and the attacks on the U.S. embassies in East Africa back to stand trial. But those were lesser al Qaeda operatives. Against the group's organizational infrastructure and leadership, there were no such successes. Law enforcement had neither the access nor the capability to go after those targets.

2. Not a Clear and Present Danger or War

Since terrorism had been classified as crime, few Pentagon officials were willing to call it a clear and present danger to the United States--much less grounds for war. Any attempt to describe terrorism in those terms ran into a stone wall.

For instance, on June 25, 1996, a truck bomb killed 19 Americans and wounded another 250 at the U.S. military's Khobar Towers housing facility near Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. In the aftermath, a tough-minded subordinate of Allen Holmes, then the assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict, asserted that the Defense Department needed a more aggressive counter-terrorism policy to attack those responsible for these increasingly lethal terrorist attacks. Holmes told him, "Write it down, and we'll push it."

The aide laid out a strategy that pulled no punches. Khobar Towers, the World Trade Center bombing, and other attacks were acts of war, he wrote, and should be treated as such. He called for "retaliatory and preemptive military strikes against the terrorist leadership and infrastructure responsible, and even against states assisting them." In his strategy, he assigned a central role for this to SOF.

Holmes ran the proposal up the flagpole. A meeting to review it was held in the office of the undersecretary of defense for policy. As the hard-charging aide explained his recommendations, a senior policy official blurted out: "Are you out of your mind? You're telling me that our Middle East policy is not important and that it's more important to go clean out terrorists? Don't you understand what's going on in terms of our Middle East policy? You're talking about going after terrorists backed by Iran? You just don't understand." And that was that.

In the wake of Khobar Towers, Secretary of Defense William Perry asked retired General Wayne Downing to head a task force to assess what had happened. Formerly the head of the U.S. Special Operations Command, Downing had been in counter-terrorism a long time. He was more than willing to pull the trigger and cajole policymakers into giving him the authority to do so. Interviewed in 2002 during a year-long stint as President Bush's deputy national security adviser for combating terrorism, he reflected on his report: "I emphasized that people are at war with us, and using terrorism as an asymmetrical weapon with which to attack us because they can't in a direct or conventional manner." It was war, he told the department's senior leadership; they needed to wake up to that fact. But his plea fell on deaf ears. He lamented, "No one wanted to address terrorism as war."

Even after bin Laden declared war on America in a 1998 fatwa, and bombed U.S. embassies to show his followers that he meant business in exhorting them to "abide by Allah's order by killing Americans . . .anywhere, anytime, and wherever possible," the Pentagon still resisted calling terrorism war. It wasn't alone. A CIA assessment of the fatwa acknowledged that if a government had issued such a decree, one would have had to consider it a declaration of war, but in al Qaeda's case it was only propaganda.

During the late 1990s, the State Department coordinator for counter-terrorism was Mike Sheehan. A retired Special Forces officer who had learned unconventional warfare in El Salvador in the late 1980s, he was considered one of the most hawkish Clinton officials, pushing for the use of force against the Taliban and al Qaeda. His mantra was "drain the Afghan swamp of terrorists."

I visited Sheehan at his office at the U.N. building in New York, where he had become assistant secretary-general for peacekeeping. He recounted how aggressive counter-terrorism proposals were received in the Defense Department: "The Pentagon wanted to fight and win the nation's wars, as Colin Powell used to say. But those were wars against the armies of other nations--not against diffuse transnational terrorist threats. So terrorism was seen as a distraction that was the CIA's job, even though DOD personnel were being hit by terrorists. The Pentagon way to treat terrorism against Pentagon assets abroad was to cast it as a force protection issue."

"Force protection" is Pentagon lingo for stronger barriers to shield troops from Khobar Towers-type attacks. Even the attack on the USS Cole did not change that outlook. As far as causing anyone to consider offensive measures against those responsible, "the Cole lasted only for a week, two weeks," Sheehan lamented. "It took a 757 crashing into the Pentagon for them to get it. "Shaking his head, he added: "The near sinking of a billion-dollar warship was not enough. Folding up a barracks full of their troops in Saudi Arabia was not enough. Folding up two American embassies was not enough."

Of course, Washington continued to try to arrest those who had carried out these acts. But the places where terrorists trained and planned--Afghanistan, Lebanon, Sudan, and Yemen--remained off-limits. Those were not areas where the Defense Department intended to fight. A very senior SOF officer who had served on the Joint Staff in the 1990s told me that more than once he heard terrorist strikes characterized as "a small price to pay for being a superpower."

3. The Somalia Syndrome

In the first year of his presidency, Bill Clinton suffered a foreign policy debacle. The "Fire Fight from Hell," Newsweek called it. The Los Angeles Times described it as culminating in "dozens of cheering, dancing Somalis dragging the body of a U.S. Soldier through the city's streets." Those reports followed the 16-hour shootout portrayed in the movie "Black Hawk Down," pitting SOF units against Somali warriors in the urban jungle of Mogadishu on October 3-4,1993. The American objective had been capturing Mohammed Aidid, a warlord who was interfering with the U.N.'s humanitarian mission. The new administration had expected a quick surgical operation.

The failure caused disquieting questions and bad memories. How could this happen? What had gone wrong? Some Clinton officials recalled that the last time the Democrats had held the White House, similar forces had failed in their attempt to rescue American hostages in Tehran ("Desert One"), a catastrophe instrumental in President Carter's 1980 re-election defeat.

Some senior generals had expressed doubts about the Mogadishu operation, yet as it had morphed from a peacekeeping mission into a manhunt for Aidid, the new national security team had failed to grasp the implications. The Mogadishu disaster spooked the Clinton administrationas well as the brass, and confirmed the Joint Chiefs in the view that SOF should never be entrusted with independent operations.

After Mogadishu, one Pentagon officer explained, there was "reluctance to even discuss pro-active measures associated with countering the terrorist threat through SOF operations. The Joint Staff was very happy for the administration to take a law enforcement view. They didn't want to put special ops troops on the ground. They hadn't wanted to go into Somalia to begin with. The Joint Staff was the biggest foot-dragger on all of this counter-terrorism business."

Another officer added that Somalia heightened a wariness, in some cases outright disdain, for SOF in the senior ranks. On the Joint Staff, the generals ranged from those who "did not have a great deal of respect" for SOF, to those who actually "hated what it represented, . . . hated the independent thought process, . . . hated the fact that the SOF guys on the Joint Staff would challenge things, would question things."

During Desert Storm, for example, General Norman Schwarzkopf was reluctant to include SOF in his war plan. He did so only grudgingly, and kept SOF on a short leash, wrote the commander of all Special Operations Forces at the time, General Carl Stiner, in his book "Shadow Warriors." But SOF performed well in Desert Storm, and afterwards Schwarzkopf acknowledged their accomplishments. In 1993, Mogadishu turned back the clock.

4. No Legal Authority

August 1998 was a watershed for the White House. The embassy bombings led to the reexamination of preemptive military options. President Clinton proposed using elite SOF counter-terrorism units to attack bin Laden, his lieutenants, and al Qaeda's infrastructure.

Also considered was unconventional warfare, a core SOF mission very different from counter-terrorism. The Special Operations Command's "Special Operations in Peace and War" defines unconventional warfare as "military and paramilitary operations conducted by indigenous or surrogate forces who are organized, trained, equipped, and directed by an external source." For the White House, this meant assisting movements like the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan.

Both the Special Operations Command's counter-terrorism units and Special Forces training for and executing unconventional warfare operate clandestinely. That is what their doctrine specifies. But because such operations are secret, the question arose in the 1990s whether the department had the legal authority to execute them.

This may seem baffling. If these missions are specified in the military doctrine of the Special Operations Command, and actual units train for them, isn't it obvious that the Department of Defense must have the authority to execute them? Perhaps, yet many in government emphatically deny it.

A gap exists, they believe, between DOD's capability for clandestine operations and its authority under the United States Code. In the 1990s, some Pentagon lawyers and some in the intelligence community argued that Title 10 of the U.S. Code, which covers the armed forces, did not give Defense the legal authority for such missions, Title 50, which spells out the legal strictures for covert operations, gave this power exclusively to the CIA.

Title 50 defines covert action as "an activity of the United States Government to influence political, economic, or military conditions abroad, where it is intended that the role of the United States Government will not be apparent or acknowledged publicly." Covert action and deniability go hand-in-hand. If a story about a covert action hits the newspapers, the president must be able to avow that the United States is not mixed up in it.

But is it the case that only the CIA has this authority? Title 50, Chapter 15, Section 413b of the U.S. Code stipulates: "The President may not authorize the conduct of a covert action by departments, agencies, or entities of the United States Government unless the President determines such an action is necessary to support identifiable foreign policy objectives of the United States and is important to the national security of the United States, which determination shall be set forth in a finding that shall meet each of the following conditions." The key condition is: "Each finding shall specify each department, agency, or entity of the United States Government authorized to fund or otherwise participate in any significant way in such action." Title 50 leaves the choice of agency to the president and does not exclude the Pentagon.

At the heart of this debate, said a former senior Defense official, was "institutional culture and affiliation." The department took after all, their very purpose, laid out in the official document" Special Operations in Peace and War" 1996). To find the answer, I interviewed civilian and military officials, serving and retired, at the center of U.S. counter-terrorism policy and operational planning in the late 1980s and 1990s.

The position that it lacked the authority because it did not want the authority--or the mission. He told me, "All of its instincts push it in that direction."

One senior member of the National Security Council's counter-terrorism group recalled encountering this attitude during deliberations overcounter-terrorism operations and clandestine support for the Northern Alliance. To the Joint Staff, neither was "in their minds a military mission. It was a covert action. The uniformed military was adamant that they would not do covert action." And, he added, if you presented them with "a legal opinion that says 'You're wrong,' then they would say, 'Well, we're not going to do it anyway. It's a matter of policy that we don't.'"

The authority argument was a "cop-out," said a retired officer who served in the Pentagon from 1994 to 2000. Sure enough, the Defense Department could have bypassed Title 50 by employing SOF on a clandestine basis. While both clandestine and covert missions are secret, only the latter require that the U.S. role not be "acknowledged publicly," which is Title 50's key requirement. Using SOF to preempt terrorists or support resistance movements clandestinely in peacetime is within the scope of Title 10, as long as the U.S. government does not deny involvement when the mission is over.

But this interpretation of Title 10 was considered beyond the pale in the 1990s. The Pentagon did not want the authority to strike terrorists secretly or to employ Special Forces against states that aided and sheltered them.

5. Risk Aversion

The mainstream military often dismisses special operations as too risky. To employ SOF requires open-minded political and military leadership willing to balance risks against potential gains. Supple judgment was in short supply in the Pentagon in the 1990s.

Walter Slocombe served as Clinton's undersecretary of defense for policy, and took part in all counter-terrorism policy discussions in the Department of Defense. "We certainly looked at lots of options which involved the possible use of SOF," he stressed. But in the end they were never selected because they seemed too hard to pull off, he acknowledged. Options that put people on the ground to go after bin Laden were "much too hard." It was much easier and much less risky to fire off cruise missiles.

During Clinton's first term, someone would always find something wrong with a proposed operation, lamented General Downing. The attitude was: "Don't let these SOF guys go through the door because they're dangerous. . . . They are going to do something to embarrass the country." Downing recalls that during his years in command, he "sat through the preparation of maybe 20 operations where we had targeted people who had killed Americans. Terrorists who had done bad things to this country, and needed either to be killed or apprehended and brought back here, and we couldn't pull the trigger." It was too risky for the Pentagon's taste.

The other side of the risk-aversion coin is policymakers' demand for fail-safe options. A general who served in the Special Operations Command in the 1990s encountered "tremendous pressure to do something," he said, but at the same time, the requirement was for "perfect operations, no casualties, and no failure." There were some "great opportunities" to strike at al Qaeda, "you couldn't take any risk in doing so. You couldn't have a POW, you couldn't lose a man. You couldn't have anybody hurt." It was Catch-22. There were frequent "spin-ups" for SOF missions, but "in the end, the senior political and military leadership wouldn't let you go do it."

In the mid-1990s, and again at the end of the decade, the Clinton administration flirted with supporting the Iraqi resistance and then the Northern Alliance. An officer who served on the Joint Staff recounted how the senior military leadership put the kibosh on these potentially bold moves.

The CIA ran the Iraqi operation. But its unconventional warfare capabilities were paltry, and it turned to the military for help, requesting that SOF personnel be seconded to bolster the effort. The Joint Staff and its chairman wanted nothing to do with it, he said. "The guidance I got from the chairman's director of operations was that we weren't going to support this, and do everything you can to stall or keep it in the planning mode, don't let it get to the point where we're briefing this at the National Security Council or on the Hill."

Later, the National Security Council's counter-terrorism group proposed supporting the Northern Alliance. They pushed the proposal up to the "principals" level. But attached to it was a "non-concurrence" by the Joint Staff, opposing it as too complex and risky. That was the kiss-of-death.

None of this was new to the Joint Staff officer, who had been in special operations for a long time. "Risk aversion emerges as senior officers move into higher positions," he explained. "It's a very common thing for these guys to become non-risk takers. They get caught up in interagency politics and the bureaucratic process, and get risk-averse."

A member of the counter-terrorism group in the late 1990s noted that General Hugh Shelton, a former commander of the Special Operations Command, considered the use of SOF for counter-terrorism less than anyone when he was chairman of the Joint Chiefs. The official said Shelton directed the Joint Staff "not to plan certain operations, I'm sure you've heard this from others." In fact, I had. "It got to the point," he said, where "the uniforms had become the suits, they were more the bureaucrats than the civilians."

6. Pariah Cowboys

When events finally impelled the Clinton administration to take a hard look at offensive operations, the push to pursue them came from the civilians of the National Security Council's Counter-terrorism and Security Group.

One of the hardest of the hard-liners was the group's chief, Dick Clarke. For nearly a decade, this career civil servant began and ended his workday with the burgeoning terrorist threat to America. He knew in detail the danger the bin Ladens of the world posed, and it worried him greatly. Defensive measures were just not enough. "Clarke's philosophy was to go get the terrorists," one former senior Pentagon special operations official told me, "Go get them anywhere you can."

Asked if that meant using SOF, he replied: "Oh yeah. In fact, many of the options were with special mission units." But "Dick Clarke was attempting to take on a Pentagon hierarchy that wasn't of the same philosophical mindset."

Clarke was not alone. Mike Sheehan also pushed for assisting the Northern Alliance and striking al Qaeda with SOF. Such measures worried the senior brass, who proceeded to weaken those officials by treating them as pariahs. That meant portraying them as cowboys, who proposed reckless military operations that would get American Soldiers killed.

Sheehan explained: Suppose one civilian starts beating the drum for special operations. The establishment "systematically starts to undermine you. They would say, 'He's a rogue, he's uncooperative, he's out of control, he's stupid, he makes bad choices.' It's very damaging. .. . You get to the point where you don't even raise issues like that. If someone did, like me or Clarke, we were labeled cowboys, way outside our area of competence."

Several officials who served on the Joint Staff and in the Pentagon's special operations office remembered the senior brass characterizing Clarke in such terms. "Anything Dick Clarke suggested, the Joint Staff was going to be negative about," said one. Some generals had been vitriolic, calling Clarke "a madman, out of control, power hungry, wanted to be a hero, all that kind of stuff." In fact, one of these former officials emphasized, "when we would carry back from the counter-terrorism group one of those SOF counter-terrorism proposals, our job was to figure out not how to execute it, but how we were going to say no."

By turning Clarke into a pariah, the Pentagon brass discredited precisely the options that might have spared us the tragedy of September 11, 2001. And when Clarke fought back at being branded "wild&" and "irresponsible," they added "abrasive" and"intolerant" to the counts against him.

7. Intimidation of Civilians

Another way the brass stymied hard-line proposals from civilianpolicymakers was by highlighting their own military credentials andothers' lack of them. One former defense official recounted a briefing oncounter-terrorism options given the secretary of defense by seniorcivilians and military officers. "The civilian, a politicalappointee with no military experience, says, 'As your policy adviser, letme tell you what you need to do militarily in this situation.' Thechairman sits there, calmly listening. Then it's his turn. He begins byframing his sophisticated PowerPoint briefing in terms of the 'experiencefactor,' his own judgment, and those of four-star associates. The'experience factor' infuses the presentation. Implicitly, it raises aquestion intended to discredit the civilian: 'What makes you qualified?What makes you think that your opinion is more important than mine whenyou don't have the experience I have?' 'Mr. Secretary,' concludes thechairman, 'this is my best military advice.'" In such situations,the official said, civilians were often dissuaded from taking on thegenerals.

Wayne Downing, the former special operations commander, had plenty ofexperience providing such briefings. "Occasionally you would get acivilian champion," he said, who would speak up enthusiastically infavor of the mission being presented. "And then the chairman or thevice chairman would say, 'I don't think this is a good idea. Our bestmilitary judgment is that you not do this.' That champion is not goingany further."

During the 1990s, the "best military advice," when it came tocounter-terrorism, was always wary of the use of force. Both risk-aversionand a deep-seated distrust of SOF traceable all the way back to World WarII informed the military counsel offered to top decision makers. Almostall those I consulted confirmed this, and many, including General Stiner,have described it in print.

When President Clinton began asking about special operations, one formersenior official recounted, "those options were discussed, but nevergot anywhere. The Joint Staff would say, 'That's cowboy Hollywood stuff.'The president was intimidated because these guys come in with all thosemedals, [and] the White House took the 'stay away from SOF options'advice of the generals."

Another former official during both Clinton terms described severalinstances where "best military advice" blocked SOF optionsunder White House review. "The Pentagon resisted using SpecialForces. Clinton raised it several times with [Joint Chiefs chairmen]Shalikashvili and Shelton. They recommended against it, and never reallycame up with a do-able plan."

Occasionally, policymakers kept pushing. When support for the NorthernAlliance was on the table after the embassy bombings in Africa, thesenior military leadership "refused to consider it," a formercounter-terrorism group member told me. "They said it was anintelligence operation, not a military mission."

The counter-terrorism group at the National Security Council pushed theproposal anyway, but the Joint Staff strongly demurred and would notsupport it. They argued that supporting the Northern Alliance wouldentangle the United States in a quagmire. That was the end of the line.Let's suppose, said the former counter-terrorism group member, that thepresident had ordered a covert strike "despite the chairman going onrecord as opposing it. Now, if the president orders such an operationagainst the best military advice of his chief military adviser, and itgets screwed up, they will blame the president who has no militaryexperience, who was allegedly a draft dodger." The Northern Alliancewas left to wither on the vine.

8. Big Footprints

The original concept for SOF counter-terrorism units was that they wouldbe unconventional, small, flexible, adaptive, and stealthy, suited todiscreet and discriminate use, say those "present at thecreation" following the Desert One disaster. Force packages were tobe streamlined for surgical operations. The "footprint" of anyoperation was to be small, even invisible.

By the 1990s, this had dropped by the wayside. One former officialrecalled that when strikes against al Qaeda cells were proposed,"the Joint Staff and the chairman would come back and say, 'Wehighly recommend against doing it. But if ordered to do it, this is howwe would do it.' And usually it involved the 82nd and 101st AirborneDivisions. The footprint was ridiculous." In each instance thecivilian policymakers backed off.

To some extent, SOF planners themselves have been guilty of this."Mission-creep," one official called it. Since you can't"totally suppress an environment with 15 guys and threehelicopters," force packages became "five or six hundred guys,AC-130 gunships, a 900-man quick-reaction force ready to assist if youget in trouble, and F-14s circling over the Persian Gulf." Thepolicymakers were thinking small, surgical, and stealthy, so they'd takeone "look at it and say that's too big."

One original Delta Force member traced this problem back to Desert One."We took some bad lessons from that," he said. ". . . Onewas that we needed more. That maybe it would have been successful if we'dhad more helicopters. That more is better. And now we add too many bellsand whistles. We make our footprint too large. We price ourselves out ofthe market."

It's a way of dealing with the military's aversion to risk. "One waywe tend to think we mitigate risk," he said, "is by adding morecapabilities for this contingency and that contingency." Asked ifthis thinking had found its way into the Special Operations Command, hereplied, "Yes. Absolutely.

9. No Actionable Intelligence

A top official in the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policyin the 1990s described the intelligence deficit with respect to targetingOsama bin Laden: "If you get intelligence, it's by definition veryperishable. He moves all the time and he undoubtedly puts out falsestories about where he's moving," making it extremely difficult"to get somebody from anyplace outside of Afghanistan intoAfghanistan in time. The biggest problem was alwaysintelligence."

But if the target had been broadened to al Qaeda's infrastructure, theintelligence requirements would have been less demanding, noted DickClarke. "There was plenty of intelligence. We had incredibly goodintelligence about where bin Laden's facilities were. While we mightnever have been able to say at any given moment where he was, we knewhalf a dozen places that he moved among. So there was ample opportunityto use Special Forces."

In effect, to turn the need for "actionable intelligence" intoa showstopper, all you have to do is define the target narrowly. Thatmakes the intelligence requirements nearly impossible to satisfy. Broadenthe picture, and the challenge of actionable intelligence became moremanageable.

Special Operators are actually the first to seek good intelligence. Butaccording to an officer on the Joint Staff at the time, "no actions[were] taken to pre-position or deploy the kinds of people that couldhave addressed those intelligence shortfalls"--people who could haveprovided the operational-level intelligence needed for SOF to deployrapidly against fleeting targets in the safe havens where terroristsnest.

What was essential for counter-terrorism operations was to establishintelligence networks in places harboring targets. This "operationalpreparation of the battle space" is accomplished by infiltratingspecial operators who pass for locals. Their job includes recruitingindigenous elements who can help SOF units enter an area of interest, andorganize, train, and equip local resistance and surrogate forces toassist them.

But no such preparation took place in the 1990s in terrorist havens likeAfghanistan, Yemen, Lebanon, and Sudan. Operating in those lands"would have taken official approval that prior to 9/11 would havenever been given to us," one knowledgeable individual explained."Prior to 9/11 there was no willingness to put Department of Defensepersonnel in such places. No such request would have beenauthorized."

Why? Because it's dicey, was the bottom line for a former senior Clintonappointee at the Pentagon. Asked if there were proposals at his level forit, he said: "Not that I remember," adding, "I canunderstand why. It raises a lot of questions. Without saying youshouldn't do it, it is one of those things that is going to causeconcern. . . . You're talking not just about recruiting individuals to besent, but recruiting whole organizations, and you think about it in thecontext of Somalia. I'm sure that would have raised a lot of questions. Ican see why people would have been reluctant."

DURING CLINTON'S SECOND TERM, then, the possibility of hunting down theterrorists did receive ample attention at the top echelons of government.But somewhere between inception and execution, the SOF options werealways scuttled as too problematic.

War and tragedy have a way of breaking old attitudes. September 11, 2001,should have caused a sea change in SOF's role in fighting terrorism. Tosome extent, it has. Consider the stellar contribution of SpecialOperations Forces to the campaign in Afghanistan in 2001-02. In the earlyplanning stages, SOF was only ancillary to the war plan; but by the endof October 2001, it had moved to center stage. It played a decisive rolein toppling the Taliban and routing al Qaeda.

Since then, SOF have deployed to places like Yemen and the Philippines totrain local militaries to fight al Qaeda and its affiliates. And lastyear, Secretary Rumsfeld ordered the Special Operations Command to trackdown and destroy al Qaeda around the globe. In effect, he ordered aglobal manhunt to prevent future 9/11s, including attacks with weapons ofmass destruction.

In the war against terrorism, a global SOF campaign against al Qaeda isindispensable. Happily, our special counter-terrorism units aretailor-made for this. And now that the United States is at war, it shouldbe possible to overcome the showstoppers that blocked the"peacetime" use of those forces through the 1990s.

It should be--but will it? The answer is mixed. Some showstoppers havebeen neutralized. While law enforcement still has a role to play, we areclearly fighting a war, in which the Department of Defense and the armedforces take the lead. Thus, there should be far less latitude for turningadvocates of tough counter-terrorism missions into pariahs. September 11and the president's response to it changed the terms of the policydiscussion.

Yet the other showstoppers have not ceased to matter. Competing powercenters continue to jockey for influence over counter-terrorism policy. Ina war in which the CIA may feel it has both a role to play and lostground to regain, the Title 10/Title 50 debate and arguments overactionable intelligence are likely to persist. In our democratic society,fear of another Somalia remains. And the conventional military's mistrustof SOF has not evaporated.

Once again, a civilian is pushing for greater use of Special OperationsForces. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld wants the Special OperationsCommand, for the first time in its history, to play the role of a"supported command," instead of supporting the geographiccommands, as it has in the past. Neither those commands nor their friendson the Joint Staff are likely to welcome a reversal of the relationshipin order to facilitate SOF missions. "Who's in command here?"could become a new wartime showstopper. Some in SOF believe it alreadyhas.

Once again, the problem involves institutions, organizational cultures,and entrenched ways of thinking. "Rumsfeld might think we're at warwith terrorism," observed one former general, "but I'll bet healso thinks he is at war within the Pentagon....The real war's happeningright there in his building. It's a war of the culture. He can't go towar because he can't get his organization up for it."

Donald Rumsfeld may believe that Special Operations Forces should be inthe forefront of the global war on terrorism. But for that to happen, hewill have to breach what remains of the phalanx of resistance thatblocked the offensive use of special mission units for over a decade--andhe'll have to overcome the new showstoppers as well.

For now, it appears that the most powerful defense secretary ever hasfailed in his attempt to do this. In a disquieting October 16, 2003, memoto the Pentagon elite in the war on terror--General Dick Meyers, JointChiefs chairman; Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz; General PetePace, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs; and Doug Feith, undersecretaryof defense for policy--Rumsfeld laments that progress has been slow andthe Defense Department has not "yet made truly bold moves" infighting al Qaeda. And he wonders whether his department "ischanging fast enough to deal with the new 21st century securityenvironment."

It's a good question. As al Qaeda regroups and deploys to newbattlefields in Iraq and elsewhere, our special mission units--the Deltaboys, the SEALs, and the rest--remain on the shelf. It's time to takethem off.

Richard H. Shultz Jr. is director of international security studies atthe Fletcher School, Tufts University, and director of research at theConsortium for the Study of Intelligence in Washington, D.C.

Shultz explains how a series of "show stoppers" prevented America's SOF units from pre-emptively striking at Al Queda before 9/11. While he lists compelling arguments that civilians at DoD are risk-averse, are intimidated by the service chiefs who want only to fight big wars against nation-states employing their blind obedience co-dependant minions and how everyone that wants to get the bad guys before they get us, is "torpedoed" by nit-picking legal arguments from Justice and Defense Department lawyers-----------he fails to lay any blame at all on America's SOF units for not significantly improving themselves tangibly so missions are not at such great risk of becoming another "Black Hawk Down!" fiasco where troops on foot and in unarmored, vulnerable trucks and helicopters were clobbered by an enemy in superior numbers with local RPG firepower and urban building cover superiority. 11 years after Somalia, Army Rangers still don't use M113A3 Gavin light tracked AFVs that would have prevented the debacle entirely by their bust barricades and shrug off enemy fires mobility even though the Army has thousands of them and all they have to do is ASK FOR THEM. When its all said and done, victory is everyone's and defeat an unwanted "orphan" no one wants to talk about and learn lessons from. American SOF units are to blame for not employing light tracked armored fighting vehicles into permanent SOF unit organizations to provide local superiority on the ground after special insertion techniques are employed as other world SOF units like Israel and Russia do. American SOF units are overly dependant upon surprise via foot movement after special insertions and lack the humility to admit that after the shooting starts surprise is lost and PHYSICAL SUPERIORITY in firepower, protection and mobility must be in hand. Driven by egotistical hubris that covert SOF Soldiers are "better" than conventional, overt Soldiers American SOF units have dismissed out-of-hand employing light tracked AFVs into their mission profiles that would answer civilian fears of "another Somalia" type blood bath and improve chances for SOF mission success. Today's light tracked AFVs can be propelled silently by hybrid-electric drives and using quiet band tracks to be the most stealthy and cross-country unpredictable vehicles on earth after air/sea insertions yet American SOF because of their egotistical hubris and narrow-mindedness refuses to employ them to decisive advantage.

American SOF on occasion has successfully used light tracked AFVs in special missions on an ad hoc basis--namely when someone with clout like a General Officer (GO) likes General Wayne Downing and Stiner put together a "panzer group" that was extremely effective in Panama urban combat. But after the success, American SOF because of ego doesn't want to admit that it needed tracked armored vehicles and to date has not incorporated them into permanent force structures for the next conflicts. 4 years after Panama Army Rangers did not have any tracked AFVs and the preventable Somalia debacle ensued.

The modern non-linear battlefield demands non-linear, tracked AFVs that can be inserted by air, land or sea. SOF units with a reputation for function over form have yet to overcome their own pecking order existentialist hubris to become all they need to be then wonder why Washington and the Pentagon are not eager to send them into risky, direct action missions against "high value" targets that will likely be HEAVILY DEFENDED(?) and require AFV SHOCK ACTION to overcome them, vehicles they don't have.

PLAN A: NLSOF-TAFV capabilities

Supply M113A3/4 Gavin tracked AFVs to current Army Special Forces Groups to use in lieu of their HMMWV wheeled trucks for DA missions. Create a 18H MOS skill specialty of SF Heavy/Light Vehicle Sergeant.

PLAN B: AMS LOGOPS

Put the 173rd Airbone BDE's IRF-M (Airborne) from the 1st Infantry Division (Big Red One) personnel and M113A3 Gavins on parachute jump status. Ditto that for the IRC taken from the 3rd Infantry Division that supports the 82nd Airborne Division. No longer restricted to airland delivery of TAFVs, the IRF-M (A) and IRC (A)---fully "Air-Mech-Strike" (AMS) capable could then parachute force-entry simultaneously with their Paratroopers to provide vital shock action, fire support and armored mobility/maneuver.

Its also conceivable that if SOF is unwilling to employ the NLSOF-TAFV concept that the Airborne's defacto AMS Forces available to the 173rd and 82nd Airbornes could be sent deep into enemy territory as the modern equivalent of the still thriving "LGOPS" ethos; Little Groups Of Paratroopers operating as maneuver groups bringing destruction wherever they go. The pros are the Airborne already is half-way there to AMS capabilities with M113A3 Gavins; the IRF-M has combat experience, the cons are these folks are still constrained by being part of the unimaginative, stay-in-your-lane conventional Army and may not be bold and independant of spirit enough to be used as small AMS LGOPS to work alongside SOF to strike multiple sub-national enemy targets at the same time. Also, their M113A3 Gavins are still noisy and would need to be upgraded to HE drive M113A4 configuration to effect a covert operational maneuver while deep in enemy territory.

AFGHANISTAN:

Washington Times writers, Bill Gertz and Rowan Scarborough write in their "Inside the Ring: Notes from the Pentagon" column about recent Afghanistan U.S. Army "Green Beret" lessons learned:

Some [U.S.] Army Special Forces Soldiers (the Green Berets) are saying that while their mission in Afghanistan has gone extremely well, some "lessons learned" must be addressed for future unconventional warfare.

But Soldiers say the operations revealed flaws. There is not enough training in direct fire. They also lack vehicles to move around in harsh terrain, such as Afghanistan's mountains and deserts.

We obtained one Green Beret's lessons-learned list:

[Special Operations Command] "stopped developing SOF-unique [unmanned aerial vehicles] a couple of years ago as a policy decision, a shortsighted and bad decision." Such a spy system, the Soldier said, would help Green Beret "A teams" of 12 troops see the enemy first and direct fire.

Green Berets need a special inventory of vehicles from which to draw depending on the terrain.

"Our guys need to be able to move," the Green Beret said. "Need pre-stocked 'tool kit' of ground transportation in every theater, and at home station for training, for the Kosovos, the Afghanistans, the whatever. Mix of Humvee platforms, Toyota 4-by-4s, whatever, with configurable armor, weapons, sensors, must be available fast. Cannot tell you how much mobility has become critical factor. Also need air transport independent of multi-million-dollar helos and fixed-wing."

The Vehicle

Unprotected U.S. Army SOF Soldiers have been killed by errant B-52 strikes improperly rendering Close Air Support (CAS) and enemy small-arms fire. While its true that USAF A-10s can fly in close proximity and with direct coordination with SOF units on the ground to get accurate CAS without fratricide, Senior USAF leaders hate the A-10 and play their "favorites" in a war to later brag on them to Congress to get increased budgets. So AFSOC or Army SF Aviation (160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment-160th SOAR) should own some A-10s to insure CAS, but don't hold your breath. What Army SOF needs is a "ground spectre" gun platform for on-the-spot firepower and to transport them under armor protection, with maximum ground mobility and stealth---that can be delivered by round and ram-air parachutes and helicopters.

A M113A3 width-reduced, could roll-on/off 160th SOAR MH-47E Chinook helicopters and be paradropped and airlanded by AFSOC MC-130 Combat Talons. The "Mini-Gavin" would be propelled by stealthy hybrid-electric drive (HE) and quiet, vibration-less band-tracks for maximum unpredictable, cross-country and amphibious movement.

An option would be to build the entire body of ceramic composites to make it less visible to ground surveillance radars. In the 1980s, FMC built two M113s and two M2s Bradleys. The ceramic could defeat .50 caliber rounds at 50 feet while weighing that same as the aluminum armored hull which can as-is defeat (7.62mm x 51mm AP) .30 caliber.

The HE drive large reserve battery capacity would power electro-optical sensors and laser target designators for long duration surveillance "eyes-on-target". The Mini-Gavin would be covered in thermal camouflage to be both optically and infared-sensor invisible. Armament packages would range from Javelin fire/forget ATGMs to hunt/kill SCUD-type ballistic missiles from long ranges deep behind enemy lines, to ASP-30mm autocannon and 7.62mm Gatling mini-guns, 106mm recoilless rifles to blast heavily defended enemy targets. Some Mini-Gavins could have 120mm mortars with 7 kilometer plus ranges, over-the-horizon targeting provided by quiet Pointer electric, hand-launch UAVs providing infared day/night TV imagery. Guided 120mm mortar bombs are also available to take out key targets with fewer rounds of ammunition.

Having Mini-Gavins organic to the SF A-Team insures tracked armored vehicles to bust through possible enemy fire, obstacles will not be denied special operations during direct action missions against high-value, defended targets like what ruined the Ranger/Delta helicopter air assault operation to catch Somali warlords in 1993 ("Blackhawk Down!").

The Course

Proxy forces advised by Army SOF that use tracked armored fighting vehicles like the Afghan Northern Alliance need the best mounted warfare (tracked, wheeled vehicles, horses, mules, bikes, carts) advice possible; SOF must create a Mounted Operations Course to teach and pass on these skills to its Soldiers to effect Coalition and/or Unconventional Warfare.

The Military Skill Identifier

Graduates of the Mounted Operations Course would maintain and operate the various ground vehicle force packages as needed in training and real-world missions. Those with 18A, 180A, B, C, D, E and F MOSes would receive an Additional Skill Identifier (ASI). But what is crucial is that a new SF Military Occupational Specialty (MOS) "Special Forces Mounted Operations Sergeant" 18H be created to expand the A-Team to include a Subject Matter Expert (SME) who would be responsible for mounted operations of the team.

The Stealth Transport Aircraft

Lastly, there is much expressed Army SF dissatisfaction with the availability of complex rotary and fixed-wing aircraft provided by separate units subject to politics if they deploy or not (playing political favorites again). At one time, Army SOF had an air component with robust UV-18 TwinOtter STOL fixed-wing, twin-turboprop engined aircraft. A Twin Otter can be armed and drop Paratroopers. A Twin Otter was flown into Desert One in Iran to mark the landing strip with infared lights for the larger USAF C-130s to later land on. The existing C-12 turboprop transport plane could be modified to be an attack/STOL transport for SOF. Its reasonable to assume a creative designer like Burt Rutan could create a stealthy extremely short take-off and landing aircraft with long ranges using the Burnelli MCBY-100 fuselage aerofoil design that can deliver a SOF half an A-Team and their mini-Gavin to anyplace in the world. Legendary X-1 pilot and Burnelli design advocate Chalmers Goodlin was recently on CNN's Lou Dobb's Moneyline TV program detailing the need for crash-worthy aircraft. For the SOF mini-Gavin mission, we'd change the MCBY-100's turboprops to turbofans mounted over the wings to get 400+ mph speeds and exploit the Coanda effect to get extremely short take-offs and landings like used on the YC-14 and Russian AN-72 and AN-74 STOL transports. The civilian airliner Burnelli design with this arrangement is called the GB-108. Replacing vulnerable and high ground pressure air-filled rubber tires with Tracked landing gear would allow landings on grassy fields and rural areas--a near V/TOL capability that General Gavin advocated in his book, Airborne Warfare. The MCBY-100 as a STOL transport could airdrop or short field airland with tracked landing gear an Army mini or full-sized M113A3 Hybrid-Electric "stealth" armored vehicle and a 12-man Special Forces "A" team. Also, Army Aviation has suffered when it lost the CV-2 Caribou which though a superb conventional STOL design of course is inferior to the MCBY-100.. The USAF demanded they be given the Army's Caribous and flew them for a short time into Vietnam's short base camp runways, but as soon as no one was looking, retired the Caribous!, leaving the Army without a fixed-wing transport aircraft to supply its forward bases!

A "stealthy"...."MCBY-2000" made of non-metallics could be the ideal way for Army SF to self-insert/extract much faster than their 100 mph helicopters at greater ranges and without the unsafe hazards of the V-22 abomination...The Burnelli design is fully crash-resistant, an important design criteria for a combat aircraft and tragically, a non-existant priority in civilian air travel where profits matter more than human lives which has resulted in thousands of needless deaths.

A less visionary approach would be to use a CASA 212 or C-27 twin-engined STOL aircraft could be upgraded to meet SOF needs to air-deliver them and their Mini-Gavins. Flying these small, austere stealth transport aircraft would be a 160th SOAR pilot/co-pilot bearing the new SF MOS of 18J. The now 15-man A-Team can self-deploy itself anywhere in the world by either air or ground organic vehicles. Another 18J task would be the operation of UAVs when on the ground and not conducting air operations with their stealth transport aircraft.

Another Airborne/Special Operations application would to form a separate transportation M113A3 Gavin Battalion that would be tasked to high-altitude stand-off, precision parachute themselves and their vehicles from above 15,000 feet and most enemy air defenses; a defacto return of the "stealthy" ASSAULT GLIDER. The stand-off airdrop of armored vehicles is the creation of creative RAND researcher Peter Wilson.

TECHNOTACTICAL

U.S. ARMY'S 3rd INFANTRY DIVISION (MECHANIZED): Soldiers in TRACKS BEATS marines in trucks to Baghdad; triumph of 4GW ground maneuver over Tofflerian RMA mental firepower hubris

This is the story of the tracked, mechanized "Thunder Run" into Baghdad that collapsed the Iraqi resistance. It looks like the "Thunder Run" will replace the Battle of 73 Easting as the most studied ground engagement in U.S. History.

Los Angeles Times Magazine
December 7, 2003

The Thunder Run

'Are you kidding, sir?': Fewer than 1,000 Soldiers were ordered to capture a city of 5 million Iraqis. Theirs is a story that may become military legend.

By David Zucchino

Nine hundred and seventy-five men invading a city of 5 million sounded audacious, or worse, to the U.S. troops assigned the mission outside Baghdad last April 6. Ten years earlier, in Mogadishu, outnumbered American Soldiers had been trapped and killed by Somali street fighters. Now some U.S. commanders, convinced the odds were far better in Iraq, scrapped the original plan for taking Baghdad with a steady siege and instead ordered a single bold thrust into the city. The battle that followed became the climax of the war and rewrote American military doctrine on urban warfare.

Back home, Americans learned of the victory in sketchy reports that focused on the outcome-a column of armored vehicles had raced into the city and seized Saddam Hussein's palaces and ministries. What the public didn't know was how close the U.S. forces came to experiencing another Mogadishu. Military units were surrounded, waging desperate fights at three critical interchanges. If any of those fell, the Americans would have been cut off from critical supplies and ammunition.

Embedded journalists reported the battle's broad outlines in April, but a more detailed account has since emerged in interviews with more than 70 of the brigade's officers and men who described the fiercest battle of the war-and one they nearly lost.

Times staff writer David Zucchino, who was embedded with Task Force 4-64 of the 2nd Brigade, 3rd Infantry Division (Mechanized), returned to the United States recently to report this story.

On the afternoon of April 4, Army Lt. Col. Eric Schwartz was summoned to a command tent pitched in a dusty field 11 miles south of Baghdad. His brigade commander, Col. David Perkins, looked up from a map and told Schwartz he had a mission for him.

"At first light tomorrow," Perkins said, "I want you to attack into Baghdad."

Schwartz felt disoriented. He had just spent several hours in a tank, leading his armored battalion on an operation that had destroyed dozens of Iraqi tanks and armored vehicles 20 miles south. A hot shard of exploding tank had burned a hole in his shoulder.

"Are you kidding, sir?" Schwartz asked, as he waited for the other officers inside the tent to laugh.

There was silence.

"No," Perkins said. "I need you to do this."

Schwartz was stunned. No American troops had yet set foot inside the capital. The original U.S. battle plan called for Airborne Soldiers, not tanks, to take the city. The tankers had trained for desert warfare, not urban combat. But now Perkins, commander of the 2nd Brigade of the 3rd Infantry Division (Mechanized), was ordering Schwartz's tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles on a charge into the unknown.

Schwartz's "thunder run" into the city the next morning was a prelude to the fall of Baghdad. It triggered a grinding three-day battle, the bloodiest of the war-and dismissed any public perception of a one-sided slaughter of a passive enemy. Entire Iraqi army units threw down their weapons and fled, but thousands of Iraqi militiamen and Arab guerrillas fought from bunkers and rooftops with grenades, rockets and mortars.

The 2nd Brigade's ultimate seizure of Baghdad has few modern parallels. It was a calculated gamble that will be taught at military academies and training exercises for years to come. It changed the way the military thinks about fighting with tanks in a city. It brought the conflict in Iraq to a decisive climax and shortened the initial combat of the war, perhaps by several weeks.

But when Eric Schwartz got the mission that would prime the battlefield for the decisive strike on Baghdad, he had no idea what he had taken on. Task Force 1-64, a battalion nicknamed Rogue, rumbled north on Highway 8 toward Baghdad. The column seemed to stretch to the shimmering horizon-30 Abrams tanks and 14 Bradleys, their squat tan forms bathed in pale yellow light. It was dawn on April 5, a bright, hot Saturday.

Schwartz's battalion had been ordered to sprint through 10 1/2 miles of uncharted territory. The column was to conduct "armored reconnaissance," to blow through enemy defenses, testing strengths and tactics. It was to slice through Baghdad's southwestern corner and link up at the airport with the division's 1st Brigade, which had seized the facility the day before.

In the lead tank was 1st Lt. Robert Ball, a slender, soft-spoken North Carolinian. Just 25, Ball had never been in combat until two weeks earlier. He was selected to lead the column not because he had a particularly refined sense of direction but because his tank had a plow. Commanders were expecting obstacles in the highway.

The battalion had been given only a few hours to prepare. Ball studied his military map, but it had no civilian markings-no exit numbers, no neighborhoods. He was worried about missing his exit to the airport at what fellow officers called the "spaghetti junction," a maze of twisting overpasses and offramps on Baghdad's western cusp.

Ball's map was clipped to the top of his tank hatch as the column lumbered up Highway 8. He had been rolling only about 10 minutes when his gunner spotted a dozen Iraqi soldiers leaning against a building several hundred yards away, chatting, drinking tea, their weapons propped against the wall. They had not yet heard the rumble of the approaching tanks.

"Sir, can I shoot at these guys?" the gunner asked.

"Uh, yeah, they're enemy," Ball told him.

Ball had fired at Soldiers in southern Iraq, but they had been murky green figures targeted with the tank's thermal imagery system. These Soldiers were in living color. Through the tank's sights, Ball could see their eyes, their mustaches, their steaming cups of tea.

The gunner mowed them down methodically, left to right. As each man fell, Ball could see shock cross the face of the next man before he, too, pitched violently to the ground. The last man fled around the corner of the building. But then, inexplicably, he ran back into the open. The gunner dropped him.

The clattering of the tank's rapid-fire medium machine gun seemed to awaken fighters posted along the highway. Gunfire erupted from both sides-AK-47 automatic rifles and rocket-propelled grenades, or RPGs, followed minutes later by recoilless rifles and antiaircraft guns.

Iraqi Soldiers and militiamen were firing from a network of trenches and bunkers carved into the highway's shoulders, and from rooftops and alleyways. Some were inside cargo containers buried in the dirt. Others were tucked beneath the overpasses or firing down from bridges.

In the southbound lanes, civilian cars were cruising past, their occupants staring wide-eyed at the fireballs erupting from the tank's main guns and the bright tracer flashes from the rapid-fire medium and .50-caliber machine guns. From onramps and access roads, other cars packed with Iraqi gunmen were attacking. Mixed in were troop trucks, armored personnel carriers, taxis and motorcycles with sidecars.

The crews were under strict orders to identify targets as military before firing. They were to fire warning shots, then shoot into engine blocks if a vehicle continued to approach. Some cars screeched to a halt. Others kept coming, and the gunners ripped into them. The crews could see soldiers or armed civilians in some of the smoking hulks. In others, they weren't sure. Nobody knew how many civilians had been killed. They knew only that any vehicle that kept coming was violently eliminated.

As the column lurched forward, buses and trucks unloaded Iraqi fighters.

Some were in uniform, some in jeans and sports shirts. Others wore the baggy black robes of the Fedayeen Saddam, Hussein's loyal militiamen. To the Americans, they seemed to have no training, no discipline, no coordinated tactics. It was all point and shoot. The machine guns sent chunks of their bodies onto the roadside.

The Americans were suffering casualties, too. A Bradley was hit by an RPG and disabled. The driver panicked and leaped out, breaking his leg. A Bradley commander stopped and dragged the driver to safety.

[EDITOR: BFV applique' armor needs greater stand-off separation from the hull; at least 24 inches and/or Explosive Reactive Armor (ERA) tiles need to be fitted before we go to war. The BFV is too tall and you can get injured jumping out from it. The BFV needs a smaller 1-man turret to get a full 9-man infantry dismount squad inside, and to break out of the BFV mech-infantry disease that the troops in back cannot fight heads-out from the top troop hatch as the 2-man senior NCO "tureet mafia" tries to fight the BFV as a wannabe-machine gun tank.]

At a highway cloverleaf, a tank was hit in its rear engine housing and burst into flames. The column stopped as the crew tried desperately to put out the fire. But the flames, fed by leaking fuel, spread.

The entire column was now exposed and taking heavy fire. Two suicide vehicles packed with explosives sped down the offramps. They were destroyed by tank cannons. After nearly 30 minutes of fighting, Perkins ordered the tank abandoned. To keep the tank out of Iraqi hands, the crew destroyed it with incendiary grenades.

By now the resistance was organizing. Fighters who appeared to be dead or wounded were suddenly leaping up and firing at the backs of American vehicles. Schwartz ordered his gunners to "double tap," to shoot anybody they saw moving near a weapon. "If it was a confirmed kill, they'd let it go," Schwartz said later. "If it wasn't, they'd tap it again. We were checking our work."

At the head of the column, Ball was approaching the spaghetti junction. His map showed the exit splitting into two ramps. He knew he wanted the ramp to the right. He had been following blue English "Airport" signs, but now smoke from a burning Iraqi personnel carrier obscured the entire cloverleaf.

In the web of overpasses, Ball found the ramp he wanted and stayed right. He was halfway down when he realized he should have taken a different one. Now he was heading east into downtown Baghdad, the opposite direction from the airport. The entire column was following him.

He told his driver to turn left, then roll over the guardrail and turn back onto the westbound lanes. The rail crumbled, the column followed, and everyone rumbled back toward the airport.

Behind Ball, a tank commanded by Lt. Roger Gruneisen had fallen behind. Some equipment from the crippled tank had been dumped onto the top of Gruneisen's tank, obstructing his view from the hatch. With the emergency addition of Staff Sgt. Jason Diaz, commander of the burning tank, and Diaz's gunner, Gruneisen now had five men squeezed into a tank designed for four.

The gunner had swung the main gun right to fire on a bunker. In the loader's hatch, Sgt. Carlos Hernandez saw that the gun tube was headed for a concrete bridge abutment. He screamed, "Traverse left!" But they were moving rapidly. The gun tube smacked the abutment. The entire turret spun like a top. Inside, the crewmen were pinned against the walls, struggling to hold on as the turret turned wildly two dozen times before stopping. It was like an out-of-control carnival ride.

The crew was dizzy. Hernandez looked at the gunner. Blood was spurting from his nose. His head and chest were soaked with greenish-yellow hydraulic fluid. The impact had severed a hydraulic line. Except for the gunner's bloody nose, no one was hurt.

The main gun was bent and smashed. It flopped to the side, useless. The tank continued up Highway 8, Gruneisen on the .50-caliber and Hernandez on a medium machine gun. They rolled up to the spaghetti junction into a curtain of black smoke-and missed the airport turn. They were headed into the city center.

Hernandez saw that they were approaching a traffic circle. As they drew closer, he saw that the circle was clogged with Iraqi military trucks and Soldiers. It was a staging area for troops attacking the American column.

From around the circle, just a block away, a yellow pickup truck sped toward the tank. Hernandez tore into it with the machine gun, killing the driver. The tank driver slammed on the brake to avoid the truck, but it was crushed beneath the treads. The impact sent Hernandez's machine gun tumbling off the back of the tank.

The tank reversed to clear itself from the wreckage, crushing the machine gun. A passenger from the truck wandered into the roadway. The tank pitched forward, trying to escape the circle, and crushed him.

The crew was now left with just one medium machine gun and the .50-caliber. Firing both guns to clear the way, the crewmen helped direct the tank driver out of the circle. As they pulled away, they could see a blue "Airport" sign. They were less than five miles from the airport.

They caught up with the column. They passed groves of date palm trees and thick underbrush, and everyone worried about another ambush.

In the lead platoon, Staff Sgt. Stevon Booker was leaning out of his tank commander's hatch, firing his M-4 carbine because his .50-caliber machine gun had jammed. Enemy fire was so intense that Booker had ordered his loader, Pvt. Joseph Gilliam, to get down in the hatch. As Booker leaned down, he told Gilliam: "I don't want to die in this country." As he resumed firing, he shouted down to Gilliam and the gunner, Sgt. David Gibbons: "I'm a baad mother!"

Gilliam, 21, and Gibbons, 22, idolized Booker, who, at 34, was experienced and decisive. He was a loud, aggressive, extroverted lifer. His booming voice was the first thing his men heard in the morning and the last thing at night.

As Gibbons, in the gunner's perch at Booker's feet inside the turret, fired rounds, he felt Booker drop down behind him. He assumed he had come down to get more ammunition. But then he heard the loader, Gilliam, scream and curse. He looked back at Booker and saw that half his jaw was missing. He had been hit by a machine-gun round.

[EDITOR: WHERE ARE THE VEHICLE GUNSHIELDS?

At the very least Soldiers should have clear ballistic faceshields on their helmets. I'm not sure the CVC helmet can hang a Paulsen clear ballistic riot control shield or not?]

The turret was splattered with blood. As Gibbons crawled up in the commander's hatch, he saw that Booker was trying to breathe. He radioed for help and was ordered to stop and wait for medics. Gibbons and Gilliam tried to perform "buddy aid" to stop the bleeding.

The medics arrived and, under fire, lifted Booker's body into the medical vehicle. The driver sped toward a medevac helicopter at the airport, just as the physician's assistant radioed that Booker was gone. The assistant covered the sergeant's bloodied face and, not knowing what else to do, held his hand. Booker's body arrived just ahead of the rest of the column, which rolled onto the tarmac in a hail of gunfire. Some of the [M1 Abrams] tanks and Bradleys were on fire and leaking oil, but they had survived the gantlet.

At the airport that morning, Col. Perkins spoke on the tarmac with his superior, Maj. Gen. Buford C. Blount III, the 3rd Infantry Division commander. Rogue battalion had lost a tank commander and tank, but they had killed almost 1,000 fighters and torn a hole in Baghdad's defenses.

Blount wanted to keep the pressure on Saddam's forces. He had seen intelligence suggesting that Saddam's elite Republican Guard units were being sent into Baghdad to reinforce the capital. But, in truth, he really didn't have good intelligence. It was too dangerous to send in scouts. Satellite imagery didn't show bunkers or camouflaged armor and artillery. Blount had access to only one unmanned spy drone, and its cameras weren't providing much either.

Prisoners of war had told U.S. interrogators that the Iraqi military was expecting American tanks to surround the city while infantry from the 82nd Airborne and 101st Airborne cleared the capital. And that was the U.S. plan-at least until the "thunder run" that morning altered the equation.

Blount told Perkins to go back into the city in two days, on Monday the 7th. Blount wanted him to test the city's defenses, destroy as many Iraqi forces as possible and then come out to prepare for the siege of the capital.

Perkins was eager to go back in, but not for another thunder run. He wanted to stay. He had just heard Mohammed Said Sahaf, the bombastic information minister, deliver a taunting news conference, claiming that no American forces had entered Baghdad and that Iraqi troops had slaughtered hundreds of American "scoundrels" at the airport.

When Perkins got back to the brigade operations center south of the city, he told his executive officer, Lt. Col. Eric Wesley: "This just changed from a tactical war to an information war. We need to go in and stay."

The brigade was exhausted. It had been on the move day and night, rolling up from Kuwait and fighting Fedayeen and Republican Guard units-sprinting 435 miles in just over two weeks, the fastest overland march in U.S. military history. Their [M1 Abrams] tanks and Bradleys [M113 Gavins] were beat up. The crews had not slept in days. Now they had just one day to prepare for the pivotal battle of the war.

The charge up Highway 8 on April 7 was similar to the sprint by Rogue Battalion two days earlier. Fedayeen and Arab volunteers and Republican Guards fired from roadside bunkers and from windows and alleys on both sides of the highway. Suicide vehicles tried to ram the column.

Gunners pounded everything that moved, radioing back to trailing vehicles to kill off what they missed. It took only two hours to blow through the spaghetti junction and speed east to Saddam's palace complex. Schwartz's lead battalion, Rogue, rolled to Saddam's parade field, with its massive crossed sabers and tomb of the unknown Soldier. Rogue also seized one of Saddam's two main downtown palaces, the convention center and the Rashid Hotel, home to the Baath Party elite.

Lt. Col. Philip deCamp's Task Force 4-64, the Tusker battalion, swung to the east and raced for Saddam's hulking Republican Palace and the 14th of July Bridge, which controlled access to the palace complex from the south.

The targets had been selected not only for their strategic value, but also because they were in open terrain. The palace complex consisted of broad boulevards, gardens and parks-and few tall buildings or narrow alleyways. The battalions could set up defensive positions, with open fields of fire.

The Tusker battalion destroyed bunkers at the western arch of the Republican Palace grounds, blew apart two recoilless rifles teams guarding the arch and smashed through a metal gate. The palace had been evacuated, but there were Soldiers in a tree line and along the Tigris River bank. The infantrymen killed some, and others fled, stripping off their uniforms.

At a traffic circle at the base of the 14th of July Bridge, Capt. Steve Barry's Cyclone Company fought off cars and trucks that streaked across the bridge, some packed with explosives. There were three in the first 10 minutes, six more right after that. The tanks and Bradleys destroyed them all.

By midmorning, Perkins was meeting with his two battalion commanders on Saddam's parade grounds. They gave live interviews to an embedded Fox TV crew. Lt. Col. DeCamp and one of his company commanders, Capt. Chris Carter-both University of Georgia graduates-unfurled a Georgia Bulldogs flag. Capt. Jason Conroy toppled a massive Saddam statue with a single tank round.

As his tankers celebrated, Perkins took a satellite phone call from Wesley, his executive officer. Wesley ran the brigade's tactical operations center, a network of radios, computers, satellite maps and communications vehicles set up on the cement courtyard of an abandoned warehouse 11 miles south of the city center.

It was hard for Wesley to hear on his hand-held Iridium phone; a high-pitched whine sounded over his head. He thought it was a low-flying airplane.

Wesley shouted into the phone: "Congratulations, sir, I-" and at that instant an orange fireball blew past him and slammed him to the ground. The whine wasn't an airplane. It was a missile. The entire operations center was engulfed in flames. Wesley still had the phone. "Sir," he said. "We've been hammered!"

"What?"

"We've been hit. I'll have to call you back. It doesn't look good."

Rows of signal vehicles were on fire and exploding. A line of parked Humvees evaporated, consumed in a brilliant flash. Men were writhing on the ground, their skin seared. A driver and a mechanic were swallowed by the fireball, killed instantly. Another driver, horribly burned, lay dying. Two embedded reporters perished on the concrete, their corpses scorched to gray ash. Seventeen Soldiers were wounded, some seriously.

The brigade's nerve center, its communications brain, was gone. The entire mission-the brigade's audacious plan to conquer a city of 5 million with 975 combat Soldiers and 88 armored vehicles in a single violent strike-was in jeopardy.

It got worse. As Wesley and his officers tended to the dead and wounded, Perkins was receiving distressing reports from Lt. Col. Stephen Twitty, a battalion commander charged with keeping the brigade's supply lines open along Highway 8. One of Twitty's companies was surrounded. It was "amber" on fuel and ammunition-a level dangerously close to "black," the point at which there is not enough to sustain a fight.

[EDITOR: why M1s need diesel engines not turbine engines]

The Baghdad raid, launched at dawn, was now approaching its sixth hour-well past the Hour Four deadline Perkins had set to decide whether to stay for the night. That benchmark was critical because his tanks, which consume 56 gallons of fuel an hour, had eight to 10 hours of fuel. That meant four hours going in and four coming out.

To conserve fuel, Perkins ordered the tanks set up in defensive positions and shut down. They couldn't maneuver, but they could still fire-and each hour they were turned off bought Perkins another hour. Even so, time was running out for Twitty, whose outnumbered companies were clinging to three crucial interchanges.

"Sir, there's one hell of a fight here," Twitty told Perkins. "I'll be honest with you: I don't know how long I can hold it here."

Even after Twitty received reinforcements, tying up the brigade's only reserve force, his men had to be resupplied. But the resupply convoy was ambushed on Highway 8; two sergeants were killed and five fuel and ammunition trucks were destroyed. The highway was a shooting gallery. If Perkins lost the roadway, he and his men would be trapped in the city without fuel or ammunition.

American combat commanders are trained to develop a "decision support matrix," an analytical breakdown of alternatives based on a rapidly unfolding chain of circumstances. For Perkins, the matrix was telling him: cut your losses, pull back, return another day. His command center was in flames. He had spent his reserve force. And now his fuel and ammunition were burning on the highway.

On the parade grounds, Perkins stood next to his [M113 Gavin] armored personnel carrier, map in hand, flanked by his two tank battalion commanders. The air was heavy with swirling sand and grit. Black plumes of oily smoke rose from burning vehicles and bunkers.

Perkins knew the prudent move was to pull out, but he felt compelled to stay. His men had fought furiously to reach the palace complex. It seemed obscene to make them fight their way back out, and to surrender terrain infused with incalculable psychological and strategic value.

Sahaf, the delusional information minister, was already claiming that no American "infidels" had breached the city's defenses. Perkins had just heard Sahaf's distinctive rant on BBC radio: "The infidels are committing suicide by the hundreds on the gates of Baghdad." A retreat now, Perkins thought, would validate the minister's lies. It would unravel the brigade's singular achievement, which had put American soldiers inside Saddam's two main palaces and American boots on his reviewing stand.

Perkins turned to his tank battalion commanders. "We're staying."

Lt. Col. Stephen Twitty is right-handed, but early that morning he found himself drawing diagrams with his left hand. He was crouched in a Bradley hatch, holding a radio with his right hand while he tried to diagram an emergency battle plan.

Over the radio net, Twitty had heard the tank battalions in the city celebrating and discussing the wine collections at Saddam's palaces. He was only a few miles away, at a Highway 8 interchange code-named Objective Larry, but he was in the fight of his life. Twitty had survived the first Gulf War, but he had never encountered anything like this.

His men were being pounded from all directions-by small arms, mortars, RPGs, gun trucks, recoilless rifles. The two tank battalions had punched through Highway 8, but now the enemy had regrouped and was mounting a relentless counterattack against Twitty's mechanized infantry battalion.

As he scratched out his battle plan, Twitty spotted an orange-and-white taxi speeding toward his Bradley. A man in the back seat was firing an AK-47. He realized how absurd he sounded. So he shouted at his Bradley gunner: "Slew the turret and fire!" The gunner spotted the taxi and fired a blast of 25mm rounds. The taxi blew up. It had been loaded with explosives.

Twitty's China battalion, Task Force 3-15, would destroy dozens of vehicles that day, many of them packed with explosives. They would blow up buses and motorcycles and pickup trucks. They would kill hundreds of fighters, as well as civilians who inadvertently blundered into the fight. Twitty ordered his engineers to tear down highway signs and light poles and pile up charred vehicles to build protective berms. But several suicide cars crashed through, and Twitty's men kept killing them. Twitty was astonished. He hadn't expected much resistance, but the Syrians and Fedayeen were relentless, fanatical, determined to die.

Twitty saw a busload of Soldiers pull straight into the kill zone. A tank round obliterated the vehicle-burning alive everyone inside. The driver of a second busload saw the carnage, yet kept coming. The tanks lit up his bus, too.

From Objective Moe, about two miles north, and from Objective Curly, about two miles south, Twitty received urgent calls requesting mortar and artillery fire-"danger close," or within 220 yards of their own positions. Mortars and artillery screamed down, driving the Syrians and Fedayeen back. But at Curly, a stray round wounded two American infantrymen, and the artillery was shut down there.

At Curly, Capt. Zan Hornbuckle had enemy fighters inside his perimeter. He sent infantrymen to clear the ramps and overpasses. It was dangerous, methodical work. The infantrymen crept up behind a series of support walls, tossed grenades into trenches, then gunned down the fighters inside as they rose to return fire.

The Americans were killing fighters by the dozens, but the infantrymen were getting hit, too. Their flak vests protected vital organs, but several men were dragged back with bright red shrapnel wounds ripped into their arms, legs and necks.

Dr. Erik Schobitz, the battalion surgeon, treated the wounded. Capt. Schobitz was a pediatrician with no combat experience. He had never fired an automatic rifle until a month earlier. Schobitz wore a stethoscope with a yellow plastic rabbit attached-his lucky stethoscope. It was hanging there when a sliver of shrapnel hit his face, wounding him slightly.

With Schobitz was Capt. Steve Hommel, the battalion chaplain. He moved from one wounded man to the next, talking softly, squeezing their hands. Hommel had been a combat infantry sergeant in the first Gulf War, but even he was alarmed. He feared being overrun-there were hundreds of enemy fighters bearing down on just 80 combat Soldiers, who were backed by Bradleys but no tanks. Hommel tried to appear calm while comforting the wounded.

Enemy fighters were firing on the medics, and some of them fired back. The chaplain grabbed one medic's M-16 and shot at muzzle flashes east of the highway. Hommel didn't know whether he hit anyone, and he didn't want to know. He was a Baptist minister.

Several miles north, at Objective Moe, Capt. Josh Wright was struggling to keep his perimeter intact. Two of Wright's three platoon sergeants were wounded, and two engineers went down with shrapnel wounds. A gunner was hit with a ricochet. An infantryman dragging a wounded enemy soldier to safety was hit in the wrist and stomach. One Bradley's TOW missile launcher was destroyed. Another Bradley had a machine gun go down. One of the tanks lost use of its main gun.

Wright radioed Twitty and asked for permission to fire on a mosque to the north. Through his sights, he could see an RPG team in each minaret and another on the mosque roof. Under the rules of engagement, the mosque was now a hostile, nonprotected site. Twitty granted permission to fire. All three RPG teams were killed, leaving smoking black holes in the minarets.

By now, Wright had managed to get infantrymen and snipers into buildings north of the interchange. They were able to kill advancing fighters while mortar rounds ripped into Soldiers hiding in the palm grove.

Then the mortars stopped. The platoon mortar leader at Objective Curly radioed Wright and apologized profusely. He was "black"-completely out of mortar rounds. He couldn't fire again until the resupply convoy was sent north.

Wright's own men were now telling him they were "amber" on all types of ammunition. Wright wasn't certain how much longer he could hold the interchange.

At Objective Curly, Hornbuckle tried to sound positive on the radio but Twitty could hear the stress in his voice. He asked the captain to put on the battalion command sergeant major, Robert Gallagher. A leathery-faced

Army Ranger of 40, Gallagher had survived the battle at Mogadishu, where he had been wounded three times. Twitty knew Gallagher would be blunt.

"All right, sergeant major, I want the truth," Twitty said. "Do you need reinforcements?"

"Sir, we need reinforcements," Gallagher said.

Twitty radioed Perkins and told him he could not hold Curly without reinforcements.

"If you need it, you've got it," Perkins assured him.

Twitty called Capt. Ronny Johnson, commander of the reserve company defending the operations center, which was still burning.

"How fast can you get here?" Twitty asked.

"Sir, I can be there in 15 minutes," Johnson said. It was only about two miles from the operations center to Curly.

"That's not fast enough. Get here now."

Johnson and his platoon raced north on Highway 8, fighting through a withering ambush. With 10 Bradleys and 65 infantrymen, the convoy bulked up the combat power at Curly. They plunged into the fight, stabilizing the perimeter.

At the burning operations center, executive officer Wesley was directing casualty evacuation and trying to build a makeshift command center, combining computers and communications equipment that had escaped the fireball with gear salvaged from burning vehicles. Within an hour, they had fashioned a temporary communications network across the highway from the scorched ruins.

Back in radio communication, Wesley resumed helping Perkins direct the battles. He offered to send the rest of Johnson's company to Curly to solidify the interchange. That left the stripped-down operations center virtually unprotected.

At Objective Larry, Twitty's men were beginning to run low on ammunition. He could hear his gunner screaming, "More ammo! Get us more ammo!"

Twitty had to get the supply convoy to the interchanges, a dangerous endeavor. The fuel tankers were 2,500-gallon bombs on wheels. The ammunition trucks were portable fireworks factories. In military argot, they were the ultimate "soft-skin" vehicles. Worse, there were no tanks or Bradleys to escort them; they were all fighting in the city or at the three interchanges.

Twitty called Johnson at Curly and asked for an assessment.

"Sir," Johnson said, "what I can tell you is, it's not as intense a fight as it was an hour ago but we're still in a pretty good fight here."

Twitty asked to hear from Gallagher. "Boss," Gallagher said, "I'm not going to tell you we can get 'em through without risk, but we can get 'em through."

Twitty put the radio down and lowered his head. He had to make a decision. And whatever he decided, American Soldiers were going to die. He knew it. They would die at one of the interchanges, where they would be overrun if they weren't resupplied. Or they would die in the convoy.

He picked up the radio. "All right," he said. "We're going to execute."

Just north of the burning operations center, Capt. J.O. Bailey was in a command armored personnel carrier, leading the supply convoy-six fuel tankers and eight ammunition trucks. He felt vulnerable; he had no idea where he was going to park all his combustible vehicles in the middle of a firefight.

The convoy had gone less than a mile when Bailey spotted a mob of about 100 armed men across railroad tracks. He was on the radio, warning everyone, when the convoy was rocked by explosions.

Near the head of the convoy, Sgt. 1st Class John W. Marshall opened up with a grenade launcher in the turret of his soft-skin Humvee. Marshall was 50-one of the oldest men in the brigade-and had volunteered for Iraq. Marshall had just sent grenades crashing toward the gunmen when the top of the Humvee exploded. In the front seat, Spc. Kenneth Krofta was stunned by a flash of light. Black smoke was blowing through the Humvee. Krofta looked up into the turret. Marshall was gone. He had been blown out of the vehicle by a grenade blast. {GUNSHIELDS? WHY DOES A MECHANIZED INFANTRY DIVISION HAVE VULNERABLE HMMWV TRUCKS WHEN IT SHOULD BE FULLY MOBILE UNDER M!!# GAVIN ARMOR?]

The driver, PFC. Angel Cruz, stopped and got out, looking for Marshall. He saw gunmen approaching and squeezed off a burst from his rifle. Bullets ripped into the Humvee.

The radio squawked. Cruz was ordered to move out. Soldiers in another vehicle had seen Marshall's body. He was dead. The convoy was speeding up, trying to escape the kill zone. A week would pass before the battalion was able to retrieve Marshall's corpse.

As the convoy raced through the ambush, an RPG rocketed into a personnel carrier. Staff Sgt. Robert Stever, who had just fired more than 1,000 rounds from his .50-caliber machine gun, was blown back into the vehicle, killed instantly. [GUNSHIELDS?] Shrapnel tore into Chief Warrant Officer Angel Acevedo and Pfc. Jarred Metz, wounding both.

Metz was knocked from the driver's perch. His legs were numb and blood was seeping through his uniform. He dragged himself back into position and kept the vehicle moving. Acevedo was bleeding, too. Screaming instructions to Metz, he directed the vehicle back into the speeding column with Stever's body slumped inside.

Riddled with shrapnel, the convoy limped into the interchange at Curly-and directly into the firefight. Bailey was trying to move his convoy out of harm's way when something slammed into a fuel tanker. The vehicle exploded. Hunks of the tanker flew off, forming super-heated projectiles that tore into other vehicles. Three ammunition trucks and a second fuel tanker exploded. Ammunition started to cook off. Rounds screamed in all directions, ripping off chunks of concrete and slicing through vehicles. The trucks were engulfed in orange fireballs.

Mechanics and drivers sprinted for the vehicles that were intact. They cranked up the engines and drove them to safety beneath the overpass, managing to save five ammunition trucks and four fuel tankers-enough to resupply the combat teams at all three intersections.

Fuel and ammunition were unloaded under fire. The surviving vehicles headed north to Objective Larry, escorted by Bradleys, breaking through the firefight there and arriving safely.

Twitty felt overwhelming relief. He knew he could break the enemy now, and so could the combat team at Objective Curly. But he still had to resupply Capt. Wright at Objective Moe.

Capt. Johnson, whose Bradleys had escorted the convoy to resupply Twitty, headed north toward Moe. By radio, Johnson arranged with Wright to have Highway 8 cleared of obstacles so that the convoy could pull in, stop briefly and let the resupply vehicles designated for Wright peel off. Then Johnson's vehicles were to continue on, obeying a new order from Perkins to secure the mile-long stretch of highway between Objective Moe and Perkins' palace command post in the city center.

The convoy broke through the battle lines and stopped at the cloverleaf at Moe. But there had been a communication breakdown. The full convoy, including the supply vehicles, pulled away under heavy fire, leaving Wright's company still desperate for fuel and ammunition.

Wright's heart sank. He had been forced to tighten his perimeter to save fuel, giving up ground his men had just taken. Now he watched his fuel and ammo disappear up the highway. But the smaller perimeter also meant Wright could afford to send two tanks to a supply point a mile away that Johnson set up near the palace. There the tanks refueled as their crews stuffed the bustle racks with ammunition. A second pair of tanks followed a half-hour later, bringing back more fuel and ammunition. Wright's men were set for the night.

In the city center, the tank battalions led by Schwartz and DeCamp were holding their ground but still desperately low on fuel and ammunition. With the combat teams at all three interchanges able to hold their ground, two supply convoys were now sent up Highway 8 toward the city center. It was a high-speed race. Every vehicle was hit by fire, but the convoys rolled into the palace complex just before dusk, fuel and ammunition intact. Tankers at the 14th of July circle cheered, and there were high-fives and handshakes when the trucks set up an instant gas station and supply point next to the palace rose beds. Perkins was convinced now that Baghdad was his. He didn't need to control the whole city. He just needed the palace complex and a way to get fuel and ammunition in.

Now he had both.

"We had come in, created a lot of chaos, lots of violence and momentum all at once," Perkins said later. "We had speed and audacity. And now with the resupply, we were there for good and there was nothing the other side could do about it."

The next morning, Capt. Phil Wolford's Assassin tank company would repel a fierce counterattack at the Jumhuriya Bridge across the Tigris River. Rogue battalion would engage in running firefights throughout central Baghdad. At the three interchanges on Highway 8, Syrians and Fedayeen mounted more attacks for much of the day, bringing the China battalion's casualties to two dead and 30 wounded. But the American forces now fought from a position of strength. On the third day, April 9, Saddam Hussein's regime collapsed.

On the night of April 7, after a long day of sustained combat, there had been an extended lull at the palace complex and up and down Highway 8. The tankers and the infantrymen sensed a shift in momentum. Some dared to speak of going home soon, for they now believed the war was nearly over. There would be two more days of fierce fighting before Saddam Hussein's regime collapsed. But on the night of April 7, theirs would be a decisive victory, the last one in Iraq for a long time.

David Zucchino is a Times national correspondent based in Philadelphia.

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OBSERVATIONS:

1. AFV and Force Re-design

Two supply convoys were wiped out trying to bring fuel to overly hungry M1 heavy tanks. The M1 is a horrendous fuel hog with its 7 gallons-per-mile consumption rate. ASAP we need to re-engine 1500 hp turbine-engine M1s with disel piston 1500 europack engines to get 1 mpg fuel economy.

BFVs need a smaller 1-man turret and spaced armored skirts.

WHY ISN'T EVERYONE IN A MECHANIZED INFANTRY DIVISION IN AT LEAST A M113 GAVIN TRACK?

The non-linear battlefield does not offer safe "rear" areas for resupply trucks to waltz around. Everyone needs to be armored and able to fight, including resupply see Scott Miller's Dominant Logistics web site.

2. AFV self-reliance

AFVs need to employ Flex-Cell fuel bladders and fuel/ammo trailers to be able to sustain fights and go-to-ground.

3. Not Enough Infantry

10 tracks, 35 infantrymen? Where did they all go?

We must face the facts of "Bradley Disease". The 2-man turret smothers any dismounting infantry in the back who try to ride in anything but the buttoned-up, in the dark BFV back. Any self-respecting 11B flees from a BFV unit.

The solution is to remove the old technology 2-man BFV turrets and replace with a smaller 1-man autocannon turret operated by a TC not a squad leader or platoon leader, who incidentally command from the top troop hatch, and are able to lead their dismount maneuver elements.

4. Stealthy Hybrid-Electric drive M113A4 Gavins needed

Additionally, beaucoup Hybrid-Electric Drive M113A4 Gavins need to replace vulnerable HMMWV trucks in heavy division scout platoons so we can have a stealthy recon and raiding capability.

5. Hand-Launch UAV needed

At a critical time in the battle the 3rd ID had NO AIR COVER or air recon capability. Off-the-sheld hand-launch UAVs should be purchased IMMEDIATELY and supplied to the 3rd ID (M) before they redeploy back to Iraq again.

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MILITARY HUMOR 101

"Aim towards the Enemy." - Instruction printed on U.S. M72 LAAW Rocket Launcher

"When the pin is pulled, Mr. Grenade is not our friend." - U.S. Army

"Cluster bombing from B-52s is very, very accurate. The bombs are guaranteed to always hit the ground." - USAF Ammo Troop

"If the enemy is in range, so are you." - Infantry Journal

"A slipping gear could let your M203 grenade launcher fire when you least expect it. That would make you quite unpopular in what's left of your unit."

- Army's PS magazine of preventive maintenance.

"It is generally inadvisable to eject directly over the area you just bombed." - U.S. Air Force Manual

"Try to look unimportant; they may be low on ammo." - Infantry Journal

"Tracers work both ways." - U.S. Army Ordnance

"Five-second fuses only last three seconds." - Infantry Journal

"Bravery is being the only one who knows you're afraid." - Col. David Hackworth

"If your attack is going too well, you're probably walking into an ambush." - Infantry Journal

"No combat-ready unit has ever passed inspection." - Joe Gay

"Any ship can be a minesweeper ... once." - Anon

"Never tell the Platoon Sergeant you have nothing to do." - Unknown Army Recruit

"Don't draw fire; it irritates the people around you." - Your Buddies

(And lastly)

"If you see a bomb technician running, try to keep up with him." -- U.S. Army Ammo Troop

Professional Military Education Hot Link

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Since the occupation of Iraq has become an insurgency, Land Power Transformation suggests reading the U.S. Army's Field Manual:

FM 90-8 Counter-Insurgency Operations

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