The 82d Airborne in Saudia Arabia

by Captaln Sean Cotrigan The announcement that the 82d Airborne Division had begun to deploy to Saudia Arabia caught me by surprise. The announcement caught us all by surprise. Our combat focus had been south, in the Caribbean, Central America, and South America. Initially, we assumed that, as the seventh task force in the division’s order of deployment, we would be watching this war on CNN. The task force commander, however, completed his announcement with a warning order to be prepared for immediate deployment. This warning order underscored the seriousness of the issue because the division had not fought as a unit since World War II. This significance was not lost on anyone. I met with the scout squad leaders to gather our thoughts. Our most important issue was that we knew we were not trained to operate against amounted, armored enemy in a desert environment. All of our training, and all of our focus had been on fighting a dismounted light infantry enemy in a woodland or jungle environment. Our focus would have to change quickly. Not knowing how much time we would have prior to deployment to Saudia Arabia, we decided to concentrate on the skills we associated with an antiarmor defense: vehicle identification, reporting procedures, and calls for indirect fire. To give the platoon an idea of the time and space relationships of mobile warfare, I took my HMMWV 3,000 meters down the median of a freeway and drove toward them at 15 miles per hour. They were amazed at how difficult it was to see the vehicle, even through binoculars. As we continued to experiment, we tried to simulate calling for and adjusting fires on an advancing enemy. The mood was rather somber as we realized just how difficult this mission would be for a dismounted scout platoon armed with rifles, grenade launchers, and our ANPRC 77 radios. At Fort Bragg, task force after task force hustled through issue points, packing each soldier’s rucksack with ammunition and MOPP gear prior to squeezing into C-141 or C-5 aircraft for the long trip to Saudi Arabia. As the seventh task force in the order of movement, 3-504 Parachute Infantry Regiment had the luxury of a few days to analyze its mission, the threat, and the operational environment. The task force commander and the operations officer focused on the antiarmor defense (AAD), as opposed to the airborne antiarmor defense (MAD). The assumption was that we would not be making an airborne assault into Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, or Iraq. Jump ing was only an emergency contingency plan at that point. As scout platoon leader, I reviewed my missions in a task force antiarmor defense. In a wooded environment, dismounted scouts use natural cover and concealment, along with much-practiced stealth, to occupy OPs for- “The mood was rather somber as we realized just how difficult this mission would be for a dismounted scout platoon armed with rifles, grenade launchers, and our AN/PRC 77 radios.” ward of the main defense. With no organic firepower capable of killing a tank, the scout platoon did not intend to engage anyone. FYeviously, we had relied on our fieldcraft to remain unobserved as we reported enemy movement and called for indirect fire. This new threat, a fully mechanized force, and the new desert environment that offered little or no cover or concealment forced me to rethink my methods of doing business. While I struggled with an unfamiliar mission, I had my squads researching the threat and the environment. Being highly industrious scouts, they dug up an incredible amount of information in a very short period of time. The soldiers had only a few hours to leave post to collect their TA-50 and deployment bags before returning to the battalion for lock-in. 32

During that time the snipers managed to buy enough graphite to supply each man’s weapons cleaning kit. The dry graphite lubricant works far better than gun oil or Break Free, which only collect sand and dust in the desert. The scout squads rushed out to the local hobby shop and bought plastic models of every vehicle that we knew the Iraqis had in their inventory. Each squad built, painted, and researched a few vehicles, then briefed the rest of the platoon on the weapon’s capabilities and limitations. We took the models out to the regiment’s PT area and set them up in open, hull defilade, and turret defilade positions. By scaling the distance separating the observer and the model to the scale of the model, we got a good feel for what the vehicles would look like at various ranges and in various positions. Individual skills training continued at a breakneck pace, but I still had not resolved the issues relating to the mission itself. The issues every dismounted scout faces are security and protection, observation, and communication. Dismounted scouts in a desert environment have very few options in balancing survivability with mission accomplishment. My initial solution to all of my problems was to mount my platoon on HMMWVs, arm the vehicles with SO-caliber machine guns, and create a mobile scout/recon platoon. The hard, cold Wty of a come-as-you-are-war precluded that quick and easy solution. The 82d Airborne Division’s battalion scout platoons had not been mounted since the division traded in its M151 jeeps for HMMWVs, and there were not enough vehicles in the division to equip each of the nine scout platoons with four HMMWVs. We would have to make do with what our MTOE had given us and think harder about how we would accomplish the mission. Our tactics of infiltration by foot, observation from hide sites, and FM communications would have to suffice in the desert. It was our technique that needed a complete overhaul. By the 18th of August, the task force had closed on the brigade assembly area. Training began immediately. The desert environment presented challenges we had not encountered in our previous training. The extended distances, the lack of vegetation for cover and concealment, and the summer heat restricted our tactical movement to the night. The lack of ground water forced us to carry 11 quarts of water per man and to cache 50-gallon blivets of water well behind our OP locations for nightly resupply. The open terrain and lack of vegetation forced us to dig into the sides of sand dunes or under the sparse clumps of palm trees to hide from both the enemy and the scorching afternoon sun. The first brigade, once fully deployed and equipped, began to train as a brigade for an antiarmor defense in our assigned sector. The training exercises extended from the last week of August into September. With tension remaining high due to the lack of friendly armor or mechanized forces in the theater, the 82d Airborne set off into the desert to try to create a defense. If the situation had not been so serious, my scout platoon would have been a funny site trudging through the sand under rucksacks over-stuffed with communications equipment, NVGs, binoculrus, water, and MOPP gear. The defensive sector staggered us with its frontage and depth. Communications at these extended ranges were unreliable and unclear. The ANPRC 77 FM radios did not have the range to make effective communications, especially in the heat of the day. The scout squads quickly learned that the standard long whip antennas were insufficient. To increase our ranges, we used copper long wire directional antennas, suspended a meter off the ground by palm fronds. Additionally, we grounded each radio with a wire and unpainted metal tent stake buried deep in the sand. Even with the modifications, communications remained poor during the day. I had to relay all reports to the TOC through the forwardmost rifle company in the main defensive sector, slowing the reporting process and cluttering an already overtaxed command net. The next issue at hand was the lack of cover and concealment. The sand was so fine and loose that our efforts to dig in were futile. We could not carry enough sandbags to properly reinforce a hide site. Unable to gain any real cover, we had to settle for the concealment of dispersed clumps of palm trees or construct makeshift hide positions out of palm fronds. Inspecting the positions from the enemy’s vantage, the hides were actually well concealed, but it was painfully obvious that they offered no protection from direct or indirect fm. Concealing our paths into the hides was also a challenge. The soft sand and lack of vegetation made tracking our movements incredibly easy. Eventually, the wind would blow enough sand into the tracks to erase our signature, but the winds were not very reliable and the process was sometimes very slow. As a passive security measure, we used the buttonhook technique of bypassing our hide sites, then looping back into them in order to give us more reaction time if anyone was tracking us as we occupied each hide site. Observation also presented new challenges. Even though there was no vegetation to block our lines of sight, the undulating dunes and the refract-ing light from the intense heat made vehicle identification difficult. Identifying personnel was not any easier. At extended ranges, camels looked very much like human silhouettes if they were facing the observer directly. The ANPVS 4 and 7 NVGs were ineffective at extended ranges, even though the clear desert nights optimized the systems. The PVS 4 proved to be a much better system at ranges up to 500 meters, but that was not nearly far enough. After three days of preparation, the brigade conducted a full-scale rehearsal, with the division’s armor battalion as the OPFOR. When 3-73 Armor attacked, I learned very quickly that my scout platoon was not yet tactically prepared to deal with a mobile enemy. We heard the vehicles long before we saw them, but pinpointing their location was impossible. Reporting was difficult and vague, with our radios faltering after days of near continuous use in the desert heat. Through the dunes, the light tanks suddenly appeared, easily and rapidly crossing terrain that we had considered slow-go or even no-go. Before we could make effective calls for indirect fire, the enemy had passed us and was heading for the main body. The GSR section had also been unable to detect or report the enemy. As scouts, we had failed our mission in two respects. We failed to make clear and timely reports, and we failed to put indirect fire on the advancing enemy. Additionally, we found ourselves caught between the enemy’s advance guard and its main body, with nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. It was painfully obvious that we needed to rethink our tactics and techniques, then retrain ourselves to correct those failures and avoid repeating the disaster. In a detailed internal after-action review, the scout platoon identified several weaknesses, to include communications, reporting procedures, observation, cover and concealment, and logistical sustainment. Through seemingly endless training exercises and rehearsals, the platoon had the opportunity to continuously experiment and improve on techniques in preparation for a contingency mission of defending oil fields southwest of our initial sector. Our new location had many advantages over the previous sector. The terrain was mky, with many hills t6 provide excellent cover and concealment, By late October, temperatures had dropped to a much more tolerable level, reducing the physical stress on the soldiers. Additionally, we had all become acclimatized through the months of training in the desert heat. The new sector was much smaller, making FM communications slightly more effective. I had learned more about the IPB process, and had learned to work more closely with the S2 in selecting OP locations to cover likely avenues of appmach. The entire platoon had become quite proficient at vehicle and aircraft identification and accurate, concise reporting pme-dures. During the task force’s exmal evaluation in late October, we felt much more ready and able to accomplish our mission. But as the evaluation kicked off, we realized that we had not yet solved the logistical problem. Three days into the mission, the scout platoon was bone dry, having exhausted the water supply we had carried in our rucksacks to our OPs. 34

“Fortunately, tactical air support and heavy divisions arrived before Ira9 could or would attack. We avoided having another Task Force Smith.” We had done all that we could to reduce our loads and conserve water. Prior to infiltrating, we had stripped our MREs, taking along only the hy-drated main courses. Crackers, cookies and dehydrated fruit all sap water from the body and make the soldier thirsty, while adding weight, volume and refuse to the load on the scouts’ backs. Simply put, the nutritional value of those components did not warrant their extra weight or space, but a week’s worth of them add up in the rucksack as a scout humps around the desert all night. Eventually, the support platoon established forward logistics release points to which the scout squads could infiltrate under the cover of darkness. The system made for a lot of walking, but it struck the best balance between sustenance and security. The resupply patrols had to be extremely cautious during movement to the LRPs because each resupply offered the enemy an excellent opportunity to ambush the scouts or compromise the OPs. Prior to the enemy’s probing attack, that is exactly what happened. We lost a three-man patrol and a cache site in the process. When the OPFOR finally attacked, the scout platoon fared much better than it had in August. All O h gave accurate, timely reports, giving the commander a better picture of the enemy’s main and supporting efforts. Calls for indirect fm forced the enemy to button up, deploy into combat formations, and halt at obstacles. The hills and rocks helped keep the scouts hidden and protected from enemy observation throughout the attack Even though we had made significant improvements, some fundamental problems still lingered. While our radios were within range to communicate, stronger signals often blocked our reports over the command net as the battle progressed into the main defensive sector. Calls for fire were not relayed quickly enough to fully capitalize on opportunities to destroy the halted enemy. Adjusting fires was slow and u m - sponsive, even for a simulation. Logistics had cost us three valuable men and compromised our location. In after-action reviews, some possible improvements surfaced. To decongest the command net and improve scout calls for indirect fire, the evaluators suggested establishing a task force intelligence net between the S2 and the scout platoon leader. The FSE, colocated with the S2 in the main TOC, could eavesdrop on the net in order to avoid taking calls for fire over the task force command net. Since we had limited radios, this would require a trade-off. By reporting on an exclusive net, the task force commander and the company commanders would not be able to hear my reports as I sent them. Switching back and forth from frequency to frequency would not be any better because the problem of overloading the command net would still exist. Resupply remained an issue. The task force antitank company had the most success in pushing water forward to the scout LWs, but the resupply mission significantly interfered with the company’s primary mission of establishing defensive positions and engagement areas. No technique was completely successful or secure. The evaluators had no suggestions or alternative techniques to offer. As scouts, we expected to be hungry and thirsty between resupplies. By the time our evaluation ended, the coalition’s strategy had changed, or at least our battalion’s mission had changed. Any hopes of returning to Fort Bragg died as the 82d Airborne shifted its focus to the offense. The 3- 504 PIR never again trained to defend against an m o r force in the desert, but some of the lessons learned on the scteen line carried over into the offense. As dismounted scouts, we came to realize that our ability to communicate and call for indirect fires was our only weapon against a mobile protected enemy. We learned our tactical limitations based on our radios’ ranges, the environment, logistics, and the soldiers’ physical strength and stamina. Most importantly, we gained an appreciation for the speed and mobility of an armor force, causing us to plan for a faster-paced fight over greater depths. We all realized just how tenuous and exposed our initial sector had been in late August prior to the arrival of heavy forces. As a lightly anned, unprotected, and dismounted task force, we could not have stopped a determined armor attack of any significant size. Moreover, our lack of desert training or experience prior to our deployment to Saudia Ambia complicated our early efforts. Fortunately, tactical air support and heavy divisions arrived before Iraq could or would attack. We avoided having another Task Force Smith. Captain Sean J. Corrigan received his Infantry commission from the U. S. Military Academy in 1988. A graduate of IOBC, AOAC, and Special Forces Officer’s Qualification Course, he sewed as a rifle platoon leader in 3-504th Parachute Infantry Regiment during O p eration JUST CAUSE, as a scout platoon leader with 3- 504 PIR during Operations

STORM, and as battalion S3 Air, also in 3-504 PIR. He is currently serving with the 7th Special Forces Group, Ft. Bragg, N. C.