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'Tip of the spear' waits on the
border
By Ron Synovitz
ASSEMBLY AREA HAMMER, Kuwait - The United States
Army is making its final preparations in the desert of
northern Kuwait for war against Iraq.
Some
120,000 US troops are now in the emirate and more are
arriving each day. To make room for the new arrivals,
thousands of soldiers in the US Army's Third Infantry
Division have moved from the relative comfort of tent
cities - such as Camp New York and Camp Pennsylvania -
to a series of tactical assembly areas just south of the
Iraqi border.
At one barren encampment, called
Assembly Area Hammer, three task forces in the Third
Brigade Combat Team are poised should US President
George W Bush issue the order for battle.
Lieutenant-Colonel John Charlton, the commander
of Task Force 1-15, confidently smokes a cigar while a
sandstorm rages outside his tent. He is certain that his
soldiers are ready after nine months of desert training
in Kuwait during the past year.
"We're part of
the Third Infantry Division. If and when we attack Iraq,
we'll be one of the primary forces in that fight. This
task force is part of a brigade combat team composed of
several other battalion task forces. So you have several
thousand soldiers in a brigade combat team," Charlton
says.
Charlton says that a successful US battle
plan depends on the integration of many different
elements - not just between the army, the marines, the
navy, and the air force but also within individual task
forces.
"I've got several hundred soldiers in my
battalion task force. We're an infantry task force - a
mechanized infantry task force. Our primary fighting
systems are the M1 Abrams tank and the Bradley infantry
fighting vehicle. We also have heavy combat engineers,
mortars, scouts and, of course, a large number of
logistics elements [such as diesel fuel trucks, medics
in armor-protected ambulances, five-ton supply trucks,
mechanics and cooks. It's the logistical elements] that
keep the whole thing moving," Charlton says.
The
42-year-old Charlton says that a war with Iraq would
start with heavy air strikes and hundreds of Cruise
missiles targeting Iraqi command centers and heavy
weaponry. He expects a ground assault to start soon
after the air war in order to minimize Iraq's ability to
set fire to its oil fields.
In the ground war
phase, waves of war planes, helicopters and unmanned spy
planes would first fly over Iraqi territory in search of
targets. Their intelligence information would be sent to
the command-and-control cells of each task force on the
ground.
Sergeant Major Rodrigo Arreolo works in
command-and-control operations for Task Force 1-15. "The
command-and-control cell receives all the battlefield
information. From there, we orchestrate and synchronize
all the moving units that are attached to the task force
and put them into play. According to the enemy's
situation, we move the units to best fight the battle,"
Arreolo says.
Arreolo and his soldiers use radio
signals to relay the air intelligence to the scouts of
Task Force 1-15. The scouts drive lightly armored
vehicles called Humvees. Using high-resolution thermal
imagers, the scouts can see potential targets at night
from as far away as 40 kilometers. They can positively
identify a vehicle at a distance of 10 kilometers and
broadcast target coordinates, accurate to within one
meter, over the battalion's radio frequency for all of
the troops to hear.
Air strikes would then be
called in as artillery and armored carriers mounted with
mortar launchers moved into position against the most
powerful conventional weapon in Iraq's Republican Guard
- the Soviet-built T-72 battle tank.
Artillery
in Charlton's task force has a range of about 17
kilometers. From a distance of about 7 kilometers,
within the first minute of getting target coordinates, a
typical mortar launcher can fire 10 shells, designed to
pin down an Iraqi tank or force it out of a dug-in
position.
While the Iraqi tanks are dealing from
the combined air and artillery attacks, the US Abrams
tanks would move quickly to within their 3-kilometer
firing range.
Sergeant Jerold Pyle is an Abrams
tank commander in Task Force 1-15 who fought in the tank
battles of the 1991 Gulf War. Our correspondent asks him
about his expectations in any future combat against
Iraq's Republican Guard. "An Abrams tank in a battle?
This is the heavy armor. These are the killers. This is
what the enemy is afraid of. The Abrams was made to
fight the Soviet Union, designed back in the 1980s. It's
been updated over the last 20 years until it's the best
tank in the world. This is the heavy armor. This is the
tip of the spear," Pyle says.
As in any battle,
Charlton says that his tanks also will need support from
foot soldiers to prevent rocket attacks by Iraqi
infantry on their flanks or from behind. That is the job
of armored troop carriers called Bradleys.
A
Bradley is a box-shaped armored vehicle with a three-man
crew that can fire heavy machine guns or antitank
missiles. Six infantrymen are transported in the rear
compartment of each Bradley. Once the troop carrier gets
close to Iraqi infantry, the rear hatch is lowered and
the soldiers disembark in squad formation, ready for
battle.
Combat engineers are positioned in the
middle of each task force and can move forward under the
protection of tanks and Bradleys to clear minefields or
to build bridges over the irrigation canals near
Baghdad. An armored mobile chemical-detection
laboratory, called a Fox is positioned in the middle of
each task force to warn troops about any chemical or
biological attack against them.
Copyright (c)
2002, RFE/RL Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio
Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave NW, Washington DC
20036
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