On the cutting edge of the war on terrorism

Army, Oct 2003 by McKiernan, David D

Third U.S. Army:

The war on terror continues to place a significant burden on the U.S. military, and the Army is bearing the brunt of it. U.S. Central Command (USCENT-COM) in particular remains deeply engaged in shaping and prosecuting combat operations across its area of responsibility (AOR), a geographic region of significant ethnic and religious diversity and strife. The Army component to USCENTCOM is Headquarters, Third U.S. Army/Army Forces Central Command (ARGENT). Normally headquartered at Fort McPherson, Ga., the headquarters has seen little of Fort McPherson in the past year, displacing forward to Kuwait in September 2002 for the second time in less than 12 months as it transitioned to the Combined Forces Land Component Command (CFLCC), the joint and combined land headquarters responsible for planning and executing ground operations in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF).

The command, leveraging the talents and experiences of a staff battle-tested in Afghanistan during the execution of Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF), rapidly made the transition to organize, train, plan and execute joint and coalition campaign-level ground operations during OIF. The many successes of the command are a testament to the extraordinary dedication of a staff that was deployed for nearly 19 of the last 24 months, and a leadership team-officer and NCO alike-absolutely committed to building an organization that fully embraced jointness across every operational and functional area.

Unlike Operations Desert Shield/Desert Storm, where Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf retained the land component commander "hat," Gen. Tommy Franks, as commander, USCENTCOM (COMCENT), decided early on to fix responsibility for land operations on. his ground component headquarters. Throughout the fall and winter of 2002, an extraordinarily effective CFLCC staff, composed of officers and NCOs from every service, both active component and reserve component (RC), with highly capable support from the British and Australians, shaped the ground campaign. That same joint but land-centric staff set the conditions for and executed a ground campaign that was enormously successful, a ground campaign that was fought like no other, marked by an acceptance of greater risk and the unprecedented synergy and integration of conventional and special operations forces, all working in the same battlespace without seams.

A key strategic task for CFLCC was setting the theater. Although the U.S. Army had been exercising in Kuwait since the early 1990s, the theater, including Kuwait, was still quite immature. In the summer of 2002, even after the command had displaced forward to support OEF, the infrastructure required to support a major ground campaign was still minimal. The communications backbone alone was hard pressed to support tactical-level operations, much less a full-up, joint campaign. The structure required to receive, stage, push forward and integrate multiple corps-size formations was not present. The task to set the theater fell to the Third Army/ARCENT/CFLCC, supported by the 377th Theater Support Command. The 377th, a multicomponent organization, expended enormous energy and resources preparing the theater for what were still "potential" combat operations even into late winter. The preparation of the port and air facilities, base camps and distribution systems was phenomenal. Working around the clock for months, the logisticians, with exceptional support from the Kuwaitis, put a structure in place that not only effectively received upwards of 200,000 troops, but also enabled the projection of two maneuver corps deep into Iraq. Elemerits of V Corps and the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force (I MEF) maneuvered more than 1,000 miles during the decisive phase of the campaign. That they were able to do so, with uninterrupted theater logistics support, set a new campaign standard. Today this same infrastructure is receiving coalition units and readying them for onward movement into Iraq to join Coalition Joint Task Force-7 (CJTF-7), while receiving and redeploying units from V Corps and I MEF as they complete their OIF rotations.

Army involvement with setting the theater cannot be overstated. The CFLCC staff and downtrace developed the requirements and set the infrastructure while the Department of Army, at considerable risk, began investment in the theater well before it was clear that there would be a campaign launched against Iraq. The Army, already stretched supporting combat operations in Afghanistan and multiple stability and support operations elsewhere, rerouted dollars and people to make sure everything from the C^sup 4^ISR architecture to prepositioned equipment sets were as ready as possible. Reaching deep, the Army reset priorities, at some considerable cost to other programs and commands. The people bill alone, even after a very sizeable call up of RC forces, had significant second and third order effects across the Army. There is but one service that could have met this task, and the Army reinforced once again the essential and strategic importance of setting the theater for the joint and combined force.