The highest number of American casualties in the first stage of a war against Iraq would likely be suffered not by the front-line riflemen but by those just ahead and behind them struggling to keep the fighters supplied with food, fuel, water, and ammunition, according to the general who directed supply efforts in the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
"Logistics is no longer a rear action," said retired Army Lt. Gen. William G. "Gus" Pagonis in an interview looking back at Operation Desert Storm and ahead toward a possible new war with Iraq.
"Very few people know that at least 50 percent" of the 390 GIs killed in Desert Shield and Desert Storm in 1990 and 1991 died while supplying front-line troops, Pagonis said. Most of the deaths resulted from highway accidents, not bullets, he said. The same dangers from rushing war materiel to the troops would confront the beans-and-bullets brigades in Iraq II.
Here's what this Gulf War supply chief, whom theater commander Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf praised as his miracle man, sees ahead if President Bush wages war in Iraq:
- Before the shooting starts, squads of young officers and sergeants would be flown secretly into the Iraqi desert to build supply bases practically overnight. "When we set out those secret bases" in Iraq before the Persian Gulf War really got going, Pagonis recalled, "the combat-arms guys weren't thrilled about it. They said, `Geez! What are you going to do if you're overrun and you're out there without any combat support?' I said, `I'll blow [the bases] up. Who says you can't blow up your own bases?' We had satchel charges and everything set up in case something happened." With the full support of Schwarzkopf, Pagonis planned to build a string of supply bases all the way to Baghdad, but he had to build only a few because the Iraqis surrendered so quickly.
- Middle East ports would be busy. Ships would stream into all the available deep-water ports near Iraq, with Kuwait's being the main ones if Saudi Arabia refused to let the American military use its ports. Turkish ports would be an additional option. "As a logistician, you never want to put all your eggs in one basket," Pagonis said. "It's just the opposite of combat arms. They don't want to fight on four fronts," while logisticians want to open up as many fronts as they can find for starting supply lines into the interior of the enemy's country. "I'd do both Kuwait and Turkey. Turkey has huge ports. It would be very easy to offload the ships there, but the trouble is that you then would have a huge land line [into Iraq] to protect."
- Ports would be overtaxed trying to unload the ships. The U.S. military would be sailing in many of its pre-positioned ships packed with tanks, Bradley fighting vehicles, artillery, ammunition, and other heavy impedimenta of war. Local stevedores, along with active-duty military, would unload the ships and put the supplies onto trucks. These trucks would then move to the hastily prepared supply bases inland.
"The bottlenecks will be at the ports, so you're going to have to be extremely efficient in shipping the stuff. The lesson we learned [in Desert Storm] is to only ship what you need. We took over 400,000 short tons of ammunition and brought home 370,000. But in those days, we didn't know how big the [Iraqi] force was or how good they were. They know all that stuff now, so the Pentagon is not likely to flood the places with all kinds of resources."
- Cargo planes would fly into Iraq and land on airfields that Army Rangers or other combat forces have captured; on roads that Army engineers or Navy Seabees have determined to be strong enough to take the weight of the heavy planes; and on hard unprepared ground in the case of the more flexible C-130 and C-17 transports. "Any time you can modify anything" already in place in the target country, you do so, because "it's easier and quicker than building from scratch," Pagonis said.
Pentagon officials say that they hope to set up, within Iraq's borders, bases from which they will launch forces toward the center of the country. Their hope is to isolate Saddam in Baghdad so completely that he and his regime would collapse without ever engaging the allied forces in bloody street fighting. If allied forces can avoid fighting in the cities, "I don't think the war will last long," Pagonis said.
Establishing U.S. enclaves of military power, including supply dumps, in the deserts of western Iraq would also be a top priority at the outset of war because the U.S. would want to push any Scud missiles placed there out of striking range of Israel. If Saddam managed to fire Scuds into Israeli cities, the Israeli government might feel compelled to retaliate, turning the conflict into a religious war rather than a disarming action. President Bush, like his father before him in the Persian Gulf War, is obviously apprehensive about this possibility.
If Bush sends 250,000 troops into Iraq as rumored, about 50,000 of them would have to be logisticians, the general estimated. Commanders usually want enough supplies on hand to keep their troops in the fight for 60 days. This means that an Iraq war would require a massive supply effort.
The "easiest part" of going to war these days, Pagonis said, is getting the soldier to the battlefield; the hardest part is giving him food, water, ammunition, housing, and medical care. "We're an army that moves on our stomach," Pagonis said. "You can't give somebody a bag of rice and say, `Go out and live in the woods.' The logistical support for any kind of tactical operation is very horrendous."