In war, questions of leadership are ultimately
questions of character. Warrior’s Rage: The Battle of 73 Easting. How the
soldiers won the battle and the generals lost Iraq recounts
two stories of leadership, character and competence. One is the inspiring tale
of the valiant American soldiers, sergeants, lieutenants and captains who won an
extraordinary battle in the Iraqi desert on 26 February 1991. The
other is the story of
Late in the afternoon of 26 February 1991, barely 24
hours after 80,000 soldiers of Iraq’s Republican Guard Corps had begun their
withdrawal to safety from Kuwait and southern Iraq, “Cougar Squadron,” the
2nd Squadron of the 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment, finally caught up with
Iraq’s Republican Guard Corps in spite of the VII Corps’ efforts to stop it.
Taken by surprise, the defending Iraqi armor brigade arrayed along the North-South grid line of a
military map referred to as the “73 Easting” was swept away in less than
30 minutes by salvos of American tank and missile fire that devastated the Iraqi
fighting positions.
However,
the Battle of 73 Easting, like the battle of Antietam, bore no abiding fruits.
Instead, the
fruits of the Battle of 73 Easting rotted on the vine while the commanding
generals of the Army’s VII Corps wasted precious hours herding their divisions
into a “tight fist” for a fight that was already passed. What the soldiers
of Cougar Squadron won on the battlefield was lost by an Army chain of command
filled with McClellans who never saw the Iraqi opponent in his true light and
never grasped the strategic implications of their failure to close with and
destroy the Iraqi Republican Guard Corps, Saddam Hussein’s power base.
Official Army accounts barely scratch the surface of what really happened in combat during 1991, let alone the consequences of weak and indecisive leadership by commanding officers remote from the battlefield that shaped the outcome; the survival of Saddam Hussein’s regime that required U.S. military intervention to remove it 12 years later. Operation Iraqi Freedom began where Desert Storm ended.
Emerging from an interwar military climate in the 1990s of intellectual and professional rigor mortis, the Army’s newest generation of generals chosen for their compliance with Army orthodoxy based on a hollow victory in 1991 simply hurled a smaller version of the old force at Iraq instead of adapting the force and its tactical methods to new conditions and fixing its many weaknesses, weaknesses that would become manifest when the Army’s generals confronted an Iraqi insurgency that adopted unconventional, non-linear tactics.
To this point the high
quality of America’s combat soldiers and Marines has compensated for the
deficiencies in general officer leadership. But great soldiers at battalion
level and below cannot compensate indefinitely for inadequate generalship in
war. Warrior’s Rage
ultimately asks: How
much American blood and valor must be sacrificed before the civilians who are
supposed to be in charge demand competence from America’s generals?