Moving past the Iraqi village, the lead elements of Eagle Troop encounter a line of eight Iraqi T-72 tanks from the Tawakalna Division of the Iraqi Republican Guard. Captain McMaster in Eagle-66 and the Bradley fighting vehicles of the 1st Scout Platoon engage the enemy tank line, with the tanks of the 2nd and 4th Tank Platoons moving up to finish off the rest. Eagle Troop then moves forward to assault an Iraqi position behind the line of destroyed Iraqi T-72s.
JACK RYAN ENTERPRISES, LTD., BY LAURA ALPHER
Eagle Troop moves into a general assault on an Iraqi Brigade assembly area of the Tawakalna Division. The tank wedge of Captain McMaster, Major MacGregor (the 2nd Squadron S-3), as well as the tanks of the 2nd and 4th Tank Platoons, moves east to engage, followed by the rest of the troop. The advance terminates at the 73.8 Easting line.
JACK RYAN ENTERPRISES, LTD., BY LALRA ALPHER
1 As quickly as the line of tanks was destroyed, Captain McMaster sighted additional Iraqi armored vehicles beyond them and behind the village. This concentration of Iraqi armor was a defensive sector for a brigade of the Tawakalna Division. H.R. quickly ordered Eagle Troop to advance and engage the numerically superior enemy force which they had surprised.
A burned-out Iraqi T-72 on the 73 Easting battlefield.
LIEUTENANT COLONEL TOBY MARTINEZ
Though they did not realize it at the time, the men of Eagle Troop had just fought the main action in what has become one of the most studied battles of modern times, the Battle of 73 Easting. The Army and General Fred Franks (the commander of VII Corps) were so impressed with the results of the fight that a team of analysts from the U.S. Army’s Institute for Defense Analysis came out to study every aspect of the battle in order to reconstruct it for future training and use back in the United States. From this has come a computer model of the entire battle, which is considered on a par with textbook operations such as Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain’s defense of Little Round Top at Gettysburg and Major John Howard’s capture and defense of Pegasus Bridge on D-Day. But before the history books could be written, there was another day of war to finish. For Eagle Troop, though, it was actually fairly quiet.
General Franks with Captain H. R. McMaster inspecting the battlefield at 73 Easting.
LIEUTENANT COLONEL TOBY MARTINEZ
A few weeks after the end of the war, Eagle Troop and the rest of the 2nd ACR packed up and headed back to Germany to resume their normal duties. Sadly, with the end of the Cold War and the success of the U.S. Army in the Persian Gulf, the perceived need for units like the 2nd ACR had decreased to the point where a decision was made to deactivate this distinguished and long-serving unit.
Captain H. R. McMaster trained for over a decade to be ready for the relatively short period (probably less than an hour) that he was in intense combat. Yet it is doubtful that he or the taxpayers of the United States would question the bargain they got for their money and efforts. And for all of us, the good news is that H.R. is not all that unique. As the Army Chief of Staff, General Gordon Sullivan, pointed out recently, the U.S. Army is full of fine young soldiers like Captain McMaster.
At the time this book was being completed, H.R. and Katie McMaster got two more examples of how rewarding the life they’ve chosen can be. Their third daughter, Caragh Elizabeth, was born, and H.R. was selected for promotion. It is good to know that the daughters of H. R. McMaster will know a better world—one that was forged by people like their dad.
Roles and Missions: The ACR in the Real World
At the end of the Cold War, it was difficult to imagine a crisis large enough to require the Army to deploy a whole division, or even a regiment. In fact, since Vietnam, no U.S. Army unit bigger than a brigade had fought as a unit. Certainly there had been corps-sized exercises, but no situation had actually demonstrated that the Army really needed large-scale units. Some analysts even suggested that the Army should downsize itself to a few brigade-sized task forces.
Desert Storm shattered this theory. The United States fielded and maneuvered three full corps of troops (two Army, one Marine) to action against Iraq. Continuing threats from Iran, Iraq, and North Korea, instability in the Balkans and the former Soviet Union, and the need for large-scale humanitarian and peacekeeping missions, as in Somalia, suggest that the United States needs to be prepared to use the exceptional combat and staying power of ground forces to achieve national objectives.
This said, just how might an armored cavalry regiment be used in the next few years? Let’s look at two scenarios that explore the range of options that might be presented to the United States. The first of the scenarios that follow explores the uses of conventional armored cavalry, represented by the current 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment based at Fort Bliss, Texas. The second scenario looks at a new formation, the Armored Cavalry Regiment-Light, converted from the old 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment when it returned from its NATO mission. It is a new and untried organization, with many details left to be worked out. Nevertheless, it will probably become a major player in the action to come for the Army’s mobile “fire brigades”—the armored cavalry regiments.
Operation Robust Screen: The Second Korean War, January 1997
How they had lasted over fifty years was a mystery. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea was an anachronism—a hermit kingdom from which little information ever escaped, and little of that made sense. But one thing was clear. The North Koreans wanted to control all of Korea. They had fought one war in the early 1950s in a fruitless attempt to gain that goal, and few doubted that they would attack the South again if the opportunity arose. Even though repeated peace overtures from the Republic of Korea (ROK, South Korea) had met with superficial cordiality, they had repeatedly led nowhere. Meanwhile, the spectacular economic development of the South had made the North increasingly irrelevant. Politicians worldwide had adopted the convenient belief that ignoring Kim I1-Sung and his erratic son and designated successor, Kim Jong-I1, would make them disappear. It was a dangerous assumption.
As the third generation of North Koreans grew to maturity, knowing nothing but the two Kims’ bizarre blend of militarism, Confucian morality, and Communist dogma, pressures built up within the party and the military elite for a final and forcible reunification of the divided peninsula. For almost fifty years the Inmun Gun (Korean People’s Army), a brutally disciplined, lavishly equipped force of over a million, had trained, planned, and prepared for one mission: the “liberation” of the South. Since the end of the first Korean War in 1953, hundreds of thousands of patiently toiling laborers had burrowed into the hard granite mountains of Korea to build underground aircraft hangars, arms factories, command centers, even hardened radar stations with pop-up antennas, protected by massive steel doors. About two dozen of those hundreds of burrows were particularly precious to the Great Leader. They were silos for the home-grown Nodong1 missiles, with home-grown nuclear warheads.
Even after the death of the elder Kim in 1994, the “Dear Leader” (as Kim Jong II required others to address him) still believed in self-reliance. Like his father before him, the junior Kim wanted to complete the great work of Korean unification as a legacy to the world, before he went to join the other great Communist saints, Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and his father.
In Korean cosmology, separate seasons and divinities are assigned to each of the four directions. Since north is associated with winter and the Divine Warriors, the Dear Leader thought it fitting that the invasion of the South would begin in January, in the dead of winter—and as luck would have it, just as the American imperialists were inaugurating a corrupt new President. Kim was inspired to compose a poem on the subject, for limited circulation within the ever-appreciative circle of the Central Committee, to celebrate the coming “liberation” of the South. As might be imagined, it was well received.
Sunday, January 25th, 1997, 0300 Hours2
To ensure strategic and tactical surprise, the People’s Army attacked without advance preparation (having been on winter maneuvers), on less
than an hour’s notice, under total radio silence, relying on sealed orders. The first wave of invaders included some twenty-two commando brigades composed of over 70,000 elite special forces troops. They swarmed through tunnels under the Demilitarized Zone, parachuted from antique An-2 Colt transport biplanes (quite stealthy because of their wooden construction), or swam ashore from midget submarines. A small team disguised as Japanese businessmen hijacked a Korean Air Lines Boeing 747 in flight, and briefly seized control of Seoul’s Kimp’o International Airport, the control tower and terminal complex being thoroughly wrecked when the ROK elite Capital Division stormed it the next day. One of the most successful of the North Korean special forces brigades crash-landed inside the U.S.Embassy compound, using a number of American-made MD-500 helicopters illegally acquired from a German arms dealer back in the early 1980s. The Marine guards were wiped out, and the handful of Embassy staff then on night duty were slaughtered. When a hastily assembled relief force of U.S. Army Military Police and combat engineers arrived to retake the building, it was in flames, with its vital electronic communications and monitoring gear destroyed. A similar raid on U.S. Eighth Army3 headquarters in the suburb of Yongsan was detected in time and decimated by the Stinger missiles of an alert Avenger air defense battery.
Sunday, January 25th, 1997, 1200 Hours
Most of the North Korean commandos were wiped out quickly, but the confusion and disruption they spread helped to open the way for the main attack. The rugged topography of Korea allows for only a few invasion routes, and these tend to channel the flow of any military movements. The narrow road down the east coast barely provided maneuver room for a single North Korean division of the 806 Mechanized Corps, which seemed to pay for every yard with a knocked-out tank. Five specialized river-crossing regiments and several divisions of infantry forced the wide Imjin River along the west coast, but the bridgeheads were contained and gradually eliminated by the ROK divisions holding the line. The main axis of advance was the highways east of Seoul. There were 2,000 T-72, T-62, and improved T-55 tanks, supported by more than a dozen tube-artillery regiments and some sixty-plus rocket-artillery battalions, massed along a front of less than 50 miles/82 kilometers in width. The U.S. Army’s 2nd Infantry Division, supported by Republic of Korea (ROK) units on either flank, fell back toward Seoul taking heavy losses, but inflicting three or four times as much damage as it was suffering. The People’s Army knew that street fighting always favors the defender, and the Dear Leader wanted to take the historic, economic, and cultural center of the nation relatively intact. The invasion pushed south and east, away from the heavily urbanized capital area and down the Han River Valley. The North Korean objective was to bypass Seoul, then hook suddenly westward to capture the ancient walled town of Suwon. The capital with its ten million residents would be cut off, besieged, and starved into surrender. What the Dear Leader’s generals did not know was that this was exactly what the the Eighth Army wanted them to try. The North Korean army took the bait.
Despite the chaos of the war’s opening hours, the situation was quickly assessed by the National Military Command Center in the Pentagon, and the Pacific Command (PACOM)4 headquarters in Hawaii. North Korean frogmen had cut the telephone and fiber-optic cables that crossed the Tsushima Strait to Japan, and relentless rocket and artillery attacks forced the surviving headquarters units in South Korea to move constantly, making it difficult to maintain communications even via satellite link. But real-time imagery pouring in from reconnaissance satellites in low earth orbit made it abundantly clear that the Second Korean War had begun. The new President, who had taken office just a few days before, was informed by a call from the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, an Air Force general. The President immediately convened a meeting of the National Security Council, and asked the Speaker of the House to arrange an emergency joint session of Congress. Meanwhile, as Commander in Chief, he ordered the acting Secretary of Defense to execute the existing plans for the reinforcement of Korea. Less than one hour later, the officer on duty in the communications cell of the U.S. III Corps headquarters at Fort Hood, Texas, received an urgent phone call.
Monday, January 26th, 1997, 1000 Hours
The first reinforcement unit to arrive in Korea was the Alert Brigade from 82nd Airborne Division. Airlifted directly from Fort Bragg, North Carolina, to Taejon, Korea (a 7,000-mile flight that took almost twenty hours with refueling stops), they deployed the next day into the hills north and west of the city to secure the air base and the strategic bridges over the Kum River. With the airfields around Seoul under continuous SCUD and long-range artillery bombardment, Taejon was chosen as the forward headquarters of the U.S. IX Corps, based in Japan, which would control most of the units being sent to reinforce the Eighth Army.
At the same time, six Maritime Prepositioning Ships (MPS)5 steamed out of Agana Harbor, Guam, bound for Pusan with supplies and equipment for a Marine brigade. Except for one quick-reaction battalion aboard several amphibious transports at Okinawa, the troops would fly in from Camp Pendleton, California. Thus, the initial mission of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force was to secure the ports of Pusan and Ulsan and keep them open. Once this was certain, the leathernecks would move up to the line wherever the North Korean threat was greatest, and dig in.
At the same time a second MPS squadron left Guam with equipment for a brigade of the 10th Mountain Division (Fort Drum, New York). The troops would be airlifted into Taejon by the end of the week and rushed north to relieve the battered 2nd Infantry Division, which would be pulled back into the Seoul pocket for reorganization and a bit of rest. As the C-5 Galaxy, C-17 Globemaster III, and Civil Reserve Air Fleet (CRAF) transports returned from delivering the first wave of reinforcements, the alert brigade from the 101st Air Assault Division (Fort Campbell, Kentucky) would be airlifted to Taejon to form an airmobile reserve with enough helicopters to move the entire brigade in a single lift.
The linchpin of the reinforcement plan was the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment (3rd ACR) at Fort Bliss, Texas. With 123 M1A2 Abrams tanks, 127 M3A2 Bradley Fighting Vehicles, seventy-four helicopters of various types, and hundreds of wheeled vehicles, the regiment was impractical to airlift, especially with the extra engineer, artillery, military police, and support battalions attached from the III Corps at Fort Hood6 Even if there had been enough transport aircraft (and cutbacks in the procurement of the C-17 during the 1990s meant there weren’t), the few remaining operable airfields in Korea were overwhelmed with arriving supplies, reinforcements, and casualty evacuation. During the next few weeks, runways and terminals were also under sporadic attack from rockets and mortars carried by North Korean infiltrators. Despite the claims of airpower enthusiasts, you don’t just airmail an armored unit the way you would an overnight letter. The 3rd ACR would have to go by boat. But first, it had to get to the boats, and that was a trick in itself.
Wednesday, January 28th, 1997
You need specially reinforced rail cars to transport 70-ton tanks like the M1A2. Yet thanks to tireless staff work by planners and dispatchers at the Military Transportation Command in St. Louis, Missouri, it took just over two days to gather the rolling stock from across the country and assemble complete trains on the rail sidings at Fort Bliss and Fort Hood. Meanwhile, the Military Sealift Command sent six SL-7 roll-on/roll-off cargo vessels to Long Beach, California, and the two additional SL-7s (there are only eight of them) to Beaumont, Texas.
The SL-7s are vessels with a remarkable history. Built in the early 1970s by German and Dutch shipyards as very large high-speed container ships, they were too expensive to operate and maintain commercially. But the combination of speeds of 30+ knots and immense capacity was irresistible to a Sealift Command that had seen its WWII-era cargo ships decay into obsolete hulks while the U.S. Merchant Marine withered away. Displacing about 30,000 tons empty and 55,000 tons at full load, an SL-7 can hold 180 heavy tanks, or 600 HMMWVs. Each SL-7 has a pair of 50-ton cranes, as well as roll-on/roll-off ramps port and s
tarboard. The ships were named for eight navigational stars long special to mariners: Algol, Bellatrix, Denebola, Pollux, Altair, Regulus, Capella, and Antares.7
Following plans that had been carefully worked out in countless exercises and simulations, the 3rd ACR was loaded at Fort Bliss, two trains a day, while the III Corps loaded one train every two days at Fort Hood. As each element of the regiment arrived in Long Beach, California, it was loaded onto its designated SL-7. The same process was repeated at the port of Beaumont, Texas, for the III Corps artillery and other attached units.
The transportation plan was based on the concept of “combat loading.” This means that every vehicle would be fully fueled and armed when it rolled off onto the docks in Pusan. This made the ships more vulnerable to fire and explosion if they were hit, but it reduced the time required for the 3rd ACR to prepare for battle upon arrival. Critical regimental assets were carefully divided up among different ships, so that the loss of a single vessel would not cripple the regiment. The Abrams tanks were driven onboard the ships already loaded on Heavy Equipment Transporters (HETs). This took up more space, but ensured that the armor could rush to the front at high speed over the excellent South Korean highway net, without wear and tear on tracks or suspensions.
Monday, February 9th, 1997
The SL-7s from Long Beach took six days to cross the Pacific. The ships from Beaumont had to pass through the Panama Canal, adding about three days to the trip. Meticulous work by intelligence and Special Operations troops attached to U.S. Army Southern Command Headquarters at Fort Clayton, Panama, identified and “terminated” a North Korean sabotage team traveling on fake Chinese passports that had been dispatched to sink a rusty old Panamanian-flagged cargo ship in the canal’s narrowest section, the Galliard Cut. For February, the weather was unusually mild in the stormy North Pacific, and knowing the urgency of the situation, the civilian (but mostly ex-Navy) crews of the big ships extracted every bit of performance from their temperamental boilers and steam turbines. Thus the little convoy averaged a bit more than the specified thirty knots.