2-4  |  Army Field Manual I Warfighting Tactics - Part 1 The Fundamentals

Operation Iraqi Freedom (2003)

On paper it looked like an attack against a numerically superior enemy with a relatively
small offensive force. Was I tempting fate by defying the war college maxim that an
attacking force should have a 3-to-1 numerical advantage over an entrenched defender?
“Not a bit of it”, as my Brit friends would say. On the twenty-first-century battlefield,
strength would derive from the mass of effective firepower, not simply the number of
boots or tank tracks on the ground.

Our ground forces, supported by overwhelming air power, would move so fast and deep
into the Iraqi rear that time-and-distance factors would preclude the enemy’s defensive
manoeuvre. And this slow-reacting enemy would be fixed in place by the combined effect
of artillery, air support, and attack helicopters.

Without question, our lines of communication would be long and exposed in places,
stretching more than three hundred miles from the border of Kuwait to the outskirts of
Baghdad. But the object was to destroy the Iraqi military’s will to fight. A larger, slower,
methodical, attrition-based attack model could defeat the enemy in detail, and our lines
of communication could be better protected with such a force. But the time it would take
to stage and launch such a juggernaut would leave Saddam too many strategic options:
he could use the time to destroy Iraq’s water or oil infrastructure, launch missiles against
his neighbours, or use WMD against our troops - and his track record suggested he
wouldn’t think twice about any of those options.

No, manoeuvre speed would be our most important asset. If high balling armour units
could sustain that speed for days and nights on the end, they would own the initiative,
and our momentum would overwhelm Iraq’s ability to react - tactically and strategically.
We would not apply overwhelming force. Rather, we would apply the overwhelming
‘mass of effect’ of a smaller force. Speed would represent a mass all of its own.

General Tommy Franks, American Soldier (New York: Regan Books, 2004) pages 415-416